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Gacha God: A Black Cat (ch. 15)
🕑 Added 2023-02-26 15:42:33 +0000 UTCYou have earned an Item Roll
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I was standing on top of a building in full Audacity gear when I saw that I had another roll. “Sweet,” I muttered to myself, glancing around the rooftop and seeing nothing -- no cameras or people, just air conditioning units and a skylight that I would be helping myself to. Reaching into the screen and grabbing the dice, I dropped it at my feet and the D20 spun uncontrollably for a few seconds, letting me reach into my pocket to procure the other item I had been given.
The drone that Peter had created was a tiny bugger. It was about the size of my thumb, but it was a lot wider than it was thick. A couple of wings were on the back that fluttered soundlessly and it sat on a receiver that I would have to hook up to transmit the data because the drone was too small to have a decently sized storage drive on it. By the time I booted the thing up, I looked down to see that I rolled a… six. I’ve been astoundingly shit with my rolls lately.
Then I saw what I got. “Oh, what the…” I muttered to myself, reaching down and picking up my reward. With apprehension. It was a cylinder that had a screw on top that seemed vacuum sealed, with the bulk of the cylinder being clear glass that displayed a greenish fluid. Which wasn’t the cause for concern. The two eyeballs floating inside of it, however, very much were.
Sharingan
One of the Three Great Dōjutsu. The left is an Eye of Insight, granting increased perception as well as insight into the function of jutsu by seeing the flow of chakra. The right eye is an Eye of Hypnotism, enabling the ability to cast Genjutsu with only eye contact.
I looked at the eyes for a long moment, seeing that they were red with a neat little design of a ring around the pupil with a single tomoe lazily spinning in each eye. “Power, you have given me some really weird shit over the years, but this is a first, even for you,” I remarked, wondering what I was meant to do with them. Eyeballs didn’t really feel like a plug in and play kind of item.
“Hey, Guy in the Chair,” I spoke up, pressing down on my earpiece. “Hypothetically speaking, if I had an extra set of eyeballs… could You-Know-Who replace my current set with them for me?” I asked Ned, and I heard a tellingly long pause on the other end of the mike.
“He says probably not -- not without medical training and equipment, but he could look into it… why?” Ned asked me, his tone cautious. And fair enough. It was a question worth being cautious about. Especially considering that he didn’t know how I got the eyeballs in question. Still, it was good to know that, maybe, Peter could do something with them. Might take a bit for him to brush up on invasive surgery though. Or maybe he could build something that could do it for him.
“Don’t worry about it,” I decided, tucking the eyes away. “And the two of you need some code names. Real ones. You can’t pull off a heist without code names,” I told Ned as I rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck, and stretched my legs. All the while, the drone was going through the bootup sequence. It would be controlled by Peter, but it was still a prototype. I would need to get it in position before it could work its magic.
“I’m kind of worried about the extra eyes, Audacity. Like, did you just… find them on the rooftop?” Ned asked, not letting the topic drop. “And, you’re right about the codenames. I’m still workshopping mine, but I’m thinking… Beacon. Since I’m like a guiding light, you know? Oh, and P- You-Know-Who is thinking Gizmo, but I’d expect that one to change eventually. So, what’s up with the eyes?” He really wasn’t going to let that topic go.
“I’m starting the heist,” I told them, rolling over to an air conditioning unit and unscrewing the gated panel that blew out the air. Reaching in, I paced the drone and the receiver onto the side of the metal grating. The drone flapped its wings before lifting up near soundlessly before it took off. We had the blueprints to the air conditioning system, which would take us straight to the penthouse that Tully lived in.
I heard Peter join the call with a slight ding, “I’m at the grate,” Peter informed us, and I got a look at the drone when I finished putting the plate back on the air conditioning unit. The drone slid between the spaces that blew in cool air. It flew over to the front door, where the security system was activated. As Ned had informed me, Tully had super beefy security. Part of the reason why the drone had to be so small and silent was anything bigger or louder would have been an alert.
However, it had a rather fatal weakness. Tully.
“I can’t believe he gave you the passcode,” I remarked, watching the drone hover over the number pad. Ned had sent a fake email, pretending to be the security company, asking to verify a login. Autofill gave the login and the password for his account, which in turn gave us the passcode to the security systems. Incredibly simple.
“No. No, no, no. We aren’t moving on like you didn’t say what you said, Audacity. Where did the eyeballs come from,” Peter questioned, joining in on the topic while the drone fed the code and disabled the hair trigger on the security systems. “Where did you get them? And why do you want to put them in your head? That’s a really invasive surgery, you know.” As they grilled me, Ned input a command from his access.
