(A/N) Hey guys, sorry for the slight delay with this chapter! Went to see Jesus Christ Superstar last night, which was awesome, but meant I wasn't able to upload this until now. But regardless, here we are with another fantastic chapter by WargishBoromirFan, from the perspective of Agent Utah, and taking up a lighter tone than has been typical from our work of late! Again, for those that don't know, we will be making some cool reveals on Saturday the 15th of February, for Community Day, and on Monday the 17th of February we will be opening our forum to applications for Agent Texas!
Enjoy!
Chapter Thirty-Four – Party Hard
Agent Utah
Written by WargishBoromirFan
"Eat, drink, and be merry." - From "The Parable of the Rich Fool"
"This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here." - Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
"Come on in," Florida waved them towards the simulator room. Utah took a few steps forward, but even though it was Florida, several of his fellow recruits seemed to balk and hesitate. There were other voices coming from within, too muffled to make out exactly what they were saying, but Utah recognized Wyoming's low-pitched chuckle and a grunt from Maine, followed by what sounded like an apology from Georgia with his mouth full. Rooming with the engineer had taught Utah that Georgia would rather hold a stray instrument between his teeth than hand it over to the oversized newbie while in the middle of a project, and furthermore, that Georgia didn't like being disturbed in the middle of a project. Unless it was to let him know that Kent was popping by. Utah decided to stick a little behind Kentucky, just in case.
Kent, at least, seemed one of the less wary, and Utah was the second to emerge through the door Florida held open for them. The simulator room was dark, the shadows of other suits of armour barely visible as they gathered around high-piled tables. Utah couldn't figure out the silhouettes in the dark, but between the smell and half-repressed bursts of California's laughter, Kent was running.
Towards the group.
"Surprise!" The simulator switched from the inky night to a daytime park scene, revealing the senior agents standing around a pretty good party spread. Georgia appeared to have already helped himself to a cookie, much to Maine's annoyance, but Utah didn't blame him. He'd like one or six himself. And some of that cake. And a sandwich, just to say he'd gotten his vegetables. Kent certainly wasn't being too shy about digging right in.
"You guys have survived the Director's welcome into the Project; now I'd say it's about time we gave you our greetings, Freelancer to Freelancer," North said, clapping a hand on Connie's shoulder. She blushed at her feet, but North tended to have that effect on a lot of girls.
"Don't expect that this changes all that much," South spoke up from behind the table, arms crossed in front of her. "But you've at least shown us that you might survive."
"Quite right," Wyoming almost sounded like he was about to soften the unspoken marks against the untried new agents, but the way he smoothed his moustache upwards should have been a warning. "And if you do die, it shall be in a most amusing fashion."
York rolled his eyes, mouthing "ignore them" as he held the snickerdoodles to ensure their survival against Kent, Georgia, and Utah's first assault, and moved them out to where the rest of the newbies could reach them, nodding to Cal to cut the cake. California was very precise with that knife, and very, very quick. Utah didn't have to wait long, but he did wait until Cal was done. "They're just jealous that we didn't get a welcoming party organized for earlier waves."
"So this is kind of like your welcome into the group, too," Utah summarized, grabbing Sota's hand and pumping enthusiastically. "Welcome to Project Freelancer!"
"Thanks? I think…" The lanky sniper pulled away from the handshake to massage feeling back into his fingers, looking to Cal for an escape plan. Cal just handed him a slice of cake.
"Better late than never," Cal shrugged, twirling the kitchen knife through his fingers.
"You all settling in okay?" Florida came up behind the knot of newbies, putting arms around Nebraska and Colorado and trying to pull all eight of them in with his smile as York suddenly and empathetically volunteered to take over cake-cutting duty from Cal; North, Carolina, and Virginia were all on the verge of seconding his offer if California didn't take him up on it and hand over the knife.
"I think we're fine." Rado wriggled away, brushing off her shoulders as Kent stepped in with a couple of plates piled high. He handed one to Jersey and another off to Florida, happy to fill the gap Colorado would rather maintain. "This sort of party just isn't my thing."
