Escort Mission

Here was the closet of a powerful business villain, the sort that could be both the love interest and antagonist in a dark modern romance. The shoe rack shelves were authentic ebony to obscure any errant marks and long and tall to fit all manner of gentlemanly needs, from the conference room to the ski slope. There were floor-to-ceiling hangers for your great coats and the like, with drawers and shelves beside them for cufflinks and various accessories. The only homage to a more rustic existence was the red cedar backer board tastefully hidden away, filling the space with that oh-so-manly scent and acting as a natural insect repellant.

The double doors had full-length mirrors to match the one in the center of the closet and allowed you to make a three-way mirror when opened at the correct angles. All three reflected an extremely handsome former meathead, examining his tragic collection of clothes. I hummed at the dirty sneakers on the shoe rack, arms crossed, one hand stroking my chin, and turned my eyes to the basketball jersey hanging on the rack next to an old shirt I'd cut the sleeves off of. Why had I even bothered hanging that?

"Something's not adding up here, James buddy," I said to myself.

"I know," I replied. "These clothes look perfectly normal when they're not in a millionaire sex pest's closet. Now they're giving: kept Bull staying in a wealthy couples' guest room."

That wasn't great; I already had the vibe of a guy you could hire to fuck your wife. I wasn't trying to lean into the look. Maybe I'd invite one of my – hm, what was I calling them? Girlfriends didn't sound right – maybe I'd ask a friend or two if they wanted to help me pick out some new clothes. Maki was a conscientious dresser even when she'd been ludicrously depressed, and Annie would probably enjoy dressing me up like a Ken doll.

In the other room, Smoothie was eating his third wet food meal of the day. As usual for the former street cat, that meant that he was alternating between taking small bites of his tuna and sprinting wildly across the apartment. It was a hell of a meal routine, but who was I to judge? The little man had been eating trash out of the gutter and sleeping under dumpsters two days prior; I'd celebrate too.

I tilted my head, pausing all thoughts about fashion to listen in on the kitten. Smoothie had started hissing at something near the kitchen. Normally, that meant he'd slipped and collided with a piece of furniture or a wall and, as was his nature, had responded with blind aggression, attacking everything within reach. This time, however, I hadn't heard the typical scramble of claw on wood or the soft thwap of his semi-liquid cat body meeting a hard surface.

I darted for my door when the hisses grew mixed with pathetic wails and desperate meowing, and poked my head out. By the food dish lay the immense girth of a rat, tuna juices gleaming on his whiskers. It had paused its feasting to look back at the kitten entangled in its tail with embarrassed amusement, an odd expression to see from a rat, to be sure. Smoothie, for all his valiant effort, had gotten his front paws bound together rather effortlessly in a single loop of the porcine sewer demon's tail. He was attempting to kick and claw with his rear legs, but any time he came close, the rat spun him away, mopping the kitchen floor with his ginger fur.

Fiend!

I instantly clamped down on my rage at seeing the rat terrorizing my kitchen once more and vanished into the Crouching Tiger Stance. The creature was a master of ninjutsu and could sense intentions better than I and most human martial artists could, but luckily, it seemed I had been fast enough to enter the stealth stance. My nemesis showed no reaction, continuing to play with Smoothie while taking little nibbles of tuna from the dish. He was surprisingly gentle with the kitten, even scooching over and bringing Smoothie over to the other side of the bowl to show that they could share. The cat wasn't having it, though, attacking with all the fury his three-pound body could muster. I'd have to send Joseph Mao a thankyou card sometime; he'd managed to find me a true warrior. Or at least a violent maniac, which would work just as well for my goals.

Thattaboy, Smoothie! Get his ass!

As loathe as I was to admit it, this was an objectively adorable display, and I was grateful the rat was showing so much restraint with my boy. However, I couldn't let the little bastard think he could buy his way into my good graces with a few Looney Toons-esque shenanigans, no matter how cute they were. I'd spare him by abstaining from outright Murderous Damage, but that was the only concession he'd get from me.

I moved quickly, staying low and stalking a circuitous route around the living room area of the apartment to the other side of the half wall that separated the kitchen from the hallway, making sure to block any potential line of sight with various pieces of furniture. My plan was to switch from the Crouching Tiger to the Happy Idiot before springing my attack. The latter Stance, I was hoping, would foil the ninja rat's danger sense. But, as soon as I was crouched nearby, Smoothie ceased hissing and began to exclusively meow desperately, his enchanted Familiar's Collar informing him where I was at all times.

There came a curious squeak from the kitchen, the rodent equivalent of, 'Hm?'

