[Seldom]

I'm a little hesistant to post this here, but on the other hand you guys have good opinions and I can't think of another place more appropriate. It's actually the middle story in a series I'm doing, but it's the first one I finished, and I don't think it makes a bad introduction.

I usually visualize my stories as I write them.  This one I picture as an anime, which makes me wish I could draw.  I even have a decent soundtrack in mind.  Anyone know a good animator looking for a violent story?

Warning, there's a bit of cyber-dorkage in this.  Mostly because I get so frustrated when movies and television get the simplest things about computers so terribly, completely wrong, when all they would have to do is consult one single programmer!

* * * * *

Mumbai, the financial capital of India, Asia's fastest-growing economy, a strange mishmash of ancient culture and Western money, gleaming skyscrapers a painful reminder of unattainable prosperity to the dull-eyed, unambitious masses in the filthy streets below.  Brilliant limousines so black they hurt the eyes vied with three-wheeled auto drivers hell-bent on taking their low-priced fares on a pulse-pounding joyride.  Money was the heartbeat of the city, from haggling over rupees in the all-night bazaars to multi-billion dollar negotiations played in a cleaner but far more dangerous environment.  Swiss bankers, German industrialists, American multi-nationals all vied to extract as much money from the world as possible, while Indian programmers and tech support slaved away beneath keeping the whole machine grinding on.  Corporations found their greatest friend in India, a resource-laden, nouveau-riche, relatively stable democracy with the ineffective and corrupt government of a third-world country, where people and laws can be bought and sold, and nothing is illegal if the price is right.  And bankers found their greatest friends in Mumbai.

A non-descript gray car, noteworthy only in that it was clean and new in a city where anything new meant wealth, pulled up to the valet station at the Hilton Towers.  If anything the car was not worthy of the dazzling monolith of glass and concrete.  The answer to why became clear soon enough when two giant, muscle-bound blondes stepped from the car.  Bodyguards, clearly, German ex-military by the look of their crew-cuts and boring yet expensive suits.  One of them reached an enormous hand into the car and pulled out a tiny brown-skinned girl.  She barely reached his chest, even in heels.

The girl was delicately beautiful, and timeless in an oriental fashion.  From a distance she could be anywhere from twelve to thirty.  She carried herself well, though she was clearly scared.  Her tiny size and oriental features marked her as one of the depressingly large number of Nepali child prostitutes kept in sexual slavery for the bizarre and insatiable appetites of powerful foreigners.  Demand creates its own supply, powerless victims in an unfair world.

One of the European giants gently but firmly guided the girl into the hotel's gleaming lobby.  The clerk's dark face was carefully neutral and respectful.  He was not paid to judge the ways of white men.  The girl glanced up at her handler, who smiled down at her not unkindly.  "Come on, be a good little girl," he murmured in German.  Her face was blank and terrified.

The younger giant joined them in the elevator.  Together they rode higher and higher in the tower.  "Weren't you saying something about today?" the huge German asked.

"My granddaughter's birthday," the man with his hand gripping the tiny prostitute said.  "She'll be two."

The other German laughed.  "And you here in this fucking city in this goddamn backwards shithole of a country," he said through a grin.

"I'm glad you find it so funny.  It proves we aren't nearly so humorless as the world believes," the first man said dryly.  That shut his companion up, and they finished the ride in silence.

The other bodyguard made to frisk the girl when they reached an ostentatious, tackily decorated suite, his eyes a little too eager.  The first man stopped him and knelt down to look into the girl's frightened eyes.  "It's okay, I have to do this," he said, but it was clear she couldn't understand him.  He quickly and efficiently frisked the girl, not lingering.  The other bodyguard grunted in disappointment.

A door opened, the entrance to the inner bedroom, and a corpulant elderly man waddled out, yelling impatiently into his cell phone, barely glancing at his bodyguards and their expensive cargo.  He had thinning white hair and purple fingers and he wheezed as he yelled.  "Don't tell me you can't do it.  I want that company buried and I want Morgan destroyed, do you understand me?  I want him tossed into the street, spat on, villified, I want his wife and children to abandon him!  No, better, I want her to commit suicide with the shame of it!  Now get it done!" he screamed before snapping the phone shut and throwing it irritably at the younger bodyguard, who easily caught it.

