Disclaimer: I don't own RvB.
Episode 49: Another Round of Exposition?
Alpha stared at the sight before him. "Okay... what the heck is going on here? I thought you left to beat the stuffing out of my idiot brother, not surf the web!" he said, seeing Tex and Epsilon standing beside the computer with Rick.
"Hey, she's not pounding me into the ground, I'm not filling her with lead, we're both getting dirt on Freelancer... don't rock the boat, okay?" the red said.
"I think I like this one," Tex said, nodding toward Rick.
"Why thank you. I make an effort to be the most likable member of our team," the man said. If he could have, Alpha would have rolled his eyes. "Hey Al, you might want to take a look at some of this. We've found some pretty cool stuff on Phyllis' hard-drive," Rick added. Quirking a digital eyebrow at the nick-name, the A.I. moved closer to see what the tech was all excited about.
"Psych profiles?" Alpha asked.
"Washington used to wet the bed!" Rick sang with far too much glee.
"What's it got on Oregon?" Alpha asked, seeing where this could be fun.
"Let's see, Agent Oregon... decorated medic, placed her team above herself, never left a man behind... traumatized Agent Wyoming?"
"Hey, I think I remember that!" Alpha said. "Didn't he act all scared around her when she put on her Freelancer armor?"
"Yeah. Says here she... oh," Rick said, backing away.
"What? What did she do?!" Alpha asked, taking a look for himself. "Oh."
"Yeah. Guess it's pretty clear why she was an Agent and not just one of the on-call doctors, huh?" Rick asked. Alpha thought he sounded a little green. He shook his head and looked up Agent Florida.
"What?! Aw man, Captain Flowers was a Freelancer! GAH! I should have just let Dex shoot him," the A.I. ranted, staring at the psych eval for one Butch Flowers AKA Agent Florida. Rick shook his head.
"Marley already told you that," Rick said.
"Yeah, but no-one told us he had a major crush on her!"
"Dude... that should have been, like, blindingly obvious," Rick drawled. "Hey, since you're here and not a total wimp like Epps..."
"HEY!"
"Think you could coax Phyllis into giving us the Director's information?" Rick finished, completely ignoring how Epsilon protested being called a wimp. Alpha sighed.
"I don't want to know," he said, then turned to Epsilon. "Just being around Epsilon is giving me a headache from all the loose information he's got swirling around him. I keep wanting to call Tex 'Allison' and 'my wife.' It's kind of distracting." Rick sighed.
"Right. I'm just gonna... go... run inventory or something. We're going to need more ammo if nothing else," he said before running off.
"HEY! DON'T LEAVE ME WITH HIM!" Alpha yelled as he ran after the red.
/*/
Rick smirked at the pounding of Al's boots on the metal flooring. "Couldn't stand it, huh?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"Shut up," Al growled. "Know where to find the ammo in this place?"
"Well~," Rick drawled, feeling a bit playful. "I would assume that it's in a crate that hasn't blown up yet."
"Oh, ha ha, very funny," Al drawled back.
"Aw come on~! That was one of my better ones!" Rick mock-whined.
"I would hate to hear your bad ones," Al remarked dryily. "Now come on, let's find that ammo before the Freelancers find us or worse, Tex decides beating up Epps isn't as much fun as she was hoping for."
"Oh hey, you used my nick-name," Rick noted as he pried open a crate. "And~... jackpot!" The thing was full of...
"Dude... those are magnum rounds. Hardly anyone uses those," Al pointed out. Rick scoffed and pulled out... "And where do you guys keep getting this stuff?! I know you didn't have that spray paint before."
"Freelancers got Armor Enhancement, Reds got Hammer Space. It all works out," Rick explained, speaking as though to a child. Al gave him a bland look.
"You have issues."
"We all do man. It's just a matter of utilizing, repressing, and masking them that allows us to appear half-way normal," Rick answered, painting his mark on the magnum ammo case with his maroon spray paint.
