<b>Darion / Valerie</b><br/><br/>When the building came into sight, Kal paused, casually stepping to the side of the road while throwing a few looks down the street. Sure enough, about five stories, old chinese pagoda style. It had a hell of a view, right on the edge of the 156th. Looking all the way up, he'd have a view of the underside of the upper city.<br/><br/>"Alright, ladies..." He muttered, removing his pistol from its holster, "show time."<br/><br/>There were no 'guards' to speak of. No one standing outside at least. They didn't have a good angle on the windows, though. Kal didn't suspect it would matter as long as they hugged the buildings on the same side of the street as the apartment complex which they wanted into.<br/><br/>They got closer and closer, right up along side the building. Kal looked down the alley between it and the adjacent structure. There was a fence, the requisite amount of garbage... Still no sign of the 'Skullfaced' motherfuckers Mouse had told him about. He quietly hoped the kid had been right about this whole thing. He wouldn't knowing screw Kal over, but the kid didn't exactly have the razor sharp awareness that a Dreg rat survived on. Kal waved Valerie to follow him into the alley.<br/><br/>"Come on, there might be a hook-in down here. Service box or something." He said, keeping his voice low.<br/><br/>They moved along the edge of the building, Kal ducking down beneath the windows. He threw a few cautious glances into a couple. They were barred, grimy, and dark inside. No sign of activity on the ground floor at all. "Well shit, I hope we got the right place..."<br/><br/>His foot caught something on the ground. He looked down and saw a pair of dead eyes staring back up at him. An old woman, prosthetic hand, garbed in rags. She'd been dead for a while. Kal paused for a moment raising his arm to his nose as he caught the stench of death. He looked down at the woman, eyes locked with hers.<i>Hell of a way to die... living a full life just to end up here. All that those eyes must have seen, now nothing but a lost memory.</i>He stared longer than he should have, felt the sorrow creep its way up from the depths of his mind.<br/><br/>He blinked, shook himself out of her gaze. "Around the back." He pointed Valerie on.<br/><br/>The back of the building was open to the 156th, a huge expanse of open space punctuated by utilities for the superstructures above. They were standing on the edge of an old plaza, a good hundred square meters in size. Trees planted, a chinese dragon statue in its center. Nothing but a dead ruin. A short wall separated the back of the apartment building from it. Kal leaned over the wall, looking around for anyone that might spot them. No one.<br/><br/>He looked across the wall of the pagoda apartments, spotted the utility box, thick metal tubing showing plenty of rust going up the side of the building. He grabbed the door to the relays and opened it. Something had died in there years ago. The black signs of rot and lingering stench made him certain of it. He looked over the circuitry inside, but couldn't have fathomed a guess at what worked and what didn't. There was at least one glowing light on it, so that was good, wasn't it?<br/><br/>"Alright... take a look." He stepped aside to let Valerie take a gander at it while he leaned over her shoulder. "We happy, or fucked?"<br/><br/>Valerie's trained eyes told her a whole other story. The glowing light was the indicator for electrical current to the buildings mainline. There were signs of it being tampered with, though the goal of the tampering was difficult to ascertain. The system was, as expected, quite old. Even so, the jacks were intact, so hooking into the building was possible. Determining the extent of what was usable within was impossible without doing so, though.<br/><br/>Out front, there were still no signs of real activity, though a view from the middle of the street would give the observer a view past the pagoda roofing to a few windows which had lights on inside. Somewhere nearby was the roar of an engine, or perhaps several. Gunshots in the distance. Across the street, leaning against a building in an alleyway was a woman, casually watching what was happening. She was dressed up like a hooker that had seen better days. Between her fingers was a cylinder, a trail of smoke rising from its end.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><b>Nikki</b><br/><br/>Frakkis, leaned back, letting out a low sigh as Nikki's hand found its way to his groin. He undid his pants, sliding them down his hip until his cock, beginning to swell was free. He took a long draw from a a smoking cylinder, then reached over, putting it in Nikki's mouth for her to take a drag from it.<br/><br/>Cleaver, with his hand down her pants fingered her cunt, She could see him getting hard, his growing erection pressing against his tight pants. His withdrew his hand, sticking his fingers in his mouth, then got up from the grungy couch, crouching down in front of Nikki and undoing her pants before pulling them down her hips.<br/><br/>Outside the room was the sound of footsteps as someone walked down the hall.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><b>Spook</b><br/><br/>The clown had the pipe in his hand when the blade punched into his gut. He jerked, instinctively reaching for the weapon, in this case leg. He reached, grabbed, missed and clutched his side, abandoning the pipe to grab the bike's handlebars just in time to slam into the back of a vehicle, the bike nosing down and throwing him forward into its back window, the glass spider webbing but holding, the momentum flinging the biker over the top of the vehicle as it suddenly braked.<br/><br/>Cat looked over her shoulder and yelled, "Shit!" She laughed. She lowered herself against the bike and accelerated, yelling, "hang on!"<br/><br/>She zipped past the next few bikers as they turned their heads to see what had happened behind them. The Black Cat roaring between them spurred them to action. They pointed, yelled, twisted the throttle. The rest of the biker gang was alerted immediately. Instead of pulling clear, Cat ran the bike right between them. Vehicles began swerving as the dozen bikes started getting dangerously close. One biker pulled left nearly hitting a car, he threw a bottle of something at the windshield, cracking it and making he driver pull away from him in a panic, right into Cat and Spooks path.<br/><br/>"Shit!" Cat yelled, pulled the brake and veering to keep from slamming into the vehicle. The weight distribution was off, and her reflexes were tuned for her, not her plus one. She had to heave against the change in momentum to get the machine back on course, the back wheel snaking dangerously.<br/><br/>But the move to cut up the middle of the bikers had been shot, she'd lost momentum, the fuckers behind them closed to the gap, flanking. On their left, a clown came right up along side them, reaching to grab Spook to pull her off the machine. The other gunned it, passing along their right side, looking to pull ahead of them. Pressing against Spook's thighs were Cat's twin SMGs.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>