The Bowl'N Bones

"Good... Just don't get careless. I don't think she's the kind that you want to underestimate," Lisa finished, moving back to the stall and closing it behind her. Chris proceeded out the door and immediately met Mundwoon outside, with her butt poked out towards him as she leaned forward.

Hearing his voice, she turned around and smiled devilishly, raising one finger. "You left this on the table when you went to the restroom! That's dangerous! Someone could come along and take it... someone less trustworthy than me. You can trust me, though, so I'm giving it back to you now," she laughed, handing back his PET. "Your navi and SP are both in there. Seems like the bowling strip game is over... That sounds like it would have been fun. I should have seen if SellSoul could join... But that would have made the player numbers uneven."

While the two conversed, it seemed as though Simon and Phyra had gotten into an argument, very likely over what TriangleMan had been seen doing to Trace. "I can't even understand what you're saying, you silly man! If Lisa is here, your words come out and they bounce against my genius brain! Can't you get with the program and learn the same language as the rest of us, huh?" she griped, crossing her arms defiantly. "What TriangleMan was doing was a simple enforcement of the rules, I can't help it if your navi is too much of a baby to go along with what she agreed to. One's word should be as good as gold! That's a code to live by, Simon-san!" On second glance, he didn't seem to be arguing at all; he was just holding his head. He threw out both hands and repeated himself, but she took it as another opposition and tilted her head. "What are you saying? I can't even tell!"

No one could know what exactly he was trying to say until Lisa finished up on the potty... Electra turned to Chris and Mundwoon and grinned. "A little post-game drama. I think that Phyra's gotten a little too buzzed and is thinking that Simon here is mad about what her navi did. Methinks someone's got a guilty conscious," she laughed; she was still in only her underwear and seated upon one of the pool tables. Her talking about other people's motivations and guilty consciences must hold the unmistakable, bitter taste of irony for Chris, who knew what she'd really done. "Say, Chris... there really must be something special about that SP of yours, if she was willing to kiss TaxidermyMan. There's no chance you'd be willing to lend her to me for a night so that I can ask her a few questions about the experience, is there? It would be a tremendous benefit to my research, I kid you not!" She tilted her head to that same past-45 degree angle, which seemed especially scary with all of her other clothes off.

Wodin watched, leaning on one fist. He seemed to be the only person paying attention to the two of them now, as Mundwoon had gone off to do something else, undoubtedly with the intention of currying Chris's favor further.
Chris nodded and smiled at Mundwoon as she returned his PET, Nitro and Tina safely inside. "Thanks," he said. "I guess I left for the bathroom a little quickly and left it behind. That really was some display, Tina," he addressed his SP. "What possessed you to do it?"

Tina shrugged a bit. "What can I say? The man's got a certain animal magnetism."

"You sure?" Nitro said. "Because honestly, I think he's got about as much "animal magnetism" as that squirrel we saw plastered on the road near our bus stop."

Chris's face went a little green, but he shrugged it off, coming up with a comeback on Tina's behalf. "As I remember, Nitro, you're the one who's got a thing for squirrels."

Nitro pondered the somewhat cryptic statement, then recollection dawned on him. "No fair, you're the one who made me put on the stupid GMO!"

"You have a squirrel GMO?" Tina asked. Despite being partially built off of it, Tina had no knowledge of Nitro's more feminine form.

"Uh... I'll tell you later," Nitro said.

Meanwhile, Chris listened to Electra's explanation of Phyra and Simon's argument, and though he felt the irony of the statement, it didn't explain much. "Mind filling me in?" He asked the programs in the PET.

"TriangleMan literally cut Trace's clothes off," Nitro explained.

"Oh..." Chris said. Part of him wished he could've seen that, even though he had an eyeful of Electra sitting right in front of him. Perhaps he'd lost interest once he discovered she was basically an accessory to Navislaughter, maybe he'd just become acclimated to her underwear. Chris shook his head as Electra asked to "borrow" Tina. "Sorry, not tonight," He said. "I'm planning on upgrading her at home once things wrap up here. Maybe another time." Like when Hell freezes over, Chris added in his mind.
((I hate retyping modposts that are eaten by my phone browser crashing, sorry if its not as good as it otherwise would have been))

"It's a no go? Poop. That's scientific advancement for you: so often stymied by the stingy," Electra sighed, shaking her head sadly. "We'll take a raincheck, for now. Patience is a virtue of mine."

Lisa returned from the bathroom, standing nearby Chris. She remained quiet for a moment, then noticed the heated argument going on. Before she could lend a hand by translating for Simon otherwise distracting Phyra, Ferris burst in through the double doors.

