Chapter Twenty-Six - Even In Death I Serve My Waifus

"Games aren't portals to infinite worlds, where players dance with imagination, conquer fears, and craft their own destinies, all while forging connections and finding joy in the art of play.

They're magic money printers.

Now, how can we better separate the player from their cash?"

--Electronic Artists CEO, 2031

***

The Family didn't look like they loved me.

Rac and I took my bike over. It was fast, and while it wasn't the most comfortable ride for a passenger... well, I wasn't the passenger. Rac held on tight, and she complained about it being chilly, but she was wearing a skintight suit that was pretty damned well insulated.

The ride over to the Family's headquarters was pretty fast, but not as fast as it might have been. There was traffic in the air. It felt a little lighter than I was used to seeing pre-incursion, but not by much. There were more people up now than I'd seen in a week or two, and I was pretty sure that was a good sign.

Business was picking up, or something. At the very least, it meant that people weren't afraid to get out anymore, and that the shit people needed to keep hovercars going was available again.

I hadn't heard of any major power outages or anything, so I supposed the electricity needed to run the cars wasn't lacking, but they probably still needed stuff manufactured to work, right?

I was out of my depth when it came to that kind of thing.

We arrived at the parking space on the roof of the Family's HQ and I slid into one of the samurai-reserved parking spots. Interestingly, there was a car in the space next to the one I took. A long, sleek-looking thing that might have come out of a luxury commercial.

It was black and white, long, with sharp angles. A narrow band at the front where a cheaper car might have a windshield and... I assumed there were doors somewhere. I couldn't see any seams.

"Do you know whose car that is?" Rac asked.

"I think I have an idea," I said. The car had a knight at the front, acting as one of those old-timey hood ornaments, and the wheels had rims that looked like pawns stuck in a mandala pattern around the central hub.

Cheesy chess themed things along with a sort of classy old-rich aesthetic? That was Jolly Monarch's ride.

Actually, I was starting to doubt that it was a car. Wasn't his whole gimmick a set of drones that worked on a chess theme? Would this be a knight, then? Or... maybe he wasn't that obsessed with the chess thing that he'd only use... however many pieces were in a chess set.

"Hey, Myalis, I know you can't spy on other samurai, but any way you can let me know how many are here?" I asked.

Technically, no. Also technically, Grasshopper, Laserjack and Sam-o-Ray have all appeared in publicly-posted social media posts in the last six hours, all located within the Family's New Montreal headquarters.

Right, so that wasn't the straightest answer, but it was still pretty damned good. "Thanks," I muttered.

Rac and I moved towards the entrance only to be met halfway there by a sweaty young man in a suit and tie. He rushed out of the doors and stopped ahead and to my side, so as to not block my path. "Miss Stray Cat, welcome. And... guest? Will the, ah, other Miss require a guest pass?"

I blinked, then grinned. Did they think Rac was a samurai too? Nah, it was probably best to break that misunderstanding. "This is a guest, yeah," I said. "Can you make out her pass to Little Baby Racoon?"

"That is not the name I'm going by," Rac said.

"If there's not enough room on the pass, you can spell it 'lil' Baby Rac," I added.

"Just Racoon," Rac said with a growl that had the guy standing stiff. She turned towards me. "Why do you have to be a bitch sometimes?"

"It's just a bit of teasing, but I can let up," I said. "I wouldn't do it if I didn't think you couldn't stand up for yourself... did I get the double-negatives correct there?" I asked the guy who'd come to greet us.

He jumped, then nodded. "Yes ma'am. Assuming you meant to inform Miss Racoon that you only insult her because you are aware that she's capable of taking it?"

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Huh. Well, when you put it that way, maybe I am a dick?" I shook my head. "So, care to catch me up? I was out of the city for a hot minute so I don't know what's going on with the project I handed off to the Family. For that matter, how are we handling the end of the world?"

"The what?" Rac asked.

"The world's going to end in about a week," I explained. "The aliens flung a moon at us. Don't worry, it's a pretty small one."

"Oh," she said. I think she might have been more worried if I told her that her favourite soda was no longer being produced. "So we're all going to die?"

"Eh, it depends on whether or not someone does something about it. Right?"

The young guy stared at me for a moment, then licked his lips in a concerning manner. "The Family's stance on the matter has mostly been to leave the, uh, situation in the hands of the Samurai. We're working to keep the news as discreet as possible while providing distractions for the general public."

"Like that gacha game?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"Right," I said. "Well, let's go meet some of these Samurai, yeah? See if they're actually planning on doing something or if we're all still at the hot potato stage of things."

"Gacha game?" Rac asked.

I turned towards her. "You know what those are?" I asked. I had played one, but only for a while. The gameplay was a little boring, and I found it super predatory the way it wanted me to log in every six hours to collect shitty rewards across fifteen in-game currencies, all just to collect a PNG of an anime girl.

If I wanted to see a cute girl, I could stare at Lucy.

Lucy had been a lot more obsessed with a few of them over the years, but her attention span wasn't long enough to keep it up for more than a few weeks at a time.

Plus we were always too poor to afford pulls and such, and the games tended to eventually get enough spyware into our augs to find out we were shit broke and would give up on us.

"It's very exciting," the intern said. He was perking up at the topic, so I figured he was a fan. "This will only be the third gatcha game with samurai likenesses, and it's the first that's official. That means that the samurai in the game have given permission for their image to be used. The gameplay is also pretty great. It's a PvE MOBA!"

That last bit was meaningless to anyone with a social life. "I don't know what that is," I said.

"It means it's a cooperative game where players pick a Samurai and fight on an isometric map against waves of antithesis. It's very reminiscent of older Mobas," he said with a nod. "The classics, with a modern twist."

"Sounds fun," Rac said.

"Wait, you play that kind of thing?" I asked.

"Yes?" she said. "I used to fix phones and handhelds all the same. It's good money. Some of them play games. I even got some from dead people that had a lot of rares. My main account is nineteen years old. The guy who had it logged in every single day without missing a day for years."

"And you picked up his account after he died?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Someone shanked him and I found his phone after. The password was one-through-six, it wasn't exactly hard to crack."

"Wild that he had a phone though," I said.

She shrugged, and I glanced at the guy escorting us in. He looked a bit horrified at the conversation, but I couldn't quite peg why. Was it the dead guy speak?

He cleared his throat, then gestured to some seats and asked us to wait for just a minute. Less than a minute later he was back with a lanyard that had a guest pass on it addressed to Miss Racoon.

She took it and slipped it on, looking rather smug about it. "Alright, care to point us to the bigwigs around here? Is Jolly Monarch really on Earth?"

"Oh, just one of his remote drones, ma'am."

That explained... some of it. Did he drive his drone over in a car? I supposed that wasn't impossible, but it was definitely a little weird.

Well, whatever. He could be as weird as he damned-well pleased as long as he had a solution for the exploding Earth problem. Some of my favourite people lived on Earth and I didn't want it all blown up.

***