Always Hiring
Commander: standard (rank 1)
The new Yellow and White stood waiting for them at the back of the Hall of The Force. They had already put on the freshly bleached uniforms of their predecessors. Black and Red whispered at the back end of the hall and watched their new compatriots.
“So the thing about Yellow,” Black says, “is, you know, I’m seeing a very slender body shape, but uh,”
“Not much in the asset department?”
“Yeah, so slender like a woman; but it could just be a very skinny man. You think he, she, is Asian?”
Red sighs.
“Why? Because he or she is yellow? They don’t choose the colors, Clarion assigns them, and I don’t think Clarion is as racist as you.”
“You’d be surprised. In fact he was kind of weird when you first started.”
Red turns to him.
“Wait, what do you mean?”
“Hmmm? Oh, forget it. He was kind of weird about it, that was all.”
“Weird how?”
“Like, he asked me to watch you. So you didn’t tag anything.”
“….That son of—being of enlightenment my ass.”
The Suit Makes the Man; Or the Woman,
Armor: standard (rank 1)
The new White Warrior waves towards the pair.
“Excuse me are you guys the other two warriors?”
Black and Red exit their conversation and walk towards the two newbies.
“Yeah,” Red says, “We’re the other warriors. I’m Red, that’s Black,”
“What are your names?” The man in white asked. Red and Black stopped.
“Our names?” Red repeats, “Don’t worry about it. If you try to call people by their names then you got to learn a new set of names everytime the team turns over…for, whatever reason that may be. Just stick to Red, White, Black, and Yellow. If we’re all here at the end of the month, then we can learn names.”
“Now hold on,” Black interrupts, “I think White’s got a good idea. Let's take names. For example, I’m David.”
“I’m Tim,” says White.
“And I’m Wen,” Yellow says. Red and Black just stare at the Yellow Warrior for a bit.
“So, ‘Wen’,” Black finally says, “That’s interesting. Is that short for Wendy, or Wendel?”
“No, just Wen. It’s a Chinese name.”
David the Black Warrior lets out a light noise of surprise, then turns to huddle with Red the still unnamed black guy.
“Well that got me nowhere on action item number 4. P.S. I told you Clarion was racist.”
“I know, man, I know.”
“And the voice isn’t helping either,” Black whispers, “Its either a Fran Dresser or an Andy Dick, but I can’t tell which.”
“Well, I think that may just be the helmet.”
Yellow and White stand outside the huddle and try leaning in.
“Excuse me guys,” White calls out, “I don’t mean to be rude, but the floating monster head told us you’d be training us in how to use the armor.”
Red and Black break their huddle.
“Train?” Black asks, “It’s armor. You use it to not get shot, stabbed, mauled, or gored. Pretty self-explanatory.”
“But what about the super-strength, and the enhanced reflexes, and,”
“WARNING! WARNING!” The Force Siren screams from a back corner, “Attention Force Warriors, Dina Dino Danger has escaped from the center of Earth and threatens Khazan!”
“Perfect,” Red shouts, “You want training, no better training than experience. Quick; to the Force Van, away!”
To The Force Van!
Vehicle: standard (rank 1)
“What is that smell,” Red yells, “Dammit Black, do you ever wash this thing?”
He leans over in his seat and sticks his head between his knees.
The inside of the Force Van is a windowless box. The floor is covered with a psychadelic tye-dye shag carpet. Either that or it has been vomited on so many times that the colors are mixing. Black swings a hard left; White and Yellow were standing in the back, and slam into the van’s wall. Black then turns to Red.
“Look I will deal with the smell whenever I can either capture or kill whatever is making it, but I swear that thing is like the rodent version of Castro. It will outlive me.”
He swings another hard turn and the newbs in the back slide into the other wall with two solid klunks. The new White Warrior stumbles to the driver’s seat and taps Black’s shoulder.
“Can you please slow down?”
“Slow down? What are you, my mom? We’re driving to a crisis, not a flea market for new knick-knacks.”
