DISCLAIMER: If it ain't already copyrighted, I own it.
I'd been sitting on this ledge for a few hours, watching Snipe fire round after round into the target until I told him to switch guns every once in a while. An old warm-up trick of mine, start with the handgun and work your way up to the big ones.
Snipe was landing them pretty dang close, too. Not the bulls-eye from his first shot, but still, he had talent. Only the night before had Shade and I carried out our evil plan, which wasn't working as fast as I hoped.
"Yo, Sniper Boy, you get that thing I sent ya?"
He stood there behind his mechgun for a second before turning around to look at me through his helmet.
"…not sure what it was, but yeah,"
I swung my pipe-cleaner legs, still sitting on the ledge on the side of the ammo station.
"It's a little energy capsule I picked up in the Ruins, figured you'd have a better use for it than me."
He shrugged, acting like he didn't get it and kept blasting the plastic circle a dozen feet down. I smirked and walked off to get a diet killer from the candy machine, remind me to learn where Snipe learned to act. Seriously, he should do New Broadway.
By the time Snipe had emptied the ammo station and we had to leave before the manager got pissed, I'd gone through three candy bars and a large coffee. I finished off the coffee as Snipe's new MAG, which looked like a floating backpack, absorbed all his weapons lying around his station. As he turned to walk out and it followed him he noticed my candy bar wrappers.
"…there goes your new fad diet, eh?"
I smirked at my helmet-head prodigy. He's been known to make jokes about how I go on diets I don't need and always quit them. I spared him a deadly comeback as we walked downtown to the Hunters Market. Soon we were surrounded by neon-tinted stands, each selling something different.
"My kid's birthday is coming up, wanted to get her something nice."
By now Snipe had gotten used to how I combined daily chores with Hunter work.
"How old is she gonna be?"
"Nine. A woman always keeps track of how long it's been since she stopped giving birth."
Two minutes later I had my elbows on a counter, bent over casually as I examined a small Shield. Snipe was leaning over my shoulder, probably bored.
"…so you think she could handle a Hunter Weapon? She is part Force…"
I kindly kicked him in the stomach without looking at him. He shut up and the clerk walked up to us, an older woman with too much paint on her face.
"…looking at a gift for your husband?"
…who was suck in the century before women took over Earth and the galaxy in general…
"…my daughter, actually."
The woman asked if it was a gag, and I was giving her a party dress instead. How did these people end up on this space station? Did the people back on Earth just not want them around?
"Excuse me, can I just buy this thing?"
She proposed a price of several hundred meseta.
"...let's get out of here."
I glared at the old bat and walked off, then noticed I was alone. I looked over my shoulder to see Snipe was still at the booth. He was holding the shield I'd been looking at and talking to the old hag. After a minute he walked back over to me, handing me the shield.
"Got it."
"...you bought it?"
He cracked his neck, tapping his helmet to his shoulder plates..
"Actually I was the one getting paid. Those 'antique' daggers she was selling had traces of toxic carbon on the blades, I said she could get shut down for it. So she agreed on a silence price and threw in the shield for free."
I stared.
"...so you learned to bargain from Moon..."
Moon was famous for this kind of thing. Snipe didn't get the joke though.
"...pardon?"
"Never mind. Thanks for the shield."
"No problem. Remind me to turn that hag in later, anyway."
Yep, a chip off the old item junkie. We left the market after raiding the discount bins for anything Snipe could fuirnish his box with. Honestly he acted like he didn't need anything. But still, I sent him home with a nice lamp and a space heater. After helping him carry the stuff I walked a few blocks to Snake's pub. He wasn't in, but a few cops I had trained were. An hour long conversation later I was back home talking to my daughter.
"...you mean..."
"Yep, all three of them."
"Wow..."
Right as I was about to explain how he did it, Shade walked in looking bored yet ragged.
"Honey, I'm home, please shoot me in the head."
I mimed cocking a gun and asked how his day went. He grunted and shuffled to our room to take off the nun outfit male forces have to wear. He did ask me a question as he struggled to take off his hat.
"Any luck exposing his secret?"
"Nah, he didn't take the bait."
