Our two new staff members were a study in opposites.

Melania Quill was a cheerful, kind woman in her thirties with a smile constantly on her face and a skip in her step. She seemed happy to be there, happy to chat with us, and generally happy to exist.

Tirgo, just Tirgo, was a calm, quiet man in his early twenties who was content to be overlooked and ignored.

It was ironic, then, that Tirgo was working in the front of the clinic. He was in charge of greeting patients, arranging appointments, and even working on our as-yet-uncreated website.

I mean, technically, I could have put together a site myself. Unfortunately, I had about as much design knowledge as the next slum rat. So while I'd have no trouble putting one together, I'd be thoroughly lost when it came to making said website appealing.

Meanwhile, the chipper Melania was the official ripper face of our clinic. A nurse masquerading as a ripper, there to usher people inside and knock them out so Amelia could get to work on them. This naturally meant her chances of interacting with patients were minimal.

Despite their contrasts, though, there was one thing tying Tirgo and Melania together.

They were both criminals. At least in the eyes of Zanos law.

Melania Quill was a relatively successful sub-ripper contracted to one corp or another. She'd been climbing ranks and earning recognition. Then the mistakes of a family member and their debts had thrown her entire world into a free fall, and she'd chosen to halt that disastrous plummet by stealing.

Nothing large, admittedly. A few drugs here, a few drugs there. Some of the rarer, restricted stuff which wasn't necessarily expensive to buy legitimately, but which could be sold for massive profit on the black market.

She was caught, obviously. Caught and stripped of all her titles, contracts, and everything else she had going for her. If anything, she now had less than what she'd started with, because her 'termination based on criminal behavior' had triggered all sorts of clauses hidden in the aforementioned contracts.

The corp was out for her blood. Just because she'd had the temerity to steal from them.

Perhaps she could have earned enough money eventually to pay off the ridiculous amounts they were asking for, but here's the kicker: the corp had spread the word, and she was blacklisted from every legitimate employer in the middle, inner, and core city districts. She had no money to start her own clinic, either.

When Yuri's proxies found her, she was at the lowest point of her life.

Her entire family, a husband and two children, were out on the streets. The relative who'd used her as a guarantor for his debts was long gone. She had nothing. She was nothing. And that made her a juicy target to snatch up, especially when paired with her stellar work and personality assessments performed by the corp before the incident.

Now her family had a warm new home, she had an easy job that paid good money, and her debts were a thing of the past.

Well, mostly.

I had it on good authority that her debts had actually just switched hands, with Yuri's proxies buying them out. It was a bit of a crude comparison, but Yuri literally owned the woman until she managed to pay him back in the distant future.

Tirgo was a similarly messed-up case, with a similarly close-to-home origin. Except the source of his trouble wasn't a scummy relative.

His sister hadn't done anything wrong at all. The problem was what had been done to her. Or almost been done.

Rape wasn't an issue most denizens of the inner districts had to worry about. Most being the operative word. As everywhere, there were disparities: the rich and the not-so-rich, the powerful and the relatively powerless.

Frankly, these people still lived like kings compared to the slums. But that didn't mean they were guaranteed happiness and protection. When a pretty young woman encounters a group of drunk idiots with top corpo parents to back them up, things can get… ugly.

So, it wasn't really any surprise that said drunk idiots hadn't given two shits about the fact that the young woman in question was accompanied by her brother. A brother who loved to go to the gym, practiced martial arts on the side, and happened to know how to handle a knife.

Or was it a dagger? Bleh, didn't matter either way. Tirgo had a stabby-stab implement and a pretty sister. The idiots were drunk and feeling in a rape-y mood. Put the two together, and you get a bunch of dead corpo brats.

Tirgo's fortune lay in the fact that he came from a 'shadier' part of the inner district. A part which housed a bunch of ne'er-do-wells associated with Yuri in that same, nebulous way as the proxy who'd handled Melania.

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They made a few bodies disappear, Tirgo's sister was sent home terrified and mildly traumatized, and Tirgo was told he'd be contacted about what he could do for his 'rescuers' in return for services rendered.

I'm pretty sure he'd expected them to ask him to kill people or something of that nature. Instead, he was asked to tap into the talents and knowledge his university courses had provided him with.

Tirgo also happened to be in a much worse position than Melania, because while she at least had some kind of an exit clause to the favors she owed Yuri's proxies, Tirgo had none. They owned his ass, now and for the foreseeable future, unless they 'released' him from his dues or he put himself in a position where he wouldn't need their protection anymore. Which was, let's say, unlikely.

In other words, we had two capable if slightly problematic employees who owed us their complete and utter loyalty. You could say a lot about Yuri, but you could never argue that he didn't follow through when he promised to deliver solutions. Not that I had any clue how to feel about the fact that he'd provided us with what was basically indentured staff.

