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A continuity one to be specific. You might spot traces of it if I fucked up, and I don't want to say here in case.\n\nBecause really, if I did fuck up in such a way it'd be interesting to see who spots it.\n\nAnyways, enjoy Simon maybe coming out of his shell a bit.", "description_bbcode_parsed": "Just as a heads up, I made an error when writing these stories and had to go back and fix it. A continuity one to be specific. You might spot traces of it if I fucked up, and I don't want to say here in case.

Because really, if I did fuck up in such a way it'd be interesting to see who spots it.

Anyways, enjoy Simon maybe coming out of his shell a bit.", "writing": "Leashed Chapter 8: Being Social\nBy TerraMGP\n\n\t“This is your time to pay! This is your judgment day! We’ve mad a sacrifice and now we get to take your life! We shoot without a gun. We’ll take on anyone! It’s really nothing new, it’s just a thing we like to do!”\n\n\tThe chipmunk’s ears twitched. The implanted sound links tweaking his eardrums just right. He held up his pistols, arms outstretched in a rough cruciform as he leaned forwards. The nothingness before the skyscraper rushed passed him. Arms outstretched in a cruciform while a pistol was gripped firmly in each hand. Silky strands of fiber-optic headfur fluttered in the near terminal velocity wind along with the tails of his graphitie’d jacket. \n\n\tBelow were the buzzing red and blue lights of corpsec. Dozens of guns pointing up at him as he fell. The young runner could practically feel the laser dots scrambling to center on him and the zoom of high powered optic visors trying to latch on to a moving target without putting anyone in the building’s upper levels at risk. After all, those were the ones which mattered.\n\n\tThe world paused for a second. His eyes fixed on the nearest corpsec car. A trivial little bit of rushing thought and the speakers below were blaring the same music humming in his ears. A split second later the munk shifted his body. One arm pointed towards the nearest building. The chrome-lined mat green of the cybernetic lower limb barked a loud bang and a cable streaked off into its target. Ground rushing towards him, Glitterboy pulled his legs up and felt the satisfying click of his lower cyber-legs deploying a pair of sick LED-enhanced rollerblades. The cable swung him towards the nearby modern art sculpture that dominated the main skyscraper’s center plaza. The sides of those blades connected and he began to shred down the curving pipe like railing. Hopping along the twisted web of metal and feeling the flint-laced composites of his wheels spray sparks out behind him.\n\n\tThe cable detached and the gun bunny munk boy began to unload. He hopped from one meaningless rail to the next while beginning to unload. Armor piercing rounds and explosive rounds hitting targets near indiscriminately. There was no room for tactics or strategy in this dojo!\n\n\tDry magazines began to rack up. Two, four, then six gone. By that point though Glitterboy had made his way near the bottom and perched on the head of the giant eagle which held up the abstract strands of pipe that composed the statue. His left arm twitched, convulsed, and then the hand slipped down to reveal a long and strange looking barrel with a large lens in the middle. A powerful green laser beam snapped from it and cut a swath of lethal light along the line of corpo thugs. His hack-inserted song about ‘party-party-party’-ing joined by mad femboy cackles while he emptied the remainder of his emergency gun into his opponents.\n\n\t“Frag yeah! Come on boys! I can take all of you… and I can beat you inna fight, too!” With the gun dry the forearm clicked back to normal and the skates popped back in to the converse-styled lower cyber legs. Glitterboy leapt into the fray with his blade ready to cut things up!\n\n--------------------\n\n\tGretchen was grumpy. She always seemed grumpy. It felt odd considering she was the one who pestered him to come out here. At first he wasn‘t going to. A stranger more or less demands you go to a game shop with her and the obvious thing to do is say no. Except he felt guilty. Someone pestering him that much had to be terribly lonely. Besides, edging might work a bit better with a bit of recursion. That‘s what reddit kept saying. Why not give it a try?\n\n\tSo now here he sat. Stuck beside a prickly girl who had somehow managed to turn off the entire shop to her very presence. Any attempt to approach their table was met with a hard glare. It was odd. Sure, he wasn‘t exactly social either but at least Simon knew that if you wanted people to go away you were better off being polite. You just had to roll with it. Let them wash over you.\n\n\tGretchen didn‘t seem to understand that. Or maybe she didn‘t care. One or two people actually tried to approach them and ask about things. Mostly people looking to trade. He‘d quickly learned to pity those people. The way she opened up on them was staggering to say the least. Shrill drones of hushed aggression that might be considered words if one spent the time to string them together.\n\n\t“Jeeze“ She finally sighed after the third person was driven off. “You‘d think these people never saw a girl opening boosters before. At least let me figure out my deck before trying to vulture though the rares. Not like I asked any of them to come at me anyways.”\n\n\tSimon sighed and offered a smile. It was hard to force this time. Not because he disliked her more than most people he had to deal with. If anything he somehow hated her less. At least she seemed honest. Crazy, but honest.\n\n\t“You know you probably could have taken these home if you didn‘t want to trade yet.” he offered\n\n\tThat made her muzzle wrinkle in something that might have been anger or disgust. He wasn‘t sure, and he wasn‘t trying to figure it out. He was just trying to survive this. Sitting there and picking though the cards she hadn’t cordoned off. Supposedly the reason she’d dragged him out here. Making his magic deck into something viable. Because apparently ‘commander’ decks weren’t useful for whatever format they were doing. God he didn’t even know what was going on anymore.