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Section 99 Story Framework - "Don't Scratch, You'll Make It Worse"
🕑 Added 2024-06-17 15:38:50 +0000 UTCWelcome back to Van, his galaxy of problems, and his means of navigating the mess with violence, charisma, or both.
OKAY SO JUST BEFORE WE GET STARTED, WE GOT SOME CANON CHANGES:
Hey so you remember that story, the Messes of More Together People? Didn't happen yet. Wasn't quite happy with how out of nowhere all that came in, and it really needed a better setup for a story that complex and potentially Difficult because of the subject matter (people weaponizing mental illness in others is a bugbear of mine and I really, really want to get the right tone of hatefulness toward folks who do that) and size.
So instead: here's what happens instead, the followup to Pirates Honor, Telin's story, where a bunch of people are going to be introduced, like Mr. Darcy, Frank Mendel and Galatea Galaxy. Don't worry, I'm not stoned, the timestream just skipped.
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“Don’t Scratch, You’ll Make It Worse”
--Outline--
We’re in the aftermath of Pirate’s Honor, where we left Telin and Keeda. It’s actually a day later from the call Telin got while they were eating lunch. Welcome to the briefing for what the fuck just happened:
Scumbag Stanley’s grift was just him being committed to small time evil, making as much blood money as he can via being the stupidest motherfucker he can be while still being competent and professional. He was extremely good at being a stuck door that scumbags could slide through, the sort of dude who was good at his job to the point here he satisfied all checkboxes, while being dense and unpleasant enough to be plausibly deniable in his ability to achieve what he was pulling off. His fatal flaw, is that he wasn’t the sort to make an exit plan, and once found out, he was also the sort of stupid to try to swing on a quantum. Figment responded by clawgripping him by the skull, volume-ripping his memory center with an unkind hand, and putting him in the hospital wing of the local lockup.
What Figment found was deeply, profoundly unpleasant, enough that he just had to go and give direct sitrep to Port of St. Joseph’s 99 operators, so they should know: Hey buncha fuckers were about to buy the familial leadership of two Line-bonded Rhidling Clans out of your backyard- you know about that?
The Saganda and the Ihr-Saganda aren’t Freelanders, but they aren’t the vicious extreme that a lot of other Outliers can be. In the words of Freeland aligned rhidlings, ‘they caught a bad case of Consortium economics’ and have some bad and destructive practices, but they aren’t the casual monsters of the laissez faire that other Outliers can be.
That said, they haven’t been exactly gentle about parting out the new homeworld for their materials corporation, which they have extremely little ethical reserve about who they sell to. Just because they take care of their own, doesn’t mean they take care of their neighbours.
St. Joe’s responds back: oh holy fuck, we got intel that one of the rocks in our debris field is a pirate fort and we’re trying to figure out which one, and why wasn’t it demolished when it was mined out.
Everyone involved with the mining that stone, from the most baseline-pay pickaxe swinger, to the foremen, to the administration staff, are now under watch by investigators in Local-97 and 98. According, they’ve already got members of the Dock Devils tailing people in plainclothes as counterterror elements in the city, and people are pissed that they’re having to pull that kind of shit in their backyard.
Two unpleasant things become clear from this: Hargrave is already trying to destabilize the Freelands with his backswing; and people inside of St. Joes’ leadership are willing to work with the motherfucker- it’s the only way something like this could happen under the peoples’ noses.
The destabilization thing might not have been intentional, but one way or another, if things had gone down as intended, members of the Maniro Clan that Telin and Keeda are a part of, would be directly implicated in the trafficking of the leadership of another Clan. The Maniros are one of the families that built Port of St. Joseph, there’s a shipyard named after them there, and whoever allowed this thing to happen in the first place would have had an easy scapegoat in them.
So this is why Telin and Keeda are being looped into the proceedings; that, and their ship, and Telin’s past as a 99 asset. She’s no stranger to situations that require the utmost secrecy, her certifications are unrenewed, but they never lapsed due to conduct or competency issues- the Gunshot Crown’s doors are still open to her, if she wants it.
Telin doesn’t like being made a villain, especially against her own people, and especially not by terrans. Terrans, who made her life on Terra hell; terrans, who shot her father for the crime of taking cover while being a rhidling, while another wanted rhidling was being shot at; terrans, who tried to vote them out of ownership of their own fucking starship during the exodus. Another fucking shot across her bow, in the fucking tolerant and harmonious Freelands.
At least she’d met a good terran in Figment, and of course, it’s probably because he’s a mutant among them, a quantum, someone that’d be treated about as well in the Low Town as a terra-born rhidling. He wants her aboard, because when he confirmed her story with his reading, he saw the sort of person she was, the sort of anger this stirred up in her, and the experience in her that was pulling at the leash.
Telin is a former 99 Privateer, an individual charged with the shipside operations in a smaller scale op, one that wouldn’t commission an actual naval accompaniment, one that’s more of an irregular group than formalized squad. She’s been away, because she was was given cause to take leave- a lonelier galaxy has a way of taking the fight out of a fighter.
But this isn’t what she was doing before in her mind, this is different. This is not the thing she was doing where she was going out and looking for trouble, this was her taking a slap across the face and responding with a closed fist that breaks an orbital bone.
Whoever put in this situation is going to have some blood on them that’s spilled by her, and whether it’s theirs or someone they’re in charge of, it will spill like a valve opened. You don’t make Telin Enara a trafficker by conspiracy.
