So, yes. OC. OC drops in on another dimension from the "real world." This is that kind of dumbass fic. Well, partially anyway. Always wanted to write one, maybe one that gave a shot at not being too stupid. That being said...
WARNING: There will be NO: OC/established character romance, "fixing" anybody, or any meaning or purpose to any of this. What does that mean? The Powers That Be did not deposit said OC into this universe for any discernible reason, except for the fact that I think it's hilarious to torture my original characters. Which is shitty, but life is shitty and unfair so there you go. This is not a cute adventure story about having fun while preoccupied with trite high school crushes. It's a story about someone trying to quite literally survive in a hostile environment. There are drugs, alcohol, violence, death, and abuse, sexual and physical (although because America is creepily prudish about sex while totally okay with evisceration, we will go with implied for the former and explicit for the latter). Cheerful little bits of happiness are stolen where you can get them.
But also, and more to the point, this is about Vicious and his issues and how the hell he climbed that ladder, because why the fuck not and there's not nearly enough about him. Ps, no, the OC is not going to hook up with him or ever really be on good terms with the man. Hahahahaaaa...no. You're funny.
Vicious is an acrimonious bastard who eventually pulls off a coup, so that's what we're going to go with.
Also, there will be a fair minimum of interaction with the main characters of the show on the part of the OC. If ever. Because that just doesn't fit the character arc. Vicious will, and so will Lin and whoever actually existed in the main show, but then this fic is primarily concerned with the times and places that are off screen.
Disclaimer: I don't own shit.
This story starts out kind of wordy, but it gets into actual action pretty quick. Also, swearing. If you can't handle it, get out.
Pale pink fingers of light reached across the Martian plain, stretching towards the rim of the crater city. The view shimmered as the enormous weather-regulating machines churned out the planned atmospheric conditions of the day, spilling mist all the long way down to the planet's bare floor at the base of the crater wall. People here took it for granted that the weather report could be relied upon; Denali had laughed at her when she suggested that he should bring an umbrella when it was an overcast and moody gray, because when the weatherman said it was overcast but not going to rain, it would be overcast but not rain.
Outside the cities the sky was a burnished bronze, and to Elena that would always be beautiful and novel. She made a point of coming up here at least once a week to watch the sun rise, the city behind her forgotten if only for a few sweet minutes.
She shivered as a poof of cold air washed over her head, and she hugged herself tightly. Terraformed Mars hovered at around 60-ish Fahrenheit—no. Eventually she would get used to Celsius (and the metric system), which was what was used here. Mars hovered at 15 degrees Celsius, give or take a few, but in any case it was on that edge between chilly and cool. The burning end of her cigarette was a poor source of warmth, but aside from the long, gauzy red scarf wrapped several times around her throat it was all she had.
Once, she had found an excuse to be here during the early afternoon, and she sat at her perch watching the ships make their final approaches to the spaceport through forests of holographic billboards, sometimes skimming so low over the rim of the city that she was afraid they would hit it. The engine burn was deafening, louder even than jet engines, and the roar made the maintenance scaffolding tremble; she had to cover her ears and bend down low to keep from going deaf and getting blown over the side to her death. From the angle she viewed them, they first looked to be diving like Stuka pilots before careening in a parabola at the last second, ultimately destined to roost into their ivory and tarmac nests in the south end of town.
The sun was fully above the horizon line now, and she turned around to view the whole of Tharsis, still shaded in its cradle except for the topmost, shimmering spires of the eastern business district. The first settlements on Mars had used craters as convenient bowls to hold biospheres, and humanity hadn't quite spilled over their rims, yet, but maybe that was a good thing for the moment: technology hadn't advanced far enough yet for total terraformation and outside of the scattered poleis the land was still arid and largely inhospitable.
"There's no place like home," she whispered, and just in case it worked this time, she tapped her heels together. But she wasn't wearing silver or Technicolor scarlet; she wore the plain flats she 'arrived' wearing. Nothing happened.
