I was randomly inspired! Here's some random in-universe style fluff I was just musing about that came mostly randomly. I was mildly inspired by how Aberrant tells it's background information. If you like this rambling topic, contribute your own stuff. It does not have to be in the same style as this post, but if you feel like doing it, awesome. And without further adieu... War Stories. ### [b]FROM: Direct Action, Training Acclimation #221 Instructor: Srg. Takashi [/b] Today, we’re going to be showing you eight silent ways to kill a man with a M-41 Skullgun. But first, we’ve got a special treat for ya’ll: John Kovacs – yes THAT John Kovacs – is going to be doing hands on demonstrations of the latest in militech from Jupiter, Extopia and the Vulcanoids. So if you ever wanted to see someone who could take down this entire base and everyone in it with a flat and a pen-knife demo some of the best the gunbunnies could make, be sure to head on over there after the demonstration. Bring up Pod-A please…now, this is the simple method. We call it the Dazzler... [A faint pop sounds, followed by a squishy noise not unlike a plate of spaghetti being dropped on the floor.] ### [b]FROM: Untitled Biopic, John Kovacs (Independent Mercenary) [/b] The Fall was not a war. Oh, sure, people fought – and usually died screaming – but it wasn’t a war. Even the most one-sided of battles between armed forces had nothing on the Fall. It wasn’t a matter of going up against muskets with spears. At least a spear thrower is within the same geological timeframe as a musket – or, hell, a Cruise missile. We were chucking spears while the TITANs were throwing around fucking black magic. And worse, they were in our spears too. I have a pet theory: Half the shit that we did to each other has its source right at the TITANs black fucked up heart. They were a NETWAR system for god’s sake. A netwar system that had become a vengeful pack of gods. It must have been child's play to get us to start fighting eachother. I’m not saying atrocities weren’t committed – I’d have to be deaf, dumb, blind and stupid to say that – but I think it bears consideration…the fact that we were dancing from their strings from day zero, probably before. So, the Fall wasn’t a war. I didn’t fight in it. I survived through it. So none of this is going to be about my heroic battle here or there, cause they weren’t battles and they weren’t fucking heroic. Got it? Thank god, though, that we had some actual wars after, or this pic would never have gotten off the ground and I'd have died a few times drinking myself to death on Venus. Here…see, I’d say ‘see this’ and show you a scar, but that was two morphs ago and I’m not sad enough to transfer my scars over. But right here, a hunk of my friend’s thigh ripped through my arm. He’d made the big stupid and stepped on a hunk of hydrogen ice on some unnamed Gate World whipping around a dead star at fifty AUs. The soles of his boots sublimated the hydrogen and made a frictionless cushion under his feet. He slipped and the back of his suit slammed into the hydrogen. The whole thing set off and blew him to pieces in the time it takes to key your mesh inserts. Hopped up on neurochems, though, so he had enough time to apologize and ask me to smack him once he resleeved. No chance of getting his stack back, not after that. And here, here, I got stabbed. Yes. Stabbed. On a brinker hab that was sitting on enough radioactives to make some hypercorp oligarchs real happy. But, get this, Direct Action was paid extra to take the hab intact and the fucking brinkers were running inflatable tin-cans out here. The hab could be expanded, they said, and it’d be cheaper to take it intact than riddle it with holes. So we went in with SWORDS. Could you believe it? Five transhumans with the best technology could give them: Neurochems, Kick, power armor with ablative patches and every kind of stealthing you could imagine, T-ray emmiters and radar and infared and the best tactnets…and we went in with a gladius in one hand and a shield in the other. The Brinkers managed to miss our oncoming shuttle until we were right at the front door and we hacked in and through them. One of them had a sword of his own and managed to hold us at bay at a corridor junction. Fucking broadswords… ### [b]IM LOG, @-Chat, Locus Meshsource[/b] Quote of the day: The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots…but I’d prefer it to be with the tyrants – Thomas Jefferson. (Citation Needed) SKINNYBOI: You’re really going to do it? CHANI: Yeah SB: Really? C: Yeah! SB: …really? C: YEAH!!! >:( SB: LoL. SB: Forget about it. SB: Don't do it. C: Love and Rage need fighters. They’ve got the rep, and I~ SB: Love and Rage are a load of fucking lon yerng C: You know my muse bleeps that stuff out, right? SB: Shitface cocksucker goddamn whore~ C: CUT SB: Fuckfuckfuckfuck~ C: CUT IT OUT. Why do I even talk to you? SB: Cause I’ve actually done all the shit you keep saying you want to do. Listen, kiddo, I’ve been Over There. C: Yeah, and you never talk about it. You just keep haranguing me for sex. SB: And you never seem to complain about it. 1 sec SEVERAL MINUTES LATER C: That