Electra Rose
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Superdim 3
🕑 Added 2023-03-12 20:00:06 +0000 UTCShe woke up without any alarm and pulled on workout pants and a shirt. Ji-Min stuffed two dollars in her bra and used it to get a bottle of water on her way to the hotel's gym.
The gym turned out to be a long, narrow room with a few sad treadmills and basic weights. A quick glance showed that they topped out at 20lbs. Useless. She ignored the free weights in favor of a morning run. She didn't even like running. But she didn't hate it, and she had to work off the excess energy that her body produced.
When she was done she took a quick shower and tossed her clothes in the washing machines.
While that ran, Ji-Min got a shitty coffee from the hotel buffet and waited. She drank it while watching morning traffic out of her 5th floor window.
As the caffeine hit her brain, she pulled out her phone and started reading through Hammer's messages. He'd sent champagne bottles and congratulations to someone with a cowboy hat emoji instead of a screen name, and gotten no reply.
There was also a new message waiting from Sunspot. The preview said something about "the car". Ji-Min hovered over it before regretfully scrolling away. She couldn't open his new messages. He'd notice that.
The rest of his messages were unremarkable. He didn't seem to be awake yet. She pocketed her phone and walked back to get a second coffee, with a bagel this time. She regretted the bagel. It was bland. Still, it had calories, and she needed a lot of those to maintain her weight.
…The odds were good that she'd be using a lot of energy today, actually. She resentfully made a waffle and smothered it in chocolate sauce and chopped peanuts just barely before the buffet closed. She moved to sit as someone came to start clearing the food and then remembered she'd want a drink.
"Excuse me," said a hotel employee, when she got close.
Ji-Min tried to look inoffensive. "Just going to get some juice, if that's alright." She gave a thin smile.
"Oh, of course. Let me get out of your way." The woman stepped to the side and then watched with poorly hidden concern as she filled three glasses with orange juice and one with milk. Her left hand still had the plate. So she balanced her drinks on her palm and fingers and gave the hotel worker a nod.
She got back a thin-lipped smile and a look that said the woman was weighing up how rude it was to ask if someone had ever been in the circus.
'I would be good at that,' Ji-Min thought absently. She put everything on the table and kicked out her chair. 'It's always an option if crime or car insurance don't work out.'
It would be a waste of her degree and certifications, though. Ji-Min contemplated this as she methodically destroyed the waffle. Plus, having a publicized travel itinerary would make it easier to find connections between her travel and crime that fit her MO.
She checked the phone again. Hammer still wasn't up. She flipped over to the hater group chat and was disappointed to see that no one had updated on what Sir Tiger Explosion had done yesterday. Ugh. She scrolled an app for a while and found a dated meme that she saved and sent to two friends. She didn’t expect an answer, since most people were at work.
…She had to find something to do with her time. She couldn’t just look at her phone until Hammer said something like ‘it’s time for a cool crime! 🧊🥶❄️🌶️”
If nothing else, her battery would die.
'I'll go do the tourist thing.' Ji-Min went back to her room to pack a bag for the day. ‘I have hours and hours before he starts up. He’s going to crash hard after that breakout yesterday.’
Her mask and gloves went in the bag, as did a black jacket with an unflattering shapeless vibe. After some deliberation, she added the half mask that basically just covered her eyes as well. If she was in a real rush, she wouldn’t have time to properly secure the better one.
After some consideration, she decided to dress a little loudly today. She changed her white t-shirt for a hot red crop top and slipped on big red earrings in the shape of watermelon slices. She put a black headband on to keep her hair out of her eyes and left the rest loose. If she needed to go incognito, it would be easy to take off the colored accessories and cover up with the jacket. People would probably remember the red, not her jeans or build. There were a billion small women in the world and on any given day, probably half of them were wearing black pants.
That was her line of thinking, anyway. Ji-Min pocketed her keys and hotel card and jogged down the stairs to the parking lot. Her silver car blended into the parking lot so well that she missed it at a first glance.
