Rogue Sloth

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

For a while, Jacob watched and rewatched footage of the three men in the halls of the hospital. The cameras had picked them up on the first floor after they had put on sets of stolen scrubs, surgical masks, and hair coverings to disguise themselves from the nurses they passed by. He propped his elbow on the desk and rested his chin in his hand, chewing idly on the inside of his lip as he replayed the clip again. There was nothing glaringly obvious about them that he could use to identify who they were, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. No criminals were perfect. He just needed to keep looking long enough to spot the flaw in their plan.

Moving back to the video of the men when they were on the third floor of the building, he watched closely as they wheeled the bed out of Iris’s room and then glanced at his watch. It was getting late into the night, and he was getting tired. Knowing that his attentiveness was most likely becoming compromised by exhaustion, he debated whether he should call it quits until the morning to get a cup of black coffee to stay up longer. It would have been easier to do the former, but he couldn’t face King Atlas without more information.

Coffee, it is, he thought, pushing his chair back to get up. However, just before he rose to his feet, he froze, noticing something in the footage that he hadn’t caught before. Bemused, he rolled the tape back a few seconds and squinted as he played the bit again. There it was; the same subtle detail. It hadn’t been his imagination. One of the rescuers had an uneven gait when he walked, as if he was sporting a limp.

“Son of a bitch,” Jacob breathed, scrambling to find the file that contained the clip from the exterior camera in the parking lot. All this time, he’d been looking for clues that could tell him if the group had made a mistake. He’d assumed they were members of the rebellion who had come in from beyond the capital, since no one on the inside had a reason to help a prisoner escape. However, he’d forgotten about the one person who would have been reckless enough to get involved, who he suspected had a personal motive for keeping Nox-Fleuret out of the hands of the soldiers.

He watched more closely as the three men approached the building clad in all black clothing and baseball caps. It was hardly noticeable, but he could see the telltale sign again in this video. The man at the front of the pack was favoring his left leg. It had to be Prince Caspian.

Stunned, Jacob stared at the screen as the heir to the crown pulled his phone from his pocket and made the call to Harry. Everything suddenly made sense. He’d wondered how a member of the rebellion would have been able to impersonate him well enough to fool Calhoun into abandoning his post. Caspian knew most of the guards by name as well as how they operated, so he would have had the confidence to pull off such a bold stunt without a hitch.

When the royal touched a key to the pad that unlocked the door, Jacob narrowed his eyes. Too late, he realized why Caspian had been acting strangely when they’d run into each other at the palace. He hadn’t been looking for him to run an errand; he’d been trying to get rid of him so he could steal one of the master keys from his empty office. I’d bet anything the key to the hospital is still missing, he thought, standing up from his chair and heading out of the room. He couldn’t believe the prince had been stupid enough to do something like this, but at least he knew how to find Iris now.

Without speaking to anyone or announcing his departure, the guard left the hospital and drove back to the palace to confront the rebellious prince. He wasn’t quite sure how he would approach the subject, but he knew that he would have to speak with him directly before he told Atlas what had happened. With any luck, Caspian would see reason and give up the girl’s location, so the king wouldn’t have to know he’d even been involved. If Atlas found out his own son had attempted to harbor a traitor, there was no telling what he would do. However, Jacob wasn’t unwilling to get the monarch involved if that was what he had to do. Everything depended on how willing the younger Maydestone would be to comply.

Once he’d returned to the palace, he headed inside and made his way to the stairs that would take him to Caspian’s room, hoping the prince had come home rather than run away with the rebel girl. Before he could even place his foot on the first step, though, he was intercepted by another guard.

“Sorry, but where are you going, sir?” the other man asked with a concerned expression, barring his access to the staircase.

Jacob eyed him, irritated by the interruption, “I need to speak with the prince. Stand aside.”

The guard winced. “I don’t think you’re going to be getting a coherent conversation out of him tonight, sir,” he warned tentatively. “His Highness just got back about half an hour ago. He was so drunk, he couldn’t even walk a straight line.”

“Drunk?” Jacob blinked.

“He went out to the club with those other boys. Arowood and Kinder,” the other guard nodded. “Looked like he really let himself go.”

