Me waking up and getting stuck in traffic on the way to work for an hour: "This is going to be the worst day ever."
Me arriving at work to find staff cheering because our evil Home Secretary Suella Braverman has finally been sacked. "Never mind! Best day!"
Cover Art: Kirire
Chapter 78
Blake finished ordering a new desk and the furniture she'd been allocated and arranging for its delivery to the office before she headed for Alistair's. No installation necessary of course, as the last thing she or Jaune needed was some enthusiastic deliveryman getting ambushed and cuddled into a heart attack by Timothy. Once that was done, she sent a quick text Jaune's way informing him that she needed to investigate something.
His response was a simple "Good luck" and no more questions asked.
He trusted her to be able to handle herself now, which was a good feeling. Also, a bad feeling, because she really didn't want the words "on her own" and "anomaly" to be in the same sentence, but at least this was a more familiar zone. Angry humanoid anomalies wanting to rebel against the established order was practically her childhood years.
Better this than them eating people.
Touching around the seemingly solid brick wall for the entrance to Alistair's bar, Blake felt her hand sink into stone and looked around the alleyway to make sure it was clear before entering. A haze of cigarette smoke and, lest she mistake it, cannabis tickled her nose. She supposed Alistair didn't see much point in cracking down when his bar wasn't held to any legal standard. The jukebox in the corner was playing songs from twenty years ago, and the round tables were mostly filled with anomalies of different shapes and sizes.
Some were more clearly humanoid and split between masculine and feminine, but you couldn't really call them human. There was a man whose face and body kept melting into a puddle on the floor and then reforming moments later, a set of seven garden gnomes stood stock still on a table with straws poking from their drinks into tiny holes in their mouths, and other crazy things. The most human-looking person there just appeared to be a man in a brown overcoat, but his face didn't move or twitch, and he was moving a bottle of beer to his chest instead, pouring it into a small opening in his coat, where gurgling, hissing sounds emerged from.
"Excuse me," warbled a mermaid, brushing past Blake on human, female legs. Its big, fishy upper body and head ducked down into the toilet door and its fin slapped it shut.
"Blake! Hey!" Alistair waved her over, raising an empty glass he was cleaning in greeting. His proboscis twitched and shivered as he talked, his big, mosquito eyes reflecting her face a hundred times over. "Coda call you, did she? Good to hear. How have things been? Drink?"
"Just a soda please, and things have been challenging." Blake drew a barstool back and sat. "We've been stuck babysitting a younger member of the family, which is why Jaune and I have been doing our best to avoid this place. They don't know about it, and we want to keep it that way."
"Ahhh. I see. Violent little whelp is she?" Alistair pushed a nozzle into a tall glass and filled it, then handed it over to her. Blake flipped some lien out onto the bar. "Takes after her father more than her brother?"
"Don't they all?" she replied, taking a sip of her drink. "The only reason we've been entrusted with her at all is because ARC Corp is short-staffed after the Mountain Glenn incident. But no one should take that as a sign of them being weak. If anything, it's just made them easier to anger."
"It's not me you need to convince." Alistair's voice dropped and he leaned in. It wasn't easy tilting her head to let him whisper into her ear, partly because he spoke through a proboscis half the length of her arm, and partly because there was a visceral part of her that didn't want to put her face so close to a mosquito's giant head.
Which felt awfully racist in some way.
It didn't help that his antennae came out the front as well, brushing against her hair as he held his bloodsucking proboscis to her ear to whisper into it. Blake bit down on her lip and reminded herself she'd only ever seen him drink beer and cocktails.
"I'm not sure who the ringleader is or if there even is one, but they're a younger lot. New to all this, and idealistic." Naïve. "Ain't no one here that doesn't sympathise with what they're saying, but a lot of us are old enough to understand that Jaune is doing the best he can by us, and that perfect or not, things would be a whole lot worse without him hiding us from his family."
Blake hummed. "Are these young ones angry at him, then? Or at the family in general?"
"Mostly column B and a little of column A. They're not some unified group so there are disagreements between them. Most see Jaune as a fairly decent guy who wants to help, but who either doesn't have the balls or isn't willing to risk his life for it. There's a minority that think he's some kind of double agent doing ARC Corp's bidding, like a good cop to their bad cop to keep us in line so they don't have to waste time eradicating us. They say he doesn't really care at all, and just wants to keep us all locked away."
"That definitely isn't the case."
"I know that. Most of us know that. It doesn't change what they're saying, and it doesn't change that they're not listening to us old folks." It was hard to actually judge Alistair's age given she had no idea what determined the age of an insect. He could have easily been over fifty for all she knew.
