The crisp Tabor air had become even more biting; more ruthless in its coldness (it could catch - steal - your breath and turn it into a cloud of mist which it would never give back) and yet there was a warmth to it.

"You know, of course, that if the Machines wished her dead... she already would be. Makes you think."

"Hmmm?" he said absently, looking around the plaza, disinterested.

"..."

"The redhead?" he glanced in his direction for a second. "... she's not dead, friend." he continued, returning to his inspection of the buildings; and trees; and sky; and people on either side of the bench on which he sat.

"I wouldn't imagine so, no."

"Though she did mention you... Guess I'm just too trusting." Dante informed, looking upon him with a disappointed gaze; sighing.

"She asked if anyone had been looking for her. I said you had been looking to get in contact with her Confederacy."

"All the same friend, I'm not here to take you out to the woodshed. Hell, it wouldn't be worth the time."

"... the woodshed?"

"An expression, friend."

"Evidently."

"As in: I have no reason to beat'cha to a pulp."

"Glad to hear it."

"Heck, you probably made my job easier. Cause of you, she was sittin' in here waitin for me." Dante chuckled to himself. "Can you believe that?" the words almost drowning in the loudening laughter.

"Yes. Wonder why she would have done a thing like that."

"She's just a kid - probably still thinks she's invincible." he said with a smirk.

"Maybe she is. I've seen stranger."

"I don' think so, friend. Last I left her, she was pretty ravaged..."

"Dead?" XElite interrupted.

"Nope."

"Mm." XElite smiled to himself.

"Pro'lly not far from it, though."

"So near but yet so far." almost laughing.

"Well, I just wanted to stop out for some air." Dante proclaimed as he rose from the bench and stretched himself fully, taking a deep breathe of the crisp Tabor air, en route to the phone booth. He turned his head on his shoulders to look XElite directly in the face. "You watch your back, friend."

"Keep chasing your tail, friend." XElite replied instantaneously, the other man placing a well used receiver to one ear. "One day you may catch up." and in the next moment, Dante had turned to a streaming green gauze and in the next to nothing...

She was nobody anyway.

The sun beat down on him as he trudged up the stairs between a crackhouse at the end of the industrial park and a crackhouse on the edge of Chinatown. It was too hot in here; that's why he had kept out for so long. There was always that sticky, sweaty feeling at every joint and in each nostril. The undead bastard had broken his nine-year streak.

"Thirteen-three hu'dred Sou'f Bell," he muttered to himself, looking around for any address on a building. It was all for appearances, anyway: he had mapped the route on the Equinox a hundred times before he had finally brought himself to jack in. He reached the building, and nodded nobody a polite hello before quickly stomping to a door no different from the others. It opened before he knocked.

An attractive, young man with glasses and a neatly tailored suit answered with a crooked grin painted on his face and a half-eaten apple in his hand. Except there was no apple. He was frowning. And besides, it wasn't a young man in a suit; it was an old man in a ratty red jacket.

"Ooidal, y'finally decided t'uh join us. I'm so glad, friend." The words were beautiful in a sort of inebriated, unpassionate sort of way. They bounced through Ooidal's ears and landed on the redhead's, slipping through dried blood and clearish gunk. She had her eyes open anyway, and recognized the man when he had appeared in the crisply cut fudge-coloured suit. The girl smiled a resigned sort of sad little smile and spat at an apple core in front of her.

"Y'uh we'r'unt supposed t'uh do anythin' like this," stumbled from Ooidal's fat, cracked lips. "This'us crossed th'uh line."

"We didn't draw no lines, friend. And if we did, I would've drawn ‘em. And if I had, I wouldn't've drawn ‘em."

"Y'uh owe me this favor, Dante."

"I don't owe you sh!t, kid. Y'ah owe me money, y'ah owe me time. Hell, I've probably saved your life more times than you've thought about endin' mine," he glared at the tumor of a man in front of him, still seeing the young, nimble operator of the Lethe.  His expression softened, "How is my daughter?"

Ooidal frowned, sizing up his war-torn former captain. "How'd she lose h'urr arm?"

"Nice catch, Ecks."

"Why, thank you."

As a thin silver data pen fell into a soft, strong black fabric pocket, Ecks asked the burning question.

"Th'vacation in Erew'hon was simply explosive, thanks f'er askin'."

"I'm glad you enjoyed it!" he smiled warmly, stifling a muted chuckle.

"Oh! Well, we'd never h'uv located it without y'er assistance. We'd tried asking f'er directions on several occasion but they all proved t'be less than helpful."

"Tsk." he tsked from a shaking head. "So rude..."

"Where the hell is she, friend. Her and that great lump she calls a friend."

