05-16-2018, 10:10 PM
“Guess you can’t kiss me now,” Aisha slurred. From her tone and the defeat on her face, it almost seemed as if she had anticipated this to turn into some bizarre version of Romeo and Juliet.
“What?” Seventeen shot back as a smirk started to form on the edges of his mouth. He couldn’t get out his next thought—a carefully crafted quip designed to disarm and move on from the situation. Instead of some high-quality sass from the cyborg, an explosion went off in the main hall. The ground shuddered violently as the machine-hybrid reflexively threw out his hands to brace himself against the walls of the stall. Beneath the standing man, Aisha lost her grip on the bowl as the shaking elicited some more vomit from her depleted stomach.
Before Seventeen could react, two explosions tore through the adjacent room in short succession. For all his training and physical fitness, the cybernetic warrior couldn’t hold his balance through both blasts. The tremors tore apart the linoleum, causing the walls of the stall to snap off and topple like dominos. One moment, the cyborg was grimacing and up on his feet, and faster than he could blink an eye, he was collapsed on top of a slumped, vomit-scented Aisha.
“Cover your head!” He barked as pieces of the ceiling started to crash down onto them. In the distance, he could hear screams and what sounded like gunfire. Were they under siege? Before he could right his focus, a chunk the size of a dinner plate struck the crown of his head and exploded, and with it, the cyborg lost consciousness.
When he regained his grip on the world, Seventeen’s first concern was his companion. Even though he could feel nothing south of his waist, he tried to turn his blurred eyes and ensure the well-being of the medic. Even after his vision found its focus, he could see nothing—there was a thick haze that lay over everything. The air smelled like sulfur and shit, and the fact that his impaired hearing could pick up the sound of gushing fluids led him to believe that the plumping had been grossly compromised.
“Aisha?” He asked, his voice barely able to muster enough strength to be heard over the ringing in his head. The blonde should have been right there next to him. He had smacked the floor just a few inches from her right knee, so unless the ground had collapsed, she couldn’t be far.
Before he could find Aisha, the cyborg heard the crunch of something wooden just a few yards away from his position. “Is anyone alive in here?” A voice shouted through the voice tech of a stormtrooper helmet.
“Y-yes,” Seventeen croaked as he lifted his hand to be seen through the fallout. Closing his eyes to the dust, he waited as the thuds drew closer. Hands grabbed onto his shoulder and wrenched him up off the ground with a little too much gusto for his taste. The raven-haired warrior’s eyes popped open as he tried to blink away the dust. “What happened?”
“Nothing to worry about, Sir,” the man replied as he reached for his waist.
Seventeen didn’t bother. He lifted a hand and grimaced as he summoned a ki saber. The cylindrical shaft of energy roared up from his bloodstained palm and slipped silently through the soldier’s lightly armored chest and out his back. A glance down showed what the cyborg had expected: A sidearm just a few inches from a now quaking fistful of digits.
When the hands on him went limp, Seventeen relaxed his own grip and had to shift his own weight to avoid the mass of the stormtrooper. The dead weight thudded past him onto the twisted remains of a bathroom stall.
***
Trixie was calling the shots from what remained of the main room. Her subordinates had arrived, and the situation was under control. Or, at the very least, there was a nice façade of control laid out over the scorched husk of the banquet hall. “Causalities?” She barked as she moved to confront the local response teams.
“Uhh,” an unarmored trooper with the local branch of the police muttered. The man had beads of sweat around both temples. It was clear from his lack of chill that he had never dealt with a situation like this during his tenure. “I think they’re still sifting through the people.”
“The bodies,” Trixie clarified, her expression hardening as she looked the little man up and down. Without a follow up, she stepped forward and grabbed the small piece of tech from his hands. A single glare wilted what remained of the policeman’s confidence, and he quickly shifted away to tend to his own subordinates, leaving Trixie to process the information on the data pad. The list of casualties had yet to be cross-referenced with the party-goers.
A voice from across the wreckage of the dining hall yanked Trixie’s focus from the handheld screen. “Ma’am!”
The Captain craned her neck to see a trio of armored troopers helping a scrawny, bloodied man walk his way over to her. “You’re alive,” she replied as Seventeen lifted his head to meet her gaze. The woman’s tone was stern, but the cyborg saw the faint glitter in her eyes that betrayed the truth of the matter. “You are a stubborn one.”
“Yea,” Seventeen groaned as he politely shrugged off the troopers. After making sure he could stand on his own two feet, he spat some more bloody flecks of tile and paint from his mouth. “It’s a good thing they didn’t know that my weakness is a rocket to the face.”
“What?” Trixie asked, furrowing her brow as she spotted an unconscious Aisha being carried into the room.
