Change of plans. I do need a gun.

[MurderWeasel]

Zandah sat on the edge of the empty pool, legs dangling over, heels bouncing now and then on the tiled side. He looked at the dim world with its colors desaturated in part by the passage of decades and in larger part by the tint of his sunglasses, and he made his shoulders loosen and lower. He was doing a really good job not hyperventilating, he thought, given the circumstances.

There were a lot of big reasons to panic. They were all as good as dead. Any doubt of that had been annihilated by the stubby shotgun he'd found in his bag. It seemed real. It was heavy, solid, and had a lot of shells. If the gun was real, then he could easily hurt himself or others, and that was a tremendous liability for any ethical organization, which suggested their hosts were anything but, which in turn implied either that everything else was real, including the Nexu from Attack Of The Clones, or that enough of it was real that they'd just get gunned down in some more mundane fashion instead. Right now, Zandah was willing to believe in the Nexu. At least it seemed reasonably quick and unlike a cat in its temperament.

Zandah's heels bounced again. He would've never sat this close to a swimming pool if it was full. Couldn't stand swimming pools. Didn't even like to think about them, but one this decrepit was actually sort of neat. Some of the tiles were cracked, and the floor was blurred beneath a layer of dust and debris, lane dividers tangled like seaweed on the beach. The only wetness came from a few fallen tears.

None of them were leaving. It was obvious. The people running this had tried to hide it, but they'd tipped their hands with that detail about the convicts. They needed to dangle enough promise to make everyone here fight each other, but all that would be waiting for them at the end would be an impersonal liquidation. It was the efficient answer. Keeping someone quiet forever would be difficult and expensive. Killing thirty-five people, meanwhile, was not a huge step up from killing thirty-four. They must have promised the criminals the same prize, and look what they'd gotten. Well, Zandah wasn't biting. If he was going to die, it wasn't going to be by futilely throwing his morals away just to get clowned by people who had already proven willing to lie in order to bait him to his demise. Until proven otherwise, he was assuming that every word they said was spoken only with the intent of causing harm.

But that was not why Zandah was on the edge of breaking down and rolling around screaming until he passed out. It was all very big, and big things could be crushing but in a less direct and immediate way. No, the real problem was something intensely personal.

They'd done something to his neck. There was a sore spot, and there was a little bump under the skin, and Zandah didn't know or care what it was but he wanted it gone. He hated needles. He feared them. He wasn't an anti-vaxxer, but he also skipped every single shot that wasn't super important, just because the process was so unpleasant. He'd had to hype himself up for every vaccine and booster he'd gotten during the pandemic, and that had been very quick jabs, then done. Piercing needles and tattoo guns were a whole other level, a phobia of sorts that made him shiver if he looked too hard at anyone who was inked and imagined the process. Those things terrified him, and now someone had done... something adjacent, and there was something under his skin and he'd noticed it and couldn't un-notice it, so all he could do was try not to wig out.

He forced himself to focus on other things, but it never more than half-worked. He hadn't checked the Pip Boy. He hadn't tried to figure out if the gun was loaded. It lay in his lap, and he thought it was strange to be holding an actual gun—the closest he'd ever come was a paintball gun that one time, and he hadn't been a natural at that, no way—but he didn't really have any plans for what to do with it. It just seemed like the sort of thing it'd be irresponsible to leave around, and maybe he'd pop a shot at the Nexu if it showed up and he let himself be momentarily deluded into thinking resisting was a better choice than getting it over with and embracing sweet oblivion.

[Shiola]

There was supposed to be an old swimming pool here. A long, open space with a pit that could collect shrapnel was exactly what he needed. Evan had tried a couple of doors before this last one, and each had led him to another room. Many of those rooms naturally had busts of Lenin in them.

By the time he’d found the pool, he had three busts of Lenin in his arms, a his backpack strapped to his back, a guitar strapped to that, and a rifle slung around one shoulder. His face barely peeked out from behind the stony visages he clutched to his chest.

His eyes scanned the room. He recognized Zandah from a tutorial he’d ran earlier in the year. During the group discussions he was mostly quiet, but they’d chatted on either side of the class and Evan enjoyed their conversations, which oscillated between serious conversations about social and political topics to some fun discussions of their overlapping interests.

Overall, cool dude. Little shy. Kinda grim outlook on things. Looked like he was about to crawl out of his own skin there by the pool. Evan knew what to do.

