BRAVE BANGERS Chapter 01: Business is Booming

April 2030

Befitting of the fastest-growing metropolis in the country, Braver City was home to a seemingly never-ending supply of new businesses. You couldn’t turn the corner on your usual route to work without seeing a new sign plastered across a new building that definitely hadn’t been there a week ago, and you couldn’t turn the same corner on your usual route back home at all, as the street had to be adjusted to fit a brand new block of new office buildings. Either take your chances in the alleyway to your left, or go back a few streets and try a new route.

And in Braver City, there was one type of business that was spreading faster than your mother’s legs – or, perhaps it was more appropriate to say “business”.

And that type of “business”…didn’t really have a name. Not yet, at least. It was too new. Too vague. Too involved in things the rest of society hadn’t been made aware of yet. A close comparison could perhaps be “gang warfare”, if “gang warfare” were fought by teams of superhuman screw-ups who were somehow paramount to maintaining the existential integrity of the world – of all of the worlds, really.

Little slips of paper. Cards, really. That was what it came down to.

Like the card that had fallen into the hands of one of Braver City’s “businesses” – more specifically, the hands of Flint, a high-ranking member of the organization known as Gunmetal.

The sun had begun to set, bathing Braver City in a relaxing, orange spring glow, when Flint and his two most trusted assistants cut through the jam-packed burroughs of the eastern side of the city, disappearing between numerous alleyways, ascending to the rooftops to arrive at the entrance to one of Gunmetal’s offices.

Gunmetal was a big organization, and one of Braver City’s veteran members of “gang warfare”. This office, though, was tiny, on the ass-end of town, and had never really done anything worthwhile. It existed just to pad out the organization’s numbers and territory – to give someone something to do to feel involved.

Ordinarily, Flint wouldn’t have bothered coming here due to this aforementioned mediocrity, but he hadn’t much choice. It was the office he’d been the closest to when he’d acquired that strange little card tucked into his dark gray suit pocket, and he had to get out of sight as fast as possible, or someone else in the business would pounce on him to claim it.

The door was shut and locked multiple times the second Flint stepped inside. There wasn’t even anyone else in the office at that time, but that was fine. It helped prevent information from spreading too quickly.

Flint, still flanked by his two most trusted assistants, marched to the room at the back of the building, and that door was also shut and locked behind them.

Taking a seat on the top of the old, dusty mahogany desk, Flint turned to his assistants, and they all exchanged a look. They all knew this was a serious pull, and to keep their fucking mouths shut about it until the time was right.

He reached into his pocket and procured the card – half the length of an envelope, and barely thicker than a standard sheet of paper. This was Flint’s first time actually looking at the thing for longer than the half-second it took to recognize what it was. He’d heard of them before, he’d been told of the sheer fucking magnitude of their importance, but he’d never even been in the same room as one before, at least as far as he knew.

And now that he was…

It was…pretty unspectacular. There was nothing on the back, and the front wasn’t packing much more than that. Just a simple word printed across the face, overlaid on a distorted copy of itself.

“[Mask]…” he read aloud, his voice strained and gravelly. “Gotta say, I was expecting a little more than that.”

The assistant to his left smiled. “Ooh, yeah, that’s an important one. Definitely underselling it, boss.”

Flint raised a brow, but the assistant had raised his handgun first, aimed right between the boss’ eyes.

The second assistant scrambled for the pistol at his own waist. “AJ, what the fuck are you-?!”

AJ’s other hand snapped out almost as fast as a bullet would have, snatching the wrist and sending the second man’s gun to the floor. “Whoa, whoa, settle down, Danny. There’s no need for that.”

As Danny winced in pain at his twisted arm, Flint narrowed his eyes and clicked his teeth. “Who the fuck are you?”

“AJ” smiled, just as a glowing green light danced across his body in a hexagonal pattern. When the light reached his face, the visage was gone, replaced by a high-tech mask that completely covered “AJ”’s head, with a sheen glossy enough to provide Flint a clear reflection. “I usually go by ‘Ace’. Thank you for asking.”

