2000/1/05 - Burnt out, Sold out

[Agita]

"Works, thank you. Have fun with your stuff. And don't get any paper cuts." Kiley winks at Sam and gulps down the rest of her half-lunch to get going.

[Bozwevial]

Sam scarfs down the crepe before gathering up everything he needs and reluctantly traipsing off to the student council meeting. Time to go endure another few hours of manipulation and petty abuses of power, all wondering which person is secretly trying to blackmail him. Lovely.

[Agita]

Hitting the city, Kiley takes a bus and train to visit an internet cafe she knows well: The fee is cheap, the coffee is good for its price, and the computers have games she likes.

[veekie]

Kiley

At this time of day, the cybercafes are fairly crowded by other students after school, mainly gaming from the sounds of things. Kiley finds an open spot at the Shadow Connection, a mid range cybercafe with poor lighting, good machines and more importantly, dividers between the computers and headsets for any audio, affording a modicum of privacy and limiting the noise to the onesided chatter of overenthusiastic gamers yelling at each other, though any nosy parker could probably look over shoulders just fine.

[Agita]

Kiley greets the owner quietly and gets a big coffee to go with her seat at a computer, willfully ignorant of any stares she's liable to get in the middle of the gamers. She's not really sure how it's supposed to go, so for a first try, she just finds an appropriate Usenet group to make a post that looks at least vaguely on-topic.

got a better computer recently, so I've been taking the Wires and parts out of my old. any1 can recommend a good place 2 sell the parts off (not that old, slightly used) fairly?

With the shot in the dark fired, she starts up a game of Alpha Centauri, checking back periodically, without the headphones. Trying out the Hive, for a change. Nobody will question why she's sitting around for hours on a 4X game.

[veekie]

Sam

The council members file into the absurdly opulent student council meeting room, styled to resemble a corporate boardroom. Two rows of hard chairs line the walls, mounted with a writing surface for the gofers and anyone awaiting judgement, while a horseshoe shaped meeting table occupies the middle of the room, with eight seats for the council members and a space for whoever they're grilling in the middle.
Sam gets in just in time, earning him a few looks from the other gofers, as the door closes. The council is in full attendance today, complete with the victim of the week, a senior Sam fails to recognize. She likely offended Antonio during a new year party, and is now up to resist a club budget re-evaluation for the Modern Art Club, doing badly if her expression is anything to go by.

While the first third of the meeting involved a lot of running around fetching records and delivering memos, the latter bit was more the council members having a snack while the gofers worked on verifying facility usage, club accounts and requests, allowing Sam to study the council and his fellows in detail.

Antonio and Lisa are out, being unlikely to regularly attack Franco's, and by extension, their own concerns. Annette, the secretary is the wrong gender, while Darius, the head of prefects, is too overweight to be the villain. Thomas, the treasurer is about the right height, but too skinny, Alice, in charge of event planning, is too female. Roberto and Michael roughly fit the right shape, being in charge of facilities and clubs respectively. None of them however, have the right voice.

The other gofers are much worse off, as they tend towards their own cliques. Sam doesn't know most of them very well, much less enough to recognize them freely.

OOC:
Sam should pick which of the councilors he's under, in which case he gets a more detailed snapshot of their personality, and their other cronies. Antonio, Darius and Thomas are off the table, for personality reasons they wouldn't entertain Sam, even as a minion.

[veekie]

Kiley

Kiley's gaming is uninterrupted for over two hours, then a message is sent to her from one of the AI factions. The Data Angels, which had just spawned out of one of the University's cities right then, and the dialog text certainly was nonstandard.

'artifact for credit? choose military, exploration, industrial or science bonus? hostile factions?'

Looks like she made contact.

[Agita]

It takes Kiley a bit to decipher the metaphor in the message, then she answers before taking her turn,

science. Hostile: University/Morgan Industries

[veekie]

The response is immediate and brief, '30% cut, resale to industries or other faction?'

[Bozwevial]

Sam shoots sidelong glances at the other gofers in between page after page of the stack of event records he's verifying on Alice's behalf. If his mass sense were a tiny bit more refined, it would be so much easier to narrow the pool down, but as-is he's forced to keep scanning the room and figure out which of the minions has the right build, starting with Roberto's lot. While it wouldn't be hard for any of the gofers to get a locker room key, it'd be easiest for someone directly overseeing the school's facilities.

