Leave 'Lived long enough to become the villain' to get a glimpse of my character being a villain.
The sound of the door sliding shut behind them wouldn't have been so ominous had it not been paired with the distinctive click of the locking mechanism engaging.
Synthetic though they were, the twins were still capable of feeling their fair share of emotions.
Unease.
Worry.
Fear.
"Humans and synthetics," a voice called out, echoing in the small room, "living and working together like one big, happy family. A glorious ideal, no? A worthy cause to fight and die for?"
The voice was familiary, and yet not. Who...?
It was Hana who dared to respond. "It's a goal we should strive to reach, yes."
"So that we can remain imperfect replicas of our flawed creator race?"
"She didn't say that," Sakura snapped, all too aware of the flare of anxiety from her sister's side of the twin-link.
"It's all we'll achieve in continuing to tolerate their kind," and Heather dropped from one of the ceiling vents, only a few meters separating her and the Fiore sisters. "We'd be so much more if humanity stopped impeding our progress. Our...evolution." The woman, a Shadow Guard of Beacon City, looked between the two for a moment, nothing of warmth or kindness in her gaze. "A world populated only by those worthy of keeping her." Her smile was all wrong. "Those capable of caring for her."
"No," and Hana was physically shivering now, altogether uncomfortable with Heather's anti-human rhetoric. It was too similar to...to his way of thinking, even as a macabre pendulum swing to the other end of the spectrum.
"This world belongs to synthetic life, to Reploids."
"No," Hana struggled to get out, her voice breaking even on so short a word, and it was only Sakura pushing over their link, holding her matrix as steady as she could manage, that kept the elder from losing control of her emotions. "No. We need humans just as much as--"
"We need them for nothing," her snarled words punctuated by the sound of the Shadow's blade coming to life. "And this world has no room for those who sympathize with our creators..."
Send me “Some Other You” and I’ll introduce you to an AU version of my character. [x]
“Reinard, I do not believe that we are where we were accorded to be.”
“Where we were supposed to be, Krieger,” the blond corrected, “and what makes you think that?”
“The feel of this place has become something different,” and the Gallade’s eyes turned skyward, to the unfamiliar stars shining above them. “It has gained a quiet I am not used to.”
"My handler finally buckled and got me a legit image to post on my blog. So, uh...Lieutenant Colonel Heather Parkes of the Zan'ei Stealth Forces, reporting for duty? And just to reassure everyone, I had fun picking out the props and outfit. Pity I couldn't just show up in armor, but hey, you win some, you lose some."
“Discipline? At home? As a BCCO unit, my fathers made a point of being lax while I was growing up because they knew how rigorous and comprehensive my training was going to be. I mean, they weren’t letting me run amok at all hours of the day and disobeying the City’s laws—you don’t let a child grow up without understanding the concept of wrong and right, after all—but I didn’t have a set schedule for my day, aside from the three years I spent in school. Reploids do need socialization, and attending for a few years is part of how we manage that, even if most of the concepts are things we already understand. Anyway, I digress. There was the base impression of morality and ethics, doing the right thing, but beyond that? They left my discipline up to my military training.”
16. What does your character do for a living? How do they see their profession? What do they like about it? Dislike?
“I’m currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the Zan’ei Stealth Forces of Beacon City, as well as an officer in the Shadow Guard. While my first priority, as a member of the Guard, is ensuring the safety and security of the government and administrative leaders of the City, the Guard is currently comprised of a little over one hundred members, so it’s not like it’s the only part of my life. As a member of the Zan’ei proper, I’m the Lead Infiltrations Specialist for the 21st Squadron, so I’m the one that knows how to get into whatever building we need to get into without raising the alarm. I’ve not gotten to the level of skill that Stealth General Light has, nor do I have any interest in learning the maps of Neo Arcadia Tower’s ventilation system, but getting into places is where I excelled during my training. So I pursued that for my work beyond the Guard.
“In terms of what I like, I’m comforted by the fact that I don’t regularly leave the Dome, if ever, and while I have been sent out on extraversal assignments, I’m not listed as an extraversal diplomatic liaison for the City the way Fleet Admiral and Stealth General Light are. My trips are, if nothing else, short hops to gather someone that fell through a rift. With the trackers in place now, that’s certainly gotten easier to do, thank Light.
“As for dislikes? There’s almost nothing that I don’t like about my job. I mean, sure, I can’t talk to Dad or Papai about what I do on the clock, not without using the most vague of terms, but they knew what they were getting into when they signed up to adopt one of the BCCOs. That much, they don’t mind at all. I’m an important part of the City security team and I’ve played my part in stopping several criminal operations, so I can’t say I disagree with that. Really, it comes down to two things. One—I don’t like having to kill people, and as often as I can, I avoid using anything but my service pistol, since shock gel rounds usually aren’t lethal. At present, there’s only seven deaths listed on my record, all of which were in the line of duty and all of which I am not criminally liable for. Two of those seven were accidental…I did say shock gel was usually non-lethal, after all. The other thing—and from what I’ve heard since then from Commander and Stealth General Light, it won’t be much of an issue any longer—would be Lieutenant Commander Zero’s orders to tail his wife. There are Shadow Guard who have been at this longer than I have, who are better suited to the job of tailing Counselor Leto, and yet I’m the one he pulls on-duty on my days off.”
