Corona folded her wings around her shoulders and ducked through the Midnight Sun's front door. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the dim lighting broken here and there by neon and plasma lights flashing in sync with the beat of the music. She swept her gaze over the roughly two hundred people on the main floor and at the tables surrounding it, and those on the balconies as well.
Heads at the nearby tables turned as people noticed her. Even among chimeras, she tended to stand out, and here, almost everyone around her was human.
She tried to ignore them as she skirted the edge of the crowd. Fortunately, most of them had their attention on the strippers. She took a moment to watch them, wondering what it was like to be considered attractive by so many people. Being a stripper looked fun, but she'd learned early on that not many people wanted to see a bipedal dragon with huge muscles taking her clothes off in a place like this.
These girls are so lucky. They weren't made by a corporation that only cared about making biological killing machines.
She shrugged, turned away from the dancers, and kept moving until she found an empty table near the bar. The chairs were all the same, one solid piece of plastic on metal legs molded to fit the average human ass, differing from one another only in color. They had been built before creatures like herself were created, and hadn't been designed with things like tails in mind.
She spun one of the chairs around and straddled it. It creaked and gave under her considerable weight, but held her up, for now at least. She braced her feet under her, just in case the chair buckled while she waited for her clients.
She kept an eye on the other tables as she waited for Myaku and the rest to show up. A few minutes passed, then she decided to go order a drink. She headed for the bar, slipped into an empty spot between a pair of canids, towering over them and everyone else seated there. The bartender, a human, gave her a nervous look and braced himself visibly before walking over to her.
She scanned the menu board on the wall behind him and raised her brow ridges. Unbelievable, the prices they charge for booze. For something that impaired judgment and reflexes, and often caused people to lose control of their bodies, they were quite willing to pay through the nose to get their hands on it. Yet another thing about humans she didn't understand.
She shrugged and said, "I'll have a cola, please. With ice."
The bartender filled a glass and placed it in front of her. She smiled, being careful not to bare her sharp teeth and thumb-length fangs. She paid for the drink and added a generous tip for the bartender.
"Thanks."
"Anytime." He smiled back before going off to serve another customer.
"Are you Corona Borealis?" a woman's hesitant voice said, and Corona turned to find a young human with metallic purple hair standing behind her. She was dressed in tight jeans and a red trenchcoat that looked like it was made of vinyl.
Corona nodded. "Myaku?"
"Yeah." She grinned. "I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find you in here, but when you said you stick out like a sore thumb, I guess you weren't kidding."
"Yeah, I'm pretty hard to miss."
Myaku waved a hand behind her. "Well, if you'd like to join the rest of us at that table over there, we'll tell you about the job."
"Lead the way." Corona followed Myaku over to one of the tables, turned an empty chair around and lowered herself gently onto it. It gave a little more than the previous one had. She planted her feet under her and hoped for the best. She sipped her cola and looked over the three other girls at the table. All were human and were about the same age as Myaku, and were dressed similarly. Myaku waved a hand at each and introduced them as Nori, Teikiatsu, and Kim.
"Nice to meet you." Corrie smiled. "So, what can I do for you?"
"There's this guy who's been following us around," Myaku said. "Stalking us, I mean. Harassing us."
"How?"
"He shows up just about everywhere we go." Myaku shook her head slowly. "We've stopped using several of our regular hangouts because of him. He'd keep bugging us at one, so we'd start going somewhere else, and he'd turn up there and we'd switch again."
"See," Teikiatsu said, leaning forward, "he's a guy we know from high school. He started going after us there and kept it up after the summer break started. He's always talking about tying us up and all kinds of other sick shit."
"You talk to the police about this?"
"Of course. Know what they told us?" Myaku snorted. "All they can do is talk to him, but they can't do anything else unless he actually tries something."
"They never do anything until after someone's been attacked or raped or killed," Teikiatsu grumbled. "That's their idea of 'serve and protect' -- don't do anything to prevent a crime, but only get involved after some freak puts someone in the hospital or worse."