The sound of Shade struggling to get his skirt off.
"How about the back-up plan?"
I practiced my handgun hold on our remote control, blowing away the stuffed animal atop the shelf.
"No dice."
My husband walked out of our room wearing semi-masculine clothes and grabbed the remote from me to check the sports broadcasts, he does this every day after work to compensate for his cross-dressing.
"Well, how's Snipe?'"
I tapped my nails on the side-table.
"...well, he's gone from a 'newbie' to a Ranger in record time."
Shade stared, thankfully Salia had gone off to play in her room.
"...Sonnet, you know that word has been banned since it started those mass killing sprees."
Come on, they ban the term 'Newbie' because it caused some fragile little guy to go nova?
"I already taught our daughter how to curse in six languages, one more little trauma isn't going to kill her."
My reluctant soul-mate sighed, turning on some wrestling show to restore his testosterone.
"So on a scale of 1 to 200..."
For some odd reason my husband judged people on a scale of one to two hundred. All the time. Why not one hundred, I'll never know.
"...Sniper-Boy would be a 60. Except he's using that steroid-jacked MAG. I swear to Rico's Ghost I saw him squeeze a rock and water came out of it."
My husband grunted at this and our evening went in silence. Well, more like ten minutes of silence before I pulled on a civilian outfit and headed out for Moon's skyrise. I saw some one with an Apsaras and remembered something odd from today at the range. Snipe's MAG wasn't black, it was still neon yellow.Why hadn't he fed it yet?
I remembered how he nearly fainted when he first felt the power surge. Feeding the MAG would add yet another notch to his power. So far all this kid did was level up and nod quietly at my dirty jokes. Maybe he wanted to do things on his own a bit.
After letting myself into his condo via picking the lock, he walked out of his bathroom wearing a towel and saw me on his couch using one of his ultra-rare blades to do my nails. Those ancient craftsmen sure had an idea how to push down those cuticles.
"...Sonnet... "
I looked up from my manicure to watch him glare at me from under some brown/blonde streaked bangs that he really needed to trim. I liked to think his eyes and ears reflected his mother's. He had a slightly narrow face, a bit of a square jaw. Sure a guy could work out all he wants, buy expensive supplements but either you're born with a superhero jawline or you're not. Moon came close though.
When I first met him he was a bit skinny, an average athlete. But in the last couple years he's packed on some lean mass. The abs were a nice touch in that towel he was sporting, if I weren't married...and older...and a complete bitch.
"My manicure place is closed, and the other salons don't use extremely crude sharp objects."
He sighed, walking over to his bedroom.
"Just remember where you got it from on the wall..."
As he went to put some pants on I turned to the weapon-covered wall, looking for a blank place. I didn't see one so I shrugged and tossed the fancy dagger on the coffee table. When the collector came out in full black Hunter Armor with the red highlights, I felt out of place in my blouse and faded jeans.
"You doing laundry or do you just like the way the force-field jockstrap feels?"
He rolled his oak brown eyes and checked the digital watch built into his sleeve, he had that armor customized like a cherry car.
"I have an appointment with the book publishers in a lobby, I figured I'd be more comfortable in this than a suit and tie."
I tapped a button on my watch and my MAG appeared floating above my head.
"Mind if I tag along? If a Hunter suit makes you feel important, why not the presence of a stem-level Ranger?"
He turned to stare a few seconds, thinking. but he gave in and let his neck twitch slightly, an extremely subtle nod. My MAG flashed and I was now clad in my white/silver Ranger outfit. He raised a faint eyebrow at this.
"...you dress more like a comic book character than a RAmarl..."
I smirked as I stood up, noticing my loafers had turned into high-end performance boots.
"I thought you hated the labels they give us."
The only part of Hunting Moon hated was our labels. HUmars had a reputation for being weaker, dumber and with little chance of success. To this day he was looked down on in public by badly programmed HUcasts, Forces and even the occasional civilian who'd never held a weapon in their life.
"Let's just get going..."
As he opened his door two small missiles jumped off a shelf and started orbiting his armored shoulders. Those Kama MAGs were unusual at times. We walked shoulder to shoulder through the neon streets, catching a few stares partially because we were both semi-well known, but mostly because he was in dull black and I in brilliant white.
