It's terminal. [Circa]

[Anonymous]

Ash had taken the elevators down and, and a hoverbus across to the station.  The atmo was set to a light drizzle.  It sogged up his cigar, but he kept gnawing anyway, out of habit more than real need, a little absentminded.  At the station he scanned his chip, still a little unused to the change from full palm-and-retinal.  The station bustled, warm and yellow, and way too bright compared to the misty outdoors, if you could call Lower City Haviah outdoors--

"Hakon."  A folder smacked him in the chest, and Ash stopped, mouth half-open around the cigar, one hand clapped over the folder to keep it from falling.  Lt. Baksheed had to tip his head way back to look up at the constable.  "We need your psych eval.  Yesterday."

"Ayep."  Ash nodded and slowly removed the sticky cigar, rolling it between his fingers, then stuck it between index and middle finger and opened the file, peering inside.  "I'll get 'em on it, sir."  

"Well--good."  Baksheed looked mollified, and backed away, straightening his uniform collar with one hand.  He'd been harried lately.  Their districts weren't the quietest in the city.  Surveillance vandalism abounded.  "Hrolleif is waiting for you, deal with that--"  He waved a hand, already turning away.  He had more important things to worry about than a new cop with a military discharge on record.  Ash behaved himself.  As far as Baksheed knew, he stuck to the simple stuff.

"Yep."  He nodded back again and headed for the Sarge's office.  They had been monitoring discarded Thanatos, Inc. terminals.  Word on the street and word from on high was they'd been part of subversive activity for awhile.  So their little unit had--Ash enjoyed this, it had been elegant--bugged a bunch of the terminals and dumped them.  Operation Bait in place, Sarge had been waiting for a bite, and they had gotten several.  For now there was nothing to do about it but make a few visits... no arrests yet.  Just see where it led.  It did mean an unfortunate amount of undercover.

Gods, if she made him put on makeup again, he'd just hafta do something regrettable.  Heh.  He dropped the folder off at his desk and jammed the by now quite soggy cigar between his teeth once again before he thumped at his Sergeant's door.  Knock, knock.

[Anonymous]

Karen had her bad habits- hell, did she have her bad habits- but smoking was one she kept off the list for a variety of reasons. The fact that her coworker- an ex-military john, at that- entertained such a barbaric addiction won him few point in her book, and she had no qualms with giving him hell for it.

The man was a subordinate, after all...

Without looking up from the three datascreens that fed along the top of her desk, Hrolleif barked a terse "Yeah," followed by the requisite, "..and don't you dare set foot in my office with that shit in your mouth. You put it out, or I'll ram it up your ass."

Her door was typically only closed on mornings begun without coffee. For good reason- the Sergeant was promoted for skill in the service rather than tact. And word around the paper pushers was that without a little more of an ass-kissing personality, she wouldn't be due for another promotion for decades. Good thing I don't give a flying fuck...

"And your psych eval's overdue. I thought they taught you gents timeliness or something like that in the service...?" Lazily, her dark eyes flicked up to finally acknowledge his entrance, and she leaned back with a languid and careless grace, lifting both long-fingered hands to rub at the back of her neck. "Just get it in sometime this week, or we'll never hear the end of it. HR's a bitch." Rubbing the back of her neck had evolved into straightening her short, bristly mohawk- an idle habit she entertained in those few moments there were only a dozen, rather than a thousand, things to be thinking on. "But I'll cut to the chase... same drill today."

Her hands fell to the desk, flowing over its surface to pull up a map of their target area that she'd saved during her overtime. It was painstakingly perfect in detail; every bait area highlighted right to their cordon distance, specs on average traffic and pedestrian flow printed next to each station. "This time I'm expecting a haul, so it'd be nice to get you looking rougher than ever for cover." Latticing her fingers together to make a bridge upon which her sharply-pointed chin could rest, she mimed a sickeningly-sweet smile up at her underling. "You've always wanted a facial tattoo, right?"

[Anonymous]

Sweet as always.  Ash ground out the sputtering tip of his cigar against the rough pad of one thumb.  He twiddled it up and down, then pulled a screw of paper out of one pocket and carefully wrapped it around the end of the cigar, which he stuck in his pocket.  All set.  He sidled into the office and shut the door carefully behind him, then settled into his customary at-ease position, waiting for the latest news.  

