A/N: Welcome to my first X-over fanfic! I put it under Trigun just because all of this stays mostly on the planet Gunsmoke. It's a Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star and Trigun X-over. I love these three animes, but Trigun is my favorite. well, without further gilding the lily, here's the first chappie! Enjoy!
Chapter 1: The Cowboys, the Job, the Competition and the Untamed
Spike sat in front of the TV, cleaning his gun at the table, Ein the dog at his feet, watching him.
"Let's see what's on the menu for today, shall we?" the man from Big Shots said. "Wow! It's a Double Deuce!"
Spike stopped wiping down the barrel of his gun and looked up at the TV.
"His name is Vash the Stampede, and unfortunately we...don't have a picture of him."
"What?!" his girl partner squeaked. "No picture?! But, how are all those cowboys out there gonna find him if they don't know what he looks like?!"
"Don't think we're gonna leave 'em hangin' sugar!" the man assured her as Spike set his gun down, now paying full attention to the TV and ignoring Ed humming in the background. "We may not know what he looks like, but we do know that he lives on a planet in deep space called Gunsmoke, and he's got a huge gun! He's also known as the Humanoid Typhoon."
"That's nice," Spike grumbled. "Now what's the bounty on him, already?"
"Well, what's the Double Deuce price on him, huh?" the girl wondered.
"That'd be sixty billion double dollars in Gunsmoke currency," the cowboy continued. "That translates as fifty billion woolongs!"
"Holy shit!" Spike shouted at the TV, his eyes almost popping out of his head and he quickly looked around before shutting off the TV and turning to Ed who was leaning behind him on the couch.
"Hey, where's Jet?" he wondered.
"He's gone into meditation mode with his planty-plants," Ed replied, sitting up on the head of the couch as if she were meditating.
Spike nodded and put his gun back together before standing and heading to the little greenery Jet had set up for his Banzai trees. He leaned sideways in the doorway and watched Jet water for about two seconds before getting bored.
"Hey," he called and Jet looked up at him with a slight frown. "Feel like heading into deep space?"
"Not particularly," Jet replied, turning back to watering his plants. "What for?"
"Oh, just a bounty worth fifty billion woolongs is floatin' around out there, that's all," Spike replied casually as he lit a cigarette.
"Worth how much?!" Jet asked loudly, spilling some water from the pot he was holding as he whipped around to stare wide eyes at Spike. "What're the details?!"
"Apparently, the guy's got a huge gun," Spike began, taking a drag from his cigarette then blowing it into the air again. "Name's Vash the Stampede, aka the Humanoid Typhoon. He lives on a planet called Gunsmoke. Ever heard of it?"
"Gunsmoke?" Jet echoed then scoffed and turned to his Banzai trees. "Forget it. That place is too hard to find. And besides, a bounty that large is bound to attract every bounty hunter in this quadrant. We'll just stay right here, thank you."
Spike gave a grimace and walked away, shoving his hands in his pockets as his cigarette hung in his mouth. He reached the main room and flopped onto the couch with a sigh. Looked like it was another day of just sitting.
"Ed found it!" Ed suddenly called from her little computer and Spike frowned as he looked at her.
"Found what?" he asked as she sat cross-legged, swinging in circles in front of her computer, her goggles on her eyes.
"Planet Gunsmoke!" she grinned and Spike sat up with wide eyes. "Smokey smoke, ashes to ashes, dust is dust!" Spike stood and walked toward Ed to look at the screen. "Ed found coordinates from the nearest hyper-gate. Quadrant CC 43. Should take one day to zoom through space and land on planet!"
Spike examined the information on the screen then smiled and tousled her hair praising, "Nice job."
"Nice job, good job, fifty billion woolong job!" Ed chanted then giggled and fell back, still giggling as Spike hurried back to report Ed's findings to Jet.
