Disclaimer: I do not own Metroid but all other characters belong to me.
"Stop sulking, Rista," Miranna scolded the pouting ten-year old. "You earned this punishment." Rista snorted and crossed her arms, eyes downcast on the streets of K2L. She was not looking where she was going, only trailing behind her mother's footsteps. Because of this, she soon bumped something-or really, someone.
Rista looked up to see a man with long, greasy brown hair stuffed under a blue baseball cap, staring down at her with shocking green eyes. A mangy beard was growing on his chin, and his breath was foul. He scowled at her, briefly showing her yellow teeth. Yet he was familiar somehow, and finally, it struck her as a large grin stretched on her face.
"Uncle Bill!" She squealed. "I haven't seen you in months." Miranna stopped and looked back. She gasped and snatched her daughter by her wrist.
"This is not Uncle Bill, Rista," She whispered, though she knew as well that it was.
"What do you mean, Miranna? I guess I have let myself go since I saw you last, since you threw me out of your house," He spat at her. "And look at your beautiful little brat."
"U-uncle-"
"Don't call me that!" He snarled. "I'm not your Uncle. Ream is, and I don't want to be compared that son of a-"
"Stop it!" Miranna's voice rang out clear. "Come on, Rista. We're going." Her grip tightened on Rista's arm as she pulled her away.
"If she didn't have those eyes, I could believe she wasn't his," Bill still called out. "She looks just like you, except those tainted eyes. I wish I could gouge them out. I'd do it with pleasure, with a dinner knife. I'd slice your pretty face and break your arms like they were twigs."
"Don't listen to him, Rista," Miranna cautioned, but the words had taken effect on her, as if he continued to spout brutal and graphic ways of killing her, before moving on to her father and her sister. "He's drunk. Don't listen." Miranna was crying as Rista's face paled. He followed them, his voice growing louder, garnering attention from other pedestrians.
"What ya looking at? I'd kill you too! Three months is all ya got before this colony is done with!" His voice was rough, but it was the exact copy of all the deranged lunatics in movies and on HV. Rista shut her eyes, her "tainted eyes" as she painfully remember, and she knew Bill was speaking the truth. She knew that in three months, something would happen.
----
Bill was unsure of what would happened, unsure of what he would do. Flirnick would take care of them, Bill had been trying to assure himself, but still, there was a nagging uncertainty. What if the girls escaped? They seemed to be masters at that.
Bill reached into his pocket and stroked a pebble-like thing with care. If worst came to worst, he would let them have the satisfaction of winning. He would never live to see them win over him; in the end, it would him that had the last laugh.
----
Samus waited patiently. She almost tapped her foot in frustration, but she knew that it could potentially give her away. Still, the thought was tempting. She crouched low behind a tree, a gigantic behemoth of a red wood. It was so large in diameter that she did not have to bother going into morph ball mode...or at least not yet.
The ship's radar said that the troops were headed this way. Rista had scampered a safe distance away, reluctantly agreeing to let Samus deal with this. Quick and effective, Samus knew she could deal with this. Finally, Rista's voice entered Samus' helmet.
"I see them. Better get in that freaky ball thing."
"Gotcha." Samus transformed into the morph ball, and she rolled around, hiding herself in the heavy underbrush. A few more minutes ticked by, and finally, the faint sound of Space Pirates stealthily marching towards her reached her ears. She prepared a single power-bomb. They began to sneak by her, and she counted down, aiming for the best time to let it loose.
Finally, she detonated it. For a few seconds, there was the eerie absence of all sounds. A bright light blinded all, taking the confused pirates by surprise. The few surviving Pirates scurried around in chaos and confusion a split second after it was all over. Then came the unmistakable sound of cracking woods as trees began to fall. Most of the plant life had already been ignited.
Samus lept out of morph ball mode and prepared her arm cannon. She prefered to do them of the hard way-aka, the fun way.
She began firing at the lower ranked troops, finishing them off with a few blasts. Two pirates approached her on either side, and she once again dropped into a sphere and gave them a pair of normal yet effective bombs. There were few more to deal with, a few running away. Samus figured that the big guys never spared the well-trained or especially brave soldiers on Bill.
