LogThe City Never Sleeps-Jason-5

Game log for the 2024/01/14 session of AW:The City Never Sleeps, as taken by Jason

We begin in media res, with someone about to throw a punch at Jones, right outside the Colosseum. Grandma tells Twiggy to get control of things. She tells him that if he can't make his people settle down, he should make them go away. The Stooges express the view that Grandma's responsible for Jones and she needs to get things under control. Abnett vocally agrees. Granda tells the Stooges they're fired. They laugh at her, and one of them says that's big talk for a hardholder who can't hold her hard. MacWillard has a bad feeling about this and realizes that Grandma's unpredictability is a threat to everyone, and also that there's probably a chance to just get lost in the crowd if he needs to vanish. Augustus does the same and realizes that if Grandma sends her troops against the Stooges, it's going to be a disaster, and that Grandma is a threat to him too. On the other hand, he could probably get to Twiggy, if he wants to go that route. Twiggy tries to spot the person in control of the situation and realizes that nobody is in control of this situation. It's a self-powered cluster right now. If he wanted to make a move on someone, Spartacus would be most vulnerable.

Grandma asks Twiggy where Jones is (he doesn't know) and what he'd do if he found him (the Stooges would attempt to curb-stomp his ass). She wants everyone to agree to a meet. Semmel chooses this moment to say, "Don't send a Stooge to do a man's work." Twiggy says the Stooges have done their job every time they were hired, and fuck you, Semmel. He agrees to go round up Jones and try to bring him back alive. Abnett reminds Grandma that she's supposed to be the law, so if she wants Jones to come to a meeting at the Bakery, that's on her. She accepts that. The Stooges leave and things begin to simmer down.

Spartacus tells Augustus that the the Stooges will be a problem for them as long as Grandma holds their leash. He recommends that Gus befriend Twiggy and get the Stooges on his side. Gus puts the word out that next time Twiggy comes around, the two of them need to have a sit down. Since Twiggy enjoys a little live entertainment, that should be at their next event.

Twiggy can tell that the gang is basically OK with this situation, but at least one, Crocker, would like to hunt and kill Jones anyway. A few think hunting and killing Jones would be good if they had Frost with them.

Jones is at Joe's Crab Shack, trying to get the Maelstrom to tell him where he might find more wanted posters of Twiggy. Post offices and cop shops would be the usual places, and he has a sudden memory of how it tastes to lick stamps, so, post office.

Grandma tells Semmel to take four other guards with him and go to get Jones and bring him back to the bakery, alive, and civilly if possible.

Semmel and his men find Jones at the Crap Shack, and head right over. Semmel tells Jones something about Grandma wanting him to come over to discuss a job, but Jones can tell the job part is a lie. Jones says he has some stuff he has to do first, and they offer to come do it with him. He heads out to the nearest post office, which is outside the settlement. Nobody seems to be there, but there are signs of recent activity. Semmel orders the gang to fan out to keep an eye on things. The door opens for Jones, so he, Semmel, and a guard enter. There are wanted posters there, and one of them is of Twiggy... and another is a promotional poster for an MMA competition, depicting someone who looks exactly like Frost. He and Semmel to go ransack the packages, and as they do, Jones explains how licking stamps is great for getting bad tastes out of one's mouth. The guards try it and determine that they do not care for the taste of stamps. He ends up looting a barter's worth of packages.

Jones goes to the Bakery but visits MacWillard before Grandma. He drops off some knives with MacWillard and the two of them chat briefly before going to visit with Grandma. The doc was hoping he could figure out some way to convince Jones to be loyal to Grandma the way he is, but Jones just doesn't feel that.

