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  Mandra Bay law enforcement was ill-equipped and ill-motivated to counter the shenanigans of a gang of soulless, antisocial marauders who had nothing to lose so the Bruisers ran a rampant, uncontested campaign of criminality. Sure, they weren’t top dogs in the criminal underworld--more an assembly of low-level rabble--but they were a force to be reckoned with.

  Maximillia became exceedingly thin, her lack of nutrition bordering on life-threatening. She’d become Mardo’s favorite girl and he found enjoyment in watching her every orifice get stabbed by several of his drug-addled goons as she was in the midst of Gatekeeper-induced intoxication. However, she found not a single one of them physically attractive. In fact, in sober moments she found them physically repellent but the drink potently diluted her standards and did so frequently.

  Mardo would remark how he liked his “little girl” skinny, so Maximillia’s deprivation of food was something of a fetish for him at that point. Wherever he went, she was at his side like a loyal minion and everyone in the gang knew that no one could lay a finger on her without his consent. She belonged to him. He made it a point to constantly compliment her on her long, dark locks and would illustrate this by cumming on her hair while she slept or even by ordering some of his knuckle-dragging disciples to do the same while he watched. He’d take great pleasure in watching half a dozen of his goons empty their balls into her hair; a kind of dry shampoo job.

  In Maximillia’s near-constant drunken stupor, she consented to every vile sexual escapade. During sex he began to get very physical, going so far as to choke her into unconsciousness on common occasion. Her bare ass would typically end up with a pink, hand-shaped mark on it after an especially energetic Mardo took his spanking to the next level. The choking and spanking led to light face slapping during sex, then heavy face slapping. The

  one-sided physical altercations bled into non-sexual situations and the brutal beast began to find the simplest non-reasons to sling Maximillia’s weakened, rubbery form around his love nest.

  The violence escalated still. The first pure assault took even Maximillia by surprise. Mardo had just given her a heaping glass of Gatekeeper and she was midway into her blissful descent into drugged comfort when a hallucinatory episode brought about by a drug-fueled binge of his own threw him into a rage. He threw her across the room and proceeded to throw down a storm of fists atop her, cracking several of her ribs and loosening several of her teeth. She managed to slip out into the night after he collapsed into sleep and found refuge in a nearby storm drain.

  She’d been with the gang for nearly a year and had become so irredeemably blended into their ranks that she felt that her individual persona was gone and her only value was as one of them. She was cold, nearly naked, hungry, broke and with no friends whom didn’t bear the branded mark of a Bruiser that her options were few. She didn’t dare entertain the idea of going to see her father. Definitely not in her current state. The man, upon seeing his precious lost girl merely an upright sack of hair and bones peppered with cuts and bruises, would’ve rolled into the Bruiser compound with a blaster in each hand, gunning down goons until he himself was gunned down. She still loved her father dearly and couldn’t allow her horrible life mismanagement to doom his own. No, she’d keep her diseased curse of dependency and physical abuse to herself.

  It didn’t occur to her after the sixth or seventh time curled up in that storm drain--one of her eyes swollen shut, her nose bleeding and lips busted, courtesy of Mardo’s knuckles--that perhaps their association was less than beneficial for her. She always shuffled back into his open arms, tears streaming out whichever eye wasn’t swollen shut. He’d shed his crocodile tears for her with promises that the abuse would end, which it would for a few weeks. When he predictably, yet somehow unexpectedly, snapped she’d crawl back to that storm drain.

  Sometimes, as Maximillia sat in that fortress of solitude, that nurturing ring of metal,

  she’d glare out through the curtains of drizzling rain at the glimmering lights of Mandra Bay in the distance as she’d sink into this serene, almost supernatural sense of calm. The world around her melted away and all that was left was the sound and the lights. The glaring, judging eyes of her peers, the lustful eyes of the male Bruisers, the watchful eyes of the local police, it was as if the world were bearing down on her, refusing her an inch of peace.

  A growl of distant thunder would remind her that strife was never more than a moment away from intruding on her serenity. With rueful regret she’d tread that familiar path back into Mardo’s arms and into his bed.

