#that is a great capsule to go back to rifle through and remember

[jodi-chigurh]

RR-2 (part one) by Jodi Chigurh

(Note: due to Tumblr's text block character limit, paragraphs here are split up. This story can be read in its original form here.)

For sixty nights and sixty days after first losing my picture of my darling Salome, I and the rest of the Henry Company were sort of aimless, more so than usual. The metaphorical loss of her had tarnished the morale of the entire company. One down, all down was the way Pvt. Thom (Sukyingpong) had put it. It was his mantra, and though he never admitted it, we knew that he knew just as well as we knew that it didn’t go the other way. It was only ever downhill. I was a drafted Air Force kid transferred to a drafted Private-ranking soldier amid minefields and makeshift military ha-has when I was only used to seeing the things I berained with flechettes as tiny pieces of land on a great gameboard which stretched to the horizon. Everything down on the ground was new to me. The company helped me acquaint myself with all of it, but I never got to venture up in the air again. The Earth is a lot more depressing than the Sky. Bickley understood the transition. He had been a voluntary Air Force Officer who quit and was then subsequently a drafted Captain. Said the only good thing about Captainhood was “‘cuz [he] worried [his] girlfriend didn’t think airplanes was sexier than crawling through jungle muck.” In Bickley’s pocket, he also carried a picture of his sweetheart, she whose name he had forgotten, stapled to a crude facsimile on cream paper given to him by Gambolix or Sukyingpong around a month or two ago, back in the southern Sác before our marching-in-circles helixed upwards into the northern half of the area:

FOREIGN-U.S.A. COCHINCHINESE CONNECTIONS RELAY SERVICE MEMORANDUM #171, 3RD HENRY COMPANY, RSSZ-2* LOCALE Typical proceedings LIMITED TO ELLIPTOID CYCLES MARCHED THROUGH RSSZ-2. Company guided by Cpt. CHRISTOFF BICKLEY. Localized to NORTHERN RUNG SAT SPECIAL ZONE. Designated relay-airman A is #171, Off. JEWGENI GAMBOLIX. Backup relay-airman B is #055, Off. PATRICK VIMANA. Memorandum filed by Mr. EDWIN MONTPARNASS on 04 JUNE 1970. Please ensure all fields are completed before submitting. * Rung Sat Special Zone (Area-)2.

Americo-pyxides shook and bumped into each other deep in our pockets as we marched, filled with heart-shaped rocks for Thom, his sweetheart in San Fran, and capsules supposedly medicinal for Erstazky. They even rang as we wandered through the deep mud of that unnamed Sác river.

That night, we set up base around five chains from a barren opening, which acted as a locus of nocturnal faunal activity. The location was Ersatzky’s idea. Dinner that evening was some sort of noodles which no one among us, not Knut nor Crampton nor I nor Bickley could really identify. They were sallow like a sickly man’s skin.

Crampton: “Do you guys ever miss your girls?”

Bickley looks up. “I can’t even remember her, so maybe not. You, James?” Ersatzky looks at Bickley after calling his name but doesn’t respond.

I clear my throat. “I miss Salome a whole lot. I draw her in the dirt sometimes. It’s hard without that picture…you know? Maybe Bickley was wise to not take one.”

“Did ya,” Scrumbleknut coughs up some noodles, “did ya ever do anything like that, like umm… hanky-panky with that photo? It was, a-haah! it was quite dirty, no?” The other guys and I feel sick. Crampton laughs.

“No, I didn’t, it—”

“Really? Reaaaaally, ‘cuz I—”

“—was just dirty because we’re in the wilderness, man.”

“—always notice—oh, yeah, sure.”

“Shut up, Knut, you fuckhead.” James Ersatzky coming in with some common sense!

The conversation went on, with increasing use of pejoratives and threats from Team Knut vs. Third Henry Company as Bickley and I continued to stay quiet and eat like depressed porcine geriatric men. What it escalated into was rifle-chest contact and a dead rabbit, shot by Crampton after missing Ersatzky by a few hairs. It was then that Bickley called everyone in for bed, begrudgingly.

Late that night, perhaps even in the early morning, when everyone had drifted off into the mosquito-infested indigo night, save me and him, decided to tell me a little life tale of his as we both, independently of each other, batted away bugs. We were in bed, just neither of us asleep. He starts without warning: “Hey, Erik?”

I asked what it was he needed and he puckered his lips, I think. “I should probably tell you this, I think you’d just find it interesting. It’s about when I was an Officer. Airtime.”

I nodded but forgot he couldn’t see me. “Well, what happened, Chris?” That sentence was one continuous exhale.

“I worked in the Air Force for a couple of years before quitting and subsequently getting drafted up here as part of the Henry Company. That was crazy. I didn’t really do much, I just kind of slacked off on all our projects and flew around, that too. It was mostly theoretical rocket science when I was down on the ground. And I was never a rocket scientist as much as it sounds like it to you, I had more of a mock-job if anything. What I do remember was whenever the third Okinawan troop arrived here in Nam we started working on this thing called the U.R.R.S. and a specific rocket for it called RR-2. The RR in that stood for Red Rocket and U.R.R.S. was Ultradestructive Red Rocket System. I don’t know if that was the final name, I think Maj. Doumo just recommended it to some overling as a sort of cheeky joke. I didn’t work on the first Red Rocket, that was something they constructed after Nagasaki got bombed and they never ended up using it. But it wasn’t nuclear, nor was ours, even though it was an ICBM. What it was was,” he turned over on his cot to look at me. “What are those things called? That you was dropping from your plane?”

Me: “The Rainbows? Like Agent Orange?”

Bickley slumped back on his cot and looked at the ceiling. There was a hole up there. “No…no, I meant those little guys that you dropped from your plane.” I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t fly AD-5Ns often to drop those little flechettes—they were called Lazy Dogs. As I had stated above, I spent most of my time in the air, which was minimal, flying C-123s and effluxing from their tanks Agent Orange. “Those dense little fuckers that go, like, a foot into firm concrete if you drop them from your plane. Lazy Dogs! That’s it. That was the plan with RR-2, ‘cuz what U.R.R.S. was was that we were gonna have the RR-2 flying over South Nam over Vietcong bases. The rocket itself was just a modified V-2 rocket since we already had Nazi scientists at NASA. Arthur Rudolph had brought some plans over from when he worked on V-2 in Germany and we just used those and changed a couple of things. But the RR-2 itself was a pretty weak ICBM. What made it potent or what would’ve made it potent was it had a ton of miniature Lazy Dogs on it. There were mechanisms to, when it was launching, it would drop a bunch of Lazy Dogs before it made contact with the ground. All the Dogs would just fall outta the Red Rocket before the rocket itself would make contact with the earth and fucking blow up.” Bickley laughed a little. “But we scrapped it. There were too many complications and we couldn’t reliably get the Lazy Dogs to fall out. We did once, but we didn’t remember how we did it and it didn’t work again. They also didn’t want to send ICBMs to an Eastern Bloc warzone, is what they eventually decided.” Bickley wasn’t wrong that Lazy Dogs go around a foot in concrete. When I rarely dropped them back in the AD-N5, they left tiny holes in the ground. A couple times I hit actual Vietcong troops, their anti-personnel manufactory purpose. I never saw that carnage up close but I’m assuming, since we were dropping them from 3k. feet in the air, that they dug straight through those Vietcongs’ skulls and into their thoraces and abdomina. The thought of a ballistic missile covered in those, dropping those across the plains of Vietnam, lodging themselves in the crania of the Henry Company and Vietnamese villagefolk and northern communists alike, was terrifying. And that night…

That night, wheretofore I had always kept half my set of eyes open even in slumber to pay attention to my base and environs, I had now resorted to closing both my eyes, completely sinking into the Zone and losing myself in its brine.

Here is what I hallucinated that night in an angst-induced mania: I envisioned a Cartesian plane, scraped into my inner eyelids with a scalpel, and against it a ring of Unity as a corona of light above Salome’s head as she looked down at me and clicked tut tut or tsk tsk tsk as she would smile a smile straight out of one of my father’s stained, dilapidated film rolls held hostage in the basement in Peoria, IL, Home, and she swooped down from the heavens to pick me up from the depths of the Cochinchina, as Scrumbleknut called it, and so I did indeed imagine Salome Joey Zrank, the angel sent from heaven, floating down with her white wings, reaching down to the cursed earth upon which I stood, her white wings made of Unity, not in an individually mathematical nor spiritual nor philosophical sense but in a sense which was a synthesis of all three, her ethereal form beckoning acceptance from me of the fact that she was the Monad and the Everything, that the Universe was neither here nor there, neither infinitely dissectable nor infinitely assembling itself into something larger, that it had an end in both directions, the micro and the macro, and it was Her, that she was to be my everything, my guiding moonlight, and that I would do literally anything she told me to do, all this as she ascended with me into the clouds above base, which was now host of a terrible coup orchestrated by the Vietcong, Tonkin’s little puppet down south, the Vietcong and my own comrades drafted from the States by chance and not by commitment and nationalism, some not even understanding why they were there like me, yes, they were seeming more and more like chess pieces or circular xiangqi tokens as I went up and up with Salome, and I saw them there, on the Cartesian plane of southeastern Asia, with Laos and Thailand in the peripheral, and I cried into Salome’s bosom as a hundred thousand dead Vietnamese men and women and children and American postadolescents sang majestic chori in all of the world’s forgotten tongues, those with holes in their heads and arms lopped off by the Enemy, with the meat of their jaws sloughing off into their laps, and nevertheless they smiled on and on, their smiles shining into the great horizon, a beautiful lightshow upon the Sky-Quilt, none of the earthly bacchanal or debauchery of Vietnamese nor American land present, only the innocence of infantile, not Judaic, cherubim which danced in the air like the pervading scent of Man’s good. And then I fell asleep.

In the morning, we marched on. We had long ago resorted to marching in vague circles and limaçons and ellipses and helices in the jungle unless airmen sent by FUCCRS—Foreign-U.S.A. Connection Communication Relay Service—dictated otherwise, which no, today they did not. Scrumbleknut and Crampton brought these girls from a nearby village which we passed every three or four days. Scrumbleknut had a way with translinguistic and -cultural gesticulations, and had either convinced them to dress up or simply found them dressed up in makeshift áo nhật bình formed from loose fabric. Bickley, who had been standing far out scouting the ground for anti-personnel arms, reported to me that that night he saw written on the back of the shorter girl in childish majuscule lettering ᴄʀᴀᴍᴘ, and on that of the leaner one, ᴋɴᴜᴛ. We had encountered other young women who owned these makeshift áo and used them for what seemed like a sort of juvenile and mirthy rôleplay—we’d witnessed many performances. Sometimes secretly in the case of Scrumbleknut. He was big and burly and had an affinity for east Asian women—he said they were “the most innocent things on God’s forsaken Earth” with drool leaking out of his mouth onto his sallow, pustular chin even as he watched an all-female Vietcong guerilla militia named the Sác Bạn Gái attack and nearly kill our FUCCRS airman Jewgeni Gambolix. He talked of how at home he studied Japanese women’s speech and imagined their acclivitous intonation—nē!, aramā…, uchi. And, of these women, he had no problem killing them, watching their souls leave their bodies as those bodies fall to the dirt ground. Ersatzky would tell a joke his father told him, that Scrumbleknut had a bad case of “yellow influenza.” You can’t say that anymore, but we said it a lot back then, solely as a descriptor of the Knut. It wasn’t always jocular—you would catch him sitting amidst dry shrubs and bushes, or in a trench he’d dug out long ago, belt and trousers down to his knees with binoculars glued to his eyes, and us, the Americans, seeing small figures moving playfully in a village around a few chains away, would waltz up to whatever he was so entranced by, only to realize they were girls—expected—and they were pubescent—unexpected the first time, but not long after. Then we’d scare the kids away and the Knut would holler and yell and someone would surely that night be the recipient of capital and spinal strikes from the Knut’s BAT, which was not an initialism, he just always screamed the name. Scaring the kids was never for the sake of scaring the kids for us, at least not for Bickley and me—it was because the Knut had derived his nickname not just from an ellipsis of his full patronym, but because he was, to put it mildly and/or euphemistically, “(k)nutty,” Crampton’s words, i.e. he was known to do things on a whim. Amorally so. He arguably had no conscience and only two primal modes: sex and murder. Sometimes intertwined....

One time, when we still got non-FUCCRS transmissions from Gambolix, checking in with each of us, asking how we were holding up in the awfully hot Sác, it was Scrumbleknut’s turn, and he took the radio out to a horticultural village and had Gambolix listen to a woman dying. He had cut her throat with a machete, and was laughing and entranced. He said “Jewgeni,”—pronounced the J-E-W as jew instead of yev despite having heard it a thousand more times than he had seen it written out—“Jewgeni, this is fucking amazing. Have you ever felt what this feels like? Watching this?” Stuttering Jewgeni Gambolix responded with a disgusted and panicked no. The Knut clicked off the radio, villagewoman still a-gurgle, but not for long. When the Knut came back, he was adjusting his trousers. A short-lived nickname for Scrumbleknut thereafter was the Bashy Bazooka—we didn’t expect him to know what a bashibazouk was. There was no jolly irony in that name. And so what we began to call him when he wasn’t around, the Company outside of his company, was Urmensch. He was an Urmensch—if you go to the Navy, the Air Force, etc. intentionally, you find a fair amount of them in your squadron. That or you become one. My father was an Urmensch, not unlike Scrumbleknut. He was named Occidenzo, though the paternal side of my family was full of Britons who had been in America since the Revolution, not Italians. And no one really ever called him Occidenzo til his soul had gone ex vivo—just “the Man,” “Mister Hisser,” “Ozzy,” “the Big O.,” “Majordom-O,” variants thereof. Or Dad. Dad looked really similar to me, more so than most consanguineous look-alikes. He never balded more than a hundred odd hairs, lacked the prominent schnoz of Barbara, my mother. She hated the Man. Towards the end, she moped and cried every time he spoke to her, her tears wiping away and pulling down loose guiches which hugged her cheekbones and temples. Perhaps I was too drunk, secretly of course, on the Big O.’s stash of cinnamon Fireball to properly recall what she was doing and gesturing at, but I recall her upstanding from her seat, screeching at the Man, irate gesticulations transforming into shaky indices pointing at rashes and welts which stretched like striae from her chelidons to her wrists.

