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Max Stat and the Harem Blight, Chapter 11: Misfortune & Darkness
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Jinx was in her workshop, idly rolling a ball bearing on the table as she imagined various potential designs. Sometimes she wished she was on a rockball, just because then she could make stuff that was big - in the tight confines of Zaun, there just wasn't the space for anything really fun, like a tank or an aircraft. Only teeny tiny drones.
Don't get her wrong, she still liked teeny-tiny drones - especially when they exploded - but there was more to life than that.
Her phone buzzed. Naomi. She answered the call with her AR. "What's up, sister-wife?"
"Excuse me?" Naomi asked, her voice sharp.
"Sister-wife. Should it be sister-breeder? Breeding buddy? That sounds pretty good. Buddy's a little too male though... breeding sister? Breeding gal pal?" Naomi was surprisingly uninterested in interrupting her running off on a random tangent. "Anyway, pole sister seems inadequate when you both got knocked up by the same dude. What's up, my fellow MMLF?"
"I'm afraid to ask."
"Mother Max Loves Fucking, duh," she said, a grin on her lips. "Seriously. You must've called for a reason, right?"
"Yes, I just..." Naomi sighed loudly on the other end of the line. "You're really pregnant?"
"Yes, I am really pregnant." She popped her lips as she idly tossed the ball bearing into the air, catching it with her foot, clenching it between her big toe and the next one over. Index toe? She actually didn't know the name. "Duh. Why would I lie about that?"
"I don't know."
"Oh, you know, mommy-twin," Jinx said with a grin. "You're the one who got me dragged over for a threesome, remember? Max's dick is the best. Objectively. Seems like the kind of guy who's not quick to abandon the mother of his children, too."
"There's more to a relationship than sex."
"Yeah, and he's a nice sweet boy toy in addition to having a megadick that makes your brain ooze out of your cunt. Smart, too. 'parently Zaun's sitting on some mega-cool archaeology site. Did he mention that to you?"
"I don't remember any details, but I think so."
"Yorp. So, smart, sweet, prestigious, nice, gonna be rich, juuuust got done with his PhD so he's dateable but there's probably no hidden downsides, fucks like a god. So, that's why I would pretend to be pregnant. Not that I did."
"Explain that bit about the PhD?"
"Sheesh. Didn't you call me for a reason besides explaining every little thing?" Jinx tsked.
"I was confirming you were pregnant."
"I could just lie again. Are you talking around asking me if I want another threesome? I can do one whenever. Betcha he'd have a hard time saying no if two hot-to-trot babes showed up at his door."
"The PhD," Naomi repeated.
"Right. So, problem with dating older guys - well, you should know this, but... over time, the good guys get taken, right? Guy finds his special someone, they get married. Could happen at 20, 24, 27, whatever. Every year, the number of good guys in that age group declines. The shitty guys, though, they keep dating, right? They get married, but then divorced, 'cause they smack their wife around, or cheat, or whatever. Or they can't even convince a chick to marry them, which is saying something, because the same logic applies to shitty gals. The older a guy is, the more you need an explanation why he's not already taken - and a PhD is a great explanation. No time to date when you're working on your thesis. He's now stuck on a shitty little middle-o-nowhere station with a population of like, eighty k? Best time to put a ring on it, Naomi. Never gonna get better."
"I'm not interested in getting married right now. I have something I have to do."
"Yeah? While pregnant, even?"
"Yes. While pregnant."
"Must be real important."
"It is."
Jinx huffed. "I answer all your questions, and you don't answer mine? So mean. I feel hurt. I thought we were close. Pole sisters is one thing, but the sacred bond of getting pregnant by the same guy during the same orgy? That's a bond so few women have."
"You didn't ask a question."
"Fine, what's up with you?"
"You know what - I have to go. Ask me in person when we next see each other," Naomi said, then hung up.
Weird response.
Well, they'd see each other again, next threesome.
Hm. She pulled the ball bearing out from between her toes as she thought it over. Could she make a sex toy to outdo all other sex toys?
No, wait. That already existed, and his name was Max.
* * *
Olivia hung up on Jinx. Her Naomi voicechange mod had worked. There was no sign that the other woman had any suspicions, and she'd successfully managed to inject the worm over the course of the call without any apparent response from Jinx herself. It wasn't hard at all to keep the idiot babbling - she really liked the sound of her own voice.
Now she had access to Jinx's AR, and it was time to work out how to kill the bitch. Right now, she was alone in some kind of workshop - but Olivia had no real idea of the layout of the surrounding area, since she'd only just started watching. She set her computer to record, and set to work finding more data about Jinx via her AR.
...it took about two seconds for her to actually out-loud gasp at what was hooked into Jinx's AR. She had to double and triple check, flicking through subsystem after subsystem, but no, it wasn't some funny labeling scheme. Jinx had root access to what looked like virtually every single camera on the entire station - though not the ones that Charybdis had installed in the outside hallway. She didn't just have root access, she'd also used that access to install a program that automatically edited her out of video feeds, replacing her with one of several dozen replacement models or just scrubbing her altogether.
In other words, every single CCTV auto-purged her. It was actually insane. It couldn't even be that good of a disguise, since the way it was set up, at least some of the time, she would appear as a white guy on one camera and an Asian girl on the next, at the exact same time. Anybody cross-referencing them would notice something was up immediately.
Which - along with the root access itself - meant it was basically dead certain the bitch had connections in the local government. There was no way a hack this blatant could go undetected for longer than, like, a week. Olivia had found this shit within minutes, and yeah, she was better than your average code jockey, but come on. It was so obvious she was pretty sure that even somebody with zero technical skills might be able to find it eventually.
