Well, you guys should all know how this goes by now… I got a new idea.
So, while I was going through what I've currently created for this archive, I noticed something: I haven't created a single story involving Red vs. Blue yet. And so, I started to do some brainstorming… and then completely forgot about the idea. Recently I saw a story that jogged the memory of that idea. That story on this site is "For the Love of a Memory" by Vindicated Skies (id: 9754859). Unfortunately, this writer decided to delete this story from the site. FORTUNATELY, I had the foresight to archive all chapters inside of a webpage archive and can be viewed at archive . is/RlViA (remove the spaces replace it with a period).
Essentially, that story was going to be set in a post Halo 4 and post RvB season 10 universe where the Director is dead and Cortana doesn't control the galaxy through the Guardians. Basically, it was going to be a Chief 'n' Church adventure exploring the many aftereffects of the seasons 11 and on finales. I thought it was a well-written story and I feel honored that I was the first to snatch the pages in a web archive before they were deleted from the site entirely due to reasons that the author puts in the final note in the story. But that aside, what is THIS story about?
So, I had an idea very loosely based off the initial concept of a Harry Potter/My Hero Academia crossover called "But I don't want to be a hero" by shigeka (id: 12044283) wherein that story Harry is the Master of Death and goes through reincarnations, unfortunately for him they seem to happen in many different universes. I'm going to run with that.
But this story! I can hear you all yell. I'm getting there, you should know me by now that I like to give background and context to an idea. As well as give credit where credit is due.
This story is essentially about a reincarnated Harry, many reincarnations down the line, where he's reborn into the cloned body of one Dr. Leonard Church for the original purpose of using the cloned brain to create another Smart AI a la Catherine Halsey when she created Cortana. As for the setting, this will obviously take place WELL after Harry Potter ends and after Season 10 of RvB where the Director kills himself after being confronted by Carolina and Epsilon. And before someone yells "SPOILERS!" it's been almost 6 years now, get over it; I think I'm well after that buffer zone.
And with that out of the way, let's get this show on the road!
Title: Clones, clones are fun too
Summary: Reincarnation sucks. One Harry Potter knows that quite well, especially when Death won't let him die. Reborn into a futuristic city among the stars? No problem. Find out that you have a daughter older than you and you are her father's clone and she has an AI based on said father? That's a different story.
Rating: T+ - M depending on language, descriptions of blood, etc. No sexual scenes are intended to make an appearance in this story, although innuendo is another story.
Disclaimer: I own nothing except my copy of MS Word and my laptop. Red vs. Blue belongs to Rooster Teeth and Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling (and Halo belongs to Bungie/343i/Microsoft). I only own any original ideas. See the foreword for the full disclaimer.
XxXxXxX
"Talking."
'Thinking.'
"Radio."
XxXxXxX
The last thing I saw before I died was the face of my grandchildren once again. This time it was a peaceful passing. I blessing considering the passing before that I was hit by a runaway lorry. You never do get used to dying, especially in grisly ways. If you name a death, I've probably gone through it. Impaled by a spear? A medieval world that decided that it was a good idea to invade the modern world through something called a 'GATE'. Decapitated? Star Wars. Fucking Sith Lords. Shot a couple of dozen times by hollow point bullets? An anti-superpower world where anyone who exhibited special abilities either worked for the government as their unpaid labor and those that resisted got executed. Guess which side I was on? Point being, I've died. A lot.
This last life was fairly mundane. It was a quiet existence. Nothing spectacular about it. I was your Average Joe who grew up in Middle America, USA, went to college on a scholarship, graduated in the top fifty of my class, married the woman of my dreams, and had 2.5 kids and a bunch of grandkids to spoil. There was a saying I picked up during my childhood as I played video games with friends and by myself. 'Always a tower, always a city' from the Bioshock series of games. Turns out death for me is like that. Always a train station, always a bench.
Every time I sit down on the bench as a far-off train whistle blows taking either one or multiple souls to their final destination. Wouldn't have been the first time when an entire universe got destroyed. I may, or may not, have been responsible for it. There was a train whistle and the familiar red engine that pulled the Hogwarts Express pulled into the station.
"So, where am I going this time?" I ask. The train slowed and the doors opened with a hiss.
"Postwar society, although it isn't quiet," a raspy voice said behind him.
"It never is," I reply as I headed towards the train. The train doors closed behind me and I found my seat. I peered out the window to see my eternal afterlife 'companion' wreathed in its never changing black cloak. It seems as though it wanted to sit and watch as I passed once more onto the 'next great adventure'. I looked forward facing the seat in front of me. "Once more unto the breach."
The next thing I saw was a flash of white, followed by darkness.
