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The brig. Tossed there for starting a fight with the two pricks that couldn't mind their own damned business. It irritated Mei-Xing, but there wasn't much to be done about it. So she made up her mind to irritate her jailers by not being bothered about it at all.

She started off her mornings with a nice stretch, coupled with some minor exercises. Sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, even squats and lunges were used. After that, she'd spend her day either meditating, reading a book or watching a movie from the data storage unit in her head, or stepping out into the astral realm and futzing about the ship that way. Having so many people with no idea how her magic worked or what she could do with it came in handy, it seemed.

At this time, Mei-Xing is at the tail end of her morning work-out, just fooling around by this point. She stands on her head, then lifts herself up, her entire body weight on her hands. Slowly, she pushes herself up just a bit further, resting on her fingers. Carefully, as if unsure if she could do it, she lifts her left arm from the ground, holding it to the side. She lowers herself slowly, touching her nose to the ground, and then straightens her arm again.

Just because she was a mage was no excuse for her to be out of shape, after all.

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So, the debate raged on. It was almost cute- the clear divides, common sense, emotional reaction and anger itself flew everywhere. Hypocrites. They weren't thinking, but...as always, the Major might have an opinion, but she didn't care to voice it more than she already had.

The council couldn't really do much about the decision, in her mind it was already made up. That was the beauty of having Kennedy as captain: he wasn't above the idea of secret police.

Imagine, for a moment, her surprise to find that whoever had locked her up knew little enough about Mei-Xing's equipment to realize she had a transmitting implant. For the love of-- they hadn't even bothered to put her in a shielded cell as a precaution.

Either Aran was slipping, or she wasn't making the calls on this any more.

« Are you just planning to sit there until they execute you? » Motoko's cybercomm signal was clear- though her voice was soft enough that it might be mistaken for an intercepted transmission, « Try not to act surprised. They're still monitoring you, remember? »

To her credit, Mei-Xing doesn't even twitch. Spending the last few years in an environment so heavily saturated with augmented reality popups and spam had long broken her of a physical reaction to a sudden electronic transfer.

She places her other hand down again, resting on her fingertips as she sub-vocalizes. « I don't plan on dying any time soon. Unless I've seriously misjudged them, even the pair that discovered me don't want me dead. » They had been furious, disgusted when they discovered her, she'd seen that in their auras. But neither of them had any kind of killing intent.

« This is the Major, isn't it? I recognize your voice from that 'training' you hosted a while back. » She brings her feet down and stands again, stretching out her arms and back. Nothing wrong here, people.

« They're xenophobic. If you don't think the more reactionary splinter group won't come after you, then you've clearly misinterpreted their histories. » Not too bad. Motoko smiled at the security feed, without moving her lips. Her body was in the city, tucked away in one of a dozen hidey-holes she'd contrived mostly for this sort of purpose.

Of course, John Connor had contrived at least half of them, but that was neither here, nor there.

« Are you enjoying your stay that much? »

« They'd have to be a special kind of stupid for that. » She settles down, folding her legs into the lotus position, and closes her eyes. For all intents and purposes, she's just meditating. She can do it for hours without twitching.

« They're no Yakuza. And I'm hardly constricted to this cell alone. » Bars and force shields couldn't hold her astral form back. « Besides, I must 'atone for my sins' in attacking those two. I doubt that Samus is going to let me get out early. »

From the questions, she'd almost guess that Motoko expects her to try to escape. Or has something else in mind. Either way, she wasn't going to ask. Let the Major say what she contacted her to say.

« Aran isn't the final word in this. Listen. »

And she paused, let the connection ride silent for a few seconds, as if encouraging Mei-Xing to listen to some physical sound.

« I'd like to offer you a a job. »

Her ear twitches a little, but that's the only sign of her concentrating on the noise. « I'm listening. »

It wasn't as if she had any pressing matters at hand.

