(A/N) Hey everyone, sorry that this is going up late, had some problems with FFN not letting me upload documents, but thankfully that little conflict has been resolved. This chapter is another one of mine, so I hope that you'll all enjoy it, and kind of reveals a little more about some of the freelancers. I had a lot of fun writing it, so I hope you'll all have just as much fun reading it! This is the last chapter of our fifth batch of chapters, so, all things going well, we should begin our sixth round on Saturday, starting with Carolina.
Later today we'll have an update for our X-Ray and Vav chapter, which will be updated every Thursday from here on out. Also, as I'm sure many of you know, RWBY debuts later on today, and I assume you're all as excited for that as I am! Can't wait!
Enjoy!
Chapter Sixty-Five – Analyse That
Agent Wyoming
Written by NicKenny
"You have nice manners for a thief and a liar," said the dragon." ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Wyoming groaned, pausing the video and turned away from his old British period drama to glare at York. "I swear to God, if you don't stop whistling that infernal tune, I will not be held responsible for my actions!"
York stared at him in surprise from where he was, lying down on top of his bunk, and held up his hands in mock-surrender. "I'm sorry man, didn't even realise I was doing it."
Wyoming sighed and turned back to the display, his finger halting just before he pressed play. "It's no good," he groaned, "You've gotten it stuck into my bloody head now! I need some fresh air." He picked up his helmet off his desk, cradling it under his arm, and turned to the door, pausing just before he left to say: "Al Jolson, eh? Subtle, old chap. I wouldn't let her hear, all the same, if I were you."
Before York even had time to feign innocence and offer an attempt at confusion, Wyoming ducked through the doorway, into one of the Mother of Invention's many corridors. He passed by the other rooms without incident, pausing to exchange a few short words with Massachusetts, who was on her way to the nearest lounge room, a book in her hand. As he passed one of the recently filled rooms, he heard what could only be some sort of drill, accompanied by the occasional dull thumping of a hammer.
'Don't ask, old chap,' he advised himself, 'As long as it doesn't affect you, they could have a damn chainsaw in there.' Of course, he had barely thought this to himself when an even louder noise started emanating out of the walls, following by a short chain of small explosions. The door to the next room opened suddenly, and Cal staggered out, his hand pressed against his temple, obviously having been woken up from a nap.
"Wh…what's happening?" he stuttered, his mouth struggling to form the words.
"We're under attack," Wyoming promptly responded. "The Director wants you to head to the cafeteria immediately, no time to change, there's a good fellow. Chop chop!"
He couldn't help but smile as Cal staggered off in the direction of the cafeteria, in somewhat of a daze, where no doubt half of the ship's crew where currently eating, just in time to see Cal stagger in in his underwear.
Kid's got to learn sometime. Don't trust anyone. Ever.
Especially not on this ship.
He continued walking, eager to put as much distance between himself and the soon to be irate California as possible, navigating the ship's maze of corridors with ease as he made his way towards his favourite spot on the whole of the Mother of Invention, the one place he could relax and get a few minutes of peace in.
The room in question was a small, essentially unused mess hall on the highest level of the MOI, and, as far as he knew, no one else had discovered it up to this point. That was why he was surprised, and more than a bit devastated, to hear several voices echoing down the corridors as he reached his destination.
He burst into the room, a frown on his face as he nodded to Massa and Maine, seating himself as far away from the two as possible, and staring out the nearest window, clearly sending out the message that their presence here was not welcome and that they should leave as soon as possible. The pair didn't seem to get the idea, with Massa offering a cheery "Hi!" and Maine giving a brief grunt that could have been an acknowledgement or just…well, a grunt.
Wyoming's attempts to tune out their conversation quickly failed, and he sighed quietly to himself as he realised that the peace and quiet that he so craved was likely to elude him today, so, grudgingly, he turned back to Maine and Massa, trying to look less inhospitable to his two teammates. If they were here, he may as well try to make the best of it. After all, they couldn't be more annoying than York and his continuous obsession over their team leader.
Sometimes Wyoming thought he'd have to kill that man, someday, just to retain peace of mind.
He tuned back into his two teammates' conversation, and realised, without a great deal of surprise, but with a certain amount of admiration, that Massa was reprimanding the giant agent, in true big sister style.
"Just because you can't feel pain, doesn't mean you'll be able to function at maximum capacity if you don't rest and allow your injuries to heal, you idiot! Broken bones are broken bones, and even if you want to ignore them, you're compromising your abilities!
