The Razorgirl's Five Hundred Suitors

[IamLEAM1983]

"Joey" followed her gaze. If he'd had blood to shunt to his feet in a sudden feat of ice-cold terror, Jameson would've seen him noticeably blanch. He was, however, sufficiently articulate on the literal level for his emotions to be easily perceptible. He was running late.

"Oh, fuck me," he breathed out, his voice turning thready, "I thought I had time! I- I thought it was twenty minutes earlier! I-"

He sighed dejectedly, looking in the parking lot's direction. "I don't suppose you'll appreciate givin' a total stranger a lift, huh?"

Nervous vulnerability was the key. Nobody in this situation ended up bumming a ride with a straight back and a relaxed posture. If he had, the suggested self-assurance would've keyed Mary off almost certainly. Considering, keeping his limbs close and awkwardly held was important. Archibald Holden could break limbs or necks with nary a thought; Joseph Danvers couldn't keep his rent paid on time or remember not to slouch to save his life. The more Mary felt like she was in control, the more Archie was surreptitiously free to mould events to his liking.

[Karl the Mad]

Oh, of course, Mary thought with an internal sigh. Either this kid's for real or someone's going to a fuck of a lot of trouble for a joke. Probably a bad one too.

"Well, don't just stand there, come on," she replied as she stood up and walked out the door, automatically assuming the calm-yet-commanding demeanor of a cop on a mission. "I hope you can ride bitch on one of these things; if time's as close as that, we can't muck about." Her bike, while larger than most bikes, was nevertheless just a bike and still somewhat small as far as road-things went. And there was something about the gleam in her eyes as she swung a leg over the saddle and kicked the engine into life...

"Warning you now, kiddo, get grabby and I will dump you off," she warned as she rolled her hair into a quick bun and pulled her helmet down. "Mind your manners, be a gentleman and don't hold on so tight I can't breathe, alright?"

[IamLEAM1983]

Joey scoffed at the threat. He really wasn't in the mood to attempt anything on anyone. As for Archie, this actually puzzled him a bit. A gentleman to a tee, he had trouble understanding why anyone would honestly want to even attempt to touch someone who was so scandalously dressed. Doing it was asking for trouble.

They rode off towards the north, and Sandhill in particular, passing through South Little Italy on the way. It reminded Archie that once the initial stage would be over and done with and they'd be openly collaborating as part of the "test" he had planned, they'd have to ask for an audience with the city's Chairman. If Reds were dicking around on his turf, Weasel Biggs was sure to have something to say about it - perhaps some useful information, as well.

Eventually, they'd left the few residential zones in the longest and narrowest of all boroughs in the city, and reached the edge of the city's wide set of industrial parks, warehouses and factories. From there, it was easy enough for Joey to nudge Mary to tell her where to turn, where to park, and which forlorn and sleepy little locker service the Russian mob had elected as its domicile.

Nervously, the C-Chav checked his pockets and double-checked for the presence of his debit card. Once he was satisfied, he banged on the left garage door three times. It slowly rolled open, revealing a typical maintenance chair Clanks were strapped in to; a grease stained and lanky fellow with goggles and an acetylene blowtorch, and a very literal anthro grizzly bear. That second fellow was big, brown, surly-looking and apparently not in the best of moods.

"I'm here for Dima," nervously intoned Danvers.

The bear rolled something around in his mouth. "You're late. Two minutes late, Machine Boy. Dima say you come on time, or you fuck off.
- Aw, come on, mate - it's two minutes! You'll be saving me fockin' life here!"

The bear grunted. "Who's the bitch?" he asked, obviously referring to Mary.

Danvers swallowed hard. "My ride. That's all."

The one called Dima shut off his torch. "Look at her. Dressed like a slut, with fancy Paradise knife. Ride? No."

He addressed Mary directly. "Razorgirl. You trouble? You stay here, in plain sight, and wait for me to finish. If this little shit said you would see money, one twitch out of you and you won't get paid. If not, well... Was a waste of your time, then. Move, and he dies. Then you die."