I pounced before he could realize what was happening. One hand outstretched in an Eagle's Talon, I leaped, arcing up and over the half wall to dive-bomb the rat. Despite the fact that I was still immersed in the Crouching Tiger, the vermin tensed, and his eyes showed no difficulty locking on to the oncoming Talon. I'd anticipated that, though. My other hand hung back and caught the countertop with a thumb just as I was fully perpendicular to the ground and inches away from striking my target. That slight arresting of my momentum allowed me both the time and the precision to torque my entire body in a fraction of a second into a vicious kick. My left foot traveled in a perfect half-circle from the twelve o'clock position to the six, aimed directly at the rat's skull.

I was mature enough to admit that I'd lost both of our previous engagements quite badly. He had used his ninjutsu to utterly humiliate me, smacking whatever ego I had to the ground. I'd come a long way since then.

Within those milliseconds, we were both blurs, faster than any untrained eye could hope to track, but I, and my eleven Successes, proved ever so slightly superior. The rat was already dodging before my foot was halfway to its destination, but I shifted my angle of attack by a few degrees, letting my big toe scoop under his body and sending him flying into the tile backsplash across the way. He went semi-gelatinous, using his bulk to absorb the impact like a gel toy, and bounced onto the stove below unharmed. It wasn't a technique I could replicate unless I wanted to put on about a hundred pounds of fat, but I filed it away for potential future students of mine with bigger bodies.

Rats were social animals and enjoyed games and puzzles. I had, in the past, gotten the impression that the creature liked getting caught and bumbling cartoonishly away as much as he did gorging himself on my stolen groceries. There was none of that this time; he reacted with pure bestial panic. He twitched to face me, eyes flashing a dark purple, and two spikes of Divine Qi, similar but different to the power I'd felt within the Peach of Immortality, hit my brain like darts. My Special Feat Impossible Determination activated automatically, and I took an immediate point of temporary Willpower Damage in order to try and resist his enchantment. The feat was my only defense against supernatural abilities that wouldn't normally allow Willpower rolls, things like a vampire's hypnosis, a dragon's fear, or, apparently, my rat nemesis's more impressive genjutsu.

The room around me began to melt and blur together like a runny painting, but I powered through the effect with a loud, involuntary shout. "KAA!"

We both froze, neither of us, I think, sure of where to take things from here. Smoothie, on the other hand, did that weird arched side-run that kittens sometimes did to make themselves look big and charged in the direction of the stove. His antics deflated some of the tension in the room and, with it, left our fighting spirit. I had resisted the illusion, but the aftereffects of Impossible Determination were a sort of static buzz in my head and an unpleasant ozone smell, as though I'd just come down from strong psychedelics; all I really wanted to do at that moment was to sit down and have a fresh cup of coffee. In turn, whatever technique the rat had used had left him looking older and more brittle, having rapidly greyed the hairs around his snout. It was mutually obvious that neither of us wanted to push the fight further.

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That didn't mean I wasn't still upset. I pointed accusatorily. "Who the hell steals food from a baby, you bastard!?"

I don't know what motivated me to start yelling at him like he was a person. Maybe my brain was still short-circuiting from the genjutsu.

The rat gave me a sheepish look, if such a thing was possible, and scratched his nose as if to say, 'I only took a little.' Then he twitched his whiskers and tapped one of his back feet in the direction of the cabinet where I kept Smoothie's tuna cans. I got the distinct impression he was saying something like, 'It's not like the child would have starved.'

My mouth fell open. "What kind of excuse is that!? He's a growing boy! Why do you even come to this apartment? I'm the only person on this block who could even conceivably stop you from robbing them."

He quirked his head. The little shit, he hadn't ever considered it before. Finally, a mischievous twinkle appeared in his eye, an unmistakable and universal, 'It's fun, isn't it?'

I snapped my fingers and sent two tendrils of flame from the gas stoves on either side of him whipping towards the rat. He gave a panicked squeak and vanished in a puff of cherry blossom petals.

"Tch. Asshole. I'm using lethal force next time."

Smoothie, who didn't have line-of-sight to the stovetop and was too afraid to jump up, continued hissing while doing a series of false charges. His bravado totally left him as soon as I scooped him up. I could tell that he'd be peacefully asleep soon, but in the meantime, he started purring and buried his head into the crook of my arm, his claws trying to find purchase in my Force Armor as he clung to me for safety. I wondered if he would develop Divine Qi on his own or if that was a quirk of living in the sewers and eating undigested remains of Peaches of Immortality and whatever else ended up down there. There were stories of animals ascending into divinity, but I couldn't remember how much of that was from mythology and how much was from broader, modern fantasy.

"You were so brave!" I started peppering his fur with kisses. Smoothie squirmed, suddenly disinterested in being held. "Yes, you were! Yes, you were! You're going to be my fearsome temple lion when you grow up, aren't you?"

