5A/N. I do not own Borderlands or Tales from the Borderlands. Or anything for that matter.
"I win. It's over Jack.." "NOOOOO!" screamed Handsome Jack and faded into thin air, as I finished plucking my ECHO eye off. I stared at the remnants of what was left from Handsome Jack and took it with me as I haven't decided what to do with it just yet. "Finally, it's over." was what I only managed to wheeze out before I passed out from exhaustion.
I awoke to the sound of a knife (or was it an axe?) being sharpened. I tried to look up for the source of the sound, but didn't manage to move an inch from where I was, as I was tied to some kind of pole and it was too dark too see anything. Naturally I freaked out and realized that I was in some sort of tent which I really hoped wasn't inside a bandit camp.
But it seemed that luck was not on my side. "I MAKING FINGER PIZZA! FINGER PIZZA THE BEST!" was what I heard across the room. Even though I was only in Pandora for a little less than a week, I'd recognize that sound from a mile away, and I'd have probably ran off somewhere far away as I did with my last meet up with some type of Bomb-Psycho.
However I was still tied up and being a coward myself, I did the next thing best thing to running away.
I fainted... again.
BOOOM!. I woke up for the second time that day as the ground shook and everything inside the tent went haywire. "IT'S TIME FOR MEAT PUPPET!" screamed a psycho that probably was the one earlier today. As the psycho ran out from the tent, probably taking care of what made the explosion, I took a deep breath.
"Okay Ryhs, you need to stay calm and find a way out." I tried to find anything among the mess, anything that can cut the ropes when I spotted a glint just a few feet away from where I was. 'A shard, it'll probably work.'
I tried to reach for the shard but my legs weren't long enough to grasp it. BOOM! As another explosion reached my ears, the shard went spinning... opposite my direction. "Shit..." I then panicked and tried to wriggle my way out, pushing hard against the ground with both my legs and suprisingly the ropes tying me gave out.
'Well at least being captured by a psycho has it's perks' I thought as I remembered that psychos are mentally unstable and basically nuts, so being able to tie a rope correctly, does not fit in the description of being a psycho. This kind of begs the question 'Why did they even tie me up in the first place? Why didn't they just kill... or sacrifice me for some meat pizza immediately? ' but I managed to wave off those questions later.
As I managed to stand upright, the chaos happening outside began to quiet down. I managed to sneak a peek by the tent flaps and saw two figures from where I was, and by the look of it they were Vault Hunters. And they do not seem to take kindly to someone that once had Handsome Jack inside his head. Vault Hunters and Handsome Jack are taboo words if mixed together. I only managed to get a tale or two from one of my friends in Hyperion about how Handsome Jack died. But I guess the hatred the Vault Hunters felt for Jack was huge. They were basically asking Jack to go to hell. Well that's what I hoped too.
I saw them pinning down one of the bandits that didn't manage to escape from the vault hunters. "Tell me what happened to Helios?" asked a guy that looked like a military soldier from Dahl. "We don't know anything, the ship came down by itself!" said the bandit in a terrified tone. "Tell me what you know, or your life will end the same way the ship did." threatened a blue haired woman."We know nothing I swear!" replied the bandit. "Then why were there tire tracks from the crash site leading to this place!" replied the soldier. As I listened on the conversation, I realized I had to get away now, or I'll have the same fate as the bandit.
I looked at my options and decided that my best bet is to walk over to the row of Technicals at the end of this camp, and hope that they were too busy torturing the poor bandit. As I walked over to it, I figured the best plan is to head back to the Atlas Base in New Haven to repair the damages done to my cybernetics.
I quickly enetered into one of the Technical and luckily the keys of the truck were still dangling, so I sped off. I heard shouts and protests directed to me, and I suspect that the Vault Hunters had finished asking their prey.