None of that really changed any of Olivia's plans. She'd watch Jinx, wait for her to be alone, and then... she glanced to one side.
The Keter of her was a spare, meant for Vivi if something happened. Olivia would have to buy a new one, because she'd cracked it open and rearranged the guts. Where an EM chip should go, she'd added remote access, as well as a copious amount of plastic explosives. It was standing upright, wearing one of Vivi's virgin killer sweaters, a blank, neutral expression worn - though, for Vivi, that tended to look like she was smiling just a smidge. The opposite of resting bitch face.
She turned her attention back to her monitors. Right now, she could see everything Jinx did through her AR. She'd learn the bitch's patterns, and then Vivi would 'stumble' upon her, and...
* * *
"Oh, Jinx!" Jinx immediately recognized the voice, pausing her walk to spin around and face the other woman. Vivi. She looked surprisingly not-pissed, but then, Vivi wasn't very neurotic.
"Yo." Turns out that it's awkward talking to your pole-sister nine days after you point a gun at her girlfriend. Who knew?
"I'm surprised to see you here," Vivi said, approaching her slowly. "I heard from Naomi that you're pregnant - can I feel the bump?"
Something was off about Vivi's movements, and Jinx casually walked backwards a few steps to keep her distance. She checked her AR, and nobody else was around ready to take a shot or anything, so it was Vivi? Vivi could kill, the Charybdis were proof of that, but while something was 'off' about Vivi's movements, it wasn't emotional. "No bump yet. She's pregnant too, so..." Alarm bells were ringing, so Jinx took out her gun. "Alright, stop walking towards me," she said, pointing the gun at Vivi's torso. "Something's fucky."
Vivi's expression flickered through emotions as she raised her hands up. "Sorry? Jinx, I'm not angry. I know Olivia started things, sending those guys after Max." There was definitely something wrong with how Vivi was moving. It was more than just her being awkward or scared. Your basic instincts are programmed to notice when people don't move right, it's a natural defense mechanism against ebola and shit, and right now, Vivi wasn't moving right. "I thought that you had resolved things? If you don't feel like you have, I can just go."
"Guilt trip. Nice." She wasn't actually going, after all. "Take two steps back."
Ah, that's it. Vivi moved to obey, but it took the wrong amount of time. Her face looked right, her words sounded right, her body moved right - just too slow.
Latency. There was a trace of lag in her reactions, like she was getting everything a fraction of a second late. "Something wrong with your chip?"
Vivi tilted her head to one side, but once again, the reaction took longer than it should have. "I don't think so? Why do you ask?" She glanced down at her torso. Those movements there were fluid and immediate, since they all chained on one another. Vivi poked herself.
Yeah. Jinx knew what was going on. She shot the Vivi body's leg off, and the thing tumbled to the ground. It just hit the ground, facefirst - the hands didn't manage to respond in time to keep herself from faceplanting. Jinx herself took quite a few steps backwards, checking her AR. "I warned you, Liv. One act of sisterly mercy, that's all you get, and you blew it with this?"
"I don't understand."
"It's a fucking remote access chip, do you think I can't tell when I'm not talking to a person?" In fairness, most people probably couldn't, but c'mon. Jinx had mentioned her extra neurons, hadn't she? "You're even dumber than you look. Should've just let your brains dribble out of your cunt and become Max's personal bangmaid or something. Everybody would be happy that way, but nooooo. You had to go and do this," she said, letting out a long-suffering sigh. She pointed her gun at the Vivi's head, and blew that away too, a spray of electronics splashing around, the fungoid pseudoflesh coating her body splattering in an ugly way.
"I can't see. Jinx, I'm not-"
"Oh my God, you're found out, this is so fucking boring, these are your last words to your nemesis, and that's all you got?" She fired again, this time aiming for the cavity where Vivi's EM chip should be - and the Vivi promptly exploded, which did surprise her. She was far enough away that it felt more like a loose wave of heat and force. Except for a few lacerations and minor stabs from various bits of the Keter. "Motherfuck. Shrapnel, fuckin', bitch," she spat out, gritting her teeth.
* * *
Olivia could admit the assassination attempt had gone poorly - but she was still hooked into Jinx's AR, so she could watch the bitch's every move. She had headed back to her workshop, ducking and weaving through traps that Olivia tried her best to categorize, wrapping up the various cuts with bandages and gauze before finally rummaging through drawers to pull out a neat little box which contained what looked like a cockroach.
"Now, fly, my pretty, fly," she declared, cackling a little as the thing took flight - and her AR provided picture-in-picture of the drone flying off. With one hand, Jinx effortlessly controlled its flight. If Olivia hadn't seen it through Jinx's eyes, she probably would have assumed the thing was a genuine insect. There weren't many out in space, but they sometimes managed to crawl through the cracks. The thing flew and crawled all the way over to the hallway outside Olivia's apartment, at which point it began to flutter back and forth, rotating through the sky with a lazy, performative movement.
Olivia rolled her chair out of her office. "There's a bug drone out there," Olivia said to the Charybdis. "It looks like a cockroach."
"Mm." Charybdis's eyes tilted to one side as she presumably consulted her own camera access. "I see it. I can probably go stomp on it if you want, but it won't be able to open the door. How do you know it's a drone?"
Fuck. Right. She definitely didn't want Jinx to know she had AR access. "Forget it. If you see a chance to make it look natural, go crush it."