I decided to go with my blue-grey and white Black Harbor Peregrines basketball jersey for the date. Cavalcante might have called it classless for a night out, but the little Milanese tailor was in his mid-seventies, and the times had changed. I couldn't be seen walking around Harbor Hill in golf wear; I'd look ridiculous. For my pants, I'd busted out basically new black joggers that had a pattern of golden claw marks on the upper thighs. They had been a birthday gift from one of my uncles in Hunan, but I'd never worn them out before. As cool as they looked, they were too close to something a Tiger member would wear, I figured. Now, that only added a zest of delicious irony.

Frankly, I thought I looked great, and not just because I could make anything look good. This was a tight outfit, apart from the sneakers. Unfortunately, those were a bit busted. I wasn't a sneakerhead and had a tendency to push any shoes I bought well past their limits before I replaced them.

Luckily, I was taking two eighteen-year-old girls out tonight, who weren't typically known for their exacting standards. The stories my friends would tell me about their first boyfriends were often as comical as they were sad. What horniness did to the teenage brain could not be underestimated; they had tolerated things like a guy who used layered sleeping beds on the floor instead of a mattress, and another who was constantly muddy because he thought it was cool to ride a dirt bike through the woods to school every morning. Ratty sneakers were more than forgivable in that light. I was even past the usual idiosyncrasies for a guy in his mid-twenties, i.e., my bed had sheets, my cat had a clean litter box, and I didn't drink milk straight out of the jug. Granted, the last one was because Alan's influence had heightened the standards I held myself to, but they didn't need to know that.

I paused at the entrance to Marianne's building, my finger hovering above her buzzer, and frowned. Thinking about being half Alan had been the wrong move just now; I'd deliberately been avoiding the thought for a reason. Shania and her friend were legal, and the age difference wasn't that weird considering that James Li wasn't only four years older than them, but I was also part thirty-something. And that thirty-something wasn't from a porn world where it was apparently acceptable for even reasonable people like Marianne to ask their hot neighbors to bang their daughter.

Alan was decidedly queasy about the request, more so than he had been about Maki's sexuality. She was mature and intelligent, probably more than our combined self was, and had genuinely convinced herself that I had ascended sex and gender, viewing me as more Kami than human. There had also been the glow of battle, multiple near misses with death, and the effects of a powerful emotional catharsis to take into account. This was closer to a classic, sleazy seduction; even disregarding the age difference, these were high school girls with no relation to the Underworld. Getting involved with them put them at risk for more than a broken heart.

Do it for the Experience, I told myself. Plus, when in Rome – if Marianne thinks this is okay, then it must be okay. She's our most normal friend, our rock for what's considered normal; we've got to trust her for that.

My finger remained motionless where it was. I sighed.

We'll play it by ear. If we aren't feeling it, we aren't feeling it. But the girls still need someone to escort them to and from the movies.

I pressed the buzzer; it was broken. "Fucking slum lord piece of shit," I grumbled, taking out my phone to text the girls that I was outside.

Shania and her friend ran down to meet me instead of letting me up. Marianne's daughter had put on understated makeup and an apron dress with a simple white blouse and black tights on underneath. Her friend, who she introduced as Aminah, had very light brown skin and was otherwise dressed for a sleepover at a friend's in jeans, a long-sleeve band shirt, and no makeup. She also wore a hijab, which reminded me that her very religious parents were under the impression that I was supposed to be no more than a kindly older neighbor and friend of Marianne's, and that this was supposed to be a chaste, quiet evening.

The physical reminder of the taboo sent an electric shiver down my spine.

Uh oh, thought my Alan half.

Well, you learn something new every day. James was ambivalent; a babe was a babe was a babe to him. But Alan, it appeared, had discovered a late-in-life kink – for what, exactly? Was it the teenage rebellion, the idea of a religious girl 'going wild'? It was impossible to say - that part of me was steadfastly and stubbornly refusing to reflect on the discovery.

I gave my Alan side a mental squeeze of the shoulder. It is what it is, big dog. You can't control these things, brother. Not without going back in time and stopping yourself from jerking off to nun porn as a teenager, presumably, and that would only butterfly effect you into a weirder kink.

I was struck with the urge to get a move on and smiled. Precisely half of me was finding this extremely amusing.

"We still have about thirty minutes before I figured we'd head out," I said, checking the time. "Did you guys want to grab a bite or something?"

The girls shared a look and giggled. I suspected there would be a lot of that tonight. "Actually," started Shania, nervous for whatever reason, "we saw that you adopted a kitten—"

"Smoothie!" added Aminah. "We're big fans."

I nodded. "As you ought to be." They giggled; I wasn't sure what the joke was. I'd only stated a fact. "You guys want to meet him? I need to get him more adjusted to other people anyway."

"Yes, please!"

"I'll warn you, he's still a bit feral. Smoothie is of the streets, you see."