8-Bit Dystopia: Zoanthropy [Video Game Multicross SI]
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Zoanthropy is an self insert fic set in 8-Bit Dystopia, a crossover setting inspired by the Protomen and their epic rock operas. 8BD reimagines retro video games on a cyberpunk world on the brink of total collapse.
In 1978, the Earth was attacked by the Space Invaders. After years of conflict, the Invader Wars came to an end with the catastrophic Crash of 85' that led to the homeworld of mankind being destroyed. The new home of humanity following the Crash is an industrial wasteland known only as the City, which is contested between a trio of hostile megacorporations by the names of WilyCorp, EggDyne, and Metpharm. Beneath them are a cavalcade of minor corps, mutant gangs, and the occasional evil cult that fight over the Big Three's scraps. The City covers nearly half of the planet's surface, and is always growing, but the depths below it are a labyrinth of endless pipes and ancient ruins from the Hylian Age. There is no true safety from the City, and there are no heroes left in man.
Into this world comes someone who isn't a hero. They shouldn't even be alive. The one thing they do have going for them, besides the incredibly bad luck of being turned into a zoanthrope by Metpharm against their will, is an astonishingly good memory retention for video game trivia that suddenly became a lot more useful. Will that unwanted life skill that was completely worthless in their old life be worth anything in their new one?
The night was the worst time to be alone in the City. Neon and fluorescent lamps of every imaginable color streaked across the walls of buildings, denying you the peace of darkness unless you clung to the sanctuary of the gutters. Staying in the bright lights, as inviting as they looked, was as much a danger as the dark. Around these parts, being seen as being in need was an invitation to be kicked while you were down. No matter where you went, the cold wore at your bones, seeping in through the weathered holes in your clothes and shoes. The hunger gnawed at you like a starving beast, and it was a small miracle that one of them hadn't given me rabies yet.
Then again, this wasn't exactly a charmed life I was living. I'd only been out on the streets of the City for a few weeks, tops. I had stopped putting out a cup and begging for change, simply enough to get back on my feet, as I hadn't fully recovered from the last time that the wrong person saw my vulnerability. With the way my ankle still sent spikes of pain up and down my leg with every step, I couldn't tell if it was ever going to improve. I had to be a bit choosier about how I got my food and picked my battles. Skulking in the dark, leaning on a sturdy plank that I'd been using as a crutch about as much as I did to persuade strangers to keep their distance. I hadn't used it for anything else, save the giant insects and rats that tried to get a drop on me while I was sleeping.
Where the fuck was I? It was the million dollar question. I didn't know where I was, or even when I was. All I knew, from what little I got out of anyone who'd deign to answer when I screamed the question at them, was that I was in the City. There was no Florida. No America. No Earth. The only place anyone knew about was a refuse-ridden, industrial hellscape called the City. My money and ID weren't any good here, wherever I was. I had to sell my wallet to a pawn shop, as even "genuine" leather was something of a rarity here. It let me buy food for a couple of days, until I had to go back to the dark.
When I did have the money to clean myself off and look presentable enough to enter a building, none of the products were recognizable. It was all in English. The names were close to or rhymed with the familiar brands, and the taste was never too far off as to be truly alien, but nothing looked the way that it should be. Nothing was the same.
Every day I lived like this, hanging on by a thread, I felt another lightyear away from home.
It was on my lowest night when the strangers approached. A man and a woman, with gentle eyes that were a rarity in the City. The two wore bright colors that were easy on the eyes.
"Are you well?" one of them asked me. The man.
"Stay back!" I said, in a nervous panic. I didn't know who these people were, and every experience I'd had so far had been negative.
"Are you sick?" the woman asked. "Hungry?"
"I'm fine," I said unconvincingly.
"We don't mean you any harm, sir. We're only asking because we have food to share. If you don't mind me saying, you look like you could use some kindness."
My guard was lowered by the burning pit in my stomach, but I wasn't born yesterday. These people were too clean-cut to be genuine. The only question was what they wanted out of me that meant I could get the food, because that was the only thing that mattered.
"I… What do I have to do?"
"Nothing much," the woman said nonchalantly. Like this wouldn't mean life or death to me. "Come with us."
The woman gestured to a black van on idle at the other end of the road. I hadn't noticed it before. On the side of the vehicle was a corporate logo, of a red circle with a red and black line sticking out of it. Over that was a name: Tyron Cybertec Corporation.
Why did that sound familiar?
"You won't be gone for long. We only want to conduct a survey. Understand the opinion of the man on the street."
"You need me to go with you, in a black van, to conduct a survey."
"That's correct."
I shouldn't have gone with them.
"I can leave if I'm not comfortable, right?"
I knew it had to be a trap. I didn't know how, or why, outside of human trafficking. Did they want my organs?
"Of course."
I should've known better. The woman sounded like she'd answered that a thousand times.
"Then… okay. I'll go with you."
I should've recognized the signs and ran, but I didn't. At that moment, I was so desperate, I thought I would've done anything to survive. I was expecting for this "survey" to end in a cage match with another homeless man corralled into an underground arena, fighting each other for the camera. If that's where this led, then it couldn't be worse than where I was.
I couldn't begin to comprehend how wrong I was until the paralytic gas started pouring out from the air conditioner the second I closed the door.
Compared to what came next, that was the easy part.
The rest were the invasive scans, the needles, the electroconvulsive therapy, the transfusions, the metamorphosis--
I opened my eyes and awoke from my old nightmare in a cold sweat. Unnerved, but not terribly surprised. It was only a dream. Once I realized that, I told myself that I was more annoyed than afraid, and that it shouldn't be such a big deal anymore.
That wasn't the same as not being afraid. My mind was abuzz with flashes of things I could've done better, and things I never had a choice in. I took deep, deep breaths, until my heart rate got back to a less elevated level. Approaching a normal heart rate.
It's nothing new. Nothing I haven't dealt with before. Can't redo the past.
If I could, I'd tear those fuckers apart.
Turning over in bed, I could see that my wood-paneled digital clock read 5 in the morning. I had another hour before I had to get ready for work, but I could also see the date I had circled on the calendar. Today was the big day of the meeting with the boss and the department heads, so I guess I could use the extra time to look my best. Besides, I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep with my head like this if I tried. So I opted to crawl out of bed, turn off my alarm, and start my day early.
It was no great feat to get from one side of my apartment to the other and fire up the burner, as the square footage of this place compared favorably only to the parking space that came with it. There were much better places that I could stay in with the cash I'd saved up over the past two years, but this flat was far away from the bright lights and noise of downtown, to the extent that I could get peace and quiet whenever I needed them. Having a landlady that didn't ask inconvenient questions also helped streamline my experience as a tenant. The accommodations were such that I had a basic kitchen, a bathroom, and a save to stow my savings. After getting a taste of abject poverty, Spartan living arrangements were good enough for me. I couldn't complain.
When my quick shower was done, I wiped away the steam in the mirror. My face was less gaunt and haggard than when I'd been on the streets, but a brief stint on a starvation diet and a lot of physical exercise since had caused me to shed excess weight and pick up an amount of lean muscle. Not that I'd recommend my crash course from a sedentary lifestyle to my current one to anyone, any time soon. My curly, brown hair had thinned out some from stress, and I'd had it cut short to look neat and professional to go with the appearance I wanted to match around me. The beard I'd been growing out had to go, too, and I did a quick shave to make myself look more professional. More corporate. The blue blazer, red tie, white slacks, brown loafers, and my custom, ceratanium-framed glasses completed the thin veneer of me belonging to this fucked up world.
Once I was done getting dressed, I took a sip of the freshly-brewed coffee from my moka pot. The candy-colored beans were an EggDyne import, cloned and cultivated on West Side Island. After that, I whipped up a bowl of chicken, eggs, and yellow rice with algae pellets. The fresh ingredients were sourced from the local night market for flavor, while the algal drek was a distasteful necessity to ensure I got the rest of the vitamins and amino acids. The dish was off the beaten path from a donburi bowl, but remained well within the vague definitions of a protein bowl. When I was more strapped for time, I would've bought instant noodles and a cup of coffee from the ZEED konbini on the way to work. If I'm in a real rush, I pour the coffee into the noodles and consume them as a singular entity. Maximum efficiency, maximum punishment for running late.
As much as I was loath to admit it, there were benefits to waking up early. Like a breakfast that didn't taste like coffee and ramen at the same time.
The sun was only beginning to poke out of the smoggy skyline when I locked the door to my flat and started walking down the steps, waving to Mrs. Kumabachi as I reached the car.
"Good morning, Mrs. Kumabachi!"
My landlady was watering the plants outside of the apartment complex, getting a decent vegetable garden going in spite of the pollution. We frequently traded recipes, produce, and gardening tips, as cooperation meant we didn't have to eat the algae filler that was adjacent to dog food as often.
Mrs. Kumabachi beat her translucent wings and ascended to get more water coverage on her garden. She then set down the metal watering can, swiveled around midair, and arranged her mandibles into what by this point I was pretty sure was a smile.
"Ohayo, Hudson! Is that a new suit?"
Incidentally, my landlady was a red and black bee in a dress who stood about a meter tall. I pegged her as being a first-generation uplift, given that she looked much more insect than human, which scared off some potential tenants even in an uplift-friendly zone like Ridgeside. I didn't know what kind of bee she was, and I figured it'd be rude to ask for her particular taxonomy. Thankfully, by the time I became a tenant here, I had already learned all of the accidental faux pas you could stumble into when taking to uplifts through trial and error. By this point, I could pass sensitivity training with flying colors.
"It is! I'm gunning for a promotion today, and I wanted to look my best!"
"Such a diligent young man!" she said praisingly. "I don't suppose you could get Kyuko a job at NYAMCO, could you? Put in a good word for Goro, perhaps?"
Mrs. Kumabachi wriggled her right antenna in a wink-like fashion, a gesture that was followed by a reminder that her daughter was twenty five and single. I was able to get away with saying I'd see what I could do. I hadn't been able to set up a proper meeting in person with Kyuko because she had an active nightlife in Monsteropolis that kept her busy. I doubted we hung out in the same circles after dark, but if I happened to see another giant bee woman that looked like Mrs. Kumabachi out and about, I'd be sure to introduce myself.
Extricating myself from my landlady's matchmaking efforts, I said my goodbyes and got into my car to take off for the NYAMCO HQ. My vehicle of choice was a light blue Age Erriso. It was a dead ringer for a Fiat 500, fulfilling the same niche of being a small and cheap city car for a daily commute. I was leaving the apartment and hitting the Ridgeside roads at the ideal time. Early enough to avoid getting caught in traffic, while not being so early that you're at risk of being t-boned by the restless street racers.
I accounted for everything, save that, with the radio broken, I was stuck with my own thoughts. I thought about the other places I'd been to since I got stuck here, before I settled in the zone of Ridgeside. How well of a job I've been doing to shed off the pieces of my old life, and putting this new one back together.
