Freelancer: In the Claws of an Idiot

Author: Richard the Pedantic
Published: From:11-02-04; To:10-23-05
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Greetings all, what follows is a hopefully humorous collection of nonsensical Freelancer short stories. Read if you please and tell me what you think.

Story the First: Orillion and Cooking.

With the Nomads banished to wherever the Hell they went after they were sucked through the Hyper gate, the Order found itself with very little to do. For all Orillion’s talk of ‘We’ll be ready for them next time’ and ‘The threat isn’t over’, it soon became apparent that the Nomads weren’t going to return any time soon.

All those that hadn’t joined the Order so as to defend their homeland from the alien menace had joined because they had been swept away by the romantic notions of honourable outlaws, fighting for humanity and so forth. They had all believed that they would be hailed as heroes at the end of the war, receive unnervingly high deposits in their bank accounts, fame, prestige and frequent fornication with star struck members of the opposite, (or same depending on their sexual orientation,) sex that possessed the I.Q of a severed finger.

The truth was that these people received pitiful cash rewards of three dozen credits from the evil order of greedy bastards that is Interspace Commerce. The Order persons were however awarded with complimentary baskets of turnip-flavoured muffins from Republican Confectionary Inc., courtesy of the new, sugar loathing Rheinland Chancellor.

As you may have guessed from the lack of any news stories relating to the Order following the conclusion of the storyline missions, prestige and fame was denied to them, and space of the colony news service was reserved for kidnapped Manhattan artists and overachieving BMM executives with pickaxes in their skull.

Sorry I’m drifting from the subject, suffice to say that when the Order found itself with nothing to do expect guard the pretty, swirling Hyper gate, desertion became commonplace. Those that remained within the Order tried to amuse themselves with a colourful pinball machine that Orillion had made for them. When this novelty wore off, they set up a debating team and discussed the pros and cons of Kusari’s foreign policies for a total of fourteen days.

Orillion, who couldn’t give a toss about Kusari’s foreign policies, decided to pass his free time in another way. He gathered to him a chef’s hat and costume from Tshushima depot, (What they were doing there in the first place you’ll have to decide for yourself), a fake moustache for visual effect, and assorted kitchen supplies from a guy called Jim who was his brother’s friend’s father’s employer’s son’s hairdresser’s local vicar who also worked in a failing shop on planet Denver named ‘There be shite within.’

Anyway, when all was prepared, Orillion tried his hand at preparing a simple yet tasty dish for the remaining crew of the Osiris, this was a welcome gesture of good will as the ‘Suspiciously brown’ flavoured Synth paste that the crew had been eating for a month was driving everyone to insanity.

It didn’t occur to Orillion however that he didn’t know the first thing about cooking. He didn’t even know what an oven was. Consequently he crammed too many slaps of beef into a kettle.

The resulting explosion led to a large hole in his right leg.

Despite being told he’d be confined to a wheelchair for a month, Orillion remained un-deterred. The crew were less optimistic about Orillion taking up the chef’s mantle this time and decided o abandon ship and wait in a nearby transport that had been delivered a supply of garlic. The stench of garlic lingered throughout the whole ship was overpowering. Three people fainted, ten more people were violently sick, and one person, a woman named Amy, who was unhealthily fond of pretending to be a vampire, shrieked and ran from here to there shouting that she needed to get off the ship or she’d die. In the end they threw her out of the airlock.

Orillion, who had now seen the logic in reading instruction manuals, had slightly better luck his time. Actually, that sentence may give you the idea that he got it right and created a fine, garlic filled dish of some description. He didn’t.

Despite the fact that he knew how to use an oven, he had no idea what to do with the garlic gloves. Hence he simply stuck them together in the shape of a top hat via the use of an unhelpfully sticky plastic explosive.

The resulting explosion did not kill Orillion, but a flaming piece of blunt metal struck him on the head and put him into a coma that he remained in for the next three chapters. Everyone else returned to the Osiris, put out the fires, erected several air fresheners around the place, and buggered off to Curacao, where they could eat lettuce. The moral crisis in the Order was over.

Thus endeth the first story.

Tune in next week for the next one.

Thanks to Jummeh and Hahukum Konn for reviewing on and to all TLR reviewers. Enjoy this next chapter or you shall be attacked and killed by a weasel.

Story the Second: Liberty Security Dementia (LSD).