“I’m going to go with fighting style here and put my vote in for ‘that thing the Zan’ei do so well’, given that our fighting style is less fighting and more ‘doing everything to avoid engaging’. Now, don’t get me wrong: try to harm the person whose Shadow I am, or pull a weapon on me, and I will make you regret it, but on the whole, I have no true love for fighting. Unless I’m sparring. Sparring’s fun, especially if it’s with another Zan’ei and even more so if we’re showing off our skills. I’ve had more than a couple new recruits join the force because I was out with a fellow officer and we got bored.” She grinned. “Not surprising how many times we’ve been mistaken for Jin’en, given how rough and tumble we can get when we’re enjoying it.”
“My daggers, most definitely,” she answers, pulling one of the matte black blades from the sheath attached to the back of her hip armor. “Given how good I am with these, both in close-range and at distance, there’s a reason my friends don’t bet against me anymore if we’re playing darts.”
“Death in the line of duty, taking a life, becoming a judge-in-the-moment…it’s never easy to live with, never really…” and she worried the back of one hand with the nails of the other. “The only time I can think that a kill could be good is if you know that what you’re doing is…if you’re taking out an Overridden. They’re shells of who they used to be, puppets wearing faces people know, and while I know that Lieutenant Commander Zero’s daughter doesn’t mean to be altering units the way she does…”
Silence permeates the room for a long moment before, “Were it to be me lost to the affliction of the virus she spreads, I would pray that someone put a saber through my processor before I claim an innocent’s life.”
“I think the biggest misunderstanding I’ve experienced as a member of the Shadow Guard is people assuming that because I’m part of the City’s Secret Service, because I’m tasked with protecting the Arcadians and the District Vicars, that I’ve had to…put down those who pose a threat to the regional governance. Truth is, I served fifteen years before I killed someone.
“Shortly after I made that fifteenth ‘anniversary’ with the Zan’ei, I was part of a joint tactical strike against an illegal arms manufacturing ring based out of Nadezhda na Zarya, and as you can expect when dealing with those who make weapons, it wasn’t a clean strike. My first kill…” and Heather takes a moment to move to her bed, settling on the edge of the mattress.
“I’m trained in the use of my buster, my service sidearm, and a pair of small throwing daggers I wear when I’m on-call,” though she’d been out on a couple of occasions off the clock with the blades on her person. “With this strike, we were told to rely on our service pistols, mostly because the shock-gel inside the bullets would only incapacitate the individuals rather than killing them, so we were going through and knocking out all these people either making or buying the weapons. Of course, this is draining our clips, and unlike video games, it still takes a minute to reload. However it was that Commandant Foenur and I both managed to drain our clips at the same time…it was a stroke of bad luck, especially when the woman pointed a gun at us, and it doesn’t take much beyond the sight of a weapon before you’re reacting.”
She tapped her chest then, lightly, with her right hand. “I don’t even remember pulling my dagger, as quickly as everything happened, but Jayde managed to get his gun reloaded and up just in time to see her go down with a blade through her heart.”
♜ :Post-kill actions, thoughts, or emotions
“It’s…” and Heather shifted on the bed, glancing at her hands for a moment. “It’s like suddenly having all the coolant in your body freeze over, that moment you take your first life. She wasn’t the last person I’ve killed in the line of duty, and it’s…you never really grow numb to it, and I’m fairly certain that you’d have to be going a little bit Maverick if you did get used to it.” Even Lieutenant Commander Zero and Commander Light, in talks with the Shadow Guard, had admitted that the taking of life was something they’d never quite gotten used to, even during the unholy nightmare that was the Elf Wars. “Given the way my systems were primed to the danger, to the task at hand, that wash of ‘dear Light, what have I done?’ didn’t hit until some time after we’d completed the raid, but it didn’t change the intensity with which it hit or keep me from buckling and just…I needed a few minutes before I could bring my emotional matrix back in line, even with Caidan and Pima trying to use calming signals to stabilize me.”
Would you rather have your only assignments be tailing Counselor Leto, or would you rather never have joined the Zan'ei?
At the question the other had asked, Heather blinked for a long moment before catching herself and shaking her head. "You have to understand one thing about me, Greyface. I am Lieutenant Colonel Heather Vitória Cristina Parkes, Beacon City Covert Operations build number one-five-three. I was made to be Zan'ei before the first bits of my frame had even been fabricated. I was born to serve under Stealth General Light, and I would rather my only service to the City be the continued protection of Counselor Leto than to have spit in the face of everything that I was meant to become. Now, if you would please be so kind as to turn around and walk right back through the hole you crept out of," and while her wording had been polite, her tone wasn't.
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