She didn't care, though. It was cheap. She was absolutely starving.
In nothing but her briefs, the sore Clara laid back on the dirty mattress, which she humbly called her bed.
The chilly air of Stem City's skyline crept in through the locked maintenance closet's cheap metal door. Clara momentarily considered putting her clothes back on, but she knew the effort wasn't worth it. They smelled like sweat and feces, and she was about to pass out anyway.
Across the small room from her was Baltimore. The hanging body watched her with unblinking intrigue. He idly swung left-to-right on his wires, the loose ones slowly slipping out from the power box on the ceiling.
"YOU SEEM TIRED," he commented.
Clara startled. She had completely forgotten he was there, and his shrill synthesized voice surprised her. She glared up at him with cut eyes. The fact that this was the first time he spoke to her since she had gotten home was unusual considering how he'd usually ramble on for days if she let him.
Her devil tail flicked. She'd prefer if he had kept quiet, but she doesn't have a choice. He won't let her sleep if she doesn't chat with him.
"I am tired."
"WHAT HAPPENED?"
She sighed. That was the odd part. Lawairs descended upon that slime beast and shot it down before an extraction team came and hauled it off to Stem Tower. Fencien made Clara promise that next week's outing wouldn't be so chaotic and then headed off.
Clara had gotten into dangerous situations and high-tailed it before. Came with being a drug peddler and haphazardly doing business on smaller gangs's turfs. She figures that the physical actions alone weren't the exhausting part.
The truly exhausting part was reliving memories of who she used to be. The Red Rabbit being chased by a murderous slime through a jungle; only this time, the jungle was constructed out of concrete.
"There was a big explosion earlier at the place we delivered to... A huge monster chased us."
After she got paid by Teis earlier, Clara went straight to the nearby convenience store to buy a cheap dinner, haggled Joe at the hardware store for a type of wrench that Yenjo forgot to get last week, and then she made it straight home. It had been an eventful date with Fencien; she was always glad when they were over, this one especially.
"IS PINK LAWMAN WOMAN OKAY?"
Clara barely nodded. It was Baltimore's idea to invite Fencien along today. When Fencien showed up and banged on the rooftop closet's door as she did every week, Clara was going to deny her under the pretense of work, but Baltimore's loudmouth had to suggest them going together.
Sometimes, she wished that she had never rescued Baltimore from his moldy sewer prison. His loud mouth had the tendency to get her and her guests into uncomfortable situations.
Shoveling more food down her throat, Clara's spent body was quickly catching up to her mind.
"You inclined to ask anything else, Baltimore? Am I free to pass the hell out now?" She sarcastically asked as she set aside the half-finished dish.
"WAS THE CYBORG CAPTURED?"
"Yeah, it was," She nodded again as she pulled Yenjo's old scratchy quilt over her bottom half. "No idea what that thing actually was, but hopefully I'll never see it again. Have had enough of slimes for a year."
Setting her visor next to the bowl of food, Clara looked up at Baltimore one last time. His eyes had gone blank, and his body hung lifelessly. The sudden lack of life gave her a sudden reminder that he wasn't truly alive. He was left abandoned by some mysterious genius—an unfinished recreation of biology.
Yet, he somehow knew things that she didn't. Baltimore never hid the fact that there was a reason that he called out to her specifically to save him. Time and time again, Clara tried to pry the reasoning out of him, but he never budged. It seemed to be his one secret.
She wanted a purpose. She needed a purpose. She had hoped that he would be the one to give her the thing that motivated her to keep pushing on.
No dice. All she got was a noisy roommate.
As Clara drifted off to her dream world, a field of rainbow-colored flowers waiting to greet her, her conscious brain cycled through dozens of questions and answers.
One lingered for a bit longer than the others; did she even tell Baltimore that the slime monster was a cyborg?