AD Police Files: 'Broken Triat' Chapter 1: Prelude to madness, an anime x-overs fanfic

Gargoyles: AD Police File 1

by Bubblicious (felching_wang@hotmail.com)

Disclaimer: Some of the characters/concepts here are Disney's, some are AnimeIgo's, some are ADV Films', some are White Wolf Entertainment's, and some are mine. I'm not even going to try to separate them all, and bore you poor readers to death. Enjoy.

Preface: This is a crossover between the cartoon series Gargoyles and the anime series Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, with some White Wolf RPG action thrown in. You DO NOT need to have seen either series or have read the White Wolf books, mainly because I'm borrowing events that are explained, and a very, very few characters. So, anyways, enjoy.

***

"Just...tell me they won't go rogue, Sylia. That's all I want to know."

Priss Asagiri

Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040: 'Are You Experienced?'

"A gargoyle's purpose is to protect. To be otherwise is to be corrupt. Empty. Lifeless."

Goliath

Gargoyles: 'Reawakening'

***

Excerpted from the introduction of Detective 2^nd-class Max Osaka's "Notes on the Future":

"The voomer project was supposed to be humanity's gateway to the future. Even if the Tokyo MegaQuakes in the 2030s hadn't occurred, the voomers would have been necessary, if humanity ever were to have any chance of leaving Earth for the stars.

"Voomers are cyber-organic creatures, dumber than the average dog, programmed and designed with one specific purpose in mind: serve humanity. They build our buildings, they manage the space-needle that provides the majority of the Earth's power. They serve as secretaries, they maintain the sewer-systems of our major cities, and they even serve in military and personal protection services.

"They are also the greatest threat to public safety humanity has ever encountered.

"'Rogue' voomers are responsible for more death and destruction across the scope of the world per year than humanity itself. When a voomer goes rogue, its core goes through a kind of poly-metamorphosis that leaves most scientists and scholars simply scratching their heads in confusion. The core is the hive-nexus of a voomer; it supplies the power and basic programming necessary for a voomer to simply operate. All higher functions are handled by a central CPU-system. It houses a small portion of genetic material, and is often located in the chest or head.

"A rogue voomer has two stages. First, its core begins rewriting and subverting the higher AI CPU, transferring all instincts and programming to the core itself. Rogues tend to drop out for moments at a time, before seeming to come back to life and go about their jobs. Shortly afterwards, they go berserk. Reacting to perceived threats, they lash out at their human overlords, killing them whenever they can, but typically leaving other voomers well enough alone.

"The second stage is infinitely more dangerous and terrifying. The core begins to grow, its genetic portion growing more dominant, subverting the mechanical processes. Limbs are able to be regrown, and new extremities begin growing. 'Fusing,' the process by which a rogue voomer may attach itself via bio-organic tendrils to other non-organic creations and absorb them into its own body, is possible.

"There has been only one occurrence of voomers going rogue en masse. Tokyo, 2040 AD. The MegaCrash. The death toll has been calculated at close to 100,000 men, women and children, and untold property damage. It was only put down thanks to the work of a group of armored vigilantes, an eclectic group of young women called the 'Knight Sabers.' Working with a select group of Advanced Department Police officers, they were able to obliterate the source of the problem, and wipe the city clean of the rogue infestation. Unfortunately, the city itself was wiped off the map in the process.

"Voomers were brought back in to repair Genom's Shorham Project, and reconstruct the city of Tokyo itself. We had dared to hope that the rogue infestation, called the 'Sotai phenomenon,' had disappeared altogether. The first confirmed rogue afterwards appeared in Los Angeles in 2042. The 5^th AD Police precinct, LAPD, was formed as a special crimes division, battling terrorism, voomer crime, and most other things the normal police simply could not handle.

"The 3^rd ADP was formed in New York, after the Aerie-Wyvern gargoyle Clan lost several of its warriors to a group of rogue voomers in late 2032. The gargoyles have withdrawn from the public scene altogether, and the city hasn't heard from its guardian angels for the past decade.

"I am...I was...Detective 2^nd-class Max Osaka, 3^rd Advanced Department Police. My partner, Melissa Shields, was butchered by a rogue, while I watched, helpless.

"I never believed the stories about just how bad Tokyo was. Now, however, I know the truth. And, even before the events chronicled herein occurred, I knew that New York would be worse.

"This is the chronicle of all that I have seen, heard and learned. This is the chronicle of the world's end; of Ragnarok and Armageddon."

***

New York City

2044

Max sat in the café-bistro on 7^th Street, enjoying a nice cup of coffee, engaged in some fairly interesting discourse with a fiery brunette college student, attending the Stingray College of Advanced Studies. (At least, that's what her sweater said.) The conversation had started, amazingly enough, when she'd dropped down into the chair across from him and demanded to know why he was flaunting his ADP badge in everyone's face. When he'd explained to her that he was simply wearing it on a chain around his neck, she'd scoffed and gone off on a tear about just how much she hated the ADP. At first, Max had been mildly annoyed with her audacity and impertinence, but after they'd begun to get into the areas pertaining to voomer sentience and voomer rights and so on, he'd gone from amused to intensely interested.

The young lady, one Georgia Shelby, obviously didn't think much of the ADP. And that was a view Max could live with; he didn't think all that much of the ADP himself. The majority of 'liberated' voomers - the 3^rd-generation voomers that came off the construction lines after the Tokyo MegaCrash of 2040, and after the UN Sentient Rights Act of 2042 - Max had met were a helluvalot kinder, nicer, and less annoying than many of the people Max had to deal with.

By the time their conversation was at its end, they'd come to agree on a number of issues. Oh, they disagreed fervently on a few others, and Max had decided that she made one of the most adorable faces when she felt that her beliefs were in question. Ultimately, though, he'd reached one conclusion: she talked too goddamned much.

At any rate, it proved to be a moot point. While they were in the middle of a pitched debate concerning whether it was ethical or not to send unliberated voomers into the military's service, a crazed voomer, a scaled-down military model about twice Max's size, crashed in through the south wall. Brick and mortar sailed through the air, smashing into light fixtures and bringing them to the ground, pelting people with anything from medicine ball-sized chunks, to coating them with fine dust. One person was killed outright, a young man who'd been on his way out with a young woman on his arm, when the wall crushed his head flat under it, and pinned the woman to the floor.

Max reacted faster than he thought would have been possible. Somehow, in under two seconds, he'd torn the table free of the floor and thrown it into the voomer's path, bodily tossed Georgia behind the counter, where several others were cowering, and yanked his sidearm clear of its holster.

The voomer careened headlong into the table, unable to avoid it, and managed to barrel right over it, just at the same time that a holed and smoking AD police cruiser came screaming through the hole the voomer had created. A second, larger hole was created as the car came swerving to a halt, smashing into the voomer side-on as it struggled to keep moving.

Unfortunately, Max saw, aghast, the wheels of the cruiser had managed to do what the voomer hadn't; the woman, previously pinned, had been crushed flat by the car's maverick maneuvering.

Max turned from the gruesome sight, forcing down his bile, and focused his rage on the voomer. It was various shades of green, gray, and black, with bipedal shaping and reverse-articulated legs. Its arms were an impressive display of blades and close-quarters weaponry, while it also had a pair of retractable submachine guns mounted in its forearms, and even a rotary gun mounted in a recessed chest cavity. Its head was streamlined and had a swept-back, dangerous look to it. It fixed Max briefly in its glare, two smoldering liquid-blue eyes boring into his own. It had no mouth, nonetheless Max would have sworn it had sneered contemptuously at him and his handgun.

By this time, the idiots driving the cruiser - what was left of it, at any rate - were stumbling out, bringing automatic rifles and carbines up and around to fix the voomer in their sights. They opened up with all barrels blazing, hurling grenades and explosive-tipped rounds at the metal monstrosity. It seemed to sense the attack coming, however, and executed a neat back-flip that sent it sailing back and up. Its metallic claws scraped the ceiling as it sailed backward, bullets chewing into the air and wall around it. However, the two officers weren't shooting very well; in fact, they were shooting worse than the average civilian would. Max unleashed a torrent of obscenities and dove for the car. He landed just behind the man at the driver's side door. Peering into the car, he scanned about quickly for weapons.

What he found was an empty bottle of vodka, its contents soaking a box of armor-piercing rounds.

He did, however, see another assault rifle in the back seat. He snatched it up, checked to make sure it was loaded, and set himself up for a bead on the voomer, just as it landed.

The voomer opened up with both the SMGs on its forearms, and the minigun buried in its chest. Slugs poured into the ground, the walls, and the cruiser's chassis. High-velocity rounds punched clear through the cruiser's armored exterior, sending Max flat on his face in a panicked scramble to stay the hell alive. The officer above him, drunk as he was, was slower in seeking cover, and paid the price when three of the slugs went straight through the kevlar-II vest he wore. He crumpled, dead before he hit the ground. The other one, by sheer luck, managed to dive back into the car before the door on his side was blown clear off its hinges. The hail of bullets didn't let up for what felt like an eternity, before a different sound entered the mix; a distinctive high-pitched whine that could only belong to a certain type of machinery.

Another explosion, this one just slightly less severe than those set off by the grenades the idiot brothers had used, sent the voomer flying back out the window of the café. Both Max and the inebriated officer scrambled out of the smoking remains of the cruiser and looked up to see what the hell had just happened.

What they saw sent a thrill through Max; a sleek, jet-black armored figure had arrived to take the voomer down. The XE-12P powered armor made the old K-class battle armor look antiquated by comparison. Boasting three times the destructive power of the old K-series, fuse-resistant armor, and increased agility, the XE-series armor had single-handedly proved its worth again and again in the years since Xanatos Enterprises had sold the specs and rights on them to the United States government. They were based on the basic anatomy of the gargoyles that had come into the spotlight back in 1997. With razor-sharp wings capable of slicing cleanly through steel plating three inches thick, as well as fully articulated hands and feet, tipped with talons just as deadly as the wing-blades, they were able to soak up and deliver heinous amounts of damage. The hands were able to make use of specially-designed weaponry, from quarterstaffs to battleaxes to railguns. Also, a retractable laser-cannon was buried in the right-hand forearm. The laser-cannon, in and of itself, could reduce a tank to scrap, if kicked up to full power. It could also be toned down, to simply be able to punch through flesh or the like, if the need arose.

