The store was clearly different from Blacklight Threads, Yuriko decided. It was more like those she’d experienced back in Bresia and Herrera City, though it still had its idiosyncrasies anyway. For one thing, the antechamber wasn’t all that big. It was just shy of four square paces, and the receptionist was behind a clear panel that Yuriko was sure wasn’t glass.
“Good morning! Welcome to Simon and Garoll, guns and ammo!” The girl behind the counter had shocking pink hair styled in what Yuriko now knew as a mohawk. Both sides of her head were shaved except for a narrow strip in the middle. The hair there was styled into spikes that ran all the way to her nape. The shaved sides of her head sported ‘chronian gear, which was quite fetching considering how colourful the metal alloys were.
“Hello,” Yuriko said, “I’m looking to purchase some guns.”
“‘Course you are, gorgeous,” the girl said with a wide smile, “what are you looking to get?”
“Do you have a catalogue?”
“Of course, miss, though you’re not loaded with gear so I’ll connect it to your tab.”
“Thank you.”
Yuriko watched her tab access a list. It had pictures as well as specifications. She didn’t quite understand those though. The first on the list was a pistol that roughly five inches long, was silver, and fired 9 mp bullets, and could hold eight bullets in the magazine, and one in the chamber. The Peacemaker Defender.
“9 mp?”
“9 MiPace. Mi prefix denotes a thousandth of the unit.”
“You don’t use inches?” Yuriko asked curiously.
“Oh, you’re a traditionalist?” There was barely concealed disdain there. Yuriko just shrugged.
“More uninformed than anything else.”
“You’re a new immigrant.”
“That obvious?”
The pink-haired girl pursed her lips and stared at Yuriko. “Someone looking like you should be well known in this district, but lack of knowledge is the real kicker. MiPace, NiPace, OiPace, stand for a thousandth, a hundredth, and a tenth of the unit, though it's normally used for paces. Since longstrides are a thousand paces in length, scientists, and rumours say, Lord Autochron, added the prefixes to be more precise, since inches aren’t a hundredth or a tenth of a pace.”
Yuriko blinked, “Oh, I guess that makes sense.”
“It does.” The girl simply grinned wider.
Yuriko continued to browse through the rest of the catalogue. Most of the guns are from the corporation Peacemaker Technologies. Most were variants of the Defender, but the changes seemed more cosmetic than anything else. Then she picked a different category and found herself on the machine pistol list. The difference was that these ones could empty their magazines with a simple pull of the trigger, and the handles were longer to accommodate twice as many bullets.
The next category was submachine guns which were the ones she observed yesterday while riding on the monorail. Peacemaker only has a couple of models, the Forceful Stop, and the Knocker. The latter had more bullets in the magazine, forty-nine plus one, and the Forceful Stop had thirty plus one. The Forceful Stop looked more elegant though, with sleek lines, and a charming blue stripe down its silvery barrel.
She moved to the next page which had long guns. Specifically, shotguns, which fired shells filled with smaller pellets. It should have good stopping power, but the range of those types of guns was barely better than a handgun. The model she liked was called the Peacemaker Truth, which could hold up to six shells in the magazine. The next page had something called an assault rifle, then there was a designated marksman rifle which called to her since its function resembled her Plasma Caster. Of course, all of them fired solid bullets instead of superheated plasma.
“Can I try shooting them?” Yuriko asked.
Pink-haired girl shook her head, “Not unless you intend to test fire them after buying. If you want to try them out, you’ll have to dive into our REI-space server’s shooting range. Ah, that has a fee of a hundred ACs per hour of use.”
Dive into REI-space? Well, it was something Yuriko had to try anyway. “How does it work?”
“Well, I’ll lead you to a small room you can lock only from the inside, put on a spacediver helmet and log-in. After you pay, of course. You pick your selection from the list when you dive.”
“Alright, I’m interested.” Yuriko fiddled with her Autotab and authorised payment for the hour. A door opened to her left and the receptionist girl waved her in. The hallway didn’t open to the reception counter, which she supposed was to protect the girl behind it. She followed the indicator lights that eventually led her into a small room that only had room for a reclining chair.
“Close the door and lock it, then sit on the chair and put on the dive helm.” Pink-haired girl’s voice came in from a box set above the door. A speaker, Yuriko reminded herself. She followed the instructions and once the door was secure, she sat down on the chair and picked up the helmet. It honestly looked like a metal bucket, just shaped to fit a head inside properly. At least the chair was comfy and didn’t snag the bucket helm. Once she had it on, “Prepare for REI-space dive.”
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Yuriko waited for a moment, then felt her mind and Anima being pulled. It was a rather weak tug, one easily resisted. Nonetheless, it took her a long moment before she realised that she should follow it.
“Something wrong…?” The pink-haired girl’s voice whispered out of the speaker, which jolted Yuriko into action. She found the thread trying to pull her somewhere, and pushed her mind towards it. In something akin to her forays in the dreamscape, she felt herself detach as her body settled into a meditative trance. Then, she followed the thread, though it didn’t lead her to the pseudo dream that she’d been visiting ever since she arrived in the Arcadia Region.
