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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:03:53 GMT -5
CLOCKING OUT
As it turned out, something from out in the wastes had found its way into the cloning lab and gummed up the works something evil. About five clones past the front door, Amin's team was trapped around an airlock by a mob of monster-muscled tree midgets. People started losing limbs, heads, and kidneys to things half their size. Amin did what came natural; she bugged out and ran. She picked herself up, picked the clearest hallway she could find, and ran.
No one's all that sure about what happened afterwards. Amin's said nothing on the matter. She's refused to talk about it. The only thing that's slipped is that, somewhere, somehow, she ran into something that'd haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life. It was something fleshy, angry, and messy. It was something that couldn't speak a single language. It was something that was doing its best to save the terrified girl's life - and it was doing a very good job.
Somewhere along the way, Amin found the port the team was looking for. She shut XDTero down on her own, without any of her team's equipment. How is another question she hasn't answered. Nobody even thought she was alive at the time - a few minutes later and Raki was going to leave her behind. What mattered in the end was that she'd pulled off something that bordered on impossible. On top of that, she showed up just behind the team when they were getting ready to leave. Right alongside her was that same noodly thing, covered in plant juices and wasteland slime. People out in the wastes knew him as the Leather Man. People up in Cloneston were about to know him as the Dough Man.
For the Kalav'Lees, Amin was an overnight legend. She'd snatched victory from the jaws of defeat on her first gig. For Amin, it was the worst mistake of her life. She'd only seen a few other redworlders die before - and only one of them up close. Death was something that was still a bit new to her. Being jumped by screaming mutants in a dungeon, watching some kind of raging jelly ripping things apart - it was all too much for her. She shut herself away and stopped talking. It took a week before anyone got a word out of her.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:05:13 GMT -5
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES
Raki eased her back into the Fair Hand through a desk job. He put her to work doing what she'd always done; online jobs, where the only bodies were bank accounts. Out of Drassa, with the Kalav'Lees behind her all the way, it was a chance to make up for what she'd lost back in 1304. It also meant she didn't have to go out on contract with the flesh monster she'd found in the labs, so she was all onboard. She went back to her old habits under the new handle of CyclicMetastasis. Things got a little weird after that.
Even as shaken as she was, Amin was still Amin. She had a certain style that was hard to miss. A few people recognized her when she started hitting chat rooms and forums. Word started getting out. Not a month in and not two jobs later, people were asking for pictures again. This time, it wasn't just her fingers. Toenails, nostrils, eyebrows - most were more strange than scandalous. Somehow, in all the time she'd been gone, Amin's following had gotten twice as big and ten times more bizarre.
Again, Amin obliged. This time, she had an idea. During that year, the Fair Hand was working for Jimmy, which meant Beth was their preferred target. She started digging up images on Beth's agents in the field. She started chopping up pictures and filling requests. On the surface, it all looked innocuous; a tame internet joke about sending random bodyparts to people. It was a little more than that. Amin was sending the photos off to the people that mattered - the people that were out for Beth's blood.
Amin didn't have the stomach to see people die, but ordering someone's death was something she could roll with. Hitmen found their marks in reaction images. Snipers picked out nests in chat room spam. It was something Beth couldn't keep up with. The joke had gotten too big. Checking every image that flew by in knee-jerk posts on the internet was impossible. The game gave way to solid relationships between freelance mercenaries and the Kalav'Lees. Cuts on contracts trickled back to the gang's accounts. Jimmy tittered to himself every time "show me your fingers" popped up again.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:08:05 GMT -5
FLIPPING TABLES
Amin's return to internet fame was just a tiny slice of what was really going on. If Raki wasn't leading the Fair Hand's cyber-heisters, they were following Amin. It wasn't exactly a job she was cut out for, but she could lead by example. She was the team's pointman on the web. She was a powerhouse of cyberintelligence and obfuscation. She was beating the response times for spine-jacked cyborgs with nothing more than her famous fingers. Meanwhile, she was still her regular old self. She didn't want to change it, either. If there was one thing she didn't envy about the Fishbowl, it was his maintenance bills.
It's hard to put it into perspective as to how much trouble Amin stirred up. Cryptomining, gambling website hacks, heists on AI banks - if it made money, she was doing it. She even helped program about two dozen video games part-time and sent the royalties straight to Raki. When the Fair Hand switched sides, Amin didn't bat an eye. She left backdoors everywhere that no one could find. She tore up every system she'd ever worked on. She chained up virtual vaults to her digital presence and dragged them off whenever it was time to change camps. No one was safe. Nothing was off the table.
