0655:I hate waiting. Especially, when waiting in an ancient helicopter with LOUD ASS BLADES! The metal hull amplified the stupidly loud roar of the rotor with determined vengeance. I couldn't even hear myself think about how much I loathed it.

In a desperate attempt to keep sanity, I checked my Athleros R-675 for possible defects about 653 times, and now I'm simply content on bashing my head against the wall until I pass out. The R-675 is a very well made gun; it's fully automatic (which has both JHP and AP ammo), an X-tel thermal scope, and has been lightened to about 5 pounds... mag and all. Did I mention that the Cornerian equivalent FJ-60a weighs 16 pounds? No? Well it does! My body armor, on the other hand, was much more cumbersome. It weighed in at whopping 30 pounds, but what it lacked in lightness, it made up for in sheer badassness. It was a Goch manufactured BPV complete with kevlar, knife plates, and some, "special modifications". I also wearing a Cornerian jumpsuit, worn simply to spawn confusion in the ranks of the mentally retarded. (READ: Cornerian Military) I also carried other standard crap: a Jackson hand-made combat knife, six Mark-4 frag grenades, a pair of Jenson 440 magnifiers, and enough ammo to take out half the population of Zoness. Where did I get all this gear? Why the saggy vagina, of course.

She, being the sandy crotch she was, didn't want to help me for "administrative" reasons.

"Wolf, I still don't know why the hell you need any of this. THE WAR IS OVER, you should be getting off the system, not chasing after some toy!" she said in a lecturing tone.

Well, I was definitely in no mood for this shit. She sat staring at me, trying to look sturdy among her innumerable folds of flab. She was weird though; she was a fox, but she had blue fur... fuck if I know. I'm not talking about some light blue either, I mean OCEAN blue. I picked her up out of an escape pod on the Katinan sea about 7 years back. Wow, seven years ago. That was back when I was in the KIFF (Katinan Interplanetary Fighter Force). What the hell was I thinking; getting into a underpaid, under appreciated, piss hole of job like that, I must have been insane. Anyways, all I could gather from this fox's past was that she lived on some god awful remote planet, and that she, "doesn't like to talk about it." What a bitch. Sadly, I still needed equipment, and I'll be damned if I was going to let this puddle of blue blubber stand between me and what I want.

"All right, Ruby(well that's an oxymoron), when I picked you up out of that pod, you were a big shivering, jaded husk of flesh," she narrowed her eyes which told me she remembered every last painful second of it. "I could have just dumped you on the beach and let you fend for yourself, like I was supposed to, but..."

She didn't even bother to let me finish, "Alright, alright, I'll get you whatever you want. But I'm DONE after this, I'm tired of supporting your stupid obsessions," She said with a look of 'I'll do it despite I fucking hate it... and you.' She was only about 53, but she looked 73. The skin around her chin sagged about a half an inch off her face, the bags around her eyes drifted downwards to ground, and it seemed that only a paranormal force could possibly be keeping them from sliding completely off her eyeballs. It suited her.

"That's a good Ruby," I smirked

Composure stiffening, she looked me dead in the face, "Okay, now get the hell out," There's the old, crotchety woman I know and love.

---

"Wolf! Get your ass moving! We're almost there!" a voice shouted from the cockpit. I looked up at Leon's face glaring at me from a small sliding door. Next to him was our pilot. Now this was the kind of man that would make me proud. He wore a cheap, alcohol stained wife-beater and jeans which were so frayed it resembled a fur coat which had been in a short scuffle with a lawn mower. He also wore a standard flight helmet with the words, "Fuck Everybody" etched on the back of it. ...A man after my own heart. Leon looked over to him,

"I want to be there by 0703 exactly! Got that!" Our pilot, masked by his superbly engraved helmet, only nodded. Well, we could only hitch a ride in this neanderthalic contraption via a well placed bribe, since there wasn't an man alive who would actually give us a chopper. Fine by me, means I didn't have to fly this damn thing home.

Leon got up from his seat and tossed his gun at me, which smacked me dead in the face.

"Goddamn it!" I yelled... meanwhile, the all too familiar taste of blood running down the back of my throat began to permeate my taste buds, "What the hell, Leon?"

"I'm going to go covert, that will just make me stand out," He replied as I got pelted with another piece of equipment. I knew what that meant.

"Oh no you fucking don't, Leon, I'm not carrying all of your shit again!" Leon continued tossing shit at me.

"I said no." He then busied himself with adjusting his parachute.

"So you're making me carry all this crap?" Leon looked over at me, "Il gve yu...," and the remnants of his sentence were garbled up by the reverberated noise of the helaloudcopter decelerating. I simply stared at him with a, "what-the-fuck-did-you-just-say," face.

"We can't get any closer without coming up on their radar," The pilot yelled from the cockpit. Leon wasted no time in removing himself from our "aircraft."

