Domino City

14:30

2nd August 2043

The Black Clown casino jutted upwards into the skyline like an accusing finger, the tip piercing clouds the colour of molten celadon. Rain fell, black and thick, exploding against the streets and buildings with a sound like fattened worms being crushed underfoot. The outside world was a wondrous, roiling mass of chemistry and industrial endeavour, and it was all utterly shut out once within the walls of the casino. Otogi would have it no other way. Layers and layers of resistant armour sheathed the building, and not a single window broke up the faces of its cyclopean mass. As far as Otogi was aware or concerned, the entire world could end outside and he would be utterly ignorant and unmoved by it.

He winced a little at the loud cracking sound his knees made when he pulled himself up to his feet in the bathtub; clearly he had been sitting in a blissful stupor for far too long. He stepped out onto the marble floor and let the water patter off his body, his own personal-scale rain shower, before reaching out and grabbing one of the towels from their gleaming rack. He dried his hair as best he could and draped the towel over his shoulders before walking back into his grand bedroom.

The room could be generously described as a "bomb-site", with clothes and bedding scattered over the floor, a whole plethora of foreign objects in leather and rubber lay out in the open, smears of human blood were even now drying to a rusty brown veneer up the central marble pillar of the bedroom. They were the signs of an evening well spent, and of activities that would begin to take their toll on Otogi's body once the pleasant numbing effects of his daily medication had worn off.

With a sound halfway between a yawn and a purr, the room's only other occupant turned over on the bed, stretching out with all the poise and grace of a man who had practiced long and hard to wake up like a movie-star. Pegasus tucked a few stray strands of hair behind his ear, revealing the gleaming golden bionic eye implanted into his skull. Otogi fancied that he could hear the sound of every nanometre of motors and processors whirring into life with their host. Unlikely. Pegasus always kept that damn eye on, even while he slept. He had the thing recording everything; such was the man's paranoia. Right now the tiny golden orb was filled with hours of footage from their escapades last night.

"I wasn't expecting you to be awake before me," he said with a grin, reaching for the bottle of wine at the bedside. "You're a lot more resilient than I often give you credit for, my boy."

Otogi ignored him, dropping the towel to his waist and tying it about himself. He walked to his wardrobe, running a finger down the pad at its side to open it, a cool draft of air rushing over his slick skin as the doors parted.

"The power of youth, Mr. Crawford," Otogi said with a forced chuckle before adding "And a diet of more than wine" under his breath. He pulled out a dark suit, checking it over before getting dressed. "I have a meeting to get to-"

"Yes, yes, your three o' clock with a Mr. Ishtar?"

Otogi turned and narrowed his eyes at his partner. Pegasus simply gave a light tap to the golden orb in his eye socket and smiled.

"You talk in your sleep, apparently." He said, letting his hair fall back into place over the bionic attachment. Otogi scowled and slid the jacket over his shoulders, pulling out a pair of shoes and stepping into them.

"Stay here if you want, or go down into the casino. Just please don't try and… Ingratiate yourself with my guest. I'd rather nothing happen that might scare him off."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Pegasus told him. With his back turned, Otogi had to make do with the idea that the man was grinning like a sadist, both of them recalling the Doma Organisation buyout. Otogi sighed as he approached the exit of the room, opening it just as a cleaner that he had never learned the name of arrived and took in the state of the room with a look of building alarm.

"Blame him." Otogi said with a flourish in Pegasus' direction before stepping out the door and into the elevator at the end of the hall.

Black Clown Casino

15:00

If Otogi had to be perfectly honest, it was not the most successful meeting he had ever orchestrated. There were no outright denials to any of his requests, no hostility or attempts to undercut him. Instead there was an ever present air of menace. This Malik Ishtar, the head of a small freelance security firm, carried himself less like a savvy business man and more like an apex predator. An animal that was content to sit and watch quietly, not wanting to strike its killing blow just yet.

Several times during the negotiations, Otogi thought he caught the man gazing at his throat or, more accurately, a point an inch or two beyond his throat. Those wide, dead eyes would always return upwards though, and start boring into Otogi's. The whole meeting gave off the stench of a madman, barely contained, ready to leap the table and start carving into his host with broken shards of champagne glass.

Needless to say, Otogi cut the meeting short. Ishtar was offering him a deal that was far cheaper than every other security firm in town (and by a wide margin at that), but he was smart enough to know that it wasn't a good enough deal if it meant letting this lunatic roam the halls of his casino. In the midst of all his apologising, the Egyptian seemed remarkably understanding, smiling and nodding, "I know"ing and "Please keep me in mind, here's my card"ing. Otogi wasn't sure if last night was starting to catch up with him, or If he had pulled something in getting away from the table so quickly, but the ache in his knees had revved up to sheer agony by the time he got to the bar and took a seat.

What today called for was a strong drink, followed by about four or five of the same. That would hopefully go some way towards levelling him out. Or so the theory went.

When he was halfway through the second, he spied Pegasus waltzing through the casino, nodding at patrons as he passed, sharing a smile and a wink with a few others, always happy to be seen as the "sociable face" of the casino.

Otogi was into the third drink when Pegasus bumped into Malik and the two began talking. A knot formed in his stomach, but he knew that his partner was intelligent enough to know when to disappear. He had nothing to fear from those two just talking. He hadn't even finished the drink before they vanished from sight into a crowd of people in the casino, reappearing near the private elevator at the back and stepping inside. Otogi sighed into his glass, massaging his temples. It was the Doma Organisation incident all over again. The scandal was going to be all over the papers by morning. Any words he thought he might be able to have with Pegasus would be… Well, they would be lost. They'd had that conversation many a time before, and it never led anywhere.

Drink number six was in its final droplets by the time Otogi spotted either of them again. He hadn't seen them re-emerge from the elevator, but he definitely saw Malik among the crowd, the predatory smile he had worn earlier replaced with a look of grim determination. He marched through the milling people, heading in a straight line for the exit.

Good riddance, Otogi thought, letting out a long, heavy sigh of relief. That was not the sort of crazy he wanted in his establishment. He put the glass down and headed to the elevator himself. He wasn't in a fit state to have any sort of serious conversation with Pegasus, that much was obvious, but it would probably be better to start ironing things out now than wasting sleep on it later. He stepped into the elevator and punched the button for the penthouse, feeling the mother of all headaches starting to move in.

The door to his bedroom was wide open when he arrived, and the lights switched off. Either Pegasus was still there, or he had forgotten the conversation they had engaged in long ago about locking up. Otogi poked his head in and reached for the light-switch.

*click*

Nothing. Just blackness.

He stepped inside, into the tiny triangle of light that the hallway provided.

"Pegasus?" He called out, taking another step forwards, his foot landing in something loose and wet. Ahead of him, at the bed, a small light flickered on, the bedside lamp. Pegasus sat on the bed, eyes fixed straight ahead, panting and sweating as though he had run a marathon.

"Otogi?" He wheezed, looking down at a dark shape clutched between his hands. He turned it over, giving his partner a good look at the discoloured head of the cleaner that he had never learned the name of. "I think we may have a problem on our hands."