The Quaranteam Universe is the creation of CorruptingPower, used with permission.
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Chapter 15: Architecture
18 September 2020
Many chapters of Adam’s life had been started by being dropped off by a van in front of a building, recently. Even if this particur building was home, now, and technically had been a couple of weeks before. The sky was gray and heavily overcast, the building somewhat foreboding despite the cheery new sign outside decring its new name, and his familiarity with most of its features.
Team Jeffries walked inside, still bundled up for protection. The gradually dropping temperatures were making that much more bearable, but the feeling was still unpleasant. Especially since, despite everything, the van had passed by several knots of unmasked people on the way there. It was like the country was divided into thirds. The ones who were careful and trying to stay alive, the ones who were flouting every rule and recommended step, and the ones who were too dead to weigh in. And the thing was, when group two did what they did, they contributed to group 3 from way more than just their own numbers.
At least the elevator was working now. All four of them piled in with their luggage and backpacks, and though the trip was probably a bit slower than if they’d taken the stairs it got them where they were going. There were way fewer doors now. Way fewer apartments. Each was much rger, so it made sense, but it still felt odd. The door to his apartment no longer led to a living room with a couple of offshoots. No, it was at one end of a much longer kind of space. Even to his eyes it was obvious what the renovators had done. They had gone through and knocked out as many walls as they could, the ones left up not quite random but close. Anything load-bearing was left, and anything else was just to make those look decent. And it looked like whoever was making that decision was trained in “keep the building from colpsing” first and “aesthetic architecture” a distant fifth or sixth pce.
Still, it could work. Eventually, with effort, it could work. What was irritating was the state of their belongings. When the crews had come through to do the renovations, it looked like the movers simply grabbed all of the stuff they’d left and shoved it into boxes to haul out. Then, once the renovations were done, they hauled it all back… and left it in disorganized piles. The one in the middle of the living room, or at least what was once the living room and seemed to be serving a simir purpose this time around, looked like it was mostly taken from the general area. Just scrambled and haphazardly stacked. There was no telling where the other piles might be, what they contained, or how much work it was going to be to set them straight.
Adam started stripping yers of clothing off and the others followed suit. “I don’t know about all of you, but I’m exhausted. Let’s get the food put away, everything else can wait for tomorrow.”
Callie nodded in agreement after she peeled off her own outer yer. “That sounds good. I don’t even see the bean bag chair or the cot, so unless there are actually more beds around then I don’t know where Esther and I are going to sleep.” She shook her head. “This pce feels creepy, too. Maybe it’s just me.”
“I thought it was just me,” Esther commented. “I was not here for long enough to get used to it before our absence, but it does not feel like home right now.” Her own skin was getting noticeably firmer, her movements much more smooth. It was something the others noticed, now, not just something Adam had to remind her to measure.
“I think I found them!” Shannon’s voice came from a door that used to lead to a bedroom. She had decided to roll her suitcase there first thing, since her belongings mostly went there anyway. “And… uh, this is going to take some getting used to.”
Adam swiftly walked over to his busty girlfriend and looked at the room. It had nearly doubled in size, the small bed repced by a king-sized one. The cot, beanbag chair, and computer table were all there, though arranged haphazardly. The closet door was ajar, revealing that the interior had become a walk-in rather than the shallow one he had. “You’re not lying, Shannon. I’m not even sure where to start.”
“I think we need to start in daylight, Adam.” She was still standing there, trying her best to mentally map this pce to where she had been living. “You’re right. Let’s shove some stuff in the fridge and get to sleep.”
In the end, the capacity of that rge bed was tested. Both Esther and Callie joined Adam and Shannon there. The rest of the apartment was just too unfamiliar, too cluttered for them to even want to explore. The sun would make it all easier. For now, they all needed rest, and they all needed to feel like they were home. If the apartment wouldn’t help them, then they could help each other. Call the test a success, after finding enough bnkets for four they slept quite comfortably.
The problem with the tactic of leaving tasks for tomorrow is that tomorrow has an annoying habit of showing up promptly. Four sets of eyes opened, and then it was suddenly time to get started on everything. The desire to stay in a comfortable cuddle pile warred with the desire for fresh coffee in Adam’s mind. Ultimately, coffee won, and once that was brewing he started pulling out ingredients for breakfast since he was there anyway. Appliances and pans were in the correct general vicinity, even if they weren’t quite in the pces he left them. Eggs and bread were in the fridge, as was butter. That would be enough. The smells were more than sufficient to start drawing the others out of the aforementioned cuddle pile, starting with Esther.
She looked around. “Last night when we got home I thought it was a mess. Good to know I was right about that.”
“Yeah. I took one look at that and figured I wanted to wait for help before diving in. You’re out first, mind helping me with the coffee assembly?”