Amelia shared none of my hesitation. She took one look at the duo, smiled, and proceeded to charm them. She extolled the virtues of working for her, discussed what their pay would be (very reasonable, and in fact higher than the industry average, I was informed), and tried her best to set them both at ease.

Whatever vision of their future the two had built up in their heads, I doubt it involved working for a bubbly, friendly, young employer. Not to mention that Amelia was 'extremely open' about her motivations and why exactly she needed them.

"Oh, I'm simply too young, right?" she declared brightly. "I mean, I passed all the courses, got my accreditations and everything, but people still look down on young rippers! So, I'm hoping you two will help me build up this clinic from scratch. I'm sure we'll become popular if people just give us a chance."

And while there was some doubt in Melania's eyes, I was pretty sure the woman would pass that lie along if she ever made the horrible mistake of betraying us.

Of course, then the little menace had to go and introduce me as her husband, whom she'd chosen to elope with. That sent me into a terminal blushing fit and made her giggle for the next several hours every time our eyes met.

Silliness aside, I couldn't deny that the presence of our new employees was… unwelcome.

Already, I was starting to feel like our new house was our home. Not as much as the apartment, of course, but the feeling was there. So, to have complete strangers roaming around the bottom floor?

That put me on edge.

I wasn't sure if it was paranoia, healthy worry, or my eldritch instincts driving the feelings, but they did amplify some of my Stalker-imposed issues.

I caught myself planning a gristly murder of our new employees no fewer than seven times. Four times, I almost twitched into action and snuffed Melania out when her eyes travelled over me. I only came under risk of butchering Tirgo three times, though! Such a massive point of pride for me.

What helped turn that whole thing from a potential disaster to a more manageable, persistent annoyance was the knowledge that Melania and Tirgo were ours. Yuri would absolutely reduce their lives to living nightmares if they decided to fuck with us. Not even the Stalker bits of me could find enough justification to commit to an attack.

That, of course, left me with one simple question: what about patients? Could I remain calm around those just as easily? Would I be able to resist destroying those intruders in Amelia's and my home?

Apparently, yes.

Only by the thinnest of margins, though. And only because of who our first patient was.

The paranoia of having the mercs so close by and unknown people skulking inside the walls of our home was blazing ever higher that first day. So when I used the clinic's camera's to spy on the arrivals, I almost missed why they were there.

Then my humanity kicked in. I registered the tears on the six-year-old girl's face, as well as the fact that her right arm was missing, leaving her shirt sleeve to dangle uselessly by her side.

The woman with her was desperate.

She was a single mother, living on a single salary, with no alimony to help her support her daughter. Whatever the accident was that had robbed the girl of her right arm, it had taken the limb clean off about ten centimeters away from her shoulder. Her mother had cracked open her bank account and purchased the cheapest commercially available chrome, so her daughter would have the chance to live a normal life.

As I well knew, though, having the chrome was only one half of the equation.

The other, frequently more expensive half was finding the right ripper. With their bank account nearly crippled by the purchase of the arm, the duo couldn't exactly afford the peak of inner district medical care.

When a new, cheap clinic opened close to their home, the mother decided to bite the bullet and visit.

In the slums? Horribly risky move. Zero out of ten. You just got your daughter's organs sold on the black market.

In the inner districts? The move was still risky, but at least all she had to fear was potential malpractice, rather than organ-harvesting rings.

Well, 'potential malpractice' and any murderous eldritch/human hybrids lurking on the second floor of the clinic's building.

Be that as it may, my pity for the two and memories from my own childhood were, together, just enough to help me hold back the worst of my impulses. I still demanded to tag along with Amelia and stay by her side, even during surgery.

Her teasing taunts about six-year-olds trying to tear her heart out would have been cute to anyone who didn't grow up in the slums. Considering I'd once seen a group of kids beat a man to death, rob him, and then debate eating him, I wasn't amused.

My stubbornness got me an out-of-the-way corner in the surgery suite, though, which is how I learned that I was definitely not fine with cybernetic limb replacement yet.

It was horrible and more than a little traumatizing to watch Amelia prep the stump for cybernetic installation. This consisted largely of 'trimming' it, as well as preparing the local nerves for the flesh-to-metal connections. Thanks to Amelia's arms, there was remarkably little blood. She also got to save a ton on healing drugs, thanks to her ability to pinch flesh together and watch the wounds seal.

Still, I was left with a healthy dose of appreciation for what Amelia could do, along with a few new traumas.

That single appointment turned out to have more far-reaching consequences than we could have imagined. Apparently, parents on the edge of poverty really needed a good ripper to rely on. Who knew, right?

Over the next two weeks, we were inundated by patients that were far too young, their steady trickle drumming up interest and affording us older clients, too. By the end of our first month, the clinic was, dare I say it, growing popular.

And that sort of popularity finally caught the eye of the kind of people I wouldn't mind sinking my claws into.

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