/*/
"I'm leaving," Tex said.
"Good! And take Epps with you. Guy needs some sense beat into him before he meets the Phantoms," Dex answered. Everyone swiveled around to stare at him. "What? Marley wants him for her personal A.I. and she's proven she can make dummies of A.I. in the past. Why couldn't she make a Dummy!Epsilon and turn him in along with all the info we swiped off the computers at Command?"
"Plot Hole Alert," Eagle droned. "I sense a Plot Hole!"
"Shut up, Eagle. No-one cares about a little thing like Plot!" Epsilon barked.
"Please, take him with you," Dex pleaded, hands in front of his face. Of course, his lackluster tone made it more amusing than persuasive but whatever.
"Later," Tex said, dragging Epsilon out of the warehouse and toward... something. Was there a frozen base involved? Empty files full of nothing? Snowflakes on blacktop? Something poetic like that.
"So... why did you call them 'Phantoms' when they were clearly working as Freelancers?" Rick asked. Dex shrugged.
"I dunno, Marley just always talked like she knew pretty much everything so it was just a little weird that she'd turn on us like that. Besides, after that one skirmish at Blood Gulch, when have they attacked us?"
"We threw them off our trail, that's all," Red said. Dex shook his head.
"It doesn't fit! Marley gave us this armor. I may not be an expert, but I'm fairly sure she can track it. She knows stuff, full stop. How could she not know where we are from the Visions alone? On top of that... it's freaking Marley! She wouldn't want to kill us! Washington, on the other hand, needs some convincing that the Freelancer way isn't all it's cracked up to be. And Lock and Clear are new as well. Come on, it was a set up!" he argued.
"Fine. Maybe it was. But we're here, we have access to the Freelancer network, ammo, and let us not forget... armor enhancements. If they stored any back ups here that is," Rick said, throwing up his hands in surrender.
"Fine. Rick, you and I will look for those enhancements. Red, Eagle, you two go look for ammo. Doc, see if any of the medical supplies can be salvaged. Tucker, Al, you'll be babysitting Caboose," Dex said.
"Hey! Who made you leader?!" Red asked.
"Well, we're of the same rank. I guess I can't really give you orders. So... please go with Eagle to find ammo?" Dex answered.
"Fine. Not like I have anything better to do," Red grumbled. Eagle nodded and walked off, presumably in search of ammo.
/*/
Turned out, there were back up armor enhancements. "Okay, I don't trust Gary to tell me the truth about what these do, so ask Larry to analyzes these things," Dex said, staring at them.
"The red one is Speed, the Blue one is a localized EMP, and the yellow one is a healing unit," Larry said.
"Why's the yellow one healing? Why not green? Or red?" Dex asked.
"Uncertain," Larry answered.
"Can you ran any of them?" Rick asked.
"Uncertain."
"Well that's helpful. Hey Rick, if you could have a superpower, what would it be? Speed, EMP, or Healing?" Dex asked. Rick shook his head and picked up the EMP unit.
"This wouldn't effect you, right Larry?"
"Uncertain."
"Hey, is the sky blue?"
"Uncertain."
"What about... is my armor orange?" Dex asked.
"Yes. You are Orange," Larry answered.
"Okay. Just checking that you didn't get stuck," the red said. Rick rolled his eyes again an put down the EMP unit, not wanting to risk it.
"Let's try the Speed Unit," he said. Dex almost chuckled but hooked the unit up anyway. "Alright, Larry. Let's try this," Rick said.
"Accessing Speed Unit. Ready for use. One foot in front of the other, Agent Maroon," Larry answered.
"It must be some sort of rule that all Churches being at least mildly patronizing," Rick grumbled but took off all the same. "WHOOOO!" he shouted, vanishing in a blur of speed. Dex could only smirk as he listened to Rick's feet pound the metal flooring. "THIS IS AWESOME!"
"Oh yeah, he's keeping that," Dex remarked, half to himself and half to Gary.
