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Murderbot fic: Crime and Punishment
DW catchup continues ... I posted this on AO3 yesterday, and I wrote most of this fic in the car, actually, on the 7-hour drive home from my mom's part of Alaska. I would drive for a while and think of a new section of fic and stop to write a bit on my laptop.
Crime and Punishment (Murderbot books, Mensah POV, 2500 words)
Missing scene/tag for Fugitive Telemetry. Mensah gets a call from station security. (Entirely bookverse.)
Follow-up on Mostly fluff and banter, in spite of the actual topic.
"Oh good, you're here," Senior Officer Indah said, in a tone which heavily implied the existence of unspoken words and phrases such as Finally and What took you so long and Can we get this over with.
"I had to clear my schedule," Mensah said. "And Pin-Lee's," she added, nodding to her companion. "She is here in her official solicitor function." Pin-Lee smiled in that way she had that showed too many teeth and had a slightly shark-like aspect.
Neither of them bothered to sit down, which meant they were standing in front of the desk in Indah's office. Maybe there was a bit of looming involved.
Although Mensah didn't plan to mention it, she wasn't that busy, and neither was Pin-Lee. When Mensah had called her, Pin-Lee had laughed for probably a minute straight, and then the two of them mutually agreed that showing up too quickly would set a bad precedent.
However, now that they were here, she felt that being too conciliatory would also set a bad precedent.
"You probably want to see them," Indah said grimly.
"Oh, I definitely want to see them. I also intend to leave here with all three of them released into my custody."
"So to speak," Pin-Lee put in quickly. "Informally. From a legal standpoint, we intend to walk out of here with my clients released from all legal obligations and free to go."
"Uh-huh," Indah said. "Well, they're in Holding Suite One. I can have someone -- Officer Solange -- no, not Solange," she amended, as the security officer standing in the doorway looked horrified and made a faint squeaking sound. "... someone else show you the way."
"I'll find it," Mensah said. "Did you confiscate anything from the, uh, the ...."
"Suspects," Indah supplied.
"My clients," Pin-Lee put in.
"Them, yes," Mensah said. "If you've impounded any of SecUnit's drones, I'll have those back, please."
"She couldn't have," Pin-Lee said, her shark smile widening alarmingly. "The drones are officially an assistive device, so they have to stay with the person they belong to."
"Right, I forgot," Mensah said, making a conscious effort not to glance down at the drone riding on her shoulder. She wondered if Indah had noticed it and thought the answer was probably yes.
"We did confiscate this." Indah reached into her desk and took out a bag wrapped around something that Mensah recognized as Gurathin's tool kit.
"Thank you." She took it, politely not pointing out that SecUnit, and probably Gurathin as well, could hack out of any cell on the station in seconds if they wanted to. "I'll go see them now."
"Down the hall, to the left," Indah said. Looking warily at Pin-Lee, who still seemed to be circling with her fin out of the water, she asked, "Will you be going with her?"
"Oh, no," Pin-Lee said. "I'm going to stay here and discuss the terms of their release."
Indah looked resigned. "You know if this goes before a magistrate, the reparations will be a lot higher."
The shark smile reappeared. "I'm going to make sure it doesn't."
***
Preservation Station's version of holding cells were designed to be essentially small hotel rooms, although in spite of every attempt to make them look less cell-like, they were still definitely cells. One wall was reinforced mesh. Inside, there was a room with two beds, two chairs, and a small table. A door led into a small, private bathroom.
When Mensah arrived on the other side of the mesh, Gurathin was sitting in one of the chairs, elbows on his knees and eyes half-closed and unfocused, so presumably doing something in the feed. Ratthi was sprawled on his back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and looking a few minutes away from expiring of terminal boredom. SecUnit was standing and staring at the wall as far away from the other two as it could get. Mensah could tell it was aware of her because a couple of drones reoriented on her -- plus it had been monitoring her with its dedicated drone all along, so of course it knew where she was -- but the other two both jumped when she cleared her throat. Ratthi sat up, and Gurathin jerked upright, and both of them looked at her. No one said anything for a minute. Gurathin, she noted, had some minor bruising around his eye, as well as a bandage on his right hand.
"I got the most interesting report from Senior Indah earlier today," Mensah said conversationally.
Gurathin closed his eyes briefly. Ratthi said, "Does this involve us being unjustly imprisoned for not doing anything wrong?"
