The closer Brock got to the festival, the odder the entire gathering seemed. The people drinking from large steins of foamy golden brew had faces a little too flushed, and their laughter was a little too loud, as if they were forcing it out in an attempt to convince themselves that they were happy. Strange neckpieces adorned everyone; wide, elaborate displays of feathers, precious metals, paper maiche skulls, and in one case, a glowing golden halo that looked as if it had slipped down around the wearer’s ears onto their shoulders. Their only similarity was that each one covered the wearer’s necks completely, making it impossible to see if someone was wearing a Limiter or not, and several curved up and around to where they almost entirely concealed the bearer’s face.
The clothing, on the other hand, left very little to the imagination, and several sartorial choices actually focused attention on things usually left to the imagination.
Brock blushed as he walked into the crowd, and tried not to stare too blatantly. He’d seen his fair share of naked people on the internet back in his previous life, but it was one thing to see it on a screen and quite another to be up close and personal with the action.
Especially when the action was filled with so many beautiful people.
His blush deepened when an expanse of very obviously uncovered flesh pressed up against his elbow, an arm curling around his waist.
“Oooh, look at Mr. Stuffy here,” the woman cooed, peacock feathers forming a cage around her face that only revealed a mane of wild chestnut hair and a pair of violet eyes. They danced with mischief and other, darker desires.
The rest of her body was quite visible, and extremely well-formed. Brock figured she was two lost feathers away from being naked.
She traced a finger down his arm and licked her lips. “I haven’t seen you around here before. Why don’t you shuck those inhibitions and have some fun?”
“I’m... uhhh... looking for... my...”
Brock’s voice trailed off, and as if in a trance, he shrugged himself out of his leather trenchcoat, letting it fall to the street. His fingers fumbled at the neck of his shirt, trying to pull it over his head. Dimly, he heard Bindy’s muffled bleats from the abandoned coat, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to care.
What am I doing, he thought drunkenly. I don’t know anyone here. I don’t even know where I am. What the hell?
The woman ran her fingernails underneath the top of his jeans, scratching areas that quickly sent blood to other, more intimate parts. Brock shivered and gasped, then forgot anything other than getting his shirt off as quickly as possible. Just as he finished pulling it over his head, a siren whooped nearby and five figures came plummeting in from above, landing on glowing crimson runes that sent up jets of fire with each impact.
They were dressed in familiar outfits of black tactical gear festooned with various dangerous-looking paraphernalia. The one in front, a sour-faced man with black hair and rectangular glasses, whip-thin as a ferret, marched directly towards Brock and the woman, while the other four fanned out towards the festival-goers.
“We’re shutting this down, Aphrodite,” the slender man declared, eyes hard behind the polished glass. “You’re only cleared for skill level two events in this district.”
The woman pouted, arms pressing inward to send various bits of interesting anatomy jiggling.
“Oh, if it isn’t my favorite Vice Squad Black Cat, Captain Hardick. Come to sample our wares?”
She licked her lips even more suggestively, but the man in glasses appeared unphased.
“That’s Darwhick, Aphrodite, and I’m ordering you to put a halt to this right now.”
Aphrodite’s lips pinched for a second, and she pulled Brock even tighter towards her body, heat radiating from her bare skin against his own. Somewhere, fireworks exploded behind his eyes.
“You can Appraise me if you want, Captain, but I’m following the rules. My Limiter’s engaged. This party is perfectly legal.”
“There’s rules, and then there’s rules, Aphrodite,” Captain Darwhick said, grabbing a heavy pistol-looking device from his belt. “Shut it down, or I will.”
“Fucking prude,” Aphrodite muttered. She stepped away from Brock, raising her hands to the evening sky.
An ice-water sensation drenched him from head to toe. Sputtering, he whirled around, mind cleared of the bewitching haze of the festival.
What he saw didn’t make any sense.
The formerly angelic forms of the nearly-nude festival goers were now soft and sagging middle-aged doughbodies, stretchmarks and skintags on full display, and the roadside stalls had lost their luster. Instead of clever contraptions filled with enticing lures, ramshackle plywood structures one sneeze away from collapsing now lined the sidewalks, sloppy paint signs covering their busker fronts. The fireworks faded into pathetically sputtering twigs, and the alluring aroma of exotic foodstuffs sank beneath the weight of three-day old refuse. Rainbow-colored orbs melted back into plain white streetlights, their harsh glare filling the street with shadows.