There was a blast above Samus' head and looked to see a grisly veteran Pirate, covered the armor of an Elite Pirate, yet it looked even stronger. She charged up a plasma beam and fired, but with surprising agility, he leapt up into the air and crashed down in front of Samus. This move took her by surprise, and she barely had time to dodge his body.
"Missk Aran," He breathed, surprisingly in basic tongue. " 'Pare to die." Samus ran around him, taking precise aim and shooting a missile. It bounced right off his armor, causing little, if any, damage.
"What the-"
"Like it? New teknolgy," He grinned deviously. "Soon, all pirates have it." Samus didn't bother to listen to him. Instead, she fired an ice missile, which effectively froze him. In his frozen state, she let out a round of her plasma beam. When the body thawed, it crumpled to the ground, obvivously wounded, but he was not yet dead.
"I not lak others- I power...I leader." Without blinking, Samus finished him off.
"That was pathetically easy," Rista's voice said through the comunication unit.
"We might still have some problems from the renegade pirates or the others inside the base," Samus told her back. She made her way through the mess of burning foliage, fallen trees and mutated Pirate corspes. Rista was waiting for her in their designated spot. Rista had decided to forego any armor that Samus offered her, taking a single blaster. "Not my kind of thing," she had claimed. Samus tried to persuade her it was dangerous, but Rista just said, she had lived with it before.
"No injuries?" She asked, studying Samus.
"Just a few burn marks on the suit, but nothing I can't fix."
"Oh yeah, because I really care about the welfare of your suit."
"You asked."
----
He left the entrance to his underground base out in the open. Let them come. He had to face them; it was his destiny. Whether or not he would prevail was a different matter entirely. He sent out the rest of his soldiers under his command. Bill was not a religious man, but he decided now would be a good time to start praying again. He knew it was useless. Somehow, they would get past the obsticle.
----
The first corridor was eerily silent. Samus went first, taking slow, cautious steps down it. The sound of her footsteps echoed through the hall. Rista's were silent, as she knew how to disguise it. She followed close behind Samus.
A shot was fired, the echo resonating resonating though the entirety of the corridor, and it had been fired over Samus' shoulder. She turned around to face Rista, who only pointed at a security camera.
"They probably already know we're here," Samus commented.
"Yeah. Suppose we should have knocked first, though." Rista gestured her head forward. "We need to keep moving." Samus begun down the hall once more, blasting open a door.
The next room was dark, not a single light to be found. Samus' visor enabled her to see in the dark, though Rista was blinded. Her ears perked up though, searching for any sounds. As the adopted daughter of theives, she knew how to slip through the shadows and how to tell when someone was approaching. She took a step away from Samus and walked into a puddle. Leaning down, she dipped her fingers into it. It was thicker than water. She backed away and fired at it.
The entire lake of the substance burst into an ocean of fire.
"How'd you-"
"Lucky guess that it was flammable, and as long we weren't in it, I assumed it'd be ok." Samus admired and was annoyed by Rista's impulsiveness at the same time. She looked around now at the burning inferno around her.
"Can you take the heat?"
"I've gone through worse." They both scanned the room for another exit besides the door they came in, but they found none. Then a higher platform caught Samus' eye. She raised her grapple beam and fired, latching on to a support beam. She swung herself up to the platform and searched for a way Rista could join her. She spotted a button, inscripted with Pirate words. Her visor translated it. Elevator.
"Rista, move onto the platform there," Samus ordered. Rista complied, coughing from the heavy fumes that were beginning to fill the room. The elevator rose with little heisitation, and the two women moved on to the next room eagerly.
Rista filled her lungs with the fresh air and gasped. "I...have a feeling that...substance was posionous."
"You think?"
----
The girls were becoming dangerously close. Bill breathed deeply to calm himself. Today, revenge would be served. It might in an unconventional way, but he would get them somehow. They had the detrimination of their mother, and he knew that he could tarnish all they worked for. He slipped the thing out of his pocket and smiled.
By tonight, he'd be dead. But it wouldn't be by their hand.
----
Somehow, the hoard of Space Pirates missed Rista and was bombarding Samus. Not that she could not take it but it was difficult with the constant stream of them. In fact, she could not even spot where her sister went.
