TITLE: Juggernaut
THEME: "Megalomanic" by KMFDM
RATED: PG-13 for dark themes, violence, some slight situations, and language. I may have to change this to R, which means you'll have to search for it since FF.Net's default settings only go to PG-13... X_x
TYPE: Multipart, serialized fic.
GENRE: Drama
SUMMARY: Yeah, well, this is probably your usual premise. But I rather liked the idea. Thanks to my good friend Rigelle for collaboration, along with my best friend IRL, a massive Guilty Gear fan like myself (though she isn't on FF.Net :P). So. Onward! XD; Takes place pretty much right after the ending of GGX and before the beginning of GGXX. Constructive criticism is good, because I know this story probably took a loaded Beretta and shot continuity in the head. x_x Flames and ridicule are welcome as I will just point and laugh, but just remember: my first piece of crap on this section is proof in the pudding that I can always do much worse. Action or sap? It's your choice, children. ^^; Having said that, there's very slight Anji/Baiken hints here, but nothing sappy. Enjoy!

::chapter one - bad moon rising::

++++++++++++++++++++++++

"I see a bad moon a-rising, I see trouble on the way..."

--Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Bad Moon Rising"

++++++++++++++++++++++++

--THE MAYSHIP: ST. GERMAIN DOCKS, FRANCE--

"Dizzy, this is April, my chief advisor. April, this is Dizzy. May and I picked her up on our way back."

Johnny cast a sidewise glance at the demure young woman at his side. Her wings and tail were concealed for the time being, but what little he could see of her downturned face was as deathly pale as Testament's had been. The clasped hands at her slender waist trembled fearfully - though almost below perception. Despite his repeated reassurances on their way to the dock, she was obviously terrified at the prospect of meeting and associating with humans. Ever since they had entered the port city, the innocent Gear had practically glued herself to Johnny's side, her hand clutching his arm in a painful and half-panicked grip.

Not that he could blame her, really, not after everything she'd suffered.

In an effort to calm her he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and patted. "She'll help you get used to the way things work around here, and she and May are in charge when I'm not around, so maybe the two of you should get to know each other?"

April didn't miss the meaningful expression on the captain's face, and quickly smiled. "Don't worry about her, Johnny. I'll make sure she learns the ropes around here, and I'm sure May can take care of her..." Her alto voice was direct and friendly as she offered a hand. "It's really great to meet you, Dizzy. Welcome aboard."

Dizzy finally lifted her head, her crimson eyes flickering with uncertainty as she stared at April's hand, then accepted it and tried to smile, the rare action stretching her lips a bit and quivering at the corners. "I... um, thank you... I'll do my best."

"Hey, don't worry about it, okay? We're all in the same boat here - no pun intended, of course." Johnny chuckled a bit at his own joke, then assumed a more brisk manner as he addressed the pirate girl once more. "April, you said you checked the tanks. Do we need to stop in Zepp and refuel?"

"No, sir. Everything's accounted for."

"Great. We're lifting off in fifteen, then. I'll go let the crew know."

"I'll come with you, Johnny," May piped, swinging her anchor over her shoulder, but he shook his head. "Aww, come on! Please?"

"I need you to take Dizzy to her new room. She needs some clothes. April and you can show her where everything is on the ship."

May's face drew itself into a petulant sulkiness that, despite all the girl's vehement arguments for being 'grown up', was proof that she still had a little work to do in that department. "But I wanna go with you, Johnny!"

Johnny shook his head and sighed, then leaned down and drew her to one side as he murmured in her ear. "Dizzy's still very frightened, May. Remember when we first found Evelyn?"

"Evie? Yeah, sure I do. Her aunt got killed when those Gears knocked down their village..." That had been seven years ago, during a stopover in Russia, and she barely remembered it, except that Johnny had come back in need of medical attention while bearing a small, crying dark-haired girl over his shoulder. She'd been afraid of her own shadow, and even though May had only been about eight or so she could clearly remember that Evelyn couldn't speak at all. For nearly a year, the girl had been mute. Then all of a sudden she just started speaking as if she'd always done so. "I was just a little kid then."

He bit back the obvious response to that addendum, then shook his head. "Dizzy's afraid that people will hate her because she's a Gear, and it's a very real fear. She trusts you, though, so stay by her and be her friend. If she relaxes, she'll be fine. Got it? Do it for me, May," Johnny added as an afterthought, turning on the charm. Okay, so that last part was just the tiniest bit blatant, but it inevitably worked on the bouncy teenager. Her chocolate eyes lit up like candles on a birthday cake.