“Long story,” the cyborg smirked as he followed his commanding officer’s gaze back to the medic. In the haze of being manhandled over to Trixie, he had forgotten to ask if they had found anyone else under all that debris. “She alive?” Instead of waiting for an answer, the raven-haired warrior jogged over and helped the soldiers lower the woman down onto one of the many blankets laid out in the ruins of the banquet hall. Seventeen cupped the right side of her face in one hand as his other felt the side of her throat for a sign of life.
“She has a pulse,” one of the soldiers answered as they took another sweep of the nonresponsive medic with their tech.
Just as they had said, Seventeen eventually found the faint yet telltale sign of life within the partially scorched form of Aisha.
“Scans show that she’s stable, but she needs to be transferred to a medical facility if a full recovery can be expected.” Those remarks weren’t aimed at the man crouched on the ground but instead at his commanding officer, who still stood a few yards back. “Should I prep here for transfer, Ma’am?”
“Negative,” Trixie remarked as she put a hand up to her ear. “I’ll have the boys with Able Company fast-track her back to the Sulaco. They’ll treat her there… it should be quicker than any civilian installation.”
“Of course, Ma’am,” the local responder said firmly as he scampered off to assist with the other injured survivors.
Before he left his former companion for the evening, the cybernetic warrior removed his bandana and used it to wipe away some of the dust and dried blood that marred Aisha’s face. Once you could tell she was a person, he tied the garment around her neck and smoothed it out so it lay flat on her chest. Was this his fault? The feeling in his gut certainly made it seem like he was somehow to blame for the woman’s present state.
“What’s the move?” Seventeen broke the silence and rose back to a fully vertical stance. He shifted his gaze back to Trixie and tried to turn his mind to the grimy business at hand. “We going to track down the perps and book ‘em?”
There was the faintest trace of a smirk in the left corner of the woman’s mouth—enough to make Seventeen feel like he’d served his actual purpose here. “Seek and destroy mission.” Trixie replied in that stern voice she used when she read Imperial dossiers out loud at meetings or went over professional development manuals with the recruits. “They were using stolen gear, so they had to have some connections. Coruscant doesn’t usually just let this much materiel fall off the grid without some sort of paper trail.”
“Wasn’t she our medic?” Seventeen asked as he gestured toward the unconscious Aisha. “Do we have a backup or are we just going to hope our skin is thick enough? Do you want me to bring up the story where I got impaled by the changeling? Or the time that the avatar hacked my arm off? You know what I was missing in both those instances? A trained medic.”
Trixie rolled her eyes. “Your arm would grow back here, and an impalement might actually give you some character.”
“Is that sarcasm, Ma’am?”
The captain scowled as she reached a hand back up to her ear. She nodded a few times, and from her body language, it was clear that there were no unpleasant developments to report. “Able and Bravo are organized outside and waiting on my orders. They’ve managed to contain the situation outside, but for the moment, they’ve mostly focused on dispersing the crowd. Gawkers, mostly, but you never know who might be a hidden rebel. They’ll be thorough out there… probably to the point of wasting a lot of time and resources, but those’ll be orders from beyond the colonel. If they follow the rulebook, it’s possible that they’ll want to sweep the entire neighborhood. That could get dicey.”
Seventeen nodded his head. While the banquet hall was an opulent piece of Imperial architecture, he knew that due south was a collection of streets that housed a degree of illicit activities. There was nothing more pleasant than a bunch of spooked contraband dealers and upper-class gangsters. “What other options do we have?”
“Not many,” Trixie remarked as she stepped a little closer to a giant, gaping hole where a bay window had once been. “Aerial scans will take too long and be just as undesired by the local population. This is a docile region, but there are some seedy elements that might get startled by all the troopers knocking on doors. Last thing they want is a dozen more Jagiellonian Pharmaceuticals.”
“Don’t remind me about it,” Seventeen groaned as he followed Trixie up onto the ledge. “We’re getting gear, aren’t we?”
“Should be arriving from the Sulaco,” she spoke a little softer as she pointed to the skyline to the south. Looking back over her shoulder, she flashed a small smile. “So do rockets mess with your wiring or something? Scramble your computer parts?”
The cyborg couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the woman’s mostly serious inquiry. When he composed himself after a few moments, he shook his head. “Just some bad memories of being blown up. I used to get blown up a lot by jealous rivals and space demigods. Being blown up is awful. One second you’re all in one place, and the next…” Seventeen just gave another slow shake of his dirty, blood-spattered head.
“Don’t worry,” Trixie muttered beneath her breath. “You blow up here, and all your bits go back to the fountain. Unless…” She trailed off, and there was something in her tone and the sudden far-away look in her eyes that told Seventeen he didn’t need to push her to learn what she meant.
