Luck 8e a L8dy Tonight

The sunlight streams in through your bedroom window, casting rays of intense white-gold light through the remnant murk and haze of lingering smoke, vape, and dust that swirls slowly in lazy spirals and visual whirls. You can feel the pressure of its warmth as it casts across parts of your body, everywhere that isn’t covered in the heavy silks and satins of your summer blankets.

What had woken you up? 

You’ve been experiencing sudden wakefulness a lot lately. At first you’d chalked it up to possibly gunfire, hearing something in the city, or maybe even a new autonomous unit that was doing something periodically. You can no longer do that. No, the reason you felt awful and the reason you kept finding yourself suddenly awake with no clear reason were one and the same, and you were still avidly trying your best to ignore it.

Every spot of your body aches and groans as you pull yourself up to a seated position and rub your face with the cold, inviting chrome of your metallic hand. It was smooth and ice-like in the heat of your bedroom. The AC wasn’t turned on, the night had been cool enough and you’d had your balcony sliding doors wide open when you’d passed out, but someone had been by to clean up the scattered garbage and food waste that had been strewn from wall to wall after your little get-together. 

Right. You had a party last night to cele8r8 August 8th. Your brows furrow as you try to remember what happened, but all you get are flashes of hot and dirty intimacy and a number of faces ranging from just a few to more than ten. Probably another reason your body hurts so bad, but still not the reason you feel awful. You suck your garbage-tasting teeth and teeter your way up to your feet, a task that was much harder than initially thought. A few attempts and falls back to your rear eventually fruit into you being on your (unsteady) feet and heading towards your adjoined bathroom.

The light flicks on with an automatic swipe of your knuckles and you’re presented with the image of yourself.

You were thinner than you usually were. Still not the reason you feel awful. You had brilliant dark blues and purples up the right side of your face and neck, trailing down along your shoulder and into your ribs. You were covered from neck to thigh in lipstick smears, bite marks, and welts from fingernails. Still not the reason you feel awful. You check your teeth in the mirror and see that the front two are crusted in now dried, dark blood from the split in your upper lip. 

Mouthwash, toothpaste, and salt-water became your next steps. Your mind begins to drift every few seconds, carried away by the currents of alcohol and other, more devious substances that are still creating deep and obfuscated oceans inside your consciousness. Still not why you were feeling awful. You scrunch your nose at the thought, finish up your mouth cleansing routine and fumble half-blinded by the screen of your awareness for your signature cerulean lipstick. After some noisy groping and the overturning of a number of unidentified objects that littered your bathroom counter, the lipstick is acquired and applied and you move on to fixing your hair.

Your routine at getting organized, washing off with a warm, soapy towel in lieu of showering so early in the day, and getting dressed is just long enough to fill up the gap of time between wakefulness and the alarm now blaring on your phone in the other room. Before you step out of your bathroom, you do a quick bump to top off your high, wipe and massage at the burning in your nose, and carry yourself out towards your phone.

The alarm stops before you reach it, and not of its own volition.

There is someone standing in your bedroom. Someone you did not invite.

You recognize him, not because you’ve ever seen this man in person before, but because you’ve seen a fair number of his alternates roaming around the multiverse. Your blood runs uncharacteristically cold for the human form you’ve been housed inside of for the past several years. “...can I help you?” You speak while keeping your standard nonchalance palpable on your tone. 

Dirk Strider looks up from your phone and makes direct eye-contact through his shades. His free hand moves to the hilt of the katana on his well-dressed, pressed-suited hip and there’s a long and pregnant pause filled with only the gentle hum of the Air Conditioner you hadn’t put on before you left the room.

“I think you should take a seat, Serket.”

You nod. “...I think I should, too.” 

—

Gearing up for Pandora was the hardest part. You spent way longer than you wanted to finding your shield, locating the weapons that would work with the ECHOnet, and decking yourself out in body armor. You don’t fit the theme this time around. Instead of a ‘Bandit Queen’ you looked more like a soldier, dressed from head to toe in carbon fiber body plating and a helmet with full HUD capabilities. You weren’t going to Pandora to sightsee, you weren’t going to romp around in the wastelands and have an adventure. You were going to hunt a dangerous Siren, a version of yourself who had presumably been living there for the past few years and had the upper-hand of Home Base.

There are no goodbyes when you set out, no notes left, just a quiet and solitary trip to your transportalizer, a grave plunking in of the coordinates, and the familiar screaming of the multiverse around you as you materialize in a universe that isn’t your own. The trip makes you feel ill, it twists your guts and you can feel them writhing back into place as you step out into the heat of Pandora.

