"Heroine at the Abyss" - Girl in the Metal Suit-un
Posted: 2006-12-09 01:27pm
The purpose of this story is to introduce yet another new character to the Mistyverse. These will be a bit more serious than the "Girl in the Metal Suit" stories, though I hope to maintain some humor.
Hawthorne, New Hampshire, was not a metropolis by any means. A partial one, perhaps, with a population of around three quarters of a million, founded primarily as a suburbia for Boston's expanding population base that then promptly gained a life of it's own, even it's own international port to complement Boston's.
Unfortunately, with that had come the seedier elements of such amenities. Hawthorne's ports were teeming with criminals, foreign and domestic, and over half of it's police force was either on the take or too afraid to deal with those who were. Drugs and guns flowed everywhere, while some streets were almost perpetually lined by desperate women looking for johns so they could simply make the rent or pay for their drug habits or keep their pimps from hurting them.
There were "safe" areas of the city, of course, where the city's wealthy and middle class had long flocked to, with individual police forces at the town level or private security outfits to keep them safe, and then there were the unsafe ones; the dark streets of urbania, some of which no sane person would walk after nightfall - or even during the day - as one would be a target for both the individual criminals and the gangs that divided the city up into turf zones.
One particular girl, a school-going girl, had yet felt no choice but to brave these mean streets, going home from one thing or another and perhaps convincing herself that as long as she didn't make eye contact with someone and stayed on the sidewalk she'd be safe. A pretty thing, with a bronze mestizo skin tone - likely from the city's Dominican or Venezuelan populations - walking along in a modest blouse and pants, she was carrying her schoolbooks.
Unfortunately, she stumbled into the territory of the Brotherhood - a gang predominately made up of poor whites and affiliated with Hawthorne's Sicilian mafia family - and two of the gang's lower-ranked thugs noticed her. "'ey, look like we get some money, maybe even a bit of pussy, y'know?"
The girl noticed them and began to backtrack into an alley, terrified as the two larger males stomped up toward her. "Here, take my money!" she said frantically, scrambling for her purse. "Please don't hurt me!"
"C'mere, chica chica chica," one of them said, immitating Spanish horribly. The other grabbed her wrist and was pushing her against the wall as she screamed down the length of the dark alley, waking up a half-drunk hobo.
"Somebody help! HELP!" The girl began to scream as one of their hands pulled down along her blouse, ripping the yellow polyester material and revealing the black bra she wore underneath. "Stop! No!"
A glint of metal appeared in the darkness and one of the attackers screamed, a small blade having hit his hand and going right through it, sticking in his palm. The girl scrambled away on her rear as the two men looked down the alley.
The figure that emerged was clearly female, with gentle sloped curves on her chest to show breasts. Her dark suit was skin-tight and looked like it was made of a semi-transparent weave, showing off lean, muscled abs and arms that her sports bra-like undergarment didn't show through. The same weave material was pulled over her legs, resembling particularly thick fishnets, while the shorts underneath ended half-way down her lean thighs. Dark-colored eyes peered at them from under a face-mask that was slightly horned at the temples, with her dark hair cut boyishly-short. Her skin was light, but there was a hint of yellow to it, though that was barely visible to the two gang-members given the darklness.
"Fuck, it's that bitch in the catsuit!" one of them cried out, reaching for his gun while his buddy pulled the knife out of his bleeding hand. Before the gun could fire another object flew from the woman's right hand, smacking the thug in the forehead. It was not a knife but a blunt object, a sort of short baton, and it certainly caused the thug a concussion as he dropped unconscious to the ground. The thug with the wounded hand finally reached for his gun, but the woman grabbed him by the wrist and twisted backward until she felt it dislocate, making him scream pitifully. A quick smack to the head made him as unconscious as his associate.
As the masked woman applied tie-straps to their wrists and ankles, she looked to the Hispanic girl as she looked up in fear, a conspicuous stain on her pants. "Wyldryder," the girl said with short breath. "You are...."
