A Quick Death in Texas Prewriting: Ellering's Crew

And now, a list of dead people.

Hey, hi! Not much of a preamble for this one, because it's filling out the rest of the antagonist cast. Second verse, same as the first, though with this entry, I'm just gonna chime in with a quick italicized thought about where my head was at when I was writing them initially.

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Fake Anchor (“Gator”) - The Would-Be Spoiler

The individual known as “Gator,” whose profile is buried on the Section 99 register, is one who prefers when people say “there’s not much to say” about him. In that, we learn the sort of person he is: one who admires the efficient apex predation of the alligator, a creature who spends much of its time pretending to be harmless driftwood, up until the moment Big Jaws Take a Great Big Bite. And this is who “Gator” prefers to be to the larger world: a guy who is just a guy, from a distance. That’s who he is, he’s just the average cogitoi guy. Upon closer inspection, he is the boringest motherfucker, one that you regret taking a closer inspection. So you don’t bother, ever again, and this nasty, lizard-brain killbot with a wide-choke shotgun contained in his hinged and serrated trap-jaw goes off lurking, unnoticed by you. Boring driftwood. Don’t mind him, he’s not after you; don’t mind him, you’ll make him after you.

“Gator” is an example of what can go bad in the mind of a cogitoi, when they choose to embrace an idea of machine purity or perfection in their thinking patterns, and not realize they’re engaging with their emotions in a healthy way (or not engaging with them at all). “Gator” fell out of standing with a number of Section 99 teams due to ‘differing ideas of what constitute acceptable Rules of Engagement’, so “Gator” decided logically that a team can be dispensed with. A team is discordant, full of multiple individuals with discordant opinions and ideas; a team requires greater than one, and is yet less than one in certain situations. Situations like assassinations, which can be bought quite easily without needing anything approaching a typical Section 99 action, so long as nobody knows the death in question was result of a formal agreement. He’s a Section 99 scab, is what I’m saying- this fuck likes to use the register as a means to solicit bandit work. This is how he’s operated since the teams he bounced between threw him out, citing him as having unaddressed personality issues- 99ers understand they’re by and large a bunch of out-and-proud Two Percenters, but killers aren’t murderers, they just know what they smell like. “Gator” reeks of murderer, of the enjoyment of premeditation and predation on the unexpecting and powerless, the instinctual pleasure of a clean bone-snap mixing with the thinking machine satisfaction of watching a 1 flatten to a neat, tidy 0.

I mean, that jaw gimmick is wayyyyyy too much for one. Highly suspect, at the very least. Most stable people? They don’t have mouthguns. That’s too extreme for even most Section 99ers, especially when they’re serrated with bitey-teeth.

This guy's a henchman to the hilt, but that doesn't mean he can't be a ton of fun. Let's do some crazy Ninja Scroll shit with Section 99 bad guys, why not?

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Richard Bekker - The Paper Stooge

Behind every great individual, is a fully-together individual; behind every megalomaniacal dickhead, there’s a talented bureaucrat. Dudley Ellering is an individual who deeply believes that every functional empire throughout terran history had a strong foundation of bureaucracy- you don’t want to know what he includes in his list of ‘functional empires’ but you can probably guess some of the underlined examples. Richard Bekker also deeply believes in this, and he genuinely does deeply believe this. I point this out, because he also deeply believes in other things that he chooses to deeply believe in only because Dudley Ellering also deeply believes in them too. It’s an extremely good idea to have ideological purity in your business partners, or at least Richard Bekker believes to this excessive degree. He’s protean, an individual who is so there for the paycheck, he’s up for a sit-down where you tell him what to believe and how much to prioritize it, so he can always be at his most professional and composed for his employer.

This is what Bekker is: he’s not a man who’s really about anything other than his work, to the degree that he has himself become a complete and irredeemable sleaze because of it. You couldn’t tell this by looking at him, because this motherfucker has the full-blown Ned Flanders effect going, that clean-cut chipper wholesomeness that Compassionate Republican John Wayne Gacy was also known for. This isn’t to say he’s secretly a serial murderer; he’s not, he doesn’t have that much self-inspiration and will of his own. It’s more to say that he’s made himself, and willingly I might add, into a vessel for atrocity management. Because what gives him satisfaction, what makes him rise in the morning, is being the little wheel that gets turned by the big one, that turns other wheels in return; nothing makes him happier to be led. He is a naturally occurring underling of the very highest quality, a man who wants nothing to be the adjutant of a truly remarkable individual, and to live in interesting times influenced by them. Because that means interesting timetables to track, and truly fascinating data to file. 