Keeda is, of course, along with her, because in addition to being an asset by extension of Telin’s crew (not to mention that, technically, her family owns the Closeup Sunrise, not the Enaras, so she’d be the ones holding the papers on the ship for purposes of an op), she’s also a known engineering mind in the Freelands, the sort of mind that’s integral to keeping a ship with a small crew running. 99 ops generally like a small crew- fewer people that need to keep a secret, especially when her knowledge of starships, space engineering and astrophysics could easily allow her to serve in an advisory/analytical role.
The other members of the team include:
An absolute motherfucker as a pointman, who’s other jacket is made of dead slavers. (Hi, Van)
A quantum psionic native to St. Joes’ whose sitrep was alarmingly vulgar. (Snare, of course you’re here.)
A 99 heavy from the St. Joes’ local co-operative area that was completely okay with an op with very little outward-facing detail on the contract. (Sisu, a future 1-STF member, who is basically a cyborg that’s past he point of giving a fuck about anything other than Unmaking Bad Guys, but is very Finnish doom-zen about it.)
So the plan is simple, at least from a high overhead view: Inject themselves into the Matter of St. Joseph’s; find out who let this happen, from the Port Patrollers who have to be looking the other way, to the tunnel bosses that should have collapsed the mining tunnels in that asteroid after they were spent, to the colony councillors that might be involved at an administrative level; and then find out who they haven’t infected with their corruption, so they can either be dragged out into the street, kicked, and thrown into the Reform Colonies, or shot to death in a firefight that’ll do them the honour of making them a more honest enemy.
Obviously, this is easier said than done. Which is why the people going about it are going to be ‘two black ops cyborgs, a hitman turned militia agent, a privateer captain, an advanced engineer, and two psychics.’ To their credit, they do at least have a literal murderer’s row on their hands…
So it’s off to the trouble spot- the others have found their ways as disparate elements arriving at their own time. 99’s got a term for an insertion like that- Strangers on a Train.
En Route we learn more about Telin as a person and as a rhidling; specifically, we learn why she’s quite so reactive towards Terrans. The short version: it is a prejudice, but it’s the kind bred out of prejudice. It’s a symptom of her family and clan being seen as one of many Problems ing the ongoing Rhidling Situation as perceived by the Consortium, of her and her immediate family being displaced from their relatives, extended family and clan, to be shoved into the Consortium’s melting pot and made a More Compliant People. She was relocated to Mars, the Cydonia MPC, a place that was predominantly Low-Class Terran and Peasant Arissiyan, where her species was propagandized as a counter-Consortial vermin-people that was in the process of being “tamed.” Among Cydonians, who are by-average even less educated with even narrower cultural allowances than their counterparts on Terra or the Asteroid Stations, this was tantamount to being thrown into a cellblock owned by an arissiyan supremacist group. Her father was nonfatally wounded by cops because he dared to run from a shootout while Being a Rhidling; Telin was bullied, frequently physically, in full view of her preparatory facilitators, who did nothing but continue their lessons in machinery operation and Consortium civics; her neighbour was firebombed for daring to worship Rhidling gods- wasn’t even sectarian like it can get on Rhishay, this was just pure “Second Era Pantheon = The Alien Devil”; she and her brothers were frequently accosted and arrested on basic suspicions of crimes that happened in their vicinity, and not once had any of them been convicted, and yet despite this, they were forced to incur monetary penalties in order to clear their own names.
The final straw, was that during her family’s Freeland exodus, during which other members of the Maniro Clan paid with their lives, the Closeup Sunrise was almost ‘liberated’ from her family’s possession by Terrans looking to render all communal, including a starship that had been in her Clan’s possession since Terrans were using ironclads. When they resisted, these Good Communists decided that the Alien Menace was going to go Outlier and sell them into slavery, as is The Rhidling Way- words were said that couldn’t be taken back, because many of the people who said them are now dead. While Telin will admit that other Terrans fought for her and her people in that stupid, pointless moment of brutality, she’s also bitter down to her marrow that it even happened in the first place, that her father was once again downbore of a pistol in the hands of a Terran calling him vermin, all for the crime of slight noncompliance.
Telin will acknowledge that her animus toward Terrans is something she shouldn’t hold so tightly to, that it’s a flaw, not a quality and one she holds a quiet inward anger toward herself for; Telin will also state that she’d also like to get rid of her gun, too, but that’d also leave her defenseless.
And similar to her sidearm, her prejudice also has an automatic setting.
What she does know, is that Figment is a good man. She didn’t think she’d feel that about a guy whose first interaction with her was forcing his way into her brain and knocking her unconscious with a psi-command. But she understands why that happened, and she respects his honesty, his drive, and his own willingness to be understanding- common courtesy, from a guy that dresses like a ‘wizard rockstar’ by her own approximation.
Keeda thinks he’s hot; Telin doesn’t get Terran attractiveness- to big, too musky, too much in general.
So it’s time to head to Port of St. Joseph, in the Josephian Debris Field. The long story short with this place? A long, long time ago, there was an extremely mineral rich planet here; somehow, it got blown up, entirely. Some suspect some form of ancient foul play, another hinting at the lost aeons of Bad that the Freelands used to live in. The planetary chunks now live in the debris belt of the Wheelspur System, which like the name suggests, lives as the central point between the Gem Worlds of the Freelands, the 100+ Stable Colony worlds of Samoud, Evergreen and Omitochtli. It is a major shipping port, stockyard, and shipbuilding facility, and its mining and refineries put more steel, aluminum, copper and nickel into space than any other single sector of the Freelands, among other alloys and elements.