⠀ A familiar smell of burnt rubber, skag manure, hot sandstone, and the slightly wrong mix of breathable gasses meet your nose. You should have taken something for your nerves before you left, or at least something for your queasiness, but it was far too late for that now and like hell you were going to risk anything made by Dr. Zed to soothe your insides.

You orient yourself, you get all of your tech connected and functioning, and you plug in the waypoint for where Skaianet seemed to think this other Spin was. You’re outside of what’s left of Fyrestone, beneath the now dilapidated super highway that Handsome Jack had been building the last time you were here. Much of the slag has been cleaned up, but the town is still in ruins. It’s filled with Bandits and Psychos now, you can see them roaming about inside the makeshift barricades they had set up. There couldn’t be any less interest inside of you on engaging with them right now.

Something was happening beneath your armor; all across your body is a dull burning sensation followed by a cold tingling. You feel the surge of Eridian power creeping its way back up your flesh and it brings back deeply ingrained physical memories that your consciousness isn’t quite privy to. Your HUD gives you a warning that your heart rate is elevated to dangerous levels. Yeah, you think, no shit. Panic attacks do that to you. 

The swelling of your Siren powers sputter and flicker just as you feel the finalizing surge of Eridian power through you, and then all at once the burning, tingling, and discomfort stops. You knit your brows as you tuck your assault rifle under your arm and pull back as much of the sleeve of your undersuit as you could given the armor around it. The Siren markings are inert, completely dull and just a shade or two lighter than your regular skintone. Strange. Both you and the other you existing at the same time must’ve fucked with the stipulations of how Siren powers worked. Hopefully that meant that she was unable to use her Phasecontrol abilities, too.

⠀ Navigating Pandora was more difficult this time around than it had been last time. Much of the planet seemed to be inaccessible from the Fast Travel Network, either because the comms relays were down or because whoever was vying for control of Pandora at the moment was trying to limit travel. With so few options, you were going to have to travel from The Dust to Lynchwood, which wasn’t too bad of a journey as far as you could tell. Of course, you weren’t on the Updated ECHOnet, how accurate your maps are was questionable. Still, you set out, counting your bullets as you make your way to the nearest Fast Travel Station.

Travel is only interrupted two or three times, once by Skags and twice by Bandits, but your Assault Rifle makes short work of them all and you can’t dwell on the loss of human life when you still had a bounty to claim. You were no longer registered in the Catch-a-Ride system, so the journey is done on foot, and by the time you see the outskirts of Lynchwood, your legs are like jelly and you have enough sand in your boots to fill a bathtub with. 

Lynchwood has grown. 

You recognize aspects of the infrastructure as things you’d planned and built for L8dy’s Country years ago and all it does is confirm to you that you were nearing your target. Sweat made it hard to see as you rounded the pathway leading up towards the city only to find yourself barred out by massive walls with auto-turrets scanning for any potential hostiles. The colors on the walls, the sponsors on the buildings, seemed to be of Jakobs make. Probably one of the better manufacturers to align herself with. You’d be impressed if you weren’t already exhausted and struggling to push forward with the mission.

⠀ Taking out the turrets wasn’t that hard, they went down in only a few bullets each once you figured out where to hit. It’s the mechs that digistruct from alcoves on the barricade wall that look like they’ll be the actual challenge. You re-count your bullets. You have about 46 left so you change your assault rifle to single-shot mode and bunker down behind some wreckage nearby to watch the constructs as they patrol. After a few minutes, you have their paths figured out, and you lead some shots into their weakpoints. Your hits land critical, and with only 12 bullets spent, the pathway to the front gate is clear.

It’s as simple as walking up to the gate, bashing the butt of your rifle into a control panel, and moving inside. Lynchwood is bustling with life and you manage to blend in fine despite your attire, especially after you stop and rub some dirt and sand all over your almost pristine armor to make it look more weathered than it was. Only one person sees you doing this and he’s too drunk to do more than stare at you menacingly from where he was crumpled against a dumpster.

Lynchwood as a whole had your particular brand of stink all throughout it, from the slot machines people were pouring their earnings into to get guns and cash, to the patrolling guards having cerulean diamond emblems on their shoulders marking their loyalty. If she were trying to hide, she was doing a piss poor job of it. Did she want to be found? If you were going to hide, you’d do a hell of a lot better at blending in and shedding your telltale attributes, but who were you to judge? How many years had she been here already? Maybe she thought she was in the clear.