"Great work, boyo! I see a pint o' ale in three hands, a lady in red knickers, and you've got a gal on either arm! You throw quite a party, that's what I gather," Ferris chuckled, lighting up a cigar inside his own bowling alley. "Unfortunate as it is, I gotta close up the ol' Bowl N' Bones fer tonight. Gotta nother party early tomorrow and these tall workin stiffs gotta get this place spick and span!" Of course, that lie didn't hold a lot of water, given that the place looked like a mess and likely looked what way most of the time.

"Now, yer lookin' mighty winsome in that red, Electra, but ye also look a tad buzzed, if'n you don't mind my sayin'. Why don't ye let me and Mundwoon's jackets help you out to my car and I'll bring ye home?" he offered. While that sounded cordial, the two guys quickly grabbed her up by each arm and started dragging her away.

"Ferris? What are you doing, exactly?! Let go!" she snapped, growing gradually more visibly upset with the goons dragging her. "What about my damn car?!"

"I'll send it to ye if I remem'er to buy stamps!" he called out to her, clapping his knee and guffawing at his own joke. "Oh, well now! How bout ya'll clear outta me alley? Cept ye, Chris an' Lisa. Ye stay."

Everyone, with an air of confusion, nodded to him and started getting ready to leave. "By the by, Simon, I got a gift for ye! An' ye can all expect a newsletter, I promise!"

"... My genius brain comprehends none of this. If there was some sort of conspiracy going on, you should have included me! I feel hurt," Phyra complained, pressing both hands to the breast of her turtleneck sweater.

"I'm just as confused, but really, it's about time I got home regardless. I'm worried about the dogs," Wodin agreed, standing up with some effort. "Thank you, Chris, Ferris. It was fun."

Simon said something similar, then departed with the others. Lisa sighed as she watched him go out. "He and Trace don't have any idea we just solved their big mystery," she mentioned.

"I'll give em the scoop later. For now, let's talk cash. I promised ye 80 faction points, didn't I? Well, that was for Nitro's work; as I live and breath, ye both worked plenty hard. So I'm upping it to 100, plus another 15 for a job well done. Furthermore, I'm givin'ya both 3000z to reward ya for yer time and outta the goodness o' me soul," he finished. Lisa nodded, but apparently none of that fulfilled the prize she was actually looking for. "And I'll see if we can't get ye some more recognition with the Teksqp, both o' ye. Just uh... Still don't try to talk to KevlarMan about it... Ain't nobody talk cordial with that'un, me'n Kismet learned that firsthand."

((Gained 115 Faction Points + 3000z))

"Good, thank you," Lisa responded. She watched Mundwoon bring an ale around for Ferris and raised a finger to signal she wanted one as well.

Ferris sat down and sprawled both arms to his side; he looked happy and relaxed, despite having presumably just dug through four large, private, mafia-owned houses. "Well, boyo? The show's over. Got anythin' else ye wanna know before we to our separate ways?" he inquired, then took a big puff of his cigar.
Chris gave a slight sigh of relief as Ferris burst in. As composed as he was acting, the evening was starting to wear on him a bit. As Electra was dragged out (without allowing her to retrieve her clothes, he noted), and everyone else filed out, he waved and bid them farewell, and sat down with Ferris and Lisa.

His eyes boggled slightly at the admittedly large amount of rewards Ferris gave them. "Wow, thanks," he said with a grin. "That's really generous of you." He gave a slight chuckle. "Maybe I should actually start spending some of my faction points, huh?" He reclined in his seat a bit, chuckling. He'd been recieving his faction points a little bit at a time, so he hardly noticed them piling up. Now that'd he'd been given a whole pile at once, he realized just how many he'd gotten since he started working for the Mafia.

He waved his hand a bit as everyone ordered their drinks, to signal he didn't want anything. He wasn't planning on sticking around for much longer, and that aside, he wasn't a drinker anyway. He was a bit thankful that Electra's game hadn't come to pass, or he might have ended up drunk off his ass.

"No, I think I'm good, Nitro says he was given a pretty decent scoop on what happened between Electra, Shok, and the mime." He turned to Lisa. "I am a bit curious, though, where'd you learn to speak Simon's language? Don't take this the wrong way, but you didn't really strike me as the bilingual type."
"It's no coincidence that yer earnin' so many, lad. When some'un goes above 'n beyond to the cause of our organizashen, tis only logical that we load em up, keep em fat and happy," Ferris continued, talking through his cigar. "Hell, I was beginnin' to wonder whether the Teksqp were good fer anythin' but siphonin' members from our other families, but ye've turned that all around."

