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Smallfry Samba (Cowboy Bebop)

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Crow could be her, Crow could be Ed, Crow could be a child, lots of options on Crow. But what kind of shenanigan's are we seeing here? Time, Space, Looping, Dimensional?

I am eager to find out.
 
Jackie said:
And Jet hadn't let me bring my machine gun.
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Jet is such a buzzkill.
Jackie said:
She had my gun, the same gun that I still had sitting in my bunk. It couldn't be any other and she had to get it from somewhere. No, it looked like it went the long way around. I didn't know if that was supposed to mean I eventually made it back or if it meant I wasn't from here at all.
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Do we have some time travel Shenanigans going on here, or something? She seemed very sure it's the same gun, just older. And she does even say she wonders if that means she'll go back. Or is she doing some kind of looping thing, because it looks like this Crow may be her future self?
 
Skychan said:
Crow could be her, Crow could be Ed, Crow could be a child, lots of options on Crow. But what kind of shenanigan's are we seeing here? Time, Space, Looping, Dimensional?

I am eager to find out.
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Well at the very least she knows what year she was in when she took off in her plane full of Columbia's finest nose candy and she knows what year she's currently in while aboard the Bebop.
 
You know Jackie, I find it a little hard to believe that you'd instantly recognize your vz. 58 with an additional fifty years of hard living on it. Unless it has some pretty distinctive markings or damage, there shouldn't be all that much to set it apart from the hundreds of thousands of other vz. 58s that CZ has cranked out.

Anyway, it's a good read and I eagerly await more of it.
 
13th Fleet said:
You know Jackie, I find it a little hard to believe that you'd instantly recognize your vz. 58 with an additional fifty years of hard living on it. Unless it has some pretty distinctive markings or damage, there shouldn't be all that much to set it apart from the hundreds of thousands of other vz. 58s that CZ has cranked out.

Anyway, it's a good read and I eagerly await more of it.
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I put it together myself from a parts kit. I'd recognize it in a pile of other similar guns.
 
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Session 8
  • Threadmarks
    • Session 8:
    Hometown Funk​



    I could have found better things to do with my time than turn wrenches. Would have loved to have found better things to do, but Jet had confined me to the ship. 'You can get off the ship but you're staying off if you do.'

    I believed him.

    Jet was, in my limited experience, a good man. A kind man. But the tone he'd taken with me… Well, I believed him.

    So, with my hair pulled back and wearing a spare set of Ed's work clothes, since we were nearly enough the same size, I found myself crawling through machinery ducts tracking down leaks and patching them with strap clamps.

    I was going to need to shower for at least six hours afterwards, I was sure. Some of the pipes that I was strapping were part of the waste system. So far I was only covered in oil and gray water but the pipes weren't exactly well documented and a leak was a leak so it was only a matter of time until I hit something a little too nasty to think about.

    I figured that I must have been up by the hangar, having traversed several dozen meters worth of crawlspace over the past several hours. The duct was widening out and the pipes were getting thicker, hydraulic probably. On of the larger pipes had a weeping crack in it and I grabbed one of the bigger high pressure straps.

    Normally, in an ideal time in an ideal world, the whole line would get swapped out. But this was not an ideal world and these were not ideal times. The strap clamp would hold until it didn't but it would hold for at least a little while.

    I leaned back and kicked a panel up and out from above me. The hangar ceiling greeted me. I was right! I slithered up out of the crawlspace and finally stretched out for the first time in what felt like hours.

    Faye's zipcraft was back. I'd apparently missed hearing it land, but that wasn't too strange, the living section of the ship was fairly acoustically isolated from the hangar anyway. All must have been forgiven, but it always would be. Families were like that, though the crew of the ship might not have agreed with me that that is what they were to each other.

    In that way, I supposed I was the odd one out. But then I had a family of my own to get back to, if I ever could.

