TemplarInc

To be honest I wrote it as a one off; but thinking about it, I could make it something of a series...just have to be careful to not make the lvl 13 Ninja Blade / Reflexes Stalker out to be too much of a good guy. Though something like this actually happened in game.

Sally was out late, but her mother probably wasn't back from work yet anyway. WSPDR kept her busy. Wherever her dad was, he was probably working late too. There wasn't enough money around to just work a normal shift.

For all of her eight years of life, Sally had lived on Cap Au Diable, growing up in the shadow of the horns. Her mother had steered her clear of the chanting of the Luddite fanatics, demanding the disuse of technology and the discarding of modern luxuries; she had turned her away when the Arachnos footsoldiers of Lord Recluse had come to blows with the Gold Brickers, the thieves with their technology and jet packs. She'd been taught well, and yet there she was; in Haven, way past her usual curfew, scurrying home after a trip to the store.

It was a trip she wouldn't forget. A group of Arachnos soldiers were outside, taking notes over a fallen Gold Bricker. One of Midas' criminal soldiers, it appeared, had been murdered.

"Tenebrean's work," one of them had said in a dismissive way.

Now as she walked home the sight of the body bothered her. She was a taciturn child, and bodies didn't usually concern her - she had seen her first at the age of six and barely batted an eyelid. Now, though, as she clutched a candy bar in one hand and a bottle of milk in the other, she wasn't so sure she was really as tough as she thought.

She caught a look of herself in a broken window as she passed it, a glimpse of red hair, freckles, blue eyes and glasses, braces hidden behind tightly closed lips. Her jacket was dark, the better to not draw attention to herself on most streets.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite good enough.

She went around a corner - the last corner - and came face-to-face with a group of three Gold Brickers, loitering around the back of a small office building. Two of them looked around, fearful for the intervention of Arachnos forces; then when their eyes settled on her, they smirked.

"Hey look...candy," one of them said. He was a swarthy type. She didn't like swarthy types.

"You remember what Midas said about taking candy from a baby?" a second interjected. This one was flabby, ugly looking; it put her in mind of a frog.

"Dare you," the third said, ratlike and nasal. "Dare you to."

She took a step back. She didn't get much pocket money. She'd bought the milk out of it - she needed it - and had had enough for one candy bar, one only. It was hers. She was going to treasure it. She wasn't ready for some thieving Gold Brickers to [censored] it away purely out of spite.

"Hand it over," said the flabby one, stepping forward. Ratty followed just behind him, smirking evilly; the first, the swarthy sort, hung toward the back. Soon he was hidden from her view by Flabby.

"No," she murmured.

"Don't be stupid," said Ratty with a little giggle. "Give him the candy."

"No," she repeated.

The dust behind them shifted in the streetlight, coiling in a strange pattern. She saw it. They, apparently, did not.

"Last time, kid," said Flabby.

"No," she said finally.

He reached out, but was stopped by Ratty, who gripped his arm and made a little choking sound, looking back at the coil of dust. Flabby turned around in a slightly lumbering way, and peered back at Swarthy.

Swarthy wasn't there; or at least, no living being was where Swarthy was. Now Swarthy was clearly dead, and had died silently and without struggle. A single neat hole was pierced through his jet pack, which was bubbling over with blood, pushed through from a pierced lung emptying of air.

The two remaining Gold Brickers stared in horror at the body. She looked up at them, took half a step back, ready to run when she got the chance.

The dust moved again.

There was suddenly a blinding flash of light, as if the streetlight was caught by the edge of a blade that slashed out of nothingness and clear through the chest of Ratty. It speared in, and Ratty made a choking sound as the invisible edge pierced something vital; Flabby tried to scream in shock, but didn't get the chance. The blade - its wielder slowly revealed as the shadows peeled away from his form - twisted and hacked, cleaving straight through Flabby's neck. An arc of blood followed the blade, the merest splash flicking from the point and splattering against her cheek as the sword point stopped scarcely inches from her face.

Ratty and Flabby dropped to the ground at the same time, very dead.

Sally took a breath and clutched her candy bar tighter as she stared at the creature that had appeared out of the dark. Very tall but only slightly muscular, his chest was bare and covered with red tribal tattoos; his hair - arranged in a top knot - was the same colour as dried blood, the same colour as his skull-shaped shoulder pads, his cargo pants, his hand wraps and his gas mask. His eyes were bound with bandages, dark red splotches over each eye that had long since dried. Over the bandages, a coil of barbed wire further covered the figure's eyes, and for a moment, Sally wondered if what she was looking at was human.