\n\n\t“I‘m not taking you home with me. Master and I live in the same house. That‘s obviously not ok.” She sighed “I swear I knew I should have just stayed home today.”\n\n\t“Ok, so if you don’t want to be here, then why are you here?” Simon sighed. He gave the girl the side-eye. Gretchen might have seen it. If she did, she didn’t seem to care. Bristly and prickly were her default personality traits, it would seem. On the flip side he had to admire the way she gently worked those cards out of their binder pages using nothing but her stubby digger claws.\n\n\tEventually Gretchen glanced towards him and narrowed her eyes a bit more. “Two reasons.” She muttered “First of all I need you. If I’m going to beat that bitch then I need to be sure I can reach her. If you’re on my side that’s another deck I can help work on to combat whatever she has, and another person on my side to take up spots at FNM.”\n\n\tSimon narrowed his eyes and whimpered a bit “I uh, I never agreed to ‘any’ of that. But ok…” he looked down at the handful of packs she’d bought for him. As far as he knew, she didn’t have a job. It wasn’t like he as loaded, and he had just spent way more than he should have on things. Twice. Still a near stranger buying him things felt profoundly awkward.\n\n\t“Hey” Gretchen snapped, pulling him from his distraction “What the hell are you even doing? You can’t just throw a third color in your deck!”\n\n\t“You can’t?” Simon blinked\n\n\tA loud sigh and a face palm saw Gretchen struggling to stay upright. She glanced at him though a gap in her diggers and folded her ears back “No, you can’t. One color is fine. Two colors are fine. Three is right out.”\n\n\t“So what” he sighed “Is there some rule about it? Because I’m pretty sure I saw someone doing that the last time you dragged me into this.”\n\n\t“It’s not a rule” She corrected quickly, pushing a pair of lands from the booster packs up together. “it’s statistics. Most things will be one or two colors. You need to have that mana available. Cards that provide more than one type usually have a drawback and you can only have a few of each in your deck, so…”\n\n\t“Sweet Jesus this whole game is just statistics and resources management” Simon slumped. “God damn it. This is suddenly sounding way too much like my job.”\n\n\t“Good” Gretchen grumped. “Then you should be able to figure it out fast. Ok. Kodama of the west tree. Do I put equip cards in my deck to use this…”\n\n\t“So what’s the other one?” Simon himself was a bit shocked as he heard the words leave his lips.\n\n\tGretchen startled and glanced up from the small pile of packs she was about to open. Along with the few he’d bought for him, she’d gotten two big boxes right off of the shelf. Both with different art and presumably of different sets. He didn’t know this woman very well and yet Simon felt fairly sure that this had been some kind of spite buying. The financial professional in him screamed internally at the idea of some poor college girl dumping a months worth of food out on cardboard like this. Meanwhile Gretchen seemed far more confused by him, staring at Simon and quirking a brow. \n\n\t“What’s the second what?” she muttered\n\n\t“Reason” He sighed “You said there were two reasons for all of this. What’s the second one?”\n\n\tGretchen slumped forwards once more and bristled. Her head lowered and shoulders poked up. Once again it was the kind of thing he expected to see from a hedgehog or porcupine. This wasn’t helped by the odd brushing motion she reflexively did over her muzzle. Something that was apparently starting to become far more common.\n\n\t“I… Mistress said I should” She sighed. “She said it would probably be healthy for me to make friends with people besides her and Master.” Gretchen shifted and leaned in, eyes narrowed and nose wrinkling with barely contained contempt “That doesn’t mean we’re friends, mind you. I just want to please Mistress. I absolutely have other friends besides my owners. I mean there’s Ozzy, kinda. And Willa… I guess. Esme has been kind of nice to me, too.” \n\n\tNone of those names meant anything to Simon. He wasn’t quite sure if this girl had any idea of that. She almost seemed to be in her own little world. It was tempting to bring up any number of factors here. Like the fact that he had never in fact offered to be her friend. Or that she’d spent more money on him than he had ever spent on dates in high school.\n\n\tOk, well, date. But still.\n\n\t“Well” Simon finally sighed “I guess that’s at least better than you thinking I’m some stalker.”\n\n\t“I never said I stopped suspecting you” The mole muttered “That’s probably reason three, if there is one. If I can keep you around and keep an eye on you then I’ll know it if you try anything with Master. Now you owe me. You’re accountable.” The gesture Gretchen made was something that smacked of something so often seen in anime and manga. An attempt to push her glasses up her muzzle in a way that made her seem intelligent and in control. \n\n\tShe ‘was’ smart. Even Simon could tell that. The motion did nothing to affirm it, though. Quite the opposite. She seemed like little more than a wrecking ball in a grey hoodie ready to bowl him over for any imagined slight. On one level Simon knew full well there was nothing functional she could do to him. At most he might end up enduring a bit of a scratch from those admittedly nasty diggers of hers. \n\n\tThat wasn’t what made him nervous around her though. It was hard to even put his finger on what it was. All of her actions made sense, but only when he twisted his own brain around enough to imagine, well, a stalker. This was only the second Friday he’d spent around Gretchen and already Simon was imagining her sitting in a bedroom full of broken possessions sitting innocently on the bed holding up her phone to display the unread text she’d attempted to send. Also the kind of girl who likely never would have noticed that the text itself didn’t send.