Blackwell, The Slag. The clubhouse of Switch's chapter. The parking space out front was packed with sport bikes of various makes and models, a rare sight in recent times. The girls congregated upstairs in the meeting area, judging from the sound of loud conversation and raucous laughter, punctuated by the clinking of beer bottles and the stomping of boots.
Switch stood by the rifle rack, her oversized cyberarms crossed in front of her chest as she looked over her chapter sisters, giving them time to socialize and catch up. Well, most of them. One glance towards the rafters above and she spotted Stiletto hanging upside down, most likely deep in reading another novel.
A glance to the side, catching Onigiri surprisingly socializing with Blackjack. She never pinned her to break out of that antisocial shell back when she brought her on. On the other hand, Harridan seemed to be lingering nearby, having apparent interest in one of the nearby cabinets. Growler was the only one acting the part of a wallflower, but at least she had her reasons.
She settled into her reserved seat at the head of the table, its leather cushioning sinking and conforming to her curves. She flipped her glorious mane of fiery red and knocked against the metal table with chromed knuckles, calling for the attention of everyone present. The room hushed, even the Orsa SRS-TR500 sound system stopped pumping out music as the girls took their seats. Stiletto dropped down from the rafters.
“So, here we all are.” Her words, delivered in a smoky contralto laced with the subtlest hint of a Rostislavan accent, rolled out as if on a smooth downward slope. “My prolonged absence has put us in a difficult spot. Or so it seems.”
She swept her gaze across the table, cybereyes whirring softly as she focused on the faces of her chapter sisters. It has been a while since she last saw them properly.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘cause of your prolonged absence,” Onigiri spoke up, both surprisingly, and surprisingly out of turn. “I figure it woulda happened if you were here or not.”
Switch focused her cybereyes on Onigiri. She said nothing at first, deliberating her response. “Good point,” she broke the silence that almost went on for too long. She took her gaze off Onigiri and swept it across the room once more, resting on Harridan's face. “I called the chapter meeting to get us all on the same page. Let us start from the top. This doubles as an announcement to you girls who are not familiar with the new face. A few months ago, Harridan came to us seeking asylum to lay low from the operator purge. While the purge does not affect us directly, I agreed to take her in due to my personal relation to her.”
Low murmurings filled the room, and Switch caught some of her girls stealing curious glances in Harridan's direction.
“…not in that way,” she clarified before continuing, “we have simply worked together before. It's not just me, Hotrod can also vouch for her. For now, she has set up shop in the warehouse where Shy used to stay.”
She took another deliberate pause, wanting to gauge the reactions of her chapter sisters at the mention of Shy. A slight, almost imperceptible smile tugged on her lips when it was met by darkening stares and stomping boots. Even the usually gentle giant Cherry Pie and the soft-spoken Blackjack had contempt plastered on their faces.
Switch raised a chrome hand, the simple gesture enough to quell the growing agitation. She didn't need an angry mob of chromed-up and juiced-up go-ganger girls. Not yet.
“And that is where I went dark to take care of things with the other captains. The floor is open.” She leaned back in her seat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket.
To her right, Hotrod rose to her feet and made her way to the large screen on the wall. The screen flicked on, displaying a freeze frame of camera footage pointing towards the entrance to a rundown apartment.
“Alright, before I hit play on the footage, a little bit of context.” Hotrod pointed towards the doorway. “That's the entrance to Harridan's old living arrangement, the Fame Heights apartments in Lewendeen. I dropped by to help get her stuff and ran into two operators in the middle of an argument in her unit.”
She pulled up a still image of the two operators before they got gunned down by her and her drones. In the background, the mangled corpse of an ork wearing a similar attire.
“These two bozos. See the dead guy in the back? I didn't do that, that was Harridan's handiwork. I'm not going to waste our time by making you look at how cool I was, so let's—”
“Tease!” Pizzazz shouted from the far end of the table. “Show us! Show us! Show us!”
The other girls soon joined in on the chant, banging on the table like a group of drunk frat boys goading a stripper into taking it all off. Switch kept a neutral expression, her cybereyes glued to the screen.
Hotrod exhaled exaggeratedly and placed a hand on her hip, her display of feigned disappointment betrayed by the proud look on her face. “Okay, fine.”
A gesture from Hotrod pulled up another video, this one a footage from her cybereyes, apparent from the Mühl AMP dead center in the shot. They never stood a chance, immediately mowed down by the combined fire of Hotrod and her drones. The girls applauded like they just witnessed the climax of the newest summer blockbuster.
Hotrod bowed towards the crowd, continuing when the cheering died down. “But that's not the fucked part. Right as I grabbed Harridan's floor safe, I heard footsteps from above going down. Running, like they were chased by something. When I got back to the lobby, I only saw the body. Checked my van's cameras, and this was what I saw.”
She played the first video. An elven man, dressed like the other three operators lying dead in Harridan's apartment unit, bursted out the door. He's clearly panicked, looking left and right with his Harcourt Model-M SMG drawn. Suddenly, he fell forward, twitching as blood pooled on the ground by his head.
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“Someone flatlined him without me hearing it. Even the thermals picked up nothing. Don't have a clue who it might be, but it's safe to assume we got heavy hitters crawling around our backyard.”
Switch's cybereyes narrowed as the footage looped back, immediately racking her brain to narrow down who has that modus operandi. Too many of them. Might have to hit up the infobrokers for a list of stealthy fuckers who are still alive and working.
She took a drag from her cigarette. “Those of us who have an in with any of the bonafide infobrokers, arrange for a query session. We will figure out who the stealth bastard is, see how it affects us. What else has happened that might be related to this gentrification plan?”
