"Nothing in forever. Not really sure when she's comin' back, kid."

"Don't appear very machine like, though. I mean obviously some kinda' process ran through it but why in the hell would it write somethin' as horrid is that? Is it even capable of doin' it?"

"That's what I heard. Never can be too sure if your ears are tryin' 'a hear what you don't wanna' see, though."

"Somethin' like'at. Crewman? Heh. Far from it, Captain of the Demiurge Confederacy. Quite the prominent machinist fleet, a'll 'ave y'know."

"What? Black suits? Not aroun' 'ese parts, stranger. Likely to get you bruised and beaten. Or th'other way 'round as the case may be. Y'er lucky I don' take y'out t'the wood - shed."

"Nah. Rats. Lots and and lots of rats. Hahahahaha. Ahah. Hah. Haa. Anyway, yeah, where was I?"

"Vice? Dead. Finished. Out for the count. Sleepin' with the fishes. Fin. The End. Kicked the Bucket."

"Vice? Yeah, she's through in the back room. Did y'wan 'a word wi'er?"

"I was still quite new to the City, then. Still a bit overwhelmed by the bright lights, you see. Moved in from the country..."

(To be taken with The One That Got Away)

The sun started meekly peeking from behind a whitewashed splotch of sky, its blinding forebears squinting though a Marquis of Queensbury of metal blinds and dusty fabric that were all half-up-half-down in a messy mussed-up kind of way, the little white cord all tangled and knotted into itself.  Shadows from the blinds painted themselves in a careful, geometric sort of pattern across all the room’s surfaces, a slight breeze making the whole wallpaper-and-Berber affair look fluidly mobile.  Something like a bird passed by the window, stabbing madly into the light’s ebb and flow.  The girl blinked hardly, stirring herself from unconsciousness again, her eyes opening into whitish almond shells, painted in a messy light brown and pitted black in the center. 

“Who foun’urr” croaked Ooidal, his sloppy gaze darting between his two captains.

“Some scavenger punk, I ne’er got a good description from Alexis.  Bas’surd got her healthy enough to work an’ sold her into the slave trade,” he coughed.  “I guess it was luck that the Ephialtes was refueling when it was.  Luck that he still recognized her, too.  Told me she was jus’ about in the pawn shop when he bought’er.”  Dante’s caricatured eyebrows lifted for a moment, a smile creeping across his lips.

“Why did’un’t y’hou nab her when y’whurr stringin’ them up by th’urr insides?” hissed the operator, his fat, sweaty nostrils flaring, his jowls slapping at the side of his unhappy chin.

“Don’ think I didn’t try.  Alexis didn’t say two words ‘til I threw his whore’s ear into his lap.  The whole crew was just as close-lipped.  Hell if I know why, though.  The kid’d skipped off to Erehwon at some point, back when they were still buildin’ that hole.”

The girl lifted her head slowly, her wrists still tied snugly to the back of her chair.  She traced the side of her palm across the Braille messages carved all up and down the grain of the wood.  It told a whole meandering, messy story that nobody wanted anything to do with: a haphazard heady tale of a little redheaded girl with pigtails and an old man with a spidery, creased scar across the back of his bald head where a blonde woman had bludgeoned him with a crowbar.  Her head felt heavy, a handful of conflicts squeezing their way between hemorrhaging capillaries and hammerhead migraines.  “Why we’ar y’look’hin’ f’er me, then?” she whispered once, the raspy words only timidly creeping past her lips.  She repeated it, her blurred halfway gaze meeting the lazy, happyish scowl chiseled into Dante’s dark face.

His mouth unbolted, showing just the off-white ankles of his front teeth as a floorboard creaked outside the door.  The room was painted in a softish kind of gleaming yellow for a moment, and again, and again.  The noise followed just after, explosive cracks elbowed their way out of the barrel of Dante’s powerful handgun, though the dusty, distilled air.

The door splintered, three, maybe, distinct holes nestled themselves in the wake of their projectile pedigree.  Ooidal had tightened his fists, and with a vague fire in his belly, landed a shoe next to the door’s handle, sending a shower of toothpicks out into the hall and driving the door wildly out onto the cramped, beige balcony.  A slippery looking red stain, no wider than a coal-miner’s smile contrasted the dark brown of a wooden rail.  Ooidal’s cancerous, rusty form burst through the door’s absence, his hands landing on either side of the stain.  Below, a little blonde sprite with a heart-shaped necklace and a cough from teenage smoking pointed to 1:35 on a collapsed poker table, a brownish-red pooling just under the dramatic tear in her abdomen.