\n\n\tThere ‘was’ something cute to that. Some romanticism. You had to be profoundly fucked up to see it. Fortunately Simon was very much that. He chuckled softly and turned his attention back to the task at hand, fumbling though the cards and trying to get a handle on what each one of them did.\n\n\t“So what about you?” She sighed. Gretchen had turned her attention back to the cards and was popping the packs open the way some rich person might with expensive prosecco, or whatever it was that those people did. Simon sure as hell didn’t know about the rappers and pop stars.\n\n\t“What about me what?” he quirked his brow just a bit\n\n\t“Well, why did you show up?” Gretchen wrinkled her nose and huffed at what was probably a bad pack. “Here. I don’t need any stupid machine rat ninja people. None of them are going to help my deck.” She slid the card over to his side of the folding table. A few moments later Simon found her setting whole piles of sorted-though cards over there as well. Another clear frustration response that caused him to recoil and just passively accept the ‘gifts’ lest he incur her wrath.\n\n\t“I uh, I guess I don’t know.” He finally sighed. “Honestly I was thinking of doing the same thing tonight I do almost every night.”\n\n\t“And what’s that?” Once again Gretchen’s question slipped past any defenses the neophyte accountant might have had. This wasn’t like the office where nobody actually gave a shit. Suddenly the reflex to go limp just left him getting juggled like a rag doll by this beast of a girl. ‘The taming of the Shrew’ came to mind for a moment, even if the play was rather bigoted by modern standards. Against women and shrews in general. \n\n\tBlushing bashfully Simon leaned forwards and gnawed on his lip. His already feminine alto hurt a little. Mostly from his attempts to practice ‘girl voice’. It had gotten better the past few days as he’d given it a bit of a break. Now his whole body was tense and he felt like his vocal chords would shatter if he spoke above a whisper. “I, uh.” he sighed nervously “Gooning, I guess. You know. Edging.”\n\t\n\tEven if they weren’t in a public space he wasn’t sure he would have been able to say it louder. He could feel the girls eyes ripping into him like flensing knives. He didn’t know just what he was feeling but hate was absolutely somewhere in the mix. His voice finally did crack into a passable falsetto as he shrank further in on himself and his leg thumped and bounced nervously.\n\n\tShe snorted. Actual amusement. A first for Simon. He couldn’t recall hearing this girl make any noises unless they were rooted in sex or disgust. Not until that moment. “So what, you can’t edge before work? Or class? Armature.” She snorted. Still contemptuous, but also quite pleased with herself.\n\n\tSimon’s blush grew and he found himself stammering as he pulled the glasses from his face and began cleaning them on his shirt. A gesture more intended to keep from looking at her than anything. “I-It’s not like that. Look I got a new automatic onahole. A-and Mistress gave me some audio files. So I figured I’d use that, and my plug, and kinda see if I could last all day. But to do that right I had to… get… sensiti-”\n\n\tHe could feel it when she turned away. Even without looking. Even without opening his eyes the shift in attention was palpable. Waves of hate drifted from her new ‘friend’ back on to the hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard she’d purchased. Anything that wasn’t black, green, artifact, or land was shoved to the side and it looked for all the world as if she was about ready to knock those piles of ‘unneeded’ cards right off of the table.\n\n\t“Sorry” he finally sighed “I guess it’s not really a topic I should be talking about with ‘friends’ or anything. Is it?”\n\n\t“Let me make ‘one’ thing clear.” Gretchen’s voice was jagged stone jutting up from under Simon. It threatened to consume him. To skewer him like some hapless adventurer in every D&D stereotype he’d heard growing up. “You are not a slave. ‘I’ am the slave. ‘I’ am owned. ‘You’ are a client. You pay Master’s bills. I don’t care if you’re his ‘easy’ day or not.” \n\n\tJust like that her eyes locked his and for a moment Simon felt a primal terror he could not explain. Before he at least had the mercy of being able to look away. The luxury of avoiding her gaze was something his body refused to grant him now. Even if Gretchen was shorter than him. Even if she was a submissive masochist like him, was clearly a terrified little pushover most of the time. In this moment she was a demon. Some creature of myth ready to devour him for daring to trespass on her domain. The fact that Simon’s brain only came up with monsters from video games as an attempt to personify that fact was a pinch of salt in a slowly opening wound. One he only really started to feel once the woman looked away again and huffed.\n\n\t“S-sorry.” he stammered\n\n\t“You should be.” She sighed.\n\n\tOnce again things fell quiet. For his part Simon sorted though the cards that Gretchen continued setting near him and placed those he thought looked cool or might prove useful off to one side. He’d caused enough problems for today. It was only his fear of making things worse socially that kept him from getting up and bolting entirely.\n\n\t“Zinc”\n\n\tThe word cut the quiet like some future katana. Simon only needed one guess to know why that was on his brain.\n\n\t“I’m sorry, what?” he blinked\n\n\t“Zinc” Gretchen repeated. “If you’re looking to up your volume and put on a better show, take zinc. I don’t know how it impacts the taste. A slave shouldn’t actually care about those things. If it tastes bad that just means your owner’s happier. Even a fake slave should be able to figure that out.”\n\n\t“O-oh…” Simon winced and bit the corner of his lip “I uh, I mean I guess that is the end result of what would happen after a few days of waiting. B-but it’s not like the taste matters. I mean I’m not really gay-”\n\n\t“You’d clean it up if ‘she’ told you to?” The mole smiled just a touch at her own question\n\n\tSimon nodded meekly and deflated in defeat.