You wander about Lynchwood for about 20 minutes, trying to navigate the streets that were different than you remembered and different than what your map was trying to tell you. Your best luck comes when you follow the rail line through Main Street. As far as you could recall, this place has been prettied up quite a bit since your last visit. What used to be somewhat run down has been repaired, with new buildings replacing the sand-worn structures that you would’ve been more familiar with. The most notable changes were the addition of a Fast Travel Hub smack-dab in the middle of town, and the almost corporate-like expansion of the clinic. Brilliant holographic banners displayed simple animations of new medicines and robotic prosthetics in eye–catching colors. None of the products being advertised looked like anything you had any familiarity with.

The initial thought is to raise hell and get arrested. Maybe, if she were running this place, you’d get taken straight to her if you kicked up enough of a shitstorm. You re-count your bullets. 34. Even if every hit you landed was critical, the armed town guards wandering around looked like they’d take at least 5 or 6 each. You’d probably get put down before any of them made an arrest. Your shield was basic and didn’t offer much in terms of elemental effects. 

The second thought is to ask around. While it was still liable to get you into a gunfight in the wild wild waste of Pandora, it was probably the better route to take. Of course… you didn’t know what she was going by. You didn’t know what she looked like, aside from probably having a robotic arm and brown skin. You had to start somewhere though, so you follow along Main Street until you find a place called ‘Skagsbreath Bar & Grill’, which sounded way more like a family establishment than it looked once you stepped inside.

⠀ It was like walking into a grungepunk western. Several people turn to look at you from behind their mugs and shotglasses, each strapped with guns and in varying levels of bodily filth. The bartender, a tall man with an eyepatch and four robotic limbs, sizes you up before smacking a sign behind him that says ‘No Guns, No Grenades, No Greenhorns’. You’re thankful that the helmet completely obfuscates your face because the look of incredulity on it would’ve probably started the night’s fifth bar brawl.

You carefully peel your gun from yourself and flick on its safeties, unequip your grenade mod, and place them on the table by the doorway in. People watch you for a moment or two longer before you make a show of trying to digistruct any other equipped weapons and turning up with glimmering, digital nothing. Once you were fully unarmed, the majority of the patrons returned to entertaining their drinks and glowering at you from the rims of their eyes instead.

⠀ “...whisky on the rocks.” You order with no intent to drink. Your hands come down on the bartop and you smooth your fingertips along the glass-rim stained wood. The bartender sizes you up even more now that he’s heard that the voice coming out of the helmet, despite its digital compression, is unmistakably female. Still, he gets you your drink, and even starts up a chat with you while he does.

“New in town?”

“Passing through.”

“You one a’ them Vault Hunters?”

“Not even a little bit. Private mercenary, off-planet.” You try to give a scoff of a laugh at the idea of being a Vault Hunter but he doesn’t seem to buy it. He slides you the grimey, scratched tumbler full of cheap whiskey and dirty ice. A casual pan of your head to people on either side of you confirms that this isn’t the standard, it was some kind of hazing. You reach for the glass, frame its rim with your fingers, and swirl it around.

“Somethin’ wrong with yer drink, miss?” The bartender asks with feigned innocence. You recognize it immediately.

You stop swirling the drink. 

“Yeah, actually, there is. I wouldn’t clean my boots with this shit. How much extra you charge to make it palatable?” If there was one thing you knew about Pandora, it was that snappy banter and quirky one-liners were the norm of conversation, especially if you wanted to make a good impression. He plants both hands on the bartop and leans in towards you, scarred face deeply lined with something between a scowl and a frown.

“You insultin’ my establishment?”

“If it’s an insult to want something I can actually drink instead of this dishwater bullcrap, then yeah, I guess I am.” You shrug, placing the tumbler down and straightening up some to make equal eye-contact with the Barkeep. You tilt your head to the side a bit. 

“You make a habit of treating every new guy like this? Or am I just special?” You’re speaking with a grin and it’s carrying on your voice. You can see the veins on his dirty neck start to pop out. 

⠀ Just as you’re about to say something else, your HUD flashes a bright orange-red and the world is pulled out from underneath you. Something hits you in the back of the head, hard, hard enough to clunk your helmet down into your skull and for the pain and force of it to only hit you once you’re already on the floor and unable to control your limbs.