Frost has been trying to rebuild her place. When she gets to a stopping point, she goes to look for a gig. By look, I guess I mean she hangs out at the bar where she usually hangs out, trusting that work will find her. The Stooges roll in, and begin drinking and arguing about whether they should have gone right out to kick Jones' ass, or set an ambush for him, or what. One of them, Gilroy, comes over to buy her a drink and see how she's doing. He's sad to hear that she's not hanging with Murdock on the regular, even though poor ol' Murdock is a little infatuated. Frost doesn't really want to talk about that. Gilroy airs some grievances about Jones killing Binder, and Frost doesn't feel strongly about that either. Gilroy eventually makes it clear that he wants to know if she's side with the Stooges if they got into a fight with Jones. She would not. She tells him he should just put the word out that the Stooges already kicked Jones' ass, because if they tell it right, people will believe it, and that's what's important. Also, she admits that she was just using Murdock for his van. She then points out that Murdock would never say no, and asks Gilroy if he'd ever say no to her. Gilroy's OS crashes. Just then, someone puts a hand on Gilroy's shoulder and says, "Hey friend, I need you to fuck off for a minute." Gilroy might not always appreciate that, but right now, it gets him out of a jam.

The new arrival is Teddy. He checks in with her on the story of why she killed Grimes. Once it's all clear, they talk about Teddy's desire to work with Gus as Grimes' replacement. For the right price, she could make an introduction and a recommendation. He might go for that, if she also came with him to the Colosseum. Deal. On the way, Twiggy stops her to make it clear that he has no personal interest in a fight with Jones, but given the trouble Jones causes, he might not be able to prevent a fight either. He suggests that siding with the Stooges would be better for Frost in the long run. She points out that his pitch comes down to wanting credit for not being an asshole, and she won't give it to him. She heads for the Colosseum.

She's welcomed there, of course, and allowed to see Augustus.

For his part, Gus has found someone who might be able to run the gaming, a woman called Skint. Gus is willing to meet with her. When Frost arrives, he's also happy to meet with her. He asks her what she'd think about putting the Stooges on staff. She can imagine them being there for entertainment maybe, but not as contributing members. Anyway, she puts forward Teddy's name for gambling boss. He mentions that Skint was already under consideration, so Frost tells him that she's good, but muscle, not management. (She knows that Skint is actually quite intelligent, but she's trying to earn Teddy's coin.) Gus is willing to give him a job interview.

Back in the Bakery, Grandma tries really hard to make Jones feel like a wanted guest. Before they get down to business, he shows her the wanted poster for Twiggy. She and MacWillard marvel over the fact that someone wasted paper on Twiggy, and then get down to brass tacks. She needs to get Jones in relation to her town somehow, rather than having him be a sort of roaming chaos Muppet. Sadly, Jones wants to be a free agent, not tied down, making their objectives incompatible. There's just nothing she or MacWillard can think of to motivate Jones. Finally, the doc suggests that either Augustus and Grandma should turn Jones vs the Stooges into an event, or they should contrive some mechanism by which the Stooges find Jones outside of town, and whatever happens between them won't be the boss' problem. Jones has no love for any of this.

Some time passes, and hunger grows in the settlement. Augustus interviews Terry to see what his ideas for making more money are. He wants bigger events, absolute spectacles. He happens to know where to find a monster truck, which would certainly be spectacular. Also, distributing food or selling food would both be helpful. When Gus asks what other job Teddy would choose, if he didn't run gambling, he says he'd run the weekly swap meet. There's no such thing, but he could start one. Skint, on the other hand, thinks Augustus should up the gate cost to keep the riffraff out, and have more audience participation. Maybe they could compete in safer events and the house could take part of the pot. People come there to see and be seen, right? This way they could be seen to win. If she wasn't running gambling, she'd take Augustus' job. He appreciates his candor.

Jones finds Frost at the bar and hands her the poster he found of her doing MMA. She likes the way she looks in the photo. She suggests that the two of them go find some food. Jones is game. At Frost's behalf, Jones opens his brain to try to find a good place to pilfer. When they arrive, it's already been pilfered, and there are several recent blood trails. Jones tries following the blood trail, to see if they can find the food on the people who took it. The trail goes down into a manhole. On their trip back to town, Frost tries to convince Jones to look for a way to make peace with the Stooges, but he's just not interested. Also, as they talk, they realize there are signs of a lot of violence back there, but no bodies. Where are the bodies?