“Hey, Zandah! You’re alive!”

((Evan Keane continued from Никогда не умереть!))

Evan stumbled across to the edge of the pool where Zandah was sitting, and haphazardly set the Lenins down on the ground. He took a moment to stretch his arms, and then took a bit longer to occupy the awkward pause before he asked a stupid but necessary question. He noted the far-gone look in Zandah's eyes - he could only assume it wasn't so different than the feeling he'd been fighting off since he woke up.

“It’s nice to see you’re still with us. You okay? They didn't get you too bad with the sedatives, did they? My head's been ringing since I woke up.”

[MurderWeasel]

Zandah didn't make any sort of big reaction to Evan's arrival, no gasp or jerk to attention or accidental face plant into the pool, but inside he was grateful for the distraction. There was only so much you could do to change the course of your own thoughts, while external stimulation took that pressure away. There was some guilt to this, because Evan was a cool enough guy that Zandah didn't like seeing him here and didn't like being relieved to see him here, but the relief was stronger. It just wasn't strong enough to get him to his feet.

"I'm..." Zandah started, and then just sort of stopped for a second. His heels bounced on the wall. He looked down at the dust and debris. A moment passed, and slowly he stirred and lifted his head, though his eyes didn't focus. Blame the shades. He lifted them up and blinked, and the world seemed impossibly bright and impossibly blurry, so he let them drop back down.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Alive, I guess."

Thump thump, bounce bounce. His hands had left his neck pretty quickly, at least. Horrible fixations melted beneath the social pressure to pass as vaguely normal, even in the furthest possible situation from.

"For now," Zandah added, under his breath.

But finally he looked at Evan more properly, and that brought still more welcome distractions.

Evan had his guitar strapped to his back, and also a rifle. The gun was sort of reassuring, in that Zandah didn't think Evan would shoot him and didn't have any way to deal with it if that did happen, and this meant there would be no need for difficult decisions or conversations regarding Zandah's own gun. He wasn't especially attached to it, but all the same he wasn't quite sure that handing it to anyone would be a good or ethical idea. But someone else could probably make better use of it. But it didn't matter right now, so he didn't have to puzzle it out. They both had guns, and neither seemed in any hurry to use them.

More interesting was Evan's other cargo. Zandah had been around the internet enough to identify Lenin (oh, and also, of course, had seen that face in those History classes that were ostensibly forming the core of the education that would guide his future). Evan had to have something in mind, but Zandah couldn't begin to guess what. It pretty much had to be better than sitting here stewing while waiting for the Nexu, though, no matter what it was.

"What... what sort of party are you having with the Chairman?"

[Shiola]

Evan picked up what Zandah said under his breath, but didn’t remark on it.

For now.

Uncomfortable thing to think about. Evan didn’t like their chances, but he wasn’t especially inclined to be fatalistic about it.

Instead, he broke into a smile when Zandah asked about the Lenins. Withholding an immediate answer, he promptly set down his backpack and unslung the rifle from his shoulder, before sitting down next to him by the edge of the now-empty pool.

“Haha, not that kind of Party! So here’s the thing-”

Evan set the gun down on his lap in front of them, muzzle pointing away from his compatriot.

“Soon as I woke up I went through all of the supplies they gave us. It’s the real deal - not enough, but it’s not nothing. Turns out for a weapon, they gave me this hunting rifle. It’s not fucking around. Like, I dunno how to describe it -”

Struggling to explain properly, Evan pulled one of the massive cartridges from the bandolier across his waist, showing it off in the air.

“- look at these fuckin’ rounds! It’s basically an elephant gun.”

He slipped the round back into its place, before enthusiastically continuing. Evan hoped in the back of his mind that his bright, straight-to-business approach might allay some of the obvious fear in Zandah’s eyes. He wondered if his own anxiety was as obvious.

“So cool. Got a big gun, right? I dunno about you, but I’m not going down without a fight. Thing is, I’ve never used anything like this before. If I gotta shoot the Chimera or some Janus-Hayes goons, I should probably have some practice.””

Evan set the rifle down next to him, turning and grabbing one of the Lenins. He turned the stone over in his hands, before holding it out in front of Zandah.

“That’s where Comrade Lenin comes in. I saw these, and it seemed like as good a target as any. State Communism was no fun, for one thing. For another, he kinda looks like that Sycamore dude? At least, close enough. I figured it’d be a little cathartic.”