She returned to monitoring Jinx, who was now reviewing the drone footage - as well as the past several days of footage from outside Olivia's apartment, pausing on the Charybdis and humming, then zooming in.
"Pain in my fuckin' ass," Jinx muttered. "That's gotta be a Charybdis, who else would paint a bunny on their exerter armor? Seriously, I gotta ask pops for some exerter armor of my own." She huffed and then rolled her chair over to the table.
* * *
Exerters are an advanced form of science humanity copied off the Yoke. They produce a field which mostly accomplishes the function of preventing the movement of fermions (you know, protons, neutrons, electrons - the building blocks of matter) through it. To turn that description into something intuitive, just imagine you can make a physical object of any arbitrary size and shape, which is completely weightless and almost-invisible.
Almost is a critical part of that equation there. The field produced by an exerter is almost invisible; which is to say, they do interact with photons (light), just much less than with fermions. That means a laser can penetrate an exerter-produced shield far easier than an equivalently-lethal bullet. Lucky thing for humanity, too - if exerters had been as good against laser weapons as against kinetic ones, Final State soldiers would have been basically invincible during the First Contact War, when they had all the tech advantage.
The main problem with using a laser weapon as a personal firearm in normal circumstances is that your eye lenses are weak shit, and any laser weapon capable of doing appreciable damage to a person by drilling a hole through them, is also going to render you permanently blind on the ricochet. The same basic logic applies to most ordinary cameras, and so on. They also have pretty shit penetrative power compared to a bullet - they do much better against soft materials than against hard ones. (Luckily, humans are mostly made out of soft materials.)
That's why Jinx wasn't just putting together a laser weapon to deal with the Charybdis, but a traditional firearm too. Or, really, a combination laser weapon/firearm. The biggest engineering challenge was making it swap back and forth from laser to bullet without needing to shift your aim - you sure weren't putting a bullet down the optic channel of your laser weapon, after all. She had to tweak the code like ten times before she finally got it nice and accurate.
Once she was satisfied with the weapon, she made a nice little drone with a shitty little exerter that - while definitely not enough to stop a bullet, even while overclocked - could let it float through the air right down the hallway, burning out every single camera that the Charybdis had set up with nice itty-bitty laser pulses. It wasn't even hard to program the targeting.
Once that was done, she set about with her pièce de résistance: a fake Jinx. It was a real art piece, in her humble opinion: looking at it laying there, you'd probably even imagine Jinx was actually dead, if it wasn't for her being right on top of it. It was even filled up with several liters of blood and ballistic gel, so it'd still give the impression of being her. The actual point, of course, was the eyeballs: twin cybernetic eyes that she could see through.
The plan was pretty simple, and brilliant, if Jinx did say so herself (she did, though not aloud): she'd burn out all the cameras, then wave the fake Jinx in the doorway to get shot by the Charybdis. At that point, she'd drop the Jinx, faking death, and use its eyes to aim through the wall and blow the Charybdis away. Simple, and genius.
The last thing she needed was something suitable for the ricochet on a laser weapon. Yeah, military grade optics were designed to survive it, but she didn't have any military grade optics on her, now did she? Instead, she came up with a far more ingenious (and, perhaps more importantly, cheap) mechanism: eight different cameras, which would shutter and cycle as they got blinded by the laser. So, she'd have eight shots with the laser before she was flying blind.
It did mean she'd have to take off her AR, but she was going to be playing a much more fun game than Plush Demon Hunter anyway.
* * *
Charybdis had arranged most of the furniture in Olivia's apartment into a makeshift fort. The Vivi had been sent away, and Olivia had told her everything she'd seen from 'Jinx,' the would-be assassin. The fake body with cyber eyes was presumably going to be used for targeting; the drone would blind her cameras right before the woman of the hour arrived; and the rifle didn't need any explanation. A mattress or a sofa would make for perfectly good protection against bullets and laser pulses, though she couldn't shake the feeling that her ass was exposed - and not in a good way.
Now it was just a matter of waiting. The worst part of being a bodyguard.
When this was done, she was going to need Olivia to step on her face or something. She'd have been jittering with the excess energy, if the Camniel 3-A let you do that. She took a few simulated deep breaths, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Goddamn, was it ever lucky that EM platforms didn't get uncomfortable from holding the same position for an extended period.
She kept waiting, lying prone, firearm aimed at the doorway, the barrel poking out just barely between mattresses.
Her patience was rewarded, though. The cameras went down in rapid sequence, as the drone blinded them one by one. She remained stock still, just patiently staring at the doorway. A good solid minute passed, and then. "Howdy, Liv, my least-dearest pole-sister! To the Charybdis, I'm gonna kill you if you shoot me, just so you know. If you don't, we can become great friends, though! I can even introduce you to Max! He is literally the best ever at sex. Well - I'm coming out, now!"
The door slid open, and the dummy Jinx's head slipped around the corner, alongside a firearm. Charybdis shot it right in the head, and Jinx just dropped the thing, with it hitting the ground like a wet sack of potatoes. She took two more shots, blowing out both its eyes, and leaving Jinx blind.
* * *
Fucking thorough, ain'tcha, bitch? Jinx scowled as she lost the feed from the bot. She'd only gotten a fraction of a second of visual on the Charybdis, which meant she didn't have enough data to find a good angle. She couldn't believe she was being held back by a glorified pillow fort. Were they gonna have a sleepover next?