    Still, the hangar opening and closing again would have explained the pool of hydraulic fluid under the leaking pipe.

    A sudden rumble through the deck told me the engines were spinning up, and so I slipped the box wrench into my pocket and headed up to the flight deck. I needed to check the line pressures anyway.

    Up the ladder and then up towards the flight deck, every step I could feel in my joints and in my bones, penalty of getting older, I supposed. It beat the alternative at any rate.

    My thoughts drifted back to that rifle, that impossibly old rifle that I still had in my bunk in a much younger form. The woman wielding it, who took me out like I was nothing. She knew me, even if I didn't know her.

    Colliding with a solid wall of meat dragged me unceremoniously from my thoughts and I found myself flat on my ass looking up to Jet's amused smirk. "You alright?"

    "Yeah."

    He nodded and turned away, back towards the engine panel. "Well I'm not sitting down, but go ahead and say what you wanted to say."

    I pulled myself back up to my feet and walked past him, to the forward windows on the flight deck. "I don't want to say anything without being sure… and to be sure I'd need to go, well, home."

    "And then?"

    "And then I'll be sure. So next time we're on Earth--"

    "Let's go." He answered, cutting me off mid sentence and surprising the hell out of me.

    "Just… yeah, okay let's go. Thanks?"

    "Don't thank me yet; you're paying for the fuel."



    ***​


    The controls stiffened up in my hands when the autopilot deactivated. Earth, but not the one I remembered from my life before, floated in front of me. It had a few more craters than it should have, but North America was still recognizable.

    The trip inward had been... awkward. The ship had seemed less lively, despite everyone being back aboard. All seemed forgiven, though not forgotten. Expecting everyone to bounce back immediately had been naive, sure, but that didn't mean I couldn't have hoped all the same.

    "Brace for acceleration. Brace for acceleration." I called out twice over the intercom before waiting a five count and then throttling up the engines. The ship creaked under the strain and I felt myself being pressed down into the seat as the ship shed orbital velocity.

    Jet was strapped in at a station behind me. I knew where 'home' was, he reasoned. I could fly us in. I needed the practice anyway and I was sure he'd pluck me out of the pilot's seat in a heartbeat if he thought I was doing it wrong.

    The navigation console showed our descent track; straight for the Gulf of Mexico. I would do last minute course corrections once we were in the atmosphere, but this way we'd have a clean landing even if I didn't.

    She ship shook under me as the sky changed from the black of space to the dark blue of the upper atmosphere. Orange licked in around the edges of the hull as the rarefied air compressed against the bow of the ship.

    I eased the controls back and watched the angle of attack indicator switch from orange to green, not a perfect entry angle but close enough to one. I'd always wanted to grow up to fly the space shuttle and, while that had never panned out, flying a fishing trawler through a Mach twenty five re-entry cycle was close enough.

    It was hard to tell the where falling ended and flying began, but as we dropped through the cloud deck over central Texas, or what had at one point been central Texas, I decided that this was flying, and flying was what I was good at.

    Reconstruction seemed to have never happened as most of the man-made landmarks I would have used for navigation were gone, but the bodies of water were still, for the most part, there. I swung the bow north and throttled the engines up enough to keep us aloft as we finally decelerated under the speed of sound.

    Ruins ahead and to our left were likely the remains of what had been Dallas, once upon a time. A surprising number of buildings were still standing, for a value of standing, but there didn't seem to be any electricity. I supposed it was human nature to walk away instead of fixing it.

    The lake I was looking for was still there and I steered the ship towards it, boards out, I brought the nose down. Five hundred feet, four hundred feet, three fifty. I brought airspeed down to two hundred, one fifty.

    Fifteen feet below the keel, I pulled the yoke back and the boards in. The nose rose up at a forty degree angle and I fired a burst from the bow thrusters before the whole ship set down into the water at around thirty knots. It was a little faster than the ship would have gone were it an actual ocean going vessel, but it was nothing that a space ship wouldn't be able to handle.

