Heh, you know what, you're right, it's a lot funnier that way.

Well, what the hell, it's Christmas. Here's how that went down, fresh off the top of my head, probable typos, word duplications, and other unproofread rawnesses and all!

Azula had already assumed, from the pre-War advertisements she'd seen and the preposterously dated way of speaking Benny had had, that she wasn't going to like the Tops Casino when, at last, she reached it. Stepping through the door into its threadbare, tacky, goofily hepcat-retro lobby, she saw that she'd been absolutely right.

This impression was only reinforced a moment later, when the greeter at the reception desk, a sharp-faced young man in the ill-maintained pinstripe suit that seemed to be the Chairmen gang's uniform, turned what he probably thought was a suave smile to her and said,

"Hey hey, baby doll, welcome to the Tops Hotel and Casino. Before you get to the action, I'm gonna have to ask you to hand over any weapons you might be carrying."

Suppressing her instinctive reaction (a mocking laugh), Azula instead gave him a sweet but vaguely challenging smile, unfastened her gunbelt, and placed it on the counter. Then she waited for him to say something smarmy about needing to do a more thorough search, at which point she would most probably break his arm and the fun would start a little early. Instead, he just gave her a slightly nervous smile in return - the contradiction in the one she'd just given him seemed to flummox him slightly - and swept the gun and holster out of sight under the counter.

"There we go, safe as houses," he said, recovering some of his aplomb with a ritualistic adjustment of his tie. "Enjoy yourself, baby doll."

"Oh, I intend to," she assured him. "Where can I find your boss?"

The greeter looked puzzled. "Benny? He's on the floor someplace. What do you want with him?"

"Unfinished business," said Azula casually, breezing past the desk toward the casino floor. "Don't lose my gun, now. It has sentimental value."

The Tops casino floor was a vaguely surreal experience, like many things Azula had encountered during her time on Mojave so far. On the one hand, it was, well, a casino floor - blackjack tables, roulette wheels, croupiers, gamblers. No big surprises there. On the other hand, it was a casino floor on a planet where, evidently, no one had done even the most routine building maintenance in 300 years. The place looked abandoned in spite of the bustle of activity. For that matter, the people looked abandoned too, wearing their dirty, tattered dress clothes like discarded shop-window dummies.

For about the thousandth time since she came here, Azula wondered why it was that no one on this planet seemed to have the slightest inclination to clean anything up. Even in places like this, where the trappings of civilization were well on their way to reasserting themselves, it was like one of the technologies lost in the Great War had been the broom. It was all so out-of-order. Did these people enjoy living in filth? Was it some kind of bizarre survivor's pride thing? She didn't know, but she wished at least a few of them would bother to dust now and again.

Putting the thought aside, she stood at the corner of the L-shaped room and scanned it with her eyes. Yes, there was Benny, unmistakable in his hideous black-and-white-checked suitjacket with its ridiculously exaggerated shoulders, standing in the far corner. His right hand was a heavily bandaged white mitt, obvious even at this distance. He had his back to the room, talking to one of the identically suited and hatted triggermen surrounding him. Bodyguards with nasty-looking little drum-fed submachineguns, four of them. Not a problem.

No one paid Azula much attention as she walked across the gaming floor. The gamblers were too intent on losing their caps and the croupiers too intent on taking them. Only one person, a bored-looking man who was evidently the escort of one of the gamblers, looked up from a roulette table to take note of her as she passed, and he didn't seem to make much of her. Just another wastelander, mildly out of place in this environment with her many-patched leather trousers, well-traveled boots, and slightly ratty vest-over-sweater top. Upon closer inspection, she was cleaner, her hair neater, and her made-and-mended clothes more meticulously maintained than most to be seen out there, but that in itself was merely a mark of eccentricity, not exceptionality.

Benny was just delivering the punch line of a dirty joke ("... and he says to the guy, 'I'm tryin'! I'm tryin'!") to one of his bodyguards when Azula slipped up next to him, clapped a hand onto his padded shoulder, and leaned to murmur in his ear,

"Hello again, Benny."

"Aaah!" Benny cried, recoiling as if she'd touched a lighted match to his neck. He whirled, one hand rising to his ear, and then goggled in utter shock as he recognized her face - most especially her eyes, that amazing shade of amber, of which he'd taken particular note when last they'd met.

"What in the goddamn?!" he blurted, the color draining out of his face. His bodyguards had all taken a step back, a couple of them reaching for their weapons, but they didn't really seem to know what to do. At least two were still trying to figure out how the mysterious chick in the red sweater had managed to walk right up to the boss without them noticing until she was practically on top of him.

Azula half-smiled, the expression containing neither mirth nor warmth. "Surprised to see me?" she asked rhetorically.

Benny stared at her, his jaw working silently for a second; then he pulled himself together and said, "OK, let's just take it easy, everybody. Smooth. Smooth moves. Easy does it." Then, with a wan smile of his own, he replied, "I gotta admit, I wasn't expectin' to see you again, babe." The smile became a rueful grin as he added, "I guess now I know why the Khans never came lookin' for the rest'a their pay, huh."

"Oh, don't worry about the Khans," said Azula pleasantly. "I made sure they got everything that was coming to them. You're the only loose end left. I'll give you this, you're a fast runner. By the time I finished with your hired muscle, I had no idea where you'd got off to in the dark."

Benny gulped audibly and tried to be jaunty as he replied, "Well, hey, everybody's gotta have a talent, am I right? So listen, uh, what'd you come all the way here for? I gotta figure if it was to waste me, you wouldn't'a shown your hand like this."