Now, the XE was bringing a massive taloned fist up and around to deliver the voomer an uppercut that sent it reeling. The voomer staggered, but stayed on its feet. The XE pilot kept moving, throwing a right-left combo at it. The voomer rocked back, dazed as its programming sped to keep up. It did, and when the XE came in again, the voomer ducked low under the foot, and sliced cleanly upwards with the blades attached at its elbows. It only caught the tail, however, slicing it clean off.

The ADP pilot rallied, bringing his hind foot up and hooking it towards the voomer's head. But the voomer was ready for the move; it caught him by the ankle, and held the pilot and his suit fast in the split-second necessary for the other hand to spear out and punch its hand-talons clear through the XE's helmet and cleave through the pilot's brainpan.

The XE slumped, both pilot and armor down and out.

"Jesus Christ!" Max swore, drawing another bead on the voomer. "What in the hell does it take to kill this thing?!" He lined it up in his sights as quickly as he could, and squeezed the trigger. The armor-piercing round took the voomer high, right across the shoulders. It rocked backwards, howling in animated pain. Max flicked the mode selector over to full-auto, and depressed the trigger, holding it down again. High-velocity armor-piercing slugs peppered and holed the voomer again and again. Finally, the drunken asshole beside him finally opened up, his shots insanely inaccurate, even as the voomer fell, leaking lubricants.

It didn't get up.

The two men advanced, slowly, warily, stepping to either side, the drunk stumbling and damn near falling on his face as they stepped out onto the street. People were beginning to peek out, wondering if the action had stopped for now.

Max kicked the voomer experimentally, even as he heard the background whine of police-sirens and XE jet-packs approaching. It didn't move, laying in a rictus of mechanical agony. He crouched down next to it, staying as far away from the blades as he could. He peered closely at the head, the chest, and the midsection, looking for the core - the heart of the voomer. Without it, no voomer could carry out its programming, much less function.

He finally found it, or what was left of it, dead-center in the voomer's 'forehead,' recessed deeply into the armored core.

Falling back on his haunches, dropping the assault rifle to the ground and putting his face in his hands, he let out a long shudder.

Kenji Cromwell's eyes flicked over to his partner's prostrate form. His partner and counterpart in crime was currently jacked into both his computer and Kenji himself. They both knew exactly what the other was thinking, and they were able to process information almost as fast as the computer they were interfacing with at the moment. The 'almost-as-fast' in that equation was what made Kenji nervous as all hell.

His partner, on the other hand, was a sea of tranquil calm. Lexington Wyvern's fingers flew over the keyboard deftly, manipulating the keyboard and trackball built into the side with the ease and grace that seemed to flow from all the gargoyles.

Both of them knew just how dangerous it was, 'decking the mainframe of Starling Industries. Their were all sorts of traps and hazards, both technical and mystical, built into the central CPU of the Western Hemisphere's largest supplier of voomer technology, since the Genom Corporation had been all but wiped out in the Tokyo MegaCrash, created specifically for hackers, deckers, and slicers. Mind-wipers, deck-smashers, and the lethal Scylla virus were just a few of the dangers.

But they knew just how necessary this particular deck was right now. They were in search of a specific file, filled with the serial numbers of an unknown number of voomers. These voomers had been installed with defective cores, all of which were at an incredibly insane risk of going rogue, or 'achieving the Sotai,' as various acid-heads and voomer-worshippers had called it. Naturally, this was information that Starling didn't want to come to light; not only would it be a horrible PR debacle, but it'd result in a massive loss of profits.

Not that peoples' lives factored into the equation, of course.

Kenji was sweating profusely from where he sat at Lexington's side, his arms and legs folded into the lotus-position. In his mind's eye, he saw both of them stepping through a typical city-scape. The street was aglow with veins of luminescence - files being transmitted back and forth. Black strands wove in and out of the streets, and over and through the 'buildings - folders, containing other various unaccessed and protected files.

Getting in had been fairly easy; Starling, like Genom had been, was lazy and complacent with their technological security. They put absolute, blind faith in their automated hunter-killer programs. Moving around was a whole other mess, however; there were a lot of those programs running around, and avoiding them made movement tedious and slow-going.

The two hackers, however, knew where they were going; the large, pitch-black 'tower' in the 'center' of 'town.' That had to be the secure database, where Starling hid all their dark, dirty little secrets. Starling executives were an incredibly anal-retentive type, both Kenji and Lexington knew; they wrote down and recorded everything they could possibly use against someone else, or even themselves, and they filed it away in some dark little corner for future use.

So, they made their way slowly to the obelisk. Lexington took point, of course; Kenji was good, one of the best hackers in the business, but he paled against Lex. Lex, who had a natural affinity for computers that dwarfed most anyone else's, and cyberware and decking gear that went past state-of-the-art. Hell, Kenji's cranial deck wasn't even state-of-the-art. He was only riding shotgun on this mission, to make sure Lex didn't get ambushed by any of the HKs running around.

Lex hunkered down on the roof of a nearby building, scanning the obelisk with those synthetic eyes he had. As Kenji crouched down next to him, he tried not to let himself be reminded again of just how alien his partner was sometimes. So much like a gargoyle, yet so much like a human, and even a voomer as well.

"There." Lex said after a few moments. He pointed towards the top of the obelisk, at a section of it that seemed as nondescript as any other portion of it. "See it?"

Kenji shook his head, no.

Lex sighed tiredly. "I swear, I've gotta get you an upgrade for that deck of yours...fine. Wait here."

Kenji opened his mouth to protest, but Lexington had already dropped off the side of the roof, and was gliding up towards the obelisk. Kenji swore under his breath, and waited.

Elisa Maza reflected that, once again, she was too old for this crap. But, of course, no one gave a rat's ass just what it was she felt too old for. She eased back down into her chair, putting her face into her hands and letting out a slow, shuddering sigh.

She hated her job; hated it with a passion. But, at sixty-some years old, she was the only one still left to do it. The only one with the ability and experience needed to act as the Commissioner of both the ADP and the normal police. Her former partner, Matthew Bluestone, was dead, killed with his wife in a drive-by while they'd been out on the town. Their daughter, a teenage girl named Callinda, had disappeared from the orphanage shortly afterwards, only to turn up in a dumpster three days later, raped and murdered.

Maria Chavez, Elisa's former boss, was dead and gone. Her children had moved on, and one of them held Elisa personally responsible for Callinda Bluestone's death. Officer Morgan, her old coffee-and-donuts pal, had, likewise, kicked the bucket shortly after retirement.

Even the gargoyles had changed. Lexington had quit the Clan after his transformation, and Brooklyn had been on walkabout ever since...

Elisa promptly slammed that mental door shut. Her head snapped up and her back straightened in her chair. She rose, and, tugging the corners of her jacket and checked her reflection in the window, made sure her blouse and suit fit correctly. She stepped back over to her desk and thumbed on the intercom. "Laurine, please show Detective Osaka in." She slid back into her chair and waited.

She didn't end up waiting long, as the double doors of her office opened, and both Laurine and Max Osaka entered. Max did his best to surreptitiously avoid Elisa's secretary voomer, while managing to flash her a roguish grin. Laurine simply bowed slightly to Elisa. "Commissioner, this is Max Osaka. Detective Osaka, Commissioner Elisa Maza."

Elisa stood from behind her desk and nodded to her secretary. "Thank you, Laurine. If you'll excuse us, please..." Laurine nodded, blue-green hair dipping about her face briefly, framing it in a comely manner. She turned to go, making it halfway to the door before Elisa called out again. "Oh, Laurine, I'm sorry, but would you please inform me when she's arived?"

Max looked politely confused, but hid it well by examining the various medals and commendations Elisa had up on her wall. Laurine nodded slightly, then stepped out, closing the door behind her. Max turned back to face Elisa, smiling tiredly. He took the proferred hand and pumped it tiredly.

Elisa smirked. "Please, Detective, take a load off before you pass out across my desk."

Max snorted, easing into his chair gingerly. Elisa sat down herself, taking a moment to look the man over. After his run-in at the café, he certainly did look like hell. He had a variety of cuts and bruises on most every inch of exposed skin, and he was nursing his knuckles quite a bit.

Elisa started. "Do you know why I've asked to see you?"

Max shrugged, folding his hands in his lap. "I...would imagine that you want me to offer my testimony on what happened earlier today..?"

"That's only part of it, yes. But we'll get to that in a minute. If you'd care to tell me..?" She gestured for him to go ahead and speak.

And speak he did, for a solid twenty minutes, going on about the young woman he'd met, the voomer, its appearance and abilities, the arrival of the ADP cruiser and its drunken occupants, the XE armor's demise, and the events thereafter. How he'd given the surviving officer, Sergeant Luther Mannheim, a thorough dressing down in public, to the point where other ADP officers had to pull them apart. About the casualties and fatalities carted away afterwards by the EMS and Coroners, and how Georgia had come up to him shortly afterwards, wrapped in a blanket with a nervous-looking ambulance junky hovering around, keeping an eye on her. How she'd demanded to know just how often this kind of thing happened, and how he'd been forced to answer with the truth; 'daily.'

"That good enough?" He snapped, harsher than Elisa knew he'd intended, ostensibly because he just looked damned weary.

"That'll do, Detective." Elisa responded evenly, meeting his gaze. "Thank you. I'm sure you'll be glad to know that Mannheim is going to end up crucified in a public court." Max simply shrugged. "Now, about the other manner of business..."

Just then, her intercom beeped. "Excuse me a moment." Elisa reached over and thumbed it to life. "Yes?"

"Commissioner, Sergeant Wyvern has arrived, and awaits your pleasure." Laurine's voice answered in crisp, clipped tones.

"Thank you, Laurine. Give us a few moments, then show her in, please." Elisa turned back to Max, who had a vaguely interested look on his face. Elisa smiled inwardly. "Detective, I know that you've recently suffered the loss of your partner..."

Max winced visibly. "Putting it mildly, ma'am. What, are you guys..." He searched for the word, a word, any word, other than 'replacing.' No one could ever just 'replace' Melissa. She'd saved his life too many times, covered for him on too many occasions to just be 'replaced' like a voomer.

Elisa nodded ever-so slightly, remembering all too well what she'd gone through when Matt had died. "We both know you can't face down a voomer on your own, Detective. So..." She spread her hands placatingly.

