Haunt

Pickpocket Julie Makes a Deal - Part 2 of 2

Weekend One - Friday Night, Continued

September 16, 2022

POV: Seven Wonders Park

Click!

It worked, it worked! Her little plan worked; the door to the staff offices accepted her keys without a hitch. She felt around a hallway and flicked on a few light switches.

HR, after-hours, seemed as creepy as the haunted houses themselves. There was something eerie about an empty place reeking of day-job tedium. Stretched out before her were the husks of the beating heart of the park, stations where people made their daytime homes left unguarded.

One of Julie's significant accomplishments had been her handmade Boo-Bucks. She crafted about a hundred counterfeit bills at home with her desktop copy machine and paper she'd bought at an office supply store, and she traded them in for all sorts of Seven Wonders merchandise that she sold later on eBay. HR didn't know how many Boo-Bucks each individual earned, and management certainly didn't track how many she spent. Management was far too busy to bridge the gap like that. Frankly, she couldn't believe no one else had ever tried it. When Julie learned she could pull that off, she deduced that a similar line of logic could apply to everything around the park. The disorganization of the whole system was her camouflage.

With that in mind, Julie didn't worry about the security cameras. People could be watching, sure, but she was dressed like a yellowshirt and moved like she belonged there.

Julie visited human resources enough times to know where she was going. She made her way to a particular door - the "managerial office," which was the dumping ground for temporary people, a lot of detritus, and plenty of endless drawers to rifle through. It took a few tries, but she found the appropriate replica key and opened the treasure trove. It was a room of filing cabinets and shelves. There were two desk setups. Julie's eyes locked onto the shelves holding the screamster binders for each haunted house.

Julie spread the binders out on the desk to examine them. They contained paperwork for every employee, along with their sign-in sheets. And beside each, in a plastic pocket, were the screamster tags. The costume tags!

Costume tags were an employee's connection to the power granted by the park and its administration. Tags were keys to supernatural abilities. If an employee misplaced their tag or, heaven forbid, took it home with them, there would be hell to pay. Most of the time, unless shit was chaotic, one couldn't even clock out without having two or three people confirm that one's costume tag was returned. Julie did not quite understand how this worked; however, she was willing to bet these tags could be priceless if she could figure them out.

Can I make a copy right here?

With all of the tags in front of her, the idea did intrigue. Paper and materials were aplenty within the document storage office, so she went to work. She found more scissors and supplies in a drawer.

With a snip snip here and a cut cut there, she ended up...very disappointed. A key was specifically made to fit a door and could be copied, but a Seven Wonders costume tag was just a piece of laminated plastic. The magic the administration imbued was what mattered; the tag was just the host, so her replica tags did nothing.

"Wait a minute." She schemed. "Wait."

She turned around and inspected the room all over again. Where, oh, where were the street freak tags? Street freaks had the best costumes and the most magic and were the most trusted employees. Those would be the best if she meant to take tags from the park. They were most likely to work even outside the Seven Wonders' borders and most likely to have strong magic attached to them. Imagine if the Overlord's tag is here! He must have one! To her frustration, she found that the notebooks before her contained screamster tags only.