    Touching the water was the beginning of the end of the flight, but of course it goes without saying that even after a water landing there is a fair bit of taxiing. The place I was looking for wasn't far from shore and with our bearing it was only a gentle nudge of the rudder to point our bow towards it.

    It was, if I thought about it too hard or looked at it too close, kind of bizarre. A boat that flies through space at thousands of miles per hour coasting up to a muddy overgrown shoreline at walking pace. Even here the structures were neglected and half-collapsed, but the geography was still familiar.

    At some point I'd made it from the cockpit to the deck of the ship but I didn't remember the trip. I was on autopilot, hope and fear tied my guts up into a knot and...and...and…

    I bit the inside of my cheek and clenched my fist. I was here for something, after all. Even if I wasn't sure what it was that I was really looking for. Answers that nobody alive could possibly have.

    My rifle bounced against my back when I jumped off the edge of the deck onto a half-collapsed fishing dock and made my way up through the brush that had overgrown what had once been lawns, not that there was anyone around but me who might have remembered what that had looked like.

    It was easy enough to follow what was left of the lake side road, not even time could fully erase the concrete and asphalt, even if it was more gravel and weed than pavement.

    It was a four minute jog to my front door, I'd timed it and run it hundreds of times. I let it take eight. I couldn't bear to look up until I couldn't bear not to. Whatever I'd imagined, it hadn't been what I found.

    The house had slid off its foundation piers at some point and the roof had collapsed in over the kitchen, the windows were blown out and…

    It was real, it was right in front of me and it was real and it proved that--

    The front door was more or less intact but the frame had become so warped that the rusted lock bolt was sitting in a gap big enough to put my fist through. A rough shouldering knocked the door inward and caused what was left of the roof to creek in a way that threatened consequences if I pushed my luck too far.

    Smashed vinyl and broken glass, dirt and rot and other things I couldn't identify littered the floor of what had at one point been a living room. A pile of books lay strewn across the floor, knocked free from their shelf when that side of the roof had come down, or maybe when the house had fallen off its foundation.

    But there was enough left to recognize that I'd been here before. Changes that I had made.

    I took a breath and moved deeper into the house, down the remains of the hallway, collapsed half way down. It kept me out of the two rooms at the back but that wasn't where the thing I needed to check was.

    In the room just off the hall I found a safe laying on its side against what was left of the floor. The section of floor it had been bolted to was still attached to it, though it was no longer attached to the house.

    The dial was stiff at first but it freed up as I turned it, left, then right, then left again. A grunt of exertion and I had the wheel turning, screeching as the lock bolts retracted back into the door. A sharp tug against the handle caused the rusted-through hinges to fail and the entire door came off in my hands and fell to the floor in front of me.

    A cloud of dust kicked up in my face and I found myself on my hands and knees coughing up all kinds of nasty and trying to catch my breath as the thoughts of all of the different diseases and infections I'd just contracted raced through my mind.

    When the dust settled I found what I was looking for lying in front of me. A marriage certificate, a few pictures. A birth certificate. I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted to find or if I would have been happier to find something else instead.

    Whether this was the future or some alternate universe or if I'd just died and found myself in fiction, I had been real here. She'd been real. They both had been.

    I'd found those things in the top half of the safe. The bottom half had always been for rifles, and I had enough firepower, it wasn't really that important. Still I felt that checking, even if just for the nostalgia--

    The silver shine of a pistol grip stuck up out of the pile of rifles and busted ammo boxes laying against the side of the safe. With some effort I pulled it free of the pile and recognized it immediately. My dad had given it to me as a gift and it was still sitting in my bunk back on the ship.
     
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    • This is so confusing, especially since you are including your own personal life in this. What happened to alt!Jackie and family that your house is abandoned but that so many important things were left behind and not looted/taken when they moved, I wonder.
     
    Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh dear the questions keep piling up, don't they, Smallfry?

    But at least we've ruled out one possibility! You definitely didn't get back and leave your gun back home so this 'Crow' could find it later on. Doesn't rule out the possibility that you got back and left your gun back home so you just found it, but at least we know that Crow isn't Jackie plus sixty years.
     
    Brainarius said:
    This is so confusing, especially since you are including your own personal life in this. What happened to alt!Jackie and family that your house is abandoned but that so many important things were left behind and not looted/taken when they moved, I wonder.
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    Don't forget that in Cowboy Bebop Earth got totally fucked up by an explosion that sent chunks of the moon crashing into the earth. The implication was that the area was abandoned after this calamity, and that's why everything has fallen into disrepair.

    moon:

     
    To be precise an Astral Gate located on the moon's orbit exploded in 2022, showering the Earth with moon rocks and killing off a LOT of people. Also somehow some of these rocks made people stop aging?

    Read bout it here:
    cowboybebop.fandom.com

    Astral Gate accident

    The Astral Gate accident was an incident in 2022 AD, in which the first Astral Gate, built in orbit around Earth's moon Luna, was destroyed. The explosion shattered a massive portion of the moon, resulting in lunar debris moving outward. Some of this debris absorbed energy that could be...
    cowboybebop.fandom.com cowboybebop.fandom.com
     
    Jackie said:
    Don't forget that in Cowboy Bebop Earth got totally fucked up by an explosion that sent chunks of the moon crashing into the earth. The implication was that the area was abandoned after this calamity, and that's why everything has fallen into disrepair.

    moon:

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    But that your marriage cert and gun and stuff like that are still there implies that your wife and kid were killed in that event instead of leaving alive😔
     
    The only person who stopped aging that we know of was actually in the blast wave of the Astral Gate, so it could have been some weird FTL-adjacent radiation thing. So the, uh, physics check out. Of course by 'check out' I mean smile and leave, but that's better than saying 'gamma radiation.' After all, the only thing physics has to say about tachyons is that 'they could exist but they probably don't and we wouldn't be able to interact with them if they did.'

    Brainarius said:
    But that your marriage cert and gun and stuff like that are still there implies that your wife and kid were killed in that event instead of leaving alive😔
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    Not necessarily true if they were evacuated in the emergency response; wife grabbing baby and running for the spaceport...
     
    Jackie said:
    When the dust settled I found what I was looking for lying in front of me. A marriage certificate, a few pictures. A birth certificate. I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted to find or if I would have been happier to find something else instead.

    Whether this was the future or some alternate universe or if I'd just died and found myself in fiction, I had been real here. She'd been real. They both had been.
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    Something else, for sure. That they're still here means no one came back for them, suggesting no one who wanted them was left to. :(
    Jackie said:
    My dad had given it to me as a gift and it was still sitting in my bunk back on the ship.
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    ...ok, buh? So not looping, but fictionalized AU? This universe's version might be dead or our mystery friend with the rifle, maybe?
     
    Well, it's not the latter. Because there are now three copies of the gun. One is Jackie's, one is Crow's, and one is original to this universe and Jackie found it in the house that we now know wasn't hers.

    So Crow isn't Jackie who's still hanging around, because she would have had to get an exact duplicate of her gun (described as 'unlikely') just to leave the original in a safe in her house.
     
    Well then this is odd certainly. As Jackie now has to ask herself, why wouldn't she take those with her or go back for them later. What would have her abandon it all forever.
     
    Well, this is Cowboy Bebop. Earth is a bad place to be. It's entirely possible that Jackie didn't have a chance to grab it during the rush to evacuate after the disaster, and couldn't get back to it later.

    I like that much better than the most likely answer, which is that Bebop!Jackie is somewhere under that rubble.
     
