By the time you reach the high street, it has unaccountably filled with bystanders. The high street all the way up to the Hexagon Centre is usually busy on a week day, but that is with shoppers, moving pedestrians; this afternoon, the crowd has lost almost all of their momentum, forming into clumps and eddies.
The densest point is in a circle around your goal: WHSmith. Something has happened to the upper floor and a cordon has been thrown up around the immediate surrounding area. Jinge and Sparrar gesture as they approach.
“You missed all the excitement!” says Jinge.
“Fucking blinding!” says Sparrar. An aromatic zone of bong hits emanates from the two of them for several metres in every direction.
“What’s happened to Smiths?” you ask.
“Reasonable question,” says Jinge. “This fucking ginormous robot landed on top of the building.”
“It was fucking ginormous,” adds Sparrar.
“Like a fucking…” Jinge waves his arms around in search of the bot mot, “Sherman tank, but with fucking legs.”
“Then the filth turned up!” says Sparrar.
“Fucking loads of them,” says Jinge, “but not like normal fuzz. They all had these fucking semiautomatic machine guns. Heavy squad.”
“Fucking automatic assault submachine fucking rifles,” Sparrar adds usefully, before the two of them mime large weapons and start to make noises like “BOOSH BOOSH BOOSH!” and “AKAKAKAKAKAKAKADOOOF!”
“They were shooting at the robot?” says Bae.
“Yeah well no,” says Jinge, “but they were all proper tooled up.”
“So where is the robot now?” says Bae.
“Flew away!” Sparrar looks dramatically around in the air, as if searching for any sign of the intruder.
”Flew off, mate,” says Jinge, “but it kinda turned as it leapt, and those big robot boots, with a kinda axial skew, tore off most of the roof of the fucking joint.” He indicates the damage to the roof as evidence.
”The fax ribbons are all in the upstairs,” says Bae.
“D’you want to meet up for a drink later?” said Sparrar. “Like if you’re not too…”
Do you tell Sparrar that Bae has more important things to do at the moment? (goto 57)
Do you wait to see what Bae replies? (goto 44)
Or do you ask her what you can do about the ribbon now? (goto 42)