“As long as you remember to actually put seasonings on the eggs. We have them, use them.” She opened up the fridge for creamer, then went to grab sugar, pausing to pointedly watch Adam until he got some dried herbs to mix in with the scrambled eggs. Nodding approvingly, she started pouring coffee mugs full of the day’s kickstart. Callie and Shannon came out shortly after, looked disapprovingly at the pile of stuff in the middle of the living room, then gratefully accepted the coffee and breakfast. Of course, all of them had to eat it while sitting on the floor since the table was piled up, but it was at least a start.
“Okay, here’s the thought,” Adam got started once he had a few bites of food in him along with half of his mug of coffee. “We take a look around the newly-enrged pce to get an idea of the yout, decide where everything is supposed to be, then work on getting things that way. We start from the living room and kitchen so that we can have an area to stage things and one for snacks. The goal for today is that plus the bedroom in at least decent shape.”
“So basically the old apartment, then start unlocking the extras?” Shannon asked.
Callie chuckled. “Only you would put that in video game terms, but I think so. Let me go ahead and add, we need to be looking for damage to the pce. Anything they scratched up, dented, or did wrong. I don’t know who we would report it to, but I’ve never seen a renovation actually go a hundred percent smoothly even when it wasn’t for a radical change, by government contractors, and on a rushed schedule.”
Esther had a bit of a ugh, herself. “And only you would think to put it in legal terms first. That said, you’re right. I can already see scratches in the linoleum that weren’t there before we left.”
Adam sighed. “Let it be known that I don’t like how right you two are. When I used the sink earlier I thought I heard a thunk coming from the pipes, so that might be something to be added to the notes.”
Shannon pulled her phone out and started tapping something out. “Time to make this easier for us. Everyone, I just sent you a link to a bnk document and I’m writing categories. When you find something wrong, write it in the appropriate pce and it’ll all be in one pce for us. That work for everyone?” Everyone gave some form of yes, then focused on finishing their food.
Callie was first to stand, since she still wasn’t exactly eating much, and took her cup to the sink. “I think I might have found the first thing to add. Aren’t sinks supposed to be sealed? Around the edges?”
“Caulked, but yeah.” Adam stood and went to look. Sure enough, he’d missed it when filling up the coffee pot earlier. He gave an experimental push, and the sink shifted by a millimeter or so. “Looks like they skipped a step, which means we need to look for a lot more than just dings and scratches.” He sighed, suddenly tired despite having just woken up. “The kitchen is the heart of a home. If they skimped here then that means they weren’t paying attention to quality control anywhere. We’ll fix or patch what we can once we get the pce mapped out and our stuff put away.”
What followed was a long and frustrating kind of process. Taken as a whole, the rooms weren’t id out in any kind of logical pattern. They connected oddly, open spaces interspersed with bathrooms and bedrooms seemingly at random. It was Esther who finally thought to y down a few brightly-colored knickknacks in a line on the ground in two spots. Once these divided the space up it was easy to feel where the different apartments used to be. This let them see the open areas as former living rooms, no matter what purpose they might put them to ter. It let them get a feel for where the three bedrooms were, and made the second kitchen way more obvious in its spot at the opposite end of the home. The third one, previously near the middle of the space, was conspicuous by its absence, repced by what seemed to be extra closet space.
And then there was the furniture. Almost all of it was new or near-new bndly generic rapid assembly kinds of things. Stuff that could be bought in bulk retively cheaply and put where it would be needed. That wasn’t shocking, though. It was the few objects that weren’t that gave a clue what was up. They were all rger pieces that could not be easily disassembled or moved. Shelves, a rge rocking chair, and the like. Those had a lot more wear on them, more character. It was like those bits of the lives of the previous residents stayed, even if those people were either dead or gone. Adam ran his hand over a square imprint in one shelf. Had it been full of books, and this where the bookend was? Maybe a small trophy for one accomplishment or another? He’d never know, and his musings were interrupted by the others starting to call out issues.
“This door swings open if it isn’t completely shut, and you kind of have to lift it a bit to get it to close..”
“Found a couple of plugs that are really finicky. They’ll work, but you have to jiggle a bit to get the plug in the right spot.”
“I tried the water in the showers. One of them has the hot and cold reversed.”
“This toilet isn’t completely steady, it rocks a bit if you shift your body weight too much.”
“Please don’t make this bedroom mine, the light switches go in opposite directions and that is going to drive me batty.”
“The paint in here needs to be redone. It looks like they didn’t re-prime before painting it eggshell, there was blue underneath and it shows.”
“This patch of floor is creaky and the carpet is a bit uneven.”