  Weeks later, after healing completely, Maximillia ginned up the courage to find her way back to her father’s house to collect some of the few items she wanted to take with her back to the compound.

  Gareth wasn’t one to let something simple like losing the use of his legs in the Mechanized Infantry stop him from earning an honest living. Vintage hovercycles were popular amongst the old-timers in Mandra Bay. The largest concentration of cycle gangsters in the region set up shop in Mandra and they tended to treat their bikes the way they treated their women, guaranteeing Gareth plenty of work. It kept him employed. It kept him sane. Confined to a hoverchair wasn’t going to keep him infirm. Maximillia’s absence weighed heavily on him, though. A good father’s mind is never far removed from thoughts of his child but she was always on the outside. He pursued while she fled. The cycle would’ve been too much for most, but Gareth was never one to give up on anything, least of all her.

  She knew her way back to the shop. The garage was a glimmering beacon, a unique block of old world architecture amidst the tedious, glossy corporate decay. With an empty bag slung over her shoulder she traipsed up to the open door and found her dad hovering over a Castor-Trach reverse magnatron capacitor. Ancient engineering by modern standards but the old-timers favored vintage over state-of-the-art.

  “Hi, dad.”

  Gareth looked up from his bench. Maximillia looked as thin as a shardflower, almost unrecognizable, but still his daughter. Awestruck, he reached out to her with a quivering hand. “Maxie?”

  She cracked a smile and walked up to him, bending down to hug him. In disbelief he wrapped his arms tightly around her, not letting her go. He could feel her rib bones rolling under her skin as he hugged her. She tried not to let the bubbling emotion overcome her.

  The shop doubled as the family home growing up. Maximillia was always comfortable around technology. Her childhood bedroom was a miniature shop in its own right, complete with child-sized workbench. She never quite grew out of it, but make-up and clothes started to crowd out the outdated mech parts that were typically strewn about her room. When she left, Gareth didn’t disturb a speck of dust there. She hadn’t set foot in the room for almost a year. It felt like an alien environment. Too still and peaceful. She had grown a disturbing symbiosis with the chaos inherent in the Bruisers’ compound. It reminded her of a cruel early life, as well.

  Maximillia’s father heaped love and affection on her but she’d soon come to realize that the outside world wasn’t as welcoming. The kids always teased her during those formative years. They said her eyes were too big for her head and that she belonged off-world on some alien colony. This successfully alienated her and she sank into herself, preferring the safety of solitude where that room offered its best utility. She burned away thousands of quiet nights in that room, listening to her dad’s arc-saw cutting through an engine’s metal. That whirring, grinding song put her to sleep many a night.

  There were always boys. The shy ones would shuffle around the shop from time to time but they were in a worse mental world than she was in. They were lost souls looking for acceptance. She was lost, but content in limbo. She knew they didn’t want her, they just wanted someone to want them. They wanted reassurance and saw her to possibly be one equally desperate and likely to quicken them. There’s no truth in that kind of desperation.

  “I left everything as you left it. I knew you’d be back,” Gareth beamed with a suffering pri
de as they stood in her bedroom's doorway, looking in.

  Maximillia inched into the room, overtaken by nostalgia, even though it had been less than a year since she set foot there. Her condition was the elephant in the room. He couldn’t ignore her scrawny appearance.

  “Can I feed you at least?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

  He couldn’t relent, ever the concerned father. “You’re just so skinny, Maxie. Have you been eating?”

  She nodded, looking back at him. “Yeah, of course.”

  “Are you sick?” He knew where his questions were leading him. He was hoping she’d reveal a truth that contradicted his suspicions.

  “No, I’m fine, dad.”

  “You don’t look fine, sweetie.”

  She sighed, rolling her eyes, snapping out of that nostalgic sentimentality and moved quickly to start tossing certain items into her bag, as if anxious to leave. He knew he was losing her again.