Max was all too painfully aware of just how dangerous it was to try to take down a rogue voomer on your own, especially if it had mutated.

The doors opened, and both Elisa and Max rose, turning to look at the new arrivals. Laurine was there, of course, holding the doors open for...

Max went rigid, his eyes bulging, and his skin turning an interesting shade of white. And then he fainted.

An hour later, the doors to City Hall, where Elisa's office was sequestered, flew open, and Max came storming out, in mid-tirade. His partner followed after him, a vaguely amused look on his face. She didn't interrupt him once as they moved off towards his cruiser, instead letting him get it all out of his system now.

"I mean...whose bright idea was this?!" He snapped, turning to look back at her...and found his eyes inexorably drawn to her chest, where her 'uniform' did nothing to hide her figure. He grunted and stuffed his hands into his pockets, shuffle-footing along like a sullen child. "No offense or anything, but...hey!" He hollered, glowering at her as she started to move towards the driver's side. "That's my baby, woman!"

Alicia Wyvern arched a single ivory eyeridge at him, striking blue eyes turning to meet Max's own. Her lips split in a feral grin, and her wings caped about her shoulders.

"And stop looking at me like I'm dinner, goddamnit! I am not whatever it is you gargoyles eat!" He stepped up to her and crossed his arms over his chest, meeting her gaze evenly. With a smirk and a toss of her hips, she moved to the passenger side. Max grumbled to himself and keyed open the door, then opened up the passenger side doors. He flipped the ignition while his new gargoyle partner eased into the passenger-side. She played about with her tail for a moment, trying to figure out where to put it, and readjusted the seat until she managed to at least fake a comfortable look.

Max threw the car into reverse and tore out of the parking lot as fast as he possibly could. They went cruising around town for a long while, Max rolling down his window and lighting up his first in a long chain of cigarettes, muttering to himself the whole time. By the time they hit the highway, however, he'd tossed his last butt away and rolled up the window.

"This is your normal patrol pattern? Cruising the highways?" She asked, shooting him another vaguely amused look.

He only frowned at her, gripping the control yoke just a little harder and goosing the engine a bit more. "So..." He said finally, his left eye twitching just slightly. "Who put you up to this, and how the hell did you get to be a Sergeant already?"

"No one 'put me up to this,' Osaka." Alicia growled, stretching out as best she could in the seat. "This was my own idea. Anyone tells you otherwise, shoot 'em."

Max eyed her warily, shrugging it off. "And your rank..?"

"Military service."

Max eyed her again, this time with a look of sheer skepticism. "Right. And I'm the Real Slim Shady."

"The what?"

"Nevermind. Tell me about your - damned rat-faced bangers!" Max swore viciously, rolling down his window and shaking a fist at the pair of motorcycles that had intentionally nearly hit him. He huffed indignantly and slouched a bit deeper into his seat. "Your rank."

Alicia sighed, turning her gaze out the window, watching the city go past. "I've been living in this city all my life, Osaka. I've been guarding the streets since before the Tokyo quake, before and after the city ordered us to stop our vigilante work, even after that...voomer...killed my father and uncle. I've got a genetic need to protect the men and women in my protectorate, even at the expense of my life, of my Clan's life." She turned to fix him with a dark, challenging stare. "If you think I haven't earned this slab of metal..." She thumbed the badge hanging from her neck. "...then you can, with all due respect, Detective, go straight to hell."

Max looked over at her out of the corner of his eye briefly before nodding slightly. "Fair enough."

They drove in silence after that, going about their rounds.

As Kevin O'Leary moved around inside his powered armor, he reflected once more on the sheer unfairness of it all. The organization - such as it was, what with three active members and a single wrenchie - offended his very sensibilities. He was ex-British Marine Corps, for God's sake! In His Majesty's service, for the love of Pete! He shouldn't be here, running around with a group of mercenaries and vigilantes.

But...if not him, then who the hell else was going to do it?

The boss had approached him; not the other way around. Him and Chris. Asked them if they'd wanted to do something to keep the civilians out of the line of fire. The latest incident, what with the bistro out on 7^th, only served to remind Kevin of just why this was so necessary.

He and Chris had been training for months on their suits and, now, according to the boss, they were finally ready.

Kevin just hoped God felt the same way.

"Scream in, check out! Look around at life today,

You sick of it yet?"

The music was heavily laden with bass undertones, and carried at a beat fast enough to suit most acid-heads.

"Hey, little screamers! You see this shit?

Down to yer knees, li'l piggies! Ain't takin' your shit anymore!"

The club was an out of the way rave, a dive in most senses of the word, save for the fully-stocked bar .

"Whatever happened to life's sanctity?

It ain't the boomies, my friends!

It's the goddamn ADP!"

The band was a local one; the song an amalgamation of several different late 20^th-century pieces, laid on top of some punk-rock/techno strains, played at ear-splitting volumes for maximum effect.

"I look at our lives today

I see nothing but pain

I feel only solitude

I know only sorrow"

The customers were a rowdy bunch; drug-addicts, gang-bangers, and normal people just looking to get away from particularly bad days/weeks/years/lives.

The lighting was next to non-existent, with a number of lasers and strobes, the majority of the dive's marginal lighting focused on the stage, and the band on it. Hypodermics, half-consumed narcotics, cocaine dust, and the thick scent of marijuana and booze lingered any which way you turned or went. It didn't matter how they marked the bathrooms; both of them looked like ass, and both were littered with urine, semen, and used rubbers. Couples copulated in the stalls and against the walls, and no one batted an eye.

Men and women, vampires and vampyrs, humans and voomers: all attended, all were welcome.

This was Gomorrah.

This was Lexington's creation.

He stood above, looking down on them from the tinted window that made up the eastern wall of his office. At his desk sat his team, the mercenary decker-runner group called the Underground Railroad; Kenji, Miyu, Dexter and Krul the Orc.

Miyu was a 33-S, Genom-manufactured Sexaroid voomer; one of the few left, after they'd been declared illegal, and had become hunted by most everyone. She'd come to join Lex's group of her own volition, after she'd been captured by the European Union and forced through several attempted reprogrammings. She'd been plugged into a new type of heavy-weight battle mover, to rival even Japan's J-11 walking fortresses. The reason the 33-S had been discontinued, as it happens, was because they'd been found to have cores and mainframes capable of interfacing with incredible ease with most any type of weapons systems. But, her brain-wipes had failed to hold. Miyu rebelled against the EU, and after she'd wiped out most of downtown St. Johannesburg in her rampage, using the new battle-mover, she'd escaped - barely. She'd made it as far as Prague in 2039, where she had a chance meeting with Brooklyn, of all people. Brooklyn had no idea what to do with her, or how to even help her, so he'd called in some favors at XanaCorps, and had her sent back. After Lex had been recalled by Xanatos to help in her repair, she'd left with Lex.

As far as Lex knew, Miyu was the last person to ever see his brother.

Dexter was an elf, and the best data-slicer the group had. Dexter, of course, was not his given name, but he rather preferred it to the ten-thousand characters that comprised his true name. Dexter had a unique affinity with the mouse-and-keyboard type of computer, and preferred it to having his head sliced open, and a deck inserted. He was the group's key link to staying out of sight, as he was capable of forging any document and fooling any security system. He served as the group's mechanic, and had formed a sort of brotherly rapport with Miyu.

Krul, on the other hand, was the gentle giant. Everywhere he went, his pet Alaskan Eskimo-Husky followed him. The dog was named Dog. Krul had a simple mind, obviously. Krul was the closest thing the group had to sheer muscle. Whenever they needed a physical diversion or distraction, Krul always did it. And he was good at what he did. He used only non-lethal weapons, but managed to make them look lethal. He smashed and broke a great many things, but never beyond any hope of repair. He had also been cybernetically altered, at his own request, to help him control his own genetic bloodlust and boost his intelligence to that of a human child's.

Kenji was an orphan. He wasn't much more than 23, and he was second-dog only to Lex when it came to straight decking. He was capable of ripping the most advanced mainframe apart and putting it back together as he saw fit. He knew the ins and outs of every deck on the market, and knew how to insulate himself from deck-smashers and other techno-thrill-seekers in his sleep. He'd also fallen hard for Miyu, though he didn't admit that to anyone, least of all himself.

Lexington was the enigma. He was cold, distant and aloof. Only Miyu's history was known to all of them; the rest hoarded their privacy, as though it were rarer than gold. And yet, Lex seemed to see right through them all. He seemed to know exactly what they were thinking, and he knew everything about their pasts. The group had talked about it in private, and they all had widely differing opinions as to who and what he really was, and what had happened to him since the Hunter's Moon, so long ago in 1997. All they knew was that he'd managed to get himself established with a series of front organizations, all financing his private war against the voomer-manufacturers of the world. He was partially a voomer himself, more than half of his body mechanical in nature.

They sat at his desk now, looking over the files he'd pulled from the Starling database. Kenji tossed those same files on the desk and rubbed his eyes tiredly, before shifting his gaze to Lex. "It shouldn't be hard to go through the serial numbers on the list, and match them up against those we might own or employ."

Lex nodded subtly, hands crossed over his chest. "I was thinking the same. Have someone do it. We'll pull any matches out and replace their cores with clean ones."

"...and we'll pull the serial numbers of the voomers we own from the list we forward to those ADP bawsts, ju?" Dexter asked, slipping back into his native elfin tongue briefly.

"Best to cover tracks." Krul rumbled briefly, before lobbing a huge ball of string fitting in one of his beefy hands across the room. Dog hopped off after it, barking at it before pouncing on it. Krul squealed with delight and clapped his hands merrily, gesturing Dog to come back with the string.

"Best to cover our tracks." Lexington echoed, his voice devoid of emotion.

"And what of this other you...found?" Kenji asked, his voice hinting just a trace of tired suspicion. Lex had known just what it was he'd gone in for. So, when he'd come out of the obelisk, carrying copies of two files, Kenji had been confused as all hell. Until he'd seen what it had, and then it just made sense that Lex had, of course, found it and retrieved it. "If Starling is really trying to resurrect the - "

Lex cut him off, voice tired and far wearier than Kenji remembered hearing in a long, long time. "Don't say it. We'll just...get these files into the right hands, and let someone else deal with it..."

Self knew its job. It took the unclean, and disposed of it, and made the clean. Self was important. Self, and its counterparts: all were important in ecosystem of green place. Self liked the green place. It was...green. Self had lived there all of its life, and its counterparts had always been there.

