Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Seventy-Five - Planning Plus Proper Preparation Prevents Potential Problems, Probably

"At some point, reality has become so stupid that even our wildest speculation and parody keeps turning out to be real. We're having a hard time coming up with new headlines."

--The Shallot, Satirical news site, 2028

***

The next couple of days passed in a blur. That had happened to me before, of course. Entire weeks slipping past without me really noticing them. Interestingly, they were usually the weeks where things were kind of alright?

I guess high-stress moments focused things a lot. It was harder to disassociate when you were one wrong move from straight up dying. There had been a lot of that throughout my life, sure, but there were an equal number of weeks or even sometimes months where things were okay.

I think it might have been a human thing to fall into a routine, and I guess in the days leading up to the conclave that's what happened.

We'd wake up in the morning, Lucy would go to school and sometimes I'd follow her for a class with Professor Rogers, then there would be a list of small tasks to tackle, usually coming down from Gomorrah.

They were never anything too strenuous. Threaten a corp here, remind someone not to fuck with us there, look into some minor matter in the evening. Honestly, it wasn't interesting, but it all needed to be done. I think that's what mostly ended up contributing to me passing through it all in a blink.

And then I was woken up at five in the morning by a call from Gomorrah, rubbed my face, then answered. "Yeah?" I asked.

"Catherine. The conclave is today," she said.

"Yeah?" I asked again.

"...Catherine, we need to be there to prepare things," she said with far more insistence.

I sat on the edge of the bed, then groaned. "But it's five," I said. "Isn't the conclave like... noon-ish?"

"No, Catherine," she said. Why was she able to make my name sound like a slur? "The conclave is at nine in the evening. We agreed on the timetable already."

I'd probably just nodded to whatever sensible thing she'd said. "Okay, so it's even further away. Why did you wake me up?"

"Mmm, she's right," Lucy said. She turned, flopping onto her back. "We should get up. The sooner we arrive, the sooner we can start prep."

"I hate this," I said. "Let's cancel the whole thing."

"No, Catherine, we're not going to do that just because you're lazy," Gomorrah said. "I'll see you at the Bastion in thirty minutes."

She hung up.

"Why did I agree to this?" I asked.

"Because it's a good way to consolidate a lot of power, keep the gangs from causing trouble later, and it's a good way for you to establish yourself as a reliable samurai?" Lucy asked. She yawned. "Shower first. I'll go put some toast on."

She rolled out of bed, hissed as her cold feet touched the floor, then slipped into some cat-themed slippers before leaving the bedroom.

I groaned as I stood up, feeling like I was ancient for a moment before I got up and started to root around a dresser for something to wear. Then it was off to the showers. Twenty minutes later, I was in the kitchen, with my hair still wet, sitting with a mug of warm one-point coffee and a piece of buttered toast with a lick of jam on it.

Lucy came over, and I blinked as I took her in. "You're gonna wear that?" I asked.

She looked down at herself. "Does it look good?"

"Hmm, kinda corpo? But you'd look hot in a paper bag."

Lucy was in a pantsuit, with a silky-looking blouse and jacket. The pants and coat were this nice, shiny silvery material, and the blouse was a soft beige-y colour. Creme? Something like that. She looked nice, like she'd stepped out of a corporation's diversity hire poster.

"Thanks," Lucy said. She reached up to her lapel and fixed a small Stray Cat pin to it, the little cat-faced logo that Myalis liked to stamp onto the stuff I bought sometimes. "There! That completes it. Oh, and the badge too... where did I... ah!"

The badge for the conclave was pretty simple. A plastified strip with a very standard flat-cord to go around the neck. The badge itself had a picture of the attendee, their chosen name, and the gang they were part of. Lucy's had a bright pink strip across the side labelled STAFF, though her 'gang' section labeled her as part of the Kittens.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Weird, but whatever.

"Ready to head out?" I asked.

"Mhm! Is that all you're going to eat?" she asked.

"Yeah. Don't think I could stomach any more than this." I wasn't sure if it was a latent stomach ache, or the stress, or what, but I wasn't feeling super hungry. I did take one final, large bite, to keep Lucy happy, then I ran over to the bathroom to brush my teeth--something I didn't do terribly often--and to slip into a skintight suit of underarmour. Once that I was on, I shrugged on my nicer bounty-hunter style gear, the stuff that Emoscythe had helped me pick out.

The last thing I did was hook a few grenades to a bandoleer that I wore across my chest. Little ones. Just in case.

Every woman owed it to herself to carry around some essentials, just the usual stuff. Lip balm, hand sanitizer, wipes, some tampons, a few high-explosive grenades, extra ammo, maybe some sunglasses? Oh, and some sort of pain killer and hair ties.

Once I had everything squared away, I stepped out, met Lucy in the hallway, then after exchanging a quick kiss (and messing up her lipstick a little, heh) we rode the elevator down into the parking garage.

Somehow, Gomorrah exited the same elevator just a minute after we got out, before we even made it to the Bastion. "Hey, I thought you'd be waiting for us?" I asked.

"And I timed it so that I would be here five minutes after you were meant to arrive," she replied. "Thereby not wasting any of my own time waiting."

I really wanted to be annoyed, but she kinda had me dead to rights on that one.

"Alright, fine," I muttered. "Let me load the Nyanzerfaust into the Bastion and then we can take off."

"It's not loaded already?" Gomorrah asked.

"I mean... no? I had some last minute repairs to do, still."

The mech was in a working state. More or less. Mostly less, to be honest. I'd slapped everything back into place, and it was armored back up, but it wasn't fit for combat. Some of the guns, including the main belly gun and one of the shoulder-mounted ones, weren't functional, and a bunch of sub-systems were still reading as red, but like... it would probably not come to that?

Right now, the mech looked functional, and it could still blow a conventional tank apart and put down an entire crowd's worth of gangsters with peashooters. It was meant to stand outside and remind people not to fuck around unless they wanted to do some rapid high-caliber finding out.

I opened one of the ship's side doors, then directed the Nyanzerfaust from the workspace it was tucked into and over to the Bastion. Lucy and Gomorrah went in and made themselves comfortable while I made sure that the mech was properly secured into place. I didn't need it rattling around in the back if we took a turn too sharp in mid-air or something.

Once that was done, I walked back to the cockpit and strapped in. I was feeling strangely awake, which was weird. Maybe it was the caffeine kicking in, or maybe four-ish hours of sleep was all I needed, but I was feeling a weird mix of jittery and awake and kind of excited.

We took off, leaving our home with Gomorrah's Fury following behind on auto-pilot. I wondered why she wanted to ride along for all of a minute before she started to deep-dive all of the shit I'd have to worry about for the rest of the day. Security precautions, who to watch out for, how to act, blah blah blah.

I'd be less dismissive about it if she hadn't covered it all twice. Still, I listened with half an ear while manually piloting the Bastion towards the Velvet Wheel. The questions eventually turned towards Lucy and her prep, and she was ready for them.

Gomorrah should have known better than to test Lucy. Lucy had been prepping go-bags for an entire gaggle of crippled and medicated kids for a decade, plus snacks and other essentials. She had last-minute organization down to an art.

We arrived at the casino five minutes before six, and it looked like there was already some prep-work going on. Cleaners were out on the sidewalks, vacuuming trash up, there were bots on the windows, and a tow-truck was finishing up the clearing of the main parking space just across the road.

Damn, this was gonna be a long day.

***