"Okay...I was assigned to the platoon as a weapon specialist. I kept the guns working. I was in the middle of clearing the gun on the Bradly when Brians got a fucking bug up his butt. He started harassing me to get everything cleared to go, he had a convoy to run." You slump back. "I said there wasn't no fucking convoy for today - I fucking checked the schedule, there wasn't one. So, Brians gets hostile. He says he outranks me, he's in charge of the platoon, and that either I get the Bradly ready to go, or he'll have me up on insubordination."
Betters snorts. "Friendly guy, huh?"
You frown. "That's when the other guys show up. With duffels."
Betters frowns. "Duffels?"
"Yeah, duffel bags. Full duffel bags."
Betters nods. "I have an idea where this is going..."
"The motherfucker was selling something - guns, maybe, I don't know - to the fucking insurgents for a cut on the heroin they're making. Ship it back home for a profit." You shake your head. "And I was just doing my
job and that was screwing everything up for him. I saw what I saw, I asked what the hell was going on, Brians gets in my face. I..." You pause. "I don't...I...I got mad. He started threatening me. Lots of places for people to go AWOL out here, he says. He thought I'd get scared."
You pause.
"I...got madder."
Betters frowns, drumming his fingers on the desk.
"Then he..." you trail off.
"The term would be psychokinesis," Betters says. "Are you saying you killed him?"
You look down at your hands.
"Christ," Betters says, leaning back in his seat, drawing his hands off the table. "This is a clusterfuck and a half. How much evidence is there that Brians was running drugs?"
You shrug. "I don't know what it's like at other forts, but morale was subterranean, the officers didn't give a shit, and we're all just waiting for Clinton to pull the plug so we can go home and on the dole. It's not like Brians had to try that hard." You rub your thumb against your eye, wrinkling your face up. "The fucking thing is, I'm a small arms repair technician. In what universe is a fucking M242 chaingun small arms?"
Betters frowns. "Well." He reaches up, then tips your file slowly shut. He looks thoughtful. "It sounds like Brians was basically threatening to murder you to keep his secrets." At your nod, he continues. "The army's not going to like any of this."
You snort.
Betters is silent for a time, considering you. "Want an out, kiddo?"
"That's kind of what I was hoping," you say, leaning forward.
"How do you feel about a reassignment?" Betters asks.
***
First Encounter, Assault Recon.
They came up with acronym first. You were positive. You were reading the files Betters had given you while the C-20 you were shipping home on soared over the Atlantic ocean in a great, gentle curve over the world - and the more you read, the more incredulous you got. The first F.E.A.R team had been formed in 2002 and it had only had one recruit for nearly a year and a half, sitting around and twiddling their thumbs - Lieutenant Spencer Jankowski, who'd been transferred out of the marines and to F.E.A.R because...and you read this
three times: He had pyrokinetic abilities. There'd been a 'empath' who had been recruited through civilian channels and trained as an investigation technician named Jin Sun-Kwon. The team had moldered for another year before, a week before the Freeport bombing, they'd been joined by a big black redacted censor.
Censor, Jankowski, and Jin Sun-Kwon had been involved with the Armacham Technology Corporation terror attack.
Things just got weirder when you read
that shit.
Psychic cloned super soldiers? Experiments on paranormal entities from the 1970s and 80s. All of it ending with ATC's buried research laboratory detonating its reactor core under downtown Freeport.
That...
That really was the most surreal part.
For literally twenty years, people had been claiming that Freeport was an inside job - it had basically consumed and eclipsed the minor terror attacks in New York that had popped up just a few years back, and ran hogwild with their conspiratorial energies. And here you had it, in classified documents, that it
hadn't been terrorists, it had been one of America's own upstanding military-industrial companies. Fucking...amazing.
"Are you sure I'm allowed to read this shit?" you ask, looking at Betters, who was snoring next to you.
He jerked his head up, blinking. "Huh?"
"Do I have the clearance to read this shit?" you ask, louder.
"You do now," he says, his voice wry. "You're a national asset."
The C-20 landed at a military base somewhere in the continental United States. You weren't sure where. You're met by a jeep with the F.E.A.R acronym stenciled across the hood, and when you swing in, Betters takes the driver's seat. He drives and you watch the tarmac whip past. It's evening and it is cold - and you can see temperate woods beyond. Greens that are as familiar as they are alien after a stint in the Middle East. Betters starts talking. "I've pulled all the strings required to get you transferred - even if you're not psychic, the rest of your record shows enough promise." He grins. "And if you're not psychic, I can see about getting you a discharge and you can head back to civilian life."
"You'd do that?" you ask.
Betters shrugs. "I figure, I got the strings, I got pull. Might as well do some good with them."
He pulls into a motor pool and parks the jeep. He gestures you after him and you follow him to a barracks. The door opens and you...