Giving Mary a dejected look, Joey managed a bit of a smile and proceeded with the removal of his top clothes. Archie had removed his ornate carters for the occasion and had traded them with what had to be severely refurbished and dangerously bendable cheap plates of steel. If his keyhole had looked ornate in any way or if his forearms had shown his recognizable set of artfully impacted travel souvenirs, the jig would've been up. He didn't know if Jameson had visited Holden Hall during its tenure as a museum. If she had, she probably would've seen the real him, sitting his silent vigil over the "hunting room".

[Karl the Mad]

"Trouble enough for you," Mary replied haughtily, still somewhat jazzed from the ride over. Nevertheless she shrugged and leaned back against a relatively clean stretch of wall, arms crossed beneath her chest and one leg propped up against the wall, watching the room carefully. She wondered if these fellows had ever dealt with cops before. Not desk cops or lazy patrolmen, but the serious guys with serious hardware; you could always recognize a cop if you knew what to look for, even a retired one.

Well, maybe American police were different from Hong Kong police. Naturally the whole thing was fishy, especially if these guys really were russkaya mafiya; what were they doing on Commission turf, especially when anyone with even a marginal awareness of Hope's underworld knew that the Irish were the better clanksmen? It spoke to her of Joey's desperation and poverty, but she didn't think much farther into it.

And she had indeed been to Holden Hall a time or two, but Archie's disguise was sufficient to keep her from associating this down-and-out clank with the regal and well-maintained guardian of the hunting room. For now she kept silent and held a very careful eye on the proceedings, glancing around for others in case they decided she was too offensive. Which had happened before, deliberately or otherwise.

[IamLEAM1983]

The procedure was simple enough, sufficiently so that even shady foreigners with something like a baseline and slipshod proficiency with Clanks could do it well enough. Dima carefully paused the etheric flow between Joey's torso and his arm, to more or less numb him to the fairly freaky nature of the required procedure. Then, carefully, Joey's arm was dislocated at the shoulder and lightly pulled away, so a scrubbing tool could be passed between the slightly extended gears. A little scrubbing, a little high-pressure water nozzle job, and a fairly gruesome quantity of old grit, dust and collected oil fell out in clumps, like blackened blood clots. Once the shoulder was replaced, Joey seemed noticeably relieved. His shoulder jerked under the autonomous desire to give itself a shrug and a roll, more or less to test out the Clank's new lack of pain, but the straps adequately stopped him from doing anything too rash.

"You can let me out, now," said Joey, smiling nervously. Dima, always with his soldering goggles on, gave him a humourless smile. "You stay here a minute or two longer. Relax," he said, obviously using this moment to rifle through Danvers' wallet. He pulled out the debit card and headed to a nearby workbench, where a hacked transaction terminal had been quickly set up. Joey couldn't see anything at this point, and demanded to know how much he was being charged.

"Two hundred and seventy-eight," replied Dima. "Twenty dollar more because you were late, boy."

Again, Joey's face blanched. "I-I can't pay that!"

Dima sighed. "Niet. It seems you can't. You know our price, then. Eternity in a box."

This was more or less slang for getting your phylactery yanked out. Locked in something that was designed to contain his soul but unable to escape from it to rejoin with one of the spiritual planes, Joey's soul would he stuck in a non-space, a non-state, complete non-existence in the physical plane - from which the only cure was sheer luck and being reconnected to another armature by someone else. This was, obviously, a depiction of Hell that scared many an automaton into complete witlessness.

In the immediate, Archie kept up with the pretense. He screamed, wriggled, tried to buck his way free of the chair while Dima went to work on his cheap plating with that blowtorch from earlier, while Teddy Ruxpin - the bear from earlier - proceeded to try and shove Mary out of the garage while simultaneously pulling the door down.

No matter what she'd do, there'd be a split-second in which the door had been lowered enough for most of Danvers to be out of her sight, and certainly one second in which Ruxpin blocked her sight of the Clank entirely. In that minuscule window, something happened.

There was the sound of leather being sliced open, along with the very low impact of a blade penetrating flesh - nothing like what you typically heard in movies. This would distract the bear and give even more time for Mary to act - but Danvers, the debit card, wallet and the hacked payment terminal were all gone, the last object neatly ripped from its wall socket.

