Easton Secure Deposit
First Floor
Security Booth
9:59 PM

The Easton Secure Deposit was not a bank. Nobody put things away for free. The ESD, as it appeared on forms, was only for the rich and powerful. Here is where they could stow away valuables, family heirlooms, important documents, stolen items, severed hands; the ESD didn't care what you put in your Safety Deposit box so long as you paid the bill. And it was worth every penny, so long as you got their insurance policy. Banks would pay you the cash amount of any lost or damaged item you insured with them. The ESD guaranteed that whatever you put into the box, you would get out, even if it was stolen.

And the ESD didn't want that to happen. And that's why they employed men like Stefan Kirsch. Stefan was an ex-Russian military officer working as a security guard. He was good at his job, which was probably why he got it. The ESD hand-picked their employees. There was no interview process. That's because being an employee at the ESD was like no other job in the world.

Being a Security Guard was more then just sitting in the Security booth and watching monitors. There were monitors, true enough, but you were required to maintain the boxes as well as ensure that they stayed within strict parameters, set by the individual clients. To even get the job, you had to better trained than most military officers.

The Security booth in which Stefan sat was like no other in the world. It was, for one thing, not placed in the front of the building, like most others, it was placed in the exact center of the building, where the guards could get anywhere faster. The booth was lined with monitors, showing every facet of the building, in normal, inferred, and X-ray. There were no blind spots. And there were no possibilities of a guard missing anything. Whenever there was any sort of change on any screen, from a fly to a light turning off, it was immediately brought to the guards attention. Nobody had authorization to be in the building. Guards took one of three special hallways to move back and forth between the boxes and the lobby. Even they would set off the alarm if they passed in front of a camera. Unless you were a guard, there was no way into the Secure Deposit Room.

The Deposit room was a marvel of modern engineering. Each box was climate-controlled and set on gyros. If someone whispered near them, an alarm would go off. Every two minutes, the order of the boxes would shuffle, making it impossible to target a specific one. As if that was possible. The Room was a giant sphere, armored form all sides, eliminating any weak spots in the design. It was also a vacuum. The only air was inside the Boxes. And any motion that was not during the ten-second period of motion when the Boxes shuffled themselves was met with an immediate shot with a precision laser. A bullet could be fired inside the room and be disintegrated before hitting anything. The door to the room was a series of door set on the four layers of the sphere. When not opened, the doors were all shut and not near any of the other. When it was to open, the layers of the sphere would rotate around one another and the doors would line up, allowing entrance into the air-lock where boxes could be accessed remotely.

Stefan had just finished examining a light alteration in the second corridor when the digital clock in front of him turned to 10:00 PM and a light flashed. Time for a routine check of the corridors. He stood up and went to the door, opening it and stepping outside, just as his replacement went inside. He nodded to him, shut the door, and began his check. He went up one hallway, down another, and back up the third one. When he reached the third access terminal, he ran a diagnostic check of the Boxes. Everything was fine. He turned back down the third hallway, made another sweep of the long hallways, and went back to the Security booth. It had been thirty minutes, just as it was every time. Security guards only worked for two hours a day. He had 9:30 AM to 10:30 AM and 9:30 PM to 10:30PM. Certain guards only worked maintenance of the Boxes. He opened the door to the booth to check on his replacement before going home for the night. He opened the door to find his replacement missing. He probably just left for his check of the hallways early, but his military instincts told him to check on it. So he went to the cameras and found one that had been brought to an alarm. He looked at the monitors and narrowed his eyes. He set off the lockdown alarm and began the process to secure the Deposit. As he left, all monitors showed various scenes of the exact same figure racing around, and in the last one, the figure racing down one hallway carrying a Safety Deposit Box. The first successful robbery in the history of the ESD.

Easton Secure Deposit
First floor
Lobby
10:14 PM

Rouge had spoken to a certain billionaire and rare jewel collector she had encountered during a very successful heist on her part. The collector had ownership of a Chaos Emerald and had chosen the ESD as it's holding place. Obviously he wasn't going t just hand it over to rouge. Or G.U.N. But Rouge managed to trade the jewels she had stolen that night for the code to the deposit box. And so she had come here for her Emerald.