"That's because we haven't gotten you full of sugar and liquor yet!" West insisted, handing her a plateful of the former and a glass of both. Utah hadn't had much opportunity to drink, but the tiny umbrella made the unknown cocktail look too tempting not to try.
Rado considered the brightly coloured alcoholic confection she'd been handed with nonplussed suspicion. "How did this even end up in our run of the rat maze?"
York raised his hands innocently. "Wasn't me this time. West has her own mysterious sources."
Nevada seemed to perk up at that. "Ooh... We have ways of ferreting out hidden secrets," she said, tapping her fingertips together with menacing enthusiasm. "Can you do a cranberry cosmo?" she asked West. "That's my favourite."
"Sure! Lemme just find the ingredients..." West disappeared off deeper into the chamber, where she appeared to have squirreled away her stash before the senior Freelancers had made their own preparations.
"Connie, you want one of these!" Nevada informed her roommate rather than asking her, elbowing the paler tech. Connecticut didn't argue, but accepted the highball pressed upon her with both hands.
Jersey had been innocently inquiring after the names of the cook staff that York had managed to bribe for the day's goodies when she was ambushed by the man in green. "May I see your hand? I'm sorry, I've been trying to leave it lie 'cause I don't mean to throw you any uncomfortable questions, but I gotta know: is this a genuine Cassidy?" Utah had seen that manic look in Georgia's brown eyes before; brief but colourful experience suggested that he back out of the way. From the way Jersey's gaze dashed about the rest of them, she acted like she would like to do the same, but she was unfortunately attached to the hardware the engineer was current admiring within a strong two-handed grip.
"Uh, last time I checked, I guess it was about as close as I could get..." she said, scratching at the back of her head with her free flesh hand and seeming torn between encouraging Kent's filled-mouth offer of becoming the distracting white knight and afraid of what he might decide was an appropriate distraction. "This is just a new prototype. You've heard of the Cassidys?"
"There may have been a very small death-match in my anthromechanics lab for the right to apply for an unpaid internship with one of Dr Cassidy's followers. Not that I had the money or necessarily the inclinations to be system-hopping at the time, but I figured if I broke anyone's limbs off, it was just giving them an alternative opportunity to study her work. The lady's a genius, and this is far beyond even the model rigs we saw of her work back then." Georgia had pulled a small sparking pen from his toolkit, and applied it to the metal fingers like a rubber reflex hammer on a knee. "The fine motor control on these is almost as good as flesh 'n' blood without sacrificing the strength... about how much feeling wouldja say you had? I hear that she's been pioneering direct neural attachments, and you can only wish those came standard in a body; that's why I've been sticking to full robots so I can predict where all the wires're supposed to go..."
Georgia's extended fanboy outpour was abruptly halted by a fastball clocking him dead centre in the back with enough force to make the engineer stumble as the air was driven from his lungs. It had to have been an accident, Utah decided. If South had been aiming, she would have pitched the ill-titled softball at Georgia's unprotected skull.
"Well? You throwing it back or do I have to take you down again?" South called out.
"Oh, you may regret that, especially if you see a Cassidy custom in action," Georgia shot back, scooping up the ball. "Whaddya say, Jersey? Kent? You in?"
"I'm on South's team," Rado volunteered. "I know the winning side when I see it."
"All right, boys, we're definitely bringing the heat now." Jersey cracked artificial knuckles around her gauntleted flesh fingers. "How about you guys?" She turned to the rest.
"Greg's!" Kent spoke through a mouthful, raising a hand. Georgia just rolled his eyes good-naturedly and tossed him the ball, which Kent caught with barely a move of his hand. "You look more like a Greg than a Georgia, is all."
"Even among official Freelancers, we're not really supposed to share original names. Still, better than Pinky," the engineer shrugged. His grip was better suited for a larger ball, but he could spin the softball about its horizontal axis well enough.
