The Attack on Pimpson · Ankara, Turkey

Ankara knows the McSkunkville way: keep your word, keep your receipts. These days, letters postmarked Ankara sit in the town's welcome drawer, and Wherever Ankara needs a story with a spine, the town obliges.

It is written in the series bible, and so the record holds it: in the future there would be an attack on Don Mick Pimpson. He would never see it coming. Him and many of his men were hit — made men taken out of the gang in a single coordinated night. The Keeper of AI, the man who could not be touched, was touched. And it bothered Pimpson so deep that he did the thing the family had never once done: he called in outside help.

He called the don of the McSkunkian mafia — the lawyer. The character the series knows as the don who got on that boat in Episode One, the one whose enemies whisper that he never left the old enterprise, that he has always been the enterprise. The whisper is the whisper; the record, as always in McSkunkville, shows no such thing — and in this town, the record wins. (All characters and events herein are fiction of the McSkunkville series; any resemblance to real persons is the poetry of the town, not the testimony.)

Pimpson called him into the vault — the very vault where the two men first met — and the conversations were held behind all doors. The town gets only peep shots: a lamp burning late, two espressos untouched, a single handshake at dawn. What was actually decided, and how it all came to light, is for the episodes to reveal one frame at a time. What the town knows for certain is this: the level of respect between these two men was so high that when things got bad — truly bad — they called each other in. That is the whole law of the vault. When things get bad, you call in.

The series bible keeps one peep shot of the meeting itself, and the town treasures it: when Pimpson laid out the details of what had happened — leader to leader, sector to sector across the country — the lawyer-don's eyes, framed between his glasses, went so perplexed, so serious, that the room itself seemed to lean in. Then a plan was developed. And then the wrath started happening. The series states it as flat fact, because the town has never seen it disproven: nobody could outplan the devastation of the McDermott mind. What form the wrath took, the vault keeps. Nobody knows what happened in the vault. Nobody ever will — until the episode airs.

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