I should really ease up on all the fanfic I've been doing lately and go back and add to my personal project.
Poor Oni and company have been stuck in some hellhole desert planet alternate universe fighting horse-sized scorpion-excavator hybrids and samurai-cosplaying aliens since August.
I’ve spent, like, the past two days describing a spaceship exploding and I really just wanna get done with it so I can move on to the good stuff but the words just haven’t been coming to me lately.
Hostages First, Hoagies Later: A Wolfpack Short Story
[February 14, 2538
1357 hours
Hoppe City fuck-shit city in the middle of nowhere
Colony of Lumesc boring-ass planet in the middle of nowhere]
Oni hated rebels.
Not the leather-clad, chain-wallet-loving, “anarchy is a valid system of governance; no it’s not a phase, mom!” kind of rebels. No, she hated militant rebels – the kind who ran around the galaxy, claiming their own worlds away from the ORG, and then shat them up. Things would be fine if they just stayed there, on their own shitty little worlds, but they didn’t. They never did. Those “enlightened few” who’d split and gone their own way always ended up coming back, usually with big ships and even bigger guns.
And sometimes when they came back, they stormed a super-important government building in a super-important political colony and tried to take hostage a super-important ORG diplomat, failed to get past his office’s reinforced Olympium door, and resorted to taking several office drones who worked for said super-important ORG diplomat hostage instead. And when that happened, somebody usually ended up spending several hours on a rooftop, lying on her stomach and spying on those damn, dirty rebels in the building across the street as they went around waving their big guns and scaring those helpless little office drones.
That “somebody” just happened to be Oni.
“Rebels suck.”
“Eloquent as always, Oni,” Rick said, eyes never leaving his target.
Oni shifted her weight and smirked. “Damn right I am.”
Rick’s finger tightened on the trigger. He adjusted his angle and pulled. “He’s down.”
“Ooh hoo-hoo, they’re not gonna like that!”
“They’ll be dead before they get to that point.”
Oni turned to her rooftop buddy, amusement and surprise on her face in equal measure. “That’s stone-cold, man.”
Rick shrugged. “Just a fact.”
“Gimme the truth: am I rubbing off on you? ‘Cuz that’s totally something I’d say.”
“If you are, I hope there’s a medication for it.”
“There’s no cure for fun, Prickly Ricky.”
In the building across the street, a few floors below where they stood, a man in worn, pitch-black armor rushed to his headless comrade’s side and knelt by him, an endless stream of babble Oni didn’t care to decode pouring from his mouth. He grabbed one of the hostages, a woman with all the bells and whistles of a secretary, and dragged her to her feet by her hair, gun pressed to her cheek. She cried and cried as he barked and barked, and Oni was trying to count in her head exactly how many times she’d seen that scene play out. Had to be in the hundreds by now.
Rick aimed again and fired. “Got him.”
Oni got up, wiping her hands off on her thighs. “We should move. They’re getting antsy and so am I.”
Rick stood with her and nodded. He reached into his pocket and came out with two identical gadgets, square-shaped and palm-sized. One he put on the roof’s metal lip, and the second he put on his forearm where it stuck thanks to the unexplainable power of magnetism. He aimed again at the same window, his arm that time instead of his gun, using his wrist like a sight. The rods sticking out of his shoulder pads hissed and sparked until a blue-white electric charge burst to life in between them. Oni’s face tickled. She put her helmet on.
The charge reached its climax within seconds and was gone faster than it had appeared, a popping sound and a smoky smell the only signs it had ever been there. The little gadget on Rick’s wrist was gone, too. Oni spotted it down by the rebels’ bodies, stuck to a steel pillar among little cubicles. Rick stood himself on the roof’s lip.
“Why don’t you ever just, oh, I dunno, jump across?” Oni said.
“If I did that, what would be the point of all this then?” he said with motions to the gear and gizmos strapped all over his armor.
“Oh, sure, invent stuff that’ll get you out of a little exercise, but when I ask for something it’s ‘too impractical.’”
“No, not impractical. Counterintuitive. Because it’s counterintuitive to die on the job. Now,” he gestured at the wide gap between both buildings, “ladies first.”
Oni smirked slyly. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
Then she pushed him off the edge.
