"Money money money! We got lotsa money!" Isia sang taking a long swing of the suspiciously murky bottle, following it through with a loud burp. Her breath reeked of something overly sweet and alcoholic. "God, it's so nice to finally have that weight off of my shoulders!" She snatched my shoulders and shook me back and forth, threatening to spill the contents of my plastic cup.

"You sure you wouldn't rather go back to the night-club?" I asked.

We were currently in an empty lot at the edge of the fourth district, a flimsy rusted fence all the separation we had with the badlands beyond. Isia's rampage through the district's night-clubs had been as swift as it had been forceful, dragging me from one spot to the next as she was "looking for the right vibe", but apparently never quite fully satisfied for long. Eventually, she'd just dragged me over to the car, promised she was taking me "someplace awesome", and then spent every minute along the way adding spontaneous lyrics to every AI-jargon-beat song that blasted out of the speakers.

She was about as bad at rhyming as she was at singing.

Not that the enthusiasm wasn't contagious.

I might have sung a few myself.

"Music's all wrong, they got 0 taste," Isia replied, giving me a sly smirk as she emptied her bottle and threw it over the fence. "Besides, wouldn't be able to test out what it takes to get you drunk!"

I sheepishly extended the cup her way and she poured the contents of the bottle, sloshing some of it down onto the cracked pavement. "Smells like rubbing alcohol," I muttered, taking a sip and grimacing, nose wrinkled and gagging. "Tastes like it too."

She just watched me closely with squinted eyes full of suspicion as I just downed the whole thing to minimize the experience. I followed that by fishing for a chocolate bar out of the grocery bag and throwing the whole thing into my mouth. It helped with the taste, as well as the lingering hunger from the transformation.

"That's the strongest shit I got," Isia commented with a thoughtful look in her eyes. "If this doesn't get you at least buzzed, then you really are a meguca."

"Seriously?"

"The only way we had to get Bea drunk was with some really freaky booze." She visibly shuddered at the memory. "It stank so bad it made your eyes water from just being in the same room. Shit came in containers with more warning labels than a nuke."

"Beatrice?" I leaned back against the car, looking out to the empty badlands. "She was the gang's meguca, right? How did that work out?"

"Badly, if you couldn't tell." She snorted. "Never liked her, always arguing over how much of a cut she'd get out of everything. But if you ask Vespi, those were the days back when we still had something to cling to. To me it just looked like we were stalling."

I couldn't help but wonder at that. "What did that look like? The 'good old days'?"

"I only got to see the tail-end of it. You'll have to ask Vespi, she's the legacy hire." Chuckling and taking a swig straight out of the label-torn bottle, she fiddled with the music for a bit before finding some sort of soft-rock-garble. "Walking down the street with the Saint's merch on? People gave you free shit just for showing up to the store, and the bangers left you the fuck alone."

"Wait… is 'banger' an insult?" I asked. "I called Bear a gang-banger."

Isia snorted. "Not to her face, right?" She asked between chuckles. "Bangers are the shit-stains that think they can do crap just because they got a gun. They wouldn't know the difference between a tire-wrench and a mouther's ass."

"Ah." I awkwardly scratched my cheek. "I guess they are what we'd call 'proper' gangsters back in Frontier City 02."

"'Proper' my ass! You're just a village bumpkin that doesn't know left from right!" She made wide threatening gestures with her empty bottle. She took a step and stumbled a little, needing a few seconds to regain her balance. "God, tomorrow's gonna suuuuuuck."

"You don't have anything for hangovers?" I wondered.

"What? No, not that. Tomorrow's Spike duty."

Spike? The pet? "Too hard to spend a few hours pampering a rodent?"

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"Watch your mouth, that's the Saint's secret weapon!" She blurted out, waving the bottle around as she slumped against the car's hood. "We would've been doomed without him! He is truly the hero of our gang!" She boasted.

I couldn't help but laugh at the image of the overfed rat wielding a mini-gun. "Maybe we could rent an AI-movie-generator and get it to make some 3rd rate action slop about Spike mowing down hordes of monsters."

"The Rat and the Furious part eighty-three!" Isia burst out in mad cackling. "And it must include a romance-subplot, where Spike sings little songs about the love of his life, and it's revealed in the third act that it was just a cheese wheel all along." The laughing got louder, and quickly turned into a mix of giggling and coughing as she toppled over, clutching her gut and laughing some more.

I took the opportunity to get a soda while she heaved and wheezed her way back up to her feet. We'd taken the chance to stock-up in between night-clubs (Isia had seen how hungry I'd been after the mission and "wasn't taking any chances"), which left us with a hefty surplus I fully intended to keep for later.