A wave of disappointment rose up and engulfed her, and she put a hand on the railing to steady herself.
"I am Elena Reynolds," she murmured, a kind of mantra. "And this is not my universe. I won't forget that, because I have to stay conscious enough of it to try and find a way..." Her voice faltered, "Home." Somehow. She had no notion of how she had come here in the first place, though, and less idea where to start looking to find a way back, so her outlook was decidedly bleak.
From the very first night it was impossible to extract herself from the reality of her situation: she was here, and she still needed to eat, sleep, and do all the things that kept her physically alive and in good repair. It was not an adventure. There was no whimsical traipsing and exciting, dramatic conflicts forthcoming, no greater purpose. Here, she felt the wind and the rain, and smelled the smells. She got earaches, and sneezed when her nose tickled, and got chapped lips in dry wind.
Her existence here was exactly as miserable, invisible, and meaningless as it was on Earth—even more so, since on Earth she had had a place to be and people who really cared about her. The only things she recognized from it, she had come to realize, were of an almost purely superficial nature, specific to individuals whereas she stood alone in a multitude.
It was strange how easily she had become enmeshed in this world, and then how back-breakingly normal it was; almost like being abroad, but with more and different technology, customs, and people. She was beginning to recognize names and places, had her favorite foods and things, and it mattered less and less every day that she must have been sometime around whenever Spike and Vicious fell out and Spike left the Red Dragon syndicate.
If it had happened, was happening, would happen, it hadn't affected her. People talked about the syndicates, but not about two men and a woman and their personal problems, even ones as seminal as these seemed.
People talked about money.
It didn't mean roses and gunfire and cool poses. 'The syndicates' encompassed all kinds of people, with one overriding aim: survival.
To that end, she saw little difference between them and her. Here, as much as anywhere, the syndicates were a living social organization, a vast network of interconnected businesses and interests, feeding into a great, overhanging storm cloud, one which warred with other storm clouds. It was always there, behind a closed door. Its eyes were omnipresent and invisible, beneficent and tyrannical, and in its territory its power was omnipotent, a source of order and chaos.
It was so easy to forget that she was "supposed to know things"—maybe it was so easy because of the finite value of the things she knew? What was she going to do? Knock on the Red Dragons' HQ door, ask for Mao Yenrai, and tell him that she knew where he could find Spike? To hell with that—odds were, she would get herself killed even trying to figure out how to make that meeting happen. Mao might be convinced to talk to her, but why should she stick her foot in a hornet's nest if Vicious was there, too? What good would that do her? Would Mao feed her or feel any kind of gratitude? He didn't know her, and the man, as sweet as he appeared on the show and defunct as Vicious thought him, still commanded a good deal of hushed respect on the streets. Mao had earned his place in fire and blood. He didn't give a shit about her. He sure as hell wasn't likely to treat her nicely for her trouble; worst case scenario, he had her killed to protect Spike.
And, here was the other side of that coin: if she flubbed it—which she was all but guaranteed to do—and the wrong people found out, even if Mao would have thanked her gratefully and set her up for life and Vicious didn't do anything, Spike had still run from an organization that consisted of more than just the ones she knew of. It was an organization you did not leave except in a body bag. Somehow, at the end of the show, if Spike had lived, the assumption was that he would have taken command of the syndicate like some kind of Necromonger. But that was a singular situation.
Spike would be targeted if she dimed him out for personal gain, and she had no reason to draw that down on him.
This was not Tharsis, a city in Cowboy Bebop, where things happened through the lens of cinematography and those well established and on the inside.
This was Tharsis, the city on Mars where she lived in the closet of a crappy, falling down apart tenement building, peddling coke for an ambitious and clever high school drop out. Where she saw tiny shrines to the Buddha in the windows of many restaurant and businesses. Where there was a kebab shop around the corner run by a really sweet old couple who used to give her scraps at the end of the night before Denali took her in, and later invited her to their Eid feast. Where there was a city park with ducks in a pond, and a latent, damp coolness in the morning that was something like the western coast of California which was dangerous after dark, something she found out personally...but the buildings all looked old before their time, having been built up fast to hold refugees from a wrecked Earth, then emptied as the diaspora after the Gate Accident flooded to the Julian moons, and left without maintenance.