"I'm taking care of it," he said, nodding.  He'd get the psych eval in on time; Baksheed normally wouldn't have even made a fuss, but everything was stressed lately, and Ash knew the little things built up around the big ones and made it all a lot less shiny.  "Guess there's a reason I'm not military anymore."  His smile was barely perceptible, but it was there.  She knew why, though it was off all official records.  

Ash took a step forward to eye the map she had pulled up, rocking from one foot to the other, hands still laced together behind his back.  "Hm."  He made a little noise in the back of his throat.  The hot districts were still hot.  And the Dragons were still monitoring all they could, but there were a few stubborn bastards who kept getting around the surveillance cameras.  They had tracked enough communications to set up a dummy identity, and from there they were working to secure a face-to-face meeting with an operative from the so-called Wrong Way Club, someone off the chip record altogether; they didn't even have his name, just the codename Core.  It had taken months to establish their connection.  The meeting would be a coup, when they managed it.  In the meantime, they'd been going out and poking around, building credibility and connections, checking for ways around what the insurgents called 'survees.'

It involved makeup, of course.  Ash smiled back at Hrolleif, a slow movement of facial muscles playing out under his skin.  His mustache tickled his nose.  If he had to dye he'd just shave the thing.    "Yes ma'am."  He gave her a two-fingered salute.  Only the droop of his heavy-lidded eyes betrayed a certain... I know what you're doing, and it's not going to get a rise out of me... feeling.  His voice stayed even, a low, gravelly rumble.  "So do we make contact today, or just keep building the setup?"

[Anonymous]

The corners of her lips twitched- an obvious sign that the woman was suppressing a smile. "I could have sworn you were discharged for asshattery to superior officers... My mistake." She considered him for a half-second longer with that not-quite-smile, her thin brows arched bemusedly high on her forehead.

Come on, muscles, not even a smile? You can't tell me all that strong stoic shit gets you all the girls.

The map took up her interest again, and she huffed, rubbing the pad of one thumb along her lean jaw. "The heat's on us, I'm afraid. We need to start producing quantifiable progress or we're going to be getting a lot more pressure from folks we want to hear from as little as possible." Karen followed the minute shifts in his posture with her peripheral vision, weighing his response- or, really, lack thereof- for a beat before continuing. "So we're taking the plunge now, despite the fact that our relationship could stand to mature a little longer."

She rolled her shoulders in a leonine, discreetly powerful shrug, flashing a smile so full and earnest that it revealed the pale tips of her teeth. "So, how about it? Ready to see the belly of the beast? ... And get rid of that parasite on your face? Because I've got to tell you, almost everytime I look you in the face I half expect it to start inching away."

[Anonymous]

Yep.  A lot more pressure from the Dragons.  They didn't even trust the Pilots these days, Ash heard.  As they said, whaddya call three holes in the ground?

Well, well, well.

He ignored Hrolleif's teasing, just nodded and touched a hand to his forehead on the way out.  They knew the procedure.  Usually, they figured, it was enough to pinpoint identities on the people who used the terminals.  Some of them were chipless, living in the lowest echelons of the Lower City, or in those hidden corners they had somehow mapped out.  Ash and Karen hadn't yet gotten the graffiti codes down, though they sifted through radio broadcasts and blog posts when they could.

They had ID scanned a few faces last time they had gone down.  The surveillance cameras would pick them up now.  A lot had been on record as deceased, which meant someone was messing around, but that wasn't Ash's department.  He just went out and got the data, ran the scans, came back.  Acted and tried to think like he didn't like Aedolis so much, in case there were any psychics around.

The fact was, psychics would know he was police and they'd know, honestly, that if they kept tabs on him he'd be more in their pockets than in his immediate superiors'.  Because his superiors couldn't pick his brain.  And Ash was just doing his job.  

But Core had told them he wasn't psychic.  He led a whole group who weren't, and it wasn't so strange that there would be chipless who didn't just want to hide out from the Pilot program.  

Heck, Ash wouldn't want to be a janitor himself.

Getting set to go out took some time.  He went down to the sealed chemical room and stripped, then took the shower that'd effectively dye his hair and body hair black.  Karen had joked that he could just shave it, but that wasn't going to happen.  He did scrape off the mustache with a cheap razor, then stood for a little in front of a fogged mirror, laser-applying the facial tattoo, which wrapped one side of his face and down his neck.  He popped in the thin lenses that changed his eye color from yellow to the more acceptable brown and got dressed in lower-class togs, ripped and ready-to-wear, then checked himself in the mirror.  

