Drunkard, Hobo, Liar: Gwin's Tale, part 1, or, Second Breakfast

a/n: Gwin was also in Sylvalum four weeks ago. If Case can't bring herself to describe it all, maybe Gwin will.

No swears, I think, and not enough editing. Gratuitous Lin and Tatsu hijinks.

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft, except Case and Neesae and Case's rookies.


Breakfast had been hours ago and Gwin was starting to wonder if maybe he could grab a snack. Today was a brainless, harmless mission, and it was clear that it would take a while. The goal: collecting a bucketload of fuzzy beaporge. The job involved smearing a little grease on their sole skell (Irina's Verus, looking otherwise spotless), setting a trap, and crouching quietly a few meters away. If they kept very still, eventually one of the little raccoon-like critters came out from whatever den they hid in and would start to clean the skell. The cage would snap, Lin would squeal at how cute it was, they'd give it a jab of tranquilizer to keep it quiet until they got back to NLA, rinse, repeat. Most of the job involved patient waiting. He figured he could chew quietly enough not to spook them.

Then an earsplitting shriek hit the radios, piped directly into their helmets or other headgear. It was an incomprehensible babble of screaming distress call, clinical location marker, and strained pleading. It lasted maybe 15 seconds. Silence followed.

Irina ripped her earpiece away from her head and almost flung it at Lin. "ARGH! What the hell was that?!"

"They're done now," said Neesae. She stood up and shook her long legs.

"Awww, you're going to spook them," whined Lin.

"Like Irina didn't already?" Neesae sighed and scanned the spore desert plains beneath them.

Irina picked up her earpiece and dusted it off. "Sorry about losing my cool, Lin. The volume on this thing is wonky." She moved and stood shoulder to shoulder to Neesae. "Spot anything?"

"Nope."

Gwin had gotten up more slowly, because he'd hoped for something more, something less panicked. But the silence had continued, and he finally said in a rush, "I think that was Case. I think we better go check on her."

Irina continued to scan the overlook. "Great. I suppose we better."

"She sounded really worried," Gwin said unnecessarily.

"And you sound a little too eager to go show off your new toy." Irina shrugged and walked toward her skell. "You all stay on foot, because if it's really as bad as she seems to think it is, I don't want to waste time unloading you guys. But I bet it's nothing bigger than a Oc-serv."

"Lotta Xe-dom in that area," Neesae muttered darkly, grabbing her weapons. She started running after Irina's skell as it skimmed down the slope.

Gwin was happy to grab his gear and follow, although he wasn't sure they were up to fighting the towering patrol robots of Sylvalum. Then again, maybe they were. He patted his new rifle, the toy that Irina had dismissed a breath ago, as he snapped it on his back. The full truth was that he kinda did want to put that thing to proper use. It had been a week of quiet missions, and he'd dumped a lot of care and credits into his new gear. The magazine might be smaller than he'd like, but he'd boosted the reload speed until it could pump out as much damage as Lin's Gatling, and its distance rivaled even a sniper rifle. Beaporge trapping had been almost an insult to its possibilities, and he had looked with envy when a Harrier team had flown by them this morning, off to beat up the hulking gorilla-like vigent further up the hill.

He tried not to look eager while he lagged behind Neesae and her ridiculously long strides. She was gonna make it to the bottom before he was halfway. He was used coming in third when she was on the team. At least he would beat Lin and Tatsu.

"Coming though!"

"Friend look out!"

A spray of spores blinded him as Lin shield-surfed down the hill. He managed to see Tatsu clinging to her waist and streaming behind her. Then his foot hit a rock and he rolled the rest of the way down.

Lucky for him, his ears were too full of spores to hear Irina's staticky snort. Neesae hauled him to his feet and thumped him to get most of the dust off him. He stepped to the side to give his nose a good farmer's blow to clear it.

"Ew!" giggled Lin. Tatsu watched in admiration.

"They're back on the skell comms," said Irina sharply over their team link. "Saying there's a wave of enemy, ground types, over a hundred. So, not just an Oc-serv, my bad. Time to go."

They raced toward the path that would lead directly north, and once they'd rounded the overhang they all could see exactly what the distress call had been about. Although he couldn't distinguish the individual enemy, there was a grey tide that didn't belong there. Irina had patched the continued uncertain reports from Case's team into everyone's headsets. It wasn't Case's voice anymore.

"He sounds young," panted Neesae.

"So let's go help that rookie and the Head... and Case," Irina said cooly.

As he pounded after Irina's skell, Gwin tried to digest the bits of information they were hearing. Hundreds of enemies, a mix of human-sized Puge and skell-sized Pugilith. A much smaller number of flying enemies. It sounded like a smaller version of the mechanical mass that had attacked New Los Angeles months ago. Regular bursts of gunfire provided a backdrop to the accounting on the radio.

He heard Lin make a small, distressed noise, but Irina cut in immediately. She sounded confident and a little angry. "They just don't take no for an answer, do they? Lin, you know we've got this. We should be in range in a second."

They arrived just before the other team was completely cut off. Case and two other BLADEs were standing at the pillar of light marking the Frontier Nav site, clustered around a skell that was firing blast after blast into the enemy. They were all fighting hard, the ground team focusing on sweeping the left and right to keep the enemy from passing them while the skell hollowed out the center.

"Lin, you go stand to the left, by the longsword user. Try to open up the center more. Gwin, god help me, stand by Case and do what she tells you. Neesae, we'll ..." She stopped her orders as first one, then a second Xe-dom rose from behind the dunes. The seeming heaps of scrap that had been resting in the sand lifted and reassembled to become the relentless long-armed, gravity-bombing, skell-shredding monsters that they were.

"Neesae. The thing."

Once again, Neesae shot past Gwin, leaping directly on and up the side of Irina's skell, to reach the shoulder of the mech and stand there, one hand holding tightly to the top of the pilot's capsule. Gwin saw her fumble with something in her other hand. Not a weapon, something smaller that she slammed into her thigh. Gwin recognized it as a system stim-pack and winced. Those tensifiers burned like fire, through your whole system. Just as bad, maybe worse, they cost plenty, almost as much as skell salvage tickets. Neesae wasn't going to hold back in this fight.

Irina's skell rose from the ground and headed directly at the closest Xe-dom, Neesae still riding high above them all. She was now holding her longsword straight in front of her. Already, her movements had quickened to a blur. When they came in range of their enemy, Gwin caught Neesae's greeting for their target, almost a taunt shouted between vicious slashes. "Blossom dance, you hunk of junk."


a/n: Neesae's greeting was edited for content. Tatsu has so played BotW and told Lin all about Heropon of Hyrule.

Next up: Gwin's Tale, Part 2. Still haven't said why he lost it, but we're getting close. Shoot me now, but I have a subtitle.