Six: Bear with me here. Bit of background.
It's the Fall of Reach. Battle where I got a sword through the gut. I've arrived in the city of New Alexandria after a nine day trek. Falling from orbit doesn't really let you control where you land very well.
Spent a few hours helping some evacuation transports get off-world and then I linked up with my squad. As it turns out, though, the Covenant are jamming all our communications to our commanders - we used the same communicators you and your friends are using to talk, and the Covenant had figured out how to garble the messages we sent.
Fortunately, the good thing about a jammer is that you can find it by going in the direction that makes your radio scream louder until you see the bright glowing thing, and then blowing it up. Decided to help out one of my squadmates, Kat - a bit cold, but very good with... stuff like Stubbs's cortex. We got into an aircraft and went out to destroy the jammers, and give some help to the poor bastards fighting with us.
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."It all goes fine, we kill the jammer, and then we find out that there's gun turrets keeping people from evacuating through the local intelligence branch's headquarters. Giant skyscraper. So we blow those up too, then head up topside and meet back with the rest of our squad.
We get to talk for all of thirty seconds before Kat detects a massive radiation surge - a Covenant ship over the city is firing its plasma beam projector, a giant energy gun, to try and glass the city. Kill everyone in it and remove any trace we were ever there by boiling away everything and melting the ground. We all get our helmets on and book it towards the building's fallout shelter to ride it out.
We're talking about reassignment orders, about the ridiculousness of some things the intelligence boys are doing, all while we're hoofing it as fast as we can to safety, and then...
-Six pauses for several seconds and looks down-
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."-When Six resumes speaking, his tone of voice lowers, and he speaks more slowly. It sounds like he's actually mournful-
I'm going to remember that sound until I die and I don't come back. The high-pitched fwutch of a needle rifle firing.... the sort of metallic shear-spike a helmet emits when something razor-sharp punches right through it... hell, I think I remember the exact moment that squad comms went utterly silent as we realized what had happened.
Kat... Kat had forgotten to turn on her shield generators when she put her helmet back on. So when a sniper nailed her in the back of the head, well... that... that was it. She was dead before she hit the ground. We provided aggressive sustained counterfire, of course, but it didn't matter. The Elite laughed at us, fucking split-lip bastard, and his ship left. He'd done what he was ordered to do.
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."—Takanuva is manipulating a bunch of scrapped steel in a cage of light around as he moves it into a pile—
@Albert: I'm worried, Albert. I messed up big time, and I can tell that I have a long way to go before I have the trust of Six or the others I spaced.
—He sets the steel scraps down in a big pile. In total, he's got about a single ton of steel—
@Albert: You know what the stupid thing is? I opened that lock thinking it'd just give Oliver a way inside.
'If you fall seven times, stand up eight.' The cry of the Undead.Six: We dragged her body into the fallout bunker amidst the screaming civilians and we stayed there for three days. Lot of time to think about what went wrong. How we could have prevented it. It's... it's still difficult for me to deal with. Grapple with. Whatever term you want to use. God only knows how bad Carter, our squad lead, took it - Jorge said the two of them were shacked once upon a time. And Carter had a habit of taking things very personally. Chains of leadership and whatnot.
He never said anything. I never found out.
But at the end of the day, despite the fact everyone figured we could have done more, could have dived and took the shot with our shields, could have moved with more caution and spotted the sniper... there was a ship about two klicks away firing a plasma beam hot enough to melt a dreadnought., coming right at us. Running was the only option, and her final cause of death was... a fatal lack of situational awareness.
It's rotten. But that's war. And life, I've heard.
edited 17th May '17 4:00:24 PM by SpartyMcFly
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."-Sorting through another pile-@Takanuva Albert: "I figured it was something like that, that's why I'm not mad at you." -Takes out what looks like an old piece of pipe and scans it before tossing it away- "Blasted oxidationed copper, anyways, at least you're working on fixing your mistake now instead of trying to rationalize it as not your fault."
Will make dad jokes for friends.-Six doesn't expect the hug, definitely-
-MJOLNIR feels cold and tough. You can't exactly comfortably cuddle armor, after all-
-But he returns the hug anyways-
edited 17th May '17 4:27:03 PM by SpartyMcFly
"Seven is here too, dressed like the concept of choosing clothes that look nice together was an arcane secret far beyond their grasp."@Albert: I suppose I just feel like I wind up causing myself more harm than good. My friend's albeit temporary death was caused because I didn't accept my destiny as the Toa of Light sooner. I thought that after I had fulfilled the first part of my destiny, I wouldn't make such mistakes. But look where I am now.
—He finds a large patch of steel and lifts it into the pile, making it now almost two tons of scrapped steel—
@Albert: Turaga Vakama would likely call this penance for my screw-up, and I wouldn't call him wrong. —Sighs— With any luck I can help Mercuria rebuild Stubbs sooner than later. The funny thing was, I actually considered providing her help building a different body for Stubbs, but I scrapped the idea almost as soon as she turned down my offer to help her after I showed her a Boxor.
'If you fall seven times, stand up eight.' The cry of the Undead.

Lisa: Let's just focus on finding Stubbs right now. I don't know how, but there must be a way.