All that headache she was slinging around didn't go unpunished. In a small way, she helped bring down the Kalav'Lees. Senators didn't like seeing that much electronic muscle. Mercenaries didn't like seeing bank accounts turn out empty for the tenth time in a row. The Fair Hand had more hackers than just Amin, but she was one of their top players. She turned out as a top target. Solah wasn't completely deaf to the whispers, but she wasn't listening much. She was young enough to think the Fair Hand was forever.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:10:04 GMT -5
JUST THIS ONE TIME
Even if Amin was right, the future wasn't all rainbows and plate life for her. When things started getting touchy online, the Fair Hand's hackers had to fall in line with the rest of their heisters. For most, it was just business as usual. Most of them were career criminals who'd done their time in the grand larceny circuit before. Amin was ready for it, but not for who she'd be working with. There was still that thing hanging around; Ezimat nes Zak, the Flesh of the Dough. As luck had it, he'd earned a seat of favor with the Fishbowl that was about even with Amin's.
Amin had loyalty to Raki. She respected him, admired him, even honestly enjoyed his company - not many in the Kalav'Lees were able to get that far. When the Fishbowl told Amin she was going to be working with that thing, none of that mattered. There wasn't the same snarky sass Solah was so fond of. Whenever the subject came up, she simply turned around, left the room, and stopped talking. Usually, it was for a few hours. Sometimes, it was a full day. Raki picked it up pretty quickly. Amin's heisting career had to start somewhere else.
The problem was that the Fair Hand's mercs usually had their own crews. Husbands had their wives, brothers had brothers, old heisters had old buddies. Amin didn't have anyone; she was too young, too small, too skinny, and too fresh into the game. No one wanted to take her on. The only solution was to pick whoever wasn't tied down and force them to buddy up. About a year after the XDTero job, fate had one of its mean days. Raki was out on a job with DuBuon's, so someone else had to handle personnel assignments. Without the wisdom of the Fishbowl guiding things along, Amin ended up on a duo heist with number two on her list of least favorites.
The job itself didn't make things any better. It was a raid on an industrial facility operating at the edge of the city, north side near the HEXAK Exclusion Zone. The operation was run by a VANDAL front, MAGGS Laboratories, and flooded with up-geared clones. The timing, placement, scene, opposition - the fact that Ves was her only partner on the job was just adding insult to injury. It didn't end there. The two had to get inside via runoff pipes and dead tram tunnels halfway down the city. Amin had a bit of a reputation for keeping herself presentable. Suffice to say, she didn't like the idea. Meanwhile, it seemed like Ves wore white just to show off every little stain and sludge smear she picked up in the scums.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:11:58 GMT -5
LET'S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED
Things started off well enough. The two were arguing every step of the way, but it was never about what they were doing. By the time they got to the industrial complex itself, that hateful, unhappy silence kept things smooth. The job was to grab a few samples of materiel to take back to Chuikov for analysis. That didn't happen. They found what they were looking for; some kind of assembly operation for badlands scout cars and inner city gunships. They just never got ahold of anything. As soon as they snuck into the target location, the clones came wise.
Things got rough in a hurry. Ves and Amin didn't have the firepower to punch through to the assembly lines. They didn't have the firepower to pull back, either; by the time they turned around, there were already clones and combat drones slamming the door. Amin started choking. Live fire still wasn't something she was used to. She bungled clone hacks, door cracks, and just about everything in between. For Ves, things went par for the course. As per usual, she was shot about a half million times and made it out on nothing but combat drugs and rage. By most accounts, she would've bled less if she wasn't busy arguing with her sister again.
It was something a little awkward for everyone involved. The two sisters weren't doing well. In fact, they were completely flopping the job, but they were staying alive. Somehow, despite spending just as much time cursing eachother out for the slightest of slights, they were beating the odds. Once Amin straightened out, she took back her crown. Clones crowded around her as living shields, dumping fire on everything like a fortress with legs. Ves was somewhere between dimensions, just about impossible to find until she was hilt-deep into Pedro's throat.