All of these things—this was Tharsis. And she was one infinitesimal, alien part of it. Up here, she stood above, but down there..
Elena shut her eyes briefly and leaned her head backwards, pulling back the last of her cigarette. It was only up here that she let herself think about these things much anymore, kept this lofty perspective; in the city basin, she was just one more human, and it didn't matter if she had been born in this universe or another. She still shit, ate, slept. Nothing marked her as remarkable, and she was so commonplace that sometimes she wondered if she only tried hard enough, pulled herself out of anonymity, then she could find somebody who might be able to help her.
Meanwhile, Denali seemed to like her; she had started to make deliveries for him in the nicer parts of the cities to places he couldn't go easily because he looked like the two-bit bottom-feeding street-level gangbanger he was. Even if he wasn't officially on the inside yet of whichever syndicate it was he was hanging around (it was in the works), he still looked like a punk troublemaker and he couldn't talk pretty. That's what he had her for. Since she had started working for him, his distribution north of the canal had quintupled, and so had profits.
And people said knowing the difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork never did anybody any good.
Elena opened her eyes and rolled over so that she faced the horizon again, but looked down. From this high place the fog was almost opaque as it hit the ground. She dropped the cigarette, and watched the ember fall and disappear into obscurity, into a great vastness in which it was nothing.
She snorted. Poetic.
"You can't do that."
Elena lifted her head and turned to the left, towards Donnie. He wore a fluorescent yellow safety vest over his blue coveralls. She wore a safety vest too, over her regular clothes.
"You're not supposed to trash the base."
Elena shrugged and straightened up. "Same time next week?"
He nodded. "Drop the vest off at the front office, okay?"
"Did they get those little muffins today? I like the blueberry ones."
"You are such a scavenger."
"I have a lot of ground to cover and I need the calories," she replied. "Either way, Maria's guaranteed to have coffee."
"Right. See you next week."
Elena didn't say goodbye as she climbed down the latter and descended from the catwalk. She never really knew how to end a conversation, and would linger awkwardly trying to find the right moment to leave. Donnie didn't seem to mind her abrupt exits and she didn't care what he thought about her as long as their business relationship worked out, which of course was fruitful.
She stopped by the office to drop off the vest and chatted with the office girls long enough to make off with coffee and three cinnamon walnut mini muffins wrapped in a napkin. From there she made her way back to the skytrain station. She ate her muffins while waiting twenty minutes until the train arrived. It carried day workers who got off at the perimeter maintenance station and rank-and-file white collar salarymen who worked uptown, where she was headed.
Elena tucked herself neatly into a small space between a nervous looking man with no chin and another, very tall man who was muttering frantically (into an earpiece?) in Russian. The couple sitting down in the seats were chatting amiably in something that didn't sound Vietnamese and didn't sound Turkish, so who knew what that was.
The skytrain jolted unexpectedly. They all lurched, caught off guard, and the tall Russian stumbled into her. He caught himself and turned around, looking down into her face.
"Izvinite."
"Gesundheit," Elena quipped.
He only stared at her. "It means excuse me." He had a glass-cut RP British accent. She was taken aback to hear it.
"Uh...sorry," she managed, and looked at her feet in embarrassment.
By now the sky even down here was noticeably lighter. Inside the crater the sky was blue in the day, like it was on Earth. After a while you forgot about the walls rising all around on a conscious level, but they were ever present in the background. It was only on the rim that she remembered where she was, who she was, and what she was: an outsider. It was a perspective she could not afford to forget, and so she returned to it often.
"There's no place like home," she whispered, so quietly that it wasn't much more than a breath, her mouth moving around the words. She tapped her heels. And nothing happened.
