<strong>Victoria Barrowe, the Hellion.<br/>Club Mercy, New York City<br/>11:02 PM</strong><br/><br/>The downstairs is a teeming sea of bodies, fueled more by passion and desperation than the alcohol and music.  She loved to watch, to lean out over the balcony from her loft office to look down the geometric-cornered terrace of balconies to the nightclub floor below.  It was easy, even at this meager height, to imagine that she was staring down the tunnel of a microscope at some petrie dish of livid bacteria, its reproduction fever-pitched with the catalyst of body heat and a chain-reaction of chemical release.  It was easier, though, to imagine she was staring down the barrel of the world's largest gun, and on the other end wasn't a bullet, but a swarm of them... an arsenal of hot skin and cold drinks, Nostalgia-scented bosoms and fresh-cropped, still bristly hair, low-pay jobs, fear of destruction, anger at parents and lawyers and politicians and doctors.<br/><br/>Long legs carried her closer, crossing each other with each step, and stared down the barrel of the Desperation Cannon, waiting to be aimed and fired.  Club Mercy... god, she was proud of that name.  It hinted at baby seals and crumbling cathedrals and broken hospitals all at once.  One of a hundred clubs in the Soho district, but somehow the one that defied change and trendification.  Where a topknot crew would come without starting a fight, where the trenchcoats danced with the bleach-blondes and the Wall Street crew could get their rocks off after a day of bleeding the country dry.<br/><br/>War was coming alright.  And if the nukes didn't get them, this club would.<br/><br/>She was wearing only a black silk robe... the temperature on these upper levels would rise steadily from nine at night until three in the morning, then clear out slowly over the next few hours.  The office where she was standing was basically an open area, beige and red carpet with a mahogany desk, dressing screen and chiffarobe in art deco.  She called it an office, but it was her home; it had once been a building full of 19th century apartments... the stairwell had been gutted like a spine ripped from a fish, then the new stairwell constructed up from the ground, tier by tier.  The lower three floors had become one massive area-- an elevated dance floor, recessed bars, and lounge tables filled the massive space, and the upper three floors were essentially Victoria's to do as she wished.<br/><br/>Tonight, though, she was less concerned with the test-slide below than she was with the little electric window within the sideroom she used for actual work... the lamp on the desk would flicker if the telephone rang, and as she made her way to the desk, she closed the heavy, insulated door to drown out the thrumming of a Joy Division track from downstairs.  Bathed in the pale blue glow of the television, she looked again at the newspaper's she'd accumulated over the past few days... images of a massive hovership-- private and unlicensed, no doubt-- balooning like a curious moth near the towering inferno on the east side.  A sidebar, days earlier, she'd torn out and laid atop that scenic black and white image-- man falls from highrise window, military honors at the funeral.<br/><br/>Oh really?  Honors, you say?<br/><br/>She'd recognized the name by luck.  The KGB would be smiling and kicking themselves simultaneously to know that the Comedian was dead... one less capitalist icon to shatter on the pavement, but one less treasure-trove of information to pick clean.  From her own assessment, the death was clearly an assassination of some kind.... probably to keep that very treasure-trove buried.  But she was out of the spy business, and had no interest in re-entering the world of government secrets, even if there was a good chunk of money or leverage to be gained there.  And if half the things she'd heard about the dead spook were true... Hell, if a<i>quarter</i>of them were true, then she was quite satisfied to see that he'd been escorted onto the express elevator to hell.<br/><br/>Beside that stack of newsprint was another.  Rash of vigilante violence.  Escalation of tensions in Afghanistan.  Doomsday clock...<br/><br/>Fucking Doomsday.  She had a drink downstairs called the doomsday clock-- shot of Irish cream, shot of Jager, shot of grain alcohol, taken out of a pipet so it comes on smooth, then gets dark, then turns to fire.  Tasted like complete shit, but people thought it was cool.<br/><br/>More vigilantes.  Nothing so noble as the Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's rumored return, but... they were out there. And they wanted... what?  Justice?  Order?  She was laughing as she stepped across the blood-wine carpet and spun the combination-dial of the gunsafe, mid-room in the adjoining, windowless tomb she called her 'working space'.<br/><br/><i>Fuck the spook,</i>she thought, as she stood from her desk and made her way to the vault that adjoined her office.<i>I'm more interested in the flies his corpse is drawing.</i><br/><br/>The steel door swung slowly open, and the skin of her 'costume' gleamed back in the wan light like a beetle carapace.  "Hello, you," she said softly.