Chapter Sixty-Five – Your Average Roleplaying Group

Chapter Sixty-Five – Your Average Roleplaying Group

“The average samurai isn’t so different from the average person, I don’t think. But… you know how there’s perhaps one person in a thousand who’s spectacular? They’re a genius, peerless, insane in a way that leads to greatness? Within the ranks of the samurai, these geniuses make up something like a quarter of their number. Sure, the average is still average, just people tossed into tough situations and given great power. They’re above-average in all respects, but they’re not so special.”

— Excerpt from Deus Ex’s Sleepy Time Blog, 2056

***

“So, what are we looking at here?” I asked.

Gomorrah was leading me through the crowd of soldiers and support personnel around the temporary base. “That surprise attack this morning is delaying things a little. We need to move up some road-clearing machines from the city.”

“Road clearing?” I asked.

“Snow plows,” she explained. “To ram through all the corpses.”

I nodded along. “That makes sense, yeah. Surprised we don’t have anything fixed to the front of a tank or something.”

“I think that exists, but we don’t have it on hand. Snow plows though? There’s some coming up the road at full-speed, we’ll have them here within the hour then start moving out.” Gomorrah turned her head my way. “Which happens to leave us with just enough time to meet the new samurai.”

“Oh boy,” I muttered. “What are we talking about here? That was plural, so at least two?”

“Four,” Gomorrah said. “We know one of them already. Crackshot Cowboy.”

“Oh!” I said, cheering up a little. Crackshot was actually a pretty cool guy. He had helped on the wall when defending New Montreal a while ago. Had a huge–understandable–crush on Emoscythe. “His whole thing was being super accurate with that old gun of his, right?” I asked.

“I think that’s still his specialisation,” Gomorrah said. “Long-ranged single-target attacks. He’ll fit in nicely with the two of us if it comes to a fight.”

“And the other three?” I asked.

“I haven’t met them,” Gomorrah said. She sent a file my way, and I poked it open. It had some information on the people we were heading out to meet. Not much, but it was there.

“Princess and Knight, Hedgehog, and Tankette?” I asked as I read the names. “Gomorrah, that’s four, and with Crackshot… four plus one is five, right?”

“Yes, Catherine, four and one make five,” Gomorrah agreed. “Those lessons with Grasshopper are paying dividends. Knight isn’t a samurai,” she explained.

I frowned, but decided not to question it. We were heading out to meet them anyway.

The first I saw of the new samurai was a middle-aged woman that looked like she was very much in the wrong place.

She was kind of cute, in that pudgy motherly way. A woman maybe in her early forties or so, with brown hair cut into a bob and the kind of simple blouse-and-jeans outfit that was more suitable to sitting at home than out here on the edge of a battlefield.

If we weren’t here, with a whole ass army around, I might have dismissed her entirely. She had some aug that looked decent, and a few ports on the side of her neck. Her hands were all silver on the inside. Smart palms? She had a ring, too.

The tank she was sitting on kind of made any uncertainty about her samurai-ness disappear.

This had to be Tankette, because that’s what she was sitting on. The tank was minuscule, about three quarters the size of a luxury hovercar, with four tracks on each corner that looked like they could all turn independently. There was a turret in the centre of the tankette, with a stubby box of a barrel sticking out of it and pointing ahead. A panel was open on the side, and I caught a glimpse of the interior.

Tankette had to be a small woman, because anyone taller than five foot six wouldn’t be able to fit in that tiny cockpit. Still, the interior looked high tech. It reminded me a lot of my mech’s cockpit, with screens all over and a yoke for controls.

I nodded to Tankette, then glanced around, looking for the others.