"Did somebody say fifty billion woolongs?!" Faye suddenly called from the doorway leading from the hall to the main room. "I'm so there! When are we leaving? What's the plan? How will we split it?"
"If you work hard enough to catch the guy and earn your keep, we might let you have a cut," Spike retorted on his way to Jet and she glared at him, her hands on her hips.
"It had better be a fair cut!" she spat back and Ein barked from his place on the floor in front of the couch.
"Faye-Faye!" Ed grinned, sitting up. "Guess where we're going! Planet Gunsmoke! It's in deep space! We're going to catch a guy named Vash the Stampede!"
Faye gave a frown and looked at the girl as she began giggling again, hugging herself as she did and Faye murmured in awe, "Vash the Stampede?"
Meanwhile on Planet Gunsmoke...
Two men sat on the porch of a hotel, enjoying a drink of whiskey on another hot day in the city of Temple. One of the men took a shot of his whiskey but when he came back from drinking it he frowned at something on the horizon, catching the other man's attention.
"What is it, Jared?" he asked then turned to see what he was looking at. "What the…?"
He trailed off and they both stared at the huge cloud of sand being kicked up by something going very fast and heading toward the town. The men set their glasses on the table between them and leaned forward in their seats to better see what was kicking up all that sand.
"Car, maybe?" the first man, Jared, guessed. "Herd of Thomas's?"
"Not sure," the second man, Sam, replied, squinting to see farther. "Too small to be a car, and I only see one speck. Maybe it's one Thomas?"
"One Thomas kickin' up that much dirt?" Jared wondered in disbelief. "Maybe it's a motorcycle?"
"Well, we're not gonna find out just sitting here," Sam retorted, standing. "We'll have to go see."
"Or, we could wait for it to come to us," Jared smirked, sitting back in his chair and tilting his hat in front of his eyes to shade them and Sam glared at him. He was about to step off the porch when he stopped and Jared shot up in his seat. They'd heard a loud, wild yell and a few gunshots followed it. Jared stood up slowly and stepped next to Sam to see whatever he saw.
The speck was starting to take form and they saw now that it was a person kicking up all that sand. The figure looked like it was running, but before they could see a face, or try to make out if it was a man or a woman, two cars swerved to be out of the sand cloud in its wake. The cars had huge guns mounted on their roofs, along with a few men with hand guns and rifles hanging from the windows or sitting on with the big guns. Sam and Jared yelled in frightened shock and ran into the hotel, not seeing any of what happened next.
The men on the cars started shooting at the man running, for it was, in fact, a man. He was yelling and running as fast as he could, fountains of tears gushing from his eyes as he kept yelling, "Why does this always happen to me?!"
He gave a girlish scream when the bullets started flying toward him and he dodged them expertly, his red coat bellowing with wind and sand, his blonde hair somehow still spiked up on his head.
"How can he keep up this pace?!" one of the drivers yelled at one of the other men. "We've been chasing him like this for fifty iles now!"
"Just shut up and drive!" the man he was talking to shouted and aimed his rifle at the man running. "Hold still you---!"
The blonde man suddenly dug his heels into the sand and skidded to a stop and the cars on either side of him whizzed past him as he fell face first into the sand from stopping suddenly at the speed he had been running. He skidded forward a bit then flopped fully onto the ground as the sound of rubber grinding on dirt was heard as the drivers of both cars hit the breaks.
"What the hell'd he do that for?" one of the men asked, and another shrugged. "He's got nowhere to hide now."
"Maybe he died from exhaustion?" the other man replied.
"Are you kidding?!" the first man snapped. "This is Vash the Stampede! He can't die of exhaustion!"
"Either way, it doesn't matter," another man piped up, climbing out of the car. "We can take him in dead or alive and get the reward. Come on. Let's load him into the car."
A few men jumped out of the cars and walked toward Vash who hadn't moved from his spot the whole time. They cautiously walked toward him, not knowing if he was really dead or if he was just faking it to get the jump on them. They soon found out when he lifted one of his hands and fired his gun toward them. They all froze but none of them were hit. In fact, the bullet had missed them all completely. They looked around at each other and Vash lifted his head from the ground, an exhausted look over his face.