The thread, once it was out of the material plane, twisted and turned, slipped into the void spaces in-between, before eventually leading her into some other layer of reality. When Yuriko opened her eyes, she found herself in a mirror copy of the shop, in the very same room she’d sat in.
She felt for her surroundings, spreading her Anima in the process. As soon as she touched the walls, she couldn’t help but flinch when sparks of lightning shot into her Anima. It felt like a warning, and if she persisted, more potent defences would assail her. She also felt a weight pushing down on her mind. Her Will flared in response, pushing back against the pressure, while she used Intent into her Anima, needing to find out what this place was.
She felt a barrier pushing her back, but her Intent was much stronger. But as she delved deeper, she paused. Instinct warned her again, that if she pushed too hard, she would draw attention that she could ill afford to have. She pulled back, though she noted her reserves of both Will and Intent had depleted by roughly five percent each. Continuing to stay here would deplete her reserves, but at a much slower pace if she didn’t resist and try to push into boundaries she’d best stay away from.
In her distraction, she didn’t even notice the door opening, and it was only when somebody spoke that she jolted out of her reverie. “Please exit the room and head to the shooting range.” The voice wasn’t the pink-haired girl, nor was it by a woman, really, and could go either way. It was pleasant sounding though.
She walked out of the room and down the hallway, which eventually led into a bigger, longer room that was the shooting range. There were no guns on display, but there was a panel hovering in the air that had pictures of the guns she shortlisted. Yuriko tapped on the Peacemaker Defender, and a hole opened on the divider. Out popped the handgun along with a case of bullets. The gun wasn’t loaded, so Yuriko did that, albeit a bit slowly since this was the first time she was doing something like this.
Once she was ready, the first target, a square with concentric circles in the middle, appeared ten paces away. The handgun was light, and so was the recoil when she shot the target one-handed. She hit the center of course, since it was really close. “Can you increase the range?” Yuriko asked.
“How far, miss?”
“Maximum rated.”
“Done.”
The targets moved farther away. Yuriko thought the length of the shooting range increased as well, and the targets were now a hundred paces distant. The handgun was accurate until fifty paces, but she was sure the bullet could fly that far anyway.
Her first shots missed but she compensated. By the third one, she got the range, even if she had to angle the gun up a bit. The Defender wasn’t all that different from a Plasma Lancet, except for the limited shots based on ammunition. She swapped it out for the machine pistol and gave it a go. She set the target closer though.
A single squeeze of the trigger practically emptied the magazine. The thing bucked in her hand, and if she had less strength and control, she would have missed the target with ninety percent of the bullets. As it were, only two shots hit the centre while the rest were scattered around the third and fourth rings. Not really her cup of tea.
The submachine gun felt the same, except the Forceful Stop lasted for about one and a half seconds before going empty. The Knocker lasted two and a half seconds. Hmmm, if she wanted to lay down covering fire, either weapon, and she had several MiJins of ammunition… then these guns could serve. They also weren’t the most precise weapons even if she kept the barrel steady. She had fun though.
The shotgun felt great, but it was really too big to carry around all the time. Hmm, or was it? She recalled the looks of most people she encountered so far. While her perception could not touch other people who had ‘chronian gear, that actually didn’t include their separate weapons. Plus, she’d been honing her Metal Phase Style intermittently and she could feel the weapons carried by others, even if they were hidden underneath clothes. Many of them carried concealed handguns, and a lot carried bigger weapons. Not the regular workers though, but the people like Big W and his gang.
Hmm, so openly carrying long guns would probably mark her as a thug or something, unless it made her out to be a soldier. Unless she wore a uniform, that was unlikely. So, no long guns or should she buy anyway and stuff them in her backpack in case she needed them? But she should go back to why she wanted to buy guns in the first place. She hardly needed it to fight, and the range was shorter than her reach. The only one that made sense would be if she bought a designated marksman rifle which should have a longer range than her sunblades.
Oh, and an SMG since they looked great!
She test fired the other guns. The assault rifle felt like a mix between a DMR and a submachine gun. Yuriko didn’t like attacking with things that weren’t accurate and precise. If she wanted to damage a wide area, she’d use her Radiant Lance.
But then again, she should buy some guns for the others too, right?
She finished the hour and returned to the room she came in to return to the material world and connected with Gwendith through their thread.
‘Hey, love. Do you want me to buy guns for everyone or should I let them buy it themselves?’
‘Hmmm, just something to intimidate people and keep in the apartment for now.’ Gwendith seemed distracted so Yuriko left it at that.
She ended up buying three shotguns as well as a hundred shells for it. A Peacemaker Defender, a Forceful Stop, and the DMR. It wasn't made by Peacemaker Tech, but by a corporation named Millenium State Conglomerate. It was called the Milstate Pacifier. All in all, it was thirty-three thousand ACs for the guns and nearly two thousand ACs for the bullets. She packed everything up and shoved the shotguns and the DMR in her backpack.
Afterwards, she wandered off looking for the furniture shop. She crossed about half of the district, but suddenly found herself near a stairwell that led downwards. She noticed that the lifts earlier all stopped at the 101st level, and the stairs next to the lobby stopped right there.
So what was below the hundred and first level? The stairs weren’t blocked or barricaded, but there was a door. It beeped when she touched it and it unlocked. Curious, she stepped into the stairwell, and the door locked behind her.