In other words, this isn’t just an outrageous place for a man like Hargrave to be allowed to operate, it’s one that could make the entire Freelands vulnerable- it losing its foundation as a trusted community could lead to political instability at an interstellar scale.
The trip was uneventful, as routine FTL space travel is, when it’s not a disastrous ordeal by sheer entropy or engineered disaster. But as is worth noting, Telin is a pilot that always factors entropy into her plans, and Keeda has engineered disaster out of her own capacity.
It is, of course to her own confirmation bias as a void-captain, exactly as soon as she gets off ship when things go wrong. The second things are out of her control…
Heinz Rowland, a safety inspector in the mined out rock, is showing nerves in a big time way, enough that he’s gone and made himself stick out among the crowd. Specifically, he seems to know that pieces are moving, and as a result, he’s hastily pulled up stakes and began moving out of the colony. As luck would have it, he’s trying to make it through the port terminal just as the Closeup Sunrise is pulling in, and people are playing catchup to get into position.
And what they don’t know is, Rowland’s own people aren’t about to let him do something stupid, either…
So the situation as of the Sunrise displacing back into spacetime-proper: Rowland is currently making his way through the terminal, with present Operators in play tailing him, as martialled by Detective Shawnique Bains of the Traffick/Trade Violations squad of the St. Joe’s SecVols. They’re not in position, however: Canine and Snare are caught in St. Joe’s infamous internal colony traffic- you try building a road network inside of an asteroid that works properly, all the time, it’s fucking harder than you think. Meanwhile, Sisu was staked out at the Port, but has remained radio silent for about a half an hour. Bains is instead trying to run interference the best way she knows how, through bureaucracy, but her usual tricks aren’t working as they normally do- in her words, “Bains must be calling in a favour from the outside, and getting the side-door treatment.”
In some sense, he is; in others, he’s about to be pulled into a trap by people who’d rather have him dead than mobile.
From outside the colony, Telin can see the trick Rowland is trying, a move favoured by VIP smugglers and kidnappers: a hot-dock, where the ship feigns a minor malfunction or a missed shot during a docking manuever so as to stall for time, eat up time in the schedule, and basically force checks and customs to be crunched into the equivalent of a Hello, How’s Your Mom, Bye so as not to block up the entire port and bring the fucking Freelands to a standstill. It makes it so that people that need to just sneak aboard ship without a proper check can, while people that might be following them don’t have time to, as long as it’s played right. It’s something that people are told not to do, but it happens anyway, because ultimately, the alternative isn’t the desirable outcome, and it’s one of the ways Freeland trafficking crimes occur the easiest- through people not doing the fucking job properly.
From what Telin can see, Rowland’s commissioned ride, the Catalina Island, is pulling the “oh jeez, towers, my fine manuevering thrusters have gone miscalibrated in displacement, give me a bit to get them directionally synced out here, wouldn’t want to bump a thousand tons of steel into your space colony now, would you?” trick.
At which point, Telin sees her shot- she gives Keeda and Figment the call to brace, then quietly ramps up the power of the Sunrise’s shielding- a ‘debris shove,’ a little trick done when pulling into a port like St. Joes to potentially clear the way of anything that might ding the exterior of a ship before needing to deactivate the shields entirely, due to the threat of Close Spatial Turbulence affecting the dock, the other nearby ships, or the colony itself.
Oops, and she just happens to have the right of way against the Catalina Island, who is technically out of the way, but also in reasonable “bro watch your jet, WATCH YOUR JET” range. So as she performs her perfectly reasonable debris shove, the Catalina’s slightly shady thruster test causes a minor explosive interaction that shunts both ships, mostly the Catalina, as their shields were off at that point.
With satisfaction, Telin notes she caused mostly superficial damage to the Catalina, the only effect to her functionality being mostly due to thrusters gaussed-up from a violent interaction with a Static Potential Field. You know, the sort of damage that requires a recalibration at most…
“Tower, do me a favour? Yell at those assholes for pulling their smugger’s trick in my way, yeah? Buncha amateurs.” [comms click]
“Get voidsick and fall out of your seats, buncha gakkosi half-a-pirates.”
You don’t even need to ask how Telin gets through customs on this: “Do not pull that Equals in Safety shit when someone’s pulling a dodgy maneuver in the open because you’re not enough of a stevedore to call some shitheel trafficker’s bluff. You know how dirty that move is, and if you want to bring that up to my Union rep, I’ll bring one motherfucker of a report to the meeting, along with Maniro’s legal team. Thank you, you’re welcome, you can bill them for the damages to my paint job at your leisure. I appreciate it.”
Of course she said it loud enough so that the supervisor heard it, why wouldn’t she.
It is at this point that Telin is just slightly a little more keyed than she’d like to admit, because in this moment, inward to her, the rush is hitting her again, and it’s like an addict falling off the wagon. It’s more powerful than she’s expecting because she hasn’t felt it in a while, and it’s made all the worse because she’s taking it all in at the level of bluster and swagger she would have when she was more numb to the action. Heelcutter wants this petty little slaver man. Heelcutter wants to cut his heels and make him swim with the sea’s many predators. Heelcutter wants to keelhaul Rowland’s corpse as her triumphant return to…
Figment mentally slaps her on the back of the head. He sees what’s happening to her, because he saw the passion in her before, her will to see this through for the sake of moving forward; he also saw the danger in her lighting the fire too bright, too soon, and forgetting she’s been away too long to be quite the same privateer she once was in every aspect.