That hadn’t been any kind of tactical decision. It was the same car that she’d owned since she’d finished her applied science degree in automotive repair. She’d got it cheap and fixed it herself while she was still working at a garage.
She sat for a while to pull up a navigation to a theme park and then snapped her phone into place on the dashboard. “41 minutes,” she said aloud. “Man. This is not a very walkable city.” Ji-Min eased her car out of the parking lot and into light traffic.
It felt like a day for cute pop music. She leaned over to tap at her phone with her left and start up a playlist. She drove for a while without incident, enjoying the sunshine.
The car in front of her screeched to a stop.
Ji-Min hit her brakes hard. She barely avoided hitting the white minivan in front of her. There was a crunch- crunch crunch in quick succession. A scream. A-
“A gun?” Ji-Min shrieked. That had been a gunshot and the sound of broken glass. She unbuckled and got out of the car to rush ahead. Other drivers were doing the same. She saw an older woman rush from the driver’s seat ahead and to the sidewalk, phone in hand.
The car in front of her had rear-ended a black car. That car in turn had rear-ended a blue car with an aura of blood-chilling menace. Ji-Min felt her heart pick up as she came level with the door of the black car.
It was hanging open. She kept her front to the car as she stepped around and took in the situation.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
The older woman Ji-Min had seen was dialing 9-11 while a middle-aged man knelt by someone lying on the crosswalk, a good ten feet in front of the blue car. Blood was seeping out. A hit and run. Some asshole had hit a pedestrian, caused a pileup, and fled the scene.
A quick glance confirmed that the blue car had damage to the front. She looked across the intersection. The car that had given it was tearing down the end of the block, bumper barely hanging on. It was nearly out of sight. As she watched, it turned left.
A man kicked open the passenger side seat of the blue car and got out, scowling. He unfolded to his tall, wiry height with a slight clink of metal.
Ji-Min felt her mouth drop open at the sight of a celebrity. That was- well, everyone knew Gene, even if they hadn’t met. She wasn’t surprised to see that when she really looked closely, the driver’s seat was occupied by the ghastly insubstantial face of a withered wraith. The wraith turned their dark, empty eye sockets to watch her pass and tightened their hands on the steering wheel. She averted her eyes on instinct and was cursed with the knowledge that four more wraiths were crammed into the backseat. They were all staring at her.
That was too many ghouls. Some practical part of her brain said that fabric-wrapped bones didn't take up much seat space, and wondered if Gene could have crowded more of his boys in the car if he'd thought to.
That was a bad train of thought to get stuck on. It felt like they knew.
'Where are the others? There's 9, right?'
“Gene,” she said, a little desperately.
The possibly undead outlaw turned to her with sharp eyes. “Have we met?” He may or may not be as dead as his hangers-on, but he looked as healthy and handsome as he did in his original wanted posters from the 1800s.
“No, I just watch the news.” The fact that he was finishing up a sentence had been all over the news sites. She’d been rooting for him to stay out for a while this time. At least a month. “Hit and run?”
He looked as mad as she felt. “Yeah,” Gene said. He gestured with his right hand, which she now noticed was holding a pistol. “Gotdamn irresponsible and rude. I shot off their mirror, but they ain’t fucking stop.” He frowned at the victim. Other bystanders were moving the man off the road for the sidewalk, so he must have been alive. “Think I should have one of my boys take ‘em to the doctor on their wing things?”
Wing thi-
“No, you shouldn’t move an injured person more than you have to,” Ji-Min said. She tried really hard not to think about what ‘wing things’ Gene’s boys might have access to.
He took that in stride and then peered contemplatively across the intersection, where the driver had fled. “I can’t go, right? I need to talk to the police?” Gene tilted his head, as if the idea of talking to the police about a situation that didn’t involve him committing crime was a mildly interesting novelty.
“Yeah. I’ll get them. It was silver, right?” Ji-Min checked. “Did you see the model and make? License plate maybe?”
“I have no idea.” Gene seemed unconcerned. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
...Fair enough.
