"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle"
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I sincerely believe that the Great Clown Mime War scarred my soul, as I still remember so much after I received the mandatory memory wipes. Since my memory refuses to lose these burning images, I shall share my story with you. This story is one of a massive loss, and in no way a victory. This is the story of a tragedy.
After the Clown Uprising and upheaval of its hierarchy, the Clowns united and were stable enough to maintain its own resources to focus on their ancient enemy, us, the Mimes. We stood fast against the tide, but as time worn on, our enemy was getting close to stamping us out. Life became hard and desperate as the proximity of our homeworlds was close enough that the hostilities were never-ending. Many had left both our homeworlds during those harsh times. One of the few blessings of our trials, as it may be the only way I have met several of my own brethren, though, few. Our options were growing grim, and our resources were quickly depleting. We sought new ways to fight the war in the quickest of fashions.
I was a member of the Ghost Division, the Spec Ops of the Mime Homeworld. The tension was high as we sat in the dimly lit shuttle. Our morale was low when we learned of the stakes of our task. King Squiggles the Eighth was to be assassinated during his latest speech to his people. We had little information to work with and we were going to have no backup or support during the entire mission. We knew we were dead men.
The shuttle docked, and we slowly advanced into the Clown Compound, dispatching their security with ease. We knew he would be on the balcony to make his speech, so we proceeded to the destination until we came across an unknown machine, a behemoth of a machine to behold. Unable to ascertain its purpose, and we felt forced to ignore it.
We were fools to slow down so much by curiosity, as it gave the enemy time to realize that they were being breached. Alarms were going off as we were having to run and gun before the king could catch wind of it to escape. I reached the balcony first, in time to see the king was being escorted off the balcony by a clownkopter.
I took a deep breath and pushed my legs as hard as I could to perform a running jump off the balcony and dodged the HONK Mech's as they attempted to block my path. I latched on to the clown shoe feet of the copter, holding on to dear life. I looked back to see two of my comrades being beaten down by the vicious honking air blasts of the HONK mechs. Hearing laughter and honking above me, I saw the Clown King's face hover out of the clownkopter doors to launch a banana mortar at me. Being pelted hard by the disgusting peels, I climbed up towards the doors and grabbed his ugly mask. The last thing I heard was loud laughter as they shot me full on with the mortar, the slime and force of the peels overtook my grip.
I woke up in a wooded area, barely clinging to life. I went to peel the slimy banana jackets off me, I realized I was still clasping that damned clown mask with a death grip. I may have failed to kill him, but I knew I left a mark. The remaining members of our squad gathered up, and we left the planet hanging our heads in defeat.
In the early morning, I woke up in my bunk to massive explosions. I struggled to rush to the port side window of the shuttle as it rocked violently. Witness to our planet being sundered by massive glittering beams shot off-world. I did not even have to turn on the Gesture Network on our screens to know what was happening.
The Clown King was striking back.
Our error was now harming everyone we cared about and everything we were fighting for. The captain of our squad had burst through the airlock to my chambers and thrown a silenced SMG towards me.
His frantic hands struggling to mime out to me how we were about to perform a drastic maneuver and required us to be on high alert as High Quiet Command performed their operation.
Then I saw it. I would be in awe if not that it made me weep at the realization of it. My homeworld began moving towards Clown Planet. It was madness!
The very idea of such a dramatic measure is for clowns, not us! Before I could even utter my dismay, the clown war fleet had warped in. I knew there was no turning back. We were all going to sleep with the eternal silence of the goddess herself. The end of the era was in our faces, and this was the time to make a clown show of it.
Our shuttle docked with the flagship of the clown fleet, the C.C. Honkstratus. They designed it from the best equipment they got from their alliance with NanoTrasen. It was a marvel to look at. A marvel of shit. The shape would be best explained if you took an ear of corn, replaced the cob with a banana and aged it by a few weeks.
It was already firing blistering welts upon our homeworld's engines that were put in place. As soon as our doors opened, we were met with extreme force, as they had rigged explosives in their docking bays.
We had already lost half the force before we even began, however I was undeterred by this, and had glided past the wreckage determined in my goal. I was going to return that mask right up his ass. We were laying into their forces on the ship heavily, as a supporting division joined us and our advance started cleaving through towards the bridge.
