Post by Nobody on Apr 13, 2015 3:17:34 GMT
"J-3197! Front and center!" The drill sergeant of our platoon, given name Castle, leaned his boiling red face down to mine. The force of his year rattled my eardrums.
The platoon surrounding me stepped back as I stepped forward, like clockwork.
“Sir yes sir!” I shouted back.
“What is my policy regarding trash in the barracks, Private?” He stood to his fully impressive height of six foot six inches.
“You don’t like it, sir!”
Castle began to march down the row, watching the faces of the recruits in my platoon. All of them were stony faced, except for J-3196, my bunkmate. He had his usual crooked grin though he did his best to hide it when Castle passed by.
“And why is that, Private?”
“We leave trash for the enemy, sir! Trash is useless in our possession and makes us useless!”
He nodded. “That’s right, Private. Then I’m sure you can tell me why I found this in your bunk?” He produced a piece of paper from his breast pocket.
I gulped reflexively. It was a sheet of paper folded twice horizontally, and addressed to someone I used to be.
“It’s a letter from my home, sir. From my family.”
Castle took the paper in both of his giant hands and tore it in half three times. “I’m sorry recruit, I must have misheard you. The only home you have is the bunk you sleep in here in wonderful Pallas 10. The only family you have are those good enough to graduate. Only five of you can graduate, and the rest of you are trash! And how do I feel about trash?”
The troop stepped forward, and I stepped in line. Clockwork. “You don’t like it sir! Trash is left for the enemy sir!”
“That’s right. Now fall in for PT!”
[/hr]
I flopped onto my bed after the brutality the sergeant put us through. I held up my arms, starting to gain tone from all of the effort. I rubbed my sore biceps and maoned. “Oh shut it, Seven, you pussy,” J-3196 said from above me. We usually just called each other by our digit out of the ten we bunked with; He was Six, and I was Seven. From most people, pussy would have been just a general insult. But Six was targeting me as a girl. Which was of course, against the rules, and left him open for a blow in return.
As an Apparent, we volunteered to lose everything: Our names, our families, and as far as the enemy was concerned, our identity. We became a number preceded by a letter to indicate our crop of the year. I was J-3197, of course. You know that by now.
I slid out from my punk and popped up, landing a punch straight to Six’s unmentionables. He grabbed himself in surprise and fell out of bed, groaning. Nine rushed over to Six’s curled up body.
“Six, are you alright? What happened?”
Six rolled over to her, teeth gritted together in pain. “I think she may have broken me, Nine. I need your help.” She leaned in close to make out his words. “Kiss it better.”
She kicked him in the gut and made her way back to her bunk, blushing furiously, as Six laughed. “It was a joke,” he said, wheezing.
Everything was a joke with Six. His lopsided grin and his penchant for strange humor had earned him something of a strange relationship among us. His brown hair was too long for regulation but he never cut it, and it just kind of hung everywhere but his face, which wasn’t bad looking. And his ‘jokey’ flirting with anything that had a pair of breasts wouldn’t have been so unsuccessful if he had been able to limit himself to one target at a time.
Nine was a bit of a recluse. She was very pretty, with straight black hair and almond shaped green eyes. She was probably Asian, but I never asked. We weren’t supposed to talk about who we were before we were Apparent.
The other members of our group had dropped from the original ten to six. Three had broken his arm during routine training and had to be dropped from the program, but he was free to try again next year. One and Five had been caught sleeping together and were banned from the program. It made me wonder why Six was so set on getting laid, knowing the consequences. Eight died before we even made it here, when her pod left its tube at the wrong time, sending her flying out into space. But things like that happened, and it left fewer people to compete with. That’s just how things worked.
Two was a pretty boring guy overall, small and twitchy. He had short cropped blonde hair and a plain face, but crazy luck when it came to gambling, another thing we weren’t supposed to do. Currently he was swindling Four out of a week’s worth of rations in a game of poker.
Four was a giant of a man, a little taller than Sgt. Castle. He was from the same place as Nine, judging by appearance, though he lacked her trace of an accent. I walked behind him and looked at his hand. A pair of twos. He was going to lose hard if he didn’t fold here.
“I raise you to a week and a half,” Four announced. I resisted the urge to smack the back of his head. Four wasn’t stupid, but he was stubborn as hell. Two showed his hand, a pair of aces lining up with the two on the table. Four swore loudly and threw his twos down on the table.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked Four.
“You know what they say, Seven. Food won is twice as tasty as food earned. I mean, I’m paraphrasing a bit there, but you get the point. Besides, I don’t back out of a fight, even if it’s a battle of luck.” He pushed his stack of cards over with a melodramatic sigh. Ever graceful in defeat, Four was a perfect example of the friendly giant. He knew he would lose if he played against Two, but he did it anyways.