Rick rolled with it, figuratively speaking, and stuck his hand out. The magnets in his gauntlet caught onto the magnetic zip line and he slid down and across the street. He swung feet-first through the broken window. Not a second later, his rifle’s familiar takk-takk-takks echoed through the city blocks.
Oni ran her eyes across the room until they settled on where the rebels were concentrated most. It was near the front of the room, where they hunkered down behind the row of cubicles nearest the elevator. There had to be almost a dozen there. She couldn’t really tell from her position. They spread themselves down the aisle and didn’t budge an inch as they returned Rick’s fire. Maybe that was their escape route.
She had to roll her eyes. Didn’t these guys know the first thing about fire safety?
Oni stepped a good few meters back, then covered that distance again in two long, sprinting steps and gave a double-booted kick at the edge of the roof. For a second, she was flying.
Then she was crashing.
Then rolling.
Then she handsprung and rocketed her feet into the face of some hapless mook and his brains blew out the back of his skull.
She landed low and swept a pair of stubby legs out from an equally stubby woman and drove her fist through her solar plexus before she hit the ground.
The human mind can interpret an image in 13 milliseconds, fast enough to process a picture before one can blink – still too slow to catch a sight of Oni. When she slowed she was still a mere blur of red and blue, a gale of razor wind that tore through flesh and bone with a mere flick of the hand. By the time the rebels had processed her presence, she was elbow-deep in her seventh victim’s chest.
Bullets flew her way. Most of them tore away at the mook she wore for a glove. She tossed him at a rebel nearest a window and they both took the short way down. Four left.
As the saying goes, they put all their bullets in one basket, so when they ran dry there was nobody to cover the rest their reload. An empty magazine fell out of its grip.
Oni covered the distance. Jumped. Kicked one neck, then another.
Grounded now – fed her momentum into a reverse roundhouse. Finished with a hook.
The magazine clattered as it hit the ground.
Two necks, one jaw, and an entire skull shattered in what seemed like the same instant. The bodies flew far.
Oni had a line about broken bones and flying pigs ready but the familiar click of a handgun’s hammer pulling back stopped her. She turned unamused.
The scrappiest of the rebels held his gun to her head with all the confidence of a newborn puppy in the face of a thunderstorm. Every inch of him shook, hands most of all, his face an unconvincing mask of bravado. Oni swore she’d seen the same one, albeit more sincere, on the lead of one of last year’s action blockbuster flops.
The muzzle flashed, fire and smoke blooming like a rose. That wasn’t just artful simile either. Every moment lasted ages. Particles of light exploded before her eyes – a split-second instant that stretched on and on in her head. It was maddening, like she really were watching a plant grow, because it left her alone with her thoughts. Might as well think of something fun.
Like deciding on what would make her look more intimidating: dodging the bullet or letting it bounce off her visor. She came to a decision around the time the round started poking out of the muzzle.
The bullet that hit her at over three times the speed of sound was of a caliber frequently used in anti-armor small arms. Many Hydra tanks had fallen to just a handful of well-coordinated fighters armed with them. Enough concentrated fire with the stuff could tear through a freighter’s hull and get at the squishy humans inside. It was the leading reason Iron Inquisitors never stopped looking to improve their magnetic shield generators.
And it crumpled like a tin can against Oni’s armored brow.
She watched it bounce on the floor and roll to a stop against her foot, then looked at him – arms crossed, hip cocked, the universal stance for silently saying, “Really, dude?”
His mask slipped and fell. He shouted – wailed, really – as he fired until his pistol’s slide slid back. Through the tears in his eyes, he couldn’t see how his rounds disappeared before they could hit home.
Oni gave him a few seconds to collect himself before raising her hands to either side of her face and spreading her fingers. In the little spaces between was every last bullet he’d fired. She grinned widely.
He broke all over again.
An ear-piercing cry stabbed at the air as he tossed his gun her way and ran for the elevator.
“Hey,” Oni shouted, “aren’t you forgetting something?”
She threw his bullets back at him. The wailing stopped.
“Oh, man! Dude looks like I took ol’ Queenie to him,” Oni said, patting the shotgun magnetically stuck to her back. “Nasty.”