They also go past a building where someone has spray painted a rectangle on a wall and labelled it "door". They go to investigate. Jones knocks on the door. There's a thump on the other side of the wall, so he calls out, "Hello?" A peephole in the wall slides open and someone asks what he wants. He asks if they want to buy a blender. The person seems very young, and was probably standing on something to see out the peephole. Also, this is a cinderblock wall, and there's no peephole. Frost just asks which of them is high right now. Frost suggests pretending that they have beans to sell. The kid does not believe them. Jones asks how the doors work. The kid does not answer.

Twiggy and the Stooges are carefully hanging around town. He's sent Crocker to go look for work, and Gilroy to check in with Grandma. He himself goes to the Bakery to check in with MacWillard. They talk about all the weird things that happen around here. MacWillard confirms that he's friendly with the Stooges still, at least enough so that he'll treat their wounded, and also that he'll help investigate oddities, especially if paid. Twiggy mentions he's got some interest in Lollipop and Mac becomes very concerned about his sanity.

Kenworth comes to find Augustus and reports that someone has broken into the walk in. They rush to investigate, accompanied by Spartacus, and are interrupted by someone who walks in, and promptly pulls a gun on them. He won't identify himself, and says he doesn't want to hurt anyone, but he has to have the food. Gus knows that this guy has his gun out already, meaning there's no sure way to resolve this without getting shot. Augustus steps so that he's between his bouncer and the thief, allowing Sparty to draw his gun surrepitiously, and then moves again so everyone can shoot. Augustus gets grazed by a pistol shot but the thief gets wrecked, and drops his giant can on butterscotch pudding. As they're pondering, Crocker pokes his head in and suggests that Auggie should hire the Stooges to guard the breach. No. They do try moving everything out of the walk-in and evacuating the building for a few hours, to see if the problem solves itself. Sure enough, a few hours later, the Colosseum is a motocross arena with a fully functional walk-in. The amount of dirt here now is insane.

Gilroy checks in with Grandma to see what the Jones situation is. Hearing that she even tried to recruit the gunlugger makes him sad. Gilroy is pretty pissed that someone can just jump into a fight between Stooges and not get in trouble it. He walks out on her. She calls upon Kinnick to see him out. Then Twiggy enters the scene and cannot believe Gilroy is getting this shabby treatment from Grandma when he went in there to make sure things were cool.

The Stooges all stomp off, angrily. However, Twiggy wants to make a sensible choice here, focusing on finding food first, but Crocker can't let it go, and accuses Twiggy of not having the stomach for a fight. Twiggy backhands the shit out of him. Crocker suddenly realizes that Twiggy is genuinely resolved on not picking a fight with Jones. A lesson has been taught here. Then they go to check in with Augustus at the Colosseum.

Twiggy doesn't see how a tandem bike race on a motocross course is going to help them. The maestro points out that if they turn their backs on the bikes for a while, they'll turn into something else. OK, that might work. They talk rules and rewards. They'll do three heats, top two from each heat to to the final, light contact only, and Twiggy will pick Stooges to make sure there's a healthy sense of competition.

Augustus hires Skint as his gambling manager but does offer Teddy the job of running the swap meet. He manages to convince Teddy that this swap meet thing is actually a better job, the job he never knew he always wanted. Skint, meanwhile, gets Augustus' approval to talk to Twiggy about finding ways to optimize the revenue from the race, with sponsorship and all like that. Twiggy is OK with it. Also, he's totally OK with her flirting with him as well. Somehow their conversation ends up including them inviting Jones to race with them, and also declaring that the race will be naked.

Skint goes to find Jones at his usual barn. He's willing to think about her idea. She rushes back to Augustus and reports her near-coup.