While the boys took to the skies to get to their BUBBLE, the girls fortunately had the comfort of the car Mira had rented upon arriving in Braver City to get them to theirs.
“It’s a bit of a drive,” Mira said as she weaved her seatbelt across her big tits and locked it in snug. “Would you like to stop somewhere and grab snacks before we get there?”
“No, let’s just hurry this shit up,” BB grumbled, jerking the seat adjuster around until she could basically lie down. “Gettin’ snacks is just gonna drag this out longer.”
“Are you in a rush to get home?” Mira asked as she pulled out from the GLYPH parking lot and out onto the street. “If you have an emergency, I’m sure Malena would let you head back early.”
The resulting snort was loud and sudden enough to get a little jump from Mira. “Yeah, good one.”
“You don’t think she would?”
“Fuck no. I’m a dumb fuckin’ slave who’s stuck doin’ her biddin’. We all are.”
Brows furrowed, Mira replied, “I don’t think that’s true. We’re all working together to keep the world safe from-”
She was cut off as BB slammed her heels atop the dashboard. “Pssh. You actually buy that bullshit? That’s just how she suckers you goodie-goodie types in.”
That gave the older woman some pause. BB’s talk of being forced into working for GLYPH didn’t match Mira’s own recruitment into the organization – hers had been more akin to a musician being scouted and signed to a record label for her big breakthrough. Malena had approached her after she’d finished teaching her music class at the school she worked at, and invited her out to a nice dinner wherein they had a long, heart-to-heart conversation.
They bonded over motherhood and their shared goals of making the world a better place in a way no one else could. Mira was finally able to speak freely to someone about her family’s unique style of magic and how she wanted to find a way to use it to help those in need, and Malena had provided her with ample opportunities to do just that. It had been the single most exciting prospect of her life, and when she’d been asked to join GLYPH, she immediately accepted without missing a beat.
While she didn’t want to discredit BB’s own experience, as she certainly wasn’t privy to it, it didn’t quite sit right with her to hear the young woman slander Malena, whom Mira considered a friend and great woman. And so, she decided not to prod that beast any further.
Though pleasant small talk for the drive clearly didn’t seem to be in the cards, Mira didn’t want to give up on it just yet. Malena had mentioned dividing up the agents into new pairings specifically for them to grow closer to each other and become better teammates through it. The newfound family GLYPH provided Mira had been one of her driving forces to continue working for the organization, and she was intent on trying to keep that going if she could. “Oh, I heard that you run a bed-and-breakfast!”
“Yeah,” BB said, curtly.
“How cuuuute! Where is it at? I love bed-and-breakfasts; I’d love to stop by yours!” she glanced over at BB with a smile. “If you’re okay having a coworker as a guest, that is, heehee! I don’t wanna inconvenience you or anything if that’s too awkward for you.”
BB groaned. “You can drop by if ya want, I don’t care. Look, lady, we don’t gotta be all buddy-buddy. I’m just here to get this job over with so I can leave, aight?”
With a frown, Mira nodded and dropped her attempt at small talk. While it had been obvious from their first meeting that BB and Dahye were very different in personality, she hadn’t been expecting to have such a disastrous first impression with her. Malena often spoke highly of the two girls together, and after Dahye had shown herself to be an angel and an absolute joy to work with, Mira had been looking forward to meeting BB as well, though she was quickly coming to regret that assumption.
She then reached for her phone to put some music on to drown out the awkward silence for the rest of the ride.
“You heading out, babe?”
Ryder stopped in the middle of the HQ hallway at the familiar sound of his girlfriend, Raelynn’s, voice coming from a nearby cubicle belonging to one of her friends who also worked at GLYPH. The tiniest little breath hissed out from his nostrils at the interruption, though by the time he turned around to face her, the irritation had waned. It was hard to be grumpy at a cutie like her, even for a total grouch like him.
The sporty, short-haired, magenta-eyed brunette stepped away from her friend’s desk and skipped over to her much-taller beau, snaking her hands around his back to pull him in close before moving down and giving his booty a squeeze. “What kinda mission do you have today?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried worried. I know you’re gonna kill it out there like always,” Raelynn responded, pressing her tits against him until her cleavage was practically popping out from her button-up shirt. “I’m just curious. Is it a dangerous one?”
