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xyzzysqrlCurrent word count: 2055.
Status of writer: Tired and sickish, but cautiously optimistic.
Chicken Cordon Boom
Chapter One: Maw of the Tempest
The official story behind the Citan Empire's invasion, as Sanguine understood it,
was that they as a race were warmongering bloodthirsty pirates. They were the sort of
cruel, vicious bastards who'd steal your grandmother's favorite gold necklace and then,
for example, toss her out a window purely for the fun of doing so. This sounded like
overt propaganda to him, and he'd said as much at length, but he was never one to
back away from a chance to go and shoot things, and once it became clear that this
was all that was required, he went at it with much gusto. This was why he was currently
tucked behind a row of alien terminals as red balls of plasma rapidly converted them
into lumps of bio-metallic slag and sparks showered down around his head. According
to his helmet display, there were two of them out there blazing away at his position, two
of his fellow Galactic Army warriors left alive, and his ammo count was disturbingly
close to zero. It was beginning to look like a lost fight, and it had only lasted fifteen
minutes. He fumbled at his belt for a grenade, and came up with only one. It'd have to
do.
Tapping the button on the side of the grenade three times to prime it, he shoved
his arm under the terminals, jerking it back quickly as dripping, plasma-laced molten
goo ate at his armor. Sanguine heard rapid, three-clawed footsteps clatter across the
metal of the floor, but he'd set the grenade to short fuse, and as the explosion went off
behind him and wet splattering sounds filled the air. His helmet announced in bold red
that he'd blown both of them out of existence, which was a good thing as far as he was
concerned, and that the single remaining non-human life form had accounted for the
other two remaining humans while he'd been pinned down. It was a one on one
situation, and he swung himself out of cover and readied his largest gun in anticipation.
The gun was a four-barreled shotgun derivative, a ballisticly unsound idea, but one he
was entirely prepared to blast things with. Carefully stepping over acidic alien slime, he
strolled down the long metal corridor of the ship.
The dim light pressed in all around him, interrupted only by the flickering of a
monitor screen off to his left, dark enough that he was tempted to put a hand on the wall
to keep him on track. Instead he took a few second and kicked his auto map into a
display window on his helmet's faceplate, consulting it thoughtfully. The area he was in
was a tangential offshoot away from the main hub of the ship, an elevator ride and a
long tight passage away. Hunching down to be sure of being a small target, Sanguine
swept his gun back and forth in front of him as he proceeded along the hallway toward
the elevator.
In the dark it's easy to let your mind fill in details which simply aren't there, and
Sanguine kept feeling the sensation of being watched. He couldn't hear anything except
for the dull hissing of dead air and the clanking of his own boots on the glossy metal
floor, but that paranoid suspicion kept him twisting back and forth, looking over his
shoulder and into every alcove he crept past. Up ahead he saw the light of the elevator
terminal, and he shuffled the last few feet towards it gratefully. The rest of the ship was
better lit, he suspected, as he jabbed his finger at the large single button of the elevator
control. A tooth-rattling hum surged through his body as motors drove the lift into
operation. He looked up to see a wide metal panel descending towards him along the
elevator shaft. He took a deep breath, and let it out again. His motion detector chirped,
and he slapped at his helmet controls quickly, bringing that window online.
It took him a critical moment, his eyes wandering over the map, to find his own
position. His first assumption was that the elevator had set off the detector, and that he
had no reason to be paranoid. This assumption was shot down not only by the
detector's window, but by the clang of claws on the floor as one of the Citan Empire
elite warriors dropped from the ceiling to land just behind him.
Sanguine snapped around and took aim with his shotgun, not hesitating a
moment before hauling on the trigger. The shotgun pellets dug sparks out of the far wall
where the cockroach-like beast conspicuously no longer was. Instead it was in the air,
legs folded in a low crouch as it somersaulted forward impossibly, twisting through two
loops before slamming into Sanguine's chest firmly. He felt the impact sharp and clear
against his ribs, and recoiled straight back into the elevator shaft. On his back, winded,
he stared up at the ceiling... which was getting closer at an alarming rate.
"Oh hell." he thought. "The elevator."
