Recover…

I headed home. And got the shakes halfway there and had to pull over. I kept seeing that fucking knife in my face, his smile and the knife coming at me. Jesus, I’d nearly died. To save some embezzling bitch who’d gotten herself in trouble…Fuck, but she’d been helpless…

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Kianna and Diamond were at work. Kat was, according to her text, sleeping over with a sergeant--I really needed to buy the no STD upgrade for 5 credits…Asa…

Not yet. I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t want to interfere with her relationship.

I did want to interfere, but I’d told myself I wouldn’t.

Fuck, I needed a distraction. I turned my attention inward. Three credits, no, I would save those up. But the five cosmetic options. Maybe some retail therapy would help? I’d basically ignored the cosmetic options before, but now…I took a look.

Lots of cock options. Like, so fucking many cock options. Jesus, Christ, I didn’t consider myself vanilla, but I didn’t even want to think about what would happen with a horse cock.

Helpful Hint: There are cosmetic modifications to targets which would allow them to take phalluses of extraordinary size.

No, thank you, not even with the ‘cock swap’ feature on all of them, which meant those wouldn’t be permanent (and a good thing to, horse dick wouldn’t fit in my pants).

That was just a waste of points at this moment. Even if these were limited to cosmetic functions. I hoped there was something like shapeshifter, but if so, it was hidden. Most of them were pointless, ‘change you hair color to anything, without people noticing that it has changed.’ Same for eyes, or even skin color.

Then there were a lot of more physical ones. Those ranged from Muscle Bound God, to Femboy, with the latter being ten times the cost of the former…it was interesting that the app even included it as an option, if whoever was setting the pricing hated it that much. That was the sort of thing I expected from a company, or team, compromising on options, but here it was clearly only one entity I was communicating with.

Regardless, none of them came with any actual changes to my general physical abilities, those traits were all ‘locked by the Editors.’

I was just getting frustrated and considering blowing all five credit on letting me change my hair color at will, when I spotted it.

Lock In Those Gains:
Set current physical capabilities to be the minimum your body is capable of. Additional exercise may improve condition, but is not required to maintain it.

I was spending more time than I cared to in the gym, especially as 30 approached. Cutting that out would open up time in my schedule, which was fucking packed. And look at that, 5 credits.

I took it.

The purchase unlocked a set of higher tier cosmetic upgrades…but to be honest, I got frustrated looking at those after the tenth variety of ‘this is the dick of some magic creature you’ve never heard of, want to replace your own, perfectly functional dick with this one? You’ll have to spend more points to make it able to fuck anyone from this planet!’

No thank you.

Just doing something had helped me calm down. I was able to make it the rest of the way home without getting the shakes again.

As I walked into my house, I tried to figure out why this was rattling me so much. I’d been so stressed I hadn’t managed to get any points with Frannie and the Penelope points had been self-defense and instinct, not anything thought through. I’d been hurt before, I’d been attacked before. I’d been stabbed once, actually stabbed, not these little grazes. Fuck, even Kianna had technically injured me more than Zsasz had. That scar she'd given me had taken almost fifteen stitches, both his cuts had been less than five each.

After a moment, I realized what it was. No one had ever deliberately set out to kill me before. Like I said, I’d been stabbed in the leg, but I’d been chasing a mugger and he hadn’t wanted to get caught. He left his knife in my leg and kept going. I’d been shot at a few times in similar circumstances, but again, the men had wanted to get away, not actually kill me. I’d broken up quite a few fights where I could have died if something had gone wrong, but they weren’t trying to kill me, they were trying to kill the other guy and I was just in the way. Or everyone’s least favorite call, the domestic, occasionally ended with people attacking you, but again, it wasn’t about you, it was about protecting their family, or stopping you from taking away their punching bag, or whatever.

Zsasz had wanted to **** me. Still did.

In the end, I didn’t contact Asa. Instead I called my parents like I was a fucking child. I chatted with mom, then asked to talk to my father. He’d worked the GCPD when I was young, then left as things got worse and worse. He worked private security, until he got his leg smashed in a robbery. The company tried to cheat him, but a legal aid lawyer, and maybe some old friends from the GCPD dealt with that. He got his retirement and disability and he and mom got out of town.

I’d just started with the GCPD, sure I could succeed where he failed. I’d been an arrogant teenage twit. But we’d gotten over it.

“What’s wrong, boy?” he asked, blunt as always.

“I almost died today.”

“How?”

“Zsasz tried to stab me. Got him first. He’s still alive though. Think he might hold a grudge.”

And the most moral man I knew said what I didn’t expect. “If it’s really you or him, be sure it’s him.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

“How close was it?”

“Close. I’m fine.”

“Good,” there was a long moment, then he spoke slowly. “Be smarter than the criminals.”

I remembered his old saying. “Faster than their knives.”

“And duck if they shoot.”

“Because you need to come home at the end of your shift.”

“Go home, son,” it was the closest he could come to ‘I love you.’

“Love you too, dad.”

He snorted and hung up on me.

I straightened. Zsasz needed to die, but I apparently couldn’t do it, both literally and because it would have terrible consequences for some reason. The only people who could kill folks in Arkham were…the inmates.

