Meanwhile, in a different part of Blackwell, a few hours prior…
Harry's eyes bounded back and forth as she watched paper after paper sputter out of what could be described as one of the most archaic machines she'd ever laid eyes upon. She'd easily been standing there for over ten minutes watching and listening to the machine clank and whirr as it scrawled words onto the flesh of deceased trees in a manner that might as well have been magic to the blonde-haired woman.
Harry's instincts chalked up this mysterious device as a threat, and was currently ping-ponging between telling her to run to the other side of the print shoppe and turning a shelf into an ad-hoc perch, or destroying the device by slamming it into the ground repeatedly. It wasn't like she hadn't seen a printer before. It wasn't even the first time she's been in this specific print shop. She'd been thrown out a few times in the past when her instincts overwrote whatever rational thought she had at the time. And right now that same instinct pricked her in the back of her neck, prompting her to fully turn her head in the direction of the clerk. Her gaze was met by the clerk giving her the stink eye.
Harridan abruptly turned her gaze to the communication board hanging behind the girl and saw her own face, sunglasses and all, printed on the large notice pinned front and center. Underneath it, a warning in block text: CUSTOMER HAS TENDENCY TO ASSAULT PRINTERS UNPROVOKED. BE ALERT BUT REMAIN POLITE.
Harridan made eye contact with the clerk again, who is now noisily chewing on her gum. A few trepid moments passed while their eyes remained locked. The printer continued to whirr away in the background.
Pop. The burst of a blown bubblegum broke the hanging heavy silence.
“So,” the clerk started while still chewing on her gum. “That's a lot of paper.”
“I need to print this,” Harry responded in turn, cold eyes staring clean through her sunglasses and into the clerk. If it wasn't for the aforementioned shades, the employee's blinking LED-strip hair would've had her squinting. Anyone else would ask why a girl like that was working in a place like this. Anyone else but Harridan.
“Of course you need to. You wouldn't be standing here if you didn't. The shielding on the machine prevents me from seeing what you're printing anyways, but…” She blew and popped her gum again. “If it's this much, you know you can just view all this in AR, right?”
Harry gave the woman an incredulous look, as if this was all part of some elaborate ploy to trick her out of her paper. She nodded, hoping that it would get the clerk off of her back. No, she didn't know she could view this in AR. The last thing she wanted to do was try to hold a conversation with Gum Girl over here.
Gum Girl continued to stare at Harridan. Silence hung in the room once more until the machine announced that it had finished its work. “That'll be a hundred creds.”
Easy enough. Harry was tech-illiterate for the most part, but at least she knew how to pay for things. She tapped her commlink on the till, scooped up her armfuls of papers, and scurried out the door.
It was time to follow some leads.
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A hop and a skip back to Shy's warehouse. Technically, Harry's warehouse now. Her new nest of sorts, even though she hadn't done much in the way of renovating the place or changing the decor. She didn't have a need to, or at least presumed that she didn't need to. It was just a place to stay when she wasn't actively out doing things.
The past few weeks were the closest to ‘actively out doing things’ she'd been in a while. Productivity tends to crash to a standstill when your known associates skipped town or got scythed down in a giant organized hit.
She fumbled through the papers, realizing just at that moment she didn't order them in any way that had rhyme or reason. This was going to take some time. With her trusty roll of tape, she set about her work, adhering each sheet of paper to a rusted, disused cargo container.
Most of the papers didn't even contain anything relevant written on them, with various corporations that had no reason to be involved in the matter that saw a huge drop in the deniable operators community. HiFi Soda? Sure, they might have some dirty dealings going on with them, but they aren't going to be sending out hit squads.
She still stuck the paper to the side of the container, haphazardly holding it on with a length of tape as she unspooled a red thread. She paused not a second later, looking over her shoulder to regard a chipped corkboard that was propped up on top of a workbench.
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Take two. Everything seemed to be coherent this time, despite all the sheets being thumb-tacked to the corkboard in no particular order. Red thread looped over and across itself, trapping the movers and shakers of Novonachalsk within the information spiderweb.
Jiuchongtian Biomedical. Considering their near open dealings with militia and rebel groups in the far north, their involvement was within the realm of plausibility. It didn't seem like their modus operandi, however. Harry took her sharpie and drew a big X over the sheet of paper.
Darwin Conglomerate? OneShot Firearms? DenebWorks? Even less likely. They all had their fingers in the game and disrupting it in the way it had been wouldn't be beneficial for business. More big X's were scrawled. She'd been at this long enough that she knew who was connected to who without even having to resort to trawling through the matrix for information. A lot of these names were names she worked for in the past. Though, clearly under different names and through a few proxies and middlemen. At times, it was blatantly obvious who you were working for. Especially when they had you hitting the only competition in town.
