Chapter Twenty-Six - Stray Cat's Cut

“You gotta at least try to look good. Otherwise you’ll be made the fool.”

--Mayor Dupont, to an administrative aid, 2057

***

“Uh,” I said.

There was a hovering projection of me standing in the middle of us, the hologram’s feet brushing just over the coffee table’s surface as it gently spun.

“That’s just me,” I said.

It was. I’d talked to Audrey and Lucy for what felt like several hours, but was actually closer to just the one. We’d gone over what I wanted for my image. It wasn’t too complicated. Or that’s what I thought, at least.

I wanted to be scary to those that needed scaring, and I wanted people that needed help, people in the shitty sorts of situations that I’d been in, to trust that I’d help them.

“Yes. Did you expect me to show you someone else?” Audrey asked.

“No, I mean.” I gestured at the hovering me. “That’s literally just me, in my normal gear.”

The hologram was me, in my long coat, scarf around my neck and cat-eared helmet on. The image wasn’t armed, but I could imagine myself carrying one of my usual guns.

“This is you as you are, yes,” Audrey said. “Now, I have had a few ideas, and I’ve compiled them as we talked. But I don’t believe in leading with the weakest idea first. This is what I think you could do to lean into the image and style you described. My other ideas don’t fit.”

She waved her arm and the hologram split into three. One was still me, but my coat was sharper, the helmet sleeker. Everything under the coat was synthetic and clean. Basically, it was me as a corpo stooge.

The image next to it was a hard contrast. The hologram was standing a bit to one side, hip canted out. I had a coat still, but it was ratty on the edges, and the entire back of it was one large glowing cat face. The image’s pants were covered in straps with logos and there were pins all across the coat. The shoulders were covered in little spikes and the helmet had a generic sticker slapped onto the side. So, a corpo me, and an all-out punk me.

The third image was a bit strange. No coat, instead the outfit was... superheroic. There was a cape, and the rest of the gear was sleek and accentuated my stomach and chest.

“Oh,” Lucy said. “I like the superhero look!”

“It’s nice,” Audrey agreed. “But it’s not Stray Cat. You do embody a lot of traditional values the public might associate with superheroes, so you could lean into those tropes, but it doesn’t quite fit. Superheroes are supposed to be clean and fight for what they think is just. You don’t fit the anti-hero role either. I don’t think it’s the right way to go.”

“Okay, so none of these,” I said. The grungy one did kind of call out to me, but I could see why it might not fit. I was... well, I was street trash, but I wasn’t a street punk. There was a difference. Probably not one someone up top would notice, but it’d be obvious to any real punks.

“Here’s what I’d suggest,” Audrey said. She made another gesture and the three images winked out. They were replaced by another me.

“Oh,” I said.

It was kind of obvious. Right, in a way that was just... right? It was like finding the square peg for the square hole after slipping in every other shape because they just happened to fit.

The coat was there, but different. It cut off at the knees and had a much more pronounced collar. And a hood. A really cool hood that had space for cat ears. The coat was black, with armoured pads over the shoulders and elbows.

It was covering a tight shirt with several clasps running across it. A little bit corpo, but also a little military. That look was broken up by the belts. There were a few of them, actually. One around the waist, another at the hip. Belts with a few small pouches that looked to be about the right size for one of my grenades, and there was room for both my Void Terminus and my Trenchmaker.

The boots were big, clunky things, and there was a small, tight backpack fixed to the middle of the coat. It had nozzles, and I recognized a jumpjet.

The helmet was almost unchanged, though it was adjusted a little to appear more like the face of a cat.

“Fuck, that looks good,” I said. “But it looks like, uh.”

“A bounty hunter,” Audrey said. “That’s purposeful. You’re not a bounty hunter, but you fit into a similar role. Someone who works around the bounds of the law, who kills those who are hard to kill, but who doesn’t necessarily work against the society they’re part of. There’s a bit of ninja in there too, the hood, the mask, the utility belts. But that just fits well with your tendency to use stealth when you feel like it.”

I stood up, then slowly walked around the image. It was pretty cool. “What do you think?” I asked Lucy.

“It has your scarf,” she said.

I looked back at the hologram. It did, wrapped around ‘my’ neck was a familiar hot pink scarf, the same that Lucy had picked out for me a while ago. It clashed with the rest of the gear a little, though... well, there were some glowy bits, otherwise how would people know to take me seriously.

“I like it,” I said. And I was being entirely honest. It looked right, like something that someone called Stray Cat would wear. It was a cyber-ninja-hunter-badass outfit. It almost felt too much like what I wanted to be.

Audrey smiled. It was slight and yet incredibly smug. “Why thank you. I’ll send you the design files. You don’t need to change into this all at once. In fact, I’d discourage it unless you want to go out and make a big splash. Small, subtle changes over time are often more appreciated than you might expect.”

“Are you sure this is all free?” I asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” Audrey said. “Even a samurai needs a hobby, and this happens to be mine. Actually, samurai especially need hobbies.”

“Cat’s been trying to get into repairing stuff,” Lucy said. “It’s... well, she’s spending a lot of time on it.”

I gave Lucy a flat look. “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Lucy just giggled. “Anyway, this was a lot more than I expected to get out of all this,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” Audrey said. She sighed, then slowly got up herself. “Unfortunately, I carved out some time from other work to help you. I’m certain the world will fall apart if I don’t get back to work.”

“The world?” I asked.

“Of fashion, of course.”

“Right,” I said, a little dubious. “We still need to buy stuff anyway. It’s kind of why we came here in the first place.”

“Oh, right. I thought we’d be back home by now,” Lucy said. “How long is the market open for?”

“Another couple of hours,” Audrey said. “I’ll let you have the friend’s discount, it should help you grab more clothes. Though... do wear the stuff you buy. I always find it insulting when someone buys something only for it to rot in a closet.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not the sort to stay in any closets,” Lucy said.

We said our goodbyes. Audrey decided to stick to her office, and as we were leaving one wall lit up with a multitude of smaller screens, each with graphs and images and camera feeds and enough information to probably make the average person dizzy. The door shut behind us and all the noise was masked away.

“That was something,” I said.

“That was. Are all the samurai so intense?”

“You’ve met some,” I said.

“Delilah’s a little intense, but she’s polite. Grasshopper is very intense, if nice. She’s aggressively nice, actually. And now Audrey, who is, ah, the way she is. I barely met Deus Ex.”

“That seems like a decent sampling.”

“That’s five, counting you. I guess I ran into some in Burlington, but never long enough to have a good opinion. I thought that Grasshopper was, like, an outlier. But maybe you’re the weird one.”

“I’m not weird,” I defended.

Lucy leaned into me. “Mhm,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means mhm.”

I rolled my eyes at Lucy being Lucy. “Well, she’s pretty normal for a samurai, I guess. I haven’t met that many, but I think they, we, tend more towards the very focused and intense side of things, as a general rule.”

“That’s alright, then,” Lucy said. “I do like it when you’re being intense. It’s kinda hot.”

“Ah, well, no complaints then.”

***