Panic sets in underneath the throbbing, thrumming pain in your skull and you try to push your body back up just in time to see the ass-end of your Assault Rifle careening towards your face.

Sobriety was forced upon you and had expertly swept away the lingering sense of floating, replacing it with the tightly wound and rusted coils of anxiety. What was supposed to be a day of recovery from a night of celebration was now a dissociative panic attack from which you couldn’t bring yourself out of. There was a good reason, of course, but still. You were supposed to be stronger than this.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀You are Vriska Fucking Serket.

You pick at your food. Absolutely none of it seemed appetizing which was no fault of the staff. You still feel awful inside, in a deeply unsettling way that persisted even before Dirk issued his ultimatum and that hasn’t really faded or changed even with the addition of the new upset. Whatever. Your fork is dropped hastily and clatters against the plate, disturbing the contents here and there. You needed to clear your head.

You’re out in the streets of L8dy’s Country within the next five minutes, walking along the sidewalk with your hands buried wrist-deep in the pockets of your light jacket. The sun is most of the way down, the day’s heat is lingering. Misters spray fine droplets of water into the air, carrying on the slight drafts and making everything feel a lot cooler than it was.

People gather their things and bring them inside for the night. What used to be hollowed out buildings, half-collapsed and pieced together, are covered in new growths of cement and rebar. There are planks of wood closing off holes once blasted by artillery, plastic wrap pulled over drywall. The scabs of L8dy’s Country are everywhere and abundant. 

Ahead of you, two kids probably no older than 13 laugh and run through the streets. They weave in between retrofitted vehicles driving slowly down the block and people hauling in their goods from the market. High-pitched elation chirps out before they vanish down one of the streets and you can no longer see them, only hear the echoes of their play under the living thrum of the city.

You keep walking.

Over the next two hours you venture further away on-foot from L8dy’s Mansion than you’ve ever been with no guns or guards in tow. Nobody out here recognizes you. The only people with any kind of recognition are the few faces you’ve seen at the Casino, and even then it’s only been a point or a wave to acknowledge you. This part of L8dy’s Country, even so close to the heart of it all, is so disconnected from the seedy underbelly you’ve created that it’s flourishing without you. Wild growth from planted seeds.

There were so many people here, more than you could fathom. Seeing numbers on a sheet was a vastly different experience. Down here, on the ground, you can smell the myriad scents of cooking dinners, of fresh laundry, of perfume and cologne catching on the air. It’s so much easier to breathe out here. You shrug your jacket a bit tighter as the sun finally crests down over the horizon and you feel the chill of the desert night air starting to creep in. The misting system had shut off a few minutes ago, but the air was still humid and the residual cold hugged itself to your skin.

Where were you going? ‘Away’ was the easy answer, though not entirely true. You know that you can’t just walk out of L8dy’s Country, not only because the barricades have shifted so far away and the city has expanded so massively outward that you’d never make it on foot, but… you can’t leave L8dy’s Country. Not in that sense. You’ve put too much work into her, died too many times to raise her up and built her on the foundation of your own bones a hundred or so times over. Letting Skaianet roll in and destroy everything you’ve poured blood, sweat, and tears into felt like the loser’s surrender.

So you keep walking. You keep thinking of all of the different angles you could take. You start wondering why you were so opposed to killing an Alternate of yours, when that was something you’d done already. It should be a piece of cake. There was nothing she could do to you that you haven’t already done to yourself, and you highly doubted that if you failed your mission Skaianet would uphold its threat of not reviving you. You are probably the only person who can take you out. 

They needed you. You take a modicum of solace in that thought.

⠀ Before you know it, you’re walking up the busted steps to an apartment complex that’s vaguely familiar to you. You’ve been here before, never on foot, but you recognize the paintings and banners and the patterns of broken foundations. Tank’s house. Your feet are tired but they manage to get you to the intercom and you punch in her door code. There’s a long silence as the line connects and the acid in your stomach shifts. Nerves? Maybe. You can’t dwell on it.

“Whosit?” Tank’s voice eventually cracks out. Her gruff tones ease your nerves some and you can’t help but smile.

⠀“Take a guess.”

There’s a long silence. You’re not sure if she heard you or not. You’re about to speak again when you hear the buzzer and the telltale click of the front door unlocking, so you steal yourself inside and head up to the third floor where her shitty little apartment was. The air inside the building is stagnant and hot and immediately evaporates the lingering mist on your skin, and suddenly once again your mask slips back on.