“It’s your meals. I guess you can do whatever you want with them.” I shrugged and made my way towards our lockers at the end of the room. Ten was standing against the wall, looking as shady as ever. She had dark skin and red hair, with two blue eyes. One of them was shot through with a streak of brown through the iris.
“It’s a damn shame Castle found your letter,” she said, face serene. I wanted to punch her in her pretentious face. But I would have my chance.
“I’m sure you’re very disappointed after he found your shitty magazines. What did I do to piss you off, again?”
She shrugged. “To be honest, I just don’t like you, Seven. You’re a bitch, and I hope something awful happens to you after I graduate. That way no one will think of it as foul play.”
I ignored her and opened up my locker. I pulled out the little electronic journal that we were allowed to keep while we were here. It served as a sort of pager for the most part, and a diary at any other time. I pulled down on the bottom half, unveiling the screen. It flickered into life and I checked for when the next day of sparring practice would be before graduation. There weren’t any. Somehow I had missed how quickly time had passed. Two days before graduation. Good.
I didn’t say anything to Ten but I made sure to flash her the bitchiest smile that I could before I went back to sleep in my bunk.
[/hr]
Those two days passed by with incredible speed, now that I had realized how close the end of my time here was.
Castle stood in front of a huge steel door. He looked at the twenty seven of us left from our starting class of hundreds. “You all know what comes next. You go into that room and the suits’ll do the rest. I know there’s some namby-pamby word for them, but suits are what they are. They’re damned expensive, and they serve a purpose. You can’t just wear it for no reason. And once you wear one, who you are is set in stone, forever. And at most five of you will graduate from this. You knew how it was going to be when you signed up though. When you leave this room it will be as my equals.”
He saluted us then, and nodded once. The door groaned as it slid open, the titanic amounts of steel pulling themselves into the sides of the meteor. Inside it was dim and musty. The room had been closed off for a long time, so I supposed that made sense.
A gas torch lit up as I stepped in, the first of our class. There was no order, no hierarchy now. It was a free for all, literally. Ten rushed in and tackled me, scuffling up to her feet as quickly as she could and sprinting towards the center of the room, where large glass vials filled with solid smoke waited. She stumbled, though, and smacked into one, sending it crashing to the floor. The smoke spilled out over the glass and the floor, before it started to shrink.
She shrugged, almost apologetic. “Looks like there can only be four of us now. Darn.”
The others ran in now, struggling to make their way towards the few vials left. Six stopped by me to help me to my feet, though he had never really been the chivalrous sort of guy. Nine looked back at us sadly from the crowd as the sounds of brawling broke out.
Then the screaming started.
Ten spluttered and choked, blood streaming from the corner of her mouth. Black ooze splattered from her wound onto the floor, writhing and then evaporating. She hung limply in the dim light, dangling from something in midair. A shard of glass jutted out from the center of her chest before whipping back through her, letting her crumple to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. The others began to panic and ran back towards the now sealed entrance. We were locked in with a monster, now.
The smoke had solidified into a grey skinned technorganic monstrosity. Tentacles of gunmetal gray flesh tipped with shards of glass flailed around, cutting into the recruits like they were shafts of wheat in front of a combine. Four looked at me and at the three vials remaining. Ten must have tried to use one before she got gutted. I looked at the pile of vanishing black ooze. Yeah, she did.
Four and Six ran on either side of me, moving with grace earned through hours of practice. I’m surprised, in retrospect, that we were as calm as we were. Amidst the carnage and the mayhem, I should have been afraid of dying. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. There was no fear, no worry. Nothing but the objective, the vial.
I jumped over the leaking stump that dropped in front of me and snatched up the vial. I tipped it back and swallowed, and saw Four doing the same from the corner of my eye. I looked for Six and saw him go down as a tentacle cut across his throat.
He crashed into the pillar, throat cut, deep. The vial fell over and crashed over his head, cutting his face. He looked up at me. Isn’t this just fucking hilarious? his face seemed to say as the black ooze creeped in through his wounds.
The suit washed up out of every pore of my body, from the corners of my eyes, from my nose and my ears and my mouth and a few places I’d rather not mention. Everything was black and then a yellow box spread across my vision. A series of numbers flashed and I could see. The monster had a yellow outline around it distinguishing itself from the piles of bodies around it.
I looked to my right and saw what I assumed was Four, huge, scaled, and terrifying. What looked like horns came up from his head and a huge tail extended from his back.
