Point of Documentation: Marshall, Phoenix 11
Why couldn’t Marshall just stay where he was told? Why was something always messing with him or making his life that much worse? The questions flooded his head as he started to come back into consciousness. What had even happened to him?
Marshall had been standing there, taking in the words that Cadence had said to him like words of a sage… In a way. He knew she had her reasons; they all do. Marshall needed to get home to get back to his life, his family and friends. Cadence sounded as if her life was gone, in a sense, and that she was trying to sink into this new one. Marshall rubbed his chin as he thought of this. Well, as close to his chin as he could get in this damned suit.
After thinking for a few minutes, he had turned to go back into the shop when something behind him rushed him. Marshall tried turning to face the attacker, but got as far as pivoting half the distance before a sharp pain arced his neck. Marshall swung out with his left arm at the attacker, seeing only a man in a very rough and torn outfit looking at him.
“Sorry mister, the money’s worth more than your peace of mind.” came the dry words of the homeless man with the syringe in his hand. A… syringe?
Marshall grabbed at the shop’s wall as he slid down it. His eyes had gone to the people around at the stalls, and the fact that most of them just simply looked away from him. He remembered two people approaching him, not even sure if they were people through the blur, and dragging him off someplace. Anything past a few feet from the scene was a blur of motion and cut memory.
Now Marshall sat in a room with dirty-white walls and a smell of rotting wood. There existed a couple chairs before him that looked like they were pulled straight from a school as well as a wooden table against the far wall near the door. A vent was positioned above him with the sole light placed behind it. Odd placement, but Marshall guessed it was some kind of scare tactic to have the only light in the room ebb and surge with the passing of the large fan’s blades below it.
After a while, a woman entered the room followed by two men. One was a man of taller stature and a broken nose. He looked familiar, but Marshall couldn’t place him in his addled state. The other was a man who looked like a walking bean sprout with how skinny he was. Fair skin and pointed ears as well. Marshall guessed one was an orc, and the other an elf. He was never going to get used to actual fantasy races being real on Earth, and yet again he was assaulted with their presence in dim and dingy places.
The last of the trio, the first to enter into the room, was a woman who was so unremarkable that Marshall had a hard time placing defining features. She was neither tall nor short, neither dark nor light skin. Her face looked just the same as most would see a female template would be represented as and her hair was a plain brown with a bun pulled back. The most defining part of her was that her eyes were two separate colors: one pure white and one green. Neither of those were natural colors, so Marshall guessed even those were something added to this woman to make her more detailed.
All of them wore some kind of long coat and fine shirt underneath. If Marshall wasn’t sure this place was still in the Badlands, then he would have guessed he slipped into a shitty pre-war movie about gangsters and mafia bosses from the dress alone. The guns slung across the backs of the two behind didn’t help that case. They wore matching ones that seemed to be in some different states of disrepair or corrosion.
The gun had some kind of rounded magazine and shape that looked like an Enforcer-SMG but… wrong. An Enforcer-SMG was a bullpup gun that was the child of the Thompson and it’s children. It moved the magazine’s feed back to the rear of the gun and almost forced the user to tilt it slightly so the magazine didn’t collide with their arm. A terrible design that had been more or less shelved after The Fall and gave way to the modern SMG. It didn’t help that the Enforcer was a pseudo-civilian gun used by Police that barely saw any action, and so barely had any real usage in combat.
Yet as Marshall looked, he could see the wrongness of the weapon and how it had been changed to benefit a post-world scenario. The gun had its magazine feed tilted slightly, shifting the entire barrel and mechanism slightly to the left. The entire gun now looked like it had a crooked body and sight with a degraded trigger system. Neither of the two guns looks the same, as each had their own paints and additions to them that spoke to these being non-conforming armaments.
Marshall saw all this and took it in quickly. The lack of maintenance, the odd adjustments, the way they had them slung across their back with a band that was meant for a full rifle and not an SMG, and the fact that the guns seemed to have been salvaged. All of this spoke to Marshall that these people had no real supply of weapons and had to take from others and scavenge. They were raiders in some sense, but allowed inside of a town?
His thoughts were ripped from him as the woman took one of the chairs and spun it so the back was facing him. She sat in it and… Marshall noticed something else. All the sounds in the room were more muted than he expected. It also didn’t smell as bad in here as he thought it would. Upon waking, the general background noise was also not present.
“Good morning, Princess,” came her words from a sharp and inhuman mouth. It wasn’t really her teeth, but just the angle of how her mouth moved made it seem… sharp, in a way. “Sorry we had to remove your dress, it was very much in the way of our observations.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Her words once again made Marshall pause and attempt to gather something else. She had said ‘remove dress’. So did that mean…
Looking down made some things clear, and others so much more confusing. His suit was gone, but the apparatus on his mouth was still present. The clothes he wore under the suit were also still there. So sound and such should be louder… but the exact opposite was true. Was it panic setting in that dulled his senses, or was it the drug that the homeless man had hit him with?
“Ah ah!” The woman leaned forwards and tilted his head back up. “No getting lost in thought over a simple undressing. We have so, so much more to discuss. Like your name: Marshall Locke. What is a ‘Phoenix-11’?”