Another kick shoved him to the back of the shaft, leaving him reeling. He could
tell already that he wouldn't have time to stand up, much less stand up and make a run
for it. Instead he rolled over onto his back and hefted the heavy weight of his
quad-shotgun in one hand, angling it at the alien warrior's chitinous thorax. As the
weight of the elevator slammed into him, his finger twitched and jerked the trigger. The
one question on his mind as the pressure above hit his body like several hundred
pounds of metal driven by a high speed motor (which, as it happens, is what it was) was
“Was that enough to kill it?"
His helmet speaker blared to life. "HUMANS LOSE THE MATCH. CITAN
EMPIRE REIGNS SUPREME. RETURNING TO LOBBY IN FIVE, FOUR..."
The blackness of death faded into white, and then into the familiar red and blue
color scheme of the Citan War Online Between Game Lounge, clustered among his
fellow Galactic Army troopers. Across the room, the cluster of alien warriors were
cheering and sharing high-fives, with the occasional "Good game!" called across the
room. The avatar-characters on the human side were a bit more subdued, most working
out additional strategies or accusing each other of being 'lame' half-heartedly. One tall,
square-jawed soldier detached himself from the group clustered around the "Select
Next Map" terminal and wandered over towards Sanguine.
"Y'know, I had him on chase-cam." he offered, "And he had about six armor
points left and next to no health after that last shot. Squishfragged, though. Ow, man..."
he trailed off sympathetically as Sanguine nodded.
"It's been a chore to play Army since around patch 6, with the stealth upgrade for
the Citans." Sanguine replied, shaking his head.
The other soldier shrugged and nodded his head back, the name-text of
"Lt.Mitchell0029" floating over his helmet bobbing with it. "You've been off your game
since the whole breakup thing, though, man... you've gotta get back with it."
Sanguine winced. That wasn't exactly a subject he was happy with, and the
comment was all the sharper because it was true. He pushed his thoughts past that.
"Anyway, I'm out for the evening. Kick some for me, Mitch."
The other soldier waved as Sanguine pushed open the "Disconnect" door and
stepped through, his screen dissolving into static before giving him the steady
power-off blue. Reaching up he flipped the off switch and pulled it off his head, and au
tomatically reached for the box of tissues next to the computer desk. Cleaning the optic
panels of sweat and stray hairs was a familiar ritual for him, and gave him some time to
think and decompress before getting back to normality. Usually he found this period re
laxing, or even joyful if he'd had a particularly successful gaming evening. After the re
minder of his latest failed romantic attempt, though, he wasn't in the best of moods.
A dull grey apathy settled over him as, for roughly the thousandth time in one
week alone, he replayed the entire three month fling in his head to see if he could find
the exact moment something had gone wrong. As with the other nine hundred plus
times, he found nothing to focus on, no single incident he could jab his finger at with a
triumphant scream of "Yes! This! This is the moment! I should have said something
nicer, truly swept her off her feet with intricate Shakespearian wordplay, showered her
with a thousand gifts, and then love would still bloom within her heart for me!" which
was how he talked in his head when he was feeling romantic and sorry for himself. He
was certainly not unattractive, he told himself optimistically. His tousled brown hair,
nigh-permanently ruffled up, hung down over one brown eye in what he thought was a
most appealing way. He had fair skin... perhaps a little too fair from being indoors often,
yes, but smooth and soft. He was moderately tall, moderately thin... moderately every
thing, he admitted to himself.
He scrubbed at the inside of his Immersive InteractWear Headgear (TM) and
sighed quietly. It was hard to admit even to himself, but Minerva and he simply weren't
compatible people. He'd known it all along, really. He didn't offer the sort of excitement
she wanted in her life, she didn't seem more than passingly distracted by his interests...
a memory sprung to mind unbidden, his brithday gift to her had been a 5,000 piece jig
saw puzzle which she'd assembled more than a third of while eating lime-frosted
chocolate cake, and finished the next day. Surely his dull life, thought Sanguine as he
glanced around the bare white walls of his bedroom, couldn't hope to interest someone
as intellectual as her. Or something. He honestly didn't know. "Behold, Common Geeks
of Northeast America." he murmured to himself. "Section one, The Great American
Loser. Watch his mating rituals fail horribly."