Jinx didn't say or do anything herself, just remaining stock still in the hallway - maybe the bitch would come out - but she did still have two drones. She directed the cockroach to crawl along the edge of the door frame, and then poke its head just-barely in from the corner. Its antennae were slicked back and still as it got into position, and the Charybdis didn't notice, remaining still on the floor.
With the cockroach drone in position, Jinx now had a great visual of the whole room. Charybdis was blocked by an overturned sofa, two mattresses, a desk... but there was a weak point, little wedge between two pieces of furniture. She slowly creeped her way into position, using her goggles to coordinate the shot juuust so. The dumbass Charybdis didn't move at all. C'mon, girlfriend. You're like an honorary pole sister to me. I know that's not a special ranking to you, but it is to me. This is just a disappointing showing. You're practically asking for me to blow your brains out, at this point.
Ah well. She'd given her a chance! If she hadn't shot, Jinx wouldn't have to do this!
She squatted, aimed the rifle just so, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet punched clean through the wall, impacting the bitch's exerter field directly. In the tiniest fraction of a second, it was followed up by the laser barrel, which promptly drove pulse after pulse of high intensity energy through the exerter field, cracking it and then continuing straight through, melting the delicate electronics inside the armor itself. The cockroach went blind as the laser ricochet blinded it, though since she was shooting through a hole in the wall, none of the ricochet came back to her. Another fraction of a second later, another bullet impacted the woman's chest.
With the amount of juice she'd just shot downrange - the heat was boiling off the gun, and it felt like a roaring flame was a couple feet from her stomach - there was no chance the Charybdis had survived. No sense in letting that sort of thing make her stupid, though: she brought the blinding drone around next, creeping into the room from above. There was no motion from the Charybdis, though the woman in question was an EM, so it's not like she needed to breathe, nor like she'd drop the gun because her muscles went slack.
The drone lowered itself towards the Charybdis, and neatly blinded the body in both eyes. With a casual movement, she saw she'd torn through the armor and that the EM chip was cooked too.
Mess with the best, die like the rest. She set her little blinding drone to checking the room for any cameras, even as she shifted her own physical position, moving a few feet to one side. None of the cameras had shown Olivia moving out, but she was definitely going to be extra angry if the bitch had managed to fuck off, yet left a perfectly nice Charybdis to get gibbed.
A shot rang out in the room, and simultaneously, the drone went down.
Jinx smiled. The drone had been blindsided, but that meant that Olivia really was in there. She waited in patient silence, even going so far as to hold her breath, trying to get any hint of Olivia's exact position by sound.
She used her gun finally cooling off as a sign to move, creeping towards the doorway agonizingly slowly, making sure not to make the slightest sound as she almost floated across the ground. Her breathing was slow to make it quiet; the air felt stagnant as her lungs strained to make do with less, while she listened carefully.
She heard Olivia move at that point, and in only a fraction of a second, she could tell what sort of movement it was - away. Away meant explosives. Jinx scrambled back, diving for the ground, and the grenade went off behind her. It exploded so fast it was either inertia armed or else manually blew its load, but it did even less damage to Jinx than the shrapnel had. She rolled onto her back in record time, bringing the gun to bear, and Olivia appeared in the doorway, her own gun at the ready. It came down to the minutest fraction of a second.
Unfortunately for Olivia, Jinx had superhuman reaction times, and the laser beam moved at the speed of light as it drilled a hole in her forehead. She was still holding her gun as she collided with the far wall, but it clattered out of her hand as she lost all self control.
Jinx let out a long breath, rising to her feet. A quick visual once-over confirmed that it was Olivia, not some reskinned Keter or fake body like Jinx had used, and she considered going into the apartment to do a clean sweep, but honestly...
Why bother? She was here to kill Olivia, and Olivia was dead. Going in just risked getting blasted away by some other dipshit in there; Enforcers would probably come around soon, and hallways had two exits while rooms had only one. She decided to make like a banana and split.
* * *
Vivi stared at the door in front of her. Maybe she should have sought refuge with somebody else - she did know other people on the station - but, well, she was a very particular sort of person. She quite literally wouldn't exist if she was a different sort of person.
And the sort of person she was, was the sort of person who used sex to cope with fear, anxiety, sorrow, and every other negative emotion. She did have a mostly-positive mood as a baseline, but she wasn't immune to feeling bad if, say, her beloved mistress had decided to get in a shootout with a superpowered psycho, and was quite possibly already dead or dying. Olivia had sent her off and told her that she'd be called back if she won... she didn't know how long it would take for Olivia and Jinx to confront one another, but...
She loved her Mistress. She knew Sombra was an incredibly capable hacker and tech geek. She knew Sombra even had some paramilitary experience, dealing with cartels back in Mexico in her youth - but she wasn't exactly special forces.
The Charybdis did give her hope on that front. She gave a quiet little prayer that her fork would protect her Mistress.
Then, she knocked on the door to Max's apartment. "Max? It's Vivi. I'd... well..." The door slid open as she stumbled over her words, and she let out a soft breath as his handsome face came back into view.
"Hi, Vivi," he said. "Does your mistress know you're here? I don't, uh, want you to cheat or anything. Olivia seemed nice, when I met her."
She gave a wan smile at that last bit. Max really saw the good in people. It was part of what made him so attractive. "More or less. She knows I'm out having sex. I really need sex right now," she told him. She reached for his hand. "Please," she breathed, guiding his hand up to her throat. "Make it rough and vicious. I need you to brutalize me. Step on my face, call me every mean name you can think of. Treat me so badly any other girl would cry and beg for mercy. Make me forget about being anything other than a sex toy."
He stared at her, and his fingers tightened around her throat - and he dragged her into his room.
