At night, Bloom! has a different flair. The tinted windows produce hazy hints of what’s within. Silhouettes of writhing bodies. Crowds of dancers and revelers, jumping and wiling. Moisture cakes the purplish floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating every living relief with a satisfying violet aureola haze—an inversion of a holy red flame—as if the visitors were trapped within some kaleidoscopic Raurava.

Throngs of patrons, dressed to the nines, enter and exit on yet another auspicious evening. Like before, Yaomo guards post themselves at the entrance. One’s equine and shirtless, covered in explicit tattoos of comic book cuties, the other’s bovine, plastic toothpick sticking out from his discolored yellow maw, gold ring between nostrils chafed from narcotics. They revel in the front-door attention, more content showing off their imported, personally modified Kitaka 7 machine pistols, extended magazines reaching past their groins with a lascivious implication, sporting D’Valay lenses they claim to be genuine, upturned and popped puresilk shirt collars like satellite dishes, rather than guarding Bloom!’s entryway with any sort of vigor.

Near the foot of the stairs, a courtesan, human face covered in a sickly white makeup, pupils dilated, black lacquered teeth yowling, argues loudly with her John, hitting him with an emerald-periwinkle rhinestone plastic pocketbook over a discrepancy of a few credits. Just last cycle—where those angry platform heels dance like crane’s feet—the tungsten roadway cupped the twitching body of a tenghuan gangster. Head split, eyes lingering open, staring with ambivalence at the hazy twin suns before expiry. A forgotten memory on the metal sidewalk.

Even Bloom!’s window has been repaired, already.

Another topless hostess receives you in the commotion of the packed entryroom. The overwhelmed komainu barks the nightly specials, screeching above the laughter and crying of the loitering groups waiting to be seated, most with half-empty bottles in hand, others waving loaded firearms in impromptu masculine measuring contests. You both push past the lion-dog girlie, muttering dusty excuses from chapped lips—the bitch recoiling at your shredded clothing, discolored pelts, and sunburnt skin—as you search for the correct room, navigating through the skinny hallways and battling the typhoons of drunks, both obstacles winding and meandering.

By the time you reach Room 124, you have no interest in strategizing. Ø’s jaw is too bruised, your body too dehydrated from the heat, to do anything except continue lurking towards your goal. The number 124 reflects in gold sequins on the flimsy door to the soundproof room. Its serif typeface implies some upper class premium, maybe even a complimentary bottle of alcohol. Nearby, another patron is heard coughing through a door left ajar, choking loudly on a fishbone to an out-of-tune k’ni, the fiddle tuned improperly, strings set too loose.

Ø sits against the wall, her knuckles bandaged, left nasal passage plugged with puresilk strips torn from an officer’s discarded black driving glove, and with a scratch behind a torn ear, sand coats the floor.

You hit the door with four loud raps. An eerie silence replies. To which you’d send another four raps, if you weren’t interrupted by a familiar cynocephalic face.

“Huh?” Kathi begins, the jindo’s face coated in familiar white makeup, blonde-black hair tied back in twintails. From behind her, hushed conversation directed by a familiar vixen is heard, its contents wholly unremarkable. Within the L-shaped room, alongside the central table filled with overcooked and oversalted food, an auto-erhu dispenses pleasant robotic tones, interspersed with braying advertisements, begging for another credit to be inserted.

Kathi’s face lights up, in its own dense sort of way.

“Sensei! What’re you two doing here? Did you enjoy the Rose Love? Oh, and did you try the food, too? It’s so good…” she salivates.

“Kathi, who else is in the room?” Ø growls below her breath. It’s a calm sort of interrogation. She’s too winded to do much else.

“Oh,” she whispers back, her facial expressions barely changing due to her layers of makeup, her joy broadcast mainly by the flashing of her ebony teeth and dilated pupils. “A guy. A nice guy. Maybe a tourist. Never seen him before. Deep pockets. But he’s kinda shy,” she giggles, “you know how when there’s a guy who’s all like,” she smacks her lips, over-salivating, high out of mind, “like when he’s, like, he’s got this whole thing where—”

“Who set you up?”

“Nobody,” she knocks at furry kneecaps, curly tail wagging with anxiety, hips bouncing side-to-side while maintaining unflinching eye-contact, “we’re not working yet, honest.”