\n\n\tThe mole girl’s grin grew a bit as she looked at one of her cards, then winced and sighed. “Dang it. Stupid Wrenn girl costs five. But her ability is so good! Ah, screw it. Maybe she‘ll help me. In she goes!” Another pop of a card pack and a new set of cardboard slid into her hands. Each time it did the few parts of Simon not consumed by his own shame and confusion were hit with a pang of second hand regret at the wasted money. “Dare I ask what you were going to do then if you weren’t going to edge?” She sighed “You know, like hobbies and stuff. You said you don’t play the other card game after all.”\n\n\tSimon shrugged and offered her his best smile. It wasn’t a great one. He wasn’t at all trying to hide his fear at this point. “Usually I just try new runs at Cyberpunk 2077. Or take care of Artemis. That’s my pet owl finch. I try to give her at least some attention every day, though. Honestly I’m glad the whole cyberpunk thing is starting to be more of a ‘thing’ socially. I didn’t even know that’s what the genre was called when the game first came out. But once I did I was hooked.”\n\n\t“Guess that’s why you like the new Kawigama cards, huh?” Gretchen’s eyes rolled about as far back in her head as they could.\n\n\t“I did think it was pretty cool” he nodded “Though I also got a couple books from a bookstore recently. You know, the one right above the, ah, ehehe, ‘club’?” he tried to wink. The mole clearly knew what he meant, and also somehow rolled her eyes again even harder than before.\n\n\tThe poor munk slumped his shoulders and shook his head. “I was trying to figure out a character for a tabletop game yesterday. It’s this weird game. Shadowrun? It’s a cyberpunk thing but like, with elves and stuff. I kinda got an idea but uh, But I think the books I got were old.”\n\n\t“Shadowrun, huh?” The mole girl’s face began to brighten and at least some of the hate left her eyes\n\n\t“Y-yeah.” Simon nodded “I could show you if you want. Like I said I’m still learning. But if you like cyberpunk stuff it’s pretty cool. Plus with the magic stuff it kinda feels like this card set.”\n\n\tShe didn’t say anything, but now Gretchen was grinning. A real grin. A sinister grin. Simon already knew he didn’t like that grin.\n\n--------------------\n\n\t“Would you try to check your fire?” A shrill voice shrieked into the team channel. The two men who had once been SINless vagabonds lurched forwards and huffed in rage as their cybernetic limbs hacked whirring saw blades and chromed fists into the cement under the chipmunk’s feet.\n\n\tRather than let the wall collapse under him, the crazed runner did a forward flip and began to unload both of his pistols into the backs of the two half baked cyber-zombies. Four barrels all in a straight line down. Each one barking at the same time when using burst fire. The man who had once been a rather sizable ork took eight explosive rounds into his cyber spine leaving it a smoking husk of metal and composite as he collapsed on the ground. The other, most likely a human in his life before, screamed and whirled around. His right arm split open to reveal a shotgun. Nanomachines bled from the digit as it broke apart. More dangerous than the gun itself based on who they were facing. Fortunately that gun never got a chance to fire. AP rounds bit through the nanite shell and at least once grazed the guns magazine. The limb blew off at the shoulder and fell free to the floor.\n\n\tThe femboy winked, accentuated by the perpetual dusting of blue and green glitter which seemed to follow him and accentuate his movements. The boy winked with his left eye, the one with a similarly glitter dusted black heart scribbled under it, and tossed his long RGB-cycling hair off behind him.\n\n\tAll of the primping and preening unfortunately left him open. The creature that had once been a man charged with saw-arm outstretched. Blood and foam streamed from one side of the canine’s mouth while he hammered his metal feet on the floor.\n\n\tThe blow never landed. A flash of light and the ‘thing’ collapsed into the cement. One clean slice down its back severed every single neural pathway. Even a being born of the worst in magic and cybernetics had no hope of getting up after such a blow.\n\n\t“You know I had him, Dolly.” He pouted. His arm raised up and the sharp spur-blade deploying from out of his lower forearm.\n\n\tHe was looking at the figure which had done the damage. A pale skinned piglet-looking thing dressed in a stereotypical black-and-violet gothic Lolita dress, holding a scythe too big for its body. Only careful observation would allow one to notice the obvious joints and doll-hair. Not that it was made to look real. If anything it would have passed for an antique porcelain doll if it was just sitting in a bedroom. Which was, he realized, probably the idea.\n\n\t“Can it” The same shrill voice came over the comms “We were told to be a distraction, and part of that means we can’t die. Or get infected. Did any of that drek get near you?”\n\n\t“Not even close, ‘DollMistress’.” the bemused contempt in the wild munk runner’s voice was all too much to handle. “Though I guess it is nice knowing your little toys are around to jump in when I need them to.”\n\n\t“Scrubbing them for stray Nanomachines is easier than you, Glitterboy” Dolly huffed. It was simply his runner name, but Glitter basked in how much ire his teammate could muster when she said it.\n\n\t“Too bad you can’t take prep for CFD the way you would for STDs” The femmy munk cooed “But don’t worry. I know you’d be heartbroken if I ended up a headcase. Just means I have to get serious, doesn’t it?” A wicked grin crossed his lips as he held up his arm. The spur retracting and the glowing barrel of his laser pistol snapping into place. Nothing like a bit of heat to burn out an infection, after all.\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "Leashed Chapter 8: Being Social
By TerraMGP

