Limbo

"No, I am not Kerrigan. And if I had my own game, you'd know that."

"Hey, speak for yourself lady, you still got to appear in two of them. Three if you're in Legacy of the Void."

"Yeah, well, that's a big 'if.' And like I said, I was meant to get my own game."

"Bite me."

Nova sighed. The Nuke Cola was running out, and it wasn't doing anything to remove the tedium of being stationed on the arse-end of the galaxy, a.k.a. Iron Star. And talking to a robot, while interesting at first, lost its charm when she remembered she couldn't read the droid's thoughts.

"I mean, my last debut was over a decade ago. You got to have fun in less than half that time."

"Only on some no-name Umojan planet."

"Actually I believe the name was XT39323."

"Course you'd know that name."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

An empty Nuke Cola can hit the ground of Iron Star. Nova took solace in knowing that the aluminium would be recycled by the droids inhabiting it. Building a better society after a long war, making do with what they had…it was kind of like the Dominion really. Only the Dominion was light years away, and she was stationed here. Valerian Mengsk might have been kind enough to not have her executed, but that courtesy only extended so far, yet far enough to send her hundreds of light years into the middle of nowhere.

"So," the droid said. "What's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"Shooting zerg."

"Simple. You shoot them before they kill you."

"Oh."

The droid was called Glitch. He was three feet tall, blue eyed, restless, bloodthirsty, and obnoxious. Nova liked him.

"I mean, a war against two alien races sounds pretty neat," he said, fiddling with a gun that said Who's your Daddy? on the tip of its barrel (do robots even have daddies? Nova wondered). "Droids against droids…well, there aren't any Mils left. And any thoughts of a Morbot invasion went down the crapper."

"You crap?"

"We, er…" Glitch's eyes dimmed. "Never mind."

"Come on, tell me."

"Only if you explain how the hell your species is able to reproduce. I hear there's some kind of white oil involved."

Nova reached for another Nuke Cola. "I'll pass."

"Eh, see?" Glitch said. "Not so different."

"I never said we were."

"True, but let's reaffirm that anyway," he said, reaching for a can of radiator coolant (or what looked like coolant, Nova couldn't be sure). "Life sucks, right?"

"Right."

"And we'd both love to be back in action, right?"

Nova hesitated for a moment. "Right."

"Right," Glitch said, clinking the can of…whatever it was against hers. "Here's to battles we'll never fight."

Nova sipped her own cola before looking over the settlement called Droid Town, getting a vantage point from the cliff they were sitting on. A misnomer if she'd ever heard one – not the "droid" part (it was crawling with them), but rather, the "town" aspect. Because she'd seen towns before in the Fringe Worlds. This was nowhere near small enough to be a town. With the defeat of the Milbots, Glitch had supposedly allowed that to happen.

And yet here he was, an outsider to it. Living apart from the society he'd allowed to exist in the first place. Nova knew the feeling. He'd gone on about a Doctor Exavolt, how he was out in the galaxy somewhere, still waiting to be brought to justice. Having watched Tosh slink off with Raynor's Raiders after the New Folsom debacle, it was another feeling Nova could sympathize with.

"Y'know, it makes me wonder," she heard Glitch say, interrupting her thoughts. "It's a big galaxy, right? There can't be any shortage of stuff to shoot."

"Well, under the premise that you're talking about stuff that needs to be shot…yeah. The zerg are like that."

"Right," Glitch said, his eyes shining. "So, I figure, the Morbots aren't turning up. Exavolt got his nuts in a screw and probably through in the wrench. So, if you need any help…just saying…"

"You offering to serve the Dominion?"

"Hey," Glitch said, putting his gun aside to draw out a rocket launcher that looked loaded, heavy, and even more loaded. "Gotta shoot something, right?"

"Well, my missions…if I got to go on missions…tend to be based around shooting as little as possible. Stealth and all that."

"Hey, I can do that," Glitch protested. He took a sip of his coolant before tossing the can aside towards. "Had to pretend to be a reprogrammed drone once."

I know the feeling.

"So yeah. Um…if you need help…"

"What I need," Nova said, "is to do something. Get off this rock."

"So then," Glitch said, putting the rocket launcher aside and drawing out another can. "That's something we've got in common."

He held the can out. And after a moment's hesitation, Nova tapped it with hers.

"Yeah," she said. "Suppose we do."

A/N

So, it turns out that Blizzard renewed the Metal Arms IP recently - turns out they own it as per their purchase of Swingin' Ape Studios. Purchasing a company to make StarCraft: Ghost (never released), and ensuring that Metal Arms 2 is never released. I doubt the renewal is anything but just that (as opposed to preparing a new game or re-release), but it gave me the idea to jot this down.