RP: NSS Acadia [Prelude] Fortune, Neon and Sand

"..." Ran smoked the cigarette to the filter and flicked it to the side, turned around and rolled his neck around, popping it. "I'm not gay..." He whispered to himself, before lighting another cigarette. "We need to get to a liquor store immediately. Pussy's probably the last thing on my mind right now."

Autumn let out a soft laugh as Ran turned away, she watched him with a curious tilt of her head. "Awww, don't be like that Chief! We can get you a new bottle of.. whatever it is your drinking and another pack of smokes. It looks like your gonna puff through the pack in another couple of minutes."

"Eh, sure." The man at the counter handed her a gunmetal black .45 caliber handgun, with a visible compensator in the front. The weapon itself was relatively new looking, but had obviously been handled quite a few times by other people in the store, some of them cybernetically enhanced, judging by small scratches around the handle. "Yannow, you could prolly get one like this from your quartermaster. But if you want to show off a two-tone silver and black model to your bunkmates, I've got a dozen in the back. Cleaned off the packing grease justa few hours ago, too."

The owner smacked himself in the head, remembering he'd forgotten the component that was nearly as essential as the gun itself. Ammunition. "Uh... and shit. How many rounds? It's five DA for three mags, or thirteen for a box of fourty-five."

Amelia examined it a bit, making sure the safety was on and making sure that she wasn't pointing it at anyone. "Hm? Oh, three mags should be just fine. I only need to get a feel for it. Five DA you say? Alright.." Just out of curiosity she placed it in her cybernetic hand gently, twisting it around a couple times. She quickly put it back in her organic hand though.

"I suppose I could get it from the quartermaster, but I like having something apart from the norm. Plus it would mine alone so I'm free to do with it as I wish." She payed the five DA for the ammunition and looked at the gun's design a bit more as she waited. She though about different modifications she could put on it, and hell, why not a different design on the side? She could do it in her spare time.

"Kohouna - Bouha." Henry said as Adrian took the cigar, "Odd blend. Tastes - good."

The smoke from the cigar had a musky, tropical scent, not the sort of industrial crap you'd smell from other cigars made by bigger companies. The smoke itself was thick, and strong, you could feel it go down your windpipe and coat the insides with a nice layer of cancer and tropicana.

Well, Harrison decided he had had enough flying around in circles over the city, so he decided to do the one thing he did quite frequently on shore leaves- go souvenier shopping.

His souveniers just happened to be guns.

So, swinging his K1-33 down into the streets, he eventually whined down to a stop in front of the gun shop where Amelia was currently (in an attempt for the OC's controller to get Harrison back into some sort of plot) and went inside.

"Oh, hey Amelia." The merc said as he strode through the door.

"Huh. Well... here're your bullets. I stuck them on clips to make reloading easier, but I'll want those back when you're done. Shouldn't be too hard for a hardboiled marine type like yerself." The gunshop owner replied, a slight smile on his face. It was always nice to get business outside of the usual jackasses trying to rob a casino, or from security guards working at the places being hit.

"We can talk about customizing the thing if you want to actually want to buy one."

Amelia loaded the pistol up and cocked it, checking to make sure the safety was on till she was ready to shoot. "Of course, of course. I had no intention of taking them." She grabbed the extra magazines and smiled a bit. "I do want to buy one. I don't think I'd be here otherwise. As for customizing? Well we'll see. Best see how it performs first."

Amelia paused at the sound of another greeting her. She turned, "Oh, hello... You.." She frowned. She was terrible with names. "Oh yes, Harrison I believe? Weren't you the one that helped keep one of those crooked demons from cutting me up?" She spoke as she walked over to test her potentially new gun.

"Yeah. You were the one who got hit by an explosion. Weynolt, right?" Harrison said, turning to the shop owner and getting clearance to use the range before pulling out one of his HHGs.

"I remember you. You were one of the WATER pilots, but you kind of lost it. Started calling yourself 'Alice' or something..." Harrison guffawed.

"We better all be getting some sort of medal for that mission; I think there were only two people who came out of that mission alive and unharmed, and I wasn't one of them." He attached an aiming laser to the barrel of the pistol and sighted in.

"Heh, who knew low-velocity deflected rounds could pierce shields."

"Yes. I am Weynolt. I don't think I ever got to thank you for saving my hide out there." Amelia looked down at her leg. "As for the explosion? No permanent damage. It'll be fine in a couple of weeks. Modern medicine at work for you." She walked up to her spot at the shooting range. She took an odd stance, only firing with one hand. She had amazing control over the recoil though, hitting the target quite accurately. It seemed she had trained herself to fire that way in light of having only one organic hand and the other was an obsolete model.