More X's. More dead ends. Varenberg Tech. Prosthetics and cyberware. They were a subsidiary of another, bigger corporation that was housed outside of Novonachalsk. It might've been a bad hunch, but Harry figured if she'd never done business with them in the past, they weren't the type to get their hands dirty. Not in this fashion anyways.
The middlemen and proxies themselves were even larger dead-ends. The most she could ascertain was that most of the contact was done via proxies that nobody knew. On top of all the middlemen she had on the board being out of the game, or dead. This time, she didn't even bother to X anything out.
She sighed loudly, displaying a rare frustration that she'd never let others see. None of this was adding up. Everyone in this town was connected one way or another, and she should've been able to follow the breadcrumbs right back to—
She looked over her shoulder, noticing she left a lone sheet of paper taped to the cargo container. That sense of frustration grew even further. She must be exhausted if she managed to miss that. She could read it from where she was standing, but that broiling anger commanded her to stride across the room and rip the sheet from its roost.
Wait a minute. The realization struck her like shrapnel as her eyes darted over the paper repeatedly. Maybe this wasn't connected at all. How did she miss the obvious? Her internal alarms began to blare, and she sprinted for the door.
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Stiletto hung upside down from her usual perch in the rafters. Just underneath her, the meeting room was more packed than usual, but she was just too engrossed with her latest novel acquisition to socialize. Heartthrobs of the Boardroom proved to be a deliciously steamy read, even if the intricacies of corporate life eluded her. Angelique, the novel's heroine, made a playful show of wrapping slender fingers around it, before starting to—
«Oh, no! Your subscription ran out! Would you like to extend, Dear Customer?»
«Yes / No»
She grunted at the sudden and unwelcome appearance of the pop-up ARO and swiped a hand to the left for ‘Yes.’ No response. She tried again.
Still no response.
“Wait a minute, I've never been on any subscrip—”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Another intrusive ARO popped up.
«Oh, no! You just got pranked by Onigiri! Suck it!»
She screeched and dismissed all of the AROs floating in front of her while dropping down from the rafters, corkscrewing her body midair to land on her feet.
“—what the fuck was that about?” Pizzazz, the resident mage, piped up beside her.
“Oh, sorry! Oni spammed me with pop-ups right when the novel I'm reading was getting good.”
“Fair enough. I just wasn't expectin' you to do your outside voice indoors.” Pizzazz stared back at the cards in her hand and rubbed her temple with two fingers. “Don't mind me, Stil. I'm just—”
“—stalling because you got a hand that no gambler would wish on their worst enemy?” Cherry Pie cut in from across the table, a shit-eating grin plastered on her face. Amazing how small the cards seemed in her massive hands.
Pizzazz inhaled sharply and ran a hand through her tall white mohawk. “Alright, listen here, you big bitch—”
Stiletto hastily retreated from the bickering card players and cartwheeled towards the fridge. Might as well get herself a drink since her reading time got interrupted. All out of Golden Wisps. That's weird. No one else drank Golden Wisps so the stock they had was hers and hers alone. Or supposed to be, at least. She looked over her shoulder and scanned the room, intent on silently judging her sisters should she catch one of them with a bottle in hand.
Zero culprits. Maybe she just forgot to keep track of her own drinking. She sighed and settled for a bottle of Devil's Milk, popping the cap off and bringing it downstairs with her.
“If I'm bein' honest, I ain't got an idea as to why we decided to lift those,” the familiar voice of Onigiri echoed out from the garage.
“SR-41's aren't too bad, if you're willing to splash on aftermarket parts. It's decent stock and it's backed by Kamiya's rep for reliability, but you can totally turn it into an asphalt-shredding beast with enough creds,” a second voice belonging to Blackjack said in a much more soft-spoken tone.
Stiletto took a swig from her bottle and tiptoed towards the door leading into the garage, trying her best to stay silent and not interrupt the discussion.
“Four friggin' wheels, though? It's just takin' up space in the garage we could be usin' for other junk. Bikes. Parts for bikes. Literally anythin' else,” Oni continued to whinge despite the fact this was at least most parts her fault.
“Well, it's true that we lean towards bikes but having a car or two in our armada wouldn't hurt. Hotrod's van is a huge help when we need the cargo space. Which sister chapter has the fuck truck again?”
“Ain't that Mary's? The Contessas?” She responded quickly, nearly cutting Blackjack off. “Fuck trucks these ain't, though.”
“They aren't, no, but we can use these babies as blockade runners.” Blackjack paused. “Probably late to ask this question now, but who did we lift these from?”
Stiletto took that as her cue to cartwheel into the garage proper, spilling her beer all over the floor. “We took it from—augh.”
Getting hit by the sunrise's seeping rays cut her off mid-sentence. Both Onigiri and Blackjack stared in Stiletto's general direction, taking a pause in the middle of their conversation.