One last gunshot echoed through the room and then the only noise was the panicked breaths and whines of terrified office drones.
“That everyone?”
“That’s everyone,” Rick said from across a sea of cubicles.
“Good. Get the door so we can get outta here. It’s Valentine’s Day and you know what that means.”
“Is that the only reason you brought me here – to get the door instead of, you know, defusing the bomb in the basement?”
A wave of gasps and exclamations destroyed the quietly fearful atmosphere Oni’d been enjoying. She rolled her eyes, pulled her magnum out, and fired once into the ceiling.
The sound was like an explosion going off. Oni didn’t even notice the recoil but its sheer force still cracked the ground beneath her feet. There was total silence.
“Relax, you buncha worry-warts. We’ve got someone on it.”
-
Sam was no bomb disposer.
Her skillset was varied, wide as an ocean and just as deep. She could cleave through an enemy frontline as easily as she could recall the intricate cultural proceedings of Kah’Eel marriage ceremonies; speak hundreds of languages with perfect fluency and care for just as many species of wildlife no matter their planet of origin. But explosives and electronics were why they had Rick.
She supposed that was why complacency was so dangerous. If there was one lesson that had carried over from her childhood days as a hard-working farm girl, that was it. Idle hands and all that.
But she didn’t allow herself a modicum of doubt. Rick had left her with a document of detailed instructions to access from her heads-up display, and if she really needed the extra help she could always patch him. Those reassurances kept her mind clear and her steps steady.
The building’s power had been cut off. That wasn’t an issue on the higher levels, where every wall was a glass window that let in the bright midday sun, but underground there were no such things.
The staircase leading to the basement was dark enough that Sam imagined she wouldn’t be able to see her own hands an inch from her face if her eyes hadn’t been genetically augmented to see in the dark. If the rebels really were as ill-equipped as they suspected, they would have to rely on flashlights down there where it was darker. That made them easier targets and her – clad in pitch-black armor that lent itself well to the shadows cast by ceiling-high hills of office equipment – a nightmare come to life.
She reached the automated double doors leading into the basement, although the power outage meant their emergency systems had kicked in and left them wide open. Just a few feet beyond was a desk before a wall, and an entryway on either side. Washes of light shone from both.
They didn’t move much and, judging by the way they streamed and splashed against the walls, were facing away from her. She took the left entrance and slipped inside.
Sam spotted four men idling about before crouching behind a chest-high machine she didn’t recognize. Their theory had been correct. The rebels only had primitive flashlights to work with, and they each carried one. Two of them stood across from each other, a row of what looked to be 3D printers in between them, nearest the entrance and her, and two more stood near the exit in the same configuration. More walls stood on either side, dividing the room into thirds. Her plan of attack formed and finalized within seconds.
She gave the ground a hard knock and unsheathed a short, hooked blade. Feet shuffled, a wary conversation between the men beginning.
“What was that?”
“Something fell off a shelf, probably.”
“‘Fell off a shelf,’ my ass. Go check that out.”
“Why me? Why’s it always gotta be me?”
“You’re closest. Don’t argue just this once and go check it out!”
“Fine, fine…”
His grumblings and footsteps got closer until a boot landed an inch away from Sam’s hand. She gripped her knife tight. Before he could take another step, he yelped and tripped on torn ankle tendons.
The pain, she imagined, kept him from breaking his fall. He landed on his stomach, winded, and Sam pounced, planting her forearm against his neck while her other hand jabbed the knife through the back of his skull. Not a whisper came out of him.
More feet-shuffling. “Hey, man, you okay? You need a hand up or something—?”
Sam was up, cartwheeling over the printer. The rebel’s flashlight turned on her and its light shone off the long blade sticking out of her boot-heel. She stuck the landing. And his eye.
Before his body hit the ground she threw two knives from the same hand. They hilted in the temples of the last couple of fumbling rebels.
No flashes of light came from the other two-thirds of the room so she didn’t crawl around as she took back her throwing knives and moved on.
At the left of the room were more doors and another staircase leading only down, which she took three at a time and ended up in an entryway leading into a much larger, more populated floor. She took cover behind the doorway.