On that day it was a Wednesday, and there was no school. It was snowing. I was then the centerpiece of a household miasma of the influenzal variety. The Big O. could be heard yelling at Madeleine and tearing up her bedding—earlier, she had boughten a large cookie and given him but a measly moiety. Mom was in the kitchen beheading a hen from the coop who could no longer lay eggs, and it was clear she was trying to distract herself, because as much and as horribly as she loved Madeleine, she knew if she interfered with the Big O.’s strict proceeding of capital blows and gluteal slaps, she would be added to his waitlist, so she was in the kitchen, preoccupying herself by practicing the ablauts of English—drink, drank, drunk, sing, sang, song, sung—attempting to give each a concise Peorian English nominal definition and/or tense-cum-aspect. It was when an osteoid CUR-A-ACK! resonated down the Persian-fitted steps of the stairflight against the western wall in the parlor that Mom’s head and mine pivoted and halted at once, in different spots but our gazes converging to a singularity, that young feminine screeching of agony—the sight of which was concealed by a stucco ceiling above industrial ducts and pipes and tubes—shaking the house. I remember Mom running up the stairs, her heels falling into on each carpeted step, and she burst into Madeleine’s room, and there was the Urmensch in the Big O.’s vessel. He was smiling widely, holding a tome in his hand and beating Madeleine, her aching body, to a pulp. You could see her leg was broken orthogonally, and the Big O. was there grinning with a toxic rictus, like a suspended zygomatic convulsion. I remember my mother calling it rictus mortis—the grin of death—the week before I left. Dad was at a pub that night. It had then been six years since he broke Madeleine’s leg, and that was the first time I asked my mother about it. She said, with apprehension, as though he was still watching her, that no matter how many times Dad serenaded her on how deeply sorrowful he was, how unbelievable it was that he would do such a thing to his daughter, how horrible he felt, she will never forget that it took a month for him to even say anything. Only upon mentioning the event herself did he even apologize. It was at 10:36 ᴘ.ᴍ. that we got news that Dad had crashed his jalopy into a BMW at a T-junction south of Main street and died upon impact. His last words to me and Mom were “don’t do anything stupid” followed by some mumbled pejorative and that was the end of it. There were no tears of grief, there was no bereavement.

My first Urmensch pokes above the surface of the subconscious like a turtle crawling up from the depths of the sea to the shore, slowly but surely, while there sat Scrumbleknut, in the frame of my father, drinking cold coffee and laughing, one arm around the girl labelled with his sobriquet, most of us trying to determine whether or not she was of age—her male-length hair made it difficult to tell for some reason. Every direction she turned her head she looked sort of different, but we knew she was a girl since she occasionally let out short expressions of disgust in a Vietnamese dialect we could not parse, and her voice was deep and feminine. She looked both scared and disgusted by the Knut’s hairy hand. We’re all seated around a little bonfire fashioned of branches and twigs and trunks of tillers. Crampton of his girl, long hair, deeply asleep in a swoon: “I’m naming i…it Lilith!”

“You ass,” the Knut tightening his brachial grip around the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl, laughing, chelidon behind her neck. “You don’t name a gook whore…” Former-FUCCRS-messaging-airman-turned-crawling-through-the-Vietnamese-muck-and-mire-type-soldier Thom Sukyingpong reädjusts, making an uncomfortable expression at the Word. We, the white men, sans Scrumbleknut, fall silent.

Bickley turns away from the bonfire to bury something behind him, and without looking back advises “Not while Thom’s here, Knut.”

“What?” Tongue click. “What sez you? What do you care?”

“Well, from your perspective, you wouldn’t want Thom to get pissed and go off and snitch to the Vietcong, right? Even—”

“Right.”

“—though he’s Chinese, not Vietnamese, right?”

“Thai,” Sukyingpong interjects, picking at the soot lodged under his fingernails. “I’m Thai-American.”

“I thought that was part of China.”

Bickley expects Thom is just being pedantic, but hearty laughter escapes his gut: “No!”

“What?” Furrowed brows indicate Bickley is riding through his mind-palace on cavalry, trying to figure this out, and then “Oh! I was thinking of Tibet. Buh-hah!” and he scoops a mound of hot cod into his mouth, then starts exhaling vehemently to cool it down.

The Knut upstands. He’s tall and still holding onto his girl so his height yanks her up and she groans tiredly. “I might be just be a hunk to you guys, but I’m not Goddamned stupid!” So he starts stomping around, stomps right on Bickley’s unshoed foot. You can hear the cracking of knuckles, maybe even bones!

“Knut, you ass!” Bickley springs up like the Knut’s member upon the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl crossing her legs, ands jumps around on scarce gravel upon the dirt. The cod falls out of his mouth. A typical reaction among the Company would be to burst into laughter and knee-slappery but Scrumbleknut’s face of Urmenschian contempt is making everyone uncomfortable. And of course, Bickley is very uncomfortable, in pain.

Everyone soon departs for the night, makes up excuses to leave for bed as the Knut’s arm moves around the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl’s shoulder as an amorphous mass of muscle fueled by vitriol and brutality. Thom wanders off into the forest and comes back with nothing an hour later, immediately goes to bed. Bickley and I falsely admit we’ve got some planning to do for tomorrow and head off to our yurt. We soon hear Crampton and Scrumbleknut pulling out rope and tearing fabric from clothes and at one point a girl, unclear which one, perhaps neither and an apparition, scream and sob into silence.

That night, Bickley and I had a much shorter conversation than the night previous. “Well, I know those men well, Erik,” he gazed sadly at nothing, into the dark environs of camp I guess, like there was some deep evil swirling in there.

“Walk them back to the village.”

“That’s the right thing to do and it should be so easy, but Knut’s gonna beat the shit out of me. And their home’s only some half a mile that way too. And I can’t even do shit or I risk getting sliced up, shot, and literally banged to death by Knut like that one lady last time Jewgeni called.”

“I…doubt he’s sadistic and gay. You’ve seen how many girls—”

“Ach.” Bickley looks over at the ᴄʀᴀᴍᴘ- and the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl, both loosely tied to a sapling’s and blindfolded with parts of their clothes, asleep. “How’d we get such a fucked up demented idiot fucking lunatic in our company.” Not interrogative.

The name of the land we were occupying that night was not Nam nor Cochinchina nor Việt Nam, it was the Orient. It was us, the Europeans, approaching these people as objects of the East, like nineteenth century Britons and Frenchmen learning of Persian harems from a more western sect of the postquranic Orient, how they drew women in their harems with huqqas atilt on malapropos Ottoman carpets, the women painted doffing their hijabs, tantalizing the male “trespassers,” because those Britons and Frenchmen could not figure out any potential activities other than carnal lounging with regards to what those otherly women—whose colors said Britons and Frenchmen could only liken to metals and not skin—could possibly be doing alone in a room so elaborate with geometric Islamic architecture and wainscoting and gül-donned cushions. That was who we were, hold Thom the Thai- and Gambolix the Israeli-American, pale men young and spry and ignorant, not sure how these people we were fighting worked outside the context of comics and cartoons and how they could feel quite as much as we did. We sure saw their agony when we killed them though…a tin-tin-tin-tin-tintinnabular ringing which lacerated our hearts when we saw a young child’s final gaze, or a man’s ultimate scream, or a woman’s last bloody throat-gurgle…

I think for us to not have killed ourselves out there in the jungle we needed one of two things: comradery and/or psychopathy. Most of us got through on comradery alone, but even on those other than the Knut, even on Bickley and perhaps some others, there had to be some inhibition of empathy for them to carry out what they did. Maybe it wasn’t mental—Bickley was, after all, known for his on-the-fly moonshine-makin’. In the Zone. Bickley’s grandparents, in fact, had met during l’Exposition Universelle Parisienne de 1900, his grandfather a British engineer-turned-architect-turned-sailor who had continually circumnavigated the Dutch East Indies and was sent to Paris for l’Exposition to ensure le Pavillon de Indes orientales néerlandaises was constantly up and running among the colonial pavilions, and the grandmother was a Moscovian yellow-ticket prostitute, Alexandra “la Shurca” Bickley née Barakov, specializing in sadomasochistic appointments, which included that which made her famous among Russo-degradees—a subset of non-Slavic sexual tourists who specifically ached to be degraded by, say it, a Russian minx: pouring samogon into her clientèle’s eyes and subsequently stomping their genitalia to bits. Good business. Bickley men historically loved that shit, and the great-great-grandfather was no different. “Ya, castigate me, ye minx!”—yes, the double great-grandfather was born a North Englander…or perhaps had picked some language up from Dubliners and Kerrymen alike? Uncertainty on Bickley’s part. The Barakov samogon recipe preservation was originally to ensure Alexandra, and no, that great-great-grandfather shall not be named, that her future daughters and granddaughters may start a filial yellow-ticket business in the States, whereto they had moved in 1903, but it was in 1918, after bearing the children twain she would and could, when she travelled with a one-way (yellow-)ticket to Justingrad, UKR to live with the cetera of the Barakovs, catching wind that her grandfather had passed. The next year, in the shtetl, the Russian Volunteer Army waltzed in and pogromed the area. Most of the women were raped—Alexandra, as Bickley clan legend goes, fearing more sexual trauma atop that of Moscow, cut her hair to pass off as a man, and was killed before she was defiled. The shtetl was a sea of corpses atop each other. We wondered as kids how those soldiers carried out those pogroms and genocides without emotion, and after months there in Nam we understood that some of them, those ones not already too antisemitic, had to have felt some sense of guilt, slaughtering Jews—w/r/t the Pale—in Ukraine Citerior, for no reason other than orderly ones: General knows best… Among us, even those viewing each Vietnamese man as just a “gook” and each woman as a “bitch” and each child as a “brat,” the extramilitary sense, there was guilt. There was always a supratheatrical tragedy to the days succeeding a mass murder here. It was a terrible guilt transforming Here, the British Orient of 18XX, into the Vietnam of 1970, like that of late-Mahlerian chords in archi tutti and horns. Gambolix giving those needless massacre assignments via crude staticky radio always sounded uneasy. He had seen carnage from high above, and unlike me, thought it was more terrifying than on the ground like it was seeing the world as a god and having to acknowledge that you let these people die before a strange battalion of stout Vietnamese women in uniform began to shoot down your plane as you were trying to find the company which FUCCRS assigned you to, smirking Scrumbleknut with binos in the peripheral, who had, if we’re to believe the many times we’d found him there as the norm, likely shitten his pants and just didn’t care, “eyes on the prize. Yak-yak-yak!”

The ᴄʀᴀᴍᴘ-girl is growling in her sleep like the Knut tonight. I hear what must be another aurally hallucinatory rocket, but it seems so real. The kathoomp! of a Lazy Dog burrowing into the ground sounds off somewhere outside tonight’s base, to the north.

In the morning, Ersatzky, cup of militaristic faux café au lait in hand, sits beside the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl. One of the guys had given her his button-up shirt to wear. Scrumbleknut had gone out anti-personnel scouting with Bickley, and Crampton’s catatonic—the ᴄʀᴀᴍᴘ-girl knocked his socks off and ran off into the jungle this morning, finally doffing her mock áo nhật bình. No one cares enough to really do anything, since we know he’ll come to soon. Thom Sukyingpong lays on a log, gazing up at arboreal foliage. Ersatzky is the worst-versed in the Vietnamese tongue, so he, in the introductions, resorts to primal chest thumping in conjunction with speaking his name (“James”, pointing towards his thorax) and then pointing to the ᴋɴᴜᴛ-girl and giving an inquisitive look, head tilting.

She looks confused and worried and paranoid, as a kidnapped girl does, and slowly, articulately, carefully says, “Tôi…là…Trinh…” Her hesitation’s the same as ours would be had Ersatzky spoken to her instead of resorting to grunting like a wild animal. She basically sounds like she was talking to aliens, that which we might as well be.

I, overhearing Vietnamese conversation, swivel. “Trinh? Her name’s Trinh, James.”

Ersatzky upstands, shakes soot off his trousers. “Trinh…Trinity…ach, my love!” a hand covers an eye and he gazed upward dramatically—he’s trying to obscure his bereavement with irony. It’s a common practice among those company-clown privates who realized long ago that in the Vietnamese jungle, with Lazy Dogs a-rain, mines a-planted, Vietcong and American vengeance rampantly gallivanting across minds Occidental and Eastern alike, there is not much humor to be found. It is the Theater of War—tragic to the soldiers, comedic to the overlings, and both to those who could never understand.

I sigh as Ersatzky paces back and forth. He set himself off, thinking about Home. “Your girl’s name was Serenity, man. No, not even, that was her sister! Your girl was Faith!” I look behind him at Trinh. “Chào…” She waves. It’s a face of contempt. “Trinh?” Nods.

When Scrumbleknut returns with Bickley he puts Trinh’s blindfold back on which had Ersatzky had doffed in the morn and calls after us to follow him forth into the jungle, Trinh limp and agitated in hand. Groaning: “Đụ má…người Mỹ ngu…” She hits a tree and the Knut and Crampton laugh. Trinh estimates the Knut’s position aurally and spits in his vicinity, a deed to which the Knut pokes her chest with the barrel of his rifle. We’ve sort of cut loose from the grand helical ambulatory ovals of yore…the Knut guided us now in a straight line through the Sác, and it was around four or five hours along the trail, finally at twilight, at which PHASE II of Scrumbleknut’s plan began. He explains to us while holding a still blindfolded Trinh that the night prior, he had had a dream, a vision, of this river—he points behind him—of women bathing galore, and so he brought us, his men, a determinative phrase which Cpt. Bickley raises an eyebrow to, to finally relax, a break from the horrors of War, a beautiful bacchanal like that of the Romans.

From behind him: “Hallo, Herren!”

“Jo, hallo!”

“Kommt! wir sind eure Rheintöchter, Herren!”

Crampton’s eyebrows go worried and frantic. “Ach! Nazis! They’ve rejoined the Eastern Bloc!” He aims his rifle, eye a-wink. “Father, I made you this promise…” Rarely does Crampton show this much familial patriotism—only to his WWII-vet pops. Sort of sweet but terrifying.

