Author's Note: A tribute, not plagiarism, to Pip Malloy and her beautiful piece of work, "Sing Me A Song." ( story ID: 386593 ) If you're a fan of Final Fantasy VII stuff, go read that. Fuck that, go read everything she's written. It's all brilliant.
-Doc Mob
-
I've heard them call me anything from Suzette to Miss Montio, from Doc to Ma'am. But there's one name that they all call me, and that name is Doc Mob.
My office is a buffer zone for the syndicates. No one is hurt here, and if anyone is, the injuring party is ousted from their respected syndicate. But that never really came up; it was just a pact from one Van to another that no one would be hurt inside Doc Mob's office. The White Tigers never really showed their faces here anyway, so I did work with the Red Dragons. Once in a great while, a member of the pacifist syndicate, the Blue Herons, shows up, but not often.
That's not what you want to hear, though. No, you want to know who I treat. Lucky for you; they're coming in now.
Anastasia Mal is the first in, as usual. She's the driver; not like the hotshot driver who can hurl a sports car around at top speed, fire a gun at their pursuers, and give a class blowjob all at once. Just kidding about that last part, by the way. Syndicates need humor, or else they'll get too violent. No, she's the transportation expert because she doesn't look like a mobster at all. She drives them here from their headquarters; she drives the drunks home when she's not drunk herself; she drives right up to police officers and asks for directions when she's lost. Little Orphan Annie, they called her; she was an orphan, but damned if she's little. Very nice woman when you strip away her suit of stoicism.
Annie got into the syndicate rather strangely. The Van is a trio of eighty-something triplets, as anyone can tell by looking at them, and they adopted a son. The son was a very outgoing man, despite being blood-bound to the Red Dragons, and made it through a very exclusive college very well. His roommate was a man named Nicolas Mal. You've probably guessed by the name that Annie later married him; when Nicolas died of heart complications and has no will to leave Annie anything in, the roommate took her under his wing as a syndicate member.
She shouts, "Ready the OR!" and disappears into it without any safety precautions at all.
Julia Fitzgerald is right after her. No one except for two people we'll get to really knows her last name on a personal basis, but I'm Doc Mob and I have records. I can't disagree with Annie's first comment on the blonde; put a halo on her head and she'd be the most beautiful angel in the heavens. Tonight she's carrying a gun, so I know something big is going down in the mob. Julia, as opposed to the first woman, is the hotshot driver with the looks to back it up. Minus the good head, of course. She handles the syndicate life as well as she can, I suppose. Doc Mob talks to everyone, and as Doc Mob I've learned that she's as innocent deep down as she appears to be. Most call her Julia, but there's one guy that can call her Jules, and, like I said, he's one of the ones we'll come to later. A real looker, that Julia.
Her story is as much of an enigma as herself. Maybe a dozen explanations circle round the syndicate grapevine about her origins, but I've gotten the dirt from Julia herself. She was in the C'est la vie one night, which she claims to be the greatest billiard hall in the solar system, when a drunkard came in and started trying to get that hotshot driver head from her at the pool table. She broke a pool stick over his shoulder, not knowing he was a member of some wannabe syndicate, and three of his friends stood up. The two guys we'll get to saved her ass then and there and brought her back to headquarters, which she claimed as as good a place as any and never left.
She's all business tonight, too, but a tiny bit flustered. She sputters something about an eye at me and disappears after Annie.
Ah, the next in are the Motoya twins. Hmm. . . We'll take this one at a time; let's go with Lin first.
Lin has pledged his alliance not to the Dragons, but to one man in particular. Hold on, hold on; we'll get to him. You have to understand; I'm a very orderly person. He's more quiet than his brother, which was obvious from the first day they walked into my office, but he's also a lot more focused than most of the people inside. He's more of a bodyguard than an assassin, which is shown by the fact he follows one man more than a group, but there's a lot of intelligence behind that mask if you can pry it up for a moment or two.
On the other end of the Motoya curve is Shin. Though loyal to the Dragons through-and-through, he's always up for fun and games, even when the time doesn't exactly call for it. But, likewise with all members of the syndicate, he snaps to it when there's serious business afoot. He's taken quite a shining to everyone in the group, and looks up to his brother despite being the same age. He puts away two guns, one of which must be the one Lin isn't carrying. Something went down tonight that's going to prevent me from going home to the cats, I can tell right now. Judging from what I know about the Red Dragons' workings -- and I'm not exactly short on the knowledge -- Lin had to be the driver because they needed Julia's looks for the job.