Utah had been raised on Europa, a wet moon frozen at its poles but certainly warm enough at its more central latitudes, colonized primarily by settlers from Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and other overpopulated islands who had just wanted a little more space by the seashore. Baseball was as much a part of the cultural identity as fishing, and for the hundred years it had taken to finish terraforming the local oceans and stabilize the aquatic ecosystem, it had probably been more profitable a pastime. "I want to play," he said.
"Nothing wrong with a friendly game," Nebraska agreed, offering Florida a diplomat's grin as he followed Colorado away from the tables. "Don't get a lot of shore time to just enjoy the nice weather, so I can see why you chose to set up a park in the Danger Room, here." He glanced over the field where a few senior Freelancers were setting up the infield, taking Kent's wild throws and Jersey's neatly-plucked catches in with the air of a man studying an art exhibit.
"Is that really what you've got them still calling the simulator, now?" Carolina raised an eyebrow as she crossed her arms.
York and North traded sheepish glances. "Well, it seemed catchier than 'the holo deck,'" North admitted.
"And rather accurate to what anyone using it in certain agents' presence is likely to experience," Wyoming added. Despite the clear theatrics to Kent's passes, both he and Rado failed to intercept the ball until it was Georgia's turn to throw. South snagged it like it had been meant for her. Wyoming let it go and headed back for a beer. "Do let me know when you chaps want to start playing a real sport."
"Well, it's not Grifball, but this looks like it could come in handy." Cal picked up the bat and gave a few practice swings.
"Still prefer the superior surface area of a cricket bat to that sorry stick," Wyoming sniffed, twitching crumbs from his moustache.
"Can't go wrong with aluminium, though," Florida chimed in, setting aside his plate. "Huh, Alaska?"
The big man in red caught the far end of Cal's bat, squeezing it hard enough to leave faint imprints of his gauntleted fingers in the metal. "It's soft. Light. Malleable. Though this does have its uses," Al observed. "Non-lethal force, for instance." California shot him a look suggesting he was willing to test just how far one could go without actually killing someone with the sporting equipment as Al released it.
"Or hitting the ball," Jersey added from the pitcher's mound, as she and Kent took their places. South had tossed her the ball with tangible arrogance as she waved her brother towards the batter's box, swaggering past Georgia on her way. Utah counted at least three on each team for certain, with Nebraska leaning towards the Dakotas' and Rado's side and Florida getting dragged in after Kentucky. Alaska and California had yet to declare sides, but it would be of little surprise if the two rounded out the teams to five players each. They certainly didn't look like they wanted to work together out on the field. Jersey was half-wound up before Alaska dropped into a catcher's crouch, ducking beneath the dented aluminium Cal drove through the air in a brutal "practice swing."
"She's got a magic-fast mechanical arm, dude," Kent called from first base. "You're not going to have much luck just swinging at random. You're probably not going to have a lot of luck anyway, but wait for the hey, batter batter, say batter batter..." The patter was familiar as the sounds of his sisters' voices to Utah, and Kent could motormouth the rhythm as well as anyone he'd played as a kid. Yeah, Project Freelancer might feel like home here.
True to Georgia and Kent's claims, Jersey's fastball was blinding on its way to Alaska's mitt, all but knocking the red-armoured senior agent out of his crouch. Cal never had a chance to make contact with the softball. "Well, girls, I think we can safely play outfield without risking our drinks," Nevada decided, and West raised her cup in enthusiastic agreement.
"You're not out yet, Cal," York called encouragingly, bringing Sota and Maine to the fold. "Two more chances to hit it out of the park!"
"Just don't let it hit you," Sota muttered. Virginia's gaze went back and forth between her sister in right field and the blond adding his own support to York's advice before she dashed out to fill the final spot on the defending challengers. Carolina brought a few more finger sandwiches over to the unofficial dugout, smirking as Cal took his second strike. There was always the position of designated hitter, Utah supposed, but Wyoming remained planted by the party platter.
