In the few years that Kai had known Fortuna Electric to be a home, millions of girls had passed through - girls who spent their whole lives in and out of wards, either as wards themselves or wearers of paper thin robes that held no modest pride like their inner city counterparts. Most of them, Kai knew, would never have a real family, and probably would end up homeless or muling for some offshoot gang that was only left alive to be used as bait. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that the place, at least, with all its anti-corporate sensibilities and pseudo-revolutionary decor, was made half-real through the regularity of some of the patrons - war weathered women who fought against the Anaximander Corporation all those years ago, who now, aimless as they are, find meaning in those small bits of comfort like hands held against the hair of the broken girls who sold themselves to those depraved enough to buy their souls like pieces of hard candy. Broken girls who were ushered in from the pounding of the rain and horrid lovers - they knew the fires of the night hours - and the Fortuna had become a haven for volk of no renown. There was no middling middle management, nor any corporate overlords that dictated which brews to serve - the Fortuna Electric was owned by the working girl and her alone. Yet those old souls who all dressed like it was still 2995 - tight clothes, big hair, many-rings and knife’d mascara - were akin to aunties. And they each had about their persons, the likeness of the archangels dressed in lingerie. In the evening-time, they would venture into each and every haunt across the great city of So Loon in search of the finer things - and yet the greatest irony was that their persons still possessed the heart of anarchists. And like all things, where the holistic health of society holds true the inner disquiets of her citizens, here too did the songbird sing. Sheltered away in the great acidbar were remnants of old - the grime-ridden 80s and 90s. Growing from bony fingers, smoke climbed and obscured the rot of the ceiling, which was built to withstand typhoons, but not the flow of time. So, within the cave there were those who still clung onto the decaying wooden walls as if time had no meaning, rather, it was a repeating dialectic against the fabric of human thought, and there were those who noticed the regulars with all their kitchy street-punk sensibilities, often from wealthier families burgeoning from the growing middle class - new implants, Muulanwear that hung like a waterfall, draping off their slender bodies, pseudo-sceptresses commodified to mimic the new divine influencers that watched over the imperium. These were the newer crowds, either fresh out of high school, or even still attending, for an older sister can sometimes be more of a God than she has any right to be. And the aunties with their late millennium vogue watched over their little goslings. They rested in the shade of the newfound comfort that they so casually forgot had been brought about by their own suffering. They had grown to accept the inner cacophony of a generation that had not known ontological horror. The turmoil of one’s own nomadic gnosis, ever fleeting, when juxtaposed towards that which is real, ever present in all peoples, a black against white, a prisoner in a soft lacen bedroom - an unknown beauty gestated from an unknown pain - had been lost in translation. One can only paint an apple so many times, in so many different ways before it’s presented as a red splat of automatic art. No amount of explanation in regards to it being a new artistic movement would be able to justify its existence. And so, the aunties who watched over the working girls of the Fortuna had only known one thing - chaos - and though the girls had no experience in the shaping of the society they had lived in, that being warfare, they had grown ill to the war within their own minds, and the aunties all pitied them. And this had become vogue these days for they had all grown weary of material things, finding meaning in revolutionary ideals - preferring vague whataboutisms in regards to spiritual liberation, as opposed to the boring syndicalism of a worker’s union. And those women who prided themselves on having sacrificed their childhoods, in the hopes that such vulgar rituals would evoke a zeitgeist, and it had, found themselves busy sheltering the younger, who were shell-shocked in a different way - lonelier than their aunties ever were; their collective search for meaning was an evil to those who bled for its tangible counterpart.