Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Twelve (3/5)
Swinging with Cats
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
Note for readers: There won’t be any new chapter next week (sometimes boring life stuff gets in the way), but Midnight Metropolis will be back the following Friday. The next chapter will likely involve bad poetry 😲
Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
Thankfully, Traci-Lynn was too preoccupied to notice Ginx’s sudden discomfort. Tattie strongly suspected the diminutive woman had been sampling her own product. Hard times made sensible people flirt with crazy.
“Caggotty’s probably been drunk for a week,” Tattie said. “Knowing him, he spun all his credits to a wraith-witch because she offered him a blow job.”
Traci-Lynn laughed, throwing her head back and opening her mouth far too wide. It was unsettling.
“I’ve been branching out,” she said. “I still got creditors to smooth; the Bunker shuttering was no good. No good at all. This place is a bust, though. They think they’re in the Valley or something. The manager won’t even use synthetic milk, there’s no way they’re letting me set up shop in the back room. I tried to tell them, I said—” Traci made an expansive gesture with one of her small, dimpled hands and almost whacked Ginx in the shoulder. “—I said my particular line of products only brings in more trade. I said what I sell is all-natural, it’s good for what ails you. They looked at me like I’d just yakked on their shoes and asked me to leave. I’m still here though, ain't I? They’ll have to drag me out, bloody coffee-slinging weirdos.”
Tattie had never seen Traci-Lynn so animated before. Her speech was all rapid-fire and spittle, on the verge of mania.
“You been dipping into your supply?” she asked.
The woman’s face darkened. She hunched forward, eyes fixed on Tattie. “I don’t dip.”
Tattie thought Traci-Lynn was about to lunge across the table and make a grab for her. She braced herself, ready to fend her off, but the dark look lifted like a dusty stage curtain swishing aside and Traci turned to Ginx, a warped smile plastered on her moist face.
“You still owe me for that znuff, Ginx.”
Traci-Lynn’s bird’s egg-pale eyes widened when they focused on Ginx’s face. Ginx shifted uncomfortably, glanced at Tattie.
“You did it,” Traci said, lisping voice verging on a shriek. “You daughter of a whore, you actually went and did it.”
Ginx looked as though she wanted to strongly object to being called a daughter of a whore, but Traci-Lynn rushed on before she could get a word out.
“I’ve only ever met one person in my entire life who successfully negotiated a daemon share. He went nuts-out insane in the end, but before that, he was more powerful than Mervaroid the Divine himself. I mean, I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.”
“He went insane?” Ginx said. Her face drained of colour and her eyes flared. She was listening to something again. Then, “Only the weak are unable to withstand the immense gifts a daemon can bestow. That man was ungrateful and unforgivably feeble.”
Traci-Lynn rocked on her chair, barely able to contain a gleeful cackle. The people around them began to turn and stare.
“You’re talking to it right now, aren’t you?” she said. “This is wild. Has it told you its name yet? If you can winkle out its name, you’ll hold sway over it forever. You’ll be unstoppable. You’ll be an interdimensional goddess of death. You’ll—”
She spun on her chair and growled at a man openly watching her from the next table over. It was like watching a mangy Romarlian threshdog trying to scare off a pike-toting trapper five times its size.
“Mind your own fucking business,” she screamed, her eyes spitting acid and her nostrils flaring.
The man, portly and ham-fleshed, spluttered into his coffee and almost dropped the cup. He stared in dismay at the dark droplets splattering the front of his formerly pristine white shirt.
“Go on, get,” Traci-Lynn growled.
He scrambled up from his chair, folding himself into the crowd and making a bolt for the doors as the coffee shop manager glared at them from across the room. Traci-Lynn thrust her middle finger in their direction.
“Unbelievable,” Traci said. “People have no bloody manners anymore.”
Tattie searched for a way to calm the woman, turning over weak jokes and crap comments in her head, anything to lower the tone of Traci-Lynn’s voice or soothe the bony shoulders shaking with rage. She was saved by a man in a red felt bowler hat.
He jumped onto the stage and removed the hat, then turned to the audience with a flourish. “Welcome to the Swinging Cat’s planet-famous Festival of Free Verse. The most lyrical, melodic, free-thinking, free-wheeling night of the week.”
There was a smattering of applause. Traci-Lynn had turned around to stare at the stage, the coffee-stained onlooker and Ginx’s daemon passenger forgotten. Tattie glanced at Ginx.
“They’re really going to read poetry?” she whispered. “I was hoping that wasn’t a real thing.”
Ginx offered her a half-shrug and a small sympathetic grimace. It was going to be a long night.
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Content Warnings
Swearing