carmen sandiego oneshots

Atlantic/Pacific (Excuse my French-)

The problem starts when Jake is able to track down Carmen's new boat, six days after her escape from VILE island.

It doesn't take long. He knows exactly where the island is, having found a pathway to triangulate Carmen's brick-phone's location ages ago. He doesn't have an active tracker on her phone, but it's not hard to open back up his self-made instructions and follow through. He's never used it, but then again, he's never had reason to. He almost did, before the year of radio silence, but he wasn't sure that the strangers across the phone at the time, who he now knows as the VILE faculty, wouldn't find out, and it wasn't like he would be able to do anything anyway. It had been a nice thought, but ultimately pointless. 

Now, though, he's hacked into the location pathway he's set. That isn't even the issue: the coordinate he finds, however, is a problem.

"You're in the Pacific Ocean," He tells Carmen, eyeing the eight-hour call timer in the top left corner of his monitor screen. Somehow, he has the feeling that number won't reset for a long while. As an afterthought, he adds. "I'm on the Atlantic." She's actually somewhere near Indonesia, just 400 nautical miles off the coast. He probably should have suspected she was in the Pacific -- the number of islands there was far greater than his side of the globe.

"I know that," she says. Carmen sounds like she's trying for banter but she's missed that exit by a mile and is now rapidly approaching manic territory. Honestly, Jake can relate. "So I'll just have to find somewhere else to crash."

Jake frowns. He doesn't like it when she throws out her plans without so much as a second thought -- it's a bit too close of a reminder to her so nearly giving up on everything, on what felt like yesterday but was closer to three days ago. "No, we're getting you to Canada at least, Carmen. You'll just have to go through the Panama Canal, or something."

Carmen laughs. She's started doing that a lot -- laughing when she probably should cry. Not that he wants her to cry, but her laugh isn't a real laugh either, more bitter and self-decapitating than anything. It was a bit of a lose-lose situation, to be honest. "Player, VILE will instantly know where I am if I go through the Canal."

"How would they..." he trails off, then realizes how stupid he is. If their academy's visitor needed a brand-new brick-phone with a SIM card that belonged to no company, legal or not, and a private boat with no traceable funds or sources, of course they'd know. They've clearly made a lot of dedicated enemies, and they'd be idiots to not have eyes and ears everywhere. Honestly, the more time Carmen spends explaining VILE's system to him, the more they sound like the world's most dangerous crime syndicate.

Or maybe he's just a DC nut.

He pulls up a simplistic map of the world off Google. Unlike some certain individuals over the phone, he doesn't have a world globe memorized in his head. It still mystifies him to this day, her knowledge of Earth's geography -- he knows for a fact that's not something taught in such extensivity in the VILE curriculum. It's probably closer to some kind of special interest, he figures. "Well, you could turn back over New Zealand and make your way back that way."

"That's the stupidest, longest route I've ever heard of." she snarks. "Next thing I know, you'll tell me to take a lap around Madagascar, too."

Jake laughs, even though it isn't really funny. He prefers this light, joking air to all of the other vibes they've had so far. "Fair enough. You could go over Canada?"

"Too many islands." She refutes. "If someone sees me, it's game over."

He really, really doesn't like the way that sentence is going."... You realize that the common civilian won't shoot you down on sight, right?"