So it seemed that Mary's new order of business involved dealing with the bear on her own and maybe figuring out what kind of Clank went about being able to kill people and disappear so quickly and so neatly. Once her life wouldn't be in immediate peril, she might want to spend a few minutes investigating the scene further...

In any case, the calm before the storm didn't come complete with the quick bangs of brass feet on the rooftop or of hydraulics-powered legs negotiating a jump to the next rooftop. Whoever Joseph Danvers had really been, he'd been good.

[Karl the Mad]

Mary wasn't quite clear on the exact details, but back in Hong Kong threatening a clank with "eternity in a box" was legally the same as threatening to kill them, and actually do so tantamount to outright murder in the eyes of The Law. There was no way to do so by accident, after all, and doing so in self-defense was impossible as one had to disable the clank far past the point where "self-defense" would have stood. Not even clanks sentenced to execution were subjected to such; clanks fried in an electric chair as well as any flesh and bone, after all.

So when she heard the man threatening her charge with such horrors, there really was only one response. "Hey! You can't do that!" she shouted, pushing off from the wall to help Joey. The bear stopped her though, shoving her back and obscuring her view; she tried to resist in a way that wouldn't either kill him or hurt herself, but the noises she heard overrode those concerns. "Move, pok gai!" she shouted, suddenly displaying an obscene degree of flexibility as her leg spun up and cracked into the side of his temple; riding the momentum of the attack she reached up farther, hooked around his neck and pulled him down, pushing herself up at the same time to grab the garage door (which had slid back up before) and slam it down on the back of his head. "Cào nǐ zǔzōng shíbā dài," she hissed, spitting on the unconscious ursine and turning to see what was what.

What she saw made her blink in confusion. "Ugh, fuck my life," she muttered, kneeling down to check out Dima, wincing as she did so; that roundhouse had really stretched. Fairly obvious stab wound, aimed from low to high so as to avoid sticking in the ribs; in her estimation his heart had been pierced and sundered, he'd be dead real soon if he wasn't already. The size and shape of the entry wound was consistent with most hidden blades, further evidence of "Joey" being far more than he appeared.

Very carefully she stood up, drawing her katana and glancing about. "Joey" and his things were gone, along with the illegal card reader; he'd been out of her sight hardly more than three seconds, yet he'd managed all this in such a small window! Think, girl, she told herself, checking windows and doors for obvious signs of a hasty exit. Carefully she backed into a corner, squatted on her haunches and activated her personal organizer; a bright light shone out of her glove, and a holographic keyboard and screen glimmered in thin air before her. She could type and think without relaxing her vigilance, or dropping her weapon.

Joseph Danvers, Clank Chav, roughly 200 years old, she began, glancing up and about ceaselessly as she typed in Cantonese shorthand; on the remote chance of someone spying on her, all they'd see were meaningless symbols, vaguely Asian. Good story, excellent actor; bodily insecurities genuine, or seemingly so. Played me like a fiddle. Must have done his homework.

Quick glance at the Russians, one dead and one conked out cold. Not a rush job. "Joey" had history with the Reds, a schedule, expectations. They were fooled as thoroughly as I was. One of them dead, but why? For the sake of this ruse? Maybe Dima was a thug and a gangster, but who kills a man for something like this? "Joey" is dangerous, should notify authorities.

She paused and shifted slightly, massaging her leg; it was already feeling better, she stretched twice a day to keep limber, but even so. Whoever "Joey" really is, he had time and resources, a willingness to let his frame be corroded and to establish history with the Reds, however brief. Should check the big guy when he wakes up.

Conclusion: someone's fucking with me, or I've got recruiters after my ass. Which is preferable? Can't say so soon.

None of it was very encouraging, but she saved the document anyway and powered down the hologram. Then she stood up and went over to Teddy, yanking the door back up and straddling his chest. "Hey!" she yelled, slapping his face repeatedly. "Wake up, pok gai!" Once he began showing signs of coming to she put her blade across his neck, gently pressing into his fur. "Alright furball, no sudden moves and you get to live. Now, tell me about that Danvers punk," she growled. "What do you know about him, how long has he been coming to your shop, what's his situation?" She slapped him again for good measure. "Talk!"

