INTERLUDE 50.5: The Deep Guilds

Boston was a large city, the greater Boston area holding seven million in a Post-Change world. Which was a significant increase in population despite the devastation following the Change, an obvious indicator displaying the importance dungeons played in the modern day. The mayor of Detroit has vocally tried to move a dungeon into their suburbs for years.

Skyscrapers lined the Charles as it emptied into the Back Bay area, downtown a packed city center as dense as Manhattan or Tokyo. Most of those high rises were clearly marked, businesses proud to label themselves in the rich historic city, to be known as American with ties to the original colonies. Prudential Tower’s tall rectangle outline, the blockiness of the Boston Public Library, Trinity Church sitting beside blue glass covering the John Hancock building (locals will quickly remind newcomers that the name is still John Hancock, no matter what idiot decides to rename it). Boston was a major city with a magnificent history.

Nevertheless, it was easy to hide inside that concrete jungle.

In one of those buildings late at night, on a floor somewhere in the middle, the elevator opened with an innocuous ping. Inside, a short and dumpy African woman - wearing a velvet skirt suit with white blouse underneath the buttoned coat - marched out of the elevator. Her graying hair was cut short in a crew cut, no makeup except for light eyeliner and blackberry red lip gloss. She also wore a necklace with three small pearls looped through a thin silver chain. Though heavy enough to appear over three hundred pounds despite her short height, she carried herself well with a military posture.

“Ms. Walters, the Council is wondering when the quarterlies will be finished.” The girl who trailed behind the fat black woman was a contrast in every metric. Over six feet tall (183 cm), made taller with stiletto heels yet slouching heavily, clearly the subservient to her militant superior. Her bad posture was in part caused by a large stack of binders she held with one arm against abnormally plump tits that appeared as if the girl smuggled a pair of honeyed hams into the building. All while juggling a phone in the other hand, scrolling a flurry of text messages pinging every other second. Aside from her massive juggs with more silicone than flesh inside them, the girl was anorexic thin with unhealthy pale skin and long blond hair kept in a tight bun. Even in a tailored canary yellow pants suit alluding to false maturity, anyone looking at the girl’s face would know she wasn’t a day over twenty. With all this, the top-heavy girl wobbled after each step as she tried desperately to keep up with the other woman.

“Tell them they can suck my fat clit, and you can quote me.” Turning a corner, the curt woman put her eye against a panel, opening a security door and marching in, her companion following. “I asked you to call me Mistress, Lily. Do I have to make it an order?”

“No…Mistress.”

Mandy Walters was not someone who suffered fools or time wasters. She was still putting out fires after the Council’s last disaster when they demolished the famous guild Vedic Starlight. That came back to burn them when Arun Nair’s widow killed Enoch and sunk the Bone Castle. It wasn’t even about the money - although they lost billions in assets. It was the loss of a Herald they could control that hurt the most.

The corridor these women walked along was long and narrow: cameras to monitor them, mounted gun turrets open threats if they didn’t pass scrutiny. Lily was terrified, hunching even further, yet Walters was irritated and bored. Without fanfare, the door on the other end of the corridor opened and the two women stepped into a dark room with numerous screens lining one wall.

Mandy hated this room. Too much effort on useless pageantry and it made no sense to her. Each screen displayed a separate contact for the various interests of the Council. None of these people were part of the Council itself - Mandy wasn’t either - yet each were vitally important to ensuring the Council functioned as an entity. They were middle management, and Walters thought middle management worked best in a boardroom, not a supervillain’s collection of blurred out screens in an empty theater.

“Can we get this over with? I’m busy.” In fact, Walters wasn’t, but she had been on her way home when the alert went out for a meeting.

“Someone attacked the Nair compound,” Hisha stated.

Hisha wasn’t his name, Walters’ spies told her he was a middle aged man by the name of Ed Cuomo. Yet someone on the Council really liked shogi, meaning all the movers and shakers in the cabal received stupid names based on the chess variant. Walters’ own alias was Kinshō. The less she thought about it, the less she thought about strangling someone with her own hands.

“So?” Walters huffed and rolled her eyes. “Want me to give this someone a medal?”

“We don’t want Becoming Monsters killed, we want them crippled.” Kyōsha was a woman well into her nineties, but no matter how much Walters dug, she couldn’t find anything on the ancient crone. “The Council doesn’t want to deal with either of the other Heralds. With Enoch dead, Jefferson is our best option to control.”

“Then let me bring her in, I could settle this by breakfast tomorrow.” Walters argued this very point numerous times in the past week. The whole circuitous way the Council did things stupid beyond all reason to her.