I wish it were that easy.
She rode the train to Walleye Station and all of them got off, leaving just a few behind as they streamed out onto the platform. The uptown district was made up of glass-walled skyscrapers and city streets that seemed permanently choked with traffic, even in the wee hours of the morning. Since everyone who was anyone had a car, they made sure they drove it to work. The sidewalks were moving tides of people, and Elena kept her hands in her pockets, hands around the things she didn't want to lose. The money and the drugs were safely stashed inside inner pockets that couldn't be picked, but anything in an outer pocket that wasn't nailed down had the tendency to disappear.
Elena was looking up at a third-floor restaurant that had just opened, with its advertisements flashing on the windows, when her knee crashed into something that let out a startled, shrill grunt. She stumbled, but caught herself before she fell. Something small and shadowlike darted away into a nearby alley.
Little asshole, she thought uncharitably, and kept moving. No one else had even glanced at the urchin, though that probably just meant someone hadn't noticed their wallet was missing, yet. She checked...yep, everything of hers was still there.
She kept walking until she made it to her destination.
The Chrysler Building—no relation to the New York City landmark, except in the name, because it didn't look anything like New York's Chrysler Building—was one of the larger skyscrapers in Walleye, a big steel brute that added a fourth more height to itself with the inclusion of an enormous antenna fixed to the top. It was one of the skyscrapers she had looked at from the rim, though that early in the day she had still seen the flashing red light at the top that warned air and spacecraft that it was there.
She walked up to it and through the doors, into a climate-controlled, marble-floored lobby with real potted plants next to chintz couches. Cindy looked up and smiled at her from behind the reception desk.
"You're back!" she exclaimed cheerfully. "Go right on up. He's expecting you."
Elena breezed past her towards the elevators, joining a throng of sleepy-eyed worker bees gravitating to their places in this great big honeycomb. Slowly, she became aware of someone hissing her name above everyone's head. She looked up and around, and saw a hand waving over the throng.
"Julie!" Elena managed to slide through the press and sidled up to a round woman in a gray business casual pantsuit. It had happened almost by accident; one moment Elena was only as friendly to her as she was to anyone here, and the next Julie was inviting her out for drinks with girlfriends. Elena always declined, but wasn't sure how to deescalate the situation harmlessly. "Are those donuts?"
"It's Friday," Julie said by way of explanation. "I haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?"
Most people here were as polite to her as they were to any other coworker, though many of them didn't pay her enough mind to wonder what she did. She waltzed in and waltzed out looking like she had a purpose, and most people accepted that at face value.
"I'm alright. How are you? How was Christine's recital?"
And Julie was off. It was easy to sidetrack the woman by showing any interest in her children. Elena was decidedly not interested in kids as a rule, but she nodded and smiled as if she were. As they finally filed onto an elevator and the doors shut, Elena tried to vainly ignore the foot that was still firmly planted on a moral compass. It was a dangerous thing, currying any kind of friendly relations with someone up here whom she was not selling to.
"But, you know, she's only eleven and she's such a whiz on the oboe! Her tutor says that she might be ready for circular breathing."
"I do not know what that is," Elena admitted, rousing herself to listen in earnest.
"It's when you breathe in through the nose while still playing a note on the instrument."
"Sounds hard."
"Oh, it is!" Julie gushed. "But she'll do wonderfully."
"Are you trying to get her into music school?"
"Oh, no, we want her to go to medical school. She's going to be a neuroprosthetician."
Elena wondered what little Christine thought of her parent's grand plans, or if she had been taught to have an opinion that wasn't fed to her. Then she thought of the forgotten, ragged little thief she had almost tripped over. I wonder if they even know what an oboe is.
"So why make her learn the oboe and not the periodic table?"
"Medical school requires a well-rounded resume," Julie said as if Elena should have known that. "Especially if she wants to get into John Collins University."
The name meant nothing to Elena, but she figured it must have been a pretty big deal to go there, wherever it was.
