<i>...the fuck does stationSec want this time?</i>Maggie swiped away the request that blocked her view of the video, right when Cain looked directly at the hidden cam. Of course she knew. Of course! Would’ve been too good if Maggie had got to surprise the two lovers right in the middle of unguarded sex. She cursed out loud and stood angrily up from the stool in search of a new outlet for her rage, or whatever the fuck this feeling was.<br/><br/>“I need a team,” Maggie spoke to the comms and barely glanced at the tablet. Only by the half-way to her bedroom she realized the call hadn’t even started. Meanwhile, the girls were having a talk or some shit but she didn’t even bother with the audio. The call wasn’t picked up, so she tried someone else.<br/><br/>“Report,” Maggie said when all she saw was an empty room at the other end of the video call. Her cam was turned off for privacy. There was no reply. Her steps hastened towards the end as she made her way to her wardrobe. With a few taps on her pad, she sent an alert to her security team. The larger pad with Cain and Toshimi still hovered about as Maggie stepped out of her shoes and pulled on a pair of black suit trousers. Still, no one at the end of the call. She slipped on a pair of fresh, black socks and stepped back into the high-heelers that were practically the only kind of shoe in this room. Then, the cam suddenly rotated and showed the face of a heavily masked man.<br/><br/>Maggie’s hand quivered as she stared into his blackened eyes that stared back as if he could see her, too. She put herself on mute before making any stupid noise, and right so, she let out a squeaky whimper, just as the man took a step back and put a gun on the captured officer’s head.<i>Bang.</i>That’s what it sounded like, in Maggie’s mind. There was no sound through the comms. The cam was rotated again now by someone else and it revealed two more of Maggie’s men on their knees—and then, abruptly, on their faces on the floor.<br/><br/>The shocked ambassador of the Black Dragon tossed away the pad on her bed and trembled as she pulled on the black jacket of the suit.<i>Holy shit.</i>This was fucked—<i>more</i>than fucked up. It wasn’t even smart, to give her a heads-up like that. All it did was put her at edge, and induce a panic, which she could manage. Right. The security station was far away, so at least those men would take their while to get here. Those men. There could be more. But… if they wanted her out, the way they behaved was way too risky. Was it just a scare? Can’t plan for that. Hope, sure.<br/><br/><i>Shit!</i>Realizing her priorities, Maggie dived onto the bed to reach for the pad and then tapped a full readiness update for the alert. Then to evacuate the building. And then input an override to move the elevator back up; there were two others, but only this one went all the way up to her apartment. For a second or two, she weighed the pros and cons of letting station security in, considered the possibility that a pesky bot would just slow her down, but then instantly granted the access as the thought of an armed war machine on her side came to her mind—by her side, at least, not necessarily on it.<br/><br/>Before Maggie took off from her bedroom, she stopped and reached back for a set of three metal spheres on her side table; matte black, elegantly patterned, ornamental, and flat-bottomed, pretty much what a grenade would look like if it cost a thousandfold its price. They were carefully put in a black purse, and the purse hung on her shoulder, where the strap felt a bit strange until she realized there was no shirt under the suit top—no shirt, just the open-cup shelf bra, and a tall V for an exposed neckline. In any case, she was already at the front door, on her heels across the field of broken glass, and dress code was far off the top of her list of worries. For some reason, however, she had picked up the metal bat as she had walked past it on the floor.<br/><br/>The elevator took a few seconds longer to get up than the time it took for Maggie to walk to the door, time which she could’ve well used to put on a pair of shoes that she could actually run in, but instead she prepared for the awkward moment to come. When the doors slid open, the sight of Maggie Greer staring menacingly from among her still damp undone hair would render the girls speechless just for long enough for her to step inside and for the doors to start closing.<br/><br/>“Not a word,” the older woman then hissed and looked each girl in the eye, “Do exactly as I say. If you don’t, I’ll blow us all to hell, because that’s where we’re going even if I don’t.”<br/><br/>The look in Maggie’s eyes was unlike anything Cain had seen so far. The playful, ever-excited glimmer was gone, replaced with the destructive fire of the Black Dragon that was not to be vainly disturbed. The woman pressed to stand between the girls so she wouldn’t have to face the Ethonian in particular anymore, and they’d all get to face the door.<br/><br/>“Prepare for... anything,” Maggie said as the ride began to descend, “I have no idea what we’re up against.” She paused, and then added, looking around for reactions, “Which is bad. In case that wasn’t clear.”<br/><br/>“We’re making one more stop at street level... to pick up an old friend,” she continued to explain with whatever came to her mind, and slowly swung the lowered bat like a pendulum, now recalling the involvement of this ‘sexbot’ in their first encounter days ago, “We stay in the elevator, and then we’ll go down a few more floors. There are five maintenance tunnels we can stop at, one of which I recommend we pick at random, so as to increase our odds at avoiding an… ambush.”<br/><br/>Maggie concluded the not-much-of-a-briefing and then handed the metal bat over to Cain. It wasn’t as if anyone here would need a fucking baseball bat, but since Maggie, too, belonged to this group of people who didn’t need it, it just made sense to hand it over to someone else. This did, though, free her hands to produce a small handgun from her purse.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>