"Oh, I didn't hit anyone?" he wondered, unenthused. "Damn. I thought I had the angle right."
The men looked at each other and grinned smugly, thinking it would be easy to tie him up and take him to the nearest sheriff's office and collect their bounty, seeing as he was so disoriented that he couldn't shoot to hit them. The men walked toward him with full confidence, but Vash wasn't done yet. He fired his gun toward them five more times, emptying his gun and making them stop again.
"Damn," Vash sighed. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I didn't hit any of you?"
"Nope, Mr. Humanoid Typhoon," one of the men smirked, smugly as he knelt down at Vash's head. "Not a one of us. You'll just have to make peace with the fact that you didn't kill anyone today."
"Well, I don't like blood," Vash replied, rolling over onto his back as the other men crowded around him. "I was really just trying to wound you anyway. My search is for love and peace, not death."
The man kneeling burst into laughter then said, "You're kidding me! Love and peace?! After all the damage you've caused you think you can find love and peace?!"
"Well, this world is made of it, after all," Vash murmured, staring at the sky. "It's possible, even for me to find it."
"Let's see if you can find it in a jail cell, then," one of the other men smirked evilly and one man with a rope came up to tie him up.
"Ah! No! Please! Ow! That hurts! Stop it!" Vash yelled, trying to struggle away, but the men around him were 'too strong' for him to escape and he was tied up in moments. One of the men slung the scrawny man over his shoulder and hauled him toward the cars. "Ouch! Hey! Put me down! I won't run away! Honest! Could you please put me down?!"
"Sure, we'll put you down," the man carrying him laughed, evilly and threw him into the back of the car, making Vash grunt in pain. "Comfy?"
"Actually, it is a little cooler in here than out there," Vash replied, meekly and the men frowned at him in wonder.
"You're a weird one," one of them blurted.
"Yeah," Vash chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. "I get that a lot."
The men were about to close the door, chuckling at him but froze as he put his arm down. Vash stared at them in wide-eyed wonder as they stared back at him and he looked down at his hand. He screamed and just as the man in the doorway of the car lunged toward him to keep him from escaping, Vash flew out the window, tucked and rolled across the sand and ran toward the town they were just outside of.
"Get in the cars and get him!" one of the bounty hunters shouted and they all piled in the car as some of them started firing their guns at him but he only dodged them by jumping and hopping through the sand.
"Hey!" one man shouted. "We have two flat tires!"
"Us too!" the other driver shouted and they all growled in frustration.
"Get him with the big guns!" another man shouted and the men manning the guns on the roofs of the cars aimed and tried to fire. They growled in frustration and one of the men growled, "What the hell is the matter?! Fire at him already!"
"We can't!" the men shouted in unison. "There's a bullet jamming the hammer!"
Meanwhile on Sentinel Three...
Gene sat back on the couch, feet up on the table, his hands cradling his head back and snoring loudly, making some strands of his red hair float up with every breath out. Jim glared at the older man's laziness then sighed as he turned back to his computer.
"Ya know, Gene, this would go a lot faster if you got your lazy butt up and helped me find a job for us," he said, not looking at him but hoping he'd said it loud enough to wake him up. He groaned and looked back at Gene who wasn't moving then was about to get up and kick him awake when the phone rang.
Jim picked up the phone and grinned, "Hi! Starwind and Hawking, here! We fix everything from engines to relationships! So what is it you need?"
"Oh, Jim! How are you?!" Fred Luo's voice came through the receiver and up on the screen.
"Oh, h-hi, Fred," Jim sputtered, nervously at the grinning man. "I'm fine, thanks."
"If he's calling about the money we owe him, tell him we're getting' there," Gene suddenly piped up and Jim whirled a glare toward him.