[IamLEAM1983]

It took a few slaps, but the bear eventually came to, responding with Russian to May's Cantonese. He obviously tried to struggle and pushed back against Jameson for a few moments, but the sensation of feeling Mary's blade bite into his throat's skin stopped him cold. He kept a firm hold on her if only to protect himself, but didn't push or protest in any way, following this.

"He was kid who came by a week earlier. Seemed real enough to us - same as today! Scared, screamed a little when I told him to stay away from Dima! Real as any punk-ass Clank without weapons training!"

Still, he glowered. "Doesn't matter. All I know is Dima told me to watch out for fancy Clanks with blades or guns. Said we'd get a raise if we could capture one, beat him at his own game. Dima said there were a few other groups like us around Sandhill, all paid for already."

This was certainly odd. A small-time operation like this couldn't have captured any militarized Clank, not with the best effort in the world. Nobody in the veterans roster would have been so gullible as to trust these bozos for their maintenance needs. Not when Masterson Armatures sold machined Goliath parts that were compatible with vintage models and cost a fraction of the cost of full-brass or full-iron parts.

So this had to be a baiting operation. Why trust two men to bait something old, stronger than the average person, apparently much faster, and much more aware of the tricks of the covert trade? The only explanation available was that the Russians in Sandhill were part of a shell game they ignored - and Dima's eagerness to kill not-Joey had proven it to the mechanical assassin. Either someone else was testing the waters to assess local Clank capabilities, or that same someone else also had plans for one of the handful of somewhat important Clanks in town...

Of them all, Archibald Holden was undoubtedly the most important. Even if it turned out Danvers wasn't Archie, the old spy was liable to have begun his own investigation into the matter.

[Karl the Mad]

Mary scowled, but the bear didn't seem to be lying. "That doesn't help," she muttered, more to herself than to Teddy. "Well, whatever. I'd get out of town if I were you, furball. Go back to the Motherland or something, there's no room for any more Russians in Hope." She got up, leaving him to do as he liked. "I'm going now, and don't even think of following me, got it?"

With that she turned and went back to her bike, stowing her blade and sliding onto the saddle, revving the engine and then roaring off. She made a few random turns just in case anyone did try and follow her, heading generally north and east until she came to one of the central bridges. Now she had a choice, head back to Willowdale and see if old Lord Archibald was up and about, or keep on for Little Italy to inform the Commission of this latest intrusion? She suspected that whoever was after her had nothing really to do with the Russians and their clank hunting, but it was only a suspicion at best just yet and anyway it still wasn't very comforting.

[IamLEAM1983]

Leaving the West bridge, Solita was much closer than West Willowdale. Buck Tower's multitude of offices and its blithely crowning helipad seemed like the easiest and most relevant location in the immediate.

Of course, not every single one of the businesses the tower contained was linked to the Commission. There was one marketing firm, one game design studio, a few extra legal cabinets, a small-scale security company largely designed to cover banks and other office spaces, a few restaurants near the bottom floors and a corner store of sorts, where workers in the tower usually stopped to grab big oatmeal cookies, the day's newspaper and a coffee. All of these were entirely legitimate.

Astoria Developments and Donnola's financial headquarters weren't, however. Astoria was one of the architectural firms controlled by the Biggs clan - specifically Marlon. Marlon Biggs wasn't outwardly criminal, however. His degree in architectural design was kosher and his work was solid enough. He wasn't the most visionary of architects, but he didn't really have to be, either. His job was to ensure that his accountants would earn a little extra each months by cooking Astoria and Donnola's books, as well as the rest of the clan's properties. He was the one who made sure everything in Weasel's corner of the Commission stayed on the up-and-up.

As for Weasel - or the Chairman, as he was more commonly called - his job was to ensure that every thug, every small-time crook, every huckster, every hooker, every two-timing pawn shop owner in town would all know who to report to, depending on where they lived. His job was to ensure that every single arm of the Commission would remain aware of what was going on with the other ones. He fostered communication and collaboration, and was frequently called to represent mundane interests. Despite the fact that he was Sicilian-American, if one of Jimmy Winters' boys had a problem with a vampire in Weasel's turf, it was Weasel's job to discipline the vampire accordingly - no matter if he happened to be one of Winters' boys himself - and see to it that the mundanes would receive adequate compensation. He was the one who kept the ball rolling for anyone who wasn't one of the Fomor (Sarvin's boys) or who wasn't blessed with some flavor or another of immortality. In his turf, mortal moxie was predominant. Very few vampires made it past the rank of enforcer, which kept the rodent's arm of the Commission on its toes, endowed with the kind of flexibility that came only from knowing that Weasel himself would eventually kick the bucket.