A sibilant, evil hiss broke the air. Ji-Min felt a chill.
Gene cocked his head and looked into the car.
She couldn’t breathe. Her muscles seized up.
“Ah,” Gene said. He nodded. “My boy says yeah, it was silver, and a 2016 Ford. License plate was local and started with 65, but that’s all he noticed.” He paused. "Oh. Male driver, tall, heavy-set."
“Tell the police that,” Ji-Min said. The pressure in the air lessened as the wraith stopped talking. She took a moment to wonder if he actually had a license. How would you get a license without a living identity? His "boys" had been around at least as long as Gene himself.
Then she looked at the car properly and felt her eyebrows shoot up as something else took her full attention. “You shot through your windshield?”
Gene blinked at her. “The what?”
She indicated the broken glass. Another car eased past them in the right lane as others started to pass the scene of the crime.
“Oh, that.” He rolled his shoulders. “Yeah.”
Ji-Min couldn’t help but notice that his window was hanging open. He could have just leaned out. “Fair enough,” she said. “Tell the police that the window broke when you hit the car in front of you, no gun involved.” She grimaced. It was practically obligatory to help Gene out. He’d been out of jail a whole three days. He didn’t deserve to go back in for shooting at some asshole. “If they ask, say you don’t have collision insurance."
“I don’t know what that is,” Gene agreed amiably. He put the gun in his pocket. Ji-Min saw the moment that it straight up disappeared.
Oh, so fucking cool. He’d never publicly commented on the magic gun thing, but it clearly wasn’t a normal antique.
A little distracted, Ji-Min dug around in her back pocket for a card that she didn’t have. “Ah, fuck. You have a mechanic?” She pointed her elbow at his fucked up bumper. “You should get that checked out asap.”
“No, I do not.” Gene shrugged. “You know somebody?”
“I’ll fix it,” Ji-Min promised, “or at least check it out. Don't drive on it more than you have to. Call me before 7 tonight, alright?”
That should be well before whatever time that Hammer would act out.
Gene brightened. “That would be much appreciated. I don’t have a phone now, can you give me your number?”
Her wallet was still in the car. Ji-Min gave up looking for a business card. “You have any paper and pen?”
“Nah, just tell me.” Gene cracked his neck. A siren started up in the distance as an ambulance was probably deployed to their location. “I’ll remember it.”
Ji-Min rattled her number off, shot him a salute, and got back to her car. She gave the pile-up a wide berth as she passed, and then tugged on her gloves as she drove. The watermelon earrings went in the cup holder. The half mask ended up in her lap, and the jacket was tugged out so that she could shrug it on as soon as she stopped the car. This was definitely illegal shit, even if vigilantism was a different genre of crime from her usual. She gritted her jaw and tried not to get too tense as she took the same turn that the hit and run driver had. She couldn’t afford to get too wound up. This wasn’t a fight. This was some standard human. Ji-Min wasn’t in the murder business. She had to stay calm.
If she hadn’t been watching intersecting roads so closely, she would have missed it. The driver had pulled over into an alley, just far enough off the street that she only noticed as she passed.
“Wow, must have hit hard,” Ji-Min mused. Her jaw flexed. “If the car isn’t driveable… You were really speeding, huh.” She felt a wave of loathing. “We live in a fucking society, fuckwad.”
Ji-Min noted a business sign as a landmark and pulled over at the next place she could. She gave the store a quick glance to memorize the name and then zipped up her jacket as she grabbed her phone from the dashboard. She got out of the car and jogged back. When no one was looking, she put the mask on. Then she approached the car on foot, catlike and quiet. Someone was yelling but the car’s windows muffled what they were saying.
'That's definitely not drivable,' she diagnosed as she got closer. 'He's not going anywhere unless it's on foot, and I'll just stay until the cops come.'
She was waiting for the car to start again, to drive off when they noticed her. Something crunched under her foot. She glanced down, expecting to see broken glass or metal from the car.
It was a shattered phone.
The shouting from the car took on a different tone to her as she actually listened to the words.