A surprisingly loud gurgle from his stomach brought his attention back to the cur
rent time and place. He was a little embarrassed to find he'd been tracing little hearts
on his visor's optic plate with his tissue. Tossing it in the trash, he rose from his seat
and stowed the virtual reality gear away in its cabinet. "Yearning later. Food now." he
mumbled quietly, making his way into the underappointed kitchen of his three room
house. It really wasn't much, but on his salary he couldn't afford much. Still, he lived
comfortably enough, he decided. In the back of his mind he knew he was just looking
for something else to pin his dissatisfaction on. Psych courses in college had taught
him the concept of projection, if little else.
It only took a few moments in front of the fridge and freezer unit to consider his
options. "Rather dismal, really." he mused, pushing a few boxes around on the
off-chance that perhaps something edible was behind them. A couple of packages of
fish sticks, a few of chicken sticks. Some microwaveable chicken cordon bleu. French
fries. Something his aunt had given him, he didn't quite know what it was. His fridge unit
offered only a selection of caffinated drinks and some presliced artifical swiss cheese
food product in plastic wrapping.
Of these choices, the chicken cordon bleu was likely to be the freshest. He
reached in, took a box, and unwrapped it. "Microwave... mmh. Conventional oven. Call
me old-fashioned..." he paused expectantly with a glance around his kitchen, as if ex
pecting an answer. It relieved him greatly when he received none. This was his little
test, he'd explained to Minerva when she'd walked in on Sanguine narrating the ingredi
ents of a box of cereal to himself one morning, of his own sanity. If he got an answer to
any of his questions, he'd know he'd been living alone much too long. "Call me
old-fashioned," he repeated for his own benefit, "But I find the taste of conventional
oven cookery over microwaving." As he spoke he was opening the packaging
one-handed as another fished about in the cabinet under his sink. Dancing around a
mousetrap with his fingertips, he grabbed a baking sheet and dumped the stuffed,
breaded chicken breasts upon it.
I'm a little surprised that I managed to push myself to 2000+ words. Of course, I intended to do 3000. Blah.
Still... I'm off to a good start, I hope. Comments... y'know, welcome. And stuff.
Status of writer: Tired and sickish, but cautiously optimistic.
Chicken Cordon Boom
Chapter One: Maw of the Tempest
The official story behind the Citan Empire's invasion, as Sanguine understood it,
was that they as a race were warmongering bloodthirsty pirates. They were the sort of
cruel, vicious bastards who'd steal your grandmother's favorite gold necklace and then,
for example, toss her out a window purely for the fun of doing so. This sounded like
overt propaganda to him, and he'd said as much at length, but he was never one to
back away from a chance to go and shoot things, and once it became clear that this
was all that was required, he went at it with much gusto. This was why he was currently
tucked behind a row of alien terminals as red balls of plasma rapidly converted them
into lumps of bio-metallic slag and sparks showered down around his head. According
to his helmet display, there were two of them out there blazing away at his position, two
of his fellow Galactic Army warriors left alive, and his ammo count was disturbingly
close to zero. It was beginning to look like a lost fight, and it had only lasted fifteen
minutes. He fumbled at his belt for a grenade, and came up with only one. It'd have to
do.
Tapping the button on the side of the grenade three times to prime it, he shoved
his arm under the terminals, jerking it back quickly as dripping, plasma-laced molten
goo ate at his armor. Sanguine heard rapid, three-clawed footsteps clatter across the
metal of the floor, but he'd set the grenade to short fuse, and as the explosion went off
behind him and wet splattering sounds filled the air. His helmet announced in bold red
that he'd blown both of them out of existence, which was a good thing as far as he was
concerned, and that the single remaining non-human life form had accounted for the
other two remaining humans while he'd been pinned down. It was a one on one
situation, and he swung himself out of cover and readied his largest gun in anticipation.
The gun was a four-barreled shotgun derivative, a ballisticly unsound idea, but one he
was entirely prepared to blast things with. Carefully stepping over acidic alien slime, he
strolled down the long metal corridor of the ship.
