Freedman

[t0l]

A certain mister Ravis stared down into the endless void of a cup of plain, black coffee, tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Omicron Delta in his own little corner of the sector. The bar he was in, like most institutions on Freeport 11, was a bit seedier than he liked, complete with a sizable crowd consisting of local riff-raff ranging from sniffers to scruffy-looking Zoners that made the whole place smell like wet fur. To top it all off, it was a bit chilly throughout the entire station, as the environmental controls had been broken by another marauding Core battlegroup and nobody had bothered to fix it yet. Not that it bothered him, though. He had his firepower to keep him warm.

He wasn’t anticipating a confrontation today, as much as he wished someone would step up to the plate and try something. Dressed in his normal attire of a black hoodie, some khakis, and his trademark tactical black beanie, he didn’t look particularly interesting or like much of a threat to some Corsair’s overinflated ego, nor was Tal Ravis a household name or image enough to warrant anything more than a passing glance at the strange, pale Libertonian man.

Such was life after the GMG, after his squadron was disbanded and it’s members were thrown to the wind. With a skillset like his, it wasn’t hard to find work in backwater areas of Sirius, although scoring another long-term contract with a place to settle down in was going to take a while. It didn’t have to be a nice place, after all, he was content with living in a metal box on a gas miner in the middle of nowhere for the longest time, but just a place where he wasn’t shuffling around the sector every few days.

For a second, he’d even contemplated going home to Manhattan and settling down somewhere, as he’d amassed enough funds to live comfortably in an apartment not unlike the one he grew up in as a child, fit with three square meals a day until the inevitable end of his depleted uranium-shortened lifespan. Boredom would be his main enemy, however, and he gave it about a week before he’d suit back up and go back out into the fire, making it definitely not worth the time or investment required.

Was this what it was like to be free? Sirius was now his oyster, but he wanted little more than to sit in the ready room on Ogashawa for another 24 straight hours.

Maybe he’d call Kurosawa or Valdez up again and see what was up. Nah, on second thought, maybe not. He couldn’t stand either of them and wasn’t that desperate yet.

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