In short, he’s a secretary of pure menace, an individual more interested in the management of the details of an operation, rather than what the details actually are. He’s sort of like a scientist, tirelessly and with active interest developing a nerve gas, because it’s just such amazingly satisfying work. Except he’s not a scientist, he’s the scientist’s data entry guy.

If you've ever met someone who you can confirm has a clipboard or a tablet in their hand, but not confirm they have a pulse; if you've ever met misery with a practiced smile; if you can tell the presence of a ghoul shaped like a bureaucrat both look and smell, this guy's impending skull-check is for you.

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Largo Ross - The Homeboy/Liability

The inner circle that orbits a powerful personality can consist of any number of specific people, but somehow, there always manages to be one that makes the others say “why the hell is this person here?” They display no appreciable skill, no ability or want to apply themselves, and no good taste to vanish into the wallpaper when adults are talking. The reality is, these people do have a skill, it’s just a subtle and annoying one: they can stand to be the best friend of the one in charge. In being able to tick those strange and particular boxes of relationship acceptance, they’re free to be the biggest lout, the emptiest shirt, the most unable-to-read-a-room asshole, just the sloppiest stain on an operation by proportion. Folks like these are often overlooked as a liability even in a tightly run ship, because they’re often budgeted off as the acceptable amounts of entropy in an otherwise well-run machine, and this is why the individual in question is allowed to think that under the pool table, surrounded by empties, is a good way to wake up in the morning, even well into their 30s.

I wanted to make a joke about Billy Carter here, but that guy was very left to the fash partyboy fuck that Largo Ross is, buried deep down in his rarely sober mind.

The dancing organ grinder monkey to the neverending capitalist hell-party Oktoberfest oompah band Dudley Ellering is conducting, Largo Ross is the very picture of the guy who sucks, can go fuck himself, and yet doesn’t ever get made to do so because he’s the boss’s best pal. A heavy duty wet/dry vodka vacuum with cocaine hose attachment, Largo is a wellspring of bad advice, unappreciable interjections and simple operational weakness that would get less privileged humps shot and buried in a ditch. This is him in his best state; at his worst, he’s the type to get bored and ask to get put in charge of a project, which he’ll promptly ruin somehow, in some unexpected and catastrophic fashion. And then not suffer consequences for, ever, most likely. This is the menace of Largo Ross within NuWay; it’s also the not-so-hidden threat to Ellering- he’s got a blind spot for his buddy Largo, and how he makes him feel like a real live person, with real live friends and everything. Being blind to Largo? It’s like being blind to a drunken filing cabinet full of your otherwise opsec-covered documents, that likes to go speeding down the white line highway and then start screaming about the details of the rock opera biography he’s writing about you, while fucking up the dance floor to music only he can hear. The dance floor happens to be anywhere he’s standing, by the way.

This is a man that has a date with a pair of zip cuffs and a black bag, is what I’m saying.

This man is a microcosm of that time when the Proud Boys tried to take the streets and the Juggalos disappeared their pear-shaped fratboy asses in a sea of clown makeup, basketball shorts and glorious chaos

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Kristof van Rooyen - The Misunderstood Outsourced Security Asset

Jesus fucking Christ, this guy. If the mustache wasn’t a dead giveaway, the smoked glasses are. The literal only way this guy can’t actually choose to identify himself as a ‘Rhodesian’ is because in this timeline, Rhodesia never had a chance to happen. Instead the fuck conducts himself in the general manner and menace of the Rugged Yet Uncomfortably Country Club South African. You know, the person whose very presence in the room amps up the dread every time he opens his mouth, because you just know he’s got some truly heinous words he can say in there.

The unfortunate thing about this type of person is, they aren’t the kind you actually can just upend and dunk into a toilet; they actually can fight back, they aren’t just some geek.