I’d been just saying to myself that I was quite popular with the inmates thanks to my improvements of the library…and as the app itself had just told me, Zsasz wasn’t. My ****, or departure would make the lives of many bad people worse. Whereas Zsasz’s **** would make everyone else’s lives better. It was just a matter of making that clear to people. The fact that the library would be closed today and I wouldn’t be there to let folks check things out would start it, as would the story the girl told, but it might need a push.

But I had two days off…which was sort of a problem, since almost everything I needed to do was inside, excluding the package of files Frannie had slipped me.

Frannie’s files on Andre were pretty thorough, as far as I could tell going through them. A big chunk of it, I’d already known. Andre Jackson, bastard son of Jackson Ltd. Chairman and primary owner Liam Jackson. His father gave him the family name and a trust fund that had started at about ten million dollars when he was born and had been properly invested. He’d spent it down quite a bit when he gained control at 18, but it still had about twelve million. Married to Diamond Jackson, a senior executive at Gotham Insurance.

He’d joined the GCPD after college and a stint at his father’s company that hadn’t gone well. Diamond had also worked there, doing quite well, and leveraging that to a promotion to Gotham Insurance, where she’d remained ever since.

They had two children Liam, named for his grandfather, was 17, but had skipped a year and so was off to college with his sister, Romy, a local cheerleader. Both were going to Gotham University.

I glanced at a picture of Romy and felt my stupid dick jump.

But that was a waste of a harem slot and would hurt Diamond, even if it made me hard as all fuck.

He and Diamond had been together since college, temporarily separating when Andre got caught having an affair, but Diamond had been pregnant with their first child, so they got back together. Liam followed quickly, then there were repeated affairs, but no separation, until they came to this ‘open relationship’ stage. His police career was fine. The only unusual thing was his rapid promotion off the street, but that was just due to his family connections. That made me fucking bitter, he was off the beat in two months, I was still there after ten years, but that wasn’t his fault. She’d actually found an email from a senior Jackson LTD executive stating how inappropriate it was that a Jackson, even a bastard one, was working the street, no sign of his involvement.

No actual corruption beyond that necessary to survive in the GCPD. He dropped cases when he was ordered to and didn’t go looking for trouble, but had a perfectly respectable closure rate and didn’t visibly take any bribes. Given his long career, that meant he was probably one of the ‘Clean Men.’ Those lucky bastards who were only given the jobs where corruption wasn’t needed…

Goddammit. He was a bad husband and a not-so-great man, but he wasn’t corrupt, or a murderer, or a ****, or anything else that would justify destroying him. Fuck. I’d actually have to talk to him like I was some sort of grown-up.

Finally, I let everything go, locked my door, curled up in my bed and screamed into a pillow until I actually felt better.

Then I got up and went looking through my emails. Asa had been inviting me to help her out with stuff. I looked and, yes, there was a shoot tomorrow. I agreed to help her. Hopefully Andre would be there. If not, well, given how possessive he was being, if I gave her something to tell him, then he might come talk to me…and give me an excuse.

For today, I spent a bit of time looking up Arkham’s formal leadership structures on the off-chance they and not some sort of curse or supervillain where behind the rules Frannie had laid out. Funded by the city and private donations, it had once also provided more standard psychiatric treatment, but after it started housing supervillains that basically stopped. It’s leadership was a Board of Trustees, made up of 13 members. I got all excited by the number and the alleged mystical significance of it, but the actual members were basically Gotham old money royalty. No way those guys would be involved in anything occult. The only big name I knew missing was Wayne, but that might have been because the average age of the board members had to be 70, or because he was a party boy and they were all deeply serious people.

None of the Jacksons were there either. I mentioned it in passing to Diamond later and she made a joke about it being racism, but apparently even after four generations of success in Gotham, the Jacksons were still ‘New Money.’ At least to the ‘Old Money’ who’d made their fortunes back at the founding, or before. In the end, I shrugged it off, expecting that once I got Alyce on a leash, I’d learn more. That was a mistake, but I think, an understandable one.

Well, that had gotten me nowhere. I just went for a walk. I did swing by the local VDS site and spotted some college students clearing the ground and being hassled by a local meth-fiend. Usually he didn’t bother anyone, since everyone knew who he was and a lot of cops lived in this neighborhood.

I wandered over. The idiot was pretending to be local mafia. They ‘ran’ this neighborhood as much as anyone did, but were almost entirely encompassed by the Penguin’s territory and were his bitch as much as an independent gang. They had a tiny connection to Black Mask and a lot of outside connections, so they weren’t entirely subordinate, but it was close.

I moved up behind him and interrupted. “Well, maybe these good citizens should negotiate the protection fee directly with the Don.”

The college students suddenly looked a lot more nervous, and didn’t even notice how panicked the addict looked.

“No, no, no,” he said, “uh, you can handle it!” he bailed instantly.

I rolled my eyes and glanced at the kids. “FYI, the actual mafia types around her all wear nice suits and aren’t trying to extort you for your pocket money. They’d approach you talking about security for your project.”

One of them, bolder than the rest looked at me. “Like you’re doing now?”

“You see any suit? Also, when I said you, I meant whoever’s running the project. The only way actual workers get approached is if someone isn’t paying and the workers need to be convinced not to show up until it’s resolved. This was my good deed of the day. Have fun kids.”

I walked away, feeling old. Then headed home. I sent Diamond an email saying that this time, she should keep her fantasies only for herself and choose the one she thought I would enjoy the most and let me know what, where and when.