Once they hit the sewers and scums below, it finally blew up. Someone said something that neither could stand. Ves disappeared. Amin was on her own. The White Hunter knew how to navigate the city's underbelly just fine. Amin was just trying to find a way back up that wasn't swarming with VANDAL's reinforcements. All she had left was a gaggle of clones, trickling in behind her at every turn. She was lost for about two days before someone finally came down to look for her. Ves kept her distance for a month after.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:13:20 GMT -5
THIS CAN'T BE REAL
Amin had a rough start in heisting, but it wasn't the end. She picked herself up after the Fishbowl took the reins again. There was a part of her that idealized that kind of special-forces-caliber operation, that kind of thing that put everything on the table. She just didn't want to be traumatized by plants or blood relatives in the process. Amin kept at it, occasionally running jobs with the Fishbowl. She had her hard knocks just like most career criminals, but the Fair Hand made sure none of them were ever final.
Solah finished her rise with a DuBuon caper, negotiated by Sakazzah and run by the big man Vincent himself. She wasn't stellar on the job, but she earned enough respect to call herself one of the best. That came around the end of her notoriety. March of 1309 hit right after. The sun fell on the Kalav'Lees. Amin was there to watch it burn past the horizon. She, Ves, Raki, and just about every member of the gang were milling around the main safehouse at the Raffemaster Industrial Plate. Everyone was resting off a big spree of scores on the east side of town.
For Amin, the first few shots were nothing she was worried about. Nobody else was, so she didn't have much reason to care. She wasn't focused on the network chatter, the grumbling on S&C radios, or any of that. She was busy actually resting; bad headache and an overdue bill on sleep. An explosion in the tunnels kicked her out of bed pretty quickly. VANDAL had men on the ground, poking around everywhere Chuikov's goons weren't. They'd found an old anti-tank mine with an IFF package Amin had helped program herself.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:14:01 GMT -5
PLAY STUPID
What was left of the goons didn't stand up for very long, but it made it very clear to everyone inside. This wasn't just an accident or a scout team. This was a full-blown invasion. All the sins of the Fair Hand were coming back to bite them, with a mercenary for every toe they'd stepped on. Amin went to work straight away. She was never part of the shooting out front, the sniper duels and machine gun leapfrog S&C was playing. She was where the real war was; cyberspace.
At about any given time, half of the Fair Hand was busy fighting the war on the internet. Chuikov's men were always on the offensive, trying to wrangle clones on the plate and environmental systems deeper in. Forward teams were launching attacks on hard access points to try to swipe surveillance sensors out from under the Kalav'Lees. VANDAL was launching attacks from the sidelines, too, trying to open up every door in the old chemical plant the Fair Hand called home. A million other AIs were hurling themselves at everything they could, piggybacking every signal going up and down.
Amin played her part. She played it well. In all that chaos, seeing people coming back covered in crimson, seeing every shred of bandwidth taken up at every millisecond, she never buckled. She was up to the tricks she'd learned with Ves, Raki, and DuBuon. She was swiping clones from Chuikov at every bend in the road. Pedro pulled a gun on an S&C officer every time someone was daft enough to let him close. Clone breaching teams spun around and hosed Chuikov mercenaries every time they found a door. All the while, Chuikov's goons couldn't see what they were doing; there were too many fingers.
Helmet HUDs were useless. If it wasn't covered in a pop-up of Amin's digits, it was printing back useless data. Squad communications played back seagulls and cricket chirps. Gunship radars were playing chiptunes off of bogus contacts. Every unsecured and vulnerable system on the plate was part of some kind of terrible orchestra, played at Chuikov's expense. Every so often, the wrong comms went to the wrong people. S&C mercenaries knocked out dozens of incidental allies over pride and dibs - and thanks all to Amin and the rest.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:14:16 GMT -5
THIS IS TOO MUCH
On the surface, it seemed like Amin still wasn't taking it seriously. To anyone on the receiving end, it might've seemed like she was having one big laugh about it all. The truth was that Amin was terrified about what she was seeing. All that noise, all that goofy showmanship - that was all based on software she'd developed for jobs in the past. She was one of the only people who knew where the fight was going. S&C was reinforcing every minute. VANDAL hit squads were lining up in the tunnels. Chuikov gunships had air superiority even the clones couldn't contest. For every one clone the Fair Hand turned into a suicide bomber, S&C hijacked five more.
The Fair Hand held on tight in the net war. S&C and every AI in the city couldn't beat out a hacker gang of redworlders on their home turf. That didn't change the real, physical part of the fighting. Numbers were what mattered. Industry was what won the day. The Kalav'Lees had neither. Hardware kept streaming in for hours. Finally, the redworlders were fighting in their own home. S&C mercenaries hit the main compound. By then, flamethrowers were a fact of life. If someone wasn't on fire, they were being ripped apart by an angry grunt in powered armor.