'I suppose Helios suddenly falling from the sky might have alerted the whole planet. Well, to be fair it was pretty big. And I guess those who hate Handsome Jack and everything he owned or had, like the company Hyperion which includes me, would have probably wanted to know what happened, or... they might even be celebrating it.' I thought to myself while steering through the rocky lands of Pandora using only one hand to steer.
"Wow, I actually remembered how to get here." I thought aloud as I walked along the familiar route.
As I entered the Atlas secret base, my mind replayed the scenes that had just happened in less than a week. It just seemed too surreal to me, a Hyperion employee who managed to fight bandits, stayed alive in Pandora for more than an hour, and taking down a ship that was, or had been owned by Handsome Jack. It sounded impossible, but I lived to tell the tale.
"Fiona. Sasha. Gortys. I wondered what happened to them. I hope they're fine." Even though we were only recently acquainted, I have grown accustomed to all the constant insults, disrespect and continuous debate over what is right and what is wrong. It seemed that this life or death experiences brought us closer to each other than being old friends with someone. (No offense Vaughn, you're still my bro.)
As I was thinking quite deeply, and was currently rummaging the place for tools and materials to fix my arm, I didn't hear the sound of a continuos beep on one of the computers, in which a red dot could be seen blinking almost quite rapidly over a point in a map and it seemed as if it indicated of something urgent. Really urgent.
I took notice of this and tried to find out what was it about. However since the computers have not been used or even touched for a long while, I could not access any information I need to find out about this mysterious beeping. I passed this off as a fault in the system, seeing as it was an old tech as well.
I finally found the tools and luckily I happened to come across a mechanical arm that had been sitting around on one of the shelfs of the basement, so I quickly set to work on my second arm. Suprisingly the arm was attached to my torso in less than five minutes, and that was weird, considering my mind drifted a bit and I was only working with one hand. What's weirder is that I had no recollection of having installed the arm, like my mind was somewhere else altogether. 'Okay, this is weird...' As I tried to figure out what happened during the time I kind of zoned out, I decided to first try and move my mechanical arm.
'Wow, this is so bulky and heavy, now that I'm using it. I hope this isn't made of... What's it called again? Umm... Metal-something? The metal that Atlas stopped producing because it was too impractical? Yeah, good move Rhys, you found a beefy mechanical arm, that is too heavy to be called practical, and basically nothing else to support anything good about this arm.' I commented at myself.
'Not that it had anything good to being with.' I thought.
I need to find a new arm, since this arm although functional and moving, is not really useful for anything else. They have no other functions besides being able to move it around. And it was so damn heavy. "Well it should be fine till I get out of here." I sighed.
As I sat down to get some rest, I have this nagging feeling of something important. "Oh yeah my ECHOeye!" I said as I dug around my back pocket searching for it. I took it into my hands as I stared at the blue light encircling the eye.
'Oh god no! You're WAY better at killing people than I am.' Jack's voice reminded me as I stared at the remains of the eye. The longer I stared at it, the more I felt guilty about the actions I did to get rid of Jack.
"How many people do you think were on Helios, huh?"
"What makes you think you're the good guy in this scenario, huh?"
As I pushed away the haunting thoughts that litterred into my minds, I was trying to search the base for my ECHOeye replacement (keyword try). However I was feeling too exhausted and my head has refused to take anymore of this day.
Thankfully during my futile atempt to find an eye replacement, I happen to have found a small room which I was surprised to have found a fold-up bed, the bed which you can store neatly on the sides of a wall. 'I thought this bed was long gone.. Well I guess a hidden base might hide it from bandits and... destruction. I guess..' I thought to myself as I drifted to sleep.
As I practcally snored myself to sleep, It did not hit me how I managed to survive from Bandits, able to protect myself from instantaneous death by Psychos, able to find the Atlas base in New Haven without any help, and practically attached an arm with no difficulties at all.
Or how I managed to ignore the sound of footsteps just outside this room.
A/N. FIRST FIC. Hope you liked it and tell me what you think about it. Anything would be great. Oh, and this fic's cover picture is owned by AVALI. Thank You!