With my inspiration for doing any more Borderlands fics pretty much non-existent at the moment, I thought I would take the time to archive my older works in here: namely Zagreus' Song, Fly Me to the Moon, and Opening the Cage. The first two were meant to be an AU of the Ballad of Ricky and Angel where Richard Snyder was kidnapped and experimented upon by Atlas, and got involved in the events of Borderlands (Zagreus' Song) and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! (Fly Me to the Moon). Opening the Cage was meant to be a crossover between Bioshock Infinite and the original Borderlands, but that petered out. So, I'll be archiving those stories here, and in a few weeks, I'll be deleting the original posted stories.
ZAGREUS' SONG
CHAPTER 1:
I AM ZAGREUS
I don't think my sister and fellow prisoner was a fan of my singing skills. Well, she was a sister in all but blood. Without her, I wouldn't have survived the hell that I had been brought into when Atlas decided to bring me into their ranks. But she didn't think much of my euterpean efforts(1). Anyway, I did it more to piss off the guard than I did her.
"Jingle Bells, Mikey smells,
Knoxxie's in a rut,
Commandant Steele got tentacles
Stabbing through her gut!"
"Shut up in there, will ya?!"
I blew a raspberry at the guard, and after the last flatulent echoes died away, I began anew.
"Driving through the dust,
In a shitty Lancer red,
O'er the dunes we go,
Shooting bandits dead!
Pow! Pow! Pow!
Bones grind under wheels,
Under the sun so shining bright
Oh what fun it is to sing
A slaying song tonight!"
The door opened, with the guard coming in, ready to shut me up. Anger made him careless. But then again, half an hour of me singing songs would do that to the man. Frankly, I wasn't sure who'd snap first: my sister, or the guard. I guess I should be grateful it was the latter. I was a very good fighter, though my sister, being one of the Lance Assassins, was even better. The fight might have drawn the guard in, true, but that was a big if.
But with his attention on me, the guard's eyes were off my sister. And that was all she needed. Within a split second, her arms were around his neck. Within another split second, the man's neck was snapped, and he was on the way to oblivion. Or, if he was lucky and he had enough saved away, the nearest New-U station(2).
The man's body dissolved into a blizzard of blue particles. Ah. Definitely the latter.
"I don't think he liked my singing," I muttered, pouting.
"Zagreus," my sister said, tucking a strand of blue hair away from her similarly-coloured eyes. Her stern face was set in grim determination. "We need to be professional now."
"We're leaving the Lance, deserting our profession," I pointed out as we walked out of the cell. "Tell me, where does 'professional' come into it?"
"We don't need an argument on semantics now," my sister said. "We need to get out of here. He'll raise the alarm as soon as he is able."
"Well then. Clean and precise, or bloody and screaming?" I asked. "I mean, we might as well hurt them while we're getting out. Less resources to muster coming after us. Lots of disarray and chaos."
She considered this briefly, before nodding. "Disarray and chaos. That's what you're good at, Zagreus."
ZAGREUS AS
THE SWORD-DANCER
Why So Serious?
"Whereas wisdom and strategy is what you're good at, Athena," I said. "Save for recently, anyway."
ATHENA AS
THE GLADIATOR
Piss Her Off At Your Peril
"You know what they did to my sister," she said, clenching her fist.
Quietly, I said, "Just as you know what they did to my parents. So I know how pissed off you are. Let's use that, shall we?"
"Yes. Let's."
An eternity ago (well, really thirteen, but who's counting?), there was a boy called Richard Snyder. When he was six years old, he discovered, much to his understandable horror and that of his parents, that he had a condition known as the Sci-Zone. When he went into the Sci-Zone, he basically became a mad scientist, capable of feats of astonishing deduction and induction, at the cost of his morality going bye-bye.
When he first got diagnosed, he also met a girl by the name of Angel Clarke, the daughter of a programmer at Hyperion by the name of John Clarke. The two became friends, for they were both something of outsiders. Angel was, you see, a Siren, a girl with extraordinary powers. Her particular one was technopathy, the ability to hack without much effort any electronics…with her mind alone.
Two years after they met, however, Angel vanished, and John refused to tell Richard where Angel went, whether she died, or left, or was lying in a hospital bed, comatose. Richard persisted…but could get no answer from John.
It was a sad day, but it was far from the worst day of his life. He would get a whole lot of those.
One day, while he was walking home from school on Elpis, after parting ways with an acquaintance called Janey, Richard was abducted by scary men. Of course, there's all sorts of nasty things that men like that can do to children. But these men were not just thugs, but the best kind of thugs, hired by the Atlas Corporation.
You see, for some time now, they had been abducting children, and doing nasty stuff to them. Brainwashing them, training them in military arts. Most of them were girls, retained to become the Lance Assassins. But Richard was to become a special experiment. When in the Sci-Zone, Richard could instinctively target the weak points of the human body, and Atlas, in their dubious wisdom, thought that could be harnessed. They performed all sorts of experiments, designed to bury the sweet little boy that was Richard Snyder in the Sci-Zone.