"Eleuthero--"

"The gurl! I've no time for games, friend and if I had wouldn't be playing any." Dante breathed from a fuming red face. A boiler struggling to contain the hot water in its pipes, on the verge of either exploding or falling apart at the seems. You could never be entirely sure.

"Last I heard, she was on a vacation to--"

"Erewon?"

"Indeed so. Lovely weather this time, of year too." he smiled in a, for all appearances, decidedly conceited fashion, rolling his head around in a circular stretch.

"No! She's--" the old antique ground to a halt as another washer snapped apart. "When I find her!--"

"You'll be sure to let me know?"

This thread wreaks of style i'm impressed.

~Darminian

Outside, a veteran with stitches across his forehead began to play dirty water from a trombone, looking for small change and buttons. The deep moans of the brass found its way into Dante's ears, pausing him for a moment. He smiled, glancing at Ooidal.

"Go shut him up," he directed in a sort of half-whisper. Ooidal nodded, excusing himself past Virtue and Vice. He hesitated, reaching for the door, first plucking an umbrella from the end table. His hand was in a greyish suede glove with nickels sewn into the knuckles, crawling out from the unbuttoned sleeve of a pea coat in charcoal. The click-clack and thunder of the 219 roared on the overhead tracks as the man stepped into the rain, catching the sideways glimpse of a stray cat. An explosion snapped across the very-early-morning sky, illuminating the blackened skeletons of clouds.

Ooidal blinked slowly at the roadblock along the manhole construction, spotting the street corner Satchmo near the vent of a basement Laundromat. His instrument warbled a kind of wet, uninvited stink like a vagrant dog. The man was in his late fifties, probably older, with no hair on his head, a long crooked scar mapped from his right eye to his left ear. His double chin expanded and contracted like a frog as he played, pouring his soul through blackened teeth into the brass.

"Can y'uh spur'r some change f'ur an old rain dog?" interrupted the music as Ooidal sloshed toward the man. His helpless groans were ignored by the streetlights as Ooidal pummeled him with eighty-cent fists. As his eye cracked and his teeth fell out, he fell silent. The sky dropped a bass drum down a flight of stairs, and Ooidal stepped away from the bloodied man.

"-in full drag," escorted the brute back into a cramped room above a hardware store. Vice wore a halfway sort of skim milk smile behind black cherry lips. She smelled like gasoline and envy, and her gums were always bleeding. Her blackened hair pulled on her scalp and punched out from the back of her head, twisting and splaying at the nape of her coffee brown neck and a black pea coat's collar. Ash fell from a Parliament in her hand.

"What do we do with the breakfast crowd?" rose from Virtue, unwavering. She was pale, with plain blonde hair dripping from a white mohair beret. Her eyes were a drowning victim's grey-blue, starting off at something inside her own head, and her stare was enough to hold back spring. She had on a look like she had just swallowed a bit of sour tasting poison, or maybe like she was chewing on a lit cigar.

"They won't be a problem," Dante commanded. "There aren't any heroes in Westview. If it gets noisy, the worst we'll get is a waitress looking to clean up a broken plate." His silhouette was all that was visible, shifting its weight between feet in front of the room's only window. They were all genuinely bad people.

Twenty minutes of graffiti and brown brought the car to Southard's chugging factory row. Two men with shaved heads cracked jokes and eyeballed the big black boat as it came to a stop, the white bottoms of their pant legs grey and brown from city filth. Dante caught their glance, obscenities clogging his mind. He stepped calmly from the driver's seat, a boot landing in a damp pile of cigarette butts. Ooidal circled around the front of the car from the passenger seat, yawning and rapping his thumb on the hood as he went. Virtue and Vice huddled together, shivering and dripping from the weather.

The eight went east, and the five went north, and they all started down the block toward a neon north star that read Peg's Diner. Peg had never once stepped foot in the restaurant, she was the owner's way of coping with his Vietnam memories and social disorders. He had opened it just a month previous, and lived in a supply room around back; rumors would later surface that he hung himself, or shot himself, or jumped from a roof down the block. Vice stuck her hand into Ooidal's gloved mitt, and they strolled ahead of the captain, Vice leaning her head onto Ooidal's shoulder for a moment as they passed a man selling newspapers. They reached the diner's door and gave Dante polite, unfamiliar nods, signaling the hostess to find a table for two, preferably a booth near the window, and two coffees, cream in one, but only a little bit, with no sugar, please, and no cream in the other, but two scoops of sugar, thank you.