Smart houses were pretty stupid when you came right down to it. Everything was connected to the house system -- doors, windows, temperature… So, with ease, the skylight popped open and rolled up, allowing me to start to climb through. The Ring of Nine Dragons flashed and a copy of me grabbed my hands before the other Seb started to lower me into the penthouse apartment. And, in turn, another Seb grabbed his legs when he was forced to hang upside down to lower me further while two more Sebs kept that third Seb in place.
“It’s my power,” I answered, touching down on the hardwood floor.
“Power?” Peter questioned, and the surprise in his voice honestly caught me off guard. “You have a power?”
What? “Uh… yeah? Where do you think I got the Air Treks? Or the Ring of Nine Dragons?” I asked him, not too sure why he was so surprised. I guess I never really outright said it, did I? I figured they would have put the pieces together -- I mean, they knew I had the Golden Scarab, Divine Water, and so on. Did they think those items were just falling out of the sky and into my lap- well, I guess they technically were, but unprompted? Or that I just stumbled across them?
“Dude. You have a superpower that gives you stuff? Like more superpowers?! For how long?” Ned blurted as I took a moment to examine my surroundings. The interior decorating of the place told me that my assumptions about Tully were correct -- he was a pompous fuck. Everything had that vibe of being purchased because it had a big price tag attached to it. Given that I doubted that Tully did his own interior decorating, the man got finessed by his decorator.
“Your power gave you eyeballs?” Peter questioned, sounding like he was cringing at the thought. “Did… did it… take them away from someone?” Peter questioned as I went about my business. I had a little checklist of things I was supposed to do -- such as downloading malware into Tully’s electronics, placing a few bugs in some light fixtures, and so on. Spy kind of stuff to find out where he was squirreling away his funds and to gather evidence to nail him to the wall in the court of law. Not really sure why we were bothering with that last bit, but Ned and Peter were fond of the idea.
I paused to think about it as I headed into Tully’s office and booted up his computer, “... Probably? I mean, they probably didn’t grow on a tree, you know?” I ventured, shrugging my shoulders as I was brought up to a home screen. The bug landed near me, offering its ‘stinger’ which was a jack that I plugged into the port. In response, I saw a bunch of black screens appear on the monitor as Ned worked his magic.
“Ugh,” Peter summarized his thoughts rather aptly. “Has it always been that way? When did you get the power- oh, wait, was that rude to ask? You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Peter hastily offered, realizing that he might have stepped on some toes, but I could hear it in his voice that he was curious.
“I’ve had the power since I was a kid,” I told him, seeing Ned get through the home screen and I saw him uploading a piece of malware onto the computer. “Manifested when I was five years old -- my first item was a knife that would teleport back into my hand when I threw it.” I missed that thing. It was a simple item, but it sure was convenient. Seeing that Ned had the computer handled, I started to get up, only to find that my foot got caught in a cord- ugh! What the fuck was that cable management?!
“Dude! Don’t knock anything over,” Ned quickly protested as I had to catch the desktop from tipping over.
“Sorry, sorry. I used to have items for this kind of stuff,” I admitted, extracting my foot from the tangle of cords. If Tully didn’t have this coming because of his horrible business practices, being a colossal douche, and profiteering from criminal connections then this cable management made him deserve it. The man was a legitimate psychopath. “I don’t think I broke anything, so we’re good.”
“Security systems says that he has a safe, but it's an isolated system from the rest of security. The panel is connected to the smart house, though, so I’m opening it up,” Ned informed me. “Do you still have all of your stuff?” Ned asked, his tone cautious, sensing the story there. After all, if I did, then I would be using them, wouldn’t I? I cast a final glance around the office to see that no secret panel had opened up, forcing me to get up from the admittedly comfortable chair to search the penthouse.
I pursed my lips, wondering if this was the place to really get into it. I wasn't hiding the truth, not really, but I did understand that if Ned and Peter asked the right questions… well, this talk was better had with everyone in the same room. Maybe taking some seats. With a therapist in the same room. “Nah, I left pretty much everything back home,” I told them. “There were people there that needed it more than me.”
Or, rather, they would have looked for me a lot harder if I took all of my good shit with me.