Next Chapter
Previous Chapter
Jinx was in her workshop, idly rolling a ball bearing on the table as she imagined various potential designs. Sometimes she wished she was on a rockball, just because then she could make stuff that was big - in the tight confines of Zaun, there just wasn't the space for anything really fun, like a tank or an aircraft. Only teeny tiny drones.
Don't get her wrong, she still liked teeny-tiny drones - especially when they exploded - but there was more to life than that.
Her phone buzzed. Naomi. She answered the call with her AR. "What's up, sister-wife?"
"Excuse me?" Naomi asked, her voice sharp.
"Sister-wife. Should it be sister-breeder? Breeding buddy? That sounds pretty good. Buddy's a little too male though... breeding sister? Breeding gal pal?" Naomi was surprisingly uninterested in interrupting her running off on a random tangent. "Anyway, pole sister seems inadequate when you both got knocked up by the same dude. What's up, my fellow MMLF?"
"I'm afraid to ask."
"Mother Max Loves Fucking, duh," she said, a grin on her lips. "Seriously. You must've called for a reason, right?"
"Yes, I just..." Naomi sighed loudly on the other end of the line. "You're really pregnant?"
"Yes, I am really pregnant." She popped her lips as she idly tossed the ball bearing into the air, catching it with her foot, clenching it between her big toe and the next one over. Index toe? She actually didn't know the name. "Duh. Why would I lie about that?"
"I don't know."
"Oh, you know, mommy-twin," Jinx said with a grin. "You're the one who got me dragged over for a threesome, remember? Max's dick is the best. Objectively. Seems like the kind of guy who's not quick to abandon the mother of his children, too."
"There's more to a relationship than sex."
"Yeah, and he's a nice sweet boy toy in addition to having a megadick that makes your brain ooze out of your cunt. Smart, too. 'parently Zaun's sitting on some mega-cool archaeology site. Did he mention that to you?"
"I don't remember any details, but I think so."
"Yorp. So, smart, sweet, prestigious, nice, gonna be rich, juuuust got done with his PhD so he's dateable but there's probably no hidden downsides, fucks like a god. So, that's why I would pretend to be pregnant. Not that I did."
"Explain that bit about the PhD?"
"Sheesh. Didn't you call me for a reason besides explaining every little thing?" Jinx tsked.
"I was confirming you were pregnant."
"I could just lie again. Are you talking around asking me if I want another threesome? I can do one whenever. Betcha he'd have a hard time saying no if two hot-to-trot babes showed up at his door."
"The PhD," Naomi repeated.
"Right. So, problem with dating older guys - well, you should know this, but... over time, the good guys get taken, right? Guy finds his special someone, they get married. Could happen at 20, 24, 27, whatever. Every year, the number of good guys in that age group declines. The shitty guys, though, they keep dating, right? They get married, but then divorced, 'cause they smack their wife around, or cheat, or whatever. Or they can't even convince a chick to marry them, which is saying something, because the same logic applies to shitty gals. The older a guy is, the more you need an explanation why he's not already taken - and a PhD is a great explanation. No time to date when you're working on your thesis. He's now stuck on a shitty little middle-o-nowhere station with a population of like, eighty k? Best time to put a ring on it, Naomi. Never gonna get better."
"I'm not interested in getting married right now. I have something I have to do."
"Yeah? While pregnant, even?"
"Yes. While pregnant."
"Must be real important."
"It is."
Jinx huffed. "I answer all your questions, and you don't answer mine? So mean. I feel hurt. I thought we were close. Pole sisters is one thing, but the sacred bond of getting pregnant by the same guy during the same orgy? That's a bond so few women have."
"You didn't ask a question."
"Fine, what's up with you?"
"You know what - I have to go. Ask me in person when we next see each other," Naomi said, then hung up.
Weird response.
Well, they'd see each other again, next threesome.
Hm. She pulled the ball bearing out from between her toes as she thought it over. Could she make a sex toy to outdo all other sex toys?
No, wait. That already existed, and his name was Max.
* * *
Olivia hung up on Jinx. Her Naomi voicechange mod had worked. There was no sign that the other woman had any suspicions, and she'd successfully managed to inject the worm over the course of the call without any apparent response from Jinx herself. It wasn't hard at all to keep the idiot babbling - she really liked the sound of her own voice.
Now she had access to Jinx's AR, and it was time to work out how to kill the bitch. Right now, she was alone in some kind of workshop - but Olivia had no real idea of the layout of the surrounding area, since she'd only just started watching. She set her computer to record, and set to work finding more data about Jinx via her AR.
...it took about two seconds for her to actually out-loud gasp at what was hooked into Jinx's AR. She had to double and triple check, flicking through subsystem after subsystem, but no, it wasn't some funny labeling scheme. Jinx had root access to what looked like virtually every single camera on the entire station - though not the ones that Charybdis had installed in the outside hallway. She didn't just have root access, she'd also used that access to install a program that automatically edited her out of video feeds, replacing her with one of several dozen replacement models or just scrubbing her altogether.
In other words, every single CCTV auto-purged her. It was actually insane. It couldn't even be that good of a disguise, since the way it was set up, at least some of the time, she would appear as a white guy on one camera and an Asian girl on the next, at the exact same time. Anybody cross-referencing them would notice something was up immediately.
Which - along with the root access itself - meant it was basically dead certain the bitch had connections in the local government. There was no way a hack this blatant could go undetected for longer than, like, a week. Olivia had found this shit within minutes, and yeah, she was better than your average code jockey, but come on. It was so obvious she was pretty sure that even somebody with zero technical skills might be able to find it eventually.