Virtue bought a newspaper to shield herself from the blurred drizzle leaking from the grey, morningish sky, and Dante whistled, motioning her to follow him. Five minutes passed, and a noise like an arguing couple erupted from the diner. Ooidal knocked his cup of coffee to the floor as Vice spat curses at him and tore a vending machine wedding band from her finger. Dante and Virtue stepped through the back entrance of the restaurant, well aware that nobody would be looking that way. After a few minutes, and a nod from a woman reading a newspaper near the back entrance, Ooidal settled down, and allowed a waitress to escort himself and his furious wife from the diner. On his way out, he caught the glance of a wide-eyed little redheaded girl with syrup at either end of her mouth. She stuck her tongue out at him, mad because he was a big stupid meanie that had ruined her breakfast and scared her.

He forgot about the girl at the chime of a payphone, and did not remember for eleven years.

He didn't forget about Virtue, though. Virtue with her dead eyes and her unhappy smile. He and Vice were back aboard the Lethe, each passing second catching in their throat like gargling weighted dice and lucky coins. Virtue checked her watch and almost cracked a smile, the corner of her lip stretching a tiny bit. She closed the newspaper and tucked it under a shoulder, catching herself in the glance of a little redheaded girl. She yawned, stepping away from her post, back into the alley behind the diner where a double-handful of bald men was standing.

"Oh fu*k," Vice's eyes bulged as the display flashed a white rectangle and updated all at once. "What the hell'uz that little b!tch doin'?" She glanced at the next screen over, at her father beating a paperweight into the sequined chest of a broken old man named Peg. "Fu*k, fu*k fu*k. This is total sh!t." Ooidal nodded, dumbstruck. "I've got to get back in there. Get me back in there." She glanced over at Dante's comatose form, resting comfortably with a six-inch needle comfortable in his head, and placed her hand on Ooidal's shoulder.

Ooidal's hands danced wildly across one, two keyboards, trying to find a hole to sneak Vice through. She planted herself in a worn armchair with a gaping hole in its headrest. The screens updated again, Dante's dark red form ducked and weaved liquidly, his thick, powerful fist catching the old man's stomach. Peg had been dreaming some bad dreams about robot spiders and big fields of people, but some talking head from Zion decided that he was better off dead than out. Just to old to fight the good fight. Virtue chewed a pattern into her lips as she walked up to Adrian Noble's car, its window sliding silently into a black envelope.

Behind, the bald men unholstered gleaming silver hand cannons, kicking down the door to Peg's. A steady tattoo ripped though the wall of the supply closet as Dante yelled, ducking toward a far wall. More than a few of the bullets hit Peg as the door fell from its shattered hinges, the man's unfortunate form wrinkling, falling into itself, a blonde wig falling into its eyes.

Vice exploded from the phonebooth on Sixth and Vine, the two-block sprint impossibly long. Her jet-black hair splayed behind her, sticking to her neck in clumps as it was pelted with rain.

"Y'know it pains'uh me t'uh make a y'ung'in like y'hurse'luff do this t'her daddy," crawled slowly from Noble's lips, his disarming bayou drawl doing nothing for Virtue's apathy. She yawned, cocking an eyebrow. "Fine then, miss-ey'uh. I'll give y'uh th'b-ahud news now then. There ain't gon-" A bullet whirred through the saturated air, eager to embed itself in the blonde's straight hair. Instead, it was lodged in the leather upholstery of Noble's car. Then another, his driver decided against heroism and shifted into reverse. Three more bullets, and Vice stood at the end of the street, her feet spread apart, her black leather legs in a triangle.

"Who was that, ‘sis?" she yelled toward the blonde.

"Well." she smiled, stopping to take a breath, the red blush still fading from her cheeks. The long rain still crawling from the back of the matte brown duster coat. The almost smashed resemblance of shades still almost cracking.

"... it was a long time ago. You know? Lots happened back then."

Through a half smirk; "Yeah they did. Good times!"

"It was around then that I made it to the docks. One of the crates there, to be about to the point."

"Aurghh, took us forever to brake it open, I tell thee. We even had a crowbar but it snapped! Anyway, once we got there we tried to climb the fence but I mean, we haven't even been told that the front door had been left open for us. Fun, though."

Catching a glimpse of something in the window pane, from the corner of its eye, it coughed a hearty laugh. Lacing the tale with some ol' humor.

"When we opened it, though? Nothing inside it."

"..."

"Nothing but thin air. And rats. Lots and lots of rats."

The cold creeping in... (It creeped becuse it always loved to sneak up on you. Interlaced itself with fondness and warm air but then, when you least expected it, the warm breeze would choke on itself and - so did she.)

"That Spark, though. Haaa, hell of a kid. Thing change, though, you cant hang onto the past forever."

"..."

"Wish she was still here, you know."

"I'm sorry, can I help you?"

"What?! I'm very late for a rendez -- for a miss-- for a meet--... if youll excuse me!"

