“And then I got to cut out his kidney!” Anya says excitedly “with supervision of course, but still!”
Alex chuckles “look at you little Maestro, moving up in the world” she slurps her ramen before a thought crosses her mind “you didn’t cut up my rib cage did you?”
“Oh, no, muscles are too complicated for me right now, cutting them out and attaching new ones is one of the last things i’ll learn”
Alex breathes out a sigh of relief.
“Hey!” Anya exclaims.
-
Alex spits out some blood, “Did you really have to hit that hard?”
Korin shrugs, “Pain is a better teacher than me”
“So you admit you suck?”
“Get into your stance girl”
-
“AKI!” Sasha yells in the common area to the curses of the many children trying to sleep.
The door to Aki’s room opens to reveal an asian boy with some bad bed head “If you don’t have a good reason for waking me up, I’m stabbing you with your own sword”
“Alex is being mean!”
Alex just chuckles
Aki groans “what am I, you’re mother?”
Sasha’s gaze is pleading, Aki sighs “what did she do?”
“She put insta-glue in my shampoo!”
Aki sighed then turned to Alex “why?” he says simply
Alex shrugs “she was getting too into my love life”
“And you thought glue was a good idea?”
“It was a great idea”
Aki groans “I can’t deal with this shit” before slamming his door.
-
Alex is getting paranoid.
She’s decided this fact because she keeps getting the sense that someone’s watching her.
Yet every time she looks there’s no one there.
“You alright?” Hiroshi asks
“Yeah” Alex replies “It’s just…it’s nothing”
Hiroshi lowers his bokken “voicing whatevers bothering you tends to make it easier to deal with”
“It’s stupid” Alex mumbles
He shrugs “most things are”
“It’s just…I get the feeling sometimes that i’m being watched, but every time I look nothings there”
Hiroshi ruminates on that.
“You’ve been in many life threatening scenarios, maybe it’s your body being over-cautious?”
“Yeah, maybe”
-
Roan’s made some friends!
They don’t understand sign, so he has to write to them using a tablet, but still!
“I’m so proud of you, you little munchkin you” she says while giving him a big bear hug, lifting him up from the ground. He taps her back.
Reluctantly, she let him go.
“So” she says excitedly, “what are their names?”
Roan takes a moment to catch his breath before replying.
{G-e-l-l-e-r}
{A-i}
{J-o-r-d-a-n}
-
Anya is so nice, so precious, so naive.
It hurts Alex to know that Arthas will probably take those qualities away. Or at least hide them under a shell where nobody can hurt her. She wonders if St.Louis is really that peaceful, that it could produce such a creature as her. When Anya texted her to go shopping, she thought she developed the sense to buy a gun, but no, instead they’re rifling through clothes.
Although the looks she’s getting from the other patrons is kinda funny.
“Come on, it’s totally your style!” Anya says
“I can’t wear blue, that’s wolf colors” Alex responds
Anya huffs “Your gang rules are so stupid, how are you supposed to be fashionable if all you can wear is red and black”
“I don’t need it to be fashionable, just functional”
Anya looks at her slack jawed and wide eyed like she’d just cursed the name of God in a church.
“Alex” she says slowly
“Yes?”
“How big is your wardrobe?” she asks
“About three sets of clothes, and my armour, why?”
Anya seems positively scandalized “you don’t even have a dress?”
“In what world would I need a dress”
The shock has seemingly stunned the girl into silence.
“Hello, earth to Anya, anyone there?” She says while waving her arm in front of Anya’s face.
-
Aki sighs “I fold”
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Sasha smiles wide as she wins, then they see her cards.
She didn’t even have a pair.
“This is bullshit” Alex grumbles
“I’ve been working on my poker face,” Sasha chirps.
-
The laundry machines in Lost Hope have a strict schedule for who and when they get to use them. Alex get’s Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Considering how much they sweat regularly, they have to use any opportunity they can get to clean up. Luckily the showers are more numerous.
Still it’s boring to watch the noiseless machine clean her clothes at the speed of sound (not literally), she thanks her past self for getting a phone.
While her clothes are washing she looks for any updates on the war from The Arthas Journal, apparently The House brought out one of their Walkers, signaling a major escalation. The Kingdom and Bastion members were absolutely decimated. But now higher ordinance is fair game.
She wonders why The House hasn’t offered restitution by this point.
They don’t plan to fight to the death, do they?
-
Alex has grown an inch!
Now she stands at a proud six five, towering over all who seek to oppose her.
“Stop growing,” Clarice says simply.
Alex nods.
“I’ll get right on that, along with figuring out space travel”
Clarice nods.
“Get on the scale,” she says.
She does.
It reads 244 pounds. Great! Tall and buff, truly, she’s living the woman's dream.
Clarice groans
“What?” Alex asks
“You’ll need more food” She grumbles
-
“Fucking ‘ell” Danny says “you couldn’t have gone easy on me?”
Alex shrugs “you’re the one who wanted to spar”
“Yeah, spar, not get my ass beat! You need to learn how to hold back”
Some heat reaches Alex’s cheeks from that “I can’t really when i’m in my flow-state”
Danny groans “you need to find a different name for that funky shit. Like killer instinct or something”
Alex snorts, “killer instinct? That just sounds like I’m trying too hard to sound cool”
“Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s pretty fucking cool, you ever try it in a gunfight?”