Evan motioned to the gun in Zandah’s lap, partially obscured by his hands.

“So what’s that piece you’ve got there?”

[MurderWeasel]

Zandah did look at the big fuckin' rounds. He didn't know much of anything about guns, and even to him the bullets looked excessive. How much did bullet size have to do with destructive power? Zandah's assumption had always been that getting shot was enough of a bad thing no matter the caliber to not need to think any more about it. He understood loosely that there were different types of ammunition, but thought about those in game terms. Armor piercing rounds pierced armor, but his understanding of what made a round good for that was nonexistent. Tracers were for... accuracy? And they left little trails of light? That was about the level he was working with.

This led neatly into Evan's question. Zandah held up the gun with both hands, fingers far from the trigger, weapon parallel to the ground.

"I have no idea what this is," he said.

He figured it was probably a shotgun? It looked like a shotgun, or else like some kind of pirate weapon. As a kid, Zandah had had this toy flintlock pirate pistol that was designed to fire caps. His mom hadn't been too keen on him playing with caps, but the hammer still made a satisfying click sound when he pulled the trigger. This gun looked sort of like a giant version of that toy, which made Zandah feel a lot more comfortable with it than he would with some CoD-blackened-ceramic-tactical-flashlight-laser-sight-M-16 monstrosity.

"It's not loaded," Zandah continued, lowering it back into his lap, and then corrected himself: "I mean, I didn't load it. So maybe it is and maybe it isn't."

He was actually generally anti-gun, but from a very theoretical standpoint. Guns simply did not factor into his life, ever, in any way, until now. There were guns in video games, which were fun; and he'd had toy guys, though not many, because his mom didn't really like them; and cops had guns, which made him more than a little uncomfortable but that was cops in general. They were slightly more real than magic wands. Until now.

"I guess I could read about it and help you shoot Lenin," he said, mentally preparing and then rejecting as inappropriate a joke about Catcher In The Rye. Not like it mattered anyways, of course; it wasn't as if Evan would be revealing to the world some deep political incorrectness on Zandah's part that he'd have to live with the consequences of.

Zandah did look at the Pip Boy more carefully now. He didn't really entirely trust it, but it was leagues better than the neck lump he was had mostly managed to use Evan's presence to distract himself from until right this moment. Thump thump, went his heels. He made himself focus again. Through the sunglasses, the screen was a little dim, but it wouldn't be a problem to read up on his gear, presumably.

"Um," he added, "but, won't we have to worry about ricochets?"

That was one thing he knew from fiction. Though, upon reflection, Zandah couldn't actually remember a single time a ricochet had mattered in a story.

[Shiola]

So Zandah clearly hadn’t so much as held a gun before, from the way he was holding it. People who’d never handled them before tended to treat even an unloaded gun as if it would explode at any moment.

Which, given what guns were, wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

It had been a new interest for Evan, and he’d been hoping to spread that knowledge to help marginalized folks who didn’t have as much access to instruction as he did. It was by no means complete, and he wasn’t as trained as he’d like to be, but it was enough to give some pointers.

Pointers.

For killing monsters?

There was a fraction of a second where Evan didn’t respond right away.

His attention drifted to the wooden rafters above them, before he looked back down at the pool itself.

“Nah. Not if we set up Lenin down in the pool. If we hit the concrete dead on, it shouldn’t be a - oh hey, you got a Garbage Rod!”

As Zandah pointed it out, Evan recognized the weapon almost immediately. It was most of the important parts of a Mosin-Nagant, one of the very first rifles he had ever shot many years ago in rural British Columbia. They were dirt cheap, and they were the first rifle many gun owners purchased for that reason. They made serviceable hunting rifles, though he suspected fruit and discarded cans were more common targets for those who owned them.

“Oh, sorry eh. I’ve been reading a lot about guns lately. That’s a sawed-off Mosin-Nagant. It’s called a garbage rod because like, it’s not a great rifle, but they’re real fuckin’ cheap!”

He pointed out the muzzle of the rifle, which had been cut down quite professionally. Nevertheless, there were no front sights. Good grief. He tried to point out the positives.

Positives. Here. Another half-second. At least Peter Harrison had died horribly.

Self-hatred welled up at the inappropriate, unkind intrusive thought. It was easy enough not to give such a thing oxygen, and he continued rattling off facts about the weapon.

