Full Life Consequences [REDUX]
Author's Note: This is a project that may or may not be on-going, with the goal of taking works of potentially ground-breaking fiction that were sadly lost in translation and giving them the respect and admiration they deserve. SquirrelKing has genuinely inspired me, and I want to return the favor by attempting to bring to life one of his grandest ideas.
Without further Ado, we begin.
John Freeman, fabled brother and close friend of the eponymous Gordon, reclined in his swiveling chair, surrounded by cheap walls covered in cheaper fabric. With a sip of his coffee, he made a routine check of his daily schedules, punching in some superfluous data, checking his e-mail as he was wont to do on any given day, should he get bored or curiosity get the best of him. While his brother had been called to action against the Combine, John tried to distance himself from the business.
Tried, that is, until today. Clicking on an e-mail he presumed of no consequence from his brother, though mostly intrigued by the lack of a header, he nearly spit his coffee onto the cheap monitor he was gazing at half-interestedly. In the message Gordon was asking John for his help. The typing was mostly incoherent, seemingly in a hurry, but John managed to grab the gist of it and knew that he had to move.
Without a second thought, no hesitations whatsoever, he pressed in the power button of his tower to hard-shut down the PC and turned away, headed determinedly toward the elevator platform that would bring him to the roof of his building. It was an office in name only, ever since the Combine had come and generally laid waste to the surrounding area, imposing their own kind of 'order' that John preferred to call 'forced enslavement'. The office was a last sort of refuge for his cluster of companions, unknown to the vicious regime.
Shaking the loose assembly of lingering thoughts and mixed feelings from his mind as the platform reached the roof of the reasonably tall building, he steeled his nerves for the coming tasks ahead him. Dropping to the floor his lab coat, walking over to a pile of civilian clothes he kept just for this sort of occurrence, he changed silently. Turning to the sleek assembly of metal he called his motorcycle, not able to help containing the slight grin that squirmed its way onto his features whenever he got the chance to rev the engine. "It's time," John Freeman said, putting on his riding helmet and widening his grin, "for me to live up to my family name and face full life consequences."