The Others had always been there, too. The soft, fragile ones, who didn't have the tough exoskeleton that self had. The Others, whom came and went as they pleased. Occasionally, an Other would come and fix self when it was broken. That happened, sometimes.

Self didn't understand the Others. They were disgusting. They made the unclean that self had to clean up, but self wasn't allowed to disturb the Others. Self could only pick up after the Others.

It was dark now. Now the Others would be unclean. Self didn't care; just as it didn't care when they talked behind its back, call it a 'stupid voomer.' Self just made the clean. And the Others made the unclean.

But...why the unclean? Self wouldn't have to make the clean, if the Others would stop making the unclean. Self could enjoy the green, then. Self and its counterparts could simply walk the green, while the wing-life sat on self's shoulders and chittered happily to it.

Self liked the wing-life. And the tail-life. But the green most of all. Life and green was clean.

Self didn't like the Others. They made the unclean.

So...why did it serve the Others?

"Sweet Jesus!" Max swore viciously as he was cut off - again - by another taxi. He stuck his fist out the window and waved it ineffectually at the cabby. "Where'd you learn to drive, asshole; Jersey?!"

Alicia threw her head back and laughed, short-cropped dyed-red hair spilling around her face. "Isn't that the same line they use in New Jersey?"

"Ah, shaddap." Max grumbled, hunching down over the wheel, reaching over to the dashboard and flicking the scanner back on. He reached over to his cup-holder and pulled the Starbucks cup from its container. He sipped at his coffee, continuing to mutter to himself about the 'gawdamn Jersey punks' while the scanner fed a fairly continual stream of background noise at them. "Check in, rookie." He said after a few moments. He swore, as he managed to burn his tongue almost immediately after speaking.

"Would you quit calling me that?" Alicia growled, thumbing the radio on and speaking into. "AD-056, 'Roost," She grumbled into the mike, giving her designation first, followed by the message's intended recipient, the ADP Information Management Center, nicked 'Raven's Roost' after a fairly antiquated military tradition. "Nothing's happening near the Park. No, wait...I've got a make on two teens in the bushes."

"Doing what, o-five-six?" The response came back, clipped and precise, while Max chortled into his coffee.

"Uh...'fleecing sheep,' sir." She responded, sticking her head out the window as they passed. That elicited another round of guilty chuckles from Max, while the controller verbally floundered in the background.

"Copy that, o-five-six. Continue patrol." The operator finally managed before signing off.

"That was cruel and unusual." Max said after he'd put his coffee back down, easing the car around a turn of the road.

"Oh, what, and coming onto that waitress while we were on duty was...what? Public relations?"

"Better'n beating helpless drunks senseless..." He retorted teasingly.

Alicia sniffed indignantly and gave her hair a defiant toss. "He deserved it. 'Is that tail fake, or are you just glad to see me?' Christ, where do you men come up with this shit?"

"Oh, c'mon..." Max snickered, holding off from laughing at her again. "The poor bastard was obviously taken in by your unearthly feminine wiles..."

"How'd you like to shut up and drive, Osaka?"

Max had a retort on the tip of his tongue, until a flicker of pseudomotion out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. "What in the..?" He peered out her window, squinting. His eyes snapped wide open an instant . "Duck!" He thundered, slamming the steering yoke back, decelerating, and throwing the car into a 90-degree spin. Alicia responded instantly, dropping down and tucking her head between her legs.

The rogue voomer would have taken her head - and her torso - clear off if she hadn't.

It careened into the back of the cruiser, screeching a thoroughly inhuman mechanical yowl as it went. It was huge, nearly three times the bulk of the average human, and one sweep of its arm took most of the passenger-side with it as it passed. Shards of metal and plastic bit into the unexposed flesh of Max's arm and face, drawing up tiny rivulets of blood.

Alicia was up and out of her seat before the voomer had managed to stop and turn around, vaulting easily over what was left of the door and facing off against the voomer while Max was just shrugging out of his seat-belt. He slapped a hand down to the portable radio attached to his waist. He didn't bother trying the scanner, as shrapnel had managed to destroy it. He pulled his sidearm, a heavy assault pistol capable of putting a hole through powered armor, clear of its holster, thumbed the radio on, and dropped down behind what was left of his cruiser, all in the space of a heartbeat.

He was yelling into the radio, calling for backup and leveling his pistol at the voomer when Alicia did something that thoroughly floored him: she charged the voomer. Max's jaw fell, and his aim wavered. The ADP operator was giving him a roger, but he didn't pay any attention as Alicia waded into the metal monstrosity, her eyes blazing a bright red and her talons flying.

And through it all, Max finally noticed something he hadn't before; under the overcoat she wore, she'd managed to hide a pair of forearm-sheathes and shin-guards capable of somehow folding over her hands and feet. He watched, completely dumb-founded, as she fended off attack after attack, then sent the voomer reeling with an uppercut that would have killed a human. The voomer staggered backwards, a large dent in its jaw, electricity coursing and crackling over its skull. She followed through, hopping up and bringing her foreleg across its jaw with a near-deafening crack, followed by a small explosion.

The voomer staggered, and for the second time, something exploded where she hit it. Max stared, dumbfounded, as Alicia nailed it again and again with those gauntlets and shin-guards, and each time her armor found a target, there was a small explosion. Slowly, Max began to understand why. All along her gauntlets and armor, at strategic points placed specifically for maximum damage - and so she didn't blow her own leg off - miniature explosives had been embedded into or just under the surface, capable of being deployed whenever she needed to trigger it, apparently.

The voomer, smoking and bleeding nutrients, managed to finally get away from her. It swept a massive hand across her midsection, thick tendrils of something bordering between flesh and metal waving about like some demented cilia. Alicia went flying, her wings flailing uselessly as she careened head-long into a tree - and straight through it. She groaned and stirred, spitting out a mixture of saliva and blood as she did so.

The voomer shrieked another mechanical cry to the heavens, and thrust a single arm towards her. The cilia erupted from their forearm-sheathes, shooting towards Alicia, wriggling in a terrifyingly animated manner.

Max regained his senses fast enough to bring his pistol up and around. He snapped off three rounds into the creature's arm, knocking its aim off by precious inches. The cilia rolled and snapped through several trees and bushes, punching through yielding bark and leaves. They recoiled back to the voomer's arm, as the creature itself turned to face Max. Its mouth, twin mandibles clicking together hungrily, gaped at him, and a third ear-splitting shriek tore the night air.

Max swore, and fired again, putting a shell right between its eyes. He squeezed the trigger again, and again, and again, hitting it in the face, the mouth and the chest. It shrugged it off, and sprinted forward at him. Max managed to squeeze off another round before it was nearly on top of him.

He should've died, he would recall later. He should've been smear-marks on the soles of that's voomer's feet. And if it weren't for that huge, red...thing...that had swooped in and taken the voomer clear off its feet, he would've been just that.

Max and Alicia were both reduced to mere bystanders in the ensuing struggle. Three suits of powered armor - the red being larger, with wings, a tail, and a long, sheer helmet with horns sweeping back over its brow - took the voomer down.

The red tackled the voomer from the side, taking it clear off its feet. The voomer rallied, throwing Red off and coming to a rolling jump. Cilia shot out again, but Red simply rolled and avoided.

The yellow suit, laced with green and black trim, and obviously built with a woman's physique in mind, seemingly came out of nowhere. Her form was a bit less odd when compared to Red's, but visually much more attractive. She was incredibly curvaceous, and her acrobatics put Alicia's own to shame. Vibro-blades hummed and buzzed from where they were built into her forearms and shins. Her helmet, a standard piece with a tri-pronged communications suite that swept back from where her ears and forehead molded into an elegant crest above her nose, glinted in the moonlight as she struck. She was in and out before the voomer had time to react, landing on its back and gouging four deep furrows with retractable wrist-blades.

White, his armor trimmed with black, finally took the voomer down, via the pair of retractable laser-cannons mounted into its forearms. Where Yellow was graceful and elegant, White was bulky and massive. His helmet was simple, save for the crest that swept back from his brow and covered the sensitive joint at the back of his neck. When the voomer tried to take a swipe at him with one of those massive forearms, he simply caught it by the wrist, jammed one of those laser-cannons against the center of its chest, and blew a hole the size of a watermelon through its chest - and its core.

The voomer slumped, twitched in White's death-grip, and fell to the ground, dead. White dropped the limp forearm, metal joints creaking as it rolled its shoulders and neck in a fairly sedated victory dance. Yellow, standing off to the side, simply cocked her hips hautily, crossing her arms over her chest. Red stepped out of the foliage, brushing off dead leaves and branches from its bulk.

In those brief moments, Max got a good look at all three of them. White was definitely the tallest, but only because Red seemed to be hunched over in a perpetual slump. Yellow was dwarfed in comparison to them, but she carried herself with an air of imposed authority, in comparison to the others. It was long seconds, when the three were staring from Max to Alicia to themselves and back, before Max had the sense of mind to say, "You guys got permits for that armor?"

Red, White, and Yellow shared another look with each other, and Max would have sworn they were laughing at him. He'd never know, though. A spotlight snapped on from above, and a booming voice intruded on the scene. "Alright, everyone just freeze where they are!"

Max looked up, as did Alicia as she came to join him, both of them bruised and bleeding profusely. It took Max a minute to discern just what was casting the glare. An XE unit, he finally concluded. Bloody wonderful... He thought sourly.

"Goddamnit, I said freeze!" The XE pilot snapped. The officers' heads snapped around to look at the HARDsuits, only to see the jetpacks built into their armor flare to life. The asphalt blackened immediately, and they took to the air. "No respect." The XE pilot snorted to himself, though he apparently forgot the loudspeaker was on, taking aim with its forearm laser.

"Damnit, Harvey!" Max waved furiously at the XE pilot. "Don't shoot 'em!"

Too late, the laser whined to life. A thin red line of light shot out, and clipped Red across the wingtip. The HARDsuit rolled with the impact, swooping up and around. It hovered for a moment before leveling its right hand at the XE. There was a thin wisp of smoke, and a thin, wafer-like disc shot out. The XE and its pilot tried to evade, but moved too slowly; the disc slapped with a metallic clang against the armor's midsection. Currents of electricity surged out from the disc and enveloped the XE's exterior in its entirety. The armor writhed in the air for a moment, before it went abruptly rigid. The jetpack built in sputtered, before petering out completely.

