Villainess phase

Lily asked as they stood up, "So, what was the second thing you wanted to see me about?" She was already pretty sure she knew what the third thing was, hopefully.

Grace hmmed, "Oh! That. Yeah, you'll see when you see my friend Miller in a bit when we come back. It'll be a surprise! I'm sure you'll understand immediately. It's going to take a couple of hours to get a driver and a truck. Should we take all the stuff in through the front?"

"No, we got the freight elevator working the other day. It goes straight to the basement, and you can load four tons on it. You almost can't pull a truck up to the back since the security fence is so close. Still, if you pull it up to the side as close as you can, you'll have quick access to the freight elevator in the back," Lily instructed her.

"Well, okay then. I'll see you in a few hours then," Grace added.

But instead of leaving, she hooked an arm around Lily's hip and pressed her up against the wall, kabedoning her again. Lips met lips, lips met neck, and for a little over a minute, nothing else occurred. After disentangling themselves, Lily coughed and nodded.

Grace sauntered out of the room, whistling. For that, Lily decided not to tell her that she hadn't invented transfer-proof lipstick quite yet. There were several red lip marks on Grace's lips and neck in several places. Lily watched her leave smugly, imagining how much shit Big John would give her.

Lily stepped out of the room; something was in the back of her mind warning her, 'Wait, there is a flaw to this plan of mine,' she thought. Then she saw it, her Apprentice approaching her, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, "Oh, Dr St. Claire... I couldn't help but notice some of your lipstick must have accidentally rubbed off on your business partner, somehow."

Then to add insult to injury, she flipped out a small folding hand fan and used it to obscure her grinning face. The fan had illustrated multicolour plum flowers painted on it, and the whole thing must have been completely synthetic because it was obviously a pre-war product, and a real sandalwood or bamboo fan would have been dusted by now.

Lily half-expected the Apprentice to start laughing like, 'Ohohohoho' stereotypically.

Lily had no idea how or where she got the fan, but with it, she gave a passable imitation of a white lotus bitch archetype character in an imperial drama period piece. The outwardly perfect Imperial Consort who would secretly poison you if you got pregnant in order to prevent you from becoming Empress and who would cry with you as you miscarried.

It was so on point that Lily was positive that the girl had gotten into her stash of trashy Kung Fu wushi novels that she had liberated from the library near Canterbury Commons, and even which one Alice had to be reading.

Obviously, an American library during a war period with China wouldn't have novels in Chinese. Still, some famous ones had been translated into English, and since they were different from what Lily remembered, so she took all of them home with her.

Honestly, she privately suspected they were in the library as bait. If someone had checked them out, they likely would have gotten a house call from an investigator from the Unamerican Activities Bureau.

These novels were a guilty pleasure for her and always had been. It was a shame there were no novels where the main character could punch out mountains or fight devils, immortals and gods. Perhaps she would write one herself when she got to the point of living a life of leisure.

Lily narrowed her eyes at the disobedient girl. Fine, if she wanted to play... Lily threw out some tropes that she knew for a fact were present in the novel she suspected Alice had been reading, "If you've been reading my novels, you should know the tragic, grisly fate of those who are unfilial to their Shifu!" She extended out her hands in the classic grabby pose, "You'll die without leaving a body behind! Take this, my Tyrannical Dragon Claw!"

She grabbed and tickled the Apprentice, causing her to shriek in protest, laugh, wriggle away and run off.

Should Lily be concerned that Alice seemed to like to imitate villainesses? 'Well, who didn't go through a villainess phase now and then,' Lily thought.

Lily would remember this, though, and show no mercy at the moment the Apprentice got moon-eyed over some boy.

Ducking downstairs, she spent about an hour translating the scans she had taken of Megaton's nuke into a passable imitation of engineering drawings using the graphical editor, stylus and her drafting skills to create exploded diagrams.

She even labelled them TOP SECRET and included the appropriate part numbers, which were easily discernable from the embossed ink in each subassembly, before printing out the images on the rickety, yet still functioning dot matrix printer.

The paper was a bit yellowed, but the prints, even the smallest assemblies, were quite legible. She used a pencil to circle areas on several of the printouts, showing a simple way to get at both the circuit boards and the fission kernel.

As she came upstairs, she heard a commotion in front of the building. There were still workers working in and out of the building more or less all day, so she did not overthink about it, but it kept getting louder, so she went outside to investigate it, setting the supposedly top secret blueprints on a table like a discarded comic book.

