The Chay Ong Casefiles, Volume One: Always Chasing Rainbows.

Chapter 8: Breakfast On the Roof

"Hey Crol, can I ask you something?", Chay asked through a mouthful of rice porridge.

"Sure, shoot.", Crol responded, also with a mouthful of rice porridge.

"Well, I'm just wondering about...well...."

Chay's foot kicked out and struck the four meters of cyclone wire fence that was surrounding both her and Crol, even overhead .

"....about that?".

"The fence? Protective measures I learned in Korea. They definitely come in handy in this city. There's a lot of really nasty shit that flies around here."

She looked up overhead into the ruddy red sky, the white lines of the pentagram slicing through it. She could see vague shadows of... things flying miles above them.

"Good point."

"By the way, I've been meaning ask you...can I take a look at that Apache you're carrying?"

Chay reached into her pocket and pulled out the revolver. "You recognize this thing?"

"Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen one up close though. Can I?"

She opened up the cylinder and emptied the bullets into her hands, pocketing them before handing over the now unloaded gun. "Handle it with care", she said.

Crol took the firearm into his hands and eyed it carefully. "Wow, polished and everything."

"Yeah, the receptionist at Val's place cleaned it for me while I was talking to his boss."

"You ever hear the story about these things?". He bent the grip under the cylinder, putting the gun into it's knuckle duster function.

"A little bit. My contact told me it was used by old timey French gangsters."

"That's part of the story. The design was originally from the mid-1800s. They mass produced these things for about a decade until the original manufacturer went under. Then they started flooding into France around the turn of the century. There was a bunch of petty gangsters who called themselves Le Apaches who adopted them as their prized weapon."

Crol carefully folded out the blade near the barrel. "This isn't one of those, though. This one looks like it may have been from WWII, or maybe even custom-made."

"Why do you say that?"

The kobold-demon handed the gun back to Chay. "It's the barrel. The original ones didn't have much of a barrel to speak of. They basically operated like bellyguns. It was also pin-fire activated like old-style cowboy revolvers. This thing is more like a snub-nosed revolver, like the ones cops use."

"Huh, imagine that.". Chay folded back the blade and pocketed the gun. "So when did you encounter one of these? In Korea?"

"Nah, never saw them there. I first saw them here in Hell during my first few decades. Buddy of mine had it. Fellow veteran."

"Another soldier?"

"Yeah, but he was a decade or so after my time. He works over at the Hotel now..." Crol pointed out to his left, over the rooftops.

Chay followed his line of sight to where he was pointing. She squinted her eyes through the forest of skyscrapers and cheap complexes.

Hunched in the middle of all of them was a red, ram-shackled building, looking like it had been patch-worked from several other, long dead buildings of smaller size. She could see pieces of an Asian pagoda, a Victorian balcony, an Elizabethan tower, and a piece of an old sea-liner all balanced haphazardly on top of an expansive complex. At the very top, in bright lights, were the words HAPPY HOTEL, over an enormous artificial eye.