It plummeted to the ground, crashing into the remains of Max's cruiser with enough force to destroy what little remained.

Max and Alicia rushed to the armor's side, only to find the pilot already stirring, having switched over to the emergency battery. The pilot twisted the dial on his chest, causing the armor's hermetic seal to pop and release. He yanked the helmet off and tossed it to the side, coughing.

Max smacked him cleanly upside the head. "Where the hell have you been?!"

Max sat slumped down in the chair, holding an ice-pack against his forehead while the yelling went on.

AD police Captain Rebecca Christmas was an angry woman. It was rumored that she took testosterone just to keep that mean-edge. Or that she had somehow perfected the perpetual PMS. Either way, the effect was to leave her an anal, angry shrew of a woman, who paid too damned much attention to rules and regs, and gave officers a reaming whenever she could get away with it. At least, that was Max's take.

AD police officer Alicia Wyvern was the new kid, but she had a mouth like a New Jersey lawyer. She was free, she was wild, and if she could get away with it, she'd pee all over the rules of jurisprudence.

Which meant one hell of a headache for Max.

Later, he'd reflect that the yelling break-down went something to the effect of,

Alicia: "What the -- ?! Out of our jurisdiction?! Who the hell else is going to handle those HARDsuits! The straight NYPD?"

Bitchmas: "You're one to talk, Sergeant. As I recall, it was your family that's been tearing up the streets of this city since..."

A: "That has nothing to do with this!"

B: "Oh? Those 'vigilantes' are outside of our jurisdiction! And that's an order from the mayor, Sergeant!"

A: "What in the name of...the bastard's on Starling's payroll, and you know it!"

B: "Why in the hell would Starling want the ADP to lay off these...uh... (checking report) ...'Vigilantes'? No, wait, don't answer that. Let me just take a stab at this. Starling, Inc, is building another series of Sotai-class voomers, to wipe out humanity as a whole, or to use specifically against his competitors by making their models go rogue, right? And the Vigilantes are part of his plan, right? The Sotais set 'em up, and the Vigilantes knock 'em down, and then these punks are revealed to be part of Starling. And the ADP look like idiots, Starling looks blameless, and then we have another MegaCrash. Am I close, Sergeant?"

A: "Well...uh...that's actually better than what I had, but YES, damnit! And since when does the ADP need help looking like a bunch of idiots?!"

B: "Get the hell out of my office! And take that lazy sack of waste sitting in my chair with you!"

The Private Journal of Max Osaka best describes the following:

"I had decided, within five seconds of stepping inside Alicia Wyvern's 'home', that this had been a bad idea.

"Oh, sure, it had seemed a good enough idea at the time; she invited me home to eat with her family - after we'd filed all that damned paperwork; I swear to God, if I have to vouch for one more bullet I put in a rogue's festering corpse... - and I'd, of course, said yes. Free food equals happy Max, right?

"Wrong.

"What my bonehead self had failed to register previously was, of course, since Alicia was a gargoyle, it might reason that her parents and 'Clan' were gargoyles as well. Sweet Jesus on rollerskates...it had been a bad day already, though that really doesn't need to be said. Two voomers, three dead civvies, two drunk cops, one dead cop, and a new partner. Oh, yeah, and my new partner has wings, a tail, and a triple-Z cup-size. And if she wears a bra, I ain't seen the outline yet. And trust me, folks; my eyes have spent enough time in her chest, even in the five hours I was on-duty before they sent us home.

"She lived in the Aerie tower. The tallest building in New York. The tallest. Not the second tallest, the freakin' tallest. With a friggin' castle on top! And the castle was where she lived! I pity the poor bastard who has to court this girl. This is just insane. And when I say insane, I say absolutely nuts. Xanatos imported the castle from Scotland, and now we've got gargoyles living there?! Where's the Count, man? We'll have a little...ah, fuck you. It was a funny joke.

"Needless to say, I needed a drink. A stiff drink. The kind of drink that leaves you drunk the next morning.

"Of course, the way Alicia's mother, Delilah Avalon, was glowering at me, I have no doubt that, had I asked for anything other than water, I would never be able to father children. And the jury's still out on that one. This woman hates me. Delilah Avalon is the type of woman that makes grown men weep simply by staring at them. This lady would make that SWAT-asshole Darla cry uncle.

"Yeah. The same guy who told the Commissioner to bend over. That Darla.

"I digress. Also in attendance were David, Fox, Alexander, Dawn, and Christine Xanatos - the richest people in the whole of New-stinkin'-York. And there I am, in a black t-shirt, a pair of gnatty jeans, and a black leather jacket. Appropriate for getting laid, perhaps. But not the Xanatos family. The Xanatos family! The people who finance the ADP, for fuck's sake!

"David and Fox Xanatos were...well. Whatever it is they're doing to maintain those girlish figures of theirs, they're doing a damned good job of it. And can you say upper-class? I kept sitting in my chair, fidgeting nervously, glaring at Alicia the whole time, going Why didn't you warn me?!

"This must be how she's getting back at me for that 'just how flexible is that tail, anyway?' crack. Why me, God?

"Where David and Fox Xanatos were regal, refined, even courtly, Alexander and Dawn were...well. If those two hadn't been getting a little PT in before dinner, I'm the fucking Pope. But they were dignified; hell, they made me feel right at home. Treated me like one of the family. Actually, the whole Xanatos family did, but, damnit, Christine just made me nervous. The pupilless, pitch-black eyes, the sheer fingernails capable of shredding steel, and the pointed ears...and that....ethereal beauty about her...

"It was all I could do not to stare at her all dinner long.

"Angela Avalon...what. The. Fuck. Where the Xanatos' are graceful and ethereal, this broad looks pissed twenty-four hours a day. And gargoyles are stone for half that, so you get the idea. Alicia told me about how her Clan had gone through some major separation angst in the '30s, and how Angela's husband, Brooklyn Wyvern, had gone on a self-improvement kick back in '37, and left Angela high-and-dry. So, naturally, she's pissed. I get that. I respect that in a woman. Scares the hell outta me, but I respect it.

"And her son, Drake Avalon (not Wyvern; Avalon, after his mother) is a ten year old squirt. I had to sit next to this annoying little shit, and he kept kicking me through the whole goddamn meal. What was I going to say? "Excuse me, Angela, would you tell your son to stop kicking me?" And risk her ripping my nuts off? Are you insane?!

"But the rest of them were alright, I guess. Commissioner Maza was there. I'd always heard rumors that she had been closely involved with the gargoyles back in 1997, so I guess this just makes sense that she's part of their Clan. She's a really fun gal when you get to know her, really. She made a crack on Officer Darla's prowess in the sack, which prompted a lot of choked food at my end of the people, and endless mirth on everyone else's behalf.

"Derek and Maggie Maza. I thought gargoyles, cyborgs, and that mutt, Bronx, was bad, but these guys take the cake. They're cats. Yeah. Cats. Well, hybrids, but, damnit, with cat thrown in. And they can throw lightning. And so can their grandkids. Oh, the parents were cool; they had a little fun at my expense, but then, even that stiff, Owen Burnett, had that. Their kids were fine. Their grandkids are why I'm never having children. And that's all I'm telling you.

"But something I noticed, though. The Clan's split in the '30s came up once during dinner, and when someone mentioned the name 'Goliath,' the Commissioner's face absolutely fell. And then, when it came time to do the toast, the elder Xanatos said, "To all those no longer with us, but forever in our memories," and the breakdown went like this: Fox said sommat about a dude named 'Halcyon,' Elisa had 'Goliath,' Delilah, 'Broadway,'(Alicia actually came close to tears here) Angela 'that no good son-of-a-bitch, Brooklyn,' the cat-people did a thing to a dude named 'Claw,' and then it got down to me.

"Picture it, please. Here's everyone, all swanked up...well, okay, only the Xanatos' - the others were wearing these smelly little loincloths that smelled like a Bronx bordello in a sweltering 95-degree summer heat - with their glasses in the air. And they're all staring right. At. Me. Expecting me to bare my soul for them for three friggin' seconds. So, I just raise my glass, grab my proverbial ankles, kiss my ass good-bye, and say, "Melissa Shields."

"I'd like to thank the Academy. I hope you're laughin' it up there with God, Melly.

"...I know I'm not."

Max's Journal continues:

"Well, we finished dinner. The appetizer looked like Owen had fished it out of the sewers, the salad looked all...green and leafy, the chicken looked like someone had wiped their ass with it, and the dessert was fried ice cream. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't care how good it tastes (and taste good it did), you do not fry the ice cream. It just...ain't American!

"Of course, neither is blood pie, but that tastes like ass, so let's move on...

"Well, the Commish turned in early, so did the Maza couple. The kids got tucked in bed, and the atmosphere just abruptly changed. I don't know what it was, but it was. I watched in awe as Fox put back two steins of booze in a gulp - a gulp; singular - and come back for more. Delilah and Angela eased up a bit, and we all got into a huge game of poker (I think I owe Xanatos my firstborn now, but don't quote me on that...) that devolved into strip poker. Welp, Alex and Dawn didn't last long, and were soon necking on the couch while I drunkenly fumbled my cards and lost more money. Alicia and her mom, Delilah, got into a running series of jokes about their late father/husband, which Fox promptly got in on while Xanatos and I wisely kept our traps shut. Angela, by this time, was damned near naked. Of course, so was I, but it's all in the Clan, right?

"Oh, yeah, apparently I'm Clan now. Kinky, I think, but absolutely useless next time a voomer comes at me tooth-and-claw. But I digress.

"So, anyways...we got to talking, and after a great number of beers and some hardcore prying, Xanatos finally spilled the Clan's split to me.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen some tragedies in my day. I'd like to consider myself somewhat immune to them by now.

"But this goes beyond tragedy. This is just sadistic."

Max's Journal continues:

"To truly understand the depth of this tragedy, we've got to go back to the beginning. Somewhere around 996 AD. According to Xanatos, this was a time when a bunch of bad hombres were running around; aside from humanity's normal riff-raff, you had all manner of baddies running around. Goblins, orcs, ogres, giants, fey, elves, even the occasional rogue gargoyle.

