[Bakiri Retsu]

Taking her mask off Retsu rubbed the bridge of her nose as she put the welder down, the thudding pain combined with the darkness outside letting her know she'd been at it for much longer than she thought she was. Her other hand reached for her phone to check the time.

"What the-?!"

A string of green characters rolling over a black screen was all she got when she pressed the button on the side. Her eye twitched when a message in the same style appeared, a vein atop her head bulging as she reached into a drawer and pulled out a pen and a notebook. As fast as she can she scribbled the coordinates, date and time down. Once it's all written down she tapped the screen in several places, turned the screen off and on again and finally turned the entire phone off and on again. Her anger certainly didn't diminish when every single option put her right back on to the exact same screen. She half considered bricking the phone and calling it a day but the pain throbbing through her head combined with the audacity of whoever took over her phone caused a single thing to overtake her sense of caution. Spite. She pressed the 'Y' prompt, downed several painkillers and got to work. Checking the time she saw it was 9:47 pm and she had little more than an hour left to get ready and make her way there.

"No flash photography, huh? Won't be a picture i'll be shooting anyway."

She chuckled to herself while shoving several flash bangs into the pockets of her dark green cargo pants. Then for good measure she put several more into her duffel bag alongside a few other toys including her airsoft rifle. She'll be damned if she's caught unprepared for anything. She tapped her knife several times to check for weak points before putting it back into its sheath and strapping said sheath to her lower back. Finally she put on the gun harness allowing her to put her airsoft pistol under the sleeveless jacket she puts on top to hide both from view. 

Once she was combat ready she went over her final preparations. For starters she rummaged through a box full of odds and end for almost a full minute before finally finding what she's looking for. A small box full of trackers. Sticking one to her phone she grabbed a second phone and put that one into her pocket as well. Without a further thought she made her way to the closest bus stop and stepped on to the first bus to Akihabara.

"'Scuse me, does this one pass through Shinjuku?"

"I'm afraid not, madam.

"Aight, cheers."

While distracting the driver she slipped her phone and accompanying tracker under one of the seats before stepping back off again and making her way home. If she could put a tracker on her phone there's no way someone that hacked into her phone couldn't do the same through the built-in features. She smiled. Let whoever did it go on a wild goose chase, she'll take a different route. 

Her bike roared beneath her as she pushed it hard, racing through the streets on her way to the meeting. Even though it didn't take her long to arrive the ride calmed her down and bought enough time for the painkillers to work. Checking how late it is on her phone she realized it'd barely been an hour since she first read the message leaving her with just enough time to park her bike, store her helmet and walk the rest of the way there. Once she neared the alleyway she double checked that her duffel bag is unzipped enough that she can withdraw her airsoft rifle should she need it. Purposely approaching the alley from the other direction she'd have arrived from had she taken the bus her eyes narrowed when she saw a lit mask looking right at her.

"Yo, heard ya were looking for me?" Retsu said more than asked while hovering her hand over the opening of her duffel bag. "I'm listening."

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facade

[facade]

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| facade | @freelance_facade
Location: Tokyo, Japan. | Current Status: none of your business :)
Now Playing: Hudson Mohawke - Watch Dogs Theme

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As the day had wound down, trading sunlight for streelamps and moonbeams, facade had been hard at work. Aiden Markusson had a lot of work to do, and he'd even begun to get some 'freelance work' requests from the less-than-legal elements of the city. Of course, most of it was fairly easy for him, but it took longer than usual because facade was distracted. He was almost certain that he'd sent one of his 'messages' much earlier that day or even the previous day, but he hadn't received any response yet. Finally though, an hour and a half before he'd arranged to meet them, a notice appeared on one of his monitors.
[Confirmation Received: Bakuretsu.]
[Switching to passive mode, awaiting deactivation.]
He chuckled, wheeling over to the isolated monitor, and started to prepare for his meeting. "Open Profiler. Target: Bakuretsu. Add trait: Not technology-reliant. Note: further threats towards mobile phone will be ineffective. Close Profiler." With a few voice commands, facade had edited some files on the device. This was a typical strategy of his, trying to build a 'profile' of someone to inform future encounters. He already had a pretty decent picture from Retsu's reputation with local gangs, but any extra information was worth it.
He quickly set about making sure that his office building and the large ProjectYou store (neighbouring both sides of the alleyway meeting point) would be clear of people at the time, rerouting all camera control to his personal laptop, and positioning himself inside of a side-access door so he could quickly enter the alley just before the set time. It was time for some reconaissance. He opened a graphical view of the network around Retsu's phone, quickly observing. "A load of other cell signals nearby, but no other connections. Burner phones?" He continued this, briefly accessing the phone's microphone only to hear what he hoped wasn't an actual statement of Retsu's intent. "Note to self, assume armed and dangerous." The remainder of the time wasn't particularly eventful, besides a small anomaly he'd noticed. "Wait, 2 GPS signals? Why are there... another tracker? Why would she need to track her own- Oh. Neat trick." He managed to find the bus route the phone was following and track where it would've stopped to arrive at his location, then watched as it passed by.