“I see,” Jacob frowned. Briefly, he felt a flicker of doubt that he had been wrong and that Caspian must not have been involved in the escape at the hospital. However, his suspicion returned when he remembered that there had been three culprits. Caspian, Jay and Miles made three as well. Glancing up the stairs, he considered confronting the prince about it in spite of his inebriation, but if the other guard was right, he wouldn’t get anywhere tonight. It would be better to wait until the morning, when he was sober enough to rationally think about giving up Iris’s location. By now, King Atlas was probably asleep as well, so he wouldn’t have to tell him about what had happened until he woke up the next day.

I’ll give him until tomorrow, and then I’ll have my answers, he decided firmly.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Thanks!

I can probably wrap up the rest of Jacob's POV in my next post. Did you have much else you wanted to cover for Harry and Matthew?

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

The last thing Jacob had expected was to be spending his night hunting down a missing hospital patient. While he’d been on his way to speak with King Atlas about the weakened security point in the garage, he had bumped into Harry, who had immediately blanched upon seeing him. Right away, he had realized that something was wrong, since he’d never seen the other guard abandon his post before. However, he’d had a long day and had been too tired to question why Harry would have left Iris alone at the hospital. Instead, he’d reprimanded him for his negligence and ordered him to go back.

That was when Harry had told him that someone had impersonated him over the phone and told him that he would be taking over his shift.

With enough expletives to make a sailor blush, Jacob commanded Harry to return to the hospital while he called the police to inform them of the situation. He’d hoped that the law enforcement officers would be able to respond quickly enough to catch the perpetrators before they got away. Unfortunately, when he got through to dispatch, the woman on the other end of the line informed him that a nurse at the hospital had already called a few minutes ago and that police were already on the scene. The criminals, however, had escaped.

He had hung up the phone in a rage and headed to his car, driving down to the hospital personally to find out if he could do any better identifying the culprits than the officers had. He was going to have to tell the king that their prisoner was gone, and he wanted to have at least some good news to offer when he delivered the worst of it. Having a solid lead to follow to get her back would be a good start.

With that objective in mind, he made his way into the building and beelined for the security personnel’s office, making phone calls along the way for the soldiers to keep an eye out for suspicious people and notices for stolen vehicles. It hadn’t been long since Iris had disappeared, so she and the others couldn’t have gone far. Assuming their plan was to take her out of the capital, the military needed to cut them off before they could get to the border.

In the meantime, he reviewed the security footage at the hospital. Due to patient privacy policies, there weren’t very many cameras on the inside of the building, but there was some suspicious activity that had been captured on two of them in the hallways on the first and third floor as well as one in the parking lot.

“As you can see, we don’t have a lot to go off,” the on-duty security guard explained with a perplexed sigh as they looked over the recordings that had caught Iris and the three people who had helped her escape. “The only things we’ve determined are that they’re all male and seemed to know enough about the way this hospital works to get in and out without raising suspicion. Do you think they’re from the capital?”

“Possibly,” Jacob replied noncommittally, leaning closer to the computer screen and narrowing his eyes as he studied the repeating footage of the group slipping out of room 311 with Iris still in her mobile bed. His bent was to assume more members of the rebellion had gotten inside the city to rescue her, but he wasn’t ruling anything out just yet. “I’d like some time to review this alone,” he added to the hospital guard. “Check in with the police officers, will you? Tell me if they’ve found anything else worth noting.”

“Sure thing,” the guard nodded, stepping out of the office.

Jacob glanced at his back on his way out and then returned to looking through every bit of footage the hospital had caught of the three men once he was alone. Even if it took him all night, he was determined to find something that would help him narrow down who could have taken Now-Fleuret and where they could have gone.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Thanks! And you can skip to when they find out Iris is gone. Jacob would get involved pretty quickly before the night is over

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

So far he's fine. His coworker is the only one who's sick. We'll find out on Tuesday if she tested positive for Rona. I'm really hoping she tests negative, because if she tests positive, then he'll have to get tested, and then I might have to get tested ^^; It'll be a mess.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Unfortunately for Caspian, ralphing in the toilet didn’t make him feel any better than he had a few minutes ago. He found himself laying on his back on the tiled, bathroom floor with his knees in the air and both arms crossed over his face to block out the light. He wished his friends hadn’t made him take those last two shots when they had been playing their game. There had been no reason for him to get this wasted when he’d only needed to appear hungover enough to make his trip to the club believable. Jay and Miles had just forced him to drink in excess for their own amusement.