At the mention of her little episode, however, Amelia froze. She slowly turned her head towards Harrison, a scowl that could be read as she was two steps away from turning the gun on him. "Never speak of her again. Ever." She went back to her target as if none of that had ever happened.

"We're soldiers. We do what we're told. Odds be damned. I'll give you that intel should've actually done their friggin job, though. I don't think there is any excuse for that." She reloaded one magazine, adjusting her aim a tiny bit. "Tis war, though. People get hurt, they die. The losing side usually have the luxury of reviving their soldiers."

She raised an eyebrow at his last comment, but didn't look away from her target. "Shields aren't infinite. They wear down enough and you could effectively break it by throwing a good sized rock at it... Supposedly. Normally though we can usually get out of the way before it gets to that point. Thank god for the recharge on it."

Harrison's face went flat when faced with Amelia's scowl. The fact that that face just looked so damn evil, combined with the fact that she was holding a gun, made him feel more than just a little bit intimidated- a completely new feeling to him.

"Okay; with a look like that you don't have to tell me twice." Harrison said, dropping the "Alice" topic like a hot rock. Listening to her responses one by one, he finally responded after about a minute of awkward silence.

"I couldn't move fast enough." He said, removing the sighting laser from the muzzle of his HHG and loading a few rounds into the chamber.

"If it weren't for the fact that the rounds were ricocheting, therefore losing velocity, and I was in a FIRE and not one of the more maneuverable suits, it was a recipe for disaster." He thumbed the hammer and held the HHG in both hands, then squeezed the trigger. The .44 slug ripped the paper target down the center.

"But everyone's luck runs out eventually, eh? Some just happen to run out faster than others'."

Amelia made no comment on his dropping of the topic on Alice. She didn't even seem to notice actually.

"We should've done a better job of protecting you guys though. FIRE's can dish out a lot of hurt, but they don't take it too well unfortunately." She fired another round. "I guess we all made some mistakes, huh? And yet we won."

She paused on that thought and added, "It's like they say. Warfare is a chain of mistakes. The winner is just the one who makes fewer of them."

Amelia slapped in the last magazine. She wasn't sure yet how well she was hitting her target, but she'd see soon enough. "That's why we have training. So we have something to fall back upon when our luck does run out."

"And yet, things usually fall apart at that point where luck runs out and training is what has to be relied on, especially when that training involves following an accurate, minutely timed battle plan."

Harrison flicked the hammer again and fired off another round.

"A wise man once said, 'no plan survives contact with the enemy'. Normally I didn't think that was true, but that point where I got shot is the point where I believe him."

That's when he caught Amelia's statement about "doing a better job protecting" the FIREs.

"Amelia, you did a fine job protecting everyone; it was my own damn fault that I got shot. Sacrifices needed to be made, and everyone is alive. Well, mostly. Autumn was... A statistic to the commanders of that mission; necessary but expendable, as we all are. But to us it feels different when someone goes up like that. Hell, I had to drag her out of an Aethersperm concert when both of our cybernetics shut down." He sighed and shook his head, a small smirk on his face. "Fun times." He then turned back towards Amelia.

"But she's back now, alive and well. We're all alive and well."

"Statistics though we may be. Numbers don't win wars. Soldiers do." Amelia fired, hitting the halfway point on her current magazine. "Point is, I could've done better. I could've stayed with it the entire time and not put others in danger just to save my worthless hide."

She sighed a bit at the mention of Autumn. "Soldiers die. It's just the way it works. Try to imagine before we could revive our troops, though. If someone next to you died, they were dead for good. No revival through the brain spiders or anything. Of course, this also negated the need to collect their heads, but once you ran out of soldiers, that was it. No amount of technology could save you then."

Amelia raised a small eyebrow. "Concert, huh? Never been to one. Why'd your cybernetics shut down?" She asked as she fired her last shot. She retrieved her target when it came to her. Even shooting with one hand, she had managed to hit her target each time. Most of them were centered well. A couple shots were placed into the head reigon of her target, and one interestingly punched a hole into the crotch region of it. She smiled slightly. "I like this gun. I think I'll buy it."

"Ah, Styrling. I've heard of them, they supposedly make a good gun. Never knew myself, though." Harrison said, smiling a little bit himself. His grin only grew a little bit wider when he heard Amelia asking about Aethersperm.

