U free 2nite?

✅🔒3:25 PM

Oh, and she texts like that.

meeting with TP at 4, should be hꙮme by 5:30 at the latest. after that i'm all yꙮurs.

✅🔒3:26 PM

<3

✅🔒3:29 PM

The TOWN POTENTATE calls you up from time to time, when there's a case he would really rather go tragically unsolved. It behooves you to hear him out; your success rate is good enough to tank the occasional ding, and in any case he's not a man you want to get on the bad side of.

You disembark from your BUS and start walking to the prescribed STREET CORNER, a pure white giant WASP trailing after you. It's probably some kind of unethical to enjoy the company of the lusus who murdered your previous lusus and then decided you were, like, its helpless 25-year-old child or something, but whatever. Honestly she treats you better than that stingy old SPIDER ever did. Today she's offering to share some of the SWEET NECTAR she's gathered.

You take it, sip it, and plug your WIRED EARBUDS into your PHONE to put on some music as you await pickup by the boss's GOONS for transportation to the actual MEETING SITE.

—I will escape this city, leave its rotten EDIFICE behind—

Several associative jumps away from the song currently playing, you contemplate replacing your useless three-pupiled eye with some kind of cybernetic implant. You think you caught the PLAGUE a few years back when it was in town, but of course plenty of cases of VISION TENFOLD naturally decay into VISION THREEFOLD or VISION SEVENFOLD as one eye blows out over time...right. You were considering implants. Would be badass and cyberpunk, but ultimately presents insufficient practical benefits to justify the expense. Your seven-pupiled eye suffices for now (except for the myopia—you've seen your namesake depicted wearing glasses, but that can't have been true; no one as cool as her would've worn them), and maybe in a few years medical science will advance enough to put the repair of the other one within your budget.

The GOONS are late.

By the time the CAR arrives, your "meeting with the boss" playlist has advanced to the next out-of-context cover of a song from a concept album (spend my day with dogs and jackals, politics is always the same), and you've drained your glass of NECTAR to the last drop.

The WASP whisks away your glass...

...as you appraise your bodyguard and driver. A Dersite and a Prospitian respectively. Important to avoid the appearance of favoritism for one's own color of carapace,

but the boss is not enough of a radical social reformer to allow, say, a human or a troll such proximity to the real levers of political power in this town.

You hop in, your hand slipping into your pocket and brushing past your WALLET from the DADLIER DEPOT (look, it's an efficient modus! No bullshit!) to reach the RING OF KEYS that will be your only line of defense if the meeting goes badly.

(The bodyguard, of course, is not actually for your benefit.)

You make a few minutes of polite small talk with the GOONS before putting your EARBUDS back in and using your free hand to scroll your PHONE for another playlist to queue up in case this one runs out. You gotta lengthen it if they're gonna keep being late.

The ride is three-quarters over, and your lips are moving silently along to where they hung the jerk that invented work, in the Big Rock Candy Mountain when a gentle tap with a claw on your shoulder gets your attention.

It's your Dersite bodyguard.

"You should know, this isn't the usual meeting about a case. The boss found something so scary he's buying rocket tickets to test it on the Moon, and he wants you in."

"Does that mean the meeting is gonna go long?" you ask. "Cause I kind of had plans this evening."