Pirated Entertainment - VR Edition - Prologue (Patreon)

Well I did say she'd be back, didn't I~?

Welcome to a new series of Pirated Entertainment! If you missed the first one, don't worry, they're only loosely related. You can read the first series here:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/27432945 

This one will have the same sort of setup, a Choose Your Own Adventure where you can vote here on Patreon for what will happen to everybody's favourite bird!

I'll be writing and illustrating this one, so I hope you buckle up and enjoy the ride with me! 

In this installment, Amourres finds herself dealing with having been stranded on a strange station, only to be rescued by strangers.

Amourres belongs to me

Eckleson cameo by Loquacious Jango 

- - - 

The starship jostled and bumped beneath her, jarring Amourres from her thoughts. Not that the raven hadn’t gone over everything in her head hundreds of times already. How could he choose them?! That miserable ingrate excuse for an antivirus that she had been searching for, for years. The stars had aligned, everything was in place, and he chose them. They weren’t even people. Not most of them. Two slaves and an upstart bat who had to be pushed to get the slightest bit of actual work done. What did he see in them, that he couldn’t have seen in her? That miserable jumped up pile of soon-to-be deleted code...

           “Something wrong with your internal suites?”

           Amourres made an indignant squeak of a sound, it seemed she had been talking out loud. She squinted up at the bat-like figure in the doorway - it was less than a door as much as an airlock, a hatch that separated the ship’s cockpit from its meager ‘living quarters’, such as they were. Had the bat actually crossed the threshold, the two of them would be cramped, as it were he kept a healthy distance from the bird. Bound as she was, she was still liable to bite him if he got near. 

“Like you’d care.” She spat back. She would have been done with the conversation, if she hadn’t realised it was another chance to try and persuade her idiot of a captor that she was worth something. “Like I keep telling you, if you’d just let me near a bank terminal I can pay you! I can pay you anything you want! I’m a vice regent for Chrome’s sake!” 

Her captor only rolled his eyes and sneered. “Yeah, a real lady. Did all that etiquette teach you to take a swing at me? Sorry about the restraints by the way.” He didn’t sound sorry. Still though, as he talked he seemed to study her. Just as she had studied him. He was an ugly specimen, all told. Fur matted, snout too long, eyes too tired. Eckelson, he had introduced himself as when he landed at that Chrome forsaken station that she had been left on. Eckelson. Some scavenger that had answered her SOS hoping to pick through salvage and had found her.

“Anyway,” the bat went on, patting his pockets for a flask of something, “‘s not like I’m gonna sell you to slavers or anything. We’re headed back to a station where you can pay off your debt all quick like.” Finding a small flask, no doubt containing some alcohol or another, Eckelson took a quick swig. 

This time it was Amourres’ turn to roll her eyes. She hadn’t done a day's worth of hard labour in her life, and she wasn’t planning on starting now. Having survived the last two weeks in the landing bay of an abandoned space station she wasn’t much to look at, or smell, but when it was new her dress had cost more than this smuggler probably saw in a year. Her hair was a tatted mess, and her feathers had lost their glossy sheen. Even the art which she applied to her beak was faded and stained. The taste of nutrient paste had been so repulsive she could swear she’d lost weight, and the way her clothes hung about her confirmed her suspicions. No, she wasn’t going to be put to work on some back-water station, the first thing she was going to do was access her bank accounts. The second was going to be a long bath. The third...

“Hey,” She glanced back up towards Eckelson, yeah, he seemed the type. “You do hitman jobs? Or know anyone who does?”

He just scoffed. “Keep dreaming.” A beat. “What all was done to you huh? Must’ve pissed someone off to be left stranded like that. But not enough they din’ go to the trouble of repairing an SOS beacon for ya.” 

Amourres seethed. “Me?! I didn’t do anything! I helped indentured servants, I even helped that other damn bat while she was on the run! I gave everyone around me a life, and a purpose, and this is how they repay me?!” 

Eckelson was silent for a moment. Amourres barely seemed to notice, but she was pulled from her seething momentarily by his words. “Huh. Mustn’t have been much of a life you gave ‘em.” He turned and wandered back into the cockpit, walking away from the raven as she erupted into a miasma of swearing and curses. 

“I’ll skin you and them!” She yelled into the cockpit, struggling against the rope that tied her wings behind her back. It was useless though, she knew that before she tried. The synthetic fibre held tight, all she was doing was rubbing her wings raw, and she would need all the feathers she could keep if she was going to make a resplendent return to high society. Still, the bat’s words crawled under her skin, writhing inside her mind. What did he mean? Amourres had pulled those people from the lowest of the low, rescuing them from lives of menial labour or worse, death, and what price did they have to pay? Oh a few pounds here, a shuffled contract there. The worst that could have happened to them was the life of a pet, and it was probably the best any of them could have ever expected! That any of them could be ungrateful for that seemed inconceivable. 

Eckelson’s voice echoed from the cockpit, “What if they didn’t want to be pets?” 

She had been talking out loud again. Amourres flinched and cursed inwardly. Then again, with ears like that, she wouldn’t be surprised if he could listen to her thoughts.It hardly mattered what this walking rug believed, but it didn’t do well for her to betray her motives so easily. A lifetime of being able to play Imperial politics with the best of them and she had become unravelled after two weeks alone! She took a calming breath and for the first time since she had been unceremoniously dumped on the floor of this ship, allowed herself to relax. Amourres didn’t answer Eckelson, he didn’t deserve an answer. He was just another pawn. A piece on the board of her life, to be discarded as soon as possible. But again she found his words crawling under her skin.

The raven was still sitting in silent contemplation when the ship beneath her shuddered and rocked. It was slowing down. Finally, she would be free of this troublesome bat and able to resume her life. She edged herself forward and propped herself up on one knee, moving to look around the door frame of the cockpit and get a glance at where she had ended up. It didn’t really matter, anywhere there was a banking terminal she would have her money. And then she could hire the kind of help necessary to exact her vengeance on everyone who left her b-

the blood in Amourres’ veins ran cold. She had seen this place before, in holovids, in warnings.

Before her, rising out of the black, built in and around a massive asteroid, was a blob of neon colours, holographic advertisements, and steel frames. The Pirate Station. It had other names like the Thieve’s Den and Smuggler’s Choice but all of them meant one thing - it was the opposite of the kind of place she wanted to be in right now. Pirates! And not the romantic ones, but the unwashed, untrimmed, messy furred brigand types who would hold her for ransom if they knew just one tenth of what she was worth.

Eckelson must have seen her in the reflection of one of his terminals because he turned to her and grinned. “Impressive ey?”

“Fuck.”