outsiderslogs | merc killin'

TARGET: POLONIUS ( SENTINEL )

A turian Talon member who collects payments from some of the Omega vendors. He moves mostly through the Omega market, but he does reside in Theta district in an apartment, and frequents one of the cheaper bars on the station.

TARGET: PATRICK HUNT ( VANGUARD )

A newer human Talon member who patrols Zeta district. He’s been assigned to watch out while they attempt water repairs, but they work in shifts, and he usually gets off in the evening and heads to Afterlife to have a drink or four before heading home, to an apartment in Zeta district.

Marco wasn't quite sure what happened in his life to cause him to suddenly find himself in the position of having to orchestrate and murder another human being. It started off as a move to increase his own chance of survival, and he entertained a fancy notion that he could both be part of a cold-blooded mercenary gang and continue being just another harmless kid trying to stay alive. But then he got the assignment and an incredibly brief briefing. And then he went back to running pizzas.

For a couple of days, he just redirected his delivery routes to put him closer to his target, doing equal parts observation and psyching himself up to the task. Finally, he got to a point where he needed to take another step.

That step was, apparently, calling for help.

He was too paranoid to make contact with any of the other unknown initiates; the less he had to deal with his fellow mercenaries, the more plausible deniability he had. Besides, he didn't have much of a read on any of them. Except for one. Even if that read was 'creeper, possibly pedo, probably furry in denial'. Better the devil you know, right?

So at the end of his delivery shift, he grabbed one of the pizzas off the discard pile (anchovies and onions) and beelined for Arthur's apartment. The door suffered a long series of impatient taps.

Edited 2013-04-03 17:32 (UTC)

Arthur received his information at the same time as the other initiates. He's relieved that his target seems fairly normal - not a biotic or a salarian. He's had to covertly research how one might kill a turian, but he's confident he has a way to make it look like something gone wrong. He might need a new gun, though, since he only has his old regular caliber one.

Then a couple nights after he gets a knock, and he pauses as he's starting to take something out to eat. He goes over and presses the button for the intercom.

"Who is it?"

"It's Marco, dude, let me in. Are you alone?" A pause, as he realized how that sounded. "I'm not coming on to you so keep your pants on."

He fidgeted with the cold pizza box while he waited to be let in, and wondered if this was really the best idea. They were on the same team, right? Arthur raised all of his paranoia flags (though, to be fair, very few things didn't) for reasons he couldn't figure out, and just standing in front of the door made him antsy.

Then again, backup would be nice. A sanity check would be nice. And he did offer his help before.

Arthur has to give a sigh behind the door when Marco tells him to keep his pants on.

"I'm alone," he says before he opens the door, stepping aside. "And I have to say, you're really not my type, because my type isn't a couple decades younger than me."

But he lets Marco inside none the less, closing the door behind him - leaving it unlocked, though.

"What are you here for?" Arthur had an idea, sure, but he wanted to be positive about it.

"Likewise, dude. You hungry? I needed an excuse to come here."

Marco helped himself to a seat and opened the box on his lap, digging in to a slice right away. Cold pizza with weird toppings wasn't the most appealing food ever, but he'd gotten used to eating a lot of gross pizza over the past few weeks.

"But anyway, cutting to the chase. I'm here to borrow a cup of sugar. And by a cup of sugar, I mean a gun, and you for like twenty minutes of your life."

"I can eat," Arthur says neutrally, leaning against the wall next to the door. Despite saying he was hungry, he didn't make a move for the pizza yet.

Despite not knowing this Marco at all, he still felt some responsibility towards him - he could become the Marco that was on Sacrosanct, if he wasn't here.

"You need help with your initiation," he ends up saying after a moment, quirking an eyebrow up. He moves away from the wall, moving towards Marco and snagging a piece of pizza before he moves past him.

Anchovies remind him of Mal, but he still takes a bite.

"You have a plan?" He asks Marco after he turns around, swallowing. Like killing someone isn't a big deal at all.

"Do I have a plan? No, I was just going to sit around and hope my target dies of old age." Marco chomps away for a moment, dropping pizza crumbs all over the couch. Enjoy the pizza, Arthur; the shop wasn't going to stay open for much longer with this water shortage going on. He's continuing Arthur's lead of not making a big deal about this. All in a day's work, right? The rest of the slice disappears into Marco's face.