The litany of minor compints was extensive and varied. Any one, two, or dozen of them would have been ignorable. Just the quirks of an older building spread out over an apartment three times the previous size. Taken together, you basically couldn’t go more than a dozen steps without needing to move around some kind of quirk or seeing some fw or other. Once spaces had been divvied out for a library, office, bedroom, game room, and the like? The rest of the day was spent sorting through piles. It helped that they didn’t have all that much random stuff to begin with, their home had been tiny. On the flip side, with a room now designated to be a library, both Callie and Esther could get a lot of their stuff delivered from storage. Those calls were the st thing before dinner. With a shrug, Shannon noted that she had all of her stuff already.
Three more days passed as they settled back into their routine. Shannon, Callie, and Esther did their remote jobs. Adam did his best to either repair or stabilize all of the little quirks, helped get food together, and generally checked on the others while he waited for responses from the teaching networks. The measurements continued, as did Adam’s gentle-but-insistent reminders to Esther to make sure she included herself. It was during one of these measurements that she noticed something.
The two of them had a naked Shannon between them in the bedroom, doing their usual checks, when she looked down at her paper. “Adam, are you absolutely sure that st measurement is accurate?”
Adam, who had been happily feeling up the happily accepting Shannon, stopped so that he could re-measure.“28 inches around the band, 43 at the fullest part.”
“That is in fact what you said. Interesting.”
Shannon whipped around to face her, a task which was more difficult to stop these days with the momentum her breasts gave. “I don’t like that word applied to my health. What’s going on?”
“That is also the same measurement he gave yesterday, and the day before. Congratutions, Shannon, it seems the process has decided to stop.” She did some quick math on her notepad, then wryly added “it would seem you like coffee so much you decided to grow a pair of K cups yourself.”
Adam’s undignified snort of surprised ughter was followed by gales of uncontrolble giggles, Shannon turned back around to face him, boobs bouncing directly at his eye level again. He looked up at her face with some effort. “Look, Shannon, all jokes aside, I’m just gd they stopped at a reasonable point.”
Shannon looked down at him. “Are you calling boobs that are triple the size of most US measurements reasonable?”
“First off, a month and a half ago you were scared you wouldn’t be able to fit in a car before it stopped,” Adam replied. “And second off, this is the perfect size for me to do this!” Adam dove his face into Shannon’s vast cleavage as the buxom woman giggled.
Esther shook her head. “And third, they’re about ten times the mass and volume, not three. I would tell you to get a room, but we’re in it. You two can go ahead and get to it.” She stood and left the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
Adam brought his hands up to palm both of those huge breasts, and Shannon hissed in pleasure. His slightly muffled voice came from the depths between them with a “doctor’s orders.” He had the advantage of her, Shannon let herself be pushed gently back onto the bed, ying back as Adam pulled off his pants and straddled her. He id his dick between those amazing boobs, and Shannon squeezed them together into a softly firm envelopment of bliss. Both were turned on beyond belief, and Adam didn’t st long, but the sensation of him thrusting forward over and over almost had her cumming by itself. The semen that sprayed onto her and into her mouth from there just tipped the scales. The orgasm she experienced seemed to come from her whole body, filling her from head to toe with bliss. She was still lying on the bed, her abdomen twitching in pleasure, when Adam got off of her.
The shower she needed to take afterward was well worth it, in her opinion. Which she loudly stated ter, at lunch.
The dies went back to their own things after the meal, but Adam went to the bedroom again. The computer booted up easily once more, the many quirks in the electric wiring of this redone apartment thankfully not seeming to extend to the Internet cabling. One screen had Shannon’s document up, a few of the compints checked off thanks to his ability to either improvise a fix or else get appropriate materials ordered to use whenever they arrived. Many more of them were not within his skillset, or within his ability to acquire.
That’s why the contract he’d signed was on the other screen, turned to the page he saw construction information on. From there, he got ready to py phone tag. People had been a bit difficult to contact in the recent past for some odd reason, so the game pn was to try to catch at least one of the half-dozen people mentioned somewhere in the contract. Cast the hook enough times, as it were, and someone might bite.
Four out of the six were the expected misses, and Adam left messages where he could. Two were hits, but both directed him elsewhere due to contracts and bor. One of those two redirects was present, who again redirected Adam. That one was a miss. Joy of joys, nine calls deep and basically nothing to show for it. He looked at the notes he’d taken. That st one he tried was a bit different from the others. The area code, specifically, was in California, one that was awfully close to some previous ones he’d looked at. Could it be the same New Eden he’d been sent the contract from?
The idea gave him another one to follow on. All of this came from the Serum teams, so he might have a couple more tricks up his sleeve. Starting from the bottom up, he pulled out the DA 6969-R forms all three of the dies had come with and used the contact information there. Good news, all three were hits. Bad news, all three were random low-ranking soldiers who couldn’t really help. That left one, since his Mysterious Observer hadn’t had the courtesy to leave a phone number. As the sun began to descend and his nose told him someone was up to something in the kitchen, he dialed Dr. Sherman.