The City had about a hundred of these cloistered districts, or zones. Each zone had their own quirks, rules, and idiosyncrasies, many of which banded together to operate as quasi-nations or city-states onto themselves. The lion's share of the habitable zones were split between the "Big Three", a triune compact composed of the largest megacorporations in the City: WilyCorp, EggDyne, and Metpharm. Those were the closest to what I might recognize as "real" countries, with their own deranged twists and turns that made me want to steer clear of them when I could help it.
Maybe I was upset because I was the only one who thought a world run by Doctor Wily, Eggman, and Mother Brain was fucking insane. Instead of people listening to me when I tried to warn them that the City was in need of a top-down reset, I was the crazy one for remembering a world that the megacorps didn't control. A world where they weren't real. Just harmless video games, which were an entire medium of entertainment that fell to the wayside after the damn Space Invaders blew up the Earth and smothered it in the crib. The survivors of the Invader Wars, which was what they had been calling that conflict ever since, came to the City as a second chance. A second chance that they only took a couple of years to completely squander.
WilyCorp controlled their territory with an iron fist and his hordes of robots. Or bioroids, as the brand was dubbed. I spent enough time in the overcrowded megaregion of Monsteropolis to know that I was all too close to picking a fight with a Robot Master over how thoroughly ruthless the Sniper Joe enforcers got with their version of law and order. EggDyne was expanding rapidly into the inhospitable wilds around the City, bleeding them dry of resources to fuel his mad ambitions. I couldn't help myself from jumping into the fray and trashing a few badniks that were harassing the uplifts in the favela-esque slums of the Hill Zones, only to throw up after witnessing the wriggling wads of biomass that powered them. Then there was Mother Brain, who must've taken over Metpharm from the shadows, because no one was pointing and screaming at the alien supercomputer puppeteering the genetics and bioengineering firm that makes most of our medicine.
The firm whose subsidiary took the fall while they went unpunished!
TYRON. They deserved everything that they got and more, but that isn't enough.
I took a deep breath, raised my foot off the gas, and shook my head. It was a dumb idea to lose my temper behind the wheel, and it wasn't like you could get good auto insurance with all of the car thefts. The only defense I had was having a car no one else wanted.
There were other zones outside of those controlled by the Big Three, like Ridgeside. They were controlled by the lesser corps, the major gangs, and those groups that fell somewhere in between. Once I figured out what was going on with the Big Three, it didn't take long to figure out what everyone else was up to. ZEED's ninja cabal was running all of those gas stations and retail chains. GD Tech were arms dealers with a red Triforce logo, whose owner was enthusiastic about integrating Outlands tribes into his company and paying handsomely for any relics of the extinct aliens that lived on this world before us. The X-Syndicate were a high-octane mafia with a hand in every gangland zone from Tokyo-to to Virtua City. Even the seafood at the supermarket were up to something, because the prawn fished out of the Lunar Bay looked like xenomorphs ready to eat us if we took our eyes off of them.
It was maddening, but no one listened when I tried to tell them the truth. When I couldn't take it anymore, I'd shout to the heavens everything that was wrong with this miserable planet. That was when the wrong person eventually overheard what I said. Bioroids, badniks, biomonsters, ninjas, and all sorts of miscellaneous freaks that wanted to silence me. They only stopped chasing when their heads were involuntarily separated from their shoulders, and I ran to the next zone where their masters lost track.
With exceptions. For those rare ones that had extra cyberware or bio-mods that kept them moving without a head, I'd keep cutting until the whole body fit into the trash can.
The City was treacherous, in its own way. When Earth was destroyed, mankind needed a new home, on a new world that they could call their own. They called it Princepts Dominaire, or "Hyrule". To construct so many habitation blocks for all of the arriving humans, they used robots. There was supposed to be an artificial intelligence guiding them called the S.I.M., but it broke years ago. The unattended robots kept building, and building, and building without them. By the time human oversight caught up to the machines, the robots had created the City. Destitute, thoughtless, industrial sprawl in every direction, until the City covered forty percent of the planet's surface.
No one's stopped them, so they must still be building.
I was trying to look for a sanctuary in the City, which was a lot like searching for a strand of hay in a stack of used needles. I wasn't the only vagrant in the City, of course. I'd only been at this for a couple of months after escaping Tyron, and many of these homeless have been at it for much longer than me. A lot of people slipped between the cracks, with no one to fish them out but each other. When they weren't dragging each other down.
One of them had let slip over a trash can fire that this zone had a place for people in our positions to rest our heads, if only for a night. A place where we wouldn't be chased out, beaten, or arrested. Maybe even fed, which would save me the trouble of hunting. It was Messian church, and I thought it was well worth the risk of scoping out where the rumors said it was hiding.
It wasn't. I don't even know why I kept getting my hopes up.
By the time I got there, it turned out that the Church of Messiah outpost was a burnt-out husk, its corpse desecrated with mounted skulls and the grotesque iconography of the Mutant League. These walking horrors had been rejected by society, and rejected society in turn. Depending on which member gang of the League you were dealing with, any "normal" person who entered their side of town was a dead man walking.
In hindsight, I should've taken the zone's letter designation of EA as a bad omen.
A big-boned, skeleton mutant in spiked leather armor broke away from the damned procession of hovercycles driving around a dumpster bonfire and approached me. The smoke reeked of burning flesh, and it wasn't pork that was cooking in the fire.
When you had a strong nose like mine, you could learn to tell the difference. I stopped eating pork and never accepted any food offered to me on the street, just to be safe.
"Lookie what we got here," the flensed abomination said with an odd sweetness to his voice. He took off his black shades, revealing no eyes under them. It was dark out, so I think he only did that for dramatic effect. Jackass. "Fresh meat for the barbeque!"
I rolled up my sleeves. I didn't want to ruin this outfit any more than I had to.
"You don't want this fight," I said flatly. "All of you. Walk. Away."
I didn't think it would be convincing, but I didn't care. They were officially warned.
"You on shrooms, man cub? We ain't exactly spooked by a shrimp like you."
Not recognizing a lifeline when they were tossed one, the mutant boss laughed off my threat. The rest of the mutants joined in on mocking me.
Sticks and stones. I shrugged.
"Suit yourself."
I stomped a foot down while the mutant boss prepared to cut me down with a machete. That was the psychological trigger I used to activate the change at-will.
Then came the pain, as my whole body ignited with rapid cell growth. My skeletal structure stretched and grew in some places while compacting and thickening in others. New flesh and thick, brown hair formed over my entire body to supplement my altered frame, which was now hunched-over with thick muscles along my enlarged arms and torso. Sharpened claws that were thicker than railroad spikes ripped out of my hands and feet, the former of which were now massive, five-fingered paws. The only parts left of my outfit were the ripped pants, a frayed shirt, and the black glasses sitting on my snout. They were chemically treated to darken from the heat emitted by my transformation.
The bike began to lose speed as the paling rider approached. If he was now having second thoughts, then tough shit. He made this bed, and now he could die in it. With a surge of wild strength, I lanced a clawed hand over the handlebars gored through his chest. The late mutant's machete flew out of his hands and the aircycle kept going until it hit a wall, exploding on impact into a sprinkling of metal shrapnel.
I flung the dead gang leader's corpse off my paw and I did the same thing to the next mutant to run up and attack me, a leprous reptile man with a face that only a brood queen could love. The rack of blades that was my hand made a clean, horizontal cut. Past the arms. Past the ribs. Past the spine. Everything in between was a non-factor. My hand came out the other side in a warm spray of crimson blood.
After the first and second casualty, the rest of the mutant gang had varied reactions. The dumbest percentile lunged at me, likely out of a misplaced loyalty for their dead leader. Coming at me as a mob of bodies must've helped them feel better. It certainly bought time for the smart ones to get on their bikes and drive away, leaving the slow ones behind. I didn't look like much, but I was shockingly agile on the ground and inside it. The slow ones ran as fast as they could until I caught up to them, and they were more than happy to lead me to where the smart ones were hiding if it'd save their own skins.
By that point, I had already inspected the Misfit Demons' camp around the church. My nose was very, very keen, and I was able to confirm what they were doing with the bodies sent in this direction by their inside man in the vagrant community that lured unsuspecting victims into their territory.
They were celebrating a victory over a rival gang with a feast.
A feast.
I tried not to get involved in local affairs. I really, really did. In times like this, I couldn't help myself. I just couldn't.
I stuck around long enough to execute any Mutant Leaguers wearing the colors of the Misfit Demons that I saw on the street, poured hi-grade biodiesel all over the old arena the rest of the survivors had been squatting in until "the heat died down", and tossed a torch to set it ablaze.
After the agonized screams abated, I left. Unsurprisingly, I hadn't heard so much as a peep from the man-eating community in the EA Zone ever since.
I stopped the car at the traffic light. All red.
I felt warm, and my heart racing again, breathing techniques be damned. Looking down at my hands on the steering wheel, I could see they were shaking again.
Again.
I didn't feel bad about taking out those cannibal mutants. Not even close. It weighed on me whenever I had to take a life. Any life. Just because they turned me into something that was pretty damn good at it, it didn't mean I liked it. It was at times like these where being a zoanthrope was especially emotionally draining.
I sighed, and took another swig from the cup of coffee I took to go. This time, I took it with a singular white pill from the bottle I kept in the glove compartment. When the light turned green, the tremors were gone. Almost like magic.
That wasn't the same thing as being a cure-all, or lacking in side effects. I had to moderate my use to one a day, because a smart gal like Mother Brain could've patched out the addictive qualities if she wanted to. If she was sufficiently motivated to do anything besides perpetuate the drug crisis to fund her Space Pirates terrorizing human ships in the rest of the star system surrounding the City.
Thanks, Mother Brain. Thanks a lot. I can't wait for Samus to get off her ass and rearrange your brainstem with Super Missiles.
One of the most critical things I learned about the City, once I had a better grasp of the bigger picture, was that there weren't any heroes. Not yet, at least. We had the Big Three, but no Mega Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, or Samus Aran to put them in check. Nor any other heroes that should be around to fix this shithole of a planet, and anyone else who tried got stomped down. Hard. The closest thing to hide or hare of a hero was the Mario Bros' plumbing business in Monsteropolis and a maverick terrorist who called himself Bomberman. There were slim pickings for good guys, and at this point, I was dreading what would happen if I ever met one of my "heroes" in person.
Going against the grain and trying to be a hero in a world that only had contempt for the concept was going to get me killed. If I wanted to do some measure of good in the City, then I needed to dismiss any silly ideas I had of "fixing" the world with a few good acts and calling it a day. That didn't mean I had to be a scumbag and make the problems worse. I just needed to find a way to make being a hero less punishing an endeavor.