The entire system, was automated, all she had to do was put in the code and a guard would bring her the box. She entered the code and… nothing. Nothing happened. A message came up on the screen:

Access Denied

She had been given a fake code. Normally she would get upset, had she not given him fake jewelry in exchange for said code. She turned away and thought for a moment before smiling and racing out the door. She knew how she could get her hands on the Emerald…

Easton Secure Deposit
Outside
10:00 PM

Arra looked around the outside of the massive sphere. It was time. He looked to Crack, next to him, and then to glide, fifty feet up, climbing the sphere. He nodded and pointed to the wall next to him. Crack grunted and charged towards it, crashing through the mortar and into the wall. He nodded to Arra and stepped out of the way as the pangolin leaped inside and ran through the electrical wiring and piping that filled the wall. He continued running until he reached where the sphere began. He followed the mass of wiring into a hole in the wall and began examining the wires. One of these went to the sphere and ran diagnostics on the sphere. He had to disconnect it if their plan was going to work. And it had to. He found a small wire running under the wall molding and into the hole. A clever ploy. He found that it connected to the sphere from under the molding as well. He smiled as he sliced through it with one of his bladed wrists. He knocked on the outside wall.

Outside, Crack heard the knock and waved to Glide, still up on the sphere. Glide had Been crawling around the outside, searching for the three doors built into each layer. He had brought along a red marker and drew a giant X over each door. He pressed his ear to the metal, searching for the innermost door, he rapped on the glass. Evolution had granted the Flying Lizard with incredible hearing. So great, in fact, that Glide was able to detect differences between the normal metal of the sphere and the thicker metal of the doors based on the sound bounced back by the thicknesses. Sort of a natural form of radar. Glide leapt off as the layers began to shift and landed just as the doors lined up.

Glide raced over to the wall and knocked again as Arra waited and listened for the guard to leave and for the first one of the doors to close. When it did so, Arra ripped out a wire, causing the two other doors not to close as the layers rotated back to their original position. Arra sighed as he knocked back on the wall. Glide heard it and flapped over to Crack, who grabbed onto the legs of the Flying Lizard. Glide flapped his arms and carried the ram up into the air. The two flapped over the massive sphere and over to the first red X. Glide carried Crack higher up in the air. The ram protested "Hey! This wasn't part of the plan! You know I don't like heights!"

Glide paused in mid-air. "The metal's too tough, you need more momentum." And then he dropped the ram twenty feet down to the sphere and soared down after him. The ram swore at Glide and then straightened his body as he dropped down upon the sphere, crashing through the metal door when striking it. He crawled out of the hole as Glide flew in, saying as he ducked into the tight space between layers, "Always said your skull was as thick as titanium…" Crack reached out for him, but he was too late. Glide reached out for something as Crack sighed and handed him a chunk of the destroyed metal and watched the annoyance slip back away.

Glide crawled through the space to where he remembered the X being. He soon found the first open door and he slipped inside. He found the next door in the same manner. He then lifted the piece of metal, nearly as large as himself, over him and leapt out of the door. He was now in the air lock layer. Now was the time for listening. Even though the process took a while, he managed to reach every laser and smash it in from the outside with the chunk of titanium. Once he was satisfied that all had been disabled, He grabbed the chunk of titanium and began ramming it into the metal beneath him. Even though he wasn't very strong, all he had to do was dent it. The vacuum did the rest. Glide leapt aside as the dent became a crater with the resulting force. Once the room had depressurized, Glide leapt down and selected amongst the hundreds of Boxes, a single one. He then tossed it through the windows of one of the access terminals and flew back through his hole.

During all of this, Arra had managed to disable the alarm system and had entered the Security booth and subdued the guard, tossing his unconscious body inside the wall, along with the wires. This took him about five minutes. He took pride in his speed. He managed to race back to the access terminal and catch the Safety Box just as it was being thrown through the window. He then turned away and bolted back down the hallway, into the wall, and then back outside, meeting up with Glide and Crack.

Glide smiled "Nice catch… could've ran faster…"

Arra shoved the box at the Flying Lizard "Shut up, Glide…"And raced off, the other two thieves behind him.