\t“This is your time to pay! This is your judgment day! We’ve mad a sacrifice and now we get to take your life! We shoot without a gun. We’ll take on anyone! It’s really nothing new, it’s just a thing we like to do!”

\tThe chipmunk’s ears twitched. The implanted sound links tweaking his eardrums just right. He held up his pistols, arms outstretched in a rough cruciform as he leaned forwards. The nothingness before the skyscraper rushed passed him. Arms outstretched in a cruciform while a pistol was gripped firmly in each hand. Silky strands of fiber-optic headfur fluttered in the near terminal velocity wind along with the tails of his graphitie’d jacket.

\tBelow were the buzzing red and blue lights of corpsec. Dozens of guns pointing up at him as he fell. The young runner could practically feel the laser dots scrambling to center on him and the zoom of high powered optic visors trying to latch on to a moving target without putting anyone in the building’s upper levels at risk. After all, those were the ones which mattered.

\tThe world paused for a second. His eyes fixed on the nearest corpsec car. A trivial little bit of rushing thought and the speakers below were blaring the same music humming in his ears. A split second later the munk shifted his body. One arm pointed towards the nearest building. The chrome-lined mat green of the cybernetic lower limb barked a loud bang and a cable streaked off into its target. Ground rushing towards him, Glitterboy pulled his legs up and felt the satisfying click of his lower cyber-legs deploying a pair of sick LED-enhanced rollerblades. The cable swung him towards the nearby modern art sculpture that dominated the main skyscraper’s center plaza. The sides of those blades connected and he began to shred down the curving pipe like railing. Hopping along the twisted web of metal and feeling the flint-laced composites of his wheels spray sparks out behind him.

\tThe cable detached and the gun bunny munk boy began to unload. He hopped from one meaningless rail to the next while beginning to unload. Armor piercing rounds and explosive rounds hitting targets near indiscriminately. There was no room for tactics or strategy in this dojo!

\tDry magazines began to rack up. Two, four, then six gone. By that point though Glitterboy had made his way near the bottom and perched on the head of the giant eagle which held up the abstract strands of pipe that composed the statue. His left arm twitched, convulsed, and then the hand slipped down to reveal a long and strange looking barrel with a large lens in the middle. A powerful green laser beam snapped from it and cut a swath of lethal light along the line of corpo thugs. His hack-inserted song about ‘party-party-party’-ing joined by mad femboy cackles while he emptied the remainder of his emergency gun into his opponents.

\t“Frag yeah! Come on boys! I can take all of you… and I can beat you inna fight, too!” With the gun dry the forearm clicked back to normal and the skates popped back in to the converse-styled lower cyber legs. Glitterboy leapt into the fray with his blade ready to cut things up!

--------------------

\tGretchen was grumpy. She always seemed grumpy. It felt odd considering she was the one who pestered him to come out here. At first he wasn‘t going to. A stranger more or less demands you go to a game shop with her and the obvious thing to do is say no. Except he felt guilty. Someone pestering him that much had to be terribly lonely. Besides, edging might work a bit better with a bit of recursion. That‘s what reddit kept saying. Why not give it a try?

\tSo now here he sat. Stuck beside a prickly girl who had somehow managed to turn off the entire shop to her very presence. Any attempt to approach their table was met with a hard glare. It was odd. Sure, he wasn‘t exactly social either but at least Simon knew that if you wanted people to go away you were better off being polite. You just had to roll with it. Let them wash over you.

\tGretchen didn‘t seem to understand that. Or maybe she didn‘t care. One or two people actually tried to approach them and ask about things. Mostly people looking to trade. He‘d quickly learned to pity those people. The way she opened up on them was staggering to say the least. Shrill drones of hushed aggression that might be considered words if one spent the time to string them together.

\t“Jeeze“ She finally sighed after the third person was driven off. “You‘d think these people never saw a girl opening boosters before. At least let me figure out my deck before trying to vulture though the rares. Not like I asked any of them to come at me anyways.”

\tSimon sighed and offered a smile. It was hard to force this time. Not because he disliked her more than most people he had to deal with. If anything he somehow hated her less. At least she seemed honest. Crazy, but honest.

\t“You know you probably could have taken these home if you didn‘t want to trade yet.” he offered

\tThat made her muzzle wrinkle in something that might have been anger or disgust. He wasn‘t sure, and he wasn‘t trying to figure it out. He was just trying to survive this. Sitting there and picking though the cards she hadn’t cordoned off. Supposedly the reason she’d dragged him out here. Making his magic deck into something viable. Because apparently ‘commander’ decks weren’t useful for whatever format they were doing. God he didn’t even know what was going on anymore.

