Inktober18 25 Prickly
a/n: Remember 23/Muddy? Where Gwin fought off one terebra on a mission gone bad? His other remaining teammate Rosalee dealt with the rest.
Swears. Plenty of them. I couldn't think of a way to redact it. At least it is short.
All the good things belong to Monolithsoft. If they make someone like Rosalee, they better give her solid armor, because she's not standing for bunny suit nonsense, I'll tell you that right now.
Everbody agreed that working with Irina Akulov was no bed of roses. The woman was wrapped so tightly, you knew you had to be ready to duck when she snapped. Not a question of if, it was always a matter of when. Rosalee didn't mind. For one thing, it kept her on her toes. Also, it made her look a little less prickly in comparison, because Rosalee was always three seconds away from rage mode herself. But the thing she liked the best was that no one questioned whether you'd earned your credits when you ran a mission with Iron Akulov.
Correction: No one questioned it but insufferable trolls, and there was a very fun solution for that.
More pressing correction: No one questioned it if you came back alive.
This was turning into one of those kinds of missions, Rosalee realized as the dozen hissing, clicking, utterly wrong terebra surrounded the squad. To be honest, they hadn't expected killer zombie wolves, with or without floppy ears. They'd been sent to shoo a pack of playful doggos away from the water plant. Yet here they were, fighting for their lives and they'd only been at the target location for minute.
When the first indigen flashed past her, ripping into the side of her teammate Neesae and tumbling over and over her body, Rosalee could only stumble out of the way. Her flicked her shield arts at the party, but the heals weren't going to cover the damage Neesae had already suffered, and she was already pushed too far away from Rosalee for anything else to be of use. She fought the urge to draw the pack's attention. That was the absolute wrong move when there were this many enemy. She'd be drowned in attacks before she knew it. Rosalee would still have risked it, but something told her that the big terebra that was worrying at Neesae wasn't going to be distracted by anything Rosalee had up her sleeves. She hoped that the last member of their party was useful for a change.
She lit up her launchers instead, chipping away at the smaller members of the pack. The flash and buzz of each shot would cause more confusion than damage, but an ineffective enemy was as good as a dead one, at least short term. She'd leave the heavy guns to Irina, since that woman literally had those, in the form of a nice, neat skell.
Rosalee and the ground parted ways suddenly, as one lucky indigen whipped her into the air with a solid slap of its tail. It was a lucky hit, and god she hated luck on this planet. She had time to remember how she would beg her dad to shot put her into the deep end of the pool during the endless blistering weekends in the Central Valley.
She surfaced, spitting mud and fury. She tore through the water, back to the shore, ready to wreck house, with her fingernails if necessary. She reached the shallows just in time to see Irina flung from her skell, her silver ride crumpling into the mud, but Rosalee was still too far to protect her from the pack.
To hell with common sense. Rosalee had had it with these insane puppers. She slammed her shield down, once, twice, making sure to get all eyes on her. "Bad dogs! BAD!" she screamed. Evil hissing zombie monsters, she'd show them she wasn't a dog person. She wasn't even a cat person. She was an Irina person, and they had picked the wrong bitch to mess with.
a/n: I suddenly realize I may be channeling more than a little bit of my own prickliness into Rosalee. Fancy that. It's been a week, kids. I've also been experimenting with shield/psy launcher builds, and all I can say is ... I remain Ether Blossom Dance trash at heart.
Time for shameless plugs: Rosalee shows up in Twitchy Tales of the Whale/1/Music, Rosalee and Lucky, and Day of the Dead. Also in The Great Skell Robbery and Ring around the Rosies.
Next up: I want to write something fluffy and happy and dumb. Stretch. Not sure how that will happen...