With apologies to @GoddesSammi, who wrote "Mech Pilots who share a callsign & now must battle each other to determine the better [callsign]"
They came up through the gangs of Neo Wolverhampton, under the shattered neon and driving rain, pit-fighting against blood-crazed androids desperate to win dwindling replacement stocks of perishing plastic parts, forever unavailable from manufacturers who pivoted to smart toasters or Voight-Kampff on the blockchain; their vendetta sealed, already perfect in its intensity, by a black-market beer spilled on both during some ineffectual teenage buffoonery aimed to impress an inevitably straight girl.
A rooted cling-plastic sign cutter spat out a limited selection of fonts and colours, heatgunned onto crusty denim jackets as a badge of belonging. One, beer-soused and pissy, clocked the name collision — "Winner? Fucking as if, wanker, meet the real Winner—" and it was on. Tooth and nail, mutual annihilation or die trying.
Ten years on, ten years of scars and struggle, of perpetual reversals of fortune. Camille is the undisputed warlord of a splinter faction from their childhood gang, controls Neo Wolverhampton's entire tinned food black market. Sapphire is forward strike pilot in a mech-merc troupe, dancing in and out of Camille's sphere of influence on the northern end of their operations, offloading the riches risked in the London Devastation Zone.
It's the week of the Briïsh Neolympics.
Every five1 years, a come-one-come-all melting pot of competitive brutality and boasting, sodden with booze, ringing with ancestral chants that have lost all context but retained the scorn: "Your mum shops at Marks and Spencers!" And Sapphire will be (home) back, has responded to sneering overtures with fire-eyed vehemence: too chicken to get in the mosh pit? Fuck off, you fucking Waitrose pillow princess!
There's a crowd of thousands, baked beans are selling all week for more than HESH, and Camille's event is the Triathlon: Pub Crawl, Arm Wrestling, and Lasers. The local fixture. The legend. The bookies' favourite (if they know what's good for them). And Saph's late. She's late, and if she no-shows, Camille wins, and Camille will never let her forget that she didn't even dare turn up....
"Boss," says Turnip, cupping a hand round her earpiece. "Boss, she — she ain't gonna get here," and Turnip's already doing a conciliatory lean away from Camille, as if she's an unexploded friendlybomb that'll lobotomise her like a Slough p-zombie when it goes off, and there's a taste in Camille's mouth already that's nothing like victory.
"Why not?"
"Her troupe just landed. Hot mess, Boss. Million-to-one SAM hit knocked her out of the air over the Milton Keynes Thunderdome. If there was even anything left, they'll have dragged her inside."
"Fuck that," Camille says, in a deceptively calm way.
"Boss—"
"Fuck that." She shoves her chair back, grabs the table, flips it. "I get to smack her down. Nobody gets to Two Winners Enter, One Winner Leaves her but me. Fuel the Killfleet! Milton Keynes burns!"
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due to inflation