"Have they done anything? Has anything bad happened? I can assure you Jaune and I will keep it hidden and make sure the consequences don't fall back on you if it has."
"No, no, no." He shook his head, his antennae rubbing over her hair and making her shiver. "They're mostly just looking for new people at the moment. Recruiting, though I'd almost call it fermenting. They come here, sit around brooding, and just overall filling the bar with gloom and doom. It's miserable, and the booze doesn't help them any, but I don't want to kick them out. Where else would they go? Last thing I want is them getting drunk at home and doing something reckless when someone here could have talked them out of it."
It wasn't the excuse it sounded like. Normally, she'd be all for a place like this kicking dangerous people out, but Alistair's was the place for anomalies to come and relax. There was nowhere else as far as she knew. At least when they were here, the older and more worldly anomalies could try and calm them down or, failing that, keep an eye on them like Coda and Alistair had been doing. Kicking them out might have let everyone relax, but it wouldn't stop the problem. It'd only push it out of sight and ensure she and Jaune had no idea what was going on when it happened.
"That's a good sentiment," she said, making sure he knew she – and by extension Jaune – approved. "I'm glad the more experienced among the community are trying to look after the newcomers."
"I mean, we have to. Don't we? We're not born like normal people. Some of us never had parents, or we can't remember them if we did. Some of us just came into existence. Others existed long before and are only now becoming civilised. Others don't remember how they came to be or what happened before. Either way, we don't have a school or family to teach us, so we have to look out for one another. That's a big part of what Coda does. She runs programs looking over the city's CCTV systems for new anomalies and gets in contact with them. Directs them to us. Scrubs footage, too. Keeps the secret of this all to keep ARC Corp of our back." He paused and laughed. "And off Jaune's, too."
"Don't worry. We're not going to complain about you helping us out."
Alistair relaxed and drew back. "Glad to hear it. A few of us were worried you all might see it as us taking a few too many liberties and all, especially when it comes to seeking out new anomalies to... uh..."
"Save them from us?"
"Yeah..." He realised she didn't mind and regained his confidence. "Yeah, that. Not that we don't agree some of us are too dangerous but not everyone is."
"I agree completely, Alistair, and hopefully I can convince these people to realise that before they put everyone in danger."
"Hopefully, girl. Hopefully." Alistair's head rose to look over her shoulder. "Shit. I didn't think they'd come now—"
Blake shifted on her seat immediately and spotted a large... thing approaching her. She wanted to say man because the body was masculine. Two arms, legs, but broad shoulders and a stocky frame. The problem was that there was no head at all. Instead, there was a strange object lodged in its chest from which two pricks of yellow light glowed from a thin channel of darkness, a visor cut into the metal. It was as if someone had taken a human man, cut out his chest and stomach, replaced that with what looked to be a roundish ball of metal, and then fixed all the limbs back on. It has human hands, though. Blake couldn't tell if it was an anomalous item that had taken over a human host, a human who had transformed into an anomaly, or just an anomaly that happened to have humanoid limbs.
Nor could she judge its emotions given the clean, sheer orb of metal that presumably made up its face, but the way it was swinging its arms and powerwalking toward her gave her a good clue. Blake slid off her stool as the bar went quiet.
They were watching her and how she would react.
And Blake knew that the worst thing she could do was galvanise them against her.
It was ironic in a sense. Here she was, the authority and oppressor to a group of people who really did deserve better than this. Was this how the Atlas police had felt when the White Fang railed against them? It felt like it might be, though Blake's memories painted those officers as having been far too happy to fight back and brutalise the "dirty animals" disturbing the peace.
"Oi, Mikael!" shouted Alistair, past her shoulder. "Don't go causing trouble now!"
"Trouble!?" The voice that came from the orb was robotic. Tinny. It sounded more like it came from behind than within, like the true anomaly was inside a metal casing. "Causing trouble is all you care about Alistair, even when one of them is here acting like she belongs."
"Mikael, is it?" Blake smiled faintly. "The name is Blake."
"I don't care what your name is." He jabbed a hand toward her. "You're one of them, killing and locking away anomalies that didn't do nothing to you, and making us live like second-class citizens. For what? Because we look different?"
He was putting on a show for those behind and around them as much as he was challenging her stance. Blake knew the game, having seen it playing out countless times amongst the White Fang. Their support relied on two things – suffering and anger. That was the suffering of their people, or the anger they could whip up against the ones pushing them down.
Their suffering, Blake could understand, sympathise with – and she wished she had an answer to it – but there was nothing she could do to fix it. Instead, she focused on his anger, and tried to stop him whipping others up. If she got aggressive or heavy-handed then it'd make people dislike her, helping his aims even if she put him down.
