Volume I - Episode 54 Where: Cologne, Germany When: 15 days after E-Day, 11:39 am Ping! Jack hadn't slept in weeks. He stepped into the elevator and jabbed the button to take him to the 18th floor - the floor Krystal's apartment was on. Ping! He sighed as the doors slid closed. He was sick of this journey. He was sick of the monotony. How many trips has it been so far? he wondered. Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? The elevator whirred quietly as it propelled him upward. The sound reminded him of the monotony, but it also filled him with certain amount of selfish pride. It had taken him almost a whole day to get the elevator rigged up to the generators, and half a night more to get it running again. He had never accomplished something like this before - had never even seen the inner workings of an elevator before - and the fact that he'd managed to figure it out after more than two weeks of chronic insomnia...well, that just made the feat all the more impressive. The first day had been the worst; six laborious, lumbering trips up eighteen flights of stairs, his back aching from the pain of lugging bag after bag of food, supplies, drugs and medical equipment. He had tried to count the number of steps out of sheer morbid curiosity, but his over-tired brain always lost count and had wandered off to think about other, more enticing, thoughts...like how much he wished he could sleep again. "Soon," he whispered, eyeing the half-dozen containers that sat on the floor surrounding him. The strange, brightly-coloured contents of those containers had almost cost him and Klaudia their lives back in Berlin. But now, he hoped, they would save his. "Please God, let me sleep." The elevator doors slid open. Ping! He would do anything to be able to sleep again. First published: Sunday, 11 July 2011 Credits: Spartacos by StudioArtVartanian Urban Casual by WillDupre and MAB Urban Casual Yes! by RO MAN Inked Volumes 2, 5 and 6 by Shana Characters rendered in Daz Studio 4 Buckets and elevator modelled in modo 501 Composited in Photoshop CS5 Extended Additional filters using Filter Forge Pro 2