"No, not exactly," Mensah said. "It's actually concerning an assault on a refugee that we're supposed to be helping, and you three all know exactly what I'm talking about, so let's just get straight to the part where you tell me what in the world you were thinking and why you're not going to do it again."
"For the record," Gurathin said, "I want to be clear that I didn't go there intending to fight. I just wanted to talk to her."
"He's telling the truth," Ratthi said earnestly.
"And why were you there, exactly?" Mensah asked him.
"Moral support," Ratthi said, then added, "And, uh, to de-escalate if it was needed."
Gurathin sat up straighter and barked out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "Oh, is de-escalation what you were doing? Sorry, I must have missed that part, in between 'Show her, Gurathin!' and 'Jab to the left!'
"That was the moral support part!"
As Ratthi protested, Mensah turned to SecUnit, who had been standing very still, doing its best impression of being part of the wall. "And why were you there?"
Looking slightly to the left of her, it said, "My drones were monitoring the situation. I felt I might need to intervene."
Mensah decided not to point out that if it had been doing any intervening, it didn't seem to have done it until at least a couple of punches had been thrown. "So I take it that talking it out didn't go as any of you hoped," she said wryly.
"I did talk," Gurathin said. "She wasn't listening."
"So you thought hitting her would help with that?"
"First of all, I was provoked, and second, I think she did more damage to me than I did to her." He flexed his bandaged hand.
"You know that's not how assault works," Mensah said. "It's not a matter of weighing up the damage to figure out who's at fault, it's more a case of who threw the first punch, which was definitely you. I'll get back to you in a minute." She turned her attention to SecUnit, who continued to do its best furniture impression. "Anyway, so this is when you got involved, I assume."
"That's when Station Security got involved!" Ratthi interjected. "For absolutely no reason!"
Mensah turned a look on him. Ratthi visibly flinched. "Oh, don't worry, I'll get your side of it soon." She turned back to SecUnit, who regarded her with badly concealed nervousness, and consulted Indah's report in her feed. "It says here that you assaulted Security Officer Solange."
"It didn't assault her," Gurathin said, before anyone else could say anything. "It moved her away from me."
SecUnit said, in the deliberately robotic and slightly strangled-sounding tone that it used when it was experiencing some kind of strong emotion and determined not to admit it, "The security officer was attempting to interfere with Dr. Gurathin, who is my client."
"Who," Mensah said, "to be clear, just punched a refugee in the face."
"Not very hard," Gurathin said under his breath, flexing his hand.
"The report says that you picked her up," Mensah went on determinedly. "Officer Solange, that is."
"By the neck!" a voice echoed down the hall. Presumably that was Officer Solange, and also a useful reminder that the cells were monitored. Mensah heard Pin-Lee's voice answering quickly in ringing solicitor tones, although the words could not be made out.
"I'm always very careful when calibrating the amount of force I use," SecUnit said with somewhat more animation. "I didn't hurt her."
"And while you were holding her harmlessly by the neck," Mensah said, turning to Ratthi, "that's when you got involved."
"No," Ratthi said, "that was when two more of Indah's goon squad tried to assault SecUnit."
Attempted unsuccessfully to physically remove Suspect 2 from Security Officer Solange, was how the report phrased it. Still, Mensah couldn't imagine that this had been fun for anyone involved, even if SecUnit was just standing there not doing anything.
"Very well, and then you --" Mensah consulted the report again. "Tried to pick up Security Officer Reese to pry her off SecUnit, failed to realize how heavy she was, and both of you stumbled into a cafe table and fell over. SecUnit, did you save drone footage of that?"
"Of course," SecUnit said, a faint flicker of amusement fleetingly crossing its otherwise glum face. Ratthi yelped, "SecUnit, no!" just as a file dropped into Mensah's feed labeled RatthiOverboard.vid.
"See if I ever help either of you again," Ratthi said to the other two.
"You weren't helping us anyway," Gurathin said.
Mensah deleted the file unwatched. SecUnit undoubtedly had the whole thing on video from a dozen angles anyway, which meant that either Indah had requisitioned the video and hadn't mentioned it, or had failed to get it from SecUnit and probably wouldn't be able to now that Pin-Lee was involved.
"And by that point, I understand that Dr. Gurathin and SecUnit had both surrendered to Security?" Mensah asked, getting back to business.
"I did because I chose to, not because I had to," SecUnit said pointedly.