"Okay, sure!"

"That's my girl." He grinned, doffed his hat to the trio of girls, then made his way towards the bridge. In the background he heard the upward inflexion of May's cheerful soprano voice - no doubt she was now half-dragging poor Dizzy to one of the guest rooms.

***********************

--SHIROKU COLONY: GALICIA, SPAIN--

"So then the silly bastard tried to run from it. Imagine that, running from a dragon. And guess who got left to kill the thing and clean up the mess?"

"His fault for not listening to you."

"No one listens to me, Baiken." A nonchalant shrug. "I'm used to it."

"Obviously not. You don't have the common sense the gods gave a cockroach."

"This coming from a broad who looks like fifty miles of bad road." He studied the woman seated across from him with a mockingly clinical golden eye, a fang slipping free at the corner of his mouth as he grinned at her. "Nice rack, though."

A smirk wrinkled the corners of the woman's face, stretching the scar covering the hollow space where her eye had once been even as she lifted her hand to tuck a few cerise strands behind her ear. "Shut up and drink, Sol. You make me look bad enough as it is, associating with a no-account like you..."

"Your choice to invite me in, wasn't it?" The bounty hunter released one of his rare chuckles. Sol Badguy was a stoic and no-nonsense sort, preferring action to blather, but Baiken was one of the few people he could actively like as opposed to simply tolerating her. Therefore, she was possibly the only one who could carry on a decent conversation with him without getting offended. She got more emotional over things than he did, but hell, she was only human. It was expected. Besides, she could drink him under the table, he noted critically, glancing at all the empty bottles surrounding her. "Jesus riverdancing Christ, woman. Your liver must've already said to hell with it and committed ritual suicide by now. Look at all that shit."

"You get used to it after awhile."

"Where's your little fan-wielding boy toy, by the way?" He reached into one of the pockets of his jeans and produced a lighter and a half-finished pack of cigarettes.

"Oh, Mito? Hell if I know. He sneaked out of the colony again a couple nights ago. Hasn't been back and I haven't seen him since Saturday last."

"Any ideas?" A flare of light and the acrid scent of burning tobacco, not as pleasant as the smell of her pipe but comforting in its familiarity nonetheless.

"Why're you so curious?"

Sol Badguy shrugged with an almost arrogant casualness. "Because if we're going to have wild kinky sex, sweetheart, I don't want him walking in on it."

"Not even in your dreams, Badguy." Baiken closed her remaining eye as she released a puff of smoke from her own pipe. Translation for that bit of smartassery probably was, Sol had his own reasons and didn't want to disclose them. None of her business, whatever it was. "My guess is, he's gone to talk to Testament again."

"That jackass?" Sol snorted. He didn't bother to filter the derision from his voice. While Ky Kiske's constant hounding to "settle the score" did little other than annoy him, Justice's former right hand was a different prospect - the prototype Gear disliked him immensely. Then again, the feeling was mutual. The chief annoyance for Sol was that he could never quite bring himself to kill the former Crusader; something inevitably stayed his hand whenever he had the chance to do it... maybe it was his humanity whining and bitching again.

Or maybe, it was because Testament's predicament was basically his fault.

"Anji seems to like him for some reason. Besides, he has it in his head that Testament may know where to find that man. I doubt it, though."

"Think so?"

"His memory of becoming a Gear is just bits and pieces. Guess it's something he tried to forget about..."

"Yeah." Sol could relate to Testament on that issue, at least. Unfortunately he remembered quite well that the transformation wasn't exactly a fun-filled and enjoyable experience, though he doubted that he and Testament were the only humans who'd suffered it - The Man (as he was called) had already been trying to find a way to use the technology for human augmentation when Sol had decided that he was in the middle of a hostile work environment. And of course, he had taken it upon himself to find other employment opportunities, so he'd simply left without notice. As far as Sol knew, they were still trying to find a way to make a Gear serum that didn't have such detrimental effects on mental stability - most humans changed during the Crusades went incurably insane both because the trauma was so massive and because Justice had immediately extended the "mankind erasure" command to include them.

Hell, he was lucky he didn't have more issues than he did.

And that's another reason why I've gotta find that bastard and get rid of him. Before he does this shit to someone else...