"Aha," the Swiss banker said, finally eyeing the slender young girl like a prime piece of meat.  He smoothed his thinning hair back and instantly oozed charm.  "Come here, my dear, come here," he said in English, coaxing the girl into his embrace.  She looked back at the older bodyguard fearfully, her eyes pleading.  The bodyguard looked sad, but it was not his place to change the way of the world.

"We're a fucking circus of stereotypes," he observed as the fat banker closed the door on them.  He tried not to hear the girl's cries of pain that followed.

* * * * *

THWACK!  The man's fist landed hard on the back of Pin-Mei's neck.  She winced and choked back a sob as he threatened to split her in two.  Her everything ached, and after a full hour of being slapped, punched, kicked, and raped she was barely conscious.  Wouldn't the banker ever come?  Maybe he couldn't come.  The thought made her blood run cold.  She needed an opportunity.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he roughly grabbed her thin but surprisingly firm shoulders and squeezed brutally hard, ramming into her ass and jerking so hard she twitched with him.  "Aaaaugh," he said finally, collapsing back onto the bed with her still impaled on him.

Now.  Pin-Mei casually reached into her thick mane of jet-black hair held up by an ornamental clasp.  She pulled the clasp out and shook her hair loose, letting it cascade down her back.  "Lovely," the banker murmured through slitted eyes, watching the light gleam off the sharp-looking tongs of the hair clasp a split-second before Pin-Mei used it to gouge out his throat.  He didn't have time to scream as his esophagus and a good chuck of his neck were torn out like so much meat.  How could this tiny girl be so strong?

The banker clutched his throat and gurgled as he died.  He looked up into the prostitute's child-like face, but there was nothing childish about her cold, dead, completely emotionless gaze as she watched him drown in his own blood.  She wiped her hair clasp clean with his shirt and glanced at the door, wondering when the bodyguards would come to check up on their master.

She felt a familiar reluctance.  There could be no witnesses, of course, she didn't question that, but it still felt wrong.  Well, there was nothing that could be done about that.  She inhaled and let out a piercing scream.  Seconds later the door crashed open as the two Germans broke in, guns drawn, their eyes instinctively settling on the banker's gory corpse.

Pin-Mei struck faster than they thought possible, kicking the gun out of the younger man's hand and plunging stiff fingers into his throat, tearing out a big chunk of his meaty, muscular neck.  As she ripped his neck out with one hand she caught his gun with the other, pressed it into the older bodyguard's chest, and pulled the trigger.  The bulk of his muscular body muffled the gun's explosion and he jerked back, staggering backwards and falling to the floor.

She turned her attention to the man in her unbelievably strong grip, strips of flesh and muscle squishing in her tiny, powerful fingers.  He looked up at her in panic.  She calmly pushed the gun barrel into his mouth.  His brains splattered against the wall, the force of his head's explosion coating her in bits of gray matter and bloody viscera.

The older German wheezed and gurgled.  The bullet had punctured his lung.  He stared in wild-eyed terror at the horrific oriental she-demon.  She dripped gore from her slim, shapely naked body as she calmly stepped towards him, her utterly expressionless face more terrifying than the incredible violence she had just unleashed.  "Es tut mir leid," she murmured.  Not wanting him to suffer needlessly, she reached down, cradled his head in her arms, and, with that seemingly superhuman strength she had, quickly snapped his neck.

She waited by the door to see if anyone had heard the muffled gunshots or the scuffle of bodies hitting the floor, but nobody came to investigate.  Satisfied, she took a quick shower to rinse off her small but hard-muscled, finely-tuned body, careful to leave the bathroom door open so she could hear if anyone entered.  She collected her torn clothing, patched it together as best she could, adjusting it to cover her rapidly bruising skin.  The banker had hit her harder than most.  She took one of his coats, an expensive but non-descript dark cotton which she swam in.  After a deep breath, letting her adrenalin subside and her heartbeat return to normal, she walked out the door and slipped out of the hotel unnoticed, invisible when she needed to be.  She walked the four kilometers of dirty, crowded streets back to her hotel, a quiet lodging that asked few questions and accepted her fake identification without a raised eyebrow.