The top three floors all belonged to the rodent, with the base one containing his penthouse and personal office, the second one sheltering the Commission's administrative services and the seldom-seen Round Table where all the bosses, big and small, congregated on a monthly basis. The third level was the antenna and helipad access, but it also contained a closed-off and heated pool and Jacuzzi that gave a striking view of the city's panorama, safe from the biting winds that would have otherwise torn at the viewer at this altitude.

Weasel was a bit of an oddball in the public eye. He was cultured and yet crass, generally analytic and tactful but still prone to heated decisions when suitably keyed off. He seemed polite and friendly enough, lacing both with a kind of borderline "Brooklynesque" direct attitude, and generally had his way with other people in a very congenial matter. Some people had been heard to say Weasel especially had his way with City Hall officials and a few politics-inclined women, and some more said that "his way" involved a few hungry smiles, a knack at identifying unguarded temperaments and using their weaknesses to give himself a bit of fun.

This wasn't exactly surprising - Weasel had essentially cornered the sex shops, escort agencies and prostitution rackets in town. Corrupt officials and blithely wealthy types came to him rather freely to benefit from his unusual expertise as a sort of high-class city-wide pimp. His girls weren't drug addicts or rejects from the streets; he'd instead twisted prostitution around into a rather classy-looking profession. His girls were college-educated, usually gainfully employed to a certain degree, and stalked the bars and clubs around town, rather than the streets.

To smaller pimps went the classic drug-ravaged dolls, and Weasel snapped at anyone who even attempted to debauch one of his girls. That, plus a healthy dose of money laundering and exporting a few thousand Ks of cocaine or Red Snow out of town every single year kept money coming in. His chain of restaurants served largely as a convenient front and as a means for him to change his mind, when reviewing the results of takeovers, defensive operations or smaller gang wars got to him.

Deadly, yet friendly. Casual, yet professional. That was Weasel Biggs' basic M.O.

[Karl the Mad]

After a few minutes, Mary decided Solita was her best bet, although Buck Tower always made her think of male compensation. She disliked the overwhelming bias toward mundanes that Weasel Biggs cultivated, knowing from first-hand experience that discrimination could go both ways. What good did it do to constantly and deliberately overlook qualified, genuinely skilled immortals? All it did was foster resentment among them, which never went anywhere good. Well, that was how she saw it, anyway.

In any event, once her mind was made up she gunned the bike and tore off, resisting the temptation to go too fast; the rush of the last run with "Joey" would have to be euphoria enough for a while. She made a stop, though, at one of the fashion shops for a change of clothes; Biggs being the notorious pervert he was, the last thing Mary needed was to have him staring down the front of her leathers and not hearing a word she said. Twenty minutes later she emerged again, dressed in a much more sensible shirt and calf-length pants, and after stashing the blade in its slot on the bike she was back on the road.

Even though she wasn't a member of any of the gangs, she could still call herself a "contributor" of sorts, and her face (or maybe it was her figure?) was at least recognizable around these parts. Therefore she didn't feel bad about parking in front and walking through the door, leaving her gear at her bike so she wouldn't cause a scene if security questioned her; she had to try and squash the feelings of nudity and vulnerability it causes to be detached from the implants, and told herself to use the slow elevator this time.

She hadn't changed her boots, and the heels clacked sharply against the floor as she walked across the hall toward the front desk. "Hi, I'm Mary Jameson, of Hardy & Jameson's Exotic Imports," she told the receptionist, holding out her ID (which identified her as a cyborg, much to her annoyance). "Are any of the head honchos in? I have something urgent to tell them." Perhaps her status as CEO of a prominent shipping firm and irregular donor would expedite her entry, but she didn't count on it.