Azula chuckled darkly. "Unless, of course, I was trying to make a statement in the process." Taking a step toward him, she fixed him with a smile that had a strange combination of sultriness and cruelty in it and went on, "Then I would do it exactly... this... way."

"Guys, what're you just standin' there for... " Benny muttered, backing away. Shaking their heads, his bodyguards moved to restore their formation. The pair closest to Azula pulled out switchblades, while the other unslung their SMGs.

"'Some say the world will end in fire,'" said Azula, still smiling.

The croupiers and other members of the Chairmen gang present on the floor of the Tops that day had seen any number of screwy things in their time, first wandering the wasteland as part of the tribe that had preceded the Chairmen, then during the gang's consolidation of its position on the New Vegas strip. None of them, however, had ever seen an unarmed woman walk head-on into a straight-up fight with four heavily armed men and come out on top - let alone throw fire from her empty hands while she was at it, all while calmly reciting pre-War poetry in a low, faintly seductive purr.

she said, and Frankie Knives was down, his blade spinning from his hand as she trapped his first thrust in some kind of kung-fu joint lock, then gave him a kick that sent him hurtling over the railing and across one of the blackjack tables with his suitjacket on fire.

and Big Franny hit the deck, blasted clear to the Presidential Suite express elevator by what almost looked like a gas explosion.

and she slipped, smokelike, out of Rocky Ramone's line of fire, letting him stitch a line of bullet holes up the already-ragged wallpaper. With a karate-punch-like movement, she launched a bolt of blue fire out of nowhere. It struck his SMG's magazine, causing the ammo to cook off like a grenade in his face.

and Zippy the Jethead opened up - closer than Rocky, he couldn't possibly miss; she drew an incandescent line with an open hand, calling a sheet of that blue flame into existence between them, and Zippy's bullets vaporized before they ever reached her. Her smile becoming just a touch fierce, she spun out of the follow-through and punched through her own wall of fire, causing it to part and dissipate around her like a curtain with an audible WHUMP of heated air, and then Zippy got the same treatment as Rocky.

Still in motion, as if the whole thing had been one continuous, pre-rehearsed dance, Azula crossed the three paces to Benny and slammed him up against the wall by the neck with one hand, the other cocked next to her ear, two fingers extended, like a kid's play-gunfighter gesture. He had his good left hand in his jacket, going for a shoulder-holstered gun, but he was right-handed and obviously hadn't practiced the move much, and he hadn't cleared leather by the time she pinned him.

"Mommy!" Benny squeaked as she stared into his eyes, her own alight with the pleasure of a well-executed takedown.

"'Is also great,'" Azula purred, "'and would suffice.'"

Then, still holding him against the wall with one hand, she reached the other into his side pocket and withdrew it with the Platinum Chip between her first two fingers. With a movement like a conjuror, she held it up in front of his terrified eyes, then made it disappear, displaying to him her empty palm.

"And what have we learned?" Azula inquired conversationally.

"... you are one crazy broad," Benny gasped after a moment's fearful silence.

Azula smiled, the manic energy dissipating from her eyes. Laughing lightly, she released him and stepped back as he felt at his throat with his good hand.

"True enough," she said. Then she straightened his tie and lapels, patted him patronizingly on the cheek, and said, "See you around, Mr. Chairman. I'd stay away from Red Rock Canyon if I were you."

She was about halfway back to the door, silently enjoying the shocked stares of gamblers, croupiers, and assorted random Chairmen, when Benny's voice barked sharply from behind her, "Hey!"

Azula looked back over her shoulder to see that he'd raised himself away from the wall and drawn his gun - an ordinary replacement for the fancy custom job she'd wrecked, along with his right hand, in Goodsprings. His face crimson with humiliation and fury, he leveled the pistol and thumbed back the hammer.

Without hesitation, Azula whirled, one foot sliding in a semicircle as her body bent slightly down and to the right. The bullet cracked past her left ear and went on to ricochet from the bannister of the main staircase with a crazy zannnnngggg sound, just like in an old Western. At the same time, her left hand tucked into a fist at her side as the right thrust forward, two fingers pointing straight at Benny's heart.

The witnesses to this curious duel were expecting more of the fire she'd taken out Rocky and Zippy with, but instead, what hit Benny was a bolt of lightning, such a brilliant and - pardon the expression - shocking blue that people recoiled and covered their eyes with painful cries as it burned a vivid green afterimage in their vision. Benny didn't even scream. He didn't have time before all the apparatus he would've used to do it was vaporized and blown out his back.

What was left of him hit the floor a second after his gun, slumping to the threadbare carpet with smoke pouring from his mouth and the charred through-and-through hole in his upper torso. By then, Azula had turned around and started for the lobby again, as perfectly composed and completely unconcerned as if she'd just had a pleasant conversation with an acquaintance. When she reached the lobby, the greeter and a couple of other Chairmen were just standing there staring at her in utter disbelief, their own weapons completely forgotten.

"My gun, please," she said calmly to the greeter.

"... Huh?" he replied.

"I'm leaving," she explained patiently. "I want my gun back."

"Oh! Uh... right! Sure!" He retrieved the weapon from under his desk and slid it across the counter to her.

"Thank you," said Azula cordially. He watched in continued astonishment as she belted it back on, settling its familiar weight on her right hip; then she dug in one of the pockets of her black leather half-vest for a moment and spread a handful of bottlecaps on the counter. "Sorry about the mess," she said, and then turned and left the casino without a backward glance.

"... God damn," said Swank, the casino's newly-promoted manager from beside the greeter. "What a dame, am I right?"

"No lie, boss," the greeter agreed, staring along with him at the closed door she'd left by. "No, fuckin', lie."

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.