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"Ah, shit, my bad," muttered Tal, who didn't have the word sorry within a 5-mile radius of his crude vocabulary. Quietly, he retracted his arms back into his pockets, feeling a slight twinge in his biceps as if he'd been holding them up like an idiot for about a month. That one was new. He really needed to get back in shape, before something as rudimentary as picking up a gun would cause him to throw his shoulder out.

He let out a yawn as Komachi recovered, drowning out her complaints about how hard he'd hit her. There was something about this weather, maybe just something in the air, that soothed him, even though he had the short, Kusarian equivalent of nails scraping against a chalkboard standing behind and slightly to the left of him. Perhaps it was the fond memories gathered from watching the rain pitter-patter ever so lightly against the windows of his childhood apartment on Manhattan, or perhaps it was the experiences from his tenure in the Corps. Most of the time, he'd be forced to stare at the back of a tripod-mounted machine gun during some gimmicky training exercise on Los Angeles, sitting low in a foxhole, while rain fell around him and dripped off of the edges of his helmet. Thinking back, there was a certain nostalgic charm to it, even if it nearly bored him to death at the time, most likely related to the comradery of being stuck in the suck together. A little bit like his time on Nauru, but with less...strange people.

Who was he kidding, he was only incredibly smug and cozy because he just got away with pimp-handing Komachi right in the middle of her stupid face.

His ears perked up at the mention of Eliza again, and he figured he oughta slay this garbage before it got out of hand. Hell, who knew what a rumor like this would do to his sterling reputation as an intergalactic, swashbuckling loose cannon?

"What? Nah, I never met Eliza in person, I just stole some of her money and dipped like my dad did in '01. Figured by her voice that she was ugly, though, and it turned out later that I was right." He chuckled morbidly to himself before continuing. "I didn't think I'd ever hear about her or deal with her ever again, though."

He sighed and slowly looked up into the clouds, shifting his hands around all the crap in his pockets in order to find a comfortable idle position.

"Well, she seemed like a nice girl to me," probed Komachi, needling him just a little further. The fact that he was still listening to her and not just mumbling an uh-huh or mmhmm in her direction was enough to signal that she had him trapped, caught on a subject that was equal parts irritating to acknowledge and dangerous to ignore. "She's kinda local, too, if she's still knocking around Shikoku. Maybe she wants her money back- or, wait, maybe she just wants to shoot you for being such an asshole." Tal's spilled coffee was on the move now; a gelatinous, tar-like excuse for a drink slithering into a nearby drain as the flowing rainwater washed it away. It was the sort of thing that could mutate sewer rats into six-foot-long hulking monstrosities, and even watching it slide away turned her stomach. They must have looked an incredibly conspicuous pair - the tall, drab Libertonian and the cherry-pink clothed Kusarian both cowering under the awning, each looking just as awkward and out of place as the other. She didn't even want to think about what any passers-by might have been thinking. Fortunately, though, the torrential downpour was keeping the streets as clear as could be.

"Okay, so, it's cold and it's wet and if we're going somewhere else then, like, can we go already?" she whined, her tone finely etched with just the right amount of nasal inflection to really get Tal's teeth gritting. "Seriously, you could have just had us meet up wherever it was right away. I don't know why you dragged me out to this dump when you could've just sent me all of this over the neural net."

She slouched over to complete the sulky image, fixing him with the kind of disdainful stare that took years to really perfect. "Give me your coat, too- or an umbrella or something," she added, making a give-give gesture with her hand. "You're meant to be, like, ex-Marines or something, right? I'm going to get soaked again in this rain."

By now, the downpour was vicious enough to force Komachi to raise her voice over the din. The rivulets of water swirling around their feet looked set to blossom into a full-fledged stream, and somewhere down the street a car alarm could be heard wailing through the New Tokyo evening.

As Komachi pushed the Valdez offensive like she'd caught him in some kind of pitfall-Pungi-stake spike trap when in reality he honestly couldn't care less, Tal chose to tune her out, instead diverting his mental capacity into appreciating the vibrant scenery around him. The weather had been like this since he'd first touched down on New Tokyo - torrential downpours mixed with intermittent periods of stillness. There was something soothing about the climate here, the bright glows of various neon signs along the road still visible even as the rain picked up, and it was almost as if he were back on Manhattan despite being half a galaxy away from home. Indeed, standing under the awning beside Komachi, safe from the sweeping touch of Mother Nature's right hand as the rain fell in sheets around him, he felt relaxed, maybe for the first time in years, and thought to himself that maybe, just maybe he could get used to this place.

So he stood, slightly slack-jawed, fatigue visible in his eyes, until it felt like he'd been staring out at the street for three whole months and some change before Komachi's fucking voice came back into his ears. He winced as he heard it, a more nasal rendition of her usual grating tone, and he already knew from the get-go that she would try that shit to get his attention at some point in the day. He swore she never ceased to ruin the moment for him with her strange perversions of LSF tactical psychological warfare tactics, and let out a sigh that was masked by the sounds of heavy rain on asphalt.

"Seriously, you could have just had us meet up wherever it was right away. I don't know why you dragged me out to this dump when you could've just sent me all of this over the neural net."

