Snowskeeper

"Good." Click. The squad-sergeant stared blankly at the vitals on the left edge of his HUD. All but two of them were flatlines. The sniper that had gone unnoticed was one of the exceptions, and the other--barely a flicker--was one of the assault-squad. He'd survived the initial burst of flame, somehow, and was now unconscious on the floor. It'd be kinder to just execute him now, like he'd done to the runner. If he could just get a second alone with that freak, he'd show her how pain really felt. --- Men wearing flame-proof suits were there to greet her when she woke. So was a wire stuck in her arm, and an extremely cloudy feeling in her head, as if seven pounds of something illegal had been pumped into her system and left there to stew. She was restrained, and pretty damn tightly, too. "Now then, I trust you aren't going to make us drug you again." She'd only remember this time. "Are you ready to cooperate with us?" It was impossible to tell where the voice came from. The faceplates on the suit were opaque, and the speakers projecting the noise from inside the suits were on the walls. Probably some sort of preplanned scare-tactic. --- As soon as they were out of the rather-too-public refueling station, the guards slammed him against the wall. One pulled his gun on him. "Now friend, you just deprived us of our primary source of... Income... For this area. A hundred credits a week. Unless you can double that, we're sticking you in lockup until you can prove you didn't assault that poor, defenceless man for his cash." The 'civilians' on either side just kept walking, as if this were normal. It probably was.

I need you to fix a few things before I can accept this. ^_^; Weapons have not advanced to such a stage where it is practical, or even plausible without massive expense, to destroy an entire planet. I can't really accept the thing about battle-barges either; capital ships are capable of laying down intense amounts of devestation as well as transporting fighters (I mentioned in the opening post that they're capable of taking on four frigates at once and barely sustaining an injury). Also, most capital ships aren't two times bigger than a frigate on their own. Fix these up and I'll be fine with it. Mostly just stuff I should have had in the opening post, and that will be on the wiki when I finally remember to make it...

I give up. Bloody hell, they make it really hard to support them... You see that epic Daemon teleport, then: NOPE! Gonna cost real-world money.

Nope! You don't get an explanation. All you need to know is that I'm sorry.

I do remember you, and I'm sorry. V_V

The Special Police were professionals; that was beyond doubt. They were trained to deal with sociopaths and psychopaths. This particular squad had even been trained to pursue, observe and, if neccessary, neutralize altered humans such as their current quarry. Even so, they hadn't expected her to burn down a hotel. They still didn't quite understand how she'd managed it. One second, the occupants of the hotel had been going about their business; the next, the entire place was burning merrily. They'd lost a squadmember escaping that deathtrap, something that had stung more than any loss of civilian life could. For the first time in over a decade, someone had managed to get a squad of Special Police well and truly pissed. Still, that didn't mean they were going to be careless. They'd carefully tracked her down, using their innumerable bases of information, and staked it out. Every exit was covered by one of the squad's three snipers. The windows weren't a problem; the only ones that opened were near the entrances, and those that didn't were reinforced glass. Breaking that with anything short of a small bomb would be difficult, to say the least. The snipers had tranquilizers, but if those didn't work they had mags full of big bullets to bring her down. If she didn't come out in an hour, the six remaining members of the squad would move in. Equipped with heavy shotguns, tactical grenades, nightvision-equipped versions of their normal tinted-plastic headgear, and tranquilizer-laden assault rifles would move in and drag her out. The scientists could study her corpse just as well as they could dissect her living body, even if it was a little mangled. The squad-sergeant reviewed these plans carefully, checking over his gear as he did so. It seemed too simple to capture this snake. The way she tricked them into that hotel still haunted him. His career didn't exist in any official record, but if it had it would have been filled with successful cases pulled off with flawless ease. He was getting old... He flipped on his coms. "Any contact?" "No sir." He nodded uselessly. "Keep vigilant." --- The people around weren't exactly rushing to the Imperial army hopeful's defence. Some of then were even taking bets on how badly the man with the knife would mess up the soldier's face. The only guard present certainly wasn't going to be any help; he was drunk and laughing at some joke a crony of the gangster had told. If the soldier wanted to get out of his, he was going to have to do it on his own.

You can invite someone who's already killing monsters in the same area as you, can't you?

Accepted; we'll be accepting new people as long as possible. It's not called the Primarin army anymore, though; most people refer to it as the Imperial army.

Awesome, the more the merrier. Hopefully. V_V Don't quite remember you either, though...

Accepted, though I have some questions about the ship. Does it have living quarters (food preperation, bathroom, etc.) or is it an escort fighter kind if thing? Also, I'll have a reply up ASAP, I just really want to get started on the wikia I've been thinking about for the last month. I don't want someone making a mistake because I hadn't provided enough information.

My sister deleted the original, so I wrote this one in an hour. I know it's horrible, but...

Space Ports are equally busy and unpopular venues. Most merchants are forced to use them, since purchasing and maintaining private docks or a dropoff satellites in orbit is prohibitively expansive. For this reason, though, all of the pirates, smugglers, drug-dealers and mercenaries tend to hang around there. Private merchants are required to get a special liscence just to be allowed to dock. That made advertising a new kind of energy source in Erava's space port--arguably the biggest, ugliest, most shamefully corrupt space-port in the rediscovered galaxy--the worst idea Javen Ferenczy had ever come up with. Erava position near the hub of the galactic spiral made it a natural hub for trade, so Javen had reasoned that advertising it where everyone was buying and selling would be lucrative. He had even researched the port's speaker hours, and, finding them empty, had been shocked at the lack of applicants, instead of wondering why no one wanted to sign up. So far, though, three men had tried to mug him (his body guards had intimidated them off), seven had tried to con them (his pilot had outsmarted them) and countless dozens had tried to pickpocket him (his pockets were empty). He'd seen starving families begging at the side of the hall, a man with a hemorrhaging stomach-wound lying just inside a bathroom (and several people stepping over him), and slavers leading their chatel into auction chambers, beating those who were slow to follow. The most jarring thing about the whole experience was how clean everything was. Several times, he'd witnessed mugged men and woman put on stretchers, but before the workers had moved off they'd cleaned the floors. It was as if they thought that they could wash away the crime (or more likely, the resulting paperwork) by cleanin up its stains. Javen spent more than a minute preparing himself to go up onto the raised platform. He did manage it in the end, but he couldn't make himself speak loud enough to be heard over the hum of the port. Finally he gave up, stepping off the stage and back towards his guards. "Let's get out of here," he said, his disappointment at his failure tempered by his relief that he was done, and that he could finally leave this hellhole. On his way out, he saw a billboard with several sheets of paper pinned to it, as well as several more expensive sheets of plastic. He ignored it initially, but his pilot stopped him. "Did you see the way some of those pilots were looking at you?" the pilot whispered in his ear. "I understand we have a contract, but if you don't find an escort flier, and some people who actually know how to fight rather than just scare people, I ain't flying anywhere with you." Sighing, Javen nodded. He pulled off his pack, opened up one of the pouches, and took out a sheet of plastic and his stylus. He wrote a quick hiring notice and posted it up to the board. "Can we go now?" Javen said, a little more annoyed than he meant to sound. The pilot nodded, and they left the port for the nearby hotel.