Once in her small, simple but clean room, she pulled out her most expensive possession, the Syndicate laptop.  She slid her thumb over its scanner and entered her password, waiting as it established an encrypted satellite link and received authorization to decrypt the system software on its shielded hard drive.  Whenever the system was powered down, the volatile memory was rapidly reset thirty-two times, then every bit randomly flipped, the same happening to the scratch space on the hard drive.  The system software was strong encrypted, and no data was stored locally between sessions.  The laptop was built with a paranoia the world's intelligence agencies could only dream of, and quality-control procedures matched only by the glory days of the U.S. military (before it became mostly privatized in the name of efficiency, of course, another brilliant Syndicate maneuver).  As a final, gross physical backup, any attempted tampering would detonate the hard drive, RAM, and CPU cache in addition to melting the LCD monitor.

The connection established, Syndicate servers uploaded whatever relevant session data and programs they thought she should have.  She confirmed the banker's termination, along with the two witnesses, and reflexively checked for another assignment.  Rarely was she required more than once a month, allowing her crucial decompression time.  Assignments were usually given at least a week in advance as well, time to travel to a target area, analyze the situation, and proceed with the termination.  The Syndicate liked their assassins well-trained, well-armed, well-rested, and most of all, completely invisible.

Pin-Mei was careful to keep her reservations to herself.  She was bought and paid for, fully owned by the Syndicate, and any deviation would not be tolerated.  She was also the best, so she was given considerable discretion.  To her surprise, a flashing icon indicated a message for her.  She frowned.  The signature was not her handler's.  She opened the message and stared at the simple English proposal in dumbfounded confusion for a long time.

"My dear Pin-Mei, if you want out, meet me at 7:30 tonight."  There was an address appended to the message, a small diner in the financial district.

Pin-Mei logged off the laptop, watching as it ran through its paranoid erasure routine, for once grateful for the extraordinary measures.  She sat back and pondered the implications.

Someone knew who she was.  Someone who could break into the Syndicate's communications channels at will, a ghost in their machine.  It should be impossible, nobody outside the Syndicate should even know its servers existed.  They were firewalled from normal internet traffic, reserving most communications for secured satellite links.  But someone could do it, and that someone had found her.  Someone wanted to meet her.  Pin-Mei felt an uncharacteristic fear, different from the keyed-up adrenaline-filled high-intensity fear of an assassination, this was a deeper, more primal dread, the fear that comes when you know someone is behind you, staring right at your head.

Another thought gave her pause.  This could be a Syndicate test of her loyalty.  She should report this breach right away.  She should tell them their servers were not as impenetrable as they thought.  If this was a test, they would be expecting to hear from her soon.

She told herself she had not yet decided.  But for the first time in a very long time, Pin-Mei was lying to herself.

* * * * *

At precisely 7:20, Pin-Mei finished assembling the high-powered sniper rifle she had spent the day procuring.  She set up in an empty office several floors up and slightly down the street from the cafe.  It was a cafe that clearly catered to Westerners and those Indians who did business with them, full of high-priced caffeinated drinks with long names that gave no hint of their coffee-related origins.  It was part of a locally-owned chain that had been started during the rise of India's financial prominence and had not yet sold out to the coffee multinationals, but only because they hadn't found the right price.

Pin-Mei paused before looking through the rifle scope.  Did she really want to do this?  She should contact the Syndicate before it was too late, or they would surely kill her for betraying them, whether she did it or not.  But still, she had to know.  Just one look, she promised herself.  She lowered her eye to the scope and focused on the cafe across the street.  She blinked, focused, and rapidly received the two largest shocks of her young life.

The first was that she had seen this man before.  In a Syndicate-wide memorandum circulated to all their in-house and contracted assassins.  His face was on an immediate-termination notice, meaning that anyone who saw him must kill him instantly, no questions asked, and report the termination.

Which led to her second shock.  She had seen that notice eighteen months ago, which meant that this man had been living for a year and a half with a Syndicate death blanket wrapped snug around him.  Nobody, nobody, nobody ever lived that long.  Yet here he was, calmly sipping coffee, waiting for the Syndicate's most deadly assassin to join him as if he had no worries in the world.

Her finger tightened on the trigger as she contemplated whether to take him out.  It would be insane not to.  If she didn't take the shot, she would be marked as well.  On the other hand, the risk that this was a Syndicate test was almost non-existent at this point.  "Pin-Mei, if you want out…"  Of course she did.

The cross-hairs were centered on his head.  A mild wind blew from the ocean, not strong enough to alter the bullet's trajectory at this range.  Pin-Mei kept him sighted and studied him.  There was nothing in his appearance to suggest he was a threat to the Syndicate.  Medium height, chubby, he had the look of someone who had lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time.  There was an underlying athleticism to his soft, pudgy body.  He had a round, trusting face with kind blue eyes and an easy smile which he was currently using to charm his small, pretty, Indian waitress.  This was the man who defied the Syndicate?  He looked the opposite of the supreme superman Pin-Mei had expected, and she felt vaguely disappointed.

He held today's India Times in his hands and was casually reading it, glancing at an inexpensive watch from time to time.  He was clearly waiting for her.  There was something strange about his right hand.  It was gloved and didn't move.  A prosthetic!

Pin-Mei finally admitted to the decision she had reached when she first read his message.  She disassembled the sniper rifle and dumped parts of it in various cracks and office trash bins.  She pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt, not cold but the ocean breeze made it cool enough that she was not out of place.  She could pass for a wealthy Indian teenager, or, if someone looked at her face, the young consort of a Chinese businessman.  She melted through the crowded street and entered the air-conditioned interior of the cafe, now truly chilled by the blasting cold air.

She observed the man without letting him see her yet.  He glanced around from time to time, still looking at his watch.  It was just now 7:30.  Pin-Mei slipped into the booth across from him and looked up, letting him see her face.  He paused as he took in her gorgeous features.  For a moment she was afraid he would be stupid enough to say her name, but he didn't, waiting for her to take the lead.

"Well," she said in English.

"Well," he replied.  "You're here."  She nodded.  When she didn't reply, he said, "I assume you've been watching me, wondering whether to blow my head off."  He almost pulled off a nonchalant tone, but not quite.

"No.  I should have, but I was not going to shoot you."

He grinned, and suddenly he was stunningly handsome, his smile warm and infectious, wrapping around her like a soft blanket.  She was alarmed at her mind's and body's responses.  Her cheeks flushed and she felt things she couldn't define.

"That's comforting," he said, still smiling.

She could not figure him out.  He had evaded Syndicate capture and execution for eighteen months, yet he had calmly sat here knowing that she was probably aiming a gun at him.  "Start talking," she said more harshly than she intended.

His grin disappeared, replaced by an intense focus on her every bit as hypnotic as his smile.  "Down to business, good," he said, talking quietly and rapidly.  "I have a proposition for you.  Something I hope you will consider and accept.  I hope this because if you don't, you will shoot me."

"You'd better make it good, then," she said.

He stared at her for a few seconds before breaking into another grin.  "Darling, you made a joke!" he said proudly.

Pin-Mei felt her carefully controlled expression cracking, and she forced back a smile of her own, keeping her face studiously neutral.  "Your proposal?" she said.

He looked around, making sure they were not being overheard, and dropped his voice.  "I have a very important question for you.  Do you enjoy killing?"

She pondered that for a few minutes, staring back at him.  Finally, she said, "You already know the answer."

He nodded.  "Yes, I do."

She frowned.  "No, I don't enjoy it.  Sometimes there is a certain satisfaction, like today—"

"Yeah, that guy was a real scumbag," the man interrupted.

"—but no, I don't like killing.  I'm just good at it."

The man's voice was quiet, intense, and sad.  "Honey, you're great at it.  Spectacular.  The best in the world.  Thirty-eight targets in ten years, hundreds dead."

Pin-Mei did not deny it.  "How do you know this?" she asked.

He looked into her beautiful dark eyes.  "The same way I knew you weren't going to kill me," he said.

"I might have.  You took an awful risk," she countered.

"So did you."

She looked away.  When she looked back, she found he was still watching her with that strangely intense concentration.  "You were born into the Syndicate," he said.  "Raised from birth as a child prostitute, but with your natural athleticism, intelligence, and talents, they quickly trained you as an assassin. It must have been brutal," he said sympathetically.

She couldn't bear the intensity of his gaze.  "It's hell," she admitted finally.  "A nightmare I can never wake up from."  She finally worked up the courage to glare back at him.  "How can you possibly know all this?  Are you Syndicate?"

He shook his head.  "They are arrogant, and not nearly so mysterious and impenetrable as they like to believe.  They think billions of dollars can buy them safety.  They are as blind, stupid and arrogant as my government."

She couldn't help it.  She grinned.  "You're American," she observed.

He chuckled.  "Very, and damn proud of it.  You better not let me hear you talk about my country like that."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"So are you ready to hear my proposal?"  She raised one perfect delicate eyebrow and waited.  He pulled out a plain manilla folder and handed it to her.  She opened it as he started to explain.

She couldn't believe it.  It was all here.  Her life story, boiled down to a few beaurocratic euphemisms in a global conspiracy born from the darkest recesses of the human soul.  She tried to pay attention to his words as he walked her through the documents, every page revealing a new memory she wished she could forget, another assassination of some poor innocent with the wrong political agenda, or someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  All the screams that she kept carefully locked away, the lock ripped off and their ghosts rampaging through her mind.

He paused.  "Are you okay?" he asked gently.

Pin-Mei looked up at him and frowned.  She had not cried since she was a child, she would not start now.  "Of course," she snapped.  "Continue."

He finally came to the interesting bit, the operational details of her life in the Syndicate.  It turned out that the Syndicate's paranoia extended to its own members and staff.  It was a highly compartmentalized organization, each branch running operations in parallel, ignorant of what the others were doing, but all following the same basic agenda: controlled chaos, the rise and fall of empires, safely catering to the depraved appetites of the most rich and powerful men in the world, child prostitution, murder, rape, kidnapping, orchestrated genocides, horrors banal to truly mind-numbing in scope.  Yet in the midst of that chaos, there was a chain of command that came down to two people.  Two men in the entire Syndicate who knew that Pin-Mei existed: her handler, the man she met when she needed direct contact with the Syndicate, and a mysterious, unknown case worker who handled several assassins at once.

That man was mysterious no more.  His face stared up at her from the manilla folder.  His name, address, the names of his immediate family, all of it right there for her to see.  The two men she needed to kill to be truly and totally free of the Syndicate, forever.

"I can handle the computer end of it.  You'll be wiped from the system like you never existed.  You have to handle the hardcopies and…" he trailed off.  "And the people," he finally forced himself to say.

Pin-Mei looked up, a strange, knowing smile on her lips.  "You don't want me to kill them," she said.

He couldn't meet her gaze.  "I don't want anyone to die," he admitted.  "But you're right, they have to."  His expression hardened and he looked at her.  A new, steely glint was in his eyes, making him at the same time much less attractive, and much more dangerous-looking than his pudgy body would indicate.  "And probably a lot more people, too."

Pin-Mei understood.  These names, this file, these men, wiping the computer, giving her a new life.  This was the payoff.  He wanted something in return, something only she could provide: the world's most effective killer.  "Okay, then, what do you want from me?"

He leaned back and crossed his mismatched hands over his stomach, trying to thread the fingers of his left hand through the prosthetic, his expression settling back into a friendly concern.  "Me?  I just want my wife back," he said softly.

When he didn't elaborate, she tentatively held out her hand.  He took it and smiled at her.  "I met Daphne three years ago," he started.  "Beautiful, god she's beautiful, smart, strong, tough, she's too good for a geek like me, I always knew that, but she loves me, God help her.  For some reason she married me.  Then, on our honeymoon, we were kidnapped by the Syndicate.  Turns out Daphne had a few skeletons in her closet, like being a killer in a secret underground cage-fighting tournament set up for the amusement of the Syndicate."  He laughed harshly.  "What gets some people's rocks off, huh?  Anyway, Daphne broke us out, then left me to fight the Syndicate."

He stopped again, seeming to become absorbed in his own memories.  "And?"  Pin-Mei prompted quietly.

He roused himself.  "And, well, she was supposed to contact me to let me know she was okay once a month.  A little over a year and a half ago I stopped hearing from her.  So I went looking.  But the Syndicate found me first."  He shook his head and laughed bitterly, holding up his prosthetic hand.  "Gave me this and a limp before I persuaded them to let me go."

The termination order, she thought.  "Let him go" like hell.  This out-of-shape, completely ordinary fat guy escaped from a Syndicate torture facility?  Well, she thought, obviously he's far from ordinary.  "How did you do it?" she asked.

"Will you help me?" he countered.

She thought it over.  "She's probably dead by now, you know."

"She's not dead."  He said it with a quiet, fanatical intensity that invited no argument.

"Do you know where she is?" she asked.  He nodded.  "And you want me to help you get her out?  From a heavily guarded, state-of-the-art Syndicate facility?"  He nodded again, and she grinned, a full, warm grin with real feeling behind it.  "Sounds like fun!"  She felt giddy.  Not just quit the Syndicate, but quit with style.  Fuck the bastards, she thought happily.  Fuck them all!

He smiled at her, and the world brightened again.  "Good!" he said.  "And to answer your earlier question, I had some help.  You'll meet her in Russia."

"Russia?"

The man pulled out another folder.  This one had several passports, driver's licenses from various countries, and matching credit cards.  Pin-Mei was startled, but not entirely shocked, to see that all the photos were of her.  "There's a half million dollars in credit there, fully backed by anonymous accounts in non-Syndicate banks," he explained.  "You have one week to do what you need to do.  Call me with this," he indicated a small, sleek, stylish cell phone, "when you're finished and I'll take care of the Syndicate computer system.  Don't forget, you have to destroy the hardcopies of your files.  Eight days from now I will pick you up from the airport in Moscow.  Don't get caught."

He stood to leave.  "Wait," Pin-Mei said.  He paused.  "What's your name?"

"Keith Richards," he replied with a wink.  "No relation."  And with that, he tossed some money on the table to cover the coffee, limped to the door, and disappeared into the crowded, dark Mumbai streets.

"Relation to who?" Pin-Mei idly asked the air.  Nobody paid her the least attention.  They never did.

[reaper0002000]

Very nice.
Elegant, even.

I would expect nothing less from you…

Best wishes,
Reap

[cactusjoe]

Very good introduction for a future great story. Thanks a lot.

[Reason]

Sorry to be a little late in posting, but it's been a while since I checked the Story Section of this board. It's pretty much my dream to create an anime featuring a lot of female muscle and violence. In fact I'm pretty sure it was one of your early stories that got me interested in this genre in the first place many years ago.

So it goes without saying that I would love to help you adapt one of your stories into an Anime, but I'm afraid there's just not enough muscle in this particular story to get me hyper interested. It's a fine story, but there are already many Animes out there featuring supernaturally strong, but otherwise normal looking girls. If you were to write a really over the top violent story where the girls were impossible huge and muscular however, I would certainly drop everything to give it a go.

In the mean time, you might want to check out a program called Anime Studio Pro. You can do a YouTube search for Anime Studio to see some amazing animation videos that have been done using this program. What's good about this software is that it's vector, so you don't really have to be able to draw well, just have a good visual imagination, which you obviously have. You can even buy some pre-rigged Anime style characters for it that you can then customize for your own project.

You might also want to get in touch with Terrence Walker http://www.studioartfx.com. He is pretty much the King of Indie Anime, and I've noticed he is even starting to include some muscular female characters in his work. He even did one Manga that featured a massive red-headed, barbarian woman… He has also done some work with Anime Studio in the past, but has also use LightWave and Mirage.

[Seldom]

Thanks for the kind words! I'll look into the anime studio.

Yeah, the other parts of this story have a lot of muscle, but I haven't finished writing them yet. I finished this part pretty quickly, and thought it gave a good introduction to a couple of the characters. I have been especially taken with the idea of a small, invisible, perfect girl assassin lately.

[demented20]

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I have to say that I missed it when it was posted over a month ago, but I'm glad it got bumped so I could read it.

I like Pin-Mei and I really like how things aren't quite what they appear. This story could go so many ways based on what you've written, I'm curious where you'll go with it.

And as for the lack of muscle, I've read some of your other stories, I have no doubts that some female muscle will appear whenever you're ready for it.

I have been especially taken with the idea of a small, invisible, perfect girl assassin lately.

Yeah me too 🙂

[Author]

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