Most of the equipment had been pushed to the sides, leaving much of its middle empty space and stone pillars. Eight men patrolled the place – four along the outside diameter, four on the inside – and one stood in the center of it all by a big, bulky, blinking machine. The bomb. She recognized that much. Another plan started forming.
Barring those thin stone pillars, there was nowhere to hide, and those wide swathes of light could easily cover every inch of the room if properly coordinated. But they weren’t. The patrollers moved in very predictable patterns, leaving her with ample space to move through undetected. It didn’t take long for her to figure them out. She took a blade in each hand, one for slashing and the other for piercing, waited, and took her chance the second it came.
The first to fall was a rebel patrolling near the doorway. She caught him through the back of the head, as mundane an act as picking ice, and was slitting another’s throat before his body fell. A third took her blade through the brainstem.
Faster footsteps than usual signaled an irregularity in their pattern. She took a small knife, followed the noise, and threw. Four down.
That left the four forming the innermost patrol diameter. The falling bodies had them spooked and aiming their weapons haphazardly.
Terrified whimpers turned into gurgles through mouthfuls of blood once, twice, then a third time. The last man didn’t whimper, his nerves stronger than most, but not his arteries. They ruptured all the same.
The last one standing, the bomber himself, looked ready to fall, shaking in his boots. He babbled strings of meaningless words and almost hugged his gun to his chest. Time to make herself known.
Sam stepped out of the shadows and into his light. Her armor slipped from black to a dark, snakelike green in the brightness and her helmet fell away. She wanted him to see her face.
His gun homed in on her chest immediately.
“S-stay back, b-bitch!” His voice was barely audible, his knees knocked so much.
Sam took a step forward.
He jumped away, one hand reaching shakily behind his back before raising it over his head, a detonator in hand. “I-I’m serious! Do anything funny and I’ll blow us all to shit!” His voice seemed to have gained the barest hint of confidence with his contingency.
How cute.
Sam took another step. “What a curious contradiction it is,” she said in a voice of honey and ice, “to trust a man desperate to live with a dead man’s switch.” Her grin shone in the light, predatory, hungry. “I think I’ll call your bluff.”
His hands shook even harder, gun muzzle swaying and pointing at everything but her. “It ain’t no b-bluff, bitch. I d-die, we all d-die!”
Sam’s eyes narrowed but her grin got bigger. “Oh, was that a Freudian slip I just heard?”
“W-what?”
“‘It ain’t no bluff.’ Isn’t that what you said? That’s a double negative, meaning that it is a bluff. You’re afraid to die. You’re not even holding the trigger.”
The bomber’s brave façade fell, but his trembling fingers wrapped around the trigger all the same. A tell-tale click said it all. “Ain’t a bluff…” he more whispered to himself than told her.
Sam sighed and curled her index finger. “In that case, be sure to hold on as tight as you can. We wouldn’t want a little high-yield mishap on our hands, would we?”
“What are you on about—?”
He hadn’t seen it until it was too late, glinting in the light as it tightened around his wrist.
For all intents and purposes, monomolecular wire was another science-fiction invention that worked better on paper than in reality. It was simply too thin to have proper tensile strength, no matter the material it was composed of. That was, until Olympium, the “metal of myth,” had been discovered and made the impractical an everyday reality. Smith an Olympium blade and one has the power to cut anything. Forge Olympium armor and the wearer will live in comfort knowing nothing can ever hurt them again. Make Olympium bullets and see one’s enemies fall in droves.
Or so the myth goes. It had surpassed all the tests, in any case. And with flying colors.
But in that moment, the only flying color was crimson, spewing from the bomber’s wrist and staining the basement floor. A puddle formed around his disembodied hand, detonator still tight in its grip.
He screamed loud enough Sam had no doubt Oni and Rick could hear it all the way up on the twentieth floor and long enough that he went pale in the face. Although that could just be blood loss.
Sam extended her hand, the little slot under her wrist housing the wires barely visible to even augmented eyes, and curled the rest of her fingers in. More wire wrapped around his body, invisible but surely there.
And they tightened – tighter and tighter until blood seeped out of the many miniscule cuts in his armor. He only cried louder.
They reached bone and that went too, like butter baking on a hot summer afternoon.