The villainish, weasely Outcasts were facing financial hardship in recent times, The Liberty peace keeping forces had finally figured out that by not asking before they scanned passing ships, that they could sneak up on potential criminals and blow them away whilst they were blissfully ignorant of the fact that their contraband filled cargo hold was known to the police.

Originally, as you know from countless 'I'm scanning your cargo hold for contraband' messages, they gave this pointless piece of information to pilots, giving the smugglers more then enough time to run for the metaphorical hills.

The Outcasts, whose main source of income came from Cardamine distribution, decided that something had to be done to overcome this obstacle before this new method of policing spread to the other colonies.

Dr. Antonio Tourella, who had for ten years been trying to a suitable drug that would have the same effect as Cardamine but that he could still get high on so as to forget the depressing thing that was his life. (His wife had left him, his daughter had been cut to pieces by the local grass and one of his co-workers had an annoying habit of nailing his underwear to the ceiling of his house.)

Anyway, what he came up with, as you may have guessed from the chapter title, was LSD, or at least something very similar. He urinated in the mixture a few dozen times due to the face that Don Benitez had confiscated his toilet. Don't ask me what he did with it, I don't know.

Anyway, the Outcasts took this wondrous narcotic and got one of their best infiltrators, a woman called Elena, who had only seven fingers, to travel from place to place and spike the Liberty authorities coffee supply with lysergic acid diethylamide. (That should make LAD then shouldn't it? I know that would clash with Noam Chomsky's 'Language Acquisition Device' but... On second thought, never mind).

LSF headquarters was the first target, as the assorted LSF types trudged into their workplace; they all sat at their assorted desks and ingested their morning coffee. Seeing as Synth paste produced the caffeine filled beverage, coffee was now a solid and had to be consumed with a knife and fork.

It wasn't long before the effects started to show themselves, King, who's desk was actually located on the ceiling, (he didn't actually have a desk job, but President Jacobi had given it to him as suitable compensation for his part in the Nomad's destruction. In other words for acting as cannon fodder and getting in Trent's way as he tried to take the shield generators around the Nomad's city down.)

Sorry, I keep drifting from the subject; suffice to say, he started hallucinating, he soon came to believe that he was being chased by a huge, flying beer glass that was constantly shouting the words,

'You'll pay for stealing that sparrow's wallet! He needs a new kidney by the way. Damn it, what'd I have to mention food for, I haven't eaten in three days. Stupid dieting. Tell me something, what does angst mean?"

Again and again the words would repeat themselves as King charged from one end of the building to the other trying to evade the beverage holding hallucination.

Now you might be expecting me to write something about King falling from the roof to some ghastly death, possibly landing on someone's car and shattering the windscreen, possibly landing on a random person called Floyd, a humble ALG employee with no hands and a wife called Bertha.

Wrong, I have much more grand plans for King in this collection of stories, (actually that's a lie but I'm still not going to kill him.) King did fall from the building, but he landed on the hull of a low flying Rhino and was whisked away to some distant part of the planet. No one seemed to care.

Right, now we get to the mentions of Juni's hallucinations.

She soon found herself hallucinating that she was being shot at by several co-workers who were now, for some reason, all resembling Herr Von Claussen. Since you get Von Claussen look-alikes in every system I guess its not that surprising.

Anyway, firmly grasping a fully loaded needler rifle that was hidden underneath her desk, Juni unleashed hell in the room. Three janitors and two agent types were gunned down. The rest were already hiding under their desks due to the grotesque apparitions that they were seeing.

Another LSF commander, named Fredrick, Bertram, Laurence, Henry, Stewart Hill, (Fblhsh for short), eventually returned fire, believing Juni to be his brother who had slept with his wife on the day of their marriage.

He missed and destroyed two pot plants. He also ended up shooting a passing seagull, or at least the Manhattan equivalent, what it was doing inside is up to you to figure out.

Whilst the madness continued, the Outcasts met their assorted quotas, received an unnervingly high amount of money, their smuggling freighters were then destroyed by a Freelancer named 'Mandarin'.

Four stupid LPI pilots flew into the sun, believing it to be the sight of buried treasure, specifically the quasi-legendary golden radish of New Tokyo. The battleship Missouri, whose crew's coffee had also been spiked, flew into the zone-21 minefield; the crew believed that the mines would magically disperse, as they sometimes appear to do in the game. Needless to say there were no survivors. And a few other things happened, I would explain but I'm trying to keep all the chapters more or less the same length.

