Plurk paste

A few hours after everyone had left, Meise looked directly at Plumber and whispered, “I think I can take ‘em.”

“What?” Plumber asked, unsure if he’d heard right.

Meise shuffled closer, bound arms shaking behind his back. “The skinny one. The one with the hair.”

“You mean the girl!?” asked Hedge, who had overheard. He scraped his way towards them using the grip on his boot heels. Even with his visor in the way, you could tell from the set of his jaw that he was disturbed by the idea.

“No, of course I don’t mean the… well, obviously I could take the girl, but — “ Meise hesitated for a moment, unsure if that had been a cool thing to say or not — “but I’m talking about the guy. The skinny punk with the creepy eyes. How old do you think he is, like, thirteen? I could snap him in half like a block of noodles.”

Plumber exhaled a long breath into the fluff of his scrim scarf.

“Sir,” he said, after he was sure he’d come up with something that would both discourage Meise and make him think it was his idea, “did you get a look at what kind of sword he was using?”

To his alarm, Meise just nodded, his mouth a line of grim understanding.

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t be risky,” he said, his voice gravelly, “but speaking as someone who knows a thing or two about tactical combat, that weight is going to send him off balance. Once he takes a swing — “

“He’s going to swing it in here?” asked Hedge. He looked at the wall immediately to his left, the wall immediately to his right, and, apparently just in case he’d forgotten something, the wall covered in control panels immediately to his back.

“He’s right,” said Plumber, “it’s not possible for — “

“Members of SOLDIER can use weapons that a normal person wouldn’t think possible,” Meise continued, making Plumber grateful that the visor obscured how hard he was rolling his eyes. “This is how it’s going to go. When he takes a swing, at the end of the arc he’s off-balance and I use that timing window to put him into a suplex, then unleash my Limit Break technique.” Meise eyed Plumber. “It’s like I always say as your commander — the right way to end any fight.”

Plumber swallowed several comments about how, with this level of combat nous, it was amazing Meise had been passed over for SOLDIER. There were better times and places. Besides, Meise had failed the blood test, albeit on IQ grounds; he’d been found lying in a scarlet mess on the tiles of the 66th floor bathroom with the clear resin casing of a ballpoint pen stuck into the palm of his hand and a urine cup half full of blood in the other. They’d handed it to him and said ‘give us a sample to check that the Mako will work with your blood’, and he’d misunderstood.

“But what if the girl sees what you did?” Hedge said.

“What’s she going to do?” Meise snorted. He attempted to strike a pose despite both of his hands being bound together with cable ties. “Kick us off the ship and let us get back to our lives?”

“Or, she might, uh, kill you.”

“Hedge, I’m going to pretend for the sake of your continued military career that you didn’t just suggest your commanding officer would be beaten by a girl.”

“Sir,” asked Hedge, “what actually is your Limit Break? Is it to shoot blood everywhere?”

“Sir, that last part — ” Plumber decided to cut in, before Meise could react to what Hedge had just said — “the part about her kicking us off the ship. Maybe we can find a way of being just annoying enough that it’s best for them to get rid of us?”

Hedge and Meise considered this.

“Come on,” Plumber said. “It’s better than dying here. And they seem to think of themselves as good people. So they won’t just kill us if they have a better option. Isn’t there anything out there still worth it for us?”

Hedge looked upset.

“I want to call Mam. My cousin died in Sector 7 and, well, now it’s the end of the world. So now she just spends a lot of time sleeping.”

“Great,” said Plumber, nodding at him, “you’ll get to call her soon, so long as… Sir?”

The cold blue and pink light from the submarine console picked out something wet shining on the skin just underneath Meise’s eyes.

“It’s perfect,” he said. He hadn’t shifted his usual tone of barked enthusiasm. “Hedge!”

“Yessir?”

“You left the lock off the back of a containment vehicle and got three trained Hounds eaten by a Bottomswell.”

Hedge shuffled with discomfort. “Thank you for reminding me of that, sir.”

“And Plumber! When you led that unit in Midgar…”

Plumber stared at the floor. “I really don’t want to talk about it —”

“Whatever! Point is, we’re all a bunch of useless screwups,” Meise said, his teeth glinting wickedly under his cap. “But now, we’re going to use that to screw them up! It’s the perfect job for us. We will smash shit! Take up space! Get into fights and lose! Our talent for failure was given to us by the Goddess!”