With this knowledge, facade quickly shut the laptop and stepped out into the alleyway, making sure to face the side that would ensure he wasn't blindsided by Retsu's little misdirection. Sure enough, there stood the other villain in all her glory. If only he hadn't chosen to meet in shadow. He took a short moment to study what he could see of Retsu's body language from the distance between them, luckily just enough time for her to start talking. The hand hovering over the bag certainly set off alarm bells, though nothing outwardly changed as facade shifted his demeanour slightly. He bowed. "Thanks for coming, takes confidence. Yes, I asked you to come here to talk. Just to talk, no need for whatever you've got in that bag, though I can't blame you for coming armed. You'd be a fool not to. I like to be taken seriously." He moved a couple steps closer and stopped, phone in his hand. The mask didn't seem to muffle his voice at all, so presumably it comtained some kind of speaker system. "As I said in my message, I'm here to propose a partnership. I've heard a lot about your craftsmanship, you seem to be a benchmark for quality in your community. I think we have complementary skillsets, a lot to offer eachother." Another pause, the display on his mask changing to the kanji for engineering. "You're good at the physical stuff and mechanical engineering, much better than me, and I can't find any competition in this city for your supposed expertise with explosives. I'm good at the other kind of brute force, as you may have seen, but that's the tip of the iceberg. I'm second to none with all things electronics, optics or code. We could be very effective with combined effort, make a lot of money. Thoughts?"

[Bakiri Retsu]

With every word out of the man's mouth Bakiri Retsu hated him just a little more. She'd seen his type before. Even now the prick was looking right past her. Her lips parted into a toothy grin. She knew just how to deal with him.

"Nice shoes."

Retsu said offhandedly with full confidence he'd look far too deeply into real meaning of her words. She resisted the urge to toss a grenade at him and be done with it, far too little to gain and far too much to lose if she misjudged. She doubted it though. The trick with her phone was intimidation, pure and simple. 'I know where you live, I know how to get to you.' The invite to a far more 'classy' area than the one she lived in? A means to establish rank between them. Like a petty king inviting a delegate to their ornately decorated palace and looking down upon them from atop their gilded throne. She had to stop herself from scoffing.

He was even standing in the shadows and further blocking her sight of him with the light flooding from his mask. What he didn't know was that she didn't need to see his body language to read him like an open book. Buttering her up with every other sentence and placing demands and statements she's supposed to take as factual in between, he doesn't even seem to question that this is already a done deal. Like a script being acted out that he already knew the ending of before she even set foot in this place. She had to stop herself from gagging. If he were any more full of himself he'd burst. 

Unfortunately for him he'd revealed a crack in his facade. Starting the conversation off with praise, asking her to take her hand away from her weapon and then telling her she was doing the right thing? It smelled of fear. In her experience the weak always tried to look strong and the truly strong cared very little for appearing that way. She moved her hand away from the opening of her duffel bag.

He wasn't looking at her, not really. What he saw in front of him was a pawn to be used and discarded. Her grin grew wider. She'd make him look at her.

"See, there's a lot of times I've been told I should be doing something. Most I've forgotten by now but there's some that stuck, ya know what I'm saying?" She asked rhetorically. "Things like if you're tryna talk to some, tryna sell them on one thing or the other, you should probably introduce yourself first, ya know what I'm saying?"

