More of the Same

Hi. Or something. Do you ever get the feeling you're talking to no one? I get that feeling all the time.

I keep its because I do that so often....

Where did we leave off? Hmm... Right. Just finished explaining how that piece of shit Duckie killed my brother.

I can look back at that now and appreciate that I went a little off the deep end. Lke, I don't know, maybe a in out. A foot tops! I'm not crazy and I'll fucking kill you if you try to prove otherwise, I swear to fucking god I'll snap your lying jaws off and cram them into your brain through your fucking ears.

... So I snapped the tiniest littlest bit. I abandoned my squad, my brother's sword in hand, and I started trying to track Duckie down so I could kill the ugly son of a bitch. That didn't work out so much at first.

Tracking people is hard. I ended up have to go through an information broker. An information broker that,in hindsight, sounded, looked, acted, and had the same eye and hair color as our new glorious leader, the infamous Lord Betrayer, Sloth.

Retrospection tells me that the only reason I was able to get at him was because Fracture was sending Sloth to sell me information to get at Duckie. We'll get more into that later.

I fought Duckie a couple of times after that. At the same time, my old squad was hunting me. Some of them wanted to bring me back. Some of them thought I was a rabid dog that needed to be put down. I could see why they might have thought, hurtful though it was. I they backed off after one of them nearly got their head crushed by one of my fire extinguisher traps.

For all of my efforts at that time, I discovered I had quite a knack for improved traps. It amazes me what I can do with a saw, a hammer, and fish line. I'm like proxy MacGyver sometimes, to reference something fewer and fewer people would understand and that I myself have never seen. One day, a MacGyver will refer to a great improvised craftsman and no one will know where the fuck that name came from anymore.

Rant aside, for all my success against my former life-mates, I found little success against Duckie. I always refused to use traps against him. I didn't just want to kill him. I wanted to be better than him. I wanted to destroy him. So I met him in an honorable way where I announced myself and came at him with my brother's sword, which I still found unwieldy at the time.

Duckie wouldn't just beat me through, he would beat the shit out of me. Later on he'd take a knife to me when I couldn't stand and he'd mark me.

And when he decided I wasn't improving, and those were his words, 'I can see this isn't going anywhere, you're just not improving. You're a disgrace to your brother's memory. At this point I'm doing him a favor,' he ran me through with my own sword, Trent's sword, and then had me slowly slide off of it... off the roof. To fall to my death.

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you're gonna die. Others say you find a moment of clarity to reflect on your life and ask your higher power of choice for forgiveness if you should find yourself worthy of such grace.

Only one thing came to mind as wind rushed faster and faster around me as I plummeted toward the ground. And I spoke it out loud. So overpowering was the sensation that I had to make it audible.

"Fuck!"

I would have died there if Fracture hadn't teleported in and plucked me from the sky into the compound, or as we apparently call it today, the Free Market. As a quick aside, the Free Market is a terrible name for an organization. Like, the worst name imaginable. Of all time. -938573 out of 10.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with everyone that they let that travesty happen.

</rant>

I don't know how long I was out after that. When I woke up Fracture gave me a whole speech about how my brother use to work for him and how he wanted me to work for him and how he'd make sure Duckie got what he had coming to him if I did.

Apparently this kind of recruitment was pretty common at the time. I get the sense I was supposed to be a patsy. If you ask any one from the years 2002 to 2012 that signed up with Fracture in that time frame, they'll tell you Fracture faked their death and stole them from the Bureaucracy. Something they typically agreed. I've certainly not met anyone that claimed to have refused his offer...

So naturally, I agreed. In hindsight, Duckie did get what was coming to him in a big way. Even if I couldn't appreciate it at the time... apparently. I've read I didn't but I was apparently a crazy bitch for the last 3 years or so, so who knows what I was thinking during that time frame.

I spent a lot of time locked in the compound. Fracture and Lord Fire refused to let me leave until I had actually learned to wield a sword. And after a good year of practiced dedicated training, I had. I even made friends like Ivan, Whisper, and Gravel Father rest his troubled soul. Occasionally I even found love, not that I'm willing to name any names here on that topic. And I got my self a pet Mask, useless though Moth usually is hes reliable.