"I'm fine," Maine grumbled, looking away from Massa's stern features, and Wyoming couldn't help but chuckle a little to himself. The big guy might be terrifying and intimidating in a fight, when his adrenaline was pumping, but confronted by Massa in a rage he was like a deer caught in headlights. A little part of him clearly didn't believe that someone as small as Massa could be talking to him like this.
"Oh, you're fine, are you? So I didn't catch you bleeding all over the place a few minutes ago, because you had torn your stiches and not noticed?! For crying out loud, mate, surely you can come up with something a little better than that?"
Sensing that this argument was only going to escalate, Wyoming cautiously interrupted the two, knowing full well that he'd probably regret it later. "Something I've always wanted to ask you, Maine: What does that goldfish bowl you wear actually do that my helmet doesn't? Other than make you look all cool and intimidating, old chap, but that was inevitable anyway."
Maine glanced over at him, surprised. "Better visibility," he grunted, waving at his helmet that was lying on an armchair a few feet away from him. "Let's me see more."
Wyoming nodded, guessing that it made sense for a brute combatant like Maine to need a larger field of vision in the field, given his penchant for getting close and personal in the field, just like Penn. Wyoming however, preferred his own helmet, which, while it may restrict his vision slightly, wouldn't crack open from a punch like Maine's would. Well…unless it was a really strong punch.
Maine took this opportunity to leave, nodding to Wyoming on his way out, and pointedly ignoring Massa's glare. However, when he had made his exit, her glare was swiftly switched onto Wyoming, and now he was the one to feel the brunt of her anger.
"I'm sorry, what gives you the right to interrupt a conversation that concerns the health and safety of one of our teammates," she snarled, and Wyoming was yet again surprised that she could actually be quite intimidating, up close.
"Massa, my dear, it was pretty clear that if I didn't intervene you would have beaten him senseless for his stupidity, and I really don't think that would have been good for morale," he replied smoothly, looking away and fumbling in one of the pockets of his armour. Drawing out a battered packet of cigarettes, he avoided Massa's accusatory glare, took out a lighter from another pocket, and, igniting it, cupped a hand around the flame as he lit his cigarette, as was his custom after years of lying in wait in some rough terrain for his target to make an appearance.
"Those things can kill you, you know," Massa remarked disapprovingly, looking away.
Wyoming let out a brief laugh. "Really, my dear, with our line of work I really think that's the least I have to worry about. If I even make it to fifty I'll be surprised."
Massa just sighed, and walked over to the window. "Not everything's a joke, Wyoming. We're a team, and we have to look out for each other, even if some of us are too stubborn or pig-headed to admit it."
He breathed in deeply, inhaling the cigarette fumes and smiling as the nicotine did its work. "Are you talking about Maine or me?" he asked, looking up at her.
She snorted and walked away, pausing at the doorway to say: "Him. I'm almost about to put you down under the "lost cause" column. Least he doesn't always have a witty retort."
And with that she turned and left, leaving Wyoming to wonder whether Maine had even grasped the concept of wit. He wasn't exactly a big talker. From what Wyoming had gathered, he preferred punching things. Strangely, he felt a note of sadness at Massa;s words, even through he could tell from her tone that what she had said about giving up on him had only been in jest. However, such sentiments were alien to him, and he quickly dismissed them.
At last, he finally had the room to himself, and he leant back in his armchair, at peace. Sadly, this brief moment of happiness was swiftly interrupted as he heard footsteps echoing down the corridor leading up to the room, and he swiftly began praying that it was just an engineer or something making the rounds, who'd pass by without coming in. He cursed under his breath as the familiar coral and sage form of Arkansas strode into the room, nodded at Wyoming, then sat himself down in the far corner of the room.
Irritated at the new agent's presence, Wyoming sighed heavily, wondering when his secret room had quickly become not so secret after all. He tried to ignore Ark, but as with Massa and Maine beforehand, he simply couldn't tune out the mere existence of his teammate, and, reluctantly, he looked over to Ark.
"What're you doing up here? I was under the impression that you and Georgia were working on something, judging by the noise coming from your room."
Ark let out a short laugh, shaking his head emphatically. "Georgia's been working on this new idea of his for the past three days straight. I've been coming up here to sleep, because I just can't do it when he's using a high-powered laser cutter mere inches from my bed. Was over in one of the other mess halls, but York was holding an arm-wrestling contest, having already beaten North and Cal, and I was looking for some peace and quiet, you know?"
Wyoming nodded, understanding what it was to have a roommate consumed by an obsession. "Ah, I see, well at least that means my room is free, at last. What's our resident nutty professor working on, anyway? Some sort of half woman, half shark robot, and the woman half is part jaguar?"