I looked to Six, prepared for the worst.
He had black skin, and it seemed to amplify his muscles. Green lines extended down his chest, and his eyes were huge hollow circles glowing the same shade of ghostly green. A grin lit up across his face, mirroring the cut across his throat. They met up at the top of his jaw, making a giant ghastly grin. Three nubs rose from the top of his head, small crosses cut into them with the same fluorescent material. He stood with effort.
I couldn’t see myself, but I assumed I must be just as terrifying. We had become monsters, to fight monsters. And there was one in front of us that needed dealing with. I picked up one of the gas torches.
[/hr]
Castle looked at his watch. It was time to open the door and see who came out. “I hope we get a full crop this time,” he said to the inspectors behind him.
The doors slid open and smoke spilled out, along with the smell of burning meat. A giant horned fighter came out and stood before Castle before saluting. A slender one with a creepy grin followed, opting for a mock salute. And as the smoke cleared, one last figure emerged. Light played across the features of a skull set into the front of her head, and black muscle seemed to ripple across white bone all over her figure.
“I guess that’s it?” Castle said.
The girl nodded, her helmet retracting into her skin, revealing J-3197. She looked up at him with eyes full of new found strength. “What are our names sir?”
Castle looked at the big one. His helmet slid back. J-3194. “You, big guy, I’m thinking we’re gonna call you, ‘Kaiju’. You’re a Jap, right? I figure you’ll come to like that. You’re first out, so you’re squad leader.”
Castle turned to the creepy one. “You’re Joker. Obviously.” Joker had the courtesy not to reveal his blood soaked face.
And lastly he looked at the girl. He rolled a finger, and she nodded. The skull flowed up over her face, eyes lighting up a bloody red shade. “And you’ll be Skull.”
He turned around and started towards the door out, lifting a hand dismissively. “Soldiers, dismissed. Let the janitors know they’ve got a mess to clean up.” He gritted his teeth. Something must have gone wrong if they all died. “This is the world we live in, and it’s the one you’ve fought and screamed to be in every step of your way here. So I expect the three of you to be model soldiers, you hear?”
The three of them saluted, even Joker. Then he bowed deeply, arm held out to one side.
“We’ll make the fuckers pay.” Skull lowered her head, the skeletal grin over her face hiding the grimace she wore.
“We’re coming home, and we’re going to kick some serious ass.” Kaiju rolled his neck, horns sprouting from his head and a visor clicking into place over his head.
The platoon surrounding me stepped back as I stepped forward, like clockwork.
“Sir yes sir!” I shouted back.
“What is my policy regarding trash in the barracks, Private?” He stood to his fully impressive height of six foot six inches.
“You don’t like it, sir!”
Castle began to march down the row, watching the faces of the recruits in my platoon. All of them were stony faced, except for J-3196, my bunkmate. He had his usual crooked grin though he did his best to hide it when Castle passed by.
“And why is that, Private?”
“We leave trash for the enemy, sir! Trash is useless in our possession and makes us useless!”
He nodded. “That’s right, Private. Then I’m sure you can tell me why I found this in your bunk?” He produced a piece of paper from his breast pocket.
I gulped reflexively. It was a sheet of paper folded twice horizontally, and addressed to someone I used to be.
“It’s a letter from my home, sir. From my family.”
Castle took the paper in both of his giant hands and tore it in half three times. “I’m sorry recruit, I must have misheard you. The only home you have is the bunk you sleep in here in wonderful Pallas 10. The only family you have are those good enough to graduate. Only five of you can graduate, and the rest of you are trash! And how do I feel about trash?”
The troop stepped forward, and I stepped in line. Clockwork. “You don’t like it sir! Trash is left for the enemy sir!”
“That’s right. Now fall in for PT!”
[/hr]
I flopped onto my bed after the brutality the sergeant put us through. I held up my arms, starting to gain tone from all of the effort. I rubbed my sore biceps and maoned. “Oh shut it, Seven, you pussy,” J-3196 said from above me. We usually just called each other by our digit out of the ten we bunked with; He was Six, and I was Seven. From most people, pussy would have been just a general insult. But Six was targeting me as a girl. Which was of course, against the rules, and left him open for a blow in return.
As an Apparent, we volunteered to lose everything: Our names, our families, and as far as the enemy was concerned, our identity. We became a number preceded by a letter to indicate our crop of the year. I was J-3197, of course. You know that by now.
I slid out from my punk and popped up, landing a punch straight to Six’s unmentionables. He grabbed himself in surprise and fell out of bed, groaning. Nine rushed over to Six’s curled up body.
“Six, are you alright? What happened?”