Bickley rests his hand on Crampton’s trigger arm. “They’ve joined the Bloc…as fair rivermaidens…?”

“Lots of roles to fill, Bickley. They’re everywhere…”

And now Scrumbleknut: “Well, I’ll be damned! Haa! told you chicks’d be here!”

“Er…” the rightmost Rheintochter grimaces and yanks on a nonexistent necktie ‘round her tattooed neck. “Hall…hello, y’all! And we ain’t ‘Nazis,’ you on the right, only, as the tall man kindly pointed, rivermaidens.” She flashes a metallic nametag, similar to those of American office spaces, though blood below it indicates that she’s pinned it straight through her chest: Floßhilde. The two others, running their hands through their hair and glancing at us, are thus from their nametags assumedly Woglinde and Wellgunde, which most of us find confusing, and so we don’t talk to them much. That lack of communication may also be attributed to the fact that, unlike Floßhilde, the two Ws were attractive Medusae, and we feared if we looked at them and their snake-hair for too long, we’d turn to stone, and how does FUCCRS write home about that? or categorize that manner of death?

Wellgunde downs a chipped bottle of Heineken, and it catches Crampton’s eye. The Knut is the first to make the innuendo, though: “You can really down that bottle, huh?”

She spits out her wine and takes aback the Knut. “Pfaugh! god, you men…” Trinh, despite never showing comprehension of English, gets the innuendo from the Knut’s eh? eh? expression and Wellgunde’s reaction, and she also shows tired disgust.

Scrumbleknut frowns. “What of us, eh?”

“Ugh…” Floßhilde groans. “Another penis-obsessed man-child? You look around twenty, no?”

“Twenty-one…”

“Twenty-one? Old enough to drink where you’s from? And here you are, pointing at everything that leaves a linear shadow and making a big ruckus outta it. Have your men not brought up to you how stupid that is? or are they just immature too?”

We yell in unison as the Knut looks back at us for advice, “Not us, ma’am!”

The Knut tells her, “I just meant it as a joke!”

“Alright…? It sucked ass,” Woglinde hands Floßhilde a lighter and a cig.

“Is it in y’all’ses nature? I guess pointing out every ‘dick’ is easy for you guys. Just so noticeable, hmm? We,” she looks at the Ws, “we don’t point out every trench, hole, opening, as a vagina! We never have, outside of dick jokes made by men alone.”

“Well, excuse me,” Scrumbleknut approaches the stream akimbo, “I assumed three naked women in water gesturing towards incoming men wouldn’t be so taken aback by just ol’ flirting.” His current gesture is one he’d likely laugh at any of us for making on grounds of looking effeminate.

Wellgunde belches. “Shut up, asshole.”

“We didn’t even gesture,” Woglinde lighting her own cig with Floßhilde’s. “Just said hallo.”

“Ach…” Floßhilde looks back at us. “Any help, boys?” We look at each other absentmindedly. “Well, screw me, you’re all our third company today, and that’s been our eighteenth dick joke. Great fun! I mean please,” cough, “is no stick sacred to you?” The Ws chortle. “Maybe,” Floßhilde turning away, “because the yoni is defined by an absence of space, we don’t see it as ubiquitous—we tend to only think about what’s real.”

Woglinde: “So, like…not your chances of an orgy. Sorry, bud.” The Rheintöchter then each left, dove under the bubbling stream, arms twisting together upwards above their heads, then each would flip around her yaw a bit, then her pitch severely, the origin being her navel, diving headfirst into the stream until only her legs showed, upside-down, and then she was none. The Knut did throw himself in after them in a last-ditch effort to fulfill his vision, but they had, in fact, gone.

We sat that night just before a large opening near the stream, where the Knut was still soaked. Trinh, finally unblindfolded, was attempting to cover her smirk all throughout the evening. I am unable to give Scrumbleknut any comfort, out of ethics. But Bickley tries. “Need a blanket, Tim?” “Yeah,” he shudders. And then, around five minutes later, he snaps. Perhaps from the cold or perhaps from the Urmensch within finally breaking free after months of chiseling away from the inside of Scrumbleknut’s endoskeleton like a prisoner breaking out of his karma. He stands straight up and spits on Bickley, and he takes Trinh by the arm and yanks her up, tosses her over his shoulder, and he screams the loudest any of us have ever heard a scream be, even when we did genocide villages as commanded by a reluctant but acquiescent Gambolix. This scream was so loud that Trinh may have, for a second, completely given up hope of resisting, which for her consisted of pounding on the Knut’s back over and over until something broke. We were all calling after Scrumbleknut as he ran into the field, Trinh screaming, curved near parabolically around his shoulders. The Knut’s gallop was like that of a feagued horse. By God! his libido inhibited his ability to walk! He was galloping into the darkness of the forest before us! And though one saw how Trinh escaped from the grasp of Scrumbleknut, when she came back out of the darkness she was skipping, dancing around like a particle of paisley finally unsuspended from fabric, almost…gallivanting, and then there came the Knut running out after her, ungraceful as always, again, he looked as though he had been feagued, this time like it was Trinh herself who feagued him, shoved an Vietnamese river eel up his ass, running through the meadow, still wet and dewey from the morn, yes the Knut was galloping like a wild animal who had been starving for a week, and on his sixth or seventh stride—bowop! a sound exponentially louder than any orthographic representation could indicate. It blew out my ears and I felt earthly debris slap my face. Trinh was now really dancing, under the rain of blood. She dug her heel into Scrumbleknut’s decapitated head and laughed. Ersatzky, who didn’t have the same East Asian affinity as Scrumbleknut did but still viewed them as, disgustingly, “innocent creatures,” was more shocked by Trinh’s behavior and demeanor than his “comrade” getting blown to shit. Bickley stared in awe, and Crampton had a nervous guffaw at the miserable display, intestinal tissue and other unidentifiable flesh suspended in the air by high twigs. “Knut!” two men yelled. I never found out which. Trinh was the happiest she’d been throughout all her kidnapping. Bickley later wondered if that was indicative of the Knut doing something to her while we weren’t looking beforehand. But even through her cackling joy, she looked shocked. It was such a sudden death that even she could not come to terms with its brisk execution. We marched back to base after what felt like a day under a nonsetting moon. Most of us had been simply unable to move. Even minutes later, carnal debris was still falling from the sky, like the beginning of a rapture in some old Christian denomination’s eschatology. Trinh, who we expected to simply leave, followed us back, though at a distance. There was a cool silence as if Scrumbleknut’s voice, at any point, would pop up. Anticipatory nothings. They were especially tense when, around three chains outside base, we saw Floßhilde and the twain Ws dead, eyes leaking out of their skulls like the glair of an egg. In the morning, after uneasy sleep from all parties, Trinh had departed and taken some of our food. Bickley was not particularly mad, and he called up FUCCRS to let them take care of it, and to alert them that Pvt. Timothy Scrumbleknut had died.

[madamescarlette]

I think what will always be beautiful and rare about music to me is how much it can put a frame around a moment in time for you to keep and look over again later!

[imjeralee]

Wallflower: Chapter 11 - The Honeymoon Phase (NSFW)

Raihan x F!Reader

Disclaimer: Do not own Pokemon

Note: This is my first Pokemon fanfic. I hope you enjoy it :) Originally posted on Archive of Our Own.

Summary: You’re an unassuming Pokemon breeder who works at the nursery in the Wild Area and he’s Raihan, the fearsome gym leader of Hammerlocke who has more than a million followers. You don’t want anything to do with him but he’s…persistent.

Rating: Mature/Explicit

Warnings: Lemon, smut, violence, language

Extra Note: Plenty of smut here 

THE HONEYMOON PHASE

...

...

"So, how's things?"

"Good."

It's been a while since he visited Alola but Looker thinks it's time he paid Nanu a visit. Nanu had always been rather rough around the edges and when it came to dealing with people, he's not exactly described as being a ray of sunshine, but he gets things done and his heart is in the right place, even though people may not realise it. Looker calls in advance of course, and when he arrives, his superior's looking more grizzled than ever but overall, he seems to be fine. He's just slumming it in a dilapidated settlement called Po Town, right next to the hideout of a gang that once roamed around Alola. After some brief catching up, they decide to go through some cold cases from regions ranging from Kanto to Kalos which Nanu has kept in a box under his desk.

"Heard you helped a couple of kids recently," Nanu grunts out, rifling through the documents and examining them. They're so old, the paper is turning yellow and wanes in his hands. "It's always the kids these days, isn't it?"

"It was more of a personal favour." Looker puts down his file, deciding to pour himself and Nanu another cup of hot herbal tea, watching as two Alolan Meowths play with a ball of string. Another Meowth is resting at the foot of the window whilst another stares at Nanu's fish tank which contains several Goldeen and Finneon. That's not all - In fact, there's a lot of Meowth here. Looker counts sixteen, but there could be more. "...Before I left, they told me they found a dead body in the woods of Galar and the Stow-on-Side gym leader said it belonged to a Phantump."

"You gonna investigate that?"

"Not this time."

"Good on you."

Together, they go through some more documents until Looker finds an old photograph of a young couple - the mother is holding a little girl in her arms. Lifting it up, he studies the little girl's face carefully and realises he may have seen this girl before. He turns the glossy print round but there is no further information aside from a date stamp. Looker picks up the file next, flipping it open. The file mentions the little girl went missing and has never been found. "Hey, Nanu." Looker mutters.

"What?" Nanu grunts out.

"You mind if I hold onto this?"

"Nope, it's all yours."

"Thanks."

...

Meanwhile.

You have a couple of tasks to complete and on your to-do list is to check up on your family. Therefore, early in the morning, you called them and you're glad to see that your mother's doing fine. You tell her you're dating and she's eager to meet Raihan in person so you tell her she will be able to meet him soon should you decide to visit Johto with him in the future. She asks you about work and you tell her everything is well. You chat for a bit longer and her Blissey pops up - you’re not too worried about your mother being left on her own since she has a lot of Pokemon and Blissey is an excellent nurse.

Next, you call Glenn and he's safely made it to Johto, he's in Mahogany Town and he's doing just fine. Everything is just peachy. He will also go visit mum soon as well. Great! You'll check up on them again when you have the time.

Following that, you message Allister and ask him how Phantump is doing. He informs you he's fine and sends you a photo of himself, Phantump and his pokemon. Allister will let you know when they find out more about Phantump and his family, if possible. It’s going to be a while, so you will need to wait. 

Either way, you wonder what will come out of this. You also message Opal, asking how she got on with Chairman Rose and the Glimwood Tangle business. She flagged it to him but Rose merely told her he's dealing with it and Eli would be careful from now on. It sounds like Eli's been left off rather lightly. This is unsurprising, you suppose, since Eli works closely with the Chairman.

You’ve scored off several tasks which were rather easy to complete so onto the next one - you open the door, the bell jingling to indicate your arrival. The nursery worker greets you and quickly disappears inside to retrieve your Pokemon. 

They've refused to stay in their pokeballs, knowing that you're coming - so when you see the large hulking frames of your Haxorus and Salamence stomping through the doorway and into the visitor's area, you hold your arms out and they growl and nicker at you affectionately as they waddle into your embrace. Mindful of their sharp skin, tusks, claws and fangs, your pokemon allow you to pet them and stroke their heads and backs.

"Here you are! Bagon and Axew are in excellent shape!" The nursery member also hands you two pokeballs which you take off her.

"Thank you so much."

"You're welcome!"

With the new pokemon, you recall your two dragons, pay the worker and leave the nursery. You can't wait to give them to Raihan; you're sure he will love them and you're excited to see his reaction. You're also wearing one of the lingerie sets you got the other day. It's not the most comfortable and the lacy thong keeps riding up your ass and you’re trying your best to resist from adjusting it every now and then, but your mum once told you beauty has a price, so you're reduced to dawdling around with an awkward gait. 

Hopefully, you'll get used to it soon and it's not like you are going to wear this everyday. Nope, on lazy days you're just going to go back to your mismatched, grubby t-shirt bra and panties. You’ve even done your hair and makeup today too. It’s not a special occasion but you wanted to put in the extra effort and it was really fun to dress up.

There's not a moment to waste - you're supposed to meet Raihan in Hammerlocke stadium as soon as you have finished up. You call the Corviknight taxi which arrives pretty quickly and once you’re at the castle city, you hurriedly make your way towards the venue; you've become rather familiar with the entire place by now but inside, you don't see Raihan anywhere on the pitch at all.

"Hey!" Someone yells from behind, and you turn round, coming face to face with none other than Ball Guy. "Hihi. You're looking for Raihan, right?" His voice is muffled behind the mask but it sounds pretty deep.

"Yeah."

"Unfortunately, he got called to the vaults, but he told me to give you this." He lifts his hand up, where you see a pair of keys dangling off his fingers. He presses them into your hand for your taking. "And since you came all the way here, this is from me, your friendly neighbourhood Ball Guy!"

He hands you a Love Ball - a type of capsule which you know is far more common to get in Johto than other regions. "Thanks!"

"No problemo! See you around! And have a wonderful day!"

Gee, Ball Guy's positivity is contagious. You leave the stadium in good spirits when Rotom sounds off. Checking your phone, you see that you've received a message from Raihan:

Doofus: Did you get it?

You: The keys? Yep

Doofus: great

Doofus: Meet me at the house :) I'll be there in 15. You remember the way, right?

You: Yep, sure. See u x

Leaving it at that, you make your way to Raihan's house, your heart pounding and stomach fluttering with butterfrees. Even now he still has that effect on you. You make your way past the main district and into the quiet, residential area with the similar looking houses where you count down the number of houses until you reach the two hundreds. You didn't realise it but this is a decent area and it's very quiet. You pass a few people with their Stoutlands and Yampers scurrying around on leashes and they greet you politely.

Once you're at number two hundred and forty one, you go up the steps, remembering the last time you had been here. Pulling out the keys once you reach the door, you unlock it and step in, closing the door behind you, removing your shoes and leaving them on the shoe rack. Now this would be your second time in Raihan's home and you take the time to look around. His wallpaper is a royal blue which reminds you of the dragon uniform colour.