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facade

[facade]

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| facade | @freelance_facade
Location: Tokyo, Japan. | Current Status: none of your business :)
Now Playing: Hudson Mohawke - Watch Dogs Theme

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The 'face' on facade's mask briefly changed to one with a cocked eyebrow, before returning to the normal featureless smiley face. "Well, I meant your thoughts on my offer, but thanks! I like your eyepatch, real practical when working with flashbangs, right?" He stalled on reading her expression for a moment, but eventually had a small insight. 'Oh, that manic smile. Probably barely-contained malice. She hates my fuckin' guts, huh? Let's try to fix that.' He listened, staring through the mask directly into Retsu's eye(s). 'Probably thinks this is a power play, right? Okay, I can work around that.' There was a short pause in speech from either side, which facade didn't move to fill, just shifting his stance as he anticipated another comment. Sure enough, Retsu spoke up again, and he merely nodded in affirmation. 'I think I'm starting to get it, this one doesn't like being told what to do.' He waited for her to finish the thought, mask display then changing to a simple exclamation mark. "Ah, right, where are my manners! I go by 'facade', hopefully you'll understand why I go by a pseudonym? As you may be able to see, I'm paper-white, my name's pretty distinctive here." He held up his bare arm/hand, to illustrate his point, and then bowed with both hands at his side.

As he finished this response, though, something seemed to tick over in his head. 'I'm not gonna get anywhere with this, she's not taking me seriously.' His mask went blank, then just displayed the katakana for 'facade'. "Listen. If you wanted to kill me or leave, you could've done so already. If you plan on listening, then listen. I sent a message you couldn't ignore, something to stick and get your attention. Cause I genuinely wanna work with you, here. If you want a little proof of what I can do, show I'm not bluffing, then here you go." With a sleight-of-hand flourish, he flicked something up from his pocket, off his wrist and into his hand, in a motion that looked like it had been hidden up a non-existant sleeve. The item in question was a small custom remote, which he pressed a button on. From behind a box in the alleyway, two tiny black drones silently rose and rushed over to a point above facade's head. With a couple more inputs, obvious only because he had directed attention to the remote, two 3D holographic projections appeared in the alleyway between facade and Retsu. They appeared as almost-photorealistic copies of the two, but with a slight distortion and shimmer around and through them that obviously betrayed their true nature. The copy of facade seemed higher-fidelity, and mirrored his movements as he raised a hand to point to the two drones. "Nowhere near complete yet, but this is some of the kind of stuff I mess around with. Call it a proof of concept."

[Bakiri Retsu]

She nearly pulled out her grenades right then and there when he answered her. Did he somehow know how the injury to her left eye was caused? Her stomach churned. 'Oh,' she thought as her smile turned positively manic. 'He messed up now.'

She cracked her neck and she kept a close eye on him, refusing to answer his question and waiting for him to continue instead. When he held up his arm Retsu had to suppress a flinch. The very thought made her anger burned brighter, condense and compress, allowing her focus to come to the fore while her rage simmered just below the surface. Was she intimidated? Afraid? Her? 

She couldn't allow that. Refused to allow that. Taking in his words while getting her head screwed on straight again she did the first thing she could think of that would allow her to regain control once more. She zipped her duffel bag shut and put it down on the ground. For no matter what this man said or implied, he wasn't a threat to her and keeping her weapons close was unnecessary.

"Hoh?" She replied while gesturing with her now unencumbered arm to proceed, her wide grin being replaced by a cocky smirk in the process. Her eye narrowed when the drones took to the air and widened once more when they activated in full. As she stepped closer her interest overwhelmed her anger causing it to slowly smolder away. Letting out a hum she began muttering while inspecting the holograms from multiple angles.

"Indistinguishable from a distance... Cracks show up close... Hmm, combine with motion detectors to determine activation and couple with detachable mines?" 

Her mumbling got quieter but no less fast as she continued to examine and theorize for a solid minute before looking back at Facade.

"Alright then, Facade, you've got my attention. The name's Bakuretsu but I'm assuming you already knew. So, given that you called me all the way here I'm guessing you've got something in mind?"


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facade

[facade]

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| facade | @freelance_facade
Location: Tokyo, Japan. | Current Status: none of your business :)
Now Playing: Panic! At The Disco - Victorious

