Murder Time, Fun Time

By the time the Saints returned to the hideout, Playa had calmed down somewhat after murdering the former Saint’s leader, Julius Little, after finding out his old boss tried to kill him. Pinkamena was silent and staring blankly in the distance during the trip while in her mind she was doing what she could to calm her sister.

After a little while, Pinkamena focused on reality again. Playa soon noticed and let out a sigh, “How could Julius just create the Saints and then toss us away like he did?”

Pinkamena thought about that for a few moments before coming to her own conclusion. “I think Julius created the Saints out of some delusion that he was creating some heroes of justice thinking that the gangs were the main cause of Stilwater’s problems. However, the problem with his thinking was that the gangs were not the problem.

“In fact, gangs are simply symptoms of the real problem: the city itself. My five years of living in Stilwater have taught me one thing, and that’s that this city is a major hotbed of debauchery and vice.

“Demand for sex, drugs and weapons are high. In fact, many of the stores in this town are named from some form of innuendo for sex. I’m pretty sure the student body of Stilwater University is dependent on getting their fix just to get through the semester. While gang violence in the city might be a problem, they, just like ourselves, are taking advantage of the market to profit.

“Julius failed to understand why the gangs were in Stilwater in the first place and simply created another one in the end. Our gang war is simply to eliminate the competition and monopolize the markets. Even if Stilwater police managed to take down the Saints, more gangs would just move in and they’d be back to square one.

“Ultor likely knows this and are likely trying to work with the other gangs in order to avoid any future trouble from them...before they amass enough military to try and take us.

“Basically, Julius lacked the foresight to see that his plan wouldn’t work in the long term.”

“In other words, he was an idiot,” Playa commented.

“Yup.”

Once the Saints returned to the hideout, they returned to their rooms to rest before the next campaign.

Tomorrow, they would decide whether to target The Brotherhood or the Ronin.

When Pinkamena emerged from her room the next morning, she noticed that Pierce was playing with a replica model of a structure along with some figures that looked like big-headed versions of the Saints while Playa’s piece was a chess pawn.

Playa and Johnny saw what he was playing with and asked why he was playing with a doll house. Pierce explained that his plan of attack against the Ronin was to attack their biggest money maker, Poseidon’s Palace Casino. After that, he explained his plan which was a lot more complicated than it should have been before Pinkamena interrupted.

“Pierce, I’m sure you thought your plan through well enough but one think you should know about the Saints: We don’t do complicated plans. None of us want to be George Clooney. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still gonna rob the Casino, we’re just gonna brute force the place and steal the money.”

“But-” Pierce said before being interrupted by Johnny.

“My kinda plan.”

“But-” Pierce was interrupted by Playa this time.

“Fuck it, let’s go...good call Pinkamena.”

As Playa and Johnny left, Pinkamena saw Pierce looking depressed about having his plans be for nothing. The madmare couldn’t care less about how he felt but wanted to be sure he wasn’t holding out on the info. “Got any other info?” Pinkamena asked.

“Huh? Oh ya, I got a couple other places we can hit.

“One of my girls at Technically Legal in Misty Lane called me up and said that a Ronin bachelor party was getting too touchy feely. The bouncers have all been paid not to do dick, so if anyone is gonna teach those assholes a lesson it’s gonna have to be you or Playa.

“There’s also the Ultor Institute for Science and Innovation in Humbolt Park. There’s more to the place than Jacob’s ladders and irrigation shit though. In the center of it all are a bunch of servers that run the Ronin’s web porn ring. Those assholes are making serious bank off their sites, so if you can take those bad boys out the Ronin are definitely gonna be hurting.”

Pinkamena nodded, “So a bachelor party going too far and a children’s museum housing a bunch of servers dedicated to selling pornography? You humans have so little self control.”

“Hey! We got plenty of self control,” Pierce defended.

Sounds were heard in a nearby room. One of the nameless Saints members was shouting loudly in pleasure and with no voice of the opposite gender accompanying it, one could easily imagine what was going on in that room.

Pierce remained silent while Pinkamena left the hideout while smirking the whole time.

