Interlude – A Roaming Raccoon’s Reasonable Relationships [Part Two]

Interlude – A Roaming Raccoon’s Reasonable Relationships [Part Two]

Rac tried to look confident as she walked.

Before, in the gutters and the undercity, she had to make herself small, inconspicuous and unimportant, like the racoons she’d been named after. There, but not important enough to bother with.

Up here, heading to the Barber Shop, the attitude was different. She had to look like she belonged.

“You’re going to need some sort of ID to get past the bouncer,” she said. “He’s this big full-borg guy who doesn’t fuck around.”

Cat shrugged. “I could take him,” she said.

She hadn’t even seen Molotov as she said she could take him. Then again… Cat could take him, and that wasn’t something Rac wanted. “No. He’s actually kinda nice? But he’ll sound the alarm if he thinks you’re corpo or a samurai.”

Cat grunted. “How’d you get in? I doubt they carded you.”

“I’m a merc,” Rac said. “Once I had my status fixed, he let me in no problem. You need someone to vouch for you to become a merc though.”

“Could probably fake it,” Cat said. Then she frowned. “Really? Huh. Well, that’s actually kind of clever.”

Rac pursed her lips and half-turned to look at Cat. “What is?”

“Right, Mercs mostly use paper. Easier to destroy, and not something Myalis can just break into. So, that idea’s out.”

Rac nodded along. “Maybe… I think you could get in just like a normal person going to the bar, but not if you’re with me. Maybe if you try to pass yourself off as a specialist? For like, a job?”

“What sort of specialist? An infiltrator? A sort of cyberninja? Oh, I can totally use Myalis to pass myself off as a meshrunner, no problem. Or some sort of front-line alien killing badass. I’m pretty decent with bombs too. And stealth.”

“Uh-huh,” Rac agreed. Cat probably could get away with all of that, but it wasn’t the kind of shit that an actual merc did. Well, maybe some of them, but the average merc like Rac did work that was a lot less complicated.

Her last few jobs had been standing around looking tough, or helping someone load up some crap into the back of a van in a hurry, or escorting someone through a rough part of the city. Cat was a Samurai, she was doing the kind of crap that legends did all the time, but most of the people in New Montreal were as far from legends as they could be.

She heard the Barber Shop before she could see it. A low, distant thrum of bass-boosted swing music from last century and a faint stink to the air that was unique to this one level of the megabuilding. It was piss (which wasn’t unique) but also booze-filled vomit and sweat and cigarette smoke.

They came around a corner, and the front of the Barber Shop was right there. A big rotating door, painted in blue and white and red, with Molotov the bouncer standing next to it, massive arms crossed over his chest.

“Hey Molotov,” Rac said as she came closer. The music was louder now, so she had to pitch her voice up. Molotov heard her though, probably. The entire upper half of his head was prosthetic. Borg eyes in a chrome skull. It stopped around the upper lip, where he had a long, rather awesome beard and moustache that he tucked into his three-piece suit.

His eyes twitched down, scanning her, then back up towards Cat. “Hey Rac. Who’s your friend?”

“She’s a specialist,” Rac said. “Lookout specialist. Thought we could use the extra hand today, and I wanted to introduce her to Millenium Animal.”

Molotov eyed Cat for a long, long time, then he gestured them in. “Behave, little Racoon,” he said. “And your friend too. The Barbers don’t like trouble.”

“Yes sir,” Rac said.

They slipped through the rotating door, and the music hit her like a slap to the face. Loud swing music, accompanying a woman on a far stage swaying her hips and multiple fox tails while she crooned through a song.

The bar was split into three distinct areas. The big central dance floor, with the stage and its musicians and a few holograms along the edges of men, women and anthropomorphic animals in suits and nice dresses from over a century ago dancing, and to the left was the bar itself, with a bunch of round tables and a counter that ran the length of the room.

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The place wasn’t as busy as she’d seen it, probably owing to it still being early in the day. Still, there were some three dozen or so people around the bar and the floor, some in nice anachronistic suits, others with varying amounts of animal parts either worn on as clothes or as elaborate prosthetics, and a few just… normal street people, like she could have seen anywhere.

The right side of the bar was where she dragged Cat. There was a dividing wall, the bottom half fake wood, the upper bulletproof glass. Behind that were the booths, which is where business happened.