“Uhm, well. I thought it’d be a good idea to make myself useful around here, so— I took a job that Onigiri pushed forwards?” Mary answered with a bit of uncertainty. “It was about the maintenance lines getting chewed on by rats, uhm. So I figured it’d be just something real easy. Stiletto came with me.”
Oni, being Oni, fired off a pair of finger guns in the cyborg’s general direction.
“— Uuh. It turns out that it wasn’t real easy. Like, there were a ton of rats down there. A literal ton.”
“Yeah! And there were three huge ones turned into biodrones of some kind,” Stiletto added.
“Biodrones in the sewers. That's a new one.” Switch nodded, prompting Stiletto or Mary to continue.
“It got messy, real quick. Totes wasn’t that much work to handle the, uhm, the big ones. After we dealt with the rat problem, there were other people down in the sewers too? Reeked of corpo. Both of us decided to get out quick. Some dude left a business card with the contact. Joey Johnson or something,” Mary continued after Stiletto. “It’s probably, uhm, a fake name.”
Onigiri raised her hand, as if she was worried that she was cutting into Mary’s story; despite the fact the cyborg had very audibly finished with her thoughts.
“Remindin’ me that Stiletto and me went and whacked a shipment from the Speednovas. They were baldfaced movin’ it with CorpSec at the wheel. No attempt to hide it either,” she said, jutting a thumb in the general direction of the garage. “If you were wonderin’ where the four-wheelers came from.”
“The Speed-who?” Melody interjected from the other side of the table, tapping a finger to her chin. A lot of the girls in the chapter stood out for not looking the part of being local, but Melody stood out even amongst them; with her dark hair, tanned skin, and soft features proudly displaying her Asharian heritage. Or maybe it's the chains wrapped around her limbs, being the resident chain fighter and all.
“Buncha wanna-be gangers out of Aurora Hills. Think they're based out of the Glendale neighborhood? Just rich kids playin’ pretend, generally don’t step outside of their turf.”
“None of their actual members were present, and it wasn't too much trouble to convince the escorting CorpSec to walk away. I only got to slice up a few, though.” Adding on that last part made Stiletto seem just a little dejected.
“I wouldn’t die for a four-wheeler,” Oni added.
Growler grunted in her seat, eliciting laughter from Viola who sat next to her.
“Wait, what?” Oni asked, her attention turning to Growler and Viola.
“Oh, she just said that cages are for animals and idiots.”
“She's not wrong!” Pizzazz yelled again, fully leaning into her peanut gallery role in this meeting, prompting snickers of agreement from the others.
“Beats the crap out of me why anyone’s driving freely through our turf like it ain’t gonna cause problems,” Cherry fumed, still uncharacteristically angry with arms folded over her chest.
“Yeah— Uuh. We’ve kind of had a lot of excursions on our turf by the Freaks and otherwise lately, right? I’ve noticed, uhm, a lot of graffiti up by Hotrod’s garage,” Mary piped up, somewhat nervously.
“Oh, yeah.” Hotrod sneakily bummed a cigarette from Switch's pack, letting the unlit stick dangle between her lips. “I was cleaning one up when Mary sent me a message asking for backup. We ended up having to fight our way out against a whole squad of those clowns, maybe two. One of 'em had serious muscle, and the other was most likely a spellslinger.”
Switch stared at Hotrod, both for the cigarette bumming and the info she just shared. “They were inside our turf line? One, maybe two squads?”
Hotrod winked at her before answering. “Well, not really? Right on the edge. But the graffiti popping up recently does say they sneak in every now and then. At least they got enough circus peanuts for brains to not cover our tags. Still a hassle to scan and clean, though.”
Switch leaned against one armrest of her chair, her expression no doubt darkening. “The Serpents are still eyeing our territory, and now the Circus Freaks, too? They must think we are pushovers.”
A heavy silence hung in the air. The girls probably didn't know what to say to that.
“That's not all,” Hotrod broke the silence. “Right after we finished with the Freaks and were on our way back, that's when the CorpSec hit squad van chased us. Couldn't shake it off for a while, so I called for backup from whoever was at the clubhouse.”
“Are we thinking there is a relation between the Freaks' newfound balls and the hit squad's presence, or is it just unfortunate timing?”
Hotrod shrugged her shoulders. “Probably the latter. We only knew about the corps plans after interrogating the dudes from a second van. The Freaks are just probing, from the looks of it. Harridan found something about the corps before that, though.”
Switch turned to the guest sitting in on their meeting. Harry stared vacantly in return for several long painful seconds before she opened her mouth.
“I attempted to follow Shy’s steps into the metroplex proper. I did not find her. I did find that she was taken in by the Hosokawa-Hamada corporation for undisclosed reasons beyond her defection,” she responded in her usual flat toned and unerring pace. “Given what was stated by the individuals that were in pursuit of Hotrod, I would believe that they are simply using Shy for intelligence at the current moment.”
“So you are confirming that not only is she alive, she is also most likely a turncoat?”
“I would believe so,” Harry nodded stiffly, before her gaze settled on some far part of the room.
Switch took a deep drag from her cigarette, the crackling of burning tobacco punctuating the silence that fell over the room once more. She returned the stares of chapter sisters one by one. “Very well,” she began. “We have a few fronts to take care of. Viola, Onigiri, I am leaving the information gathering to you two. Focus on this Joey Johnson person and all known operators who specialize in wetwork. Two fighters with Viola at all times. The rest will need to be wheels on the street and boots on the ground. Double up check-ins with those under our protection and push back anyone that isn't us from the borders.”
The girls she already gave tasks to nodded, their excitement barely contained.
“I will need a volunteer to go with me.”
“Where to?” Stiletto asks.
“Ashborne.”
“Red Gorgons country? Why?” Pizzazz this time, sounding almost perplexed.
“Need to see a woman about a truce.”