SHE looked up into the blazing, sunbaked light of some Nepleslian sun, and did not squint.
SHE did not need to squint.
This town did not please her, particularly. Ferros Block appeared to be the pimple on the ass end of nowhere, a town with nothing going for it. She walked, because it seemed less threatening, although she did not have to walk. In this weather, it would have been better to fly, hear the wind in her ears, feel it in her hair. As it stood, the heat provided a persistent annoyance.
So this is where he’d settled?
She grabbed a nearby child. It screamed. Very nice.
So he had used to live right over there? Charming place. She smiled.
The door was physical-mechanical and did not need hacked, but she let herself in through the window. There were enough broken windows in this town to justify it.
So this is where he’d lived.
She looked over her shoulder. The town seemed barren, somehow. Straining her ears, she heard coughing – lots of coughs. Someone wretched in a toilet. The air seemed heavy. The water smelled like garbage. Only the heat kept the sewage out of the air. So they had been sick? There had been a mass sickness?
She nodded to herself.
The couch. The scent of him. The scent of another.
Her daughter, maybe?
She perched for a while, considering. Then, she dropped from the window sill and began to look around. The apartment could have been wrecked, but He lived like this by choice. Someone had cleaned it. Probably Her daughter. Beer. Smell of it everywhere. Stronger, as well; it might have hurt her head, if her head was capable of hurting. She scratched beneath the hood anyway, and found something better to sniff at for a while. So he had been depressed? Or had he? Reviewing the news reports, he had become a local hero again. Not a very public one, at least not here, and the Child had not known about him. She had asked.
An action figure? Ha. What a thing to say.
SHE turned over the table, idly, and crushed it underfoot. Better if he thought someone had robbed his place. Better if she stole something. What to steal?
The Television. She wouldn’t have to go far, before dropping it.
Out the window she went, and the television ended up in a dumpster elsewhere. A few blocks down. She broke it, so nobody would use it. Then she bounced along the roof-tops, her feet never really touching. This place elicited a lot of words from the back of her mind. Hellhole? Gutter? Garbage? This is where the slum of humanity lived. Why was he living here?
She set one of the buildings on fire just to see what would happen, and how many people would care.
Surprisingly they had a fire department.
And a police department.
She watched from within the crowd, having changed her appearance slightly to blend in more.
Well.
He’d brought these filthy things hope.
She smiled to herself, and turned away. What are you going to do about it, Pavone? Nothing. You’ve already passed on, haven’t you?
One of the uniformed officers tried to stop her, but she left his corpse on the highest spike she could find in the city – the radio tower.
Then, she waited. Relatively comfortably, as it turned out.
Luca Pavone had bought a good vintage of whiskey, after all, and she didn’t feel like robbing anyone else.
After a little while, she decided to acquire another television, this one bigger. It covered half of the wall. Getting it in proved a bit of a challenge, but not much of one, after she flashed the moving corporation a bunch of green. They even fixed the window.
She got bored.
Instead of killing people, she decided to trick them. She destroyed their radio tower and watched them rebuild it. Then, she set the firehouse on fire, and framed one of the police for it. That showed up on television. She watched it, amused.
Napping was dull.
She ended up sleeping a lot. What else could she do?
So she robbed a bank, a bar, and a bakery. The bakery she didn’t actually rob; that time, she decided to look male. Big. Buff. Threatening. She surprised them by eating cake. Then she took advantage of a few people and called it a day. That showed up on the news, too. She rolled over. Ennui took her for a while. What was the point of all this? Why wasn’t he here, yet? Surely he mustn’t be so busy that he couldn’t come spare the place he called his home the wrath of what the television was calling a “Rash of Criminality.” Luca. Lucaaaaaaa.
She remembered him fondly. There was some excitement. Some sort of purpose. She could rub up against someone like that.
Not even the murders were really satisfying. That had been boring. She didn’t do it so much anymore. What was the point? So what? “Nobody cared” didn’t come into it anymore; She didn’t care. Fires. Chaos. Burning. Didn’t care. Didn’t amuse her.