“Sawing off a rifle like that was popular with revolutionaries, actually.” Evan rapped on the forehead of the Lenin bust. “Makes it lighter, and easier to hide.”

There wasn’t much point in waiting. Time was a luxury in a situation like this. Slipping his way down from the edge of the pool, Evan dropped a short distance to the tile floor below. It was well-preserved, which wasn’t surprising given how cold the island usually was. He set down one of the busts on the floor beside him, before turning back to look up at Zandah.

“It’s got a lot of punch. There should be a manual in the knockoff Pip-Boy. Mine had one, at least.

"Hey, pass me a Chairman, would ya?”

[MurderWeasel]

"Yeah," Zandah said, "sure thing."

The truth was, Evan's start and stop explanation, punctuated with stretching moments of staring into space, would have been cause for concern when paired with heavy firepower in most other circumstances. Here, though, Zandah was just grateful that Evan seemed to know something about weaponry. Leave it to a grad student to be prepared, and to still somehow point them in the right direction.

There was just a brief little flash of paranoia there: Evan was a grad student, and thus closer to the powers that be. Could he be in on this? Except just as quickly as that thought arrived, it was chased away by the memories of the film clip, of the Nexu doing its thing. If that had been what the professors got, no way would some grad student be part of the conspiracy. And if he was, no way would he be messing around teaching Zandah about guns.

At least "garbage rod" had some real charm to it as a name. Zandah didn't know what a Mosin-Nagant was, but "sawed off" implied he was right about the shotgun thing, so there was that. Being a revolutionary sounded kind of nice, in much the same way as being a wizard. Something to think about.

Zandah got up, and took two steps towards the bust, then his eyebrows bunched as the prickliness of limbs that had fallen asleep caught up with him. He stopped for a moment and closed his eyes and just concentrated on the flow of air in and out of his lungs, letting the gun hang loosely at his side. He wasn't going to force this and wipe out and have it go off and kill someone. He would be safe.

When the tingling had subsided to a level of discomfort that would not impede mobility, he took another few steps, slow and careful, then scooped up one of the Lenin busts. It was sort of unwieldy, so he set the gun down next to him, then scooted to the edge of the pool and held it out for Evan.

"I'll look through that manual in a sec," he added, giving the wrist that had the Pip Boy a little shake (and good to see someone else appreciated the classics, though it wasn't like Zandah had ever actually made it anywhere really in the original Fallout). "Might need your help anyways, though, if you don't mind."

That was called being polite and leaving outs for Evan to decline. Zandah was pretty sure he would definitely need a whole lot of assistance if he was going to do anything with the gun except wave it around impotently, but also he didn't really anticipate needing to do that. He wasn't going to shoot anyone else from the class, so what did a weapon matter? He was hosed no matter what, and it would be less disappointing if he didn't pretend otherwise. And when it came to the Nexu, well, he wasn't sure how much use it would even be. It seemed like it'd be better to be somewhere it couldn't go. Small spaces, maybe, with narrow openings and no straight shots for those spines.

What had the doctor said again? Nobody would need to tell it what to do. It knew what it was on some basic, instinctual level, and it would do its best to live up to that.

"...you ever feel jealous of animals?" Zandah asked Evan.

[Shiola]

It was nice that Zandah had asked for help. Evan nodded enthusiastically.

“Of course, I don’t mind at all.”

Truthfully, he’d been hoping Zandah would ask first. There were no doubt all kinds of weapons scattered across the island and most of the students had no idea how to use them, with the definite exception of those with military experience. They were a wild card, and negligent discharges were yet another way to get killed out in this place. Evan still didn’t like asserting expertise; he had a habit of speaking in a way that seemed very authoritative, even when he wasn’t trying to be. It made people uncomfortable sometimes.

He set the second Lenin down a short distance from the first, and then the third one after that. They made three clear targets, spaced about a meter apart and different distances downrange. For a moment, he stood and stared at the scene. The busts created a kind of diagonal line in the drained pool, and the sight of it had a curious liminal quality. It was easy to imagine the picture as an album cover, or a particularly weird bit of installation art.

And did he ever get jealous of animals?

“Hm. I’m not sure.”

The question rang out as Evan was finishing the setup, and he let it hang in the air for a moment. It was enticing to pivot to a kind of abstraction right now, but everything felt so surreal he was nervous about what he might find if he did.

