Planet Cambridge, Cambridge System
Grantchester City
Neon Lights Lounge
She scanned around the bar for anyone scarred - whilst this wasn't front line bar, this was still Bretonia - everyone was some variation of psychiatric paitent, patiently waiting for the world to come crashing down around them as it had near everywhere else. Even the famous neon was gradually winking out; the saturation had ramped all the cosmopolitan verve out of the comfortably borgeoise Bretonian nightlife that Cambridge used to be renowned for; a land of cults and creatives had drowned in uniform and machine-tooled crying. A night to remember for students and the saccharine had morphed into dead cold hysterics. She searched around the shadows someone who'd lost the colour in their eyes rather than tweaking out in rage, someone who wasn't going to force her into being anything more than another set of shoulders in the cracked vinyl darkness of barely carrying-on Bretonian hulk.
Breathing made her shiver. She'd forgotten that inpulse. Like too much coffee, too few endorphins.
Bingo. Two confused looking men conversing in unsteady voices. They wern't leaning in; not loud enough to be chummy, not quiet enough to be comfortable. No money was being exchanged, so they wern't about to screw or hit the cardi burner, even if the blond one had a jaw large enough to look good on a Baden beach. Strangers. She pressed herself up and tried to draw one whole of Carinea's Own Royal Inches off her height when she wrapped on the table between them, dragging her empty mug with her. "Hey." She tried to smile out a qualifier, but it just came as taught, strangled thing. "Don't mean to bother either of you, I just... don't want to get hit on tonight. You mind if I sit here and pretend that I've got wingmen?"
She shrugged. "Tolerate my silence and I'll buy you a round. It's all blood money in the end."
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)
![[Image: XTF1d6x.png]](https://i.imgur.com/XTF1d6x.png)