Star Vixen: Rebellion for Hire
Chapter 1: Ladies and Gentleman, We are Floating in Space
Much to how people believed getting stabbed in the back will make you cry and scream in pain, you instead take a deep breath with your lungs punctured, before shock takes your system and you end up fainting and bleeding out right in front of your husband at the dinner table.
Your husband was supposed to be the target.
"Ah flark, my bad," a vixen muttered, darting her eyes between the dead husky on the dining room table, filled with feasts from all over the system and beyond plus a dead body, and the intended target of the butter knife she threw to protect herself from the alive husky that figured out she was in the room.
The husky, the alive one at least, wore an officer's uniform, and judging by the medals he was esteemed by the Venomian Empire. Probably had plenty of training and combat experience, which is why he so effortlessly dodged the vixen's attack.
Though the same couldn't be said for his wife, dead in the chair. Can't exactly dodge real fast in a chair.
"Annabelle! No!" the officer screamed, looking back at his beloved and running to her side, ignoring the threat in the room. "Annabelle, please! Thou must conserve thy strength! For the child!"
The vixen, clad in a red leather jacket with military-look-alike black cargo pants and strangely shiny white boots tip-toed a bit closer to see the officer holding up Annabelle's head, trying to keep her from slumping over the table. "If y'all rush quick, you can git her to a hospital, I saw one while I was coming up 'ere and—"
Annabelle heaved and coughed up blood before staring blankly into space.
"Oh naw, she's dead."
The officer closed his eyes, fighting back tears as he held up his fingers to close his beloved's eyes. His body shook in grief and anger, before whipping his head back to look at the vixen with a snarl. "Thou hast brought a sorrow onto my ancestors!"
Without warning, the officer darted away from the table to the wall of swords sitting atop the fireplace. He quickly pulled one out of its shelf and tossed away the scabbard, unsheathing it as a rapier, glinting in the moonlight. "I will make thee pay for what thou hast done! En garde, assassin!" the officer yelled, pointing his sword at the vixen in a defensive stance, ready to retake his honor.
In all the commotion, the 'assassin' simply stood rooted to her spot with her hands raised slightly up to the air, watching everything unfold. For all accidentally stabbing someone in the back would entail, she was not expecting a trained officer to try and fight her with an antique weapon. "Listen," she began, still holding up her hands, "First, drop that whole knight speak ya got, you're a cop, not some dang ol' renaissance fool. Second, I ain't an assassin, I'mma Edgerunner. I got hired to grab something, not to kill people. That's mah fault," she pointed to the dead husky on the table, "but I'm just 'ere for a small memory drive. Blue one, with a silver tip. If y'all can tell me where that is, I can split some moneh towards the funeral, and git outta your hair. Whaddaya say?"
The officer began to shake his sword, anger now overtaking grief. "You... Dost thou dare to mock me? Dost thou dare to mock me even at my lowest?! All for this?!" he yelled, using his free hand to dip into his pocket to reveal the memory drive mentioned, an old-fashioned blue thumb drive that looked like it belonged in a tech museum rather than in a person. "If thou wish for this so badly, thou will have to kill me for it, assassin! And a Rotillado never dies in battle!"
Roti- what now? With no time to lose, she needed to quickly come up with a plan.
Right, so, let's think about things. I snuck in through the window of a large dining room within a huge castle out here in the forests, trying to avoid being spotted but I got distracted by all the ancient paintings and weaponry of an obviously rich and noble family with a kink for the medieval pinned on the walls, so I flarked things up and accidentally got discovered by the castle owner, while he was dining with his wife.
No biggie, other than how I accidentally threw a knife into the back of the wife. Juuuuuuust a slight mistake.
Let's just focus on the positives. That guy has the drive. Right in his hand. So I just have to take it from him, and then follow the original escape plan. I can still salvage this. You got this girl. Just gotta figure out how to get it from him.
He's got it in his hands. Pry it from him? Do I really need to kill a Venomian officer just for his little drive? He's got me on the ropes with a… sword.
He's trying to threaten me with a sword. Congrats, officer, you win the Darwin award for modern soldiers.
"Oh, that's where it is. Thanks," she mentioned, flicking her wrist down to her hip where her pistol sat holstered, and firing a shot from her hip right between the officer's eyes.
