Arcade's Dungeon

Hunter\Hero 1: Regular Night

"What?" I asked, putting a hand to my buzzer and clicking the call while punching in numbers to my calculator with the other. "I'm busy."

     "Busy patrolling, which means you shouldn't be too busy to listen to me speak."

     "Same thing," I fired back, leaning over the number that appeared and grabbing my pencil to start scribbling away on the worksheet. Almost done. Almost there. I checked the time on my display, looking up to the rightmost corner of my own little digital world. Ten minutes to midnight. "Now what do you want? I'm really doing something right now."

     "I just got a report that there's a bank robbery in progress not far from you. It's Spear Mint Associates. Go take care of it. I'm logging you on to the job."

     "Give me a few seconds." Of all the timing in the world. Fumbling for my phone along my legs, then remembering I was wearing a suit so there was no such thing as pockets because that would've just been too efficient, I seized the white backpack at my feet and rumbled around till my phone appeared. Scribbling some numbers down for the rest of the slots after some seriously fast mental math, taking a picture of the worksheet, this side and that, and opening that stupid slow app...uploading the pictures to the assignment, and hitting submit. Taking my the folder off the ledge where I'd been pinning it down with a desperate forearm from the wind to hide beneath my backpack on the roof. "Okay, ready."

     "You're thirty seconds late."

     "Come on! Are you trying to mess up my track record?"

     "Then you should stop doing homework on the job."

     "Well!" My feet went on top of the ledge as a blue map appeared in front of my eyes, a green dot pinging where I was on top of my usual perch in the city, and a red dot pinging where they were, three blocks away. "If you stopped giving me so many patrols and a little more action, I'd have a lot less time to do it!"

     Though I hoped she would give me more action, I also hoped that she protected my homework time. I still hadn't mastered the art of productivity on the weekends and got everything done during my patrol shifts during the week.

     Ah, crap, I realized, backing up from the ledge and feeling the wind beginning to take around my feet. Don't I have an essay due next week?

     The smart thing would've been to get it done on my one day of the week I was free from both school and work.

     Well. That's taking into account the idea that I'm actually smart.

     Buildings flew by below me, dark roofs with colorful sides and people still working into the night. Air vents humming, dark clouds emerging from vents on top and clouding the already deteriorated and polluted midnight sky. When I hit the next roof, it was with a light tap that sent me off again, and again, covering those three blocks in as straight of a line as I could before the alarms finally reached me and I was right overhead.

     Ugh.

     Black vans out front told me they must've brought a fleet. And there were two of them, even, as I shifted the setting on my buzzer and looked down. Red outlines pulsed around the interiors of the vehicles, showing me the two distinct figures in driver's seats and the one in a passenger seat in the first van - no doubt the boss - waiting for the others to come out. Looking straight down through the building didn't really do much for me since there were layers of floors, a stray office worker here and there, a janitor vacuuming back and forth over a bunch of other heat signatures.