When she opens the door, Tank is wearing just a ratty bralet that barely covers anything due to the cigarette burns, solder burns, and general wear-and-tear holes that litter it all over, along with a pair of camo cargo pants two sizes too big for her tied at the waist with a bundle of scrap wires. She’s also sporting some rather impressive bruises and scrapes, the most striking of which was a double black eye that made her look not unlike a raccoon. She lurches forward and hugs you so tight you feel like you might die right then and there.

She invites you in and you step around the piles of scrap and half-finished robotics projects, trying not to look indignant as you choke on the oil and grease in the air. Tank gestures for you to sit on her couch and moves a cardboard box filled with various assorted engineering viscera so she can sit with you. Before anything is said, she offers you the weed she’d been smoking just before you came in. For the first time probably ever, you say no, and Tank does her best to sober up. 

“...what’s up, babe?” She asks you with a grave intonation. It sounds weird on her, she was usually so aloof. This is an unusual situation, you suppose. Your fingers twist together in your lap, metal claws digging under keratin nails to pick the dirt out.

You’re quiet for a long time. Tank takes a final drag off of her smoke and pinches it out, getting comfortable on the threadbare and rough upholstery of her sofa to share in the silence with you. At some point you stop fidgeting, and the both of you sit there in silence only broken by the mechanical clicks and vyrrs of her apartment

⠀ “...I think I’m leaving, and I might not come back.” The words don’t fit together in the way you want them to, they don’t carry the implications or context necessary for Tank to ‘get it’ as anything more than the standard ‘I’m going to do something stupid and I’ll probably die plus Skaianet is mad at me’. You see it on her face, the gloss of ‘okay but you’ve always come back’ and the invalidation of your actual vulnerability. Tank slings her arm over the back of her couch and your stomach turns.

Your mask is still up. You’re acting weird but your expressions, your body language, all parts of your ‘Gambling Queen of L8dy’s Country’ visage are working in tandem so you can’t fully blame Tank, as much as you want to. She’s supposed to know you. She’s supposed to know that if you were going on some great, exciting adventure where you were risking your life, you’d be excited like you usually were and you’d be coming to say goodbye and have a night of fun in standard ‘You Only Live Once’ hedonism. Tank, if anyone, was supposed to be able to see past the flamboyance and try to stop you. The wounded void left by her failure to actually see you heats up and you start feeling prickles itching under your skin.

You move to stand and Tank interrupts you. A glare leaves you and shoots through her before you can stop yourself. Tank doesn’t shrink to it, and at the moment you can’t tell if you appreciate it or if it just pisses you off more.

“...like, leaving leaving?” She finally asks in clarification.

⠀So much of you wants to tell her that it was fine, that it was stupid of you to come here and that you’d be back to have drinks again by the weekend, that you were just drunk, or high, and you shouldn’t have come here and interrupted her hard work being stupid. You want to leave, to rush out of her apartment and ignore any attempts she made to contact you before you left. She would be better off without you, she didn’t actually care about you if she didn’t know you well enough to realize you were trying to say goodbye. God, she must actually hate you. Your chest tightens and your throat aches as you once again try to stand.

Tank pulls you into another hug before you can, she leans across her couch and buries her face into your chest. Her robotic arms lock around you, comforting and solid, and you melt into the embrace. Every inch of anger and panic you were feeling escape in a flood of tears while you grip onto Tank, a lifeboat in a storm, and she just holds you until you’re done sobbing.

Once you were, she plants a chaste kiss on your lips and gets up to go make coffee. The emptiness of her side of the couch makes you feel so small that you might vanish between the cushions if you shift in the wrong way. You’re tired now. Your body is heavy and stiff from the walk, from the cry, from the tension of the news, from the heat, from everything it had gone through in the past 24 hours and everything it will go through in the next 24.

⠀ You and Tank talk over coffee for a while. You explain to her everything for the first time. You tell her about The Game. You tell her about Skaianet. You tell her about your life as a Troll, you even go into details about what it was like trying to feed your mother before she died and the terror that you might be the next meal if you didn’t keep it up. She does an excellent job of active listening, even for the things you know she couldn’t possibly understand. Partway through, she lights her weed cig back up and you trade off until the roach smoulders and you’re both floating through the remainder of the conversation.

It’s probably an hour or three later by the time you’ve talked enough for five separate people. Tank knows you now more intimately than anyone else on this side of the fourth-wall, maybe even more than the puppeteer pulling the strings. You once again tell her that you might not come back from this one, that if there was a version of yourself strong enough to give Skaianet the slip and integrate into a different Universe while being wholly disconnected from the safetynet of respawn, she might be stronger than you. It’s a tough pill to swallow.

