Chapter Thirty-Three – Oh My God, Nya!

Chapter Thirty-Three – Oh My God, Nya!

“If you want to have a good work life, you need to be friends with your coworkers. It’s ridiculous to think that you can spent twelve hours a day in one space and hate the people there the entire time.

Yeah, life sucks, work sucks, and you’re going to spend more hour there than anywhere else in your miserable life, so why do so many people make a point of hating the wage slave stuck next to them?”

–Post on WorkersOpinion blog, 2035

***

“OMGN!” Nya said with a gasp. “It has kitty ears!”

She was pointing at the top of the Bastion. I was pretty sure she’d seen it before, but maybe this was the first time she noticed that the ship had two protrusions at the top and front that… yeah, they were cat ears. They were armoured, like the rest of the ship, but they were also definitely cat ears.

“Uh-huh,” Lucy said. “What’s OMGN mean? I mean, I know ‘omg’ of course.”

“Oh my god, nya!” Nya said, and already I had had my fill of the woman. Buuuut Lucy seemed to like her, and I supposed that if I looked past the wall of cringe, she wasn’t that bad.

“Myalis likes sticking cat ears on things,” I said. “It’s her hobby, and who am I to question it but her pitiful victim? Anyway… you wanted to accompany me, yeah?”

Nya nodded. “But I still don’t know what you’re planning to do!”

“Yeah, fair. I’m gonna load up my power armour into the Bastion, then we’re going to drop Lucy off at school. I don’t have classes today, but… look, there’s a bit of a gang problem in New Montreal right now, and I think I want to see if there’s anything I can do to calm it the fuck down. The last thing the city needs is open gang warfare on top of all the rest.”

“I’ve dealt with yakuza before,” Nya said. “They gave me a cool sword once.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, but I did make note of that. If they gave her a cool sword, then maybe she didn’t ‘deal’ with them in the normal samurai way and actually handled the situation with minimal bloodshed. Or something. I hadn’t seen Nya in action yet, except for that one little scuffle we had.

I loaded my power armour into the back of the ship, then made sure there were a few guns around, just in case. If things really went to shit, then I had the M.E.O.W. mech in the back as well, but… well, if I needed a heavily-armoured warmech to handle the gangs, then shit had really hit the fan. I was kind of hoping that it didn’t come to that.

Lucy wasn’t telling me to hurry up, but she was shifting from side to side and giving me a look that I knew meant that I was already late, and… yeah, she was right. So we got onboard the Bastion and took off.

Nya sat across from Lucy at the back, only glancing around once before settling in. “So, where’s this gang?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Our first stop’s actually at the school. There’s this bunch of students that have been studying gangs and stuff, and they probably have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. They wrote articles about it and shit.”

“Is it a student project?” Lucy asked.

“I think so? It could be tied to the… uh… anthropology department.” I had to pronounce that one carefully. It wasn’t a word I spat out every day. “Anyway, they wrote a whole article and some media sort mucked it all up for fear baiting. There’s an address to their department in the article, with emails and shit. Can’t be too hard to track them down.”

“Hmm, let me know how it goes,” Lucy said. “Oh! By the way, I’ve invited a few people from the kittens–the adult ones–over to our building. Not home, but to one of the offices next to the clinic. We’re setting up the New Montreal branch.”

“Already?” I asked. “When do you find the time for that?”

“Here and there,” Lucy said with a giggle. “But it’s not as hard as you think. You just have to find people who have that spark and who want to get something done, then point them in the right direction and give them a bit of encouragement. Mostly all I do now is act like the last word and kick out anyone too troublesome.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Lucy was awesome. “Sure you don’t want to be the new mayor?”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I’m not one for elected positions,” Lucy said.

We landed in Cial a few minutes later. They’d marked out the entire side of one street with black-and-yellow markings, with little signs saying ‘Samurai parking’ every three or so metres.

I parked on the other side of the street.

We got out, and then I went through the motions of giving Lucy a goodbye hug, a goodbye kiss and letting her grab my ass as a goodbye pinch, as one does.

And then it was just me and Nya. “Alright,” I said. “Now we need to figure out where the anthropology department is. Can’t be too hard to find.”