As soon as Amin heard the screams from her terminal, she jolted back to her senses. She grabbed her gun, ammo, and ran for the door. There was still a bit of that redworlder sense of loyalty in her; she was headed for Raki, to get him and get out. He was the only person that was still alive - so far as Amin knew, anyways. A few quick shootouts took her across the compound. None of them ended well. There were a few chances to see people she knew killed in front of her. Cousins, in-laws, and even an old partner about her age.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:16:45 GMT -5
THIS IS IT
When she wasn't watching others die, she was doing it for them. She took a bullet at every bend that she didn't see someone's brother take one for her. It all came to a head when Amin went down, at a junction near the Kalav'Lees's command center. A team of power-armored mercenaries caught up to her with machine guns and shotguns. According to Amin, she was bleeding behind cover while the S&C henchmen were taking pot-shots at her. According to Ves, she was about to have a powered boot come down on the back of her head. Either side on the story doesn't matter much. On any other day, Amin was going to die.
Instead, Ves showed up. She wasn't in much better condition, but she was still moving. She still had a gun in her hand and hate in her heart - or what was left of it. Somehow, that was enough for Ves to drive off the entire team and drag Amin off. Somewhere along the way, Amin got back on her feet and put her gun back in the fight. The two pulled back into the sewage tunnels VANDAL had staked out. VANDAL's people on ambush, S&C goons chasing after, gunships strafing tunnels - none of it mattered. The two didn't care about hissing at eachother anymore. They were set on survival.
Times got rough after. When they weren't fighting, they were looking for somewhere in the sewers to bed down and lick their wounds. Both of them were so badly maimed after it all that it would've been easier to salvage one to fix the other. All those open wounds, lying in all that half-toxic sludge and stink - the medical costs were something else. Even when they could find somewhere to sit down, they had to fend off sewer mutants chasing after all the noise and blood. Every once in a while, they found an active pipe - or one turned on while they were in it. They spent a week doing all that and more. No one has any idea how they managed to survive.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:18:35 GMT -5
THAT'S ENOUGH
Awful as it was, they managed. They came back to Drassa like mummies, with a hole in every organ, and promptly flopped into the nearest clinic. The redworlders there already knew what had happened. People were in shock over it. They were even more dumbfounded by the fact that there was still someone alive. They woke up in a heartbeat as soon as S&C showed up, looking for the two. Chuikov didn't like leaving a job half-finished. He knew someone got out. Who exactly, he was a bit foggy on, but he could always start matching faces to corpses.
Drassa didn't play. Ves, Amin - didn't matter which one. They grew up there. They had the same color of blood, the same bright eyes. They weren't going anywhere. People weren't exactly thrilled about covering for Amin, but nobody wanted to get the blame if one of them disappeared. Protests swarmed S&C scouts. People went into Self-Defense Committee jails on bogus charges just to make sure they wouldn't snitch. When Chuikov started to escalate, the SDC opened up its armories to the public and rang the war bell. Gregor had the sense - or maybe the satisfaction - to back off. A few thousand angry redworlders wasn't something he wanted just then.
Amin spent a long time underground. She hid out in Drassa, rubbed her stashed money together to get a decent place. People wanted her gone, but nobody wanted to force her out. For all they knew, Chuikov would've been waiting at the door. There was a certain kind of vindication when she kept herself quiet. About a year and a half passed before anyone heard a peep out of Amin. There was no reign of terror over Drassa under the crown of CyclicMetastasis. The old days of Rabidogen01 were in the past. She must have had the sense knocked into her, most people agreed.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:20:02 GMT -5
THAT IS DEFINITELY ENOUGH
The truth was always a different story. Amin had done heists, taken scores, done everything from corporate wetwork to open street wars. The Red Bonfire, as people started calling it, was something completely different. She'd seen everyone she knew die. She'd listened to the choking screams of someone burning to death in the next room over. She'd been shot, nearly killed, and came away from it with nothing but a very bleak future. For a very long time, Amin was a hollow shell. No one really knows what she spent her time on. All she ever did was come up once a week for food, bills, or follow-up medical treatments.
At some point or another, Amin quietly checked herself out of Drassa. No one's sure when. She left, stopped paying her taxes to the SDC, and disappeared into the city, sometime in late 1310. Ves hadn't heard from her. Ves hadn't even seen her since the RIP Smokeout. The only thing that turned up was a little suggestion on why. She'd been late on bills for months. She'd been picking up less and less food each day. She wasn't trying to fill out her apartment or eke out a new place. The energetic girl she used to be was slowly coming back, but not without some kind of stress around the edges.