He sighed. “They all are.”
“They give you a partner?”
“No.”
She shot a cute little pout up into his broody, masked face. “Aww, that sucks. I was hoping they finally set you up with that new agent girl, Gisela. You meet her yet?” When Ryder shook his head, Raelynn stood up on her tiptoes to get as close to his ear as possible to whisper into it. “She’s a hot goth girl with huuuuge tits… I know your cock would look amazing fucking them~”
“Well she wasn’t in the meeting,” Ryder said, already accustomed to his girlfriend’s enjoyment of setting him up with the many fine women who worked for GLYPH. “I don’t have time for that right now anyway.”
While most others would have taken note of the disinterest in small talk long ago and walked away, Raelynn was completely unperturbed and continued on like Ryder had been an enthusiastic conversational partner the entire time, just as she always did. That…”tenacity”, you could call it, while perhaps a bit annoying at times, was one of the young GLYPH receptionist’s most infamous traits. And hey, not only had Ryder not told her to fuck off yet, he’d agreed to be her boyfriend, so it seemed to have worked out for her.
“Who was there then? Dahye? Mira?”
He sighed, knowing there was no escaping this topic whenever Raelynn brought it up. It wasn’t that he was disinterested in all the hot girls she wanted to watch him fuck – far, FAR from it – but he was a man of priorities, and sex had to wait its fucking turn right now. “Mira and BB.”
Raelynn’s face lit up. “Ooh, BB! Oh, babe, you gotta fuck BB! You haven’t yet, right?”
“No. She’s too annoying.”
She slapped his arm. “Who cares if she’s annoying? Babe, you see the ass on her?! Try and tell me you don’t wanna make that thing clap on your big beautiful dick~!”
Her hands took hold of one of his, slowly bringing it up to her lips, giving his knuckles a soft little kiss and a quick lick. “And if she’s that annoying, just choke her to keep her from talking~”
With another half-annoyed sigh, Ryder clutched Raelynn’s cheeks and chin in his hand and kissed her before breaking her hold on him. “Whatever. You can bug me about this later. I’m going.”
“Alright, alright,” she said, tiptoeing up to give him a kiss of her own just before he could break away. “Be safe, and kick whoever’s ass if that’s what your mission is, ‘kay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Ryder made his way down to the ground floor, and then over to the parking lot without a word to anyone else. He’d never been much of the social type, and didn’t usually say much to anyone in HQ anyway, but with the current mission he’d snatched up for himself, he was even less inclined to speak to anyone (girlfriend notwithstanding, as always), and was fully focused on his mission, or rather, his own personal mission that this GLYPH mission would help him accomplish.
He hopped into his black-and-gray sports car, and sped out of the parking lot like a bullet fired from a revolver, smoothly and skillfully navigating around anything in the way with superhuman reflexes, until he was out into the streets in the blink of an eye.
As he swerved around any other cars in his path his eyes narrowed. His mission was to take the FORMA card that had fallen into the hands of the street racing gang known as Rojas. He was already familiar with the group, and while he didn’t give much of a shit about them or whether they kept a FORMA for themselves, he did have one particular interest in them…
They almost certainly had information on the whereabouts of the man he was determined to kill.
The mission file led the girls to an alleyway in a relatively quiet, slow part of town, which was nice, as it made it easier to keep the BUBBLE perimeter protected to prevent pedestrians from promenading in (though it was less nice that the closest available parking was quite far, necessitating a ten minute wait and walk (fortunately cut down to five thanks to BB’s jaywalking and Mira’s hesitant, apologetic following of such) until they actually arrived.).
Waiting in the brick-boxed alleyway was another GLYPH staff member, although not an agent. He seemed unassuming and was certainly on the skinny side, but surprisingly strong and swift whenever he had the chance to show off his physical skills. His name was Samir, and he was a scout responsible for finding any points of interest and relaying the information back to GLYPH. BUBBLES, FORMAs, suspicious moves by other organizations – information that almost always led to missions for the field agents.