\t“I‘m not taking you home with me. Master and I live in the same house. That‘s obviously not ok.” She sighed “I swear I knew I should have just stayed home today.”

\t“Ok, so if you don’t want to be here, then why are you here?” Simon sighed. He gave the girl the side-eye. Gretchen might have seen it. If she did, she didn’t seem to care. Bristly and prickly were her default personality traits, it would seem. On the flip side he had to admire the way she gently worked those cards out of their binder pages using nothing but her stubby digger claws.

\tEventually Gretchen glanced towards him and narrowed her eyes a bit more. “Two reasons.” She muttered “First of all I need you. If I’m going to beat that bitch then I need to be sure I can reach her. If you’re on my side that’s another deck I can help work on to combat whatever she has, and another person on my side to take up spots at FNM.”

\tSimon narrowed his eyes and whimpered a bit “I uh, I never agreed to ‘any’ of that. But ok…” he looked down at the handful of packs she’d bought for him. As far as he knew, she didn’t have a job. It wasn’t like he as loaded, and he had just spent way more than he should have on things. Twice. Still a near stranger buying him things felt profoundly awkward.

\t“Hey” Gretchen snapped, pulling him from his distraction “What the hell are you even doing? You can’t just throw a third color in your deck!”

\t“You can’t?” Simon blinked

\tA loud sigh and a face palm saw Gretchen struggling to stay upright. She glanced at him though a gap in her diggers and folded her ears back “No, you can’t. One color is fine. Two colors are fine. Three is right out.”

\t“So what” he sighed “Is there some rule about it? Because I’m pretty sure I saw someone doing that the last time you dragged me into this.”

\t“It’s not a rule” She corrected quickly, pushing a pair of lands from the booster packs up together. “it’s statistics. Most things will be one or two colors. You need to have that mana available. Cards that provide more than one type usually have a drawback and you can only have a few of each in your deck, so…”

\t“Sweet Jesus this whole game is just statistics and resources management” Simon slumped. “God damn it. This is suddenly sounding way too much like my job.”

\t“Good” Gretchen grumped. “Then you should be able to figure it out fast. Ok. Kodama of the west tree. Do I put equip cards in my deck to use this…”

\t“So what’s the other one?” Simon himself was a bit shocked as he heard the words leave his lips.

\tGretchen startled and glanced up from the small pile of packs she was about to open. Along with the few he’d bought for him, she’d gotten two big boxes right off of the shelf. Both with different art and presumably of different sets. He didn’t know this woman very well and yet Simon felt fairly sure that this had been some kind of spite buying. The financial professional in him screamed internally at the idea of some poor college girl dumping a months worth of food out on cardboard like this. Meanwhile Gretchen seemed far more confused by him, staring at Simon and quirking a brow.

\t“What’s the second what?” she muttered

\t“Reason” He sighed “You said there were two reasons for all of this. What’s the second one?”

\tGretchen slumped forwards once more and bristled. Her head lowered and shoulders poked up. Once again it was the kind of thing he expected to see from a hedgehog or porcupine. This wasn’t helped by the odd brushing motion she reflexively did over her muzzle. Something that was apparently starting to become far more common.

\t“I… Mistress said I should” She sighed. “She said it would probably be healthy for me to make friends with people besides her and Master.” Gretchen shifted and leaned in, eyes narrowed and nose wrinkling with barely contained contempt “That doesn’t mean we’re friends, mind you. I just want to please Mistress. I absolutely have other friends besides my owners. I mean there’s Ozzy, kinda. And Willa… I guess. Esme has been kind of nice to me, too.”

\tNone of those names meant anything to Simon. He wasn’t quite sure if this girl had any idea of that. She almost seemed to be in her own little world. It was tempting to bring up any number of factors here. Like the fact that he had never in fact offered to be her friend. Or that she’d spent more money on him than he had ever spent on dates in high school.

\tOk, well, date. But still.

\t“Well” Simon finally sighed “I guess that’s at least better than you thinking I’m some stalker.”

\t“I never said I stopped suspecting you” The mole muttered “That’s probably reason three, if there is one. If I can keep you around and keep an eye on you then I’ll know it if you try anything with Master. Now you owe me. You’re accountable.” The gesture Gretchen made was something that smacked of something so often seen in anime and manga. An attempt to push her glasses up her muzzle in a way that made her seem intelligent and in control.

\tShe ‘was’ smart. Even Simon could tell that. The motion did nothing to affirm it, though. Quite the opposite. She seemed like little more than a wrecking ball in a grey hoodie ready to bowl him over for any imagined slight. On one level Simon knew full well there was nothing functional she could do to him. At most he might end up enduring a bit of a scratch from those admittedly nasty diggers of hers.

\tThat wasn’t what made him nervous around her though. It was hard to even put his finger on what it was. All of her actions made sense, but only when he twisted his own brain around enough to imagine, well, a stalker. This was only the second Friday he’d spent around Gretchen and already Simon was imagining her sitting in a bedroom full of broken possessions sitting innocently on the bed holding up her phone to display the unread text she’d attempted to send. Also the kind of girl who likely never would have noticed that the text itself didn’t send.