And if she killed him then he'd become a martyr.
"I'm an anomaly just like you," she pointed out, recaching up to flick her ears. "Or do you think animal-human hybrids like us were a natural part of this world?"
"Pah. Reality Class. You're nothing like us. You have it easy, being able to walk freely in the world and not have to worry about being eradicated because you might be dangerous. Don't act like you're one of us." There were agreeing jeers and shouts from his supporters. "Worse yet, you take their money and work for them. How many of our kind have you killed? How many!?"
Too many.
Enough.
There was no good answer she could give when she and Jaune had been forced to defend themselves lethally against a good portion of the community in the theatre. Damn Winter for making that happen and damn them for being so foolish as to trust a Schnee. Her silence lasted a little too long, and the crowd behind Mikael began chanting for her to leave. Alistair had been right to call it fermenting; they were like must turning alcoholic, saturating the air was a hazy tension that had everyone on edge, and that goaded themselves into a greater rage.
A rage that overcame the anomaly before her and had him surging toward her.
Blake whirled into action, ducking under his punch and reaching into her suit jacket, making the black coattails flap as she rose and pressed the barrel of Gambol Shroud flat between his glowing yellow eyes, aimed within the horizontal slit, at whatever lay inside his metal form.
Everything went silent.
Everyone became still. Her, Mikael, his supporters, and every other anomaly in the bar held their breath.
Until Mikael whispered, "Do it, then. Kill me. Like you did the others."
He'd become a legend if she did.
Blake pulled the gun away and tossed it to Alistair, who caught it clumsily. She then stood and whipped off her jacket, tossing that onto the bar and dropping into a low boxing stance in nothing but her black suit pants and a tucked-in white shirt. It had to be low because her opponent didn't have a head, or it wasn't at head height if he did. Instantly, the crowd behind Mikael began hooting and cheering for him to "knock her fucking block off" and "mess her up."
The anomaly lunged for her. He swung wildly, opening with a haymaker that she all too easily leaned back from before she darted in and slammed a quick one-two into where his gut would be on a human. Her fists struck metal, making it ring along with her bones. Blake winced and blocked his other fist with her forearms, deflecting it off to the left of her face.
Boxing a man in armour wasn't easy, so she let him go on the offensive for a few seconds while she backed away from the bar, ducking and weaving and keeping her arms up in front of her face. He got a few glancing blows on her stomach and chest – this was a bar brawl, so kidney shots were fair game – but she had her aura to protect her, and he would wear himself out eventually.
Experimentally, she took a few shots at his arms, catching the fleshy parts of his shoulder and hearing him grunt. He felt it, then. That meant the body was his, and not someone else's he'd hijacked. Good for him; that meant she wouldn't have to report him to Jaune and potentially get him killed. Blake slid under her another wild haymaker and this time rose while he was still extended. She turned into him, jutting her hip into his metal armour at around where his own hip should have been. Her hand caught the wrist of his extended arm, her other hand his elbow, and she turned and bent over, stretching her legs out wide for footing.
Mikael was hauled to the side and over one outstretched leg, and the moment his feet were off the ground she bucked her hip, rolling him up over her back and into the air, then down in front of her on his side. She quickly rolled him onto his front, still holding his hand vertically up behind him, and placed one hand on his shoulder blade to keep him down while the other held his wrist up in the air. He couldn't move without breaking something, and all it took was the slightest pressure to apply some pain.
The bar was quiet again.
Judgmental.
That was her cue to release him and step back, to let him go completely despite the risks, and brush her arms down. Blake forced a smile onto her face and said, "Nice fight!" in as jovial a way she could. "Your technique could use a little work, but that honestly wasn't bad all things considered."
There was an almost audible sigh of relief from the older members of the anomalous community at what was as clear a sign as any from her that this wouldn't lead to worse violence or, heavens forbid, an execution. There was some forced laughter as one anomaly pretended to find another's joke funny. They were trying to bring some sense of order back to the bar as well.
Mikael pushed himself – or itself – up from the floor and glared at her, but he didn't challenge her again and went back to his associates, who all hurried out the bar. Blake wasn't actually happy to see them go, as she'd have preferred to try and approach and talk to them at their table. Sure, they'd probably refuse to listen to her, but she could have made some points clear. As Alistair had said before, them being off somewhere else wasn't good, because they could whip themselves into a frenzy without anyone being there to calm them down.
"That went about as well as it could have," Alistair said, holding her jacket back out to her. Blake slipped it on and then holstered Gambol Shroud once more. "Thanks for not spilling blood in my bar. It's a bitch to clean up."