"That's what the media calls me, though they forgot that the words are spelled with 'i's and not 'y's," the woman replied with a tough-sounding soprano. "Do you have a cell phone?"
"Yes, yes I do," the girl answered.
"Good. Call the police and get them...."
The girl suddenly shrieked in Spanish and Wyldryder turned in time to have the hobo' smash her in the right shoulder with an iron pipe. She fell to a knee, her left hand going instintively to the injured shoulder, and looked up as the homeless man drunkenly mumbled, "Monstah... monstah com fer m'... m' stash... get... get out of ma head!" He swung again, and this time she caught it with her right. He was strong enough that her injured shoulder strained in protest against his effort to pull free. But her maneuver bought her the time she needed, and her free left hand retrieved the spray from her belt. She gave the hobo a faceful of mace which made him stumble backward, screaming. "Monstah go' mah eyes! Monstah go' mah eyes, o' Lord!" After staggering around for a bit, the drunken man simply collapsed unconscious from the sedative agent that was in the homemade mace.
Wyldryder looked back and saw the girl was gone. Looking at the time, she moved back into the alley and up a fire escape to the top of the building, resuming her nighttime patrol.
At about 1:30AM, the armored loading dock door to the old converted warehouse in Hawthorne's Mayflower district opened by remote control and a black motorcycle's engine purred in reply. Wyldryder guided her bike onto the hidden lift in the room and reached over to activate it, shutting down the engine in the process. She rode the lift down to a stop, locking her bike in place afterward. A flick of a nearby switch lit up her main equipment room, formerly the receiving dock for the warehouse, revealing more of her stealth bike and her heavily-armored converted four-wheeler, technically illegal on US roads but useful if she needed a personal tank for any contingency.
Hanging from various locations on the wall were her two alternative uniforms, her winter mobility and her armored combat suits, as well as the array of throwing knives, shurikens, stun sticks, and a slot for her collapsable bo, which she put back first before unloading the rest of her fighting equipment and placing the belt, always kept loaded with her various tools, back in it's place.
When her equipment was put up, Wyldryder stripped naked and placed her suit into a cleaning receptacle to wash in the morning. Only after turning away did she bring herself to look at the center of her room, where a glass case contained a red skinsuit of advanced material much like her suits, complete with hood and belt. She looked at her reflection in the glass, her naked body and the old scars here and there on it, as well as the growing bruise on her right shoulder. Her hand reached out and touched the case, a tear coming down her eye as it always did when she thought about her cousin.
It was now 1:45 A.M. and Wyldryder slipped into her computer seat, still in the nude, and pressed the key to listen to her messages. Her main "crime computer", a self-contained server farm with heavily-protected connections to the internet, hooked up to her house's IM, e-mail, and phone messaging systems. She killed most of the trash e-mail and Internet IMs, and then listened to her phone messages, deleting them as they revealed their irrelevance.
"Miss Chase...." Click.
"Hello, Jaylee Chase, I am calling on behalf of...." Click.
"Hey, Jaylee, this is Sam, just checking...." Click.
"You have three videos overdue...." Click. Damn, Jaylee thought, thinking of the videos she'd rented last week. She'd have to return them in the morning... assuming she could get up.
"Jay... it's Kylie," a new voice said, a bit deeper in tone than Jaylee's but still so feminine, "I'm just calling to apologize, I know we were going out tonight, but I had to work some overtime for this Rodenko case. I know you understand, lover. I'll be by tomorrow for our usual Sunday routine, though. Love ya, bye."
The thought of Kylie, who like her was of mixed Oriental and Caucasian descent, made Jaylee sigh. Kylie Matsuda wasn't just her lover, she was also a rising star in the Hawthorne County District Attorney's office, a heavy-hitter ADA and a dominant woman in many ways. And she, of course, was a masked vigilante, who's relationship with the authorities wasn't quite as smooth as her cousin's has been. And so, as much as Jaylee wanted to tell Kylie what she did, she could never bring herself too, not at the risk of Kylie's career.