  He treaded carefully. “Can you stay? At least for the night? I missed you, sweetheart,” he begged, his eyes welling with tears. “I haven’t seen you in so long. I miss you every day. I

  just—”

  The words struck her dead in the chest. She shut her eyes, her back to him, her face squinched as the tears trickled. She hunched forward, propping herself up with an outstretched arm resting on her workbench. He rolled around to face her, touching her hand. She flinched. He wasn’t a hard ass hovercycle mechanic anymore. He couldn’t afford to be. Not in this moment.

  “Honey, you know, she left me, too. She didn’t just leave you.”

  She covered her face, but he knew she was crying.

  “There’s nothing you did that was wrong. That crap she was taking... it poisoned her mind. It was the drugs, honey. It changed her. That’s what they do. They take everything that’s good about a person and it erases them.” His tears were streaming now, his fervent pleading unapologetic. “Don’t leave, Maxie. Stay with papa. Stay here so I can take care of you.”

  She yanked her hand away from his, still crying.

  “Don’t leave me again, sweetheart. Papa loves you. I’ll take care of you. Don’t become her!”

  “Shut up!” she barked, snatching up her bag and anxiously scurrying past him, struggling to see through tear-blurred eyes.

  Maximillia didn’t make off with much: some random chotchkies, a few unused uni-cred cards, a bag of candy. The oppressively emotional reunion with her father forced her into a mindless grab for whatever was in front of her. Gareth could only sit helplessly in his chair as she scuttled off. He’d lost her again.

  Things weren’t much better in the world of the Bay Bruisers. Mardo was a man of many vices, regardless of his self-projected persona of modern-day messiah to the lost social outcasts of Mandra Bay. Many of his vices were public: young women, food, drugs and drink and self-love. His lesser known, private vice was gambling. The problem was that he didn’t gamble with

  small-time hoods. He gambled with the big boys. Amongst the Bruisers he was the top-of-the-food-chain apex predator, but amongst the upper class underworld warlords he was just a prawn in a sea full of hyper-evolved thrash sharks. He was also a prominent, world-class loser.

  If a god existed that lorded over the realm of hopelessly ill-fated degenerate gamblers who were destined to never feel the warmth of the light of victory on their chapped, pock-marked faces, that would be the god whom Mardo had unwittingly won the favor of.

  Summarizing Mardo's fiscal shortcomings were simple: He owed lots of money to the wrong people. Dropping 150,000 uni-creds in games to the nephew of the head of the Tsen-Tze crime family wasn’t a wise fiscal life decision. Kylaxian crime syndicates were genetically predisposed to gambling, loved to win and loved even more to collect winnings.

  This wasn’t 150,000 uni-creds that Mardo was good for. He hadn’t earned an honest uni-cred in years so every bit of money he called his own was pilfered from someone else, either directly or indirectly through the criminal indiscretions of his mongrel crew. Mardo knew this, but, much like with his passion for young girls, he couldn’t help himself. He was on a thin wire with the Tsen-Tzes and had little to no collateral to keep his neck from being detached from the rest of him. They humored him because of how pathetically comical they found him. He was a court jester who thought himself a king. Unfortunately for Mardo, they had finally lost patience with him.

  When a representative from the Tsen-Tzes showed up at the compound, Mardo knew reality had shown up at his doorstep. The man, named Kee, immediately stood apart from the mangy native riffraff: from his clean-shaven head, his pressed suit, his polished, gleaming, glossy-black shoes and the digital holographic timepiece bound to his wrist, he wasn’t a Bruiser. His shoes were worth more than the lot of these mouth-breathing scoundrels. They didn’t send a single unpleasant look in his general direction, though. He was human, like them, but breathed the rarified air regularly; he was of different stock and with qualitatively different benefactors. He was a messenger from unseen gods that could strike the Bruisers down at any time so they played the role of obedient dogs expertly.

  Kee stood in the broiling destitution of Mardo’s slum kingdom, eyes scanning the rusted steel canopy above. “You live well, Mardo.”

  “Hey, I have modest standards. Freedom is my currency,” the fat man chuckled nervously.

  “You have no currency, Mardo. That’s why I’m here.”