“I’m gonna kill them for this,” he mumbled to himself then groaned as his stomach lurched again, and he scrambled upright to get to the toilet before he vomited again. The only good thing was that he’d made it back to his bedroom before his body had revolted against the liquor. At least he could be a mess in solitude.

When his stomach calmed down enough for him to risk venturing away from the bathroom, he changed out of his clothes and crawled into bed, pulling the duvet all the way over his head. He had a feeling it was going to be a long night, but on the bright side, he no longer had to worry about what was going on with Iris. When she had been at the penitentiary, he’d been almost constantly worried about what the soldiers had been doing to her; and when she had been at the hospital, he’d worried about how stable she was and whether the soldiers would come by to take her back to her cell. Now that she was in Miles’ care, he could finally relax, knowing that she was safe from the people who wanted her executed.

Doing his best to focus on that rather than the dizziness and nausea that he’d brought upon himself by overindulging, he eventually managed to drift off into a light and moderately interrupted sleep.

Meanwhile at the Kinders’ house, Miles breathed a sigh of relief that his tone deaf offer hadn’t been poorly received by Iris. “I don’t mind it, really,” he insisted with a shrug. “I can sleep anywhere, but if you’re sure you’d rather be on the sofa then I won’t try to stop you.” Technically, insisting that he would sleep on the couch would have been the more gentlemanly thing to do, but unlike Caspian, he had never been the gentlemanly type. He could show compassion when he needed to, but he didn’t stick to rules and traditions when he didn’t see a reason to do so.

With a nod at her request, he stepped over to pick up the empty water glass and took it into the bathroom to refill from the faucet. The water supply for the entire manor was purified, so even the stuff that came from the sink would taste as good as the source in the kitchen. Bringing the full cup back for her, he handed it off and then grabbed a spare blanket from the closet. It was a particularly fluffy black one that would hopefully be more than enough to keep a person warm overnight.

While he was inside the closet, he also changed into a set of silk pajamas to wear to bed. Usually, he preferred to sleep au naturel, but that would have been completely inappropriate with a platonic female guest staying over, so he tolerated the clothes this time. Once he was dressed again, he stepped back into the bedroom.

“Here you go,” he said as he tossed the blanket on the sofa next to her. “Hope you sleep well, Iris. Let me know if you need anything else, okay?” Ambling over to the edge of the room, he turned out the overhead lights and climbed into his bed to get some rest, doing his best not to think about the fact that he had an attractive woman in the room with him. “Goodnight,” he mumbled to her, nestling comfortably in the soft sheets. Despite his offer to do more for her if she needed anything, it didn’t take long before he passed out, weary from the alcohol that was still in his system.

Beyond Expectations [AHeartlessNobody & Summer]

When the human tried to pin the blame on him, Caeyin ignored her. If she had been someone whom he trusted, she would have been right. However, she had already lied to him once, and he’d had no reason to believe that she had been telling him the truth this time. Before he’d seen the other human with his own two eyes, it had been more logical for him to assume that she had been trying to fool him again, so he wouldn’t reunited with the other scouts. That she expected him to know inherently when she was being honest or dishonest was ridiculous. Even his kind wasn’t that intuitive without forming a mental link with the other person to read them more closely.

Ripping the weapon out of her hand, he turned it on her with a jaded expression. The question she asked gave him pause though. Ordinarily, he would have taken the opportunity to kill her the instant he was able to. There were no other right-minded humans—at least, none that she was willing to tell him about—so he had nothing left to gain from keeping her alive that would please the pilot. The most sensible course of action was to fire the projectile at her and walk away to continue exploring the area. However, he wavered. His thoughts wandered back to the feral male that had attacked him, and he wondered if there were more of them out there. If so, it could be worth his time to question her. He needed to find out more about the threats on the Earth, so he would be better equipped to face them next time.

“I will kill you,” he assured her coldly. “But it won’t be now.” Pressing the barrel of the weapon against her chest, he took hold of her upper arm in his free hand and dragged her roughly over to the nearby chain restraint that she had used to tie him up the day before. After he’d been forcibly familiarized with the device, he knew how it worked. He slid his hand down from her bicep to her forearm and pulled her toward it, only lowering the weapon in his other hand to snap the metal piece around her wrist and remove the key.

Disregarding any efforts she may have made to resist, he picked the projectile gun back up and stepped back, assessing his own work. It looked like the human was restrained well enough, so he finally turned his back on her to retrieve his silencer from where it had been thrown to the floor. Though he’d used the earth weapon to threaten her, he didn’t really know how to use it, so he felt more comfortable with the electromagnetic gun in his hand. Better to rely on something that he was certain he could use.