He tilted his head slightly and leaned to face her, an unamused expression on his face as he raised a knife hand to point vaguely in her direction.

"I didn't think you were gonna believe my story unless you saw the crystals in person. I know I wouldn't have."

He stood back up straight, fixing his collar and straightening his hood back out as he sighed again, right as Komachi presented her demands. It was always gimmie gimmie with her, everywhere they went, no matter where it was. At this point, he was contemplating just straight-up replacing her with an attack dog or something, since it'd be cooler and probably less maintenance-intensive.

Preparing to depart, he contemplated giving her a snarky reply about how he'd been rained on day by day in the Corps, and that back in his day, all they had to shield themselves from the weather was one poncho per platoon, but he threw it out in favor of something a bit more concise. A bit more him.

"Oh, yeah, sure! I got something for you," he said, unusually perky at first as he reached around in his pockets, digging a little straw that the old man at the counter had given him when he got his iced coffee out of a horrid, unorganized mess of Neural Net devices, wallets, flashlights, keys, a knife, and of course, a handgun. Slick as day, he stabbed himself in the side with one end of the straw, allowing the red tube to poke out the other side of the packaging. With a flick of his fingers, the straw was unsheathed, the plastic wrapper flying off into the street to get washed away, and he ungraciously presented the device to Komachi, holding it close to her face.

"Here's a straw so you can suck it the fuck up."

He dropped it like a microphone and stepped away, heading down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, comfortably warm and dry due to his hydrophobic clothing. What kind of dumbass doesn't read the weather report before leaving their ship?

The straw half-fell, half-wafted gently to the ground, rolling into the gutter to join the rest of the detritus and half-congealed street goo that New Tokyo's metropolises were so infamous for. The place could have given Leeds a run for its money on a bad day, although nowhere else in Sirius could ever really have matched the lung-choking capacity of Bretonia's forge world. Komachi's eyes followed it with grim acceptance, the familiar feeling of winding Tal up warring with the sad fact that walking through this downpour really was going to be a shit time.

"Bite me, then!" she shouted back, but the howling wind and incessant drumbeat of heavy rain drowned out her words. "Asshole!"

Of course, the raincoat-wearing figure splashing away from her probably wouldn't have cared even if he heard her, but like always shouting at him made her feel better. Unfortunately, it didn't do much for her getting back to her ship. The only saving grace was that once you got past a certain threshold of wet, it was difficult to get any wetter, at least in a relative sense. Five seconds in the downpour outside would be more or less the same as five minutes. Unfortunately, she had no idea where they were going, since Tal hadn't exactly gone into detail about where specifically 'somewhere else' was.

For a moment, she stood there on the edge of the awning, torn between the rapidly disappearing opportunity before her and the promise of relative dryness. It wasn't fair. She was cold already, and the shithole her 'acquaintance' had thought to bring them to had not only left her hungry, but a little revolted as well. The place was a bigger health hazard than a live reactor core. She had no idea how Tal was able to stomach it - probably a military thing, she thought. On their last visit to Nauru, she had mistaken one of his MREs for a pack of plastic explosive - a feat of stupidity that had left them crouching in a trench together, fumbling with a detonator for half an hour in an attempt to blow up a supposedly faulty mixture of chicken and noodles. Not either of their proudest moments, really.

With a final sigh, the pink-clothed figure set off with a series of dejected splashes, trailing the surly Libertonian at a safe distance. At least this way nobody would think they were together, in any sense of the word. The rain seemed almost delighted to see her again, that same malevolent, icy-cold chill seeping into her bones the second the torrential downpour swallowed her whole.

Whatever plan Tal had in mind had better be worth it.

Some time later...

Tal quietly adjusted the sleeve of his tan leather jacket, stretching it out a bit as it had a tendency to chafe against his wrist. The alleyway he was in was seedy by all measures, piles of trash bags and dumpsters lining the walls, topped off by rusty old neon signs and fire escapes dripping dirty rainwater from earlier in the day. Not that it bothered him any, of course, as places like these were popular hangouts back when he was a kid, but by the looks of it, his faithless companion wasn't as comfortable with it as he was.

He was standing several feet away from a reinforced metal door, fit with sliding rectangular peephole and a strong aura of please do not knock on this. Behind it was a secret GC teahouse, or at least, it was where his contacts in the GC had said to meet them. "Good hiding place," he'd thought, looking around, "No sane policeman would come through here.."

He had his doubts about the integrity of his contacts, as they didn't seem all too eager when a man called them up and claimed to be representing the Core. Reassuring himself, he patted down the right side of his torso, revealing the outline of a suppressed PDW through his otherwise reasonably thick leather coat. It was his way of dressing "normally", although anyone with half a brain would raise an eyebrow at a man wearing two jackets, a pair of jeans, a beanie, and tan combat boots with a heavy-looking backpack on in the middle of a New Tokyo summer. Oh well. No one they passed gave him any shit for it, so he continued to figure that he fit in just fine with the populace.

Straightening out his collar, he looked over to his companion, sighing.

"You ready?"

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