"Oh, now you're awake!" he spat and Gene smirked, not moving from his comfortable position.
"Jim, let me talk to Gene," Fred requested. "I've got some information on a job he might find interesting."
"Alright," Jim nodded then turned back to Gene to hold the phone to him and say, "He wants to talk to you about a job."
Gene groaned and rolled his eyes as he stood and snatched the phone from Jim's hand who stuck his tongue out at him.
"Hiya, Fred," Gene spoke into the phone and stared at the screen. "Jim tells me you have a job for us."
"Oh, yes," Fred nodded, smiling and rubbing at his ear. "It's a bounty hunt for a man on some deep space planet called Gunsmoke. His name is Vash the Stampede, but he also goes by the Humanoid Typhoon. If anyone can handle this one, you can. No one knows what he looks like, but they say he's blonde and has a huge gun."
"Well, I'm sure that narrows it down," Gene muttered sarcastically then asked, "How much does it pay?"
"Sixty billion double dollars in the planet's currency," Fred replied, lowering his hand from rubbing his ear.
"Double dollars?" Gene echoed with a frown. "How much in wong?"
"Oh, about forty billion," Fred shrugged casually.
"Forty billion?!" Gene and Jim echoed in a shout at the screen, eyes wide in disbelief.
"With that kind of money, we can keep repairs going to the Outlaw Star, have food for ourselves and do whatever else we want for years!" Jim thought out loud as he stared at Gene.
"We'll take it," Gene agreed with a cocky smirk. "What're the coordinates for this planet, Fred?"
"I'll send them over to you now, but…" Fred trailed off and Gene raised a brow in suspicion.
"Yeah, what is it, Fred?" he asked, hesitantly.
"Well, there's something else," Fred replied. "I'll pay you, but I have to have a cut of the forty billion."
"What for?" Gene wondered, not surprised that Fred was asking for something for himself. There was always a catch with Fred.
"It seems, I've racked up a debt myself," Fred chuckled nervously. "If I don't pay off some guys I lost a bet to, I'm dead meat!"
"Wait a minute, you've got money comin' out your ass! How could you be in debt?!" Gene snapped at the screen.
"Well, when I gamble, I use my private account," Fred replied, rubbing his ear again. "When it comes to business, dad let's me use his account. My private account is shot. Gene, you have to do this for me, please?! I gave you the information! You have to help me!"
Gene sighed in exhaustion, then smirked at the screen and replied, "Aw, come on, Fred. Have I ever turned you down for a favor?"
"Oh, thank you, Gene!" Fred cheered. "If you were here, I'd kiss you!"
"I'm glad I'm not there," Gene muttered.
"What was that?"
"Nothing! So, we'll leave right away," Gene gave his cocky smirk to the screen again. "Send the coordinates to Gilliam and we'll be underway as soon as we're ready."
"Right away!" Fred grinned with a nod. "Good luck!"
The screen went dark and Gene hung up the phone then patted Jim on the shoulder saying, "Come on. We gotta get the Outlaw Star stocked with food and ammunition."
"Gene, are you sure about this?" Jim asked, standing from his seat and following Gene into the kitchen. "I mean, you didn't even ask him how much he owes."
"If I know Fred, it's not that much," Gene replied, walking into the kitchen where Melfina was making lunch. "Besides, when we get the guy, we'll have enough money to pay off his debt, pay off our debt, redo the Outlaw Star five times over and still have enough left for a few months on the town. Don't worry about it."
"What are you talking about, Gene?" Melfina asked with a slight frown, drawing his and Jim's attention.
"We've got a big job, Mel," Gene smirked, walking toward her. "It's worth a lot more than even the biggest jobs here would pay."
"Really?" Melfina smiled. "How much is it?"
