No matter the time, the streets are noisy in Titan. The frantic hustle and bustle as people push past each other, clinging hard to everything they hold dear and valuable. People's fingers are sticky around here. Trash and discarded food has practically been melted into the pavement by the rain cycles. Underneath a table tucked in the corner of the street, one that usually hosts a butcher who presents his product, sits a messy haired boy with his head buried between his knees and his arms wrapped around his legs. His clothes are tattered, holes peppered like freckles on cloth. It's currently a winter cycle, he had read somewhere that it saves quite a lot of energy to lower the conditioning systems for a few months at a time. A motorcycle zooms through the center of the street, a shrill electronic sound booming from the engine as it zips right through, sending loose papers and trash into the sides of the street. A few moments later, with a flash of red and black lights, a C-Sec land-ship barrels through, nearly taking out of few civilians as they throw themselves out of the way. It's chilling siren disappears as it turns the corner, probably after the motorcycle. The boy lifts his head, taking a peak from between his knees. Despite the briefly hectic chase, it appears that people were still funneling through the street. He sprawls forward from under the table, his eyes darting from person to person, analyzing the mass of people. He might as well have dumped his fingers into honey, his fingers were so sticky. Things he was looking for: Yin, watches, gold bracelets, wireless phones. If it was cash, that was the least work, anything else he'd have to pawn off and accept that he'd be low-balled. The boy expertly scampered through the crowd, moving between people's legs and avoiding any boots to the head. He cut straight through, patting people down quickly and lifting anything he could. Just one clean cut through the crowd and he had managed to get enough Yin for a decent meal. The boy stuffed the bills into his pocket and shuffled into an empty looking ally. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had seen him and nearly trips over something prone in the ally. A man convulsing on a piece of cardboard. His spasms came and went every couple of seconds, a death grip around an injector. You see this happen sometimes, someone down on their luck, left with no options, wants to feel that familiar but now foreign emotion: happiness. So you shot happiness into your neck and roll the dice. Some get lucky enough to see another injector, some get luckier and die. The boy spies an overturned hat on the ground next to the man with a few crumpled up bills sitting in it. He leans down and grabs it, his eyes lingering on the man on the ground. Instead, he reaches for the injector. It takes both his hands to uncurl his fingers from around the injector, but he eventually manages to take it away. The boy leaves the Yin he had just lifted from the crowd in the man's hat along with what was already there. He drops the injector on the pavement and stomps on it a few times, the glass gives in against his weight and shatters, sending a viscous red liquid onto the pavement.
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"I'm not selling drugs to anyone whose just gonna put into some shit-for-brain's veins." Deckard flatly said. "My vote: we give it to Wayford's guy. The city flew by past them, their speed picking up a bit as Deckard pushed on a large looking lever. "I know we ain't exactly the good guys but I got standards for myself, you know. Deckard dramatically lifts his hands up in the air, letting the ship waver and start to spin off to the left towards a skyscraper, while shaking his head and sending locks of black hair everywhere. "Take over Dom. Immediately the ship re-corrected, leveling off and speeding forward again. "Send Dom the coordinates for the guy, I need something to eat. Anyone got extra smokes?
Momo and Mina expressed disinterest in his beliefs, which Kian actually favored, staring quietly into the holographic screen before him as other voices blared into his ears. Other voices came; Jane was willing to agree with him, but she wished to know his plans. Deckard full-on seemed to think Kian's method was more righteous, and that made the consensus clear. Of course, the question still stood: how did he know him?
It was a long story. One he didn't wish to regale to everyone, and not ever to its fullest extent. The topic of DOMINIC's death was one that couldn't be brought to light, even though internally he knew that the AI must have known the truth of his form. Mott was involved in all of it, from the beginning. And up until the conversion of the Cartel onto the corridors of the Colossus -- a key member in each of their moves. He had a lot of knowledge that Kian wanted, and for the Wraith-Broker, specifically hungering for a particular cell of information meant quite a big deal.
What they would acquire from Mott's mind would be far more valuable than the bank, or the drugs. He only... didn't know how to tell them what he intended to do. It was... betraying the supposedly righteous line he'd apparently been following.
So, he wouldn't tell Jane. Not until he did it. But he could allude to his plans, and how the two knew one another. That he could do.
"You can't kill him, Mina," he responded back. "There's something I need first. A way in which I'll need to handle him." The offer was... interesting enough, though. He wondered if the two tended to, casually, consider such a thing. They must have had past gripes of their own - things worth bloodying their hands over. Above all else, he understood that. He did.
"I... intend to acquire information from him." He would not elaborate on how - but it was a manner darker, and more callous, than any form of interrogation. A thing he'd conceptualized only in theory, to acquire the most information from one mind in the shortest stint of time. "After I do so, Dominic will throw him from the ship as it flies, and he'll crash hard against the cold steel of the Colossus. I know that might not be what you want to hear, but that's the plan I had in mind. Murder is a soft thing for a man like him. I won't feel regret."
Or so he tried to believe. It didn't really matter; he'd delved into the darker seminary of vengeance, fury, and reckless abandon of standards before. He always came out of them the same - equally committed, driven by the complexity of the human mind, and the mind of machines. At his core he never shifted, though his grimace may have become wider, and his expression may have become more laced with the cynicism of space.
"As for how I know him? Well . . . he was directly involved in the death of my family. All of them, Jane. All of them." An implication - for a thing she already knew. That included DOMINIC.
He didn't want to say more. His comms went silent, beginning with the ambience of non-speak and then to the sound of a system closed off. The Wraith fell back into his thoughts, and he wondered, hungrily... whether his plan would work, or if all his conceptualization all this time had been for nothing. Like an artist, he feared the reply from the audience as his work unveiled, only his work was the neurological decomposition of a human brain, and his audience was the processing terminal of DOMINIC's mainframe. Kian lingered on his equations incessantly, biting at his fingernails as he did.
"Let's land," he sounded. "I think we're here. DOMINIC's given me the nudge."
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