“Hello?” His bnd voice answered on the second ring.
“Doctor Sherman! I’m gd you answered, I have some questions.” Adam was obviously relieved. Finally, someone who could answer things.
“Oh? Is there something wrong with your upcoming pairing?” He seemed genuinely concerned.
Adam’s face was priceless. “What do you mean, upcoming pairing?”
There was the sound of tapping on a keyboard. “Oh, right, the st few are being finalized so it hasn't gone out yet. Well, congratutions, I get to be the first to tell you that you are getting a fourth Team member. Looks like the one coming to you is from Hawaii. Once you get the email, you’ll have a day or two to refuse. No way for us to tell if there’s some huge deal breaker we missed.”
“Uh, okay. Thank you.” Adam’s brain was still scrambled like the eggs from breakfast.
“So, if that wasn’t it, what else did you need? Doctor Kim has been sending in the requested data, as well, and let me say that I am quite happy that Ms. Owens’s breast growth has stopped.” His voice was bnd and level still, as if talking about the dreary weather or st year’s sports scores.
Adam shook his head. “Right, sorry. I’m calling about the other side of the house, the Serum project and DHHS just sent through renovators for the apartment building I live in. Looks like they were trying to prepare the pce for rger families to live in, but they did not do a particurly good job at the detail work. There is a long list of minor to moderate compints about this home, so I’m looking for how to get the people to come through and actually finish the job they were supposed to do. I know I’m reaching for straws, but you said to call you if I needed anything.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re in the Washington Heights trial. I didn’t realize it was completed yet.”
“The term ‘completed’ is debatable, doctor.”
There was the sound of tapping on a keyboard. “Okay, I get it. So, good news. They are done with the scheduled renovations, but do intend to send teams through for cleanup. They do note some thanks, since going through the process once lets them find all the quirks and bugs. They have an extensive lessons learned document from it, which will be applied to the rest of these renovations going forward.”
“That’s only somewhat encouraging, given that it’s my home and I have to live in it between now and the conclusion of the fixes.” Adam’s head was in his hand, trying to think through the information that he had been given.
“I wish I had anything better to tell you, truly.” Dr. Sherman’s bnd voice did sound sincere. “That side of things is not my expertise, and I only have what I do because the project participation was included in your medical file in case it affects things.”
“I wish you did, too, and I hope you understand that I’m sitting here trying my hardest to not shoot the messenger.” Adam looked back at the bed that the four of them had made a habit of sleeping on. That wouldn’t work for five. “Do you have any timelines or contact information?”
“I’m afraid not. If you don’t have any questions on the medical side of things, I need to get back to work.”
“I don’t, sir.”
The doctor hung up, and Adam was left with more questions than he’d started with. All he had to go on was faith, and a whole lot of proof that faith wasn’t exactly well-pced with many of these people.
Two days ter, after fielding some more failed tries at gathering information, Adam’s email gave another significant ping. He stared incredulously at it after opening, and called the others in. “I know I got told this one was coming, but it’s still hard to believe.”
Callie agreed. “Might be the first time any of this has gone the way they say it’s supposed to.”
Shannon was looking closely at the text of the email. “Lani Kaipo Aikau, from Waikiki, Hawaii. What the heck is someone from there doing coming to Washington of all pces?”
Esther shook her head. “I don’t know, but I have some suspicions. Solid Oracle score, 86% is quite compatible. Look at the picture, though.”
Adam noticed it. “She looks hungry. Not like she’s driven, though maybe she is if this bit’s true, but like she hasn’t had enough to eat. I’m going to say something here that I want nobody here to take offense to. The Serum regenerations have been doing a lot for all of you, and I’ve been boosted in profile searches before. What if someone is trying to encourage more of the same?”
Callie shrugged, her still-dwindling weight a matter of continuing curiosity but one that she was living with. “It would make a twisted kind of sense. If she wanted to leave the isnds, or if her matches were lower locally? SeaTac is a big airport, being matched in Washington makes sense, so why not have a guy in Yelm with some extra living space show up?”
“Whatever the cause, we need to be ready for her arrival. I didn’t see any major red fgs. It says here she worked at a resort? Not sure what she will be doing here, but we can get a room ready.”
Esther stood, stretched, and chuckled a bit. “Beats a cot, at least. I should probably set up a room for myself, too. It has been nice, but I’m a bit too old to pile up with you all every night.”
Shannon gnced over. “You’re the one who looks like you’re getting younger every day, Esther. Come again?”
“I move in my sleep and Callie is sick of getting kicked in the back.”
Callie snorted a ugh. “You’re not wrong.”
Adam stood. “Then that’s that. Let’s get ready, according to this, she will be here next week. Oracle decided to actually give us some warning for once, let’s use it.”