“I still think I’ll pass on being blown up.”
“What?” Seventeen shot back as a smirk started to form on the edges of his mouth. He couldn’t get out his next thought—a carefully crafted quip designed to disarm and move on from the situation. Instead of some high-quality sass from the cyborg, an explosion went off in the main hall. The ground shuddered violently as the machine-hybrid reflexively threw out his hands to brace himself against the walls of the stall. Beneath the standing man, Aisha lost her grip on the bowl as the shaking elicited some more vomit from her depleted stomach.
Before Seventeen could react, two explosions tore through the adjacent room in short succession. For all his training and physical fitness, the cybernetic warrior couldn’t hold his balance through both blasts. The tremors tore apart the linoleum, causing the walls of the stall to snap off and topple like dominos. One moment, the cyborg was grimacing and up on his feet, and faster than he could blink an eye, he was collapsed on top of a slumped, vomit-scented Aisha.
“Cover your head!” He barked as pieces of the ceiling started to crash down onto them. In the distance, he could hear screams and what sounded like gunfire. Were they under siege? Before he could right his focus, a chunk the size of a dinner plate struck the crown of his head and exploded, and with it, the cyborg lost consciousness.
When he regained his grip on the world, Seventeen’s first concern was his companion. Even though he could feel nothing south of his waist, he tried to turn his blurred eyes and ensure the well-being of the medic. Even after his vision found its focus, he could see nothing—there was a thick haze that lay over everything. The air smelled like sulfur and shit, and the fact that his impaired hearing could pick up the sound of gushing fluids led him to believe that the plumping had been grossly compromised.
“Aisha?” He asked, his voice barely able to muster enough strength to be heard over the ringing in his head. The blonde should have been right there next to him. He had smacked the floor just a few inches from her right knee, so unless the ground had collapsed, she couldn’t be far.
Before he could find Aisha, the cyborg heard the crunch of something wooden just a few yards away from his position. “Is anyone alive in here?” A voice shouted through the voice tech of a stormtrooper helmet.
“Y-yes,” Seventeen croaked as he lifted his hand to be seen through the fallout. Closing his eyes to the dust, he waited as the thuds drew closer. Hands grabbed onto his shoulder and wrenched him up off the ground with a little too much gusto for his taste. The raven-haired warrior’s eyes popped open as he tried to blink away the dust. “What happened?”
“Nothing to worry about, Sir,” the man replied as he reached for his waist.
Seventeen didn’t bother. He lifted a hand and grimaced as he summoned a ki saber. The cylindrical shaft of energy roared up from his bloodstained palm and slipped silently through the soldier’s lightly armored chest and out his back. A glance down showed what the cyborg had expected: A sidearm just a few inches from a now quaking fistful of digits.
When the hands on him went limp, Seventeen relaxed his own grip and had to shift his own weight to avoid the mass of the stormtrooper. The dead weight thudded past him onto the twisted remains of a bathroom stall.
***
Trixie was calling the shots from what remained of the main room. Her subordinates had arrived, and the situation was under control. Or, at the very least, there was a nice façade of control laid out over the scorched husk of the banquet hall. “Causalities?” She barked as she moved to confront the local response teams.
“Uhh,” an unarmored trooper with the local branch of the police muttered. The man had beads of sweat around both temples. It was clear from his lack of chill that he had never dealt with a situation like this during his tenure. “I think they’re still sifting through the people.”
“The bodies,” Trixie clarified, her expression hardening as she looked the little man up and down. Without a follow up, she stepped forward and grabbed the small piece of tech from his hands. A single glare wilted what remained of the policeman’s confidence, and he quickly shifted away to tend to his own subordinates, leaving Trixie to process the information on the data pad. The list of casualties had yet to be cross-referenced with the party-goers.
A voice from across the wreckage of the dining hall yanked Trixie’s focus from the handheld screen. “Ma’am!”
The Captain craned her neck to see a trio of armored troopers helping a scrawny, bloodied man walk his way over to her. “You’re alive,” she replied as Seventeen lifted his head to meet her gaze. The woman’s tone was stern, but the cyborg saw the faint glitter in her eyes that betrayed the truth of the matter. “You are a stubborn one.”
“Yea,” Seventeen groaned as he politely shrugged off the troopers. After making sure he could stand on his own two feet, he spat some more bloody flecks of tile and paint from his mouth. “It’s a good thing they didn’t know that my weakness is a rocket to the face.”
“What?” Trixie asked, furrowing her brow as she spotted an unconscious Aisha being carried into the room.