You hang up your coat on the hooks provided and the stairs are directly in front of you - however, you decide to enter the living room to your left. You hear something rustling from within so you quickly poke your head in to see Torkoal fumbling in the lounge by the fireplace, heating up the room.

"Hey there!" You greet him with a wide smile, squatting down to his level and he lets out a low but gentle bellow as smoke puffs out from his shell. You pat him on the head and from the corner of your eye, behind the leather recliner, you see a little Applin on its back, struggling to roll up properly. You promptly head over and pick him up, returning him back onto its feet and it rubs itself against your arm happily. "Hehe, you're okay."

Returning to stand, you put a hand to your chin, glancing around. A black leather sofa sits against the wall, facing the fireplace. The TV stands opposite the sofa as well albeit closer to the window. In another corner, there's a benchpress and a couple of weights - Raihan's workout station. You smile to yourself as you glance at his bookshelf where you see a few awards standing on the top shelf along with some books. 

There's a few photo frames too and you look at them one by one: there's a photo of himself with Leon, a photo of himself surrounded by his pokemon in front of Hammerlocke stadium along with his proteges and the cheerleaders. Then there's a group photo of the gym leaders and Rose. There's another photo with himself, Leon and Sonia.

Then you see two photos that capture your interest; the first photo shows Raihan, Rose and the blond-haired man known as Eli. They all look happy, and you wonder what happened that drove the wedge between them aside from, well, Raihan getting the position as Hammerlocke gym leader and Eli getting...well, whatever his job actually is. The other photo is a picture of Raihan with his arm around an extremely attractive young woman as they stand in front of a beach resort. Maybe an ex-girlfriend...

You should let Axew and Bagon out, so you quickly release them and they look around their new home for a while; Applin rolls over to Torkoal's side and everyone makes a brief exchange of growls and rumbling noises before they decide to follow you into the kitchen. 

There's bowls left lying around with food and water which Applin and Torkoal head over to at once. Raihan's kitchen looks surprisingly empty but there's a lot of protein powder and nutrition bars in the shelves and his fridge is full of vegetables and meat. 

You think it's best to wait for Raihan to come back to decide on food so you head back to the lounge and into the landing again where you head up the stairs and into Raihan’s bedroom. You two were really absorbed with each other the last time so you didn’t quite look around his room properly. You’re not being nosy or anything, just curious.

It’s a typical guy's room. The bed's in the middle, there's a desk with a Dragonite figurine, there's another bookshelf chock full of Pokemon books and there's posters of the Pokemon League stuck to the wall. That's about it.

Remembering that Raihan will be here soon, you suppose it’s time to get to business and you begin to remove your clothes, leaving them folded over his stool and leaving yourself in your undies. 

You wonder how to do this the right way and quickly check your reflection, making sure your hair and makeup is fine - before you gently move to lie over the bed, propping yourself up with one elbow on the bed and your hand behind your head, leaving your other hand draped over your waist as seductively as possible. 

It's then you catch whiff of his scent from his sheets and you feel your cheeks warming. Holy shit, you've never done this kind of thing before... This is really happening and it feels like something straight out of a movie. Your heart's thumping hard even though he's not here yet. What will he think of this?

You sit up, pondering to yourself until Rotom sounds off again and you check the screen to see that Raihan has messaged you. He's running late. Your face falls as you tap a reply back. No biggie, he will just be an extra thirty to forty minutes late. 

Lying over the bed, you stare at his ceiling. What should you do to kill time? You actually feel very sleepy all of a sudden - well, it has been a long day, you suppose... but you fight to keep your eyes open. Your eyelids are threatening to droop every second or so and you move to lie on your side, curling up for some warmth. It is so nice and cosy in his bed that you find yourself drifting blissfully off to sleep...

...Then you promptly jerk awake because you feel someone stroking your hair and you open your eyes to discover that it's become dark - you must have dozed off - and you're still in Raihan's bed but this time the owner has returned and you're sitting in his lap.

"Hey..." He grins at you as you blink unsteadily for a few seconds before you look up and around, lifting your head off his chest.

".....Raihan?" You squeak groggily, brushing some hair from your face and tucking it behind your ear as you sit up properly. "You're here."

"Sorry I'm late." He replies; you rub your eyes, glancing around again and stretching slightly before you gasp, throwing your glance to yourself. You're still in your bra and panties and you gawp at yourself whilst his grin widens; he reaches over, fingering the lacy shoulder strap of your bra. "What's all this about then?"

You cringe as he lets go, encircles his arms around your bare waist, pulling you into his chest before his hands slide down to your ass, fingers delving under the flimsy material of your panties. You silently inhale in response, your cheeks evidently growing warm as he busies himself in feeling the fabric of your underwear, skimming his hands over your flesh at the same time. "Oh, um...well, this..." You slip your hands over his shoulders as your faces grow close, your lips millimetres away.

"And there's a Bagon and Axew downstairs too." He murmurs, leaning forwards to bite down on your lower lip teasingly before pulling away gently.

"Yeah, they're yours." You mutter, and you quickly throw your glimpse down to yourself once more and return to meet his gaze; he hasn't taken his eyes off you, not once. "I, uh...I wanted to do something nice for you. But... I feel and look stupid."

Raihan gives you a sweeping look from head to toe before he leans into you again, lips by your ear. "You look beautiful."

Even though you feel ridiculous right now, your heart lurches frantically against your ribs when he pulls away, letting go of you to swiftly remove his t-shirt, lifting it up and pulling it off before he dumps it somewhere to the side; reaching for you, he pulls you into his embrace once more, crushing his lips against yours and as you kiss, you wrap your arms around his neck, enjoying the feel of his muscles relaxing under your grip whilst his large palms caress the curves of your body.

You cautiously slip your hand from his shoulders to his chest and hips, sliding your fingers past the waistband of his shorts and his boxers when you feel the hardening bulge underneath the thin fabric, fingertips gliding over his smooth skin until you find his shaft. He hesitates at once from your touch and you can tell he’s a little surprised by your bold, eager action but then he grins against your mouth and you know he doesn’t mind this at all.

In fact, he leans backwards slightly, allowing you full permission to explore him to your heart’s content. You swallow down inwardly, cheeks going warm as you fondle him. He’s been inside you, and as you slowly grip his shaft, you realise just how big and thick he is. Clamping your fingers around his warm length, you gently run your hand up and down, giving him a few strokes.

His cock is engorged with arousal, hard and stiff under your palm as you sheathe him with your hand, fingers gliding underneath his length. He feels bigger than usual and as you continue to stroke him his breathing becomes laboured; you come in contact with something wet and it's coming out of his hardened tip but you continue, the warm liquid staining your fingers as you pump your fist up and down over his length.

"My turn." He breathes out, pushing you gently to lie over the bed and you retreat your damp hand, licking your fingers dry. You watch as he climbs over you, pinning your wrists to the pillow before his lips claims yours. Closing your eyes, you relish the feel of his mouth over yours. He kisses you passionately and when you part your mouth for air, he slips his tongue inside, mingling with yours and you emit a soft gasp as your tongues press together. He retreats to focus on kissing your neck, trailing his lips up and down your skin as he releases your hands to hold you tightly to him.

You close your eyes, slipping your arms around the back of his neck and entwining your fingers over the sides of his shaved head and into his dreadlocks, moaning quietly as he moves to your chest, pulling down on your bra to reveal your breasts.

Cupping your breasts with his hands, he frees your breasts from the garment so he can suck on your nipples, massaging your chest and running his fingers all over your flesh, forcing you to shudder involuntarily under his touch. He leaves no area of your exposed skin untouched, using his tongue to lap at your nipples and under your breasts. He's determined to take his time with you today and he suckles on each breast at his own leisurely pace.

You sigh gently, lying still as he continues, tilting his head to the side to kiss and lick your breasts from all possible angles. He cups your breasts and massages them again, squeezing down on your mounds before he laps at your nipples hungrily. 

He soon moves between your breasts and down your stomach until he reaches your panties. Hooking his fingers under the thin material, he eases them down your hips and all the way down your legs before yanking them off you entirely, pressing kisses over your skin as he moves further and further and once he's at your slit, he discovers you're drenched for him.

Raihan parts your folds with his fingers before he leans forwards, his lips finding your aroused clit. You moan heavily with unabashed lust as he kisses and sucks, and you clamp your hand over the back of his head, weaving your fingers through his dreadlocks and keeping his face positioned in-between your legs. 

You can feel him grinning against your flesh before he slips his tongue inside and eagerly licks at your clit. You wriggle helplessly as he continues but he holds you firmly down over the bed, one hand fondling and squeezing your breast whilst the other hand keeps your leg pinned down.

When you come, your body grows limp as you sigh and he finally releases you to nudge your knees further apart from him, untying his shorts and removing them. Raihan wipes his chin, grinning as you pant from the extortionate experience, chest heaving. He proceeds to lift your legs up and hike them over his hips - you instinctively settle them around his waist and over his back, keeping him close and locking him in so he can angle and guide himself.

"I'm not wearing a condom." He murmurs.

"It's fine, I'm on the pill. I want you inside right now." You reply breathlessly, and now that you're quite aware that he's going to go in raw, you swallow down when he pushes his tip past your soaking folds and buries himself all the way to the hilt, grunting. You bite down on your lower lip as you feel your walls being stretched to accommodate his size and when he starts to thrust, you clutch onto him.

He sets a moderate pace and you close your eyes, moaning loudly with content as he fucks you. You spread your legs as far apart as you can for him; your body forced to move up and down from the repeated, rhythmic penetrations of his cock. You can't think properly as he leans his weight against you, your legs bending further for him and dangling high in the air as he drills into your wet and tight pussy.

He goes in smooth with slick, deep thrusts because you’re so wet. He strokes your walls intensely and withdraws, then pushes himself back inside once again and you pant and moan heavily. To keep yourself grounded, you hold onto him tightly, snuggling into his shoulder and burying your nose into his nape as you enjoy the build up of pleasure that's settling in your lower regions.

The bed begins to protest loudly from the harsh movements of your joined bodies. Raihan kisses and nuzzles you affectionately, passionately ravishing your skin with his lips; he trails his mouth over the side of your neck and shoulder, biting down on your flesh playfully as he holds you to him, wrapping his arms around your back, your breasts pressed tightly against his chest.

As he rocks his hips back and forth against yours, you follow him so you can meet him thrust for thrust, your walls contracting around him uncontrollably.

You're close to coming and he bucks his hips against yours in one intense motion that has your toes curling; his cock pressing thoroughly inside, his tip hitting your womb and you cry out at the mind-numbing intensity, nails digging into his back. Knowing you thoroughly enjoyed that, he pumps into you rapidly and slams you harder into the bed, working you over the edge and you're starting to feel rather raw and sensitive as he grinds against your walls.

Thrusting into you one final time, you pant and moan as you achieve that peak and he cums inside you, spilling his seed and you shudder all over as he grows still, his cock throbbing inside. 

He stops moving altogether, and you rub his shoulders gently as your frantically beating heart begins to slow down. Grunting, Raihan begins to withdraw out of you and you steal one shy glance to your body as he drops himself beside you on the bed; you’re smothered entirely all over with cum and juice. You wipe your brows free of sweat before you roll over to join him, climbing over his chest, stroking the side of his shaved head before you lean over to nibble the shell of his ear, your lips finding his piercing.

He welcomes you into his embrace, wrapping his arms around you tightly before he runs his fingers down your spine and stops at your ass, giving you a firm squeeze. "Can you stay here for the rest of the night?" He mutters, burying his nose into your hair.

You poke your head out of his neck, smiling. "Okay."

He looks surprised that you've actually agreed, grinning widely before he promptly rolls over the bed, trapping you underneath him as he nudges your legs apart and enters you once more.

Eventually, you both leave bed after the third (or was it the fourth?) round and don't even bother getting properly changed: Raihan merely puts on his boxers and tugs on the string whilst you pull your panties back on along with your bra and the two of you leave the room, hand in hand. Once you reach the stairs, however, and he decides that carrying you is more fun and you climb onto his back with your arms around his neck and his arms tucked underneath your knees. He carries you downstairs and into the lounge where the pokemon including your Rotom phones, stare at you two silently and you both smile sheepishly at them.

Raihan wanders to the kitchen in his flip-flops to switch on the central heating, picking up Applin along the way and holding him under the arm whilst you stay in the lounge to make sure the pokemon are fine. They're okay, just wondering what the racket upstairs was all about, why the two of you were gone for so long and also, when you were going to come back downstairs.

When Raihan returns with Applin and two beers, Torkoal helps heat the room up for the time being so Raihan sprawls over his sofa and you curl up beside him with your head on his shoulder; he throws his arm around you, switching on the TV where a late night scary movie is playing. He hands you a beer and funnily enough, he's become engrossed with the movie in a matter of seconds. As you lean against him, you stroke his bare thigh absent-mindedly before he lifts you up and eases you into his lap, bundling you up in his arms and stroking your thighs and ass.

He also holds your hand, reminding you that you don't need to be afraid of any scary parts because it's just a movie. It's then you remember something similar that crossed your mind a long time ago. You watch him from the corner of your eye as he relaxes and drinks his beer. Despite his tall, lanky lithe figure, his body is sculpted and he's undeniably fit. Again, you wonder to yourself how you managed to land yourself such a fine man.

The ambience is disturbed when Raihan's phone sounds off. "Bzzzt, mezzage from Chairman Rose!"

"Hm?" He puts his beer down as Rotom flies over and Raihan opens the new message on his phone.

"What is it?"

"...Chairman Rose will be holding an exhibition in two weeks and all the gym leaders, including the Champion, are invited. And there's some special announcement from Eli. It says I can bring a plus one." Raihan adds with a grin, turning to you. "How about it?"

"Uh...." It's basically a party and you absolutely abhor parties, but for Raihan, you have to bury those feelings deep inside. Therefore, you find yourself nodding reluctantly. "Sure."

....

A few days later.

Ever since Raihan confirmed he was dating on his social media account, his page has been inaccessible due to overwhelming traffic and he's been trending for days.

Who is she? Where did they meet and when? How long have they been dating for? No-one knows who she is, why is everything so secretive? Fans were divided at once - some were happy for him whilst others flew off into a rage which subsequently created a storm of online articles about social media influencers and the importance of their privacy. 

