Chapter Text
A twenty-foot billboard of Angelina looms outside of the Rhodes Island’s Lungmen HQ that Ambriel visits on the daily. One of those glowing electric video displays more real than the hyperreal.
Not that Ambriel had particularly noticed Angelina, at this point.
Who would, when the flashiest, deadliest operators, those that get the fast-food endorsement brand deals, the music careers and acting stints, share that same promotional billboard with her. Angelina doesn’t even have any cool features to look at: no horns, no tail, no giant tits. A girl next door on a monster skewer.
If anything, Exusiai is the operator that stands out, thinks Ambriel as she rocks up to HQ for her last ongoing psych eval, the last step in the Rhodes Island recruitment protocol. Exusiai, Rhodes Island’s golden child, the punishing mascot in all her glory.
It’s a tantalizingly one-sided feud Ambriel has with this operator she’s never met, an exclusively personal parallel based on race, and weapon, and the internalized trappings of guilt and shame.
Swathed in the LED-glow, an imaginary Exusiai looks down at her and taunts in blinking pixels: “Are you proud to have signed your life away? Like me? We’re the same and I somehow eclipse you in every way-”
On goes Ambriel’s internal monologue. Exusiai’s fingers wrap kindly around the stock of her HK416, but as Ambriel looks up, up, up, it’s more like a virtual chokehold, an imaginary tightness around her neck.
That same tightness, it’s the same one that’s in her parents’ eyes as she announces she’s abandoning her college degree, opting to sign her life away to some thinly-veiled paramilitary squad. Her father is a doctor. As a child, her first Lee Enfield was an inherited piece from his own father before him. Ambriel feels like a failure that day at the dining table, shame prickling her neck as he had passed her the water pitcher in silence.
And walking underneath that billboard of Exusiai and friends every morning, she feels like the failure of failures. But what else is she supposed to do in this economy? Sidle back to her parents’ basement like her brother, tail between her legs? Live in false ignorance, pretending like the world isn’t collapsing on itself, like the only jobs left in Laterano are in temples and hospitals?
If she is destined to a life of servitude, then at least Ambriel will choose to who she will owe her servitude to. And at the end of the day, there is no better place to escape the war than in the barracks of some pseudo-NGO, armed to the teeth with biohumans and reeking with oripathy. With frontlines helmed by psychos like Exusiai, Ambriel has nothing to be afraid of. She’ll join Rhodes Island, squirrel her way into some reserve sniper force until she dies in combat or retires at 40 and fucks around for her remaining years. And what about it.
So, Ambriel is too deep in her introspection to notice. Nevertheless, Angelina is there on that billboard too, wedged between Aak and Hoshiguma. A twenty-foot giant, she towers over Ambriel like a heavy saint (two angels on that billboard then).
The sniper stubs out her joint under the toe of her boot and goes to fill out the forms that prove she definitely isn’t insane and should definitely belong to a private corporatized military force.
In she goes: no violent thoughts, no seizures. Her hands don’t shake when she hits all 10 of targets in a row.
Ambriel passes the psych eval with flying colors, contractually signs her life away, and doesn’t look back.
“Welcome to Rhodes Island!” Angelina smiles, eyes curving like little half-moons. When she addresses their ragtag group, her voice is high but slow, measured.
The first time she really meets Angelina is slightly more maddening, because it requires Ambriel to look up on her orientation day, fresh on the landship a week after clearing that last eval, and realize that her orientation guide is none other than the Six-Star Support Stun Operator.
It doesn’t make any sense, and the other new members on the tour, a sickly-looking Ursus named Jaye who smells like pot and some small girls from Kazimierz with assault rifles holding hands (gay), also look uncomfortable.
There’s something kinda discomforting about one of the top 10 operators on Rhodes Island playing mommy at freshman orientation. What six star operator does this kind of thing, explains that ops need to buy their own soap for the laundry machines with a little giggle?
Nonetheless, Angelina is there, clean white cotton shirt and clean white disposition, leading them through the shooting ranges and emergency bunkers with a gentle, steady smile. Discomfort twists into an irksome stab in Ambriel’s stomach.
She’s always been somewhat of a misantrope but she hates people like this the most, people like Angelina who don’t seem particularly funny, or sharp, or feel any particular need to explain and prove themselves.
Angelina calls the base their “new home” more than once, unironically, like they’re not all carrying over two tonnes of heavy artillery between the five of them. That must be the difference between the six-stars and them, the canon-fodder.
As the tour draws to a close, Ambriel leans over to the Jaye, wanting to whisper something stupid and cruel about their guide. Maybe something like: So that’s what it looks like, getting bitched by Rhodes Island.
But Angelina’s big brown eyes bore into her just then, deep shallow ponds. Suddenly irritated, Ambriel looks away. Smited, it seems, by the least threatening of the six stars in the flesh.
Angelina continues the tour, docile smile and dumb puppet mannerisms. Worst of all, she keeps raising her arm to point out this security system deactivation panel and that Arts-proof fire alarm and yada yada. And unfortunately, this means that her cotton shirt rides up, up, up exposing that small strip of toned, tan stomach every time.
Not that Ambriel notices, of course. After an eternity, the tour ends.
There is no housewarming for Ambriel, who decides to stay in her room and unpack. After Ambriel turns off the quipy, AI room-assistant and scans her room for cameras, she hears a knock at the door. It’s the Ursus guy from the tour, Jaye.
“Hey”, he mumbles, “you got a light?” Ambriel lets him in, because he still kinda smells like Lungmen weed and a six-pack, dewy with condensation, hangs from his bandaged fingers.
They mock the Kazimierz girls a little as Ambriel unpacks her belongings:cheap conditioner, signed idol posters, gamer keyboard. The girls were small, meek, feminine, like her but not her. Their rifles seemed heavy across their thin shoulders, but Ambriel knows the careful art of perceived frailty better than anyone. Her own precious Lee Engfield, named Jinx after her League main, remains leaning against the bed in its candy pink case. She runs one hand across it, the other nursing a beer. Usually at this time, she’d be clearing the dinner table with her family and drying dishes, the TV a comforting rift in the backdrop. She thinks of the soft part of Angelina’s mouth as it curves around the word “welcome”.
Drifting back into the conversation, she finds Jaye explaining the nuances of deshelling giant sea urchins.
“They’re harmless, once you crack them open.” Schlack. He mimes the gesture with a closed fist. “Which. Is actually a pretty therapeutic experience.”
“Uh huh,” she says, “I’m not much a seafood stan, personally”. Jaye bristles in response.
“You Lateranos don’t know what you’re missing. But I’m sure once you test the fine seafood selection we’ve been promised at Rhodes Island kitchen, you’ll change your mind.”
She laughs, “Are you quoting the recruitment brochure? You sound like that tour guide.”
Jaye grins sheepishly. “Cooking and warfare aren’t so different after all.”
A six-pack later, Ambriel feels more at home already. Jaye is fine, knows to respect her reticent social boundaries and is clearly looking for a fellow floormate to complain with more than anything else. And she’s a little tipsy, because Ambriel smokes but never really drinks.
There’s a comfortable silence and Ambriel asks, prone to these kinds of inquisitive flashes in her unusual tipsyiness: “D’you think they were,” she lifts and flaps a hand, question left unfinished.
“Huh?” Jaye turns towards her, eyes glazed. “Which - the Kazimierz girls?”
“Mmm”.
Jaye takes a sip of his beer and scratches his head. “Mm, Kazimierz, maybe. Ehh, I don’t know.”
The beer, annoyingly, has slowed his speech even further, softened his usual negative edge, so he pursues his contemplative train of thought. “But you know, if there’s one thing I’ve been told about Rhodes Island...”
“Ah, just one thing?”
“One thing”, he says, “Yeah, it’s that, Rhodes Island gets pretty hot.” He laughs, embarassed. “If you know what I mean. These operators man, I mean, I’ve heard all these rumours. There are, what, three hundred or so adrenaline-junky sociopaths on the same ship. Something’s gotta give between the battles to be won. You know, all of that pent-up tension and paranoia needs an outlet.”
Ambriel snorts. But her mind, reckless miracle, shoots straight to Angelina and her big, stupid doe eyes, the sliver of pink tongue darting between white teeth. Ah, she always gets horny when she’s high. Suddenly, she’s kind of ready for Jaye to leave.
“And,” because of course Jaye isn’t done yet, too comfortable following this loose wriggling thought to read the mood, “Isn’t there something so phallic about, like, living inside a ship?” Jaye pauses with intent, like he’s said something even remotely worth pausing about.
Ambriel rolls her eyes. This is so stupid. Angelina flits out of her head.
“Do you want to play some Call of Duty?” she asks Jaye.
Jaye leaves after breaking an eight-game win streak. All in all, it’s a much better evening than she had been even hoping for. Comfortable and drowsy, she flops across her new bed.
Her thoughts drift to Jaye, to the Kazimierz girls, but mostly to Angelina’s bland, calm voice, the soft curls of her hair. She wonders if Angelina has to curl them every morning. She wonders what Angelina would have done if if Ambriel had reached out and yanked one soft curl hard, just to see what would happen. Maybe, finally something decipherable would have then appeared in her eyes then - hurt? Annoyance?
That’s all it takes to get her going. She circles her clit with a finger and she’s so pent-up and horny, she gets wet so fast. It must be all that pent-up tension and paranoia. And then, there’s a knock at her door.
Ambriel pulls her shorts back up, scrambles off her bed. Was that idiot Jaye actually fucking back? But it isn’t Jaye she sees through the peephole.
It’s Angelina.
Ambriel freezes. It’s Angelina, in that same white shirt as earlier, the Adidas leggings, placid expression. Ambriel watches as Angelina reaches up and knocks again, three times.
Shit.
Ambriel pulls down her sleeping shorts a bit, adjusts her hair. But she knows she looks dishevelled, cheeks red, eyes red too. There’s a small electric thought that runs through her for just a second - that she’s unarmed. But it doesn’t matter anyway, Angelina could probably rip her apart with Arts in the time it’d take her to pull out any hidden knife.
Ambriel swings open the door.