Danny’s eyes nearly popped out from his skull. “What the fuck?! Where’s AJ?! What’d you do with him?”

“Oh, he never made it out of his apartment this morning. I’ve been accompanying you fellas all day,” Ace said. “Not my favorite job, but I really do appreciate that bar you guys showed me. It’s nice.”

“You killed him?!”

“What? No! He’ll be alright. I just gave him a little tap.” Ace aimed the gun at Danny’s leg and shot him right through the thigh, sending him collapsing to the ground in pain. “See? It’s not that bad.”

Flint still hadn’t budged from the desk, even when the barrel of the gun returned to his face. He kept his eyes on Ace’s mask, jaw clenched tight. “Who do you work for?”

Ace chuckled. “Whoever’s hiring.”

“How much?”

Shaking his head, Ace casually reached out and took the card from Flint’s hand. The Gunmetal officer offered no resistance.

Pocketing it into his own suit, Ace said, “Sorry, ‘boss’, but I don’t think you can outbid her.”

The two remaining goons in the office didn’t even attempt to stop Ace as he casually strolled out the door, whistling playfully all the while.

Outside, he took a different yet equally circuitous route than the one that had taken him to the tiny little Gunmetal office, with the added fanciness of leaping across a few rooftops, slipping into an open apartment window, using his masks’s disguise feature to pretend to be the family’s father to evade suspicion, before taking the fire escape on the opposite end of the building and eventually ending up on the upper floor of a nice, little warehouse. One of Braver City’s innumerable.

Taking a quick scan to make sure the coast was clear, Ace brought a finger up to the side of his mask, flicking the communication device’s switch. “Ace here.”

On the other end was the sickly-sweet bubbly voice of Saschia. “Hi, sugar~! How’s the mission going?”

He held the card up to give it a once-over. “FORMA acquired. This one’s got [Mask] on it.”

“Stuuupendous! Mrs. Meralda will be very, very pleased to hear that!”

“Pleased enough to give me a bonus?” Ace asked. It wasn’t a serious question, but hey, if it worked, that was one more arcade cabinet to add to his collection back home…

“I’ll be sure to ask~!” He could hear Saschia scribbling something into her clipboard. Even after living on Earth for a few years, she still couldn’t grasp the reality of not needing to stab the pen into the page to write with it. “Oh, by the by, is BB with you?”

“BB?” said Ace. “I didn’t even know she was in town.”

And there was the sound of the pen ripping through the paper, and a cute little “shit, fuck!” muttered under the space succubus’ breath. “She is~! Mrs. Meralda sent her to retrieve a FORMA as well, and she should be in the same area as you. I’ll be over there in a few minutes, so I can help look for her!”

He shrugged. “Alright, well, I guess I’ll look around for a-”

The quiet warehouse suddenly exploded into chaotic noise as one of the dock doors was roughly pulled open. In rushed a squadron of young boys in matching yellow hoodies, some tripping over themselves, others sporting bruises, and most looking panicked.

“D-did we lose her?” One of the boys said. He then immediately got his answer as a woman’s voice came roaring in from behind:

“GET BACK HERE YA LIL BASTARDS!”

Ace brought his finger back up to his communicator. “Found her.”

Another guy in a yellow hoodie came flying into the warehouse, as if he’d been launched out of a cannon, soaring dozens of feet across the wide-open space until he slammed up against the far wall, leaving a massive dent behind.

And not far behind him was a blur that could supposedly be identified as BB. She moved from one boy to the next, launching hooks and uppercuts that cut each one down in no time at all. Each punch echoed around the place like gunshots, and each yelp of pain somehow managed to be even louder than the last.

After taking down the sixth, BB came to a stop, still gripping to the hoodie of her latest bloody-faced victim as she turned to the remaining crew. “Gimme the goddamn stupid card already!”

“F-fuck you!” one of them blurted out, clutching his hands tightly to his chest.

One of his allies smacked him on the arm, and gestured towards the back of the warehouse. “Bodhi, you go man the ballista! We’ll handle her!”