“Long story,” the cyborg smirked as he followed his commanding officer’s gaze back to the medic. In the haze of being manhandled over to Trixie, he had forgotten to ask if they had found anyone else under all that debris. “She alive?” Instead of waiting for an answer, the raven-haired warrior jogged over and helped the soldiers lower the woman down onto one of the many blankets laid out in the ruins of the banquet hall. Seventeen cupped the right side of her face in one hand as his other felt the side of her throat for a sign of life.
“She has a pulse,” one of the soldiers answered as they took another sweep of the nonresponsive medic with their tech.
Just as they had said, Seventeen eventually found the faint yet telltale sign of life within the partially scorched form of Aisha.
“Scans show that she’s stable, but she needs to be transferred to a medical facility if a full recovery can be expected.” Those remarks weren’t aimed at the man crouched on the ground but instead at his commanding officer, who still stood a few yards back. “Should I prep here for transfer, Ma’am?”
“Negative,” Trixie remarked as she put a hand up to her ear. “I’ll have the boys with Able Company fast-track her back to the Sulaco. They’ll treat her there… it should be quicker than any civilian installation.”
“Of course, Ma’am,” the local responder said firmly as he scampered off to assist with the other injured survivors.
Before he left his former companion for the evening, the cybernetic warrior removed his bandana and used it to wipe away some of the dust and dried blood that marred Aisha’s face. Once you could tell she was a person, he tied the garment around her neck and smoothed it out so it lay flat on her chest. Was this his fault? The feeling in his gut certainly made it seem like he was somehow to blame for the woman’s present state.
“What’s the move?” Seventeen broke the silence and rose back to a fully vertical stance. He shifted his gaze back to Trixie and tried to turn his mind to the grimy business at hand. “We going to track down the perps and book ‘em?”
There was the faintest trace of a smirk in the left corner of the woman’s mouth—enough to make Seventeen feel like he’d served his actual purpose here. “Seek and destroy mission.” Trixie replied in that stern voice she used when she read Imperial dossiers out loud at meetings or went over professional development manuals with the recruits. “They were using stolen gear, so they had to have some connections. Coruscant doesn’t usually just let this much materiel fall off the grid without some sort of paper trail.”
“Wasn’t she our medic?” Seventeen asked as he gestured toward the unconscious Aisha. “Do we have a backup or are we just going to hope our skin is thick enough? Do you want me to bring up the story where I got impaled by the changeling? Or the time that the avatar hacked my arm off? You know what I was missing in both those instances? A trained medic.”
Trixie rolled her eyes. “Your arm would grow back here, and an impalement might actually give you some character.”
“Is that sarcasm, Ma’am?”
The captain scowled as she reached a hand back up to her ear. She nodded a few times, and from her body language, it was clear that there were no unpleasant developments to report. “Able and Bravo are organized outside and waiting on my orders. They’ve managed to contain the situation outside, but for the moment, they’ve mostly focused on dispersing the crowd. Gawkers, mostly, but you never know who might be a hidden rebel. They’ll be thorough out there… probably to the point of wasting a lot of time and resources, but those’ll be orders from beyond the colonel. If they follow the rulebook, it’s possible that they’ll want to sweep the entire neighborhood. That could get dicey.”
Seventeen nodded his head. While the banquet hall was an opulent piece of Imperial architecture, he knew that due south was a collection of streets that housed a degree of illicit activities. There was nothing more pleasant than a bunch of spooked contraband dealers and upper-class gangsters. “What other options do we have?”
“Not many,” Trixie remarked as she stepped a little closer to a giant, gaping hole where a bay window had once been. “Aerial scans will take too long and be just as undesired by the local population. This is a docile region, but there are some seedy elements that might get startled by all the troopers knocking on doors. Last thing they want is a dozen more Jagiellonian Pharmaceuticals.”
“Don’t remind me about it,” Seventeen groaned as he followed Trixie up onto the ledge. “We’re getting gear, aren’t we?”
“Should be arriving from the Sulaco,” she spoke a little softer as she pointed to the skyline to the south. Looking back over her shoulder, she flashed a small smile. “So do rockets mess with your wiring or something? Scramble your computer parts?”
The cyborg couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the woman’s mostly serious inquiry. When he composed himself after a few moments, he shook his head. “Just some bad memories of being blown up. I used to get blown up a lot by jealous rivals and space demigods. Being blown up is awful. One second you’re all in one place, and the next…” Seventeen just gave another slow shake of his dirty, blood-spattered head.
“Don’t worry,” Trixie muttered beneath her breath. “You blow up here, and all your bits go back to the fountain. Unless…” She trailed off, and there was something in her tone and the sudden far-away look in her eyes that told Seventeen he didn’t need to push her to learn what she meant.
“I still think I’ll pass on being blown up.”
![[Image: 17.jpg]](http://omniverse-rpg.com/images/17.jpg)