"Oh, you don't even know. I was at Los Apagos with the crew of the Alliance and a few newcomers. A few of these massive speakers popped out of the ground, and, of course, I didn't know what they were. Getting a bit closer to the speaker, it blasted enough white noise that a squad of PAs were called in, mistaking it for orbital bombardment. Of course, standing in front of one, I was lucky to still have my hearing at that point. However, when the blast went off I flew a good four feet backwards and jammed the battery out of my arm. The damn thing shut down entirely.

"Anyways, I barely managed to make my way out of that place when I noticed that, lo and behold, our friend Autumn- who was cybernetic from the waist down- had completely shut off and was crippled. Couldn't talk either, cybernetic voicebox. Me and this IPG officer ended up dragging her up to a hill a good mile away from the blast zone and fixed our cybernetics. Fun fun, poking around with my own artificial ribs and arm."

“Sorry, couldn’t help eavesdropping. You’re a marine too?” Nick asked, sidling up next to the pair at the next available spot on the range. Of course he’d gotten authorization and one of the .45’s manufactured by Zen before he crossed the threshold.

“I’m Nick. I’m just here for the Acadia and the benefits. Not necessarily in that order either.” The target dropped down and he squeezed every bullet out of the clip, leaving it riddled with bullets.

Autumn was fidgeting beside Ran, and Adrian as she waited for them to continue forward towards their destination. Her patience was to the point that she was trying to tug on their sleeves to get them to move forward. "Come on guys, we're about 100 yards away from all of our worldly vices," she whined in a sing-song voice with a grin. "All the nice fat, juicy cancer and deliciously, loose and willing hookers you can handle Chief Rui!"

Unlike most of the other Marines, Trey was sitting on a train, his bag next to him, reading a newspaper. His destination: Unknown for the moment, He would check on his Datapad after he finished this article. He was quite into this paper, Odd as it was to find a non-digital one on a frontier world where everything was new. He liked the old-school, however, and had picked the thing up, even if it cost money as opposed to the free news he could get instantly on that little-used device given him by a quartermaster a while ago.

Folding his paper, he pulled out the datapad and searched the next few stops to see what interesting things were there. Hopefully there would be an actual hotel as opposed to one of those Abhorred Casinos. Somewhere quiet and comfortable where he could relax while he waited for the next mission.

To fulfill his need to collect guns of various types, P3C Tony Tutgen walked into the gun shop. He saw a few other people shopping around as he browsed the local inventory. The marine still had his uniform on since he hadn't taken the time to stop at a general store for some casual clothing. As he paced, an old revolver caught his eye. The Geshrin/Nepleslian walked up to the counter that it was stored in and inspected it through the glass.

Henry didn't want to stick around any longer and just moved forward.
"Setting - the pace, eh?" He commented before moving toward a Casino, getting in easily.

"Welcome." A burly bodyguard said as he walked in, "Don't you cause any trouble now."

Henry then waded forward through the neon lights, flashing signs, lures of riches and fortune and the massive miasma of cancerous byproduct hanging in the air.
He eventually found himself sitting down at a Poker table where the buy-in was only 40 DA. Three other players were there, wearing things from business suits to rags.
Player Two, we shall name him, was in a business suit, wearing sunglasses and had slick, waxed-back hair.
Player Three was wearing a leather jacket, dirty blonde hair and had a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
Player Four was wearing construction worker's clothing, and he had the helmet in his lap.

"Deal." Player 2 said to the dealer, who dealt out 5 cards to each player.
Henry was dealt an Ace of Spades, Ace of Hearts, 5 of Spades, 7 of Diamonds and a King of Diamonds.
Henry discarded the 5 of Spades. Other players discarded some cards as well. Everyone was dealt cards for the ones they discarded. Henry got himself a 7 of Clubs.
Henry didn't show much emotion to this - for it would make the others influence their decision. Player Two smiled at his hand and chuckled. Player Three frowned, but nodded. He still thought he had a chance. Player Four folded at his crappy hand.

Player Two exchanged glances at everyone, seeing how they were and decided to raise by 10 DA. Henry and Player Three chipped in.

Then came the final reveal.
Player Three had One Pair. Two Kings.
Player Two had Two Pairs. Two 2's and Two 5's.
Henry then put his cards down, so only the two 7's he had could be seen. Player Two snickered.
"I win, then-"
Then Henry suddenly moved his hand and revealed the pair of aces. Player two was quite surprised!

"I - think, not." Henry won himself 190 DA.