Ch. 48 – Get You a Toy That Can Do Both

Sweat dripped down Derrick’s chin as he set the last, pink couch cushion down on the floor. He had checked on, around, behind, and under the couch where Maxine said the tablet should be near. She had triangulated the tablet’s location using the routers under her control—supposedly to a very accurate degree—but there wasn’t anything in sight that looked like a tablet.

“Ugh.” Derrick rubbed his nose with his shoulder. It didn’t really get the whole itch, but it was better than using his gloved hands and wiping crusty bodily fluids on his face.

“Did you find the tablet yet?” Maxine asked. “It should be near the couch right in front of you.”

“No. There’s nothing here. I’ve checked three times.”

“Under the couch?”

“Just more bondage gear.”

“Did you pull it out and try it on?”

“No! Why would I try it—anyways, I tried clearing out some of the bondage gear, but there was nothing behind it that looked like a tablet.”

Maxine spoke over the voice comms again. “Maybe it’s behind a hidden floorboard or ceiling tile? No, but I would be able to tell if it was that far away.”

“Well who knows, maybe it is in one of the ceiling tiles, and your triangulation is miscalibrated?”

“Try looking at anything interesting then. That’s what I would do,” Maxine said.

The giant black dildo that he had seen when he first entered the room was still sitting on the table next to the couch. It counted as . . . ‘interesting,’ Derrick supposed. He grasped it with his gloved hand and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. “Hm, weird.” It didn’t seem like a decorative part of the table, or affixed to it in any way. Derrick pulled at it again with a firm grip, and then it started to budge—

rrrRRIP.

Derrick staggered back as the black dildo jerked off the table. The underside was flecked with pink; the dildo had taken some of the table’s paint along with it.

“Shit!” Derrick said.

Something had shifted inside the toy when he had turned it over, meaning it was likely a vibrator instead of a normal dildo.

But, it was merely a vibrator. Nothing was hidden under the spot where the vibrator had sat, except for the—now partly stripped—surface of the table, so he set the vibrator back down. It was huge, almost as thick as his arm. He shuddered. What was the point of something that destructively big? Despite its lewd decorations, Charlene’s room was turning out to be the most un-sexy place he had visited in his life.

“What happened, did you accidentally sit on a dildo?” Maxine teased, before her voice jumped. “Wait! It just moved!”

“Huh? Where?”

“The tablet’s signal! It moved away from the couch, but now it’s back next to the couch again!”

“Uh,” Derrick said, stooping to pick the vibrator up again. “The only thing that moved was this sex toy. It’s one of those vibrators that’s shaped like a dick. Fucking heavy, too.”

“Walk around the apartment with it so I can confirm it’s the one.”

Derrick paced back and forth from one end of the apartment to the other, pointing the vibrator’s ridged tip in front of him.

“I see it moving back and forth!” Maxine said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.”

“WHAT! Hiding a tablet in a vibrator? Oh my god, I like this girls style!”

“Shhhhhhhh. You’re going to make me go deaf. Please, show some restraint.”

Maxine was struggling to inhale in between bouts of uncontrolled laughter. When she did breathe in, it sounded like a squeaky toy re-inflating. “Learn to appreciate a good joke, Derrick . . . This is SO ironic. Titzilla is using a big, hard, artificial dick to make your client’s artificial dick soft. This is so perfect!”

Upon closer inspection, the vibrator didn’t have the standard texture and material as the rest of the sex toys in Charlene’s apartment. There was patch of smooth, almost glassy, material on the shaft, while the bottom hilt of the device had a few recessed buttons, now flecked with pink paint, and gunked up with some sort of dried fluids. The buttons had ostensibly been labeled in the past, but much of the label text was faded and worn. Probably from overuse.

Derrick cleared his throat. “Come on, M. Focus. Any idea how I can use this thing? I don’t want to leave, thinking we’ve got the control device for X’s dick, and then realize later on that it’s actually just a simple sex toy.”

“No clueeee. Okay but seriously, are there any buttons?” Maxine asked.

“Yeah, quite a few, but I can’t tell what they’re for,” Derrick said.

“Try looking for one that’s all by itself. It might be the power button.”

“Okay, let me try that.” Derrick felt around, pinpointed an isolated button, and held it. The smooth surface on the vibrator blinked to life, showing a login screen with a welcome message at the top.

Welcome to WiredVibes

Made for Your Pleasure

Username: CharParty

Password:

Place your finger on the power button for biometric unlock

The login screen was a familiar shade of blue, and the input boxes for the username and password were slightly off-center of the screen.

“Okay, this vibrator must be our tablet. It’s running a re-skinned version of a popular tablet operating system,” Derrick said.

“You really got it?! What are you waiting for? Get out of there!” Maxine said.

