Warning, this page contains spoilers for the following chapters.
Prologue
In the bowls of an old, abandoned undersea mining rig. The old rig creaks, its tortured metal groaning under the immense pressure of the water’s depth. A figure emerges; he enters his suite, but something feels off —a sinister feeling holds the air for a little longer than he would like. Blood? Bloody footprints? Then, from the darkness, a figure appears, frightening him to his core. An old friend emerges. She does not look well. She looks drugged-up, manic, completely out of her mind. She stands openly, without a care in the world about being spotted. A thought crosses his mind: Did they send her here? As the conversation dies, she confesses that they did not send her here to kill him. But how could she be believed? She’s losing her grip; nothing feels real. She can’t distinguish between reality and her muddled imagination. Tarkoft tries to calm his old friend, but instinct takes over as he reaches for his weapon. She sees the deception and lunges at him, but doesn’t punch him. Her punch flies past him as all of her weight and anger are transferred into the punching bag next to him. Tarkoft had seen all he needed. He draws his weapon on her, prepared to kill her. To his shock, though, she just stands there, unwavering, unmoved. He demands what she wants, and her answer stifles him a bit. She wanted to die. She wanted him to be the one to do it. She had nothing but her life left, clinging to old memories so long gone they might as well be a dream. Tarkoft stands there, thinking, staring, but the thing that stares back feels as though it has been carved out. She stared back, sapped of all life with glazed-over, unblinking eyes. Then it occurred to him, no, it wouldn’t be fair to leave it like this. He sighed, thinking back to how she was never great at conveying her feelings to other people. But he didn’t care to get mixed up in that spectacle of feelings and emotions. What good would it do her to die here? It wouldn’t fix anything, he conveys to her. Her zombie like engery gets replaced by anger and frustration. What is she supposed to do? And he still owed her. But killing is not a repayment and would look more like an execution from some sodden half-wit, cyber-freak who was unwilling to pay off a debt they owed. He was thinking till his friend turned green in the face and then threw up on the floor. Figures, guess that’s what she gets for doing all those drugs at the same time. Then he remembered something, a contract still open, that was something befitting his old friend here. If it would get her out of his hair, it was worth it. So he lays the contract out for her…….
Chapter 1: Orientation
Rain poured into every crack and crevasse that this forsaken city had to offer. The moon hovers just above its light, barely able to pierce the city’s concrete jungle of holograms, flashing LEDs, Projectors and Neon signs. Its night time, but you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference; lights of all colors and intensities invade the eyes at every level. A girl in her school uniform walks along, her uniform glowing in the embrace of the artificial light, its retroreflective material being all the craze in fashion and apparel currently. She was drenched. She carried her guitar with her on her back. She saw where she was and knew it was the place, so she made one quick glance to make sure no one saw her and slinked her way off the main road into an alleyway. As the girl passed all the gang graffiti, the inner walls of the alleyway closed in around her like a winding vice. She stopped dead center right in front of the building she had scouted out beforehand. The building’s fire escape had a fence that was locked with a chain and padlock, definitely a safety violation. However, to her, that didn’t matter that much; she picked the lock like she always had for the five hundredth time. And she made her way up the fire escape. Once she reached the top, she moved over some boxes to sit down on and place her guitar down just to rest for a second. She then opened her guitar case, pulled out a plastic bag, and went to sit on the opposite side of the building’s top floor. She swung her legs over the ledge, overlooking that current part of town. She reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a sandwich. She had a long day and hadn’t had the time to eat. She was happy to have something to eat. However, that happiness was short-lived when she took her first bite and realized the deli workers had screwed up her order by adding mayo. She flung it into the air as far as she could, mad about the whole situation. Then she stared forward, at the obnoxious purple and pink skyscraper in front of her. He must be in there by now, she thought.
Chapter 2: Wind Resistance
Not caring to waste any more time, the girl pulled out her range finder that was also conveniently placed in the bag earlier. She knew the man’s schedule by now, so she knew he would be right where she looked if he was consistent. And there he was. She began to list off information the range finder was feeding her, such as the outside window thickness and the distance from where she was standing to her target. She hopped off the ledge and made her way back to the guitar. A little confirmation from her wrist computer, and it opened the ‘second’ compartment. In there was her prized possession. Her modular sniper rifle. She began the meticulous process of putting it together from its taken-apart state in the guitar. She started doing the math in her head of how much power she’d need to use for the magnetics of her sniper, how much magnification she’d need to see him through her scope, and how much she’d need to adjust for the wind since it was a particularly rainy and windy night. After all those calculations, she loads a single bullet in the chamber. She’s confident she could get him on the first shot. She realized she would be needing a new batch of ammunition soon. She attaches the scope and then takes position with the bipod positioned so she was aiming up towards the sky-scrapers main floors. She adjusts the zoom and then Infrared and thermals. She then sees smoke exiting through an open window in his office. “What an asshole,” She thought, “Who smokes inside?” She inhaled and then, after long deliberation, pulled the trigger. The suppressor silenced much of the sonic boom as the bullet pelted towards its target. Hitting its mark dead center. She stared at the crack in his window for some time, to confirm he didn’t get back up or didn’t start moving again. When he was still for what felt like hours, she confirmed the kill, confirmed the elimination of her target.
