(a Baccano pseudofanfiction)
"Got it, Isaac?" Bill asked tiredly for the third time.
"Got it! My job is to wait until the guards are unconscious and the lock has been picked, and then go in with Sheryl and steal everything that's not nailed down!"
"Everything that's not nailed down!" Miria repeated with the same enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a child telling her parents what flavor of ice cream she wanted.
This was really getting on Bill's nerves. "Isaac- no, but I guess that will have to be close enough for now. Miria- no, you have a different job. Do you remember what that job is?"
Miria thought for a moment. "Oh yeah! I drive the getaway vehicle after Isaac and Sheryl come back with the loot!"
"Very good!" Bill answered in the most pleasant voice he could muster. "Now, you two keep studying the instructions I gave you. I'm going to discuss some details with Sheryl and Joe."
"Good-bye!" Isaac and Miria saluted as he exited the room and walked down the hallway.
It wasn't too late to hire two new people, he thought as he made his way to the room where Sheryl and Joe were waiting. Two people who could at least take the job seriously. He couldn't deny that they had some sort of strange skill: last week they had stolen all the bases from Wrigley Field… again. At this point, the stadium security guards just let the duo through for the publicity and increased ticket sales it brought after each theft. The thefts Isaac and Miria had told him about on the ride to his headquarters were slightly less believable. Stealing the door to a museum eighty years ago in 1929? And capturing Axis documents and plans during World War II in order to, as they had said, "steal the initiative?" Bill had just smiled politely and nodded as the unbelievable list of thefts grew both longer and more outrageous.
Well, so they lied about their work. What crooks hadn't? Sheryl probably never snuck into Fort Knox and picked the locks. Joe probably never tranquilized three guards outside of the Smithsonian for giving him strange looks. And even Bill himself, contrary to popular opinion, had never hacked into Nasa's network to funnel their resources into his own pockets. In fact, he didn't hire any of them based what they had said. He hired them based on what he had seen.
In the case of what he had seen Isaac and Miria do, what they had done was only slightly more believable than their stories. They had wrecked his chances during his last big heist. There he was sitting in his control room, hacking the camera feeds in and around Harris Bank when one of the cameras he had hacked started showing some suspicious footage. Those two idiots ran out of a nearby costume shop dressed as Vikings, threw two large sacks into the trunk of a 1930 Buick Roadster, jumped into the front seats, and promptly rammed into the back of a Dodge Journey that had parallel parked in front of them while they were in the costume shop. Not at all phased by the damage done to their valuable antique vehicle, the duo got out of their seats, grabbed their sacks from the trunk, and immediately ran into the street where they were both hit by a Hummer speeding down the street. A scared and somewhat confused costume shop owner ran out of the store while speaking rapidly into a cell phone. Steve read her lips to find out that the two weren't even robbers. They were just regular customers. At that point he stopped reading the woman's lips, because they had stopped moving. What he saw on her face was just a surprised stare as the two would-be robbers got up, decided to give the 1930 Buick Roadster another shot, jumped in, and drove away while waving good-bye to the stunned shop owner.
Naturally, the owner of the Dodge Journey was not at all pleased by the situation when he arrived and found cops and paramedics swarming around his damaged vehicle looking for two injured people who weren't there. Bill definitely wasn't pleased either: there were a lot of cops in the way of his bank robbery. Out of rage and curiosity, he re-watched the footage to see just who these two people were who could be flattened by a Hummer and then get up as if nothing had happened. It didn't take long before he figured it out. It was them. Isaac and Miria had been known for two things: crimes that made no sense and immortality. Naturally, Bill didn't believe in the immortality part, but getting up after being flattened by one of the largest land vehicles in existence was pretty impressive. Maybe there was more to these people than he had originally thought. They must have trained with monks or the military or… something. Whatever the case, this bank heist wasn't going to happen with all the publicity the crash had caused, so he figured he might as well do a little recruiting after he told the rest of his team there would be no bank robbery that day.
Finding them and persuading them to join his team had been much easier than expected. He found a costume shop that was relatively full of masks and costumes and waited outside of a coffee shop a few days in a row until a damaged 1930 Buick Roadster parked outside the shop and two ninjas emerged from the vehicle. The man inside the costume shop also saw the vehicle, and immediately jumped over his desk to greet the ninjas.
"Well if it isn't my favorite customers! King Louis the XIV and Pharaoh Hatshepsut, if I'm not mistaken! I was beginning to think that you weren't coming back! Don't worry, I've restocked the store! And with different costumes! Take a look!"
Isaac and Miria responded to the welcome by darting behind a sidewalk tree, looking to make sure they weren't being watched, and then silently darting into the costume shop. The owner returned to his desk and watched with a grin as the two noiselessly scurried around the store, tried on various costumes, nodded or shook their head and then threw the costumes deserving of nods into two sacks that they pulled out of the ninja costumes. Before departing they threw two large bundles of bills at the cash register the way ninjas might throw shurikens at a samurai. The owner picked up the bundles and looked at the bills, the grin still on his face. He shouted a, "Thank you! Please come again!" at the ninjas, but they had already disappeared out of the shop door with only the slightest rustle from their costume-filled sacks.
This was where Bill first met Isaac and Miria in person.
"Hello! I have a proposition for you! Would you like to come to my office?"
But the duo still weren't very excited to be seen. Luckily, Bill knew their weakness. "This proposition involves you getting an amount of costumes in the end that will make even Hollywood jealous."
Now he had their attention. They stepped away from the mailbox they had been hiding behind and took off their masks. Miria thought aloud: "Well, typically it's just Isaac and me… I don't know; what do you say, Isaac?"
Isaac thought about it for a few seconds, looked at Miria, and then the two simultaneously gave a thumbs up while shouting, "For the costumes!"
And now, here they were. And here he was, wondering whether or not he should fire them and find two more serious criminals. He entered the control room to find Sheryl and Joe checking their equipment.
Sheryl looked up from her tried and true lock-picking set to ask, "So, can we keep them?"