As she walked out the front door, she caught the tail-end of a scuffle where the workers were giving the bum rush to a group of seedy-looking men. She had to blink at how stereotypically dirty and up to no good the seedy men appeared.

She found the foreman of the work team and asked him what was going on, "Sorry, boss-lady. This scum was attempting to steal some things and harass my men. It's gotten a little worse every day, and I'd say that someone is trying to send a message to you or Boss Tombs."

Lily eyed the retreating figures sceptically, "Are you insinuating zhat zhis rabble is... organized?" She definitely couldn't see it.

The foreman squinched his face up as if he was considering that, before he shrugged once, "Sort of. They're mostly a group of chem addicts, but I guess they're also a gang. They sell chems and weapons, call themselves the East Bridge Merchants."

Lily widened her eyes, "The Merchants?! Zhey don't... 'ave any... like... invisible cars or anything, do zhey? Or a mutant man zhat is made out of zhe gar-bahj?" she asked nervously.

"Well, they're all trash people, in my opinion, but they definitely ain't got any fancy cars, or cars of any kind, really," the foreman replied, chuckling.

Just a coincidence, then. Lily stared off into space and mentioned absently and said softly, "But zhere is no East Bridge into Megaton. Or East Gate, or anything."

The foreman smirked, "Yeeaaah... You're not the first one to mention that. If you ask the guy who runs it, name a Blaze, he says something about how the gang itself represents the bridge, but most everyone just assumes he's fucking stupid, uhh pardon my language."

"Why are zhey a criminal gang at all? Chems aren't illegal. Essentially nothing is illegal in Megaton beyond the don't steal, kidnap or kill," Lily asked. She certainly hadn't seen any written laws at all, so she was making even some assumptions there.

"Cuz they ain't citizens. They ain't property owners, nor do they have any permanent residence-like or lease with someone who is. They mainly squat around the edges of town," the foreman said, then paused and added as an aside, "...uhh kind of like the places where you and Boss Tombs have been buying recently."

'Well, shit,' Lily thought. She should have seen that coming. She certainly had expected some contact with the criminal element but had been assuming it would be for whatever passed for a mob or mafia around Megaton; she suspected Moriarty.

She wasn't even against playing ball with the local mob, at least at the beginning of her build-up. She was playing ball with the local government, after all, and she had such a low opinion of governments that she considered the only difference between the average government and the mafia as one of timing -- the government got there first, so they got to call themselves the government and anyone else that came by afterwards doing the same things got called the mafia.

A gang of barely organized drug-addicted squatters was a different matter, though. Her memories didn't include many problems with drug addiction in the far future, but there were similar societal problems, neo-barbarians living on the edge of society, exsurgents controlled by murderous AIs for no known reason, and similar things, and although the particulars were quite different the cores were similar to these Merchants. Chaos. Feral chaos.

It very rarely worked to bribe such elements of chaos, as submission to a minor demand tended to be taken as a sign of weakness and resulted in greater demands instead of an equilibrium.

Lily would call such elements metastatically unstable, and like other malignant tumours, there was generally only one realistic solution, assuming you couldn't avoid them entirely.

Sighing and shaking her head, Lily then continued to discuss with the foreman for about twenty minutes, telling him about the truck that was on its way and asking for some workers to help unload it when it arrived and then picking his brain on everything he knew both about the Merchants and any other underworld activity or groups in Megaton.

Lily had made a mistake not to pay more attention to such things, but at least it didn't look as though the Merchants were about to raid her holdings in force. They were still at the send messages stage.

Eventually, there would be demands, probably shortly after her hospital opened. Then escalation would occur, to the point where either she herself or, more likely, her Apprentice might be attacked in a likely non-fatal but humiliating manner. But, she still had time to formulate a response and would nip them in the bud one way or another before that occurred.

Lily dipped back inside but there wasn't much time to wait until she heard a large flatbed truck pull up carefully in the drive, parking in the mostly cleared parking lot next to her building.

Lily grabbed the blueprints and gave new orders to her two Protectrons to prevent any blue-on-blue incident and went to meet Grace and her band.

A little giddy to see the condition of her new purchases, as she had been relying on what Grace told her what her contact had said, she left the building to meet them.