“I’d like to think consciousness is a gift. Our ability to deeply perceive ourselves in the world means we experience in a way that nothing else really gets to. I guess the flipside of that is, we’ve also got a capacity for suffering that nothing else really has to cope with.”

Pacing steps from the last Lenin to the end of the pool, he tried to approximate the distance. End to end, it was probably about fifty yards. About the furthest distance he’d really want to be shooting anything at, and definitely further than Zandah was going to hit anything with the Obrez. A counterpoint occurred to him as he returned.

“I guess like, our cat back home, Nola - I feel confident in saying not a single thought has passed through that little guy’s tiny brain, and he’s a cuddly, happy little creature who lives a great life. I think that’d be a solid afterlife, just bein’ a cat - or a dog! Dogs seem to have a pretty great time, too. If that was what it turned out to be, I’d call that a good deal.”

He didn’t say it, but he knew that wasn’t true for most things. Nature was cruel, and most animals didn’t get to live full lives. They died brutally, messily, like Carla had. Churned up in the bloody cycle of creation and destruction. Raw material, for something else to keep going. Thoughts, feelings and memories broken down into meat, to rot, to dirt and loam and dust.

Yeah, it was better not to say that part out loud.
Evan set the rifle under the crook of his arm and opened the action. The bore was shiny, without a scuff on it. The thing likely hadn’t been fired much, which made sense given how badly it probably kicked.

“You ready? You'll wanna come over here, you really don’t wanna be downrange for this.”

[MurderWeasel]

"Yeah," Zandah said "I think I'm ready."

He realized immediately that he wasn't, of course. He had to trek back to his bag, get the ammunition for the gun out, make sure his things were out of the line of fire, and figure out how to load the weapon (though his plan was to lean on Evan's help for that part). So he held up a hand and said, "One sec, though."

While doing all that stuff, Zandah thought a little about Evan's response. It both did and didn't touch on what Zandah had meant. He was sometimes jealous of animals. One could look at it and say that the trait he envied was thoughtlessness, but to he'd be more inclined to call it innate confidence. An animal was what it was and didn't have to second guess that. More than that, it had a huge span of evolution behind it, usually honing it to be especially good at a handful of things. These tended to be the things it did most often, and that were most important to its survival.

Zandah tossed his bag against one of the walls, tucked a couple of clips into his pockets, and headed back towards the pool.

Of course, most of his musings were about specific types of animals, he realized. Cats were a good example. Dogs were not. Zandah didn't really like dogs, and certainly didn't want to be one. Dogs came off as needy. Herd animals were worse, casually sacrificing the weak to protect the healthy. That sort of sacrifice wasn't something Zandah objected to in principle necessarily, but he felt it should be the choice of the one on the chopping block, or at least the result of discussion, not just some lockstep instantaneous agreement. The animals he envied most were the independent ones, the ones who didn't need any help.

He laid the gun down and sat down at the edge of the pool, then slowly and carefully inched forwards, scooting his legs off more and more until the distance he had to drop was minimized. He still landed less than perfectly, stumbling a step on the dusty tile before regaining his balance. This really was a big pool, wasn't it? The line of Lenin's seemed distant and small. Or did it just look like that because it was empty, both of water and of swimmers?

People were animals too, of course. Zandah was very aware of that. The problem was that they were adapted to being adaptable, and that consciousness had exploded at a much faster rate than evolution had been able to keep up. The world was big and confusing and you were forced to rely on far too many things you could never understand, even if you spent your whole life just learning. Easier to shut that all out, and to humanity's credit it had created many ways to do just that. But sometimes, like now, all of that failed, and you couldn't avoid how small and poorly prepared you were.

Zandah didn't even know who he was. How could he possibly know what to do here?

Retrieving the gun, he set out towards Evan. His footsteps were steady, less unhurried and more cautious. He didn't want to slip and fall while carrying a weapon, and that felt like a real threat despite the floor being dry and the weapon presumably unloaded.

Really, what Zandah had been asking was something he couldn't say in so many words: wouldn't you prefer to be the Nexu right now? Because it was probably going to have a less stressful and miserable week than all of them were, and the odds were good that if it wasn't killed here, it would not be eliminated as a loose end. Then again, there was no telling what sort of hellish treatment it was subjected to that had given it such an unpleasant disposition. Maybe it'd be vivisected if it lived.

Zandah forced his hand to not drift up to his neck.