« I'm putting together a small team, » she murmured, low and confidential, as if whispering directly into Mei-Xing's ear. She was getting the feel of the implant now, and though her transmission was still, to appearances, clean, the subtle manipulation made her control more precise.

« Covert, if you're curious. I can say with confidence that you're not likely to get much goodwill, after this. »

Her lips twitch slightly, imagining the Major trying to play with her settings to get just the right 'feeling' like she is now.

« I rarely work with teams. They have a tendency to either die, or try to shoot me in the back. » She makes an irritated noise in her throat, amplified a bit by the subvocal mic. « How can I be sure that your team won't hold the same feelings for me that the rest of these erbaiwu do? »

« The last person to trouble someone under my command wandered out into the freeway and had to be scooped into the body bag with a trowel. »

Paz did good work, and that time he hadn't even needed to be asked. They'd all had a soft spot for Togusa. If Mei-Xing was asking this question, she was already saying yes, and had only to quibble on the exact terms.

« These aren't a street gang, or some throw-together band of mercenaries. They were hand-picked. »

« You're going to need a hell of a freeway for those two. » She sounds amused as she says it, though. Mei-Xing's already had detailed plans on taking the pair of them out. She just has to catch Fate off-guard.

« Sounds like this isn't your first shadowrun. »

« Not by a long shot. » And the tone was a little amused at that. Most people who'd been doing this as long as Motoko had been, had died of it. It was pure mathmatics- one day, you're in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or someone behind you screws up, and that's the end of you.

Retirement was a euphemism for 'dead.'

« I won't ask for a formal promise from you until I've had you let out. At that point, you'll have to make a decision, if you haven't already. »

« Well, I hope you won't be offended if I hold off deciding until then. » She stretches again, breaking out of the lotus position to settle on the bed, arms crossed behind her head. « If you can get the tightwads to let me out of here, we'll see what we can agree to. »

« Politics. »

Not her favorite thing, and going to Leon for this seemed somehow unwise. Kennedy was her boss, she shouldn't be...

Well. Maybe Luthor would have the pull. If she left him alone, he might even do it for himself.

« Kon-El is a stupid teenager, but the girl has more pull. It'll take a little time. »

« Politics make the world go round. I prefer money. »

What runner didn't?

« Well, I'm not going anywhere in a hurry. Still, I'm surprised they kept me in here for so long over a simple tussle. It's almost like they think they're protecting me. »

« I'm sure they do. »

She cut the line with no further preamble. Time would come soon, to talk to Lex. Not bad at all.

Ha. Well, she hadn't expected the chat to last very long.

With that thought, she enters augmented reality, and orders her head unit to open up a book on practical geomancy. Might as well get some studying done.

Well, look, Mei-Xing, you have a visitor.

"Glad to see you're using your time productively."

She looks up at Lex, bringing herself down again as she does so. "I can't just neglect my physical body just because I can shoot fire from my fingers now, can I?" She pushes herself up again, then springs to her feet, peering at Luthor through her cell's entrance, giving him a little smile. "I didn't expect guests, or I would have cleaned up a little."

Mentally, she's trying to work out what he wants. Why would he visit her here?

"I doubt you'd get much in the way of pleasant company anyway." Not with the predicament she was in.

"So, I have to admit I'm curious. How does a girl like you take on both a Kryptonian and a mage and end up with only a handful of scratches at worst?"

"What can they do, make me feel bad?" Mei-Xing crosses her arms, crafting a quick spell to eliminate the sweat and grime from her body as she does so. No reason to look icky while talking to someone. "If they really feel the need to defend a sack of meat to feel good, I'd say we've forgotten what we're really fighting."

She blinks, then shrugs a bit. "It's a simple enough question. I'm a mage, and they were too stupid to think of that before they tried to intimidate me into surrendering." She waves a hand dismissively. "Amateurs. I could've killed them both when they were recovering from my little party spell, but I figured that'd go over even worse."

"Interesting," and certainly worth looking into.

"I've taken a look at the sack of meat the three of you were fighting over."