The next feeling that I felt was floating. This wasn't a new feeling that I had been subjected to before. Usually meant that my soul had been implanted in a fetus somewhere along in a pregnancy. But this time, something was off. The space I was in felt too open. I could also hear muffled voices from the outside. But instead of sounding muffled through flesh, it sounded like a fish tank.
"Sir, Subject 13's brain activity spiked," a woman's voice said. She didn't really have a discernable twinge to her voice that would help him pinpoint where he was. But the voice that replied was a little more obvious.
"Interesting," he had replied. He had a deep southern tone. Texas perhaps? "Keep me apprised of his growth. He may be the perfect candidate for the project."
Time passed by me quickly. I would learn interesting things over the next few months of my new life. It turns out I was in a tank after all and not a womb. This was certainly new. The next thing that I would learn is that Texan? Yeah, he was my pops; but it was never that simple. I was his clone. Direct 1:1 clone. No growth hormones to accelerate my growth, no genetic modification outside the norm of this universe that all children were expected to have to ensure survivability. The technicians that watched over my growth from fetus to infant kept going on about some project and how I was the thirteenth test subject. That didn't give me confidence in my personal situation. Had I been reincarnated into some disposable shell?
I would get some questions and several more questions months later. I was adopted by another member of the program; her role was to act like my mother providing instruction in specific fields as well as the expected care that one was supposed to give a child, even if they were not genetically theirs. AI Theory, astrophysics, theoretical physics, and so on. I've been through many universes over my lives, I've never seen anything like this. This was some insane stuff. It wouldn't be until I turned thirteen that I discovered why this body had been created and the studies that I had taken were assigned to me.
Slowly but surely, I had been relearning my arcane arts otherwise known as magic. The closest thing this universe had in the sense of magic was hyper-advanced technology that they barely understood, but attempted to take apart and understand. The largest entity were these mythical Forerunners that some conspiracy theorists went on about online, mainly how humans and them fought millions of years ago and humans lost. Others said that they had created humans. Typical online forum talk. Funny thing, the Flat Earth Society is still around, although most consider them a joke and they know it as well.
Some of the times I managed to slip past my minder, I managed to master the summoning and banishment charms once more, very useful and could be written off as sleight of hand trick if done just right. The other was apparition. This was tougher to master due to the fact that when done air rushes into the place you once were causing a sonic boom; the inverse happens when you reappear in another location but it's air rushing outwards. Its outright exhausts me and right now it's my trump card in the case that anything bad happens. One day though, it actually did.
Many of the scientists called me Leo, whether it was for Leonardo or Leonard is another story. Using many of the skills I gained in my past lives, one of which being intelligence work (and sub-sequentially wetwork operations), I made my way to my caretaker's room where she was currently on a call with someone, the same someone who had called me a 'candidate for a project'.
"Director, I must protest," the caretaker, Maya, argued. "He is not ready."
"The time has come, Ms. Abrams. Collect young Leo and bring him to The Mother of Invention. It's time for the procedure," the Southern man said with finality. He noticed her lack of response. "You've become attached to him," he observed.
"No, sir. I'm not-."
"No matter. Please be advised that if you miss your check-in you will be considered a threat to the Project and Agent Maine will be assigned to hand you your... severance." That last portion definitely sounded like a threat he intended to keep. With that, the call ended and I booked it back to my room.
I packed up everything I owned into my backpack including a few changes of clothes. I didn't own much. Not out of us being poor, no, the mysterious benefactor provided a lot of money, enough to afford private tutor AIs of quality, quality housing, and high-quality food. It was just that I didn't own much personally. As a kid you would assume that I would own toys, I did, but the ones I owned while younger were educational ones. I had the occasional figure that I purchased with my allowance, but I didn't go out and splurge. After all, why spend money on non-necessities when they'll be useless to you and those not interested in them when you die?
My few possessions fit inside a backpack. A slightly magically expanded backpack, but a backpack none-the-less. At that point, it was time to leave. I had been planning for years a point in which if shit hit the fan that I could leave to. There was one place I knew was safe, it was one of the few times that I was allowed outside of the house, that being the Natural History museum downtown almost an hour away even by the fastest VTOL and even more via car when you account for traffic. And with that, I decided to leave.
After years of doing it across lifetimes, Apparition isn't pleasant. The best equivalent to what is felt during the transition is like getting squeezed through a toothpaste tube or getting your guts squeezed out by a steamroller. Neither is a pleasant thought, but magic is what magic wants to do. And with the pirouette of a heel step and a bang, there was a void in the place that I stood. Meanwhile, in an empty museum, I reappeared in a similar heel twist. From there I made my way to the nearest spaceport in orbit and disappeared.
I never did find out what happened to my caretaker, I never saw anything in local publications about a murder or body being found fitting her description. I still have no idea if she managed to get away from this 'Maine' character or if she just vanished. I went to ground as well, becoming a virtual ghost in a city. I always had enough money thanks to transfiguration. One could easily sell gold nuggets for Credits and use those credits for whatever was needed.