[veekie]

Sam
Alice Merrel, the head of Event Planning is short, petite and blond, looking the picture of an angel, and acting the part of a pleasant confidant.
Unfortunately for her cronies, she's a viperish slave driver, meticulous in the extreme, and demanding the same of everyone else. On the council, she gets along well with Antonio and Lisa, putting her in a very strong position, despite her father being merely a high level accountant in the organization. She is practically on stabbing terms with Darius and Thomas, whose ire her minions have to suffer by proxy.
Sam's fellow minions under her are:
-Samantha, a plain and overweight girl, as a personal friend of Alice, is effectively her second in command. Usually not assigned any work unless there's no hands to spare. She's in this for putting a dent in the student council's snack budget.
-Nikophoros, much abused admirer of Alice, he volunteers to do more of the work in the hope of getting Alice's attention, though all that gets him is more work rather than attention. Tall and good looking, Nikos doesn't fit the profile of Leaf Ronin.
-Mike, an unobtrusive junior. Extremely nosy person, and generally Alice's go to for ferreting out information. Short and skinny. A little shorter than the villain, Mike could feasibly fit in the costume.

Roberto Werde's underlings consists of two pretty junior girls Sam hadn't learned the name of yet and one senior boy by the name of James. Roberto tends to rotate his underlings out often, usually for new pretty juniors he can flirt with. James, at a glance, roughly fits the body profile, and is a bit of a troublemaker, protected from his antics by his cousin Roberto and his position, provided he exercises the minimum caution.
As for Roberto himself, Sam had met the guy often enough while working with Alice, and he's quite serious minded, if petty and capable of holding a grudge for the most trivial reasons. Roberto is not in the favor of Antonio, but his father is highly placed, allowing him some standing even when against the 'crown prince'.

[Bozwevial]

Either Mike or James might have something to do with this. James could easily have gotten into a situation where he had a trigger event just by doing something stupid, and Mike could certainly have found himself in hot water while snooping around. There's not quite enough to go on, though. He needs a pretext to hear their voices, but that would probably be best done after the meeting in case he pisses off Darius or Thomas. In the meantime, though, he might as well keep an eye on the two. If Leaf Ronin's nervous or twitchy, there might be some tell he can spot.

[veekie]

The meeting drags on, until a long hour later, when the council members start to leave and the remainder of the snacks are free for all who are sticking around to do the busywork of checking requests against resources. As far as Sam could tell, any nervousness in the room only stemmed from the ill favor of the eight lordlings present.

[Bozwevial]

With Mike seeming like the most obvious prospect, Sam decides he should at least do a cursory check of the snoop's voice. He stands up, glancing over at Alice's other cronies. "I'm gonna go grab some snacks. Want anything, Sammi? Nikos? Mike?"

[veekie]

Sam gets a few glances from around the room at his movement, then is summarily ignored again by the others, seeing as he isn't doing anything interesting.

Samantha blinks, and then smiles at this show of initiative,"Oh, sure, one of everything". Considering the wide spread, that's at least three plates of food.
Nikos just waves Sam off, a closer examination shows the pretty boy laboring under about just over twice the normal amount of work, with Samantha's table being suspiciously clear and ready for food.
Mike looks up from his scribbling, then grabs a note out from his stack and passes it to Sam,"A plate of the pastries then, nothing with fruit on it. Oh and drop this off with Emily from 1-D if you please. She's Roberto's new ornament."

[Bozwevial]

Sam nods, pocketing the note. "Sure thing." After making several trips to carry a significant portion of the food back to Samantha and Mike, as well as handing the note off to Emily, he finishes up enough work that he can get away with the rest on his own time and excuses himself. This isn't working too well. Even if Leaf Ronin hasn't noticed, some of the other minions might get suspicious and make trouble on their own. He'll need to find another way of narrowing down the possible candidates.

Once he's out of the meeting, Sam sends Kiley a text. How's the homework coming? I don't really feel like doing work after the meeting. Thought I might go clean up the mess from yesterday.

[veekie]

Emily is profuse with her thanks for the misplaced note, and Sam has to agree that Roberto has pretty good taste in looks, if not brains. The meeting eventually winds down without fuss, leaving the student council meeting room for the janitors to clean up as even the gofers begin to leave.

[Agita]

Kiley is interrupted in sending her reply by Sam's text and fumbles out a quick rely, feeling just a little guilty that she's been playing around while he had his meeting.
wired atm, calling our friend. After this, sure.

Looking back at the screen, she deliberates for a second before typing out:
try for resale first, unless it's a bad deal
She figures "Morgan Industries" will know best of all just what the goods are worth.

[veekie]

'need to inspect. collect secure probe unit outside of current base, recycling vat'

[Agita]

After a second of deciphering the message, Kiley replies:
ok. Privacy?