Steam still wafted through the white room, roiling around him, and he lazily swiped it away.  He looked different, all right.  When he was done, he met Karen by the back entrance.  They could go down to the Lower City the old-fashioned way, building-scaling.  Ash was good at it, had good coordination, and the architecture between Middle and Lower permitted much more messing around than did that between Middle and Upper.  

"All set," he told her, running a hand over his face to make sure no ink came off.  It didn't.

[Anonymous]

Karen, hardly discomfited that her comrade didn't rise to the bait, simply lifted her shoulders in another leonine shrug. She watched him leave, her gaze unwavering and unblinking in a manner that was far too still to be intentless.

When the big man was safely away, she snarled to herself- a sound deep in her throat, more worthy of an angry dog than a middle-aged and overworked city cop- and let her hands flow over her desktop, closing the whole mess down; saving what she needed to with little more than agitated twitches of her fingertips, backlogging the days activity with a few harsh gestures. It was easy to make fun of having to put on another face in public; in private, it was a fact of the job she loathed.

As she rose from her seat, she gave her head a shake- not unlike the slow, irritated movement of a bear beset by bees- and rubbed her face with both palms, relishing the brief coolness of the contact. "Fuck this shit."

The words were little more than a defeated sigh, and she nudged the chair out of her way, approaching the nearer wall. In one of the programmable panels, she brought up the mirror function; and leaned her face close to it, scowling. The frown deepened and highlighted the suggestions of wrinkles that edged the corners of her eyes and mouth, and in particular the furrows growing between her sharp and deeply-angled brows. What would be today's poison?


It was a lucky thing to be an endowed shapeshifter by birth; after all, when one had an alt-form that capped at 400kg complete with natural knives, it was a rare thing to encounter too much open hostility unless the opposing party was either particularly well-armed or particularly stupid. The additional benefit of being able to alter one's genotype at will was that, with experience, the ultimately achieved phenotype could (with enough patience, time, and practice of course) be honed for exact and minute alterations. It was a matter of developing a feel for the way bones moved, shifted, and moulded in relation to focused concentration; the small and varied bones in the face were naturally particularly sensitive to any such effects.

Of course, there were cons; mainly, that natural shapeshifting hurt like a bitch. So it was hardly out of the ordinary that, after some careful inspection, the Sergeant had decided to highlight her racial characteristics- growing out her canines and sharpening her incisors... hardly enough to be outrageous; just notable on third or fourth glance. She strengthened and highlighted the angle of her jaw, lengthened her fairly diminutive nose.

By the end of her efforts, she looked half as human, and twice as villainous; her hair, once held bristly and aloft with a variety of products, stood up stiffly now of its own accord- coarse and bristly as any animal's. It was also nearly devoid of color, only gleaming downy white where at its thickest. Karen's downy body hair had, as a result, receded almost entirely, leaving her skin glossy and smooth... and her nails hardened and thickened, until all were a dull and uniform dark grey. When she turned her head in either direction, the tapetum behind her eyes flashed to life in quick response to the purposefully dim light.

Peering herself over again- twice as critically now- Karen clacked her sharp teeth together experimentally. When satisfied that she looked at her most villainous, the woman rolled her eyes and headed to the locker and shower room. A thorough, triple-thick application of anti-tan dulled her midsummer glow to a wan and unhealthy pallor.

When she was satisfied that everything was so far convincing, she dug out her overused make-up kit and had it flash on a quick application of too-heavy eyeliner and dusky eyeshadow. No beauty pageant where we're going. Afterward, she tugged on the working-class dull-blue coveralls that were the occupational norm for trash haulers; but she let the upper portion hang loose around her waist, belted there with a nylon tool harness. A low-cut A-shirt with stains and cigarette burn holes completed the transformation.

Karen glared at Ash when she saw him, and breezed past him without a hitch in her stride. "Yeah, yeah. You're just lucky your ass looks better in black than florescent pink. For once, I'd rather look atcha than take out my issues on your hide."

