Angel took in both the city's vibrant sounds as well as a cloud of nicotine within seconds of stepping outside of her family's small apartment. She tried not to smoke too often, but occasionally, when she was feeling excessively stressed, the warm sting of the burning leaves was the only thing that could soothe her. Why was she so nervous? She had done reconnaissance before, often. So had Roland. She exhaled, watching the white clouds slowly dissipate, their lifespans extended by the heavy air in the city. It was because neither one of them had baby-sat in a danger zone like this before. She was worried about her brother, worried that he would be too focused on Riley's safety to watch his own six. He could take care of himself, sure, but adding Riley to the mix- well. That was a whole new story. A whole new kind of dicked-up story.
She wished her dad was here- he was off, somewhere, probably catching a bounty. She could ask him, posing it as a hypothetical question, how one was supposed to take care of an untrained shot in a firefight. Before he came to Pandora, he had been in a military force for a long time- he would probably know the answer. Maybe I'll ECHO him, she thought, and see if he can talk when he gets home.
Even if he didn't have the answers she needed, Angel always just liked talking with her dad. Even though she and her mother were bonded in sisterhood by the tattoos on their arms, there was just a lot more personality shared between her and her father than with her mother. Taking another drag from her cigarette, she loosed the small ECHO device from her belt and punched in her father's device identification.
"Hello?" the rough voice on the other end of the communication line growled.
"Dad, hi," Angel said, knowing that no introduction was needed.
"Angie!" her dad's slight tone of irritation dropped when he heard her voice. "If you need somethin', better ask your mom, I'm Oscar-Mike-"
"To?"
"Thousand Cuts, darlin', didn't you see my note? I left at o' dark-stupid. I'll be back in three days."
"What's up at Thousand Cuts, something tore up?"
"Got a call from Brick last night; 'parently some his Slab units had some kind of clusterfuck and had some blue-on-blue contact and he's pissed as fuck. ECHO'd me hopin' I could help him haze the stupid out." She could practically see him shaking his head at the stupidity of the least-inept bandit gang on the planet. "These fuckin' rocks." Angel could tell how irate her father was by the frequency of his military slang, a vocabulary he had passed on to her and ironically not the son named after a fellow soldier. "Anyway, darlin', did you need somethin'?"
"No, just wanted to call and chat, dad. I'll let you get back to your drive."
"Good to go. Love ya, darlin'."
"Love you too, dad."
Well, that led to nothing. With the exhausting long drive and then the several days of intense hazing that her father was surely about to put the Slabs through, she wasn't going to be able to have the desired tactical heart-to-heart she needed anytime soon. Well, I guess I can ask him when he gets back, she resigned, inhaling another taste of tobacco. The sooner she could get his advice, the better for her nerves, but sometimes waiting had to be done- her dad often said that the military made one used to waiting, and he had essentially trained her in military style for her entire life. So, she was ready to wait.
Angel stared at the slowly smoldering cigarette in her fingers. Even with the somber start of the day at the heroes' monument, she had felt elated- until her brother had broken to her the news of their impending exploit. It had dropped her like a brick from the edge of the flying city, sent her into a spiraling, screaming rage from which her energy was still recovering. Always, after such an outburst, she was left feeling hollow and drained for some hours afterward. This was often when she smoked the most, pumping the calming nicotine into her veins to dull the frayed feeling of her nerves. She took another drag, drawing the smolder down the remaining length of the cigarette. Holding the smoke in to saturate her lungs, she flicked away the spent cigarette butt into the metal street in front of her. Letting the cloud slip out past her lips and still feeling like an exposed wire, she decided that some more dried tobacco was going to be necessary. Turning to re-enter her home, she found Roland stepping out of the door, pack in hand.
"It's about the time you'd be done with the first one," he said simply as he offered the pack of cigarettes to his twin. "I figured this was going to be a multiple-cigarette thing." Silently, Angel took the offering and stared at Roland, who shrugged. "I know you."
As she retrieved her lighter and light up once more, he leaned against the wall beside her, staring out into Sanctuary's skyline. The old scrap-metal buildings still stood, but most had been added on to with more consistent and shiny materials, which matched the texture of the interspersed new constructions. The apartment complex that housed their own home was one of the old aluminum-paneled buildings, which their parents had settled into long before any of the new towers had been erected. Though most of the other Vault Hunters had moved on to newer residences (most outside of the city) Angel and Roland's parents had opted to be content in their old home.
Roland watched the white clouds float from his sister's lips, sensing and sympathetic of her emptiness but unable to understand it himself.
"So," Angel said after several drags, finally breaking their silent scrutiny of the city. "We have to take dead weight into enemy territory and navigate through without getting caught, and then get back out, without getting shot."