As it would turn out, I had already meandered into a workable solution. More than a few of the people chasing me, either because I knew too much or as one of Metpharm's extant lab experiments that slipped the leash, had committed a few crimes themselves. Murder, grand theft, homicide, espionage, assassination, and other charges that made them outlaws in the classic sense. If they stepped foot in the wrong corporate territory, as they often did in the service of their mutually-deniable backers, then the only value their life had was listed in the bounty value. The rest was a matter of taking their heads or other remains to the nearest collections office for a DNA scan, accepting whatever corporate scrip they were dishing out as the new currency, and moving on to the next zone. Since I technically lost height when transformed into a nocturnal creature with bad posture, I was able to pass myself off as a freakishly strong uplift, rather than a zoanthrope who could change between a mundane human and a killing machine that could fool most genetic scanners. Having had to make a name up on the spot, I left one that would plague me to this day.
Monty Mole. I could've put anything, and I put Monty Mole!
I couldn't pretend it was remotely ethical for me to tear people apart for money, but I'll gladly claim the high ground over cannibals, child killers, and literal fucking demons that escape from the pipes sticking out of the City to wreak havoc. Though, to be honest with myself, if I had the zenny saved up to spend on a full-sized Metal Gear, a nuclear missile, and an army of mooks to protect my hide from the City like some people, then I would. As much as I'd like to live in that world where I didn't have any problems, I didn't.
I didn't even live on Earth anymore. I lived in the City, where transforming into a mole mutant in defiance of nature was the only real form of protection I had.
It took years for me to distance myself from my time trapped in the hell that was being under Tyron's thumb. The company was torn apart by pissed off zoanthropes braver than I, and the public relations fallout of the revelation they'd been kidnapping people for their experiments. Not even the Big Three could get away with that, assuming they'd ever get caught in the act. The time after I'd made my escape was spent as a gray hat murderer, until I had enough cash to reconstruct a new life for myself here.
I tried not to get wistful about who I was, or where I came from, because I was never going back. Too much had changed, even if I could. I kept those things close to my heart, but I needed a fresh start. The finer details of my new ID were doctored, with the birth certificate and other essentials taken from a native of Port Edwards who died in a bus crash between zones. Ripe for forgery. His name was close to my old name, but different enough to draw a line between the past and present.
I am John Hudson. I am a normal man from Earth in extraordinary circumstances.
I am Monty Mole. I am a zoanthrope with claws that give Wolverine a run for his money.
I had to live for the present, and I liked living in Ridgeside. The hilly roads and vibrant shopping areas reminded me of pictures of Osaka and Yokohama. The sky and waters surrounding the zone were closer to blue than brown. The fields had grass that was green. You could regularly see the sun rising through the haze of smog. All of these little things that were the bare minimum on Earth were so vanishingly rare in the City.
The infrequent sirens in the distance were a comfort; someone was paying the ambulances and firemen. Ridgeside wasn't quite a democracy, as those were considered outdated. My boss, a red cat uplift named Goro, was more a semi-benevolent oyabun than an elected mayor. He did a decent job at separating his legal business from his more questionable ones, but I could only hope his dealings with the less reputable gangs out there were covered enough to pass an inspection. South Town provided a good buffer zone in case that psycho-powered nutjob M. Bison tried to expand into our far-flung corner of the City.
The City was a big, nasty place. I could only hope the heroes were on their way sooner, rather than later. Meanwhile, I'd get on with protecting the one zone I actually cared about. The money I made with NYAMCO was enough that I hadn't had to do "moonlighting" in quite a while, letting me avoid the emotional burnout that came with it.
NYAMCO, for its part, was a humble megacorp that produced pachinko games, slot machines, and other mechanical amusements for the rest of the City. Gambling money was so much cleaner than the blood money I collected from my side hustle. Once I was in a position with the company where people listened to what I had to say, I used the scraps of my incomplete business major and downright stolen ideas from home to keep ahead of the curve. The atrophied telecommunication infrastructure of the City made making the right calls to the right people a pain in the ass, but Goro practically rushed me through the process of exchanging sake once the revenue from fantasy sports betting flowed in.
At the moment, NYAMCO was running sportsbooks for fantasy counterparts to all of the major pastimes: Cyberball, Virtual Boxing, and Formula Zero Racing. Getting the last one off the ground when we did was a stroke of sheer luck, as a horrific nineteen car pileup caused the F-ZERO Grand Prix to be put on hold until they could figure out how to make the events less of a supersonic bloodbath. The people ran to NYAMCO to get their fix for race betting, and imagined the rest in their heads. Even when we had to split the profits with ZEED to use their phone lines, there was more than enough scrip to go around.
More than enough money to start taking steps to protect his zone from every other one.
I like this zone, and now I can make sure no one fucks it over.
I drove into the NYAMCO parking lot and turned off the car. No time to dwell on the past. Today was the day I switched out the bad hand that life dealt me for a new one.
When the meeting began, Goro remained an understated presence that silently exuded an air of authority from the end of the table. The other seats were occupied by my fellow underbosses. The first one on his right was a heavyset man in a kimono with a giant cannon sticking out of his head like a pompadour. How he was able to aim and shoot it without snapping his neck was beyond me. The first on Goro's left was a lithe woman with dirty blonde hair and red, spherical earrings in an orange jumpsuit. She was orbited by one of those yellow, one-eyed flying critters she adopted from one of her countless excursions into the Pipeworks.
They were Kenju and Tobi, the company's chief shinobi and plumber, respectively. While I was trusted as a member of the NYAMCO group by Goro, I was still the new guy. Most of the underbosses knew me as the "normal" human involved with our new gambling rackets, making me seem unqualified for the responsibility I was asking to take on. Goro's word meant that they had to hear me out, but earning their respect meant the difference between this plan of mine going smoothly or becoming nigh-impossible.
Behind the table, I could make out the silhouette of Goro's ever-present bodyguard, Taira. The man was a red-haired, pale-skinned ghoul of a mutant, whose samurai armor invoked the image of a restless spirit. He never spoke during the meetings, but I had to impress him the most; after everyone else left, Taira had the ears of the boss all to himself.
The meeting lasted several hours, during which I explained my goals, how to achieve them, and what kind of money I needed to get this started. When Goro gave the signal, I revealed my nature as a zoanthrope to all of the underbosses who weren't already aware of it. I was not only showing my strength, but the strength of my commitment.
Goro gave me a chance when no one else would, and he kept quiet about "Monty" until now. I earned his trust, and he earned mine.
A secret vote was held. When the votes were counted, the results were in favor. I, John Hudson, was promoted to be director of NYAMCO's new defense wing.
In other words, after much anticipation, Monty Mole was now officially on the payroll.
Howdy! For those of you who aren't quite sure what you read, this is a fic I've been working on for my 2023 NaNoWriMo called Zoanthropy. It takes place in a setting called 8-Bit Dystopia, which was made and abandoned by /tg/ way back when. Think of it as a gritty crossover that reimagines of a lot of older video game franchises and characters, which are forced to coexist on an alien world ruled by megacorps, super gangs, and the odd horror beyond mortal ken after the Space Invaders destroyed the Earth. I'm taking an almost League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style approach to the material, in that I'm including as many video games references as I can before a loose 2000s cutoff line, but they might be different from how you recognize them after they're put through the wringer of the City.
For the past couple of years, I've been dusting off this old setting, writing new material for it, and giving tweaks to it, until it's taken on its current shape showcased in this fic! I do most of the writing and handle final drafts for what gets into the "DELUXE" document, but it's a collaborative process! You're welcome to give what we have a read here if you want to find out more about the City and the myriad aspects of it, though I do not consider it required reading material for understanding what's going on in the setting. Ideally, I'd be able to trickle in a bit of this worldbuilding at a time with every chapter.
I have a couple of chapters in the bank, and my current plan to drop one every couple of days/once a week until all of my progress from my NaNoWriMo is up for public viewing. Then if folks want to see more, then I'll go back and forth between writing this and my Archie Sonic SI, Ruby Haze.
Comments and reader feedback are always appreciated!
In this context, zoanthropes are augmented humans that can transform into human/animal hybrids. If that sounds familiar, then you may know them from Bloody Roar.
For the purposes of the fic and the setting, characters from other games that can shift into beast forms (Talbain, the Centurion, the Rampage trio) may be classified as zoantropes, though the causes for those transformations may vary. Saberwulf may have been bitten by a strange beast in the Outlands and acquired the werewolf curse, but he remains a zoanthrope on paper.
Not to be confused with the 40k ones. I've recieved that question a few times from beta readers.
Man, Monty Mole is alot different than I remembered...
In all seriousness this is quite the strong start! Looking forward to seeing what comes next and how the SI deals with the insanity that is 8BD. Definitely excited to see how this fleshes out the The City as a whole and the personalities that inhabit it!
Unless the two locations were controlled by the same corp, or at least operating under the same general sphere of influence, getting a truck's worth of goods moved from one zone to another was easier said than done. A zone close to a megacorp's heart, like Palm or Termina, had checkpoints at the roads to control what came in or out. Electronic IDs and keycards streamlined interzone transit, though they were a privilege of the groups who made that corp's good books. Seeing that I was hitching a ride on a commercial transport not carrying anything illegal or dangerous, and that NYAMCO had already established a working relationship with WilyCorp, we were given authorization to use their highway system to make our delivery into EggDyne's territory. Once we were on Robotnik's side of the City, a bit of graft would take us the rest of the way to Casino Night Zone.
The lines got a bit blurrier, the rules looser, as the legal boundaries between zones deteriorated. In those places, physical barriers still worked as well as they did for humans thousands of years ago. River City was surrounded by cement walls, as much to protect the zone from external threats as it was to keep the zone's infamously rowdy populace in one place. Passing through zones on the outskirts, or the ones that had taken a sharp decline, ran the risk of driving over mines and other traps set up on the fast line. They disabled unwary freight trucks and took their drivers on a one-way ticket to an early retirement.
When the driver hit the brakes less than an hour into our trip, I had a feeling that we'd run into trouble. The driver was a gray Robotic Operating Buddy, a venerable bioroid model that was modular enough to be refitted for driving an old semi truck. Having fairly rigid positronic brain architecture made R.O.B.s diligent workers. They wouldn't need to stop for food or sleep, decreasing the amount of breaks or stops they'd need to zero.
While the WilyCorp official policy was that customers should get the positronic brains of their bioroids switched out for new ones before their expiration dates expired, the fact of the matter was that it was cheaper to buy a used R.O.B. on the second-hand-market when the old one broke. NYAMCO's cost-cutting measures meant we had several R.O.B.s with the road experience to know that there were other times when you should stop, besides when their batteries needed an emergency recharge.
For example, is a gang putting up a roadblock and demanding compensation to pass through their turf? That's a pretty good time to stop the car unless you want to get shot at. What was a simple cause-and-effect chain to an organic brain might be perceived as an unusual leap of logic for bioroids not specifically programmed to resolve these kinds of hostile negotiations. It was also more evidence to me that these R.O.B.s only got better with age.