She crosses her arms. "What was your opinion? You didn't enjoy peeking too much, did you?" She knows what you white boys are like.

"My opinion is that calling it a sack of meat is a rather generous description. But, otherwise, aside from its Elf physiology, I can't say its a terribly fascinating specimen." He wasn't going to bother addressing her other question; he was far too dignified for that.

Edited 2010-09-20 21:17 (UTC)

"Not exactly surprising. It was created as an organ donor." She leans back a little, thinking of the options she had when she'd ordered it from DocWagon. "Just having that thing made and cared for was extremely expensive. Having some genetic alteration done would've been way beyond my budget."

"Besides, what point would there be in improving the clone? I'm the one that's going out and getting shot at, any gene therapy or bioware should be going to me."

Don't go giving Lex any ideas, Mei-Xing.

"And yet, your rather boring sack of meat has caused quite the stir. How do you intend to deal with the situation?"

She shrugs. "I've been thinking about it. Assuming they'll ever let me out of here before everything's all decided, I wanna hear the arguments being tossed back and forth. So far, no one's told me anything except that I'm a disgusting she-creeper, and that the Council wants all the information I have to come to a decision."

She almost opens up AR, before peeking into the astral and realizing that Luthor's not augmented that way. "In any case, I want to see something done. I get pulled out of the City, threatened for doing nothing more than watching over my property, and tossed into the brig for responding to said threats? It's bulldrek. And I've noticed that those two used a hell of a lot more force than I did, and they haven't even stepped into a cell for the night." She's getting rather intense towards the end there, more annoyed at being treated like something on the bottom of everyone's shoe than anything else.

Honestly, the idea that someone thinks her clone deserves metahuman rights baffles her. No one in her world stands up for clones, because most clones are exactly like hers. Organ donors.

"You say it as if you actually expected it to happen." Lex almost seemed amused as he looked at her.

"The girl was hand-picked to be a Lieutenant in Kennedy's staff, not to mention that she's sharing a bed with the head of the Mystical Department. The boy is the adopted son of one of the Council members.

"If you actually expected what's right and fair to trump politics, just because the politicians are so called 'superheroes', then your faith in their character is foolishly high."

"Oh, I'm not expecting politics to ever be trumped by right and fair. I'm just expecting them to live up to their own self-given titles." She sneers a little. "Fair and balanced, right? Always doing the right thing. Unless they show that they can't live up to their own hype, in which case why would anyone trust them again?" Mei-Xing's used to society working a tad differently. "Politicians are all the same. They want power. And the only way to keep power here is to earn and keep the trust of the crew."

She turns and waves a hand, wandering back to her bed. "Really, I'm not too concerned about the clone at this point. It's more about the hassles these people have put me through. I'd like... Recompense." Something in her tone implies that said repayment would be Superboy's and Fate's heads on a pike.

Lex was starting to like this girl more and more.

"That won't be easy, what with their having friends in high places. But that doesn't mean you can't take them down a peg or two."

"It's a fun thought." She smiles to herself. "Too bad I can't do much from here."

She'd love to listen, Luthor, but who knew what kind of monitoring systems were in place in this cell?

"I doubt you'll be there for much longer," he mused.

"Oh, I really don't think they will. The fact that I'm still here is just a courtesy on my part and curiosity to see how far they'll take this." She glances back at Luthor with a cocky grin. "I've got at least three ways to get out of here, not counting simple astral projection. This cell just isn't meant for someone like me."

There was a raised eyebrow from Lex, but he'd see for himself eventually.

"When you get out, pay me a visit, we can talk some more." ~~And she can finally pick up that gun!~~

"Give me a spot where you're usually around, I might see you sooner than you think."

She had a healthy amount of time she could spend astral projecting, after all.

"Is that right?"

Okay, he'll bite. This should be interesting.

"I do frequent the crew lounge. I find it a good place to relax."

"I'll see you sometime, then." She grins to herself and settles on the bed, giving him a little wave. "See you later."

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