“Boss Shishito isn’t asking. Sensei is asking.”

“Well,” she begins with hesitation, “Hsien sent him in for Huhu. Said this guy was sent over by a friend of his. Friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing. Um, but, I mean, with the amount of money the guy paid us…”

“Get Huhu to come here, too,” the mare orders.

“I can’t. She’s with the client. And she’s about to hook him.”

“Whatever he’s paying, we’ll triple it,” you negotiate.

“I don’t think you can afford that,” she frowns, ears back in a pathetic display of pity. “But maybe tomorrow…”

“Trust sensei,” Ø hisses, her hand caressing her holster—Star emptied of slugs. You reach for the jindo, slowly dragging her by the wrist, then the nape, into the hallway, her nude form one of many in the stumbling crowds. You hold a finger to your lips as you and your mare sneak by, entering the room in her place.

Turning the corner, you find another familiar snout. Huhu—curled up in bed, odalisque, thin legs bent with her hair is done up in twinbraids like the jindo that waits, obediently and uncomfortably outside. The vixen’s wearing half of a work outfit. A short pink-black pleated skirt, wrinkled, and half-off. The same one she wore yesterday at the Jin Kee Above Market.

You realize it may be one of the only outfits she owns.

Huhu’s voice is quicker than usual, her bloodshot, dilated pupils revealing generous spezie usage reserved for the most generous of Johns. She giggles at the client’s every non-word, her tonality high enough to crack mirrors, frail semi-nude body rocking backwards and forwards in an enjoyable haze, contorting at hips and rolling knuckles across her chest. Her and her mark sit on the plastic-platformed emperor-size bed, sprawled above the oily recently-disinfected spackled covers and beneath the swooning canopies of recently-installed cheap purple and red mandala tapestries—depicting the Womb Realm.

The client is abnormal in his sterility.

He’s human. Naturally pasty, semi-olive-toned from radioactive sunrays and shorter than average height. No facial scars. No tattoos either his boring and unflashy clothes of cheap plastic threads, firing off the aura of an unassuming clerk or bureaucrat who has completed a ten-hour shift of paper-pushing. His hair is cut short, black, well-kept if a bit too oily. Large bags hang beneath his eyes, partially hidden by his thick, ebony-framed circular Glasses. He’s thin, unmuscled, even a bit underweight. Has all his fingers, too.

Using both hands, Glasses cups a single can of Hankow, rattling off rudimentary conversation—discussions of food, the economy, weather—to Huhu behind a tired, seemingly genuine smile.

“Sensei! What’re you doing here?” The vixen exclaims with excitement through her drug-fueled haze, giving an exaggerated wave, one starting at her bare shoulders. “Did Kathi let you in?” she’s yeling, although you doubt she knows it, “I don’t think we can squeeze you in tonight, though…”

“Get up, Huhu,” you say as calmly as possible, bluffing for her own safety. “Bossman Shishito needs to see you and Kathi.”

“What? Why?” she groans.

Her John’s predatory eyes size you up.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Ø’s clothes are ripped at the knees, her pelt still holding pockets of wasteland dust, looking corn-spotted all over. Your sunburned cheeks and dry lips force you to constantly wet them through the pain, tongue flapping out your jaws. You are beyond sweating, facing an uncomfortable, endless simmering through your veins like heated tea or room-temperature tapwater boiled for safety’s sake.

The insides of your teeth are sensitive with each huff, painful, as you and your mare wilt against the room’s thin plastic paneling; a dark mural of red’s, blue’s, and black’s showcasing a stereotyped village mid-festival, throngs of barely-visible dancing humanoids holding paper lanterns at dusk, courtesans with paper parasols gallivanting across blood-red hashi bridges, the pre-set illustration mass-produced, inoffensive, generic enough for installation in establishments of all ages, from pachinko parlors to whorehouses.

Your target—Glasses—tenses up, shoulders at attention, legs beneath cheap slacks straightening, realizing that you two strangers have him cornered.

“I’m kinda,” she yips with laughter and hiccups, flashing her sharpened teeth in a languid display, lips upturning in the coquettish grimace she calls a smile. “I’m kinda in the middle of something here. I mean…”

“Just get over here,” Ø spits. “We don’t have time for your girlie shit.”