Instead, he urges her: head on a swivel- if you’ve got the experience you say you do, you’d know what to look for in someone trying to make a hasty exit, someone who might be making a scene under the circumstances.
She asks why he’s not listening for his stress; Figment replies that she sorta raised the collective stress level in everyone in a one hundred meter radius of him at least with her astronautical bodycheck, which is a reasonable response.
Which means that it takes for a moment for the clamour to even become audible, the port terminal is so thick with people, who are now chattering amongst themselves, but also too polite to look directly at the tense-looking rhidling small-liner captain, the terran wearing an amp and about three hundred meters of black ink implanted into his skin, and a little smug librarian goblin-woman that looks like she’s capable of anything. But it doesn’t take long for the man throwing the tantrum at a gate agent to present himself, redfaced, ruddy, sweating like a man strapped to a firing squad post.
Figment tells Telin to hold again, wait until he gets a clear thought- there’s too much static in the way, too much agitation to hear what he’s thinking, if he is even thinking.
Get closer- we can hear if he’s pulling any “do you know who I am?” shit and he’s stupid enough to say his name, is Telin’s idea.
Telin manages to hear a “Mr. Rowland” and it almost makes her reach for her sidearm; she catches herself before Figment does, though he still speaks directly into her mind: “Hold it- a lot of stress, with some odd cold spots in the room. Stay back, stay cool.”
He’s got a read on at least two signals:
“Gentleman” Jim Argall, another bionic zombie that’s been loosed into the living ecosystem, though one that’s both technically more advanced than Lazzo in terms of tech generation, but also more early in his progression. He far more easily passes as a living human, but there’s still something uncanny about the way his face moves, or rather, doesn’t. He talks like the Executioner from Blazing Saddles, if he was 7’2 and built like a rugby wing. Reputedly a member of Fog Clan’s Special Enforcement Service on paid assignment, though some seem to think he’s been burned for some reason- he’s not as wired as he should be for someone as undead as he is…
“Holdout” Hal Harper, a man with two guns in his arms and a tenuous grip on himself. Once upon a time, was considered a reliable security specialist that effectively worked as a freelancer between the Bidwell Street Entertainment Syndicate, and some would swear up and down he’s still reliable. In actuality, the guy’s slow burn of a mess, a man who doesn’t understand he’s dying a death to addiction, because it’s one that isn’t physically killing him. He’s been bit by the gambling bug, and it’s one that’s made him realize just how much he can valuate the worth of people as money…
He also can’t get a read on a really, really big threat:
Gator, a full blown Alpha X-Ray like Lazzo, a synthetic bastard in the guise of a perfectly ignorable bore of a man, a former 99 cogitoi that gave into the quiet ruthless mindset of Nothing is Real But War and the Machines that Fight It. His dirty secret: he’s a military model android, sure, but he was a Loyalty Model, a glorified listening device, and not the high speed combat model he claims he is and has convinced himself he is. His frame could be described as “a hot rod, as designed by an intensely boring and hateful man that sees conspiracy in friendship.” So, y’know, an android modified by Boyd Coddington, may he rest in peace in his uninspired billet aluminium casket. Has a shotgun hidden in his throat, concealed by a horrifying trapjaw that opens up to deliver a brutal close range coup de grace. His modus operandi: be fucking driftwood, right up until it’s time to tear someone’s head off, then become a blur of motion, violence and cold-blooded hatred. He’s an absolute nightmare person, one that specifically denies his own personhood, preferring to self identify as pure self-sustaining technology out of a sheer self-inspired malevolent superiority complex toward everything that’s Not Him. The sort of individual that deserves a ego death before a regular, violent death. Luckily, Van has a way of getting in the head of people like this.
So in other words, three synthetics wired to kill, sent with the purpose of making sure one mid-level guy in the local mining union doesn’t leave the city, or presumably talk to anyone he shouldn’t. What does he know?
They don’t really get the chance to ponder the question, when Sisu resumes comms contact:
“Sorry for the quiet. Been busy.” Then they crash through the wall, locked in combat with:
Bill “Forklift” Barlow, a newcomer to the local underground that’s already made a name for himself, but in all the wrong ways. A tank cyborg that seems to have misunderstood the nature of the Freelands from the jump, or at least someone who doesn’t mind conducting questionable business in public places. It was such a nice neighbourhood before he showed up, said every neighbour this motherfucker ever had since he hit puberty. Apparently, this is his last chance for whoever he’s working for, because the man’s used to failing upwards because of his augs’ ability to make him last man standing. This is why Sisu was tailing him- for as big and unsubtle as Sisu is, they’re a stealth bomber compared to the noise machine that Forklift is, the literal only thing that could draw attention away from them and onto him.
And of course, here’s where everything turns to chaos, because all of the sudden there’s a pair of heavy synthetics smashing into each other like kaiju in a goddamned port terminal. This is one of those situations where on-site armed SecVols present arms but don’t shoot, for all sorts of reasons, starting with “shooting’s going to get a bunch of bystanders killed through panic, let alone Whom It May Concern Fire” and “uh I don’t think an SMG’s gonna do much to either of those folks.” They are both mostly machine and not a lot of meat, and clearly built for war.
