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When Bryce and Lulu returned, Bryce was wearing a brand new suit and Lulu once again looked like she was dressed for high school. She now had on a small pink jacket, giving her some place to conceal a gun. The outfit she had obtained for Charlene was jeans, a biker jacket with metal studs, and a t-shirt with kittens on it. Doug merely got new pair of jeans and just wore t-shirt he already has on advertising the video game Death Legion 6 (which was no where near as good as Death Legion 5: The Reckoning). They also had a katana for Doug, which he thought was cool but figured the reason they gave him that is because they didn’t trust him with a gun. He didn’t think of himself as irresponsible; he just had some bad luck with firearms that was apparently much more memorable than the countless time he didn’t fire his gun without mean to.
Prepared as they were ever going to be, they headed out, it once again being Doug’s job to carry the weird cube in its cloth sack — something he quite hated. He kept worrying it was going to do weird things to his soul, but he had no one of knowing if his soul was normal or not anyway. They were soon out of the slums into a somewhat nicer part of the city, and Doug realized a sword not only made him feel less prepared for any attack, but also made him more conspicuous. “Everyone will think you’re so awesome, you don’t even need a gun,” Lulu assured him.
“No one is that stupid except maybe Doug himself,” Charlene countered.
Bryce led them to the third floor of a decent apartment building. “Best behavior, people. This is a good contact into the upper levels of Dammon’s criminal enterprise, so we need to look professional.”
Charlene glanced at Doug and Lulu. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“So is this who you were sleeping with to get all your criminal underworld info?” Lulu asked Bryce.
“Tri-Lu! That’s none of your business!” Bryce knocked on the door. An attractive, tall blond woman answered the door. She was wearing a black pants suit sans jacket, a shoulder holster over her white dress shirt. She smiled. “Bryce, glad to see you made it out of Shride in one piece.”
“In crisis there is opportunity.” Bryce motioned to the other three. “Lara, these are my associates I told you about.”
She took a glance at them and seemed to suppress a laugh. “I imagined them different. Come on in.” She led them into her apartment. It was neat but quite Spartan as well to the point it looked like it could have been decorated by a bachelor. Lara looked over Doug for a moment. “You any good with that sword?”
“I’m adequate.”
“He’s fought the Hallowed before,” Bryce said.
Lara smiled, once again looking like there was a laugh just slightly below the surface. “So did you guys have much trouble getting out of that city in the middle of an attack?” Lara asked.
“Of course not.” Lulu folded her arms and stared at Lara menacingly. “We’re Team Hellbender. We’re badass mercenaries.”
“Hellbender? I like the name. Where did you get it from?”
“When I was eight, I saw in a book there was a type of salamander called a hellbender,” Doug said, “and I thought that was cool.”
“A salamander?”
“It’s like a lizard… but wetter.”
Lara laughed. “I know what a salamander is. Why did you name your group after a salamander?”
Doug thought for a moment. “Because it had a cool name.”
Bryce stepped in front of Doug. “Ignore him; he’s got a dry sense of humor that not everyone gets. So, do you think you’ll be able to get us in to see Colette? I’m sure someone could use the arms we’ve acquired. Plus, we have something of special interest to her.”
Lara giggled. “Ooh! Sounds important.” Lara put on her suit jacket. “Anyway, I don’t think it should be a problem getting you in to see her. You’ll need to show up separately from me, though. I’d rather her not know my relations. Like you guys, I’m one of the Last Children, and any supposed lapse in judgment will be heavily scrutinized.”
Bryce nodded. “Of course.”
“You have spot on your shirt.” Charlene point to a little red dot on Lara’s collar.
Lara looked down and quickly spotted it. “Crap.” She blushed a bit as she looked back up at her company. “You shoot people in the head so many times, you think you get used to the way things are going to fly everywhere, but it can still surprise you. I’ll need to change.” She disappeared into her bedroom.
Doug was now more than a little concerned. “When you lie to women and sleep with them, they usually end up so mad they want to kill you. Isn’t really bad idea to do that to a woman who is actually is good at killing?”
Bryce scoffed. “She’s a professional; she’s not going to let girly emotions get the better of her.”
“You all know that Bryce has no idea what he’s getting us into and this is going to end very poorly, right?” Charlene stated.
“Of course it’s going to be a disaster, Charlene,” Lulu said, “but unlike you, we like to pretend otherwise. It’s called optimism; it makes people more pleasant to be around.”
Bryce did not look amused. “Stealing the merchandise was the hard part, and that’s done. I don’t know why you think selling it will be a problem; that’s such a simple thing.” He turned to Doug. “How does selling work?”
“Um… you give someone something, and he gives you money.”
Bryce turned back to the women. “See? It’s so simple, even Doug understands it.”