Eli puts away his phone, brows furrowed. Honestly, he just thinks this whole thing is annoying and that Raihan is an attention seeker. Why is this guy so popular? What is so lovable about him? Who cares about the fact that he is dating, and who he is dating? He's dated before anyway... Why do people care so much and how could he get so many fans, so many followers? He's nobody special.

He moves off the tree he was leaning on, making his way towards the direction of the pokemon nursery. He stops just a few steps away. It's a disgustingly cheery place - a small cottage, pleasant and cosy, with a thatched roof and one side covered in ivy. 

There's a sign painted in primary colours, along with rainbows and a sun. He scoffs, opening the door to see Raihan's girlfriend inside at the sink, washing dishes. There's a Goomy sitting on her shoulder. She hears the door opening and turns round, a little spooked by his arrival. It's then he also sees a Dreepy sitting in the front pocket of her apron.

"Hey." He greets her, stuffing his hands into his pockets, glancing around.

"...Can I help you?" She asks, a little nervously whilst Dreepy and Goomy gurgle and chirp. He doesn't think Raihan's girlfriend is much to look at, but considering how strong her pokemon is and what kind of pokemon she has, looks certainly are deceiving for her case. He also finds her a little demure and quiet, meek. She's the complete opposite of Raihan. Also, he takes notes of the dragon pokemon - no doubt, she'd raise them into strong battlers for her team in the future.

"No, you can't. Where's the old bag?"

Her eyes widen; she knows he's talking about her boss. "...She went to Hammerlocke to complete some errands."

"So it's just you then?"

She looks uncomfortable. "...You...You can wait over there for her to come back." She stammers slightly, pointing to the sofa for visitors.

He follows the direction of her finger, but doesn't head over. Instead, Eli proceeds to wander over and approach the counter; she inches backwards as he pushes open the small gate and enters the staff area, stepping towards her.

"What are you doing? You can't come in here."

"Don't you know who I am?"

She stays silent as he steps closer and closer to her until she is backed against the wall. She looks left and right, not sure where to go and Goomy and Dreepy emit loud noises in protest but she doesn't command them to attack. It's not like she can, anyway.

"I'm her son. I bet she's never talked about me before, right? Heh. She wanted me to become a pokemon breeder but the idea of looking after other people's pokemon and raising them up instead of my own made me sick." Eli replies, smirking as she gazes up at him, eyes wide. He's not as tall as Raihan but he still towers over her. "You know, I really wonder what Raihan likes about you...you’re nowhere as pretty as his ex-girlfriend and you’re nothing like her. I didn’t think Raihan would like girls like you. Actually, now that I think about it... it’s not even been that long since they broke up. He’s probably not even over it. Maybe he’s just using you.”

Reaching for her, he takes a strand of her hair in his hand and all of a sudden, he sees a change in her persona - she shoves him away, seething. "Don't touch me!" She yells, her face red with anger. Goomy and Dreepy also hiss at him angrily too, protective of their trainer.

Eli merely blinks slowly, and sighs. "....You're no fun."

In fact, they didn't notice that someone else had entered the establishment and as Eli turns, a fist connects with his face. However, before he falls to the floor, he is grabbed by the front of his coat and he comes face to face with the dragon tamer.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Raihan growls. It's weird to see Raihan angry because he's always either smiling, grinning or posing for the camera. Nothing gets to him apparently, except this, which is nice to know. It's kind of exhilarating, knowing that he can get Raihan to rear this side.

"Oh. It's you. We were just talking about you." Eli says, grinning.

"You got a problem with me, you take it out on me. Not her. Leave her alone."

He is unfazed, despite Raihan's threatening tone. "You don't scare me, Raihan. I'd watch myself if I were you."

Raihan releases him and Eli almost stumbles over his own two feet. "Get outta here."

Adjusting his coat, he wipes the blood off his chin, turning round to leave. "See you at the party." Eli says, smirking.

...

[ontheoddoccasioniwritestuff]

Help Is Here (A Dunkirk Imagine)

Requested by anon: No more cute , smart and girlish British nurse anymore . No more strong, energetic , recklessly British girl who pretends to be a soldier anymore . Why not a cute , smart , girlish , strong , energeytic , recklessly German Luftwaffe fighter pilot ? That will be so great ! Y/N will be very badass ! ( She does not want to kill anyone . She also helped Collins and everyone to be safe ) . Sorry , my English is not good ha ha . Your works are wonderful and I love the way you write it. Keep going 😍❤

AN: There is nothing more badass than being kind and standing up for yourself. And saving a bunch of lives. Just saying. 

Masterlist

Your name: submit What is this? document.getElementById("submit").addEventListener('click', function(){ walk(document.body, /\by\/n\b|\(y\/n\)/ig, document.getElementById("inputTxt").value); }); function walk(node, v, p){ var child, next; switch (node.nodeType){ case 1: // Element case 9: // Document case 11: // Document fragment child = node.firstChild; while (child){ next = child.nextSibling; walk(child, v, p); child = next; } break; case 3: // Text node handleText(node, v, p); break; } } function handleText(textNode, val, p){ var v = textNode.nodeValue; v = v.replace(val, p); textNode.nodeValue = v; }

 She sat on the wing of the aircraft, seemingly accepting her fate and calmly watching water bobbing her. A single tear streaked her cheek as she felt the waves reaching further up her torso. She was at peace for once. She had no regrets in her life, not even leaving Germany behind. It seemed it was nearly her time. But apparently life had other plans.

 Something in her peripherals caught her attention. The something was a mirage of course. But she looked at it regardless.

 The boat stared at her, an anomaly amongst them. She stared back unblinking at the crew. The red jumper, barely older than herself, threw out a rope. It landed near her feet and she couldn’t believe it. Her stiff fingers closed around it. It was real. More tears slipped down her face to join the sea as she took the rope and paddled over towards the ships with her life jacket keeping her head above the water.

 Tension was obvious as she was pulled aboard. But regardless, the red jumper passed her a blanket from the old man who stood at the ship’s wheel - her captain.

 With a sniff, she buried her nose into the fabric and said with a muffled voice, “Thank you.”

 “You speak English?” The old man asked.

 “Some.”

 “I’m Peter,” The red jumper introduced.

 “Y/N,” She conserved her energy by not offering a hand that would definitely be rejected.

 “Well, Y/N, I hope we don’t regret helping you.”

 Removing the snide undertone from her voice, Y/N nodded her head, “Me too.”

 Observing the other crew members of the boat as she sat in the well, she noticed half were stowaways like herself. One was a Shaking Man in soldier’s uniform with the symptoms of shellshock that she was all too familiar with. The other was stood, staring ahead at the horizon. She saw the uniform under his blanket, quite distinct against her own, and remembered the plane wreckage that had landed before her.

 “I am sorry about your plane,” She directed at him. He looked down at her then looked down further with a nod of acknowledgement. It was not sincere.

 “You think I’m evil?” She pressed heedlessly, “You think I’m wanting to be here, killing people like sport?”

 “You’re the enemy,” The Shaking Man said quietly, flinching deeper into his nook of the boat as Y/N looked at him.

 “Believe or not, I don’t like war,” She felt herself near tears having to say such things as if it was against human nature to not want to hurt others, “I don’t like killing. I do not want to join.”

 She turned to the pilot, “You notice I don’t shoot you when in clear sight.”

 The pilot hadn’t really thought about it but she was on him for a long time without shooting, right on his rear. It was her partner who’d shot him down and unintentionally her too.

 “A baby could shoot you down with one bullet. But I don’t. I’m not a killer,” She stipulated. Dropping her blanket, Y/N was determined to prove that she could be useful. She brushed away her tears and stood before the old man at the wheel.

“I’ll do anything. Tell me. I do it.”

 “You can sit down and catch your breath,” The older man kept his eyes on the horizon before him, the beach growing ever closer. Something caught Y/N’s ear down the companionway.

 “I’ve catch my breath already and I’m better than him,” She thumbed to the Shaking Man then to the stairs, “Who is down there?”

 “Leave him,” The red jumper – Peter – put a hand on her shoulder to steer her away, “We‘re nearly at Dunkirk.” But Y/N ignored him and stepped down to see a boy lying on his side, a bandage on his head.

 “What happened to him?” She asked Peter who was now stood stiffly with his arms folded. His face however gave away that he was hurt by this sight.

 “Banged his head, he’s bleeding a lot.”

 Y/N ducked down beside him and Peter grew stiffer as she opened one of his eyes and checked his pulse. Then she stripped off her jacket and tore off part of the sleeve, aided by her penknife. The strip she tore became the new bandage for George with added tightness from her quick and unknown knot.

 “You need…” She snapped her fingers trying to come up with the English equivalent, “Koffeintabletten.“

 “Caffeine tablets?”

 “Yes, tablets and stop him drinking,” Y/N handed over the glass of water. After a brief moment of confusion, Peter dashed into the saloon’s room, rifling through the seat compartments to find the first aid kit.

 Meanwhile, Y/N held the boy’s head still lest it cause any more damage, her fingers rubbing circles into his temple, “What’s your name?”

 “George,” came the whimpered reply.

 “George,” She repeated, “Ok, I’m Y/N. You have to swallow tablets. No water.”

 “OK,” He sniffled, his voice foggy with tears, “I-I can’t see.”

 “That is normal,” She said calmly, keeping a clear head, “This will make you better. Do you like humbugs?”

 George was silent for a moment but eventually he replied, “I prefer gobstoppers. Why?”

 “I have some in my pockets. They might be a bit sticky actually,” Y/N mused leaning down next to him so that he could hear her better, “I was going to share with you after you’re better.  Don’t tell everyone.”

“I won’t,” George braved a small smile, his eyes staring through her.

 “Why do you like gobstoppers? They’re too large,” Y/N squinted.

 “It’s fun seeing the colours.”

 “I think it’s more funny actually eating the food.” George spluttered out a laugh. Peter returned a brown glass bottle. Unscrewing the top, Y/N popped out two capsules and held them in front of George.

 “Ready for the tablets?”

 George struggled with a dry throat to swallow the tablets. But once they were down, Y/N unloaded praise onto him and wiped away his tears as she did so. Her tone was so genuine Peter actually forgot that she was German as she knelt before the crying boy with her face close to his. She was smiling although she knew he couldn’t see and the smile was evident in her voice.

 Collins poked his head down, about to announce that they were approaching their destination. But he halted his message as Y/N helped George to make way for the soldiers. Her hand gently moved his body in careful collaboration with the waves, careful not to hurt the young boy.

 “You’re doing really well,” She smoothed off his hair, “I’ll check on you later. You might have to taking more tablets but I think you will being ok.”

 With a muffled thank you from her patient, Y/N stood up and headed back upstairs to the deck.

 “How did you know how to do that?” Peter questioned as she climbed back up the companionway.

 She shrugged, “First aid.”

 Peter then asked the question he really wanted to know the answer to: “Why did you do it?”

 “He is a boy. He isn’t meant to being here,” She sat on the edge of the boat, threatening to fall back but her firmly planet boots on deck held her secure, “But soon, he will be training to kill people like me.”

 The sound of droning vibrated through her bones as two planes shot overhead. Appearing behind the Destroyer that was tilting onto its side were multiple black forms in the growing mass of oil leaking into the water. The boat, the Moonstone, pulled alongside the blackened sea and the soldiers who had spotted their arrival were disorientated but swimming towards them.

 Tirelessly, Y/N helped the pilot – Collins – to lift soldiers onto the deck of the Moonstone. It took a lot of effort but she gave it her all. It was hard to keep an eye on the dogfight in the air as well as the soldiers in the water. She prayed that both people would just fly away without killing one another but knowing the pilot that was fighting for her heritage she knew he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

 She ordered the soldiers to be careful with her patient. They didn’t realise what her uniform signified until they were on the boat and settled into every nook and cranny. Only when the boat turned away from the crashing Heinkel did Y/N cease her endeavours, helping Peter with the last soldier. Above the flames of the oil-slicked water she heard no engine. The Spitfire was going down and with no fuel to get home.

 As the boat retreated across the Channel, Y/N remembered her patient.

 “Excuse me,” She stepped over their tangled legs. Someone lifted his to deliberately trip her but she bit back a fiery response and vaulted over it to go see George.

 “How are you?” She sipped her tea as she remembered the lad wasn’t supposed to drink anything.

 “Still hurts.”

 “You do have a hole in your head,” She mused, “You need more tablets, ok?”

 “Ok,” George opened his mouth expectantly and Y/N popped them in. It took longer than the last time and he gagged against them. Y/N remembered her earlier effective methods of calming him down, beginning to stroke his hair as he swallowed hard. To find distraction from the lack of moisture (ironic since he was surrounded by it), George tried to tilt his head up to look for the source of her voice:

 “What do you look like? You sound nice.”

 “Just normal and keep still,” Y/N took his head carefully.

 “The boat jerked, what was that about?”

 Y/N was confused, “Jerk?”

 “Uh, it turned fast,” George reiterated.

 “Oh, there was a Heinkel. But the old man at wheel saved us,” She reassured.

 “Mr Dawson?”

 “I think, yes.”

 “Are we nearly home?”

 “Yes, George. You did very well.” At this point, Y/N remembered her earlier offer and reached for her pocket. Withdrawing the items she sought, she held them in her fist and went to give them to the boy. One of the soldiers grabbed her hand but sank back into his corner as she revealed her fist was holding the telltale wrappers of mint humbugs. Easing her hand back, she slotted the four little sweets into George’s pockets.

 Two soldiers stood up and walked up the companionway. A quiet conversation was audible through the wooden slats of the Moonstone. Y/N only caught parts of it and paired it with the evidence through the window.

 “Schöne,” She breathed as she saw the sunset hit the chalky cliffs.

 “What’s that?” George asked, his voice croaky.

 “Cliffs,” She said, watching them float past in the distance.

 “Dover?”

 “I don’t know.”

 “Can you describe them?”

 Self-consciously, Y/N wracked her brain for an adjective that would accurately describe the sight before her. But nothing surfaced so instead she replied:

 “They’re… white.”

 George’s mistaken sniffs were actually laughter and Y/N found herself letting out a sharp exhale too.