Sitting up, Jaylee went to the old work elevator that, in the old days, had allowed the warehouse employees to go to the upper floor offices. There was actually no button for Jaylee's secret room - it required both a key and a combination of held buttons to trigger, an arrangement that Jaylee had built in herself - and she rode it up to the ground floor, where her living room was.
Living room, kitchen, den, dining room, everything together. Her cousin had bought the warehouse in an effort to repopulate the crime-ridden neighborhood, and Sandra Sakata had done so both as the charming, funny social dilletante scion of the wealthy Sakata family and as the masked Lady Scarlet, Hawthorne's celebrated heroine.
Then DarkStar and the Four Horsemen had come to town....
Jaylee ascended the steps with a fatigued stride, reaching the upper floors where the offices had been converted into her personal gym, a secondary private den, two bedrooms, and finally, her bedroom and an attached bathroom that had cost Sandra thousands of dollars to have installed.
Taking a moment to stop and look at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Jaylee noted with pleasure that she had kept her weight down and her body looked more lean than ever. She noted with displeasure the growing bruise on her shoulder, which would undoubtedly lead to Kylie asking more annoying, relationship threatening questions. She was literally running out of excuses on how she injured herself from time to time. Such a good thing that she hadn't gotten shot yet....
She stepped into the wide garden tub, ignoring the temptation to sit down and turn on the spa jets for fear she'd fall asleep in the tub, and showered quickly, cleaning off the grime of both the day and her night's patrol. Six crimes broken up, including two attempted rapes, and an abusive husband put in his place by a well-timed kick to the balls. A relatively quiet night, given she hadn't been shot at.
No, Jaylee, you were just smashed in the shoulder by a drunken hobo who thought you were.... whatever.... Too tired to be amused or angry at herself, Jaylee turned off the running water and only briefly ran the towel over her body before she stumbled back to her bedroom, only pulling her sheet hip-high before falling sound asleep.
Hawthorne, New Hampshire, was not a metropolis by any means. A partial one, perhaps, with a population of around three quarters of a million, founded primarily as a suburbia for Boston's expanding population base that then promptly gained a life of it's own, even it's own international port to complement Boston's.
Unfortunately, with that had come the seedier elements of such amenities. Hawthorne's ports were teeming with criminals, foreign and domestic, and over half of it's police force was either on the take or too afraid to deal with those who were. Drugs and guns flowed everywhere, while some streets were almost perpetually lined by desperate women looking for johns so they could simply make the rent or pay for their drug habits or keep their pimps from hurting them.
There were "safe" areas of the city, of course, where the city's wealthy and middle class had long flocked to, with individual police forces at the town level or private security outfits to keep them safe, and then there were the unsafe ones; the dark streets of urbania, some of which no sane person would walk after nightfall - or even during the day - as one would be a target for both the individual criminals and the gangs that divided the city up into turf zones.
One particular girl, a school-going girl, had yet felt no choice but to brave these mean streets, going home from one thing or another and perhaps convincing herself that as long as she didn't make eye contact with someone and stayed on the sidewalk she'd be safe. A pretty thing, with a bronze mestizo skin tone - likely from the city's Dominican or Venezuelan populations - walking along in a modest blouse and pants, she was carrying her schoolbooks.
Unfortunately, she stumbled into the territory of the Brotherhood - a gang predominately made up of poor whites and affiliated with Hawthorne's Sicilian mafia family - and two of the gang's lower-ranked thugs noticed her. "'ey, look like we get some money, maybe even a bit of pussy, y'know?"
The girl noticed them and began to backtrack into an alley, terrified as the two larger males stomped up toward her. "Here, take my money!" she said frantically, scrambling for her purse. "Please don't hurt me!"