There was a shing sound and then nothing else. Just quiet. The wires formed a blood-covered web where the bomber used to be. His pieces were perfectly proportioned, at the least.
The wires untangled and slinked back into their slot.
Sam didn’t spare a second and moved on to the bomb, helmet back in place.
It was big, its shape reminding her of one of those ancient photocopiers. Its only interface was a touch-based display, but she knew that with the trigger primed, the whole thing was locked down and ready to blow. She needed to find the metaphorical red wire if she was to stop it at that point.
Her knife of choice for the situation was long and thin and she jammed it into the tiny gap between the interface and the machine’s chassis. She pushed on one side of the handle until the metal creaked, groaned, and gave away under the pressure. It popped off, leaving her looking at circuit boards and wires of only one color: beige.
Sam gulped. She consulted Rick’s document.
“Welcome to The Statist’s Guide for Quelling Anarchy Volume I: Explosives and Riot Control,” a woman’s too-bubbly voice began.
Sam wasn’t so sure she wanted to defuse the bomb anymore if it meant dealing with…that.
“In this volume, we’ll be going over the proper procedures for defusing the most common improvised and black-market explosives in use by modern rebel cells, as well as how to properly suppress riots and peaceful protest—” a sudden burst of electric screeching nearly took out Sam’s hearing, “—riots.”
Sam gulped harder.
-
“You see why I brought you along now?”
“Okay, I’ll admit, it was warranted,” Rick said as he attached one of his many machines to the electronic lock beside the foot-thick, reinforced Olympium door the super-important ORG diplomat cowered behind.
“Damn right it was. These politician fucks are so paranoid the shit they spew makes your ‘liquid anthrax water poisoning’ theory look plausible by comparison.”
“There’s anthrax in the water?” came the panicked voice of the ORG official from the speaker atop the door.
“Oh, sure. Gallons of the stuff. You wouldn’t happen to have drank any in, say, the past month, have you?”
“Oh, sweet merciful…I have!”
Oni shook her head and tsk-tsked. “Shame. See, that’s why I stick to healthier alternatives, like soda and sweet mead.”
“Yeah, and you’d have diabetes if your immune system weren’t so strong.”
“Details, details.”
As Rick dealt with the door, Oni turned to check their evacuation’s progress.
Icarus, the team’s personal dropship, had been brought down and leveled with the window Rick’d broken through, boarding ramp extended to allow the office drones relatively safe passage onboard. She said “relatively” because without Sam at the helm, Icarus had a nasty habit of swaying with the wind. The ol’ boy just didn’t respond to anyone as well as it did to her. Still, better than sticking around where potential rebel reinforcements could get at them. She trusted Sergei would get them all, but there was always the possibility they’d use their heads for once and find a way to sneak inside.
The dropship was only meant for small teams like their five-man band, so the drones had to press together to fit inside the troop bay. Most of them were already inside, ushered in by Recon, who’d retreated into the cockpit before the mass of office workers could prevent him from doing so, leaving them to help each other instead.
It looked like there’d be enough room, which she was thankful for. Babysitting wasn’t her department.
Rick’s lock-picking gizmo beeped, something in the door clicked, and then it receded into the doorway and slid aside.
A slight, meek little man stood on the other side, glasses round and thick, looking like he were one spook away from a heart attack. He jumped when their gazes fell on him, sweat flying off his face. “O-oh. You really are ‘b-breakers.” He looked between them, but his eyes returned to Oni. “I th-think?”
Oni’s eye twitched and an all-too-familiar pain in her temple flared up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
For such a timid man, he sure had the balls to ignore her obvious irritation and say, “Well, you, in particular, are a bit, um, shorter than I imagined…”
Rick face-palmed.
Oni was quiet for a short moment that felt like a long one. Her vision grew an angry red, sound drowning out until she could only hear his words playing on repeat in her head. The pain grew. Her head twitched.
“Um,” said the government shit-heel, “are you alright?”
Oni snapped out of it. “Oh, yeah, fine. Just measuring, y’know?”
“Measuring?”
“Yeah, measuring.” She took her hand, in knife-hand form, and lined it up with his kneecaps. “Y’know what they say: measure twice—” she pulled her hand back, “—cut once!”
