The X-Project

The 'Secret Empire' meets with the Valhallas. There are some... cultural clashes.



The gate to Blake’s Motors was wide open, and the lot beyond was full of men in leathers or overalls, working on cars or tinkering with bikes. They didn’t earn more than a glance from most of them; four people in leathers on a pair of bikes, although Callisto drew a few looks. Women in the colours were rare in motorcycle clubs; more rare in those engaged in criminal activities. As they pulled up, an older man stepped in front of their bikes.

“Secret Empire. Deke! They’re here!” He said, yelling over his shoulder, back towards the garage. “I’m Walt. We were hoping to see more of you.”

"We're all we need", Angelo said cockily, hopping off his bike and immediately digging in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. "Angelo, this here's Cal, Mandy there's her old lady and Angie does our tats and wanted to tag along."

Callisto was back in her 'Secret Empire' disguise, one half of her head of hair cropped close, a plethora of hoops and studs piercing her ears, nose, lips and cheeks, though it couldn't disguise her essential Callisto pout. She tipped her chin in greeting, hands buried in her pockets.

Deke measured her with a long stare, ignoring Angelo entirely, and shook his head in mild disbelief tinged with disdain. "I've lived too fucking long, is what it is, Walt. This is what's supposed to pass for one-percenters now. I gotta palaver with some dyke grade-schooler and her fucking sleepover party. I moved back home to get away from this shit. Fuck."

"I don't think they want us here, baby," Amanda said with a pout, her arms still wrapped around Callisto's waist as she perched on the back of the bike. Like the other 'wives', she was dressed in as little as possible, tiny denim shorts and a cut-off checked shirt she'd tied underneath her breasts. Only her footwear was actually practical, a pair of cowboy boots that protected her legs from the hot metal parts of the bike. "Maybe we should just turn around and go?"

Callisto let her eyes travel slowly up and down the man before them. Shifting to indicate that 'Mandy' should remove her arms from around her waist, she swung her leg neatly up over the front of her bike to disembark without unseating her 'Old Lady' - no small feat of flexibility, as she was riding not her own little Suzuki Bandit - which would have been laughed off the lot - but a big-twin engine Harley Softail Night Train she'd borrowed from... well, it was perhaps best not to ask where she'd borrowed it from. Then she strode up to Deke, lifting her aviators up to rest on her head as she surveyed him once more before slowly and deliberately dipping her head, and depositing a large, frothy drop of spit onto the ground between his feet. Then, making sure to shoulder barge him a little, she moved past him to start what seemed to be an inspection of his lot.

Deke shook his head head, a regretful air about him and made a vague gesture. Within moments the the seemingly idle work crew was very focused on the mutants, heavy flashlights, bats and chains suddenly very much on display.

"You, girlie there. I don't remember inviting you in." Deke scratched under the eye-patch lazily. "Here's how it is. Either your club is a chickenshit little mob of wannabees, or you decided that we are. And sent the B-squad over here to see if maybe you want to walk in here and pick up the pieces after we and the Sons bleed each other. Walt?"

"That's the way I read it, Prez. Sending these gashes, the wetback and a fucking inker to negotiate a war treaty? Bullshit! And with the Feds in town..."

Deke lip rose a little in what charitably may have been called a smile, and realistically, a snarl. "Yeah. There's that."

Callisto just continued on her little 'stroll', watched every step of the way as she approached one of the now heavily armed men. Smiling benignly at him (which would've been warning enough for anyone who knew how rare it was to see Callisto smile), she then turned back around, heading back toward Deke. "So here's the thing," she said. "I don't wanna get all 'political' here -" (she didn't mime the quotes, but they were clearly implied) "- and I ain't one for talkin' too much so I don't wanna get into a debate. So I'm gonna cut right to it."

As usual, it wasn't that Callisto moved 'fast', exactly. There was nothing that appeared magical or mysterious about what she did. One of her booted feet swung out and hooked round the back of Deke's - though she hadn't seemed to be standing that close to him. As she yanked her foot back, and he swung backwards like a falling redwood toward the ground, one of his men charged forward with a bat, which Callisto removed from his grip and then prodded viciously into his face with a telltale crunch that promised two black eyes and a nose that would never sit right again. Then she simply knelt down, one of her bony, leather-clad knees handily coming to rest on Deke's thick, tattooed neck.

All of this was completely visible to the naked eye. It was obvious how she'd gone about it. It just happened with such surety and calm that there was no question of preventing it.

"Calling women 'gashes' is offensive," she said calmly. "Calling my friend Angelo a 'wetback' is offensive. Calling me and my girl 'dykes' is also fuckin' offensive unless we're the ones doin' it. And Angie... well, she's a fuckin' inker, but that don't mean you get to fuckin' so much as look at her wrong if you don't want to be shitting out your own fuckin' teeth, understand me?"

Realising that the man was in grave danger of losing consciousness if she continued to crush his windpipe, Callisto stood then, though he wasn't in a position to do much more than lie and suck in desperate, wheezing breaths.

"We are not a B-squad. And we do not negotiate with fuckers who ain't polite to us. Now, Angelo introduced me as Cal, so I'm gonna be kind and let you guys rewind. My name is Callisto. If you don't know it, that's your problem, not mine. Now, are you gonna play nice, 'Deke', or do I have to come spit in your mouth?"

Deke coughed his way to his knees, the face purple and eyes watering and shook his head, clearly woozy and taken aback. "Wha-- what---" He extended his arm, wordlessly asking the woman next to him to help him up. She didn't, but an unconscious instinct swayed her an inch closer to the gang leader. At which point the flabbergasted expression and the act of helplessness slid off Deke's face like water, leaving a stone-faced, expressionless mask in its stead, as his arm powered a fist to strike Callisto unerringly between the legs. The hit transitioned with surprising smoothness into a forward lunge, Deke's left hand coming up to grasp Callisto's face, but it never got that far. Callisto, who by all rights should have been screaming in agony from his blow, grabbed his fist in one hand, and his neck in the other, lifting him clean off his feet - though only a few inches off the ground as with their respective heights her reach simply didn't extend that far.