Sisu does at least exhibit the frame of mind to identify as 99 once in public, though. So the people at least know which one is the good kaiju.
This is when Figment manages to lock to series of loud surface thoughts, alerting him that Holdout and Gentleman Jim are moving to intercept Rowland. He alerts Telin to move in with him, that Keeda should get to cover and pull her defensive. Telin almost eagerly reaches for her Kitalagi pistol, and Figment has to tell her to leash it- he’s got a better plan, a vulnerability he spotted in Holdout’s surface psyche.
“I’ll pay you a hundred Gs in nonsequential Reale bills to put both guns on the kurac you’re running with. You know you need this,” he broadcasts directly into Hal’s brain.
Holdout, being an entirely petty mind, immediately bites the bait, opening both his arms at head level in Gentleman Jim’s direction. After a moment of angry confusion, Jim plays his gambit, and given that he’s not the brightest spark either, it’s a big-ham hock swing aiming to take Holdout’s head off. So Holdout shoots him in the head three times, sending him reeling like a superkicked mannequin… which causes him to zombie stand with legs only, then avalanche all over Holdout with E-rated hands in full Frankenstein-mode. Holdout, being mostly meat despite his gimmick arms, thus goes ragdolling into the running madness of the terminal, coma-deep unconscious.
Jim’s half-braindead, but that’s fine, as the dark shit his physiology has become lets him just overdrive the other half into his nominal malevolent and stunted intellect. His head on the swivel, he makes the two figures standing him down with weapons drawn against the chaos. Figment makes the right call to go for volume, and moves to sickle the fucker’s nervous system apart with the biggest Electromagnetic Lance he can manage, but it’s the wrong move for Jim- LazTech cyborgs feed off of dirty electricity through their bleak science, so that was basically a quantum B12 shot for all Jim gives a shit.
But as he advances through the maelstrom unexpectedly, Telin doesn’t buckle at the sight of a weapon ineffective against enemy armour; her void-combat instincts kick in, and she shifts the angle of attack against the enemy vector.
In sane people terms: she displaces to the side, slides on her knees to make herself small, and then tears one of Jim’s legs out from under him with a full mag from her nail pistol. Because if you can’t splash a target, you can try for the mobility kill or disarm instead.
In further sane people terms: if the guy’s got a vest and a helmet? Shoot him in the dick instead, and make a point while breaking a pelvis.
Main issue here: Telin’s cool move put her in reach of Gator, the one hostile that Figment couldn’t make, and his trigger is quick. In one motion, he’s on her, mouth open, trapjaw sprung, both barrels brought to bare.
The World Goes White. So why is Telin still alive?
“NOT PARANOIA IF YOU REALLY DID GROW A TAIL, YOU FUCKIN’ NERD!”, we hear Van roar in the blunted confusion.
See that’s the issue here: it’s kinda hard to break a hold by a synthetic that strong and purpose-driven without using an awful lot of force. Which is to say, Van speared the both of them, in a pile, and hoped that Telin was as tough as she looked at first glance. She is, but also: Van is 300+ pounds and moves like a linebacker moving at 4x speed when he’s going Cruise Velocity, and he threw on the burners to make that tackle- he was trailing his bionic green Mishima electricity when he made the impact, and that’s why Telin momentarily thought she’d been spaced out into a nebula.
Which is why she aims in a daze, with an empty gun, at the both of them- Figment stabs her in the brain and tells her to Wake Up, ‘Cutter, Black Jacket Guy With the Eyebrow Scar is Canine, Help Him.
“Hi hello Figment, my brain is bruised and I think this Large Dog character might have done it, and I am just largely indifferent to the idea of consciousness at the moment…”
“TAKE A SWING, GIMMICK BOY!” Howls Van; despite everything, he’s smiling, because of course he’s fucking high.
Gator’s attack is deceptive, unpredictable, efficient and completely unbuilt by skill, but generated by AI optimization; the Canine in Van sees it coming a mile off, as there’s no individual technique to it, no improvisation, no waver from rage or fear overpowering practice, nothing to make it dangerous versus a man rebuilt into a personalized homing missile that can talk trash at volume 11 while shooting your homeboys’ kneecaps out. The attack is so built by algorithm, the Canine violently groans and decides it has to make its combat solution interesting itself.
Which is to say, Van jukes to one side, orienting his back toward Rowland and his party, as they’re desperately trying to force their way into a boarding gate that won’t open, because the VOIDWAY IS OPEN TO SPACE, DUMBASS, GET AWAY OR YOU’LL KILL EVERYONE. As Gator zigs, zags, inverts, then does something an AI thought was clever, Van pulls a full Samoa Joe, and hits him with the Nope in fast forward.
Gator is so lost in his attack, he doesn’t realize he didn’t grab Van, but one of Rowland’s guards. Whatever, might as well kill someone: trap jaw full open, bite down, BOOM, thanks for coming, Timmy, or whatever your name was.
Flying brains and skull tend to add even more panic to a room already in uproar, but Van is blazed on a furious concoction of natural cannabinoids, synthetic adrenaline and bionic superiority complex; He Does Not Care.
“SOMEHOW YOU STILL MISSED, ASSHOLE!” he crows, pupils fully open and wreathed with green electricity. Six automag shots fired execution style from a gangster grip makes Gator do a little thrash dance from his prone position on the corpse of his victim. The Canine frowns as it registers no penetration: armoured clothes over armoured body- you motherfucker, that’s MY strat!