Lara emerged from her bedroom, a new shirt under her suit jacket. “I have some work to do, but I’ll see you tonight.” She lead them all out her front door, locked it, and handed Bryce a piece of paper. “Here’s where you’ll need to be. Remember: Colette is above all a business woman, so don’t waste her time or she’ll rip your head off.”
“Like for real?” Doug asked.
Lara just smiled and walked off down the hallway.
Doug turned to his friends. “She’s not actually going to rip our heads off, right?”
“I give us about a fifty percent chance of being shot or beaten to death,” Charlene said.
“Cool. I don’t want my head ripped off.”
NEXT
Archive of entries posted on 24th March 2008
A Story, Bit by Bit
Relationships and the Fourth Dimension
NOTE: This is an explanation about relationships for liberals. Most others should understand this concept, but you can read it if you feel the need to refresh yourself on these fundamental principles.
I know many of you liberals are reacting to the connection of the racist Wright with Obama by noting controversial figures who were at one point near other candidates. I guess how you’re looking at the situation is that Obama and Wright have been near each other on the three spatial dimensions, so if someone else has been recorded as being near a controversial figure in the known spatial dimensions you see that as exactly the same. What you’re forgetting to factor in, though, is the fourth temporal dimension. When you tag the three spatial dimensions with a temporal dimension and look at the data, you’ll notice a difference. Obama has been near Wright in the three spatial dimensions at many different times over the past twenty years. The examples you people have been bringing up involve usually a single temporal instance of spatial closeness. For two individuals to have what is considered a “relationship,” you should look for many instances of spatial closeness over a large time period.
Using this new knowledge, see if you can understand why if I pass a woman in the hallway I now don’t have as close a relationship to her as my wife of two and half years.
I should note, though, if you find closeness between a candidate and a racist on a fourth spatial dimension, this is notable regardless of the temporal dimension. If a candidate is meeting a racist in a universe beyond human perception, this is something voters should know about.
Police Arrest Priest for Interrupting War Protest With Easter Mass
CHICAGO (AP) – Cardinal Francis George interrupted a protest against the war in Iraq Sunday at Holy Name Cathedral by quietly giving an Easter homily, disrupting the important message of peace being delivered by the protesters.
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Three male and three female protesters vainly attempted to cogently argue the wrongness of the war by squirting fake blood on themselves and parishioners, but many fear the message may have been lost due to Cardinal George’s obstructive scripture reading.
One protest attendee, Mike Wainscott of Chicago, yelled at the Cardinal.
“Are you happy with yourself?” he said. “There were kids in there! How can they learn war is wrong if you won’t let them get splattered with a mixture of corn syrup and red food coloring? Are you happy now?”
Speaking afterward, the leader of the protesters, Ryane J. Ziemba, said, “We should all work for peace, but not by interrupting my petulant screeching about a war that doesn’t affect me personally, since I, you know, never volunteered to serve in the Armed Forces.”
Cardinal George said he was a member of a group calling itself “The Catholic Church”, which issued a statement after the arrest, saying the intrusive sermon was staged “to reach both Holy Name’s large anti-war audience – including Chicago’s most prominent peacenik and hippie citizens, who commonly attend the church strictly to show opposition to the war in Iraq – and the many more viewers and readers of the local press, which don’t give a crap about Christianity except on Christmas and Easter.”
Kevin Clark of International Solidarity Movement told the Chicago Tribune that he attended to serve as a witness for the protesters and see to it that Cardinal George was prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for interrupting them.
“If Cardinal George is a man of peace and is walking the walk and talking the talk, he should have confronted George Bush and demanded an immediate end to the war,” Clark said. “Or at least held up a ‘Bush=Hitler’ sign to make up for wasting everyone’s time blathering on about the 9th Commandment.”
Liberal Churches
Among the many odd things we’ve heard Wright say, in one of the clips he mentioned how awful it was that the Supreme Court Justices the Republicans appointed are going to overturn Roe v. Wade… because you know how important legalized abortion is to the Christian faith.
Actually, does anyone have any evidence these were supposed to be actual sermons about the Gospel and not just a political rant by a really ignorant liberal? Then again, I’ve never been to a liberal church, so I have no idea what stuff they talk about there. The whole idea of liberals and Christianity is kinda odd. At times, Jesus can be a real right-wing Christian — especially about sex — and liberals hate that. Isn’t it a lot easier to just not believe in the guy than to find some way to twist around His words so that you can imagine Him saying, “Abortion is awesome!”? With the amount of scripture you have to ignore to say that fornication and homosexuality is hunky-dory, it makes me wonder why those people even bother with the Bible?
And do liberal Christians have some apocryphal story where Jesus mugs a bunch of people and then gives their money to the poor, because that would go a long way towards explaining liberals confusions of taxation and charity.