He didn't even hit the ground fast enough before the vulpine quickly angled her strange boots forward and activated them, rocketing her forward in a jet stream located behind the heels as she quickly closed the distance and grabbed the drive from his falling hand, twisting her body around the officer just as quick to avoid him falling on top of her. She would make a 'cold dead hands' joke, but that husky's paw was still warm. With the same flick of her wrist, she holstered back her pistol while taking a closer look at the drive, ignoring the loud TWOMP behind her. Blue memory drive, small enough to match the "portable" description on the target list, and with the supposed silver tip being the connector. Yeah, this was the target. And all it took was a slide through the dining room window and the murders of a strange high-ranking officer of the Venomian PeaceKeeper forces and his wife.
If only James could see you now.
The vixen shook her head to clear her thoughts. She needed to stick to the plan and follow her escape route. Before she could react, however, the entrance to the dining room table blew wide open. Artificial smoke quickly filled the room, and two simian PeaceKeepers donned in full Venomian armor rushed in with their rifles raised and sights aligned to their eyes. "Freeze! We are the PeaceKeepers! Come out with your hands, paws, or claws up, and lay down your ar– agh, KOFF!"
Coughing followed the PeaceKeepers in, one of them dropping their trigger arm to cover their mouths. "Damn it, Josh! You threw too much smoke into the room again!"
"Sorry! You know how I get anxious about doing any room breaches!" Josh replied, taking his eyes off his rifle to look at his comrade.
"We've talked about this before, you moron! Setting only on one unless otherwise told!" the comrade replied, before coughing again.
After waiting a minute, the smoke cleared from the room, and the PeaceKeepers gasped. Josh's comrade leaned into his shoulder, pressing a button on the side of his helmet, "Alert! Officer Ronti- Rotik-Rola- ah screw it, officer down! The perp is nowhere to be seen, lock down the castle until further notice!"
In the room lay the bodies of the officer and his wife, and a suspiciously person-sized hole in the glass pane overlooking the courtyard. "Search the courtyard and surrounding areas, the perp must have escaped outside!"
"So, let me get this straight. I asked you to fetch me a drive from his house, a simple smash and grab. And you ended up actually smashing in, killing the poor fool, and grabbing the drive in the middle of a PeaceKeeper sweep?"
"Hey, don't forget how I hadda trudge through that moat of skeletons and scut in order to hide out and get the flark outta town!" the vixen reprimanded, shaking the last bits of mud off her silver-plated boots. "I'm lucky I managed to comp these jet boots for a good price, these things are a life-saver. Speaking of prices, yah git the rest of my pay?"
Outside the castle grounds stood a forest of high trees, blocking off all but the brightest rays of the moon cutting inside the foliage. The darkness was nothing new for the vixen, but her client, a chimp who stood roughly one head below her and wearing nothing but dirty clothes and a long tattered poncho, insisted on having their rendezvous here, even when his eyes were not as sharp as the vixen. She was eager to get things done and over with, partially because she really needed a shower after trudging and flying through a castle moat full of things she hoped were dead long before, and partially because she could hear the low "vrrrrrrrrrrrm" of PeaceKeeper AutoDrones and patrol carriers in the distance behind her. They were still looking for her, and she was not wanting to get caught now.
"Yes, yes, your pay, just give me the drive!" the chimp demanded. He held out his hand, which looked strangely shiny and clean compared to the rest of the chimp's vagabond attire.
She hesitated for a moment, noticing the clean hand, before placing the thumb drive down on it. She cocked an anxious smile, a curious question in her mind, "So, what's exactly on that there thing anyway that's making ya pay me another fiddy thousand of a hundred thousand units?"
"An equalizer," the chimp said, holding it up to the scant few rays of moonlight filtering through the trees. "One that the Cornerian section of PeaceKeepers were hoping to keep for themselves."
The chimp turned around and walked towards a tree. He placed the thumb drive on a moonlit part of the tree, holding it in place between his thumb and his index finger. Seemingly pulling it out of nowhere, the chimp suddenly brandished a knife in his free hand, and in one fell swoop, he impaled the drive and embedded the knife through the tree.
