Smoke curled from the point where Kheshig's soldering iron made contact with the two bare wires. He had decided to wile away his time doing some third-party upgrades to Birdseed's remote, both as a peace-offering and also to experiment with some of his newer developments. True, he had not fully tried out every function of the remote, but he was pretty sure that it lacked the ability to remotely wipe a single camera's feed. As it stood, Kheshig only managed to crudely add a directed magnetic field generator, and a weak one at that. As it stood, it could wipe a few minutes off most camera feeds, but anything more would require him to work a miracle first.

He replaced the back casing of the remote, and with uncharacteristic eagerness, left his room and looked for the closest security camera. Once he found one, he stood well in it's field of vision and waved his hand a few times. Then, he pointed the remote at the camera and pressed the button he had welded the generator's circuitry to. Unlike his favoured EMP devices, there were no sparks or sounds from the camera, and in fact it looked as if nothing had happened. That had been intended. EMPs were good, but they left traces of their use.

The only way to find out if it had indeed worked would be to check the camera datalog itself, and so Kheshig's next stop was the security room, or as he preferred to call it, the nerve center of the safehouse. It was, in a way, his pride and joy, even though he had not been the one to build it. It had been there when he arrived, but Kheshig had made a few upgrades of his own to the room. He looked for the camera which he had used earlier and used the console to rewind the footage back a few minutes.

True enough, it played all the way until the point when he just stepped into view of the camera. Then the footage paused for a moment, and when it started playing again, Kheshig had already left for the security room. The test was a success, as far as he was concerned, but he made a note to look into a stronger pulse, to erase even more minutes of footage so that it would not even show the user entering the frame in the first place. He was just about to leave when he noticed the camera placed inside the pool room. It was still frozen, and showed Birdseed and Condor in the midst of whatever they had been doing.

Letting out a long sigh, Kheshig looked around him for a spare external hard drive - he was always leaving those things around, thankfully most of them were heavily encrypted and responded only to systems within the safehouse. He found one lying on the floor near his feet and picked it up. He plugged it into a port on the console and started downloading the day's security footage from all the cameras. Not because of the still, mind you, but because he wanted to have a backup after wiping all the cameras of their footage. He felt pretty certain that Birdseed and Condor would want that to stay private. Also, no one needed to know that he had been testing his devices on the security systems.

Well, maybe not Condor, but Birdseed would. Kheshig and her might not have a good relationship right now, but he was not about to have the safehouse fall into havoc simply because of a leaked still.

[i]One might think that we are still children.[/i] He mused and leaned back in his seat while he waited for the transfer to complete. Once that was done, he wiped the entire system with just a few commands entered into the console. The displays all blacked out for a split-second before returning to normal. Kheshig pocketed the hard drive, stood up and walked out of the security room, taking care to shut and lock the door behind him. It was a futile gesture - everyone knew the code to the room, and probably had picked the physical back-up lock multiple times - but it still placed his mind at ease.

His hand reached into his pocket for Birdseed's remote, and for a moment he wondered if he should seek her out to return it. [i]No matter, she can find me once she's done.[/i] He decided with a shrug and walked back to his own room. Maybe he could find something else to work into the remote. It still had enough space for additional circuitry. Not much, but Kheshig had done more with less before.