Chapter Thirty-Eight – Basement

Chapter Thirty-Eight – Basement

“There’s a whole new category of entertainment called simply Samurai Entertainment. Sometimes it’s shortened to SE, or ‘See,’ as in the verb ‘to see.’

The genre mostly consists of following samurai the way that paparazzi of the past followed celebrities. The big difference is that most samurai don’t care for the attention, and most celebrities don’t saunter onto battlefields on the regular.”

–Modern Stream Entertainment, Genre Guide, 2031
***

Paul clambered down the stairs with all of the attitude and ill mood of a five year old who had just been told off. If I wasn’t such a bastion of moral integrity and good spirit, I would have mocked him for it.

Wait…

“Who shat in your shorts, Pauly boy?” I asked as I followed him down the steps.

He paused so that he could level a glare at me. “I don’t like you,” he said.

“Well shit, there goes my mood for the next week,” I said.

“Cat, maybe less quipping and more walking would be in order?” Gomorrah asked.

I shook my head. “Sarcasm and snark are the only things I had for a long time, you know? When you don’t own anything, you cling onto whatever you have,” I explained.

“Yes, but you’re a samurai now. You can hardly be said to have nothing. You have your equipment, plenty of resources, a girlfriend. Even a home,” she said. “Perhaps you can finally do away with the snark?”

“Huh,” I said. “Does having a home make me a part of the bourgeois?”

“You don’t actually know what that is, do you?” Gomorrah asked.

“I don’t, but something deep inside me still makes me want to blame them for all of my woes.”

Paul tsked. “You’re exactly the kind of thing we left the city to avoid,” he said.

Did he just literally objectify me? “Just get us to the basement so that we can do our jobs,” I snapped.

“And then what? You’ll leave us all alone?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s the idea. We have other hives to break, and other people to save. I still think you’d be clever to move back to the city. There’s more of us bougie-types to keep you nice and safe. If you want to use that boomstick of yours, I’m sure there’s some militia out there that’s desperate enough that they’ll hire even you.”

“Fuck off, I want to defend me and mine right here. This is my home. I worked hard for it. Did you ever work hard for anything in your life?” he growled.

I was very close to pumping a few rounds into Paul’s legs, then leaving him behind for the antithesis to take care of. But they’d probably use his meat to grow some sort of terrifying boss-tier monster that no one wanted to deal with, so I refrained from doing that for the moment.

Paul stomped across the factory floor and swept right into the kitchen area at the back. He stopped there, before bending down to pull at a strap sticking out of the ground. It opened a large trapdoor, with cement steps leading down and to a metal door.

“That’s the basement,” Paul said.

“You know your way around in there?” I asked.

“I’m not guiding you through,” he said.

“We just need some directions,” Gomorrah said.

Paul rubbed at his nose. “There’s a large boiler room one building over. The basement opens into it. If you follow the big steam pipes you’ll always find your way back to that one. It’s more or less central to the whole factory. There’s a loading dock on the far end that’s barricaded up, that’s a pretty wide room. And then there’s the big old building by the waterfront. That one’s nearly always flooded.”

“Thank you,” Gomorrah said.

She stepped down first, then fiddled with her launcher. Judging by the switched tanks, she just went from non-lethal to burn-everything fuel.

“You can run back, Paul,” I said.

He sniffed, shouldered his gun, then stomped back across the factory floor without so much as a ‘how do you do.’ I heard him clambering up the stairs a minute later, and put him out of my mind for the moment.