Ark shook his head again, chuckling. "No, nothing like that, although I wouldn't put it past him. He's got this idea for a drill that can cut a man-sized hole into the hull of ships. His schematics look sound, but I'm just worried about what he's planning on testing it out on. Pretty sure that the Director won't appreciate a hole in the side of the MOI, and Georgia's already been in his bad books after your misadventures with vandalising all of our armour."
Wyoming held up his hands, protesting his innocence. "Who, me? Tremendously sorry, old chap, but York is the only graffitist on this ship. Just check his table in any of the classrooms!"
Ark raised an eyebrow, put let Wyoming's protestations pass, and looked away. "Well, Maine was heading in that direction when I passed him in the corridor, so I have a feeling that York's current happiness won't last too long."
He paused for another moment, and when he spoke up again the tone of his voice changed, becoming a lot terser. "Guess it won't be too long before we're all back in the field again," he murmured, standing up and moving over to the window, looking out upon Eris' surrounding landscape.
"Indeed," Wyoming replied, not quite certain where Ark was going with this.
"Have you ever noticed that everyone, everyone, here sees themselves as some sort of amateur psychologist, believing that their past experiences allows them to see into the depth of the human psyche."
"I guess I have," Wyoming responded cautiously, alarmed at the sudden change in the conversation.
"I overheard Mich and Cal discussing how surprised they were at how poorly Massa reacted to her drop in the leaderboard, and it was all I could do to stop myself from facepalming. People always confuse worry with hurt, and it's so frustrating, because they're two completely separate emotions! It was clear as day that she wasn't worried about her own ranking, but at Maine's blatant anger at remaining in the same spot, and at Cal's reaction to dropping to bottom. After all, it's not like any of us want to see either of them blow up, again!"
Wyoming sat back and listened, somewhat surprised at this rant coming from the usually quiet and reserved Arkansas, noticing how Ark clenched his stomach muscles as he mentioned Cal blowing up again, no doubt a reaction to his previous injury.
"We attribute ourselves with all of these skills that we don't, in fact, have, rather than concentrate on the ones we do possess. Everyone thinks that they can read the others, they think that because they're "freelancers" there's nothing they can't do! It's like Cal using that sniper-rifle on our first sim mission! Why didn't he just stick with his actual skill-set?!"
Wyoming took this moment to interrupt, before Ark could wind himself up any further. "Why does that bother you? People are entitled to make their own mistakes."
Ark glanced at him, breathing heavily, then, all of a sudden, he nodded, and all of the tension in his body ceased and he smiled. "Because I don't like mistakes, Wyoming. I'm never going to lecture someone on how to shoot, or how to fight, because there's a lot of people here better at that than I am. The one thing that I can do, however, is read things. People, situations, manuals, they're all the same to me. It's why I'm here. I'm a tactician at heart. Things just come together in my head. Where to place a bomb in order to cause maximum damage, what words would rile a person up the most, what series of algorithms would the guy who set up a security system have been likely to use."
He looked away for a moment, a troubled look on his face, almost as though he was worried that he had said too much. "I'm very good at it, Wyoming, and that's why it annoys me to see people doing it wrong. Even people like Alaska and Penn, who are forever watching and calculating, they only ever look for their opponent's weaknesses, and that, in turn, tells me something about them. They're not trustworthy, but I can trust them to be untrustworthy. The only people here that I've seen truly judge an opponent has been yourself, and Carolina. And Carolina, of course, is too emotionally driven to remain a mystery."
"And what about me?" Wyoming asked curiously, a sharp gleam in his eye. "What deductions have you come to?"
Ark smiled again, and shook his head. "Funnily enough, I can't read you at all, Wyoming, and I find that…interesting. All I wonder is, can you read me?"
After a beat, Wyoming let out a noise that could be taken as a negative reply, as much as he was loathe to admit it. "The only thing that I've decided about you, Ark, is that you're a liar, and a bloody good one at that."
Ark laughed at that and looked away, out of the window in front of him. "I'll take that as a compliment," he replied, before nodding to the window. "Looks like we've got a new delivery. Wonder what the Director has in store for us?"
Wyoming glanced out the window and noticed that, indeed, a supply pelican was landing in one of the docking bays of the Project Freelancer Headquarters, the UNSC logo proudly displayed on its side for the universe to see, and he reflected for a moment on what it could contain before turning his matter back to the teammate standing nearby.
'Indeed,' he thought, 'A liar, and not one I would trust. He's too much like me for that.'