Julie got off on the twenty-seventh floor, while Elena continued all the way to the seventy-fifth. She hated heights and was legitimately fearful every time she made this delivery; the gentle sway of the structure in high winds was enough to make her sick, and as she stepped off the elevator, she felt the building roll under her feet, and she flinched, heart in her throat.
The 75th floor was the headquarters of a shipping conglomerate that had its fingers in everything, including a slew of lucrative government contracts. The office was decked out in shades of ivory trimmed in silver, and everywhere it exuded cool reserve. The lady seated behind the desk looked up. Elena did not recognize her.
"Good morning, how many I help you?" she asked.
"Hello; I have an appointment with Lem Magnusson."
"And you are...?"
"Elena Reynolds," she replied steadily, offering a reserved smile. This arrangement depended on Elena being polite but not pushy. "It's supposed to be at zero-nine today?"
"Elena Reynolds...here you are," the receptionist said as she ran her finger down a log book, instantly becoming a little brighter. "Please have a seat. Mr. Magnusson will be with you shortly; he's in the middle of a conference call."
Elena thanked her and sat down on a plush ivory leather sedan chair, and began to study a catalog that offered things that were too expensive to list the price. After a couple of minutes the receptionist stood up and offered her a drink while she waited. She brought Elena a full sized bottle of grapefruit flavored Perrier.
Elena stared at the full page ad that listed a vacation island on Ganymede, and briefly wondered how much it cost. Dumb question. If you have to ask, you can't afford it. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes or scoff; here, she dealt with the sort of people who thought of money in terms she didn't understand. The first rule was, don't mention money because it's rude to talk of baser things. Of course there would be a catalog with vacation islands on other planets listed without a price. Of course it would advertise children's playhouses that looked as big as barns and were built to look like a full-sized real leather teepee, a Chinese courtyard house, a Russian dacha.
Of fucking course the guy who ran this place would have his drug dealer come to him to make the delivery in business casual attire and heels. Not that she was complaining, as it turned out she really liked grapefruit flavored Perrier. It helped with her nausea. Hurk.
Close to ten minutes passed before the receptionist looked up and told her that Mr. Magnusson would see her now, and Elena stood up and followed her to the office in the back corner that overlooked most of Tharsis. It was one of the better views in the city, but Elena wondered if Magnusson had ever seen the sun rise while clinging to a maintenance scaffold, freezing his ass off.
"There you are," Magnusson said, not rising from his desk as the receptionist let her in. "Thank you, Grace, that will be all for now." The receptionist shut the door as Magnusson pushed a button on his desk that shut the blinds of the glass walls of his office, cutting them off from the view of his employees. "I was almost sure you wouldn't be here today."
"Why not? I got here on time," she said. "You were in a conference call."
Magnusson waved his hand dismissively. "So, do you have it?"
"Of course I have it," she replied drolly. "Have you got the money?" He nodded, and set out three neat stacks of crisp wulongs. He patted them affectionately and pushed them across the mahogany at her (ma-hogany). The only way she could have been more amused was if it were cocobolo (cocobolo). Elena approached, pulling out the half a pound of white crystal shards jacketed in cling wrap and plastic baggies, and pushed it across the desk at him. "Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Magnusson."
"My daughter is having a birthday party this weekend and her mother wants me to be there," he remarked, looking a bit ill. "The theme is Y2K. I'll be making good use of this."
This unexpected tidbit rendered Elena momentarily speechless. Aside from the fact he had just admitted to an intent to use drugs at a child's birthday party, "Y...Y2K?"
"Yes...almost a hundred years ago, people thought the world was going to end on January 1st, 2000." He said it with considerable smug superiority.
"Uh," Elena stammered. "No, that's not it. They thought all the computers were going to shut off and we were going to get stuck in the Dark Ages again." It was beyond her how Y2K was a good theme for a child's birthday party. She remembered Y2K, she had been twelve or thirteen at the time. "Anyway, 2038 was the real year everything was supposed to go to to hell. I guess it...didn't happen."
