The corridor had holes that probably served as an overflow into a relief channel at regular intervals. Under each of these overflows was a niche. Now all he had to do, was to get his other tools out of the car: a plasterboard that he wanted to put in the niche with construction foam and a black sticky waterproof plaster that looked like tar.
"Do you see the niche? Will the plasterboard be enough?"
>> Civil engineering generally standardizes such dimensions, but the user may place a comparison object with known dimensions at the wall to search for anomalies using the camera function. <<
Shortly afterwards, with the hand truck in tow, he was on his way towards the gravel pit. If he didn't feel like swimming, this was the only way to get to the motel. When his thoughts circled around whether his tech-savvy message in a bottle might become a sewer workers' shock of a life, two voices from the gravel pit tore him from his thoughts. Did he mentally set a flag and thus really stumbled upon a couple?
Two men. What did he get into?
Wait, it didn't sound like lovers, more like a business discussion. The two spoke at normal volume. Someone once told him that a whisper would be more conspicuous than normal speaking, because it sounds strange and people then listen more than ever. In any case, he was glad that the two weren't there when he had hidden the capsule about two and a half hours ago.
>> New quest: Find out what the men in the gravel pit are doing this late in the night. <<
Just as he was about to go straight on, the quest echoed through his headphones. For a moment he wondered if he should ask about the reward for quests first, but since he could already imagine the snappy answer he decided against it. Before he started walking a second message rang out.
>> The display is in night mode. <<
Fortunately, the unloaded and folded hand truck was light enough to simply carry. When he reached the tree line, he took out his mobile phone, which was not just in night mode but looked totally dead. He kept it in his hand anyway to point the camera in the direction of the gravel pit later. When he put down the hand truck, he hoped that the system would remember the position even without his explicit request.
Then he crouched toward the gravel pit. The same person who gave him useless knowledge of whispers also told him that in the forest it is easy to spot someone walking sideways but difficult to spot someone walking towards you or away from you. He already felt like the character of a spy film.
When he saw the two of them he was a bit disappointed. He saw a man with a yellow reflective vest and helmet, who didn't look criminal at all. Helmet man gave a little speech to a second guy with clipboard - not in the dark but in front of a brightly lit container office. Ping held his camera on it but was sure that you would see about as much as you could hear. Nothing.
Since the conversation looked like the clipboard man would get nothing more than a bunch of keys with instructions on how to use the facilities, Ping was just about to get up again when dark gray text appeared on the display in front of his nose.
>> Quest update: Examine the cargo the driver spoke about. <<
Woow, nothing escapes a microphone. Previously, he thought voice assistants would need complex microphone arrays to filter out background noise and make all the hocus-pocus that is important for speech recognition. Turns out an off-the-shelf mobile microphone was sufficient.
After what felt like an eternity, the men separated and one of them walked towards the truck parking area on the opposite edge of the gravel pit while the other got into a car at the entrance to the gravel pit. Ping had to hurry going around the pit and not lose the man, which wasn't that easy if you didn't want to make a noise. The ground was covered with leaves and there were surprisingly few branches that could make a noise, but he still needed to avoid a stumble with involuntary belly landing.
Then Murphy's law confirmed that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Of course he lost the man. A little demotivated, he crept along the trucks. He had seen the approximate direction from afar, maybe would hear a door slam or see the light in a driver's cab. To be honest, Ping had absolutely no idea how truck drivers spend the night in a truck.
Suddenly the doors on the truck he was passing opened and Ping made a small leap to vanish behind the truck, which was certainly not inconspicuous. The way he stuck behind the trailer made him feel again like a mixture of a petty criminal and a secret agent who escaped a comedy.
It was definitely the man from the gravel pit who was walking towards the motel with a lunch box and a colleague. They talked about something that was supposed to happen at 4 a.m.
While Ping thought about his next crime and leaned against the truck, he heard a whimper from the trailer. When he leaned his ear against the wall, he suddenly knew why he received this quest. There were people in there, and not just one person.
>> Quest update: Send an anonymous call to the police <<
Underneath were keywords that he should tell, including the license plate of the car from the gravel pit that he couldn't even make out.
When he called from the payphone in the diner he was glad that the younger visitors were loitering the gas station, there must have been one or two among them who were studying in the same university and he could pass on this attention.
After he had successfully ignored at least ten requests to give his name and explained everything, he hung up and started to get the hand truck to finally to drag everything into the sewer system that he needed in order finish this far too long night.
Afterwards, when he marched out of the sewers and back to the pond, somewhat satisfied with his work, he experienced the next unpleasant surprise. Suddenly there were men with flash lights searching the area around the gravel pit and the parking area flashed rhythmically in blue light.
"System, what should I do? Can you navigate me through there?" He whispered against better knowledge.
>> With the available technology, it is not possible to detect other mammalian units. <<
That figures. He took another step back into the dark to facepalm. His mood dropped into the basement and he tried to avoided thinking that it couldn't get any worse - to not set the flag for a traffic accident on his way home.
He parked the folded up hand track next to the entrance and put the closed bucket a little further into the ditch so that it looked like abandoned rubbish. Maybe he would have to return to not lose any karma points as an environmental sinner after all - was that possible?
Subsequently, he took the long way around the pond to get to the motel from the other side. Soon he found the trail that led up the mountain. Shortly afterwards he reached the paved ground where the motel and rest area started and the trail stopped to stand in front of a police officer who clearly wanted to find out whether flash lights can cause permanent eye damage.
"Police check. Your ID, please."
His name was announced via radio, then he was sent away.
"Please report to the policemen behind the gas station in the large square at the car wash."
"OK." His smile was a bit awkward and he had the feeling that every crime was clearly visible on his face. In his mind he went, for the fifth time, through his readied excuse.
As expected, half the city's youth was present at the car wash. While most of them were sitting on the curb or reflecting in the chrome of their cars, a small group was interrogated by police officers. The police were hardly outnumbered, the place looked as if someone wanted to organize a fair for police vehicles.
"You are the boy who came down the hiking trail?"
"I had a little too much at the kiosk ..."
"We already know what was going on at the mountain top and I can see that you were right in the middle of it." The policeman cut him off with a reproachful tone and looked angrily at the confused Ping.
"You're lucky that we have other things to do right now. Your personal details have been recorded, if you did not notice anything unusual on your way here, then off with you before I change my mind and call your parents."
A couple of the seated teenagers chuckled as he got a slating. For the first time, he was happy to look younger than he was. Whatever the policeman thought saved him from further questions, so Ping left, not even daring to ask what was going on.