Richard Snyder died screaming for his parents, for Angel. He fell screaming into the darkness within me. Now, there is only Zagreus. Madness embodied.
For some weird reason, the top brass of Atlas used Greco-Roman deities in their nomenclature. Or, if you want me to dumb it down, they had a hard-on for naming their top soldiers after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. You may not have heard of Zagreus, but what of the better-known god he is considered to be, Dionysus? Or Bacchus, his Roman equivalent? Now, I'm not one for partying or getting drunk, but Dionysus was the god of ritual madness(3).
In the field, I was meant to be a spy, a special operative designed to sow discord and chaos amongst the enemy, leaving them vulnerable to a strike. Where the Lance Assassins were the precise knife slipped between the ribs, I was the grenade chucked into the trench. Psychological warfare from the crudest kind to the most precise and terrifying.
In that time of harsh training, however, there was one who was a friend. Hell, we became as close as siblings. It may have gotten more intimate than that, but she wasn't interested. And I was fine about that. Until I knew for sure about Angel, maybe I would have held a torch.
Her name was Athena. She never told me her name before she got abducted by the Crimson Lance. Not that that was relevant. All that I knew was, she had a sister on Pandora. And I had my parents.
Until Atlas decided to tie up loose ends.
And the worse thing? They tricked us into doing it ourselves.
After Steele's failed attempt to open the Vault, Knoxx, along with myself and the Lance Assassins, were sent to restore order. And that's when Atlas made their mistake. Athena was sent on a night-time operation to purge the village where her sister was staying at. I was sent to seal the entrance to an Eridium mine Hyperion was in charge of. It wasn't until I saw the surveillance cameras that I saw my parents, dying as poisonous gas filled the mine. Athena, who was ordered to use thermal cameras, didn't realise she had killed her sister until it was too late.
To say that we were upset was something of an understatement.
Our reactions were how we came to end up in the brig together, awaiting court martial, and execution by firing squad. Wait, scratch the former. I doubt we'd get even that. We got a bit too 'stabby', as old Knoxxie put it, to even warrant a token court martial.
Now, I may be permanently insane, or at least thought of that way, but I'd prefer not to get my skull perforated. Brains belong inside the skull, that's how they do their job properly.
After we set up a surprise, I then activated my ECHO device. Snyder had a music player, given to him by his mother. It was one of the things ripped from him. By no means the most important, but an object of such sentimentality was still an unpleasant thing to lose. I had the music player in the ECHO device, plus a bit of software that allowed me to hack the local ECHOnet and PA systems
Soon, raucous heavy metal music blasted out of the speakers. And then, the lyrics, spoken (or rather, snarled) by a man who sounded like he was trying very hard to vomit up his own larynx.
Go, now, if you want it,
Another world awaits you.
Don't you give up on it,
You bite the hand that feeds you.
I noticed a marvellous expression come over the Lance soldiers present. Okay, they were wearing those damned helmets that seem designed to make you look like the tools of a totalitarian dictatorship, all sinister with glowing eyes, but you could see it in the way they stood. They had seen this happen to the enemy. Now they were in the very unenviable position of having it happen to them.
All alone, cold fields you wander,
Memories of it cloud your sight.
Fills your dreams, disturbs your slumber,
Lost your way, a fallen knight.
The first one fell before he even realised his head had been removed from his body. The next one caught a glimpse of me, the last sight he would ever see. Probably just as well: seeing me with my eyes so wide and with a grin that belonged on a shark would've probably given him nightmares for the rest of his life (Athena called it my 'Alucard' look(4)). Thankfully, that wasn't really long.
Hold now, aim is steady,
Another world awaits you.
One thousand years, you ready?
The otherworld, it takes you!
I danced amongst the soldiers. Poor bastards, really. They forgot that, while I wasn't quite on the level of a Lance Assassin, I was still above their own. I'd gotten my shields back, and my sword, and my beloved custom Maliwan sniper rifle. That was enough. They were guarding against people trying to break into the Crimson Lance HQ. Not people breaking out.
Go, into the sand, and the dust, and the sky,
Go now, there's no better plan than to do and to die,
Free me, pray to the fayth in the face of the light,
Feed me, fill me with sin, and get ready to fight.
"Zagreus! With me!" Athena's voice snapped over our private ECHO link.
There was no mistaking where Athena was. Although she preferred stealth, when push came to shove and battle was joined, she was right in the thick of it. Being the top Lance Assassin also meant she got some of the best toys: she had retrieved her Kinetic Aspis shield, a massive metal and ceramic shield in the shape of a gear, with a small force-field extending from the shield when it was active. The idiots fired at it, though to be fair, they probably didn't know that a Kinetic Aspis shield was almost invincible. Instead, they kept shooting at it, hoping to destroy it by concentrating their fire, not realising that the Omega symbol embossed on it meant their end.
You know you will,
You know you will,
You know it, you know it,
You know it, you know it, that you will
You know it, you know it,
You know it, you know it, that you will
You know you will
Fight, fight, FIGHT!
Fight, fight, FIGHT!
Fight, fight, FIGHT!