“What the fuck,” Oni remarked, glancing down to the spilled beer that she was no doubt stuck having to mop up. She preemptively wandered her way to the other side of the garage to find the cleaning supplies. “Guess this is what I get for prankin' you. Don't want the entire work area smellin' like the personal brewery of some twirly-mustached jakkasu.”
Frantic pounding on the front door of the clubhouse echoed in the hallway, prompting the three girls to exchange glances. They weren't expecting anyone. Unless said person called ahead and someone forgot to pass it along to the rest of the girls.
“...Do I gotta get that? I'm tryin' to clean up here,” Oni continued as she strolled back to the spill, mop in tow. “Stiletto? You got it?”
“I got it!” Stiletto cartwheeled her way out of the garage and spilled more beer by the door.
“Fuck!” Oni yelled from behind, being left with an ever growing mess of spilled booze.
Stiletto bounded and leaped towards the front door, already yelling before she even looked through the peephole. “Who is it? If you're Galella's Witnesses, nobody's home!”
“You are not Hotrod. Where is Hotrod,” the flat-toned voice on the other side of the door posed that question as a statement. From that alone, it was blatantly obvious that it was Harridan. Stiletto pressed her eye to the peephole and saw the unexpected guest standing dangerously close to the door.
“It's Hotrod's weird friend!” Stiletto called out towards the garage. “I think!”
“Who?” Oni shouted back, still in the midst of mopping up the original spill.
“No, it is Harridan.” Harry responded almost immediately, speaking over Oni's shouting.
“Okay, one moment, I'll get the door for you. Wait! I have to double check. You're not going to talk about Galella, are you?”
“I do not know who that is,” Harry responds, obviously missing the humor in it given that her tone remains as flat as an ironing board.
“That's good enough for me.” She unlocked the multitude of locks securing the door with an almost rhythmic click-clack and opened it to greet their unexpected guest. “Hi!”
“Hello,” The blonde-haired woman stepped inside, keeping her shades on per usual. “Where is Hotrod?”
“Hotrod's most likely at her own pad at this hour. I know she wasn't on Veil duty.” Stiletto shielded her eyes from the morning sun growing harsher by the minute. “Wanna come in? I don't like the sun.”
Harridan's blank stare almost bore straight through Stiletto. It almost seemed as if all of the cogs in her brain ground to a halt at the first statement. She stepped a few more feet inside, allowing Stiletto to close the door.
“Apologies, then,” Harry remarked with a slight bow of her head.
“What are you apologizing for?” Stiletto pushed the door shut and engaged the locks in reverse rhythm.
“I am at the wrong location if I am looking for Hotrod.” Harridan trailed off as she noted Onigiri still going about her work mopping the floor. “I am confused.”
Stiletto popped up behind her. “About what? Also, would you like to go upstairs and chill with the others, or would you rather stay in the downstairs living room?”
“I am unsure as to what you are doing,” Harry remarked in Onigiri's general direction as if she had never seen anyone operate a mop before. Her unspoken choice on where she wanted to be was made transparent to Stiletto, considering the awkward stride towards the living room.
“I'm friggin' cleanin' up. What does it look like?” Oni snapped as Harry passed on by her, the latter seemingly uncaring or unaware that she received a response.
Stiletto also looked at Oni while she followed behind Harridan despite technically being the host. “What are you cleaning up anyways? Isn't the garage floor always clean?”
Oni gave Stiletto a look, but no further response beyond that. Harridan continued her purposeful trot to the living area, having absolutely no awareness or social graces whatever as she opted to simply stand still in the middle of the room upon reaching her presumed destination.
Stiletto set her bottle down on the table and frontflipped onto one of the leather couches. She knew better than to spill her drink here. “So! How's things?”
“I am looking for Hotrod,” Harridan repeated herself near verbatim. “How are you?”
“Yeah, you mentioned that! Is it super urgent? Because I don't think she'll be returning here anytime soon.” Stiletto kicked her feet up onto the backrest and flipped herself upside down. It wasn't the same as hanging from the rafters, but it'll have to do.
“I would believe so. I will wait for her here, however,” she stated before pausing. “Why are you lying like that?”
“At this point, it's a habit I can't shake. Why don't you take a seat?”
“I prefer standing. Seats have proven to be dangerous in the past.” Harry responded, albeit intentionally cutting herself short as if she was refusing to elaborate on how and why. Emphasis on how.
“That's fair. I feel the same way about cheese graters.”
“Why cheese graters?”
“You don't wanna know.”
“I will do my utmost to not ask as long as you do not ask about the seats,” Harry responded a moment later, taking a seat despite her prior pensiveness.
“Have you ever seen a meat tornado?”
Harry swiftly swiveled her neck to face Stiletto at the mention of meat. “I have not. I will listen if you wish to tell me about it.”
Stiletto clapped and turned herself upright, finally sitting the way she's supposed to. Hotrod's weird friend might be her friend now too.