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Tales from Silicon City: Reunion

By Psion

A Silicon City Story

All Rights Reserved

The city of San Francisco never really caught a break in the metabeing age, becoming the personal domain of organized crime syndicates immigrating to America from China and Japan. Ruling with a combination of bribery, blackmail, and basic intimidation, the Ivory Lotus Triad and the Honshi clan had successfully carved up the city between them. The arrival of the Kkangpea from Korea changed that, sparking a war between the three that saw all of them getting nearly wiped out when the federal authorities finally came in.

While the DSA was eventually pushed out, the syndicates still maintained an uneasy truce as they turned their forces away from each other and out towards external threats. Both the DSA and the FBI were still out there, gathering information and keeping an omnipresent eye on things, and vigilantes still visited the city from time to time, usually in the process of tracking other prey. Usually being the operative word...

In the Ivory Lotus's safe house, hidden in a dockside warehouse, several triad enforcers relaxed in the main room as the sun began to set. Meanwhile their leader reviewed the day's events and prepared a report for his superiors, the heads of the San Francisco chapter. There had been some promising developments with a pea hen from Aphrodite City known as the Jade Empress but nothing concrete as of yet. Still, the family masters would be most eager to know what progress he had made thus far. Back outside the lieutenant's office, his subordinates continued to relax and unwind after another day in the criminal underworld, one of them had dug up a piece of Internet fiction and was presently reading it to the rest of the group amidst riotous laughter. Those stupid Westerners and their superhero fiction... Then suddenly, while they were all busy laughing at depictions of Asian mobsters, She was there.

No one even remembered seeing Her come in, she made no sound and most of her costume blended in with the shadows. One moment there was nothing and the next, she was there by the door. A tall female American grizzly bear with black hair worn in a shoulder-length ponytail, her statuesque body clad in heavy polymer body armor and camouflage fatigues, cold brown eyes barely visible behind a dull metal mask covering the entirety of her face, a black beret adorned with a bronze skull insignia was worn over her head. Yet it wasn't her outfit or the toned, well-curved body within it that attracted the half-dozen thugs, it was her gloved hands as they cradled a pump-action shotgun. In the deafening silence that seemed to stretch for an eternity, the thugs regarded her with a mixture of emotions. Some were amused by the silent bravado of their mysterious guest, others were nervous and had seen one too many action movies to know that scenes like this never had a happy ending for both parties. Hands slowly reached for guns held in hostlers or left casually on the card table; too slow, all too slow.

The shotgun screamed with a thunderous roar as the armored stranger tore through targets like a woman possessed, spent shell casings littered the floor as she took down one after another. Slow, so slow they were hardly a challenge at all she mused to herself as the fight ended and the room hung heavy with the stench of gunpowder. Perhaps those genemods made this too easy, she was probably one of the few bears that had a shot at being an Olympic gymnast thanks to her training and the augmentations she received from Goldstem.

In the next room over, the stereo blared an American pop song loud enough to wake the dead. You have to be kidding me! The gunwoman fumed as she quickly reloaded, her fingers a blur as they popped in a fresh batch of shells into the magazine tube, then kicked in the door to the lieutenant's office. The flatfooted Triad enforcer sputtered and cursed in Chinese as he reached for his handgun but like that she was there, disarming him and spraining his wrist in one fluid motion.

Hoisting her prisoner to his feet, knocking his chair over in the process, the masked she-bear glared at him with those cold brown eyes. "Where is the Jade Empress?" She growled furiously. The triad officer sputtered as he tried to maintain his composure. There was no mistaking those eyes; this was her, the gun-totting vigilante called Armory. Rumored to be one of the former Aphrodite Five, the one called Pvt. Doll. And right now she had his shirt collar in a death grip and a .357 revolver pressed threateningly against his crotch...

The city of Tokyo, capital of Japan and one of the glistening jewels of the metabeing revolution; a maze of towering skyscrapers and LED advertisements, the inclusion of metabeings in science and industry had pushed Japan ahead of most of the world by about a decade and nowhere was this more readily apparent then in Tokyo. Smart glass windows projecting all manner of advertisements on the facades of corporate office buildings while police officers in power armor patrolled the streets. Yet even in this near perpetual halo of artificial light, there was darkness. In the back alleys, unsavory sorts wrapped up their business before the early morning sun finished rising on the sleepless city. One in particular was regretting that he didn't take the night off...