     Alexis grunted, placing the one-armed woman with straw-grass for hair and bleeding splits in her tongue on a shining metal table, knocking half-eaten bowls of something bouncing maverick across the grated floor.  She lay there all rolled into herself like a porcupine cannonball rolling across the deck of some hellborne freighter.  He leaned her onto her back, and she winced, sprawling out across the cold surface, her asymmetrical limbs splayed parallel, hitting six o’clock on the nose.

    Ooidal’s hulking form turned pale as he felt a new kind of sweat splash itself upon his pockmarked forehead, noticing the duct tape across the clock’s mouth.  He turned from the rail, his maw hanging just open enough to taste the 65% polyester, 35% viscose blend of a bootcut black pant leg as it collided with his teeth.  Heavy leather caught the back half of his cheek, and flattened his ear into itself.

    Dante caught himself in the ragged doorframe as the lanky black stroke slashed past him, into the operator’s face.  An overflowing, guttural yell escaped him as he pounced through the hole, tackling the tobacco brunette goon toward, onto, through the balcony’s dry-rotted banister.  They landed with a resonant thud, the dinosaur’s mighty, violent mass concentrated at the assailant, the force of his landing flowing out through the two cannons of his knee and elbow, crushing the man’s pelvis and sternum, respectively.  As he rolled off the rapidly expiring form, Dante caught a glimpse of some kind of Greek looking ϝ tattooed all red and raw around the edges on his neck, teetering on the edge of his collar.

    His sort of bubble-shaped face ended with a goateed chin that he stroked when he was thinking or not thinking, blood from his split lip was dying it a brownish red.  He had no hair up top, but could have grown some if he chose to; maybe it would have disguised the big purple-blue egg forming across his temple.  And he was sort of tan, but in an indistinguishable kind of rugged way that made him look like a pioneer or a circus clown, depending upon the time of day – but now he was a much more whitish kind of shade, shock and blood loss desaturating him quickly.  “She’s gone, you fu-ging maniac,” spat Alexis, mediocre, forgettable captain of the Ephialtes as a rope was fitted around his neck.

    Two more suits clogged the staircase, their roles suddenly shifting from upper- handed offense, to man-to-man defense against the two behemoths.  Ooidal regained himself in just enough time to bring crossed arms in front of his face, blocking a piston-first.  He grit his teeth, and locked his fist, shooting a cannonball uppercut into the tail end of a not-strong-enough ribcage.  The mediumish black form fell into the punch, a strained cough exploding from its mouth.  Trained well enough, its hand found its shoulder holster, snaking around Ooidal’s sausage link arm.

    Fire spat from the beautifully polished and primed machine before it was parallel with the ground.  One, two big serrated holes popped from the floor, then a ham hock elbow plowed into the back of the suit’s head.  The world went all starry and was suddenly more comfortable and soothing – all warm milk and gently crashing waves.  Then it was on the ground with three broken ribs and a dangerous concussion.

    The remaining scowled, remaining on the stairs, removing an unsmiling submachine from inside a jacket that’s flowing cut now gained reason.  His leatherly gloved finger clamped tightly on the little parenthesis of a trigger, and rounds began to pepper the nighthawk jungle.  Liquid air seemed to fill the space between the gun’s screaming mouth and Dante’s hulking construction.  He rolled dynamically to his left, stopping midway and jumping right, catching himself behind an overstuffed loveseat.  Bullets zigzagged through the floral fabric of the armrest just above the man’s vintage haircut, half of them making it through and missing their mark by only a lucky quarter.  And suddenly a much more commanding crash punctuated the meandering statement made by the submachine gun’s rat-a-tat.

    Lethe smirked with one eye closed, the shot firing from his index finger hitting its mark - imaginary smoke pouring from his fingernail.  Ooidal shot again, his forty-five caliber lead hornet stinging the shoulder of the man who was busy mourning his shattered wrist.

    A silent man named Agustus carried another crate full of smuggled cigarettes, terrible, fake cigarettes, toward the Hovercraft Fawkes.  Some slivered piece of wood was digging something fierce into his wrist.  Three more, he counted to himself, then it’ll be the one with air holes – that’ll be a nice break.  He nodded as Noone pointed him in the direction of a cargo hold in the belly of the fatter-than-long ship.  She was just dead weight, anyway.  What good is a miner with only one hand to grip a shovel?  They were building a city, not a cripple’s home.

An unassuming white sedan signaled right, and pulled up just behind a similar one all scribbled over in black.  Grinding the parking break and killing the engine, two big men with shaved heads and white slacks snarled and exited the car.

(Here, the story gets hazy, and her hair gets too long.  No doubt, this story will conclude in some fashion before we are torn from the simulation, or rather, the simulation is torn from us.  However, I have been asked, and already have a plan to continue this in some other way once we bid adeau to this world.  It would seem that this is my only shining achievement of the past few years in MxO.  If any of you still follow this, and would care to be enlightened as to where it will exist, please drop a line in this thread.)

