“I got this close to breaking down,” Cat admitted as she showed Agatha an eight of an inch between two fingers. “Or doing something quite stupid. Goddamit, I want to punch something! This week sucked! First another terrorist attack in the heart of the country, then the President, then the IRS. The hotel manager was the cherry on the cake.”
It was already noon but the two women were having a late sleepover. Or as Agatha called it, a sleep-in-over. The FBI safe house was an unremarkable suburb house near Arlington and they were given rooms on the second floor. Without anything scheduled for the morning, they decided to take over the master bedroom and stay on the bed in their pajamas, decompressing, shit-talking, and generally lazying around.
Cat buried her face in the pillows and screamed.
“I’m glad you didn’t. The hotel chain already contacted the main office and wants to settle the issue out of the courts,” Agatha said. "That manager is toast. He won't find a job at an hotel ever again. I honestly don't know what he thought."
“Hey! I said no work!” The girl protested once she turned around and saw Agatha answering emails.
“Sorry, I had to check the phone. Contractual obligations.”
"You violated the sacred law of the sleep-in-over! Ugh, how much are they offering?"
"More than the TV network."
"I want a public apology on all major newspapers countrywide."
"They won't do it. The whole point of settling behind closed doors is to avoid image damage."
"More money, then. The IRS just told me I lost amost three hundred million dollars and had to restart from scratch!" Cat threw herself on the pillows again, “Damn, it still hurts. I’m not a prostitute. I hadn’t even undressed before the cameras.”
“I know it but the world will always go for the easiest label. You work on adult sites where ninety-nine percent of the people is naked before the camera.”
“Bullshit!”
“Why don’t you switch to another streaming site? Twitch, for example. Or just post your videos on Youtube. I think the footage you have is already enough to make a lot of videos. Diversify your income.”
“I can’t switch streaming services. I can only work if the job is related to a sinful act.”
“Speculating in the securities market is very sinful, I think,” Agatha suggested.
“I thought about that but the demon might think otherwise. You’ve seen the IRS perplexed reaction to what is happening to my records. I got turned down at a Mcdonald's!”
She explained her unfruitful job-hunting spree in Las Vegas.
“I can’t believe he can have such an influence over the world just by wishing it so.”
“You better believe it. Goethe and Dante Aligueri over-dramatized the issue. This demon had no problem at all using our technology, media, and even our very social structures against us. What happened here in DC wasn’t even directly caused by him. He’s driving the world insane.”
“How do we stop him? Do you think the silver bullets will work?”
“They might. But I have no idea if that’s the best choice. I… I don’t know how to get out of this mess, Agatha,” Cat sniffled.
The lawyer hugged her, “You poor thing.”
Catherine remained silent but they had a long conversation after they woke up.
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Earlier that morning, she was wondering if the right thing wasn’t to send her to hell, a thing Cat wouldn’t even consider. Doing that would invalidate all the sacrifices so far. All they did, everyone that died, all that happened, would’ve been for nothing.
[The angel put us in this situation for a purpose,] Cat told her. [We need to believe there’s a plan here. I think God has a plan for us. Defeating this demon is the only way to go.]
[That’s true. We need to find a way to finish him without surrendering and without letting another demon loose on Earth.]
[I don’t know. I have no idea, Catherine.]
After that, the ghost remained mum.
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“Hello? Catherine?” Agatha shook her. “You’re crying!”
“Sorry, I was too absorbed in my thoughts.”
“Would you share them? I--” Agatha’s phone played a notification alert. “Gotta see this one too,” she checked the device and gasped, “fuck it. That attention-grabbing bitch!”
Agatha jumped out of bed and started to type furiously on her phone. Cat sucked in her lower lip and worried about what was going on. After a few minutes, the social media manager returned. Cat was sucking on her lower lip, feeling her anxiety spike.
“What was that?”
“Your mom is giving an interview. I had to react to it in real-time and send some messages to media outlets with our official position.”
Her shoulders sagged and she reached out for Mr. Mouser, “How bad is it now?”
“The hotel thing blew up and she got on the bandwagon,” Agatha misdirected.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“What did she say? What bandwagon? Let me guess, she went on media to whine about her misfortune that her daughter became a prostitute. Is that it?” The lawyer frowned and Cat knew she’d nailed it. The girl got off the bed and went for her device charging on the vanity, “I’m getting my phone and publishing an official statement. I’m a clothed webcam model, not a prostitute. I’ve never even… that one time doesn’t count.”
Agatha helped her draft the messages and they published them to several social media outlets and also issued an official press statement. Following her manager’s suggestion, she prompted the websites she worked with and PixCamStudios to publish official statements regarding her line of work. She got a fast reply from the major ones stating they would help and publish their own press releases. It was free mainstream advertising, a thing hard to come by for these sites. If these websites could get a single news anchor to say “Chaturbate” on prime time, it was a win for them.
But without any ideas on how to fight a demon, Catherine’s inheritance was lost to the digital worms, and nothing else to do in DC, she got on the next commercial flight to Las Vegas. Cat had money to make.
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A week passed since the joint hearing. Congress was still going through the confirmation process for the Supreme Court. On her side, she found that the Streisand Effect and Rule Nineteen [1] were in full effect, to her benefit. Interest in her streams and the tips she received spiked once again, along with a flood of requests for her body in both the virtual and physical world. The studio’s hired legal help was having a field day filing DMCA takedowns on all the stolen content and fake nudes of her everywhere but it was impossible to stop the flood of ‘shopped [2] images.