I’m lonely, don’t you know that?
Apparently not.
The ceiling had one thousand, fifty-three pockmarks. She assumed this was on purpose.
The wall had fourty five boards, all grained correctly, according to a methodology which gave the tower he lived in approximately seven stories, each with the same uniform amount of boards. Very nice. She withheld the judgment that it should be obliterated, because she lived there for a while, and didn’t want her hideout to be publicly known.
She watched the DVD’s, Magical Girl Aeternalis actually seemed a little bit interesting. It took her a day and a half to watch through all of them, and she didn’t like the ending. Hu. So this is what my daughter is watching? What are you watching this for? Don’t you know, you can do half of that yourself, on whim? SHE rolled over, and looked at the couch for a while. Three thousand threads in the couch cushion, give or take a hundred. Not that she would be counting any further, of course. The stains on the couch were partways beer, mostly food, and at least once, Luca had fucked someone here. How dull. She could destroy this couch with him. Pique? Jealousy?
Ugh.
Get here already.
SHE burned another building down. Now she was the “Fire Ghost.” The Nepleslians sent a special team to determine who was behind the killings, burnings, and the theft of a very large television. The police officer got acquitted. He had been elsewhere at the time. Hadn’t she planted the appropriate evidence? She didn’t even have fingerprints, what were they supposed to blame?
They ended up going away. The losses were too great, they claimed. But short of evacuation, SHE stopped. Peace reigned. Three months later, everything back to normal, nothing wrong, the news a thing of the past.
SHE started sleeping in her daughter’s room.
Yawn
She adopted a cat. She and the cat had a lot in common and did not actually get in one another’s way. Pavone had bought a great deal of food, most of it spoiled, and SHE fed it to the cat. After all, She didn’t need it. Meanwhile, she munched beer cans. Obviously, he had left so many of those around that it did the place a service.
Then she started getting creative. First, she poisoned the water supply again. Yes. That lasted al little while. Didn’t even make the news; someone had caught it before it hit the public, and squished the story. So she threw him, bodily, into the cistern. That made the news. More news crews, more panic. The place had become, in the Nepleslian way, a tourist destination. Someone built a resort on the edge of it. Someone else decided to open a new eatery. The bar upgraded. The black-cloaked figure on the television, a 3D representation of Her, actually looked cool – so she adopted it.
Money money money. Is that all Nepleslians care about?
Naoko wore the cloak, the black, and donned the mask. How very amusing.
She even restrained herself. Let a few people catch her on camera. It wasn’t really dangerous, she kept everything to a suitably ‘Human’ level of potency. Looking back at it, as the news reels rolled, she decided that she preferred it that way. Dastardly clever – how had she done all those things? Nobody knew. Nobody could identify her face, or her eyes. She made sure to change both of these things periodically. Was it a cult? Was it a movement?
Was it a nekovalkyrja? No, it couldn’t be. These days, NH couldn’t manage this sort of thing.
She shut the TV off and sat back and hummed softly to herself.
Of course, she would have to keep this up for a while. If anyone connected that word with her, she would be supremely screwed. So the Black made a few more appearances in public, killed a few more people. Burned a few more buildings. Looked human. Got shot a couple of times. Limped away. That had been a blow to her pride, but she’d done it.
And then he’d apparently died. They had found his corpse. So tragic.
Same cop as before. No surprise there.
Life went back to normal.
Good gods people were stupid.
SHE decided to go to sleep for a while, and when she woke up, she decided to help people.
She ‘arrested’ a purse-snatcher by breaking his legs. That didn’t make the news. She set another building on fire, then rescued everyone inside. THAT made the news. The Black Mask wasn’t caught, yet, but here was another hero. It was…
Luca Pavone.
SHE smiled as they took pictures.
Fucking idiots.
But she looked up at the sky while they took her picture – she looked like Him. This had better make international news.
She took off Her shirt.
And revealed His sculpted, very scarred chest.
Get over here, you jackass.
Are you not watching, or something?
