Philip turned the key to the front door, trying to be quiet, not wanting to wake her brother up, if she could manage to get inside without waking him, then she would be able to make it look as if she hadn't gone out at all.
After fumbling with the lock for a while, it finally clicked, however; when the door opened, she bit her bottom lip and sighed, the radio was on, putting zero more effort into being stealthy, she pushed open the door and started kicking her shoes off.
"I'm back!" she yelled into the house.
As she did, the radio turned down in volume and she heard footsteps coming towards her, as she turned around after removing her shoes, she saw her brother walking around the corner, Adrian was tall, about 6'1, a fair amount taller than Philip, while he looked somewhat lanky he did have enough muscle on him to matter, he kept his tentacles the same gray colour Philip did (most Inklings who were not directly in a turf war or the main cities kept their mantel some muted colour).
"There you are, I was worried about you!" he said, almost looking shocked
"Why? I just went out for a bloody walk, plus I put a note on your door, didn't you read it?" Philip responded, almost laughing at the nearly comical level of worry her brother had on his face.
"Yeah, you should just wake me up and tell me next time!" he said as he turned back the way he came and walked back to the kitchen table.
"I would! But last time I did that, you were not very happy about that." Philip said, as she rounded the corner, seeing that her brother was working on some pile of electronics again.
Only a couple years ago, Personal Computers were restricted to people with high amounts of money, locking most people out of getting one, though; recently they had become cheaper, more and more people were starting to get their hands on them, however, the amount of people who knew how to repair them, was almost zero.
And in a small seaside town like Ankor, there were no dedicated computer repairers, with the exception of Adrian, with a combination of knowing the right people, having the right tools, and also being educated enough to do basic repairs on a computer: Adrian had been able to provide for himself and his sister for the last few years.
However, the pile of electronics on the table today was not familiar to Philip, she had seen her brother work on all kinds of devices, and after a while, she would start to recognize them, but this, this was different.
It looked like it had been set on fire, tossed out of an airplane while still on fire, landed in the ground, been rained on for a week, and then dragged across the asphalt for two kilometers, only to end up in front of Adrian, the metal gray casing showed signs of being exposed to fire, or beingon fire itself, it had a fair amount of large dents and bumps on it, and the top looked like someone had taken a rock to it.
"What the hell is that thing?" Philip said as she started digging through the kitchen, looking for food.
It was very bulky, looked even heavier, and looked even more so robust.
From what Adrian could understand from it, it was without a doubt designed to fit into a rack, the front plate being wider than the rest, the screw holes, and the handles all pointed to it to being designed to fit in such a way, he had seen and worked on music equipment designed as such, and for all he knew: he could be working on a really fancy and roughed up piece of music equipment.
There was only a slight problem: He couldn't understand any of the writing on the damn thing.
The writing was in a language he had never seen before, granted it could be whatever language those urchins or jellies used, and even more so, none of the plugs, screws, or circuits he recognized. Hell, the circuit board itself was blue, compared to the usual purple he was more used to seeing.
However the good news was that it seemed the device had its own power supply, so all he really had to do was use some of his own cables to plug it in, scanning the back of the device showed a switch directly connected to the power supply, seeing that it was the only button connected to the power supply, Adrian made an educated guess that it was the power switch, it didn't have the normal symbols on it though, instead of the "P" (power) and "NP" (No Power) that most switches had, it used a circle and a line, however flicking the switch resulted in a satisfying hum as the fans in the device started back up.
Adrian was amazed that the thing even started up, considering the condition it was in, however it looked like most of the damage was on the casing itself, and not the inside components.
The front of the device was covered in switches and dials, none of which he could understand the meaning to, and with only one display on the front, said display slowly had writing scrawl across it, and as with any text or symbols on this device, Adrian could not understand a word of it, after a solid thirty seconds, the text on the screen stopped, and aside from a few blinking words, there was no further movement on the screen.
Suddenly, the radio that was sitting on the kitchen countertop started screeching, the high pitched scramble caused both Philip and Adrian to divert their attention to the radio.
"What'd you do?" Adrian asked
"Nothing." Philip said, looking as puzzled as Adrian did.
Walking over to it, Philip started trying to cycle through the stations, to no success though, as all that emitted from the radio was that awful screeching sound, after fiddling with it for a good twenty seconds, Philip gave up and unplugged it.
"Damn, that sucks; I guess I'll have a look at it later." Adrian said, picking up the now unpowered radio.
Placing the radio down on the corner of the table, Adrian sat back down and looked at the device that came through his door last night, the screen had not changed at all since he last looked at it, he decided that he would leave it plugged in, and turned on for at most a few hours, he had so errands to run in the meantime, if nothing had changed by the time he got back, he decided he would try and sell it.
The thing probably wasn't even working right.
