F M K ~ fuck

(about a minute and a half, the rest is for your personal suffering)

Parasol play cross-legged on the bed wearing a frilly manga nightgown as though dressed up to be in bed.  While around the movers move boxes in high speed, she play Mario Cart in real time, bed sheets and blankets fluttering as the bed sways slightly with the game.

The world flashes by, the boxes are packed, she and the music stops.

Takes a smiling cat-toothed selfie with a peace sign, then checks the account.  A single approving nod, "Hm."

Music continues, she plays on as the movers unpack at high speed in their new home, bed fluttering away ...

~ Genuflection ~

Mary closes activates the car's door closing top down like a bird.  In this world few things define the classes more than the car.  

 

There's cars in the streets rolling on wheels, there's hovercars flying above, all the high towers become more suited to their avoidance of all that.  

 

But a car that can travel from one stone to the next ... that was freedom in the asteroid belt that spreads out upon Mary's fast departure to the sky and past.

The churning towers of the inner city connect the passing stones, meeting as dock and travel points between, cheaper than the bus and mostly for shipping between, and occasionally pushing away a stone astray.

She looks at the bobble dancer on the dashboard.  It looks back.  She stares at it suspiciously ...

 

The interior's as any such car would be, too many lights, made for comfort, she turns off the media comm's brights for the darker tones of the readouts, shuts down the mapping system after spotting the destination by eye.

A curious eye to the glove-box.  

 

She locks the controls and opens it, a pistol falls out.  She eyes it a moment ... it's a nice one.  But a moment of wisdom if not sacrifice, it's jettisoned behind with a bauble dancer and the rest of the glove box detritus as the car approaches a roid.

The atmospheres of the settled stones are continuously regenerated while heavy metals dispersed work in conjunction with the graviton accelerators, keeping it set in the the asteroid's slow movement.

Some nearby are domed in lieu of such atmospherics, some have no gravity at all, mines with a sealed structure webbing across the rock until everything is tapped and left behind to drift.

All these places began as such, it's just a matter of time.  It's only cargo which passes between in these outer roads, few other cars suited but public shuttles.

It's not just the engines, or just that the car is sealed. 

The fact is that like the ships of old, the ability to make it float is one thing.  The ability to pull that ship out and scrub it down before the sea rot works its bitter magic forever intent to sink you, is very expensive.

The door gets used over and over, all the dings and whatevers.  Get dinged by an unmapped rock all lost in the dark and rolling around drunk ... they lose all their air.

Dead in three minutes.  Didn't bring it in to be have the seals checked.

No call for help, no one knows where to look, they just ... fell asleep.  Chop shops love that shit.  As seen out the window right now (at 2:10 in the song).  But these aren't 'space ships', it would be like trying to sail the sea in a dinghy, seal aside.

~ a three car patrol approaches the chopper cars clamped to their prey.

Fluctuating radioactivity, cars are only built for the safe zone where it's minimal, the settled regions of the belt.  And to another stone, another urban structure.

~ the choppers open up on the patrol, patrol fires back (2:50).

Where the stone seen in of X O would be the capitol of these stones, this would be their place of commerce but by the numbers alone.  There are no cargo craft, only a convergence of other cars such as her own.

Her own ... she smiles as she feels the wheel.

~ the last scrapper fires before death, taking the last patrol, broken bodies and metal both twisted set to drift.

(3:12)

She flies in low of curiosity, what their streets are like at the bottom and there's nothing at all.  Quiet signs of an underworld as somebody ducks the wind of her pass over in an attempt to be unseen, but there are no cars for the ground, no one else.

She stops to a hover and looks down that alleyway and sees nothing.  Pulls out the phone.

Mary - "So I like own this company right ?"

Alley - "Well.  You own the company, but we own the land.  I mean me.  I own that rock.  My fucking rock.  Huh.  Thanks !  But yes the company that transacts there, is yours.  My father was the single shareholder.  Many died to accomplish this.  Why ?"

Mary - "Think it'll be a bad thing to be late for my first meeting ?  I mean it's my fucking company."

Alley - "True.  But it gives them time to talk to each other while you're not there."

Mary - "Wow."

Alley - "It's like that.  Think you can handle the room ?"

Mary - "It's not my first time, you have to be a lot of people to do what I do."

Alley - "But now you need to be able to stay.  What you do will matter more, when you can't just disappear.  Consequences for your actions.  I don't think you're very used to that at all.

"So.

"How much time do you want to give that room full of back-stabbing bastards, who all want what was randomly given to somebody they don't know, to talk among themselves ?"

...

The car takes to the sky and converges with the rest.

Mary - "But just so you know, there will be no consequences.  I'm placing a proxy in charge, while I soak up the profits and maybe storm around occasionally when I'm in a bad mood because where's my fucking money."

 

The car flies over the high lot at the center, the tallest building as though every stone would have it's tower, but this one's cities do not turn.  The executives to and fro past a pod of food carts.

Alley - "Hm.  Good luck finding someone you can trust."

Mary - Lands the car in her own private slot.  "I don't need someone to trust."

A short distance away, hovered behind a building as though pulled over, Geneva's also new car.
 

Mary - Heard over Geneva's comm, "I need someone to turn."

 

Geneva moves to pursue but her car is knocked from the sky by a rocket, it skids to crash hard while the shooter backs away back into that alleyway, possibly the same person as seen before.