None of that really changed any of Olivia's plans. She'd watch Jinx, wait for her to be alone, and then... she glanced to one side.
The Keter of her was a spare, meant for Vivi if something happened. Olivia would have to buy a new one, because she'd cracked it open and rearranged the guts. Where an EM chip should go, she'd added remote access, as well as a copious amount of plastic explosives. It was standing upright, wearing one of Vivi's virgin killer sweaters, a blank, neutral expression worn - though, for Vivi, that tended to look like she was smiling just a smidge. The opposite of resting bitch face.
She turned her attention back to her monitors. Right now, she could see everything Jinx did through her AR. She'd learn the bitch's patterns, and then Vivi would 'stumble' upon her, and...
* * *
"Oh, Jinx!" Jinx immediately recognized the voice, pausing her walk to spin around and face the other woman. Vivi. She looked surprisingly not-pissed, but then, Vivi wasn't very neurotic.
"Yo." Turns out that it's awkward talking to your pole-sister nine days after you point a gun at her girlfriend. Who knew?
"I'm surprised to see you here," Vivi said, approaching her slowly. "I heard from Naomi that you're pregnant - can I feel the bump?"
Something was off about Vivi's movements, and Jinx casually walked backwards a few steps to keep her distance. She checked her AR, and nobody else was around ready to take a shot or anything, so it was Vivi? Vivi could kill, the Charybdis were proof of that, but while something was 'off' about Vivi's movements, it wasn't emotional. "No bump yet. She's pregnant too, so..." Alarm bells were ringing, so Jinx took out her gun. "Alright, stop walking towards me," she said, pointing the gun at Vivi's torso. "Something's fucky."
Vivi's expression flickered through emotions as she raised her hands up. "Sorry? Jinx, I'm not angry. I know Olivia started things, sending those guys after Max." There was definitely something wrong with how Vivi was moving. It was more than just her being awkward or scared. Your basic instincts are programmed to notice when people don't move right, it's a natural defense mechanism against ebola and shit, and right now, Vivi wasn't moving right. "I thought that you had resolved things? If you don't feel like you have, I can just go."
"Guilt trip. Nice." She wasn't actually going, after all. "Take two steps back."
Ah, that's it. Vivi moved to obey, but it took the wrong amount of time. Her face looked right, her words sounded right, her body moved right - just too slow.
Latency. There was a trace of lag in her reactions, like she was getting everything a fraction of a second late. "Something wrong with your chip?"
Vivi tilted her head to one side, but once again, the reaction took longer than it should have. "I don't think so? Why do you ask?" She glanced down at her torso. Those movements there were fluid and immediate, since they all chained on one another. Vivi poked herself.
Yeah. Jinx knew what was going on. She shot the Vivi body's leg off, and the thing tumbled to the ground. It just hit the ground, facefirst - the hands didn't manage to respond in time to keep herself from faceplanting. Jinx herself took quite a few steps backwards, checking her AR. "I warned you, Liv. One act of sisterly mercy, that's all you get, and you blew it with this?"
"I don't understand."
"It's a fucking remote access chip, do you think I can't tell when I'm not talking to a person?" In fairness, most people probably couldn't, but c'mon. Jinx had mentioned her extra neurons, hadn't she? "You're even dumber than you look. Should've just let your brains dribble out of your cunt and become Max's personal bangmaid or something. Everybody would be happy that way, but nooooo. You had to go and do this," she said, letting out a long-suffering sigh. She pointed her gun at the Vivi's head, and blew that away too, a spray of electronics splashing around, the fungoid pseudoflesh coating her body splattering in an ugly way.
"I can't see. Jinx, I'm not-"
"Oh my God, you're found out, this is so fucking boring, these are your last words to your nemesis, and that's all you got?" She fired again, this time aiming for the cavity where Vivi's EM chip should be - and the Vivi promptly exploded, which did surprise her. She was far enough away that it felt more like a loose wave of heat and force. Except for a few lacerations and minor stabs from various bits of the Keter. "Motherfuck. Shrapnel, fuckin', bitch," she spat out, gritting her teeth.
* * *
Olivia could admit the assassination attempt had gone poorly - but she was still hooked into Jinx's AR, so she could watch the bitch's every move. She had headed back to her workshop, ducking and weaving through traps that Olivia tried her best to categorize, wrapping up the various cuts with bandages and gauze before finally rummaging through drawers to pull out a neat little box which contained what looked like a cockroach.
"Now, fly, my pretty, fly," she declared, cackling a little as the thing took flight - and her AR provided picture-in-picture of the drone flying off. With one hand, Jinx effortlessly controlled its flight. If Olivia hadn't seen it through Jinx's eyes, she probably would have assumed the thing was a genuine insect. There weren't many out in space, but they sometimes managed to crawl through the cracks. The thing flew and crawled all the way over to the hallway outside Olivia's apartment, at which point it began to flutter back and forth, rotating through the sky with a lazy, performative movement.
Olivia rolled her chair out of her office. "There's a bug drone out there," Olivia said to the Charybdis. "It looks like a cockroach."
"Mm." Charybdis's eyes tilted to one side as she presumably consulted her own camera access. "I see it. I can probably go stomp on it if you want, but it won't be able to open the door. How do you know it's a drone?"
Fuck. Right. She definitely didn't want Jinx to know she had AR access. "Forget it. If you see a chance to make it look natural, go crush it."
