Interlude - The Rat and a Mouse - Part Two

Interlude - The Rat and a Mouse - Part Two Mouse was busy. She was always busy. Busy busy busy. All the time. 24/7. She was in her cave at the moment. The Mouse hole. Her home inside of home. The gang HQ turned den of great evil and memes. Her room was a windowless space with a powerful AC unit mounted to one wall and posters on every other surface. In a corner was her bed, covered in plushies (mostly official merch!) and blankets that hadn't been changed out in... uh... anyway. The middle of the room was the important part. It was her throne. The place where she kept busy. Seven monitors. Seven! And not cheap ones either. These were top-end suckers, plugged into a water-cooled PC whose external temps were enough to heat up a sauna and whose internals were cool as ice. It was literally magic, and she needed it because that machine was running all sorts of things. Three monitors were on livestreams. One of them was a pair of entertainers she liked doing a cooking special. The one below that had a Vtuber playing the latest most popular game, and the one below that had another Vtuber, this one a singer, doing a concert. The other four screens were just as important. One had a constant feed of texts and messages from the guild. Their Chaos server. Two more were monitors. News trawlers, feed checkers, police and corp radio readers, she even had a HAM interceptor up on the roof in case someone went old-school. The last was a switching feed of the cameras in and around their base. If something happened in the River Rat's territory, she'd know it before anyone else. The last was the largest of her monitors. It was held up by six plastic figurines of her favourite vtubers (and a boring gimbal arm behind it) and was currently filled with flashes and explosions as she played a rather dull, uninspired FPS. Honestly, she was a little bored. There just wasn't enough going on. That's when she got a call. The screen with her messenger app flashed, and a line next below a familiar profile picture (currently an image of some anime woman's cleavage) covered everything. A ringing sounded out, drowning out the three streams and the game she was listening to. PikaRatChu6969 is Calling Was Becky bored too? Insane. Mouse had hooked her up with wi-fi inside a portal. That was unheard of. The kind of tech genius that would make nine out of ten corps salivate at the sight. Portals had wild fluctuations on entering and exiting, and that wrecked havoc on anything but the strongest signal. The fluctuations messed with signal attunement as well, in a completely arbitrary and random way... or so it seemed. If one could read the pattern of it, and say, create an algorithm that predicted the shift in the micro-seconds before it happened, they could send a signal through that wasn't entirely scrambled to hell, a signal with a segment of code attached that helped read the next micro-second of the signal as well. It was finicky as hell and had taken her a month and a half to make it work. Only the very best corps and some government agencies had something like it, and she was pretty sure theirs were only barely able to send walkie-talkie levels of communication back and forth. Becky was using Mouse's hard work to stream cat videos at dial-up speeds. She was probably bored with that. Mouse answered the call. "Hello!" she said while trying not to die in her game. She couldn't pause it, it was multiplayer. Becky didn't reply, which was concerning. Enough that Mouse closed the cooking stream (it was making her hungry anyway). Then Becky turned on streaming. It was from the retina-augs that she had. Low-quality stuff that they still got for pretty cheap. Mouse had touched up the software on it. There was soooo much spyware on modern cybernetics it was crazy, and half of it just bloated things until it was barely usable. The connection was a little spotty, so the bitrate was awful, but Mouse could still see what Becky was seeing. The inside of that portal, the one with the goblins? Becky was focused on someone up ahead. A woman that Mouse didn't recognize. Taller than average, black hair, pale skin, and... that was about all Mouse could tell from behind. "Hmm, you're gonna wanna see this, Mouse," Becky hummed. It sounded like she was speaking right into Mouse' right ear. Mouse sat up in her plush gamer chair, then she jumped as someone fragged her in her game. "Dammit," she muttered. This felt too important, though. So she quit mid-match and moved the stream to her main monitor. In the meantime, she started sending texts. To Josh, mostly. He was the most responsible one around the portal. "Pardon?" the strange woman asked. "Nothin'!" Becky said. "Don't you worry about it!" They moved up and into an antechamber, then the woman gestured for Becky to stay back. She drew a sword and Mouse took a quick screen-cap of it, then she was off, jogging into the darker parts of the room with quick, sure movements. "Can you hear me?" Mouse asked. "Yeah," Becky muttered. "Chick just showed up, said the portal was about to breach, then bribed me to help." "Weird," Mouse said. "Want to pull out?" "Nah, I can take her," Becky said. Mouse wasn't too sure. Becky was strong, she'd know, she had been training Becky in her off time for the past three or so years. Mouse herself had hit C-rank five years back and then promptly quit her job to join a gang because she liked not selling her soul. Becky was strong. Not C-rank strong though. She just had a crazy good innate magic and used it to the hilt. Direct Lightning Manipulation was a level three spell, and Becky had it from the start, and as an innate spell, she could twist and use it all day long, casting it with insane efficiency. If she joined a corp, she'd be their darling... until they tried to get her to do anything. Most electric mages were distractable, but Becky was... a lot. Mouse couldn't complain though, she got it. "If you're sure," Mouse said. "Keep an eye on her." "Mmh. Think it's true?" Mouse considered it, but only for a moment. "Yeah. Told Josh to wipe the portal tomorrow. Even if it's good money, it's due for a breach." "Damn," Becky said. "And Deadline here just knew, huh?" Deadline? Was that the woman's name? Mouse twitched and two more streams stopped, were paused, and minimised. New windows opened without her looking at the screens at all, or without her even moving her fingers. One started to look for Deadline online. Anything public. The other did a deeper dive, mostly into the hacker forums and poking at some identification algorithms that she had no right to. She had to be careful with that later, they needed to be plugged into some of the big computers some corps had, and most bigger corps had at least one or two buzzers like her plugged directly into their net... but by default, they were all easily bored and very distractable, so it wasn't all bad. