Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Thirty-Three - Oh My God, Nya!

"If you want to have a good work life, you need to be friends with your coworkers. It's ridiculous to think that you can spent twelve hours a day in one space and hate the people there the entire time.

Yeah, life sucks, work sucks, and you're going to spend more hour there than anywhere else in your miserable life, so why do so many people make a point of hating the wage slave stuck next to them?"

--Post on WorkersOpinion blog, 2035

***

"OMGN!" Nya said with a gasp. "It has kitty ears!"

She was pointing at the top of the Bastion. I was pretty sure she'd seen it before, but maybe this was the first time she noticed that the ship had two protrusions at the top and front that... yeah, they were cat ears. They were armoured, like the rest of the ship, but they were also definitely cat ears.

"Uh-huh," Lucy said. "What's OMGN mean? I mean, I know 'omg' of course."

"Oh my god, nya!" Nya said, and already I had had my fill of the woman. Buuuut Lucy seemed to like her, and I supposed that if I looked past the wall of cringe, she wasn't that bad.

"Myalis likes sticking cat ears on things," I said. "It's her hobby, and who am I to question it but her pitiful victim? Anyway... you wanted to accompany me, yeah?"

Nya nodded. "But I still don't know what you're planning to do!"

"Yeah, fair. I'm gonna load up my power armour into the Bastion, then we're going to drop Lucy off at school. I don't have classes today, but... look, there's a bit of a gang problem in New Montreal right now, and I think I want to see if there's anything I can do to calm it the fuck down. The last thing the city needs is open gang warfare on top of all the rest."

"I've dealt with yakuza before," Nya said. "They gave me a cool sword once."

"Uh-huh," I said, but I did make note of that. If they gave her a cool sword, then maybe she didn't 'deal' with them in the normal samurai way and actually handled the situation with minimal bloodshed. Or something. I hadn't seen Nya in action yet, except for that one little scuffle we had.

I loaded my power armour into the back of the ship, then made sure there were a few guns around, just in case. If things really went to shit, then I had the M.E.O.W. mech in the back as well, but... well, if I needed a heavily-armoured warmech to handle the gangs, then shit had really hit the fan. I was kind of hoping that it didn't come to that.

Lucy wasn't telling me to hurry up, but she was shifting from side to side and giving me a look that I knew meant that I was already late, and... yeah, she was right. So we got onboard the Bastion and took off.

Nya sat across from Lucy at the back, only glancing around once before settling in. "So, where's this gang?" she asked.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Our first stop's actually at the school. There's this bunch of students that have been studying gangs and stuff, and they probably have a pretty good idea of what's going on. They wrote articles about it and shit."

"Is it a student project?" Lucy asked.

"I think so? It could be tied to the... uh... anthropology department." I had to pronounce that one carefully. It wasn't a word I spat out every day. "Anyway, they wrote a whole article and some media sort mucked it all up for fear baiting. There's an address to their department in the article, with emails and shit. Can't be too hard to track them down."

"Hmm, let me know how it goes," Lucy said. "Oh! By the way, I've invited a few people from the kittens--the adult ones--over to our building. Not home, but to one of the offices next to the clinic. We're setting up the New Montreal branch."

"Already?" I asked. "When do you find the time for that?"

"Here and there," Lucy said with a giggle. "But it's not as hard as you think. You just have to find people who have that spark and who want to get something done, then point them in the right direction and give them a bit of encouragement. Mostly all I do now is act like the last word and kick out anyone too troublesome."

"Uh-huh," I said. Lucy was awesome. "Sure you don't want to be the new mayor?"

"I'm not one for elected positions," Lucy said.

We landed in Cial a few minutes later. They'd marked out the entire side of one street with black-and-yellow markings, with little signs saying 'Samurai parking' every three or so metres.

I parked on the other side of the street.

We got out, and then I went through the motions of giving Lucy a goodbye hug, a goodbye kiss and letting her grab my ass as a goodbye pinch, as one does.

And then it was just me and Nya. "Alright," I said. "Now we need to figure out where the anthropology department is. Can't be too hard to find."

The school had a pretty decent interactive map app thing, and once I loaded it, let Myalis loose on all of the malware that came with it, and bypassed the payment options part, I was able to plug in what I needed and had a pretty decent idea for where to go.

As it turned out, it wasn't too far away from the place where Lucy and I had our politics class, just one building over.

"So, uh," I said as I started to walk over. Nya seemed fine with the occasional long silence, but it was kind of bothering me. "You like cats? Like, real ones?"

"Nya! I do! I only have seven!"

"Only seven?" I asked.

"Nya would like more, but I don't like being at home all day. What's your favourite kind of cat?"

"My favourite kind of cat?" I asked. "Are there different kinds? I mean, yeah, obviously, there's got to be fancy breeds, but it's not like dogs where they're real different."

Nya shook her head. "Sad. Very sad. I like bobtails. They are very pretty."

"I guess I like calicos? The colours are nice?" I tried.

"Oh, yes, very cute!"

We ended up talking about cats until we made it to the building, which included Nya sending me a few terabytes of cat pictures and videos she'd taken over the last few weeks. It was kind of funny. I had my reservations about Nya overall, but the way her accent grew thicker when she got excited about cats was admittedly pretty cute.

The anthropology building wasn't called that. Instead it was the Applied Anthropology and Targeted Advertisement Department. The entrance hall had a few elevators and a map stuck to one wall that I stared at for a moment before figuring out. The students I was looking for had a small office on the sixth floor. It looked like it was not much bigger than a closet, but maybe that was enough.

"I'm not even sure if anyone is going to be here," I said. "They might have classes."

"Nya's good at finding people!" Nya declared.

"Yeah. Maybe we'll go snooping if they're not here."

The elevator stopped and we got out, then it was a short walk to the office. As luck would have it, there was someone there. A younger guy, maybe a few years my senior, with a well-pressed CIAL uniform and short dreads.

"Yo," I said.

The guy stared at me. I was in my 'casual' outfit, which meant a trenchcoat and enough grenades to start one hell of a party. Nya was in a skintight armoured suit thing, with her tail swishing behind her and a dangerous smile on. We probably didn't look friendly.

"Can... I help you?" he asked.

"Yup," I said. "You one of the students that wrote that article, on the gangs of New Montreal?"

The guy stared some more, looked back into his little office space, then turned to me. "No," he said. It was a lie. My augs had flagged his face and school ID already, and he was definitely in the little club that wrote that article, but I couldn't blame him for denying it.

It's what I would do if anyone showed up and started asking questions. Deny everything and hope for the best.

Still, I wasn't here to grill him. "I'm Stray Cat, this is Nya from Japan."

"Holy, you're that one samurai girl," he said. Then he eyed Nya, and didn't seem sure what to think. She had more body mods than the norm, and the quality was pretty up there, but it was possible she was just a rich eccentric. Which... she was, but still.

"Yup, that's me," I said with a smile. "Look, I'm not here to mess up your day. I've just got questions and I'm not fond of reading dry-ass articles, so I figured I'd just get to the source. You got a few minutes?"

"I've got class," he said.

"I'm sure the school will make an exception if I ask nicely," I said.

***

A note from RavensDagger

Teaching week, so 3 chapters this week!