Nori sighed. "I bet the cops would jump right in if our parents were someone 'important,' but I guess we're not worth the time and effort to protect from a single sleazeball."
Corona nodded. "My boyfriend and I have run into that kind of crap plenty of times."
"Right." Kim shook her head. "My mom's a cop, but they won't let her help because she's 'emotionally involved.' She's doing what she can, but she doesn't have enough authority to stop this guy. She wants me to stay home and keep the door locked while she's at work, but I'm not gonna stop living my life because of this freak."
"I'm really getting scared," Nori said softly, staring at the glass between her hands. "We just know he'll show up here sooner or later."
"He started out just a little weird, but he's been getting worse lately." Kim ran a hand through her metallic orange hair and sighed. "The weaselly bastard ran us out of the Event Horizon, and we found this place a few days ago. We hadn't seen him since the Horizon, but as we were walking to our table last night, he appeared out of nowhere, reached out and shoved his hand up my shirt. Right up under my bra!" She shuddered. "He touched my tits! Just thinking about it makes me wanna burn off the outer layer of my skin."
Corona grimaced. "Whoa."
"I gave him a black eye for that one, but it didn't end there. We moved to a different table across the room, and a few minutes later we caught him staring at us from maybe ten feet away." Kim sneered. "Staring and rubbing his crotch."
"Shit." Corona shook her head. She hadn't been alive long enough to completely understand human behavior, but she sure as hell wouldn't want some perv groping her. There was only one guy in the world who could touch her that way without being fed his own teeth. "Did you talk to the police again? He actually touched you this time, so that's assault."
"We did." Myaku threw her hands up. "They took our statements, filed 'em away and said they'd 'look into it.'"
Kim rolled her eyes. "Sure, they will."
"I'm not a cop," Corona said, "so what I can do is somewhat limited, but ..."
"We just need you to make him leave us alone. Scare him off if you can. Beat the living shit out of him if you have to."
"I can do that." Corona nodded. "What does this guy look like?"
"We can do better than that," Myaku said. "We went to school with him, so we can tell you his name. Patrick Henderson."
"We call him Pervy Patty," Teikiatsu added with a grin. "And not just because of this, either. He was fucked in the head even when he was a kid."
"I snapped a picture of him with my phone. This was before the black eye, though." Nori took her phone out and held it up. Corona took her own phone out, set it to receive a file, and nodded. Nori sent it over and Corona opened it. She stared at it and raised a brow ridge. The stalker was a pudgy young man with short black hair and a round, smirking face.
"I've seen this guy before, a couple weeks ago. I was visiting my boyfriend at work. He went into the restroom and didn't come out. Jack checked on him to be sure he was okay and caught him masturbating with a chocolate eclair he'd swiped from the snack shelf on the way to the can."
The girls stared at her for a long moment. Finally, Kim grimaced.
"Jesus Christ."
"Yeah, that sounds like something Patty would do. Back in junior high, one of the teachers caught him fuckin' a St. Bernard behind the school. And I'm not talking about a chimera like you. This was the non-sentient, four-legged variety. Not a synth or a sex toy, either. The real thing." Myaku shook her head. "Anyway, since the cops won't lift a finger, we figured we'd try to find somebody else who could help. We thought a chimera would be able to scare him off. Uh, no offense."
"None taken." Corona chuckled. "I'll show the photo to a couple of my friends and see if they can help track him down." She grinned, letting her teeth show this time.
"You won't need to," Myaku said. "He'll show up before we leave. He always does."
"Well, then, I'll just keep an eye on you from a distance until he appears. I'll handle him as soon as he tries anything. But it can't hurt to see what we can dig up. You never know when some little piece of info will be enough to put him away." She nodded at the bar. "I'll be nearby."
"Thanks." Kim let a slight, relieved smile show.
Corona smiled back, stood, and dialed Taura's number. Her friend was good with computers, so she should be able to find some juicy info. Jack was still at work, but he could join the fun later if it wasn't over by then.
Corona found a vacant seat at the bar and waited for Taura to answer.
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