My suspicion was confirmed after I caught the second half of a threat being delivered by a man with a coarse accent. They spoke with the eloquence of a piss-smeared New York subway station.
"...if anything were to happen to yer cargo, my mechanical man. So why not pay the Mad Gear's insurance package for the peace of mind? Gets you in and out of Metro City without any kind of hassle. If you're catchin' my drift."
As a zone on the edge of Dr. Wily's jurisdiction that he wasn't too fond of, Metro City was a crime-ridden cesspit with one foot in the grave. Either he was too busy to worry about a fringe zone that was otherwise self-sufficient, or he didn't care. It was a place where protective gangs like the Mad Gear flourished. They'd taken it upon themselves to set up barricades outside their home zone of Metro City and shake down any vehicles seeking passage. They weren't like the bandits that would chase down road trains like wolves. These wise guys were content to set up their racketeering booth outside of an abandoned gas station on the edge of town and loot anyone who couldn't pay the toll.
They were one of the many reasons as to why I was in charge of NYAMCO Defense.
"The hell are you even carrying in there?" another voice asked. "Drugs? Guns?"
What we were transporting were a new model of NYAMCO's pachislot machines. They were slot machines by any other name, with the ball bearings you earn standing in for coins or tokens. Like in Japan, the loophole with being able to take a receipt for how many pachinkos you won to a secondary store where you could trade them in for your winnings, helped us sneak the games into zones where gambling laws were a bit tighter. Not so tight that they weren't willing to look the other way for a slice of the pie. They were becoming a hit in the gambling parlors of the Mobius Archipelago, and we were getting backorders from as far as Neo Kanto. While the individual machines only cost so much on their lonesome, the quantity of pachislots as a whole represented a large sum in assets. Whatever the bioroid driver said to the Mad Gear lieutenant at the front of the checkpoint, it wasn't enough to convince them that the goods weren't being inspected.
"Why don't you two go and check it out?" the captain said to a pair of his subordinates.
"Yeah, let's find out!" shouted a third.
I was hanging out in the back of the truck with the slot machines when one of the Mad Gear goons thwacked the latch on the back door of the semi-trailer and lifted it up.
They saw me. I wasn't incredibly tall as a weremole, but I was tall enough to meet them eye-to-eye, and very stout. Two big, red eyes stared back at them from past darkened shades that hung over my snout, hot breath forming a faint mist around my face. I donned an oversized blue and white shell suit. They were miraculously still in style in the year 20XX. The reason I wore the garish athletic wear was that it was comfortable in human form, while it clung tightly to my zoanthrope form's chest and threatened to rip where my massive, clawed arms came out in beast mode. It made for a threatening look. A tiny nametag clung to my tracksuit declaring my name as Monty Mole.
"Jesus Christ!"
"Cold," I intoned to the pair of punks, my voice laced with a guttural presage. It was how I always sounded while transformed, due to physiological differences in how my voice came out and a practiced affectation to sound as different from my normal self as possible.
"What the fuck?!" the one with the shades and orange mohawk exclaimed, his grip on the steel pipe he was slugging around growing tighter.
"I said, you're cold. Care to guess again?"
I put one paw on the wall to steady myself as I stepped off the semi-trailer to greet the new company.
These two looked oddly familiar, and I got that sense of deja vu rattling around in the back of my head that I got every time I encountered a video game character I knew from my old life. If these two were with the Mad Gear Gang, then I might've recognized from the endless cavalcade of goons you had to punch and stab your way through in one of the Final Fight games.
"What the fuck are you?" the other one with goggles and a wicked gold widow's peak asked.
If they were gonna throw in the towel on guessing my name so early, so easily, then it was my turn to guess theirs.
"Take a step back, Two P and J," I uttered when the names that went with these faces finally came back to me.
The two gangsters both scrambled away, dropping their weapons in terror. I was glad that I still had a sharp mind about this sort of thing, now that I was in a universe where all of these trivial bits of information actually mattered.
I'll take what victories I can get.
My words, when delivered with the baritone of a mutant mole monster, held weight. Especially when I've got giant blades a step removed from guillotines attached to my hands and know your name. In spite of appearances, that was a form of deescalation. An act that was intended to take the fight out of all but the most insane people that came at me.
"Boss! Boss!"
I walked towards the front of the truck, where I could see the pair of mooks had to run to their yellow-dreadlocked leader for protection from the Big Bad Me. He was about seven feet tall, because I was half-convinced there was something in the leaded tap water around here that made people grow really huge and really stupid. That, or this guy was an embittered basketball player that turned to a life of crime. I could tell he had the physique to back him up in a fight, as his white vest was open to show off a broad chest full of knife scars. His leather pants and furred boots seemed like the real deal, as did the man's gold rings and chains. This was a person who had money to burn, and I don't think he earned that money he was spending the old-fashioned way.
He had the look of a boss, alright. The one you took out in the first stage, before moving on to the rest of the arcade game.
Metro City slums, stage one?
"Is this the monster that's got you two freaking out?" the man said teasingly, a wide grin spread ear to ear. "I bet you a thousand zenny that Hugo could fit him under his boot!"
The man's smell betrayed that he was taken aback by my sudden appearance. Both nostrils of the mole could work independently and share information with each other, like a computer with parallel processors. I suspected that half of the magic to this transformation was, well, magic, so I accepted that I could smell fear as much as I did the rest of the City. Considering all of the disgusting odors that surrounded the City, it was more often a curse than a blessing. At the moment, it helped me judge that to this guy, I was an x-factor jamming a stick of rebar into the metaphorical Mad Gears of his grift.
"Why have you stopped our truck?" I asked brusquely.
The man's smile got a bit tighter, which only made him look more familiar. We were both wearing sunglasses at night, so I couldn't comment on his pair without sounding like a hypocrite. He spread his arms wide, casually showing off the knife he had in his off hand.
"It's like I was tellin' the driver! This is a dangerous zone! Lots of sick nasty types might see an honest fella like you and start trouble. You want to go through Metro City without any trouble, right? Then you really ought to…"
I took a step closer to him, closing the distance between us in an instant. He must've misjudged my size, because getting up in his face caused him to falter. He was a foot taller than me, yes, but I was much broader in beast mode, and his knife was smaller than the claw on my pinky finger.
"Pay… the… fee," he finished.
"You're Damnd, aren't you?"
The Mad Gear boss' boastful implications died in his throat.
"I'm, ah, not sure who told you that--"
"Or is it Thrasher? Thrasher Damnd?" He didn't answer right away, the man's composure having been shaken. "Clear the road."
I felt a bit sympathetic for Damnd, given his unfortunate surname. I was sure that it served as a benefit when he was the one doing the intimidating.
Sodom, though I felt less sympathy for. That giant weirdo dressed up like a samurai and brought foreign objects into bare-fisted cage matches. He was practically asking for Cody or Hagar to ram a bo staff where the sun doesn't shine.
Damnd let out a nervous chuckle, regaining a shade of his swagger.
"I don't think you know how this works, my man! We can't just step aside and let you go toll-free! Think of the example we'd be setting if we just--" I walked away from him, towards the front of the truck. "HEY! Where are you going?!"
If you're good at something, don't do it for free. I wasn't here to rip the Mad Gear Gang apart, unless their bounties rose to meet the amount of time it'd take to root them out, or they were to declare war with NYAMCO first. There's no way they had anyone that could stand up to me if I was sufficiently motivated to slice all the heads off hydra until it stopped growing new ones. Not unless Belger surrendered his gang's autonomy to Shadaloo and begged Bison to send someone who could.
I've heard the stories about the Four Emperors of Shadaloo. I didn't want to test those tales unless it was absolutely necessary. For the time being, I was going to see how far I needed to twist Damnd's arm before he got with the program.
At the front, the road was blocked by a blue sedan in the Terrazi family. I could've mistaken it for a Honda. The Mad Gears that had come out here for the gang's prop-up extortion racket were armed with all manner of melee weapons, but no firearms. It's not as though they forgoed firearms out of the goodness of their hearts. Rather, the blades were to intimidate civilian transports into compliance. Anything more than that would risk provoking a pre-emptive strike from the megacorp convoys, who would kill them all to a man and carry on their merry way.
"What the fuck are you--?" began the driver, who looked to be wearing leather overalls.
Is this another fashion thing? I'm not a fashion guy, but the City's taste was bizarre.
As going along with this truck was a part of a trial run by the NYAMCO chiefs to see if I could deliver a level of performance comparable to the other big shot security companies on my lonesome, I dug my claws into the front door on the driver's side.
"Holy shit!"
The gangster tried rolling up the window for protection, to little avail when I tore the door off the hinges. Two P and J drew their weapons, but I yanked the driver out of his seat and tossed him at them.
"This is a no parking zone."
Then it was just me and the car. I pounced onto the luxury sedan like it owed me zenny. Like I was taking revenge for all my poor, burrowing brethren mowed down by late-night commuters. Like I was a one-man chop shop.
Rip one side. Hop across the car's roof. Tear the other.
In less than half a minute, the car was no more, a pile of spare parts taking its place. The Mad Gear goons could do little more than watch.
"Oh! My car!!" shouted the driver in sheer, unrestrained horror. Sounded like the poor bastard was still making payments.
I turned back to the awestruck Thrasher Damnd. The rest of his subordinates were already running in the direction of Metro City. Seeing that he had stuck around too long to do the same, Damnd took a step back, both hands raised in surrender.
"L-Look, man! It was a joke! Me and the boys were messing around!"
"We're leaving," I said darkly. "Free of charge."
"Yeah, yeah! You can pass for free!"
I got closer, and presented Damnd with a business card from my tracksuit pocket. I was glad I had experience manipulating small objects with my claws, in places where I couldn't safely change back to human. Otherwise, this would've gotten embarrassing.
"This is my employer's logo. If Mad Gear gives any vehicles with this logo a hard time in the future, I will hold you responsible. Got it?"
After that last sentence, I shoved the card into his hand with force. He'll be feeling that one in the morning, and the morning after.
"G-Got it!"
"Oh, and one more thing." I let out an animalistic snarl, causing the unsteady Damnd to fall onto his back. I took a wad of bills out of my pocket and dropped them on his body. "Keep the change."
Once the shipment reached its destination and we returned back to Ridgeside, I filed an extensive report as to how my monstrous persona made it so all of the gangs who tried to stop us with similar tactics found themselves out of luck and down an easy mark to exploit.
That is, when they weren't paying us for protection instead. This was how you networked in the City's gang society. You established yourself, beat down all oncomers, and then asked if anyone wanted seconds. When someone did, you provided that service with a smile.
The trial run was deemed a dramatic success.
"Dad made you the boss of what?"
