Nate walked home, his mood so sour it would make Lemonade look sweet.
His one hope of getting out of his quickly increasing debt had just gone out the window. Everything he had done after the attack had either bit him in the ass or. No, all of it had bitten him in the ass.
He really should have thought better about accepting the Doctors 'advice'. Crime had gotten him farther into debt than that medical procedure had.
Nate sighed as he entered his apartment and shut his door.
He had worked at Bos's for a few more hours after their meeting and then left when it hit the afternoon.
It was dark in his apartment, so he turned on the lights with a flick of the power system in the kitchen.
Nate looked outside.
His window providing him a perfect view of the city when night hit. It didn't change at all.
Hundreds of men and women entered and exited the trains leading into the city even in the night. The locomotives moving out, disappearing into the darkness as they pumped out blue and green smoke.
The gears in each cart moving in exact precise movements as they carried the train away from the city.
Nate looked at the market.
While the day-light market happened around the middle of the city, the night market was far more diverse in their locations.
Shops were set up everywhere from sandwich shops to shatter. From anywhere to in front of government buildings to brothels. If there was space and you gave the owner a small fee. You could set up shop just about anywhere.
Nate could even spot areas of the city that drowned themselves in alcohol and beer.
The notorious Rum Alley and Beer Square were easily noticeable, if not for the massive amount of people entering the area. Then for the people who exited blackout drunk.
And where there was alcohol, there were gang members.
He hadn't noticed it until he first got a glimpse of crime. But it was basically everywhere, even in areas where it really shouldn't have been.
Alcohol was one such place. Early on during the war, every colonial territory European powers had instituted Probation laws to help manage the supply crisis that was the Great War.
Even if you could create hundreds of tons of wheat in days, all of those supplies were just barely enough considering how many times said supplies got lost or were taken by the enemy or just rotted.
As such, the colonies had become increasingly crime-ridden. As numerous European crime groups set up illegal alcohol and gun trades across the African continent.
Nate started to see crime in a lot of areas.
His innocent world view had shattered his first night on the job and speaking of him being on the job.
He looked at the bag of materials that had been near the door when he opened it.
The Red Cross had delivered him numerous gun parts and other supplies to help him repay his debt, though Nate noticed the thinly veiled threat that they could end his life without him even realizing it.
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Nate walked up to the bag and opened it.
He quickly got an armful of gun parts and went to his workshop. Quickly setting himself up, he began to work.
While this was the hard way, and it would probably take him years to repay his debt, it was something he had to do in order to make some ground before he figured out a way to repay his debt quickly.
His hands quickly got to work making some guns.
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Nate wiped the sweat off his brow with a tired arm. He had been working from the afternoon all the way to ten o'clock making guns.
To save time he hadn't made any mods on any of his guns.
In short, Nate had made around seventy Spect '70s, which was a decent amount. Then he made about two dozen Coris Pistols. Before finally making an illegal firearm.
The Big Tex-50 four was an American shotgun created and tested in Texas, it was also known for its rather bulky frame. High caliber ammo, and sharp recoil.
In fact, the ammo needed for the gun was banned by the Roman government. they had lifted the ban a decade after the Great War had first broke out, in the hopes that the new guns would help turn the tide of the war.
It had for the first month or two. But the Allies did the exact same thing as the Romans and made once illegal ammunition and guns now legal.
Turning the already bloody and slow war even more bloody due to the insane firearms and ammunition made.
The Big Tex-50 used around point fifty-five-nine to point sixty-six-eight caliber rounds. Which could easily tear a man apart. Though it had some ammo designed only for it in the form of the Texan-13, which was dangerously close to violating the Treaty of Paris.
The shotgun was a double barrel, with two triggers at the bottom, one for each barrel. The handle was a redwood brown, giving it a nice old and familiar feel.
Nate didn't have any appropriate ammunition lying around, so the gun was only useful as a blunt force object for now.
Nate had also found his original guns at the very bottom of the bag of parts he was given. Which was nice, to say the least. He had upgraded his Spect 70 to have double the range for both it and his sight. Plus, he also got around one and a half dozen magazines of the German P-Ninety six eight one five.
The rounds had been the favor of Mantis who said he owed her in a note, it had come along with the ammunition and he had found it near his workshop.
It was also yet another reminder of him being unable to escape the Red Cross.
As he left his workstation and began fixing himself up a basic bacon sandwich. He heard a slight knock on his door.
Curious, Nate went to check it out, though not before acquiring his pistol.
"Who's there?" Nate asked. He chose not to look through the peephole on his door, thankfully his instincts saved him.
"Remember me, you fucking Vat."
Immediately an explosion ripped through Nate's door with a blast of buckshot. The barrage of bullets hitting him in the side with a powerful blast of force.
Nate was thrown across the room, smashing into his closed window with a 'thunk'.
His window cracked from the force, Nate groaned as he slumped down. Blood flowing from his side, he really wished these things would stop already.
Out of the cloud of splinter and tossed up furniture which had been shredded in the shotgun blast.
Stepped out the man that had started all of this bad business for Nate. Gleen looked like shit.
His clothes were all marred in mismatched colors and fabrics. His clothes looking like some unholy fusion of elegance and putrid to the eyes.
Gleen's eyes held an ounce of pure madness to them, his hands gripped tightly around his shotgun. A modified Spect-70 with the spread of a shotgun combined with the gun's original rapid-fire.
Gleen laughed and chuckled to himself as he aimed the gun straight at Nate's face.
"You ruined my life, now I'm gonna ruin yours!" Gleen said with a twisted voice.
The first thought that went through Nate's mind was how did one ruin the life of a man who you had blown his head off?
The Accords were an agreement between all of the founding nations at the time to responsibly use and perfect the Vats. The technology which had made Vat-Born, it was during the Great War that the Accords would be broken. The mass production of soldiers to feed into the meat grinder of the frontlines was a very hard violation, along with the industrialization of the Vats. It was this process that Historians point to for the underlying principle of expendability that Vat-Born would be given the following years. It was only when the true horror's of the Russian front were understood by the wider European and worldwide population. Along with the inhuman treatment Vat-Born received when the Pemberson Documents were discovered that the Accords would be reagreed to. Though it is suspected that many nations continued these experiment but on a much smaller scale.
- A History of the Accords