"Whoa, whoa, what the scut?! I just grabbed that dang thing for ya and y'all already destroyin' it? Whaddya need to do that for?!" she complained, seeing three hours of research work and two probably-not-needed deaths go to waste in front of her. She raised her hands in protest, not noticing the shadows circling in.
"I'm afraid I had to. We couldn't risk any Cornerians having a single step above us. Internal Affairs can be a pain to deal with, but they know when to truly help us when necessary. As for you, Victoria McMahon," the chimp turned around, pointing a pistol that was kept secret from underneath his cloak, "Your contract with the PeaceKeepers is now null and void, due to your confession of murdering two innocents."
Several heavily armed and armored guards suddenly rushed from the darkness of the treeline, forming a close ring on Victoria. The sudden betrayal and arrest happened so fast that McMahon's instincts failed her, and her only reaction was to hold up her arms in surrender.
"What I'd tell ya, Josh? Knew we'd catch the perp tonight," a familiar voice filtered through one of the helmets.
"You're just saying that cuz you forgot the big op was tonight! We would have killed that Ronto-whatshisface afterward if we followed through the rest of it!" the supposed Josh replied through another filtered helmet. "At least now we can make his death look like a mental breakdown, including him stabbing his pregnant wife. That was something none of us were expecting."
"Flarking scutbag! No good jackhole motherflarker!" Victoria regained a bit of her sense back and released it in anger at the chimp that deceived her. "When I git out I'll flarking git you, ya hear me?!"
The chimp smiled back darkly at her. "Threatening an officer now? Your charges are climbing ever higher, miss McMahon. Now hold still."
One of the Peacekeepers walked forward towards the vixen, a strange cylindrical object in his hands. Before she could object to the tranquilizer, she already felt the needle inserted into her neck.
The sleep was almost instantaneous.
The first thing Victoria felt was an air of stillness. Her ears were ringing, but not in pain, the grogginess causing them to block all sound as her body adjusted back to the waking world. She clicked and licked her lips, feeling the dryness of her muzzle from breathing through her mouth. She blinked the crud out of her eyes and shook her head.
All she saw were gray, crumbling walls.
Dread began to creep up her spine as she took in her surroundings. Metal frame twin cots with a thin hard mattress on each frame. No light source except a barred window looking out into the night sky as moonlight trickled in. On her side, the vixen was now wearing an orange jumpsuit, her old gear nowhere to be found. And on the other side of the rock flooring and ceiling cracks of the room, three sets of eyes and an extra one looked at her in horror.
Her eyes still had to take a moment to adjust to the dark again, but once they did she saw more clearly who the eyes belonged to. They were surrounding a table on the far side of the room, holding up hands and limbs in various poses as if they were caught in a surprise photo.
No one dared to breathe. She looked back at them, daring them to even speak, and the silence was deafening to her ears.
She took the initiative and spoke first, "Er… howdy?"
The eyes blinked back at her before one of them shifted position and moved closer in the moonlight. In her adjusting vision, she could see a lupine form, wearing a garish combo of all orange shirt and pants, move closer to her in a slow manner, crouching his knees as if ready to spring at a moment's notice.
The lupine got down on one knee in the middle of the room facing her and finally spoke, "Uh, hey there. Looks like you're not dead."
The vixen had to take a moment to process the bizarre statement. "Yeah? I mean, it don't feel like I'm dead. This gotta be heaven or hell or some flarked-up purgatory I'm stuck at?"
"Flark? What is this flark she speaks of?"
"The girl must be new to the system if the girl did not immediately recognize where the girl is."
"Grr."
The wolf scoffed, ignoring his group behind him. "Even worse. You're stuck at the Crewcyble."
The vixen could feel her heart stop. The Crewcyble wasn't just a prison, it was THE prison. An asteroid station that constantly battled the elements in Mateo, it was a punishment just to even exist on-site, much less be forced to work on mining the asteroid rich with wanted metals of the Venomian Empire.
It was also a stone's throw away from home.
She bolted from her bed, scaring the wolf to dodge back, and she ran up to the window to realize it wasn't moonlight coming through the window. It was Lylat, her blue light stretching far and wide as the stellar jewel of the Venomians, the heart of the empire beaming right back at her.
"No no no no NO! Why am I back 'ere again!?" she exclaimed, turning away from the window and holding her head in her hands, closing her eyes in wanting not to see any more of the truth.