"No fair goin' for the groin - I never crushed your nuts, did I? Look, man, I get that you're pissed havin' to hang up your Nazi flag and work with a bunch of chicks and a brown guy, but I'm guessing you're figuring out right about now that we don't exactly fight fair, know what I mean?"

They knew what she meant, all right. Her getting the drop on someone like Deke was unlikely enough, but her lifting him off the ground with an arm that at its widest was barely the circumference of his wrist left no doubt that she had an 'edge'.

"ENOUGH!" boomed the voice from the garage, as Don stepped out into the confrontation, an undisguised air of authority and power almost literally hanging off of him, his voice resonating more more loudly and powerfully than any mere human could ever hope to muster.

The warrior-built biker strode deliberately to Callisto and Deke, his blue eyes cold, hard-- and unrelenting. "Put my old man down and there won't be any more trouble," Don said without any doubt that it would be so now that he had proclaimed it. And besides, he simply towered as he stood there and crossed his arms over his chest, waiting.

Tipping her head to one side in obvious interest, Callisto immediately released her grip on Deke's neck, and the older man dropped the few inches to the ground to land squarely on his feet, swaying only very slightly as he landed in spite of the redness in his face that suggested he hadn't been far from unconsciousness.

"You need to keep a lid on your dad, kid," she said. "He upsets my freaky modern feminist queer sensibilities. Crusty old biker dudes gotta move with the times." She grinned broadly, holding out a hand to the man towering above her. "Callisto," she said.

"Hell of an introduction." One of the bikers muttered, coming over to Deke. The old man shook him off with a glare. "Sorry boss. Tailgunner Huey mentioned that he'd run with some mutant broad in Empire. I didn't think to pass the name along."

"Thou mayest call me Thor, Son of Odin, favored son of Asgard." Don replied in return to Callisto, his voice deepening and resonating powerfully once more as he reverted to an archaic mode of speaking.

His own handshake, when offered, was practically overpowering. It was clear that Don wasn't exerting any serious force in an attempted power play, but that didn't change the fact that his handshake was crushing, hand unforgiving and utterly immovable. Callisto might have suddenly been very relieved that Don was willing to be diplomatic.

"As for my father," Don added after releasing Callisto's hand, his voice returning to normal without him even noticing or commenting on it. "You will have to forgive his attitudes. Changing him is like trying to remove an engine with a socket wrench."

The young man looked over at Deke, a mixture of fondness and stern challenge on his face before turning back to Callisto's crew. "But he'll back your crew. ...as long as you're telling us the truth" The last was said with shrewd challenge, offering them a way out now, should they choose to take it. Or not.

"We are", Angelo put in, eyeing Don with a certain wariness since he was a lot bigger than him and to all appearances he'd just gone insane and declared himself to be Thor. "And for the record, I was born in California. My mama's an immigrant, though, so no more wetback comments if we're gonna stay friendly, claro?"

"The Clubhouse has been swept twice," Deke said nodding toward the building. "Either it's clean or we are too fucked for anything to be done. Let's go chew the fat."

Callisto shrugged good naturedly, giving her hand a little shake as though getting rid of a cramp, and followed his lead, apparently not of a mind to assert herself any further at present.

"Aww, we can't stay and chat with the favored son of Odin?" The red-head behind Angelo slid off the bike and pushed a pair of sunglasses up into her hair, mussing the black and blonde streaks in her bangs. "He looks way more fun than his grouchy pops." She pouted, and wrinkled her nose when Angelo shook his head. "You're no fun, cowboy. I come all this way to get like, a wider perspective and now you're gonna be all business on me?"

"Business now, Angie, maybe you can have some fun later", he said with a grin over his shoulder. "There's gotta be a bar or two around here."

"Well if you're gonna be that way about it." Marie-Ange stuck out her tongue, and tossed her hair. "Mandy, come on, they don't want us here, and we can go get loaded or I can find the local tat place and check out the art or something. Gotta be better than this boring business stuff." She rifled through one of the saddlebags on Angelo's bike and pulled out a purse. "Us girls can make our own fun and if you boys wanna find us later, the cowboy's got my digits."

"Bye, babe. Have fun." Amanda blew a kiss to Callisto as she climbed off the back of the bike. "We promise we won't get into too much trouble." She linked her arm through Marie-Ange's and the two walked off, hips swaying provocatively.

"The basic deal is the same we'd talked over before, "Deke said as the group trooped through the hall and into the inner sancrtum. the heavy oak door slammed closed behind them, the importance of the meet highlighted by the fully patched-in members chasing off the hang-arounds and taking the guard positions outside the room."We'll guarantee every load we herd through. Any losses after we take delivery are on us. Our take is 15% to start, and 25% after six months. "

Deke sat heavily into the president's chair, the gavel dancing absently between the thick callused fingers. "I talked it over with the boys. We'll shave off 5 points if your club will kick in against the Sons."

Callisto glanced at Angelo as though for confirmation, then tipped her chin in a brief gesture of assent, her eyes tracking, narrowed thoughtfully, between Deke and Don.

"My only question is who our contact's gonna be here," she said, her tone casual. "You gonna be nice, or should we go through Golden Boy there with the good manners? I don't care," she added, "don't wanna make this tougher than it has to be."

"Donny," Deke said, already getting up. "Why don't you look after them. Make sure they know the lay of the land and such. And be careful."