She returned to monitoring Jinx, who was now reviewing the drone footage - as well as the past several days of footage from outside Olivia's apartment, pausing on the Charybdis and humming, then zooming in.
"Pain in my fuckin' ass," Jinx muttered. "That's gotta be a Charybdis, who else would paint a bunny on their exerter armor? Seriously, I gotta ask pops for some exerter armor of my own." She huffed and then rolled her chair over to the table.
* * *
Exerters are an advanced form of science humanity copied off the Yoke. They produce a field which mostly accomplishes the function of preventing the movement of fermions (you know, protons, neutrons, electrons - the building blocks of matter) through it. To turn that description into something intuitive, just imagine you can make a physical object of any arbitrary size and shape, which is completely weightless and almost-invisible.
Almost is a critical part of that equation there. The field produced by an exerter is almost invisible; which is to say, they do interact with photons (light), just much less than with fermions. That means a laser can penetrate an exerter-produced shield far easier than an equivalently-lethal bullet. Lucky thing for humanity, too - if exerters had been as good against laser weapons as against kinetic ones, Final State soldiers would have been basically invincible during the First Contact War, when they had all the tech advantage.
The main problem with using a laser weapon as a personal firearm in normal circumstances is that your eye lenses are weak shit, and any laser weapon capable of doing appreciable damage to a person by drilling a hole through them, is also going to render you permanently blind on the ricochet. The same basic logic applies to most ordinary cameras, and so on. They also have pretty shit penetrative power compared to a bullet - they do much better against soft materials than against hard ones. (Luckily, humans are mostly made out of soft materials.)
That's why Jinx wasn't just putting together a laser weapon to deal with the Charybdis, but a traditional firearm too. Or, really, a combination laser weapon/firearm. The biggest engineering challenge was making it swap back and forth from laser to bullet without needing to shift your aim - you sure weren't putting a bullet down the optic channel of your laser weapon, after all. She had to tweak the code like ten times before she finally got it nice and accurate.
Once she was satisfied with the weapon, she made a nice little drone with a shitty little exerter that - while definitely not enough to stop a bullet, even while overclocked - could let it float through the air right down the hallway, burning out every single camera that the Charybdis had set up with nice itty-bitty laser pulses. It wasn't even hard to program the targeting.
Once that was done, she set about with her pièce de résistance: a fake Jinx. It was a real art piece, in her humble opinion: looking at it laying there, you'd probably even imagine Jinx was actually dead, if it wasn't for her being right on top of it. It was even filled up with several liters of blood and ballistic gel, so it'd still give the impression of being her. The actual point, of course, was the eyeballs: twin cybernetic eyes that she could see through.
The plan was pretty simple, and brilliant, if Jinx did say so herself (she did, though not aloud): she'd burn out all the cameras, then wave the fake Jinx in the doorway to get shot by the Charybdis. At that point, she'd drop the Jinx, faking death, and use its eyes to aim through the wall and blow the Charybdis away. Simple, and genius.
The last thing she needed was something suitable for the ricochet on a laser weapon. Yeah, military grade optics were designed to survive it, but she didn't have any military grade optics on her, now did she? Instead, she came up with a far more ingenious (and, perhaps more importantly, cheap) mechanism: eight different cameras, which would shutter and cycle as they got blinded by the laser. So, she'd have eight shots with the laser before she was flying blind.
It did mean she'd have to take off her AR, but she was going to be playing a much more fun game than Plush Demon Hunter anyway.
* * *
Charybdis had arranged most of the furniture in Olivia's apartment into a makeshift fort. The Vivi had been sent away, and Olivia had told her everything she'd seen from 'Jinx,' the would-be assassin. The fake body with cyber eyes was presumably going to be used for targeting; the drone would blind her cameras right before the woman of the hour arrived; and the rifle didn't need any explanation. A mattress or a sofa would make for perfectly good protection against bullets and laser pulses, though she couldn't shake the feeling that her ass was exposed - and not in a good way.
Now it was just a matter of waiting. The worst part of being a bodyguard.
When this was done, she was going to need Olivia to step on her face or something. She'd have been jittering with the excess energy, if the Camniel 3-A let you do that. She took a few simulated deep breaths, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Goddamn, was it ever lucky that EM platforms didn't get uncomfortable from holding the same position for an extended period.
She kept waiting, lying prone, firearm aimed at the doorway, the barrel poking out just barely between mattresses.
Her patience was rewarded, though. The cameras went down in rapid sequence, as the drone blinded them one by one. She remained stock still, just patiently staring at the doorway. A good solid minute passed, and then. "Howdy, Liv, my least-dearest pole-sister! To the Charybdis, I'm gonna kill you if you shoot me, just so you know. If you don't, we can become great friends, though! I can even introduce you to Max! He is literally the best ever at sex. Well - I'm coming out, now!"
The door slid open, and the dummy Jinx's head slipped around the corner, alongside a firearm. Charybdis shot it right in the head, and Jinx just dropped the thing, with it hitting the ground like a wet sack of potatoes. She took two more shots, blowing out both its eyes, and leaving Jinx blind.
* * *
Fucking thorough, ain'tcha, bitch? Jinx scowled as she lost the feed from the bot. She'd only gotten a fraction of a second of visual on the Charybdis, which meant she didn't have enough data to find a good angle. She couldn't believe she was being held back by a glorified pillow fort. Were they gonna have a sleepover next?
Jinx didn't say or do anything herself, just remaining stock still in the hallway - maybe the bitch would come out - but she did still have two drones. She directed the cockroach to crawl along the edge of the door frame, and then poke its head just-barely in from the corner. Its antennae were slicked back and still as it got into position, and the Charybdis didn't notice, remaining still on the floor.