"You really think that's wise?" Gary asked.
"You? Asking me about wisdom? I think the world just tilted on its axis."
"I am merely attempting to... heal," Gary said, some hint of emotion in his electronic monotone. Dex blinked before a slow smirk spread across his face.
"Heal, huh? Hum... We've got time. Want to take a trip inside my head? Meet my Aspects of Personality?" he asked, only halfway joking.
"Are you sure we have enough time for that?" Gary asked. Dex chuckled and strolled over to where Red and Eagle were talking.
"As long as I let someone know I'm going to be spaced out, I see no problem," the weapon master declared. "Oi! Red! Gary wants to, as he put it, 'heal,' so I'm going to be a little spaced out for a while. Let me know if I miss something good while I'm gone would you?"
"You sure it's a good idea to let Gary loose in yer head?" Red asked. Eagle snorted.
"For whom?" he asked. Red paused.
"Ya got a point there, Eagle. On one hand, Gary could mess up Dex's brain while on the other, Dex's brain could mess up Gary's code. Ah fudge it, go ahead! I'm curious," the gruff man said, waving a hand at the other Sargent. Dex grinned and sat down, resting his back against a random container and relaxing. 'We're good, Gary. Go learn what you need to,' he told the A.I. living in his armor and at least attempting to open his mind.
/*/
While Gary was taking a trip through the strange place that was Dex's subconscious, Rick was running around like a chipmunk on speed (Doc twitched as Chi muttered something about a reference sense tingling), and the other two reds were sorting through the assorted ammo in the facility, Tucker and Al decided that Tucker would entertain Caboose while the team A.I. went digging around in the computer again. Because everyone knew A.I. were automatically good with machines. Anyway, Al went looking through the records and came across something that, under different circumstances, would have been shocking. "Huh. Turns out the Reds and Blue were only ever practice for the Freelancers and everything we went through were prefabricated scenarios," Al broadcast to the whole facility. "And they were staffed by... low level operatives based on poor field performance and low test scores."
"I hate standardized tests!" Rick bellowed, skidding to a halt in the control room. "Time limits and stupid number two pencils and those creepy proctors, breathing down your neck like disapproving marine nannies!" If he could have, Al would have blinked at the man.
"Disapproving marine nannies? What kind of messed up nannies did you have as a child?" he asked. Rick gave him a dour look.
"You do not want to know," he declared. Al took that at face value and turned back just as Red walked over.
"So you mean everything we went through, all of it... was just practice for those gosh-darn Freelancers!?" he bellowed. "Even that thing with the alien and the pregnant guy?!"
"Yeah... male pregnancy is Simulation... Three," Al answered. Red sighed and shook his head.
"I knew we weren't really military, Marley made sure of that, but to have it spelled out by their own records, to know that all of the misfortune that befell us, all of us, was just some sort of sick practice run... I'm done," the Sargent ranted, shaking his head and walking out. Rick and Al shared a look before heading after Red.
"Ah, a little more to the left," they heard Caboose direct. A moment later a makeshift fort came into view and Al was treated to the sight of Rick preforming a textbook face fault.
"Oh, so this is the level of absurdity that gets you? Not the pulling-things-from-thin-air... thing?" Al asked.
"Not even that phenomenon can compare to this. This... is like pulling a pillow fort out of thin air rather than a pen or a can of spray paint," Rick answered. "This... is insane and I can only bow before the madness." Al shook his head at the red.
"I will never understand how you people work," he remarked as Rick picked himself up.
"Says the A.I. who went for a stroll through Marley's subconscious," he quipped.
"Touche," Al acknowledged.
"If it's going to be freaking acknowledged that my entire military career was nothing but a sham and that I was only ever the leader of junk, then I'll have a fort made of junk! Fitting, right?" Red bellowed.
"Dex is going to be so sad he missed this," Rick remarked lowly.
"Oh don't worry. I'm recording," Al told him.