Baiken noted the grim expression on Sol's face, half-hidden even as it fluttered almost imperceptibly across her friend's hooded eyes. Perceptive if nothing else, she leaned back casually while changing the subject. "So you gonna finish that drink or what?"

"I ain't giving it to you. Damn lush."

"Heh. You gonna go to Neo-Madrid, check your mark list?"

"Probably. In a little while." He glanced at Baiken. "I'm surprised you aren't wandering around out there yourself."

"Eh, I don't hate this place as much as Anji does, and I figure it'd be best to lay low for awhile anyway. Word that I'm looking for the man who created the Gears might get back to the wrong quarters. And I take any opportunity to train." There weren't any interruptions on the reservation the way there might be elsewhere.

"True." Sol abruptly picked himself up from the comfortable worn spot on the cushion. "Think I might go on over to Madrid now, actually. Ever since I let that kid go in the forest, there hasn't been any mention of her."

"That kid? You mean the Gear girl?"

"Yeah."

Baiken chuckled. "Checking up on her, huh?"

"Whatever. You accusing me of going soft?"

"You are soft, Badguy. You're just too much of a hardass to admit it."

The bounty hunter shot her a pointed glare that would have made most people back off very quickly. However, the mistress of this household had been weathered and hardened by war, a lifetime of it. Very little if anything fazed her anymore, and Sol knew it. "You tell anyone, Seishino, and I'll skin you alive."

"You're all empty promises. Tell Mito I said get his ass back over here if you see him."

Sol smirked as he slipped his hands in his pockets and stepped out the door, taking a long drag from the cigarette which still dangled from his lips, and headed for the checkpoint. From there was Madrid.

*******************************

--AIRSHIP WHARF NUMBER TWO: PARIS, FRANCE--

Near-frantic gales of laughter erupted from a couple stumbling out of the small riverside tavern: the tallest a man in a wrinkled work shirt and faded jeans. He was flanked on his left by a tall slim woman with long violet-black hair and strange striking amber eyes, her forehead covered and hair bound in a silken red kerchief. The long skeins were looped and molded into intricate braids save a few soft curls drifting over the back of her neck, the cloth of the headpiece matching her rather low-cut spaghetti-strap dress and thigh-high heeled vinyl boots. Attractive in a strange way, though the glimmer in her eyes was hardly one of mirth, or of any healthy human emotion.

The Seine was even now grievously polluted - some things never changed, not even with the long-ago advent of magic technology - and the unpleasant smell of raw sewage and dumped trash drifted on a weak, unhealthy stirring of air current. However, the olfactory assault only wrinkled the nostrils of the female; the man at her side was horrendously drunk, a nameless bounty hunter who'd come in looking for a good time. She'd inwardly recoiled in disgust, but outwardly maintained her silky, pleasant facade as she tittered at his alcohol-induced attempts at wit and catered to his maudlin sighing over his difficult line of work and the high levels of competition.

"Like tryin' to get that damn Gear," he'd slurred irritably, waving a hand and coming dangerously close to overturning his sixth bottle of beer. Some humans, she'd found, had an amazingly high tolerance for poisoning their own bodies; it'd been her sour observance on more than one occasion that Master Justice might not have even needed to declare war on the parasites. Wait another hundred years, and they might have simply wiped themselves out of their own volition. "World Court made that announcement 'bout the bounty and course I went for it. One Gear in the world's one too many, I always say. But I'll be damned if every half-assed kid, old man, and girlie from here to fuckin' Antarctica didn't jump on it too. I mean, th'hell? How'm I supposed to make a living if I gotta compete with thousands of other silly bastards for the cash?"

She'd made the proper noises of commiseration, but really her job was of a completely different purpose. After a bit of probing - humans were pathetically easy to gain information from when they were inebriated - he'd told her what she'd wanted to know. And now they were strolling out here in the smelly rundown waterfront district towards a nameless hotel room; he'd just assumed she was one of the "pleasure women" that frequented the Paris slums.

"But I know where the little demon is, baby," he crowed as he leaned towards her, planting a rather sloppy kiss just below her earlobe. "I know damn well where it is. I got leads, know what I'm sayin'? Hell of it is, I'm not sure if I can actually get to it."

"Why not?"