"We both chose to," Gurathin told it. "That's what surrendered means."
SecUnit looked as if it was considering picking him up by the neck.
Mensah engaged in a round of the deep breathing exercises that she sometimes used when dealing with her kids.
"You know," she said, "it doesn't do much good for the reputation of the Preservation Alliance if one of the first experiences that refugees have with us is getting punched in the face by someone who is supposedly trying to help them."
"Yeah, well, it doesn't do much for the reputation of the people we're admitting as refugees if they go around shooting the people trying to help them in the back, either," Gurathin said sullenly.
"Damn right, mate," Ratthi said, clapping him on the shoulder. Then, aware of Mensah watching, he hastily backpedaled to, "I mean, we should obviously set a better example if possible."
"Neither of you is any good at hitting anyway," SecUnit said. "You both need self defense training badly."
Glancing at it, Mensah saw that it was still looking at the wall, but wore a tiny smile that she suspected it was completely unaware of and would have denied to its dying day that it was doing at all.
"I don't know if Gurathin being able to punch more effectively would have improved this situation," she began, but just then Pin-Lee messaged her with a status update.
Good news! They're free to go. No one is pressing charges. I mean, the counter-charge would be attempted murder, which we are graciously not pursuing, and also we have the grounds to press a willful negligence lawsuit against Station Security for putting SecUnit in a position to be shot in the first place.
Mensah fought to smooth out her smile. I don't think SecUnit is any more interested in sueing them than it is in pressing charges against the person who shot it.
Yeah, but they don't know that. Well, to be clear, Senior Indah probably does know that, but she's willing to accept that no one got hurt, I mean on the StationSec side of things, and if we leave, we're no longer her problem.
"I just heard from Pin-Lee," Mensah said. "So it looks like the maximum amount of time they can hold you without bringing you to trial is three days."
"Dr. Mensah!" Ratthi protested. Gurathin and SecUnit would probably both have hated to know that their horrified expressions were almost identical.
".... which doesn't matter in this case because Pin-Lee is securing your release now," she said, once again suppressing a smile, and all three of them relaxed -- or whatever passed for it in SecUnit's case. "And now, if no one has any other pressing engagements, Gurathin and Ratthi, you need to accompany me to my office, where the refugee you assaulted and her solicitor are waiting. SecUnit, you're free to go."
There was a brief pause. SecUnit was frowning slightly. Ratthi said, "Why just us?"
Because it was unfair to make SecUnit face the person who had shot it, but she didn't think it would appreciate having that pointed out. "SecUnit was only there because you two were there."
"I was only there because Gurathin was there," Ratthi protested.
"Thanks for the backup," Gurathin said dryly.
At that point Pin-Lee reappeared in Mensah's feed. Also, I don't know if Indah told you that Gurathin is the only one who was actually arrested on anything actionable. Ratthi and SecUnit are technically in there because he is.
Mensah closed her eyes briefly for strength, held up a finger to the inmates of the cell, and turned her attention to the feed. Are you telling me they've been sitting in a holding cell with him for the last five hours for moral support?
Not really, it's more like they were all three arrested but in the case of those two, it's basically resisting arrest, or resisting having Gurathin arrested, I think. Indah and her staff would have been perfectly happy to let them go, but apparently it was all three of them or none of them, and they decided the lesser evil was holding them all to keep them out of trouble until StationSec could get hold of you.
Mensah rubbed her forehead.
"Talking to Pin-Lee," she explained, aware that all three of them were looking at her -- SecUnit using the drones -- and SecUnit had already tapped her curiously in the feed a couple of times, although she suspected it was listening in anyway. "Now that I have been apprised of the full details of the situation, I don't think any need for a group consultation in this particular case. I'm going to go talk to Bett myself, with just Pin-Lee." All of them looked blank. "Bett? The refugee? You did know she has a name, right? The fact that none of you is answering me right now is another excellent argument for handling this situation myself."
"But we still get out of the slammer, right?" Ratthi asked.
Gurathin gave him a look. "The slammer? Is that from a serial? You know there's a lot of the CR where you wouldn't be able to afford a hotel room as nice as this cell."
Another of SecUnit's drones drifted through one of the holes in the mesh and settled on Mensah's other shoulder.
If you were in any danger, I would have been out of this cell immediately, no matter what, SecUnit said in her feed.