The kick that bends Van in half and sends him flying makes him glad his stomach a mesh-steel bag and his digestive tract is carbon fiber hosing. That, and that he had a light lunch.
“HUH I DIDN’T KNOW TWO SUITS FOR A FIFTY CAME WITH ARAMID PANELS!” Van says, loading Greentips. “GUESS BORING MOTHERFUCKERS WOULD BUY BURLAP CONDOMS IF THEY HAD A PICTURE OF A GREY MAN ON THE BOX.”
Even my ancestors want you to shut up, stubend, you are too fucking loud at any volume, Telin manages to think from underneath her headache. It manages to be a productive thought, as formulating it gives her enough coherence to spot Rowland getting froggy and making a jump for the exit sign. Pressing off the deck, she loads a new mag and moves to pursue- fuck a concussion, a staggering rhidling is still faster than a sprinting terran in her book.
‘Cutter, stop! Is the broadcast Figment manages to get off before a clothesline from Gentleman Jim makes him wish he’d worn his thicker trenchcoat. Against Figment’s reckoning, the guy managed to make his leg work again. Actually you know what, fuck it, this is a cluster, just get Rowland.
As Telin moves to pursue and Rowland begins practically crowdsurfing to get away, we get a brutal glimpse of the end of Forklift, a guy who was about as built to deal with Sisu as he sounds: Sisu, having weathered the storm of a pair of unbelievably strong lifting arms, managed to dismantle Fork’s meat enough that his lifting frame buckled its rivets and came loose from the bone. Paralyzed under the weight of his own misaligned and damaged augs, Fork can only struggle as Sisu forces his arms into crucifix, disables their own safety limiters and opens the emergency exhaust on their bionic heart, which just happens to be a volatile prototype antimatter generator.
The Cosmic Pyre, as it’s known, exhales a single breath that expands like a short burst from a propane torch. It flames Forks in the upper chest, and turns everything from his collarbones up into a white fireball that collapses into atomic vapour, leaving the rest of him a squirming, thrashing, brainless wicker man. Sisu simply stands and lets him mortally shamble off their undefeatable frame, no taunt but their for their continued existence against all odds- the bitterly complex melancholy of frustration and contentment that comes with “I win. I always win.”
Forklift dies, curling into a red, grey and black knot from an unnatural flame that’s somehow still sustaining a scattering brightness, despite it consuming pure char for fuel. Nothing but unabashed “Jesus Christ, even Dr. Faustus wouldn’t use that corpse” energy in that kill.
It’s all background noise in the living hallucination that Telin finds herself in. She recognizes the terminal, but it’s so much bigger now in a dazed brainspace, and it inverts on her at one point. Fuck it, he’s not getting away. She’s not going to shoot until she sees one Rowland instead of four, but fuck it, he’s not getting away.
Out into the streets of the Wallward Docks district, where the world becomes a high-ceilinged dreamscape for Telin, the sort to make her think why are there fish above the city and the short answer is “those are scrubber drones, you’re having a mild hallucination.”
Fuck it he’s not getting away.
It’s the thought she has when she manages to martial her stunned body into a predator pounce, tackling Rowland down an inclined loading ramp, into a low-volume specialty stockyard. How ironic, it’s where the stuff Telin that would be nominally moving in her life as a space trucker would be stored.
“FREEZE, GAKKUZ, I’LL MAKE ALL FOUR OF YOU HIT HELL IF I HAVE TO!”
Now what occurs here is a momentary standoff, akin to a western, if one of the cowboys is a concussed alien and the other is a slightly rugged paper pusher in a trafficking scheme. Which is why when Rowland, eyes full of fear, finds himself reaching for a gun he isn’t prepared to use, and drawing down on a rhidling who’s compromised in her ability to use hers.
Telin switches to semiauto, and manages to catches him on the 3rd round… on the outside of the deltoid, only spinning him slightly. Rowland manages to get his weapon up and the sudden shock of him getting his shoulder ballistically unzipped makes him squeeze on impulse…
…hitting nothing but pavement. Because shots from a different source riddle him to pieces, full auto fire from a pair of guns, so loud they send everyone sheltering nearby into a full-blown panic. It’s fucking Holdout Hal, who managed to also make his brain work again in the confusion.
“Hey,” he says to her. “Nice catch.” He smirks and levels off at her next.
Which is when Van comes in at full boost, grabbing Holdout in a goozle that momentarily makes his vision go dark at the edges, and makes his ankles kick over his head.
“GUESS WHOSE FRIENDS ARE ALL DEAD?!” he happy-bellows, green electricity overloading out of his eyes, arcing between his teeth, high as balls off killer’s delight, and also 35% THC mutant indica.
“OH JESUS GOD” Holdout manages to struggle through his neck struts.
“HE’S NOT FUCKIN LOOKIN, PAL, IT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE!”
Hal manages to get an angle from his grip, and Van has to throw him to bend out of the way of his full auto blast. But Hal isn’t a particularly built-out cyborg, nor is he either an acrobat or pro-wrestler, and thus being thrown as a projectile is an alien sensation for him, so he lands hard. He tries to gather himself but he can only aim at sensor shadows from both grey-matter daze and momentary bionic I/O desync.
