Transnational Panda Heist

Aboard the Guatemalan Trans-national Express, Paula hunkered down behind crates stocked full of gin, bamboo and drainpipes as the huge, sleek, jet-black train hurtled towards its destination at a speed that made sound turn inside out.

Paula sighed and reminded herself that this was definitely the last time.

Lunging from behind her hiding place, her svelte leather-bodysuited frame cut like a rubber knife through the air towards her target, her limbs jack-knifing out and thumping with quiet yet disturbing thunks into the adam’s apple and unguarded temple of the well-armed but unsuspecting security guard. As the comatose man crumpled to the floor of the swaying carriage, Paula allowed herself a smirk.

Davos would be proud.

With the guard’s clearance chip in hand, Paula made short work breaking into the next carriage, and the next, and the next, moving so fast that the locks seemed to dissolve through her fingers and the shiny minimal interior of the cargo carriages blurred past her as quickly as the train’s shiny minimal exterior was doing through the South American countryside. All this was mere muscle memory. All this was basic training. All this was the easy part.

It was as she leapt her way past the umpteenth crate of bamboo that the irony of the situation caught up with her. Given the name of her on-train contact and all…

Said crate exploded open in a milleu of wood chips and green sticky splinters. Paula barely had time to twist her torso in mid-air to catch the first blow on her forearm. Landing badly, she reversed her momentum against the train’s forward charge, fighting gravity for a terrifying second as the next kick meant for her forehead sailed over her head. That second allowed her one glimpse at her opponent…

A flurry of blows landed all over her, disrupting her concentration and forcing her to react. Elbows, knees, shoulders, all were used to disperse the punches and chops as Paula scythed her slender muscled arms in response. Pirouetting deftly and flicking her knee upwards, she caught her attacker with a satisfying stomach- deflating kick, and at that moment, she realised she could smell the pungent oily scent of gin.

Standing over her enemy, panting, she placed one booted heel across his sweating neck before she recognised him. With the huge black smudges painted over his eyes, it had taken her a moment to see…

“…Davos?!”

Licking his lips and cracking his infamous half-grin, the head of her organisation smiled up at her through his ridiculous eye make-up and drawled; “You never got the bamboo jokes, doll? You were meeting a guy with the callsign ‘Panda’!”

Davos wheezed out a laugh from underneath Paula’s boot as she stared down at her boss, dumbfounded as the Trans-national Express droned and chuntered on its way, oblivious to its tenants.

Paula blinked.

“B-but…this can’t have been another training excersise…this is a heist!”

Davos grinned again, a tiny black cartridge topped with crackling electric blue energy appearing in his hand.

“No, sweetcheeks. THIS is a heist.”

He rammed the tazer into her shin.

IsraeLOL.

I find it amusing that there is a Theodor Herzl advert next to my blogs on this page. Earlier, it was a "visit Israel!" advert. I think maybe Google think I'm a Zionist nutbag, and my potential readers are as well.

...you aren't...are you?

I don't mind if you are. No, really.

As long as you didn't shoot any of the 13 Palestinian protestors on the Syrian border recently. I'm not racist, but I am prejudiced to mindless thugs who shoot unarmed teenagers.

Call me narrow-minded.

Loquacious Las Vegas lathering.

So this is half of a traveljournalism/alternative article I started but never finished on Las Vegas after my trip there when I was 18. It's never been finished, mainly because I don't know where to put it. Thought I'd whack it up here regardless.

Walking through the Strip was like walking through a cocktail you didn't order. Garish, sickly sweet, and afterwards you'd be covered in smells and tastes you never wanted, or ever dreamed of ever wanting. Lights from casinos, steakhouses, and bars that were far less classy than even you're thinking right now glared through eyelids and less whispered more shouted, nay, hollered promises of the full bellied and empty walleted kind.

I walked past an aspiring pop group, with their own stage and soundsystem, right there on the street. They were probably recently rejected by one of the record companies that have their offices on the fringes of the city, and were desperately trying to garner some other attention, hoping their public would carry their legend back into offices and to the ears of suited managers driving tinted windowed hummers (yes, they really do do that still.)

They were actually quite good, which made listening to them heartening and sort of pitiful at the same time. Their small,brightly lit island amidst the neon sea of the street was being swamped in by the very charisma tipsily tripping in from all directions.

This was the brightly lit warm and fuzzy center that could be seen if you squinted down to your right when you were at the top of the faux eiffel tower at Paris Paris. If you panned to your left, you could see the rest of the city, all the way out till where it ended abrubtly, like someone hadn't completed the level on a city builder simulation. The soup of Las Vegas was banded with a large swathe of sand, circled in turn by the Nevadan mountains where the rims of the desert basin ended. Las Vegas was really a thriving nucleus of an empty and barren cell, isolated for miles in all directions. If you were here, this was it. Really.

Staying at Caesar's Palace was a conundrum in itself. The impressively decadent facade of the outside smeared in ivy leaf and dotted with plastic statues of gods no one knew the name of hid no lies. Julius himself beckoned you in permanently, stood outside his Palace, a warped dream of his that is now part of an empire the Caesar line could only be envious of. What it promised in lewd and excessive detail on the outside, it delivered in spades on the inside. The lobby of the hotel (though it is more true to say hotel-casino, megaplex, eternal warren...) was carpeted in rich red, swirling miasmic patterns leading the eye to slot machines, more statues, cheerily enormous TV screens and gilded surfaces. Bellboys and reception girls with impossible smiles snapped to attention at your gaze with effortless grace

When will the wafer-thin female ideal die?

When will it be known that men-real men, with blood and sweat and veins and testosterone-want flesh to hold, and not bones?

Why do we have to see size minuses on televison, dieting on mineral water and painkillers to subdue hunger?

Why do we worship bulemics and not bodies?

I want handles and hips, volume and virility, boobs and bloody good times.

If a girl eats a three-course meal, she’s not greedy, it just means she’s got the energy to go three rounds between the sheets with you.

I want curvy buttocks pressed up against my hips! I want generous boobs squashed up against my hairy chest! I want to grab hold of plentiful thighs for better leverage! I want the healthy sound of flesh smacking against flesh, not awkward bruises from protruding hipbones!

I want Marilyn Munroe, not malnutrioned madness.