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Episode 2: Mass Rave
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What a dump!

Gray had to admit, when he heard 'giant rave party' he hadn't exactly pictured 'endless parking-garage full of sketchy hovels'. Well alright, he sort of had, but he'd left the creepy ninjas with teeth the color of eel-water out. Or maybe he'd just expected them to be balanced out by more other people. Whatever. Either way, he was happy enough to let Poole handle the guy--it wasn't that he was scared or anything, but when you've got a guy like Poole on your side you learn to let him do what he does best. Meanwhile, Gray was working on doing what [i]he[/i] did best to try and figure out all sorts of reasons to get them into a club with a fucking hyena in front of it.

Venusians liked hyenas. Maybe it was their street-smarts, the way they could figure out even complex coordination problems faster than even most pre-gene-tamped apes. Maybe it was that they were survivors, ready, willing, and able to chow down on anything that may remotely have been alive (and plenty of things that weren't) until there was literally nothing left to waste. Or maybe it was that even the females were dicks, or at least had something like one. For not the first time Gray quickly deleted the term 'pseudo-penis' from his search history, preventing one of a dozen little viruses from reading the extranet query and supplying him an unsettling number of suggestions related to the term. It doesn't do to be caught by one's own little traps.

While one small window scrolled through known facts and anatomical configurations of [i]crocuta crocuta[/i], a significantly larger one was pulling information on the Sakura Club. Venus was a hodgepodge of different security levels, security systems about as secure as a five year old's vid card lined up next to cutting edge Zaibatsu work ripped off for some criminal who meant business (or thought he did, or was sufficiently paranoid, or wanted to show off, or, or, or...). The Sakura Club was one of the latter, its own books and internal servers off-net and protected by a not-insignificant Vorsicht Gruppe security suite--that meant money, the kind that you didn't get by catering to guys buying 5.75¥ eel juice.

All of this, of course, took place in the second or two while Poole was talking. Visibly, a bright exclamation point popped up on Gray's helmet as he made for the bouncer and his pooch excitedly. Beeftip might not be here but someone who knew where Tipbuktu was going down would be, and even then this place seemed awfully big-fish for a neighborhood like this without someone pulling in the big bucks. One servo-enhanced hand had even taken Yeva by the wrist, half to drag her along and half to make sure she didn't run off. Even Gray knew that the last thing they needed was him alone in the middle of a rave trying to hunt down a notorious drug dealing. Most things that started off with "Gray on his own" didn't end particularly well.

[i]Entertainingly[/i], yes, but not well.

Over the speakers in his helmet came a sudden series of low-pitched, staccato grunts a bit like a laugh. It wouldn't make much sense to the bouncer, but his hyena might perk up a little. Standard vocal response to a hyena approaching another of a different clan with deference--they used the same things for lions, once upon a time. For his owner, his response was much the same.

"Sup, homie. We in?"

He even added a thumbs up!