"Dude gets off his guard shift. Dude goes to bar. Dude has a few drinks. Dude stumbles home." Each step was ticked off on a greasy finger, the result of tailing his target for a few days and figuring this out. "Somewhere between bar and home, he usually pops off his helmet, since who the hell sits at a bar with their helmet on, anyway. One night, he encounters a lost delivery boy wandering around. Drunk and unsuspecting, dude offers the kid help, except the kid is secretly an assassin sent to take him out and blows off his head with a gun he had to borrow from his friend because said kid doesn't have his own. Said friend also happens to be hanging around the corner as backup in case something goes horribly wrong, and then shows up to grab the gun so the kid isn't caught with it and cooly walk away while said kid posts a video of the dead body onto the internet and pretends to be horrified at finding a corpse in order to declare his own innocence for a clean getaway."

Yep, totally not a big deal.

"Good story?"

Edited (typo sniping) 2013-04-05 22:28 (UTC)

"In a place like this, you might not have to wait long anyway," Arthur says before taking another bite, gingerly. He waits for Marco to finish eating and listens to his plan.

It's admittedly not a bad plan. Not perfect, but not bad, and will probably work for what they're doing. That's a terrible thought to have.

"I'd honestly prefer not drawing attention to the body, but it helps keep your cover," he gestures to the pizza. "It's your job."

He quickly finishes his slice and wipes his hands down on a nearby towel . "I'll help you. But first things first, you ever shot a gun before?"

"I mean, come on, who's going to suspect the stupid pizza boy, right?" Marco can certainly come up with better ways to get this done, but most of them involve not being on Omega to begin with and remaining a mediocre junior high student in a world with no crazy alien bullshit. Failing that, this is his next best bet.

"I've got every single high score ranking on every House of the Dead machine within fifty miles of San Diego."

"A zapper and a real gun aren't the same," Arthur says dryly, but it is a good basis for the gun that he can use. Plus, he can use it to show Marco how to fire a gun.

He turns to get the gun he bought recently in prep for assassinating Liani.

"I won't get into the fancier options on the gun, but I'll show you how to aim, sight and fire, and how to put the safety on and off."

"Whatever works, dude. I just need to be able to point and click at someone, not field-strip it and write you a repair manual."

Marco shrugs. People have been telling him video games were a complete waste of time and wouldn't give him any applicable real-world skills for his entire life; all he's hoping now is that what they said about how he'd be desensitized to violence and murder would turn out to be true.

So far, so good. His moral alarm bells haven't started screaming at him yet.

"You sure? It could come in handy," Arthur says with a wry expression on his face. Still, he takes out the pistol - the one he bought to kill Liani with - and starts showing Marco the basics. He doesn't let him fire in the apartment, but he does warn that there will be some recoil.

Once Marco tells him his target should be hitting the bar, they go to lie in wait.

"Good luck," Arthur offers before going to wait around the corner, pretending to be a loiterer examining his omni-tool.

Maybe someday in the distant future, Marco will care about being able to take care of a gun, but this isn't even his gun, and he's decided he just needs to know the bare minimum to get the job done.

He tails his target for a few blocks, until they get a little bit out of the way of the main foot traffic around Afterlife. He knows the path to take, and sprints ahead by a block so that he can plant himself near the alleyway he picked out earlier. The pistol's hot at his side.

It's over quickly because Marco doesn't let himself get psyched out about it: flip open his omni-tool to pull up a map, pester the tipsy Patrick for directions, turn down the alleyway and walk a few steps, get confused again and ask Patrick to look over the map, bring up the gun and press it against the side of his head while Patrick leans down, pull the trigger and splatter brain chunks all over the wall.

Marco's mostly focused on the recoil he was warned about. The gun almost jumps from his hand; he yelps at the noise and stumbles backwards a few steps, but the job is already finished. Patrick's body is on the ground, and in the eerie silence following the gunshot, Marco catches sight of the mess he just made and promptly pukes cold pizza all over the street.

There's not much to be done. He's not helping Marco with his lost kid cover, and Patrick - well, the merc takes the bait beautifully. It helps that he's drunk and not exactly a bad person. He's just the target.

Marco yelps at the same time the gun fires, and then there's silence before there's the distinct sound of someone losing their lunch. Arthur wants to be comforting but there's bigger problems now.

He rounds the corner he was around and is greeted by the side of a corpse with a missing chunk of head, a mess, and Marco.