There was silence for a moment as the thing stood, blood dripping from his sword; then he sheathed it, fast enough that she couldn't make out any detail on the blade. He stooped to the ground, touching each of the bodies, then settling on Flabby and patting him down, looking for something.

She knew there was no way his eyes could see through that bandages, that was even if those blood stains could be passed off as merely for show. Maybe he didn't even know that she was there. Maybe if she was very still, he wouldn't even notice her; and she might just get home alive.

Finding what he wanted, the thing, the assassin stood upright, turning a plastic card over in his fingers; it was the same size as a credit card, though it featured no numbers or names, only the logo of the Gold Brick factory.

Seeming satisfied, the card vanished into a pocket as the thing turned, took a step over Ratty's body, then stopped dead. She wondered if she'd made a noise, and held her breath, knuckles white where she clenched her fists.

His head turned just a little, as if he was looking over his shoulder, an eerie motion when the thing had no visible eyes.

The voice was something she hadn't expected. While the vision of the figure was awful, the voice was worse; horrifying not in any way she could easily describe, but perhaps so scary to her because it sounded just as if he was politely asking someone in a library if they could let him pass. It was inoffensive and placid and very, very quiet, a whisper amongst whispers.

"Go home."

Then he vanished, as the shadows all around him flexed, grasped and embraced him; for five whole minutes she stood, trying to understand just why she wasn't dead, then she ran for home as fast as she could.

By the time she got there, the blood had dried on her cheek.

Good points, frankly. It was written as a short piece for CoH/CoV players that already knew the basic terminology; I should really describe the armour though...thank you for the input.

lol. Nice.

Susanne sat on the edge of the building, watching the King's Row traffic roll by below her, her feet dangling over the edge. She was still clad in her Templar armour, though her helmet sat to one side of her, her trusty Multiple Weapon System on the other side. Dark red hair was disturbed by the faint breeze, carrying the stench of the city; her eyes, a deep blue shade, were dilated and distracted. She was deep in thought, and it was obvious.

She'd almost had the crate open; the Neural Scrambler was almost in her grasp; and then she'd been surprised. He'd walked around the corner, and although he was in a Council uniform, and although he was in the middle of a war zone, she couldn't help but notice the look of fear and panic in his eyes.

He wasn't another fighter. He was a lab technician, a statistical analyst; she saw a kindred spirit in him. Once, she'd been a lab technician, too - before the Templar program, before her brothers and her father had teamed up with her to craft the armour, before her father had stolen the prototype and gone rogue.

He was in a Council uniform, but he wasn't a soldier. He wasn't one of the Penumbra rifle-monkies that lined up to knock her down. He was an academic.

Down below, horns honked. A group of Skulls lurked in a nearby alleyway, spraycans painting a dark tattoo against the brick-face skin of the apartment building that cast its shadow over them.

It was easy to think in terms of black and white, in Paragon City. When the Hellions pushed around a woman and took her purse, there was no room for discrepancy. They had to be stopped. When the Clockwork ripped pieces of scaffold and chunks of steel out of the city's structures, they were building something that would undoubtedly be trouble for the citizens, and they had to be stopped.

The Council, no doubt, had to be checked; they were megalomaniacal conquerors who had big plans for everywhere on earth. It was easy to know that they were the "bad guys", as much as she was a "good guy".

The lab tech had reached for his pistol.

She closed her eyes as she saw it in slow motion. The Templar helmet and visual gear had given her a pixel-accurate ultra-high-definition image of the man's face, the sweat droplet formed on his temple, the gleam of light on his goggles, the glint of the diamond set in his wedding ring.

Her reactions in the suit were too fast. She hadn't thought. He had the pistol halfway out of its holster when she pulled the trigger, and the rifle kicked in her armoured hand.

She was a scientist. She was a creator, a researcher, an inventor; yet she couldn't remember anything she'd created since XT-01 was finished, and she'd taken to the streets in it. All she'd done was destroy and kill, and it had taken her this long to realise - not everyone in her sights had been a murderer or a mugger.

Her eyes opened.

Was that really her goal? To tear apart the enemy, no matter what? The integrated Multiple Weapon System had recently had a beanbag launcher fitted alongside the grenade tube; could she turn to it and rely on it as readily as she deployed the shotgun, the assault rifle?

Down below, three of the Skulls slipped away from the shadows, starting to follow a girl on her way home from work. Susanne didn't need the goggles to pick out the gleams of greed and darker things in the eyes of the death-obsessed thugs.

The helmet slid into place and she gathered up her Multiple Weapon System.

It was always easier, she mused, when she had a target; with nothing to fire at, she would see the blood spatter over the gold wedding ring over and over again.

She slipped off the side of the building, crosshairs picking out the Skulls as she loaded an M30 grenade into the tube.