"C'mere, chica chica chica," one of them said, immitating Spanish horribly. The other grabbed her wrist and was pushing her against the wall as she screamed down the length of the dark alley, waking up a half-drunk hobo.
"Somebody help! HELP!" The girl began to scream as one of their hands pulled down along her blouse, ripping the yellow polyester material and revealing the black bra she wore underneath. "Stop! No!"
A glint of metal appeared in the darkness and one of the attackers screamed, a small blade having hit his hand and going right through it, sticking in his palm. The girl scrambled away on her rear as the two men looked down the alley.
The figure that emerged was clearly female, with gentle sloped curves on her chest to show breasts. Her dark suit was skin-tight and looked like it was made of a semi-transparent weave, showing off lean, muscled abs and arms that her sports bra-like undergarment didn't show through. The same weave material was pulled over her legs, resembling particularly thick fishnets, while the shorts underneath ended half-way down her lean thighs. Dark-colored eyes peered at them from under a face-mask that was slightly horned at the temples, with her dark hair cut boyishly-short. Her skin was light, but there was a hint of yellow to it, though that was barely visible to the two gang-members given the darklness.
"Fuck, it's that bitch in the catsuit!" one of them cried out, reaching for his gun while his buddy pulled the knife out of his bleeding hand. Before the gun could fire another object flew from the woman's right hand, smacking the thug in the forehead. It was not a knife but a blunt object, a sort of short baton, and it certainly caused the thug a concussion as he dropped unconscious to the ground. The thug with the wounded hand finally reached for his gun, but the woman grabbed him by the wrist and twisted backward until she felt it dislocate, making him scream pitifully. A quick smack to the head made him as unconscious as his associate.
As the masked woman applied tie-straps to their wrists and ankles, she looked to the Hispanic girl as she looked up in fear, a conspicuous stain on her pants. "Wyldryder," the girl said with short breath. "You are...."
"That's what the media calls me, though they forgot that the words are spelled with 'i's and not 'y's," the woman replied with a tough-sounding soprano. "Do you have a cell phone?"
"Yes, yes I do," the girl answered.
"Good. Call the police and get them...."
The girl suddenly shrieked in Spanish and Wyldryder turned in time to have the hobo' smash her in the right shoulder with an iron pipe. She fell to a knee, her left hand going instintively to the injured shoulder, and looked up as the homeless man drunkenly mumbled, "Monstah... monstah com fer m'... m' stash... get... get out of ma head!" He swung again, and this time she caught it with her right. He was strong enough that her injured shoulder strained in protest against his effort to pull free. But her maneuver bought her the time she needed, and her free left hand retrieved the spray from her belt. She gave the hobo a faceful of mace which made him stumble backward, screaming. "Monstah go' mah eyes! Monstah go' mah eyes, o' Lord!" After staggering around for a bit, the drunken man simply collapsed unconscious from the sedative agent that was in the homemade mace.
Wyldryder looked back and saw the girl was gone. Looking at the time, she moved back into the alley and up a fire escape to the top of the building, resuming her nighttime patrol.
At about 1:30AM, the armored loading dock door to the old converted warehouse in Hawthorne's Mayflower district opened by remote control and a black motorcycle's engine purred in reply. Wyldryder guided her bike onto the hidden lift in the room and reached over to activate it, shutting down the engine in the process. She rode the lift down to a stop, locking her bike in place afterward. A flick of a nearby switch lit up her main equipment room, formerly the receiving dock for the warehouse, revealing more of her stealth bike and her heavily-armored converted four-wheeler, technically illegal on US roads but useful if she needed a personal tank for any contingency.
Hanging from various locations on the wall were her two alternative uniforms, her winter mobility and her armored combat suits, as well as the array of throwing knives, shurikens, stun sticks, and a slot for her collapsable bo, which she put back first before unloading the rest of her fighting equipment and placing the belt, always kept loaded with her various tools, back in it's place.
