Axel

Monday, 25th of January, 198 A.C, 16:10

“It bears repeating: if at all possible, avoid direct engagement with Veiled suspects. If a physical altercation is unavoidable and traditional means of pacification prove ineffective, there is one method that has been found to be highly effective, if extremely difficult. While still poorly understood, chapter eleven details current knowledge and best practices for this last-ditch maneuver.” - Excerpt from the Protectorate Advanced Training Manual, Third Edition

The storage room had already been cleaned out for the most part, but there were a few neglected tidbits here and there still on the shelves. It wasn’t an optimal environment, but part of me had always wanted to jury rig some medical supplies. Sadly, I had remembered to bring my first aid kit.

I took the teeth out of my arm and put them into a plastic bag. The water to the store had long since been cut, but most of the protestors had bottles with them. I borrowed one and, with the help of an antiseptic wipe, cleaned out the wound and rinsed off any acid still on my skin. Psychons didn’t hold diseases in the same way animals did, but run-of-the-mill infections were still a danger. Afterwards, I wrapped the wound with gauze and held it in place with some medical tape.

I wouldn’t be bleeding out any time soon, but my arm stung enough for me to pop a couple of painkillers before setting off to help the others.

For the most part the wounds were similar to mine: bite marks on the hands and forearms. One unfortunate woman had been bit in the face, something that was going to require much more than my passing knowledge of first aid. It wasn’t immediately life threatening though, so we cleaned and dressed the wound and left it at that.

As I was finishing up another patch job, the man who had helped me earlier came up and introduced himself as Kent. He pointed me in the direction of a man around his age who was laying on the floor. The man’s chest was broad and his hair was fighting the inevitable march of gray with everything it had. A woman was kneeling next to him, tending to his blood soaked leg.

I headed over and knelt down. “How can I help?”

The woman looked up. “Do you have any gauze left?”

I took out what I had. “Just a few pads.”

The woman tilted her head from side to side. She finally nodded and said, “Could you keep pressure on his wounds? I’ll try to find something we can use as a substitute.”

She wiped her bloody hands off on her pants and got up, leaving me to fend for myself. The injured man’s leg was in bad shape. Instead of discrete bite marks, the Pyschon’s teeth had left long gashes down his thigh. In a stroke of luck, no major artery had been hit, but a wound that big still drew a lot of blood (not to mention the extensive acid burns). Gauze struggled to cover the bottom half of the bite, and though they couldn’t have been applied more than a minute or two ago, they already looked like they were due to be replaced.

I grabbed my own gauze pads and pressed them onto the top half of the wound. The gashes were too big for me to cover with my hands, so I conscripted my forearms into the effort as well.

“How’s it looking down there?” I glanced up. The man I was treating wore something between a smirk and a grimace on his face.

“You’ve got thighs a runner would kill for,” I quipped, masking my worry with a grin of my own. I got a full bellied laugh in response.

“The bite is going to be just fine,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t mind some help if you’re able.” He was happy to oblige, taking over the loose gauze pads for me.

“So,” I said, “You’re protestors, right? What was the issue of the day?”

“New Year’s,” he said. “We’re fighting for better conditions on the walls. More money for infrastructure and equipment, better compensation, and of course putting pressure on Watchmen and Veiled to actually help.”

“Fighting the good fight,” I said. “Power to that.”

“Yeah, well. Some of us are protecting more than just the city out on those walls every year.”

Someone tugged on the back of my shirt. It was a young girl wearing overalls and a shirt with a cartoon frog on it. The tears pooling in her eyes marked today as the worst day she had experienced in her seven or eight years on Earth.

“Mister,” she said, “Is Papa going to be alright?”

You know how when some people see someone vomit, they can’t help but yarf too? I’m like that, but for crying. Not a great quality to have when you’re trying to reassure a child.

I wiped my eyes, then realized I had just smeared blood over my face and tried to get it off with… my other, also bloody hand.

“Oh,” I said, trying to find a way to smile that wouldn’t be creepy as hell covered in blood, “he’ll be fine! He was very lucky, you know. Thigh wounds can get pretty yucky, but nothing important got hit.”

The girl glanced from my face to my hands, then over to her dad’s leg. “Really? It looks bad.”

The man and I shared a complicated look.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Hey,” I said, “You see that bag over there?” I craned my neck to gesture towards my backpack. “There’s something in there for you to play with while I help your papa out.”

The girl looked to her dad, who nodded. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be right as rain before you know it.”

As the girl plodded over to my bag, I asked the man, “Out of curiosity, your daughter isn’t allergic to cats, is she?”

The man’s eyes widened. “You brought a *cat* to a Psychon attack?” His disbelief turned into more laughter. “You’re an interesting one! An interesting one for sure…” he gestured towards me.

“Oh, right! I’m Axel.”

“Geoff.” The man patted his chest, either ignoring or oblivious to the mess he left on it. “You’re alright, Axel. No, Rachel’s not allergic, thank you.”