A round of smaller, more accurate blasts rang out and pelted the pirates. They stopped momentarily and began once more, in a different angle. This caused some confusion for a moment, but the soldiers pressed on. She recongized Rista's tatics by now, and she realized that Rista was not bad at fighting scum, despite the fact she hung out with scum. She just had never been given an aquedate chance.
Finally, the mountain of corpses stopped growing, and Rista revealed herself.
"Think that's all of them?" She asked, slightly out of breath. Samus shook her head.
"Those were just lower level troops. I'm sure he's saving the higher ranked ones," Samus explained.
"Who would trust Bill with that many soldiers?" Rista asked, wiping a bloody hand off on her pants. The green ooze had come from a pirate who had fallen on her by chance when Samus shot him down.
"The Space Pirate Legions think of them as expendable. Trust me, the upper echelons have about three times this many just on scout duty." ----
Bill watched from the cameras as they fought. The little girls had grown up into vicious brutes. Who would have thought? Suddenly, an action on another camera caught his eye. Bill leaned forward and gasped. His last remaining commanders and their soldiers were boarding one of the escape ships. He buzzed down to them.
"What are you doing?"
"Leaving. We have permission from the big boys to leave." One of the commanders said in Tongue.
"What about me?"
"You are a disgrace to our powers. Even Ridley had grown aware of your petty affairs, and he said he regretted letting you into the Space Pirates. He told us that the mutiny report you filed was obvivously wrong, and that a human accusing a Pirate of mutiny would never stand. He said we were going to let you die in the hands of those two."
"You can't do this to-" The screens on all of the monitors went blank, and his connection was cut. Bill howled out in rage. He would not even die with Piratian honors. This angered him, after all he gave up to join, after all he did...they just left him.
----
"They all left," Samus said, exploring another curve. Rista nodded. She paused at a door.
"Here, he's behind this one, if he's still here at all," She said.
"How do you know?"
"Look at the unique design. It's on all of Bill's bases in his main control room," Rista explained. "I recongized it from one of my previous exploits." Samus opened it forcefully and they both ran in, weapons raised. Bill stood there, unarmed. His legs were spread apart, arms behind his back. He smiled painfully at them.
"You'll never have the satisfaction of killing me." Bill growled. With a single, fluid motion, his right hand flew to his mouth and dropped. Within seconds, he crumbled to the floor. Samus kept her visor scanned on him, and she watched as his last life energy drained. He was dead before five minutes was up.
"What happened?"
"Suicide pill." Samus explained. Rista sighed.
"Well, at least he's dead, right?" Rista said, though her voice was filled with disapointment.
"Yeah, I guess so." She paused, silence settling once more. "What now?"
"You know what, I have no clue. My whole life has revolved around avenging my-our family, and well, now's it all over. I have no idea what's going to happen."
"You can stay with me, of course." Samus said.
"Yeah, but you basically live in your ship, and I hate that closet of a room you gave me," Rista said.
"Well, I do rent an apartment on Taras sometimes," Samus said. "In Wyles. It's an ok place, in the middle of everything. We could stay there together and work on missions together, though I suppose you'd have to be restricted to boring old research and junk since you really aren't equipped to go out with me."
"Actually, I like the sound of that." Rista stared Samus straight in the eye. "I suppose after years of being bloodthirsty, it would be a nice change." She smiled geniunely at her. "Come on, we better find a way out of here though. I'm starting to get sick from the smell."
"Oh and Rista," Samus stopped her.
"Yeah?"
"Perhaps we should keep in contact with Colleen, the last real connection to our parents." Samus suggested. Rista nodded. So what if she did not get the chance to kill Bill. At least she had her sister back, and while the future was uncertain, she was sure she was going to have a ton of fun with the cold, merciless bounty hunter that once sweet, innocent little Sammy.
Author's Note: Wow. When I first played Metroid, this idea popped into my head. I have spent so much time working on it, getting the details just right and now it is over. Rista Nevaria is one of my favorite creations. I have had so much fun with this fic, and I cannot wait to start the sequel, which will be out soon. I know the ending was kind of sappy, but I am satisfied with it. Thank you to all of my loyal and faithful reviewers. Please be dears and review one final time on this story.