When her equipment was put up, Wyldryder stripped naked and placed her suit into a cleaning receptacle to wash in the morning. Only after turning away did she bring herself to look at the center of her room, where a glass case contained a red skinsuit of advanced material much like her suits, complete with hood and belt. She looked at her reflection in the glass, her naked body and the old scars here and there on it, as well as the growing bruise on her right shoulder. Her hand reached out and touched the case, a tear coming down her eye as it always did when she thought about her cousin.
It was now 1:45 A.M. and Wyldryder slipped into her computer seat, still in the nude, and pressed the key to listen to her messages. Her main "crime computer", a self-contained server farm with heavily-protected connections to the internet, hooked up to her house's IM, e-mail, and phone messaging systems. She killed most of the trash e-mail and Internet IMs, and then listened to her phone messages, deleting them as they revealed their irrelevance.
"Miss Chase...." Click.
"Hello, Jaylee Chase, I am calling on behalf of...." Click.
"Hey, Jaylee, this is Sam, just checking...." Click.
"You have three videos overdue...." Click. Damn, Jaylee thought, thinking of the videos she'd rented last week. She'd have to return them in the morning... assuming she could get up.
"Jay... it's Kylie," a new voice said, a bit deeper in tone than Jaylee's but still so feminine, "I'm just calling to apologize, I know we were going out tonight, but I had to work some overtime for this Rodenko case. I know you understand, lover. I'll be by tomorrow for our usual Sunday routine, though. Love ya, bye."
The thought of Kylie, who like her was of mixed Oriental and Caucasian descent, made Jaylee sigh. Kylie Matsuda wasn't just her lover, she was also a rising star in the Hawthorne County District Attorney's office, a heavy-hitter ADA and a dominant woman in many ways. And she, of course, was a masked vigilante, who's relationship with the authorities wasn't quite as smooth as her cousin's has been. And so, as much as Jaylee wanted to tell Kylie what she did, she could never bring herself too, not at the risk of Kylie's career.
Sitting up, Jaylee went to the old work elevator that, in the old days, had allowed the warehouse employees to go to the upper floor offices. There was actually no button for Jaylee's secret room - it required both a key and a combination of held buttons to trigger, an arrangement that Jaylee had built in herself - and she rode it up to the ground floor, where her living room was.
Living room, kitchen, den, dining room, everything together. Her cousin had bought the warehouse in an effort to repopulate the crime-ridden neighborhood, and Sandra Sakata had done so both as the charming, funny social dilletante scion of the wealthy Sakata family and as the masked Lady Scarlet, Hawthorne's celebrated heroine.
Then DarkStar and the Four Horsemen had come to town....
Jaylee ascended the steps with a fatigued stride, reaching the upper floors where the offices had been converted into her personal gym, a secondary private den, two bedrooms, and finally, her bedroom and an attached bathroom that had cost Sandra thousands of dollars to have installed.
Taking a moment to stop and look at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Jaylee noted with pleasure that she had kept her weight down and her body looked more lean than ever. She noted with displeasure the growing bruise on her shoulder, which would undoubtedly lead to Kylie asking more annoying, relationship threatening questions. She was literally running out of excuses on how she injured herself from time to time. Such a good thing that she hadn't gotten shot yet....
She stepped into the wide garden tub, ignoring the temptation to sit down and turn on the spa jets for fear she'd fall asleep in the tub, and showered quickly, cleaning off the grime of both the day and her night's patrol. Six crimes broken up, including two attempted rapes, and an abusive husband put in his place by a well-timed kick to the balls. A relatively quiet night, given she hadn't been shot at.
No, Jaylee, you were just smashed in the shoulder by a drunken hobo who thought you were.... whatever.... Too tired to be amused or angry at herself, Jaylee turned off the running water and only briefly ran the towel over her body before she stumbled back to her bedroom, only pulling her sheet hip-high before falling sound asleep.