Magnusson seemed as shocked as she was, and he studied her as if they had not just traded four hundred grand's worth of highly illegal substance for five hundred grand—there was a delivery fee, after all, and to him it was small change. She asked for it on a lark and he had shrugged and slapped it on there. Elena had barely managed to scrape her jaw off the floor.
"2038?" he managed at last.
"Yes, um...it was similar to the Y2K problem, but where the problem was the inability to encode 20 vs. 19...the 2038 problem is...er, was, the inability of the signed 32 bit integer systems to process anything later than however many seconds it'd been since January 1st, 1970."
"What the hell is someone like you doing selling drugs?" Magnusson said, frowning hard. "The one before, the one I used to deal with when I had to actually go down there to get the goods—that idiotic little turd, I'd believe he couldn't do anything else, but not you..."
"It's...really not..."
"Why don't you go to school and get a real job? You're smart enough for it."
"But then who will supply half the decision makers of Walleye, and who is going to pay me better for so little effort?" she countered wearily, a fixed smile twisting her mouth. The skyscraper swayed again and Elena almost hit the deck. "I-I have to leave. Other deliveries to make. Please call me when you run out again."
"Have you ever done administrative work before?" Magnusson asked. "I could use a good personal assistant."
"And spend most of my time up here?" Elena blew a raspberry. "You'd be paying for therapy on top of whatever salary I'd be getting."
"You get used to it," Magnusson said with a chuckle. "One hundred and fifty thousand per month starting pay, plus vacations. And a holiday bonus. Think about it."
Elena felt very ill, but she tried her best to smile. Her head was buzzing. Is this really happening?
"I will," she said, in a nearly toneless voice that sounded weak even in her own ears. "Think about it."
"Have you ever been off world, before?"
"I was born on Earth."
Magnusson was transparently surprised. "Born on Earth? Really?"
"Haven't seen my family in a while," she said, capitalizing on her very real distress. The trick to lying was to tell as much truth as you could and be vague with everything else. "I...have nothing to go back to. I don't like talking about it..."
"Somebody took the time to educate you," he said, almost gently. "It would be a shame to let that go to waste. That little skidmark you work for—Denny, whatever his name is—"
"Denali."
"Him. You're wasted on him. Give it some thought, I look forward to hearing from you."
Oh, I'm sorry, does this seem cheerful so far to you? I'm screaming.
Warning for next chapter: Vicious shows up and wrecks shit. Aside from the complete moral fuckery, murder, gore, and compulsory drug use. Vicious is not someone you want randomly appearing in your life. It doesn't end well.
Vicious, in my estimation, is not A., insane, B., a rapist, C., going to use the grip of his sword to perform B. I've read that. That got weird. I'd imagine vag juice is hard to get out of snake skin. Instead he's rational, but subject to the same flaws as Spike, because he is Spike's darker image: selfish and completely unable to let go of something, and because of this Greek tragedy AF. Spike, for all he's cool, could be extremely prideful (yo, Andy), and self-centered (it's cool to watch him not give a fuck, but have you ever dealt with people like that? They're exhausting). Where the two differ is in the actual execution of those presentiments. Vicious is a difficult character to write; he's this alarming mix of bitter vindictiveness and calculation, but here's the thing: he likely could never have gained enough of a following to take over a syndicate if he didn't at least have the charisma or sneakiness to arrange or talk his way into support.
Elena, if you're curious (I bet you're not), was originally conceived of as a bit villain character in a DBZ fic, but was more a villain of circumstance with her own agenda. Since that kind of DBZ fic has been done oftener and better than I could ever manage and I liked her character in general, I hijacked her for use as an MC in an original story that I'm writing, hopefully to get published one day. This is a somewhat altered form of her...Because it would be an AU to put her in the "real world" ("our world") anyway. And now she's here.
Why is there a weird OC? Well, she's kind of there for context. Plus I really just can't resist torturing her for funsies.
Poleis, btw, is plural for polis.