You expect Tank to try and console you, to tell you that no, of course not, you’re the better Vriska and she has no idea what you were capable of- which you know to be a lie before Tank even says it. You’re older now, you’ve slowed down, you’ve gotten comfortable and weak. Being so far away from canon, stripped away from your peers and your social ranking, it’s changed you. Tank surprises you by looking grimly for a moment, and asking about Anna.

Anna was your ‘Understudy’. She was a girl you’d rescued from Skaianet a few years back, the lone survivor of her SBURB session. She’d come through around the same time as El had, maybe around the same time as Sollux had, and you’d just so happened to be at the compound while she was being debriefed. She was a Rogue of Hope, you hadn’t managed to get much information about what her session had looked like in your time teaching her how to run L8dy’s Country but you were damn sure if anybody could take up the throne, it’d be her.

⠀“Anna’s good. She doesn’t know I’m leaving, but I’m sure she’d step into my shoes no fucking problem. I don’t really want to tell her that I’m going on the off-chance I come back.” You let out a tired laugh. “Y’know… just in case she tries to take over while I’m gone and I’m too beat up when I get back to claim my rightful place again.”

Tank laughs disingenuously but you appreciate the gesture. She understands the implications of LC’s politics.

“...do you want to kill her? The other you?” Tank asks.

The question seems odd, out of place. Your brows knit as you think about the answer. Did you? You remember that at one time you’d desperately wanted to be the ‘ultimate’ Serket, to be the shining example that all other alternates were graded by, but that felt like so long ago. You remember the bitterness you felt about being Canon, about having your victory torn away from you, and about how much harder you felt you had to work than some of the other Vriskas you saw puttering about in their 'Victories'.

If Tank had asked you that question five years ago, your answer might be different. Right now, however...

⠀ “No, not really. I mean good for her, right? She got out of this shithole. No more sandstorms and heat rash and fucking... water treatment plant failures. Bandit raids. If she managed to fuck off and stay fucked off for however long she has, I kind of feel like the asshole going there and like… not even bringing her back, just obliterating her in whatever life she’s built for herself out there.”

Tank picks some loose threads on the hem of her couch. “Then don’t.”

You laugh. 

‏‏‎Tank doesn’t.

“I’m serious. Don’t kill her if you don’t want to.”

“If I don’t, L8dy’s Country will fucking fry Tank, I can’t do that to everybody.”

“You don’t really think that Skaianet would do that, do you?”

You shrug. “I do, kind of. I don’t have any reason to think they wouldn’t. They let everyone on Earth suffer while they bunkered down for the apocalypse. I don’t think a bunch of rebel yokels working off of a fucking barter system have any value to people who throw away shoes when they get a single scuff on them.”

Tank doesn’t like that answer, but she accepts it.

“...I just don’t think you should do something you really don’t want to do. Like you said, sounds unfair for you to waltz up there and throw a wrench in shit just because some stuffy assholes told you to. Doesn't really sound like you, Spin.”

It didn’t, and you hated that.

⠀ The conversation dies off, you change the subject a bit but nothing really sticks as things come to a natural conclusion. Tank offers to drive you back home and you decline, knowing that she couldn’t possibly do that safely if you were feeling as fuzzy as you were after just a couple hits. Coffees are finished, hugs and kisses are given, and you find yourself back on the now darkened streets of L8dy’s Country.

The nightlife is incredible. Neon signs that have been salvaged and repurposed cut through the darkness, scattered windows have warm yellow-orange light from a mix of candles and incandescent bulbs, and the streets are lined with various scumbags loitering about and making ‘illegal’ trades. You felt more at home with this crowd than you did the families that met you on your way in. You even get to punch a guy in the face who hits on you persistently even after you told him to fuck off, which felt amazing.

Soon you’re back home, though, and the wall of noise and smell hits you the second you walk through the entryway to L8dy’s Mansion. The casino is bustling, wild and busy for a Wednesday night. People were still spending their chips and vouchers from the 8/8 Cele8r8tion and the noise of the machines and the hoots and hollers of the guests bring your headache back in full force. 

It doesn’t take long to snake your way through service hallways and elevators to get back up to your office, where you find the night’s dinner sitting under a silver cloche and a long island iced tea sitting with its glass absolutely drenched in sweat, not an ice cube in sight. You make your way around the back of the desk and find your seat, swiveling into place. 