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Retsu's continually shifting and intensifying expressions somewhat threw facade off, already invisibly nervous about the implicit threat of violence made by coming armed. He couldn't tell whether it was barely-concealed malicious intent, or just somehow Bakuretsu's resting expression. Something else confused him a whole lot more, though. When he raised his arm... was that a flinch? No, it couldn't have been, but Retsu's brief pause set his mind racing. Maybe there was some kind of trauma there? Wouldn't be a surprise, given the worrying trend he'd seen across other villains and heroes. Then, she did something facade couldn't have possibly predicted. She dropped her weapons? While facade could've tried to read into that, he just decided to take the win (?) and move on. He watched with intrigue as she rattled through ideas utilising even this basic prototype of his tech, now matching her smirk beneath the mask. "Pleased to make your acquaintance. Yes, I've done my research on Tokyo's resident explosives expert. My initial idea was simple cooperation. Working on something to the effect of an EMP grenade, or any other project you could see utilising both our skillsets. I can also provide my services to give backup in any security-breaking or recon fashion for any operation of yours. In return, I have a few projects which would require some in-person infiltration of systems that I think may fit your skillset, which comes with the bonus of getting to break shit on the way in or out, should you wish to do so." His mask switched briefly to the kanji for 'deal', before changing back to his normal smiley face. With a couple clicks on the (now hidden) remote, the drones stopped their projections and flew back into the dark of the alley, on standby. "Of course, the finer terms can be agreed upon later. I'm open to suggestions, and from the looks of it, seems you've already got some ideas of your own."

[Bakiri Retsu]

Retsu's eye gleamed at the mention of an EMP grenade. Despite her bluster she was not entirely unaware of the current deficiencies within her arsenal. While she had plenty of means to take down -or at least slow- humans and supers alike, automated or remotely controlled technology had a tendency of making her life a lot harder. Not that she'd ran into many mind you but the few times she had were ones she remembered. And not fondly at that.

Fragmentation grenades tended to do the job on anything organic but the concussive force behind them was rarely enough to even remotely damage steel plates or whatever else such a thing used as armor. Flashbangs were worse than useless, they were actively detrimental and gas grenades did little to hinder the ones that worked with heat vision, the most common way the few turrets or drones she'd encountered identified their targets. Her best bet thus far had been incendiary grenades to throw off their aim serving as a distraction at best or C4 that in turn required her to get within several meters of whatever was trying to kill her to be accurate enough to end it. Something which worked on turrets at the risk of her own life and was absolutely pointless on drones. Yes, she'd long figured out there were certain things she couldn't tangle with yet. The problem was that knowing what was wrong and being able to solve the problem were two very different things.

With a solution she couldn't reach on her own -something she realizes subconsciously but refuses to acknowledge- in sight the last of her caution faded and made way for practicality. Despite the drones deactivating things looked much brighter to Retsu. Thinking it through for a second to see if she'd missed anything she shrugged and extended her hand.

"An EMP Grenade ey, Facade? Count me in. As for the other stuff, if we're gonna be be going after anything fancy imma need something to ensure my face won't get plastered on all o' their security systems. But yeah, it's pretty late, ah'm sure we can talk deets later."

Already several ideas were running through Retsu's head. Even though her first impressions were negative she has few doubts left that this will be a productive partnership.

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facade

[facade]

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| facade | @freelance_facade
Location: Tokyo, Japan. | Current Status: i'm in :)
Now Playing: The Stupendium - The Fine Print

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facade was somewhat surprised at the categorical success this meeting had been, given the atmosphere of aggression/unease that had permeated most of it. Stepping closer as Retsu held out her hand, facade quickly reached his out and completed the handshake. It could be seen that he hesitated slightly on the actual physical contact, though. Even though his research had all returned the idea that Bakuretsu was Quirkless, the caution he'd learnt in the gesture of handshakes specifically when dealing with other villains flared up in the moment. "Good to have you on board. Don't worry about the facial recognition aspect, I have quite a few ways of circumventing that. Security systems are my playground." He broke the handshake and took a step back to maintain personal space, a courtesy he always extended. In Retsu's hand after the handshake was a slip of paper containing more coordinates and a phone number. His mask went blank for the final time, as he turned his head down to do something on his phone quickly. "That's my workshop, and a burner phone specific to you. I spend a lot of time there, and have a system in place to alert me if I'm absent, so feel free to just show up. Or call first, if you wanna be courteous. We'll talk then. I've also just deleted my message program and my backdoor from your systems, but you'll have to go get your phone from the bus to actually confirm that. Seeya, Bakuretsu." He turned to leave and, barring any interruptions, left the alleyway onto the late night streets of Akihabara. Any attempt to tail/track him would see him return to the specified workshop via train, only for the signal/his tracks to go cold.

[Pancakes]

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Sorry for the long wait! Good job guys!

Retsu: 1,250 + 2,500 = 3,750

Facade: 0+ 2,500= 2,500

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