\tThere ‘was’ something cute to that. Some romanticism. You had to be profoundly fucked up to see it. Fortunately Simon was very much that. He chuckled softly and turned his attention back to the task at hand, fumbling though the cards and trying to get a handle on what each one of them did.

\t“So what about you?” She sighed. Gretchen had turned her attention back to the cards and was popping the packs open the way some rich person might with expensive prosecco, or whatever it was that those people did. Simon sure as hell didn’t know about the rappers and pop stars.

\t“What about me what?” he quirked his brow just a bit

\t“Well, why did you show up?” Gretchen wrinkled her nose and huffed at what was probably a bad pack. “Here. I don’t need any stupid machine rat ninja people. None of them are going to help my deck.” She slid the card over to his side of the folding table. A few moments later Simon found her setting whole piles of sorted-though cards over there as well. Another clear frustration response that caused him to recoil and just passively accept the ‘gifts’ lest he incur her wrath.

\t“I uh, I guess I don’t know.” He finally sighed. “Honestly I was thinking of doing the same thing tonight I do almost every night.”

\t“And what’s that?” Once again Gretchen’s question slipped past any defenses the neophyte accountant might have had. This wasn’t like the office where nobody actually gave a shit. Suddenly the reflex to go limp just left him getting juggled like a rag doll by this beast of a girl. ‘The taming of the Shrew’ came to mind for a moment, even if the play was rather bigoted by modern standards. Against women and shrews in general.

\tBlushing bashfully Simon leaned forwards and gnawed on his lip. His already feminine alto hurt a little. Mostly from his attempts to practice ‘girl voice’. It had gotten better the past few days as he’d given it a bit of a break. Now his whole body was tense and he felt like his vocal chords would shatter if he spoke above a whisper. “I, uh.” he sighed nervously “Gooning, I guess. You know. Edging.”
\t
\tEven if they weren’t in a public space he wasn’t sure he would have been able to say it louder. He could feel the girls eyes ripping into him like flensing knives. He didn’t know just what he was feeling but hate was absolutely somewhere in the mix. His voice finally did crack into a passable falsetto as he shrank further in on himself and his leg thumped and bounced nervously.

\tShe snorted. Actual amusement. A first for Simon. He couldn’t recall hearing this girl make any noises unless they were rooted in sex or disgust. Not until that moment. “So what, you can’t edge before work? Or class? Armature.” She snorted. Still contemptuous, but also quite pleased with herself.

\tSimon’s blush grew and he found himself stammering as he pulled the glasses from his face and began cleaning them on his shirt. A gesture more intended to keep from looking at her than anything. “I-It’s not like that. Look I got a new automatic onahole. A-and Mistress gave me some audio files. So I figured I’d use that, and my plug, and kinda see if I could last all day. But to do that right I had to… get… sensiti-”

\tHe could feel it when she turned away. Even without looking. Even without opening his eyes the shift in attention was palpable. Waves of hate drifted from her new ‘friend’ back on to the hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard she’d purchased. Anything that wasn’t black, green, artifact, or land was shoved to the side and it looked for all the world as if she was about ready to knock those piles of ‘unneeded’ cards right off of the table.

\t“Sorry” he finally sighed “I guess it’s not really a topic I should be talking about with ‘friends’ or anything. Is it?”

\t“Let me make ‘one’ thing clear.” Gretchen’s voice was jagged stone jutting up from under Simon. It threatened to consume him. To skewer him like some hapless adventurer in every D&D stereotype he’d heard growing up. “You are not a slave. ‘I’ am the slave. ‘I’ am owned. ‘You’ are a client. You pay Master’s bills. I don’t care if you’re his ‘easy’ day or not.”

\tJust like that her eyes locked his and for a moment Simon felt a primal terror he could not explain. Before he at least had the mercy of being able to look away. The luxury of avoiding her gaze was something his body refused to grant him now. Even if Gretchen was shorter than him. Even if she was a submissive masochist like him, was clearly a terrified little pushover most of the time. In this moment she was a demon. Some creature of myth ready to devour him for daring to trespass on her domain. The fact that Simon’s brain only came up with monsters from video games as an attempt to personify that fact was a pinch of salt in a slowly opening wound. One he only really started to feel once the woman looked away again and huffed.

\t“S-sorry.” he stammered

\t“You should be.” She sighed.

\tOnce again things fell quiet. For his part Simon sorted though the cards that Gretchen continued setting near him and placed those he thought looked cool or might prove useful off to one side. He’d caused enough problems for today. It was only his fear of making things worse socially that kept him from getting up and bolting entirely.

\t“Zinc”

\tThe word cut the quiet like some future katana. Simon only needed one guess to know why that was on his brain.

\t“I’m sorry, what?” he blinked

\t“Zinc” Gretchen repeated. “If you’re looking to up your volume and put on a better show, take zinc. I don’t know how it impacts the taste. A slave shouldn’t actually care about those things. If it tastes bad that just means your owner’s happier. Even a fake slave should be able to figure that out.”

\t“O-oh…” Simon winced and bit the corner of his lip “I uh, I mean I guess that is the end result of what would happen after a few days of waiting. B-but it’s not like the taste matters. I mean I’m not really gay-”

\t“You’d clean it up if ‘she’ told you to?” The mole smiled just a touch at her own question

\tSimon nodded meekly and deflated in defeat.