⠀ ‎ Something you hadn’t seen from your doorway was the little slip, no bigger than a playing card, sitting in front of the covered meal. Its front is embossed with the sickly, almost neon-lime loops and crosses of the Game Emblem, Skaianet’s emblem. You don’t want to open it. You slide it to the side, up by your computer mouse, and decide to have dinner first so as not to spoil it.

Dinner was some sort of seafood chowder and a couple legs of king crab, cooled to room temperature and just barely palatable because of how long it’d been sitting. The biscuit that had come along with it had gotten soggy from the condensation on the inside of the cloche. You choke it down and leave a shallow film of soup in the bowl, too anxious to finish it.

Opening the card was next.

You wait several beats, willing something, anything else to happen to steal your attention away, but nothing comes.

It’s just you, the silence of your room, and the card on the table.

You open it.

In very sterile print, Courier New font, are your assigned coordinates and a brief description of the other You's location.

It’s familiar to you. Of course she would go there, it was so similar to home. She would’ve known its layout like the back of her hand, especially after the bullshit she went through with TJ. 

‏‏⠀ It’s Pandora. 

‏‏‎⠀ Of course it’s Pandora.

----

Or, and this was the worse option, he’d been looking over your memory archives.

The cold water feels like heaven down your throat and you hold it on your tongue while you wait for him to speak.

You recognized the attire. It’s the same suit that the upper echelon of Skaianet wore, especially when they were deciding on important or pertinent matters that required Admin permissions. Was Dirk an Admin of Skaianet? It’d hardly surprise you if he were. The only thing that really bothers you about Dirk is the fact that you’ve been so alone since you got here, and here he was– living it up on the Skaianet compound, dressed sharply and existing in the lap of luxury while you fought tooth and nail to drag Las Vegas from the brink of extinction.

You try not to get retroactively angry at the injustice of it all while you sip your water and wait for Dirk to start talking. He takes his sweet time, examining your various collectables as he lopes around the room before coming to a stop at the display case with your final remaining Flourite Octet. He moves his free hand without hesitation to unlock and open the display case. You instinctively flinch and half-raise to your feet before the coldness of his snap-headed glare seats you right back down.

It feels like every part of you is raw and being ground with salt as he opens the case, retrieves the octet, and begins to turn it about while examining it. 

“Didn’t you have more of these?”

“Yes.” 

“What happened to them?”

You shrug. He doesn’t like that answer and he continues to stare at you until you cede a longer one. 

“Some bitch stole them, I detonated them. I didn’t want them getting sold or traded around. My guards eventually found her, stumped and screaming, and brought her to my office so I could personally watch her bleed out on my carpet."

You pause, stomach twisting at your own actions. Have you really gotten so comfortable as to forget your ruthlessness? You roll the memory around on your tongue before adding in a final-

"For taking things from me.”

Dirk just gives a single upward nod, continuing to hold the octet by its two ends and twist it around like he was puzzling out its secrets. There’s a very deep and intense want to sacrifice the last thing you had of your previous life, to detonate the final octet and watch as Dirk’s flesh peels back and his bones shatter. He was touching your shit. The older versions of yourself would have done it already.

The current version of yourself is too afraid to.

“...seriously, why the FUCK are you here?” You snap.

He doesn’t like that. His hand closes around the octet and he turns to face you, his movements stiff and robotic and undeniably pissed off. He takes several steps to narrow the space between the two of you before he comes to a stop roughly four or five feet ahead of you. He was tall, well over 6-ft. You wonder if he’s always been so tall or if Skaianet had augmented him. You don’t have time to chase that rabbit before he starts speaking again.

“We have a mission for you.”

‘We’ being who? You don’t ask, you just nod.

“We’ve located another entity using your memory and genetic signature with origins in this Universe. She is armed and dangerous. We need her eradicated.”

That was… a lot of information in so few words. You sit there, stunned, blinking, trying to understand the implications of this. You’d been told that there were universal sanity checks, that only one person per memory signature could have consciousness at a time. It made sense to you before, the rules of The Game were so convoluted and crazy that you hadn’t for a second considered the fact that Skaianet was making something arbitrary up. Of fucking course there could be multiple versions of you roaming around. You briefly wonder how many Dirks there are before his voice interrupts your thoughts and you jolt back to your body.

“If you refuse, we will terminate your archive.”