“Oh,” Peter muttered, hearing something in my voice as I checked the living room and kitchen. No open panel. “That’s-” Peter started, but I stopped listening when I threw open the bedroom door to see a pretty spacious bedroom. King sized bed at the center of it, nightstand, some shelves, and a big ol’ painting on one wall. A painting that was currently being removed by someone.
Both of us froze the moment that I opened the door, drinking in the sight of the woman before me. And she was a woman. A white mane of hair that dripped past her shoulders, high cheekbones that some girls would murder for that were holding up a thin domino mask that framed some of the bluest eyes I had ever seen.
If it wasn’t for the white fur on the collar of her black jumpsuit, I would have assumed that it was painted on. The suit was unzipped, revealing a rather dangerous amount of cleavage that was currently pushed up as she was pulling the painting off the wall, her breasts threatening to spill out of her suit entirely.
“Are you… seriously robbing my burglary?” I asked the woman, feeling deeply offended. Ned, you just got caught slacking. How did you not know that she was here? How long had she been here? The woman seemed to be in her late teens to early twenties if I had to guess. She paused for a moment, processing that, before her lips quirked up into a smile.
“I would say that you’re burgling my robbery,” she replied, her tone smooth as silk. “I don’t suppose you’ll give a girl a hand? Unless you’re also here for this painting,” she prodded, an edge in her tone.
I took another look at the painting. Nu couché by Amedeo Modigliani, I recognized. “Ew, no way. Amedeo was a total hack that only got popular because he died,” I said, scrunching up my face, and rolled over to help her take the thing off the wall.
“It’s worth a hundred and seventy million dollars,” the woman remarked and I just shook my head. The complete lack of taste for some people. The painting itself wasn’t even that good -- it was a nude of a woman laying on a red couch.
“It’s terrible,” I decided. “Any fifteen-year-old with one hand underneath the table could have produced a better nude. It was only good then because porn was in short supply and people would pay out the nose to see a tit,” I said with a shake of my head.
The woman looked like she was having to take a moment to process that, “Wow. How judgmental. I didn’t know that Audacity was such an art snob,” she remarked, telling me that she recognized who I was, even if I had absolutely no clue who she was. “I also think you’re missing out on all of the money laundering potential.” That was also true. Art wasn’t really about the art anymore. It was about cleaning money and the ‘culture’ of art. Whatever the fuck that meant.
“I’m judgmental because I happen to have taste,” I retorted, eying the woman. “And everything I know about art comes from osmosis. Had a sibling that was really into the scene,” I told her. Had as in had rather than her losing interest. And, personally, I had no respect for art that suddenly became super incredible when people realized that the artists weren’t going to start churning out more crap. Or modern art. I respected the hustle though -- splashing random splotches of paint onto a canvas and selling it. It was clever.
It was also trash.
“You are judging me for stealing a painting worth nearly two hundred million dollars,” she stated because it wasn’t a question. Her tone conveyed her amusement and her exasperation.
“Harshly,” I agreed. “It’d be different if you were stealing a Van Gogh or a Monet if you had to take something from the industrial era -- they actually had talent -- but a Modigliani? Not even one of his statues? I hope you understand that money can’t buy taste.”
She blinked slowly, her smile growing a fraction as her disbelief mounted, “Okay, I’ll bite. If you aren’t here for the painting worth millions of dollars, then please, do inform me what you’re here for?” She questioned and I pointed at the space that the painting had occupied. She was so focused on me, keeping me in her gaze, that she had completely missed the panel that had opened up. Her eyes widened a fraction when I approached the safe, seeing that it had a number of gizmos and doodads. “You’re actually here to rob him.”
I’m not sure why she sounded so shocked. “Uh, no. I’m here to royally fuck up this guys entire life. Robbing him is just icing on the cake,” I told her before glancing over my shoulder. “So, you got a name? People call me Audacity.”
“I’m aware,” she replied, her tone dry. “You can call me Black Cat. And it seems that we have a mutual goal,” she remarked as I realized something looking at the safe. Reaching up, I grabbed the handle and pulled it back to see that it was already open.
I didn’t catch her pulling the painting down. I caught her putting the painting back up.
“So maybe you do have taste after all,” I decided, turning around to face her, finding myself on the backfoot. Black Cat was smirking at me in a way that reminded me of, well… a cat. Peter and Ned were silent, probably having muted themselves to have their own conversation. Like how they had managed to miss that someone had already slipped by the security measures. “What’s your beef with Tully?”
“What’s yours?” Black Cat shot back, placing a hand on her hip and cocking it. She was being evasive and guarded.