Huhu’s world stops. It always does, for girlies like her, when confronted with a superior’s ire. It’s the threat of a forceful perk-up slap that the mare could deliver—something even you, emboldened by Bossman Shishito employ, are well within your rights of doling out.

In her moment of clarity, she scans the room: you and the mare’s tired poses of concern, the room’s table of picked-over platters of factory-farmed stale sashimi, the collection of empty Hankow cans, stacked pyramidal, the moonlit scene adorning the walls, not to mention the sticky-feeling bedspread on her thin pelt and the kind face of the client who stares deep into her, scowling with the eyes of a killer, nearly yellow in the reflecting strands of lights that cascade over the lumpy bed’s alcove, never losing a hint of shine.

Huhu shifts, yipping with narcotic nervousness teetering from one hoof-paw to the other, rolling her hips while seated, drawing a short breath between giggles as she attempts to stand and heed your command, but she’s just not fast enough.

Outside, Kathi can’t hear a thing.

The soundproof walls—an expensive added feature for the more discrete John—work as intended. But even without them, Room 124’s cacophony is drowned out by the nearby revolving dice games and karaoke competitions of the other rooms, doors left ajar on purpose or by accident, halls flush with people coming and going, always swamped with new girlies, laundered money, overpriced and watered-down booze. So Kathi looks about, the jindo making bland eye contact with faces that pass her by, uncaring to her unease, ignorant to her plight, whatever eye-catching attention she gets solely due to her naked display.

But, Kathi’s wet snout can still smell.

Her nose fills with lukewarm kimchi left atop the Lazy Susan, the bubblegum of flavored cigarettes chuffed by passing girlies like her, and lastly the explosion of copper-tasting blood dissolving through the door of Room 124, causing her to run back inside and investigate.

A single flourish is all that’s needed.

Glasses flicks his hidden bolo knife from his waistband. It’s hooked handle is ideal for the job, and as its sharpened blade spins through the air, Huhu has only seconds to lean away from her John. Her ear is sliced three centimeters deep before she flings her whole forearm upwards for protection, and as the blade makes contact with her bone, she flops, reeling, bleeding to the floor at the side of the bed.

Within moments, she’s stained the whole room, writhing and screeching in some unknown dialect, her radius is slashed in two. From her spezie-soaked vision, a torrent of sunflower petals spring from her slashed artery and into the miraculous garden where she writhes. She kicks her crumpled paw-hooves, their bandages already sullied with pus, now sticking to the sullied carpet with rapidly coagulating blood.

The room is a commotion. With no ammunition, Ø reaches for the table, grabbing a plastic chair as an impromptu weapon. Out of ideas, you unholster your 415, pitching it to the chest of the psychopath, your pistol missing and landing atop a pair of embroidered, now soaked, mass-produced pillows. The jindo, for her fear, pounds her fist on the Help button attached to the wall, the pink silhouette of a maid outfit producing a pleasant bell tone with each frantic, crying punch.

Glasses has to make a choice, to go for one of you, or Huhu on the ground. He thinks it best to deal with you both first, as you stand in the way of his only possible escape. Knowing you’re outmatched—unarmed and unlearned—you scramble behind the table, continuing your performance of pitching used chopsticks, plastic plates, and half-emptied cans of Hankow at the killer.

He skitters from the bed, slashing the air as Ø keeps him from arm’s distance with the swing of the chair. The two circle, your mare leaning back as far as possible, her oblong, equid face an obvious liability in such a knife-fight. Where Glasses lacks strength, he makes up for in skill. Light on his feet, he dodges Ø’s lumbering, sweeping attacks, her body worn down, dehydrated, you realize, to the point of sloppiness.

The two animals prowl like this for nearly ten seconds before Glasses seeks the easier target; you, quickly running short of projectiles. He reaches across the meter-long table, slashing and stabbing within centimeters of your cheek. Behind him, Ø leads a few steps, bringing the chair against his back, three of four feet splitting with a crack, as you duck below the table, momentum sending the killer flying over the top, bolo knife clattering along with the entire glass Lazy Susan’s crash.

Ø’s up, clawing over the table herself, staining herself with spattered soy sauces and ginger cubes, and upon Glasses before he can roll off his stomach. She stomps into him, groaning with fatigue, her hoof shattering his wrist, decapitating decapitate, and cracking his sixth through ninth ribs, beating him into the cheap flooring, staining the thin mass-produced carpeting thrown over a layer of concrete.