You palpably feel your heart skip a beat.

“...meaning….?”

Dirk closes the space between the both of you faster than your eyes can register, flash stepping in and gripping the arms of your chair with such intensity that you hear the laminated wood creak under his fingers. His face is so close to yours that you feel the heat of your own breath swirling back at you in the final exhale before you hold it. He doesn’t scare you. Death doesn’t scare you. Still, your body reacts, and still, you hold your breath.

Despite his words, the following delivery of them is cold and calm to the point of discomfort.

“If you don’t destroy her, you’re done. We won’t revive you. Every fragment of what makes you you will be deleted, shredded, and purged from Skaianet’s systems. It’ll be like you never made it out of the game. We will fucking erase you, do you understand?” 

He sounds more like he’s explaining to a child why they’re in time-out than threatening to kill you. 

You swallow against the fake, pungent taste of grating minty toothpaste clinging to the back of your tongue before your face splits in a smile and you can’t help but laugh. Dirk doesn’t like that. He doesn’t do anything about it, though, he stays right where he was to keep you pinned in the chair. You fold your legs, intentionally brushing your shin against the inside of his knee in a flirtatious gesture you’re both intimately aware of being a farce. 

“Fuck, really? Haven’t I done enough for Skaianet already? I mean, who keeps the supply of guns and materials coming your way?” You grin, sharp-toothed. You can see yourself in the reflection of Dirk’s shades. You have an extremely punchable face and it fills you with a sense of pride, especially given the circumstances.

There’s another long pause. You feel your voice itching at the back of your throat, feel the muscles in your grin spasm slightly as you think too much about how to hold it in place. Dirk just looms, silently, so close you can’t breathe and bears his weight down on the arms of the chair you were now glued into. You know he wants you to speak first, to walk back what you said, and you silently refuse.

After what feels like minutes, he finally speaks.

“We’re aware of your loyalty to us.”

It’s said flatly, without much intonation in any direction. What the fuck did that mean? So he has been looking through your memory archives. He knew, then, that you were amassing your own army. That you were withholding strategic resources from Skaianet not just to bolster L8dy’s Country, like you were allowed to be doing, but to work on conjuring a brutal force strong enough to keep Skaianet away. Getting together soldiers to prep for a war you weren’t even sure you wanted to start.

“...then why are you doing this to me?” You ask in a feign of innocence that feels far more convincing to you than it does to Dirk.

He stands, tugs his suit jacket back into place by its lapels, and takes a half-step backwards. 

“We will be sending you the multiversal coordinates of her exact location. You will set out immediately upon receiving said information, or we will launch an orbital strike on Lady’s Country and glass it along with everyone inside, including you. Do you understand or do I need to dumb it down for you?”

The grin doesn’t falter but you feel the cold chill of his words fill you like ice water, brackish as it crashes up against your bones and shrivels your organs. You dying was something you’d always kind of assumed was going to happen, hell you were sort of counting on it. Either Skaianet was going to dump you and leave you for dead or you were going to get killed by one of the many, various deities lurking about the multiverse. 

Skaianet wasn’t just threatening you, though.

There were almost a million people living in L8dy’s Country per your last census, families and children being some of the newest additions. You’d spent the past few years fixing the infrastructure, you’d brought back the hydro and electric grids, you’d started up water purification plants. You’d made L8dy’s Country an oasis, and while the Casino and the Blackmarket were the heart and spine of the entire operation, L8dy’s Country was doing something that Skaianet hadn’t been able to without you– it was giving people hope. 

How long have they been capable of orbital strikes? How long had they been waiting to drop this line of intimidation, to force your hand and get you to ask how high when they told you to jump? How fucking long had they known about your plans for L8dy’s Country, and was this always their goal? To let you build it up, let you grow, let you come to care about the people living there before they threatened to kill everyone? It was dirty. It was underhanded.

It was brilliant.

You’d willfully created your own weakness and served it to them on a silver platter.

The corners of your grin twitch and strain as you fight the well of tears rising in your eyes. The facade was falling, you were unable to hold the mask and Dirk’s attack had landed exactly where he’d wanted it to. He moves away from you, dress shoes that have probably only been worn on this singular occasion letting out crisp clacks as the hard soles move off of your area rugs and onto the marble floor.

“We expect total compliance by the time we send our correspondence. If we do not detect you leaving this Universe within 24 hours of receiving our orders, we will issue the kill command. Choose your next actions carefully, Vriska. Lady’s Country depends on it.”

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