But I digress. The Motoyas came to be in the syndicate's clutches after their street gang in Callisto was attacked on the grounds of a big business deal gone wrong for some REDEYE. Lin, ever the one with the smarts, turned his gun on his own group and told Shin to do the same. When all was said and done, they passed it off as being informants for the syndicate for years, spying on this group. But once they were found out, they already knew the inner workings of the Red Dragon clan and had an ultimatum: Stay or die. Obviously they're here now, so that decision was made in the obvious direction. Another random fact is that they both refer to Annie as "Mom."
Shin flashes me a quick smile at me and the two hold the swinging doors open, bowing slightly as always.
Ah, there he is. In through the parted doors walks the head honcho; the adopted son of the Van. Mao Yenrai has the power to do almost anything in the world he wants to. He's heir to the mock throne of the Dragons, heads up all business decisions, and recruits new members when needed. Remember the roommate of Nicolas Mal? That'd be him, the guy responsible for Annie's being here at all. He's a very kind man in and out, the kind of guy that. . .well, if I had a daughter and they wanted to marry, they'd have my blessings in full. He's showing his age, particularly tonight. I'm not exactly sure why he's with them tonight, but I rethink my assumption. Maybe it was a business deal with the White Tigers? Whatever it is, this means it was huge. Mao rarely leaves the building for menial things.
I already mentioned how he got into the syndicate. The Van trio barely open up to anyone but himself, though he only seems to call Wang Long his father.
"I'm sorry we've come so late," he tells me as he passes. "It's an emergency." Shin Motoya drops his post and follows him into the OR, but Lin stays.
And here he is. Lin pledges his very life to this man; he makes most people flinch just by looking at him; he generally leads the operations around the syndicate taskforces. Vicious, who told me his real name was Viciaso Bartelli only once, is as cold-blooded as they come. He always walks with this strange bird on his shoulder, but I've seen that thing rip people apart on video. No one, except maybe for Julia and his other partner, fucks with this guy. I've heard he's a Titan war veteran, and that was the thing that really made him cold. The only smile I've ever seen from him was when Julia, under the knife for something or other, woke up and told him to go get some sleep. Definitely something going on there. He's the right-hand-man of the Van. Even if they do fear him, they trust him maybe more than Mao.
No one likes to admit it, but not even Mao Yenrai himself knows where Vicious came from. He wandered into the Red Dragon Apartment Complex one day, killed an occupant, and said that he would serve the Dragons for the rest of his life. When they had seen the mess of the old owner of the apartment's body, they had decided saying no to this guy wasn't what they wanted to do. Still, he never lifts a bad finger toward myself, and for that I should be grateful, even if his bird's eyes follow me around all the time.
Lin closes the door after him, which is a bad thing. I should have guessed, though, by the tall figure over his shoulder, that this wasn't a routine visit. As he passes me with a cold glare, I catch the face of the man he's carrying and hurry after him.
Spike Spiegel, bleeding from his eye socket, is the other half of the duo that make up most of the Dragons' success. I don't know what else to say right now, I'm afraid; this is all a bit of a shock to me, even if I am Doc Mob. He's that cocky son of a bitch that makes your hope in the Martian race rise and fall at regular intervals. Rarely is he not grinning; trying to get Vicious to lighten up; hitting heavily on Julia for shits and giggles. But he was always untouchable. I'd never seen him in here unless he was smoking a cigarette and waiting for someone else to leave. I still can't believe someone finally shot him. He's as energetic as Shin, who looks up to him the most, but he never does quiet down in the face of danger.
When I asked him how he got into the syndicate, he looked thoughtful and said he had been a bird in the past life. A green bird that got screwed over frequently by some tiger-striped cat. I still don't know what that means, but he said he just flew in one day on his little green wings and they told him to stay. Then he asked for a reflex-tester to smack Shin on the back of the head with and the conversation was over.
He's a man after my heart nonetheless. Every woman he comes across wants him for a moment, as far as I can tell. Despite being some large child, he's still Spike Spiegel, the man with the charming smile and confusing stories. I can see why Julia loves him, as she's confessed to me -- because I'm trustworthy Doc Mob. He and Vicious barely part, just because they click so well.
Shin is the first one to acknowledge me when I hustle into the OR, even as Spike is tossed down onto the table and made as comfortable as possible by many pairs of hands. He has only one question for me, and it's the same as the others': "Can you help him, 'Zette?"
I think for a moment, and then remember why they're here at all. It's because they trust me; because I've never failed them; because I'm the one who can rise to the challenge. With a Spike Spiegel grin, I nod.
"I'm Doc Mob, baby. I can do anything I want."