I screamed at his falling figure out the door, "I better get a drink from this, bitch!"

---

0705

We veered north to skirt their radar range and approached my jump point. My gelatinated legs struggled to lift my top heavy ass off the metal hull of the chopper. After a few moments, I waddled over to the exit like a recently buttfucked duck and tried my best to "dive" out of the chopper. I looked a overweight sports fan diving for a airborne cheetoh.

Jumping out of chopper wasn't too bad. I managed to put myself in a decent looking diving position and, more importantly, my parachute didn't fail. It wasn't until I began my descent that the shit hit the fan. Despite numerous assurances from Leon, there was a nasty crosswind which blew me far off course. How far? Let's say far enough to land inside. The fucking. Base. On top of that, all of this goddamn extra weight made steering my chute next to impossible. I frantically hauled on my left steering rudder as I watched a giant radio tower extending from the trees... coming closer and closer until I could see the rusted screws which held the damn thing together. Needless to say, the following event was not very fun.

The first part of my body to collide with the tower was, unfortunately, my face. Preceding the pain in my face was one I would like to call "reverberating balls". Once my skull impacted a large support column, the shock wave traveled through my body until it reached my balls. Once affected by the shock, both my balls swung in opposite directions, then swung back, using their kinetic energy to smash into each other.

The only good that came out of that was the pain in my balls made me forget how much my face hurt.

I was vaguely aware of my rest of my drop due to the pain. As a matter of fact, the only way I knew that I hit the ground was the jarring blow that sent my head to the dirt. Blood pouring out of my abused nose, I attempted to gauge where I was. It seemed, I landed in a small patch of cleared land. Something darted to and fro in front of my eyes, but I couldn't see what it was with my blurred vision. I rubbed my eyes, then looked again. The orange demon of my nightmares had appeared again. The bug from hell had returned again and was as pissed as ever. I tried to keep my face from becoming subject to its long, hypodermic needle of doom, but I was pinned by an unknown force. I hadn't got rid of my damn parachute, which was using wind power to drag my poor carcass even closer to its deadly appendage.

Quickly, I tried to reach my arm around my pile of high velocity projectile producing dischargers, but all that crap was severely decreasing my flexibility. And what I mean by decreasing my flexibility, was I couldn't fucking bend my arm in any direction other than straight in front of me. Unable to remove my parachute from the back, I grabbed the straps from the front and began to tear them off. By then the demonic decapod had already made its move. Luckily for me, el diablo did not have the brain power to know my head was the optimum region for making me a very ugly Wolf. Unluckily for me, it seemed to be smart enough to sting me in the only place on my shoulder that didn't have protection, the base of my neck.

The pain enraged me enough to be able to completely tear off my parachute. Now, being able devote my entire attention to the little orange bastard, I stood up to my full height, now towering over my tormentor. Perturbed by my new found height, the bug emitted a small shrill and began to skitter away on its ten microscopic legs.

"Oh no, you're not getting away." I said with a smirk while clutching my neck. Despite the rapid movement of its legs, it could summon the alacrity to overcome my thundering footsteps. Soon realizing that it could not outpace me, it attempted to bank right and find refuge beneath a near-by bush. Not on my fucking watch. I stomped my right foot its path. It tried to do a 180 but that mode of escape was soon blocked off by my left foot.

"No where to run now, my little orange friend." I whispered ever so quietly. I had never seen fear in an insect's eyes until that day. With a sound crunch, remnants of the bug's entrails spewed out in all directions under the sole of my steel-toed boot. While the orange and green resin begin to soak into the ground beneath it, a few of the remaining legs and antennae still quivered, futilely attempting to save the life which was quickly torn away from them. My life, on the other hand, is now much sweeter.

After gloating over my kill, I tried to gauge where the hell I was in this damn place. It seemed that all of the buildings headed in an eastward direction, meaning, I had landed near the very edge of the base. The comm tower, which I so stealthily smashed into, laid about 75 yards in front of me while all sorts of hangers and other unidentifiable buildings extended as far as I could see. Now, the original plan was that I would land at least a 1000 yards east of the perimeter of the base, then sneak in between patrols and enter the main research building to the northeast. Presumably, where are Wolfens are most likely to be kept. I am now west of the base. Shit.

Since this was already goatfucked anyway, I decided just to throw all of Leon's crap unceremoniously into a giant pile on the ground. I might end up having to fight all the way through this god forsaken place. Like hell I was going to do it with all this shit in tow. After throughly undressing, I darted over to the edge of the comm tower and peered around the corner to find...nothing. Nadda. Zip. The whole placed was completely deserted, the only sound was that of the wind winding through the passages of sheet metal and stucco storage shacks. In the distance, some very feint silhouettes began to appear in the sky. First one, then two, then a whole shit load. They were parachutes, all descending in a great big cluster down to an unseen point beyond the horizon. Hey! Leon did his homework.