(Served best cold, with a side of Stella by Moor)

    Five stories in the air, an out-of-work reporter scribbled over the last few inches of window in her apartment in fat, black marker, holding a closet key in her hand.  A door slammed down the hall as her landlord, a short, disagreeable man with curly brown hair and a small splotch of skin cancer on his shoulder waddled toward the stairs, hoping to catch the skinheads who had just double-parked outside of his building.  She ignored it and placed a worn, brown hat on the kitchen counter.  The smell of fecal matter finger paint and decaying woman would bother her neighbors within the week.

    The floorboards creaked and moaned as Ooidal lumbered back to his captive captain.  His hands were fumbling with an extension cord when Dante reappeared.  He beat his fist on the door’s ragged frame to pull the tumor of a man from his work, knocking a clock from the wall.  In eight minutes, a payphone at the foot of a block of rowhouses all frozen in mid-collapse twelve blocks away would begin to ring.  The clock’s face shattered, leaving it forever eight minutes from an exit.

    “You brought this upon y’urself, kid.  You had mo’ than en’uff chances t’uh jus’ give me that gah-damm one-armed bih-“

    “An’ wh’ut, Dante?  Whu’thhen, huh?  Jus’ ‘cause y’uh can’nuh get pas’ Vice dyin’ duz-zent mean y’gottuh live a decade in th’uh past.  An’ it duz-zent mean y’gottuh brin-“

    “This isn’t about Vice, kid.  This isn’t about Vice, or Virtue, or Noble, or you, oh-renny oth’uh ghosts.  This’us jus’ about fixin’ somethin’ that broke.  Virtue was suppos’suh off herself an hour after I dropped her in that hole.  Vice was suppos’suh put a bullet in Noble’s crooked little face.  An’ you were suppos’suh bury your head in the caves at Ere-uh-won and never come up for air again.”  Dante’s lips were wet, and he ran his hands through his hair as he spoke, his eyes not leaving Ooidal’s for a moment.  His tempo fell apart, “That truce fell apart, an’ you jus’ itched for the good ol’ days, right?  You came to me and asked, ‘What can I do, captain?’ an’ I answered.  So what the hell makes you think you can side with her,” he motioned toward the redhead, “or Noone, or any one of these gah-damm brats?  This generation’s not worth savin’, kid.  Not one of ‘em.”

    “Then why d’y’hoo want t’uh fight th’um so badly?” Ooidal squinted, his fingers still diligently working against the tense vinyl.  “Why th’hull didn’t you jus’ take Virtue y’urself when y’foun’ur in New Antigone?”

    The clock still read eight minutes as the two bald men entered the hall.  It still read eight minutes as they stepped over the receptionist’s body, over the late Digamma unit.  And when they climbed the stairs.  And they marched toward the rotten apple of a door; and when the first clubbed Dante, hard, with the butt of his handgun, knocking the surprised man to the ground, his tongue all bloody from biting down on it.  Still when the second trained his weapon on Ooidal, his fingers moving from the last strands of knot to the back of his bald head.  The clock still read eight minutes away from an exit as the two gleaming devils lifted the bear, their trophy, over their shoulders and carried him from the room, leaving Ooidal alone with a girl he had lied to for a very long time.

Chapter 14: //Light reading.
---

The soft silk fabric pulled tightly around the tree trunk joining the old, weathered and leathered face to the hefty bulk beneath. Of a hot pink, almost red characterisation and hue, its presence was tolerated only because of the stature and authority of the man who wore it. As it lumbered toward the bar, like a worn old trumpet, it rasped "Straight up scotch and whiskey. Neat, on the rocks when you're ready." All four were downed before a knock came at the door. An announced P and D were the precursor to its forceful opening. Two stalks in striped suit to follow, each with a steely six - shooter drawn in expectation and one with a badge held open from a warm leatherette pouch.

A laugh warbled this side of the same bar. As did an eyebrow as almost as arched as the aged kingpin's forehead. A flurry of shuffles and folds, too. Both enforcement officials made good their entry, yelling at the old oak tree to face down lay on the ground.

"Tell you what." it creaked. "Ask me your question and I'll allow you to leave here with your pensions still intact." It turned in the wind, swaying back in forth and its branches stretched into the air and gave a worn sigh. Of course they wouldn't have cared for a pension so much as their care for the finesse of the job; lieutenants each of them being from a well-to-do background. It was their interest more to upkeep a semblance of society than to gush over a paycheck spent duly at the end of each and every month.

With the busied air now still; there was wait. They all waited.