Masaki's feet pounded against the hard asphalt as the red panda quickly ran through the back alleys of Tokyo. Of all the trouble he could have run into tonight, it had to be a super. Not just any superhero though, Her, the Untraceable One. A vigilante that so far had managed to visit every major city in Japan at least once, striking down various wanted individuals and confounding the registered heroes. Some thought she was a member of the Jade Scepters or even some kind of oni, a demon sent upon the world to visit the unrepentant wicked, but no one knew for sure. None of that mattered now, at least not in the same way that she was currently on Masaki's trail mattered.

And then she found him, dropping down and landing behind him after he had taken a turn that ended up leading down a dead-end alleyway. Black hair was tied up in a bun as a blood red scarf shrouded the bottom half of her face. The rest of her sculpted, shapely body was clad in a tailored bodysuit dyed dark blue, reinforced with armor over the vitals. She was undoubtedly a beautiful woman to males with tastes like his; unfortunately she was also armed. Delicate panda hands twirled two heavy metal batons while the Untraceable's green eyes regarded her prey with a casual indifference one normally reserved for squishing small bugs...

Police found Masaki's battered corpse later that morning, the Japanese character for "remembrance" was drawn on the wall above where his body was left. Medical examiners determined that the male had been beaten to death with a blunt metallic object. Initial investigations into a possible motive turned up empty... at least until his DNA turned out to be a perfect match for an individual involved in several other open cases. Then they knew, this was not a copycat impersonating one of Japan's most confounding vigilantes, this was The Lady herself.

Haru Sakurako exhaled as she caught the first morning train on the route from Tokyo to Hakodate, the panda woman looking no different then the any number of morning commuters sitting in the passenger car. Dressed in simple, ordinary clothing for her surroundings and with her costume and gear stuffed away in her backpack. Keeping her head down after another night of fighting crime in a random Japanese city, it was good to be home... at least it was at first.

Returning home with the help of Deborah and the others was ultimately not the homecoming she had expected. At first her parents were overjoyed to find her after she had been reported missing for months. But then came the questions that she didn't know how to answer and then the story of Aphrodite City finally made national news in Japan. No one seemed to have made the connection between her and Express Panda, no one except her parents. And then the questions returned with a vengeance, questions that she didn't know how to answer or if she even wanted to answer. In the end she moved out, left her hometown of Sapporo and quitting her job as an assistant teacher at her father's dojo. Now she lived in nearby Hakodate, working odd shifts as a shop clerk for a small general goods store that kept cutting her hours back to remain afloat. Hardly the happy ending she had hoped for.

As the train continued on its way through the Japanese countryside, Haru pulled a budget smart phone out of her pocket and checked her email. Most of it was junk, advertisements for one product or another. But then there was a letter that made her smile, a message from Deborah. The former leader of their group was getting them together to spend a few weeks seeing how everyone was doing and enjoying the peace and quiet of some backwoods place that Sonya had discovered. The panda couldn't wait to get home to write a reply. It would be tight, a trip to America would certainly blow her meager budget out of proportion but as much as it would sting her pride to ask them, she knew they wouldn't refuse if she asked for the others to help bring her over....

The troubled panda martial artist leaned back as the plane touched down at the Silicon City International Airport. Flying coach was hardly stress free but Haru wasn't inclined to complain. By the time the pilot announced their arrival in Silicon City and thanked them for choosing this airline, Sakurako was already tuning him out and preparing to collect her carry-on luggage. Traveling with a pair of suitcases, what contained most of her worldly possessions, she disembarked from the plane and took her first steps into America since the Aphrodite City crisis.

The terminal at SCIA was typical of major airports as far as Haru could tell. Waiting areas filled with rows of couches and grumpy travelers, ticket counters with harried clerks, duty-free shops and convenience stores selling overpriced goods, the intercom blaring with flight announcements. Checking her passport and getting her luggage through customs was mercifully short, it took longer for the customs officer to say "welcome to America" then it did for them to confirm that yes, she was a Japanese citizen vacationing in the United States and no, she was not a fugitive supervillain or whatever else they had to deal with on a regular basis. All that was left was to go out to the main lobby and try to see if she could find...