The dim light pressed in all around him, interrupted only by the flickering of a
monitor screen off to his left, dark enough that he was tempted to put a hand on the wall
to keep him on track. Instead he took a few second and kicked his auto map into a
display window on his helmet's faceplate, consulting it thoughtfully. The area he was in
was a tangential offshoot away from the main hub of the ship, an elevator ride and a
long tight passage away. Hunching down to be sure of being a small target, Sanguine
swept his gun back and forth in front of him as he proceeded along the hallway toward
the elevator.
In the dark it's easy to let your mind fill in details which simply aren't there, and
Sanguine kept feeling the sensation of being watched. He couldn't hear anything except
for the dull hissing of dead air and the clanking of his own boots on the glossy metal
floor, but that paranoid suspicion kept him twisting back and forth, looking over his
shoulder and into every alcove he crept past. Up ahead he saw the light of the elevator
terminal, and he shuffled the last few feet towards it gratefully. The rest of the ship was
better lit, he suspected, as he jabbed his finger at the large single button of the elevator
control. A tooth-rattling hum surged through his body as motors drove the lift into
operation. He looked up to see a wide metal panel descending towards him along the
elevator shaft. He took a deep breath, and let it out again. His motion detector chirped,
and he slapped at his helmet controls quickly, bringing that window online.
It took him a critical moment, his eyes wandering over the map, to find his own
position. His first assumption was that the elevator had set off the detector, and that he
had no reason to be paranoid. This assumption was shot down not only by the
detector's window, but by the clang of claws on the floor as one of the Citan Empire
elite warriors dropped from the ceiling to land just behind him.
Sanguine snapped around and took aim with his shotgun, not hesitating a
moment before hauling on the trigger. The shotgun pellets dug sparks out of the far wall
where the cockroach-like beast conspicuously no longer was. Instead it was in the air,
legs folded in a low crouch as it somersaulted forward impossibly, twisting through two
loops before slamming into Sanguine's chest firmly. He felt the impact sharp and clear
against his ribs, and recoiled straight back into the elevator shaft. On his back, winded,
he stared up at the ceiling... which was getting closer at an alarming rate.
"Oh hell." he thought. "The elevator."
Another kick shoved him to the back of the shaft, leaving him reeling. He could
tell already that he wouldn't have time to stand up, much less stand up and make a run
for it. Instead he rolled over onto his back and hefted the heavy weight of his
quad-shotgun in one hand, angling it at the alien warrior's chitinous thorax. As the
weight of the elevator slammed into him, his finger twitched and jerked the trigger. The
one question on his mind as the pressure above hit his body like several hundred
pounds of metal driven by a high speed motor (which, as it happens, is what it was) was
“Was that enough to kill it?"
His helmet speaker blared to life. "HUMANS LOSE THE MATCH. CITAN
EMPIRE REIGNS SUPREME. RETURNING TO LOBBY IN FIVE, FOUR..."
The blackness of death faded into white, and then into the familiar red and blue
color scheme of the Citan War Online Between Game Lounge, clustered among his
fellow Galactic Army troopers. Across the room, the cluster of alien warriors were
cheering and sharing high-fives, with the occasional "Good game!" called across the
room. The avatar-characters on the human side were a bit more subdued, most working
out additional strategies or accusing each other of being 'lame' half-heartedly. One tall,
square-jawed soldier detached himself from the group clustered around the "Select
Next Map" terminal and wandered over towards Sanguine.
"Y'know, I had him on chase-cam." he offered, "And he had about six armor
points left and next to no health after that last shot. Squishfragged, though. Ow, man..."
he trailed off sympathetically as Sanguine nodded.
"It's been a chore to play Army since around patch 6, with the stealth upgrade for
the Citans." Sanguine replied, shaking his head.
The other soldier shrugged and nodded his head back, the name-text of
"Lt.Mitchell0029" floating over his helmet bobbing with it. "You've been off your game
since the whole breakup thing, though, man... you've gotta get back with it."
Sanguine winced. That wasn't exactly a subject he was happy with, and the
comment was all the sharper because it was true. He pushed his thoughts past that.
"Anyway, I'm out for the evening. Kick some for me, Mitch."