Six rolled over to her, teeth gritted together in pain. “I think she may have broken me, Nine. I need your help.” She leaned in close to make out his words. “Kiss it better.”
She kicked him in the gut and made her way back to her bunk, blushing furiously, as Six laughed. “It was a joke,” he said, wheezing.
Everything was a joke with Six. His lopsided grin and his penchant for strange humor had earned him something of a strange relationship among us. His brown hair was too long for regulation but he never cut it, and it just kind of hung everywhere but his face, which wasn’t bad looking. And his ‘jokey’ flirting with anything that had a pair of breasts wouldn’t have been so unsuccessful if he had been able to limit himself to one target at a time.
Nine was a bit of a recluse. She was very pretty, with straight black hair and almond shaped green eyes. She was probably Asian, but I never asked. We weren’t supposed to talk about who we were before we were Apparent.
The other members of our group had dropped from the original ten to six. Three had broken his arm during routine training and had to be dropped from the program, but he was free to try again next year. One and Five had been caught sleeping together and were banned from the program. It made me wonder why Six was so set on getting laid, knowing the consequences. Eight died before we even made it here, when her pod left its tube at the wrong time, sending her flying out into space. But things like that happened, and it left fewer people to compete with. That’s just how things worked.
Two was a pretty boring guy overall, small and twitchy. He had short cropped blonde hair and a plain face, but crazy luck when it came to gambling, another thing we weren’t supposed to do. Currently he was swindling Four out of a week’s worth of rations in a game of poker.
Four was a giant of a man, a little taller than Sgt. Castle. He was from the same place as Nine, judging by appearance, though he lacked her trace of an accent. I walked behind him and looked at his hand. A pair of twos. He was going to lose hard if he didn’t fold here.
“I raise you to a week and a half,” Four announced. I resisted the urge to smack the back of his head. Four wasn’t stupid, but he was stubborn as hell. Two showed his hand, a pair of aces lining up with the two on the table. Four swore loudly and threw his twos down on the table.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked Four.
“You know what they say, Seven. Food won is twice as tasty as food earned. I mean, I’m paraphrasing a bit there, but you get the point. Besides, I don’t back out of a fight, even if it’s a battle of luck.” He pushed his stack of cards over with a melodramatic sigh. Ever graceful in defeat, Four was a perfect example of the friendly giant. He knew he would lose if he played against Two, but he did it anyways.
“It’s your meals. I guess you can do whatever you want with them.” I shrugged and made my way towards our lockers at the end of the room. Ten was standing against the wall, looking as shady as ever. She had dark skin and red hair, with two blue eyes. One of them was shot through with a streak of brown through the iris.
“It’s a damn shame Castle found your letter,” she said, face serene. I wanted to punch her in her pretentious face. But I would have my chance.
“I’m sure you’re very disappointed after he found your shitty magazines. What did I do to piss you off, again?”
She shrugged. “To be honest, I just don’t like you, Seven. You’re a bitch, and I hope something awful happens to you after I graduate. That way no one will think of it as foul play.”
I ignored her and opened up my locker. I pulled out the little electronic journal that we were allowed to keep while we were here. It served as a sort of pager for the most part, and a diary at any other time. I pulled down on the bottom half, unveiling the screen. It flickered into life and I checked for when the next day of sparring practice would be before graduation. There weren’t any. Somehow I had missed how quickly time had passed. Two days before graduation. Good.
I didn’t say anything to Ten but I made sure to flash her the bitchiest smile that I could before I went back to sleep in my bunk.
[/hr]
Those two days passed by with incredible speed, now that I had realized how close the end of my time here was.
Castle stood in front of a huge steel door. He looked at the twenty seven of us left from our starting class of hundreds. “You all know what comes next. You go into that room and the suits’ll do the rest. I know there’s some namby-pamby word for them, but suits are what they are. They’re damned expensive, and they serve a purpose. You can’t just wear it for no reason. And once you wear one, who you are is set in stone, forever. And at most five of you will graduate from this. You knew how it was going to be when you signed up though. When you leave this room it will be as my equals.”
He saluted us then, and nodded once. The door groaned as it slid open, the titanic amounts of steel pulling themselves into the sides of the meteor. Inside it was dim and musty. The room had been closed off for a long time, so I supposed that made sense.
A gas torch lit up as I stepped in, the first of our class. There was no order, no hierarchy now. It was a free for all, literally. Ten rushed in and tackled me, scuffling up to her feet as quickly as she could and sprinting towards the center of the room, where large glass vials filled with solid smoke waited. She stumbled, though, and smacked into one, sending it crashing to the floor. The smoke spilled out over the glass and the floor, before it started to shrink.
