Paint the Planet Red

I've been meaning to try my hand at writing a bit of fanfic for some time, and the inspiration that has finally gotten me to give it a try has been the forum game I'm currently in, where Spite is on the prowl in the Wagner Mars Base.  Presented with the seeming absurdity of Lost Children and Drug Labs existing in such a far-off place, I chose to answer those questions with a bit of speculation, and I liked where it took me.  I haven't yet decided whether to use the same supporting heroes (not trying to marginalize them, but apart entirely from Wraith being the character I played, she's also Spite's nemesis, so it would clearly be "her vs. him, with them helping" rather than "them vs. him with her help").  For now, I'm just putting up the intro bit, which I wrote a few days ago and which leaves much of the stage yet to be set.

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The wraith was quietly furious as the shuttle began the final docking procedure.  She'd known that no jail, particularly not the revolving-door prisons of the Rook City penal system, could hold Jack "Spite" Donovan for long...and sure enough, he'd found a loophole he could exploit.  It was all the fault of that miserable lawyer, Steven Witchknife; he'd located an obscure and seemingly nonsensical precedent in early Overbrook City municipal codes, dictating that anyone proven guilty of murder should "never walk the earth a free man", and successfully argued that this code mandated his client's deportation to the newly established Wagner Base on Mars, as the only way of ensuring that he could never escape any Earthly prison.

Of course, the Base was operating on a restrictive enough budget that they could hardly install a state-of-the-art prison for a transhuman serial killer; Donovan had hardly been in his holding cell for three hours, and then a body turned up.  With a working population in the hundreds, including at least four entire families, even a man of Donovan's imposing stature could manage to vanish into the crowd for a short time, and in the long term he could skulk in the tangled corridors of the base's maintenance level more or less indefinitely.

To say nothing of what would happen if Donovan learned that the originally-military outpost, despite its recent vast expansion into a full-fledged offworld colony, still held an arsenal of captured alien weapons from the Voss invasion....

I should probably write some bridging text, but for now I'll just copy/paste the other big piece of writing I've done in the game thread, which I may adjust later if I decide to change the characters involved.

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"Okay people, we know that the killer only strikes at night, so you've got six hours to make this place impregnable.  You there, get some bars on that window, the glass is only four inches thick, that won't hold unless he's feeling lazy.  Over there; I can see stress micro-fractures in that paneling, start layering on the concrete.  Remember, nobody opens that door without a password!"  Her left eye gleaming red, the Wraith might have looked menacing, but the man and the two little girls had Haka's and Visionary's word that she was there to protect them, however overbearing she was about it.  Not normally in-character for Maia, but the presence of one of her worst adversaries in this outre new locale had rattled her severely, and she was overcompensating.  A body count of one was one too many, that poor aid worker; the station's population was only in the dozens of dozens, that meant not a single pair of hands could be spared.  She might have to boss a few innocents around rudely, but she would ensure they lived to complain about it.

More copypasta, and at this point it's very clear a rewrite will be needed.

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Maia's mask shifts slightly as the mouth beneath it twists into a satisfied smirk.  With most of his intended victims spirited away to safety, Donovan's drug-wracked metabolism was self-destructing; without the adrenaline rush he got from killing things, he was a dead man walking, and certainly in no condition to pick a fight with Haka.  She could pretty much have stood back and let her teammates take the killer down over the next couple of minutes, but where was the fun in that?  No sense in taking any chances that he'd get away; it was time to end this now, even if it put her in the hospital while Donovan went to the morgue.  Or vice versa, if necessary.  Drawing three small blades in one hand and a big blade in the other, she went into a fighting crouch and started to slink inside the psychopath's guard, preferring a couple punches in the face to any chance that her throws might miss.  But then she felt a pocket of twisting ether in front of her, and realized there was no need to get within grabbing distance after all; with Visionary's help, she could finish the battle from her preferred respectful distance.

It has a lot of promise, you've got some stuff to build off of there.

Sounding good so far!

 

You know, I really do wish there was a official place on thif forum that was for fan fictions...

You know, I really do wish there was a official place on thif forum that was for fan fictions...

Ask, and you shall receive :)

And the Admin did grin, and the forumites did feast upon the fanfiction, and the fruitbats, and the orangutangs. . .

Thanks Paul.