Twist: Cage him. Then fire him straight to the other end of SL, and file a report with Linden Lab to get him barred inworld. Come on. Get your gun out.
They drew their weapons and pushed through the dancers toward the advancing AV, and suddenly Twist stopped dead.
Twist: Oh, shit!
Chas: What is it?
Twist: I’m gonna crash.
Chas: Goddamnit, Twist, you pick your moments!
But Twist was already gone, in a twinkle of fading sparkles. Chas turned around to face Tommy Tattoo, gun swinging unsteadily in his direction. He fumbled to get into Mouselook. But before he could, Tommy took off. Lifting right up over his head. And as Chas turned, he saw him landing on the stage, next to one of the dancers. He immediately activated some dance animation and began circling her, gyrating his hips lewdly. Chas managed finally to get himself into Mouselook. A small gunsight appeared in the centre of his screen, and it immediately became apparent to him that lining it up with a moving target was a lot more difficult than it sounded. He swung left to right, overreacting, then under-reacting, until finally the tattooed man was in his sights. He pulled the trigger and somehow managed to shoot the dancer.
She let out a startled yell, and great clouds of black smoke started issuing from the hole that Chas had just shot through her middle, very quickly enveloping her entirely. He watched in horror as she started running about the stage, the smoke following her everywhere she went. Tommy Tattoo put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter.
Chas was aware of a figure materialising at his side. He turned to find a young woman standing there. She had long, dark hair, and an elfin face with rich, chocolate brown eyes which she fixed on him with a look of patent disbelief. Her name tag revealed her to be Sinful Sensations Dancer Doobie Littlething. Except that she wasn’t dressed like a dancer. She wore a low-cut grey camouflage top and shorts, a pistol strapped to her thigh, an equipment belt laden with tools and a water flask, and armoured pads protecting her hips and shins.
Doobie: Did you do that?
Chas: Do what?
Doobie: Shoot the dancer.
Chas was getting used to blushing by now.
Chas: It was an accident.
She looked at his tag.
Doobie: Private detective, huh? Are you with the Twist agency?
He nodded.
Doobie: Where’s Twist?
Chas: Crashed.
Doobie: Fucking useless!
For some reason Chas was shocked by her language. But she was already on the move. Striding toward the stage. She sprang up in a forward somersault, and landed right next to the tattooed troublemaker, her weapon drawn. And some dissociated part of Chas thought how incredibly attractive she looked: her hair swept back from her face, a slash of crimson cupid for her mouth, the tiny heart-shaped birthmark high on her cheek next to her right eye. He even noticed the streaks of red in her dark hair.
The dancer was still running around the stage, bleeding smoke. No one was dancing any more. The music had stopped, and everyone stood in silence waiting to see what would happen next.
Tommy Tattoo turned toward Doobie and leered at her.
Tommy: Orbit, you bitch!
A sprinkle of lights appeared and disappeared. But Doobie remained where she was, her handgun held up next to her head, pointed at the ceiling.
Tattoo: WTF?
Doobie: I’m shielded, shit-for-brains! Prepare to crash and burn in hell!
Her handgun was suddenly extended at arm’s length, pointed straight at Tommy, and Chas knew that she had gone into Mouselook. But before she could fire, Tommy Tattoo vanished in a flash of light.
Doobie: Shit!
And she too, vanished, leaving the stage empty, apart from the smoking dancer. Chas barely had time to resurrect his sense of guilt before an offer appeared on his screen. Doobie Littlething invites Chas Chesnokov to join her in Crack Town. He accepted, and in a whoosh his screen went black, before he found himself dropping to his knees on the decaying wooden porch of a grim derelict brick building in the heart of a dark, oppressive cityscape. He stood up and looked around. This condemned building had been fenced off. But one section of the fence had been broken down and the door of the building ripped open.
He was in a long, gloomy street. Immediately opposite, a police patrol car with flashing lights was drawn up in the entrance to a covered parking lot that seemed to be occupied by down-and-outs and prostitutes. A uniformed officer stood by a fluttering black and yellow Crime Scene tape, and watched him with casual indifference. Chas could hear static and a dispatcher’s voice coming across the police radio.
Further down the street, beneath a poster of a Rottweiler bearing the logo make my day, an AV sprawled in the street in a pool of fresh blood. A gun lay next to his head. A hooker stood, arms folded, outside the doors of the Carnal City Police Department. Some youths sat on a wall, dangling their legs, indulging in idle conversation. But there was no sign of Doobie or Tattoo Tommy.
Chas turned back to the derelict building and peered apprehensively inside before taking a few tentative steps into the semi-darkness.
To his left, a tattered settee and two old armchairs were gathered around a 1950s TV set. An old packing case served as a table. The space was littered with what Chas now recognised to be poseballs. They were everywhere in SL. Pink for females, blue for males. A right-click on a poseball attached you to it, and your AV would be animated by its script to do almost anything. Sit, chat, have sex, play a piano. And so much in SL seemed sex-oriented. Give blow job. Receive blow job. Wallfuck. Two poseballs that said Love seemed somehow incongruous. On the wall hung a painting of Jesus dressed as pirate.
The room to his left was a bathroom. Above the bath were two poseballs. Drowned and DrowningHold. Pornographic posters covered brick walls.
The next room along the corridor was a filthy kitchen with cockroaches running around the floor. Off to the left, a room with a mattress. Rats scuttled about the place, disturbing the drifts of litter that had accumulated there.
At the end of the corridor, Chas emerged into the gloom of a stretch of waste ground, where a pile of burning tires belched oily black smoke into the night sky. A hobo wrapped up in old newspapers huddled nearby for warmth. Graffiti on the wall opposite read, Religion is not the opium of the masses. Opium is.
Chas climbed a ramp to the street above. Next to a scarred blue tenement door opposite, a sign advertised apartments for rent. And he wondered who in their right minds would want to rent an apartment in a place like this. It was like the worst nightmare of social urban decay. In an alleyway further down the street, two poseballs against a colourfully graffitied wall read, Strangle and Strangled.
He turned left and crossed a bridge over a stream of chemical green sludge. He could hear the sound of distant traffic flashing past on the freeway, the constant wail of a police siren, before a shadow flashed across his screen. A startling explosion of light sent multicoloured particles flying in every direction. When they cleared, Tommy Tattoo was crouched in front of him in the middle of the road, a maniacal grin on his face. He stood up and seemed to tower over Chas as he raised his axe high above his head. Chas was rooted to the spot by fear, even though he was nearly certain that this avatar could do him no damage. All the same, he fumbled and clicked on the hud to activate his handgun. But too late. The axe was descending on him. No time to move, or to TP out.