“Then can you at least tell us where we’re going,” White begs, blood now trickling down his forehead and past his helmet, “or at least what we’re doing?”
“We’re saving the world. Very simple stuff. Seriously guy, get up to speed.”
“Saving the world. That’s it? But what exactly do we do? Fight pollution, and save the rainforest?”
“Ah hell no,” Black says, “You can pollute as much as you like. Hell, I’ve been burning most of the Force Base’s trash for months now.”
“Seriously though,” Red interjects, “fuck the rainforest.”
“And monkeys,” Black adds, “Fuck monkeys.”
“I think you mean apes.”
The Force Van shoots through an intersection and flies over a ramp of raw dirt just lying by the side of the road Duke’s of Hazard style. The van lands on all four wheels and absorbs the shock about as neatly as a calf dropped from a skyscraper. But the Force Van just keeps on rolling. Inside White and Yellow are now on the floor. Yellow is gripping at the mouth guard of his/her helmet.
“Uhhhhh, I think I chipped a tooth.”
Yellow then rises to the ground and approaches the two warriors with actual seats.
“Guys you have to slow down, or at least give us seat belts or something.”
“The Force Van does not have seatbelts,” Black replies, “We’re working on it. Red what number was that?”
“Seatbelts for the Force Van? That was action item,” he looks down at his clipboard, “ item number four originally, but moved back to item number five, due to, pressing matters.”
They hit a pothole; Yellow slams into the ceiling. White is still on the floor and motionless. Yellow tries to grasp at the two front seats for some sense of safety.
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude,” he or she says, “ But shouldn’t we have a giant transforming robot or something?”
Black laughs.
“My friend you are in what remains of the giant robot. Or at least it’s left arm. If you want to transform into that, we can try it, but its not usually very helpful all on its own”
“Well, what happened to the rest of it?”
Red extends his fingers as he counts.
“Crashed into a mountain, sunk in a marina, seized by the cops. Long story short, just because you give the protectors of earth a jet shaped like a sword, doesn’t mean any of us knows how to fly it.”
“Besides,” Black adds, “you gotta admit, it’s a pretty sweet van. Great for picking up the ladies.”
“That is an absolute lie,” Red says, “No woman on Earth wants to get in windowless Winnebago driven by four guys in face obscuring masks and matching full body suits.”
“Look, I’ve already apologized for that incident profusely. You need to learn to forgive and forget what was a stupid misunderstanding.”
“Really, because the judge didn’t seem that forgiving about it.”
The van screeches to a stop. Black cranks the van into park. White begins to show signs of life.
“Our we there?” he manages to ask.
“Yup,” Red says.
“Thank Christ Almighty…”
He crawls to his knees and opens the sliding van door.
“RAWWWWWWWWR!”
The triceratops screams and charges the Van. The impact knocks the van to its side, but not before White is impaled on the ivory horns like a crouton on a fondue fork.
They Call Him Red, But Really,
Piercing Weapon: standard (rank 1)
The remaining warriors crawl out of the van. In the distance they see the triceratops trying to use a stoplight to scrape the corpse of their comrade off his horn.
“Wow,” Red says, “First day as leader; things are not progressing well.”
“I don’t really think you could have been blamed for that one. Besides, it could have been worse.”
An ear-shattering screech hits the warriors at once. Three dark, flying, beasts dive from the sky and lunge towards them. The trio of pterodactyls grab each warrior by the armpits and then take back off into the air. They zoom over the city as the army of dinosaurs destroy block by block. Humanoid lizards ride T-Rexes, and the police attempting to fight back are either knocked down by a lizard man’s spear or are simply eaten by the T-Rex he was riding.
The pterodactyls swoop down towards a massive brontosaurus. A wooden command station the length of a football station has been built on its back. The creature doesn’t seem pleased about the crude construction, but simply marches forward without comment.
As the flying beasts dive, they approach large wicker gogo cages hanging from the roof of the command station. They swoop in and throw the captive warriors through the open doors of the wicker cages. The Force Warriors slam against of the hanging cages; the doors slam shut behind them. The flying lizards disappear into the sky. Red and Black stand in their respective cages.
