Chương 606: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Twenty-Five

She immediately knew this was going to be a much tougher sell than her last place. This room had six guards within just to watch the teleporter pad, all of them alert and tense and ready to fight at a moment's notice. It was almost the exact opposite of her last stop, and it was even more intense than any of the other stops she had made so far.

She wasn't sure, as the guards reacted, if she was going to be able to talk her way out of this one, but even if not, she had already gathered enough to go far in taking this organization apart. She had been using a little trick to hide her number of rebirths until now, which looked like it was still holding, as she wasn't immediately attacked, nor did all the guards simply flee. The guard in charge in the room did approach her with her hand on her sword, Beth noting the large shield on the woman's back.

"Who are you? Nobody should have these codes. How did you get here?" the woman demanded.

"Maintenance," Beth answered, showing her spatial rune device yet again. She didn't try any clever tricks like flashing her ID because she didn't want someone with even a little extra bit of Dexterity to see it was a bullshit card. If she had a real ID for the facility, she would have flashed that while showing the tool, bringing the focus to the tool to distract the guards.

"There's no scheduled maintenance for today," the woman stated, remaining tense and ready.

"There hasn't been any scheduled maintenance for a long time, has there?" Beth asked, putting just a touch of annoyance into her voice.

"You've let the pads get so far out of whack that I'm surprised their alignment isn't dumping people in the nearby buildings. Or worse." The woman hesitated for a moment at Beth's words, looking at the pad before looking back at her.

"They're really that bad? I didn't hear anything about that."

"How much do you pay attention to the teleporter maintenance schedule?" Beth retorted slightly sarcastically.

"Look, let me show you how bad it is on the console." Beth was bluffing just a bit, but the guard immediately made a mistake, going to the console first and logging in. In fairness, it was a minor mistake, as anyone confronted with a potentially hostile situation would be wanting to get that situation resolved as soon as they could without the whole thing blowing up.

Still, that mistake let Beth get on the console essentially using the guards ID to navigate the system, and she did actually know where things were and how to bring up the data she needed. She pulled up a table showing drift in teleporter coordinates and a chart showing the sync of the runes of each of the pads, all helpfully tracked by the pads themselves.

"I don't know what these mean," the guard said after looking at the charts for a minutes, but she was now more relaxed. Beth had demonstrated a level of competence that could back up her assertions she was a maintenance technician skilled in a particular field and that caused the guard to start believing her assertions.

"The table shows the coordinates the pad use," Beth explained, pointing at the screen.

"You can see how the numbers have started drifting more than just the movement of the planets indicates? That means that the pads are slowly starting to become unsynchronized. A more expensive system would have built-in corrections for this drift, but you don't have the more expensive system, you have these bargain pads deployed. The chart shows the runes on this pad in particular, and they're all like this, just for reference, showing that the runes themselves are starting to desynchronize internally.

Problem one means you land in the toilet instead of on the pad; problem two means the pad doesn't work, in the best case."

"What's the worst case?" asked the woman a bit nervously.

"The worst case is your head teleports somewhere and the rest of you doesn't," Beth replied confidently.

"That's less of a worry, however, as even these cheaper pads have safeties built into them to prevent exactly that scenario from happening. That takes us back to best case, which is the pads just suddenly won't do anything one day. Oh, they'll turn on, and you can try a teleport, but they'll make a humming noise and then fizzle out. That's why you need the routine maintenance."

"Right, well, don't leave the room without permission," the woman said.

"We'll be keeping an eye on you."

"Right, no problem," Beth lied in response, just resisting shaking her head. This was the classic problem that started to happen as technology and skill advanced and employees weren't fully trusted to do their work. When everybody was farming, it was pretty easy to tell if someone was slacking off or not doing their job correctly. The person watching the workers or guarding a place didn't need to ask too many questions of a janitor mopping a floor, or a stevedore carrying a box.

The problem happened when the guards weren't trained in a specific field and an expert in that field was working on something; for all these guards knew, Beth was changing the teleporter pad to send everyone to the center of the sun. She wasn't doing that, obviously, but none of these guards gave the impression of experienced and knowledgeable space mages to her, and they would otherwise need extensive runic knowledge, including a large knowledge of spatial runes, to even hope to track what she was doing.

Beth didn't set the teleporter to throw people into the center of the sun, having no idea exactly who this group was or what they were doing. She didn't want some poor, uninvolved sap to get killed just for being associated with a group that was associated with the rebels. Depending on the circumstances, Beth and her team might not even care about a rebellion, as long as the CRA was being respected and people weren't throwing around war crimes like candy, but both of those lines were being crossed here.

The people in this organization might not all be rebels, from the little she had seen so far, and until she untangled this mess, she wasn't just going to condemn everyone. She was trying to go with asking questions first and then shooting later, rather than the other way around, shooting first and maybe asking questions later, which was much more her MO. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The pad didn't really need all that much work; she had been exaggerating in her explanation, at least in how bad the drift currently was, but she still fixed it. At the very least, she could show anyone asking any further questions that she had actually done something and wasn't just pretending to be a maintenance technician. She wasn't sure exactly how long she could maintain her cover, but she had done surprisingly well so far, and she was just going to play it by ear.

The worst case scenario was that she would have to go loud and start fighting or even killing the guards and the rest of the people working in the building, but she was hoping she could get a better sense of exactly what was happening first.