Mewta barged into my office not long after the first job was settled. It was a little over a week later, right before noon, the same time I always take my lunch. I hadn't had the chance to step away from my PC when I was ambushed by her.
"Our new private security wing," I explained laconically.
Mewta was one of Goro's kids, a pink-furred cat uplift with orange stripes. She looked very similar to her siblings, with them being triplets, but Mewta made herself stand out from her sister and brother by wearing a blue neckerchief with her blouse.
She tapped her foot impatiently while I finished logging off. Her impatience suddenly changed to a gasp when she got a better look at me.
"John! What happened to your face?"
I paused, before gesturing to my fading black eye.
"Oh, this?"
"Yeah, that! Did you get into a fight?"
No way I was gonna be answering that truthfully to her. I came up with something more amusing to downplay it, since my healing factor would make it vanish quicker anyway.
"Nah. Slipped and hit my face on the doorknob because I was a bit tipsy after karaoke night." I changed the subject. "Didn't Goro tell you about NYAMCO Defense?"
Mewta forgot about my black eye and was back to being irritated at my forgetful antics. Mission accomplished.
"Yeah, he did! And when were you gonna tell us?"
I shrugged.
"I couldn't announce it to the rest of the company yet, so I sent an email out to you and your siblings three days ago. Didn't you read it?"
She blinked, and got flustered. She hadn't read her mail all week!
"You--! No one ever reads those and you know it! You weren't gonna tell us in person?"
Honestly, I was so busy with going over potential hires, I forgot to make absolutely sure the triplets were in the loop about it. I felt bad, but not so bad that I didn't stick to my principle that people should read their emails. Specifically the ones sent by me.
God, I miss cell phones. It didn't make people read my messages more, but I could just text people whenever I needed to.
The best part is that they aren't fucking fax machines. Ugh. Hate those noises they make.
"I'm sorry. It slipped my mind."
"How?! It's kind of a big deal!"
Looking past Mewta, I could see that Mewchi and Mew-Mew weren't far behind. Then my secretary R.O.B., Gunpei, rolled into view of the door in front of them.
"Mister Hudson, you have three guests," Gunpei said in a slow, synthesized voice.
Gunpei was supposed to screen my calls and make sure people didn't walk in whenever they felt like, but his physical speed and reaction time for anything more time-sensitive than following a snail as it went from one end of the room to the other was painfully inadequate.
"Thanks, Gunpei," I replied dryly. His head turned to identify them, one at a time. "Could you be so kind as to--"
"Your three guests are Mewta Nyamco, Mewchi Nyamco, and Mew-Mew Nyamco."
On the plus side, he had acting chops that would give HAL 9000 a run for his money.
"Thank you, Gunpei. That will be all."
In the City, the line between private security, a private military, and the irregular mercenary bands that were a regular sight in the more "hot" zones was thin enough to sit comfortably on the pointy bit of a monomolecular knife. It was a fair question to ask which one of those I was starting, and that's what they were really trying to weed out of me.
"Alright, you three. Come in."
Mewchi and Mew-Mew poured in after Mewta, once Gunpei slowly reversed out of the way.
"Why didn't dad tell us we were gonna have a security force sooner?" Mewchi asked next, both curious and excited about what I was planning. "We could be the next Orange Star, or Regular Army!"
Mewchi was the only male triplet. He had a stocky build, a blue tuft of fur on his chest, and big eyebrows. Being the eldest (and only) son, Mewchi had the highest odds of inheriting when Goro stepped down. The only reason Mewchi didn't sign up for the Tekken Force out of high school after impressing the talent scouts during his time as an amateur sumo wrestler was that Goro wanted him to stick around and learn the family business.
"I don't know about that. I was thinking of NYAMCO Defense as being smaller, and more precise. Going for quality over quantity."
The unspoken part was, as always, cheaper. The test I did to prove NYAMCO Defense could cover our assets meant that the cynics on the board were taking my claims seriously, but it wasn't like we magically squeeze fleets of tanks and jets into our tight budget. The budget that went up with our gambling profits, which went up with successfully protecting our transports of machines and revenue. Right now, the only way I was going to hire the agents I needed was by leveraging my outside-context knowledge to guestimate who would be the safest bets. Reducing the risks that this whole thing blew up in my face.
"But why?" Mew-Mew asked innocently. She was a bit of an enigma to me. Her big, blue eyes read as being oblivious to her father's illicit dealings, but I wasn't convinced. You always had to watch the quiet ones. "Don't we pay the Mishimas for protection?"
Mew-Mew did have a point. Kinda. Goro and the automotive oligarchs who set up camp in Ridgeside paid tithes to the Mishima Zaibatsu in exchange for falling under the defensive umbrella of the Tekken Force. It was an ideal arrangement, as Heihachi Mishima liked things neat and orderly. Annual tribute and favorable trade relations suited him fine.
However, that alliance was dependent on Heihachi remaining in power. There was the rub. Things in the City were only occasionally one-to-one with the games, but I had a hunch that Heihachi was one fighting tournament away from being chucked off a cliff by his demonic pissant of a son. Kazuya was the wrong mixture of ruthless and ambitious for me to ever trust him. Considering his track record in the TEKKEN series and adding in the grunge of the City, I had no doubt he'd annex Ridgeside or sell us out as it suited his whims.
I'd rather dig into the plumbing of their fancy tower by hand and plant bombs under the executive toilets than let that happen, but I hesitated to explain the practical reality that our zone's safety was dependent on who won a karate match to three Mishima Polytechnical graduates. They all had a fairly good opinion of the arms-manufacturing corp, and I didn't have any strong evidence that could disprove their confidence that Heihachi was a reliable patron to stand behind.
Wait, was Kuma and uplift here, too, or an actual bear trained in martial arts?
Eh, I'll figure it out later.
"The Tekken Force doesn't do bodyguarding or armed escorts outside of the Mishima Autonomous Zone, Mew-Mew. They aren't available for hire, either. We've been having a lot of trouble with gangs attacking our shipments, and I figured having an in-house team to deal with them would help discourage it. I mean, you'd be surprised how much of the annual budget goes into paying them off. Reallocate some of that to NYAMCO Defense, and--"
"You're making having our own mercenary squad sound boring," Mewchi groused.
I made a so-so gesture.
"Ehh, I'm certain they'll see some action."
"Can I join?" Mewta asked, her tail sticking upright at the suggestion of anything more exciting than the sales department. Looking back at her unamused siblings, she corrected herself. "I mean, can we join?"
We'd be down a great sales agent if Mewta went into the frontlines. Mewchi and Mew-Mew were also doing fine jobs at handling the above-board side of the organization, but I could understand why they didn't want to be trapped behind a desk by an overprotective yakuza parent for the rest of their lives. Alas, Goro wouldn't stop at cutting off three fingers if I got one of his precious kids hurt.
No, he'd spare the three fingers and no one would ever see the rest of me again. Goro would make sure that Mrs. K was reimbursed for any unpaid rent and had someone stop by to donate my belongings to charity, because he's a nice guy like that.
"You can ask your father, but I don't think he'd approve of anything close to field work."
They were all crestfallen at having the facts broken to them. Should they keep pushing for a taste of what I was putting together, I did commission Rodney Recloose to refurbish an old combat vehicle for NYAMCO. Goro might let them pilot it for missions, if the three of them worked their charm enough to convince him that it was safe. Rodney said it wouldn't be ready for pickup until the end of the month at the earliest. I didn't mention it now because I didn't want to get their hopes up if the project fell through.
But if it did fall through, I was getting a refund.
"Can you tell us who's gonna be in it?" Mewchi questioned.
"I have a few people lined up," I said vaguely. I then stood up and left my office.
"Where are you going?" Mew-Mew asked. "Meeting our new soldiers?"
"Actually, I'm headed to lunch. I didn't bring anything, so I was thinking of stopping by BurgerTime."
Though I foolishly assumed that BurgerTime was the City's equivalent to McDonald's or Burger King when I entered one for the first time, it was actually closer to Waffle House. Only the service was nonexistent, the meat tasted like it was sourced from biomonster nests, and the number of fights that had to be broken up with an armed response meant that BurgerTime was banned from operating in Ridgeside. I'd have to take a bus to Monsteropolis with a zapper in my pocket if I really wanted to order from the menu, and they never got my order right on carryout!
"BurgerTime?" Mewta made a face as she and her siblings caught up with me. "No way! We're taking you somewhere nice!"
"Somewhere like… Scarfman's, perhaps?"
Scarfman's was the City's version of White Castle. The megacorps went and fucked up everything else on the planet, but at least they got that right.
"Do they even have Scarfman's where you're from?" Mewchi asked.
"Not really."
Mew-Mew tilted her ears forward, curious. Mewta saw the bait she could use and took it.
"Spill the beans, and it's a deal!" she said.
"Deal."
I began spilling the beans once the first Scarfman sliders arrived at our table.
"Okay, so the first guy I was able to get to sign on, besides Monty Mole, was--"
Mewchi spat out his drink.
"We got Monty Mole?"
I dabbed a napkin on my face.
"Yeah? First guy I got, but there isn't much to say with him."
"Not much to say? Bullshit! Monty is one of the grimiest, goriest gene freaks to ever crawl out of the Pipeworks! How the fuck did we land him?"
That sounded pretty harsh. What the hell were people saying about me?
"I… met him at Tapper's and gave him the pitch. He was in. Pretty boring story."
Right now, I was feeling that I really should've come up with a better cover. Goro didn't say I couldn't tell his children about the whole "I'm a mutant that can blend into unmodified human populations as the ultimate stealth assassin" thing, per say. I didn't have a strong grasp on how most uplifts felt about zoanthropes, but Goro's muted reaction made it sound like he didn't think I was doing the uplift version of a minstrel show. So I could have told them, and probably should have after being their friends for this long.
The real reason I had to keep that close to the chest was because I held some lingering fears that their opinion of me would change for the worse if they found out about my other, more violent face.
They'd probably be scared shitless of me.
"Can I get his autograph?" Mew-Mew asked softly.
I frowned.
"Beg pardon?"
"His autograph. I wanted it since he caught the Scissorman. He avenged Hiromi."
"Caught" felt like the wrong word to describe what I did to Robert Barrows. The maniac was a maestro with a pair of mono-edged garden shears, and he used them to cut cut cut his way through dozens of unsuspecting women. Another blatant downside of the decentralized zone system that helped me evade detection was that it meant serial killers could travel from one town to another without anyone catching wise to their activities. By the time anyone could connect the dots, the Scissorman was long, long gone.
The only thing Barrows didn't account for was that I could track him by the scent in the trail of bodies he left behind, and that I wouldn't rest until it got my hands on that demon in human skin.
"Caught" was a better descriptor of the shears, after the coroners gave up any hopes of dislodging the twisted implements from Barrows' spinal column.