"There's some kinda trap it planted," the hunter mumbled, jabbing a finger at nothing in particular. "They're sayin' that there's another Gear protectin' it - a huge strappin' male who looks like Death in a skirt, even got himself a scythe bigger'n he is. I hear he's already killed a bunch of people who get too close to where the big prize is. If I weren't hard up for cash I sure as hell wouldn't be riskin' my ass. They say it usually happens over... St. Germain way. Me, I'm an American. All these frog names sound the same to me, but least I know I'm gettin' close. I'll bring down that buck, though. Might even bring his head back 'long with the other one's when I go to Geneva to get the money. Hell, maybe I'll take his scythe, too." A drunken, triumphant laugh. "No Gear ever got past me durin' the Crusades, honey. Not Marcus 'Wind Rider' Berkman, no way in hell. I was a merc workin' for the Knights, y'know, till that Frenchy kid came on board and they tried to pass him off as the leader. Screw that, I said, jumped ship and been workin' for myself ever since. It don't matter though, I didn't need the Knights. I been killin' Gears since I was fourteen and run away from home. There's a trick to it, y'see..."

They had left the lighted area in front of the tavern, and now approached an alleyway perhaps a block south. With a wicked little giggle and no warning at all, the woman grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him roughly against the brick wall behind them, wrapping her arms about his neck. As she did so she cast him a sly, seductive smile, amber eyes twinkling with an almost predatory glint beneath long violet lashes that had never seen mascara. Feeling the stirrings of uneasiness even in his drunken gaze, the hunter initially squirmed - but his protest quickly faded when she kissed him with a great show of enthusiasm, her tongue effortlessly nudging his lips open and sliding over his teeth. With a low growling chuckle he responded in kind, his arms wrapping about her lissome waist and tugging her roughly forwards.

He broke the kiss and grinned blearily at her, lust now creeping into his eyes. "Took me by surprise for a sec - thought you were gonna eat me alive or somethin'. You're real good, honey."

"So I've been told." One of her arms dropped from his perch to her side while the other one idly toyed with the soft spot behind his ear, her slow smile full of inviting promise. Far below his already dulled perception, her hand crept slowly into the voluminous purse on her shoulder, closing about the smooth wooden hilt of an unseen object and pulling it out. "You might catch that Gear, though. You said none of them who found you've ever gotten past you, huh?"

"That's what they say."

"Well, you know..." She smirked as her hand left its teasing to tilt his head so that he gazed directly into her eyes... saw to her delight his shock as the pupils of her eyes contracted and elongated, becoming twin vertical slits.

Before he could respond, she plunged the serrated edge of her barbed knife into his gut and dragged it slowly upwards, relishing the stiffening of his body as the first threads of pain registered themselves in his brain. The hunter's eyes, as expected, flared wide with surprise and agony. Suddenly quite sober, he opened his mouth to shriek - but not before the woman plunged forward and fastened her mouth over his once more in the appearance of a second lustful embrace.

As she felt liquid running freely over her fingers she also felt the strength and breath to make any sound leave him. With a mocking little laugh she whispered her response against his trembling lips - probably the last ones he would ever hear. She could already sense the metallic taste of blood on her tongue as she simply let him sink to the ground, ripping her weapon from his sternum.

"...they also say there's a first time for everything, human."

And with a grin, the Gear strode off casually into the darkness, her lithe form wreathed in shadow before being completely overtaken by the pitch-black of the silent, moonless night.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES: Call this little ditty a celebration fic for GGXX's final porting to an English console - this means I no longer have to spend precious quarters playing the import in UTA's arcade (which I have been doing since June, sadly). Even though it so completely rocks. *_* Poor Zappa. He's *SPOILER* looking for a cure for his condition under the mistaken belief that he's suffering from a rare illness - has no idea he's possessed by a woman who Faust killed as Dr. Baldhead. AND, he's a reference to The Ring (the girl's name is S-ko - Sadako), and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure series 3. Dig the Dio Brando hearts, baby. XD;;

Reputed Gear I-no (the agent of The Man, who Ishiwatari-sempai is rumored to reveal possibly in the next game - or novel, though I still need to get off my ass and read "Butterfly and her Gale") and Sol have possibly the funniest entrance EVER. I know she's sadistic like no one's business, yes. But I have a special place in my respect list for a villain who has no illusions whatsoever about herself or her nature. Either way, I am so first in line to pay the difference on my reserved copy when that game comes out. \*_*/ Muah!