[Anonymous]

Ash let go his usual persona a little, in favor of something more relaxed.  More civilian.  He rolled his shoulders and stretched, one hand at the back of his neck, until he felt vertebrae crack.  Shook out his shoulders, arms, legs.  

He pulled a cigar out of his pocket and fumbled to light it, sheltering the flame between cupped palms, and paused to take a long, lip-puckering drag before he set off after Karen.  She couldn't complain about it out in the field.  The cigar drew white trails in the heavy air.  "I knew you were looking at my ass."  Deadpan, quietly.

A few long strides and he'd caught up to her, then settled into a slouching gait down the Midlevel street, through a residential district.  Ash eyed his partner in turn, from the bristling hair, past the animal glint of her eye, and down the muscled length of her body.  Usually, he found her about halfway attractive, though he didn't like to mix business and pleasure.  Now, part-shifted--nope.  

Those aggression issues, he thought.  She might be nervous.  Ash admitted privately that he felt a little nervous himself.  Any number of things could go wrong.  Probably better not to count them all.  Instead he thought of what to do right, and blew a smoke-ring Karen's way, as they sauntered toward an old foodfab plant, one of the few buildings that bridged the Midlevel-Lowlevel gap.

[Anonymous]

Karen snorted, inclining her chin somewhat and cracking her knuckles as she walked.  "If you didn't work out so much, I wouldn't have to." The woman wrinkled her nose when she smelled the smoke, lip curling to reveal a brief, pale flash of teeth. But it was likely better that he did, and she wasn't going to order him around now that they were, technically, just a couple of overworked autocracy-loathing gutter trollers.

Her stride was long- surprisingly so for someone of such nondescript height- eating up the ground as if she couldn't wait to get the station behind her. "Besides, it's hard to help when it looks so much better than your face." She punctuated the statement with a final pop of her knuckles, and then lifted both hands to run them through her hair. The short, coarse bristles felt strange, but not unpleasant... and the motion itself was thankfully soothing.

Her frustrations were rooted more in sensory overload than anxiety- even such minute changes had a tendency to exaggerate related racial characteristics, most predominantly her olfactory senses. And being able to smell sweat by the gram was hardly pleasant in a place that churned out a whole riotous spectrum of scents by the second. The dyes on their clothing, the chemicals responsible for the miraculous change in her comrade's hair color, the fumes from the building paints... the list was unending.

"So. How's your mutt?"

[Anonymous]

Ash stopped when they reached the building and turned, slowly removing his cigar.  He blew a puff of smoke through the slow shape of a smile.  Good joke, Sarge, the smile said, and then he replaced his cigar.  He laced his hands together and stretched in front of the door; a nondescript door, a little more battered than most things on the well-kept Midlevel.  Its paint had chipped, its industrial-design lever opener had rusted.  Its chip scan was a generation out of date.  He ran his hand under it anyway, chewing at the butt of his cigar.  When it accepted his identity, he let the cigar drop and ground it out under one heel.

"The mutt is good," he said.  Ash had been very happy when he'd gotten back planetside and been able to get out to a petshop and pick out Vintage.  The old mixed-breed left the smell of socks around his apartment and flopped down over his feet while he watched television, and so help him, he liked it.  

Cigar done with, he licked his lips, then levered open the recalcitrant door, feet planted for stability.  The door slid free of its groove with a groan, and Ash stepped back to wipe his hands on his pants and let Karen in.  Ladies-first-like.  Actually, more like she would bowl him over in her impatience if he didn't let her go first in everything.  

"He keeps asking about the bitch from work."

[Anonymous]

Karen's long stride beat soundless and steady against the path they took- and despite the height of her attendant, the woman didn't need to hustle much at all to keep up. The joke caused not a hitch in her stride... but her expression couldn't boast the same. Her lean face split into a wide grin filled with far too many sharp teeth... but there was more humor than rancor in the feral smile. "Oh...," She started, raising her shoulders and inclining her sharply-pointed chin, "... still bitchy." Her mouth closed into a small, hard-edged smirk.

She wasted no time breezing past him as he held the door, giving nothing but a nod of acknowledgement- knowing very well that the gesture wasn't anything remotely like the gentlemanly gestures she was so-very-quick to scorn. Ash wasn't stupid enough to pull that bullshit within a ten-kilometer radius of her. Thankfully, or he'd get a tonguelashing so serious that it really just might have flayed the skin off his back.

