"Tell me you're not junked. Rusted scrap heap piece of shit, you better not be junked," you spit out through a mouthful of blood. No one answers and you start to panic.
The cockpit is a vision straight from your daymares; swaths of red light timed to a pulse, cracked glass, and the gurgling spill of luminescent juice from busted circuitry to your left. A gas line hisses from a split in its membrane, emitting a small jet of foul steam. All of the viewscreens are strobes, flashing static and garbled readouts and angry warnings which means you're blind, trapped in a metal and wetware coffin only stars knew where. You're caged, the entire sky reduced to a tiny cocoon of broken parts.
It was the simplest scout mission, just there and back; now this. En route to base and you got blown out of the sky, half of you knocked unconscious and the other half useless with a smoking crater for a left wing, plummeting in a smoking spiral toward the ground. You should have been a smear on the ground, or a sinking shipwreck in the water. You shouldn't have woken up. The information plastered in your control box swims in a swirling haze of light, silent except for the sounds of critical malfunction. You're just about to scream when the suit's vocals crackle to life.
"If you're spewing pathetic insults, then I guess that means you're fine and fucking dandy."
"Fuck me, holy grubmother of shitworthy stars," is what hisses out when your lungs collapse in relief. You gasp and then, "I'm not fine. I'm bleeding. You crashed and now I'm bleeding and it's all your fault."
"How the bloody hell is it my fault? You're the pilot."
"Override! A perfectly simple, wiggler textbook override, y-"
You're cut short by fluid in your airways and you lean forward to spit between your knees, groaning as the movement makes the matter inside your braincase feel like it's swelling to burst. You cough up your standard issue lunch too. You try to process the crackling voice that surrounds you like a dizzying vat of pissed off while your whole body caves into your stomach.
"I did override, nookstain. That's why we're still alive, though barely just. There were four missiles, man. Four. That's shit outta luck, no matter what hopbeastbrained stunt we could have pulled. Some pailgargler meant serious business."
You are so tired. You need an entire ablutionary wash for your mouth and you may very well be bleeding out into the machine. Kind of funny, you think. Side by side, you and him were just a boy and a ship with a copy of his brain, but get speared and you bled about equally. How disgustingly romantic, slow death in the guts of your fucked up mechanical flushcrush. It's sick enough to make you hurl from the sweetness.
"Can you still function? Damage report."
"I'm alive. Don't even try to ask me to fly, but I can walk. Are you okay?"
"Yeah," you whisper and place your bloody hands on the controls at your sides. He kills the brilliant alerts and fills the fragmented screens with blank cherry red; a horrible sort of comfort, you guess. You'll take it. "What now?"
"I think it's safe to say that, as of thirty-six minutes ago, we're officially freelance. Some asshole—or amalgamation of assholes—tried to get us killed. I say we come back from the dead and return the favor."
FILL: TEAM [Nepeta<3Terezi]
The cockpit is a vision straight from your daymares; swaths of red light timed to a pulse, cracked glass, and the gurgling spill of luminescent juice from busted circuitry to your left. A gas line hisses from a split in its membrane, emitting a small jet of foul steam. All of the viewscreens are strobes, flashing static and garbled readouts and angry warnings which means you're blind, trapped in a metal and wetware coffin only stars knew where. You're caged, the entire sky reduced to a tiny cocoon of broken parts.
It was the simplest scout mission, just there and back; now this. En route to base and you got blown out of the sky, half of you knocked unconscious and the other half useless with a smoking crater for a left wing, plummeting in a smoking spiral toward the ground. You should have been a smear on the ground, or a sinking shipwreck in the water. You shouldn't have woken up. The information plastered in your control box swims in a swirling haze of light, silent except for the sounds of critical malfunction. You're just about to scream when the suit's vocals crackle to life.
"If you're spewing pathetic insults, then I guess that means you're fine and fucking dandy."
"Fuck me, holy grubmother of shitworthy stars," is what hisses out when your lungs collapse in relief. You gasp and then, "I'm not fine. I'm bleeding. You crashed and now I'm bleeding and it's all your fault."
"How the bloody hell is it my fault? You're the pilot."
"Override! A perfectly simple, wiggler textbook override, y-"
You're cut short by fluid in your airways and you lean forward to spit between your knees, groaning as the movement makes the matter inside your braincase feel like it's swelling to burst. You cough up your standard issue lunch too. You try to process the crackling voice that surrounds you like a dizzying vat of pissed off while your whole body caves into your stomach.
"I did override, nookstain. That's why we're still alive, though barely just. There were four missiles, man. Four. That's shit outta luck, no matter what hopbeastbrained stunt we could have pulled. Some pailgargler meant serious business."
You are so tired. You need an entire ablutionary wash for your mouth and you may very well be bleeding out into the machine. Kind of funny, you think. Side by side, you and him were just a boy and a ship with a copy of his brain, but get speared and you bled about equally. How disgustingly romantic, slow death in the guts of your fucked up mechanical flushcrush. It's sick enough to make you hurl from the sweetness.
"Can you still function? Damage report."
"I'm alive. Don't even try to ask me to fly, but I can walk. Are you okay?"
"Yeah," you whisper and place your bloody hands on the controls at your sides. He kills the brilliant alerts and fills the fragmented screens with blank cherry red; a horrible sort of comfort, you guess. You'll take it. "What now?"
"I think it's safe to say that, as of thirty-six minutes ago, we're officially freelance. Some asshole—or amalgamation of assholes—tried to get us killed. I say we come back from the dead and return the favor."