\tThe mole girl’s grin grew a bit as she looked at one of her cards, then winced and sighed. “Dang it. Stupid Wrenn girl costs five. But her ability is so good! Ah, screw it. Maybe she‘ll help me. In she goes!” Another pop of a card pack and a new set of cardboard slid into her hands. Each time it did the few parts of Simon not consumed by his own shame and confusion were hit with a pang of second hand regret at the wasted money. “Dare I ask what you were going to do then if you weren’t going to edge?” She sighed “You know, like hobbies and stuff. You said you don’t play the other card game after all.”

\tSimon shrugged and offered her his best smile. It wasn’t a great one. He wasn’t at all trying to hide his fear at this point. “Usually I just try new runs at Cyberpunk 2077. Or take care of Artemis. That’s my pet owl finch. I try to give her at least some attention every day, though. Honestly I’m glad the whole cyberpunk thing is starting to be more of a ‘thing’ socially. I didn’t even know that’s what the genre was called when the game first came out. But once I did I was hooked.”

\t“Guess that’s why you like the new Kawigama cards, huh?” Gretchen’s eyes rolled about as far back in her head as they could.

\t“I did think it was pretty cool” he nodded “Though I also got a couple books from a bookstore recently. You know, the one right above the, ah, ehehe, ‘club’?” he tried to wink. The mole clearly knew what he meant, and also somehow rolled her eyes again even harder than before.

\tThe poor munk slumped his shoulders and shook his head. “I was trying to figure out a character for a tabletop game yesterday. It’s this weird game. Shadowrun? It’s a cyberpunk thing but like, with elves and stuff. I kinda got an idea but uh, But I think the books I got were old.”

\t“Shadowrun, huh?” The mole girl’s face began to brighten and at least some of the hate left her eyes

\t“Y-yeah.” Simon nodded “I could show you if you want. Like I said I’m still learning. But if you like cyberpunk stuff it’s pretty cool. Plus with the magic stuff it kinda feels like this card set.”

\tShe didn’t say anything, but now Gretchen was grinning. A real grin. A sinister grin. Simon already knew he didn’t like that grin.

--------------------

\t“Would you try to check your fire?” A shrill voice shrieked into the team channel. The two men who had once been SINless vagabonds lurched forwards and huffed in rage as their cybernetic limbs hacked whirring saw blades and chromed fists into the cement under the chipmunk’s feet.

\tRather than let the wall collapse under him, the crazed runner did a forward flip and began to unload both of his pistols into the backs of the two half baked cyber-zombies. Four barrels all in a straight line down. Each one barking at the same time when using burst fire. The man who had once been a rather sizable ork took eight explosive rounds into his cyber spine leaving it a smoking husk of metal and composite as he collapsed on the ground. The other, most likely a human in his life before, screamed and whirled around. His right arm split open to reveal a shotgun. Nanomachines bled from the digit as it broke apart. More dangerous than the gun itself based on who they were facing. Fortunately that gun never got a chance to fire. AP rounds bit through the nanite shell and at least once grazed the guns magazine. The limb blew off at the shoulder and fell free to the floor.

\tThe femboy winked, accentuated by the perpetual dusting of blue and green glitter which seemed to follow him and accentuate his movements. The boy winked with his left eye, the one with a similarly glitter dusted black heart scribbled under it, and tossed his long RGB-cycling hair off behind him.

\tAll of the primping and preening unfortunately left him open. The creature that had once been a man charged with saw-arm outstretched. Blood and foam streamed from one side of the canine’s mouth while he hammered his metal feet on the floor.

\tThe blow never landed. A flash of light and the ‘thing’ collapsed into the cement. One clean slice down its back severed every single neural pathway. Even a being born of the worst in magic and cybernetics had no hope of getting up after such a blow.

\t“You know I had him, Dolly.” He pouted. His arm raised up and the sharp spur-blade deploying from out of his lower forearm.

\tHe was looking at the figure which had done the damage. A pale skinned piglet-looking thing dressed in a stereotypical black-and-violet gothic Lolita dress, holding a scythe too big for its body. Only careful observation would allow one to notice the obvious joints and doll-hair. Not that it was made to look real. If anything it would have passed for an antique porcelain doll if it was just sitting in a bedroom. Which was, he realized, probably the idea.

\t“Can it” The same shrill voice came over the comms “We were told to be a distraction, and part of that means we can’t die. Or get infected. Did any of that drek get near you?”

\t“Not even close, ‘DollMistress’.” the bemused contempt in the wild munk runner’s voice was all too much to handle. “Though I guess it is nice knowing your little toys are around to jump in when I need them to.”

\t“Scrubbing them for stray Nanomachines is easier than you, Glitterboy” Dolly huffed. It was simply his runner name, but Glitter basked in how much ire his teammate could muster when she said it.

\t“Too bad you can’t take prep for CFD the way you would for STDs” The femmy munk cooed “But don’t worry. I know you’d be heartbroken if I ended up a headcase. Just means I have to get serious, doesn’t it?” A wicked grin crossed his lips as he held up his arm. The spur retracting and the glowing barrel of his laser pistol snapping into place. Nothing like a bit of heat to burn out an infection, after all.
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