He doesn't ask if Marco's okay. He's not. Instead he goes over to pull the gun out of Marco's hand.

"You're gonna be fine," he says, his voice steady. "Take the video once I'm out of here. I'll be nearby if you run into trouble." And he'll be watching for the post.

Part of the reason Marco asked for backup, beyond just wanting an extra set of eyes around, was that it was the only way he knew to plan for the unpredictable state of his mind right after the hit. And as it turns out, all he needs to snap out of his unblinking stare at the thing he just did is someone else to tell him what to do.

He nods and lets Arthur take the gun away from him---he's on the verge of dropping it anyway---then takes the next few moments to gather his wits. He's not going to open his mouth again for a couple of minutes, or else he might start hurling again.

Arthur watches Marco a moment longer, wanting to do something - rest a hand on his back maybe, but he knows what the kid thinks of him so he thinks better of it.

"Good luck," he says finally, before turning, tucking the gun into his armor and heading away - though not too far. Time to let Marco deal with the rest of this, even if Arthur wasn't sure that was smart.

TARGET: LIANI ( SOLDIER )

A female turian Talon member who deals with weapons smuggling for Talon. She buys weapons legally through the Omega vendors, more often now that the relay has been lost. After dealing with this job, she usually heads home to the Tau district by shuttle.

Arthur is quietly relieved when he finds his target is a turian - not a salarian, or an asari, or a human biotic. He has nothing against this Liani, of course, but Eclipse wants her dead.

He thinks that all of this might be part of a power play, but he's not examining it right now. Right now he needs to make Liani disappear. He thinks hiding the body will work out better than allowing it to lay around to be discovered.

Tau is better than Zeta by far, but there's a few less people out late at night. Arthur's had to use some of the credits he was saving up to buy a lower grade pistol - but as long as it fires bullets at a better caliber than his old Earth one, that's fine.

He's loitered a few days before around Tau, watched her path home, and she usually takes a shortcut through an alleyway. That works to jump and kill her, but transporting the body was his next hurdle.

Except that Tau has an elevator shaft that leads down to the mines. It doesn't actually stop on Tau usually, but Arthur's reasonably confident he can hack the system to open it and let him ride down and dump Liani's body in one of the incinerators.

So, he knows where he's going. Now to get it done.

He gets off a shuttle ahead of Liani and moves ahead of her. Hopefully she'll choose to take the alleyway, but he can come back if she doesn't.

She does. Her impatience is visible as she enters one end of the alleyway. Arthur sticks to the side, waits for her to pass him, checking his omni-tool.

She slows as she starts to pass him, wary, and Arthur moves then. "Hey, you got a light?" he asks, and she turns to probably tell him to fuck off - but he shoves his arm into her abdomen and pushes her to the other side of the alleyway.

Her alien eyes widen, like she's going to make a noise - and he raises his hand to cover her mouth. She starts to bite at him, moving her leg to kick him, and he's forced to let her go.

He panics that she's going to shout but she doesn't, she goes for her gun - so Arthur pulls his pistol out. His heat sink's already loaded, and he shoves the muzzle right under her chin and pulls the trigger.

The gun's louder than he expected, but brains are brains. Blood splatters behind her, a different color than his, but she slumps against the wall, pretty dead.

He blows his breath out of his mouth, annoyed. He hopes no one heard it, or is planning on keeping their noses out of trouble if they did. Regardless, he wraps the cloth he'd tucked inside his armor from Sacrosanct around her head and starts to haul her towards the elevator. At least it's all back alley movement from here.

Before he rides down and incinerates her, he takes a recording of her dead on one of the information recorders he got a hold of. Then he takes the piece of armor with the Talon symbol off her and finishes the job.

TARGET: MARIE ( ADEPT )

A female human Talon member who escorts shipments of red sand throughout Omega, from suppliers to buyers and to various Talon members. She’s most commonly found near Afterlife or in the Omega district, however, and keeps an apartment in Delta district.

If there was anything new he'd learned from all of this, it was that he could enter the nightclub. He'd never tried before, but he'd never had any reason to step in here prior to this.

His target was sitting in the booth she'd taken the last time she was here, and Ryusei should have been debating why he'd even come in here again when he knew perfectly well which exit she would use, but he knew the reason perfectly well. He only had to prevent the feeling from interfering with what he had to do. He knew that feeling perfectly well, too.