His name was Ooidal and he worked mostly at the docks, (he said). And that's about all that I remember.

The night was grey and my hair even greyer. This city takes its toll on you. It starts off ok. You think to yourself. Hell! You even say it out loud; I'm just gonna take one little stroll over here, see. See what all the commotion is about. Then after a little while -- you feel comfortable in the hubub. You think to yourself. Hell! You even say it out loud; I'm thinkin' to start some commotion of my own, see. A young guy I knew once. Young chap, hair as brunette as the autumn sky. Newly acquainted with this place. If I'm - if I'm being honest, with himself, too.

Anyway, I'm just repeating myself now. Some broad. Heh. So she'd like to think. And of course I was never in love with her. Love; some sap of an emotion invented by someone somewhere on the top of a rock with some pen and paper looking down on the world and imaging what it might be like if he was a part of it. If one of those fine lookin' specimens of female homo sapien may take it upon themselves to make his acquaintance. Nothing ever works like it does in the books. Or the papers. Or on the radio. Not in real life; well apart from those pulp "science fiction" novels picked up from the side of a soggy magazine stand for ¢65. That kind of *censored* takes its toll on you, though. The gatekeeper guarding the bridge to some Freudian thoughts you'd never know existed. Some *censored* up. It's all anyone ever realises. Realised that they are but then it takes that to change it.

Too much brandy on ice and too much wine she said. Whether it was another sarcastic comment made through another toothless grin, I still dunno. I like to think it is. Whenever I think on it, I always produce a sarastic grin through a toothless smile - so I'm told. Looking in the mirror is dangerous enough as it is. One of them smashed once, though. Too much smoke from what I heard. Noone knew where it was all coming from. I mean I had the Mayor breathing down my neck - no I'm not gonna use some Ayetalyin American phrase like "bustin' my *censored*" because that my whooly inaccurate. Anyway with nothing more to go on, that mirror cost me my badge some say. The "unorthodox methods" as they liked to call it, say some others. The broad in the closet, more still. Old school? There's no two schools about it. There's a way to get a job done and there's a way to pose and posture and hope someone gets it done for you. I always preferred the former. I also preferred not to be poked at for some of my more advanced vocabulayry. Not that I'd care but start coming out with that sort of thing around here, and you're bound to have your *censored* busted up pretty bad for it.

Respect was something I had. Something this city used to have. It was no New York but it was something. He knew it, too. I mean it wasn't no Irish Mafia bootleg racket but noone's gonna' miss the odd crate or two. Especially if some burly guy is standing over it. You tend not to ask to many questions when a lion has its jaws around you. You tend to ask even less when those jaws snap shut. The contents? Rats. Mostly. Rats and magazines. And the odd "science fiction" novel from the side of a soggy magazine stand for ¢65.

    Virtue was made up of the parts you throw away: all those sharp, plastic and sty-ro-foam things that get cut with a razor and tossed aside.  In her twisty-tie-wrap life, she had seen no heartbreak, and felt no pain.  She just was born with the kind of meanness that makes babies bite fingers and rumors bite egos.
    
    A chasm of lightning split a fault in the mountainous sky, blooming at the edges of clouds then disappearing.  It didn’t illuminate anything, though – it had arrived late, only splitting through the muddy grey of mid-morning with enough sun still peeking through to bar the rats from camouflage.  Vice knew who had been in the car, the Lethe had dealt with Noble and his vanity before.  She stood there furious, her aim unwavering, ready to punch holes in the blonde at any moment.

    “I’m not your sister, Vice: you’re dumb if you thought so,” she blinked.  “And the captain’s not your dad.  He would have been ten when you were conceived.”  Virtue did not waver either, her hands at her sides, rain melting her hat into a sodden jelly-bean of stained fabric hanging limply just above her bored eyes.  “Noble’s men are going to kill him.  I tried to tell him that you were more of a threat, but he did not want to listen.”

    Vice counted to herself.  She had fired five shots.  One left.  One chance.

    A closer exit – Ooidal had opened the line back up, praying it would help.  And looking at the odds, Dante needed all the help he could get.  Just out front of Pegs, the jump-roping warble cut through the rain.  Virtue heard it, then Vice, then Dante.  Her eyes almost taking on a look of delight, Virtue spun, sprinting toward the noise.  Vice chased after her, closing the distance, but the telephone was just too close.  The blonde grabbed for the phone, Vice fired her shot, shattering the receiver as Virtue disappeared into wet, shining mosquitoes of greenish-white light.

    The mosquitoes turned to diamonds and gold, and vanished.  Virtue opened her eyes on the other side.

(Protip: Always, always decide to start something like this at midnight.  You'll never regret it at 4am.
To be enjoyed with Alice.)