Hey shut up that’s a thing, it was how Metal Gear Rising explained how cyborgs can get stunned. IT’S MORE COMMON THAN YOU MIGHT THI-
Which means that when Holdout gets one of his guns up, Van kicks his arm in half at the elbow, twists through his shot, and rotates through with a stabbing sweep kick to the sternum that sends the literal-gunman flying into the passenger side door of a nearby compact pickup. His good arm crashes through the window, firing up through the roof of the truck, and Van surges in, wrecking it like a bloomed tank barrel with a boosted Yakuza kick that bends it against the frame of the car.
“Look who just volunteered to play HVT!” Van says, just over the din of Holdout Hal screaming from a pair of destroyed limbs- augs be damned, involuntary bio-haptic feedback hurts. Van shuts him up by grabbing him by the jaw, whipping Hal by his own gaping face into the onslaught of the one that turned the tide of the fight:
“Take him, Snare!”
The last thought Holdout Hal has, before he wakes up in a desert made of white marble, staring into a pair of twin suns, is “oh, that’s a really soft hand.”
Then he screams out of every orifice in his head, as Snare forcibly smooths off his brain, forcibly incepting him into a nightmare of total incompetence. No better state of mind than to perform a detailed volume rip in a more controlled environment.
“I had him,” Telin says.
“I know, good work,” Van says, genuine. She does not interpret this as such.
“Asshole,” she says, flopping over, done for the day.
“Don’t mention it,” Van says, wondering once again what the fuck he did wrong.
So now we’re at Shawnique’s secured office, in the aftermath- she’s not at the Dock Devils’ HQ, she’s got herself set up in a secured and up-armoured set of unmarked containers in a yard more inland to the settlement. You know, it pays to have a contingency plan, especially when you work in the Security Volunteer sector.
As of right now, Heelcutter and Figment are getting patched up from the scuffle, while Sisu and Canine have quietly checked themselves into the local university’s cybernetic medical center to check for any potential needed repairs. This just means Snare is around to handle debriefs at the moment.
“So explain to me what happened.” “Aside from traffic?”
Scenes from an Unpleasant Situation:
Gator attempts to press his advantage against Van, but Rowland’s security team makes the mistake of opening up against him; their nines and tens bounce off his armoured anti-fashion, and he hoses out another of them with a reloaded double-blast from his gullet-gun.
Gentleman Jim has Figment in a one-legged double goozle, mostly because Figment is still at a loss for why this big asshole isn’t dying from the baker’s dozen-worth of electric chair-level zaps he’s been trying to level him with. As a last ditch, he digs the clawed tips of his amp’s hand affector into Jim’s eyes, reaching for his mind- he finds malevolent stupidity from severe degradation and rot, motivated back to intellect by highly logical machines, something somehow recognizably terran but also unreadably alien at the same time. But it’s a brain regardless, and one with a very terran vulnerability: Brainzaps.
“Take your meds, asshole,” says Figment, as his switch from ranged electrokinetics to direct neurokinetics find purchase. Which is to say, “Gentleman Jim starts screaming and convulsing like a man being shot from inside-out with a small caliber gun by the person he just swallowed whole.”
He tag teams him into the path of Snare, who takes that moment to spring her trap and do as she does: one-shot someone in fucking terrifying fashion.
Because Snare did have time to bridge her mind properly to Jim’s thoughts- Figment bought it for her. She tuned herself to find the signal in his undead noise, and she locked to his frail, furiously childlike inner voice by tracking his pandirectional hatred and wide-dispersal wrath. In his neuron-fried daze, she grabs him in her own gentle goozle, and in Gentleman Jim’s mind, reality violently implodes. The walls cave in instantly, pulverizing everyone present, turning running, fighting, panicking bodies into mashed rubble, rushing inward with the stone and bulkheads as sludgy wreckmass, on him, only him, the last alive to take the vicing punishment of the room’s full and enormous mass. In his mind, he’s the only one cognizant of it happening, and in what Snare crafted to be a general-issue mixup based on pure fucking terror, she manages to find the one thing Jim is actually afraid of: a world more insane and unafraid than he is. As he’s crushed by the unbearable weight of a literally collapsing society, we cut back to the real world, where Gentleman Jim, the Lazarus-revenant cyborg, dies his next death with an utterly lost look on his face- that wasn’t just a kill, that was a critical hit. He winks out from a fatal stroke via neural shock stimulated by a violently realistic hallucination. Real enough to make him believe he’s dead, so much so that the Him that lives (potentially) forever in his Laz-Tech blackbox is despondent enough to forget to try to raise himself.
For about a half an hour, anyway. More on that in a bit.
As Van tries to displace and gain an angle on Gator, the remainders of Rowland’s security split their fire between synthetics. Van takes a few rounds off his jacket and he dips to cover; Gator responds by puking buckshot at another of the poor bastards and taking their arm off at the elbow. The momentary horror is enough to let Van get an angle on the second to last goon and stab out his brain with a headshot.
“SURRENDER, DOROTHY, AND LET ME KILL THE BIG ONE!” Van offers to the unwounded survivor. Force Surrender Check passes- the dummy relents in their attack, and instead tends to their wounded comrade, tying off their arm with their belt.
Gator brings his gullet-gun to bear on Van, and of course Van has to shout “DON’T MISS AGAIN, DICKWAD!” as insult to injury as he veers off the cogitoi’s sightline. The buckshot spills wide; Van puts a fusillade of shots through Gator’s torso, and he yelps when the Greentips bite through and hit him in his soft parts. He gets his arms up to block incoming fire, and that just gives the Canine reason to shoot his knees out.