"Again? You got out of the Crewcyble before?" the wolf asked from his position next to the bed.
"No, the Lylat System!" the vixen responded, keeping her head down. "I'm done with this stupid Lylat and this stupid Corneria and this stupid Venomian Empire! I've already lost enough to them!"
The vixen began walking back, sitting down on her cot and still holding her head as she tried to mentally process her situation. As she felt herself spiraling out of control with memories flooding back, a pair of hands gripped her wrists. She did not flinch, instead looking up to see the wolf had stopped being scared and crouched down in front of her, looking at her with one good eye and a now-visible eye patch covering his other eye.
"Hey," the wolf began, keeping his voice low and oddly soothing to the vixen. "We've all lost something to the Venomians, you're not alone here on that. What's your name?"
It was the vixen's turn to scoff, "Can't tell y'all that off the top of mah head. I've been running so long with fake names they all git mixed up in mah head sometimes. Think the last one I was using was Victoria McMahon or something like that."
"That explains the emergency toss in here," another voice behind the wolf piped up. Both the wolf and the vixen looked to see the voice belonging to a chameleon, clad in a form-fitting purple bodysuit underneath his orange jumpsuit with what the vixen would describe as thinly lined circuitry interlaced all around the bodysuit. "The girl probably tripped something with the identifiers in processing. Instead of going to the women's ward the PKs quickly dropped the girl here and threatened to maim and hang the whole group if any in this group even dared to hurt the girl."
"Preposterous to even think that! My honor as a knight would be tarnished if I dared to lay a hand on an innocent and beautiful lady!" another voice exclaimed. The group looked to see a darker, almost brownish-hued wolf dressed in last millennium clothing of a green tunic and grey trousers, wearing old-school medieval leather boots to complete his 'out of the wrong time' look. "I believed they were instead playing a dark practical joke on us by leaving a dead body in our prison cell!"
"Grrrr," a beastly rumble replied to the knight on his right. The vixen widened her eyes at seeing a full-blown four-legged Saurian standing at chest height. Most of their body was dandy brown, but the top along his back and on their frilled head was seemingly painted purple. His frilled head was also eye-catching, with two large horns protruding forward with a smaller and hooked horn covering their nose, and at the base of the larger horns sat inlaid gold rings seemingly stuck in the very scales of the beast. A strange green collar covered its neck, presumably as a way to control the saurian or hook some apparatus to it.
"Tricky says the knight is an idiot," the chameleon translated.
"What? The monster wishes to fight again!?" the knight replied angrily.
The beast named Tricky turned to his compatriot in what the vixen could describe as annoyed indifference and replied with an eloquent rebuttal, "Grrr grrr grrr."
"Tricky says this group all saw the girl snore, so the girl couldn't be dead. Tricky also says to try Tricky again, moron," the chameleon translated in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Just because you won the last seven times does not mean I will one day best you, you demonic dinosaur!" the knight boasted, holding up a raised fist to the aforementioned dinosaur.
The saurian rolled his eyes and directed his attention to the vixen. "Grrr grr," he spoke to her.
"Tricky says Tricky's name is King Tricky, of the Earthwalkers tribe of Sauria. Tricky and Tricky's people ruled in peace until the Venomians came to harvest and colonize Tricky's planet, killing all of Tricky's people but Tricky," the chameleon explained, pointing at the Saurian with his thumb before switching it with his index pointed at himself. "As for Leon, Leon is a nobody, and the girl and Leon are keeping it that way."
"Grrr!" Tricky objectified.
"What? Leon does not know the girl, and Leon told you there's a big reason why the girl got tossed in here with this group instead of the women's ward! The girl is bad news and Leon doesn't need to have anything connecting Leon with the girl!" the chameleon argued with Tricky.
"Well ain't you all got some flarked up issues…" the vixen muttered, crossing her arms as she studied the group.
"Again with this flark! What in the goddess's name are you speaking of, vixen?!" the knight demanded, pointing a finger at her.
The vixen furrowed her brow at the knight's attitude. "Oi, flark off, it's just how I talk. I don't like cursing so I make my own," she muttered.
She quickly became aware of the confused stares in her direction. The chameleon cocked his head to the side before speaking, "This girl has some 'flarking' issues."