She was leaving. Ryusei abandoned his untouched drink and followed. After a short distance, she started to slow her gait—Ryusei expected that. He didn't know what kind of dangers she faced at her job, but since so many people here carried weapons, it was safest to assume everyone could be wary. When she whirled around, he'd drawn the gun he'd taken from Kengo's room.

For a split second, he hesitated, and the image of Inga Blink superimposed itself onto his target. It passed; he fired.

Inga had been unable to shoot, he thought as he slowly approached the body. Inga couldn't shoot Tomoko, and that would always be something Ryusei was thankful for. But if Inga had fired, Kyodain wouldn't have been revived. The situation had worked out, then. But that was then. This was different. This was completely different, he thought as he shot his target in the head to make sure.

He knelt, and picked up her arm. Proof, they'd said he needed. Clearly they didn't want the body and Ryusei didn't know enough about his target to take something of hers with which she wouldn't have parted unless she were dead. Ryusei rolled down her sleeve, pulled out the lighter he'd confiscated from Haru before... From before. He flicked the lighter on and pressed it to her arm. Did it again a nail-span away. And again.

When he finally rolled her sleeve up again and got up, he was sweltering in his clothes, his eyes were disgustingly runny, and he could barely feel his hands or feet or anything at all. Except the smell. —Forget about all of that. He turned to go. He needed to get out of here and report the injuries before someone discovered the body and word got out about the peculiar wounds the corpse was sporting.

TARGET: NEELON ( INFILTRATOR )

A salarian Talon member who patrols Xin, one of the richer districts in Omega. Mostly placed there to show Talon’s strength, he is nonetheless lethal at his job, as one of the Talon mercenaries, as well as dealing red sand to the richer inhabitants. He lives in one of the other districts and usually takes a shuttle home to Eta district.

Conner was blaming Tim for this whole entire mess. The Boy Wonder had looked into the different factions around Omega, telling Conner he was more suited for infiltrating them. Finding out information on the dealing of red sand. Wonderful. This was because he was the tank and damage dealer between them. The one most likely not to get hurt thanks to the powers he had. He was still blaming Tim when he was given a target, a target that he had to kill.

The first day after the brief was spent coming up with a plan. Conner wasn't going to kill him. He couldn't. Even if in Omega it was a pretty common thing, or so he'd heard, it wasn't something he could do. He had morals and a sort of code to live by, Conner stopped the bad guys, he wasn't one of them. So Tim would study salarians and their...everything and come up with a way to drug the Neelon and while he did that, Conner would follow him and learn what he could about his route and habits.

For two days, Conner had followed Neelon as much as he could. Finding out where the shuttle landed in Eta district at what time he usually came back at. It hadn't been clockwork but maybe an hour between the times. From there Conner watched him from a distance to see where else he went and found a suitable place where he'd be able to get him. Weren't alleys so convenient?

The third day, Conner did the same thing, though this time he had a gun at his side and a small canister of a knock out drug in his pocket. Enough to keep him under for up to an hour. Not guaranteed though because of the damn metabolism. Trust him to end up with the more difficult race when you aren't a killer. He waited and made sure the coast was as clear as it could be, two people further along, one further back but not in sight range. He reached out with his ttk as Neelon got closer and took out the canister to inject him. Really hoping that it would last that hour because he needed all the time he could get. Conner dragged him further back into the alley, away from any prying eyes.

Proof of the kill was needed and Conner used Tim's omni-tool with encryptions in place to record what was happening. He had Neelon stand and had the recording at such an angle that part of his face was hidden. The angle hid the gun as well but you could hear it was there, it was empty but when he pulled the trigger, he used his heat vision to fire a laser blast at Neelon, stopping just as it singed against his skin under the armor and dropped him. The omni-tool shook a little before he holstered the gun and walked over to the body, looking over it and showing the blast area. He then switched it off ready to send it and hoped Tim showed up soon so they could hide the body.

merc killin'

ISABELA

MARCO

Re: MARCO

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

typo sniper, the new game from drawzel studios

now accepting applications for beta testers

ooh mememe

feel free to skip training montage and cut straight to kill?

sure!

marco puking the first time he sees real-life gore is totally canon

8(

the most effective way to make marco shut up is apparently to let him kill someone

a useful if troublesome fact to know!

ARTHUR

Re: ARTHUR

RYUSEI

no subject

CONNER

no subject