"Ah, good thinking. Alright, here I go," Rick said, then cleared his throat and addressed Red directly. "That is an accurate description."
"I was being rhetorical," Red shot back.
"And I was being blunt," Rick said, crossing his arms. "Though, I suppose you might be on to something. The Blues will surely..."
"The Blues? Don't you get it? There's no point to it all!" Red bellowed down at his teammate.
"Slow on the uptake much?" Eagle asked, drawing their attention briefly to the somehow still hanging container he'd decided to lounge on.
"He was the one deepest in De Nile," Rick drawled, shaking his head.
"I wasn't in denial! I was holding out hope that there was a hidden point to it all! And now... I wish I hadn't found out what it was. Practice. Living training tools. I feel violated. Disgusted!" Red ranted, shaking a fist at the ceiling in righteous indignation.
"Huh. I think he may have finally lost it," Al remarked, calmly watching the Red Agent undergo what could be called an existential crisis. Or was this a mental breakdown? It was kind of hard to tell with Red. He's got one of those helmets. And voices. And tempers. He... he's just one of those guys, ya know? Okay, back on topic.
"No! Okay, maybe. But there's still a chance he's just being dramatic over Marley being proven right," Rick said, wanting to defend the man he'd answered to for so long but knowing that Al had a point. "Come on, Sir, it's not as bad as you're making it out to be. We knew about this!"
"Don't call me that!" Red snapped, glaring at Rick. The tech quirked an eyebrow at the response.
"Okay, I'll call you Red. Like I usually do. In fact, you refusing to be called 'sir' is actually helpful to me," he said. "Now, can you get down here? It's annoying having to keep looking up at you and yelling."
"Yeah, okay," Red said, hopping down. Rick turned back to Al.
"You got all that, right?" he asked. Al nodded.
"Oh yeah. Every minute," he answered, amused.
"Ya.. wha... 'got all that?'" Red asked.
"Oh, I recorded the whole conversation," Al answered.
"We thought Dex would get a kick out of it," Rick said.
"Yeah... it wasn't as funny as we thought it would be, though," Al added.
"Too dull," Eagle remarked.
"You are all terrible," Red growled. The other three shared a look before turning back to Red.
"You only just figured that out?" they asked together. Red growled at them and they gave him unrepentant grins.
/*/
Meanwhile, Tex and Epsilon had arrived at the Ice Base. And Tex had summarily wiped out all the people on-site. "Wow, you took all those guys out at once? Was that really necessary?" Epsilon asked, eying the bloody forms laying on the ground, dying the snow red. Tex shrugged, indifferent.
"Meh, they'll live," she said. Epsilon gave her his best 'really?' look.
"No. They won't," he pointed out. A quite scan and Tex found that, yes, she had killed them rather than simply knocking them out or incapacitating them.
"Oh, yeah, I see your point," she admitted, clearly unfazed by the multiple homicides she just completed. "Come on, let's get inside," Tex said, already heading inside. Epsilon went to follow her but stopped as some sort of vision appeared before his eyes. Several scenes of Tex running into a tunnel or base flashed through his mind and pulled him up short.
"What? Wait a minute... Hey, Tex! Hang on a minute!" he called out, jogging to catch up with his 'girlfriend.'
"What's wrong?" Tex asked, turning to face the echo of her greatest failure. Epsilon faltered, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck in that nervous habit he had. Tex mentally grit her teeth as Allison's memories tried to take purchase in her code. Allison had regarded those kinds of habits with fond exasperation. She'd thought it was adorable how the brash and arrogant Dr. Leonard Church would turn into such a shy little schoolboy around her. Epsilon started to worry the snow with his toe and Tex had to turn off her optics lest Allison's memories drive her to do something stupid. Like hug him. That little quirk had been one of the late Mrs. Church's favorites.
"Um... I... I don't know if it's something, ya know, dangerous but uh... I... kinda... had a... well. I kinda just had a psychic vision. About you. A-and you were running into places a lot like this one and..." Epsilon rambled. Tex sighed.
