The Luckiest Girl In The World

Banzai rarely patrolled Sunday nights, taking the night off to rest and prepare for the upcoming week, but since she'd bailed on patrolling on Friday, it seemed only fair to make up for it tonight instead. Crime around the club and various campuses would be lower, but there were still plenty of drug deals, muggings, and various other, more dangerous crimes for her to stop instead. And it wasn't like Banzai was going to miss spending extra time manhandling drunk idiots into cabs and breaking up fights in alleys over stupid bullshit the participants couldn't even remember four steps away from the club itself.

The Ukranian mafia had all but vanished from the city over the past few months; apparently losing the Butcher was enough to convince them that Baltimore wasn't worth the effort. In a way, Banzai almost missed them; they were good practice for when she'd be going up against the Seventeens in LA eventually. Patrolling around Stanford (if she got in, please God let her get in) probably wasn't going to be all that much effort, so she was already making plans to portal down to LA proper at least once a month to get in a proper patrol.

Spotting Jewels, one of the working girls that was part of Banzai's loose confederation of informants, Banzai swung down from the rooftop to land on light feet nearby. Always good to check in, see if Jewels had heard of anything going down, make sure that no one was bothering her, pass along money and supplies to stay in Jewels' good graces, all that good stuff.

It felt good to get out and patrol. For all her speeches about wanting to do good for the people around her and make the world a better place, Banzai had to admit that the real reason she ran around in rainbows with a bokken on her back and rope darts in her belt was a lot more selfish. What could she say?

She loved this.

It had been several weeks since Banzai had patrolled Baltimore properly. She'd spent break at home in LA patrolling there (and had somehow come back to the island with stripper heels and contact information for Regenerator and she wasn't entirely sure how either of those things had happened but thankfully they weren't related). Then had come the accidental trip to Dante's world which had been traumatizing enough to keep her off the streets, followed by Homecoming, and then finishing off her college applications and SAT II studying. And, then, of course, she'd gotten a nasty cold from the weekend without power, which had kept her in bed and miserable for a few days and so, yeah, it had been almost a month since Banzai had made an appearance.

Time to see what she'd missed in over the last few weeks. A month was a long time to leave the Ukrainians alone. Long enough for them to get cocky and let down their guard if she were lucky. Long enough for them to get deeply entrenched if she were really unlucky.

At first, Banzai thought she'd gotten lucky. Her patrol was quiet. Real quiet. It took her several hours to realize that it was a little too quiet. At first, she assumed that it was simply November at work; street-level petty crime tended to dip once it started getting cold. But even so, it hadn't been cold enough to account for this many missing faces. Several well-known drug dealers had vanished and no one had stepped in to claim their locations. Looking around the club areas, she could only spot two of the regular pickpockets working the crowds, instead of the five or six she was used to. More disturbingly, a number of working girls were missing and even a few of the homeless folks she knew, both those that Banzai hired as lookouts and informants and those Kathy bought coffee and lunches for when she was in Baltimore without her mask.

So when she did finally spot someone she knew, she wasted no time in flipping her way down to the street to find out just what the hell was going on. Jewels was a pretty girl, only a few years older than Kathy herself, and had started working the streets just about the time that Kathy had come East to school. They'd met when Banzai had stopped a prospective john from giving Jewels anything worse than a black eye (she'd felt guilty about not being able to stop him from doing even that much). Banzai had stopped by a week later to hand over one of those sharp kitty-shaped keychains and after that, a decent working relationship had been born, with Banzai slipping Jewels a bit of cash from time to time and Jewels keeping an ear out for news that might interest the superhero.

( If Jewels had been one of the missing, Banzai would have FREAKED. )

[Open for calls or anyone out in Baltimore, but likely to be slow, as I have a vdistinctive! NFB for distance]