21st night: What the fuck was that last title???

The Further Adventures of 21st Night Episode 1: BUSINESS ROYALE.

Avril and Mint leave the meeting after a few hours, having wasted a good few hours furiously debating with the loud and circular form of Volup O’Poole, a session of elegant verbal ripostes and faints whose subtlety is matched only by the sheer gravitas of every obnoxiously bullheaded remark their opponent makes.
Suffice it to say, they need another angle.
Avril furiously plots an excessively complicated plan involving splitting the directorate in two and pitching them against each other. Her meticulous domineering is interrupted as the station lurches below her feet.
Thinking nothing of it, she heads back to the spacedock
Avril is greeted by the rest of the crew waiting by the spacedock, in terribly poor shape. A horrible, if apparently nonfunctional synthetic personality with an obnoxious manic psycho villain girl program loaded is with them.

The ship is also missing.

Mint quickly tends to the crew’s wounds. Avril just leaves, tired and irritable after hours of beating against a brick wall. She doesn’t even say a single “YOU DID WHAT!?” after the crew explain their adventure and subsequent state to Mint.

The next few hours are a blur of activity. Ena, Ikan and a wheelchair-bound Dirk go on an expedition to find the 21st Night, tipped off by a wise old space hermit, while Avril and Mint rush to complete the excruciatingly intricate con - as well as several trust-building sidequests and minigames- before anyone notices Vindictus is missing. Their paths cross, as the final meeting takes place in the VIP dock, below the hulking form of the ship. Volup O’poole floats above the table, like a greasy hovering orb of cackling capitalist glee as he denounces the crew for their foolishness. He explains that he was the one whose information net worked out that their new ‘business partners’ were little more than scavengers and pirates, that he has all the cards and bargaining chips, etc, etc. He cows the rest of the board with a villain song and prepares to land the final blow.
Suddenly, Avril plays her trump card, summoning the spirit of a legendary Business Demon she bought from a wise old space hermit in one of the minigames, she multiplies her quarterly earnings by the synergy modifier in her dynamic horse racing integer.
The attack brings Volup off-guard, and the two of them duke it out in honourable business. Dirk, Ena and Ikan shoot the rest of the businessmen and security. During the fight, Mercury-17 takes predominance, and goes off to attempt to find Julie, who they left by the dock.
Having achieved her Finance Deity form, Avril is all but unstoppable on the field of Business Royale. She businesses so hard that she kills Volup, and because business operates by Santa Clause rules, takes control of the battledome and spends the next few days sorting out the details.

In the end, however, some farewells are in order.
Mint decides to stay behind on the station. No longer a battledome, now merely a dome. She plans to set up a medical practice funded publicly by the income of the dome, so that none of the residents will have to pay for overpriced healthcare.
Ena wakes up on a bench in the deserted lobby, in an outfit full of hidden knives and antimagic charms, all blotted and splotched makeup. She leaves with the others, though.
Avril stays behind to manage her newly-gained venture, partly to ensure that no opportunist takes over in the same way she did, but also partly because a being of pure BUSINESS such as herself cannot subsist on the paltry murderhoboing of lesser beings.

And so, Dirk, Ena and Ikan set off after stocking up on supplies, and, in Dirk’s case, some cool new cyberlegs.
It’s a sad farewell, but there are new things ahead.
New lives and new legs.