“First, I want you to tell me what that thing was,” he dictated, idly indicating the dead male with a wave of his hand as he inspected his weapon for damage. When he felt satisfied that the silencer was still operable, his violet eyes flicked up to meet her gaze. “A different breed of human? Or do you all become that unstable as you age?”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Sorry that one took a while! My husband got back from a work trip and said one of his coworkers came down with symptoms of the virus, so I spent a while getting set up in our spare room because we have to social distance from each other now :c

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

When Iris made a teasing remark before he left the room, the color in Caspian’s cheeks deepened slightly. It hadn’t been the first time that he’d heard someone compare him to the fairytale princess—he’d even made some jokes about their obvious similarity, himself—but hearing that she had caught on made him feel a little chagrined. He wanted to make a witty comment in return, but his muddled, drunken brain wasn’t quick enough to comply, and he headed out to the garage with Jay and Miles without time to come up with a response.

Fortunately, the last phase of their plan went as well as any of them could have hoped. After they changed back into their original clothes in the car, Jay drove Cas and Miles back to the club, parking at the rear entrance near the employees’ vehicles. They got out and snuck inside—Jay keeping an eye on the prince to make sure he didn’t get lost or say something he shouldn’t while he was inebriated. Once they felt sure they had gotten away with their reappearance, the three headed over to the bar counter, where Miles closed out his open tab as if they had been there the entire time. Of course, the receipt only showed that they had purchased a couple drinks in total, but Miles tossed the paper in the bin on their way out. Since there was no reason for the military or the police to suspect that they were involved, they weren’t concerned about any investigators questioning the bartender about exactly how many drinks they’d had while they were there. Just the fact that they had been seen at the beginning and end of the night would be enough.

From there, they headed back to Jay’s Oracle and climbed inside, talking and laughing brashly for the cameras in the parking lot for good measure. He drove them back to the palace and pulled up to the front entrance, where Cas said his goodbyes and got out. By that point, he still hadn’t sobered up in the slightest, so it was apparent to the security guards at the door that he was drunk. They jogged down the steps to escort him into the building, ensuring that he didn’t stumble and injure himself on his way through the halls and up the stairs to his room.

As soon as he got there in one piece, he was left alone and closed the door behind him, letting out his breath in a heavy exhale. Somewhat impressively, he had managed to survive the whole trip without losing his dinner, but that streak ended the moment he had a second to wind down from the eventful night. Feeling the forewarning flex of his abdomen and build-up of saliva in his mouth, he sprinted for the toilet and dropped to his knees as his stomach purged itself of its contents.

Meanwhile, Jay drove Miles back to his manor and dropped him off. Their plan was to go back to the alley to get the other car in the early morning, before most people would be out of their homes. Having finished everything they needed to do for the night, they parted ways, and Miles returned to his bedroom to check on Iris and get ready for bed. He was still tipsy from the five shots of vodka he’d had, so he wanted to get as much sleep as possible before he had to wake up at the crack of dawn and leave again with the other high born.

When he got to his room, he knocked somewhat quietly on the door a couple times to announce his presence before he stepped inside. “Iris? You still doing okay?” he asked, closing the panel and wandering further into the space. As his eyes landed on her petite figure on the sofa, he found it difficult not to stare. When he and the others had discussed hiding places for her, he’d been more than happy to volunteer his home as her refuge from the military, but that had been before he’d seen how shockingly attractive she was. He marveled that Caspian hadn’t ever taken interest in someone as pretty as her. It also didn’t help that he liked the way she looked wearing his clothes.

Not wanting to make her uncomfortable—they barely knew each other, and she was on the run, after all—he coughed into the crook of his elbow and gestured to his bed, “You can sleep up here if you want… I’m sorry I don’t have anything more private. The maids clean up all the other rooms, so this is the safest place.” Suddenly, he blinked as he realized how his offer might have come across. “Um, I didn’t mean you could sleep on the bed with me. I’ll take the sofa,” he clarified, holding up his hands innocently. “I promise I won’t do anything. I really only offered to let you hide here because I wanted to help. You can trust me.”

~Bonsoir~

Of course. Hope you start to do better soon! Depression can really take the wind out of you :(
I'll be around whenever you feel up to writing again!