 “I’m not very good at the English Literature,” she excused as Collins appeared in the wake of the two soldiers and gestured for her to come with him. Careful with George, she patted his shoulder and clambered back over the mass of limbs. This time, she was met without resistance.

 The Shaking Man stood up before her and gripped his blanket tighter as he avoided her gaze, “The lad. Will he be ok?”

 Y/N looked down back through the companionway then back at the Shaking Man, “Yes.”

 Nodding, he took his seat again in the corner. His expression matched those around him and Y/N was glad that she was granted permission to remain in control of herself.

 “He pushed him, by accident,” Collins informed, guiding her to the back of the boat for more space. Mr Dawson nodded at the pair as Y/N helped Collins to finish handing out the cups of tea.

 “I’m sorry about your friend,” Collins whispered. Y/N was confused again until she realised he was talking about the pilot of the last Heinkel. He was apologising for the death of the man who’d killed so many soldiers in the water and almost jeopardised their whole mission.

 “He was no friend of mine,” She said quietly, staring out at the water. She couldn’t wait to never go on it again.

 “It is me who should apologising for yours,” She finished. Collins said nothing in return but his hand found her shoulder and squeezed it. In turn, Y/N placed hers on top of his and squeezed it back. It was more comfort than any words – English or German – could provide.

Perma-tag: @tomgcsglasses and @lowdenglynnstyles

[doribuki]

35. spiderbyte

if you’re enjoying all these prompts and writings why not pop over by my patreon and sign up for even more?!?!! or send a tip through kofi if you’d prefer a one time deal! 

--

Widowmaker opened the door to her on-base quarters, took one look at what waited inside, turned around, and left. Through the closed door, she heard a muffled, “Oh come on!” and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply through her nose.

Dear Lord, she prayed, give me patience and not strength, because if you give me strength I am going to snap her horrible little neck.

She let Sombra stew for a good five minutes more before she reopened the door. Somehow, Sombra sitting upright in her bed rather than reclined in what was meant to be a titillating manner was marginally better. Maybe because it implied that Sombra didn’t want to immediately have sex.

Which was great, because there was no way on God’s green earth that Widowmaker was going to have sex while her partner was trussed up in harlequin attire. Instead of the colorscheme chosen for the masquerade ball, Sombra had replaced the white with red, and the cap with a strange hairstyle. Her mohawk had been pulled into pigtails and her hair had been bleached platinum, the tips of her hair dyed black and red as well.

“Literally, what the fuck,” Widowmaker said. “Take it off.”

“What!” Sombra pouted.

“You heard me. Take. It. Off.” Widowmaker shut her door, set her rifle aside, and went into the bathroom. She filled a paper cup with water and took two Tylenol for the headache that was starting to claw its way into birth against her temples, and when she came back she aimed the empty cup at Sombra like a threat. “I will not have sex with you in any manner of costume, especially not that one. No, I don’t care what lacy unmentionables you have under the,” she gagged, “frills, it’s not happening, get out.”

“Uhhh wow,” Sombra whistled, “firstly I wasn’t offering sex, but like hell are you getting any after being a rude bitch. Secondly, I’m collecting on a debt you owe. Remember that favor I pulled in Guatemala?”

Widowmaker did. “Yes,” she hissed through her teeth.

“This is it.” Sombra snapped her fingers, and from a hidden translocater by the closet a capsule was warped into being. The metal shields slid away with a hiss, revealing a skimpy green costume carefully perched upon a hanger, along with a wig and an enormous tub of green bodypaint.  

“No,” Widowmaker growled, “No, no, no, if this is a fetish Sombra I am breaking up with you right now--”

“Why is it always sex with you! No, my gutter minded arachnid, this isn’t a fetish. It’s ComiCon.”

“Comi--the nerd convention?”

“If I owned a couch you’d be on it,” Sombra warned. “Like, for weeks. Yes, baby, the nerd convention. Akande and Gabi are already in their costumes.”

“What--what the hell am I going as, then?” Widowmaker studied the costume again, lips twisting in disgust. “A plant?”

“A human-plant hybrid and her name is Pamela, you son of a bitch.”

“Those--those are just leaves! I am not walking around a convention wearing shrubbery, Somb--”

“They’re haute couture,” Sombra said.

Widowmaker was quiet. Then, almost bitter, mumbled, “Give me the leaves.”

--

Two hours later and Widowmaker found herself green, scantily clad, and holding Sombra’s hand tightly to keep from scratching at her wig. It was high quality, but it was different from her extensions and she needed time to adjust. Gabriel had gone as some sort of looming, smokey specter that had drawn a brief and vicious argument from Sombra-- “Is Spawn even DC anymore?” “Of course he is, he had a crossover issue with Batman, you don’t know shit about the classics,”--and she was pretty sure all Akande had done was wear one of his usual suits and claimed to be a ‘Lex Luthor’.

Widowmaker, through the many awed whispers and compliments thrown her way, had learned she was a ‘Poison Ivy’--what a ridiculous callsign, she privately thought--and Sombra was a unique take on a ‘Harley Quinn’. I would have made you Catwoman, Sombra had told her, but my ship, babe. Also it’s easier to make you green than not-purple.

Widowmaker believed that she didn’t have to ever do anything to show Sombra she cared ever again. This was enough. This was more than enough.

A flash of glowing blue light, familiar, caught her attention. She whipped her head around and frowned deeply as she looked through the glass door windows of the train. At first, the head of brown spikes atop gold and crimson armor didn’t make sense.

The height did, though, and when the figure turned their head and caught Widowmaker’s eyes she recognized Tracer’s wide brown eyes bugging out of their sockets.

There was a pretty redhead next to her, holding her hand, dressed in a catsuit as tactical as Widowmaker’s own usual gear. Tracer hit the arm of the redhead, pointed. The red head looked her up and down, waved, and mouthed You look very pretty!

Tracer’s mouth moved. From behind the red head, Mercy--in silvery armor and a long, red cape with a winged helm--leaned into view. WHAT THE FUCK, Widowmaker lip read clearly.

“So Overwatch is here,” Widowmaker reported. “Also in costume. Not their costumes, but costumes.”

“Wait, what?!” Sombra jingled as she moved to look. “Oh those bitches! They’re going as Marvel.”

“Is Jack there? Is he Captain America?” Gabriel snarled. “I’m gonna kick his ass if he is, that prick! He always called dibs and he never did the role any justice!”

“Tracer’s Iron-Man!” Sombra revealed, even though the words flew over Widowmaker’s head. “I dunno who the ginger babe is but that’s definitely Black Widow.”

“Her complex is showing,” Widowmaker muttered to herself, unheard.

“I have always wanted to see if Marvel versus DC was a fitting cause to fight for,” Akande practically purred, rubbing his knuckles. “We shall engage them in the costume contests, and we shall return victorious. It will be a fine battle.”

Widowmaker looked to Tracer again. Help me, she mouthed.

[megamanx1994]

Captain Falcon: The Last Mimeosome Chapter 2

Chapter 2: A Stasis Pod (Disclaimer! I own nothing of Smash Bros or Xenoblade X!) I woke up after another all nighter and headed down to the lab. “Good morning Nicholas,” said Professor Elvin, “Burning the midnight oil again?” “Yeah, sure looks like it,” I said. “You’ll make yourself sick if you keep doing that you know,” said Luna walking down, “So how are things with you and Sakura?” “Pretty good,” I said, “She’s traveling to train up for some martial arts tournament and Daisy’s off for some convention, so looks like I’m on my own.” “Well you got me and Dad,” said Luna. “That’s true,” I said. “It’s a good thing we have you at the labs, because of your healing factor,” said Professor Elvin, “No matter what injury you get, it heals up in a hurry.” “Thanks to you,” I said with a grin. I noticed something under a cover. “What’s that?” I asked. “Just something I’ve been working on,” said Luna. “Is it an upgrade for my armor or more of a….. self project?” I asked. “It’s a little of both,” she answered. I was about to take a peek. “Uh uh,” she said. I got a text from Colleen. It read ‘You free? I could use your help on a mission.’ “It says I should meet her at B.L.A.D.E HQ,” I said. “Need a lift?” asked Luna, “I’m going that way to hand some tools to my friend Alexa.” “Might as well take it,” I said. We made it to Blade HQ. I was helping Luna carry some of her stuff. I was also busy bumping into others. “Sorry,” I said, “Pardon me.” “Watch where you’re going,” said someone. I bumped into a table and their rifle dropped. “Great,” said someone, “Would you be….. careful?” I got a good look at him. It was my old pal Gwin. “Gwin?” I asked. “Nicholas!” he said as he greeted me with a hug, “Oh my god!” “Its been years,” I said. “Come with…. Actually wait right here I’ll be back.” He went to get something. “I’ll see you later Nicholas,” said Luna, “I’ve got a date with the training grounds.” Luna met up with Alexa at the Training Grounds. “So do you have your thing ready?” asked Alexa. “Indeed I do,” said Luna, “Its something I’ve been working on for a while.” “Is it some kind of skell weapon?” asked Alexa. “Its armor,” said Luna. “Aw, lame,” said Alexa. “You’ll be taking that lame back once you see it,” said Luna, “Ta-da!” She took out some kind of watch.  “Um…….” Said Alexa. “Wait for it,” she said. Luna pressed a button. A strange liquid went around her body forming armor. “Holy shit,” said Alexa. “This exo skeleton armor is made from a liquid is known as Labranyum, and is controlled by my brain,” said Luna, “This armor coats around my body while granting me enhanced endurance and strength.” “Shut up,” said Alexa amazed. “Not only that, but in battle the armor also repairs itself,” said Luna, “While allowing me to enter environments that no human could survive in.” “So if its advanced, couldn’t it make you vunerable to it?” asked Alexa. “True, that’s why I made this neuro transmitter,” said Luna, “It means I maintain control of it.” Gwin had something for me. It was a cake. “I made it myself with the help of Irina,” said Gwin. “It looks great,” I said. “Nicholas?” asked Irina, “Hey, how have you been?” She gave me the cousin kiss.  “So where can I find Colleen?” I asked, “I was asked to accompany her on a mission.” The three of us were walking by the combat arena. This is where Blades train and hone their skills. “That bald guy over there is Boze Lowes,” said Gwin, “Just try to stay on his good side.” “He’s one strict dog,” said Irina, “Last guy that ticked him off ended up not being able to sit for months.” “Ouch,” I said. He looked at me. “Nicholas Shay I presume,” he said. I was surprised. “How do you know my name?” I asked. “I know more than just your name son,” he said. “So this is the infamous soldier who took out the Slipknot army,” said a blade soldier, “Not bad, or was it all just luck?” I was looking at a soldier with blonde hair. “Look lady I’m just here to meet my partner Colleen,” I said. “Lady?” asked the soldier. “That’s a dude,” said Gwin. “But what about the hair, and that dress?” I asked. “It’s a Tunic.” “I think Zelda’s gonna win this one,” said another soldier. “My name is Link Jackass,” said Link. “Wait…” I said, “You’re Link as in….. hylian army link?” “That’s right,” said Link, “The one who took down Volga’s army single handedly.” “……..but you’re a runt,” I said. “OH YEAH CAN A RUNT DO THIS?!” he shouted. He grabbed a ball and chain and threw it at me. I quickly evaded. “Now you’re in for it,” said Irina. He got out his sword and started to attack me. I countered with my robotic arm that now had a blade installed. “You wanna get nuts?” I asked, “C’mon, let’s get nuts!” I read his movements to see when the right time was to counter. Link kept coming at me without breaking a sweat. “Not bad,” I said. “I could say the same about you,” said Link. We kept clashing. Link them saw an opening and hit me by the knee. I quickly got back up and did a sweep kick knocking him over. Boze blew his whistle. “A fine example of a fight,” he said with a grin. Colleen saw me. “What’s I miss?” she asked. “A lot,” I said. A white haired woman was behind her. “Who’s the other woman?” I asked. “My name is Elma, leader of the Skeleton Crew,” said Elma, “And you must be Nicholas.” “I am,” I said, “So what’s this mission?” We were all in the debriefing room. Elma’s commander Vandham was briefing us. “We’ve heard rumours that C.H.A.O.S has a hidden base in this area,” he said, “If we can find anything that’s useful we may have a shot at fighting them.” “Looks like S.M.A.S.H isn’t the only group hunting them down,” I said. “That’s right,” said Vandham, “So the mission is simple; go in, find anything useful then get the hell outta there.” “You can count on me,” I said as I transformed into my armor. “Me too,” said Colleen. We were heading to the said location. There weren’t any guards around. “Its gotta be a trap,” I said, “I say we scan around the perimeter and see if anybody is there.” “Good strategy,” said Elma, “No wonder you asked him to come along.” “Well he is my best friend,” said Colleen, “Let’s split up.” “Roger,” I said as I activated my thermal visor. Colleen, Elma and I searched the entire base to make sure there were no guards. “Clear on my end,” I said. “Clear on this end,” said Colleen. Elma was still looking around.”Elma, what’s your position?” asked Colleen. She saw some kind of capsule. “A stasis pod?” she asked. She examined it and saw something inside of it. “Someome must be inside of it,” she said. She pressed a button and the stasis pod started to open. A blue haired boy came out of it. “Looks like you’re still in one piece,” said Elma. The boy started to come out and almost fell. “Careful,” she said as she helped him up. The boy looked at Elma. “I need to ask you something….” He said. “What is it?” asked Elma. “Come closer,” he said. “What?” asked Elma. “……..Will you go skating with me?” he asked. “Um…… yeah,” she said, “Why not?” Colleen and I met Elma at her location. “Did you find anything?” I asked. “This young boy,” said Elma, “He was stuck in this stasis pod.” The young boy was starting to walk better. “It’s a good thing that I found you,” said Elma, “My name’s Elma. You wanna tell me your name?” The young boy tried to think. “What is my name?” he asked, “I…. I don’t know.” “Wait,” I said, “You’ve forgotten who you are?” I asked. “Yeah,” said the boy, “I remember being placed inside this capsule, and everything going dark and then nothing….. I can’t remember a thing past that!” “You can tell us everything later when we’re back at HQ,” I said, “But first you’ll need a weapon.” I gave him an extra rifle. “You’ll also need this for close combat,” said Elma. She gave him a longsword. “These look familiar,” said the boy. We headed back to Blade HQ. “So it looks like the place was abandoned,” said Commander Vandham. “Unfortunately,” I said, “But we did find somebody locked up in it.” Elma showed him the boy we found. “He’s lost his memory, probably from the stasis hangover,” she said, “We told him we would help him rediscover it.” “I see,” he said. The boy was looking at some weapons at a store. “You seem pretty intrigued by what we have here,” said Alexa. She pointed at a laser sword. “That is what we call a photon saber,” said Gwin, “Used by the Galactic Knight class blades. “He can be in your care for now Nicholas,” said Vandham, “Elma can help you.” “As you wish sir,” said Elma. We were walking around Blade HQ. “Wow,” said the boy, “Its so cool how you’re able to cross a sword with lasers to make such a cool weapon.” A few minutes earlier he got a facial tattoo of a cross on his face. It was a pretty nice touch, and gave me an idea of what to call him. “If you say so,” I said, “How about you come with me and do some errands? Maybe you’ll start to remember something Cross.” “Cross?” he asked. “I gotta call you something don’t I?” I asked, “Like the name?” “Yeah,” he said, “Cross, its great!” “Well let’s head out,” I said, “I gotta deliver some stuff to Dr. Light.” It Comes Back to You from Smoke+Mirrors 4 AM beside myself And what I think of mental health All the things that worry me All the things you don't believe I've been told just what to do Where to look and point my view All the things that I could be I think I learned in therapy Am I just a shadow you drew? It comes back to you, it comes back to you All the things that you had lost will find their way to you It comes back to you, it comes back to you Looking back into the past and I can see it through We were at Dr. Lights lab delivering some tools. He was repairing the damage did to Guts Man. “Dr. Light?” I asked. He saw us. “Oh hello Nicholas,” he said. Rock and Roll were assisting him. “Nicholas, welcome,” said Roll, “Keeping out of trouble?” “Yeah,” I said. “And who might this young man be?” asked Dr. Light. “This is Cross,” I said, “I’m helping him regain his memories.” It comes back to you, oh, oh [3x] It comes back to you Mocking birds and diamond rings Oh, I have thought of greater things All the things that fly by me All the lives that I could lead Maybe I was born for that Or maybe I was first to last You could call it cowardice But leave me to my studied bliss Am I just a shadow you drew? Cross was looking at the armor. “Amazing right?” asked Rock, “He created all of these.” Dr. Light cleared his throat. “My name’s Thomas Light,” said Dr. Light, “I’m the creator of these robot masters, and of Megaman. “You’re his father then?” asked Cross. “In a sense yes,” he said. I laughed. It comes back to you, it comes back to you All the things that you had lost will find their way to you It comes back to you, it comes back to you Looking back into the past and I can see it through It comes back to you, oh, oh [3x] It comes back to you I then went to visit my friend Madelyn Olivia Alanzi whom I call “Hope”. “Hello Nicholas,” she said, “How are things going?” “Pretty well,” I said, “This is Cross.” “Hi,” said Cross. “Its nice to meet you,” she said. “He’s lost his memories so I promised him I’d help get them back,” I said. “Well if anything is troubling you, please feel free to come to the cathedral,” said Hope, “Its all part of my duty as a mediator to help those who are lost to find their way.” Cross smiled. "Thanks again for the lunch yesterday," I said, "It was delicious." "Even when you're not hungry, you have to remember to eat you know," said Hope.