Everything was... good, for a little while. And then Fracture took me out on a trip into the Path... and I whited out under... I remember screaming. It wasn't mine, but there was constant near endless screaming everywhere...

Huh. My bad eye started bleeding. Weird...

Back to the story, as I need to wrap it up before this post gets any longer. Like I said, I whited out. I woke up a few weeks ago with no memory of what happened for the last 3 years. Ivan refuses to see, talk to me, or ever talk over the phone. He seems terrified of me. Fracture and Whispers won't look me in the eye. Pained looks of shame and guilt take them and they make an effort to make our encounters brief. Gravel's long dead, he was apparently shot down by a group of fellow runners working under someone called 'Moriarty' for the grave unforgivable crime of sympathizing with proxies. Glad to see the runner ranks are still flush with filth.

Just me and Moth... and my new pet Navi.

I keep trying to explain to my old friends that that wasn't me... that I'm me again and things are different now but...

It just feels like I'm talking to no one... because they aren't listening.

PaKaSo out.

That's Not My Name

You know that feeling? That one you get when you've been asleep for over three years and wake up with no memory of the time you've lost and learn that you spent those three years acting like a raving, psychotic lunatic, attacking your loved ones, and misspelling your own fucking name wrong?

Yeah, that feeling. We've all been there and that's where I am now.

My name is Patrica Kalso. My code name is Pa-Ka-So. Not Picasso. I'm not the worst fucking well known painter of all time. I'm PaKaSo.

Forgive me if this post has some overlap with Moth's Post.

I don't know that it will and I can't assume you've read his post. I'm just gonna talk about myself this post and we'll see where things go from there.

So like I said, I was born Patrica Kalso. I was raised in Philadelphia for what I can only remember to be a small chunk of my childhood. A part of a region Fracture and other's have often liked to refer to as 'Slender Country'. Apparently that encompasses a thick line from Philadelphia to New York. West Pennsylvania and New York's tail. And who knows, maybe that stretches up into Canada. Hard to say. Never been. Border crossing is such a pain in the ass.

I'm not entirely sure what happened when I was little. But it was something bad. I remember I had parents. I certainly don't now though. My brother looked after me after... whatever happened... happened. He took me everywhere. We lived on the streets for a week or so when a man in a fancy looking business suit invited us to join a special home for kids like us. He was apparently 'A friend of Father's'. Or so Trent (my brother) said. I didn't question it. I was happy to live indoors again.

He took us to a small town south of Philly. There we shared a large studio apparent with 6 other kids. It was a scary time for me. Everyone was masked and armed and to my horror my brother would soon be too. I got a mask but not a knife or a gun like everyone else.

Our roommates liked to call me useless. I blame my brother for that. He insisted on dragging me along for missions. Didn't like to leave me alone. Apparently taking an 5 year old to participate in hunting people to death and vandalizing was better.

So my brother fixed it, like he always fixed everything for me. He gave me a title and a job in our little cult. I got to draw Father's symbols in blood since he wouldn't let me cut or break things.

As the little girl painting abstract geometric symbols in blood, and I was named after the worst painter ever. Picasso. But spelled with letters of my name so I could be unique.

That lasted for a year. I was barely getting settled when my brother turned 8. A much more homeless looking man than the man that brought us here came and took four of us away to 'study'.

Left me and the others to cover the work load ourselves. The remaining four of us got by... but I had never felt more useless. I tried to help hunt but I... I was too weak. I couldn't stomach it.

That's when my job as designated painter started to play second to house chores. Cooking, cleaning, laundry. We were all more or less kids but someone had to do these things and if I couldn't pull my weight they decided it would be me. I still have burns on my hands from the time I spend teaching myself to cook. Laundry wasn't hard though. I don't know why people bitch about laundry. The machines do all the work.