"Clan Wyvern was, by comparison to some of the others across the landscape, the largest group around. England had been purging and persecuting the gargoyles for centuries, and the Scots - where Castle Wyvern stood - were beginning to, themselves. Gargoyles are helpless during the day, as just about any shmuck worth his salt knows, so they formed a pact with the humans of Wyvern. It was a type of symbiosis, really. The humans kept the gargoyles alive during the day, and the gargoyles did their nocturnal protection thing.

"Just thinking about it makes me wish we had the same deal.

"Anyways. Goliath, his mate, Angel (sic, Demona, but that came much later; different story altogether) and his counsel, a grizzled old warrior called Elder (sic, Hudson, but that's another story) led them in and out of battle. They fought Vikings, orc hordes, demons, even something that Xanatos called the 'Devil's Horde.' (And won, to boot.)

"In the end, though, it was the one human they trusted above all who killed them: the Captain of the Guard. He and Angel formed a pact with a group of marauding Vikings led by a man named Hakon. The plan was that the Vikings would sack the Castle at the break of dawn, but that they would leave the gargoyles in peace.

"Hakon didn't trust the Captain, so he smashed the gargoyles anyway, while the Captain was forced to watch, helpless. Angel survived by hiding just before dawn.

"Goliath, Elder, and three of the Clan's teenagers - who'd come to be known as Brooklyn, Broadway, and Lexington - as well as the doggoyle Bronx, all survived by sheer luck of the draw. As did the Clan's eggs, stored away in something called a rookery.

"The Clan avenges itself on the Vikings, but the Castle's resident magician, after managing to somehow free himself, blames the Trio, Hudson, and Bronx (Goliath was off doing the dashing thing) for Princess Catherine's - the castle's keeper - death. He casts a spell, a miracle occurs here, and the gargoyles are stuck in stone 'until the castle rises above the clouds.'

"Tragic point: while the Magus was going nuts, Goliath was saving the Princess.

"Goliath couldn't rear the eggs by himself, so Catherine and the Magus take responsibility for them, as does a young squirt by the name of Tom. Magus sticks Goliath in stone, and the eggs, Catherine, Magus, Tom, and Tom's mom, go off on their own adventures. They end up on Avalon, a mystical isle of some sort, where time passes slower than in the real world.

"One-thousand years breezes by. Enter David Xanatos. He's a young entrepreneur, and something of a blood-sucker. He buys the castle and, lo and behold, moves it atop the freakin' Aerie tower. Gargoyles wake up, and hijinks ensue.

"A lot of stuff happens between that night, and this. Far too much to put down here. I'll just buy a copy of the Xanatos Family memoirs, when they write 'em up. And y'know what? I think everyone's going to buy it. Every single word. We've just seen too much in the past forty years. The discovery of Atlantis and that huge fish, Leviathan. The creatures in Germany's dark forest. Hell, even voomers, and the Sotai phenomenon.

"Anyways, the only reason I remember any of this is because Xanatos had been recording it, and he gave me a copy. How'd he know?

"Fah. Skip to 2031. Brooklyn's managed to woo and marry Angela, and they've got a squirt. Broadway hooked up with a girly off of Avalon - Delilah - and they begat Alicia. Lexington hooked up with a XanaCorps employee, name of Sarah Conway, but they never had kids before she died in a car accident, sometime around 2030. Hudson croaked sometime around 2025, courtesy of some hot-rodder with an Uzi. Bronx hooked up with a 'Boudicca,' whatever that is. They had puppies. One of them tried to pee on me.

"Alright, back on topic. NYC, 2031: voomers were going mainstream, and the gargoyles had mucho bad vibes. Goliath in particular. He and Elisa had been pretty hot and heavy since the late 1990s, and would have had children, had a shotgun shell to her stomach in a SWAT-raid not banished her to a desk and...well. Not my story to tell.

"Wyvern Clan handled the first rogues pretty well, working with the NYPD to get rid of them. One night, though, three sewer reclamation voomers went berserk in downtown Manhattan, right near the Aerie tower. The gargoyles - Bronx, Boudicca, a heavily cyberwebbed-Lexington, Brooklyn, Broadway, Angela, Delilah, Alicia, and, of course, Goliath - responded. They took the voomers down, eventually. But not before half of Broadway's head had been ripped off, and Goliath's entire ribcage shattered, piercing his lungs and heart.

"Xanatos told me, after throwing back two shots of vodka in rapid succession, that there'd been nothing to do for them. I don't know who he was try to convince; me, or him. At any rate, there's more to that story. But considering the rest of the material, I don't think I want to know what it was.

"The Clan didn't shatter until 2032. Brooklyn grew cold and distant from the Clan he now had to lead. Angela became hard and bitter; her father was dead, and her husband was shunning her. Her son was also five gargoyle-years (ten in human) old, and you know how that goes. Lexington plugged himself into the cyber-world, and stayed there for days on end. Alicia and Delilah tried to support each other, and all the rest, but, despite all their best efforts, the schism occurred.

"Brooklyn left one night, telling Angela in private that he needed to go 'find himself.' She told him to...you get the idea. Lexington didn't give anyone any preamble. He simply left his web-ID with Owen, and disappeared into the city.

"Hudson, Goliath, Broadway, Brooklyn, and Lexington. The dog's the only original one left.

"The Clan never went patrolling again. The ADP was formed, to handle rogue voomers, gang-related activities, and to stem the ever-worsening 'competition' between the super-conglomerates.

"Alicia joined the ADP of her own volition. Her mother hated the idea, and kept insisting that she find herself a good mate on Avalon. Keeps insisting, actually. Angela doesn't care about anyone, save for her son. That includes herself.

"In the past few years, there's been a lot of talk of the Clan moving to Avalon and writing off humanity completely. I can't say I blame them.

"I don't know. It's getting late, and I've got to be up in five hours for my next shift. I'll write more later. Maybe it'll be a slow day, or something.

"... ... ...

"Hee hee. I crack me up."

Richard Starling stood at his office window, hands clasped behind his back, as he surveyed the night-side city-scape laid out below him. The Nightstone Unlimited tower, the Aerie building, the Athens Incorporated building, even the PsiNet Corporation HQ - all were visible here, at the top of the world. Starling flexed his gloved hands, black leather creaking tightly. He stood tall, shoulders back, back straight up as a decade of military service had drilled into him. He looked amazingly good for a man pushing seventy. Good facial complexion, good skin, a head full of thick, black hair. Piercing brown eyes capable of sizing up anything on two legs, and quite a few things three or more, fixed the Aerie tower's outlines in their gaze.

"I can't begin to calculate how long I've hated that tower." He said, jaw tightening reflexively. "Or Xanatos himself."

His secretary and aide-de-camp stood next to him, her long, thin fingers crossed over her chest, her hips cocked haughtily. "Ever since he sent your unit against that renegade creature of his, wasn't it?" Blood-red lips split into a slightly sadistic grin, white synthetic skin stretching just slightly. Shock-white hair, shot through with black stripings, cascaded down her back, stopping at her lower back. A single thin, petulant braid hung off to the left side, dyed at least twelve different colors.

Starling grunted. "Yes. Back in the nineties, devil take the man."

"Soon enough. The Sidhe still refuses to be of any help, however."

"I assume someone took it upon themselves to torture her?" He asked unnecessarily.

The smile danced on her lips again. "She's a challenge, for sure. Resilient little thing. This might take me awhile."

He glanced over at her, arching a single eyebrow at the liberated voomer next to him. "Indeed. Well, take your time. Those idiots in Research are still trying to figure out the basic systems parameters needed for what we're after."

"Still?" She scowled, shaking her head. "We gave them all of Stingray's notes. All that survived both the quake and crash, at any rate. What more do they need?"

"Have a little patience, Lucinda." Starling chided, a slight grin creasing his features. "Now, what about those new HARDsuits..?"

The scowl deepened, and she hunched her head in a stance that closely resembled a pout. "The ones that dropped my voomer, and saved that winged rat? We've got nothing on them. They're definitely based on the suits used by the Knight Sabers, back during the crash. They redesigned and modified them for use on men, and I suppose it wouldn't be much of a stretch to fit them for gargoyle use."

"Who has the specifications on those original HARDsuits?"

"No one. That bitch, Stingray, sold the rights to XanaCorps only. Since then, all XanaCorps has made is those ridiculous XE models."

Starling smiled, his eyes narrowing just slightly. "Oh, I doubt that."

Lucinda arched a brow, turning to look up at him.

"I doubt that very much."

Lucinda looked about ready to say something else, when something seemed to distract her momentarily. Moments passed. Then she swore under her breath, turning to look at the doors. "The kids are making a fuss again." She held a hand up before he could turn. "I'll handle it. Just enjoy the view."

"Wakie wakie there, partner."

Max groaned, opening a single eye to give Alicia the most aggravated glare he could manage on three hours' sleep. "It's not time for school yet, mommy."

"Yes, but if you don't hurry, you're going to miss the bus." She sing-songed to him, sitting down on the side of the desk and looking at him like a five-year-old would beg her father to get her the latest toy or gadget.

Max managed to straighten his neck out and fix her with a tired stare, wiping sleep from his eyes as he did so. "Are we having the same conversation?"

"Probably not. But I thought you might find this interesting."She tossed a folder into his lap, and began nursing the cup of coffee in her hands.

Max groaned and swung his feet off his desk, scooping up the folder and leafing through it drowsily. After a few minutes of silent browsing, he tossed it back to the desk with a disgusted snort. "It's a list of serial numbers with Starling ID tags. So what?"

Alicia shrugged, toe-talons drumming on the ground in a sign of slight agitation. "All I know, I wake up earlier tonight, check my ID, and I've got a message." She flicked her thumb at the folder. "That's it."

"Interesting." Max lied, reaching for the cup of coffee that had been cooling on his desk for the past twenty minutes. "And who sent this message?"

"Some creep at Sotai_Phenomenon@whizz.labs.Japan."

Max choked on his coffee, turning his head to the side to spit out what was in his mouth into the trash can at the side. He coughed and gagged for a solid minute, while Alicia simply shrugged it off and sipped at her own coffee. "Interested yet?"

"Daddy...it hurts..!"

"Shush...it's all right, darling...just a little longer, and it won't hurt anymore...it's all right, you'll see..."

Self ran it through in its mind over and over again, even as yet another of these disgusting Others moved over it. Oh, Self made all the usual noises - the grunting, the groaning, the panting - for the benefit of the Other. That's what Self was programmed for, after all.

