Private Slipped my mind

"Their tomato soup is increidble. But for the main course... I think I might call this a cheat day and have that pasta dish with the gorgonzola sauce." Fancy sauces featured heavily in most of the food here. It wasn't the best unifying theme for a restaurant, but the chefs were more than good enough to make it work.

"And obviously I have to have some fancy coffee drinks. If I don't that's a sin against the God of Something-Or-Other, and we can't have that." She smiled.

The God of Something-Or-Other had been a stupid in-joke with Aranea and some of her friends in high school. They would justify all sorts of things as a way to avoid sinning against it, especially if they wanted to justify doing something stupid. Aranea couldn't remember whether this started before or after DCA disappeared, but she was mostly sure it was from before.

"Well..." Aranea took a moment to think - how much detail could she go into about her job without getting into trouble?

"Mostly work, which means mostly going after parahuman trafficking operations. If you've heard about those genetically-engineered NEK0s - it's kind of an open secret we're going after the assholes responsible for all that."

She got a glint in her eye, remembering a detail from one of her last trips off-island. "So I get borrowed for some of the operations against those guys. And it turns out, one of the NEK0 labs I helped knock over had supplied a few girls to a brand new trafficking ring in Saudi Arabia. Which we've almost finished grinding into the dust. Last week, I helped knock over one of the compounds where they keep their girls, right. And my mission is mostly to go in, confirm the situation on the inside, and sabotage their defenses a little before the team comes in."

She laughed a little. "So I'm spider mode, poking my head out of a vent into the bathroom, and it turns out one of the guards is taking his time in the bathroom. The bathroom there is pretty isolated, so I figure, hey, I can wait for this guy to finish up, then knock him out, tie him up, and stick him to the ceiling so he's out of the way. And that's pretty much exactly how it goes, really. Nobody the wiser. Except."

She knocks three times on the table, simulating the knocking on the bathroom door. "Right as I finish sticking that guy to the ceiling, we have another guy trying to come in to, uh, take care of business. So I have to think fast. I climb over to the wall over the entrance, and I reeeach down and pull the door open, just a crack. The guy walks in and - " Aranea claps, once. "So now there's two guys I've knocked out with my venom. Both stuck to the ceiling in their bathroom. And I'm just about to call it a day and make my exit when a third guy comes knocking to check on the first guy!"

Aranea started giggling with sinister glee - giving Sid a solid chance to ask questions or otherwise get a word in.

"Good questions" It was something Aranea hadn't really thought about in a while - she had grown up knowing more or less how these things were supposed to play out, from all the stories her mom told.

"It really depends on the circumstances. Most organized crime types that we come up against have figured out that there's things behind the veil, and sometimes they even know a little bit about the scouts because of how much we've been fucking with them."

"As for how we clean up after ourselves, we don't actually like mind wipes most of the time. Big gaps in people's memory can actually draw a lot of attention if you don't finesse them just the right way. My favorite way to keep someone from being a problem went like this: it was a human trafficking thing, and they like to do all-cash transactions with that sort of thing. So they had a lot of cash laying around when we came knocking. Vegas wasn't too far away, so we decided to spend some of that money on a nice hotel room and a few other things up there. We dropped off our guy up there and let him decide how he wanted to explain the situation to his bosses."

Aranea gave a wicked smile, then put on a deep voice, pretending to be that guy. "I swear, I didn't steal your money and blow it all. It was Peter Parker's gay cousin Aranea who did it."