    Session 9
  • Threadmarks
    • Session 9:
    Can't Go To Hell If You're Already There


    ​


    I was mindless afterwards. Auto-pilot drove me back towards the lake, one weapon heavier than I'd left the ship. I knew that my walk had carried me past three grave markers, but I wouldn't let myself think about that, wouldn't let myself--

    The tears that wouldn't stop pouring from my eyes splattered against the lenses of my glasses and no amount of cleaning was going to fix the smudges, and no amount of wiping was going to clear my vision.

    No homecoming like I almost let myself believe was possible, just proof that I'd been here and then that--

    That I'd died. We all had.

    So lost, caught up in my thoughts I almost missed it, the sound of wildlife, or rather the lack thereof. They'd been chittering away in the trees when I'd come through before, but heading back I couldn't hear the squirrels anymore.

    The bullet grazed the skin of my neck, would have gone right through it if I hadn't picked that moment to look into the trees to see what had scared the animals away. I heard the shot a moment after it hit; supersonic ammo. That didn't really narrow it down much.

    Up in the tree I saw the gunman loading another round; bolt action rifle. Time, but not enough to do anything useful with. I dropped to the ground, knocked my feet out from under myself to fall straight onto my ass as his next shot went high.

    That was enough time to do something with; I had my rifle swung around and in hand by the time my ass hit the pavement. Giggle switch set to full rock and roll and I pulled the bang switch and held on as I fired a burst of one handed full auto up into the tree.

    Holding up that much gun with one hand was hard, but adrenaline was harder. I held down the trigger, scurrying backwards on my free hand and feet until the magazine was empty, and by that point I found myself below the grade of the road; he'd have to shoot through dirt and road to hit me and I didn't think he had enough rifle for that.

    I pulled a fresh thirty rounder off my waist pouch in my left hand and used it to knock the empty magazine free before clicking it into place and releasing the bolt lock. Including this magazine that left me with only ninety rounds on my person. And that might've seemed like a lot to someone else, but considering I'd just blasted out thirty in less than a minute it didn't say good things about my longevity in this engagement.

    "Hey you still alive!?" I yelled over the embankment. I hadn't heard anything from him since my blast of full auto, but that kind of thing had a tendency to make it hard to hear anything at all.

    It felt like at least a minute before I got any kind of reply. "Yeah!" I finally heard yelled back. It sounded like he was still in the tree.

    "Why are you shooting at me!?" I yelled back over the roadway as I slipped a little compact mirror out of my pocket to look over the berm. Yep, still in the tree.

    "You know who you pissed off, Crow, that's a stupid question!" the voice yelled back. Older, masculine. He was wearing a mask, looked like it had some optics in it, but it did conceal his face.

    I checked the pistol I'd lifted from the safe. It was old, but solid. I had a full magazine there too, and the rounds would only be about sixty years old on the outside. They should still fire, if I needed them. "I'm not Crow, she wears a mask, something you can clearly see I am lacking, also I'm pretty sure Crow would have already killed you!"

    "If you're not crow you're doing a damn good job of making everyone think you're her, running around with her machine gun and hitting one of her stash houses." The guy yelled back, no, he was closer, because that wasn't a yell this time.

    Fuck, he was closing in. I didn't have any clear escape routes from my current position unless I wanted to try to army crawl the rest of the way to the lake's edge. Certainly all this gunfire had to have gotten someone's attention, right? If not for a caved in house I could have seen the ship from where I was.

    A bullet skipped off the road right above my head, coming from in-land. Another fucking shooter? I slipped the forty five automatic into my left hand and kept my charged rifle secure in the other. Nothing about what was going to happen was going to be any good.

    I spared a look back towards the second shooter, or at least where the sound of the shot had come from. Too much damn foliage, I saw just a glint for a second off a scope lens, at least half a mile out. Two snipers? "Fuck my life." I whispered under my breath.

    With every ounce of strength I had a threw my rifle over the berm and down the street, in that same second I launched myself up onto my feet and over the berm at a run, lined my left eye up on the sights of the old forty five on center mass of the temporarily distracted shooter.

