Xanxus' Adventures in Parenthood Piracy by InsaneScriptist
Beta'd by the remarkable Umei no Mai
Summary: Xanxus could only blame the damn scientists for stranding him in an alternate dimension. However Xanxus could only blame himself for allowing that woman to foist her child onto him. Drabble fic.
Unhealthy
Xanxus was familiar with feeling like shit. Most of the time it happened during or after a strenuous mission turned clusterfuck, occasionally injuries but the other times was during poison resistance training. There really were too many poisons out there to truly build a genuine resistance to all of them, but that didn't mean that the more common ones couldn't be dealt with. This wasn't a required Varia standard but most members did it to a degree on a regular basis, as dying of something preventable was seen as a fucking disgrace.
Him feeling like utter crap at the moment proved to him that those inoculations were worth it. If a weakened or dead strain could knock him on his ass like this within the day, then the real thing could have been deadly to him. Vaccines saved lives. End of story. Totally worth the occasional sick-day compared to sick-week or sick-month or dying or being mentally crippled by a high fever, which was worse than being dead in his opinion. Shit like that happened. Modern medicine was an under appreciated miracle.
Since he was feeling out of sorts in a way that he knew was only going to get worse, he was going to hole up in his room for the next two days except for the stakeouts and if the shooting competition happened.
Even delirious, Xanxus knew he had excellent aim.
Notice
The old gunsmith handed Xanxus the flyer with the time, date and location of the competition. Xanxus would have normally stayed to talk guns and maybe get another go in the forge to make himself some better tools but he was ill and disguising it with sleepiness. The gunsmith went by the name of Barret Clyde and used the western naming convention -first name then surname- despite everybody else he'd met using the Japanese traditional 'last name first' system.
This dimension was making less sense to him and he'd figure it out properly once he wasn't sick anymore. He stopped by the hotel dining room for some tea and a light breakfast with plenty of citrus, as they offered meal discounts for overnight customers. His stay was already paid for up until a week after the execution, so he didn't have to worry about that. The only reason he went to the gunsmith first was because it was too damn early for them to have set up their breakfast options and to be a pest to the damn gunsmith for not telling him that information earlier.
He then found another bookstore and found a few books on pregnancy. Irritatingly the overweight and married clerk assumed that he had a lady-love that was expecting and expressed sympathy and unwanted advice about cravings, but Xanxus didn't have the energy to fend him off. So Xanxus, nodded, hid exactly how horrible he was feeling and escaped the bookstore as quickly as possible. The clerk had probably gotten the wrong idea about why he left but he didn't care. The books were dropped into his hotel room, via his window. The clerk didn't know his real face after all because sick or not, disguises were easy.
He then found the okama tailor, and was fussed over in a way that reminded him of Lussuria in ways that didn't make him feel homicidal which was a warning that he was sicker than he thought. First was fussing over his ill health -he said he had caught something foreign but would be better in a day or so- and then over the larger, more noticeable scars from the years on ice that were revealed by his having to undress and being too feverish to concentrate on hiding them all. Still sympathy points dropped his bill for the clothing some, which was a good thing, as his finances were getting low.
He brought his clothing back up to his room that he entered through the room and slept.
Fever
Xanxus woke up in the darkness that had just recently settled onto Lougetown, covered in sweat and feeling better. He realized that he had developed a fever at some point and it had just broken. Well, fuck.
Feeling icky, achy and hungry he decided to solve the first two under hot water. Hot showers were wonderful.
Lost
Xanxus had been keeping track of the news from the papers whenever possible. That was how he found out that he had lost two days of surveillance due to illness. How odd. Normally those with Sun and Sky Flames didn't get sick enough to lose days like that. That was a beneficial side effect of their flame attribute.
Xanxus then thought about it and realized that the Marines probably went for the more lethal diseases in their first round of vaccines. Colds were annoying but they weren't fatal. If you were going to have a bunch of recruits and sailors together then those should be done first. Doing the less lethal diseases first just meant that an outbreak of a lethal one before the course of vaccines were finished would cause all the time, money and effort spent in training said Marine troops to go to waste.
Vaccines could be really damn expensive to make depending on what it was for. Bacteria vaccines were often the cheapest but vaccines for viruses were expensive, especially if it was for those that were in theory locked up in little government labs behind layers and layers of security. Xanxus at least knew that the samples that the Varia's vaccines were made from were sealed up tight, because they were under the same protocol that the Varia's poison synthesis labs were but even stricter.
The protocols for the poison synthesis labs were thought of as 'disturbingly and thoroughly violating' for anyone entering and exiting the labs so there were people who lived in there and rarely came out because of those same protocols. Lapsing in them earned enough punishment that any who earned it found themselves either dead if they were smuggling products or psychologically incapable of not following through with the search protocol, no matter how boring the guard duty or disgusting the search both in and out was. It also applied to everyone, so not even the Boss of the Varia was exempt, which is how he liked it, or else the minions wouldn't have been conditioned to follow through on all the protocols.
As a bonus, the Varia had the most attentive watch-guards who never shrugged off their duty. They also had a body cavity search so thorough that it could be more intimate than sex which considering that the building was full of assassins who often saw sex as another tool was not surprising.
Still, shit and fuck his luck. That was a stupid mistake on his part, but he had survived. The next round of shots wouldn't be so bad, in theory.
At least he had a day before the shooting competition to recover and Sun Flames could work fucking miracles when used right.
Blast
While the competition was home to a number of crack shots, most of them did it for sport and it showed as guns were just getting reliable enough to gain popularity. Unlike Xanxus' sharp quick and efficient reloads, a number of competitors were much slower about it, dropping ammo or spilling powder when they tried to match his reload speed.
Xanxus hated how slow powder and shot was compared to bullets in reload time, how damaging to the gun this method was and really wished to 'invent' bullets as he knew them to avoid the hassle. Still, it wasn't that hard to build a decent speed at it so long as you minded how hot the barrel got. If it gained too much heat, the powder could blow up in your face or blast apart the metal. Iride might have been shit compared to his X-guns but it actually had a heat-sink in it so rapid reloads wouldn't cause explosions.
Clearly someone let in all the amateurs, and not just the dedicated ones either in this competition. Xanxus' accuracy was also superb, although that was a combination of both a superior weapon and lots of practice, albeit with different weapons but he had had plenty of time to adjust to Iride the day he made it.
Xanxus won the competition by a clear margin. The lanky man in a cowboy hat that came in second was far away in terms of score.
Somehow Barret managed to get him away from the crush of well-wishers after Xanxus got his cash award. Making Iride, then winning a contest with it less than a week later had apparently won him the reputation as a genius gunsmith. Barret had apparently been running his mouth.
He could work with that. Needed to, if he was ever going to make ammo for his X-guns since this dimension still used round shot and powder. That reminded Xanxus to check and see if it was lead he was shooting too; heavy metal poisoning was not a good way to go.
There was a rifle competition in three days after all. That was plenty of time to make one, practice with it and break into a highly fortified base for information about when and where the Pirate King was kept.
Sorry, there will be OCs, they will be moderately important/needed. Xanxus is making plans and so am I. This is a true cross-over after all. Mwahahaha!