Final count, fourteen injured, two thousand and thirty seven dead.

Thus endeth this story.

Another comes soon.

Thanks to all reviewers and sorry for the half-year or whatever it was since my last update.

Story the Third: The Hispania, What really happened.

The hundred-year war was nearing an end, the Alliance’s forces were all but gone, their only remaining outposts were Europa and Pluto, the only thing they had left to hope in were the five colony ships, each of which were, (during the time this chapter is set in), nearing completion.

After a century of mayhem and destruction in which each side fought fiercely for control of the Disney world that had been constructed on the moon, (300 miles from any other colonized Luna areas curiously enough,) the Coalition bigwigs had finally realized that mass slaughter, although fun to watch, wasn’t going to win them Disney world and the extra revenue from tourism.

Consequently, they resorted to the use of radio messages to distract allied ships and soldiers during engagements. This tactic proved remarkably successful, after all, if you were fighting for your life on the frozen wastelands of the dark side of the moon, with fear and adrenaline fueling your body, had all sense of reason destroyed by the heat of combat, and all of a sudden all your targets hid and started screaming in unison through your helmet’s communication unit; ‘Whoosh! Boom, twang, pzziow, clink, clink, clinkety, clink, weasel!’ Wouldn’t you be confused?

The allied types certainly were, the resulting confusion allowed the Co-allition soldiers to shoot at the enemy and kill them with contemptuous ease.

The Alliance tried to use this tactic against the enemy, however they had little success seeing as all Coalition servicemen and women had been trained to resist odd phrases. At random times throughout each day, their ships intercom would burst out with something odd like ‘swing-batabatabata-suhwing-batter!’ and ‘Good God Sir, what happened to your shoulders?’ (That last one wasn’t that good was it?) This helped to protect the Coalition types against gibberish. Alas it worked to well, and the Coalition types became immune to all spoken language. Consequently, the coalition military had to learn to communicate through a series of clicks and hoots.

Anyway, I’m drifting from the title heading. The allied types, as you know from the opening sequence, hastily created five sleeper ships, (I’m working from the final opening sequence, I never actually saw the other one, I don’t have broadband, (starts wailing uncontrollably)).

Um yes well, sniff anyway, where was I? Yes, the five sleeper ships were constructed and named after places or things with cool sounding names from their patron nations. These ships were all filled with people and assorted beasties that could be used as livestock or domestic pets. All of which were placed into suspended animation and shot into space in the direction of the Sirius sector.

All was not well on board the Hispania however, Chief Zachary Blatherspoon, charged with overseeing construction of the Hispania had been suffering from depression and piles in the final days of the war. Consequently he had taken to binge drinking. On one fateful day he uttered to a junior technician,

‘Don’t worry kid, I’ll fasten up the tertiary fusion reactor, you get home.’

Truth be told in his drunken state what he actually said was far less polite, and coherent, it was more like,

‘Ah get out ya klutz, can’t you do anything belch what? Go on, scoot.’

With that the frightened technician charged out of the door as Blatherspoon hurled tools at him with surprising precision. He then turned to the reactor, which he then crawled into and slept until the ghastly fumes suffocated him.

Little did he know that his poor choice of where to sleep would have a ghastly effect on the stability of the Sirius sector, and would lead to a particularly nasty war of attrition. Not to mention mass drug abuse.

45 years into the voyage, the tertiary reactor was brought online by the onboard computer when the primary and secondary ones were shut down temporarily for maintenance. The superheated fuel combined with the conveniently placed stick of dynamite that was resting in Blatherspoon’s pocket resulted in widespread fiery nastiness.

After the surviving crew had been revived and had sufficiently recovered from their deep sleep, the fire had consumed half the ship. They lost thirty people trying to put it out, and in reality it was the computer that did most of the work, all the crew thought to do was shriek and throw their helmets at the fire. Some also chose to shout ‘Back!’ menacingly.

It didn’t work.

Anyway, when the fire was put out, some of the crew went to the reactor and found chide Blatherspoon’s charred skeleton. Somehow, the shrapnel that had embedded itself in the wall had been wedged there in such a way that made it look like the following sentence, ‘He’s a liberty saboteur, they want you to fail.’

And the rest you already know.

I’ll try and get a new story up much sooner next time.