"Right," he said, stopping next to Evan. "I... uh, I've never even touched a gun before today, so I don't know how to load it, or shoot it, or... or anything."

He made himself smile, and avoided eye contact. That was one point in favor of sunglasses.

"Well, I went paintballing. Once."

[Shiola]

Evan shrugged, and motioned for Zandah to step closer. There was so little precedent for any of this, he wasn’t sure exactly what kind of experience would have made someone well-equipped here. Small unit tactics? Animal handling? Experience in poorly run sixties-era psychological experiments?

He looked out at the empty swimming pool, and the staggered statues several yards away.

What the fuck are we doing?

They were making sure they knew how to use the boomsticks that Janus-Hayes had given them. That was step one.

“Alright, so it’s a step-by-step process. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Even if the guns are different, the steps are basically the same. So we’ll take each step together, just follow along and you’ll pick it up quick.”

The instruction he’d received had been at a workshop, from a former marine in her fifties who had recently transitioned and was providing instructions to the LGBTQ+ community on firearms safety. Evan had joined at the insistence of a friend, and it had quickly spiraled into a burgeoning interest in the subject. Still, he wasn’t especially practiced with this kind of weapon himself, nor was he at all experienced in teaching it to others.

But he did teach! This was, he supposed, not all that different than speaking to Zandah and others in a tutorial about the horrifying truths behind how land was used in the United States. This was just more exciting.

He made a show of slowly opening the action on his rifle, and checking the bore.

“Okay so what you wanna do with any weapon is first make sure you know if it’s loaded or not. If you find a gun, check it. First rule of firearms safety is, assume every gun is loaded. Until you know for sure, don’t point it at anything you don’t want to destroy. That leads into the second rule, which is-”

Reaching over to Zandah, he gently nudged the muzzle of Zandah’s Obrez over towards the targets and away from himself.

“-control the muzzle direction at all times. Then, I guess paradoxically, you wanna open it up and check for barrel obstructions. With mine it’s just this lever here.”

Grabbing the handle, he opened and closed the breech. It reminded him of videos he’d seen of artillery pieces, the way it shut.

Jesus.

“With yours you wanna grab the bolt and turn it up, then back. Yeah, like that. Just take a look, make sure there’s nothing in there. This is the one time it’s okay to point it at your face.”

Well, maybe under normal circumstances.

“On that note, the third rule of firearms safety - keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. It’s a habit you wanna adopt.”

Evan pointed a finger gun at Zandah, and then used that hand to grip his own rifle.

“I like to think of it like finger guns - you just keep that trigger finger pointed straight forward ‘till you’re ready to party.”

That made it sound easy. Fun. Exciting. Retrieving one of the shells from his bandolier, Evan stared at it and sighed. This was going to hurt, there was no way around that. Looking to his right, he saw Zandah holding one of the clips for the Obrez. That wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, either. He supposed given the circumstances, it was better than underpowered weapons.

Nodding, he gave the go-ahead.

“Okay, so now we want to load. You’ll take your clip and you stick it in the top, where those grooves are. Then push down, it’ll load the gun. Now take it out. Okay, now push the bolt forward. You’ve gotta kind of manhandle it, you can’t really be delicate with - yeah, you got it!”

The sound of the bolt closing was always satisfying, although Evan still couldn’t help but feel slightly uneasy now that Zandah had a live round in the chamber. Maybe it would’ve been better to take it slow but - time wasn’t exactly on their side here.

“Mine’s a little simpler, I just stick this shell in and close it up.”

The Ruger made a gentle click, which seemed woefully inappropriate considering what it really was. Evan immediately engaged the safety, wary of what would happen if he accidentally touched one off. He saw Zandah watching him, likely wondering what it was he’d just done.

“Oh - don’t worry about the safety on yours. Too much of a pain in the ass to disable it in a hurry. Best safety is, uhh, common sense. Now, you wanna aim. Err, point it. Since you don’t have a stock, just grab it tight with both hands and raise it up to where you can sorta look down the sight. Honestly, you’ve just gotta try your best with that thing.”

The Chairmen awaited. Evan took a step back, giving Zandah a clear space to shoot.

“Let ‘er rip, Zee.”

[MurderWeasel]

It was calming, having Evan lay out exactly what to do in a simple, non-judgmental way. Some of this information was vaguely familiar, Zandah found, from media and general osmosis and reading arguments between weird gun people on the internet. Delivered in this fashion, everything felt more manageable, like something he could actually do, like a halfway normal thing. At least, the holding and loading of the gun no longer felt terrifying. The verdict was still out on firing it, not to mention what they might need to be shooting at.

