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Morning has yet to fully grip New York, and maybe the city doesn't sleep, it still drowses on its feet without a good injection of cheap black coffee. Chinatown rises a little earlier than most, trucks rolling through the tangled streets to drop off the day's produce and meat for the butchers around here. One of those buildings has a yawning entry where two sleepy guards keep watch over things, the labourers unloading the dingy white cargo truck tramping up and down the gangplank with a gimlet look in their eyes.
Hope lies on her belly with a rifle obtained from who knows where. The gun is an ugly part of the business, but necessary to scope out trouble. Though all said and done, they'd be better to find an eagle-eyed mutant for her to borrow from, but that's another matter. "Tongs," she says flatly. "Not likely whatever they have in those boxes is legit. I heard something about a mutant organ harvest, but they wouldn't do that so close to Chinatown. Still, you have to wonder who orders fourteen boxes of pork and counting. I have my doubts." Her elbows rest on the rough gravel and she lies in a way to avoid being stuck to the cheap flypaper loved by too many pigeons. "You think they'd be more discreet than this. Well. Figure it's worth checking out, or should we go ransack a Friends of Humanity office?"
*
Tommy is far from eagle-eyed, but while his favorite sharpshooter compensates for her lack of flawless vision with a scope, the speedster has gone a more traditional route; binoculars. The traditional vision enhancers held to his eyes as he follows along wih Hope's words. With theft on the mind - gotta pay the rent, afterall - he's opted for black clothes. black, long-sleeved shirt. Black slacks, gloves… even a black ball cap pulled down over his mop of silver hair. He can't hide all of it, but it might help with increased difficulty in facial recognition if things went South.
"Ew. If there's organs in there…" Tommy crinkles his nose a bit in disgust, "…I'm pretty sure those won't sell. Just about anything /else/ might, though." Pause. "…and if it /is/ fourteen boxes of pork, then hey. At least lunch is covered a a couple weeks." Pause. "Days." Grin. "Run and peek when a car goes by?" To help explain the rush of wind. "Or a grab-and-go, or…?" Honestly, they have options. Quite a few of them. It's just a matter of which one is selected.
*
"You'd be surprised what people will buy under the description of traditional medicine. It's bad enough in my time, and I am pretty sure they will pay a pretty price for a regenerative mutant's liver to render down to a powdered form, or eat raw at a party. They could do an implant, I suppose, but I don't even know they have the tech to do that in your time. I mean, they don't even have med packs here." Hope wrinkles her nose. The barbarity of grinding down organs into powder offends less than the barbarity of mending wounds by stabbing metal needles into the flesh and knotting string across gaping wounds. How civilization got beyond scurvy is well beyond her knowledge, all things said and done. "A tong would be happy to move that sort of thing if they could, and they would find it lucrative to shift this sort of stuff. I doubt they have people in there, at least live ones. Easier to make extractions and carry them." Her dyed black hair is stark against her fair skin, and her eyebrows are filled in with a darker powder and liner to try to accommodate no traces of red anywhere. Resting on her forearms, she inches forward to the edge of the building and looks over, measuring the distance.
"You can go down whenever. This is an easy distance for a shot, even with this totally primitive thing." A nod indicates the rifle in her hands. "I can compensate for the kick, anyways. If you don't find anything, then cool, we move on to the next mark. I'll stay up here and give you cover unless you run into trouble, but honestly, I expect you'd just take the building down. Fire is a good cover, just saying." It might be disturbing to see how casually she speaks of theft and arson, let alone potential murder, but marks of a certain kind don't warrant so much care from her. Still, she's never actually shot anyone in Tommy's line of sight, has she? "I wouldn't take the meat. Let them have it, it's tainted by the criminal element. If this fails, we can go over to Hell's Kitchen."
*
"Wait, wait. They're using those kinda things as medicine?" Tommy echoes, blinking in a bit of confusion. "I didn't figure weird ideas like that came around until Charlie Sheen became addicted to tiger blood transfusions… 'cause after /that/ there was all kinda crazy stuff that you don't even want to think about." Tommy admits, considering for a couple of moments. "Don't think we had any kind of implants outside of, like… the movies and probably secret hush-hush government labs or something like that. Pretty sure Robocop was actually a documentary that they're disguising as fiction." A conspirational nod to that statement, before attention goes back to the binoculars. Turning them down the street to get a glimpse of incoming vehicles… and starting to tap his finger on the rooftop when he spots one. Timing. He's getting better at judging how much time it takes to get from one place to another, and using other things to mask his presence… it's just not quite perfect yet.
"Right. I'm gonna grab a sample, then." A nod to that. Little burst of speed to kiss her on the cheek. "I know I'm in good hands." Honestly? Hope is one of the people he trusts most with watching his back, /because/ she has that survival instinct — it's something they share, though she has it in larger degrees than he does. Truth be told, he's not too disturbed by the speech, or potential action. It's easy not to be when he considers that these aren't exactly good people. It just makes doing things like this /so/ much easier on the mi— time to go!
In a flash of movement, he's to his feet and running. Jumping down sets of stairs and rebounding off of the railings like a speedy human-sized pinball, letting momentum carry him — he's still not quite grasped her freerunning technique, but he's getting there, too. Then it's across the street and into an alley in a blur. A moment's pause to swipe a trashcan lid and make sure the car's still coming; it is.
Time slows for him once again as he waits. Impatient as ever, for the vehicle to approach… then he's running alongside. Veering off to swing behind and around one of the fellows lugging the boxes, pulling the flaps open and reaching in for a handful of… whatever's inside and closing the flaps as fast as he can to make it look like the wind was rustling them, depositing his reward on the can lid like dinner on a plate if he finds purchase. That done? It's time to, barring any trouble, return to Hope, and examine what he's got… and perhaps more importantly, if they want to get their hands on more.
*
"They use more than ivory, rhinoceros horns, tiger balls, and monkey bones." Hope grimaces at the litany most foul going off her lips. "They've been using them for a long time, way longer than us. But someone's been saying mutant parts are good to put into these medicines. Powerful stimulants and healing properties. You could attribute anything, like it covers gallstones, sleep deprivation, insomnia, hangovers, migraines, gout, kidney problems, indigestion, palsy, eczema, limp hair, oily skin, sensitivity to latex or iodine or wheat, allergies to fish, the whole nine yards. Amuse yourself with the notion and they'll have a remedy for it." Her fingers curl around the stock of the gun as she watches the activity below. No cars are coming this way, though they pass through the other intersections around the area, sleepy Chinatown starting to rise with the impending dawn. More workers are shuffling around, preparing for the day's activities. "Organ implant or transplant shouldn't be that weird, but I hate to think this is the first stage of it. Illegal ideas are radical before they become mainstream."
Her profile is low, lying on her stomach, but she can move to a crouch soon enough. Her jaw works and she nods to Tommy when he declares his intent go over the edge. One has to hope his jump doesn't invoke a loud, noisy rattle or the hum of iron and bricks. Spooky stuff, hearing a noise that isn't there. Her gaze remains fixed on the gaping entry and the white cargo truck, the guards likely with guns, and the stream of three workers going back and forth like downtrodden bees.
The boxes are cardboard, sealed and stamped. The seal is mostly tape, a few bands of plastic wrapping. Breaking them takes a little more time than normal, but what is that to a speedster? The peeled back flaps reveal paper-wrapped contents, plastic bags with bits, slices of pink and slices of bloodied greyish-red tissues that someone can ignore; butchered meat. Lots of butchered meat. A pork loin, a hamhock, a bladder, what's the difference?