Lisa looked mildly offput by both Ferris' implication and Chris' question. "I'm still in college and I've already studied a lot of foreign languages. They're practical for any business you go into, Mafia included," she explained. "Language has gotten pretty global, but every now and then you still run into somebody who's got a fondness for an old language. Usually nationalists. There's an NP officer that still uses the accent, we've run into her once or twice, but not like Simon: he's still on the whole language."

"Yepper, he's a holdout, that 'un. He was also a great Teksqp asset, at the time. Shame now, knowin' all the bad blood between us wasn't his fault," Ferris admitted, tapping off his cigar into a nearby ashtray. "One o' the most competent assassins I recall!"

"Imprisonment was still the right call for the navi, though," Lisa pitched in. "Whether it's her fault or not, she's a psychotic killer now. I don't know if we're ever going to be able to get her back to normal..."

"It woulda been the right call, assumin' anyone we ordered inta that prison ever stayed there," Ferris chuckled, causing Lisa to scowl again.
"Well, we know what the cause of her going nuts is, right?" Nitro chimed in from the PET in Chris's pocket. Chris took it out and placed it on the table, and Nitro's diminutive hologram popped out of the projector and stood on the table. "The way I see it, we get someone to look into these Blessers, figure out what makes them tick, then come back and apply it to our mime friend. Shok can't be the only psychiatrist on the NetMafia payroll, right?"

"Nitro's got a point," Chris agreed. "And as for the prison, maybe we need more people there to guard the place. I mean, I kinda got the feeling that Jail was the only one there when we... uh... visited the place. Sorry about that whole fiasco, by the way," Chris added, more to Lisa than Ferris.
"Yeah, but the Blessers be right dangerous to deal with navi t' navi. Shok's power was probably evident to ye and I've heard from the tele that the rest of the group is dangerous as well. Unless Electra spills some more operator names to us, we could be outta luck pursuin' this eneh further," Ferris sighed, waving one hand dismissively. "We'll do what we can, but the prospects as they stand are not good, less we get a better handlin' of the situation with them nutty Blessers..."

"As for prison security, what we probably ought to do is just move the few criminals still held there to the regular holding facility. We thought it would be a good idea to segregate them, but when they'd been there a while, interest was lost, a few disappeared or deleted themselves, and nobody new came in... After a while, Jailbird was the only one who still wanted to be a guard there. Besides Mime, we really only have a few other prisoners held there," Lisa explained, feeling more talkative now that somebody else understood the difficulties of keeping guard over the net's most dangerous psychos with just one woman.

"Organizational deficiencies, eh? I believe it! Ye both raise a good point and it sounds like we can do somethin about it. Headaches like these are what makes Head Family work aggravatin sometimes," he laughed, scratching at his hair and seeming maybe a little more irritated than he let on.

"But it's good to address them," Kismet offered from the speaker of his PET. "I think we've made a lot of progress towards defusing the whole mime situation."

"That we 'ave, that we 'ave," Ferris agreed, puffing out another smoke ring. "Welp, I better go cart Electra off. You kids want anythin' before I take off?"

"No thanks... I think we've both had enough ale and nachos," Lisa sighed, although, in fact, neither of them had had any real ale, nor any nachos, real or otherwise.

"No such thing!" he guffawed, waving as he got up to walk for the door. "Nother time, Kids!"

"Nah, I think I'm good too," Chris said, standing up and stretching a bit, scooping up his PET. He flipped it open as Nitro vanished again, and spoke to the programs within. "Hey, when's the next bus coming?"

"The next bus should be there in about... twenty minutes," Tina replied.

"Alright, thanks." He shut the device again and stowed it away, turning to Ferris. "Hey, going back to your comment about going above and beyond the call of duty, Mundwoon was a pretty big help tonight," Chris said, making good on his earlier promise to the snack girl. He then turned to Lisa. "And Lisa, it was good to finally meet you, and see Jail again. I'll be looking forward to seeing you two again soon." With a nod to both of the operators, Chris exited the bowling alley, and walked down across the parking lot to the nearby bus stop, awaiting his ride home after a long night. When it arrived, he climbed on, and departed.
((I will put up a big list of FXP whenever I get to my PC, tabs on phone are annoying))
((Nitro gets 17 Jailbird FXP, 8 Kismet FXP, 8 TaxidermyMan FXP, 9 Shok FXP, 5 Trace FXP, 5 TriangleMan FXP, and 10 SellSoul FXP))