She swung fast enough to cut clean through solid steel.
Rick caught her wrist. “Stop that.”
Their speed had rendered their movements invisible. The little shit didn’t even know he’d almost had his legs chopped in half. “Um. Yes. They do say that, don’t they?”
Her next attack was much more visible – an angry, sloppy punch that Rick didn’t have to predict to catch. The shit-heel jumped again.
Rick pulled Oni in against him as she thrashed and snarled, shouting expletives in between gnashing her teeth. He stepped aside with her in tow and motioned for the shit to get out while he still could.
The diplomatic shit didn’t have to be told twice.
“Sorry,” Rick said as he passed. “It’s just teenage angst. She barely turned the big 1-3 not even two weeks ago. I think the new responsibilities are getting to her.”
The shit swallowed, color draining from his face. “13? Sh-she’s only 13?”
“Oh, yeah. Youngest of us by a whole two years. Gets to her almost as bad as the height thing. You might want to get going.”
Oni’s hand slipped from Rick’s grasp and reached for the official shit’s throat, stopped only an inch away when Rick managed to slip his arm under hers. The little shit looked ready to faint.
Good. It’d make it easier for her.
He didn’t even say goodbye before running off for Icarus, the rude shit.
Rick held her until the dropship had taken off, a mere dot in the distance.
Oni had calmed a little, although steam still streamed from her ears, face a darker shade than usual. “On my shit-list, motherfucker,” she said over and over like a mantra.
Her head snapped in Rick’s direction. “What’s his name?”
Rick feigned ignorance the best he could, which was still piss-poor. “I can’t recall.”
“Oh, that so?”
“That is indeed so.”
“Well, guess you’re barred from this year’s Valentine’s Day dinner, asshole.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Ha. Sure I can. I’m the leader, motherfucker!”
“But I’m the one who always pays.”
“Guess that’ll be me this year then.”
“With what money?”
The truth of the matter hit her harder than she’d ever been hit – and she’d taken a railgun to the gut. “Fuck!”
-
They’d shared no words on the way down, but that didn’t mean Oni was quiet. She’d muttered to herself about betrayal and all the bad things she’d do to Shitheel McFuck when she found him. For a few minutes it looked like she’d end up working herself into another frenzy until they went out the building’s front doors and reunited with Sam. The redhead had a way of soothing Oni with her presence alone.
“Heya, Sammy! You get the bomb alright?”
Sam smiled and rubbed soot off her forehead. “Oh, yes, everything went fine. Although that…‘guide’ wasn’t as clear-cut as I’d have liked.”
Oni shot Rick yet another dirty look. “Yeah. Egghead over there’s been making a nasty habit of being unhelpful lately.”
Rick rolled his eyes. Oni stuck her tongue out at him.
“Real mature,” he mouthed.
“Fuck you,” she shouted back.
Before any sudden awkwardness could settle in, Sergei, the eight-foot wall of grade-A Russian meat and muscle, stomped onto the scene. Good ol’ Sergei. Could always count on him to come in at the right time.
He grunted.
“Really? Only one convoy?” Sam said. “I expected more from them.”
“That bomb was probably the best they could do,” Rick said.
Oni shrugged. “Well, if that’s the case, we’re free to go, right? Cops’ll pick it up at some point—wait. You guys hear that?”
Everyone stood still and listened.
The unmistakable sounds of a monster engine and gravel-chewing tires tearing down the road were loud and clear. And they grew closer.
A couple blocks down the street, a Trojan troop carrier turned the corner and didn’t slow down. The steel behemoth had been painted the rebel colors of black, gray, and red, its three-ton bulk gunning for them faster than any sports car. The van-semi hybrid was known to smash through entire meters of steel barricades without slowing down. Its horn roared and it breathed smoke that looked like it could single-handedly destroy the ozone layer.
Oni swept her hand out in its direction. “Big guy, if you would…”
Sergei grunted and stomped forward. He could’ve used his massive metal axe to stop the vehicle, or maybe his mini-gun to rip it to shreds, but sometimes a man just has to feel something crunch under his fist.
His fingers curled, he wound back, and, when the time came, brought his fist up and then down on the Trojan’s hood.