"John? You okay?" Mewta asked, concern evident in her voice.
I massaged my temples.
"Just a migraine. I'll see what I can do about that autograph, Mew-Mew. And… sorry about your friend."
I should've gotten to the man sooner.
Mew-Mew nodded, finding the answer satisfactory.
"What about the second mercenary?" Mewta asked, so we could move on from the topic of Scissorman. "It couldn't be the one mutant, right?"
"The second guy I signed on was a boxer. For privacy reasons, we'll be calling him Mask X."
"Was Mask X the guy who gave you that black eye?" Mewchi interjected.
"Yes," I said quickly, trying to get back into the story as soon as possible.
Mewta flicked a fry at my face. I flawlessly parried it, only to realize that I could've caught it instead. A pity that we were down one fry.
"You lying jerk! You said you tripped!"
I ignored her. This was story time, and even an abridged story time in which I neglected to mention I was actually two of the central characters was sacrosanct.
"Anyways, his name is Mask X, and he wasn't exactly an easy guy to get a hold of…"
Another day, another chapter of Zoanthropy. This one introduces more of the characters surrounding the "normal" life of Mr. Hudson, and a regular work shift for Monty Mole. The next will showcase a few of the individuals that our intrepid SI hires for his new security force, NYAMCO Defense.
Who do you think will make the cut? Or pick up the calls of a no-name corpo from a third-rate company? Stay tuned and find out!
Man, I understand that completely. I'm also so tired of Worm, and seeing fics of it everywhere. Half of them feel like copy and paste of each other too and it just gets so boring and annoying.
"His autograph. I wanted it since he caught the Scissorman. He avenged Hiromi."
"Caught" felt like the wrong word to describe what I did to Robert Barrows. The maniac was a maestro with a pair of mono-edged garden shears, and he used them to cut cut cut his way through dozens of unsuspecting women
So things are beginning to shape up as well as Hudson's motivations. I don't blame him at all for not trusting Kazuya to uphold any of his dad's agreements, even in his earliest days he was a little shit. I also like the dynamic he has with his boss' kids
Now, anyone have any ideas on who this Mask X guy is?
He said serial murderer, so I take this is Scissorman from the horror game Clock Tower. The thing is, the name is more of a title if anything since there are multiple versions of the guy.
He said serial murderer, so I take this is Scissorman from the horror game Clock Tower. The thing is, the name is more of a title if anything since there are multiple versions of the guy.
It was late evening when I arrived at the Ring King Gym. Almost all of the attendees had left for the night, save for a muscular, mustachioed bruiser who kept beating at the punching bag long after the sun had set. It was a twenty four hour gym, and this hard-headed ringster wanted to get every second of his money's worth.
"HA! I'll believe it when I see it!"
The Ring King was one of the higher-end, more respectable gyms in the City. It had a variety of equipment for anyone from the casual exercisers to professional athletes, but it catered to one specific clientele above all. The squared circle at the center of the gym was testament enough to that. It was a premium gym with a short member list, but not so highbrow that it'd scare off the video boxers. An evolution (or mutation) of the original sport, video boxing was a mainstay in the more legal types of combat sports entertainment available to the denizens of the City. At some point during the process of the pugilistic pastime reaching the City, boxing picked up the eccentric personalities of professional wrestling. Everyone in the Minor League and up had a name and fans who got passionate about their prizefighters. As though every boxer was their own team to root for.
What few rules the sport of video boxing retained from its Earth counterpart were loose, to put it lightly. Weight classes were abolished. Uniforms were lax. Rounds were lightning-fast, three-round slugfests. Knocking down your opponent three times was a T.K.O. There were no illegal moves, and some fighters exploited this fact to their fullest.
Great Tiger, for example, fucking teleported. With real magic! I saw it for myself when Mewchi and I got tickets to see Great Tiger's bout against Afro Thunder for his birthday. I suppose Tiger read the rules long enough to confirm that using magic to hop around the ring and deliver a sucker punch wasn't explicitly banned by the World Video Boxing Association. The association still hadn't amended their rules to ban flagrant use of powers, so it must be kosher as long as it puts butts in seats.
Professional video boxing attracted all sorts of sportsmen, but "highbrow" wasn't a word applicable to any of them. On the contrary, everyone who got to the point where they were popular headliners in pay-per-view W.V.B.A. matches was a goddamn lunatic.
"Dalyarak!" the depilated boxer swore as he tore the punching bag open with a brutal uppercut, spilling cotton fluff all over the floor.
The former Major Circuit champ Balrog caused something of a stir when he, after maiming one contestant and accidentally killing another in the ring, retaliated to his lifetime ban from the W.V.B.A. by taking a job offer from Shadaloo to become one of M. Bison's chief enforcers. As the Big Three had a vested interest in warding people away from Bison's anti-corporate drug cartel, the video boxing stars were swift to condemn their former colleague for joining a terrorist group.
Then a fascinating trend started cropping up. Minor Circuit champ King Hippo was caught punching out people on Metpharm's bounty boards as a side hustle, in spite of the fact he cunningly coated his skin in blue paint as a disguise. Pete "Pizza Pasta" Zapata, a man already mired in allegations of being in the mob's pocket, started appearing in pictures at the side of the notorious alleged crime lord Dominic King. I heard Glass Joe had been doing guest appearances as a security guard at a minimall, and he let me sign him a check in exchange for telling me where the guy I was actually trying to hire did his training.
"Where are the fresh bags?" Bald Bull roared at any gym staff that were still on site.
Which led me to the current Major Circuit champion, The Reckless Bald Bull! Standing six-foot-two and weighing in at two hundred and ninety-eight pounds, Bald Bull took the news of Balrog's heel turn especially poorly. Not because they were friends, but because he thought Balrog stole his famous Bull Charge technique and took it with him to Shadaloo. Changing the name to "Crazy Buffalo" and claiming it as his own was not sufficient to abate Bald Bull's rage. As such, he had been raring for a rematch, and been taking it out on everyone else in the circuit. It was only a matter of time until he used his signature move on a referee and earned himself a temporary suspension from the video boxing season.
Seeing that he wasn't able to legally box with the only game in town until his suspension ended, Bald Bull seemed like the perfect man to offer a job at NYAMCO Defense… with a catch. I thought it was weird that no one else tried to approach him, until the reason why became all too clear. Once he figured out what I was there for, Bald Bull dragged me into the ring to see if I was man enough to be the boss of him.
"Is anyone here?! I said I need another punching bag!"
As a mostly normal human, I didn't last sixty seconds against a guy who was as strong as an ox. He must've been in a good mood when I found him, because he only gave me a black eye and left the rest of me recognizable. Following that pitiful display, he threw my ass out the door with a warning not to show my face again unless I could give him a half-decent workout.
Okay. Fine. We'll do this his way.
"Bald Bull."
I was now prepared to get more hands-on with the interviewing process.
Bald Bull turned around to see a beefy mutant uplift enter the gym. He showed no fear. Which, given that he was a video boxer who regularly crashed his head into solid objects to hype up the crowd, wasn't all that shocking. The man took blunt force head trauma and made it work for him.
"Eh? Who's asking now?"
Sliding on the biggest gloves available, which only raised questions as to who the hell regularly boxed here that their gloves could fit over my claws, I stepped into the ring as Monty Mole.
"I have a job offer for you, but I want to know for sure if you're worth my time. Get up here and show me what you've got."
Bald Bull climbed over the rope with gusto.
"Now we're talking!"
He smashed his head against the trip gong mounted to the side of the ring, triggering the gym's automatic referee to play the opening jingle for a video boxing match and start the timer for the first round.
Once the timer began, Bald Bull came at me like a bullet train. No mercy. In beast mode, I could finally apply the bare-knuckles boxing techniques I learned from the streets, where I was never more than a stone's throw away from hitting someone who wanted to use that stone as an excuse to fight. Damnd wasn't wrong, in that just walking around some zones was seen as an invitation. I also had to burn through a lot of my savings on mentorships from some of the most hard-to-find, fickle fuckers who could harness their chi and were willing to teach what they knew for money. Out of them, I got a crash course in kenpo. There were several recognized branches of kenpo; I paid for the kind that let me keep up with mobs of enemies and use supernatural moves that actually worked. The only downside was that my human self was too fragile to use them. I wasn't a nimble dodger like Little Mac, so I put up my dukes and blocked until an opening presented itself.
All of that being said, my enhanced strength and healing factor didn't automatically guarantee me the win. Bald Bull's reputation as dumb muscle was overstated, as I could intimately feel how skilled he was with his hands. With my face. The man hit really hard. Soda Popinski's detractors floated around the idea that he had performance-enhancing cocktails in his ginger ale, but Bull was nominally augment-free. A normal human.
A normal human with jabs and crosses leaving me more winded than when I got tackled by a chain chomp. Those things were organic metal all the way down, and yet I imagined I could fend off two of them with more ease than I would guard a Bull Charge.
Damn! Was he harnessing his chi?
Even when it looked like I was going to be overwhelmed, going all-out wasn't an option here. The loose rules of video boxing or not, I couldn't bring my full power to the forefront without running the risk of taking it too far. My extra stamina was all I needed to keep me vertical long enough to outlast Bald Bull and put him on the ropes. By the time the bell rang to mark the end of Round 1, he had done the hard part of wearing himself down for me.
I was taking back everything I thought about Great Tiger. If I wasn't a weremole, I'd sure as shit take teleportation over getting my nose torn off.
When the bell rang again, I went on the offensive. Round 2 started when I swung my mitts like hammers and a resolve to wrap this up before Bald Bull pulled off his signature move. I saw that he was about to pull away and rev up for a charge, so I surged forward and beat him to the punch with a headbutt.
It wasn't how you were "supposed" to beat him in the game. Putting aside all other factors, my head was now much bigger, and designed to shrug off a tunnel collapse. When our skulls collided, Bald Bull fell. He got up a few seconds later, holding a hand to his bleeding forehead.
"You're not half bad," Bald Bull conceded. He turned off the auto-ref by slugging it in the face. Talk about intuitive design. "What's the job?"
I walked him through the basics and the benefits, none of which were disagreeable. He was to be an intimidator, first and foremost, but he was welcome to wail on any gangers who tried to test if we were bluffing. Anyone who he was bodyguarding would know they were in safe, boxing-gloved hands. I knew he wouldn't kill anyone by accident, because the difference between Bald Bull and Balrog was that Bald Bull had restraint.
When he had it in his mind to kill someone -- such as Balrog -- it was gonna be on purpose.
"Are you in or out?"
"I'm in. But if we're doing this without the paparazzi getting up in my face, I'll need something from my car."
A few minutes later, he returned to the gym wearing a luchador mask that exposed his nose and mouth to the open air. The mask was mostly red, with a yellow "X" over his pate where I scarred him.
That headbutt I pulled off did inflict a scar, which I only found out after the fact. As Bull would put it later, he didn't hold a grudge because it made him look tougher.