What was…. Uh… oh, yeah. “He’s a slumlord and one of the ladies in one of his buildings gave me cookies,” I answered the question after a beat. Black Cat blinked once, then again. Then she realized that I was being serious. “So, we were going to steal all of his money and give it to the people he’s been dicking over.”
Black Cat tilted her head and I could see her brain moving a mile a minute, taking it all in and making calculations. “How noble of you,” she remarked, her gaze running up and down the length of me as her lips twisted up into a practiced smirk. “And if my intentions were less than noble?” She asked while I reached into the safe that she had so kindly opened for me. Inside was a number of things -- gun, stacks of money, passports and fake IDs, bars of gold and yadayada. What I didn’t see was a-
Ah. Looking back, I saw that Black Cat was holding the phone up and gave it a little wiggle. “Looking for this?” She questioned and it seemed that we were after the same thing. “The key to a shell company empire and it fits in the palm of a hand.” she remarked, and there was a tension in the air that I really didn’t get. Her posture told me that she was tense, and defensive, but I really wasn’t sure why.
Ah. Black Cat expected me to take it from her.
“Ah, well… Finders keepers, losers suck, I guess,” I decided, offering an uncaring shrug. It was never fun to be the loser, but she beat me to it. And I wasn’t so invested in bringing Tully’s empire down that I was willing to throw hands with a total stranger who clearly had it out for him. I guess I would fall back on my original plan and kick the shit out of him.
“That’s it?” Black Cat questioned as I made to leave the bedroom.
I scratched at the back of my head through my hood, looking back at her. “I mean… yeah? Look, I see you got your own thing going on with the guy and it’s not like I have some super personal grudge against him. So, I don’t want to intrude,” I told her. She was expecting resistance from me. Maybe even judgment or something.
Black Cat searched my gaze for signs of deceit. “And if I intend to kill him?”
“Have fun?” I tried, shrugging my shoulders in complete disinterest and I saw a conflicted expression pass over her face. Her lips thinned before she lowered the phone, a beat of silence passing between us.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a hero?” She asked, sounding like she was completely reevaluating her opinion of me. I guess that's why she was expecting me to stop her.
“Nah -- I just do my own thing,” I stated.
Black Cat chuckled. It was a warm sound and I saw the tension bleed out of her with the admission. I hadn’t realized how high her guard was up until she did, but ever since I entered the room, she was ready to either throw hands or beat feet. “I suppose that’s what I get for watching the news. You really aren’t at all what I expected,” she admitted, bringing the phone up to her chest while she tapped a finger on the back of it. “I don’t particularly care about Tully. He’s a means to an end because he has connections to someone that I want. To murder.”
I’m not surprised. Tully hung around with a bunch of scumbags. “I know he’s part of some criminal network, but I don’t know much about it,” I admitted, earning a nod from Black Cat. I could see that she was filing away my lack of a reaction to the murder thing away.
Actions had consequences. I didn’t know what the story was there because Black Cat hadn’t fessed up what her entire deal was, but the result was Black Cat breaking into Tully’s apartment to get info on how to take some guy down. Clearly, whatever had transpired, had pissed Black Cat off. Was murder an appropriate response to whatever was done? I literally had no idea and I honestly couldn’t care less. What I did know was that she felt like it was and if she was willing to follow through with it, then… well, she had a right to.
Just like the guy who she wanted to murder had a right to defend himself from getting murdered.
“That’s all you really need to know,” Black Cat said before she moved towards me in a slow saunter. A very long time ago, when cavemen were grunting out words that would become the foundation for the language that we spoke today, they managed to grunt out what would become the word seductive. And I had to imagine Black Cat is what they had envisioned, because she was the embodiment of it as she crossed the room. “I think we could help each other, Audacity. I hope you aren’t working on a timeline?” She asked, her voice adopting a flirtatious tone.
Huh. I could respect that. Black Cat knew she was a ten out of ten and she was using it to her advantage. Guys were pretty stupid. The number of things we wouldn’t do for a pretty face is shockingly small.
“Not really. Sounds like you might be, though,” I remarked. She was coming after Tully because he had info. He was a stepping stone to who she really wanted.
“A long term one,” Black Cat admitted, coming to a stop in front of me. “I already have what I wanted from this, so do what you like with it.” She told me, passing me the phone. “I’ll keep in touch,” she added, a hand drifting over my shoulder as she walked past me. I turned to watch her go, her steps soundless as she retreated from sight.