After a few blocks and several hundred double takes we reached a local Guild extension and took a telepad to the Lobbies. Well, a Lobby at least. A maze of neon paths criss-crossing around like a fountain, in the center was an automated help desk and another telepad. This room was decorated in real windmills mounted between paths, swaying to a simulated wind. Shade likes to come to these lobbies to relax, he grew up near a wind farm.
"..real party goin' down..."
I snickered dryly at Moon's crack, this huge area was virtually empty. We stepped back onto the pad and selected another lobby. A blink of light later we were surrounded by loud, colorful people of many shapes and sizes. I waved at a few of my old students while Moon scanned the room for his publishers.
He shook his head and we stepped back on the pad, appearing later in a stadium-sized room three times the size of a standard lobby. Off to the side of this stadium, several younger Hunters were running around dressed in red and green, pushing a huge eight ball toward their opposing goal circle. Some lobbies had these games for both fun and exercise.
"...they said they'd meet me at a stadium, how about we let them find us? "
I nodded, agreeing. then without a word we both tapped our colored badges. Instantly my white armor was now completely red, Moon's black had gone green. We ran into the chaos and had a hell of a good time for nearly an hour. Every few rounds the teams would get bored, and add a new rule or idea into the fray. It was truly the calvinball of technology.
Our fun had to end when two stocky figures dressed in plain blue suits entered via the telepad. Moon waved at me to signal that was them, and we bade goodbye to our team mates as we went back to our usual colors and jogged over to the two civilians.
The two men proved to be nearly identical. Thinning brown hair, blank expressions, same suits. Sameness was in.
"...how do you Hunters do that?"
The one on the left had asked as we both appeared without a bead of sweat after an hour of fooling around.
"...killing freaks burns calories."
Lefty laughed at my joke, Righty was looking at Moon.
"...Well, Mr. Moon, I'm glad you chose our company for your mother's next work."
'Mr. Moon' blinked slightly.
"...actually it's an incomplete work..."
Both twins stared.
"...so you'll need to hire one of our writers to finish it..."
He shrugged passively, I felt my brow twitch. Ten minutes later I was sitting on a green energy chair, as was Moon except on a white one. The executives had to sit on a ledge along the wall.
"...and the fee would reflect that."
Moon nodded at this. As he went to ask about royalties one of the green ball players called his name, wanting his card. He jogged off to give it to them, I watched his back until he was out of hearing range. I turned to the twins and cleared my throat.
"...so you're saying Moon isn't smart enough to write about what he lives and breathes..."
They stared.
"Ma'am, HUmars have never been known for talent and intelligence..."
I didn't bat an eye.
"...you ever see those bugs from the Ruins? Those swirling buzzsaw freaks that floated around attacking every Hunter that went down there?"
One nodded, they recently did a news article about how deadly those things were. Some had theories they were produced by Falz himself, like a queen bee.
"...that 'HUmar' took on several dozen of those things alone, an entire swarm, and he just had his Slicer."
They stared, wondring if maybe they were dealing with a cyborg who had to be rebuilt.
"I'm not sure how he did it, but when we found him, he didn't have a scratch on him. He was taking out the last dozen, four at a time, whistling 'Singing in the Rain'."
Lefty's jaw dropped.
"...and you want some nerd who never set foot on Ragol to just write down what the handbook that came with a Saber says on hunting. That's his mother's son over there."
Righty went to argue but stopped. Either it was the horror story or the fact Moon was the heir of an amazing Hunting Writer. By the time he walked back the twins had a whole new gameplan. Moon didn't show any reaction. He nodded, commented and said his goodbyes when the time came. As we walked back over to play some more ball games I nudged him.
"...hey, Hunter Extordinaire."
He stopped to listen to me.
"...your mom would be really proud, you know that?"
He just looked and me and his neck twitched. Another nod. We kept walking, him a statue, myself an aging supermodel. I knew deep down he was truly wanted to follow in her foosteps. So did he. Either way, I so kicked his ass at calvinball.
Author's Notes
I just want to apologize for the month of absence. Thank you.