Chapter Sixty-Nine – Nice

Chapter Sixty-Nine – Nice

“Hehe, nice.”

–Deus Ex, on first seeing on of her clones doing the dishes for her, 2054

***

I woke up on Monday morning to a flood of notifications and messages.

So I turned around and hugged Lucy closer and pretended that I hadn’t seen anything.

Unfortunately, my brain was made of stupid, and after seeing that number of messages waiting for me, I couldn’t quite get back to sleep. I sighed and flopped onto my back. I couldn’t get up because Lucy was sleeping on my arm. Fortunately, the metal one, because it couldn’t fall asleep.

So, I laid on my back and stared at the ceiling before I blinked a few times and brought up my messages. There were literally over a hundred of them, but most were from a conversation between three of my samurai friends, with others chiming in on occasion.

Gomorrah, Tankette, and Grasshopper were going over some details about the event next weekend. Princess wanted to know more about her role as well.

Shy had sent me a private message, asking to confirm that she wouldn’t have any public-facing rolls to play. There were a few inquiries from the casino as well.

I rubbed at my face, then started to reply to what needed answering. “I think I’m going to have to skip school this week,” I said to Myalis.

That’s plausible. This event seems rather under-organized at the moment. If you don’t address that, then issues will crop up later, and you might not have enough time to correct the issues without great cost.

“Yeah,” I muttered. I looked over Gom’s conversation with Tankette, and it looked like they were mostly trying to estimate the number of people that would be showing up. I winced a little as Tankette seemed to have expected it to be… about one order of magnitude less than the numbers Gomorrah was pulling.

Tankette could cook. Like, she was good, and she had the gear for it. I’d seen her take care of a line of hungry soldiers before. But there was a difference between that and handling a thousand-plus grumpy gangsters.

Mostly, Gom reassured Tankette who seemed ready to take on the challenge, but wanted some help.

It was all working out. Except for one small issue: Gom had a running list of pings throughout the chat, all aimed at me.

Gomorrah had a list of shit for me to take care of. I supposed it might have been revenge for pushing the entire project onto her in the first place. Or maybe she just honestly didn’t have time to tackle everything herself.

In any case, I had a list now.

Cat to-do:
– 4 corporations want to attend. Discourage
– Meet with media. Do we want to have media presence?
– Organize Lucy’s volunteers.Uniforms, security, passes.
– Warn the Family of the event. You did do this, right Catherine?

I groaned again, which made Lucy squirm a little. “Sorry,” I said.

“Is everythin’ okay?” she asked sleepily.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said as I turned over to hug her some more. None of those things were stuff I could take care of right now, so I went back to sleep. I woke up a bit later to Lucy stumbling out of bed, then I did the same.

After our morning ablutions, I found myself standing across from Lucy as she blew across a mug of warm coffee. “So, what had you bothered?” Lucy asked.

“Gom threw work at me. For the conclave. It’s a to-do list.”

Lucy snorted. “How familial,” she said. “Was it a honey-do list?”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “No, more of a list of chores that she doesn’t wanna do herself. Which… fair, I think the logistics side of this is going to be messy enough as it is. Got some corps to meet with to tell them to fuck off, or at least see why they want to attend in the first place. The media… yeah, need to meet with some of them to politely tell them to fuck off. Hey, how ready are your Kittens?”

“Not very,” Lucy said. “Some of the better ones are coming in from Burlington. I have them staying in one of the offices downstairs, actually. You said you had housing or something free, right?”

“Eh, sorta,” I said. “Myalis, add that to the to-do. We’ll see if we can’t use some of the space in that mega building Gros Baton and Hedgehog freed up.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

No one else was using it… probably. So it would be fine to temporarily occupy it. It would only be for a week or so, anyway.

“Hmm, okay then. Well, with the more experienced members coming down, I at least have some people to act as officers, of a sort,” Lucy said. “Do you think we can visit the casino? As a large group, I mean? It’d be nice to have a practice run or two.”