was more than a second, ingrate SB: Sorry, just got some new sensor feeds. It looks like we’ll be having some Scum swinging by in a few months. They’re armed, but the markings show they’re part of the Third Goat Collective. They’re all right. C: SO, anyway, as I said, Love and Rage needs people like me. SB: You’re right. They do. They’re losing ground on two GWs and they don’t have the same pull with the hardened mercenary crowd as hypercorp bastards do. But here’s the thing…it’s not fucking worth it. C: Not worth stopping hypercorps from running over the entire galaxy? SB: Kiddo, have you looked at the galaxy lately? C: …you…do know where we live, right? SB: Exactly. How many stars are out there? This isn’t the old Chicago-Milwaukee multiplex where I grew up. There, the only stars were the metacelebreties that popped up on the mesh every fucking day. The sky was just black thanks to light pollution and the advertisements. Out here, though, you’ve got stars, so you should KNOW that the GALAXY IS BIG AND WAR IS NEVER PREFERABLE TO JUST FINDING A NEW PLACE. C: But I’ll back myself up- SB: Kiddo…I had a friend once~ C: Holy shit, you’re telling me an actual war story? SB: Shut up and let me type~ C: You’re not typing C: Are you? SB: I’m old. Shut up. So, I had this friend once. Her name was Tassadar Pak, or TP to us. Sleeved in a top of the line custom V-X TR-101 Quad-Ped battle morph when we went out and a bombshell blond when we were back at Fissure side. We were there for the rep and the meme and it was the best damn day of my life when I first showed up. I’d gotten my life back, going from indentured security gorilla to freedom fighting anarchist badass in the space of two weeks and TP was pretty much the symbol of all of that. Cool, sleek, great in the sack, and amazing in a fight. C: Great in the sack, huh? SB: Says the girl with a dolphin for a steady boyfriend. C: :P SB: So, TP was our squad leader. She took us out on ops, where we’d run interference for Argonaughts, security for colony attempts by anyone who wanted to try. Heck, once, we took down a supply convoy that was cycling through a Nexus world. TP was cool as could be, had us situated under a silt desert sand, with camoflauged snorkles. When the convoy arrived – guarded by mooks in Reapers – we took them down with AP railshot from a click away, grabbed the goods – in this case, a load of indentures running in cold storage until they could be sleeved at the “””””””mining colony”””””””””” to do “””””””voluntary service”””””””””” C: Think you have enough sarcastic quotes there? SB: Shut up. It seemed like nothing could be so bad out here. Then we get word that an argonaught scouting team had run into heavy hypercorp trouble. They’d stumbled onto a big find: alien artifacts. The world wasn’t the cryogenic hell of some places, but it was chilly. I’d say post Fall-Europe chilly. Ice flows a few meters deep and treacherous as hell. We had saucer drones flitting around overhead, camoflauged and scanning the ice around us, giving us entropic maps of where the fault lines were. That’s when the DA got us. SB: They popped out of some crevasses. Some were sleeved in humanoid snyths, others in reapers. They started laying down enfilade fire. They got Singh and Sully and Badboy in the first few seconds. I hit ice and fired back with my seekers, wide spread. Risky, but it paid off, I got half of them with the thermoberic. Then TP popped out of cover and toasted one with her plasma rifle…and the blast…uncovered something. Didn’t see it quite right, but TP got a goooood look at it. Didn’t think nothing of it at first, and the snow swept it up and covered it before too long. SB: We got the argonaughts out, mostly in stack form. We got back to the gate and we exfilled. Then, we waited in quarantine. Nothing bad popped out and nothing seemed wrong. We went to backup…and I forget everything after this. It’s just me waiting in line, then me waking up in a new body a few months later. But here’s what the spimes tell me: TP gets backed up…then kills EVERYONE. They only stopped her by venting the air and sealing the place up and bathing it in the hardest radiation they can whip up on short notice. Our backups get fried and they dump the computer system. Everyone is put through more and more intense scans and studies. I’m guessing they forked us all a few times on very secure systems and just ran us around a bit to see if anyone else had been…twigged with. SB: When it seems we’re all clear, they let us out. It’s been a half year before I finally got out of that fucking place. And I swore off ever working with the Love and Rage again. They don’t just poke dangerous things with a stick…they run screaming at them firing a machine gun into the air. C: Jesus, Mohammad and Buddha… SB: Yeah. Kiddo, if you’re raring to fight the good fight, just keep doing what you’re doing. That’ll be worth more than a thousand bullets. C: What, making dolphin porn or growing bonsai trees? SB: You’re too young, but when I was a kid, a real popular song was called “Make Love, Not War” C: That was written thirty years before you were born, you big fat liar SB: Lies. Lies and slander.