“I’ve gotta figure out how to hide this thing first,” Derrick said. The vibrator was incredibly large, and had no chance of fitting in Derrick’s pockets, or the small bag he had brought. “Maybe it can be disassembled somehow?” Derrick muttered to himself. He turned the vibrator over in his hands, looking for some sort of instructions, until two letters, and a small doodle drawn in permanent marker caught his eye. It was the rough approximation of a girl with hair that resembled Charlene’s from the photos that Maxine had shown them earlier.

The girl seemingly had her arms outstretched towards a . . . vibrator, and there was a heart drawn around the two. It seemed that Charlene really cared about the sex toy. And here Derrick was, trying to figure out how to take it apart so he could smuggle it out of the building.

Did Derrick have anything he was still that attached to? Maybe his parents’ old meat cleaver—he had cleaned it off and repaired its handle after tossing at the Dixies that one night they brought Ah Jun to the shop. Or maybe the necklace that the Kims had given him. What if some stranger broke into Hack Alley and took those from him?

“Hey, M,” Derrick said. “How much would a huge-ass vibrator like this cost?”

“I can’t tell if I don’t know how big it is, and you didn’t show me the fucking picture! It’s going to be expensive because there’s a whole-ass computer in there.”

“It’s as thick as my arm. Wait, so is it as expensive as a tablet then?”

“No, dummy! It’s a tablet and a vibrator, so it’s twice the cost of each of them! The vibrator is probably specialty, so maybe around three hundred dollars.”

Going by the cheapest estimate for a computer, and Maxine’s approximations, the vibrator might have cost Charlene more than a thousand dollars. Ugh. Derrick never thought he’d lay eye on a sex toy that expensive, let alone steal it. It was a good idea not to return to the building if he wanted to avoid being caught for theft. If the vibrator turned out to be the wrong item, or Xavier had been lying about what had happened, Derrick would have to send some money over to Charlene—anonymously, of course. Vibrator or not, the guilt of taking someone’s favorite anything while they were away sat like a stone in Derrick’s stomach.

But either way, he had to hide it. If he stuffed it down his shirt, secured it with his waistband, and hunched forward . . . Derrick glanced in a tall mirror that was hanging on the wall. When hunched forward, the vibrator didn’t make any noticeable bulge underneath his shirt and jacket.

“Okay, I think I’m ready—ouch!” Derrick yelped as he twisted around to scratch his back. His skin was peeling off the sticky surface of the vibrator, and his stomach hair was probably effectively getting waxed off in the process. Derrick grit his teeth; if only he had washed the darn thing before literally sticking it on himself. “M, what’s the situation at the exits?”

“Nothing at the main entrance: security looks distracted and unmotivated. You could sneak past them if you wanted.”

“I’m tempted to, but I also don’t want to be stopped, since I’ve theoretically already left the building. Plus, I’m carrying this giant vibrator. I mean, how would I explain that?”

“Are you taking the fire escape, then?”

“Yeah . . .” Derrick walked over to the window and brushed the melted candles over to the side. The window itself was also smudged with crusty material, but not as badly as the tables.

The fire escape was the same type as the one that he had seen in the hallway earlier, and it reached down towards the ground level, but with the last section covered by a ladder, which was currently not deployed.

“Wait, but if I go down the fire escape, I’d have to let the ladder down. That would attract a lot of attention,” Derrick said.

“So you want to go down through the lobby?” Maxine asked.

“I guess that’s the best choice. Can you keep those blank video loops going on the surveillance cameras while I walk through the building?” Derrick asked.

“Easy as pie. Let me know when you’re moving, and I can take care of it,” Maxine said.

“Wait, where are X and Bettie?”

“They’re on the second floor. They’ve been winding down the floors in a really inefficient way; it’s really bothering me.”

“Can you signal them to watch out for those two Dixies?”

“We didn’t give X the earpiece, so there’s not really much I can do.”

“Shit. That’s really been biting me in the ass. How about the two Dixies? Where are they at?”

“One’s on the fifth floor, and the other one’s sweeping through the third floor. If he heads towards the second floor afterwards, he’s on a collision course with the two of them. They’re going real slow because the lady’s stopping and talking every few feet.”

“Do you think that Dixie will be able to figure out that X took the Afterburner?” Derrick stuffed his gloves in the small bag he’d brought along.

“There aren’t that many other people walking around the halls right now, so the Dixie could try searching everyone he comes across,” Maxine said. “If he doesn’t, then he’d have to recognize it by the smell. Afterburner has that burn-your-nostrils chemical smell, you know?”

Xavier had still been emitting the strong smell of Afterburner when he and Derrick had met up with Bettie, and the bag was going to keep giving off that scent around him. “Yeah, they could probably tell by the smell. I’m going to have to intercept one of them: either the Dixie or X. Keep updating me on their positions.”

Checking through the peephole, the coast was clear. Derrick eased the door open, and shut it, and rushed toward the stairs, hunching over to obscure the massive vibrator in his shirt.