>>5356033Instead of saying making some comeback, in a single, grandiose motion, Matt opens the book to shove it in front of your face. The sight that greets you is a whole jumble of letters.
“Different letter, different cipher.” He grins. “Pattern is Caesar, Atbash for every odd-numbered paragraph and Atbash, Caesar, Atbash, Atbash for every even-numbered paragraph.”
“Caesar-whatnow?” Bernard is lost.
“Okay, okay, we get it! Can we just get on with the plan?” Valjean is getting tired of Matt’s antics. From beside him, Julia squints at the mess of letters as if mentally commanding them to make some sense.
“Alright… Alright…” Matt sets the book down, looking a little miffed that no one was impressed with his tactics.
“So here’s the rundown on some stuff I came up with, paranoid ciphering tactics notwithstanding…” Matt flips to a page that’s bookmarked with neon green.
“First plan is to be as sneaky as possible, just grab Conduit and get out of there since you’ll all basically be ghosts in the building so long as Eddie’s program’s doing it’s thing. Minimize the amount of contact you make with the enemies, but, let’s be real, that’s easier said than done…”
“Is that the best you can come up with?” Valjean’s unimpressed. “I bet a preschooler could come up with something better than that.”
“Shut up, dick.” Matt growls as he flips to the next bookmark, this time in red.
“Next plan was to create a distraction. Start releasing prisoners with this–” Matt throws Boleski’s keycard on the table.
“Dominic Boleski.” Valjean drawls, peering down at the keycard in question.” Why am I not surprised?” With that, he leans back to kick his feet up on the table, looking to Matt in a silent prompt to continue.
“Now mind you, if you want to do something even bigger than simply releasing prisoners and cause even more of a fuckfest, you have the two special agents on the bottom floor, or should I say FastBall and Blaze?”
While your battles with either of them feel like an eternity ago, you remember both of those fights well. There’s also the fact that neither of them were all-that-fond of you, especially Blaze at your time in the Crux, but, if Julia’s condition is anything to go by, they likely remember nothing about you (or so you hope).
Still, you can’t deny that their powers would give FutureLabs a run for their money.
>(3/?) 