But, of course, all of this secretive, off the radar living would come to an end. At least I had several years of "quiet."
XxXxXxX
Six years later. Earth.
Today was a bittersweet day for the Reds of Blues of Blood Gulch. They had come a long way from killing each other in the place from which they hailed, Blood Gulch fighting as proxy soldiers meant to train the mercenary soldiers of Project Freelancer, their lives not really mattering in the grand scheme of things. But today? There were the guests of honor by the UNSC and UEG for taking down Charon Industries, a company so corrupt they were a threat to every sentient being in Human-held space. Of course, this would have never had been possible without President Kimball's letter of recommendation to them. And so, they had been flown all the way out to Earth to receive this honor.
As for Carolina, the former member of Project Freelancer? It was a surreal experience. She always expected to turn out like Washington, captured and imprisoned for the actions of Project Freelancer, actions that were illegal beyond anyone's expectations until they got out and really looked back at what had been done. You can't just collapse a building with a MAC shot from orbit and only cause the casualties of a single company's private military. All those debris are going to kill someone. In the case of that action so many years ago? Hundreds of lives. Billions of credits spent to rebuild that city center. While a few million is a drop in the bucket for the UNSC in terms of a discretionary fund, the killing of civilians indiscriminately caused some major rifts between the Director and the UNSC.
The ceremony was coming to a close. Kimball was almost finished giving her speech expressing her gratitude in ending the conflict on Chorus. The crowd in front of them was a mishmash of different people, civilian and military alike. Out of the corner of her eye should could have sworn she was seeing a ghost of her past. There was an uncanny resemblance to Leonard Church on a face in the crowd just staring at her with an unreadable expression. The odd thing? The face worn by the former Director was on the body of a teenager. He just stood around like any other bystander in the crowd. At this point, Carolina wasn't listening to the speech anymore, and she had caught the attention of Washington.
"What's wrong?" he whispered over their private comm channel.
"Look, 1 o'clock, behind the woman with the gawdy dress," she replied.
Washington's helmet barely turned to look at the crowd. Carolina didn't need to see his face to feel the surprise radiating off of him. "Is that?" he asked in disbelief.
"That was the first thing I thought too."
"What are we going to do?"
Carolina thought hard. There was no idea to really tell what was going on here. For all she knew, this was some elaborate plan created by the Director, her father, to continue his twisted research. But at the same time, this could just be another innocent caught in the Director's web of insanity. "I don't know, but as soon as this inane ceremony is done, we're going to confront him."
"Are you sure that this is a good idea? I mean, he looks like he's maybe sixteen or something," Wash observed.
"I know, but we need answers; we thought this whole Project Freelancer business was done and over with."
"Yeah, we certainly were under that impression."
As the ceremony went on, they were under the impression that the kid was sure they were watching him since he looked at her directly. It wouldn't have been that surprising considering that they were the center of attention right now with this ceremony, but he was looking at her directly in the eye, that's what made it so disturbing. Finally, though, the ceremony finally ended. Through the minds of the Reds and Blues and former members of Project Freelancer, the only thing that they could only think was 'Thank God.'
After saying their goodbyes with Kimball, who had secured passage for the Reds and Blues to allow them to live peacefully (see: undisturbed) on some ice moon with luxury bases on it like some kind of retirement home. The jabs between Grif and Sarge pointed as such. And Sarge being Sarge, threats of shotguns to the face were enacted but never followed up on. It was Wash's opinion that there was some kind of twisted father-son relationship between the two. Or that Sarge was insane. Or both. Probably both. Carolina and Wash started to walk towards the now retreating form of the teen with the face of a much younger Director.
Unsurprisingly, it was hard to stay incognito when they were famous, almost as famous in recent years as the UNSC Spartans who were legendary heroes from the Human-Covenant War. The kid was slowly losing them in the crowds of Earth, it was clear he knew these streets quite well. The Reds and Blues were clearly confused as to why they were following a kid on the streets. But every time one of them would chime up to ask this question, either Wash or Carolina would hush them with no further explanation. Surprisingly, the only one who didn't ask what they were doing was Caboose of all people.
Eventually, the kid turned down an alley between two massive apartment complexes housing at least a few thousand people. After all, while Earth was considered by the UEG to be the blue jewel of Humanity, it was still a massively overcrowded 'jewel'. Of course, some places were cleaner than others. When they too turned down the alley, they saw that it was completely empty. Sure, there were garbage dumpsters and other refuse piles, but no kid.
"Where did-?" Wash asked out loud.
"Dagnabbit! Why are we following some kid?" Sarge asked for the whole group, he was the loudest of them.