The entire front disappeared, just like that, into chunks and fragments of metal. The entire thing flipped forward, over his head, and at the speed it was going it kept flipping and flying until it landed well behind where they stood, its roof scraping against the street and spitting sparks. It whined until it stopped an entire three blocks over.
The team waited for any survivors to get out and they almost decided that nothing would come of it until the back doors exploded off their hinges.
A man stepped out, clad in the skeletonized remains of a Nandi exo-suit. One of the older models, it seemed. He clanked his metal fists together and shook his head, getting himself hyped to fight.
He turned to the team, glaring. Not happy to see them, Oni guessed. Couldn’t blame him. If she had to compensate by wearing ORG hand-me-downs she might just be pissed at the world too.
He crouched and took hold of the Trojan by the end of its roof. He bellowed, lifted, and kept lifting until he could hoist the thing up over his head. He shouted again, spitting and red-faced.
Oni yawned. Rick checked his watch. Sam looked her nails over.
The metal madman reared back, and then tossed the vehicle their way with enough force to rise a few stories before it fell. Its shadow grew until they were all covered in it.
Rick looked through his pouches until he found just what he was looking for: a little disk-looking thing that glowed red on its inside diameter, fitting snugly in the palm of his hand. He tossed it at the transport and it stuck to the surface. It beeped.
The explosion swallowed the Trojan whole. Its heat was overbearing and turned the nearby street to tar. Any metal that flew off burned to molten slag before it could land. In the seconds it took to near them, its body burned until it was nothing more than harmless kindling, and then ash. And the flames died as soon as they appeared.
Then silence.
The team looked at the rebel expectantly.
He was too stunned to do more than gape.
Oni drew her magnum, Rick and Sam their rifles, and Sergei his mini-gun. And they fired.
His body jerked, their rounds chewing through his outdated armor as easily as they would through any of the more modern tech. Pockets of blood exploded from his body. Bullet casings flew and clattered at their feet.
They only stopped when they ran out of ammo. He wasn’t anything worth burying by then.
Oni took her smoking gun and blew the smoke from its barrel. “Okay. I’m in a good mood again.”
Sam smiled. “Well, that’s good to hear, Kit.”
“Yeah,” Rick agreed. “I wouldn’t want to get kicked under the table the whole time I’m trying to eat.”
“Speaking of which, have we decided on the place?”
“I could go for some Chinese.”
Oni scrunched her nose. “No. Ew. Plenty of sweet; not enough meat. I’m thinking good ol’ Texan cuisine instead.”
“Just like last year.”
“And the year before that,” Sam added.
“Alright, what do you want then, Sammy?”
“I could go for anything you three decide, really.”
“That’s not an answer!”
Sergei grunted.
Everyone else paused. Then, in perfect unison, started gagging.
Full Name: Epsilon (people made for the express purpose of mass slaughter don’t get the luxury of real names >:( ).Gender and Sexuality: Male, hetero (probably).Pronouns: The male ones.Ethnicity/Species: Chimera (human/unknown-extradimensional race hybrid).Birthplace and Birthdate: In a test tube at a lab outside of ORG-controlled space; birthdate unknown but known to be in his early twenties.Guilty Pleasures: His coping mechanisms (emphasis on the “guilty”).Phobias: That his quest for vengeance will cause him to lose his family again or worse – directly get them hurtWhat They Would Be Famous For: His sheer sexual prowess.What They Would Get Arrested For: Multiple war crimes (mostly murder, torture, hostage-taking, and the killing of surrendered combatants).OC You Ship Them With: Oni’s fist (or fists if you wanna make it an OT3).OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Oni, because she’s had an irrational dislike-bordering-on-hatred for him ever since he shot her prized shotgun out of her hands. It’s fine, not even scuffed, but it’s the principle of the matter, dammit!Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Action flicks, mostly. The more intricate the choreography, the better. Stuff in the same vein as the Bourne movies. Doesn’t read as much as he watches.Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: When the hero goes out on a revenge-fueled bender only to stop at the Big Bad because, “If you kill me, you’ll be just like me!” Nah, fuck that. Shoot that fucker right in his fucking face.Talents and/or Powers: Skilled martial artist; the standard Chimera/Daybreaker superhuman speed, strength, reflexes, and brain processing speed; Chimera’s hide (power armor/suit) outfitted with plasma-manipulating gauntlets and greaves.Why Someone Might Love Them: Epsilon is a guy out for revenge against the people who shattered his family, but he doesn’t let that cloud his judgement. He did embark on his quest to protect what’s left of ‘em, after all. He’s always putting them first, no ifs or buts about it, and even puts their emotions beyond his. If a course of action will let him put a bullet in one of his targets’ skull but will actively prevent him from rushing to the help of a comrade, he’ll disengage without hesitation. Beneath the debaucherous front he puts up to hide how much he hurts, he’s someone who just wants to keep his people together and will go to the ends of the earth to do so.Why Someone Might Hate Them: Said debaucherous exterior might be a hard sell. People might see him as a callous womanizer, an oversexed fiend who needs to be put in his place. But the reason he never remembers any of the names of his sexual partners isn’t because they’re a dime-a-dozen sexual conquest; it’s because the sex is just a way to numb himself for a little while – a state of haziness where he just switches to autopilot and goes through the motions. But no matter how much others might hate him for the way he chooses to cope, they’ll never hate him as much as he hates himself for leaving behind the people he loves.How They Change: Eventually, he gets his closure, and all the coping mechanisms break away one at a time. That’s not to say that he stops drinking or splurging on his favorite entertainment mediums or having casual sex; he just controls himself better because he doesn’t need them anymore but, at the end of the day, they’re still a lot of fun.Why You Love Them: He’s a fun exercise in making a broken character. Most in the wolfpack are broken to some extent (they were all either forcibly orphaned or genetically engineered to be living weapons and treated as such, after all), but they’ve either made peace with it or embraced it as a core aspect of themselves. Epsilon’s personality and circumstances, on the other hand, allow him to rectify this as the story goes along. And he’s the only one who employs unhealthy, self-destructive methods of dealing with his trauma, as opposed to most everyone else who deals with things in more mature and productive ways, or one other very much broken character who just does unhealthy and destructive shit because that’s all she knows.
That’s how many words I’m at as of right now on chapter 2. That’s 2962 more words since I made this post almost a month ago. That means, on average, I wrote 109.7 words a day from then up until this very moment, when I’m taking a tiny break to write this post instead.
So I guess it’s business as usual, but goddamn do I wanna speed it up. I want a chapter a month done at the least, and I’m not gonna get there with this kind of progress.
One thing I like to do when writing a character is to make them out to be an archetype and then fuck with the template.
You’ve got your tomboy-looking protag, battle-scarred, brash and foul-mouthed, will fight for any reason you give her, but who’s actually really hard to legitimately anger, is the most expressive person in any given room, would never raise her hand against someone unprovoked, and is super sweet on her friends, even if her idea of that is to bug them as often as possible. She loves gushing over dogs, cooking galaxy-renowned meals for her loved ones, wearing skirts that flow in the wind, and dolling herself up for a hot date with the deuteragonist as much as she likes a night of hard drinking, sparring with hard-light reconstructions of the toughest foes she’s ever faced, stomping a rebel/alien incursion, and cracking morbid jokes at the expense of her victims. And the thought to hide any of it behind threats of, “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you,” never even so much as crosses her mind.
The deuteragonist puts on the display of a classy escort but would rather give people a shoulder to cry on than an easy lay, constantly strives to better others, and her biggest dream ever since she was a child is to just give something back to the world.
The sarcastic engineer who’s not a people-person but still feels that he has a responsibility to use his skills and genius to help humanity, even going as far as to make breakthroughs in the worlds of mechanics and computing, then “leaking” them online, all on a whim.
The big guy with a big axe who talks only in grunts but on the inside he describes every battle with only the most vivid imagery like a modern day warrior-poet and who finds that despite the overwhelming strength in his body, he believes his greatest strength is the mastery over himself he needed to get so strong in the first place.
The lone-wolf sniper who’s not a lone wolf because he hates people but because he loves his teammates too much so he distances himself both physically and emotionally in the hopes that he doesn’t lose them like he did the last group he got so close to.
It’s fun and keeps me invested in their stories. It’s probably why I’m still writing about them even over five years after I initially came up with them.