The other soldier waved as Sanguine pushed open the "Disconnect" door and
stepped through, his screen dissolving into static before giving him the steady
power-off blue. Reaching up he flipped the off switch and pulled it off his head, and au
tomatically reached for the box of tissues next to the computer desk. Cleaning the optic
panels of sweat and stray hairs was a familiar ritual for him, and gave him some time to
think and decompress before getting back to normality. Usually he found this period re
laxing, or even joyful if he'd had a particularly successful gaming evening. After the re
minder of his latest failed romantic attempt, though, he wasn't in the best of moods.
A dull grey apathy settled over him as, for roughly the thousandth time in one
week alone, he replayed the entire three month fling in his head to see if he could find
the exact moment something had gone wrong. As with the other nine hundred plus
times, he found nothing to focus on, no single incident he could jab his finger at with a
triumphant scream of "Yes! This! This is the moment! I should have said something
nicer, truly swept her off her feet with intricate Shakespearian wordplay, showered her
with a thousand gifts, and then love would still bloom within her heart for me!" which
was how he talked in his head when he was feeling romantic and sorry for himself. He
was certainly not unattractive, he told himself optimistically. His tousled brown hair,
nigh-permanently ruffled up, hung down over one brown eye in what he thought was a
most appealing way. He had fair skin... perhaps a little too fair from being indoors often,
yes, but smooth and soft. He was moderately tall, moderately thin... moderately every
thing, he admitted to himself.
He scrubbed at the inside of his Immersive InteractWear Headgear (TM) and
sighed quietly. It was hard to admit even to himself, but Minerva and he simply weren't
compatible people. He'd known it all along, really. He didn't offer the sort of excitement
she wanted in her life, she didn't seem more than passingly distracted by his interests...
a memory sprung to mind unbidden, his brithday gift to her had been a 5,000 piece jig
saw puzzle which she'd assembled more than a third of while eating lime-frosted
chocolate cake, and finished the next day. Surely his dull life, thought Sanguine as he
glanced around the bare white walls of his bedroom, couldn't hope to interest someone
as intellectual as her. Or something. He honestly didn't know. "Behold, Common Geeks
of Northeast America." he murmured to himself. "Section one, The Great American
Loser. Watch his mating rituals fail horribly."
A surprisingly loud gurgle from his stomach brought his attention back to the cur
rent time and place. He was a little embarrassed to find he'd been tracing little hearts
on his visor's optic plate with his tissue. Tossing it in the trash, he rose from his seat
and stowed the virtual reality gear away in its cabinet. "Yearning later. Food now." he
mumbled quietly, making his way into the underappointed kitchen of his three room
house. It really wasn't much, but on his salary he couldn't afford much. Still, he lived
comfortably enough, he decided. In the back of his mind he knew he was just looking
for something else to pin his dissatisfaction on. Psych courses in college had taught
him the concept of projection, if little else.
It only took a few moments in front of the fridge and freezer unit to consider his
options. "Rather dismal, really." he mused, pushing a few boxes around on the
off-chance that perhaps something edible was behind them. A couple of packages of
fish sticks, a few of chicken sticks. Some microwaveable chicken cordon bleu. French
fries. Something his aunt had given him, he didn't quite know what it was. His fridge unit
offered only a selection of caffinated drinks and some presliced artifical swiss cheese
food product in plastic wrapping.
Of these choices, the chicken cordon bleu was likely to be the freshest. He
reached in, took a box, and unwrapped it. "Microwave... mmh. Conventional oven. Call
me old-fashioned..." he paused expectantly with a glance around his kitchen, as if ex
pecting an answer. It relieved him greatly when he received none. This was his little
test, he'd explained to Minerva when she'd walked in on Sanguine narrating the ingredi
ents of a box of cereal to himself one morning, of his own sanity. If he got an answer to
any of his questions, he'd know he'd been living alone much too long. "Call me
old-fashioned," he repeated for his own benefit, "But I find the taste of conventional
oven cookery over microwaving." As he spoke he was opening the packaging
one-handed as another fished about in the cabinet under his sink. Dancing around a
mousetrap with his fingertips, he grabbed a baking sheet and dumped the stuffed,
breaded chicken breasts upon it.
I'm a little surprised that I managed to push myself to 2000+ words. Of course, I intended to do 3000. Blah.
Still... I'm off to a good start, I hope. Comments... y'know, welcome. And stuff.
