<strong>Oni – The Hot Seat</strong><br/><br/>Oni sat with Anne, his hands folded in front of him as he patiently waited for the meeting to begin. Things had taken a turn for the worse since the last mission. The budding life that was his AI was gone from him, though a small part of him hoped that it was somewhere in the net…learning…being. It would be the small nugget of positive from the whole debacle. He’s been building his case since the mission failed, trying to understand exactly what went wrong. He felt close. That enforcement AI wiped the floor with him. The help that was promised from that drug cartel never came.<br/><br/><em>’I was in! Goddamn it, I was in! And then they fucked me.’</em>Anne had to have seen that, right? He used a good part of his wetware and his own AI to build the hellish cyberfire he lovingly called the Pandora Bomb. The hole was there, but he could only hold it for so long…The Druggie AI never came through, and he was almost fried by the AI’s defenses when they came back online. He could show them the readouts…they could view the report, and if he had to, he’d do it again. It would take a little longer for the PB, but that bastard was worth its weight in credits…he could do it again.<br/><br/>As if agreeing with himself, he nodded, confident that he’d be able to show the Boss he still had what it took to help run the Op. He made the whole…he made it possible, and he wasn’t the one who dropped the ball. Nothing else was important to him at this point.<br/><br/><strong>Longshot in play</strong><br/><br/>The man slowly placed the cylindrical piece in its assigned padded indent before he gently closed the briefcase. Weeks of planning, hours of waiting, and minutes of anticipation were all boiled down to approximately thirty seconds of Op time. A majority of that was just confirming the target was down and staying down. He slid the light grey suit jacket on and adjusted his tie. Politicians were too easy, and he almost decided to not take the job, but the year had been lean so far, and seeing the smug little fat man dance the death jig on the ground was well worth the effort.<br/><br/>It didn’t matter to him that the hit was just after his speech on the advances he’d made into reducing crime in the neighborhood, but the people who paid him wished to send him off with a bit of irony. he might save a chuckle about it when he’s having a drink at the airport. It would take the authorities a while to figure out the location. The shot he chose was a relative to something he once saw from a salvaged animation from the highly flooded city-island of Japan. From his vantage-point was an office building with an abandoned chunk of office space right where he shot through. They’ll look for that building first, then some smart guy that probably deserved a raise he would never get will point in the direction of the hotel room he just came from used by a nice elderly couple who were both still stuffed into the closet with matching holes in their heads. Too cute.<br/><br/>In the taxi, the message came through. Big purse, and apparently far from boring. He made a final check in cyberspace to confirm the money had arrived, which also told him the news of the politician’s death had hit the newsfeeds by now. They’ll be looking to stop traffic, but they wouldn’t move in time…He almost felt bad for people who had to follow rules. He gave the cabbie an unremarkable tip when he got out at the airport…no tippers were remembered. Big tippers were remembered fondly. He needed neither forms.<br/><br/>He didn’t have time to play around. The switch to Switzerland would have taken too much explaining to an actual human being. With a fresh swim through cyberspace,  he was able to slip through the sharks that represented the Airline’s mid-level security and poof, some poor ad-exec gets bumped from first class, with a complimentary stay at the bar and so-sorry from airline personnel. Who says he wasn’t a nice guy? The suitcase was immediately placed in a predetermined locker. Nothing of it belonged to him, and he had a thing for fingerprints…he hated leaving them behind. From there it was heated face towels and drinks. Just one more businessman out of the capital. Just one more face in the crowd.<br/><br/><br/><br/>