Video boxers. Insane.
He flexed his muscles.
"So? How do I look?"
It looked really stupid, but if that was how we got "Mask X" to sign on for NYAMCO Defense, then so be it.
Later in the week, once the swelling around my black eye had abated enough to fit behind a pair of darkened lenses, I moved on to the next prospective agent I could get in touch with. This man was much, much easier to convince to meet me in person than Bald Bull. They were cordial, and a lot less likely to punch me in the face.
Bald Bull got that one for free, because that's what I was paying him to do to other people. From a certain point of view, I was getting a live demo.
My initial plan was to go for Pico. While the Pico I knew was an alien soldier from the planet of Death Wind in his game of origin, the Pico Tortiz of the City was an uplift veteran descended from a common snapping turtle. To my surprise, Mr. Tortiz retained his military experience as a Venomian spec-ops commando during the Lylat Wars.
The Lylat Wars were a conflict I thought I knew. For many uplifts, Lylat was more formative than the conflict they were invented to take part in. The first-gen uplifts were made as an emergency batch of soldiers during the tail end of the Invader Wars. When it became clear that the humans were fighting a losing battle, they sent a mission of uplifts to do the hard work of colonizing Princepts Dominae, the planet that would become the City. A glitch in their hyperdrives took the uplifts to the far-flung Lylat System, where they lived in peace until the exiled scientist Andross started a bid for galactic conquest.
It should all sound familiar, if you'd played half of the Star Fox library. Corneria's space force and their mercenary dogfighters won the conflict, of course, pushing the enemy all the way back to their capital in Venom. Emperor Andross was found by Cornerian soldiers, after he'd already repainted his chambers with the brains he was going to use to rule Lylat. Even in death, he still got the last laugh: The bioplagues, ecocide weapons, and flat-out atomic missiles that the Venomians utilized during the war rendered the Lylat System incapable of sustaining life for no longer than another, final generation.
Believe it or not, people continued to print history books after the Earth exploded. They were cheaper when bought second-hand, after the corporate-run colleges printed new editions with minimal changes and tried to choke out the secondary market.
The more things change, huh?
At any rate, my plan to hire Pico flew out the window at terminal velocity after the former Venomian pilot went and caused a supersonic fender-bender. Pico's murderously aggressive driving was one of those things that everyone knew was going to result in a disaster, which was what one tended to call it when one driver caused fourteen other drivers to crash and burn to death inside their cockpits. Pico was acquitted of any wrongdoing caused by his freewheeling antics, but the hideous wails of the victims on live TV were so bone chilling that even the legendarily bloodthirsty audience of F-ZERO had to admit the carnage had gone a step too far. There were protests, both for and against the continued ultraviolence inherent in the sport, until the organizers of the event came to a summary decision.
In one fateful Big One, the F-ZERO Grand Prix was put on indefinite hiatus, until the brand-new regulatory board figured out a way to make steering a rocket going a zillion miles an hour "socially responsible". Much like a vulture double-dipping on roadkill because the scavenged, decaying meat was really that good, I was once again taking advantage of the same catastrophe that resulted in Fantasy F-ZERO taking off as well as it did. Notable stars like John Dekka were able to negotiate for better contracts with the competition, but for many fans and racers, it was F-ZERO or nothing. I lost access to Pico, as he was using his sharpened espionage skills to avoid the public eye like the plague. I'm sure he'd get by somehow during the hiatus, but he currently was beyond my reach. That left a lot of other racers out of a primary source of income that I subsequently tried and failed to hire, as getting a hold of one who'd give NYAMCO the time of day was challenging.
Going over the public racer listings one last time before throwing in the towel, I realized there was another uplift with an F-ZERO machine who used to fly in the same circles as Pico. He lived in the Little Lylat section of Mute City, which was one of the largest concentrations of uplifts outside of the Hill Zones.
"Slow down!" Mewta cried as I was trying to fast-walk to our destination through throngs of people. Mute City had a seaport, an airport, and a spaceport, so the sidewalks were always a little over capacity with people coming or going. "Your legs are too long!"
I turned around, realizing Mewta was falling behind. She insisted on coming with me to meet this potential hire after hearing the Mask X story. Being slightly below six feet tall meant I was significantly taller than most of the humanoid animals that made up the crowd.
"Sorry, Mewta. Do you see the place?"
"I see it!"
Mewta pointed to one of the several ginormous, brutalist towers that took up space in the Mute City skyline. They resembled so many black and red obelisks to an unnamed god that I wouldn't want to meet in person. What everyone called "Little Lylat" was contained in these closely-packed, Plymouth-style arcologies, which housed a staggering fifty-five thousand residents per building. Having been inside one of these cities-within-cities-within-the-City a few times before on Monty Mole business, I received the impression that it was common practice to shove far more occupants than the stated occupancy limits in them.
It was a great place for claustrophobes, assuming you were down for exposure therapy. For a variety of reasons, I wasn't as claustrophobic as I used to be.
Looking more closely, I could see that one of the arcologies had a holographic name and green leaf emblem that scrolled across the center of it.
"Nook Village?" I said as a question.
Let's hope I don't have to pay for anything in there with bells.
"That's the one!" Mewchi replied.
We stepped up to the megastructure. The ground floor of Nook Village was much better than some other Plymouths I'd seen, containing an open shopping plaza with indoor trees and greenery. It was a pleasant change of pace from the usual dull concrete.
We navigated ourselves to one the nearest elevator and walked in. I pressed the button that had an "128" on it.
After a minute of silence, Mewta spoke up on what's been bothering her all day.
"Why do you want this guy of all people to work for us?"
"What do you mean?" I asked, though I had an inkling of why she was upset.
"For starters, Octoman isn't exactly a racing champ," Mewta said bluntly, her eyes narrowed.
I wasn't going to argue with that. The red cephalopod man drove a used F-ZERO machine with minimal tuning, and as such his rankings in the last race season were middling at best. We could use that to lowball him for the contract, but that wouldn't sit well with me.
Besides, a happy employee is one that won't be searching for the ideal angle to stab me in the back.
"I'm aware that his racing stats aren't the best, but Mr. Takora was a military pilot. He should know how to handle himself in hostile situations, and that's the skills I'm looking for. The fact that he comes with his own ride is an added benefit."
"He was a pilot for Venom," she emphasized, all but spitting the word out.
Years later, the amnesty extended to the bulk of Venom's army remained a sore subject. The Cornerians won the war, but Andross and his weapons of mass destruction ensured that the victory was nothing short of pyrrhic. The only way Corneria could get their refugees out of the Lylat System was by the controversial decision to let members of the Venomian army take amnesties in exchange for helping the survivors of both sides flee to the City. Former enemies taking shots at each other in the confines of these Little Lylats was hardly an uncommon occurrence. Tortiz was one of several would-be war criminals who took the pardon and ran with it, but there weren't any egregious crimes in Octoman's service record that would disqualify him from NYAMCO Defense.
"He flew a Triangle during the Battle of Sector Y and spent the rest of the war stationed on Zoness. Octoman fought military targets only. No civilians."
Mewta was almost mollified by my answer. I wasn't going to tell her she was wrong for having a bone to pick with the Venomians. The Nyamcos were among those families displaced by the Lylat Wars. The triplets were born on Corneria, and lost it when they were young. They weren't ever going to see their homeworld again.
One day, I'd like to tell them how much I could relate.
"I still don't like it," she said finally. "But I said I wanted to come, and this needs to be done. I'll just let you do most of the talking."
"Thanks. I appreciate it."
The elevator came to a complete stop when we reached the 128th floor. We stepped out.
"Octoman was the only one to pick up the phone, wasn't he?"
"Not true!" I replied in mock defensiveness. "Captain Falcon politely declined the offer when he got back to me. Said he preferred to fly solo."
"When he got back to you," she reiterated.
"He's a bounty hunter! He could've been out of the office and it went to voicemail."
"Uh-huh."
"He could've been in space!"
I didn't call everyone, but I sure called a lot of them. Samurai Goroh tried to mug me when he was done pretending to be interested in the job, so he was currently nursing a pair of broken legs behind bars. I figured that was for the best, as having a "Goro" and "Goroh" would've gotten confusing. Jody Summer had her hands full being a spokeswoman for Strike Force, the Big Three's mutual defense fleet. Clinton Gazelle was still on the slab after they dragged his remains from what the news outlets were calling the Horrific Grand Finale. Could always check in with him later. Bio Rex was in some kind of an anti-human hate group, which H.R. flagged as a no-go for obvious reasons.
Back on Earth, attempting to hire athletes from the events you were already profiting from via fantasy sportsbooks might be construed as a conflict of interest. In the City, the word for it was vertical integration. I didn't plan to leverage any newfound influence for the purposes of match-fixing, as I didn't want to wake up one morning to Black Shadow holding me in a Full Nelson while Mr. Sandman beat me senseless.
We traversed the lower-middle level of the arcology. While the greenery remained a consistent feature, the unkempt vegetation was nourished only by artificial light and leaking pipes. Crumbling cement clumped up in the less-frequented parts of the walkways. The view from the windows was blocked by the now-disused magnetic tracks dangling above Mute City. I didn't even want to think about the ungodly amount of noise those things made when the races were on. Uplifts out in the open were scarce, making their movements quickly and quietly to avoid notice. I may have been the only human for quite a while in any direction. There were market stalls run by residents trying to make a living, but they had to compete with the higher-quality stores on the bottom and the penthouse restaurants up top. As such, these shops were hanging by a thread or totally derelict.
No wonder the guy's looking for extra work.
If an arcology was meant to contain all of the essential parts of a town without having to go outside, then this was looking like the arcology's skid row.
"Are you sure this is the right floor?" Mewta asked cautiously.
Her eyes lingered on a large graffiti mural of an angular head with crossed swords beneath it. The artists got the outline of the head done, and colored in the blood-red pupils with spray paint, but the details of the face were left incomplete.
The art was amateur. It was the message beneath the image that disturbed her.
Three words.
HE WILL RETURN.
I checked my paper to confirm Octoman's apartment number, comparing it to the numbers of the apartments lining the pathways.
"He should be close."
There were two types of former citizens of the Venomian Empire that relocated to the City: The Venomians who became disillusioned with the mad ambitions of Andross, and the Androssians who saw the City as a great place to go to ground until their master came back from the dead. Androssian terror cells mixed and mingled with the dispossessed Lylatian youths who had adopted Andross as a countercultural symbol of hatred for humans and uplifts they saw as "subservient" to human masters. Stenciling an image of his face on a wall was about as neighborly as a black pinwheel on white and red.
If there's anyone around here who picks a fight, I won't let my secret stop me from protecting my friend.
We headed towards Octoman's flat, deliberately not commenting further on the Androssian tag. When we reached the door, I walked up and gave it a trio of knocks. A few seconds later, one of the occupants answered.