As he tries to load a shot into his gullet-gun, Van does as Van does: something ludicrous and showy. He shuts the fucker’s mouth, with of all things, a Shining Wizard. This is an inopportune time for this to happen, as Gator proceeds to blow this own lower face off with his own gimmick weapon and a reflexive shot.
Stunned, blinded and without functioning legs, Gator is completely vulnerable as Van slides through his strike, flares to his feet, and grabs Gator by the inside of his massive headwound. With a burst of boosted strength, he kicks Gator’s body loose from his head, spiking his broken skull like a football atop his carcass.
“You know, a lot of stuff like that,” Snare continues.
“How do you people even live?” Inspector Bains asks her, interrupting the recap.
“Drugs, alcohol and energy drinks for most. I prefer austerity. Meditation and philosophy is good for the spirit.” Snare replies. “Casual sex also helps, sometimes.”
“So then what went right?”
“We eliminated a member of the Conspiracy of St. Joseph’s.”
“Which we were intending to capture for the purposes of intel and interro.”
“Yes, but instead we have what a man sent to kill him knows, which is arguably a quicker upline when you have not one but two elite-level quantums performing a physical interrogation of his Mind Palace. Although in his case, it’s mostly a Mind Squalid Studio Apartment, which is why easy work is anticipated.”
“And yet, significantly fewer members of the Conspiracy neutralized than we first thought.”
“Well, Lazarus-tech is unpredictable, and synthetics are durable…”
Another broken down meatwagon. Another slaughtered crew. Gentleman Jim is gone, and he stole both Gator’s carcass and head. A nearby service door to an undercity maintenance tunnel has been forced open, but the trail ends once it leads to the moisture sluice warrens- man got away through the knee-deep collected condensation of everyone’s body heat and breathing, with a dead cogitoi on his shoulders. He might be ugly, stupid and unstable, but Gentleman Jim is nigh unstoppable.
“...we have to better ourselves about burning those heizeka on the scene. With plasma torches, since apparently incendiaries don’t even work as they should…”
Shawnique takes a moment to digest this. What she knows about the place where she works, where she lives, where she’d die for: it had become infected by an outside threat, pirates, dealers, slavers, and all of them working for one man: “Captain” Aldous Hargrave, the Man with Four Iron Fists. Worse, his agents were not just unwelcome invaders, but ones with a seeming foothold in the city through inside connections. Something had gone terribly wrong in colonial leadership, because now, people she should trust, people that should have solidarity in union and community, are either being paid to lie, or being paid to repeat false information, either/or. Just keep chasing the small-timers in the city, let a few get caught up in the usual dragnet to make people think it’s business as usual, but when a pattern gets noticed, it’s never business as usual. Someone on the Colony Council is responsible for this, maybe in the
Shawnique is feeling the paranoia of not wearing a set of blinders, and feeling like everyone around her is and wondering why she isn’t. This is why she’s reached for section 99- this isn’t a case any more, this is an operation, one that requires surgery. Which is why she’s slightly tense over how things turned out today.
“So who’s our man Holdout Hal know?”
Telin’s not having a good recovery. I mean, she’s fine, but she’s also pissed, specifically. That was not the return to form she wanted, and from her days, she’s having trouble not blaming it on that terran, Canine. That sort of anger and frustration you feel when you got pissed at someone in a dream, that’s not real but also entirely too real- that’s what she’s feeling, as Keeda’s urging her to stay in the clinic bed, the docs aren’t sure her legs aren’t just gonna stinger out from under her yet if she leaves now.
Which is when Canine appears in the doorframe, telling them they need to leave now.
Fuck he’s so fucking annoying, is what she thinks.
“Fine, twist my arm about it,” Telin says instead.
“Quiet and quick. This place ain’t secure…”
“The clinic?”
“The city.”
Quiet tension. Telin isn’t fully in her head yet, and everything to her is muted, distant, being called from far away on a dark night. Nothing seems wrong at first, which is why when Van piles her and Keeda into an actual van that’s being driven by Sisu and already has Figment waiting, it feels like much ado about nothing. And that’s when the SecVol cars show up, two marked, two unmarked, and everyone that comes out of them in low-pro armour, carrying their sidearms or bigger.
They go in through the front- nobody stops them from holding the door open, it’s just SecVols doing work, after all, something bad must be happening.
Something is, just not what they think.
“Who called them?” Figment asks, more frustrated than wondering.
“Bains can’t get a straight answer. Which means her section is compromised from the top down.”
“Figured as much.”
Telin is momentarily taken by how the street and the cars are framing the view: she can see up onto the cavern wall, and the blue ivy of the Maniro Clan compound that was located on the lower overhang. Sadness. Fury. Clarity. She’s fully in the moment now- she’s got a motherfucker of a headache, but now the grogginess is background noise to the sort of anger she should have been feeling from the start. Cold fusion- the sort of power that seethes but goes no further, while powering an entire megalopolis.
“We got a name? We got an address?” She asks.
“We got multiple of each, but we need more time to pin ‘em down properly. Psychic shit, y’know,” Van responds.
“When you move, I move. You’ll need someone to show you?”
“Yeah?” Van replies. “You sober enough to drive?”
“...you’re annoying.” She manages, through her headache.