An obscene amount of HONK mechs met us as they were launching a devastating destructive noise as they synchronized their obscene honking. The honking was so great, I swear it was a visible, tangible force. It ruptured and peeled away at the metal panels of the walls and floor. The merciless explosion laid waste to our force.
I crawled under some of the broken sheets of rubble after I was mercilessly tossed and deafened like a doll. I found a maintenance tunnel under the floor and drug two of my comrades with me that could shrug off the attack. After some time crawling, I assumed where the bridge would be above us.
I began carving the top of the tunnel open with my welding torch. We pulled ourselves out of the breach and engaged the unprepared clowns. After clearing out the last of them, we went to their command consoles, changing the trajectory of the ship to align in front of the moving planet.
A HONK Mech unit barged into the bridge, instantly recognizing that we had everything to lose, my comrades had dropped to their knee's and began unloading all of their ammo into it, as I went to work dismantling the controls to prevent anyone from stopping our work. I pocketed the circuit board and dived into the hole I made.
Only a single one of my comrades had followed me into the patchwork hole. The other, sadly, ripped to shreds by the cascading blasts. We pulled ourselves back to where we entered through the shuttle. As we hastened towards the shuttle area, yet another squad of HONK mechs stopped us in our tracks. Already launching their explosive sound wave without hesitation, the windows next to us had shattered, sucking us into space.
Hearing that awful laughter as we held on to the busted window panes was painful. We gave in quickly and we were sent spiraling out into space. As the flagship began its collision with the planet, we grabbed each other in desperation and watched. We created propulsion behind us by releasing some air behind us, towards some of the few surviving Mime Ships.
As we finally boarded, we had nothing left to do but watch as they used our home as a crude weapon of war, colliding in fury against the clown's planet. Those of higher rank wanted to win at any cost, that they adopted the ugliness of the clown's hearts, leaving us with nothing but the high debt.
After the madness died down, and the planetary debris had drifted away. The Planetary chunks were left partially fused. The smaller mime planet enveloping a third of the clown planet around itself. A new atmosphere formed around the ugly mass that was once something we held dear.
Our planets had notably changed its position in the solar belt, and we had constant issues trying to coordinate ourselves with our allies. The planet was finally beginning to cool down thanks to the effort of repairing several atmospheric regulators.
They sent us off on a new mission to detail the damage. After several years of survival searches and debris cleanup, me and my comrade had run across something peculiar while in the salvage ship. We were land skipping near the Mime/Clown planetary boundaries, most of it still being unobserved because of the heat and magma. Nearby there was a large speck in the distance.
A massive blue glimmering streak flying by our ship greeted us and a gigantic explosion erupted behind us nearly throwing us off our skipper. Shaking off the fear of being targeted by such epic proportions, we held no interest in fleeing, with determined glances we knew what had to be done.
Flying towards it as quickly as possible, preparing myself to jump out of the back of the skipper to arrive on top of the machine. Before I knew it, it wrapped us up in an explosion, throwing me off the small vehicle. I barreled through the air, with no time to worry about what had just happened, and focused on getting to that machine.
The parachute trip was brief, and I was soon running across its short deck when I realized it was the same device that I saw during our assassination attempt against the Clown King. They made it mobile, slowly moving towards the boundary, perhaps to dislodge the planets or just to sow destruction on anything being recovered.
I resolved I could not have that happen and therefore made my way towards the back end of the weapon. Only to find the Clown King present at the control panel surrounded by a small amount of clown troops. A wicked grin crouched on my lips as I ran across the top of the machine and threw myself, tackling the Clown King off the platform. As we fell, he caught on to a beam, grappling him, I pulled the clown mask out of my pack, and slapped it on his face, having it hooked up to my oxygen line, where I then set it to its maximum pressure setting, attempting to rupture his lungs. He let go of the beam, plummeting to the ground below, where we hit the ground with a heavy thud. I got up shakily and climbed up its massive treads, dispatching the remaining guard.
At the console I set the machine to fire right next to itself, hoping it would cause its destruction. After setting it up, the Clown King struck from behind me as he was coughing up copious amounts of blood. His anger at the situation intensified, stabbing through my right shoulder with an energy blade. Unable to hear his angry rants as he was dislocating the arm from my torso, he failed to notice the machine firing at the ground near us. The explosion was vast. I blacked out from the blistering pain, only knowing that it threw me far from the explosion.
I remember nothing past that. At some point, I gave up hope for the restoration of the planet in my lifetime and followed in the path of the other survivors, never to see my home again.