Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fifty-Nine - Puppy Princess

"The best long-term investment? Land. Real-estate. That's why there isn't an acre of land left for sale on Earth. It was such a good investment that it was invested in."

--Economy of Chubs, Ninth Edition 2049

***

I tried not to sigh, but... yeah, I sure felt it.

Princess reached out, almost as if to grab me, then hesitated before she could. "Oh, come in! Please, please, make yourselves at home. Oh! I should get changed! I'm not dressed for guests!"

Wait, so this was how she dressed normally? She had pajama pants under her tutu-style skirt, and it looked like her hair was held in place by a pair of heavy-duty scrunchies. She stepped back, turned, then darted off.

"Um," Shy said.

"Yeah," I agreed. I wasn't about to talk shit here, though, not when she might hear me. I wasn't that socially inept. I stepped in, looking around as I did so.

The house was nice. Nice-nice. As in, Princess' Daddy hired an interior designer at some point. The foyer... was that the word? The space we walked into... it was nice. There was a wide, curving staircase to one side, with a balcony above, and right ahead. A round rug was set just a couple of meters in, with a small round table on it with a houseplant of some sort. There was a plush bench to one side, and a stand-up wardrobe for coats and shit.

It was all nice, the different woods matched, the tiles by the entrance were real tile, and were clean. It was a little old in terms of design style, but like, it wasn't bad old.

The place reeked of casual richness in a way that made me feel rather self-conscious... for like, three seconds, then I remembered that I was a samurai and money was just numbers.

There was movement above, then a familiar face showed up. Thankfully, it wasn't Princess. "Miss Stray Cat," Knight said. She came down the stairs, and unlike her sister, she was dressed more casually. "I didn't know you'd be coming here."

"I didn't exactly announce it," I said.

"Is there something urgent going on? I saw your ceasefire message on the news. Is this related to that? And... I believe you're Samurai Shy? Hello." Knight extended a hand to Shy who obligingly took it, and they shook.

"Nothing like that," I said. "I'm visiting all of the... newer samurai in New Montreal, making sure everyone is in decent shape. It can be hard to keep tabs on a samurai, you know? So better to check in on everyone and make sure they're not some sort of screwed."

She nodded along, then gestured further in. "I heard my sister run by, so I'm assuming she let you in? Come on, I can at least show you to the living room. Do you want anything to drink?"

"Water would be nice," I said. "Shy?"

Shy nodded.

"Water for her too, I guess."

The living room was a short corridor away. It was a space with a very tall ceiling, one wall had a fireplace that ran up some twenty-feet, sandwiched between bookcases embedded into the walls with a widescreen TV over a crackling electric fire. The far wall was all floor-to-ceiling glass, with a french door in the middle leading to the modest yard out back and an in-ground swimming pool covered by a glass green-house like thing.

There was a massive, L-shaped sofa, all beige suede with a fuckton of cushions, and behind that, to one side, a bar with a couple of mini-fridges.

"Sit, make yourselves comfortable," Knight said as she headed for the bar. She grabbed a pair of glass mugs from some hooks, opened a thing on the bar, and scooped up ice into both mugs, then she poured water in from a movable tap.

"Nice place," I said.

"Thanks," she replied. "It's... maybe mine? Honestly, I don't know at this point. The inheritance stuff is more than a little complicated, made more so by, ah, samurai stuff."

"How's that?" I asked.

Knight came over, handing Shy and I our mugs before she took a seat across from us. "There's a whole thing there if a samurai kills someone, they often grab that person's entire wealth at the same time. All their liquid assets. Oftentimes the Samurai's AI will sell off all of their property too, even the stuff that was hidden away. So banks are always cautious when dealing with that kind of inheritance case. The fact that my sister is in the will and is a samurai in her own right complicates everything. I haven't been able to find a notary that wants to touch the situation at all. But the banks are too cowardly to walk in here with a foreclosure squad and kick us out."

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"I feel like they'd probably be down one squad if they did that," I said while admiring the stuffed head of a moose set way over the fireplace. "Princess is new, but she should be able to take out one small group of grunts just fine."

"And the place has its own security measures too," Knight said. She leaned forwards, elbows on knees, then looked me in the eyes. "Thanks."

"Thanks?" I repeated. "But why?"

"You've got to know that she looks up to you, right? You showing up like this? It'll mean a lot to her. She's been in a bit of a mood. Not depressed, but." She paused. "Yeah."

I reached up to rub at my forehead. I was starting to get a migraine. "Yeah. Cool." Well, fuck, now I really couldn't just stand up and leave if things got awkward. "She's not a bad kid. Does she really look up to me that much? I'm a grade-A bitch, you know?"

"She kind of believes that you're the reason her life took a turn for the better, and she's not entirely wrong, in a way. You offing dad was the first domino. Things went out of control, and at the end of that, she was a samurai."

"Ah," I said. "She knows that I didn't do all that on purpose, right? Your dad kind of just..." he had pissed me off, so I shot him, but that didn't feel very politically-correct to say. "He stepped on a lot of toes, mine included, and he went back on his word."

"He was a liar," Knight said simply. "And he probably won't be missed."

I nodded, but I hadn't missed the framed images on the shelves. Some of those had a younger Knight on them. She was smiling, standing next to her late father.

Very notably, there were no pictures of Princess in any of the frames.

Knight had told me once that she was her father's 'legitimate' child, and that Princess very much was not. That had to suck for Princess.

"She's going a little stir-crazy in here. I've... kind of discouraged her from solo'ing Antithesis hives outside of the city. I know it would be good for her progress, and it wouldn't really be soloing if I'm with her, but she gets a little reckless sometimes."

Ah, crap, I saw what this was. Knight was trying to guilt me into hanging out with her poor little sister because she was so pitiful and sad.

Fuck if it wasn't working though. I looked to Shy for help, but she was predictably useless with this kind of thing.

I should have brought Nya along.

"I'm back!" Princess said as she sprinted into the room and almost slid off her feet as her socks didn't give her any traction. She was in her samurai gear, which was a very white, very shiny princess gown whose hem hovered half a foot off the ground.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey!" she replied. "Um... so, hi?"

"Yeah, hi," I said.

This didn't become less awkward.

Princess refused to sit, maybe because her dress was about 80% more cushion than any of the available seats already, and I wasn't sure if she could sit with it on. Instead, she stood there, hands fiddling with her skirt, and wide eyes scanning from person to person.

"Right, Princess, this is my friend Shy. Shy, Princess." I gestured to Princess. "She became a samurai just a bit before the whole Phobos incident. She's been pretty decent about it too. Princess, Shy here's been a samurai for a while, but she's the quiet sort. You probably haven't heard of her."

"I have!" she said. "Um. Only in that ceasefire letter. The second one, where you blew up that corpo building." She let out a breath. "That was so cool."

"Yeah, uh, it was a group effort." Had Shy been in the letter? I thought so. "Anyway, Shy here's a little new as well. And I was going around introducing her to everyone, and making sure that all of my samurai friends are in good shape."

Ah, that was a mistake, calling her a friend. She'd turned up the puppy look by about eighty percent.

Too bad I was a cat person.

God, I could not get out of here soon enough, but it didn't look like escaping would be so easy.

***