It was simple. She was broke. Amin had spent all that time on her hands, so traumatized she couldn't even handle cryptomining. Her bank account had finally run dry. She didn't have any friends to fall back on. It was the kind of wake-up call she needed - just a few overdue taxes too late. One of the city's best hackers was about as rich as a mutant fresh out of the badlands. Things got worse every day the news had to settle in. Amin turned back up out west, working for Jimmy, on quick, low-pay jobs she could squeeze a quick buck out of. She cashed in on old contracts, only to find out most were to clients that wanted her dead. She was shot a few times again when some of them followed through.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 12:21:11 GMT -5
I QUIT
In around November of 1310, Amin finally hit rock-bottom. Her name popped up on a list of contractors for Damsel Center. She was involved in cybersecurity and website management, earning just enough to keep her afloat without ever getting anything better. The usual Damsel style, just with the wrong kind of person. In February, she moved in - or was moved in - to Damsel's southeast headquarters in Wyvernkeep. She wasn't kept for her curves, but no one was under any other impression. She wasn't coming out of it a free woman - if she came out of it at all.
The problem for Damsel was that, as much there were clients and rivals lining up to buy out Amin's dignity, she was just too good. She was still one of the top hackers in the city. She started off small, but she ended up absolutely fundamental to the nitty-gritty of Wyvernkeep's operations. She went from website admin, to exploit tester, and on to top-level clone monitor - and held each title simultaneously. Bumping her down to the prostitute bunks would've cost more than the payoff from the people who wanted her as a pincushion. Amin knew that better than anyone - and that was exactly what she was working to do. Every day was a fight to stay above water - a kind of desperate dedication to her duties that most Damsel employees her age could relate to.
The Center started scaling down her involvement around June. Valuable as she was, Amin wasn't the kind that was easy to keep. If another offer came around, Wyvernkeep was going to be looking at a lot of backdoors. The stage was set for an August demotion, but that never happened. Instead, Jimmy came into the picture. He intercepted Amin on her downward slide around July 5th. He slammed Wyvernkeep with the Lion's Den Breakout, aimed straight at Solah herself. Jimmies hit defensive positions around the tower, while mercs smuggled themselves in to grab Amin. It was a knife right to Damsel's heart in a way no one could've seen coming.
Neither did Amin. She'd been in touch with Jimmy for some time, but a rescue operation was never on the stated agenda. Not too long after shots started popping off, one of the rescue team - Commissioner Ironbrains - nearly killed her in a fit of rampant rage. Not too long after she'd had her strangling, she was out of the tower - and off to the Tombstone Plate. She'd been generously conscripted for the purpose of her life's goal; finding Raki'Sakazzah. She just had to find a way to make peace with being back on Raffemaster, with Ironbrains, the Dough Man, and her sister. She wasn't sure if she was still alive by the time she'd been introduced to her new roommates. It all seemed like she'd died and gone straight to Hell.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 28, 2019 23:19:00 GMT -5
GET A RUMBLE ON
Amin was one of the last to sign on for what was soon to go down as the Cross-Cloneston Rampage. Her part was mostly as an intel specialist. She had the details on Sakazzah, his habits, his hideouts, and his probable whereabouts. She was the one who'd spent years chasing him in the background, while her life was unravelling at her fingertips. When she landed on the team, leads started popping up like a wildfire. They went from rounding up relatives and help, to actually combing the city for the supposed corpse.
It all came to a head when the team hit TransUrban TeleComms, the tower where Raki was hiding out. They landed in the middle of an S&C siege aimed straight at the same Sakazzah. Amin was the chief muscle on the job; she was second only to Jimmy in clone escorts. She went up into the tower with the rest of the team while Jimmy held their exit. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Beth showed up to add trouble to the mix. It had all the makings for a comeback stunt the city wasn't going to forget.
For Raki, anyways. For Amin, it was second only to the RIP Smokeout. By the time the team was on top of Sakazzah, a gunship caught up with Ves. She was gone in a rocket barrage before anyone had bothered to turn around. There weren't any cheers from Amin, no vindictive indifference - nothing. So far as she saw, her sister was dead, and she had Sakazzah to thank for it. The redworlder in her kicked back into action. The only reason she didn't quit on the spot was so she could fit her boot down Raki's throat.
