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Save Point: The Disappeared

Field Reassignment, Azatlan City

"So if this is the 'initiation' into the squad, how do you initiate the guys?" Cleo enquires with interest as she is screwed roughly from several different angles.

"We make them buy us all a drink," say the squad leader cheerfully.

Cleo fights down a brief but dangerous flicker of anger, seamlessly smiles instead, and points out, "Well, this is way more fun. And cheaper. And all your balls are in handy squishing range."

The squad leader takes the hint and they're a little less reckless for the next half-hour or so until everyone is tired. She licks herself off and yawns in a magnificent display of teeth.

"Well, how about we go and I buy you boys that drink? You're all looking kind of a little worn out. The night's still young and I am feeling fine!"

It has to be said that she's far more malicious when she's being helpful than when she's just plain angry. Professional combatants complain with the determination of the true soldier, as she cruelly ropes them into it with unjust implications of every kind should they fail to keep up, but they follow her and that's what it takes.

~*~

The music is loud and throbbing and she keeps getting jostled around by the other partygoers. A full half of them are wearing transparent digital visors displaying rainbow patterns, self-evolving and self-propagating psychedelic information structures that enhance the effects of whatever it is they happen to be dropping tonight. They say 'don't be daft, start with half' but for this it's not in fact an option to begin with, even if she was feeling sensible.

"The label on the bottle says 'you are considered to have given voluntary consent for any sex acts occurring within six hours following opening tab and drinking the product.' Are you serious!?"

"It reduces your intelligence and removes your inhibitions. It also affects memory. You couldn't possibly give consent even if you wanted to once you've drunk something like this."

"Then why in hell would I want to drink it?"

"It's awesome. There's something deeply fulfilling and rewarding about being open and accepting towards any sort of sexual act. You can't think your way out of it, say no. And it makes you forget any bad sexual memories you have, takes away that layer of repression so its purely sensual."

She can only make out about half the words, but it's enough to reconstruct the rest. The thought of forgetting Mitzi, how she looked after she was torn up, her body eaten... even if it's only for one night, that's what sells her on it. It's haunted her ever since, like a darkness inside.

She pulls back on the tab and a flow of self-contained vapor, somehow not dispersing, spills out into the air. She has to duck slightly to get her muzzle underneath and sort of breathe-swallow, as something slick and cool and slightly greasy coats the insides of her mouth and throat.

Immediately she feels a fire inside instead, a loving and lovable warmth.

"What's this stuff called again?"

"Blue Myst."

~*~

The party would be legend if they could remember any of it. Something rough on the memory when mixed with alcohol seems to have been involved at the start, and no amount of combat augmentation can recover memories that were never laid down after the first four minutes.

Cleo wakes up in straw filled packing boxes somewhere in an industrial area. Since there are no screams, nothing is on fire and no law enforcement personnel are present, she is willing to qualify it as a success. Today is leave, at least for her, so she wanders along the streets in the morning light in a sort of gloriously dazed brightness where everything has sharp edges until she starts to feel better.

Once she's relieved the pressure in her over-used loins by pissing into a drainage gutter, she scrapes together the ability to think more clearly, tidies up her hair into a bundle and manages eventually to recognize where exactly she is in the city. She still has the leather billfold she uses instead of a purse and public transport is good enough at this hour to get her home.

She plans to visit her father, but when she gets to the house, there's no sign of him. She takes a long shower, getting her fingers deep into all her cracks in a manner that really isn't justified as necessary for cleaning, and takes her time getting changed, but when there's no sign of him at all she starts to get worried.

Everything is very tidy. There is no sign of a struggle. There is no evidence that he ever had any breakfast, no dishes in the sink. He's just plain gone.

Eventually she gets concerned enough, after pursuing all avenues, to contact 'certain persons' whom she knows have a vested interest. Some of them, in fact, are quite probably supposed to be keeping an eye on him, basically spying, in fact. They especially enjoy doing this when she's visiting and so it doesn't take her long to find a number, scrawled on a piece of paper by some ambitious junior agent who didn't realize just how far he was out of his league when he tried to get her interested.

Applying pressure eventually leads to the revelation that yes, in fact her father has now been missing since the night before last and various agencies are now going into a minor tizzy at his impossible absence. They have not bothered to tell her this already, with the supposed excuse that they couldn't find her while she was off partying with her new squad-mates.

The fact that this is blatantly a lie and they could have located her at any time the previous day in a well-defined, efficiently secured military location says it all. Through a combination of general paranoia and mediocre spying and lying, they have deliberately left her out of the loop either to see what she would do or in the belief that she might be involved.

Since she is now actually talking to them about exactly this issue, she points out what they're thinking, why it makes no sense and what idiots they are in a rigorously polite manner.

There is no sign of her father the next day either.

Because she already has personal acquaintance with all the evidence they have and more, and there's simply nothing to go on, she rejoins her squad at the end of the leave days and returns to her strange hybrid specialization of enhanced killing machine and part-time camp follower (the official designation is combat stress relief and diversionary entertainment). She ends up with her head on a lot of pillows, talking to all sorts of highly strung and very dangerous men and women, trying to make them feel better and keep them stable with all the grace of her body and all the consolations of her mind.

On leave days she investigates the house, which is now hers in her fathers absence, although she'd rather he was still here to live in it. She systematically investigates every corner, finding many small hidden things but no clues. Some unexpected objects have been moved, but they don't seem to relate to one another. Stuff out in the shed where he made her wooden sword has been displaced, leaving trails in the dust, but most of it is back where it originally was.

Lots of old technology is missing, but the neighbors confirm that he had a clean-up of some sort a short while before his absence and threw out the old stuff in favour of the new. All of the paperwork is still there in its folding case, including a letter from her mother in ideogram that she hasn't seen before, and the official inheritance papers that make her executor. The only small detail she can't quite understand is why the binoculars he kept under the table with the tree fern on it out in the lounge are missing.

For a brief while suspicion falls on her due to the convenient absence of memory associated with the initiation party, but there are enough witnesses, and indeed suspects, to track down the substance that was in use that night, and which she voluntarily took of her own free will to make things more exciting. Her whereabouts can be confirmed by a number of sexual partners to whom she put up little or no resistance under the charming haze of the drug, rendered all pliable and purring by her own desire.

Eventually it becomes apparent that her father isn't coming back, but the law still states that she doesn't inherit until some ridiculous symbolic length of time has passed. As the inheritor she gets to keep the use of the house, living in it as and when necessary, but she can't sell it. She rents it out to some old friends of the family who she knows won't trash the place and retains only her own room there, just because it's a handy space to keep her stuff.

Something about his absence has wearied her, however. The way they lied to her when he was gone. The way there's no-one left to talk to who understands what it is that she's really going on about due to a lifetime of shared reference. What happened to Mitzi was the violent, bloody face of their uncaring, but this is the more subtle side, a father simply gone, no action taken and no official response.

She starts to think that it might be time to find a different way of making a living.