Under the Influence
This is a story about influence.
Not the kind that disrupts your tennis match because someone needs to make a TikTok video. Not the kind that tells you what to wear, what to buy or which suspiciously expensive moisturizer has apparently changed someone’s life. And it’s not the kind you experience when I walk into a club and you suddenly check whether your shirt is clipping.
No. This is about real influence.
The kind that makes you get up, get dressed and come over when someone tells you she’s throwing a party. Even when the party is in a cave. A brightly lit, white, decidedly unglamorous cave. The sort of place none of us would normally want to be seen anywhere near, let alone photographed in. Unless, of course, you have to go. Because the ringleader of the Kiyori cartel has decided to throw a party at her production facility.
So perhaps this is actually a story about power.
Because when you’re confident enough to invite half the nightlife scene into your secret production facility, you’re making a statement. You’re telling everyone you have nothing to hide, nobody to fear and apparently no meaningful concern about law enforcement.
And so, one by one, we showed up. Everyone pretending this was perfectly normal. It wasn’t.
You could see people trying to hide the stress. Smiling. Dancing. Making conversation. Carefully avoiding looking too interested in what was happening around them. It probably didn’t help that our hostess spent most of the evening walking around waving a gun.
Still, everybody came. I saw the owners of Valmoor, Sanctum and The Continental, people you normally need to make an appointment with three weeks in advance and even then aren’t entirely sure you’ll actually see them. They came like the rest of us. The Vampurrs arrived to pay their respects. The Silkstones, notably, did not. I assume this means there is some sort of territorial dispute happening that I haven’t been informed about yet. Nobody mentioned it, nobody asked and I have survived long enough to understand that this is probably the correct level of curiosity.
Meanwhile, production continued. That may have been the most impressive part. Opie’s girls didn’t stop working just because we were there. They carried on in their underwear, cutting the whites and putting everything into packages while the rest of us danced around them. Business as usual. The only real concession to the festivities was that, for once, everyone was allowed to grab as much as they could. You can imagine how responsibly that went.
There was the occasional accidental overdose, obviously. Unfortunate, but apparently the cost of production is always present. Apart from that, I think we all made it out safely which, given the location, the substances and the armed hostess, I would consider a successful evening.
There was just one final requirement before we were allowed to leave. A photograph. All of us. Inside the production facility.
At first I thought that was rather sweet. A little souvenir from the lovely evening among friends we had all agreed, without actually discussing it, to pretend we were having. Then I realized what Opie had actually done. We’re all in the picture. Nobody can deny being there. Nobody can claim they didn’t know. Nobody can talk without implicating everyone else. So I suppose this wasn’t really a party after all.
It was onboarding.
And now we’re all in the cartel.
Click them for a larger resolution and save.
This post is not sponsored or paid for in any way. I was also not blackmailed or tortured to write it.
Join the awesomeness. Leave an epic reply.