Before she could, Amin took a bullet in the leg from the same gunship that'd gotten her sister. Right around the corner was Sakazzah. She was denied her vengeance at just the same moment it'd come up as an opportunity. Soon enough, she was on a merc's back and out the door. The tower came crumbling down behind her and the team. It was something she'd been looking forward to for years. To anyone looking in from the outside, it was her life's work done. Instead, the girl that came back from the Siege of TransUrban Tower was a dark, frustrated shadow of her former self.
[ ! LOCKED: Legends never die. ]
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Post by Insano-Man on May 2, 2019 15:51:19 GMT -5
COMEBACK IN BLACK
The funk she fell into didn't last long. Before the month was out, Amin's zest came back. She shrugged off the hole in her leg, the hole in her family tree, and went right back to work making holes in hostile networks. Nobody could explain where the rebound came from - nobody but Jimmy, at least - but hindsight pinned it on the upcoming job. Amin was set up to go straight back to work as one of the big names of the 1311 raid on the Restricted Residence Zone - Beth's big blacksite. She was ready to rub elbows with some of the city's best mercs - DuBuon, Soulless, the East Breach Emperor. She was slated to pull off a score that'd make her one of the richest redworlders in the city.
Pulling off the job meant staying alive. For Amin'Solah, one of S&C's most hated names, that wasn't easy. She had to get on the road and stay that way. She passed through about a dozen different safehouses, worked out of armored trams decked in comms gear. She spent just about as much time on foot in old, abandoned buildings and plates. She spent just as much time in the upper city as she did in the undercity, dodging mutants and squatters with a permanent escort of short-tempered Jimmies. Meanwhile, just about every inch of ground she covered caught fire as Chuikov tried to keep up.
Part of her job was setting the stage for the raid by staging feints against Beth assets across the city. Right alongside it, she was part of Jimmy's cyberintelligence blitz, pulling out hearsay and hard details by the serverful. All that time, she was working with Sakazzah, tag-teaming it across the internet to keep the tempo going. No one on the intel team was under any other impression - it was the worst match-up anyone could've come up with. Amin had bounced back, but her attitude towards Raki didn't improve. If anything, it dropped off a cliff edge. Blood and species didn't matter anymore. Their only ties were Jimmy and the job.
Lucky for Jimmy, that was enough. The dollar signs in Amin's eyes were big enough to cover up the bullseye on Raki's face. When the RRZ operation finally kicked off, she was tight. Her place was right next to Sakazzah as one of the top hackers on the job. The two worked together, with Jimmy, and with their teams as if the Cross-Cloneston Rampage had never happened - as if the Red Bonfire had never gone down. What exactly they did, the city never found out, but the job went down as a whirlwind success. Jimmy came out on top. Amin and Raki came out as millionaires.
[ ! LOCKED: A hole straight to Hell. ]
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Post by Insano-Man on Jun 10, 2022 15:45:25 GMT -5
THE CROSS-CLONESTON CRACKDOWN
Amin pulled up two things from the big bust on the big blacksite. Her first was a paycheck that was enough to pay for one mansion per every year of life she'd had on this Erf. The second was a bounty that was enough to pay for a mansion for every year of life she could've lived if she'd never done it. She and the rest of the crew's big names came away with nine figures of Beth money on their heads. At first, she might've laughed about it. She had enough money to flip the bird to any parade of hitmen Beth could come up with. She had Jimmy's love for life - even if that meant sexual harassment from then to doomsday. She didn't care.
Then the Cross-Cloneston Crackdown hit. Beth forced her to care. AVALON and private contractors swept across the city in one of the biggest sieges the first senator had ever laid on Jimmy. S&C came into the picture not too long after, dogpiling on the clown Chuikov wanted to crack. That meant Amin's big price tag was a twenty-ton anchor in a very deep sea. She had to go into hiding - again. As ever, Jimmy was there - and he was ready to do the same for Raki, too. The two sheltered down to the undercity below the Drassa Enclave, close to Jimmy's most reliable redworlder supply chain.
For Amin, it was a bum deal. She was down in the undercity, with a town full of people that hated her dropping their sewage down on her from above. She was stuck with a bunch of mercs and Jimmies hitting on her when they weren't busy stewing in their own disappointment. The only one who wasn't was Raki, who was someone so close to the bottom of her list that he could spoil her day just by walking into the room. Being stuck in cramped quarters, hearing shots at every hour from either Beth prowlers or mutant marauders outside - time back in Damsel's dungeon was starting to look competitive.
[ ! LOCKED: Legends never die. ]
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