Trent didn't come back to me for two years... I thought he was dead. I really did. He was lucky I was still there... I wanted to run away so many times. I had grown a lot. I was learning to kill. I was breaking shit with the best of them.

When Trench came back he saw to it I was taken care of again. No more chores. Nothing to worry my pretty little head about again but painting symbols. Like he had never left. Excepted he came back a badass, I guess.

Many protested when he declared I wasn't doing everyone's chores anymore. He beat the shit out of the biggest one... I want to say Bret, or Braker as he liked to call himself.

Not much changed for the next four years. Trent tried to teach me to fight and use his new sword but he liked to baby me. Our lesions were such a slow processes... can't say I really leaned much. Even today, most of my ability to use a sword was self taught.

That's when we first met Duckie. Our gang and his gang where being paired together to hunt down a group of runners. At the time it was a big deal. You didn't see runners group up.

The operation went miserably. Duckie held his own. Duckie, Trent, Bret, and I survived. The rest of our gangs did not. Knife and sword wielding children did not hold up to a teenager with an oozie.

As an adult, I guess it makes sense. I don't know how they got the oozie but they were just defending themselves. We were there to kill them. But none of us had seen anything like that before.

I remember asking my brother 'Why did they do that to us?' Like it was their fault. As if they shouldn't be protecting themselves.

He never did give me an answer. Although he did skin the one with the oozie alive with Duckie in the next room...

I remember crushing on Duckie, even after he showed me his fucked up face. He was cool. Confident and relaxed in a way my brother never was. I was sad when he didn't stay with us. We got sorted into a new little gang. We were calling ourselves squads by then. It sounded more legal.

Much against my brothers protests, I started training in earnest after that. There were people out there in the world that meant to do us harm... I didn't want to be burden anymore. I wanted to be strong like Duckie and Trent. Trent's sword was still too heavy for me to learn to wield properly though. Even if it wasn't, we had no way of getting a new sword just for me. So he bought me little wood cutting hatchets. Truly terrible fucking weapons. One good chop and if you didn't cleave right though, and you never do, you had to pull them back out. I guess that's why you get two and have a squad.

That's not to say I can't rip in and out of flesh with a hatchet now. I'm a grown women now. But it was harder then. I had little child arms. It sucked pretty hard.

Two more years passed. I was 14. Trent was 16, like Duckie as it turned out.

We got sent in to break up another group of runners. But this time, there was just the four of us.

Not content with our odds after last time, Trent called in another veteran for this kind of mission. My mute crush, Duckie. I remember being so excited to see him again. I wanted to show him everything I learned. After the mission of course.

That's when everything went fucked on a fucked train in a fucked hand basket.

We cornered the group of runners. Five of them. Duckie and Trent were making short work of them at first. They would stab and throw them to us. We would make sure they were very dead. But the last one was a dodgy motherfucker. Duckie went for the throat but he missed. Trent was behind the runner and was trying to grab him and didn't see what happened next coming. With one good swipe of Duckie's long curved knife, Trent's throat was ripped wide open.

The blood spray was... unreal.

I remember screaming. Apparently the runner got away. I clenched my brother... demanded and begged for him not to leave me... he never got back to me on that. Too busy bleeding out. I could have blamed the runner... maybe I should have.

But the runner wasn't the one with the knife. The runner hadn't so much as thrown a punch. Duckie had did it. And I... sort of freaked. I came at Duckie with my hatchet's but he knocked me out with a good punch to the face.

When I came to, they had disposed of Trent's body... Duckie was gone... all I had left of my dear murdered brother was his sword. Much to the protests of my fellow squadmates, I swore on that sword that I would use it gut Duckie for what he had taken from me.

And just like my brother has promised to look after me, just like he had promised to come back before he disappeared for two years, and just as he had promised I could have his sword when I was old enough and he was done with it, I intended to keep my promise to destroy Duckie.

... And now as an adult... I've woken up to find that I have.

But this stories getting a little long. I think I'm gonna stop here. I'll finish it next post or something.

PaKaSo out.