More than anything, it was a base and bestial exemplification of her higher rank. Stronger, faster, meaner dogs walk first, stop first, eat first, piss first, and a damn doorway was no exception to the rule. Similarly, she didn't pause for him to catch up... what else, after all, was he going to use those long damn legs for?

Heh.

Karen exhaled through her teeth, and began cracking her knuckles again. "Got a handle on our ETA?"

[Anonymous]

"Near as I can figure it's a drop point, not a meeting point, whatever they might've said in the last e-mail."  

Ash's voice reverberated, muffled, in the sudden, dank wide space of the abandoned building they'd just entered.  Its huge rusted pipes and machinery threw back metallic echoes of their steps down the winding staircase.  The bowels of the building opened into the Lower Level; they had a long way to go.  He hop-skipped over a couple of steps to catch up with Karen and, landing, heard the teeth-clenching shriek of tortured metal under his heel.  

"Blind spot," he explained at last, removing a light from his pocket and flicking on the strong beam, which threw their shadows into intimidating relief against the walls.  "The time and location we got?  I bet it's a spot off the surveillance cameras, like they like to use.  We'll pick that up and that will tell us where to go."  He paused and thought some more, running over hypotheticals.  "Core wouldn't risk that over VCN, he... they can't be that stupid.  Fact is, I'm betting whoever it is won't leave us enough time to communicate anything between the time we get our meeting info, uh, and the time we've gotta make the meeting.  Only safe."  He shrugged, leaning for a minute against the hand rail of the stairway down, looking into the shadowed depths of the building.  

".... But you don't care either way, right?"  

Karen had, Ash sometimes thought, an unhealthily close relationship with danger.

[Anonymous]

Karen could only wrinkle her nose distastefully at her surroundings. Old metal and old blood were too similar a scent- it conjured up for her other senses old memories that felt fresher than a new wound. But, never one to dwell on anything long, the woman just shook her head and strode on, squinting at the sudden harshness of the light Ash had switched on.

She didn't grumble at him for it, however- though she herself would have preferred the dim excuse for illumination already within the closed building, she knew very well that his own senses weren't exactly enough up to par to combat the dark. It was really only lucky for him that he had a wit to make up for it, or their whole partnership would have been... intolerable.

"I don't give a shit," she confirmed for him, leading the way into the shadows as if they were home. "There likely aren't many hoops they could make for us that we couldn't jump... for the moment. So we'll dance if they say dance, and put on a damn good show while we do it." The woman pursed her lips, and skipped a step down, swiveling her neck to toss an oblique glance back up at her comrade.

"Whatever gets me out of the office."

[Anonymous]

"Didn't know you danced, Sarge."  

Ash clunked down the stairs behind Karen, one hand on the stairway railing.  Core knew they'd be coming through this way.  It might be connected to the infamous 'tunnels' the group used to find their way into the Undercity.  But if it was, hell if Ash knew how.  

At first he thought the crackling noise was just the rusted metal beams and stairway settling in on themselves.  Then he heard something louder.  Louder.

"Ahem.  Come in, A and K, come in, A and K."

Ash's hand went to the small blaster tucked invisibly into the hem of his jacket, and then he relaxed.  Perched on one of the metal-latticed landings between stair flights was a clunky device with long, long antennae and a speaker, grounded by a long wire that dropped off the stair ledge to the nearby ground.  They were almost at the bottom.

"This is Core."  It was impossible to tell if the distorted voice was male or female, human or... otherwise.

Ash grunted in surprise.  Was that a crystal radio?  It was a hugely primitive device, but now that he thought about it, a good idea.  Untraceable.  Any citizen of any caste could've made it.  And Ash and Karen couldn't respond to anything he said, because crystal radios wouldn't allow that.  They couldn't leave, because they couldn't take the radio with them without disrupting the broadcast, so even if Core lost his visual, he knew where they were.  The radio received broadcast from a single frequency.  Whatever he wanted to tell them, he'd tell them here and now.

"Just listen, you can't respond.  Don't touch this device.  I want you to ditch your weapons and communication devices--all of them.  All of them.  I want you to cut out your chips.  This is not negotiable."

Silence.  Ash turned to look at Karen after he'd paused to study the calloused underside of his right palm.  Cut out their chips?  

Well, well, well.  He swallowed, cleared his throat.  Huh.