I know, Mensah said, not trying to keep the smile off her face this time.
Crime and Punishment (Murderbot books, Mensah POV, 2500 words)
Missing scene/tag for Fugitive Telemetry. Mensah gets a call from station security. (Entirely bookverse.)
Follow-up on
Spoilers for Fugitive Telemetry
the refugee shooting Murderbot in the novella."Oh good, you're here," Senior Officer Indah said, in a tone which heavily implied the existence of unspoken words and phrases such as Finally and What took you so long and Can we get this over with.
"I had to clear my schedule," Mensah said. "And Pin-Lee's," she added, nodding to her companion. "She is here in her official solicitor function." Pin-Lee smiled in that way she had that showed too many teeth and had a slightly shark-like aspect.
Neither of them bothered to sit down, which meant they were standing in front of the desk in Indah's office. Maybe there was a bit of looming involved.
Although Mensah didn't plan to mention it, she wasn't that busy, and neither was Pin-Lee. When Mensah had called her, Pin-Lee had laughed for probably a minute straight, and then the two of them mutually agreed that showing up too quickly would set a bad precedent.
However, now that they were here, she felt that being too conciliatory would also set a bad precedent.
"You probably want to see them," Indah said grimly.
"Oh, I definitely want to see them. I also intend to leave here with all three of them released into my custody."
"So to speak," Pin-Lee put in quickly. "Informally. From a legal standpoint, we intend to walk out of here with my clients released from all legal obligations and free to go."
"Uh-huh," Indah said. "Well, they're in Holding Suite One. I can have someone -- Officer Solange -- no, not Solange," she amended, as the security officer standing in the doorway looked horrified and made a faint squeaking sound. "... someone else show you the way."
"I'll find it," Mensah said. "Did you confiscate anything from the, uh, the ...."
"Suspects," Indah supplied.
"My clients," Pin-Lee put in.
"Them, yes," Mensah said. "If you've impounded any of SecUnit's drones, I'll have those back, please."
"She couldn't have," Pin-Lee said, her shark smile widening alarmingly. "The drones are officially an assistive device, so they have to stay with the person they belong to."
"Right, I forgot," Mensah said, making a conscious effort not to glance down at the drone riding on her shoulder. She wondered if Indah had noticed it and thought the answer was probably yes.
"We did confiscate this." Indah reached into her desk and took out a bag wrapped around something that Mensah recognized as Gurathin's tool kit.
"Thank you." She took it, politely not pointing out that SecUnit, and probably Gurathin as well, could hack out of any cell on the station in seconds if they wanted to. "I'll go see them now."
"Down the hall, to the left," Indah said. Looking warily at Pin-Lee, who still seemed to be circling with her fin out of the water, she asked, "Will you be going with her?"
"Oh, no," Pin-Lee said. "I'm going to stay here and discuss the terms of their release."
Indah looked resigned. "You know if this goes before a magistrate, the reparations will be a lot higher."
The shark smile reappeared. "I'm going to make sure it doesn't."
***
Preservation Station's version of holding cells were designed to be essentially small hotel rooms, although in spite of every attempt to make them look less cell-like, they were still definitely cells. One wall was reinforced mesh. Inside, there was a room with two beds, two chairs, and a small table. A door led into a small, private bathroom.
When Mensah arrived on the other side of the mesh, Gurathin was sitting in one of the chairs, elbows on his knees and eyes half-closed and unfocused, so presumably doing something in the feed. Ratthi was sprawled on his back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and looking a few minutes away from expiring of terminal boredom. SecUnit was standing and staring at the wall as far away from the other two as it could get. Mensah could tell it was aware of her because a couple of drones reoriented on her -- plus it had been monitoring her with its dedicated drone all along, so of course it knew where she was -- but the other two both jumped when she cleared her throat. Ratthi sat up, and Gurathin jerked upright, and both of them looked at her. No one said anything for a minute. Gurathin, she noted, had some minor bruising around his eye, as well as a bandage on his right hand.
"I got the most interesting report from Senior Indah earlier today," Mensah said conversationally.
Gurathin closed his eyes briefly. Ratthi said, "Does this involve us being unjustly imprisoned for not doing anything wrong?"
"No, not exactly," Mensah said. "It's actually concerning an assault on a refugee that we're supposed to be helping, and you three all know exactly what I'm talking about, so let's just get straight to the part where you tell me what in the world you were thinking and why you're not going to do it again."
