Chapter Text
“A little to the left.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. That’s in perfect view.”
“Yessssss…..” Jester’s spraycan overtook her glee, higher with her seat on Caleb’s shoulders. Her quick hands magicked another dick on the wall of the bank building, and he gently placed her down on the ground.
“And done!!” she did a little dance obvious through her hoodie stretched over her horns. The whole bank gleamed with Jester’s creations. Dicks, unicorns, jellyfish. A wonderful little face that looked a lot like the manager.
“Incredible!! Incredible!!!” Veth ran up to them, her security-camera-annihilator’s annenae bouncing. “This is a statement those fuckers can’t ignore!”
“I feel like we’re done here. We need to head out,” said Caleb. His internal clock read that that they were nor firmly in the danger hour.
“Woah woah, wait up – there’s one left. Look – what about this glistening piece of garbage? It’s right in the middle! The whole modern art thing of uselessness! And ugly, too!”
It truly did look useless, and ugly. A phone-booth sized white cylinder, well, if it was round, it would be a cylinder. But its sides were all chopped up, and sloped up like a house. Every side looked like a very tall pentagon, looking up like a tulip about to blossom.
It glistened with what was once modernity, but now ordinary dust and scratches.
“Look at it, it’s art!” Jester’s energy couldn’t be contained. She continued gesticulating dangerously with the spraycan. “As an ahhhtist, I cannot desecrate another artist’s work!”
“But it’s fine to do it on a bank,” Veth said.
“Yeah! It’s not art! They need some art in their lives!”
“And this isn’t good enough?”
“No, wait, actually,” Jester stumped. And then decided to draw a little dick near the base. “Here you go. Just a little whittle dick.”
“Perfect, now to go—” Caleb put his hands around their shoulders and tried to steer them out and away from the scene of their crime.
When Veth’s device beeped. Badly. And said something with static. And the cameras around them whirred back into life.
“Oh no,” whispered Veth.
“Oh nOOo,” oscillated Jester.
“Scheisse,” concluded Caleb.
Emergency lights turned on around them. And they ran.
They barely made it out of the compound before they saw security guards running, batons and lights, yelling to stop. Through his adrenaline, Caleb saw Jester throw down her spraypaints to try to stop them. They exploded on the ground with bursts of anti-corporate color.
“Hey, HEY!! GET OUT OF HERE!” a guard yelled at them, getting closer and closer. Their getaway was on his other side – they needed to get past him? And how?
The guard got so close Caleb could see his face – young, handsome, with gorgeous cheekbones that belonged on TV. He didn’t have the face of a piggish guard recognizing he failed his job and wanted to punish others for his mistake, but of someone determined, scared, and incredibly assured – for them to get out of there. The clothes flopped on him like they didn’t the other guards.
He rushed past them without putting up a fight. The chaos crew rushed past, but Caleb looked back. The guard stopped, and raised his hands, pointing in the bank with his whole body.
“No!! No! Do they ever listen, no!! Get back here!”
Now Caleb was too confused to decide, until he looked in front of him.
A wave of little metallic spiders burst from behind a building, screeching and whirring at frequencies higher than humans could decipher. But their danger, sharp and inhuman, didn’t need any deciphering.
Caleb skidded to a stop, holding Jester and Veth, and then pulled them back.
“Back to the bank!”
“They’re going to arrest us!”
“Yeah, well these are going to kill us!”
The hot guard did a little hop and ran back to the bank, searching for his keys in his giant pockets. He ran – but not to the sliding doors. He stopped in front of the piece of modern art.
“Come on, darling, come on, Light, please!!---” he pressed against the side of the art piece with a dying man’s desperation.
Just as they caught up to him, the darling did what he asked. The art piece lit up from the inside with this soft, ethereal glow. This is what people saw in churches, thought Caleb. Holiness and safety and heaven. On the base of the sculpture, in dark green, silhouetted against the brightness of the piece, smiled a little whittle dick.
The sound of metal spiders got closer and closer. Caleb hugged the girls close, and they him. The guard opened one of the tulip-petal panels – what? – and pushed them through.
“You want safety? In you go!” he smiled, no longer dying but gleeful himself.
“What, it’s so small —” Caleb barely heard Veth question before he and Jester stepped in —
And into a giant spaceship, bright central module soft and glowing like heaven, sleek dark purple metal supporting a console panel that was lit with stars and lines like constellations.
Caleb couldn’t breathe. He could only look at it. The dodecahedron floating at the center, right above the control panel. The shimmering lines in the air. The sense of space and dimension completely thrown out the window to the spiders.
The guard closed the door and walked past them confidently.
“Small, you say?” he strut around the console with a pose like a pirate captain at one of those giant navigator wheels. “Welcome to your salvation.”
He pulled a lever, and the floor under them shook. The console flickered. A sound like a whale taking flight reverberated around them.
The guard took off his coat, showing an asymmetrical jacket. His hand danced across a keypad like a pianist’s. The floor stilled. All three of them held fast to the railing around them. They stared with horror. He stared with amusement.
“Now which one of you defaced my ship?”