“Like fuckin’ hell you will,” BB growled, tossing the guy she was holding off to the side like he didn’t weigh a thing. As Bodhi took off running to the back of the warehouse, BB slowly started stepping towards the remaining boys, rolling her neck left and right. “Hand it over, buttmunchers.”

Mustering up the best battlecry he could, the first of the remaining boys charged directly at BB, fists raised in a trained boxing stance.

Flying up to BB, he flung flurry after flurry of furious fists, focused on fucking up the face of this ferocious floozy of a foe.

But BB slipped her head around every single punch with ease, barely moving the rest of her body. “Oh, ya know how to box, huh?” As she dodged the last punch, she threw a right cross right into the guy’s face, sending a few teeth loose. “Too bad ya suck balls at it!”

That left two more, who rushed her at the same time, hoping to capitalize on her preoccupation with her current opponent. It was a silly hope, but that was all they could cling to at that point.

A simple backstep was all it took to cause the two boys to completely whiff and stumble rather pathetically. A spinning backfist and a side kick to the gut was all it took to defeat the one on the left, sending him flying backward until he crashed into a stack of crates, bouncing off of those with so much force he soared upward, slammed into the ceiling, then tumbled back down to the ground with a nasty little thud.

The one on the right didn’t immediately go in just then, instead taking his own fight stance, one that BB clocked as a wrestler’s.

Knowing what he wanted to do, BB stepped forward and threw a slow, heavy haymaker of a punch. He took the bait, leaning down and lunging at her legs to go for a takedown.

That made rolling over his back a total breeze. Before her feet even touched the floor on the other side of him, her arms were locked tight around his waist. He didn’t even have time to scream in fear before BB hoisted him up and over, spiking his face into the hard, cold concrete floor in a picture-perfect suplex.

Dusting her hands clean, BB rested them on her hips and scoped out the warehouse for any leftovers she might have missed. She walked over to the closest guy, rolling and groaning on the ground, and kicked him. “Oi. Which one of you bozos has the card?” Even if he were conscious enough to answer, the blood in his mouth would have prevented him from being understandable anyway.

Just then, the shutter door at the back-end of the warehouse rolled open, and from it emerged an honest-to-God ballista, helmed by Bodhi.

“Die, bitch!” Bodhi yelled out as he took aim.

Smirking, BB tapped her hand against the underside of the silver baseball bat strapped to her back, popping it up into the air, somehow spinning it around her neck a few times before catching it. No part of that was even remotely necessary, that was just the showboat in her wanting to have some fun before ending this little group of young “businessmen” for good.

The ballista fired, shooting a gigantic bolt directly towards her. In response, she swung the bat, making perfect contact with its sweet spot.

CRACK!!

The sound that resonated from the collision between the bat and the ballista bolt damn-near permanently deafened everyone in the warehouse. Bodhi himself had to bring his hands up to his ears for protection, but there was no protection from the deflected bolt coming at him.

The ballista burst into pieces, and Bodhi went flying high into the air, screaming the entire time, until he finally hit the ground, and went night-night.

From up top, Ace began clapping his hands before calling out, “Bravo! Bravo! An amazing performance like always, BB!”

She shot him a scowl. “Tch. Bite me.”

As Ace slid down a ladder to the ground floor, a door nearby opened up, and in poked the purple, horned head of little Saschia, her signature sunshiny smile spread across her face. “Helloooo, my sweets~! How goes it?”

Ace held out the [Mask] FORMA. “Here’s mine.”

Over in the middle of the warehouse, BB had her head to the sky, looking around at all the papers floating slowly through the air in the aftermath of the ballista explosion. The boys evidently had a little “office” back there, and their “files” were now fluttering in the wind. Receipts, napkins, crude sketches of dicks, candy wrappers the boys hadn’t bothered to throw away, tissues that needed no further elaboration…

And, most importantly, the little FORMA card that Bodhi had been carrying.

She snatched it out of the air, and immediately stomped over to Ace and Saschia. Ace stepped aside to let her pass, enjoying the view of her fat booty as she walked by him.

“Here’s yer stupid fuckin’ card,” she spat, flicking the thing between Saschia’s perky cleavage and heading right for the exit. “There, I’m done. I’m goin’ home.”