    I blew the timing, he was too far away for a clean vitals hit, or maybe he was wearing armor. Each time I pulled the trigger the slide slammed back to the stop almost in slow motion as my bullets peppered his rifle and vest. One of my rounds found purchase in his rifle's stock and he dropped it like it was on fire when the wooden fore-end turned to splinters.

    Half a mile, as long as I kept my movements super erratic the second shooter would have a really hard time leading me. The slide locked back on an empty magazine and I spun the gun around in my hand, wrapped my right hand around the slide like I was holding a hammer, ready to pistol whip the shit out of this guy--

    He drew a sidearm, because I hadn't considered that. I dropped to my knees and threw my gun as hard as I could, hoping to buy myself enough time to think--

    Before my pistol crossed even half the distance the right side of his head disappeared, followed by the crack of a rifle shot. Oh.

    I scrambled back to my feet and ran for what was left of the assassin's rifle. The rifle was toast, the scope was not; I put it up to my eye to get a better look at this third party that...

    I squinted a little and adjusted the focus on the scope, and dialed it out to maximum magnification. I recognized the shooter, but didn't at the same time. Familiar, foreign. I put the scope down for a second. It had been sixty years right?

    When I looked through it again, he was gone, but the other shoe finally landed.

    "Lee?"

    Footsteps on my left, lake-side. Rushing. I managed to pick my discarded machine gun back up off the ground, only a little worse for wear. I held my breath as the steps grew closer, finger slick on the trigger I could smell the blood, stuck in my mouth, but still--

    The source of the footsteps finally came into view and the tension melted away.

    "Hey we heard the gunfire—Oh, that's quite the mess you've made, Jackie."

    I looked at the body and back to Spike. "Actually, this one is not my work. Got an idea who might have done it though. But if we're gonna be sure I may have to dig up my grave."

    **​

    I'm gonna need you to run that by me one more time," Jet said from the couch. The look on his face was one I hadn't seen before, this might be a hard sell.

    "It's like I said, I don't have any family, not any I can go back to. That might have been more true than I thought. I don't actually know how I got here, maybe time travel. I found my pistol in that house." I explained as I set my bag down on the table.

    Once unzipped, I pulled out my unloaded pistol, and then sat the empty pistol tucked into the back of my belt next to it on the table in front of him. "There was bound to be more than one of them, I don't see how that--"

    I cut him off with a wave of my hand, "No, they are the same gun. Same serial, same wear patterns. It's the same gun, just about sixty years older, give or take. There were three graves and that assassin said it was Crow's stash house. If that's the case, I have a pretty good idea of who is in those graves--I'll bet you a dollar that one of them has the same pin in the collar bone that I do--and who Crow might be."

    "Alternate universe theory is true!" Ed yelled suddenly and piercingly directly into my ear.

    Jet was still looking over the pistols, becoming more concerned by each passing minute, he couldn't deny the sameness of them. I turned my glance towards Spike who had been surprisingly quiet thus far. He seemed to notice my eyes flick over, since he took that moment to break his silence.

    "So what are you asking for?" Spike finally asked.

    What was I asking for? Information was fine but what the hell was I going to do with it? The revelation at the house had knocked me off course, left me rudderless. What did I want? Answers weren't entirely satisfying, but no matter if I was right about Crow, if I found her I'd find more answers either way, but they tended to come with additional questions.

    And then there was the second gunman. Lee, no doubt in my mind. It as much as confirmed my suspicion but I would leave him out for now, at least until I knew how he fit.

    "I want your help to catch a corvid."

    "That's not a small ask."

    I nodded. "Yeah... Yeah I know."

    Jet set the guns down and stood up. He seemed deep in thought and waited another few minutes before saying anything. Finally he opened his eyes and looked at me. "Okay. We're gonna catch Crow."
     
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