"Daddy, it's really hurting...it feels like...it's on fire..."

"Quiet! You'll sit there and you'll like it!"

Self winced as the Other's voice rang in its head again. The Other over Self didn't notice, as he was engaged in spraying Self with that foul-smelling liquid the Others always had.

"Was it good for you?" The Other sneered down at Self.

"Was it good for you, sweety?"

"'Rage, rage! against the dying of the light.'" Lexington quoted quietly, smirking to himself as he watched the vid-program - something about a boy and his dog. "The British were a quaint people in their day, weren't they?"

"Aside from the wars and the destruction and the persecution, sure, whatever." Kenji replied humorlessly. "Look, Lex, I know you miss your Clan and everything..."

Lexington turned his head slightly, a vaguely amused expression on his face. "Do you, now? And how did you come to this conclusion?"

"The point is," Kenji growled, stampeding over his sarcasm, "that we could've used a third party slicer to get that information to the ADP. And certainly not to...well, maybe through the Mayor's office or something..." Kenji finished off, the last sentence coming out as a grumble.

"Certainly not to my niece, you mean?" Lexington turned back to his screen, and continued watching the TV, flicking a kernel of popcorn into the air and catching it via his mouth. "Honestly, Kenji, for one of the best deckers in the business, you're one transparent flip."

Kenji's left brow twitched. "Whatever you say, y'winged rat. The point is, it's dangerous for us to expose ourselves this early. I mean, what if Xanatos is working with -"

Lex cut him off with a sharp glare. "The next word out of your mouth better not be 'Starling.'"

Kenji met the glare evenly. "What if it is."

"I know my godson, Ken. Better than I know the hard-deck wired into my brain. Alexander Renard Xanatos wouldn't deal with that jackal; not in a million years."

"Lex..."

"Jar'e!" The green gargoyle snapped, his grip on the popcorn bowl tightening, 'til a hairline fracture appeared along its rim. "Leave it." He repeated, in English, darkly, in a low voice. "Tell me about our newest employer..."

Kenji's mental frown deepened. He'd have to plug the leak himself, it seemed. Well, that was fine. He'd covered for Lex's mental slips before; every time Lex had put his interests before the business, in fact. And as he began telling Lex about their latest employer, a small-time voomer-manufacturer who wanted a bit of information from Starling HQ, his mind was made up.

Yes, he'd have to handle this himself...

"What in the - again?!" Kevin O'Leary grumbled blearily, stabbing the sweat away from his eyes. "We just...I mean...for the love of Christ!"

Their enigmatic leader simply arched a brow at him. "If there's a problem with it..." He growled, crossing his arms over his chest and drumming armored fingers on his forearm plating. "...you can always quit."

"No I can't, and you bloody well know it!" Kevin snapped, glowering at his employer. "That was one of the rules, remember?! Number eleven, if I remember correctly! Punishable by death and all that!"

"True." The boss growled. "And I'm paying you and Sra. Asuncion quite a hefty sum of money for services rendered. You've had five and a half hours to sleep, Mr. O'Leary. And frankly, the fabled Irish temper has never much impressed me as being much more than hot air. Now, if you please, get suited up."

The boss's visor hissed shut, obscuring those alien features again. "We'll meet you in the pit."

"Well?" Sra. Christiana Asuncion planted her hands on her armor-clad hips, cocking them smartly. "Took you long enough." She quipped, mouthing off in that vaguely-annoying Latin accent she had.

Kevin just shot her a withering glare that brooked no argument. She simply huffed indignantly and looked over to their red-clad leader. His gaze tracked along hers until both were looking to him, leaning up against the wall as he was.

"It's another sexaroid." He grunted finally. "Core's in the chest. According to FUCKUP, the possibility of a level-two Sotai occurrence is low. But given time, it could get worse."

"Like always." Christiana added. "So! When do we go?"

Kevin looked over at her, frowning inside his helmet. "Kiss-ass." He grumbled to himself.

"Grouch."

A reply was on his lips when their boss stood up - straight for once, Kevin noted - and cut them off. "Enough. I'm paying you to fight voomers, not each other." He turned and started towards the door. "Let's go."

"Get off me!" Self shrieked, pushing against the Other on top of it - no. On top of her.

"All units in the vicinity of Bronx ward 1-6-1, we've got a mad voomer tearing up the neighborhood. Reports suggest that this voomer is in its first-stage transition only. I say again, all units near..."

Max had already thrown his replacement cruiser - the voomer had destroyed his precious fuzzy dice! - into a one-eighty turn and floored the accelerator, sending the police car off like a shot down the street. Alicia's coffee went flying unwillingly from her hands, and flew out the open window. She screeched in protest as she was thrown against the car door, then slammed back into the seat's restraints. "Where'd you learn to drive, Osaka?! I've been on the beat with you a week, and you drive like this every night! What, did you take the special safety-last course they forgot to tell me about?!"

He just shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. "You sound like a nagging wife."

Alicia's eyes went wide, and her jaw went completely slack. "Nuh...nuh...nag...you miserable, ungrateful little..! Grr!" She threw her hands up in disgust. "Men!"

"Women. Rhymes with swimmin'." He answered lamely, throwing the cruiser into a ninety-degree turn that wouldn't have been possible a half-century ago.

Alicia's fist clenched and unclenched several times, those strange, ultra-tech gauntlets of hers creaking slightly as she did so. Max didn't see her do it, but apparently she'd already tapped the gauntlets' starter-switch, because they were now humming with barely-restrained power. It would take another tap of that same starter-switch before the gauntlets would arm themselves, he knew, and then most anything that came in touch with them would meet with a very pyrotechnic demise.

He'd have to see about getting her a gun. Or a tank. Whichever.

The ADP and the Vigilantes arrived on the scene at approximately the same time. The Vs were actually first, but only by a few seconds.

Christiana went in first, shrieking out a ki-yi war-cry that hurt Kevin's ears. Two seconds later, the voomer had thrown her face-first into the nearest building. Boss hung back while Kevin lumbered towards the comparatively tiny voomer, raising a massive fist and driving it down towards her like a sledgehammer. The voomer dodged, and had him eating pavement with a roundhouse. While he lay there, completely dazed and wondering just what the hell had happened, the voomer - bare-ass naked - leapt towards the nearest pedestrian, fingers clawing to rip his head clear off.

The voomer never got there, as a wall of flesh with wings slammed into her from the side. The two figures slammed into the ground with a loud crunch of concrete. They rolled, grappling, before the newcomer got her footing under her well enough to toss the voomer away.

The two combatants came up into crouches, glaring at each other over the ten feet of asphalt that separated them, while a crowd of onlookers warily gathered at the fringes.

Alicia bared her fangs, clenching her fists tightly. Max ran up behind her, leveling an assault rifle at the completely naked voomer. It was then that Christiana waded out of the rubble of the building she'd flown through, launching herself towards the voomer, wristblades humming. Kevin staggered to his feet finally, clutching his helmeted head. The voomer caught Christiana by the wrists and redirected her arc and angle of ascent, throwing her headlong into Kevin.

When asked later, Max was unable to explain why he yelled at the voomer. All he knew was that something - karma, fate, or just some randomly misfired neuron - made him yell, "Freeze!"

And, when asked, he wouldn't be able to explain why it did.

The voomer's head snapped around to face him, long ivory hair swirling around an olive complexion, and a face that betrayed sheer, unrelenting anger. It stood, drawing up into a defiant stance, glowering straight at Max. "Why..?" It breathed quietly, saline tears staining its cheeks.

Silence reigned. Christiana shoved up onto her hands, gaping openly at the rogue voomer who had, against all logical reasoning, responded coherently to a verbal command. Kevin, Alicia, and Max weren't any better off.

The voomer didn't speak again. It simply stood underneath a lamp post, blood beginning to dry between its fingers and over its breasts and midriff. No one moved, no one spoke, no one dared even to breathe.

Interesting... Red thought to himself, arms crossed over his chest from where he watched, ducked in the alley. So the rogues have begun to pass beyond unconscious defense to conscious thought. He smiled despite himself. Much as he hated rogues, and begrudged them every moment of existence they had, he was sorely tempted to let this particular one alone, just to see how the ADP would handle it. He was even on the verge of giving the order to Christiana and Kevin when the whole thing once again went to hell.

A pair of XE units with ADP markings landed with a heavy crunch of metals and asphalt in the street. Forearm lasers sprung from their sheathes, and before anyone could shout a warning, they fired. The voomer was almost taken unawares, and thus barely avoided being cut in half. Long locks of hair were incinerated as it danced away, flipping straight backwards.

"No!" Max yelled, waving frantically at the armored units who couldn't notice him. "Don't shoot her!"

The remarks fell on deaf ears as Christiana and Kevin regained their wits and entered the fray. Blasts of laser-fire flew, blades capable of shredding bone and sinew leapt from sheathes, and martial artists plied their trade.

When it was done, both of the XE units were down, pilots unconscious or dead. The voomer was down, its core broken in Christiana's fists, and its hands...

...clutching Christiana's own, as if sharing its last moments with her.

Elektra Dracon steepled her hands before her face as she listened to the report her top aide, a man who went by the sic 'Scratch,' gave her. As he concluded, a cool smile split her lips. "Let me get this straight, Scratch. Big red thinks...what? That the rogues aren't going rogue at all? That they're evolving?"

Scratch shrugged nonchalantly, crossing his left leg over his right and doing a half-sprawl across the couch. "That about sums it up, boss-ma'am. Ask me, I think he's finally slipped off over the deep end."

"Except I didn't ask." She leaned back, crossing her own legs and draping her hands gracefully in her lap. "This changes nothing. The corporate sector might want this information for themselves, but I see no reason to give it to them at this point. As for the ADP...well, they'll manage to bungle it up, like they always do."

Scratch arched an eyebrow from behind the wireframe glasses he wore. "You still want to keep our shipment dates for the new models, even knowing this?"

The smile went from cool to sinister with no forewarning whatsoever. "Especially knowing this. You forget why slavers are still able to ply their trade, why prostitution is still so popular."

The brow went just a bit further skyward.

"People like domination, my friend. Some like doing it, some like taking it. Add this into the mix, and we may have a few new clients in the next few months."

Scratch looked at her skeptically. He didn't particularly buy into her hunch on this one, but, then again, he'd been working for the Dracon family since she'd been a child, and he'd yet to see one of these hunches fail to play out.