Yeah, it was kind of like home.
He decided one more piece of cake wouldn't hurt. "So you like cricket? I don't know much about that one. Why did they name it after an insect, anyway?" Utah asked Wyoming.
"'Cause it's a buggered good game, of course!" Wyoming went for the easy pun instinctively, hardly giving away as much as a twitch of a lip to tip his play. "Of course, I've always gone for hunting over sports myself, but when one's business is one's pleasure..."He sat back and smoothed his moustache, his eyes turned toward Cal as the other softball neophyte swung at Jersey's third blinding-fast pitch and missed again, but the dark-haired Freelancer didn't seem to be paying much attention to the game.
"I didn't think we got to hunt that much. There are not any wild animals in space and very few in Freelancer City." Utah supposed that the more senior agents might get to spend time away from the ship and all but sterile headquarters more often, but that was hard when they were between planets.
"Depends on your definition of animal, chap." Wyoming leaned confidently against the table, elbow inches from a half-eaten cookie platter. "There's at least one out there that takes a good long while to stalk, but will certainly look good stuffed over the mantelpiece."
"Yeah, I had a really weird-looking rat I caught once as a kid, but my mom said I couldn't keep it in the house." It was a far bigger thing than the ones from elementary school classrooms, its ears tattered points and equipped with fangs beyond its buck-toothed incisors. His mom thought it might have been a possum instead of a rat; his dad was quick to bring up the legendary chupacabra when the boy who would become Utah had next visited and informed him about the find, and his sisters just thought it had been gross.
The Brit's chuckle never sounded happy so much as conniving. "One does have to insure the rats are quite thoroughly killed."
Maine was the next up to bat out on the field, and both sitting agents in white looked up at the hollow ring of the metal bat against home plate. Utah was pretty certain that it wasn't supposed to make that noise. "Knock knock," Wyoming stated in the quiet tones of a sniper killing time between targets.
"Who's there?" Utah asked over Kentucky's redoubled patter.
"Snow." Jersey wound up, preparing a fastball as untouchable as anything she'd thrown for California.
"Snow who?" Maine touched it. Moreover, he nailed it, sending it high over right centre field. Even if Nevada ran, she just wouldn't be able to get the vertical air to snag it as it flew higher and faster overhead, still climbing towards its apex.
"Snow wonder they picked the yeti," Wyoming observed as the softball crashed into the "sky" overheard, shorting out the illusion as white sparks drifted from above. The Freelancers and the food were still there, as real as they got.
"Does this count as your revenge against the room, Maine?" Alaska asked, rising from his crouch. Maine grunted, bat slung over his shoulder as he sauntered over for a victory cookie.
"Hang on, I think I can fix this," Georgia muttered from second base, eyes turned towards the far dome as he jogged over to the wall. "Sota, I need your enhancement, a ladder, and thirty square centimetres of silicate wireboard; I can do the soldering..." It must be nice, having a superpower built into your armour that you could use to help people. Utah wondered when his wave would be getting them, now that they were officially Freelancers, too.
The other agents scrambled or rambled off as the mood took them, some to help fix the dome of the Danger Room, some to simply unwind, as even without a sunny day to celebrate, they still had the space and time to relax and let their guards down. Some of the Freelancers were even doing so. Utah trotted into the featureless outfield with the last of his snack in hand, waved over by Nevada as she gathered Connie and West a bit closer. "I'm not saying we have to reprogram it while he's up there," Nev wheedled, "just that we totally could. You guys want to see how it's set up as much as I do, don't you?"
"Well, yeah," Connecticut reluctantly admitted, tucking a brown forelock behind her ear. "But... why are you inviting Utah, again?" She glanced sideways at the big man, remembering all too obviously how his track record with delicate machinery had gone so far.
Nevada just shrugged, offering them a tipsy smile. "It's already broken, so it's not like we'd be risking anything to have one of our own group boosting us up to see what's going on, right?" She and West traded suspiciously gleeful nods, though Connie was still less enthusiastically on-board.