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Plus, Mouse was just better. Becky jumped, which made her stream lurch as well. Mouse refocused, trying to see what had done it, only to see the dead body of a goblin flopped down in the middle of the antechamber. Deadline dropped down next to it, then cleaned her sword. "Area's clear," she said. "See that," Becky replied. "Got some ninja shit goin' on?" "No," Deadline said. "Goblins like these aren't exactly hard to sneak up to. Let's see what the rest of the portal looks like, though." "Sure," Becky said. Mouse watched as Becky followed Deadline into a large chamber, then they moved to the right, into an alcove after a short discussion about how to tackle the portal. Mouse listened with half an ear while she dug and found... not much. Deadline was a ghost. That perked her interest a little, and she widened her search. Fortress ENE had a database of all known rankers. The E-ranker database was a hot mess, but this woman was at least D. Height and approximate age, black hair, female... that brought up... about a hundred and twenty matches. Too many. She'd need to know what kind of magic Deadline had access to, and maybe a good look at her face. Her weapons might help? She took a snapshot, brought it to another screen, then zoomed in on the gun at Deadline's hip. A revolver? Mouse didn't know guns very well, but... She cross-referenced the handle, came up on one, and then narrowed down the make and model in the space of two minutes while her eyes never left the stream. Becky and Deadline were messing up goblins. Deadline was a fairly component swordswoman. Not perfect, though. Her movements were a little jittery, there was something about them that seemed... unorthodox? Mouse had seen it before. This was someone who had little training but a fair amount of experience. Interesting. Non-corp? The gun research came up. A Bastion-Krieger Model 2088c 'Stout-Nose' chambered in .454 Casull. That told her something, she supposed. It went up on a board, another detail to be pinned. Only... wait. Mouse looked into the gun, its sales, and which corps used it. She got a match, but had to dismiss it. The Stormchasers used that kind of revolver, and they had someone who was young enough and had black hair, but Mizu Aokawa was too short to be Deadline. Ah... but Mizu Aokawa had made a post recently that mentioned a 'dead line.' Mizu Aokawa - Storm Chasers Tuesday 10 of September Some punk solo we ran into just robbed me! She stole my revolver while I wasn't looking! Can you believe it? Fortress ENE is such a mess. This place needed better security or else there will be even more of these dead lines running around. The post had a few dozen likes and some comments, but not much else. Mouse dug around some more. She could smell it. Some good cheese, just around the corner. Ah! There! The Storm Chasers had done a similar search a couple of weeks ago and came up with nothing, but then a week later, someone else had done the same. A video surfaced of the Storm Chasers confronting someone, and that looked like Deadline, didn't it? A few questions, a few traces. Mouse followed them back. Redline? Weird. And then she found a fresh link. Deadline had been around when that one corpo princess had been kidnapped about a week ago. Not kidnapper, but unkidnapper. Saved the princess and then ran off without a trace. An affiliate of Redline? Maybe, but Mouse didn't think so. She watched as Deadline and Becky cleared out the next chamber, then another. Becky was having fun, at least. She was quipping a lot, talking about her special interest of the moment (some gacha game... she didn't shut up about it, so Mouse moved a decimal to the left her odds of getting any five stars and was redirecting anything Becky paid into the game back into her own account) and Deadline was listening passively, with only a few comments. "Stop staring at her tits," Mouse said. "Nu-uh," Becky said. Deadline half-turned. "What was that?" she asked. "Nothing much," Becky said. She waved her hands dismissively. "Just grossed out by all these goblins. I'm all wet over here, you know." Mouse rolled her eyes. The idiot. "Right," Deadline said, obviously not catching onto the subtext. If Mouse had to spend one more hour listening to Becky wax on about some plausible-yuri-bait gacha character she'd short-circuit her own brain. "Really hate goblins," Becky said. Then her attention snapped back to Deadline's chest. The woman was bending over to grab something off the ground, which had an obvious consequence vis-a-vis gravity. "But I wouldn't mind goblin' those," Becky muttered. "I will fry your brain until the stupid is cooked out of you," Mouse said. Becky chuckled. "Come on, Deady, let's go kill more shit!" Mouse sat back and watched as they continued to clear the portal. She was in contact with Josh the entire time, just in case, but Deadline... didn't do anything untoward. She defended Becky's back and took on her share of enemies. She was mostly quiet, but also competent. Mouse wouldn't have minded a few Deadlines in her gang, to be honest. The boss came, and the boss went. It wasn't even a challenge with the two of them working together. Mouse leaned back and considered it. Could Deadline have solo'd the portal? Maybe. Probably. She seemed to have some amount of skill, but there had been a lot of enemies, and even Becky was winded and tired. So, maybe she couldn't. And maybe she knew as much, and so chose to rely on someone. Or there was something else at play. Mouse made a call. Josh answered before the first ring. "Mouse?" he asked. "Clear the area out. Pay back anyone who paid for more time than they got. Tell them that the portal needs closing." "It's a few hours earlier than we expected," Josh said. "It's fine. We made our profit," she replied. The River Rats weren't her gang, but she brought in the most income, and she could summon thunder from a clear sky onto the head of anyone that annoyed her too much, so it was kind of her gang. "Becky will be clearing out in a moment, along with a... friend. Stand close, with Franklin too. Maybe you'll get some power from the closing. Ah, but let our new friend pass." "Alright," Josh said. "If you vouch for them." "Hmm, more like I just don't want an enemy," Mouse said. If Deadline became her enemy, she'd have to leave her basement to go fry the woman, and that would mean missing hours of content. She was already falling behind! ***