[Madcat]

Aimee arrives exactly when she intended to arrive. That is to say, twenty minutes after the time she was scheduled to arrive. It was hard to blame it on an erroneous clock. No, that wasn't true. It was impossible to blame it on an erroneous clock, because she always had one right in front of her. Well, not exactly in front of her. Yet, there it was, currently floating in the lower right corner of her field of vision. An actinic blue that, despite its crispness, never seemed to be too bright or obtrusive. It also never stopped moving entirely, as it not only tracked hours and minutes, but also seconds and milliseconds. Sometimes, it even tracked nanoseconds, but that was only when she was deep inside some system's electronic mind.

She clomped merrily down the sidewalk, not at all caring about the low quality of the neighborhood or the many colorful characters who populated it. Though she was young, she found that her common attire, in this case a pair of knee-high, spike-collared black leather boots over black and red-striped stockings under a black lace and satin dress, with a high-collared velvet coat on top, mostly hidden under the cascade of multicolored braids that fell halfway to her waist, kept most people away from her. She found that when she dressed to the nines, and did her face in white corpsepaint and her eyes in darkest kohl, they'd often whisper "vampire-girl" behind her back, and stay even farther the hell away from her. That suited Aimee just fine. It was also her purse, swinging easily in her left hand, that kept people at least three arms-lengths away. Her purse being an old, Army ammo box, once olive drab, now spray-painted black and layered in stickers that read, depending on the side one viewed, "Agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial", "KMFDM Sucks!", "The Drugs Help A Lot", and, layered one atop another, "Sisters of Mercy Bauhaus VNV Nation The Cure Beborn Beton Wolfsheim"... if one was unfamiliar with what those titles meant, one would have to ask her. Almost no one ever did. People who got too close when she was walking as she was risked getting accidentally beaned by this metal crate.

Currently, her ammo-box rattled with a few packs of gum, her makeup kit, her keys, a cellphone she hadn't touched in months (she found she no longer needed it), a small spiral notebook, several pens and pencils, her dad's brass Zippo lighter (though she did not, usually, smoke), and several USB thumbdrives (she found she also no longer had need for these). Also rattling around in the box was the pre-paid debit card her dad had set up for her, as it was easier to control her allowance and spending, as well as taught her how to balance her budget, along with several gift cards and discount cards for Starbucks, three local grocery stores, her library card, her school ID card, the passcard to the condominium complex she lived in, an iTunes card, and perhaps a dozen more plastic wafers to local boutiques and clothing stores. Completing the pile in the box was her latest acquisition, one she had come across in quite a startling, but not unwelcome, fashion: three hundred dollars in cash. If you called her a thief, she would call you a liar, because a thief is someone who takes something without permission. She had simply asked the ATM machine to give her some money and, after a couple seconds, it spit out a stack of twenties. She hadn't even needed to present her debit card! These new gifts were proving more and more useful all the time

She passed by a building where green-faced goblins leered out of a third story window, their rough garb and dangerous-looking swords and axes identifying them as characters of a popular online game, Everworld of QuestCraft II. She had tried playing it once, but grew frustrated when the servers crashed every time she tried to force her avatar to shoot lasers. Maybe next time she would pose herself as a Wizard and the code would work...

She stopped suddenly, a flashing green arrow appearing in the air in front of her, pointing to the right and blinking insistently, bouncing back and forth along the vertical edge of her field of vision. Oh... bother. She'd walked right past the place she was going, and this GPS app she'd thought up was pointing her back the way she came. She turned and looked around, ignoring a strobing, screaming banner in the sky that advertised that it could make her grow four to six inches in just four weeks.

I don't even have a penis, she thought to herself, I thought banner ads were supposed to know all my personal details to better target me for rampant consumerism? With a blink, the banner ad vanished, replaced with an ambient trance beat that had probably been judged "feminine and calming" in a boardroom of men, alerting her to an amazing new skin cream that had been developed by a mother in {{Cookie.error//IP Address Undetermined//Host Not Found}} that had doctors seeing red.

She stopped in front of a door, taking a look at the brick-fronted building. A gold star appeared briefly over the door, spinning in victory, and then vanished in a silent explosion that left her covered in digital glitter for a few moments.

"Well," she said to no one, "I guess this is the place!" She switched hands on her purse, the better to bash someone in the face with if this turned out to be a Really Bad Idea sort of place, and pushed her way into the room, coming upon an already-gathered gaggle of girls, all roughly her age, and a much older man who was dressed rather smartly for this part of town.

She wished she had put some gum in her mouth before walking in. She also wished she had decided to dye her hair entirely black this morning, no, stop that, stay platinum blonde, blue and red, and had put on her bomber jacket instead of her waistcoat.

She swept her gaze around the small group and blinked, once. "Oh. Hi."