"You two do know that he's not that tall," Connie pointed out. The highest point of the dome - as well as the broken tile - was several man-heights above them. "Just ask Georgia. I'm sure he'd let you take a peek while he's working."
"You're missing the fun of sneaking in unsupervised, where nobody knows what we're up to but us. Pinky might give us a smokescreen either way, but I believe in giving him a reasonable amount of plausible deniability." Nev watched the engineer assemble supplies with the same enthusiasm as he'd assembled his softball team; her less official assembly staying just out of range of anything that might fall from the ladder he and Florida had rustled out of storage. As long as it just fell and didn't bounce off of anything or cause a chain reaction, not that Utah would know anything about that.
"So he can't tattle on you if you screw up?" West cut straight to the point, but her smile was more teasing than accusing. "Love Virgie dearly, but all the brownie points in the universe doesn't mean I don't occasionally hide things from her," she explained with a quick shrug. "Otherwise, where's the fun of surprises?"
"Exactly." Nev toasted with what was left of her cosmo. "Now, let's see what we can see," she said, directing them towards the closest wall panel. Honestly, the entire room looked to be made out of wall panels to Utah, but Nevada seemed to know what she was looking for, even while tipsy. After explaining to the other two ladies what she'd found so far, the conversation going rapid-fire over Utah's head, Nev motioned for Utah to lift her up so that the dark-skinned hacker could investigate another tile a little closer to the overhead crack. "If we can figure out exactly where the alpha wave receptor is, we could turn it back on just to get a better feel for how the whole mental display controls work..."
That was right; the first time Maine had gone in here, the room had reacted heavily to his state of mind. Utah didn't know exactly how that had worked, but apparently the Director had had to turn the room's sensitivity way down before their first training mission, incorporating some sort of A.I. to smooth out the rough patches between runaway imaginations and walking nightmares. The server wasn't slotted in today, leaving the Danger Room's capabilities muted in its absence, only able to produce a simple scene, with most of the props and all its players brought in from the ship. Still, it might be interesting to see what the group might produce out deceptively plain white dome with all their minds in a good mood; the panels did look like giant fluffy marshmallows primed for melting into cookies or moulding and dipping in chocolate and coloured sugar while Nev and Georgia were pulling them out to play with them...
"All right, y'all, don't start hitting anything up here just yet, but I think I've got it almost about ready to go..." Georgia snapped the repaired ceiling tile back into place, only to be hit by a fluffy phantom deluge. "Jesus! Why is it raining marshmallows?"
"Um, actually, it's pronounced 'Hey-zoose,'" Utah corrected on gentle, abashed automatic, not remembering what his roommate himself had mentioned earlier. Well, it was only his middle name, after all. He didn't know why most people seemed to figure that one out first. "And it was Nev's fault!" The tech on top of him did her best to shunt away the control panel before anyone could catch it in her hands, but both she and her roommate were well within range to deliver physical rejoinders to shut him up.
"Bad Utah. No brownie points," West scolded him.
"Told you this was a bad idea," Connie added as Nevada slid off his slumping shoulders, accepting her own share of the blame as well as a drunken cat.
"Maybe." Nev stuck out a hand to catch a few puffed sugar balls, only to have them melt to water on her gloved palm. Other minds were beginning to influence the room, now. "But it's worth it to see what we could do."
"Override: Level One command," Carolina barked out, halting the sudden drop in temperature. "Reset to previous parameters and leave them there, Nevada."
Nev stuck out her tongue, though the marshmallow snowflakes dried up in the air as the grass and sunny day returned. "Yeah, that was interesting..." Utah offered as a weak consolation, slipping between an arguing Maine and Kent for the last cookie before the teams reformed. They probably could create all sorts of interesting things here, with a little effort and happy thoughts.
In the horizon beyond the dome proper, a stray storm cloud crackled with thunder.