Chapter Dos: monopoly

is just Babe trying to rent an apartment and the gimmick is he rolls the dice he has to rent in order to even be able to travel around the city; it's a shitty bus payment system, the dice roll, so like maybe this city is a vegas clone. people on the sidewalk will have tophats and scotty dogs and all be extremely homeless, the closer to the BOARDWALK neighborhood that Babe gets

eventually all he can find are overpriced and pre-furnisher air b'n'bs, littered with surveillance cameras and 'smart' appliances that all stop working as soon as a storm takes the wifi out.

the pair of cops for this one should be garden variety creeps, maybe paparazzo after some scrilla but they end up spending more money than they can make and the shitty bus fare dice roll system keeps launching them ahead of Babe around the city 'board'.

eventually the stalkers land in a cheap neighborhood and win the deed to a railroad company in a game of rock-paper-scissors (reaux chambeaux) because the railroad owner was tired of making zero dollars and getting terrorised by the owner of the other three railroads -- petty enough not to sell to his enemies but proud enough not to just donate, for free, like a weenie.

dunno how this one's getting solved, probably Babe leaves the city during the storm with renewed determination to remain unhoused, as the only way to truly win at monopoly is to just not play.

the stalkers are laughsassinated by an agent (hired by the three-title-owning railroad mogul), a dark carapacian who finds the photo negatives the stalkers had gathered thus far, and ~mysteriously~ follows Babe out of town.