Then there was that specific piece of advice about how to force the clip in. The content was fine, it was just the phrasing that landed weird. It wasn't abnormal, it was just...

Zandah just mentally stepped to the side there and translated. Use force, the gun can take it. Show less trepidation. Got it. Leave that quiet little unsettling feeling to the side. Like always.

At least there was a good distraction at the ready in the form of Evan loading his own gun. That process did seem simpler, and Zandah might have suggested a swap in other circumstances. As it was, he had a decent idea that Evan's gun was better, more dangerous, and more difficult to handle in all aspects besides reloading. Zandah had also already developed a small emotional connection to his own gun, that childhood memory tying to it and making it feel more welcoming, and the minor difficulty of wrangling it didn't burn that off.

It was emotionally safer, even if the safety apparently didn't work.

Zandah did as directed, lifting the gun with both hands and pointing it, looking through the sight. It was sort of like a video game, but the faint waver of a hand on a mouse that kept him from really favoring FPSes was amplified in reality, all the little factors of unconscious movement adding up. Lenin's head wavered, wiggled in the sights, and Zandah tried his hardest to be still.

"Am I holding it right?" he asked.

A few quick adjustments later (who knew feet were so important to gun use?) and he felt somewhat more stable, and the barrel was notably more steady. It would be enough for now. The sunglasses made it harder to make anything out through the sights, washing out the color, but you didn't really need to be that precise with a shotgun anyways, right?

Zandah took a deep breath, held it, and then pulled the trigger.

[Shiola]

Evan felt the concussion in his chest as the Obrez erupted in a blast of fire and sound, the flash astonishingly bright in the low-light of the empty pool. He instinctively flinched, and again when a tiny fragment of concrete landed nearby.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

And, given the cavernous walls of the aquatics facility, it was far, far louder than any gunshot he’d ever heard. Every time he’d been at a range, he’d always had the proper hearing and eye protection and been careful not to take it off until he was well away from the gunfire. The instructors were really insistent on that, and now he knew why. The ringing intensified his already-present tinnitus, completing the sensory overload that accompanied Zandah touching off that old Soviet boom-stick.

The Lenins, unfortunately, were all intact. The shot had gone wide, but wasn’t entirely in the wrong direction; Evan could tell which one of them Zandah had been aiming for as well, which meant the intent was there and he hadn’t flinched too badly. A single small crater was carved from the opposite end of the pool, from which shards of concrete had come back and skittered across the tile. Their makeshift backstop had worked - mostly.

“Hot damn! Well, that’s a start. Guess it’s my turn.”

Evan shuddered and blinked, letting the ringing in his ears subside slightly before he raised his rifle.

He sighed, pressed the stock tightly into his shoulder, and leaned forward. The furthest Lenin was in his sights, the white front bead sitting on the dead-center of the small statue, wavering as he trembled slightly. The worst thing he’d ever fired was a twelve gauge, and that was maybe a third of the kick this thing was going to have. It scared him.

You know what’s scarier? Monsters, and the people who set them loose.

His eyes narrowed at the statue of Lenin. Sycamore. The convenient target. A big part of him wanted this to hurt.

Evan squeezed the trigger.

[Namira]

Glenda had spent far too long psyching herself up to just go on over.

She'd struggled to sort through her agenda as she meandered her way around the building, listlessly poking into the odd room. She'd open a door and then a couple of minutes later find herself just standing there still, having not even looked at the contents. Shut the door again, wander down another corridor, rinse and repeat. Sometimes if she felt like mixing it up and was feeling particularly spicy, she'd indulge in a bit of staring at the wall without even opening a door first. The situation she'd found herself in was impossible, and every time she tried to stop and think about it, the record spinning around in her head skipped and scratched, stuttering into discordant nonsense. If it was a kidnapping by itself then yeah, maybe she could handle that. but it wasn't. it escalated from there, somehow. there was a whole—there was a whole—there was

She didn't know what to do.

Something concrete was that there were two people beyond the door that Glenda now crouched behind, and they'd been there a while, and if she you know, stood up or called out, made herself known, then there would be three people and that was the start of something, maybe.

Yep. Yep. Yeeep.

