"Licensing," said Giggles somewhere between Nova and the Valentine shop, "is the Devil's business."

The place was a vision of bankruptcy in the making. Even here- [i]Especially[/i] here, where the wealthy sprawled over the poor in the most literal of ways- Gentrification took its toll. It must've been nice in its day, thought Giggles over a packet of lead slugs. He wasn't particularly sad about its inevitable passing. 

Such things happened. He did his best. That was all he could do.

"Shit, not even a laspistol?" asked Giggles, mostly to himself, the cabinet quite visibly empty. That didn't stop him from laying out a few components, though. He looked up with a screwdriver wedged into a photon pump. "No, man. I got here less than forty-eight hours ago, I don't know the turf. And that doesn't matter, because another forty-eight hours from now I [i]will[/i] know the turf and I [i]still[/i] won't be able to get you to meet Fatcat."

A faint grunt and the top of the pump popped off. Giggles peeked into the radiochamber and started hooking it to a cell battery. "Let's say Thuit is real, and not just a mask for an AI, or a council of shareholders. Don't you think he's put out a million other shops in the last half hour? The last year? Ten years?" Something sparked around his glove and he put the contraption back down, for now.

"Whether you're tryna appeal to his big heart or shoot him in his alien nutsack, you won't be the first or last and you won't get that far even if you rounded up all the other angry proles in this city and hauled a shit tonne of ass. What do you think police are for? Citizen protection? Pffnah." Giggles slung off his gloves, this place seemed safe enough. "Police are there to be bought and then to protect private capital. I'm sorry, man. I can't fight a whole planet to reach a ghost."