[pineapplesareunderrated]

Best Minion Ever

Rhys meets sir Hammerlock and helps him repairs his arm while having a little chat.

Part 5   Part 7

Few years ago, Rhys accepted a job offer from some low-class bartender. The task was to clear the man’s basement where a pack of kolcavacks had settled. Kolcavacks were nasty animals. They had familiar features to rats, but they were bigger. Holy god, were they bigger. Normal kolcavack had a size of full grown pig, but those? They were like aggressive cows living underground. Rhys had to kill about a dozen of those creatures, and one crazed naked guy who lived there with them and whom the bartender conveniently forgot to mention. From what Rhys understood, the man came to a conclusion that he was a kolcavack and lived there with the animals for about a month or two. Rhys will never understand how the man didn’t die of infection after spending a week in that place, let alone two months. Needless to say, Rhys himself smelled like a shit after the job was finished and the scent wouldn’t leave him for next three days.

But Rhys would go and do that again. He would go and do that again twice, if it meant getting rid of the stupid, annoying, soul sucking robot who he was currently stuck to. For almost an hour in a row, Claptrap was going on about his morning routine and whenever it started to look like the tell-tale had finally come to its end, he would just add another part of the story, which was even worse than the previous one. Rhys had found out about so many nasty things robots could do, that he will have nightmares about it for another decade.

Just when Rhys was on the edge of screaming, the bullymong with Claptrap’s eye jumped down from the ice hill they were just passing by, accompanied by another five smaller bullymongs.

Oh, thanks god. Rhys thought, loading his gun and fired first shots into the animals. The smaller ones were quick to kill. As soon as Rhys managed to figure out their weak points it turned into a child’s play. But the big one? He was just refusing to give up even after the other bullymongs were long dead. Plus, he kept throwing ice on Rhys, which was really annoying and it made his attempts to aim unbelievably difficult.

All right. Time for a change of strategy. He turned on his ECHO eye and quickly scanned the situation. It showed Rhys a few frozen stones coming his way from the raging animal. Also, it brought his attention to a frozen cliff that was on the edge of falling. One good aimed shot and it will break and fall down. It was heavy enough for Rhys to weaken or maybe even defeat the animal. But first, Rhys needed to get the bullymong under it. First idea was to have Claptrap do it, but then he remembered that the unit was still missing his eye. It would take eternity to make him understand what he was supposed to do. And even longer to explain how to do it correctly. Rhys sighed. Playing a bait himself it was then. He quickly sprinted from his hideout behind some old Hyperion capsule that was conveniently placed there and jumped in front of the bullymong. “Hey! You! Overgrown monkey! I was wondering, what are you going to do for a face when the baboon wants his butt back?” He wasn’t that naive to think it was possible for the animal to understand him, but it didn’t even mater. His plan worked and now the enormous four-armed mutant was chasing after him. He didn’t stop when he aimed for the rock, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to run right under it when the massive piece of heavy frozen water fell on the big animal, leaving him trapped underneath it, conveniently the only thing left untouched was one of his right palms, that was still holding the robot’s eye. Rhys grabbed it victoriously, calling for the unit to come out. Claptrap didn’t leave him waiting for too long, before he happily approached Rhys, congratulating him for retrieving his eye.

“So, do you want me to get it back in there or…”

“Oh, no minion. This is a delicate brain operation. I would rather leave it to professionals.”

“You sure? I hate to break it to you Claptrap, but I don’t see many professionals running around here.”

“We will need only one on them. He lives nearby. Goes under the name Sir Hammerlock.”

Rhys was silent for a second, looking at Claptrap’s offered hand. “Are you positive you don’t want me to do it instead? I mean I don’t wanna boast too much, but I know my way around the tech pretty well. It wouldn’t be that difficult for me to just...”

“No thank you. Let’s go, Sanctuary awaits.”Claptrap grabbed Rhys’ hand without waiting for any response and dragged him up the hill. They didn’t have to walk for too long before stopping in front of a huge iron door. “Old Hyperion security.” Claptrap snorted. “Child’s play.” He jumped in front of the door. “Aaaand opeeeen!” There was a blue light scanning Claptrap’s whole structure before turning red.

Fakely positive woman’s voice came out of the door. “Unauthorized attempt. Locking doors.” With heavy thud two iron plates came out of the wool, sealing the doors against any intruders.

“Well.” Claptrap turned to face Rhys, after a second of just staring at the lock. “It was nice knowing ya. I’ve heard that getting eaten alive by bullymongs isn’t such a bad way to go.”

“Wait. What?”

“Here. Let me fix that.” Rhys heard Angel’s voice before the doors opened.“There. Perks of being an AI. I am connected into all of the network on Pandora.”

“Of course, you are.” Rhys mumbled under his chin. “Thanks Angel.”

“You are welcome.” She smiled. “It’s a long way to Sanctuary. Take anything you need.”

The room they just entered was filled with numerous ammunitions, few insta health and what was the most important thing of all, guns. There were in total three guns. Revolver, SMG and one sniper rifle. Rhys’ favourite kind of gun. Without thinking he throw away the old useless shotgun and quickly equipped the new weapons. Rhys took a couple of seconds to study his new sniper rifle. It wasn’t the best one he had ever seen, but it wasn’t the worst either. Surprisingly, none of the guns were Hyperion issued, but Dahl and Torgue. The sniper in particular was Dahl. However, there was a long reload speed, meaning that he had to wait a couple of seconds before he would be able to shoot again and there were only five slots for ammo. He was going to be reloading very often unless he manages to reconstruct it. Damn. Now he really wished he wouldn’t lose all his tools in the train explosion.

“Whenever you are ready, Vault Hunter.” Claptrap called, standing next to the door in classic steward position.

“Alright.” Rhys nodded. “Let’s go.”

This wasn’t the first time he used teleport but still… Rhys will never get used to the feeling of his body being shattered into million tiny pieces and spread through the air just to be rebuilt again into the chosen destination. He couldn’t poop properly for at least two weeks after each teleporting trip.

When they finally “landed” they were standing in a land that was almost identical to Windshear Waste. Only with slightly less snow and more stones.

Once again, his ECHO beeped and once again it was Handsome Jack’s voice coming out of it. But this time it wasn’t a private conversation like before, but a broadcast meant for all people on Pandora who had their ECHO communicator with them. Meaning, for every single one. “Attention, people of Pandora! Handsome Jack here, offering a million bucks to whomever brings me the head of the Vault Hunter who just arrived in Liar’s Berg. Oh, and I’m still offering a reward for Roland, the mass-murdering leader of the Crimson Raiders. Good hunting, bandits!” Bitches.

The ECHO went off only for a second, before it caught another frequency. This one surely wasn’t meant for Rhys’ ears, but since the bandit who was now speaking didn’t know how to properly work with those things, his message ended up broadcast into the whole Liar’s Berg. “A million bucks? All right boys – this is Capitan Flynt. I want you to find that Vault Hunter and bring him to me! NOW!”

“Great.” Rhys moaned. “That’s just what I needed. And million bucks? Seriously? There were awards ten times bigger on my head from people who didn’t own a half of what Handsome Jack has.” Shaking his head, Rhys started to walk forward, dragging Claptrap behind him. It didn’t take long before they arrived to the lock gates of some small town. Behind them, Rhys saw a movement. Armed and bored looking man was walking in the middle of the residence, SMG in his hand, head in the sky. A watch. The brunet realized. He kept searching the area and spotted at least five more armed bandits walking around the place, chatting with each other. One of them was lying on the ground, leaning against a wall, head rested on his shoulder. He was either deep asleep or dead. Rhys would prefer the second option. Six outside. There might be more of them in the buildings. Rhys begun to plan his strategy. He could take out at least two of them with his sniper rifle before they spot him, but the sound of gunfire will lead out those who are in the buildings. Maybe if he used a garnet, he could…

His thinking process got interrupted by a sound of rowing animals.

“Bullymongs!” One of the bandits screamed, pointing out what was so painfully obvious. None of them hesitated in loading their guns and sending their bullets into the animals’ hard fur. But they were all idiots and none of them was aiming for the weak spots, instead they were just randomly shooting in the air, probably hoping for the animals to just run into the bullets. What a waste of ammo. Another four bandits ran out of the buildings, joining their teammates in the fight. All Rhys had to do was to wait and enjoy the show. After all the animals were defeated, only two bandits were left standing. Rhys had them already focused on their heads with his sniper rifle. Two clear shots were all there was needed for the town to become “of bandits and bullymongs free".

“Vault Hunter… Can you hear me?” Rhys jumped at the sound coming from a near old radio. “Oh good, the ancient thing is still working. My name is Sir Hammerlock. Thank you for clearing the town from bandits. And you brought Claptrap?! Well isn’t that…lovely. I am in the house with the large satellite on its roof. Let me just turn off the electric fence.”

Rhys headed through the town to the furthest building. “Please, Vault Hunter, let Claptrap go first.” The brunet stopped at the request, unsure why was it that this Sir Hammerlock wanted the unit to go before him. But then he noticed an electricity sparks on the gate. It’s still on?

Apparently, the unit didn’t notice, heading towards the fence. “I know Hammerlock very well. Me and him go way back. We are like a …” A sound of electricity spreading through metal spread across the empty city and Claptrap fell on his back.

“My sincerest apologies, Vault Hunter, but every time Claptrap speaks I feel my brain cells committing a suicide one by one.” Sir Hammerlock was coming from the now unlocked gate, smiling apologetically towards Rhys.

“Yeah, I can relate to that.” The Vault Hunter nodded, studying Hammerlock’s looks. He was a tall, slim guy in his mid-fortieth, dressed in the kind of clothes that archaeologists would wear. He had fancy glasses for only one eye. Classic. But what really got Rhys’ attention was his arm. It was a metallic prostatic, but his looked way older and less effective than the one Rhys owned.

“Hmm. This unit is missing his eye. You don’t happen to have it on you, do you.”

“Actually…Yeah. Here.” Rhys handed him Claptrap’s eye, using his robotic arm.

“Oh, would you look at that.” Sir commented when he spotted Rhys’ prostatic. “Looks like I found another member of fake limbs wearing club.”

“Guess you are right.” Rhys laughed, watching the man as he kneeled next to the unconscious unit. “Which type is it?”

“The basic one. Nothing compared to what you got.” Sir chuckled, pushing the eye into the robot’s socket with maybe too much strength for a delicate brain surgery.

“You know.” Rhys ran a hand through his hair. Damn, he will never get rid of that habit. “I could improve it for you, if you want.”

“What do you mean?” The man looked away from whatever he was doing on the robot’s head to face Rhys.

“When I got this,” Rhys pointed at the limb, “it was in the same shape as yours. But I made some improvements on it.” Sir didn’t respond. He just kept looking at Rhys with raised eyebrow. “What I am saying is that I can make it more flexible or maybe stronger? Depends on which you prefer. It’s not that hard, really, when you know what you are looking for.”