“Wow! Two beautiful agents today? How lucky am I?!” he said with a bright smile and a clap of the hands as BB and Mira approached. “How are you lovely ladies doing today?”
“Hi, Samir,” Mira greeted with her own grin. “How have you been, sweetheart?”
“Amazing! Thank you so very much for asking!” the scout replied as he began digging through his pockets, until he procured from them a tin case, which he carefully opened to reveal the contents within… some tiny little picture of some pretty young woman. “Behold! A photocard of my love, Inhae~!”
He then, very gingerly, lifted the card and turned it around to reveal a cutesy signature on the back. “Autographed, too!”
“Oh, how lovely,” said Mira. She (and everyone at GLYPH…and everyone who was ever in Samir’s vicinity, really…) was very familiar with Samir’s love of kpop, and in particular Inhae, a member of the group iSING.
He quickly returned the card to its protective case and re-pocketed it with a gleeful squeal. “It’s my treasure, aheehee! Did you give their mini-album a listen?”
Mira nodded. Being a musician and lover of the art form, Mira was Samir’s prime target for peddling his pop princesses. “Oh, yes, I did, actually. It was quite nice! Very catchy, and one of them had a lovely voice.”
“That was Inhae for sure! She’s the lead singer! And she has the voice of an angel – no! A goddess!”
With a groan and a roll of her eyes, BB pushed past Samir, stepping towards the BUBBLE – the spherical distorted space hovering right in the center of the back alley. She tapped the bottom of the Big Bang Bat strapped to her back, shooting it up into the air before catching it and settling it over her shoulder. “Aight, we get it, yer a simp. Can we hurry up and get this shit over and done with?”
While Mira was less than thrilled at BB’s attitude, Samir, as always, never let anything damper his mood, clapping his hands and giving BB a thumbs up. “Yes, of course! Which of you lovely ladies is in charge today?”
Mira pointed towards her partner. “It’s BB.”
“Eh, I don’t give a shit ‘bout that,” came BB’s response. “I’m just here to bash whoever’s brains in. If there’s some other important bullshit, just give it to her.”
Nodding, Samir stepped over to a secure metal box he’d been keeping nearby as he awaited the agents’ arrival. After unlocking it, he pulled out two sets of what appeared to be jetpacks, each the size of a small briefcase, bearing a logo that said “Gallant Gear” along the edge.
“You will need these!” As the two agents slipped the jetpacks onto their backs, Samir explained, “The world inside the BUBBLE is very, very big! Lots of open vertical space, giiiant tree-like stalks that go way up into the sky! Impossible to navigate without flying! And you’ll want to avoid the ground and branches as much as you can – there’s lots of foreign plants there, and some of the ones we sampled are poisonous! I’m sure Dr. Ingram’s serum will keep you as safe as possible, but we couldn’t sample everything, so be careful, please!”
“How do we use these?” Mira asked.
“Very easy!” He grabbed a pair of matching gloves for each of them, and pointed at the circular panels on the palms. “Close your hands to turn the jetpack on and off, and hold your hands out and use them to steer! Open and close your hands over and over to slowly descend when you need to, okay?”
Mira gave a hesitant nod as she finished slipping the gloves on. The one part of GLYPH agent work she struggled a bit on was the advanced technology she occasionally had to utilize, and this was looking like another prime example of such. “O-okay… I suppose that sounds simple enough…?”
The agents then turned to face the BUBBLE. Mira looked back at Samir and asked, “Is it dangerous in there?”
“It can be very dangerous, yes, but the jetpacks will let you fly much faster than anything in there, so you should be able to get away if you need to! There weren’t very many hostiles when I scouted, but just in case, be careful, okay? The people in that world are all big bugs, so be wary of wings, stingers, things like that;”
BB, who was already halfway through the BUBBLE suddenly felt her eyes widen and a chill run up her spine. “B-bugs…?! Wait, nobody said shit about b-!” But she was already on the other side of the BUBBLE before she could finish speaking, hurtling down the wide open air, screaming in fear, albeit not at the sudden drop and freefall, but rather, the sight of thousands of bug creatures flying and crawling around in the distance.