Unlike before, she’s emboldened, ready to snuff out a life she finds unworthy, future corpse nearly beer-battered, seasoned in fresh blood and peppercorn spices.

But as before, you run over to your mare, pulling her off the badly bloodied man, just barely alive, as you had presumed from the beginning. Unlike before, however, she fights against your grip, throwing semi-conscious elbows, rearing, spitting insults through your orgones. You return her strikes, slapping her back, shoving with both hands as her winded frame stumbles backwards, slipping on the Huhu’s pooling blood.

Frustrated, screeching, Ø rips at the mandala above, cheap wiring coming loose, the whole canopy collapsing. Revealed is the true ceiling—a disgusting collection of black molds and industrial wiring, where miscellaneous roaches scatter. The mare coils the Womb Realm map, crinkling bodhisattva, their geometric kingdoms folded, bulbous smiling faces punctured with knots. Following an additional kick to the groin, the mare hog-ties the meat for easy carry.

You remove his glasses, one eye already split open, to throw punches into the other side of his face, your blood hot from both the day’s inconveniences—radiation poisoning—included in two cycles worth of complaints, corpses, and commotion, an unfamiliar anger arising, wafting off a certain mare.

But you hear sirens. High-pitched and yowling. Coming from through the crowd of onlookers that gather at the door, indoor-sunglasses-wearing gangsters with mouths agape like grimacing demons, girlies half-nude and looking inwards, then away, then inwards again, unable to decide whether they’re disgusted, interested, or desperate for a story recount with their companions after the night’s concluded.

A single paramedic, bright rose-colored outfit nothing but a plastic bikini, reflective short-shorts, and flossie cap emblazoned with barcodes of Bloom!’s employment, enters, unable to assess the situation with a yipping, laughing, dying Huhu and sobbing, nude Kathi. The ‘nurse’ stifles vomit, the girlie spooked to stillness, her insurance-required employment confronted with a medical emergency beyond both her non-existent paramedic education and the capabilities of the plastic, fake stethoscope dangling from her tattooed décolletage.

Kathi’s fallen. Slipped, in the commotion. The jindo claws at your leg, attempting to hold you in place, smearing vixen blood from your loafers’ soles up your manure-smelling sand-coated slacks. Her gibberish is lost on you, incomprehensible between wailing howls and tears that make her white shiroi makeup run, her yellow, anemic pelt contorting off her fat cheeks. Maybe it’s pleading, through the snot-filled sobs, but all that registers to your broiled mind is confusion.

Confusion that manifests in your mind as puffs of air that intermingle with the cheap pop music belting from the hallways, distorted and illegally pirated, stabbed with police sirens. For the first time in your life, its ambivalence.

Your hand gently pries at Kathi’s paw gripping your waistband, sullying your flower-petal button-up. You unfold manicured neon-painted nail after nail, leaving the girlie behind, prone and frozen in shock, the jindo’s tail pinned under a wriggling Huhu. The vixen kicks bound feet and wiggles from side-to-side in a rapidly growing lake of her own blood, imagining she were rolling down a Spring’s hill and into a bed of sunflowers, unable to understand the gravity of the situation in her drug-fueled haze, giggling at the vomiting, underpaid, undertrained paramedic and onlookers’ panicking kabuki performances.

Unwilling to explain your situation to the police for a second time, and upon retrieving your weapons, Ø holds them at eye level. Knowing her Star is spent, yet ignoring all basic safety, she brays, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” The onlookers—drunk, high, or already spooked—scatter, tripping over one another, dropping to the floor, fainting in place, bolting into already occupied rooms, interrupting mahjong games and karaoke songs with ear-wrenching death rattles, to avoid what they believe is another instance of random Settlement violence. You, too, hold your 415 and shout at scared waitresses, lost adrenaline forcing an empty barrel to a certain paramedic’s neck, toppling her over, threatening her with purpose, “Bang! Bang!”

Your duet gives up enough commotion for you both, hauling your captive, to escape into the tungsten roadways, where the pink popping neon signs illuminate your path through the alleyways—away from the circling blue lights of the Settlement Police, away from Bloom!’s vibrating windows jam-packed with half-living ghouls, away from the two girlies you may have called friends under duress—towards the Yugure Consortium’s skyscraper.