tabaqui | New Fic! Scaling Heaven...

New Fic! Scaling Heaven...

Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 06:43 pm

Wheeee!!

I've been both nervous and excited about posting this. Excited because i really like it, nervous 'cause it's a little bit different....

Different how, you say? Well, basically, it's scifi. And not a crossover! Heh. It's my own scifi, and Spike and Xander are the only 'familiar' characters in the story.

So...i hope you'll give it a try even if you hate the genre...and i hope that it goes over well!
*hugs fic to bosom*

And the poll! Wheeeeeee!! My fist ever poll, and it went so well! And i see some lurkers on there.
*waves at lurkers*

So, yay, backstory won! So there will be backstory, and then there will be the fic. I wonder if i should make them seperate entries... Hrmmmmmm... I think I will. That'd be best.

So, here is the character sketch, first, and then there will be part one! Wheeee!!
*bounce*

Yes, I'm excited. :)
I'm also slooooowly changing my website to a different background color. Under the Mountain is now on my site in the new colors, so if you wanna pop over and see and tell me yes or no, that'd be cool.
:) *smoooch*

My name's Thomas Aquinas Ferro. Yeah, I know. Blame my mother for the name. Ultra-Pope-lovin' crazy-assed bitch. I was almost David Goliath Ferro - her favorite story - but my dad talked her out of it. Thank god. Right before he ran off. At least I grew up with a mother and a father on my birth certificate - more than a lot of the kids in my neighborhood had. And he sent stuff - money and stuff - at least four times a year. So that was something.

Blame him for the Marines. He sent me the little brochure when I was seventeen and graduating. School was less boring than that gods-awful apartment we squatted in, and the cops were pretty hard-core in those days about truancy. I didn't really wanna spend a lot of time in Juvie, so... At least I got breakfast and lunch at school, which was unlikely to happen at home.

Anyway, my dad sent the Marine brochure, and wasn't it fancy and glossy and just so damn tempting. So, I graduated and signed up and I was gone. Boot camp and then four years here, there and everywhere. Africa, Iran, the Balkans, fucking China and all those little islands above Australia. All kinds of dirty little wars that just never seemed to end and we sure as hell did put our noses into 'em, as often as we could. Won me a couple of medals, too. Usual shit. I got 'em around here somewhere.

The year I joined - July 3rd, my actual birthday - was the year the Outsiders came. 2027. Everything got crazy for a while. Actual living, breathing, talking aliens; with space ships and drugs that could cure cancer and ways to make energy out of almost nothing... That really fucked up the world view of a lot of people. Made the fundamentalists go crazy. Their particular rant couldn't grok non-human life and there were lots of calls for vengeance from the Lord and jihads and what-all. Really rocked the 'one god, one species' boat, and hard. Made worse by the revelation that the Outsiders don't believe in any god at all - no god, no goddess, no ancestors - nothing. They're strictly in the now, and that made for some tense times, you better believe it.

But hell - they fixed our overpopulation problem by showing us how to colonize Mars and how to build stations and they built the Gate; got us a ticket straight into their space and their economy, which is now and always has been a war-powered machine that always needs just a little more. So getting rich was easy, all of a sudden, and all they wanted were our hands and backs and minds, 'cause they were too busy killin' each other to bother with manual labor. Oh, and Sol was the next point in a giant game of leap-frog and that particular jyiiy that had found us was looking to score big by having us on its side. A jyiiy is the equivalent of 'family' or 'clan' to the Outsiders. They don't actually have much in the way of either of those - it's more like a complex set of partners and CEO's and vice-presidents and shit. Mother and son, father and daughter, wife and husband are all arbitrary terms - you exist for your jyiiy and it ceases to exist if you lose, and that's that. Cutthroat doesn't begin to describe it.

And the Outsiders - well, that's what they really were. Home world was five thousand years of backstabbing and back-room deals and massacres and genocides and I guess it's only their super-fast birthrate that's kept them from wiping themselves out. Older jyiiy were squeezing the younger ones out - keeping them from the territory and money and power they wanted but could never actually have by the way their rules worked. So about twenty of the youngest jyiiy decided that space was the next best step. Fuck a mountain or a city - they were gonna claim a planet. A whole galaxy. That got 'em ostracized and cast out of their whole society. They really are Outsiders and they can't ever go back.

But they made a new life and a new battleground out here in space and when my hitch was up I decided to throw my luck in with them. They were hiring - ex-Marine, ex-Army, ex-anything - to fight and figure and organize all the stuff they didn't want to or traditionally couldn't take care of. It sounded like a good gig to me - three times the pay and access to all that tech of theirs.

What I didn't know and they didn't tell me was that a four-year hitch with them only counted the down-time - the real time - and skip time was all so much static. So it turned out I was stuck for more like ten years than four and that really pissed me off. Plus... The Outsiders have got some damn nasty rituals they do when they win - or lose - and I got pretty sick of seeing kids killed and women and men raped and old people burned alive. And all of it silent and...submissive. Made me sick to my stomach.

So I started drinkin' and then I started usin' - whatever came to hand. So it was about...2035 or thereabouts - sometimes I forget - and I got into some trouble; got into some debt. Well, the head of the jyiiy I was pledged to - bitch called I'kja - she fixed my debt. Any debt an employee gets into and can't pay falls on the head of the jyiiy. And she wasn't a big fan of me to begin with, what with me bein' drunk and generally disorderly most of the time - so she sold me off. I got drunk, stumbled home, fell down, woke up two days later aboard the Tur-gah, which was a war-ship, something like a scout. Little ship that spied and nosed around and generally acted like a rat in the corn-crib. Not an Outsider ship but one of their hires, one of the other set of aliens. Chaddock. Outsiders and Chaddock both, they don't have a problem with slavery and so there I was, a slave. And Chaddock are mean motherfuckers and that was...a bad time.

Then - the computer tells me 2040 but I was pretty lost at that point - somebody called a bounty on the Captain and we were free. This vamp - Spike. He came bustin' into the quarters, blood all down his side and this grin on his face like a fuckin' mad dog. Asked me did I wanna live or go down fighting and I told him if that was the Captain's blood I wanted to live. He tossed me a gun and told me come the fuck on and that was that. Me and the pilot, we decided to throw our lot in with Spike, 'cause he'd collected the bounty along with the ship and it was his, now. He got us fixed up, got the Chaddock toad-stink out of the ship and re-christened her the Drusilla. And we never looked back.

Spike - he's a mean fuck, and he's got a mouth that never shuts up and an ego like you wouldn't believe. But he remembers - all kinds of shit, and he never once treated us like anything less than real live people. I'd kill for him - fuck, I have killed for him. I guess I'd die for him too, though. Me and him, we got up to some crazy stuff, on and off. But he's with somebody now - somebody from the old days, I guess. Xander. I guess I'd kill for him, too. Bein' what I was - poor kid with no parents to speak of, and a Marine - family is the one thing you crave. I've got that now - got my partner in slavery Nia, who pilots us safe and sound, got a Captain that might love us and a fix-it geek who says he does...and nothin' in the universe'd make me give it up.

Continued in Part One.

Tags: