I had a very busy night, and it still wasn't quite finished.

God, airplane wifi is so terrible. It was overpriced, too. Or maybe not—I didn't know what was actually involved in getting an internet connection at 40,000 feet above sea level. I did know that it was super expensive despite having a completely terrible data rate.

Fortunately, the cost of the last-minute flight to Vegas was cheaper than it ought to have been, on account of the fact that a record low number of flights were being booked. The rest of the plane was hardly empty, but there was more than enough free space for me to not have any neighbors.

Along with a fairly small suitcase of essential luggage, I had Dr. DeVille's cat stashed away in a pet carrier. That was the most obnoxious part of getting the flight. Who would have guessed that trying to bring live animals makes air travel difficult? It was shocking, truly shocking.

Regardless, the first half of my new plan was almost complete. Our landing was supposed to be less than an hour away, now, and the sun was just starting to rise, lighting the barren and rocky landscape below. The flight did end up being a bit longer than it otherwise would have been on account of the altered route needed to circumvent any of the major incursions.

I had a very specific reason for deciding to steal the doctor's cat. While LA was supposedly the largest hub for the actual trade and industry of the illegal esoterics business, Vegas was supposed to be a sort of headquarters area and meeting grounds. The place where the major leadership gathered to relax and cut deals.

I wondered what connection that might have to the wider Nevada disaster that was still ongoing.

In any case, digging through those papers Dad provided me showed that they were supposed to hold private auctions fairly regularly. The same documents also emphasized the difficulty of infiltrating those events, even for Star Guardians. Due to the strict requirements and competent security, the impression I got was that I had close to zero chance of getting inside, rich Anathema bitch be damned.

So, I'd mostly dismissed it and moved on. Why worry about something that wouldn't be relevant until I was a much bigger deal and had the kind of weight to throw around that would get me personally invited?

But the cat? The cat changed things.

I wouldn't have bought the overpriced, shitty flight wifi if not for my need to keep checking the news. Surely something was going to come of the insane stunt I pulled back at Club Purple—and sure enough, the first wave of proper articles was starting to pop up about a low tier breach that opened up in the top floors of a major downtown highrise building.

Breaches occurring in places like that wasn't unheard of, but it was certainly unusual. I was also surprised. Why the fuck did a breach happen? Was it intentional? Like how the hell did we go from 'Alex jumps out the window to steal a cat' to 'hey look, it's an incursion.' Frankly, I didn't know quite what to make of it.

But whatever the cause, things somehow devolving to that point was just more good news, at least as far as I was concerned. It was, frankly, way more than I had even hoped for.

Either way, one thing was certain. The Violet Bouquet, their sister organizations, and hell, probably even the fucking Star Guardians had to be stirred up into a real buzz. If the normal, public media outlets had already picked up on it, then I could barely begin to imagine the rumors flying around on the inside of things.

And what was even the story? That someone attacked Dr. DeVille in public, killed several of his security detail, set up a 'meeting,' and then used it just to—steal his cat? No one involved knew who the fuck they were dealing with or what my motivations were. They just knew that someone was now playing a game of 7-dimensional chess and was seemingly willing to wage war with one of their most powerful organizations.

I was now confident that word would have spread throughout whatever criminal information networks existed and that by the middle of the day everyone who was anyone would know that about it.

And none of them would know what to make of it.

I was also confident most of the bigshots would figure out my identity by that point, but that wouldn't tell them anything about why I'd done it or who I was working for.

But my impromptu change of plans wasn't just to grab a bunch of attention. That would be stupid if I didn't have any particular way to direct it. No, that was only the first half of the new plan—the setup. Now, I was going to join Chloe and Kevin in Vegas, but more importantly, I was going to sell the cat to the highest bidder.

It was going to be my ticket into one of those auctions. Even if I wasn't already invited, if I showed up at the first security checkpoint with Dr. fucking DeVille's stolen cat—the cat everyone would be talking about—then surely they'd let me in.

And that was when the real fun would begin.

Katherine "Nekomata" Legato

Sitting in some kind of prison cell, Katherine still struggled to understand the exact sequence of events which led to everything going so incredibly wrong. It started not too long after they'd arrived at the club, when she realized that several of the people who'd been watching them were suddenly converging on their location.

She of course alerted Luna, and the two of them prepared for a confrontation. Something must have happened with Alex that caused the real security in the club to take action, but as for what that reason might have been, Katherine still had no idea.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

At that point, Katherine tried to stay calm and was prepared to talk her way out of things—but unfortunately, Luna tried to simply give the converging muscle the slip. That caused half of them to chase after her, at which point things must have turned violent.

And from there—well, it was chaos, essentially.

Katherine knew that Luna had taken down at least several of the guys chasing after her—taken down as in killed. Some gunshots went off, and the people in the club began panicking. Already, it had suddenly become a very bad situation—and it only got worse from there.

The best conclusion Katherine could come to in hindsight was that several of the 'unaffiliated' Guardians and augmented patrons present had foolishly decided to engage. The problem was that none of them knew the context, which meant it rapidly devolved into a total warzone of esoteric combat where no one really knew who was on what side or even what the sides were to begin with.

All Katherine tried to do at that point was survive.

Soon enough, it became clear that the situation was only going to escalate. The regular club goers were stampeding, the security was in disarray, Luna was somewhere, and people were quite literally dying left and right. Many of them simply knocked each other over in the mad rush to escape the chaos, and just as many got caught in the crossfire between small arms and low tier esoteric abilities.

It was precisely the kind of chaos that was a perfect breeding ground for an incursion—and, sure enough, a breach tore through the building mere minutes after the initial violence started.

And if it weren't for the formation of the breach, Katherine likely wouldn't have ended up sitting cross-legged on cold concrete, trapped in a tiny cage while these criminals discussed what to do with her. She herself had made it out of the club by that point and was trying to figure out the best way to make it to the ground floor of the building. Her own power was a great help in that respect.

But when the incursion formed, she had little choice but to deal with the sudden onslaught of hungry Anathema.

That was how they caught her. Fighting through the sudden incursion was one thing—the strength and precision of her power had grown significantly since first receiving her Star Core, and a low Tier Incursion didn't feel all too threatening. She could reliably wrest control over the weakest Anathema, now, and there were—there were enough people dying that she could use the necromantic aspect of her abilities to great effect.

Unfortunately for her, the remaining security were far more interested in capturing the offenders than in dealing with the incursion actively destroying their own establishment. Katherine wasn't able to evade them in the end, and now she was stuck in a cage.

I wonder what happened to Luna? And Alex? The last Katherine had seen of Luna, the newer Star Guardian was slipping away through the shadows. Maybe she managed to escape after all? As for Alex, Katherine hadn't seen her since they went their separate ways at the restaurant.

I hope she's okay.

It had been several hours since things had 'quieted down' by this point, and Katherine was almost ready. She hadn't just been sitting there quietly this whole time, waiting for someone else to do something. It might look like that—which was obviously part of the point—but she knew that her current captors had little understanding of her power and what it was actually capable of.

She'd been having quite a few different conversations.

There was a whole rat colony near the edge of her current range, and she had been working hard to establish a firm communicative link with the rodents. By this point, she was certain that they'd do what she asked.

She'd also been collecting smaller critters, exerting control over every little insect, spider, or worm that she could find. Unlike the rats, the bugs were simple enough that it was easiest to just assert control and command them directly.

Finally, she'd been negotiating with several different machines. There were a number of different control systems in range within the building, and she had finally made a convincing enough argument to be able to shut off most of the power, sound alarms, and open every single lock she could find when she gave the right signal.

The locks were the most challenging to convince, as stubbornness and suspicion were their very nature. But like most 'simple' machine spirits, they were still single-minded and would never ignore attempts at communication. The fact that they would always continue to 'hear her out' and try to follow the logic she provided in good faith meant that with enough time, she could find ways to trick them into doing exactly what she wanted.

And then there were the mobile devices. The final thing Katherine wanted to do was to establish a link to the wider world, and the several cellular devices within her power's range were the perfect way to accomplish that.

That presented a different kind of challenge. Not all machines had spirits, only those that had at least a rudimentary level to process information, make decisions, or respond to their environment. Naturally, then, computers had by far the 'strongest' and most complex, sophisticated spirits out of all machines.

They even surpassed many animals, yet Katherine still found proper communication to be uniquely challenging. To put it simply, the grandest machine spirits were immensely alien in a way that even nonhuman animals weren't. To a degree, Katherine felt more in common with the minds of some Anathema. The simplicity and single mindedness of something like a PID controller or keypad lock worked in her favor. Even though the machine spirits were alien, they weren't particularly hard to understand.

As for more intelligent animals, she could get by on shared feelings and a shared understanding of basic reality.

But difficult was not impossible, and finally, Katherine succeeded in getting what she wanted. The reason it was so much easier to use her power with her own phone was because she could bypass most of the difficulty by acting like the 'user.' With another, secured device, that was less of an option.

After taking a few deep breaths and checking up on all the different relationships she'd established, Katherine finally put everything into action.

First, the power went out. The emergency power tried to come on, but most of it failed. Only the alarms succeeded in going off, but the whole building was left in almost total darkness. By this point, multiple people had started shouting.

But that was only the beginning.

Every lock within Katherine's range disengaged, including the lock on her own tiny cell. She knew there were other prisoners nearby, so this would definitely cause some extra trouble for the guards.

And finally, she called the rats and bugs to her aide, all while quietly slipping out of her cell and past the fumbling guards. She really hoped that she wouldn't have to use either of them—but if it came down to it and someone tried to stand in her way…

Well, Katherine didn't really want to picture it.

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