A great sigh went up from the crowd and it quickly dispersed, various barely-clothed forms scampering down alleyways or into nearby doorways.
“Fucking Black Cats.”
“Can’t even let us enjoy a party.”
“Assholes.”
“The Conductor rises.”
Captain Darwhick’s head whipped around at that last whispered line, but no one was left on the street except for Brock and Aphrodite.
“Happy now, Hardick?”
Aphrodite’s voice was mocking, but Brock sensed an undercurrent of bitter scorn. He turned to look at her, then stifled a gasp.
Instead of the nubile young seductress clutching his arm, now it was a more mature woman, hints of the same youthful beauty shining through her slightly thicker midsection and legs, scattered streaks of silver highlighting her hair, but her eyes behind the peacock feathers were hard as glacial ice. She let go of his arm and stood proudly tall, unconcerned with her exposed vulnerability.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“We put up with your shit all day, every day, and when we dare enjoy ourselves, there you are again, cracking us back into the gutter.” She gestured at the abandoned trash make-believing it was a real festival. “You can’t even let us have one night off. One night to ourselves, pretending we aren’t stuck in this miserable hellhole.”
Captain Darwhick regarded her dispassionately, then strode forward until he was standing face to face with Aphrodite. He clucked his tongue and backhanded her. Peacock feathers flew into the air like an exploding pillow, revealing a familiar metal collar around her neck. She staggered, but somehow still remained upright, clutching her rose-blossomed cheek.
The Captain raised his other hand, but before he could bring it down, Brock was standing between him and the woman.
Brock didn’t know how he’d closed the gap, but he knew it was what he wanted to do.
Thank you, Starak, for not being a negative ten.
“Oh?” the Captain sneered, then closed his open hand into a fist and smashed it into Brock’s mouth. Blood flew out in a spray of red, spattering the pale stone road, but just as quickly disappeared, as if it were never there. Brock straightened back up, burning eyes glaring hate at the whip-thin man.
“Very well, then,” the Captain said quietly, this time bringing the pistol-looking device to Brock’s head.
“Wait-” Aphrodite yelled-
-and there was a bang-
-and an impact-
-and a suggestion of the grey place-
-and then Brock was once again facing down the Captain, only now the fires of hell itself were blazing behind his pupils.
He reached back with his right hand.
“Here,” he said quietly, offering Aphrodite his white t-shirt.
She smacked it proudly to the ground, her eyes slightly wild.
“You can take your chivalry,” she declared, chin upthrust, “and shove it. Showing my nipples isn’t a crime.”
In front of them, Captain Darwhick frowned.
“I don’t know who you think you are-”
One of his subordinates ran up to him, whispering frantically and pointing to the magiphone clutched in his hand. At the same time, Brock realized Bindy was yelling merrily from his discarded coat pocket ten feet back down the street.
Thankfully, the annoying voice was muffled enough by the fabric that Brock couldn’t make out what it was saying.
“Uh, you gonna answer that?” Aphrodite whispered to Brock, shifting her eyes to his coat. “Sounds important.”
“What? Why would I do that? That guy just shot me!”
She shrugged and shuffled slightly farther behind him.
“Yeah he did. Fine, it’s your phone. I’ll just be back here. Frankly, I’d rather you were getting punched by that asshole than me.” She rubbed her jaw. “You look like you can take it.”
“What happened to ‘take my chivalry and shove it?’” Brock hissed heatedly. “Seems like you should be in front of me.”
“Just living up to expectations.” She shrugged. “Sometimes playing the damsel in distress is the right move, you know? Especially when it involves unexpected bone re-alignment.”
“Why you-”
The butt of Captain Darwhick’s gun crunched into Brock’s forehead like a falling meteor, smashing him into the ground. Brock blinked, then stood back up. It seemed whatever the Captain’s assistant had been trying to tell him hadn’t changed anything.
“Hey-”
A blast of force obliterated the right side of his face, spinning him in a circle. Brock finished the spin with both eyes open, focusing on the slender man. Darwhick’s subordinate was cringing away, but the captain’s fanatical gaze was locked on Brock’s own.
“Fucking Sekkies,” Darwhick breathed out, gun held steady in a firing position. He flicked a switch on its side and ominous energies gathered around the mouth of the barrel.
Brock braced himself, but was still flipped head over heels by the energy blast exploding right between his eyes. He somehow landed upright, feet skidding backwards on the smooth stone, and came to a halt against Aphrodite. His lips pulled back in a snarl.