“And how much would that cost me?” Hammerlock was watching Rhys with stoned poker face.

“Cost? Oh, well…” Right. The only Vault Hunter who wouldn’t ask for money before doing anything. That’s Rhys for ya. “Well, I could use a shield? I lost mine when the train exploded.”

Rhys jumped as Sir Hammerlock unpredictably pushed on the eye one last time and it with a laud cracked turned on, blinked a couple time and Claptrap was functioning again. “Yeeaah I am back. And you, Vault Hunter are even better looking than I remember.”

Oh, god he is talking again.

“Correct me if I am wrong, Vault Hunter.” The man in archeologic clothes continued. “You want a shield for repairing my hand.”

“I mean…what I suggested was that…”

“That’s absolutely brilliant.” Hammerlock who was kneeling the whole time now jumped up facing Rhys with wide smile. “It’s unbelievably difficult task to find someone who knows his way around mechanical limbs in this area, and doesn’t cut your throat right after you pay him for the job.”

“Heh. I guess I know what you mean.” Rhys smiled, remembering that most of local population were mostly bandits and wild animals.

“We can do it right now, if you don’t have anything better to do.”

“Sure. Do you have any equipment that I could use? I lost mine when the train exploded.”

“I suppose I do. Come with me. It’s in this house.”

“Is the Vault Hunter going to do something with your lame looking arm?”

“The lame looking arm just fixed your ungrateful eye, but it can also break it without a problem. So, I would recommend you to remain silent while the Vault Hunter here is going to do his job.”

“Alrighty then. Don’t let me distract you. I will just wait he-” Sir Hammerlock didn’t wait for Claptrap to finish his sentence before shutting the door behind him.

“Ah, the robot will be my death one day.” Hammerlock sighed. “I don’t really have many tools because you see, aside from guns, most things on Pandora are barely impossible to find.”

Rhys quickly scanned the room. It was small and dark. Didn’t really make the impression of a room that has been inhabited by someone for a longer period of time. There were some personal stuff lying around, like bags filled with clothes, some equipment probably used for archaeology or something? Rhys wouldn’t know.

“The working table is over there.” Sir pointed at an iron piece of furniture. Rhys nodded, sitting on one of the wooden chairs that were next to the table. “Give me a moment, I will go get an equipment that you can use. Would you care for a cup of coffee when I am at it?”

“Yes please. With milk and sugar.”

The man nodded murmuring something about the first Vault Hunter who puts a sugar in his coffee. Sir Hammerlock disappeared into the other room, giving Rhys more time to look around. He noticed a frame with a picture of a young pretty lady dressed in a blue coat. Her skin had the same shade as Mr’s Hammerlock’s. He also noticed some other familiar features like the shape of her nose and the distance between her eyebrows. She was looking at the photograph with strict expression in her ice blue eyes.

“Ah, Aurelia, my sister. Terrible woman. She punched a puppy once. Said she wanted to know how it would sound like.” Hammerlock said, holding a tool box in one hand, and plate with two cups in the other.

“She looks familiar.” Rhys mumbled.

“Well. She is a Vault Hunter. You might have heard of her. She likes to call herself the Baroness. Describes her quite well, I would say.”

Baroness. That’s right. Rhys had the honour to meet her in one of the bars on Eden 4. But he’d never spoken to her. He only managed to overhear her dialogue with one guy, who probably hired her to do some job for him and didn’t want to pay her for it afterwards. So, she froze his neck. Just the neck. She turned all the meat, all the muscles into one big piece of ice and watched him as he gasped for air on the floor, blood running out of his nose. His face turned grotesquely purple and his swollen lips gained a weird shade of blue. Rhys heard her laugh as the whites of the man’s eyes turned red and begun to bleed, wheezing out his last breath. “Nope. Never heard of her. Let’s take a look at the arm, shall we?”

Sir Hammerlock nodded, sipping the drink out of his cup, and moved to sit on the other side of the table. Rhys opened the bag with his equipment. It was nothing special. The basic stuff you can find in everyone’s garage, but it will do just fine.

“So, tell me.” Rhys started, while opening the metal cover to see how the basic structure of the hand looked like. “How did you and Claptrap meet?”

“Oh well, it happened a while back. Short after Handsome Jack turned off the whole claptrap product line.” Sir Hammerlock started to tell the story, eyes locked on Rhys’ working fingers. “Well, almost the whole product line. I have been here for a while before that, studying bullymongs and other animals, when I saw a Hyperion convoy heading to the long abandoned Vault Hunter’s hideout. I noticed they were dumping some old robots’ parts in there before, so I went to check if there was something useful this time.” He went silent for a while, watching as Rhys played with the joints. “It was sad. To see so many of the robots, just lying there. I was never really a fan of the units. They were all kinda annoying and only making things worse everywhere they were employed, but still. Seeing them like that? Just didn’t seem right.” Another silence, only interrupted by Rhys’ working fingers. “Then I noticed a light in one of the unit’s eye. As if still fighting for life. It made a great impression on me. So, I brought him here. Repaired him and let him live here with me for a while. Before he decided that life with me is too boring and went to see the bandits. I haven’t seen him so often ever since.”

“Why would he want to go to bandits?”

“Oh, that’s a wonderful question my friend. But I worry that I am not the right person to ask. You might wanna talk to our robotic companion about it.”

Rhys sighed. “I guess. Well it will have to wait after I finish your arm. Do you by any chance have some Pagani Huayra bolts lying around?

***

It’s been more than five hours after he made his announcement about the price on Rhys’ head and still no respond. Those idiots on Pandora have only one job! Get him the head of the pretty Vault Hunter. One Vault Hunter! And he even offered to pay them for it. Honestly, after everything he had done for them, they should trip over themselves when it comes to returning him a favour.

Jack turned away from the photo of mentioned Vault Hunter. It was now set as a wallpaper on his computer screen. For the sake of irony of course.

He needs to distract himself away from him. Or he will go mad and break something–or someone–again.

“Meg!” Jack yelled into the microphone knowingly scaring the shit out of his young secretary.

The respond came–as always–immediately. “Yes, sir?”

“I feel like shopping. Tell me sweetheart, what’s the most expensive thing on the market right now?”

[pentomic]

ambush

The convoy comes to a sudden halt.

Inside the Sdkfz, none of us can see anything. Gruber cracks a Pervitin capsule between his teeth, grins. Scharführer Heinrichs snaps his head up like a bulldog, glances around. 

This is it.

I look down to where the StG 60 sits heavy in my hands. Twist around, pack scraping against the hull, to where the firing ports are, push the flap aside and peer out. Same as ever, another smashed East Colony street. They built these by the thousands after the Civilization War, ready for settlers from the Vaterland to fill. 

Looking around at the deliberately laid out street, the houses and shops in the classical Germanic style, it is hard-- it is always hard-- for me to truly believe it all went to shit so fast. My sister went to the East, after her husband’s KZ service qualified them for farmland and “native labourers”. Their settlement burned three months ago. SD statement said the entire population of the town had been herded into the Worship Centre and burned alive. 

Animals. Rats. Monsters.

Heinrichs takes a deep breath, wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

“Hey!”

Up front, the assistant driver half-turns around. 

“What?”

“Why have we stopped?”

The assistant driver reaches for the radio handset, fiddles with it, speaks into it. His answer comes back in a burst of unintelligible static.

“Apparently the fucking Jew rat partisans have blocked the road.”

“Ah, fuck.” The noise explodes out of our burly sergeant. “OK, children, it’s time for us to do our jobs. We pull security while the Sturmpioniere clear the blockage-- and pray to Odin or Jesus or who-the-fuck-ever the ZOB doesn’t come down on our asses.”

I have heard stories of the Jew partisans. They are called the Jewish Fighting Organization, ZOB in Polish. They work closely with the Ukrainians and the Poles. All three groups have reputations for brutality. Often in training I had nightmares about them-- the Polack fat and stinking of drink, the Ukrainian with a long greasy topknot swinging into his face, and the Jew-- more terrible than all my most horrible dreams.

The rear door whines open. Gruber catches my eye and gives me an unfocussed Pervitin grin. Instinctively I reach for the plastic pill case that rides in my tunic pocket. Should I? Just one amphetamine pill would sweep my fears away in purest exultation. I notice my left hand is trembling. No, no Pervitin for now. Must wait-- must force myself to wait. Daylight pours through the rear of the Sdkfz. 

Heinrichs roars the command. 

“EVERYONE OUT!”

I pick up the StG, wrap my fingers around the plastic pistol grip. It feels good, it feels like death. They taught us this in training, all about the blind Baldr, slain by blind Hodr, and how we were Baldr and Hodr at once, beautiful and terrible, blind without our chain of command and deadly when properly directed. Sudden pride fills my body. I remember the films of the KZs, the great kremas, the experimental labs for the glory of the Reich. We are the industrial killing machine, the avatars of a new age. Is there anything that can truly stand against us?

Outside the Sdkfz, our boots crunch on the crushed pavement. We round the corner of the vehicle, smooth and slow. My knee hits the pavement, my rifle butt presses against my shoulder. I peer up at the hollow houses and burned-out shots from under my helmet. Petersen taps my shoulder and I stand, advancing while hugging the side of the Sdkfz. The vehicle commander stands up in the low turret, one hand on the MG42. Together we leapfrog up, our half-platoon spreading out across the convoy, guarding it from all harm.

In front of us, the other Sdkfzs are disgorging their contents, including the rest of our platoon. Untersturmführer Albrechts strides toward us, grinning. His helmet is off, and his cropped blond hair is blinding in the sunlight. Scharführer Heinrichs salutes and moves to the platoon commander, opening his mouth as if to say something.

Time slows then. The Untersturmführer gives a sort of horrid shudder as his head jerks to the side, a gout of pinkish red replacing the side of his face. Heinrichs hits the ground, his face a rictus of shock. 

This is when the machine guns open up.

They are hidden in the houses. They are hidden in the shops. They are hidden everywhere. Muzzle flashes sprout like flowers in my vision, even as the Untersturmführer’s blood soaks into the gravel.

The Sdkfz in front of me explodes. Heinrichs grabs my shoulder and yells something I cannot hear. Over my head, Petersen is firing wildly, his voice stretching out in one long wordless yell. My heart is pounding away over the hills, but I am suddenly deeply and astoundingly calm. 

The protocol is to move away from the vehicles, go to ground and request support. I line up my front sight with a muzzle flash and squeeze the trigger. The StG jumps in my hands, a reassuring feeling. I keep firing, in the requisite short bursts, as I back away from the Sdkfz. I can feel the rest of the half-platoon around me-- a well-oiled machine, powerful and right. I wonder if I have somehow ingested Pervitin without noticing. I am calm and focussed. 

Out of the corner of my eye, the streak-flash of a rocket. One of ours? Then the Sdkfz in front of me-- my Sdkfz, the one I rode in on-- explodes.

The shockwave hits like a hammer blow on my torso. I hurl backwards, and as I pry my eyes open, my face stings like a thousand shrapnel needles are piercing it. As I struggle to get up, I realize my rifle has been blown to god knows where. 

“Fucking hell.” I am so damned winded. The world spins briefly, and I close my eyes. When I reopen them, my nightmare of seven years is standing in front of me. I have seen his picture in the Museum to a Vanished Race, in Prague. I have seen his image in The Eternal Jew and its four sequels. I have seen his evil in my nightmares.

Around me, the Jew partisans stalk. They are picking among the smouldering remains of the convoy, their massive Jew noses twitching. They haul Heinrichs gasping to his feet, force a stunned Petersen up at the point of a pistol. Gruber is emitting gasping sobs, eyes darting every which way, hands bound. 

The Jew in front of me looks into my eyes. His own are large, brown, intelligent. I feel as if I am staring into the abyss of history. It is at this point that I realize I am crying. 

Strong hands grab my own, force them behind my back, tie them. I inhale a glob of dusty phlegm, nearly choke, and half-snarl, half-gurgle “Untermensch!” The Jew’s eyes widen, and then he laughs.

I take another deep breath and growl “Didn’t you hear me the first time, you piece of Jew dog fucking scum kike goddamn--” There is pity in the Jew’s eyes, and I suddenly realize what I must look like. My helmet has slipped over my eyes, my hands are bound behind my back, and I am gasping, sputtering these curses at this Jew, this piece of subhuman scum who has just destroyed my column, killed my officer, captured my comrades.

A tall man strides into my limited view, his dirty blue-and-yellow armband marking him as one of the feared Ukrainian partisan groups. He addresses the Jew who has been examining me, and the Jew answers back. They laugh.

The Ukrainian pulls a large knife out of his belt.

The Jew moves closer to me, takes my face in both of his hands. His voice is soft, almost tender. He speaks in German-- good German.

“Listen, little man. Here is what we are going to do. We are going to kill your comrades, one by one, and you will watch. We will make you watch. Then we are going to let you stumble and wander back to your nest, and you are going to tell your masters that the people of the forest have spoken, and they have said that you can kill us, you can haul us from our homes and slaughter us, gas us, burn us, grind us into ash, and it will be as if you have not killed a single one of us. We will always return, and everything you have built we will destroy. That is our solemn promise.”

I realize it then. We have been played for fools. We have been sold a bill of the cheapest possible goods. In his hubris, his ultimate power-mad insanity, our divinely chosen leader decided to try and exterminate the only people this world has ever produced that no one can ever exterminate. The true Judaism. It is not physical. It travels with the air, infecting and changing those it touches. How many times have the Vopo busted down the doors of a good German household to find its members puzzling over an ancient edition of Tales of the Hassidim, or a Hebrew Bible, or-- horror of horrors-- a new-printed Talmud? None of them can explain the hold Judaism has over them. Every week there are more.

How many empires, how many nations have tried? How many have crumbled to dust, leaving only the Jews? One might as well try to kill the Sun. I know it then, I see it then, I feel the flames and hear the laughter, it is the great dome at Germania, burning! It is burning! The massive concrete edifice, the Arno Breker sculptures-- burning! And in its place, a synagogue. The largest synagogue ever, filled with millions of Jews, singing, laughing, praying, learning, on the ashes of the greatest and most terrible empire the world has ever seen! 

And when you are faced with a revelation like this, what else is there to do but laugh?