With the cockroach drone in position, Jinx now had a great visual of the whole room. Charybdis was blocked by an overturned sofa, two mattresses, a desk... but there was a weak point, little wedge between two pieces of furniture. She slowly creeped her way into position, using her goggles to coordinate the shot juuust so. The dumbass Charybdis didn't move at all. C'mon, girlfriend. You're like an honorary pole sister to me. I know that's not a special ranking to you, but it is to me. This is just a disappointing showing. You're practically asking for me to blow your brains out, at this point.
Ah well. She'd given her a chance! If she hadn't shot, Jinx wouldn't have to do this!
She squatted, aimed the rifle just so, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet punched clean through the wall, impacting the bitch's exerter field directly. In the tiniest fraction of a second, it was followed up by the laser barrel, which promptly drove pulse after pulse of high intensity energy through the exerter field, cracking it and then continuing straight through, melting the delicate electronics inside the armor itself. The cockroach went blind as the laser ricochet blinded it, though since she was shooting through a hole in the wall, none of the ricochet came back to her. Another fraction of a second later, another bullet impacted the woman's chest.
With the amount of juice she'd just shot downrange - the heat was boiling off the gun, and it felt like a roaring flame was a couple feet from her stomach - there was no chance the Charybdis had survived. No sense in letting that sort of thing make her stupid, though: she brought the blinding drone around next, creeping into the room from above. There was no motion from the Charybdis, though the woman in question was an EM, so it's not like she needed to breathe, nor like she'd drop the gun because her muscles went slack.
The drone lowered itself towards the Charybdis, and neatly blinded the body in both eyes. With a casual movement, she saw she'd torn through the armor and that the EM chip was cooked too.
Mess with the best, die like the rest. She set her little blinding drone to checking the room for any cameras, even as she shifted her own physical position, moving a few feet to one side. None of the cameras had shown Olivia moving out, but she was definitely going to be extra angry if the bitch had managed to fuck off, yet left a perfectly nice Charybdis to get gibbed.
A shot rang out in the room, and simultaneously, the drone went down.
Jinx smiled. The drone had been blindsided, but that meant that Olivia really was in there. She waited in patient silence, even going so far as to hold her breath, trying to get any hint of Olivia's exact position by sound.
She used her gun finally cooling off as a sign to move, creeping towards the doorway agonizingly slowly, making sure not to make the slightest sound as she almost floated across the ground. Her breathing was slow to make it quiet; the air felt stagnant as her lungs strained to make do with less, while she listened carefully.
She heard Olivia move at that point, and in only a fraction of a second, she could tell what sort of movement it was - away. Away meant explosives. Jinx scrambled back, diving for the ground, and the grenade went off behind her. It exploded so fast it was either inertia armed or else manually blew its load, but it did even less damage to Jinx than the shrapnel had. She rolled onto her back in record time, bringing the gun to bear, and Olivia appeared in the doorway, her own gun at the ready. It came down to the minutest fraction of a second.
Unfortunately for Olivia, Jinx had superhuman reaction times, and the laser beam moved at the speed of light as it drilled a hole in her forehead. She was still holding her gun as she collided with the far wall, but it clattered out of her hand as she lost all self control.
Jinx let out a long breath, rising to her feet. A quick visual once-over confirmed that it was Olivia, not some reskinned Keter or fake body like Jinx had used, and she considered going into the apartment to do a clean sweep, but honestly...
Why bother? She was here to kill Olivia, and Olivia was dead. Going in just risked getting blasted away by some other dipshit in there; Enforcers would probably come around soon, and hallways had two exits while rooms had only one. She decided to make like a banana and split.
* * *
Vivi stared at the door in front of her. Maybe she should have sought refuge with somebody else - she did know other people on the station - but, well, she was a very particular sort of person. She quite literally wouldn't exist if she was a different sort of person.
And the sort of person she was, was the sort of person who used sex to cope with fear, anxiety, sorrow, and every other negative emotion. She did have a mostly-positive mood as a baseline, but she wasn't immune to feeling bad if, say, her beloved mistress had decided to get in a shootout with a superpowered psycho, and was quite possibly already dead or dying. Olivia had sent her off and told her that she'd be called back if she won... she didn't know how long it would take for Olivia and Jinx to confront one another, but...
She loved her Mistress. She knew Sombra was an incredibly capable hacker and tech geek. She knew Sombra even had some paramilitary experience, dealing with cartels back in Mexico in her youth - but she wasn't exactly special forces.
The Charybdis did give her hope on that front. She gave a quiet little prayer that her fork would protect her Mistress.
Then, she knocked on the door to Max's apartment. "Max? It's Vivi. I'd... well..." The door slid open as she stumbled over her words, and she let out a soft breath as his handsome face came back into view.
"Hi, Vivi," he said. "Does your mistress know you're here? I don't, uh, want you to cheat or anything. Olivia seemed nice, when I met her."
She gave a wan smile at that last bit. Max really saw the good in people. It was part of what made him so attractive. "More or less. She knows I'm out having sex. I really need sex right now," she told him. She reached for his hand. "Please," she breathed, guiding his hand up to her throat. "Make it rough and vicious. I need you to brutalize me. Step on my face, call me every mean name you can think of. Treat me so badly any other girl would cry and beg for mercy. Make me forget about being anything other than a sex toy."
He stared at her, and his fingers tightened around her throat - and he dragged her into his room.
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