Chapter Five
Taylor announced her arrival with a thud.
Missy looked up from her PRT-issued smartphone (hey, free data was free data) and took in the thick stack of papers on the table before her as well as the absolutely, insanely smug look on her new friend's face.
The fact that they were in a library and that the loud noise would probably not be appreciated didn't seem to faze Taylor in the least. That was good. Missy was going to need that sort of audacity to get this campaign off the ground. With only the two of them, they needed all the help they could get. "Hey Taylor," Missy said, "What's all that?"
"These," Taylor said, "are advertisements."
Missy perked up a single eyebrow and slid the first page off the top of the stack.
Vote Missy Biron 2011!
Youngest candidate in Brockton Bay History!
A vote for Missy is a Vote you can't Miss!
Missy's other eyebrow joined the first, high on her forehead as she took in all the Microsoft Paint style swirly designs. The slightly over-pixelated parts at the bottom right, and the rather awful school picture of Missy that had been taken last year when she was twelve and had lost one of her front teeth in a fight against some mugger jerkface.
… Missy didn't remember handing that one over. At all.
"This is, ah," Missy said as she searched for words. Curse her bleeding heart and trusting nature. "Creative?"
Nailed it.
"Isn't it great?" Taylor asked. "I printed them at my school's office because they never reset the password and I used my bugs to make sure no one was around."
Eh?
"Wait, you stole these?" Missy asked.
"What? No, of course not," Taylor said, her eyes not shifting away from Missy's own for even a second. "The administration let me. They owe me a favour or two."
"Oh. Okay. You scared me," Missy said as she calmed herself down. That was an actual relief. Paper or not, theft was theft. Getting caught up in… in a paper smuggling
scandal thanks to her campaign manager wouldn't be a good start to
anything. "Well, they're not bad. At least they're in colour. It costs way more to print something nice than just something in black and white."
Maybe. She didn't know. Once again, not her department, but that sounded about right. They wouldn't have made all of the Wards toys several shades of Barney's vomit if it didn't do something for sales though.
Same difference.
"The last few aren't as nice," Taylor admitted sullenly as she thoughtfully eyed the ancient ink-spewing monstrosity next to the librarian's desk. At ten cents a paper, Missy had given that up as a bad job from the start. She wasn't made of money. "The printer was running out of colour ink I think. But no worries, I can break in once they refill their printers."
Missy looked at her new friend, at the beaming and tentatively proud smile on her kind of plain face, and decided not to ask any questions that she didn't want answered. Taylor had problems with phrasing, she'd noticed. "Okay then, let's go put up some signs. Where to?"
Taylor nodded eagerly and pulled out a sheet that had a map of the Bay on it. That was some initiative. "I highlighted the sections with the most people in them," she said as she placed it down. "The more people, the more likely one of them will vote for us. It's simple statistics."
Missy, who was all ready to get going at what Taylor had just said, took a moment to pause and look at the map first. Her plan had been to kind of just... wander around some more. Maybe get some more cookies from that old lady she'd met last time. Having an actual plan was better though. Totally.
Then again, her unfortunately-memorized PRT maps were quick to move to the front from the back of her mind to screw up the very pretty picture Taylor had made.
"Taylor." Missy tapped the map repeatedly. Once for every spot bigger than a dime. She stopped counting at ten. "Those are all gang hotspots."
"Really? But that's where most of the people in the Bay live," Taylor pointed out with a frown, making Missy shift uncomfortably in her seat. "I didn't know it was this bad."
That hit Missy somewhere tender.
It would be far, far safer to just pick a route in the nicer neighbourhoods of the Bay, but Taylor's observation had pricked Missy's pride. Keeping to the sections that she knew because… because they were the places she
knew wasn't right.
Her platform was
Justice, damn it, and weren't these people her con...kun… fuck it, her
voters? Weren't they the people that needed her the most?
Hadn't she been complaining about how she wasn't allowed to patrol outside of the good parts of town just a little while ago? It was time to put her money where her mouth was or shut the hell up.
"Fuck me," Missy groaned.
That wasn't a choice at all.
"What?" Taylor asked, taken aback.
"I said…" Missy grumbled. "Nevermind what I wanted to say, you're right. You win the vote by having the most voters."
And the ability to instil a vicious amount of guilt with a couple of words, it seemed.
"Unless the city is divided into unfairly segregated districts in order to maximize the value of a select portion of the votebase," Taylor said. "But I'm sure that's not something we have to worry about."
"Right," Missy agreed with a nod as she wondered just what the hell Taylor was talking about. Segregated districts? She was going to have to crack the law books open again, wasn't she? "So, do we walk or take the bus?" she asked.
"I don't, ah, have much for bus fare," Taylor admitted with a grimace and a pat of a grimy pocket. "I kind of jogged here…"
"Good idea." Missy nodded appreciatively. Everyone should take care of themselves when they could, physically and fiscally, in her opinion. Even with the occasional hiccup, Taylor just continued to impress. "We can walk and save some money for the rest of the campaign then. Add a, uh, 'go green' thing to our platform maybe…" Shaking that idea off, she stood. "Anyway, if you stand really close to me we can move a whole lot faster."
Her new friend's eyes lit up at that and Missy would have been lying if she said she wasn't eager to show off a little of what her power could do. It was, after all, a very neat power. A new and attentive audience that wasn't your average tagger on their way to community service was an attractive prospect.
Gathering everything up with all the haste and energy a pair of teenaged girls could muster, they exited the library and ran down the steps before aiming themselves towards the worst parts of town.
"So, we start off near the docks, then circle around," Taylor began as she twirled a finger. "It's pretty simple after that. One sign per telephone pole?"
"That sounds alright, yeah... Is it legal to post things on the poles?"
Taylor shrugged. "People do it all the time for lost pets and garage sales. Even if it isn't, no one will care… and you can always change the law after."
That was a fair point. "I like the way you think, Taylor."
Taylor beamed, nearly blinding Missy when a turn of her head caused her glasses to give off an eye-melting glare…. It wasn't even that bright out here. Weird. "Oh, then you'll love my ideas for bugvertisements."
Missy worked her jaw for a second. "Does, ah, does that mean what I think it means?"
She supposed that some street shows could help...
"Huge swarms of insects that take the shape of your face in the sky and buzz at people to vote for you? I'm making some pretty good progress there, I think," Taylor tried as she shuffled her stack of posters higher up on her chest. "Was that what you were thinking of?"
No. Not even close. What? That hadn't even crossed her mind, Christ, no. That was a terrible idea.
Missy didn't sigh, because she didn't want to cripple her friend's creativity, but she did think about it very hard. She just took a slightly longer breath in, that was all…. The taller girl had just made it clear that there was such a thing as too much enthusiasm. Missy was going to have to tread lightly around them, wasn't she? "Let's put that down as plan B."
"Darn."
***
Give
Marchenblanc, the co-author of this piece, some hugs too!
Wanted to give a shout-out to Eli who made the bad grammar go away.
Hey guys, do I look like the type of person that would beg on hands and knees for you to read his weird original fiction? Exactly! Check out
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