“Well Red,” Black says, “I’m beginning to reconsider. Perhaps this is all your fault.”
“Well, well, well,” a smoky female voice calls out, “what do we have here?”
A buffalo sized gecko carries a woman towards the warriors. She rides the beast on a throne sloppily stapled to its back. The beast is pained, but again, knows better then to complain.
Dina Dino Danger is clad in the leathery animal skins of some of her cold-blooded minions. She toys with the necklace of teeth hanging from her neck.
“It seems Clarion has sent the infamous Force Warriors to stop us. What shall we do with you?”
She descends to the floor; her lizard throne is visibly pleased.
“We guess there’s no point in letting you live,” she says, “you’d just try and stop us again,”
“That’s right,” Yellow calls out, “We’ll never let you get away with this.”
“That’s not true,” Red says, “You let us live and we will not attempt to stop you in any way ever again. In fact I don’t think you can really call our progress thus far as trying to stop you in the first place. I really can’t imagine us doing a better job the second time around.”
The queen shrugs.
“Perhaps. But it doesn’t really matter. We were just using it as an excuse to kill you anyway. But how shall we do it? Feed you to the T-rexes?”
Beneath his breath Black can be heard muttering in a perfect impersonation, “T-rex doesn’t want to be fed… he wants to hunt.” Dina doesn’t hear him.
“No,” she says, “Too conventional. Perhaps I can have you stomped underfoot by my longneck division. Or I could have my flying friends drop you into a volcano. Or perhaps impale you upon the,”
“Orangutans!” Red shouts. Everyone turns to him.
“That was the ape. The one I was thinking of earlier. An Orangutan. It was on the tip of my tongue for the last few hours and it was driving me crazy.”
Dina is stunned into silence. Red turns in his cage to face his comrade.
“What is that, like a Yeti, or a bigfoot or something?”
“No,” Red says angrily, “it’s a real monkey. An Orangutan ”
“Really, O-Rang-O-Tang? That’s sounds like the biggest made up name I have ever heard of. Like a frickin’ space-ape.”
“You thought a koala was an ape! I do not need to argue this with you.”
Black laughs,
“And yet,”
“SILENCE!” Dina yells, “That is enough. We are going to have you killed by those little acid spraying buggers, and that is the end of it.”
“Not exactly,” Red says, “you see, there’s one thing you’ve forgotten,”
“And what is that my soon to be acid-covered nemesis?”
Red whips a glock from his back pocket and aims it directly at the Lizard queen.
“Action item number one bitch!”
He's Omar from The Wire
Marksman: standard (rank 1)
Three shots rang out in quick succession, hitting Dina smack in the torso. She collapses instantly. As she hits the wooden paneling the command station begins to shudder. No longer controlled by the royal bitch, the beast attached to it begins to shake the uncomfortable fortress from his back.
The command station falls to splinters. The wicker cages spring loose and drop. They soar downwards and then hit the ground with a sturdy spring, and bounce around like superballs till finally coming to rest. Black and Reds’ cages have turned sideways; they slowly begin to crawl off the ground.
“Well,” Black says, “that was surprisingly successful. Pretty sure we were gonna die right then. Oh, btw, since when did you get a gun?”
“Since I saw a man mauled to death by God damn ORANGUTANS, that’s when.”
“I don’t know Red... Still sounds made up to me.”
They kick open the doors to their cages and step onto the street. The reptilian beasts were going mad as soldiers without a general, and were scattering in every direction. In the distance Red spots a third wicker cage standing on the pavement, a yellow being beginning to stir inside it.”
“Oh hey,” Red says, “looks like we only lost one this time around. We’re getting better at this.”
“RAAWWWWR!”
The same triceratops cruises past them with White still stuck to his horns. He charges Yellow, impaling the basket and the warrior within it all in one.
“Ewww, scratch that. We still suck at this…Poor Wen.”
Red bows his head.
“He or she will be missed,”
|