Okay. The temptation to not believe stuff was still...there. You had seen what you had done. You had
felt what you had done. But the horrible few seconds of Lt. Brians' death had been nightmarish. Dreamlike. You could almost trick yourself into thinking you had imagined it. Reading a document that stated, blandly, that ATC had cloned a battalion of 'psychically enhanced soldiers pre-programmed with battle and combat tactics' was surreal, but it could be faked.
Seeing a bored black woman laying back on one of the Army's many cheap, shitty beds, pointing her finger in the air and creating a shimmering ball of blue white light that crystalizes and drops into her palm as a shimmering rose made of pure, crystal clear ice?
That can't get faked.
That's not a dream.
The black woman and the two others in the room - an Asian man and another woman, a blond - glance over at you and Betters. "Hey, you caught one!" the man says, grinning as he stands up. Then he gets a look at you and flinches, like you'd glared at him.
"Holy shit, Rodney," the black woman says - not big on military discipline here, you were noticing - as she swings her legs up. "Did you pull her out of a tiger pit or something?"
"No," you say. "I just look like this."
The black woman snorts, while the blond - the only one who hasn't spoken - wrings her hands.
Betters jerks his thumb at you. "All right, everyone, this is our newest team-member: Specialist Mercury Mann. Mann, this is Gloria Robinson-" he points to the black woman. "-our resident cryokinetic. This is Albert Sung..." the Asian guy nods. "Empathy and psychometric expert."
"Psychowhat?" you ask.
"I can hold an item and see into its past," he explains.
"And, lastly, Tracy McBrant." Betters says. "She's a precognitive."
"Holy shit, really?" you ask. "What's my future?"
"Blood," she says, quietly. Then she stands and walks out of the room as fast as she can go.
***
"Sorry about Tracy," Gloria says, the next morning at mess. You're both in line, waiting for food that is somehow shittier than the food you had gotten in Iraq. "She'll warm up to you."
"You'd think if she would warm up to me," you say, sliding along in the line. You notice that the line has this big hole around you - the non F.E.A.R personal at the base don't want to get close to you. "Then she'd be doing it now. Since she can see the future."
Gloria snorts. "Fuck no. Tracy can only see the bad stuff that happens. Her brother won a scratch ticket, caught her completely out of the blue. But she called it when I was going to break my arm during training." She lifts her arm, showing a divoted scar that looks like its the end result of what had to have been a
nasty fracture. "Kinda sucks, doesn't it?"
You shrug. Better than your brand of psychokinesis.
You and Gloria sit across from Albert, who is eating as quickly as he humanly can.
"God, Albert, at least try and eat like a human being," Gloria says, shaking her head. Albert pauses and flushes as he look at you. You give him your thinnest of thin smiles, and he looks faintly terrified.
You sigh.
"Listen," you say, rubbing your palm against your face. "I know I've got some shit going on. But I didn't
ask for this. I didn't want to be born with this. So just...can you..." You trail off, not sure how to put it. Albert flushes.
"Right," he says. "Sorry. Just. Empathically speaking? You've got an...aura." He says aura in the same way that Tracy had said 'blood.' You could practically hear all the adjectives that he'd want to amend to it.
"Just give me an M-16 or something," you mutter, pushing your food around with your fork. You're suddenly not very hungry.
"Oh!" Gloria says, trying to sound perky and cheery and like this conversation wasn't awkward as hell. "We're actually going to be running you through the gun range. Put you through your paces, see how you do." She grins. "That'll be fun, right?"
You nod and Albert resumes cramming his food down his throat.
Gloria and, despite everything, Albert walk with you to the shooting range. It's one of those fancy ranges that have multiple rooms, pop up targets, and no-shoots that are peppered in among everything, to test your athletics, spatial awareness, and your shooting skills. You're given a rather delicious selection of top of the line guns to pull from and you ooh softly as you pick up a discontinued Sumak 9mm RPL Sub-Machinegun. You hold it up, and look it over. "A Sumak? They don't fucking make these things anymore! And it has a red-dot sight, and the folding stock..." You heft it up, sighting down it.
"We have surplus guns, they're all out of date," Gloria says.
"The Sumak never caught on because the accuracy is shit compared to, like, the MP-5, but its a bit smaller, so it has better handling..." you say, working the charging handle and peering inside. You give your first real, actual smile to Gloria. "I kinda like it. It's a weird offshoot mutant cousin to the big SMG family."
"Well, have fun with it," Gloria says, patting your back as she steps back and starts towards the observation area - cameras are set up inside of the enclosed rooms, so that the rest of the F.E.A.R team can watch you blow through the joint.
Fun.
---
How hard do you work for this?
[ ] Competently - Diff 2 vs your Skill of 2 = 0 Heat
[ ] Push Yourself - Diff 3 vs your skill of 2 = 1 Heat
[ ] Show off - Diff 4 vs your skill of 2 = 2 Heat
[ ] Ace it - Diff 5 (max diff) vs your skill of 2 = 3 Heat
CURRENT HEAT: 0/6 