Lily noticed that Grace had wiped the lipstick off with a smirk. Both Johns waved at her, while Tangent made no real outward gesture or expression, but she could feel him radiating a greeting, somehow. Big John greeted her from the truck bed, "Hey, Doc!"

The smaller man named John introduced her to two new faces, a similarly blonde-haired woman but of only average height and green eyes, quite a rare hair-eye colour combination and interesting recessive gene expression, Lily thought.

"Doc, this is Melissa, New John's sister. She's not a soldier as such, yet, but she has been trained as a medic by their parents. We kind of got used to the idea of one of our team members maybe being able to save our lives, even if she couldn't believe you actually successfully reattached my hand and said she wouldn't be able to do it," Big John waved the hand in question.

The blonde haired woman smiled and offered to shake Lily's hand, which Lily extended out of habit, "It's so good to see you, Doctor! It's so rare to see an actual trained medical doctor around the wastes; I'd barely be considered a paramedic or EMT, according to mom."

Lily nodded and then turned to the next new face, who was introduced, "Doc, this is Sean Miller, he goes back with Grace a long ways."

Then Lily noticed his left hand, or rather the absence of his left hand. This must have been what Grace meant! Did she have a customer for the prototype cyberarm? Well, he didn't look like he needed a whole arm. Maybe just half of one. She grinned and turned to Grace, "Did you chop 'is 'and off just for moi?!"

Miller scowled and said, "No, you crazy bitch, a Super Mutant got it a few years ago."

Lily blushed a little, 'Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.'

They all got out of the way as the workers came and unloaded the truck, using a manually operated crane that folded up on the truck bed, one box of parts at a time.

Lily told them, "You can take zhem on the elevator down to the basement; if you could place zhem next to the robot repair station, I'd appreciate it. Please don't touch anything else; you might die."

Of course, they PROBABLY wouldn't die. But then again, there were a few things down there that would definitely kill them if they touched them, so it wasn't exactly said just to frighten them.

Two workers carting off one box in a dolly paused at that, but shrugged and continued loading the freight elevator one dolly-load at a time.

"You really got genuine PHOENIX implants and the ability to implant them and not kill any of us trying to do it?" asked Miller, a little sceptically. "This is a great deal, if you do. But I don't really know you, Doc."

Melissa popped up, "Oh, Oh! Can I watch the surgery?"

Lily tilted her head to the side, and first addressed the sceptic, "Yes, I do, and of course. And yes, Melissa, you can watch with my Apprentice so long as you don't get in zhe way." She considered for a moment and then handed him the blueprints she made that would both distract him and convince him that she at least had unusual knowledge and connections, "Here, this is the data on the explosive in the centre of town."

He took the sheets and leafed through them quickly, then started over and looked through them much more slowly, "Holy fuck, where did you get these? Are you President Eden's side piece or something?"

Lily sniffed delicately, offended, "I am only ever zhe main dish."

Big John piped up with another attempt at a lewd remark, "And I know Grace sure loves eat---Owe!" But, sadly, he was interrupted again by Grace elbowing him to the ribs. She must have some sort of preternatural sense of when the dark-skinned man was going to pop wise.

Lily continued, "You can certainly examine zhe devices if you wish, but I've tested zhem and vouched for zheir integrity. Would you even know what you're looking at?" Hell, she would be able to build them herself in a few months, but the research was a low priority when she had so many of them and so few buyers of them.

"No, he wouldn't," said Grace, firmly.

Lily then shrugged, "Zhen it is simple. Zhere is a day recovery from the operation, combined with zhe reflex treatment. It is unlikely Grace would want all of you on your backs--"

"The only one she wants on her back--OWE! Okay, okay, I got it, I got it," cried Big John.

Lily rolled her eyes; she was getting a little annoyed with Big John herself but thought that he was only trying so hard because he kept getting interrupted. He probably would have laid off if he managed to get one good zinger in, she thought, "Anyway, since she won't want all of you on bed rest at once, I'll do your surgery and treatments tomorrow, Monsieur Miller? Zhen when you see I know what I am doing we will need a lot more time for a consultation on fashioning you a cybernetic prosthesis anyway."

Lily said the last with extreme enthusiasm.

The man looked slightly mollified and nodded, "Yeah, okay."

Lily grinned in anticipation, not minding this Miller's attitude at all, 'After all, he is a man. And men are always such big babies about surgeries, anyway.'