“Ehhh, I figured I should probably ask before she went into anaphylactic shock or something.”

The girl, Rachel, had discovered Octo and was now hugging him tight and scratching his head. Octo was, to his credit, being a good sport about the whole thing, but he gave me a murderous look while Rachel wasn’t looking.

He deserved some catnip for sure.

Around the time the woman returned with a roll of paper towels, I heard the telltale sound of sirens in the distance.

“If you’ve got things handled from here,” I said, “I might pop out before the Watch gets here. You know how it is.” I thought for a second, then took out the bag of teeth I had collected earlier and tossed it over to Geoff.

“For the bills,” I said.

Geoff gave me a wink. “I’ll be just fine, Axel. Now go on and get out. We’ve got you covered.”

I snapped my fingers, or at least did a bloody approximation of snapping, got Rachel to (reluctantly) put Octo back in my bag, and slipped out the door.

The fighting outside had just about died down. The Psychons were gone, presumably wiped out, and the only two Veiled on the scene were the Heister and one of the Magnolia Coalition recruits. The latter’s brown aura spilled down from the ceramic mask serving as his Veil and seeped into the asphalt around him, softening and re-hardening it to his will.

The Heister’s back boot sunk into the tarry mud as she took a running start at the other Veiled and lept, hoping to clear the mire. She slammed into him, dropping her bat and sending both of them tumbling through the muck.

As they rolled to a stop, the Heister got a hold on the other Veiled from behind. She ended up under him though, and began to sink further and further into the road as the man’s power intensified. She gritted her teeth and adjusted her grip, slipping her hands further up around his arms and latching onto the top of his Veil.

The Heister let out a guttural shout as she began to pull. The man craned his neck, trying to shake her off, but she was too strong. Her body was about halfway sunk when the man’s aura began to… crack, for lack of a better word. Shafts of brown light seeped out at odd angles from behind his Veil, more and more as the Heister strained to tear the mask free.

The Veiled man’s screams joined the Heister’s. His head vanished behind the blinding light of his aura. I fell to my knees, a wave of vertigo washing over me.

At once, it was as if the man’s aura was simply… detached from his Veil. It shot out in a brilliant crescendo, collecting along walls and slipping into alleyways before gently fading into nothing.

The ground hardened around the Heister. She lay there, face to the sky, holding the man’s Veil with a sudden softness. Not an ounce of bravado was left in her body.

It was quiet in that moment. Even the sirens seemed to fade away, their significance remote. The Heister eventually rolled the man off of her, bringing his eyes to rest on me, unseeing.

I regarded the man’s face in the seconds before the heister slipped his Veil back over it. Pale skin, neatly trimmed brown hair and a thin mustache. He had soft features and a small nose. The pupils of his bright blue eyes had constricted down to a pinhole, and the stillness of his face would have tricked me into thinking he was dead had he not been breathing.

And then his Veil covered him again, and the moment passed. The sirens swelled, a few blocks away at most. The Heister blinked away whatever emotions were hiding behind her Veil and waved me over.

The asphalt chipped and cracked as I heaved the Heister out. We eventually had to give up on getting her hair out, instead chopping off the submerged bits with my knife.

The Heister’s first order of business once freed was to retrieve her bat. Her *second* order of business was to rummage around in the man’s pockets, lifting a Bit stick alongside a handful of expensive looking trinkets off of him. She glanced up from sorting her score to sigh and give me a barbed look.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting half, won’t you?” she said.

I put up my hands. “Thanks but no thanks. I’ll just be happy if we can slip out before the Watch gets here.”

The Heister pocketed her finds. “Suit yourself.”

We gave the distinctly Heister-shaped hole in the road one last glance as we absconded from the scene.

The Heister chortled at the sight of it. “Now *that’s* a killer story right there.”

I couldn’t help but laugh as well. “Thousand Bits says your road angel isn’t getting repaved for at least two years.”

“No way I’m accepting that,” she replied. “Besides, that fantastic butt is gonna be there for half a decade, minimum.”

We walked for a bit, until we were sure that we were in the clear.

I cleared my throat. “So listen, about earlier, I–”

The Heister cut me off. “The Magnolia Coalition knows about the bounty. They left that guy to deal with me as one of their whole ‘glory and honor’ things. Unfortunately for him, I’m me. But… yeah, you’re right. We should be sticking together right now.”

She bounced the side of her finger off her lips while she thought of what to say next. “I can’t promise I won’t have to bounce for a while in the future, but next time I’ll try to let people know first. If possible.”

I held out my hand. “Shake on it?”

The Heister side-eyed my filthy palms. “You know, I was just telling myself that I wanted to contract a bloodborne disease.” She held up her forearm for a bump, then thought better of it “You got it on your *arms* too?! What kind of messy shit were you up to in there?”

We traded banter as we walked. After a few minutes, we found that our paths were going to take us in opposite directions.

The Heister turned to me. “You sure you don’t want any of these doodads?”

“You say that like you actually *want* me to take one.”

“Don’t push it.”