It had been a long day, and he was tired of this shit.
Brock took a step towards the Captain, and something smashed into his chest, driving the air from his lungs, but he refused to fall. He took another step forward, and his vision went red, then black, then returned, a metal tinkle sounding from where the bullet that went through his eye socket had fallen to the stone. Aphrodite gasped, but Brock was past caring. He closed the distance to Darwhick again, and a pair of shots rang out. His knees exploded like water balloons, then were whole once more.
A click sounded when he took his next step, Darwhick’s gun hammer falling on an empty chamber. Brock reached forward and grabbed the gaunt figure in front of him by the throat.
“Assaulting an officer is punishable by-”
crunch
smash
The sound of Brock’s fist punching Darwhick square in the nose was simultaneous with the sound of Brock’s magiphone whizzing out of his discarded coat pocket and clocking its owner in the side of the head, propelled by some sort of sparkling trail. He staggered back on his heels as Darwick fell on his ass. The Captain’s weapon skittered out of his splayed hands and across the stone street, but Brock’s attention was arrested by his phone floating in midair between them. Bindy’s psychotically cheerful voice came out in a shrill tone.
“Brock! You should answer your calls! No hitting officers! Even if they deserve it!”
Brock rubbed the side of his head. Even though the pain was disappearing like it always did, he still felt disoriented. Phones here could... fly?
His magiphone swooped down in front of Captain Darwhick, and whatever Bindy showed him on the screen was enough to get the cursing man to momentarily freeze in place. After a tense few seconds, he slowly rose to his feet, a hand clutched to his broken nose, glasses askew and one lens cracked.
“Fall in,” the Captain ordered his squad, turning stiffly away from Brock. “We’re done here.”
“Wait a minute-” Brock began, but Bindy zoomed over in front of his face, so close the phone screen covered almost his entire field of vision. Behind it, he could barely see the Captain and his squad rocket up into the sky, vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. The anthropomorphized binder clip had its white-gloved hands on what Brock assumed were its hips, and its googly eyes were drawn down into a frown.
“You need to check in to your apartment, Brock! We’re almost there! Don’t cause a scene! Turn right here! Don’t forget your coat!”
The hovering rectangle zipped back into the pocket of the coat Brock had discarded earlier, ruffling it slightly. Brock looked to his right.
Behind the shabby festival stalls, it was an unbroken stone wall stretching between two storefronts.
“You’re terrible at directions, Bindy,” Brock grumbled, leaning down to pick up his coat. “I’d throw you out if it wasn’t a torturable offense.” When he stood back up, Aphrodite was staring at him in awe.
“Who the hell are you?”
Brock tried to keep his attention from wandering below her chin. She was very definitively still not wearing anything above the waist.
“Uhhh, Brock.” He eyed her still-reddening cheek. “Are you okay?”
She probed in her mouth for a second with her tongue, then spat a tooth on the ground.
“I’ll be fine. I’ve taken worse from Hardick before, healer'll patch me up fine. What a fascist piece of shit, though, am I right? I’m Aphrodite, by the way.”
Brock nodded, not trusting himself to speak. His traitorous eyes kept trying to shift their focus lower.
Aphrodite rolled her own.
“Christ, not another NEET. Shrugs off an entire clip from one of the meanest Black Cats around, but show him a pair of tits and it’s blood geysers out the nose for days. How old are you, fourteen?”
Brock blushed.
“I’m eighteen. What’s a ‘neat?’”
Aphrodite picked his shirt up off the ground and threw it at him, then walked over to one of the stalls and grabbed a purple overcoat that matched her eyes. She cinched its belt across her waist in a practiced motion.
“Not engaged in education, employment, or training. Means you’re a slacker with no social skills that nobody cares about. Everyone here used to be one back on Earth.”
“But I was getting ready to graduate and go to college,” Brock said, slowly putting his shirt and coat on. “I was going to major in advertising. And I had friends.”
Crap. If I died, what’s that going to do to John and Alex and Theresa? We were supposed to hang out this weekend.
“Well, good for you.” Aphrodite gathered her hair back into a high ponytail. “Now, thanks for taking some punches for me, but I gotta go. I’m going to have a busy day tomorrow making up the creds to cover this little fiasco. Hardick’s going to want his pound of flesh, and I’d prefer not to pay with my own.” She turned to leave.
“Wait!”
Brock’s voice was pleading.
“Can you tell me where my apartment is, please?”