"Haru! Your flight was on time!" Deborah's familiar voice called out. The survivor of Aphrodite City turned her head, green eyes going wide when she finally saw what had become of her canine friend.

The last time she had seen the black-haired Doberman, Deborah Autumns had been fairly slender. Since then, the former police officer had put on an incredible amount of weight. Jeans and a t-shirt were fitted over a rotund, sphere-shaped female figure with an enormous belly. Before Haru could comment on this radical change, her old friend grabbed her in a bear hug. Strong arms squeezed her against Debbie's soft midsection, slowly squishing her into the larger female's girth, and for the first time in a while, the Japanese avenger smiled. The leader of their group always knew how to make her feel better somehow...

Samantha Summers smiled as she drove up to the old smuggler's hideout in the Californian Rockies. She had received the message shortly after wrapping up her business in San Francisco. The Jade Empress had given her the slip again but not without a price, Armory had managed to track down and disrupt her operations in the city before the she-bear had to move on. Someone like her tended to attract a lot of attention whether she was careful or not so it was better for Sam to keep on the move. Ducking out and laying low while checking up on everyone else seemed like a smart idea, particularly given how remote the location appeared to be. It could be a set-up but then again the message referred to things that only Shield and Amp had any right to know.

The smuggler's lair was a small compound tucked away up in the mountains about a hundred miles from Silicon City, formerly owned by a drug runner that ran weed and cocaine up the West Coast to dealers in Canada. FBI took him down and his property was put up for auction. An auction that Amp won apparently, making the Afghan hound the proud owner of a remote piece of land to turn into a vacation home.

Turning off a state road at an old gas station that looked like it hadn't seen customers in decades, Sam drove up the dirt road through the forest before arriving at Sonya's little hideout. The woodland compound wasn't particularly large, the bear suspected that a large portion of it was underground to hide from aerial surveillance, the only buildings on the surface were the main house, a garage where the original owner likely had his vehicles modified for runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian one, and a few outlaying buildings required for living off the grid. Summers smiled approvingly as she parked her car in the garage and walked up to the house proper. As she stopped at the front door, her throat tightened. Since Aphrodite City she had trained and fought against all manner of dangerous adversaries. But none of those fights weighed down on Summers like the one and only time she faltered, the time Sonya needed her the most. Even now, that moment was a crushing burden on her shoulders.

The door opened before Samantha could knock and there was Sonya Winters, the rocker formerly known as Amp looking at her with a smile on her lips. Long blond hair framed her bright blue eyes and chubby round face. The bear blinked and looked down, taking in the canine's broad pear-shaped proportions, Winters having gotten quite fat since she saw her last. The Afghan hound smiled and shook her head. "So are you going to just stand there and admire how I've been putting the heavy in heavy metal or are you going to come in?" The blond musician smiled and slowly stepped aside to let her guest through.

Sam stepped through and set her suitcase down on the foyer floor. Exhaling, she decided to get it over with. "I'm sorry Sonya." She said over her shoulder.

"Sorry for what?" The mistress of the house asked as she shut the door behind them.

The hardened gunslinger was silent for a moment as she turned to face the other female. "I'm sorry for the one time I choked, the one time you needed me and I had to have Debbie, Haru, and Rachel carry me through the fight."

Sonya sighed as she recalled the unpleasant memory then shook her head. "Don't worry about it, Aphrodite City was a horrible nightmare for all of us. I've tried to stop thinking about it and so should you." The musician replied, managing a smile as she wrapped her old friend up in a hug.

Next thing the she-bear knew; the two of them were squeezed together on a love seat barely big enough for the canine's broad backside. The round-bodied canine had her arm wrapped around the mentally frayed bear and held her tight. Summers let herself sink into Winter's warm girth, welcoming the heavy weight of the hound's thunderous thigh as it slid onto the gun-totting vigilante's lap. The tired heroine did her best to smile and relax her psychological armor as she gently slipped a hand behind her host's broad back and give her side an affectionate squeeze; it was probably stupid becoming so easily relaxed by a warm embrace with a soft friend. But then simple pleasures, often the best pleasures, usually were...