"For the record," Gurathin said, "I want to be clear that I didn't go there intending to fight. I just wanted to talk to her."
"He's telling the truth," Ratthi said earnestly.
"And why were you there, exactly?" Mensah asked him.
"Moral support," Ratthi said, then added, "And, uh, to de-escalate if it was needed."
Gurathin sat up straighter and barked out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "Oh, is de-escalation what you were doing? Sorry, I must have missed that part, in between 'Show her, Gurathin!' and 'Jab to the left!'
"That was the moral support part!"
As Ratthi protested, Mensah turned to SecUnit, who had been standing very still, doing its best impression of being part of the wall. "And why were you there?"
Looking slightly to the left of her, it said, "My drones were monitoring the situation. I felt I might need to intervene."
Mensah decided not to point out that if it had been doing any intervening, it didn't seem to have done it until at least a couple of punches had been thrown. "So I take it that talking it out didn't go as any of you hoped," she said wryly.
"I did talk," Gurathin said. "She wasn't listening."
"So you thought hitting her would help with that?"
"First of all, I was provoked, and second, I think she did more damage to me than I did to her." He flexed his bandaged hand.
"You know that's not how assault works," Mensah said. "It's not a matter of weighing up the damage to figure out who's at fault, it's more a case of who threw the first punch, which was definitely you. I'll get back to you in a minute." She turned her attention to SecUnit, who continued to do its best furniture impression. "Anyway, so this is when you got involved, I assume."
"That's when Station Security got involved!" Ratthi interjected. "For absolutely no reason!"
Mensah turned a look on him. Ratthi visibly flinched. "Oh, don't worry, I'll get your side of it soon." She turned back to SecUnit, who regarded her with badly concealed nervousness, and consulted Indah's report in her feed. "It says here that you assaulted Security Officer Solange."
"It didn't assault her," Gurathin said, before anyone else could say anything. "It moved her away from me."
SecUnit said, in the deliberately robotic and slightly strangled-sounding tone that it used when it was experiencing some kind of strong emotion and determined not to admit it, "The security officer was attempting to interfere with Dr. Gurathin, who is my client."
"Who," Mensah said, "to be clear, just punched a refugee in the face."
"Not very hard," Gurathin said under his breath, flexing his hand.
"The report says that you picked her up," Mensah went on determinedly. "Officer Solange, that is."
"By the neck!" a voice echoed down the hall. Presumably that was Officer Solange, and also a useful reminder that the cells were monitored. Mensah heard Pin-Lee's voice answering quickly in ringing solicitor tones, although the words could not be made out.
"I'm always very careful when calibrating the amount of force I use," SecUnit said with somewhat more animation. "I didn't hurt her."
"And while you were holding her harmlessly by the neck," Mensah said, turning to Ratthi, "that's when you got involved."
"No," Ratthi said, "that was when two more of Indah's goon squad tried to assault SecUnit."
Attempted unsuccessfully to physically remove Suspect 2 from Security Officer Solange, was how the report phrased it. Still, Mensah couldn't imagine that this had been fun for anyone involved, even if SecUnit was just standing there not doing anything.
"Very well, and then you --" Mensah consulted the report again. "Tried to pick up Security Officer Reese to pry her off SecUnit, failed to realize how heavy she was, and both of you stumbled into a cafe table and fell over. SecUnit, did you save drone footage of that?"
"Of course," SecUnit said, a faint flicker of amusement fleetingly crossing its otherwise glum face. Ratthi yelped, "SecUnit, no!" just as a file dropped into Mensah's feed labeled RatthiOverboard.vid.
"See if I ever help either of you again," Ratthi said to the other two.
"You weren't helping us anyway," Gurathin said.
Mensah deleted the file unwatched. SecUnit undoubtedly had the whole thing on video from a dozen angles anyway, which meant that either Indah had requisitioned the video and hadn't mentioned it, or had failed to get it from SecUnit and probably wouldn't be able to now that Pin-Lee was involved.
"And by that point, I understand that Dr. Gurathin and SecUnit had both surrendered to Security?" Mensah asked, getting back to business.
"I did because I chose to, not because I had to," SecUnit said pointedly.
"We both chose to," Gurathin told it. "That's what surrendered means."
SecUnit looked as if it was considering picking him up by the neck.
Mensah engaged in a round of the deep breathing exercises that she sometimes used when dealing with her kids.