Marshall stiffened at this, but said nothing. Giving this woman an angle was the last thing that he wanted to do. He gritted his teeth and wished he could spit on her, but this damn mask was stopping him.
A moment of silence stretched for what could have been a few seconds or a minute before she spoke again, this time with a tone of exhaustion. “Mr. Locke, I’ll have you know that I am not known for my patience. I ask you a question, and you answer. We already know some things from looking over your body while you were out, but that just raised more questions…”
A look in her eyes caused Marshall to shiver. It was a look of glee, as if an idea passed across her, and it did not fit on a face such as her’s. “Oh! My apologies, I seem to have asked something without first introducing myself. I’m doctor Sinclair, which you may call me simply: Sinclair. Regardless of whether that’s my first or last name is irrelevant. You’re in my home, my lab, and I do hope you’ll be cooperative. Especially since we know you’re not one of the Templars your friend announced you were.”
The feeling of panic hit him again at the mention of Cadence. A deep pit settled in his stomach at the thought of those goons harming her. “What the hell did you do with her?” Came the clenched reply from Marshall. His jaw barely had enough give to move. Something felt… off about that.
“Oh goodness, nothing! We would not harm a friend of a business rival! Well, not without a reason of course. We are so good at finding reasons, so please do not make us come up with reasons. Cooperate. What is ‘Phoenix 11’?” Her mouth twisted into a grin as she said this. An obvious amount of glee in her voice.
Marshall was not trained for things like this. Torture? Threats? He wasn’t trained to resist things like this, he was trained in how to fly and how to listen to his betters. Hell, he knew more about repair on his own craft and crafts like his than surviving a situation like this. If only he had been one of the Shock Division members, the Cataphracts, then he’d have some kind of knowledge of how to handle this. Should he resist and hope that she’s bluffing? And what if she isn’t and Cadence would be in danger from him not speaking? There were too many variables, something that Marshall absolutely fucking hated.
The woman leaned towards him as he debated on his answer. The expression on her face slowly losing its malignant joy as she waited. Yet, as she was preparing to threaten him more, the man actually spoke. “Phoenix 11 is my callsign. Phoenix Squadron being my wing I was a part of. I was a fighter pilot that was on a mission to wipe out Voidlings. Something that should be beneficial for all humans, right? So we’re doing you all a favor, so we’re all on the same si–”
His words were cut off by the woman snickering to herself. Sinclair seemed to find amusement in what he said somehow. What…
“I knew he wasn’t a Templar from the moment I saw him, but they really do play into the mold don’t they?” She said this over her shoulder to the orc-like man that was looking more and more familiar as time went on. Wait, wasn’t that the one from the alley? Sinclair turned her head back to Marshall. “Those that live higher than us even have a higher sense of importance too. Thinking that, just because you save us from a couple nests, we should bask at your presence and be thankful? That the lessers should be thankful that a couple holes were plugged while we drown in the fucking mess down here?” Her words were gaining an edge as she spoke. A pure emotion in them. “I used to believe this shitty view you all share. I just didn’t expect you to immediately hinge off that view just to get some pity points.”
Marshall was… confused. He thought that they’d be ecstatic to know that he was part of the forces above and want to work with him like the others had. After all, the goals of the Castle are the goals of Humanity. Right?
The look of confusion on his face must have been seen, as Sinclair sneered at him. “Too stupid to see your own hubris, Outlander? Why do you think that’s used as a slur, and not a note of endearment?” She paused for just a half second, then continued. “I’m going to get the information out of you about where the rest of the people are from your ‘wing’. Dead or alive, the bodies will be useful for organs and pure samples of genomes for my research. But I want some ‘personal’ time with you first. Just me, you, and my tools. It wasn’t enough to give you a look over, I want to see what’s really different between us.”
She stood up at this, leaving Marshall in a state of pure fear. “Everyone out,” she said, gesturing to the two guards. “Let’s let him stew. And let the Mayor know the Outlander won’t endanger his city anymore.” They all three went to leave before the woman paused and turned. She stepped back over to Marshall and, with a swift motion, hammered a fist into his cheek. The force sent the mask off his head and made him see stars for a moment. “You won’t be needing that anymore. Our air isn’t too good for you.”
With that, they left and closed the door of his cell. A brand new fear welled up in Marshall as he realized what had just happened. The ambient corruption of the land past The Wall was now coming in unfiltered to him. The very thing that was now going to slowly kill him. He screamed, trying to get anyone to listen. Anyone to come and put the mask back on. He yelled for what felt like hours, the slit of the door only opening once to a man who spit into the room in disdain and closed it. No one came to help.
No one, that was, that he would call human.
“Well isn’t this a surprise.” came the calm and grating voice from behind him. Marshall glanced over his shoulder as best he could, but couldn’t see anything in the room with him. The voice, however, now sounded ahead of him. “Over here…” Marshall’s head turned and looked to nothing. “Or maybe over here?” The voice shifted, and so too did Marshall’s focus.
“No. Here.” Marshall’s ear burned as if fire was touching it, making him whip around in pain. There, at his side, was a blue-winged butterfly. One that thrummed with some kind of energy that made Marshall’s head hurt looking at it. “It looks like you need a little help… and I come with a deal that I advise you to consider. Do you know what an ‘Angel’ is?”