During this week she ignored her emails, delegated social media to Agatha, and focused on her streams. Now that the amount of cash she was moving around was greater, she took more care with her transactions to reduce risk and get steady returns instead of the crazy trading pace of the last month. She still had her Wall Street spectators drooling at the end of the day but it was a sustainable pace.
During the weekend she went to the military base as usual but the Shaman didn’t want to train her. The older woman took a look at her and told her to go exercise with the soldiers and play her electronic piano to decompress.
Late afternoon, she showered and went to her room with Mr. Mouser. As she slumped on the bed, the feline pawed his bag until she stood up to see what he wanted.
“Do you want to play with your toys?” She knelt next to the bag and opened the zipper.
Mr. mouser fetched a button inside the bag and pressed it, making the device speak, “Yes.”
She laid out the buttons and moved them around. They read, “yes”, “no,”, “play”, “outside”, “brush”, “sleep”, “treat”, “water”, “food”, and “cuddle”.
“I can’t believe Alice trained him to recognize this many buttons,” Cat mused then turned to the critter that was pawing her for attention. “Do you want to play?” She asked.
He pressed the right button without hesitation, “Play.”
“Good boy!” She praised and scratched his head.
“Play,” The cat insisted.
She took the fishing rod toy and waved it around, making him chase the toy at the end of the line around the room. She was impressed by the speed and dexterity he displayed, having to swing the rod really hard to keep it from his paws. One time he ignored the bait and pounced at her core, making the girl lose balance and fall in a heap of fur and giggles as Mr. Mouser licked her face.
Then he jumped at the buttons, “treat.”
She spoiled him with a bit of jerky.
The girl and her cat played for a long time until Cat ran out of stamina. Mr. Mouser insisted on licking her sweat and she decided to take another shower. Mr. Mouser went for the buttons, “brush”, and then fetched the brush from the bag.
“Was he always this smart? I think he’s trying to cheer me up.”
She took the brush he dropped on her lap and brushed his fur while Mr. Mouser purred out of sheer contentment. The companionship of both feline and ghost was what made her endure everything that happened so far. Cat made sure to spoil the Wirehair until exhaustion. Hers.
The next day, it was Sunday and she felt like an early Spring. Calm, relaxed, refreshed, and with the fluffiest furball to keep her company, she finally took her phone to check her emails. Regret sank immediately. She had a high-priority message from the SPAC management, dated from last Tuesday. They were about to close with the target company and issued the warning to the investors so they could withdraw the pledge before the purchase was announced. That period ended on Friday so she missed out on the bail-out period and her money in Switzerland was already converted into shares of the target startup.
“Damn, did you read that?”
“Less than that,” Cat checked her calendar. “They announced the company name, we can check where we sunk seven and a half million dollars.”
Cat puckered her lips and stared at the wall. Then she reached a conclusion and grinned, “The demon only attacked the trust funds. This money was from a numbered account in Switzerland, then to the SPAC escrow. We never transferred it to your personal trust.”
She found another email with the information about the company. Now that she had all the details, an internet search revealed that a Californian solar power company suffered financial difficulties after the attack on Fort Hamilton. The SPAC manager capitalized on this and bought (on his own dime) a shipment of solar panels from the company, rerouting the containers to Africa. They sold the panels to the Startup as part of the deal, which allowed the target company to skip the delay between placing an order and receiving the panels.
“The media is bombarding the billionaires who lost control of their trusts but this had a profound impact on the whole economy. The whole world will have to pay the bill. You’ve seen the damage the riots caused in almost all cities. Inflation will skyrocket this year.”
“That’s because of the ‘house of cards’ effect. You remove one of the pillars and the others fall down. Your cash is in the trust, you can’t pay a loan, defaults, and things derail from that. But the demon’s cursed cyberweapon only affected trusts, you’ve heard the IRS people. Oh, wait!”
Cat suddenly became excited as she got an idea.
“This means my Crypto is still untouched too.”
Excited, Cat fired her laptop and checked her crypto wallet. Truly enough, William’s cryptocurrency was still in the wallet. “I’m going to cash it in. The IRS allowed us to write off the trust funds as a loss, we’ll get this money basically tax-free.”
She made sure the laptop was offline and created ten new wallets. Then she split the crypto in William’s original wallet among these ten and generated the transaction signature. Once the signature files were ready to upload to the network, she encrypted the wallets with a long password and sent a copy to the files to her cloud storage. Only then she made the transactions public.
“This way we can keep the wallets safe in case this computer or the cloud storage is compromised. A thief who cracks one of these wallets will get only a tenth of our cryptocurrency. It was something I didn’t know when I set this up.”
“This wallet was very, very old. At the current price, it is worth about… Three-point-two million dollars.”
“We’re going to turn ourselves into a brand. Catriel, Mr. Mouser, Stonks, I’ll turn all these into merchandise for sale. Mr. Mouser plushies, Catriel dolls, apparel, mugs, mousepads, sponsorship deals, the whole nine yards. We’re going to do what Agatha suggested. Edit our streams into videos we can publish on Youtube, stream on Twitch and other sites, get sponsorship deals, monetize our fanbase, make this brand work for us instead of frantically trading every day. We need to surf the tsunami if we wanted to exit on top. Go out and put our face on as many vehicles as possible. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, after all. Catriel will go from just a camgirl that traded online to a brand we can keep making a profit from.”
When she came to herself, she was standing on the bed, pumping her fists. "We're back in business, baby!" Cat shouted along with Catherine. "Let's cash out this crypto and make as much money we can until April!"
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[1] Rule 19: The more you hate it, the stronger it gets.
[2] ‘shopped = Photoshopped, an image edited in Adobe’s eponymous software.