"Forty billion wong," Gene grinned greedily, and neither of them noticed Jim sneak back out of the room to his computer. "We'll be swimming in dough when we get back, even with our debts and repairs." He stepped toward Melfina, finally noticing that Jim was gone and murmured to her, sweetly. "We'll be leaving as soon as possible. Be ready to go, ok?"
"O-Ok," Melfina nodded with a blush. Gene smiled at her innocence and leaned toward her for a kiss---
"Gene Starwind!"
Gene cringed at Jim's loud call and sighed, "Now what?!"
He stomped back out of the kitchen to where Jim sat at his computer and asked, "What is it?!"
"This guy is absolutely crazy!" Jim reported, still looking at his computer and Gene frowned in confusion as he walked toward the boy. "He took out a whole town…by himself, and they say he can get out of a pinch without a scratch or firing a bullet! This is gonna be impossible!"
Jim groaned and held his head in his hands as Gene rolled his eyes.
"Jim, it's gonna be fine," Gene assured him irritably as he looked at the screen and read what was displayed. "Besides, I could use a challenge."
"Gene!" Jim snapped, lifting his head and scowling at the man. "He could kill us!"
"I don't see any death reports on this screen except one," Gene noticed. "He killed a mayor or somethin', and he's just suspected for it." Gene frowned as he read the screen then stood and stroked his chin in thought.
I wonder if it's all a farce or something, he thought to himself. There's no way a guy who's killed before would suddenly stop killing. Not to mention, getting out of tough situations without a single scratch?
"What are you thinkin', Gene?" Jim asked, turning in his chair.
"Nothing," gene lied. "Let's get ready to go."
"We gonna bring Aisha and Suzuka along?" Jim wondered as Gene headed to the front door.
The man stopped and thought for a moment. With a guy like this, they might need a little extra help and strength. Ever bounty hunter in the galaxy was sure to be after him if he was worth that much.
"Sure," Gene finally answered. "You and Mel go find Aisha. Suzuka will find us. Meet me at the Outlaw Star when you guys are ready."
Meanwhile, somewhere in space...
Ebony sighed as she sat in her captain's chair, twirling a piece of her black hair in boredom and staring out into the stairs with piercing gray eyes that looked just as bored. She sighed again and leaned back into the seat, her arms cradling her head.
"Welcome to another adventure of just sitting," she grumbled, then sat up with a groan and looked at her screens. Getting an idea she decided to run the latest bulletins to see if she could earn some extra cash. Maybe take a job that would suit her skills. She scanned through wanted posters of known criminals, but just by looking at some of these chumps, she could tell they weren't worth her time.
"Nope," she chanted in boredom. "Nope. Nope. Nope. No – Wait a sec."
She turned back to the last poster she had seen. There was no face, just a vague description of a man with blonde hair and a huge gun on a planet called Gunsmoke. His fetching price: Sixty billion double dollars. His name: Vash the Stampede.
"Well, well. What have we here?" she smirked deviously, her cat-like eyes glowing with anticipation. "A man worth sixty billion double dollars. Don't know how much that translates into my currency, but it's gotta be a handsome price. Dead or alive, huh? That makes things easy, doesn't it?"
She saved the poster in her computers network, then searched the maps for the planet's coordinates. Once found, she punched them into the autopilot and started the engines to point herself in the right direction. As soon as she was on course, she flipped a switch to put the ship on autopilot then left her seat to head to a separate room in the ship.
She walked through the halls and into a dark room, where she flipped the light on to reveal walls of guns and weapons on shelves all around her. She sauntered through, looking for the perfect weapons, gathering them as she went along and setting them on the table in the center of the room. She sat down and began cleaning them, one by one, grinning evilly as she did.
"Vash the Stampede," she murmured to herself as she wiped down the barrel of one of her guns. She quickly aimed the gun at the far wall and smirked, confidently. "You're mine."
A/N: *sinister music* lol. well, i didn't think i'd add one of my OCs in here, but i figured i'd throw her into the mix for a lil flavor, eh? well, wucha think? reviews?