"Who is it?" an oddly squelching voice gasped through the door.
"John Hudson."
"And Mewta Nyamco," Mewta added.
I heard the sound of several locks being unlocked. Not one at a time, but all of them being manipulated simultaneously. The door opened, and Octoman was there.
Octoman Takora was, as his name implied, an octopus uplift. He had a large, red head, fishlike yellow eyes, and a tube for a mouth that was lined on the inside with triangular teeth. Eight thick tentacles ran through the round ports lining the cybernetic harness supporting his squat, mollusc body. This meant that Octoman used six of his tentacles as arms and two as legs on a regular day, though they were all interchangeable in a pinch.
"Come in, come in!" Octoman said genially.
His apartment was, frankly speaking, a mess. Furniture was toppled over. Sucker marks dotted the floor, walls, and ceiling from his consortium of rambunctious octopi children. There had to be eight of them, and they all had cyberware in the vein of Octoman's own.
Those couldn't have been cheap. Did he have to pay for the operations out of pocket?
"Sorry for the clutter!" Octoman said apologetically. "The sitter canceled at the last minute, and I thought I was a goner until you offered to come all this way!"
I could tell Octoman had his appendages full. One to get the door, two to mix an algal baby formula for one of his hungry tykes, two more to change a diaper, a sixth hanging on a hook so he could get around without wasting two tentacles using them as legs, and a final pair to hold the Telstar Marksman behind his back. The Marksman was a popular model of blaster for home defense. It gave Octoman a measure of insurance in case this whole thing turned out to be too good to be true. Considering the Venomian army started as a prisoner revolt, I suppose his time before, during, and after his tour of duty him prepared for anything.
While they both took the pardons, Octoman didn't have the resources or connections to ride out F-ZERO being grounded like Pico. The guy who caused it to happen! Most strikingly, I couldn't help but notice there were no other adults here besides us.
Fuck me, was he caring for eight kids and a professional racer? As a single parent? With no sponsor?
"That's… alright, Mr. Takora," Mewta said, disarmed by this unexpectedly domestic scene. I don't think she noticed the light gun at all.
Octoman swiftly wrapped up the rest of the tasks, stowed his zapper, and cleared a table so we could sit. He used a free tentacle to grasp the television remote from its perch and set it to a rerun of Wonder Momo.
Once the little ones were distracted by the flashing lights and colors of the superheroine fighting the alien menace, we started the interview in earnest. As with Bald Bull, I already knew I wanted to hire him for the organization. This check-in was to make sure I had dotted my "i"s and crossed my "t"s. To guarantee I left no stone unturned in regards to judging Octoman's character before I let him get too close to the organization. Kenju wouldn't let me hear the end of it if I let a corporate spy into our doors with open arms.
I outlined the duties Octoman would be performing with NYAMCO Defense, explaining that his experience on and off the track made him applicable for the hiring process. I did most of the talking, but it was hard to ignore that Mewta's surname was on the stationery. Octoman was a bit twitchy during the conversation, partially for that reason, and because the zenny on the table would be life changing for his family if he accepted the job. I set the aluminum briefcase I'd been carrying on his dinner table to demonstrate how much I was willing to offer if he signed on.
Octoman let out a whistling gasp, or something along those lines, with his tube mouth.
"That's… This has to be a prank. It has to be."
"I assure you, Mr. Takora, it is not."
These suitcases were a pain in the ass to lug around. Especially when the pot was sweetened with Samurai Goroh's bounty. You never saw anyone complain about the weight of carrying a case full of money in the movies. It was hardly glamorous. Bald Bull got one too, and he didn't say a word as he tossed it in his trunk next to his wrestling mask.
"You don't need to decide now," Mewta started. I closed and began to re-lock the briefcase. "But we will need an answer by--"
"I'll do it!" Octoman exclaimed.
"Huh?"
"I'll take the job! Whatever you need me to do, I'll do it."
"Good show," I said, before sliding Octoman the briefcase. It wasn't in the script, but now he could hire a babysitter. "Can you start tomorrow?"
"Yes!" He wrapped his tentacles around both our arms. "Thank you so much for this opportunity! I won't let you down!"
I knew he wouldn't. Mewta and I departed. From the door, I overheard him excitedly telling the kids the good news. Mewta seemed a bit shell shocked from the cognitive dissonance of how she expected this to go versus whatever she had built up in her head.
Overall, it felt like we did a good deed. Octoman had the money he needed to support his family, and he was exceptionally motivated to perform well during his first slew of jobs as a private security guard. His tri-pronged racing machine, the Deep Claw, cut an impressive figure as the escort to our delivery trucks. Since it wasn't as though he was going to be competing in F-ZERO for a while anyway, I paid to have him mount an autocannon onto the Deep Claw. The kind that were a common sight in the Antigravity Racing League. Should Octoman tire of private security and F-ZERO's new Grand Prix has yet to take off, then I'd be happy to petition that NYAMCO sponsor him in the A.G.R.L.
Octoman was a solid employee and, by all appearances, a diligent parent. Now to make sure I didn't get him killed in action during our assignment to River City.
The first set of NYAMCO Defense hirelings have been revealed! Good showing for those who figured out where I was going with Bald Bull, though I imagine Octoman was a less expected inclusion. Since the Deep Claw is a good beginner vehicle in F-ZERO X, then why not have him be an early acquisition? These aren't the only characters I want to use with NYAMCO Defense, of course, but they are where I want to start with it. Keeping things simple with a group of combatants that can handle one crime-ridden urban zone where bringing down the heavy ordinance is frowned-upon.
Next up: Prepare to beat 'em up in River City! The Black Warriors, Sanwa Gang, and Ground Zeroes want to take over the zone for themselves, while Mr. Hudson just wants to keep the pachinko parlors standing. The Earth died, but disco lives on forever in the City!
I wonder if the Star Fox chracter here have bionic legs? I think it has been tretconned in the games but it was a cool fact that say how dedicated they were to their mission.
I wonder if the Star Fox chracter here have bionic legs? I think it has been tretconned in the games but it was a cool fact that say how dedicated they were to their mission.
I reckon they would. In addition to the practical aspects of being a pilot who swapped out their flesh legs for chrome ones, the uplift process for first and second-genners often necessitated cybernetics in addition to other operations for the process to stick. Most of the uplifts in the City are therefore also cyborgs, though the level of augmentation varies. The Nyamco family are on the low end, while the harnesses used for Octoman and his family are more significant because they need them to assist in their bodily functions outside of water.
It wouldn't have been a common practice for pilots during the Lylat Wars to get your legs removed for the slight edge over the competition, but if you were gonna be laying your life on the line for your cause, then why not your limbs?
So, this is something that has been niggling at me since the first mention of Robuttnik was made and the fact the famous Blue Blur is nowhere to be seen. Is the ARK, or at least something related to it canon in your story? Would love to see Shadow, even if he's an edgy jerkass, he's still one of my favorite characters.
So, this is something that has been niggling at me since the first mention of Robuttnik was made and the fact the famous Blue Blur is nowhere to be seen. Is the ARK, or at least something related to it canon in your story? Would love to see Shadow, even if he's an edgy jerkass, he's still one of my favorite characters.
I don't think I'd be able to include the ARK? SA2 on the border of the loose 2000s boundary line (2001), and I don't know if I'd be able to include the ARK as its own bespoke top secret space station orbiting the City. If I got past that, then I'd have a couple of other Sonic games ahead of it in line. Frankly, I've considered downplaying some of the Sonic parts of 8BD because I already am doing 200% Sonic stuff with Ruby Haze. We'll see what happens.
TLDR: If it doesn't appear here, I'll be getting to the ARK and Shadow in Ruby Haze.
Is Nintendo a thing in this verse? Nintendo is a canon thing in several franchises (e.g. Pokemon) with their products cameoing. However, they probably never got big since the global economy crash. They probably didn't even become a video game company and either stayed a toy company or disappeared in the invasion. I was thinking of Nintendo being absorbed by WarioWare Inc. but apparently that got published post 2000.
While Bowser is undeniably evil, he's also one of the more benign villains out there. Though, considering the timeline, Bowser might be hard evil. I have an inkling that Princess Peach has a role in making Bowser more benign in the main series. Also, I have a feeling that the Mushroom Kingdom may be tolerating Bowser's reign on the fact that he stands a deterrent to more malevolent forces.
If Bowser had a corporation up top, I'd think it would excel in the automotive industry. Time and time again, the Koopa Kingdom has demonstrated an expertise in mechanical engineering with their flying airships and trap-filled courses. Magic is probably involved, but their mechanical skill cannot be denied. Bowser probably sponsors Mario Kart.
I wonder if Digimon and its sister counterpart, Tamagotchi, exists in this verse. While they're often mapped alongside what are classically considered video games, they were not video games, but rather, toys. Also, what about Tetris?
Sorry if this comes off as rather long and annoying, but I'm feeling rather curious and excited with the world you're playing with.
Is Nintendo a thing in this verse? Nintendo is a canon thing in several franchises (e.g. Pokemon) with their products cameoing. However, they probably never got big since the global economy crash. They probably didn't even become a video game company and either stayed a toy company or disappeared in the invasion. I was thinking of Nintendo being absorbed by WarioWare Inc. but apparently that got published post 2000.
While Bowser is undeniably evil, he's also one of the more benign villains out there. Though, considering the timeline, Bowser might be hard evil. I have an inkling that Princess Peach has a role in making Bowser more benign in the main series. Also, I have a feeling that the Mushroom Kingdom may be tolerating Bowser's reign on the fact that he stands a deterrent to more malevolent forces.
If Bowser had a corporation up top, I'd think it would excel in the automotive industry. Time and time again, the Koopa Kingdom has demonstrated an expertise in mechanical engineering with their flying airships and trap-filled courses. Magic is probably involved, but their mechanical skill cannot be denied. Bowser probably sponsors Mario Kart.
Bowser does not publicly have any assets on the surface. Covertly, though, there are a handful of spies and mutant turncoats that inform him on when is the most ideal time to invade a zone with access to the Pipeworks that has fallen to urban decay.
I wonder if Digimon and its sister counterpart, Tamagotchi, exists in this verse. While they're often mapped alongside what are classically considered video games, they were not video games, but rather, toys.
Probably not? At least, I wasn't thinking of using them since they're tied up in larger franchsies. They're considered video games, so i guess they'd be applicable? The internet isn't in much of a state for Digimon to manifest.
This is such a setting with fertile ground for many stories. But in a way I doesnt feel hopeless like other cyber dystopia. It's more nuanced with its crazy mishmash of settings rather than the status quo being set in stone it feels like this is just another Era in the world's history and at any point it could change. The idea of the heroes either no being around or just getting started gives it an ambiguity rather than a guarantee that good or evil will win. I want more from this setting.