She shrugged, almost apologetic. “Looks like there can only be four of us now. Darn.”
The others ran in now, struggling to make their way towards the few vials left. Six stopped by me to help me to my feet, though he had never really been the chivalrous sort of guy. Nine looked back at us sadly from the crowd as the sounds of brawling broke out.
Then the screaming started.
Ten spluttered and choked, blood streaming from the corner of her mouth. Black ooze splattered from her wound onto the floor, writhing and then evaporating. She hung limply in the dim light, dangling from something in midair. A shard of glass jutted out from the center of her chest before whipping back through her, letting her crumple to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. The others began to panic and ran back towards the now sealed entrance. We were locked in with a monster, now.
The smoke had solidified into a grey skinned technorganic monstrosity. Tentacles of gunmetal gray flesh tipped with shards of glass flailed around, cutting into the recruits like they were shafts of wheat in front of a combine. Four looked at me and at the three vials remaining. Ten must have tried to use one before she got gutted. I looked at the pile of vanishing black ooze. Yeah, she did.
Four and Six ran on either side of me, moving with grace earned through hours of practice. I’m surprised, in retrospect, that we were as calm as we were. Amidst the carnage and the mayhem, I should have been afraid of dying. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. There was no fear, no worry. Nothing but the objective, the vial.
I jumped over the leaking stump that dropped in front of me and snatched up the vial. I tipped it back and swallowed, and saw Four doing the same from the corner of my eye. I looked for Six and saw him go down as a tentacle cut across his throat.
He crashed into the pillar, throat cut, deep. The vial fell over and crashed over his head, cutting his face. He looked up at me. Isn’t this just fucking hilarious? his face seemed to say as the black ooze creeped in through his wounds.
The suit washed up out of every pore of my body, from the corners of my eyes, from my nose and my ears and my mouth and a few places I’d rather not mention. Everything was black and then a yellow box spread across my vision. A series of numbers flashed and I could see. The monster had a yellow outline around it distinguishing itself from the piles of bodies around it.
I looked to my right and saw what I assumed was Four, huge, scaled, and terrifying. What looked like horns came up from his head and a huge tail extended from his back.
I looked to Six, prepared for the worst.
He had black skin, and it seemed to amplify his muscles. Green lines extended down his chest, and his eyes were huge hollow circles glowing the same shade of ghostly green. A grin lit up across his face, mirroring the cut across his throat. They met up at the top of his jaw, making a giant ghastly grin. Three nubs rose from the top of his head, small crosses cut into them with the same fluorescent material. He stood with effort.
I couldn’t see myself, but I assumed I must be just as terrifying. We had become monsters, to fight monsters. And there was one in front of us that needed dealing with. I picked up one of the gas torches.
[/hr]
Castle looked at his watch. It was time to open the door and see who came out. “I hope we get a full crop this time,” he said to the inspectors behind him.
The doors slid open and smoke spilled out, along with the smell of burning meat. A giant horned fighter came out and stood before Castle before saluting. A slender one with a creepy grin followed, opting for a mock salute. And as the smoke cleared, one last figure emerged. Light played across the features of a skull set into the front of her head, and black muscle seemed to ripple across white bone all over her figure.
“I guess that’s it?” Castle said.
The girl nodded, her helmet retracting into her skin, revealing J-3197. She looked up at him with eyes full of new found strength. “What are our names sir?”
Castle looked at the big one. His helmet slid back. J-3194. “You, big guy, I’m thinking we’re gonna call you, ‘Kaiju’. You’re a Jap, right? I figure you’ll come to like that. You’re first out, so you’re squad leader.”
Castle turned to the creepy one. “You’re Joker. Obviously.” Joker had the courtesy not to reveal his blood soaked face.
And lastly he looked at the girl. He rolled a finger, and she nodded. The skull flowed up over her face, eyes lighting up a bloody red shade. “And you’ll be Skull.”
He turned around and started towards the door out, lifting a hand dismissively. “Soldiers, dismissed. Let the janitors know they’ve got a mess to clean up.” He gritted his teeth. Something must have gone wrong if they all died. “This is the world we live in, and it’s the one you’ve fought and screamed to be in every step of your way here. So I expect the three of you to be model soldiers, you hear?”
The three of them saluted, even Joker. Then he bowed deeply, arm held out to one side.
“We’ll make the fuckers pay.” Skull lowered her head, the skeletal grin over her face hiding the grimace she wore.
“We’re coming home, and we’re going to kick some serious ass.” Kaiju rolled his neck, horns sprouting from his head and a visor clicking into place over his head.