Playa, Johnny and Pinkamena headed to the Poseidon’s Palace Casino at the Stilwater Boardwalk. Playa hit a few Ronin motorcycles by accident and got the party started early. The madmare and psychopath who weren’t driving the car got some entertainment. When the aggression died down, Johnny discussed what he knew about the Ronin.

Apparently the Ronin were led by some kid named Shogo Akuji. From what Johnny said, the kid spent more time swimming in vice than leading the gang. If that were true then it was doubtful that Shogo had the charisma to form the gang himself. If he was just some punk kid who rode around on his bike then the Ronin were going to be less of a challenge than the Sons of Samedi.

Pinkamena wasn’t going to let her guard down though, as this meant that someone else must lead the Ronin while Shogo would be easy prey...too easy.

Before they arrived at the casino, Johnny also mentioned that Pierce would be coming by with a crew, likely to collect the money they were about to steal.

The trio arrived at the casino and started shooting everyone inside while Pinkamena hunted her yellow-wearing prey and systematically slaughtered the samurai sword soldiers with her small steel slicer.

Once the initial defenders were dead, Johnny began planting explosives on the vault that held the casino’s earnings. During this time, Pinkamena turned the front entrance into a proverbial meat grinder by cutting down the Ronin who tried to enter the building. Playa made sure the Ronin who were flooding in from the upper levels met a similar fate to his dual SMGs

It didn’t take long for Johnny to finish wiring the bomb and escaping before the blast. Pierce arrived with a delivery truck and a crew to help move the money aboard in a timely manner. Just like the last time Pinkamena defended a delivery truck, she blasted every police car, who chased them because the casino owners called for them, and Ronin motorcycle with her party cannon before the truck came to a stop at Johnny’s house. She finished off the last of the pursuit before the crew moved the money into the house.

Since Stilwater Boardwalk was still heavily guarded by the Ronin but the reinforcements to defend the casino came from Centennial Beach, Playa called a crew to secure the beach from the Ronin.

Johnny, Playa and Pierce assured Pinkamena that they could handle laundering the money while she handled the other matters that Pierce told her about so she decided to head to the nearby Technically Legal.

After turning the strip club into a horror scene slash home for traumatized strippers, Pinkamena moved to the roof of the building and delivered a series of gift boxes via parachute to the Ronin reinforcements at the entrance of the strip club. The Ronin were confused at first by the gift but a push of a detonator button brought a harsh reminder about what the madmare could do as that single button wiped out the Ronin reinforcements with a series of explosions from the boxes that each concealed a satchel charge.

With Misty Lane cleared out, the Saints had no problem claiming the neighborhood.

Pinkamena’s next target was the science museum. When she got there she was met with some resistance from the Ronin but they were unable to deter her from heading to the server room which was upstairs and across a bridge.

The server room was the most heavily defended location in the building but she had one advantage: she was there to kill and destroy anyone or anything that got in her way while the Ronin had to defend their servers and try to avoid collateral damage. She couldn’t have that so she threw in a series of flashbangs into the room and inflicted a few seconds of blindness to the defenders. A few seconds was all she needed to set up her little joke against the Ronin as once they recovered their vision but not their wits, they saw what looked like the madmare tampering with the servers so they quickly reacted by shooting at who they thought was Pinkamena but in their recklessness shot the servers instead while trying to shoot up a bunch of decoys..

The Ronin knew they would be in serious trouble with their boss if he found out that they destroyed their own servers so they did their best to report that Pinkamena had somehow snuck past them and destroyed the servers. It was a weak excuse but they prayed that Shogo would buy it.

Pinkamena shattered a window along the bridge she crossed before and used her grapple gun to pull herself to a nearby Vulture attack helicopter, forced her way into the cockpit and somehow pushed the ejector seat button that launched the pilot upward and into the helicopter blades which resulted in blood and viscera to rain down upon the ground below.

Pinkamena took control of the helicopter before Pinkie took over and piloted the helicopter back to the hideout.

Nob Hill was taken shortly after Playa, Johnny and Pierce had laundered the money and cut down a number of Ronin along the way while Pinkamena’s rampage in the museum helped the Saints gain control of Humbolt Park.

This marked the fourth neighborhood claimed from the Ronin and an excellent start to the Saints’ campaign against the Asian gang.