"Do you know where they hold up?" she asked him. "Do they have a place of their own?"
"Not that I know of. Sorry. And they know Coda, so I doubt it'll be anywhere with decent technology. You might try looking around the quietest parts of the city. Those of us that can't possibly pass as human aren't exactly spoilt for choice on where we can live. Some take to abandoned and derelict homes, or homeless communities. Barely anyone listens to them after all, and if they try and tell people of a man with a mosquito's head then good folk will just assume they're on drugs." He shook his head, and Blake did too. "Then there are those that live in the sewers."
"The sewers? Really?"
"Where else can someone live in this city when they're an abomination? Some of us are lucky. Put on a hat and a coat and you can hide what you are. Some of us have no choice. Too big, too unusually shaped, or just plain inhuman. If you want to live here, you have to stay hidden, and that's impossible for some people on the surface. Walking around late at night can help you avoid too much attention, but Vale doesn't sleep. Not really. Some have no choice but to live under the city's feet like rats."
"Hell." Blake sagged back onto her stool and drank her soda, wishing it was alcoholic. Living like that, she couldn't blame them being angry enough to want change. "Makes you wonder why they don't just take to the wilderness. It'd be harder, sure, but at least then they'd be free."
"A lot of them aren't animals that can be released into the wild, girl. When you're born anew, you know nothing. No instincts, no knowledge, no experience. There are things you take for granted because they're obvious – like not eating a decomposing animal carcass because it's bad for you – but that ain't obvious to a creature that, as far as it knows, just popped into existence one day. You take an anomaly out into the wilderness and it'll be dead within days."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to assume."
"It's fine, girl. As long as you learn. We're not like you. Some of us could be said to be born, but there's more that might as well have sprouted from thin air. No memories, no life experience – and common sense?" He laughed. "You must be joking. That's why we need Coda to locate them quick, otherwise they might just wander into a crowd of people without realising what they're doing!"
The more she heard, the more she couldn't believe Jaune had managed to keep any of this a secret from his family. It was all a recipe for disaster. Did ARC Corp not know? Or were they just pretending they didn't and waiting for this to blow up in Jaune's face so they could hold him responsible? She knew she'd never ask them the truth, so the only way she'd find out was if – or when – his family brought the hammer down.
Until then, she'd do her best to continue as things had been.
"Keep me in touch if things get worse," she told Alistair. "I think having me handle this instead of Jaune is for the best. If they hate all things Arc then they're going to do something stupid when they see him, and Jaune doesn't have aura. The more danger he's in, the more he has to fight back." And if he was in harm's way then she'd have to fight more seriously to help him. It was a disaster whichever way you looked at it. "I can afford to be knocked around a bit."
"Appreciate it. I really do. And yeah, I'll have Coda get in touch whenever they're back around here again. I don't think Mikael is the one in charge. He's a meathead, all hot blood and fire. The only way he knows how to talk to people is with threats and fists."
There were those among the White Fang like that as well – useful people, as Adam used to put it, but ultimately suited for little more than pointing at their enemies and letting loose. They served a purpose, but the last place you wanted them was anywhere close to leadership or responsibility.
"Keep me in the loop, then. And keep trying to calm these idiots down. I don't want to imagine what they might do if they get it in their heads that the best way to be free is to make all anomalies Reality Class and be done with it. That won't go the way they think it will."
"You're telling me. Trust me, I've seen enough of how your kind of treated to know people like us will be enslaved or hunted down as monsters. You can keep your Reality Class designation. I just want to run my bar in peace."
Blake's scroll beeped. Thankfully, it wasn't Coda telling her some disaster had just happened, but a message from Jaune. Her face initially took on a pleased expression, but it just as quickly faded to annoyance.
"Bad news?" asked Alistair.
"Good and bad. Amber – Jaune's sister – is going to be leaving us. The Fist Office have made room enough to take her, and the family obviously wants her away from any corrupting influences. Namely us. Not that they've said it."
"That sounds like good news from what you said about her before. What's the bad?"
"Associate Director Saphron will be coming in person to collect her, and to perform an audit on our office to make sure we are complying with company values." Blake made finger quotes in the air as she said that.
They all knew the Containments Office wasn't holding to any said values.
"Ah." Alistair cleared his throat, which came as a whistle out his proboscis. "That doesn't sound like fun. I'm... I'm just going to call around and make sure some of the more common-sense among us know now is possibly the worst time ever to cause problems. And maybe to ask them to hunt down Mikael and his lot and make sure they know it too."
"Good plan. We won't be able to stop Saphron if she gets it in her head to go on a purge."
Blake just hoped these rebellious anomalies understood that.
Next Chapter: 20th November
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