Chapter Text
A whistle from the kettle echoes through the apartment, and the keening sound brings Ren out of the drowsiness that always clings to him when he starts up for the day, just enough for him to yawn and stretch before sluggishly detangling himself from the blanket.
It’s a slow start, really, as it takes a good 15 minutes before Ren is finally on his feet, body awake enough to not move in slow motion.
He should probably ask Doc to take a look at him. It’s been a while since the last check up.
He files the thought away with his to-do-later list, and instead focuses on his normal morning routine. Remove the still whistling kettle from the stove, take out a couple of bags of nutrients for his plants and mix it with the still hot but cooling water, throw the binder and tablet into his work bag, ignore any paper that doesn’t stick to the binder, and walk around to water the plants with the now cool mixture.
A small orb appears in the corner of Ren’s eyes, and when he looks at it, it turns into a small holographic image of Xisuma, and a generic robotic voice comes through reading up the message after a second.
“ I’ll be running late, can you drop by the coffee shop on your way in? Thanks. ”
Ren shakes his head at the message, chuckling.
“Reply,” he says, and the holograph changes into a cartoon dog with a speech bubble beside it. “Sure thing, dude, I’ll get the usual. Don’t fall asleep on the bus again. End reply.”
He watches as the speech bubble gets folded into a letter before disappearing together with the holograph. No matter how many years have passed, he still finds it fascinating to watch the small avatars come and go.
With a roll of his shoulders, Ren focuses back on his task. He waters the final plant before he hurries back to his bedroom to get properly dressed – with Xisuma late, he’ll have to open the museum as well as taking a detour. He needs to get a move on.
He’s still buttoning up his shirt as he walks out of the apartment, work bag hanging over his shoulder, door locking behind him with a soft click. A glance to the side pulls up the clock into Ren’s vision, and as he sees the time he hurries into a light jog. The bus rolls up just as he arrives, and it doesn’t take long until he’s seated and on the way into the city center.
-
The coffee shop is busy when Ren arrives, and he flicks an ear backwards in annoyance. Of course he succeeds in hitting rush hour for the morning travelers. Not that he has much of a choice, he realizes, with Xisuma being so late with his request. Normally the director would know way earlier if he was about to run late, but Ren guesses that today must’ve been an emergency. Or he had stayed up way too late again and slept in.
In the end, it doesn’t matter why Xisuma is late: Ren’s here now and doesn’t exactly have much time for a detour, so he joins the queue.
To his surprise there’s a steady pace to the line and it doesn’t take long until the cashier is looking at Ren expectantly.
“One Cream Coffee and one Radiator to go, please,” he says as he lifts up his wrist, a small section of it lightning up. The cashier hums as they tap on the screen in front of them before lifting the other hand, holding a small scanner above Ren’s wrist. It beeps once and the cashier brings back the device.
“5 minutes,” they say, and waves Ren to move out of the queue. Ren does as instructed and watches the people move around him as he’s waiting for the drinks. Most seemed to be like him, grabbing a drink on the way to work, but he can spot quite a few people and androids sitting at tables and working. He finds himself watching a human and an android discuss something in low voices, gesturing towards something on their table.
“Ren,” the barista calls out, snapping Ren out of his people watching.
With a smile, Ren turns towards the barista and grabs the small heat preserving carrier containing two drinks that he’s handed. “Thank you!”
He’s barely walked out of the door to the café before he fishes out his drink and takes a sip. The street outside is filled with people hurrying about, and Ren joins them as he steers his steps towards the museum. The walk isn’t a long one – the perks of working in the city center – but it’s long enough for Ren to feel like he properly got to stretch his legs out and having sipped enough of his drink for a third to be gone.
It’s later than it’s supposed to be when Ren finally reaches the employer's door to the museum, and with a quick showing of his wrist the door beeps and opens by itself, letting him inside.
The building is silent at this time in the morning, even with Ren’s enhanced hearing. Or, it usually is, but now one of his ears twists as he hears a high pitched sound from a light somewhere close by, no doubt about to go out during the day. Which he’ll have to replace.
Ren sighs heavily and heads towards Xisuma’s office to drop off his coffee in the heat preserving carrier, before he goes to his own while downing the rest of his drink.
The door to his office unlocks when he puts his hand on the handle, a soft click sounding as he pushes the door open, and the sight of paper covering almost every inch of the floor greets him.
Right. The research. He’d forgotten about that, honestly.
Luckily it’s only printouts of different texts that he was trying to decipher, so he’s not exactly careful as he walks over to his desk to put down his bag and the now empty cup. Normally he starts the day with cleaning up the previous day’s mess, but since Xisuma is running late he doesn’t exactly have time for that. It would just be the two of them today, the groundskeeper being on vacation this week, so he not only has to change that light bulb before it blows, but also needs to prepare the museum to be opened.
Ren isn’t sure if he’s happy or not he can’t get headaches anymore.
He ignores the chaos that’s his office, even adding a little more to the pile on the floor by pushing down a couple of more papers from the desk, and heads back out to start preparing the building. He’s barely closed the door behind him when the small white orb appears in the corner of his eyes again, this time shifting into a goat when he gives it his attention. Instead of it starting to read up a message, the robotic voice let him know it’s an incoming call.
“Answer,” Ren says, and the goat shifts into the upper half of Doc.
“ Good morning, Ren, ” Doc says, one hand raised in a greeting.
Ren gives him a big smile. “Doc, my dude! Was thinking of you this morning! My body seems slower than usual in the mornings, think you can take a look?” He continues on his way towards the groundskeeper’s office, Doc’s hologram floating beside him.
Doc blinks, and looks down into something in his hands. “ Perhaps next month then. Been a couple of years since your last check up. ” Then he shakes his head. “ But that’s not why I called. Can you come by the lab next monday? ”
It makes Ren pause in his step, and he looks properly at Doc again. “Have you found—”
“ Yes, ” Doc cuts him off, “another victim. Tango and I are setting up a body for them, and it should be done by the weekend, but I know you like to have your weekends off. ”
Ren starts moving again, continuing his path to the groundskeeper’s office, but with quicker steps than before. “I want to be there when you wake them up, you know this, dude. Got any name on them?”
“ No.”
The heavy sigh that accompanies the words makes Ren’s artificial heart sink as he arrives at his destination. “Oh.”
“ The disk was named though. ” And… that’s unusual.
Ren pushes the buttons in the groundskeeper’s office to activate the cleaning robots, and doesn’t pay enough attention to the screens to see if they’ve been turned on properly. “That makes it sound like it’s not numbered,” he says as he steps out of the room, and continues down the hallway.
“ It was titled Spring . Does it ring a bell? ” Doc asks, and Ren wishes that it did.
“Hasn’t Tango looked through the police reports on the whole ordeal?”
“ He has, and found nothing. But you’re the history expert on C.H.E.S.T., so figured it was worth asking, ” Doc says, waving a clipboard around.
Ren frowns, his ears laying down flat against his skull, and gets behind the front desk. “I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’ve never heard of something called Spring before. I’ll make a deep dive though, see if I can find anything.”
“ Appreciated, Ren. I’ll send a message when it’s decided on when we’ll wake them up. Bye, ” Doc says, and Ren says his own goodbye before the hologram of Doc turns into a white dot again.
Well. At least now Ren knows what he will spend his free time on till monday arrives.
With thoughts focused on the upcoming research, Ren hurries through the preparation of the museum’s opening.