I checked my shoulder to see if she had put a tracker on me but found nothing. Black Cat just seemed certain that she would be able to find me somehow. She didn’t hash out a deal of any kind either. And what was the point of taking the phone out of the safe if she already had what she wanted from it? My lips pursed behind my mask as I looked down at the phone. The phone that wasn’t password protected, I realized.
Because it wasn’t Tully’s phone.
“Cool,” I muttered, realizing that the phone only had a single phone number on it. I’m guessing that was Black Cat. So, I got her number? Awesome. Still, kind of weird. I was missing something here because why would Black Cat just be carrying around a phone that had her phone number in it? And, for that matter, where was the phone that Tully was supposed to keep in the safe?
Did she take it? Her costume didn’t exactly leave a lot of room for pockets and enough of her cleavage had been exposed to convince me that she hadn’t stuffed a phone there. Probably.
Blackmail? She took or messed with the phone, then she would leave a phone with her number on it when Tully found out. That made the most sense to me with the information that I had. All the same, though… “Interesting,” I decided, closing the safe and putting the shitty painting back up. “You guys catch all of that?” I asked Peter and Ned, letting them know that they were in the clear to take themselves off of mute.
But, as a Seb that was still on the roof tossed me down a rope for me to climb up, I didn’t get an answer. “Guys? Can you hear me?” I asked, climbing up. The heist was a partial success because we infected his computer with malware, but it wasn’t as clean as we wanted. And I wasn’t willing to roll back the clock -- Black Cat was interesting. Way more interesting than Tully could hope to be.
There was still no response. My gut clenched as I climbed up onto the rooftop, the Seb closing the sky window behind me after pulling up the rope. I wasn’t hearing any static. As far as I could tell, it was like I was talking into the void. Was I muted? They had been able to hear me just fine in the apartment. They only cut out when I started talking to Black Cat. A coincidence? Did she do something? “Guys. Can you hear me?” I asked one last time, waiting a second with a frown that deepened by the second. “Alright, I’m heading back.”
I gunned the throttle to my ATs, flying off of the side of the building and shooting straight down a good thirty stories. The wind rushed over my body, fighting to push back my hood, but it remained stubbornly attached to my mask. Once I was down far enough, I focused my will on the 13 totems, and in response, a sizable one erupted out of the side of the building for me to bank off of, acting as a ramp to send me flying to the building across the street. Landing smoothly, I hardly lost any speed as I raced back to the HQ.
I was worried, I realized, throwing myself across the street, urging the ATs to go even faster. I didn’t like that they weren’t answering comms. The timing was too good to be a coincidence. Something had to have happened, and I didn’t know what. Clenching my jaw, I had a totem shoot out of a building for me to ramp onto, clearing a building entirely before I leaped off of it to fly through the air. The totem faded into nothing before it hit the ground below me.
A trip that had originally taken twenty minutes took only ten at the high speeds that I moved and when I finally saw the entrance to the building, the air was filled with the scent of burnt rubber as I nearly wiped myself out coming to a screeching stop infront of it. Wasting no time, I sent a totem into the wrought iron door, having it act as a battering ram, and it struck with such force that the entire door was ripped off the hinges. Leaping forward, I rode it down the stairs into the lair to see…
“Well then,” Tony Stark remarked, taking a sip of a smoothie from a crazy straw, standing over by the workbench with both Peter and Ned sitting by him. It looked like Peter had been midway through a presentation of one of his drones. “That was quite the entrance. And a waste of a perfectly good door. Jarvis, would you mind?” Tony Stark questioned, gesturing to the Iron Man suit that was standing in the living room that then began to move.
“Of course, sir,” I heard a distinctly British voice speak through the speakers, the Iron Man suit approaching me. Then simply picking the metal door up before carrying it back up the stairs.
“Dude, it’s Tony Stark,” Peter spoke up, his eyes practically shining with excitement.
In response to that, Tony gave me a winning smile that was picture-perfect. “That it is,” he agreed, inclining his head to me. “You must be the ever-elusive Audacity. Fitting name. I think it's about time for the two of us to have a conversation,” he observed, and I glanced at Peter and Ned to see that they were shooting excitement out of every pore, practically vibrating in their seats.
You dicks. Give me back my concern.
Instead of calling them out, I cocked my head at Tony, meeting his gaze evenly. “What would we have to talk about?” I asked him, crossing my arms over my chest.
To that, he smirked. “Oh… I think I can think of a few things,” he said and to my ears… that certainly sounded like a promise.