"Done," Beth said to the head guard, or just the most proactive, she wasn't sure which. None of them had anything on their clothing or gear that would label them as to their rank or position, so she was just assuming the person in charge was the one haranguing her.

"Good. What else do you need?" the guard asked, eying the teleporter pad slightly warily.

"I need access to a calibration matrix, if you have one here," Beth said, just barely resisting smiling at the woman's confused look.

"I also need to get something to drink and make a stop at the restroom, if I can do that. I've been calibrating nonstop all day and I need a quick break." That was obviously a lie, but she wasn't sure that the guards were in any kind of security network, which seemed a big weakness to her, but maybe it wasn't possible for some reason.

Considering that every set of guards so far had been surprised when she showed up, she was guessing they weren't communicating between facilities for some reason, and she was betting that it was like that now. If they were talking, they would know she was stopping and taking a break at every facility, with or without the guards knowledge, and she'd rather have 'permission' to explore than get caught after teleporting into the building and have them realize she was fucking with them.

"That's fine, but Lisa will go with you," the head guard said, jerking her head at one of the other guards.

"Hey, no problem," Beth said, smiling as the other guard stepped over and gestured for her to walk out of the room. Beth did as instructed and then just looked at the guard in the hallway, who was just staring at her.

"Hey, I haven't here before, so I don't know where to go. Unless you don't mind watching while I walk around randomly?" Beth said, putting just a bit of annoyance into her voice again. She found that it was easier to do this whole spy thing if she pretended to play a role the whole time, putting on emotions and reactions like an actor in a play.

"Right," Lisa said, clearly not the most talkative person. The guard turned and walked down the hallway, her boots faintly clicking on the polished tiles as she led the way to a large cafeteria on that floor. This room could seat far more than the other cafeteria Beth had visited, giving some hint to the size of the building here, or at least a hint to how much foot traffic the building would get in one day.

Beth didn't go for the whole ordering and eating a meal thing, not wanting to test this guard's patience so much, instead just getting two drinks out of a vending machine. Luckily, the machines worked an awful like what they did everywhere, including having a range of options to pay, Beth just using a few coins. Best that she not pay for things using her communicator; rookie mistake like that could easily give the game away, though that would more be a concern if she cared about getting caught later.

Considering the guards didn't even seem to have a network they were passing communications back and forth on, she didn't anyone was actively monitoring the payment system for suspicious names or IDs, but one never knew. It was more a problem if someone pulled the log later and saw that there was a suspicious ID, but Beth was also not planning on letting this organization last too much longer, though that again depended on what exactly was happening.

"Bathroom?" Beth asked the woman, who just grunted and turned to lead the way.

"Not so talkative?"

"Don't know you," the woman grunted back, leading the way into a bathroom and gesturing at one of the stalls. Beth didn't have to go, not really, but she pretended while at the same time using that minute to scan the building. She had a lot of advantages over others, most of all her Ideal, and she was mercilessly using those advantages to cheat.

She could detect a lot of things about the space close to her Ideal if she could just get even ten uninterrupted seconds to concentrate, and faking taking a piss was a good chance to do a scan. She got a general sense of the layout of the building they were in and found it to be much larger than any of the others she had spied on so far, which immediately got her curiosity rather piqued, considering this wasn't at all some small time operation.

A building like this, in a major city no less, meant some serious capital investment and resources at the group's disposal. She was definitely going to investigate more, but the guard presented a problem. She might have to pull the same disappearing trick as last time, pretending to teleport away only to go somewhere else in the building, though that had its own risks associated with it.

Beth exited the stall and washed her hands, slightly amused at how there was all this magic and how she had all these crazy powers, but using the bathroom was still basically exactly the same as before her life had changed so drastically. The guard just watched with a bored expression until she was done, getting ready to take her back to the teleporter pad room and see her on her way.

Beth, wanting to be just a bit mischievous, and pretty sure her cover wasn't going to last too much longer, just stopped following the woman. Strange that the guard was walking in front of her instead of behind her, but Beth hadn't exactly noted a whole shit ton of competence in the guards for this organization so far. She didn't push it too far, just going to the cafeteria before the woman had even noticed she had stopped following, buying a small fruit and sitting at a table.

She had been tempted to pull some of the much better food she had stored away out, but then remembered that an awful lot of people didn't have a spatial item or power. Blending in often meant pretending she was much, much poorer and less capable than she really was, though the guards hadn't really batted an eye at her withdrawing an item from her storage.

Then again, there were special storages for tools or small items that were rather cheap, something she could easily have as her maintenance persona, not to mention she was a spatial technician in that persona. She waited for a few minutes, becoming a bit confused when nobody came running and no alarms went off, but that was cleared up when the captain of the guard for the teleporter room stuck her head in the cafeteria.

Seeing Beth, she very clearly spoke with someone on her communicator, the facial and eye movements and the ticks of someone sub-vocalizing rather obvious, before she drew her weapon and marched over to Beth, very clearly hostile now. Beth wasn't sure exactly how to play it, but she decided on remaining calm, rather than leaning into her character too much.

A regular maintenance technician would freak out in this situation or, at the very least, also get a bit upset themselves, if they weren't too bright and had decided to just wander off and were mad about being confronted about it. If she remained calm and collected, it would likely throw the guard off and rattle her, which would give Beth yet more advantages in talking with her.