Annie (_annieareyouok) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-07-30 21:51:00 |
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Current mood: | annoyed |
Entry tags: | npc, ~annie robinette |
Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho
Who: Annie
What: Workday
When: Day of 'dusting'
Where: Her Home (Searchlight)
Rating: Language
In grade school, Annie had to read Out of Dust. It was relatively new on the young adult scene and her teachers had been all aflutter in getting granted forty free copies of the book from its publisher, so of course it had been subject of all of her grade’s language arts studies for a full semester. Annie was a city girl at heart, born and raised in Philly, and never quite understood the imagery the book’s author had used, lines about walls of dust in the air, piled up high against walls and fences, blinding anyone who might dare venture out. It didn’t make sense to Annie, a child of apartment blocks and skyscrapers that cut to narrow streets winding around the city.
She was pretty sure she understood it now.
Local weather phenomena was nothing she cared to research, so she assumed the dust that had been kicking up was just your average, everyday bullshit in Nevada. In all honesty, she hadn’t really given a damn about it -- at least until it knocked out her satellite television, interrupting a perfectly good marathon of The Simpsons.
Working remotely with piles of moldy file boxes full of messy, half-assed files to poke through wasn’t much fun if she couldn’t even run Pandora in the background to help the day pass a little faster. Still she tried, making a valiant effort to get work done.
Blah blah blah, members of some religious cult at the burned out husk of an old Catholic church gone missing. Probably ran off to become reborn or something.
Blah blah blah, missing eight year old boy, dual citizenship, father a Mexican national. Probably parental abduction, growing up happy and safe somewhere south of the border.
Blah blah blah, drunken frat boy disappearing after a bender in the city. Most likely a hit-and-run or overdose DOA somebody forgot to report.
A little after one in the afternoon, however, the mostly abandoned fax machine in the corner of the room sprung to life and spit out a badly pixelated Missing poster of what might or might not be a young woman named Kayleigh Miller; with the quality of the image, it was frankly hard to tell.
Annie thought if she squinted at it hard enough, she might just see a sailboat.
Of course the ‘CALL!!!!’ scrawled in an angry hand at the top was just the icing on the shitty cake. Annie had left her phone on the charger in her bedroom for most of the day, retrieving it to find a record nine missed calls from Brett. She snorted and mentally congratulated herself; her previous record was only five before he resorted to other means of communication.
“Do you not know how to operate a fucking iPhone?” Brett spat over the line by way of greeting.
“What do you want, Brett? I got the poster. It looks like shit,” Annie replied. “If you want me to make any headway, you need to send me the actual casefile. This thing looks like a sixth grader made it, for fuck’s sake.”
“I tried sending you the casefile, but you haven’t responded to any emails,” Brett snapped. “Just because you’re in a dead-end job doesn’t mean you get to slack off and still collect a paycheck, Robinette. This isn’t a cold case, it’s a recent disappearance, and I’ve got my hands full with a wedding party massacre, so this is yours to handle.”
“Wedding party massacre?” Annie echoed, interest piqued.
Brett scoffed. “Yeah, that’s a job for the A-team. Go back to your corner and work on the dregs, actually get results for a change, yeah?” With that, he hung up.
Annie cursed and threw her phone, picked it back up in a huff a moment later to thumb through her email and see the details of the Miller case. Just as she suspected, it was sparse at best; pretty girl, a few friends and exes weepy but mystified over her sudden departure.
Probably just chucked it in and went home.
Annie sighed and dropped her phone on the desk in the corner. She had better things to do than waste time on whatever garbage Brett would shove in her direction because he didn’t want to be bothered with it. She parked herself in front of the television and turned on her Xbox. She hadn’t played in a few days or managed to catch KidCali420 online yet, but there was always the next time.
She had barely logged in when she got the error message: No Connection. The storm, or whatever it was, had knocked out her internet service.