Then there was a fuck off loud gunshot and she dropped back down, hard. Ohhhh no. No, absolutely not. No.

Just one now, then. and she had to go before they made her a zero, so how about Glenda got up and—

A second shot, a shriek startled its way out of Glenda's throat.

[MurderWeasel]

"Wow," Zandah said, though he could hardly hear himself. "Wow."

He hadn't really known what to expect. What few expectations he had held were completely wrong. His own weapon sure hadn't behaved like any video game shotgun he'd ever encountered, so maybe it wasn't? But that was secondary anyways. The thing had disgorged a massive cough of flame, which might have left Zandah blinking away afterimages if not for the serendipity of the sunglasses. The sound had been incredible, the sensation of the firing reverberating through him.

Then Evan fired his own weapon, and Zandah got a strong second helping.

He felt the shockwave in his chest. He felt it in his teeth. The cacophony left his ears ringing like nothing he had ever experienced in his life. Zandah was careful about his hearing, almost precious about it. He didn't go to concerts. He never cranked the volume above two thirds on anything. He'd always told himself that would pay off in thirty of forty years, when he didn't need hearing aids, and the instinct was still there to snap about the sound, but he bit it back. If he ever needed hearing aids, there was a good chance he'd owe Evan a whole lot of thanks for that.

Only two Lenins remained. The far one had been struck dead center and reduced to shards, which scattered all across the floor of the pool. The wall behind it had also been struck, tiles cracking and concrete chipping much like from Zandah's shot, despite the target in between that must have absorbed at least some of the force. Zandah leaned forward and squinted, trying to see if maybe the bust had just tipped over, but nope, his first instinct was correct. It was definitely turned to smithereens.

"Wow," he said again. "Nice shot."

Whatever the Nexu actually was, it would surely feel it if it tanked one of those, right? And that made sense. Whatever they had planned at the end (Zandah was still sure that was "total liquidation" but that was a problem for later), they'd want to put it through its paces. If there was no chance to fend it off, there'd be no reason to bother with any of this.

Just one thing was bothering Zandah, though. In the aftermath of Evan's shot, he'd thought he'd heard something almost like a scream. With his hearing messed up from standing so close to it, it was hard to properly say, but...

His lips pressed tight together and he spun to look at the door. Absent context, and with the instructions they'd been given, a bunch of gunfire would be pretty concerning, wouldn't it?

[Shiola]

It had kick, though it wasn’t as bad as he’d built it up to be in his head. The statue exploded and the bullet had punched all the way through into the opposite wall. The onslaught of sight, sound, and feeling made Evan momentarily ecstatic. He laughed heartily at the carnage. As much as he had to fancy himself a Graduate Student With Big Ideas™ these days, and as much as he really did cultivate having a complex internal world, he was not at all immune to the visceral pleasure of wanton destruction. Power trips be damned, a gun like this was fun because at the end of the day, it goes boom!

Once the feeling wore off though, the sensation of pain in his shoulder made itself quickly apparent. It wasn’t sharp, as his coat and sweater were a good amount of extra padding, but it sure wasn’t pleasant. Lowering the rifle, he rolled his shoulder and winced. There was still the omnipresent ringing in his ears, but Evan knew he’d heard something else.

He froze. There was another sound.

Zandah had complimented his shot.

“Thanks.” He replied, without really thinking about it.

It wasn’t that.

Zandah had a look. Alarmed, a little bit. He’d heard it too. Turned towards the door.

Evan turned as well. “Rack the bolt. Up, back, and forward again.” Evan commanded, his attention now mostly focused on the door behind them. He ejected the lone shell from his own rifle, and loaded another. Though he didn’t raise it towards the door, he did keep it at the ready.

“Don’t point it at anything you don’t intend to destroy. If you intend on destroying something though, shoot it until it dies.”

Clearing his throat, Evan forced himself back from an edge. It had sounded like a person. That was enough, right?

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bark orders. Just spooked.”

Deep breaths. Too much focus on the violence of it all. There were more of them than there were the monsters, as far as he knew. Allies were needed. Be nice.

“Hey! Is someone out there? Sorry about the noise! We’re just shooting targets! It’s uhh - Evan! And Zandah… uhhh…”

Shit, he’d forgotten his last name. It was - too cold in here for that? That didn’t make sense. His hands were shaking, though. Why were his hands shaking?

“W-we’re friendly!” Evan called out, hoping he didn’t look at all how he felt just then.