The day had started much like any other.<br/><br/>Meli woke up in her own bed, a common occurrence in the past few weeks. She groaned and stretched, turned onto her back, and let her hands rest on her belly as she stared at the dingy ceiling of her drab apartment. The midmorning light barely made an effort to get through the blackout shades, dimly illuminating the neat but sparely furnished room.<br/><br/>Work had been sparse of late. She hadn't been needed at the clinic, and her 'exotic dancing' job only brought in so many hours of work and tips. There were a lot of women as desperate as she was, and only her unusual looks gave her any regular appearances at all. The magic helped a bit, too. The club owners she knew appreciated her willingness to keep the other girls healthy, not realizing it was for her own sake too. One girl's client this night might be her overnight escort the next. She groaned again, closing her eyes.<br/><br/>"I don't really want to think about this right now."<br/><br/>She crawled out naked from under the covers. The mattress and blankets were one item that she spent good nuyen on. Without a comfortable night's sleep, it would've been difficult to keep going, day after day. She stumbled over to the shower, taking a moment to blearily appraise her petite, bedraggled self in the mirror.<br/><br/>She was as short as always, her ears drooping like they always did. She toyed with one, and made a halfhearted growly face at herself. The best she could manage in the way of 'intimidating' was giving people a wide-eyed 'cute kitten' look, only emphasized by her big, honey-amber colored eyes.<br/><br/>She felt trapped. Caught in the same routine of wake up, shower if the hot water hadn't been shut off for the day yet, poke in the fridge for whatever Nutrisoy packaged meal was around, check messages and delete them as they were all..<br/><br/>She stopped her mass deletion barely in time. Between the usual spam that somehow got through her filter, there was an anonymous header. Source and destination masked, bare plain text, routed through at least one privacy domain. All it said was "<i>The Tech Pit</i>", a time, and an enigmatic<i>~C</i>. Ten seconds after she read it, the message self-erased. She tried to run a file recovery on it, but whomever had sent it had been thorough.<br/><br/>She thought back. Two weeks before, she'd broken down after finishing her act on stage. Mr. Granite, the club owner, had brought her back to his office and just held her for a while. He might've been a ruthless businessman, but he did feel some compassion towards his dancers. Especially the reliable ones like she'd been. Between sobs, she'd babbled out her frustration, her need to break out of the dead end life she was in. He listened to her, calmed her down, and took her to his place that night. In the morning, the troll told her he'd offer her name to a fixer he knew of, a woman who went by the name Cleo.<br/><br/>She smiled faintly at the memory. Mr. Granite hadn't been particularly long, but he'd been very thick, and a remarkably considerate lover. She held no illusions about any relationship between them, but he'd known she needed to be appreciated for herself, and she, she'd wanted to please him that night. To just make love for once, instead of coitus for compensation. They'd both gotten what they needed.<br/><br/>Shaking herself free of the memory, she looked up 'clubs in Seattle' and refined her search progressively until she found the Tech Pit. It apparently specialized in techno music and had a dance floor, but no private dancers.<br/><br/>"Not the kind of place I'd have worked. I think. I guess I have good luck sometimes."<br/><br/>*****<br/><br/>A Dodge Scoot wasn't the most glamorous of motorcycles. Nor the fastest. Its main attractions for Meli had been first, that it was cheap and second, that it was available. She secured it to one of the motorcycle parking stations outside the club, dismissing the multiple notifications that popped up about every little thing that it thought was wrong or due for maintenance. Half of them were just advertisements for the dealership that had originally sold it, anyway.<br/><br/>She'd managed to keep it in working order, thankfully. And it had gotten her here. She stowed her helmet and riding jacket in the cargo box, locked it with an electronic thought, and went inside.<br/><br/>Tonight, she had on what she thought of as her armored undies, atop which she was wearing her cleanest set of street clothes. Even so, she caught more than a few looks. Her ears, however unusual, marked her as an elf, but her height marked her to the unobservant as a child; for one of the<i>nobilis</i>, she was practically a dwarf.<br/><br/>The dazzle of the dance floor lighting and relentless beat of the techno music, disoriented her for a moment. The clubs she was mostly familiar with tended not to go in for such distracting displays.<br/><br/>She looked up her credit balance and decided she could afford.. well... probably a soda. She stepped up to the bar, sheepishly placed her order, and then leaned on the counter and looked around.<br/><br/>With her finely tuned awareness of who acted like they were looking for a good time, and who was here on business, her attention settled on the booth with the two women, elf and human. They weren't hitting on each other, at least not that she could tell. The elf seemed to be a little wary and fidgety, and there was a bit of tension in the human woman's shoulders. And they looked like they were waiting for something.<br/><br/>They could've been called here for the same reason, but maybe not. Meli decided to wait a little longer.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>