BROKEN RAIL CHARACTER INTRODUCTIONS - mesa fulver ( the wanderer )
Here are some of the stories about Mesa Fulver, or the ones that Irene has heard recently.
One is that she sat up in a watchtower on some half-flooded planet near the civilization-facing edge of the Frontier for a week, back when the corporations were still sending parties to try and find a foothold, and she shot every person who set a boot on dry land. That one’s true. Mesa talks about it when she’s drunk, chuckling into her glass, fingers twitching as if wanting to be around some invisible trigger. She always gestures wide down at the table or the controls of the ship, almost knocking over her glass, her cheeks turning red, and says the bodies stretched from here to here.
Another one is that she killed a man once by jamming her rifle barrel down his throat and pulling the trigger, the bullet so big and the impact so immense that it blew half of his back out, obliterated a good chunk of his spine, and left him a half-hollow corpse for the Protectorate to clean up. That one isn’t true, because that isn’t how Mesa’s preferred types of bullets work. They are wicked things that expand in the body, but not like that. They lodge. They stick. Then they overheat and start to melt. That’s how they kill you for sure.
One particularly amusing story is that Mesa carries a knife six inches long made from perfectly hammered plasticine dyed crimson, dyed blood-red, so that blood can never stain it. It’s never been cleaned, supposedly. It carries the blood of every person she’s ever killed with it. Irene, though, knows that the knife that she carries, the knife made from metal from her home, like every ex-Raildog before and after her, is teal-tinged and made right on Terrive XI, cooled in the waters there. Moreover, Mesa is compulsive about cleaning that knife. It’s the closest she gets to a nervous tic.
She remembers these stories most of all when watching Mesa like this, hunched over Irene’s tiny and disorganized desk and smoothing out the pages of her journal. There is grey dirt caked under her nails and she licks her chapped lips every so often, turning pages and checking on their integrity like a scientist with a scope pressed to each sheet.
“Do you still have that flower I gave you?” Irene asks, laid back, the sheets wrapped around her hips messily. There’s nothing that Mesa hasn’t seen before. “The red one?”
“Of course I do,” mutters Mesa. Another page turns gently under her fingers. “Ylliva isn’t an easy planet to get into, and picking the flowers there will get you killed. Only you would be stupid enough to do that, because I’m damn well not.”
Irene leans off the bed and sneaks a hand into the pocket of Mesa’s jacket, where she keeps those bittermint candies that she buys every time she reaches civilization, and pops one into her mouth. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
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