"So why's this 'Spike duty' such a hassle?"

"It's just driving around like a granny stuck in traffic, knock on some doors, try to recruit more people, maybe kill some G-shit that snuck through or something," she muttered, shuffling to the back of the car and pulling out a plastic cup to pour herself a shot of the shlop she'd made me taste earlier. Isia took a swig and immediately spat it out. "Gah, this is shit."

"Told you."

"It burns," she complained, ripping open some snacks to stuff into her face.

"Why did you do that?" I sipped my own syrupy drink.

"Cuz I wanted to try." Sealing up the bottle, she proceeded to throw it over the fence. "So long, shitty-discount liquor!"

"You're very impulsive, you know that?"

"You miss all the shots you don't take!" She answered in turn.

"You're the gang's sniper," I said in a deadpan.

"And I make every shot count." Her hair lit up as she spoke, turning into a rainbow glowing hue. "See this? Got it during a bender, infection so bad I nearly flatlined. But it's still the preemest shit I've got, totally worth it."

"So you're saying it's a habit of yours to get yourself into trouble others need to pull you out of."

Isia's expression hardened a little at that, the rainbow hues of her hair losing a bit of their glow. "That's the whole point of being in a gang, you gonk," she said, then proceeded to throw one of the snacks at my head. "Or did the incredible mister Smash forget that Vespi saved your ass from those ambush spider-monsters, eh? And sure, we didn't get to fight the murder-guka that is now your filthy rich teacher, but we put a lot on the line to get you that chance with Bear."

"I didn't create those situations, I was thrust into them," I replied a bit defensively.

"And we helped," Isia replied. "And I will make sure to get a tattoo with 'Property of Axel' tramp stamp, just so I don't forget you just saved my ass today."

"Please don't get a tattoo with my name on it," I groaned. "Actually, maybe ask before moving forward with something crazy next time?"

"Man, fuck you." Her voice lacked any actual heat, lying somewhere between a joke and defeat, hair taking a low blue hue. She dejectedly crossed her arms, sitting on the hood of the car, pulling her legs up against her chest and staring off into the darkness beyond the fence. "But you're solid, you know? Next time I get some crazy idea I'll bounce it off of your thick skull first."

I wasn't about to complain when she'd given such a clear concession. Despite her shortcomings, I could definitely see the sense to what she'd done. Even if it had become somewhat of a clusterfuck, the gang had been in a very precarious position when I'd shown up. From the looks of it, the fight with Bear had been a make-or-break for them, and though I would've never gambled with the entirety of the gang's funds… it was still something that would've crossed my mind.

It was somewhat odd, really. The Isia here felt completely different to the Isia that would take her sniper rifle up to a perch during the streams. Maybe it was the booze, or maybe just that we weren't in the middle of a job.

"I've been meaning to ask, but why did you bring us here?" I interrupted the relative silence of trashy AI music, staring into the darkness that stretched out beyond the fence. "I bet there were better places to just park and munch."

"Nothing to break here if you get drunk, but apparently to get you there we'd need bioweapon grade booze," she complained, head tilting slightly side to side with a rhythm of its own. "It's also the best place to get a look at the rubber wall. Night-time is when they pull closer to the city and sometimes you get to see an explosion or something."

"Huh." I cocked my head as I kept staring into what lay beyond the fence. Though it was dark out, the night vision trait made it seem more like we were approaching dusk, some details becoming fuzzy and dark further out. "Where I lived, we had just one big wall, and you could tell what class of monster they were shooting at by how many artillery units were going off. It was… comforting, in a way. I never thought I'd miss it."

The artillery and autocannons weren't always audible, but the flash was always visible at night. It created a certain rhythm to life near the wall, and it was often regular enough it could've served as a way to mark the passage of time. On a few occasions I'd even been able to tell when the city was about to go into lock-down, since the artillery would go silent.

"Totally can't relate," Isia said. "Only time our big-boy wall was active was before I was born."

"You mean when it got that massive hole."

"The hole was way bigger back when I was a toddler." Isia slurred her words, yawning. "Construction on that thing's been going like crazy. Before it was just a whole-ass section of-" Her mouth clamped shut as she blinked rapidly, her eyes taking that glazed-out look she'd get whenever checking her neuralink.

The expression shifted, from annoyed to surprised to something else. Her eyes widened, mouth agape.

"What is it?"

She pointed ahead, beyond the fence.

I could see faint flashes of light over the horizon.

Flashes that were getting closer.

"The rubber wall's been breached."

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