She raised her middle finger at the chameleon. "How's this for some issues?"
The chameleon, for his part, raised a finger right back at her. "At least that one's universal," he muttered with pursed lips.
The knight then raised both of his fists, struggling to curl his fingers back until he had his own middle fingers up, though he twisted his hands back and forth in confusion. "What? What does this mean?" he asked, showing off his fingers to everyone in the room, including the other wolf and Tricky, both looking at him with annoyed confusion.
"What, the knight has never flipped a bird before?" the chameleon asked, putting down his hand.
"Why would you flip a bird? They like to stay on their legs, right?" the knight asked back.
Everyone in the room stared at him.
"Okay, look," the silver wolf shook his head, getting everyone's attention back to him as he pointed to the various members of the group. "That's Leon, he used to work with the PKs but then had a bad day and got tossed in here with the rest of us. Swears he hates them now and has a weird way of talking, but otherwise, I need him for the plan," he explained, pointing a finger at the chameleon. Then he pointed his thumb at the other wolf, "The other crazy dude is called Sabre, he's an old-school warrior knight from out of the system who swore vengeance against his enemies and yada yada."
"Ugh, second knight in a short time. Haven't any of y'all been told don't bring a knife to a gunfight?" Vixy groaned out in annoyance.
"I'll have you know my sword is a very formidable weapon even in this uncivilized day and age of guns and blasters!" Sabre yelled back. "I took down many PeaceKeepers with it before I was captured!"
"Grr."
"Tricky says the knight was captured at gunpoint and probably thinks the knight cried when the PeaceKeepers took the knight's toy away," Leon translated.
"I don't see how being captured at gun-point means anything," Sabre answered back. "Once we break out of this prison I'm going to retrieve my sword in the personals lockup so I can claim victory over you, you mongrel lizard!"
"Grr."
"Tricky says try it."
"I WILL TRY IT! I WILL TRY YOU! I WILL TRY YOU SO HARD!"
"Anyways!" Wolf yelled out, trying to bring the conversation back around, before changing to a more friendly tone. "I'm Wolf, and I'm pleased to meet you. If you're looking to escape, we were just going over the final details of my plan."
Wolf held out a hand for the vixen to shake, and she raised her hand to meet. "That a nickname or y'all just saying the obvious bout yaself?" she asked.
"No, like, my name is literally Wolf. Also, where are you from? That's a strong accent, especially in the Lylat."
"I'm from Papetoon, and.. snrrk, I'm sorry…" the vixen replied, failing to hide her rising chuckle at the thought. "You're… a wolf… named Wolf?" Despite her predicament, the ridiculousness of it all was starting to get to the vixen, with a slight dry chuckle escaping her. Though they only just met, this little ragtag group of prison inmates was starting to grow on her.
"Yeah yeah, laugh it up, my mother wasn't the brightest this side of the galaxy. Don't know about my father, but I got all my smarts from my mentor back in the old Cornerian Academy. If he wasn't teaching me I was babysitting his kit at his house. He named his vulpine son Fox if you could believe it!"
The vixen stopped chuckling and widened her eyes.
"He went missing right before the Great War, and I haven't seen his kit anywhere since. Shame, had a nice house and a pretty wife and everything. If it weren't for him I'd probably end up dead in my first prison instead of planning out my escape from this one," Wolf continued, looking out the window as if contemplating the nature of leaving the Crewcyble. "Anyways, that's my life story. What about yours? What'd the Venomians take from you?"
The vixen looked down, now in the opposite seat of her cellmates: terrified of what they would do to her if she told the truth. But, despite her internal and rational objections… O'Donnell deserved to know.
"I… I lost mah husband and son. Right before Andross became Emperor. I saw them murdered in front of me. And all because…"
Wolf deserved to know what happened. But not the why. Not yet.
"All because of that, mah life was never the same. I was just a scientist who knew too much, so I had to run…" The vixen hesitated, before looking back up at Wolf, who stared at her in confused expectancy.
She stared at him, her greying hair flowing down one of her eyes, as an old memory of her watching her son play with Wolf came to her mind. "My name is Vixy Reinard. And I saw Andross kill my James and Fox."
Wolf's eye widened.