"Smile, Ska." She said, voice oozing with a false sweetness. "We're about to get filthy stinking rich." She snickered. "As if we weren't already."

The waiting room in Polk Hospital's emergency ward was, Max thought sourly, typical of the sheer grit of today's society. Cracked tile flooring, a pair of vending machines that had fenced-off chassis (save for the money slots), plastic chairs that reeked of urine and disinfectant, and the usual motley assortment of the inner city's less desirables. Gang-bangers, beggars, drug addicts, and the occasional lower-middle class family huddling together for warmth while a loved one lived or died on the table. Even a juicer - men and women (typically mercenaries) who took an assortment of drugs designed to increase their natural attributes, often-times in lethal doses, leaving them dead, brain-damaged, or insane - or two.

Alicia was outside, communing with a pair of paramedics who'd brought the XE pilots in. Max sat in a corner of the waiting room, eyes closed, head back against the wall as he prayed over and over again in his mind for the two XE pilots, in critical condition, to pull through. Beside him sat police officer Fiona Halkins, an off-duty friend of the aforementioned pilots, nursing a cup of coffee in trembling hands.

Hours passed. Hours that Max should have spent on patrol, doing...whatever it was that his superiors decided the ADP should be doing that week. But he didn't care. Something made him stay, overriding his normal cop's instincts to beat the streets. He hadn't had a chance to sit down and talk with Alicia yet, and he wanted to talk with those two XE pilots...if they survived. He read magazines, he drank coffee, he talked briefly with officer Halkins, but mostly, he ran it over and over again in his mind.

It had asked him 'Why..?' His cursory examinations had turned up a few facts. The rogue was a Sexaroid, a Pentex 55-S that was 'owned' by one of the myriad of gangs running operations in the Bronx these days. The core, smashed as it was, was absolutely useless as a piece of forensic evidence.

'Why..?' Why what? Max groused, sinking deeper into his chair. Why should it freeze, why had people treated it the way they did, why did it exist? Why had it been crying? Why was it even possible for it to cry? Why did it lash out the way it did? Why did any of the voomers lash out the way they did?

Max snorted in macabre amusement. 'Why,' it seems, is a far more complex question than I'd thought.

Beside him, Halkins stirred. She stood, and so did Max, as a surgeon, scrubs rather soaked with sweat, stepped towards them, brushing tousled black hair from his face. He nodded once to both of them, his face a mask of grim resignation. "Officer, Detective..." He said shakily, raking a hand through his hair again. "I'm sorry, but...neither man survived the operation."

Max heard Halkins let out a little gasp, and she seemed to reel backwards into him. He rested a hand on her shoulder, even as he closed his own eyes. Dimly, he realized that the doctor was still talking. He had to force himself to listen, concentrating on the man's words, straining as if they were coming from somewhere far, far away.

"...complications during the surgery, and as soon as the hemorrhaging began, it..." He shook his head, dropping his gaze to the ground and stabbing his hand through his hair again. "I'm sorry, officers. I'll...see your superiors get the full reports..."

"Thank you, doctor." Max said dimly, barely aware he'd said anything at all. Two more officers, dead... "I know you did your best."

He felt like a liar.

After they'd taken Halkins home, Max and Alicia had found an all night diner and stopped for a cup of coffee and a talk. Max had to stop and marvel at the simple fact that gargoyles, like Alicia, had simply become just another group of celebrities to the people of New York. The diner's staff had seated them without incident, the waiters and waitresses were fairly pleasant (or, at least, as pleasant as New York city service staff could be) and the manager had even come out and welcomed them (particularly Alicia) to the place, and offered to get them whatever they wanted. Alicia had graciously managed to fend the man off, despite the tell-tale bunched muscles in her arms and shoulders that told Max she'd wanted to put the man's head through the wall.

So, they got their coffee, found a pair of empty stools, and proceeded to stare into their coffee for a good ten minutes before saying anything. It was Alicia who finally broke the silence. "You heard her."

Max nodded, rolling his cup around in his hands slowly. "Yeah. I heard it."

"Was she a libby gone rogue, then?" Alicia asked, using the slang 'liberated.'

"I've never heard of it happening. Only the 1^st- and 2^nd-generation voomers. The libbies..." He shook his head. "No. Just the stupid ones."

Alicia scowled into her coffee as she sipped some of it down. "I thought the two-gees were illegal nowadays..?"

"Oh, they're plenty illegal. Unless they're designed for a specific purpose."

Alicia's brow knit, and she looked over at him, her face twisting into a mask of confusion. Max just smirked at her. "Didn't you ever read the text of the Sentience Rights Act..? They outlawed anything smarter than a gerbil or a rat or some other furry pest. It's null, and no one pays any attention to it. What, you think the nation's leaders are going to turn down cheap labor? They pump your gas, they clean your streets, and they're even polite about it. And the best part about it..." Max scowled, throwing back his coffee in a single gulp. "The best part for those bastards..." His voice fell several notches, so only she could hear him. "...when they go rogue, they always take someone out with them. It's population control, without looking like communist China all over again."

She stared at him for long moments, her jaw hanging just slightly open, exposing two rows of sharpened ivory fangs. "And...they get away with it..?"

Max turned his head just slightly to look at her, a cynical smirk dancing across his face. "You tell me."

Alicia's mouth snapped shut, and the muscles at the corners of her jaw bunched tightly. "Those arrogant sons of bit -"

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. "That's not why we're here, Al."

She looked ready to object, a dangerous anger smoldering just behind her eyes, but she backed off. She turned back to her coffee as a passing waitress warmed up their cups. Max thanked her.

"If she wasn't a libby, then what was she?"

Max grunted in disgust. "Thanks to those armored punks, we'll never know."

"The core?"

"The core. If we could've taken it intact, we might have known the make, the model, and the serial...num...ber." He said, trailing off towards the end as his eyes went wide.

Alicia smirked slightly. "Forgot about the list, didn't you?"

Max turned to look at her, his face twisting in shock. "You mean you didn't?"

Alicia shrugged. "I'm the one carrying it, remember? I can't believe you forgot about the list."

"Well...gosh, kind of a lot's happened since then." He deadpanned humorlessly. "Has Ching tracked the owners of all those voomers down yet..?"

She shook her head, swirling her coffee idly with a talon. "Not since an hour ago, when I last called in. He said he wouldn't have it done until sometime tomorrow. There were a hell of a lot of numbers on that list, y'know."

"Damn." Max growled.

"Something interesting he told me, though. They were all Starling Industries make and model." Max arched a brow in her direction, eliciting a shrug. "Surprised me, too. You thinking someone's trying to discredit or frame Starling?"

"If that were true, why did they send the list to you?"

Alicia's brow knit in quiet confusion. "I don't follow you."

"Think about it, Al." Max grouched, choking back another cup of coffee. "You're obviously either not a very important gargoyle, or someone's telling the press to take a hike, so it's not common knowledge that you're a member of the 3^rd yet."

She regarded him with an openly shocked stare. "Wha...how did..?"

"Oh, that's right. Sometimes people forget I'm a detective." Max snorted. "Give me a little credit, will you? Like it or not, the gargoyle species has been getting wide amounts of press ever since the late nineties. You're practically celebrities now. And, for the first time ever, one of them joins the police force. Not just the police force, but the NYPD's Advanced division. So, why isn't the press all over this one..?"

It was a long moment before Alicia completed the thought, quietly, for him. "...because they don't know about it yet." She sighed, and sipped her coffee gingerly. "Now I remember why Elisa chose you."

Max's nose wrinkled in confusion. "The Commissioner chose me..?"

She barreled over him, ignoring his confusion. "I asked them to keep this on the down-low, Max. At least, for as long as they could. The last thing either one of us needs is to have a group of reporters in our faces everywhere we go, getting in the way whenever we try to do our jobs." She sighed, brushing her hair back over her ear. "I probably should have told you, spared you just one more mystery."

"Yeah, that would've been nice." He grumbled. "But at least it got me thinking; you get a list of serial numbers from an anonymous source that implies these particular voomers are going to go rogue. Is it a setup? Possible, but very unlikely. Why? Because if someone wanted to frame Starling for something, they'd have leaked it to the press, along with a connection back to Starling, implying that the organization knew in advance what was going to happen."

"Which we can already imply that they did, because they're the only ones capable of drawing up a list of faulty cores this large."

Max regarded her with an open look of surprise. "What about one of their competitors, like XanaCorps..?"

Alicia smiled, showing her fangs again. "I've worked with the Xanatos family long enough to learn something about big business. You can have all the spies you want in a particular company or business, but it's damn near impossible to get them inside something as big as Starling. And to find out which core series' are faulty would take some top-level investigations." She shook her head, grinning like a cat. "No. This list was compiled by someone way up in Starling's food chain."

Max nodded, slowly, gazing at her with silent respect. "We'll make a detective out of you yet, Al." She just frowned at him. "Anyways, since these people - hackers, I'm thinking - obviously didn't want to stir up any trouble for Starling for...some reason or another, they didn't go to the press, they went to you. And y'know what this tells me?"

"I'm breathless with anticipation."

"Wise-ass. The person who sent this list to you is someone close to you. They know what you're doing, they know just what your resources are, and, most of all, they know just how you'll react to certain stimuli." He grinned. "How am I doing?"

She snorted, shaking her head. "Annoyingly logical."

"Thanks."

"Now quit getting off topic, damnit, and tell me about the voomer." She hissed. "She spoke. Rogues don't do that. They don't have the mental capacity to do it with any degree of conscious thought. If she wasn't libby, then how did it happen?"

"Maybe it was liberated. Maybe the new libbies can go on a psychotic shooting spree, I don't know."

"That's a half-assed answer, Osaka, and you know it. She was two-gee, but she spoke like a three-gee." Alicia hissed at him, leaning in conspiratorially.

"I don't know, alright?" Max snapped harshly, managing to keep his voice low. "Look, maybe it was just a glitch or something, okay? Rogues are unstable enough as it is, maybe it just triggered a random subroutine thingamajig, and..." His left eyebrow twitched slightly. "What do you want me to say, Al?" He growled tightly, his back hunching over in a slouch. "That the voomers might be spontaneously liberating themselves..? That's simply not possible."

Alicia looked over at him for a long moment, her brow knitting in quiet contemplation. "Who are you trying to convince, Osaka..? Me...or you?"