“The Council tried that with the Herald known as Desire. Bangkok is still a black hole: an entire city where any of our people enter, they disappear.” The rough man with a German accent was known only as George, his disdain for the alias Ōshō well known. “We still have no idea where Restitution is after that little girl burned most of Rio Verde to the ground. You think capturing a Herald with a name like Instinct is going to end well?”

“You need to see the video feed we have of Jefferson’s brood taking down enough high level monsters - including a Depth Level 8 Tarasque! - to kill an entire top tier raid team.” Hisha sounded unhinged behind the sound of him clicking a mouse in the background. “I mean, the other Heralds have been active for years and they are all incredibly dangerous. Jefferson has only been at this for a month and already she’s a threat. What will she be like in another month? A year?”

“What else do you want me to do?” Walters asked, pinching her nose as she tried to keep from shouting at these idiots. “I’ve applied pressure on the other guilds and storefronts in Harvardtown, I’ve blacklisted the cop that helped her take down Solomon, the dairy is going to find out soon that holstaur milk isn’t selling very well in the US, Jefferson’s father is about to get his business license suspended. I’m working on Chastity but she is one tough customer, I don’t know if I can stop her from doing…whatever it is she’s planning. Every government agency I could threaten or bribe is descending on Monsters like kittens on catnip. I even bought that old woman in the dungeon a new herd of cows just to compete with Longhat’s tits. Unless you untie my hands, this is as much as I can do.”

“We can’t wait any longer.” George sounded resigned, as if he hated to think of a world he couldn’t control. “The Protocol could start at any time. The survival of the entire world is at stake if we can’t regain control of the situation.”

“Which is why we are authorizing you to call in…Ms. All Night Long.” Walters wasn’t sure, but it sounded like Kyōsha shook her head. “That is such a vulgar name.”

“It’s what she likes to be called by,” Walters replied, secretly ecstatic being allowed to let loose her prized attack dog. All Night Long would have Jefferson wrapped up and delivered with a bow on top in less than a jiffy. “Better all around we be open with each other anyway. I think all this code name nonsense is worth two queefs.”

Grumbles and growls followed, but Walters didn’t care. She was already leaving, her assistant trailing behind as best as she could follow.

“Call up All Night,” Walters told Lily once outside in the corridor, marching back to the elevator.

Lily did so and handed the phone to Walters, the line picking up when they got before the Otis doors closed.

“Hey, sexy! Is this a business call, or looking for a fine serving of booty?”

Walters rolled her eyes, even as she grinned. Ms. All Night Long was many things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. “I’ve got a job. I need you to take care of Jefferson.”

“Finally. I told you the Council would cave eventually. You owe me dinner.”

“Do this in a week and I’ll buy you a new bracelet.” Walters hung up, passing the phone to Lily as they stepped into the parking structure under the building.

On the outside, Walters’ car resembled a normal white SUV with tinted windows. Inside, the vehicle was custom and had more in common with a limo. The entire back separated from the front by a window spotlighted a single built-in lounge chair. This powerful executive of the largest clandestine power behind the guilds in the United States made no excuses, she had more money than Hollywood producers and the commute to her estate was two hours. If she had to spend so much time being driven around, at the very least she would do it comfortably.

Peta, Mandy’s driver, dressed in a leather chauffeur’s outfit tailored finely enough the curvy girl would pop a seam if she bent over too quickly. Her blank face under the hat matched the outfit, opening the back door as the two women approached. When Mandy and Lily were inside, the silent driver slid inside the front and started the engine, pulling out of the lot.

“I think I will kill Cuomo,” Walters mused, booting up her computer on the side panel and glancing over the intelligence she had on the loser. “I could be home right now instead of stuck in Boston for another hour. This town stinks like crotch rot, why would I ever want to spend any time here?”

Lily didn’t say anything because silence was safe. Unless she was ordered, speaking either brought her pain or made her forget, as per her Binding Contract. This wasn’t the first time Lily heard Walters rant, which meant she was only too aware what was about to happen. Walters vented her frustrations in only one fashion.

“Now, get back to what you were doing before we drove all the way back to Boston,” Walters said, hiking her skirt up and shuffling her fat to expose wet nakedness to the back of the vehicle.

“I…”

“Do it, that’s an order.”

Peta kept the divider window up in the front, but she heard the order. She’d gotten her own set of orders in the past and now she thanked whatever God would still listen that the devil in the back of the SUV found a new toy to play with. Three months ago, Peta had been the one in the back. Ignoring the sounds behind her, Peta focused on the road and hoped the decrepit Hutt would lose interest and find a new toy soon. Lily wouldn’t last very long.

After all, lot of desperate girls in Boston are willing to make bad choices.