  Mardo’s uneasy smile faded. “I want to pay. We’re good earners. We’ve got cash coming in through different enterprises. We can offer bulk percentages on the monthly collections until we smooth this out.”

  “That’s a start!” a sharp, disembodied voice barked out.

  Kee held up a small metallic disc in his palm and a beam of shimmering holographic pixels materialized in the space above his hand. The pixels congealed into the form of Dom Tsen-Tze, the gang’s irascible figurehead. The top of the pyramid. The capstone. His rigid, angular features mirrored his personality. His brown exoskeleton was peppered with glints of silver; his was a royal veneer. His eyes were soft, yet penetrating. They commanded respect.

  “I could’ve put you in the ground at any time, Mardo, you tub of shit. No one would’ve missed you. Your litter of miscreants down there would’ve found a new pair of tits to suckle from, too. Low-level messiahs are in heavy supply nowadays, especially messiahs big on talk and small on action.”

  The typically silver-tongued Mardo had nothing to return. No pithy retort. He absorbed the verbal salvo with uncharacteristic passivity. Maximillia inched towards him. He was a sick, abusive pervert, but she’d grown a depraved bond with him. She knew he was an unrepentant degenerate time-bomb but the very nature of their association reflected and amplified her

  self-hatred. She felt that he was the only thing she deserved; in her mind she deserved this pain, this life.

  “I’m going to take a chunk out of your rackets. That’s right,” Dom declared. “That won’t suffice, though. I’ve assumed management of an establishment uptown. I need girls. You’ve got girls so now I’ve got girls. Unless you’ve got issues with that?”

  Mardo didn’t know what Dom was referring to, but had no option but to concur. “None. None at all. What kind of establishment, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “A run-down little brothel in the middle of North Antheiser called Xartha’s. I’m renovating the place and putting in some new talent. Not a high class place but, then again, if I wanted high class girls I wouldn’t be tapping your wares, would I?”

  “I’ve got a stable of girls for you. All young, good stock. Ready and willing to do what they need to do for the family. They all know their way around a stick, if you know what I mean,” he cackled bluntly. He reached out to Maximillia, taking her by the shoulders and presenting her outward. “This one especially. Look at her. Pristine condition. Great hair. Tight as a coiled socket, I’ll tell you. I’ve tested her out personally.”

  Maximillia looked over her sh
oulder at him in disgust.

  “She should be worth a good fifty thousand!” Mardo remarked.

  Dom raked up and down her form with his eyes, scanning her carefully. “She’s skinny. Don’t you feed these girls, Mardo? Kryta be damned.”

  “Girls these days. This look is the standard!” he argued with a nervous chuckle, still on edge.

  “You beat the shit out of her or what?” Dom sighed. “Well, let’s get a look. Strip down, girl, and give me a tour.”

  Maximillia was confused. It was all moving so fast. Mardo helped her out of her bath gown leaving her in nothing but her panties.

  “Let’s see what she can do, Mardo.”

  Mardo signaled for his goons to leave the room, leaving only he, Maximillia and Kee.

  “Consider this an audition, my dear. He says you know your way around a stick. I prefer to see for myself. If you don’t pass muster we take his head as payment.”

  Maximillia looked at Mardo, both worried and angry. He goaded her with his eyes, pressing lightly on her shoulders until she dropped down onto her knees. He fished out his limp dick, shriveled by the pressure of the consequences of this “audition”. He wasn’t nearly at optimum length to display her skills. She had to dry jerk his floppy member, beckoning it to swell. After a minute or so he finally stiffened to a passable rigidity and Maximillia took him into her mouth.

  When she first found her way into Mardo’s care she was just an untouched flower, a lost, inexperienced greenhorn. She’d seen other cocks before and even tasted a few, but Mardo spent months slowly ingratiating her to the ways of carnal sophistication. It was instinctual to her now. The combination of her shattered home-life, his mesmerizing oratory and the tyranny of the Gatekeeper’s influence turned her into a nearly catatonic sexual automaton who allowed herself to be sexually shamed at Mardo’s discretion and with whomever he chose. When she saw his cock she moved as a mindless somnambulist, knowing what deed had to be done.