"It's not dangerous, Church. It just means you're remembering," she said, turning back around and headed for the base again. "You've been here before," she said as they entered the now-empty base. Their footsteps echoed eerily in the large structure and Epsilon felt a shiver go down his spine. "We all were," Tex went on, her voice gaining a haunting quality as it bounced off the walls. "This is where they moved Alpha. After a few of us Freelancers went rouge, we compared notes and pieced together what they were doing to him," she explained, looking around the facility with a detached kind of curiosity. Epsilon stuck close, unsettled. "I convinced the others to come back; break the Alpha out. The Project moved him here to try to protect him, so that they could keep experimenting on him."
"Whoa wait, you were in charge of the break in?" Epsilon asked hazy memories of said break in coming back to him. Tex nodded some semblance of sorrow curling in her code.
"I couldn't just let them destroy him," she said, glancing back at Epsilon. "They were torturing him," she explained. "The Director even started to use some of the other A.I. against him. Think about that: turning his own fragments against him? It's sick. Gamma and Omega would fabricate scenarios where he was designed to fail. And they made it seem like his failures were hurting all of the people he cared about, and there was nothing he could do about it. It drove him mad. Broke him down even more." Epsilon followed her in silence for a few steps, the story of the Alpha serving to make the whole place even creepier.
"But... you came back. You saved him," he said, still not fully understanding the tragedy that surrounded the installation's history.
"No, I didn't. It was too late," Tex said with a tone of melancholy. "By the time I got to him, he was already long gone. I don't even think he recognized me. I failed. Only in my case, it really was my fault." They'd reemerged from the base now and Epsilon felt it was quite fitting, in a symbolic way, that a snowstorm was just beginning to pick up as they stepped out onto the frozen wasteland of ice and snow.
/*/
It was rather unnerving to sit next to someone who was constantly wincing while giggling. "Okay, what's going on?" Flowdie asked Marley.
"Oh, nothing much. Just that I'm pretty sure the boys just got pounded by Tex," she answered. The others shared confused looks.
"So... why the...?" Ed began, unsure of what Marley's current actions should be called.
"I'm torn between sympathy for their pain, disappointment that I wasn't there to see it, and anticipation for the security tapes. I'm quite interested in how my boys hold up to a rampaging Agent Texas," the combat doctor answered, understanding exactly what the lockpick was trying to ask.
"And that translates into wincing while laughing?" Wash asked. Marley nodded.
"Yes, it does. I couldn't make up my mind whether to cringe or chuckle, so I'm doing both," she answered. "It's like when you don't know whether to laugh or cry, Davy."
"Please don't call me Davy," Wash moaned, knowing it was futile. He may not have known Marley for long, but even he could tell that when she wanted something, she got it. Suddenly, she sat up a bit straighter. "My plot sense is tingling," she piped up. Her teammates gave her incredulous looks. "9er! Take us to the secure facility they moved Alpha to."
"Your 'plot sense' is terrifying. You know that right?" Flowdie remarked even as 479er adjusted their course.
"Do you want to find the BGC or not?" Marley snapped.
"Shutting up," Flowdie said, sitting back in his chair and holding onto the harness.
"Whipped~!"
"Three words. Surgeon. of. Death," Flowdie deadpanned. The others wisely shut their mouths. "That's what I thought."
/*/
The ice storm was still going strong and Epsilon wasn't going to put up with this idiocy any longer. "Tex, stop. Where are we going?" he demanded. Tex stopped and sighed.
"Look, there's only one person left who knows what happened to me. The Director," she said, turning back to Epsilon.
"The Director? No-one even knows who he is!" the A.I. exclaimed.
"I can think of two people who might know: Marley and Flowdie," Tex said. Epsilon sputtered.
"Who even are they?!"
"Agents Oregon and Florida. The first and last Agents to go rouge," Tex answered. "They're also the ones behind Project Red."
