============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================= | ../oldsite/ | /gallery/ | /cassettes/ | /docs/ | /jobs/ | /viya/ | /animu/ | /holy text/ | /irc/ | /blog/ | /donate/ | /portal/ |============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================= The room blurred out of focus as tears developed around her eyes. Surface tension broke, revealing the scene once more. It was more of a hideout than a living space, the apartement concisted of two 20 by 30 foot rooms, cut out from a warehouse in the housing crisis of the twenties, repurposed, then resold. Wires stretched from every spot concievable, linking everything possible. A wall slid down the middle of the room, with a hole punched into it's center, a means to get cables from one room to another. She found a home there, after having left Akiba with next to nothing, she was taken in by an unlikely bunch. Clause and Kuebiko were as different as people could be, while both always seemed to be more than kind to her, the way they handled things and the attitude they kept were utterly unalligned. Clause was calm, soft, polite. He was a pasivist in nature, but still held a strong arm when it came to his morals. Kuebiko was nothing like this, the sikly pale man had more fire in him then all of hell, he played it as cool as he could, spoke nicely, and always met his agenda. He had an idea, a dream, and it was going to happen. No matter what he had to sacrifice, no matter who he had to cross, it would happen. Somewhere between a terrorist and an entrepeneur . Dispite their differences they made a really great team, maybe it was blind luck, or maybe it was their common goal, but the two never fought for more than a minute, and always worked in sync with one another. The atomsphere had reminded her of the warm and friendly enviroment of Anomie back in Akihabara, a sense of home away from home. But none of this mattered, because both of them were dead. She would have closed her eyes if she could think of anything other than what she saw. A slit throat and a gunshot wound would define her anger for as long as she could remember. She watched herself move, move towards Kuebiko's body and brush aside the red polyester of his jacked, revealing a small leather holster attached to his belt. She pulled out it's contents, chinese plastic mixed with japanese steel formed a pneumatic hand cannon of Kuebiko's own design. The use of heavily compressed air made the weapon orders of magnitude quieter than any explosive could aspire to. She pressed the small black button on the top of the handle, holding it until a loud whirr filled the room, and ended in a mechanical clank. Hands wobbling, she reached to her waist, raising the volume of her music. Then, brought the gun to the temple of her head, closed her eyes, and tried to pull the trigger. Nothing, it felt like concrete. She could punch through a 12" thick steel wall, lift a small car, and bend strands of rebarb, but she couldn't move the metal trigger half an inch towards the handle. She lowered the gun, relaxed herself, and tried again. Nothing. She couldn't stop now, not until she was done. The RSR was a division of the Chinese military, their official mandate was to "Secure the Chinese investement in future military technologies" but in the subsurf they were better known as the surface police. They tracked, hunted, and killed, any research or researcher in the subsurface working on anything that could change anything. They were the evil of evil, the unstopable forced, backed by tax money from people who didn't even know they existed. They'd followed her here, they'd made her leave Akiba, and they killed what little piece of belonging she had found. Maybe because she had arrived, maybe because of their work, it didn't matter. The room was split, on one side, peacefuly rested Clauses' corpse, his face was calm, eyes closed. He couldn've been asleep if it wasn't for the gauging wound along his neck and paled skin. On the other side, was Kuebiko, he wasn't the type to be whispered to sleep. Anguish on his face mixed with tensed muscles to create the perfect embodiment of fury. Even when dead he looked like he could rip out your scalp laughing. There was a decision to make, a booleanian choice betweem the two sides. She could be calm, she could abstain, she could follow Clause. Or she could follow Kuebiko, and act, she could do what she thought fit, and she could get revenge. The building was twelve stories tall, at the top sat an office, one with the current chanceller's son, overseeing the affairs of the RSR. In between her and that goal sat a little over one hundred gaurds. If she was going to do this, she was going to have to take more than a page out of Kuebiko's book. She was going to need to feel it, understand the flow, let herself move and watch it happen. She stopped the song, and pulled out the tape. Sifting through her bag for something perfect, she found it, and put it in. Tokyo Caffeine, that was what Kuebiko had called it, hit the right mix of tension and bad decisions, you could skid along the surface without losing your subsurf. There was a rhythm to it, pattern, logic. She jumped from foot to foot briefly trying to match the beat of the song. Somewhere, in that tower, were the hands that had killed the only people she had left. And that was all the motivation she needed. She waltz into the main lobby, it resembeled an airport checkpoint, security, scanning, and screaning. The room was quickly filled with a mix of panic, gunfire, and confusion, marking her entry. For the next three hours, the phone lines would stop working, the alarms wouldn't function, and the power would flicker on every floor except the top one. By the second hour, 81 of the 112 gaurds would be dead or otherwise incapacitated. Sliding up to the top floor, unlocking the office door with a keycard from a dead gaurd, and pointing a gun at the man who had decided exactly when and how her life would be torn to pieces, felt natural. But when the time came to pull the trigger again, it turned back into concrete. It might aswell have been on her own head again. The man in the chair had no name to her, had no children she knew of, and had taken everything from her. She had every reason to kill him, more reason to kill him than any of the people leading up to him. The gun wobbeled in her sights, as she tried to keep it on the terrified face of the monster in front of her. She relaxed her muscles, sighed, and tossed the gun to the ground. The look of relief on the his face faded faster than it had appeared. She reached for a knife on her belt and stabbed him in the stomach, then the chest, then the shoulder. He fell to the floor out of fear or pain, and she followed. It took around ten minutes for the police to show up, and when they did, they were greeted with a broken girl, still disfugring an unidentifiable corpse. She smiled, because it no longer mattered what was right or wrong, it no longer mattered what would happen or what wouldn't, because she had nothing, nothing but revenge. When the police arrested her, she didn't resist, she was tired, exaughsted by violence, and let herself sleep. In a car, heading to somewhere worse than a prison, Cassandra would dream of her electric sheep.