"You know," she said, "it doesn't do much good for the reputation of the Preservation Alliance if one of the first experiences that refugees have with us is getting punched in the face by someone who is supposedly trying to help them."
"Yeah, well, it doesn't do much for the reputation of the people we're admitting as refugees if they go around shooting the people trying to help them in the back, either," Gurathin said sullenly.
"Damn right, mate," Ratthi said, clapping him on the shoulder. Then, aware of Mensah watching, he hastily backpedaled to, "I mean, we should obviously set a better example if possible."
"Neither of you is any good at hitting anyway," SecUnit said. "You both need self defense training badly."
Glancing at it, Mensah saw that it was still looking at the wall, but wore a tiny smile that she suspected it was completely unaware of and would have denied to its dying day that it was doing at all.
"I don't know if Gurathin being able to punch more effectively would have improved this situation," she began, but just then Pin-Lee messaged her with a status update.
Good news! They're free to go. No one is pressing charges. I mean, the counter-charge would be attempted murder, which we are graciously not pursuing, and also we have the grounds to press a willful negligence lawsuit against Station Security for putting SecUnit in a position to be shot in the first place.
Mensah fought to smooth out her smile. I don't think SecUnit is any more interested in sueing them than it is in pressing charges against the person who shot it.
Yeah, but they don't know that. Well, to be clear, Senior Indah probably does know that, but she's willing to accept that no one got hurt, I mean on the StationSec side of things, and if we leave, we're no longer her problem.
"I just heard from Pin-Lee," Mensah said. "So it looks like the maximum amount of time they can hold you without bringing you to trial is three days."
"Dr. Mensah!" Ratthi protested. Gurathin and SecUnit would probably both have hated to know that their horrified expressions were almost identical.
".... which doesn't matter in this case because Pin-Lee is securing your release now," she said, once again suppressing a smile, and all three of them relaxed -- or whatever passed for it in SecUnit's case. "And now, if no one has any other pressing engagements, Gurathin and Ratthi, you need to accompany me to my office, where the refugee you assaulted and her solicitor are waiting. SecUnit, you're free to go."
There was a brief pause. SecUnit was frowning slightly. Ratthi said, "Why just us?"
Because it was unfair to make SecUnit face the person who had shot it, but she didn't think it would appreciate having that pointed out. "SecUnit was only there because you two were there."
"I was only there because Gurathin was there," Ratthi protested.
"Thanks for the backup," Gurathin said dryly.
At that point Pin-Lee reappeared in Mensah's feed. Also, I don't know if Indah told you that Gurathin is the only one who was actually arrested on anything actionable. Ratthi and SecUnit are technically in there because he is.
Mensah closed her eyes briefly for strength, held up a finger to the inmates of the cell, and turned her attention to the feed. Are you telling me they've been sitting in a holding cell with him for the last five hours for moral support?
Not really, it's more like they were all three arrested but in the case of those two, it's basically resisting arrest, or resisting having Gurathin arrested, I think. Indah and her staff would have been perfectly happy to let them go, but apparently it was all three of them or none of them, and they decided the lesser evil was holding them all to keep them out of trouble until StationSec could get hold of you.
Mensah rubbed her forehead.
"Talking to Pin-Lee," she explained, aware that all three of them were looking at her -- SecUnit using the drones -- and SecUnit had already tapped her curiously in the feed a couple of times, although she suspected it was listening in anyway. "Now that I have been apprised of the full details of the situation, I don't think any need for a group consultation in this particular case. I'm going to go talk to Bett myself, with just Pin-Lee." All of them looked blank. "Bett? The refugee? You did know she has a name, right? The fact that none of you is answering me right now is another excellent argument for handling this situation myself."
"But we still get out of the slammer, right?" Ratthi asked.
Gurathin gave him a look. "The slammer? Is that from a serial? You know there's a lot of the CR where you wouldn't be able to afford a hotel room as nice as this cell."
Another of SecUnit's drones drifted through one of the holes in the mesh and settled on Mensah's other shoulder.
If you were in any danger, I would have been out of this cell immediately, no matter what, SecUnit said in her feed.
I know, Mensah said, not trying to keep the smile off her face this time.
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And yay for writing during your drive, that sounds excellent!
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It was fun but also kind of hilarious how new parts of this just kept dropping into my head and refusing to go away until I stopped to write them down!