"That is the million-credit question," they heard from behind the Reds and Blues. They all turned around to see the teen from before now standing in front of them at the mouth of the alley. He didn't look all that special. Hoodie, jeans, and some name brand shoes that implied he was well off. He looked clearly annoyed more than anything else. "Why would you follow a kid you've never met before?" He kept his hands inside his pockets, for all they knew he was concealing a weapon.
"Wow! How did you do that?" Caboose asked with wonder in the only way that he could. "At first you were in front of us, the next you are in the back of us!"
"I can do party tricks too," he laid on with extreme sarcasm.
"Oh! Can we see them?"
"No."
"Aww." Caboose did sound legitimately saddened.
"What's your name?" Carolina demanded.
"Ligma," the teen replied.
"What's a ligma?" Doughnut asked before anyone could stop him. Clearly, it was not a real name, and anyone who had been on the internet knew how this was going to go.
The teen pointed to Doughnut with his thumb, "Is he serious?"
"Unfortunately," Sarge replied.
The teen sighed and pinched his nose in clear annoyance, "Ok then."
"Who are you?" Carolina reiterated, clearly annoyed herself wanting to get answers.
"It's rude to not introduce yourself first," the teen shot back.
Wash, at this point, decided that he would intervene and be the diplomatic one. "My name is Washington," he introduced himself. "Next to me is Carolina. The ones in various shades of blue are Tucker and Caboose. The ones in shades of red are Sarge, Simmons, Grif, and Doughnut."
"Pleasure," he said more out of professionalism rather than some kind of social requirement. "I've gone by several names, but I guess you can call me Leo," he shrugged.
"Are you associated with Project Freelancer?" Carolina immediately asked hearing the name. After all, 'Leo' was just a shortened version of Leonard.
"I have no idea what you're even going on about." He raised his eyes to them as if he was looking at his watch before this. "You're talking about that disavowed organization that you took down? Outside of today, never heard of it."
This seemed to infuriate Carolina and she lunged to grab him. Time seemed to move in slow motion as she did. But what happened next surprised everyone. One moment Leo was in front of them, the next he was gone in the blink of an eye. Not running away and zipping around the corner, no. One moment he was there, the next he was gone with one heel twist. If they listened very carefully they would have heard a pop, a similar pop that they would have heard just before rounding the corner into the alley.
"What the? Where did-?" Carolina now found herself asking no one in particular.
"Well, that wasn't very nice," they heard from above and behind them. They all turned around to see the teen now dangling his legs off of a fire escape two floors above them. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he asked. Carolina heard the slight southern twang to his accent, the same one her dear father once had.
"God damn it!" she shouted. "Why is a clone of the Director wandering about?"
"Director?"
"Of Project Freelancer!" she all but spat.
"The only Director I know of is one who wanted me for something on a ship called the Mother of Invention, but as far as anyone has been able to discover, it doesn't exist," Leo replied.
"That was his ship," Wash chimed in.
"Oh, well I have no idea what he wanted. All I know is that when I was growing up, I was addressed as 'Subject 13'. For what plan, I have no idea."
"The former Director of Project Freelancer was involved in illegal research into AI."
"From how Smart AI are created, I think you were cloned to become one of the Director," Simmons chimed in.
"Pleasant thought," Leo chimed in.
"So... now what?" Tucker asked.
"I don't know what you're doing, but I'm getting out of here. Too many crazies for one day for me." And with that, he 'popped' away. Once again, one moment he was there, the next, he was gone.
"What he Sam hell-?" Sarge asked for the whole group.
Meanwhile on another rooftop just within eyesight of the Reds and Blues. "Interesting development," Leo said to himself.
To be continued...?
XxXxXxX
That's all I have for this one. As with most of my writings here on the site, I do take some liberties with them, so if they're inaccurate just ring that up to creative liberties.
First and foremost, I hope that everyone had a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving and hope that if you visited family it was time well spent, i know that mine was. It's been almost six months since I last saw my parents so it was a good time, especially since my IRL shitposter brother was also visiting at the same time, so things were great. Hopefully, you all have a family member that no matter how non-PC they are, they're a blast to be around. After all, variety is the spice of life.
Things for this story:
Well, I'm not entirely sure what I really want to do for this one. I have a few routes that I can go down, but one would be the post Season 15 events that go down, but then again, I haven't been familiar with RvB for years now, I'll need to catch up in order to make this worth both of our time. Me for writing it and you for enjoying it. One of the big things that I really want to explore is the whole idea that Harry (Leo) is a clone of the Director that has to grapple with being a clone, especially if that life is cut shorter from being a clone just by creation alone. I don't want this to be a "woe is me, edgy" type of fic, but one that's fun that has those serious moment sprinkled in that leads to some kind of climax.
Let me know what you thought of this pilot chapter.
See you next time in whatever I decide to do next.