"Tex... what if they don't even know?" Epsilon asked, trying to get the Freelancer to see reason.
"Then I get to kill Oregon and Florida," Tex stated. "If I can't find the Director, I'll just dismantle everything he ever built."
"Tex..." Epsilon began, then looked around as he shifted in place and memories forced their way to the forefront of his mind. "I think the Director made all this... for you." Tex scoffed at the very idea.
"All the more reason to watch it all burn," she growled.
"Facing Marley and Flowdie, if they are who you say they are, is suicide, even if we knew where they were. News flash! We don't. How in the wild blue yonder are you gonna find them?" Epsilon protested. Tex thought she smirked, but couldn't be sure. She was an A.I. in a robot, kind of hard to move metal into facial expressions.
"They'll find us," she said confidently.
"Oh, so, what? We just hole up? Wait for them to come without ever even knowing when that's going to be?" Epsilon protested, trying to poke logic shaped holes in her plan. Too bad Tex knew things that Epsilon had long ago forgotten.
"No, they'll come now," she said, readying her gun.
"How?! Are you just gonna call them on the phone?" Epsilon asked angrily.
"Something like that," Tex remarked easily as she brought the gun up and... shot Epsilon, causing his recovery beacon to go off.
"Tex?" Epsilon asked weakly, already beginning to go into recovery mode.
"I needed you to come. Phyllis' records said the recovery beacon wouldn't activate until we left the storage facility," Tex explained.
"Tex?" Epsilon repeated a world of betrayal contained in that one word.
"I didn't ask to be paired with you. I didn't want to come back. But I'm here now, so I'm gonna put an end to this," Tex declared, already beginning to prepare for the fight that was going to take place.
"Tex, I would have helped you," Epsilon moaned. Tex shook her head.
"You can't even help yourself. That's why you made me, Church. You made me to take on all the things you can't handle. Just like you always have. Well guess what, I'm gonna handle it. Oregon and Florida will be coming now. I have some things to get ready," she said, stalking off.
"Tex... why are you doing this?" Epsilon asked. Just as the world went dark he heard Tex's contemplative voice say,
"Funny you should ask. That's exactly what I plan to find out."
Too bad Tex was only counting on two Freelancers.
/*/
"Whoa hey!" Wash remarked suddenly. Marley shot a look toward him.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Where is that... no way. It can't be," Wash breathed. Marley thought she could see the whites of his wide eyes as he stared at her.
"What? What is it?" she asked, anticipation building inside her.
"I'm getting it too," North remarked.
"Should have known he might end up there," Flowdie remarked, shaking his head.
"You knew this was going to be the final showdown, didn't you?" Wash accused, trying his best to ignore the flashing coordinates inside his helmet, the glowing confirmation that Marley had pointed them in the right direction. Marley shrugged, visor clear to show her unrepentant smirk.
"I may not have gotten to see the beat down Tex gave my boys at the off-site storage facility with my own eyes, but I'm going to get to see them fighting it out in the snow first hand. I'm satisfied," she said.
"Do we have a storage unit?" Wash asked. Ed held up a unit that appeared to have been stashed under his seat for a while if the layer of dust was anything to go by.
"I'll take that as a yes," Jack said with a smirk. Wash glared at Marley.
"You've planed this, haven't you?" he asked. She shrugged.
"Not every step of the way, goodness no. Too many variables for that. No. I planned for this," she answered. "If my plan to get Wash out of prison failed, if there were a civil war style grudge match, I knew this would be the final play and so I planned accordingly. If things can finally play out like I hope, it'll all work out. Eventually. It may take a while for everything to settle just so, but trust me on this, it'll work out," she explained. Wash sighed and sat back, not quite content but at least willing to let things go.
/*/
A/N: I just... couldn't force myself to write another Journey of the Mind and jumping straight into the fight just... didn't feel like it would flow right. So, you get this. Enjoy!