"… Yes. But we're going to talk more about it later. Not now." Not so soon after her last outburst. He knew she wasn't able to handle it now.
Angel blew out another breath of smoke. "I wanna shoot stuff right now. Rollie, let's go see if there's anything on the bounty board."
"Alright, Angie."
Two hours later, the twins were huddled together in the foothills of the Highlands, watching a group of threshers thrash about along the lakefront before them. A rich elderly couple visiting from offworld, vacationing in Opportunity, had decided to take an unapproved and unguarded safari through the Highlands. Their digistructed Outrunner had been ambushed by a gang of threshers, and if the couple's screams had not drawn the attention of a patrolling Crimson Raider squad, they certainly would have been eaten by the tentacled monstrosities. More concerned with safely returning the overly-adventurous old couple to Overlook, the squad had not neutralized the threshers, one of which had somehow eaten some very expensive heirloom jewelry before their intended lunch had been evacuated. The old couple had placed an ad on the bounty board detailing a large sum for the return of the jewelry and an additional bonus for a head of one of the threshers (most likely to be stuffed and placed on the mantle so that the couple's friends could be regaled with imaginary stories of how they had killed it). It was a frequent sort of occurrence in this new age of Pandoran tourism.
"Dumb fucking offworlders," Angel muttered, digital binoculars held up to her green eyes to help her see the thresher group up close.
"At least it means the bounty board's always full," Roland replied, taking the viewfinders from his sister. "Someone's safari always goes wrong, and we get to shoot what went wrong and get paid for it." He watched the threshers for a moment. "Guess we're gonna have to kill them all to find the jewelry."
A devilish, toothy grin spread across Angel's face as she snapped a large magazine into her Hot Renegade assault rifle. "My favorite tactic." Holstering the Vladoff, she loaded the Fervid Vexation Maliwan SMG she had also brought. "Okay, you stay here and play overwatch with your sniper. Light 'em up with a first wave, then I'll go out. Try to take out as many as you can while I charge 'em with the AR and my Phaseshock. When they get close enough, hopefully we'll have thinned the herd enough that I can finish them with my smig."
Roland set out a bipod stand to stabilize his Gromky Pooshka sniper rifle and focused the scope onto the largest of the threshers. "Do you want me to kill a few or injure a lot?"
"Injure a lot," she replied nonchalantly. "If you can spread out the damage, I can take out a large chunk when I discharge."
"Alright." The soft popping noise of his silencer-enhanced rifle sounded a few times as he loosed several rounds into various threshers. Even with the muffled noise, the impact of the shots still drew the attention of the thresher gang below. With a chorus of raucous shrieks, the gang began to move in the direction of the twins in the hills.
"Hola and adios, motherfuckers!" The words were accompanied by a joyfully primitive scream as Angel leaped down the hilltop, charging towards the threshers. Her assault rifle landed round after round into the slimy scales of her adversaries, splattering their green mucous-like blood across the soft lakeside ground. Her brother's perfectly calculated shots flew by her, framing her mad dash. Each thresher had taken several rounds by the time their charge collided with Angel's, and her tattoos glowed as she unleashed a different kind of charge into the thick of their midst. Already weakened by the tag-team shooting of the twins, Angel's electrical surge easily fried the thresher gang. Their horrible shrieks died off as they all quickly fell to the ground, smoking. Angel, still sparking, was laughing over the carnage. Pulling a long knife out of a sheath on her belt and holstering the assault rifle, she began tearing lacerations down the long bellies of the dead creatures around her, emptying the contents on to the Pandoran ground. The steel blade sparked and sizzled the scaled flesh as it conducted the static that coursed through its wielder's hand. Half of the monsters had already been semi-bisected by the young Siren by the time her sharpshooting brother joined her at the bottom of the hills. He, too, withdrew a large steel knife from a belt sheath (though his was void of sparks) and began to assist his sister in the search for the eaten jewelry. Coming up to the largest of the gang, which he had been watching earlier, he calmly placed his blade underneath the head and began to saw it away from its body.
"Found the sparklies!" Angel's excited voice rang from the edge of the dead herd. Roland looked over to see his sister holding up a large golden necklace covered in thick intestinal goo, the green thresher blood dying her arms and torso. She walked over as Roland lifted the now-severed head from his target. "And here's the head for a bonus, nice." She kicked the headless body and a spurt of blood squelched out of the open neck. She grinned at her brother, a wolfish showing of teeth revealing the joy of bloodlust and carnage. "Let's go get paid."
trashlady: in which we explore a little of angel's personality disorder ok
trashlady: dead giveaway on angel and roland's paternal lineage in this chapter
trashlady: my boyfriend spent six years in the marine corps infantry, so he has to be consulted for all of my military characters because realism and junk. also he won't let me write a military conflict scene without him.
trashlady: new vault kid coming out soon!