Chapter 3
Ashe meticulously takes her sniper apart and puts it back in her case as quickly as she can, the movement being muscle memory at this point. She then retraces her steps down the fire escape and slides down the ladder, past the gate, and slinks into another alleyway, hoping to get out of the “creepy” part of town soon. Ashe approaches the end of the alleyway and peers over the side to see if there’s any nearby foot traffic. A single guy passes by. She makes one last check to see that he’s not following her. Ashe gets caught up in her mind, keeping an eye on the guy who just passed and hoping to be home and able to take a nice bath. While daydreaming, she runs directly into the last kind of person she would like to run into at the current moment in time: a member of the Ripulce City Police Department. In their bright neon-colored SWAT gear, which was standard issue for the common cop. Not paying attention, she accidentally runs into him and falls over into a puddle, drenching her clothes that had just dried off from the last bit of torrential downpour. She tries to put on her “preppy and happy” voice while also wishing death upon him and his entire family in her head for being the reason her entire clothes were soaked through to the skin. One of the cops closes his umbrella. He opens his mouth to get Ashe’s attention, but as soon as he does, a sandwich falls on his head. The sandwich falling on his head confused Ashe for a single second before realizing where it might’ve come from. Then so began the questioning. He asked her why a kid like her was out late and questioned her guitar case. Ashe, a bit mad about the “being called a kid” allegation, moved on and, in the most convincing way her delinquent attitude could muster, told the officer plainly, “Ohh, you mean this right? I’m part of the music club for my school, and I was gonna visit the festival after school.” Ashe hearing the voice she was producing let out an “ugh” in her mind as her soul got crushed pretending to be a preppy girl. The thing she had just said was a complete utter lie, well, at least the part about the festival. There was a festival going on in that part of town, and her plan was to hide out in the crowd, then maybe disappear after a few minutes. Nothing suspicious about a girl at a festival lugging around her guitar case, was there? But no, here she was talking to police about her “suspicious” behavior. The cop, his patience running thin, grabs Ashe by the collar. The other cop, kind of unnerved by his partner’s behavior, tells him to calm down a bit. Ashe, her patience running out as well, tells the cop the thing he probably wanted to hear since the beginning of the encounter: that she would show him what was in her guitar case. Johnson (the nice cop) tells her it’s unnecessary; however, Vascess (the annoying cop) insists it needs to be seen. Ashe carefully places the guitar case down while also secretly hitting a hidden button on the side of one of the latches. And the grand reveal is that it was just a normal guitar the whole time. At least that’s all they saw. Ashe pulls out her guitar, its strings well used at this point, and believing that it would take a lot more to convince the other cop, she says she needs to get home, but if they want her to play something, she can. She, however, gets interrupted and told that would be fine. The other nicer cop, Johnson, starts dragging the other cop behind him, reprimanding him for “bothering students from that school” and that it was a “rookie” thing to do. Ashe, standing there, had only one thing to say: “What a bunch of bozos.”
Chapter 4: The Hut
On her way back home, the girl rides the local public bus; its run-down interior would give anyone spending too much time in it a myriad of unknown diseases. The operator parked the bus in front of her stop. It gave the usual demand of every public bus ‘opper’; Swipe data card or insert one legally tendered coinage in the slot device, please. The girl inserted the coins into the machine. Once again, the Operator states: Swipe data card or insert-”I just did!” Ashe interrupted him. She was tired of her time being wasted. Once again, the machine insists she never inserted the right coinage. Whether it was because the Operator is broken or whether it was a problem with its core programming, Ashe didn’t care; she was tired of dealing with stupid problems. In her anger, she smashes his head straight through the front windshield. Somehow, due to either a feature in the bus’s systems or dumb luck, the door actually opens for Ashe. She steps out, and the bus drives off, Ashe somehow more mad about the day’s events.