I am sorry for my nine month absence. Its been very hard to think of anything and feel particularly inspired, and eventually the fic kind of drifted into the mists.

But no more.

Thanks to everyone whose read this. I will try and come up with ideas and chapters more quickly in the future, although I think I said that last time.

In any case, sorry again for the wait and I hope you enjoy this chapter. Also i should be updating War quite soon.

Story the Fourth: The Lord, The Lackey, and a Daffodil or Two.

As you may remember from chapter two, King was carried off by a passing Rhino after his fall from the LSF building. As it turns out, this started him down a road that would take him far from his homeland and the life that he knew.

About the same time, Lord Hakkera had returned to Honshu, where all was not well. As it transpired, a gang of fifty odd genetically engineered mountain weasels had descended upon the capitol city and ransacked the planet’s only bank. Lord Edo refused to reimburse the planet, stating that he needed all available credits to fund the construction of Sirius’ largest rubix cube. This would be placed in orbit of New Tokyo in an attempt to both counter the threat of meteor impacts, (and foolish Freelancers who kept buggering into the atmosphere), and also increase tourism.

The cube was later destroyed by the Hogosha who feared the contamination of foreign devils; also, they detested rubix cubes. There is not one Hogosha alive who can solve one. Before this incident, Hogosha operatives had been known to carry out armed raids on toy shops in which all rubix cubes were seized and shot. It is rumoured that they tried to pass some off as Dom Kovash artifacts, but that’s another story.

Anyhoo, in an attempt to repair his planet’s economy, Lord Hakkera constructed a quaint florists shop in the capital city. He encouraged others to create similar shops around the planet. No one was overly confident that this would accomplish anything, but they had little else to do so they did their lords bidding.

Two days after his shop opened, King fell through the roof after the Rhino’s pilot, (who had been delivering a shipment of Colman’s mustard promotional hats to the planet), discovered the hitchhiker on his roof and did a barrel role.

King, who was somehow none the worse for ware after his short trip through the vacuum or his long fall through the roof, picked himself off of the floor and inquired as to where he was.

Lord Hakkera was not pleased with this new development, his shop had not had many customers and he was certain that the few people who had come in were snickering at his bright pink apron which he had been told by his tailor was ‘a required garment for florists’.

However, Hakkera realized that he could make use of the Libertonian half wit, and promising him a free ride home on board a luxury liner in exchange for thirty four years of service, he put King to work, watering the cacti and feeding live voles to the Kyushu fang vines.

King did these tasks gladly, encouraged by the promise of three servings of lettuce, (a rare commodity), on board the luxury liner which would take him home to his trial and execution, long after he’d have been declared a deserter from the service.

A few weeks in, a customer entered the shop and requested a dozen suitably pretty flowers to give to his wife for their anniversary. Lord Hakkera was at this time attending a conference about mountain weasel traps. (They didn’t want to be caught out again once they’d sorted the economy out).

As a result, King was left in charge of the shop. Whilst the customer was gawking at the King shaped hole in the roof, he went to the back and examined the assorted plants.

The prettiest looking ones he could find were Kurile swamp weeds, which despite the unpleasant sounding name looked quite nice. King removed a dozen of these from the aquarium in which they were kept, let them rinse for a few moments, and then wrapped them and handed them to the customer.

The thing with swamp weeds however, is that if you don’t keep them in water they shrivel up and release a poisonous gas into the air that can cause eyes to shrink.

And shrink they did. No sooner had the customer, who shall forever remain nameless, grasped the flowers then his eyes seemed to vanish. In a moment of panic he flailed about the shop, causing havoc and mayhem and inadvertently stepped on one of the three Ripper mines that were clustered in the far corner of the room near the door. (Hakkera had bought these cheap on eBay and planned to drop them on the heads of any who sought refunds.)

Long story short, BANG! SMASH! WHOOSH! ARGH! shriek Clink, clink, clinkety clnk, sudden halt to all sound effects in the aftermath.

On second thought let me try that again.

Long story short, a violent explosion reduced ‘Hakkera’s floral distribution hut’ and sent King flying once more, this time onto the roof of a passing Drone. And thus he sailed off to his next adventure.

Hakkera, upon his return, was a little upset about his shop being reduced to ashes. Since King was nowhere to be found in the wreckage, he instead ordered a swarm of his loyal servants to take flight and hunt King down. The tale of their hunt shall be told in another um, tale.

Thus endeth this story.