Here We Go Again

[t0l]

"Ah, shit, my bad," muttered Tal, who didn't have the word sorry within a 5-mile radius of his crude vocabulary. Quietly, he retracted his arms back into his pockets, feeling a slight twinge in his biceps as if he'd been holding them up like an idiot for about a month. That one was new. He really needed to get back in shape, before something as rudimentary as picking up a gun would cause him to throw his shoulder out.

He let out a yawn as Komachi recovered, drowning out her complaints about how hard he'd hit her. There was something about this weather, maybe just something in the air, that soothed him, even though he had the short, Kusarian equivalent of nails scraping against a chalkboard standing behind and slightly to the left of him. Perhaps it was the fond memories gathered from watching the rain pitter-patter ever so lightly against the windows of his childhood apartment on Manhattan, or perhaps it was the experiences from his tenure in the Corps. Most of the time, he'd be forced to stare at the back of a tripod-mounted machine gun during some gimmicky training exercise on Los Angeles, sitting low in a foxhole, while rain fell around him and dripped off of the edges of his helmet. Thinking back, there was a certain nostalgic charm to it, even if it nearly bored him to death at the time, most likely related to the comradery of being stuck in the suck together. A little bit like his time on Nauru, but with less...strange people.

Who was he kidding, he was only incredibly smug and cozy because he just got away with pimp-handing Komachi right in the middle of her stupid face.

His ears perked up at the mention of Eliza again, and he figured he oughta slay this garbage before it got out of hand. Hell, who knew what a rumor like this would do to his sterling reputation as an intergalactic, swashbuckling loose cannon?

"What? Nah, I never met Eliza in person, I just stole some of her money and dipped like my dad did in '01. Figured by her voice that she was ugly, though, and it turned out later that I was right." He chuckled morbidly to himself before continuing. "I didn't think I'd ever hear about her or deal with her ever again, though."

He sighed and slowly looked up into the clouds, shifting his hands around all the crap in his pockets in order to find a comfortable idle position.

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