“Yeah!” Hedge whooped, and Plumber found himself smiling, too. “We should hi-five!”

The three of them shuffled into the same spot on the floor and, after some maneuvering, bonked their helmets into each other’s.

“When we get our arms free, we’ll do our special pose,” Meise said, shaking his helmet back into a more comfortable fit around his ears.

Plumber opened his mouth to agree and felt his ears pop. The door had been opened. In through it came the second, third, and first most terrifying people Plumber had ever seen.

“Well, look at that. I forgot they still here,” said the third most terrifying person Plumber had ever seen, who literally had a literal assault cannon mounted onto the end of one of his literal arms. He poked Hedge’s side with the toe of his boot as he came past — perhaps not as a show of aggression, perhaps simply because he barely fit into the cockpit.

“We probably should do something with ‘em at some point,” the second most terrifying person Plumber had ever seen said, stepping effortlessly over Meise’s leg when he tried to trip him up. He seated himself down in the captain’s chair, pushed a button to blank the screen, and used the black surface to check the reflection of his wretchedly on-trend haircut. With the obnoxious cheekbones and sulky pout of a male model, but without the height and charm, he’d have looked like any hipster slumpunk if not for the fact that the sword he’d just taken off his back was the size, and probably the weight, of Meise.

The most terrifying person Plumber had ever seen slunk beside the second most terrifying person Plumber had ever seen and asked, in an adolescent whine, “how do we feel about letting them go?”

“W-we want to,” Plumber cut in, figuring he might as well ask about it. “To go, I mean.”

All three terrifying people stared directly at him, and he felt his joints fill with cold glue. The second most terrifying person’s eyes were by far the sharpest of the three, an unnatural and highly unpleasant blue-green; there was a physical sense of relief when he screwed them up tightly and returned his focus to the screen.

“We can’t,” he said, placing his hand on the controls. “We just… can’t.”

The most terrifying person Plumber had ever seen tilted his head in a way that at first he thought might be a questioning gesture, but then proceeded to bring his hind leg over his head and start licking his own genitals.

“Right now the Planet’s what matters. Not individuals.”

“So if we don’t matter you can let us go,” said Plumber, surprised by how boldly the words came out of his mouth.

Hedge chipped in; “you think if we were going to say anything, anyone would even listen?”

A long pause. Gunarm and Haircut looked at each other, and back to the soldiers, the only sound the hum of the engine and the insistent, sandpapery noise of a sentient, fire-tailed hellbeast dragging its tongue across its ball sack.

“All three of us are prodigiously qualified idiots,” Meise added, thumbing himself in the chest. “With social capital to match!”

At the same time, Plumber said, “My manager still makes me bow and call him “sir, who is more powerful than God,” even though I wrote a letter of apology for the time I - “

Hedge also said, “Even if I had perfect evidence, Heideggar’d just whack my jaw off its hinges - ”

Haircut lifted a hand.

“Stop!” he said, and, after being sure everyone had, bought the hand to the back of his neck to rub it. “It’s just that, when you all talk at once, the noise in here gets…”

“Yes,” Hellbeast replied, flicking his tail, “I don’t run from fireworks any more, but that doesn’t mean I like this.”

“Awright,” said Gunarm, nodding, all cool, “which one of you’s gonna talk first? I pick… you.”

He pointed his gunarm at Hedge, who turned purple.

“I - I want to call my beloved mother, my mother who raised me all on her own and worked long hours and saved and worked two jobs to give me all the opportunities I had and she was so worried about me going into the Army and I try and call her every day and please don’t point that thing at me! Sir!”

Gunarm’s brow creased into a soft frown, more like he was trying to see something at a distance that could not possibly have existed in the tiny cockpit. He lowered the gun. Hedge inhaled so hard that the front of his visor visibly shook.

“Cloud, I…” he stared at Haircut, “if we ain’t gonna kill ‘em, we gotta let them go.”

(”That’s the famous ‘Cloud’?” Meise whispered, nudging Plumber with an elbow. “Interesting!”)

“We have no option,” said Cloud, and folded his arms. “To do either of those things, I mean.”