“I don’t get into that many gunfights, and if it doesn’t work I'd be very dead very quickly.”
“Shame. Welp, c’mon, we’re hitting the gym for my pride's sake.”
-
Alex is trying so hard to play winggirl, wingwoman? She doesn’t know, she’s never done this before and she hopes Danny hasn’t noticed her flaccid attempts at hooking her up with Aki.
“Sooo, you have anyone special on your mind?”
Danny grunts, “kind…of…busy…right…now” she says between reps
“Ok, but you can still talk. C’mon Danny, spill the beans”
“No”
“No to spilling the beans, or to having a crush?”
“The…Latter”
“Awww, c’mon, you can’t think of anyone at all?”
Danny places the barbell on the rack before turning to Alex.
“Just because you’ve got the hots for Hiroshi, doesn’t mean everyone else has to have someone to swoon over.”
Alex blushes hard “I-I don’t think of Hiroshi that way!” she whisper-yells.
Danny rolls her eyes “oh, please, you wouldn’t know subtlety if it shat in your mouth. Only reason Hiroshi hasn’t noticed is cause he’s dumb as rock when it comes to love”
Alex opens and closes her mouth, then deflates “am I really that obvious?”
“Yup” Danny replies, “and Aki’s cute, but he’s not really my type.”
Alex’s self esteem just took some serious damage.
-
Alex has money, and with it she’ll get a harder skull.
As she enters Ghethers clinic for the second time, she greets the dismissive clerk and goes to her assigned room. This time they don’t even need to move her to a surgery room, all she’s getting is some injections. A surprising amount actually, apparently the jaw is two different bones? And the skull is segmented by fissures? She doesn’t understand biology. If it doesn’t help with gang life, it doesn’t help at all.
It is excruciatingly painful though, much more than the ribs.
She’s ashamed to say that they almost put her under sedation because of how much she was squirming. That would have cost too much for her sensibilities, so she buckled down and endured.
Getting just bones enhanced is actually quite cheap compared to muscles, her whole skull was only fifteen thousand credits, her next enhancements going to be her spine, but that is much more expensive. Mostly ‘cause they also have to modify the padding and joints between vertebrae or some such bullshit. Again, don’t know shit about biology.
She walks out of the clinic with a splitting headache and a big smile on her face.
-
Jobs for Ellie are mostly boring, besides a few outliers, most of what they do is delivery or collection. Pay’s well though, and they have to start somewhere. As she presses her Laika and Tengu to two different skulls, she prepares herself for what’s coming next.
“It’s simple chink,” Aki says,”Just tell us who gave you the fancy equipment and you’ll get to leave here hale and whole.”
“Sure” says the man “I definitely believe you”
“I told you this was a bad idea Jerome, I fucking told you” says the panicking woman with a revolver pointed at her temple.
Jerome doesn’t respond.
Aki nods at Alex.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The gunshot echoes through the apartment complex, and a man’s lifeless body slumps to the ground. He was young, just old enough to be an adult with an awkward beard gracing his chin. He’s wearing a white polo shirt along with some jeans. His hair is slicked back with too much oil and he’s got tribal tattoos all along his left arm.
The woman screams as he dies.
The apartment complex isn’t empty, someone probably heard both the gunshot and the scream. No one comes to interfere. At least one of them knows what was going on here, they reported them after all.
“Alright friend” Aki says “Every time you don’t answer the question one of your friends dies, you get to go last.”
“Please, Jerome please, just tell them” The woman begs
Aki nods to the woman “She’s got the right idea friend, so?”
Jerome is silent
Aki sighs “Kill her” he says.
“No,nonono please-” She stops talking. A corpse can’t speak after all.
“Only one more friend” Aki say’s “What’s it gonna be?”
Sasha presses her raptor to the last man's head.
Silence.
“Fuck you Jerome! You mother-”
“And then there was one” Aki muses “last chance”
Jerome breathe’s a shaky breath.
“Dominic White” he says “of the coyotes”
Aki nods “and where might these coyotes be?”
Another shaky breathe
“The abandoned mall on Fowlers Way”
Aki smiles.
Then he shoots him in the head.
“Fucking bastard” Sasha spits on his corpse “Acting all stoic ‘till it was his turn”
Aki shrugs “It’s easy to be brave with other people's lives”
Alex doesn’t hear the rest of the conversation, she’s staring at the corpses.
The man has a small hole with a small trail of blood leaking out of it. The woman is missing most of her temple. The Tengu is made to pierce through low-grade cybernetics, against regular flesh? It eviscerates. Tears stain the womans cheeks as blood pools under her.
She thinks she hears glass breaking.
Probably the others getting the job done.
They had to kill them, they had to. Those who deal in Crystal have written their own death sentence. It’s one of the few things the gangs agree on, Crystal and Demons Blood are not to be sold, ever. She almost feels bad for the coyotes, they sound like a small time gang, and now they're going to get the full force of the Dragons bearing down on them.
Someone shakes her shoulder.
She turns to see Sasha
“C’mon Alex,” she whispers,”let’s go home”
-
{Play} Roan signs, bokken in hand.
Alex gives a small smile “Alright, just let me get out of my armor”
{Meet on roof} he signs before running off
“He’s a good kid” Aki says
“Yeah”