Fight, fight, FIGHT!
In a lull in the shooting, Athena hurled the shield. I once teased her, saying she was like Captain America, only female. She'd nearly shot me for that. But who was laughing now? As the shield hit the Lance soldiers, the stored kinetic energy from their gunshots discharged in an explosion that sent most of them flying, and pulped a couple of them. The shield returned to her arm. I smiled at the sight. I was deadly. She was deadlier.
Hope dies, and you wander,
The otherworld, it makes you.
Dreams they rip asunder,
The otherworld, it hates you.
Free now, ride up on it,
Up to the heights, it takes you.
Go now, if you want it,
Another world awaits you.
We hijacked a Lancer, and began hauling arse out of dodge. As we sped past checkpoints, an ECHO communication reached our ECHO devices. A long, weary sigh emanated from them, a very familiar one. "General Knoxx here. I'd ask what you two think you're doing, but I think it seems fairly obvious. I'd also ask whether you know that what you're doing is desertion, treason, yada yada yada, but I'm pretty sure you two do know. I'm not stupid, and I know that neither of you two are. Well, not really. Hoping you can outrun us is pretty stupid, but I honestly can't blame you."
"Oh, really? And what about the Code 64s?" Athena asked. "What about my sister, and Zagreus' parents?"
"That wasn't my idea, Athena. Mikey's little helpers had the idea. I actually warned them not to piss you guys off. Because I found it kinda sweet. Creepy, but sweet. I didn't have a problem with it. But my opinions don't count for much when the Admiral's still wearing pull-ups and is surrounded by ass-kissers who think they know how to run a military. Even Steele, heavy-handed bitch though she was, knew more about how to run an army." A long, weary sigh once more. "Listen. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to put out a kill on sight order for you guys. Nobody leaves the Lance and all that crap. If it's any consolation, I think you guys did a way better job on this rock than most of the morons I have to deal with. Plus, I've just heard that little song you were singing to piss off the guard, Zagreus." A rasping chuckle coughed out of the speakers. "Funniest thing I've heard in a long time. Goes to show how dull things really are on this ass-sphincter of a planet, bandits and tentacle monsters notwithstanding. You were entertaining, Zagreus, and you, Athena, you're the best goddamn soldier I've ever known. Sorry it had to be this way. Hope I can buy you drinks in Valhalla, or wherever we go after we die. Bye." And with a final click, he cut off the connection.
Suddenly, mortars began dropping around us. "Athena! Set your PTD to HADS mode!" I screamed, even as I did so with my own PTD.
And then, the Lancer APC was hurled like a toy hurled by the hand of a petulant child. As everything vanished in a blast of red, and consciousness left me, I wondered if this had been a good idea after all…
CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:
Well, I'm sure you weren't expecting this. Of course, you wouldn't have been expecting the story, but still, this is a very different Richard Snyder to the one in the Ballad of Ricky and Angel. A bit of Deadpool, a bit of Gilgamesh, a bit of Hyde from the BBC TV series Jekyll…this is basically what happens when Snyder is in the Sci-Zone 24/7.
I had been considering a story where Snyder joined Atlas willingly, and worked as a scientific advisor to Steele during the events of Borderlands, but decided that this story was more interesting, especially as this story has a very different take on Snyder's character, so much so that he doesn't even think of himself as Richard Snyder anymore. Which is going to scupper any actual romance he has with Angel in this story.
He's not going to be paired with Athena either. I'm going with the canonical pairing for Athena (with Janey) in future stories, and as I'm not sure whether Athena is canonically bisexual or lesbian, I decided to plump for her being the latter. Her relationship with Zagreus/Snyder is as he states: that of siblings in everything but blood. They're also nice contrasts to each other: Athena is calm and stoic, whereas Zagreus is jovial and insane. Athena prefers to do things quietly and cleanly, while Zagreus, while he avoids being in the thick of battle most of the time, nonetheless likes things messy and loud.
BTW, the lyrics are to Otherworld from Final Fantasy X, composed by Nobuo Uematsu, with lyrics by Alexander O Smith and vocalised by Bill Muir. Obviously, the copyright doesn't belong to me. But it's a pretty badass song for Athena and Zagreus in this story.
1. Euterpean is a very archaic term meaning of singing, in the same way that terpsichorean means dancing. These terms are named for the Muses of Greek myth.
2. I know that the New-U stations are not actually canonical to the story. I've made them canon for the Ballad of Ricky and Angel, but have hinted in that series, and outright stated here, that it is horrendously expensive.
3. Yes, this is true. I chose Zagreus as the name, though, partly in homage to the villain from the Doctor Who audio stories by Big Finish Productions. Paul McGann plays Zagreus (an entity composed of anti-time infecting the Doctor) in the eponymous story with marvellous aplomb and madness. In case you're wondering how it's pronounced, well, the pronunciation in the audios is 'Zah-Grey-Us'.
4. You know how Alucard looks in the heat of battle during the events of Hellsing? All bulging eyes and a big grin filled with teeth? I think you get the idea. I imagine Zagreus' victims would be scared of it.