No, van Rooyen is actually big trouble, a self-styled Colonel-Commander of the PMC that he intends to grow out of the new New Laredo Ellering’s building. For him, the Unseen Mutual is the plushest gig he could have ever envisioned after having broke loose from the doomed Incursion Force that first brought him into the Freelands. For the cost of his bent knees and assured disciplined loyalty, they give the man all the leash he wants to run the outfit of his most high speed, low drag dreams. You know, take the same concept of “strip as many parts off a car as you can without compromising the horsepower and grip to achieve the best possible quarter-mile time,” but apply it to rules of engagement. This man is tactical laundry bleach, with all the same caution and conscious as a caustic chemical, and even more hazardous to sapient life. This is the first thing Ellering misunderstands about van Rooyen: ol’ Duds chooses to interpret a willful disdain for life van Rooyen views as beneath him as ‘a can-do attitude that finds a way to make things happen.’

It’s his visible professionalism and higher-society refinement that covers the utter abyss of a heart this man has. This, plus Ellering’s ability to view turning flamethrower troops on a farming village as “low cost expediting,” is why he picked van Rooyen to head up his security team. His security team. Dudley Ellering’s Security Team. Not Kristof van Rooyen’s. That bit is fine with him. For now. It’s the part where he’s someone’s security team head, and not Colonel-Commander with the degree of autonomy he expects to deserve. He assumes that as long as he fulfills the needs of Dudley Ellering, he gets his end out of setting up stronghold territory as the local capitalist muscle, for further expansion into the northern colonies; he assumes wrong. That much autonomy is not allowed in Dudley Ellering’s Waking Reich, all who are under him are firmly under him. That this conflict of egos and ideas of autonomy hasn’t come up with is part of the reason why they’ve gotten on well enough so far. But but this is the second thing Ellering misunderstands about van Rooyen: he is a prideful man, and words will not dissuade him from a fight he wants. Especially when he feels he’s been slighted.

Heyoo, the danger is here. This guy? Big threat. If Gator is the capable henchman, this is the guy that is actually able to wrangle shooters into a proper force. This man is the lynchpin that turns Ellering's low-level soldiers from a half-dozen self-interested cliques of sub-99 militia rejects, into a cohesive set of divisions and sub-units. The fact that he's no pencil neck, but in fact a man that's been measured for his own suit of power armour, makes the muscle end of NuWay one of the least crackable parts of the operation. This is why the bandit attacks on New Laredo have been so effective.

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Freebird Broward - The Greenstar Asset; Douchebag Mutant Strain Specialist

This dude is what it’d be like if a forum post about how much better synthetic weed was at getting you high was shaped like someone who gets way too much sun and whose bleach job was equal parts mistake and misguided. He is the spirit of socks worn with sandals by someone with enough money to have someone on staff to know better for them. This is the type of man to get into the legal weed business with a guy who’s a retired cop and sees nothing wrong with that. Homeboy is the Bobby Flay of ganja, such is the reek of corporate insincerity on his mode of operation. The hink is real.

It’s just that, what he actually is, is kept very beneath the surface. Freebird is not a new arrival, he’s had years in Greenstar, more than enough time to establish himself as a member of the community and build up needed trust in his neighbors. The feeling of hink starts to fall away when they act in the interest of the community, they become just another local weirdo. And that’s when they start to stack up bodies in the basement of the community. Or start trying to spread neoliberal bullshit to the local workerbase. Basically the same thing. He’s insidious poison in an extremely dadlike bowling shirt. The knife he has cocked at the ready behind his back has a flamejob. This guy sucks, is what I mean.

As NuWay has started to destabilize New Laredo, Freebird has played his part by pretending to be the one patch of ground in the colony that isn’t shaking. The plan? Force the soft turn, by being the better choice than the alternative. Also, by not pointing out the reason he’s the supposed island of stability, is because his main ally is also the one causing the trouble. You know, the guy who’s demanding a bunch of freaky, potentially bad strains and mutant mescaline. That stable individual, you know.

I don't think I can say much more about this guy that "The Bobby Flay of Ganja" didn't.

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Tom McCafferty - The Big Country Asset; Upright Man’s Man That is Not a Cop

That mustache. Man is a cop. He gets away with it, because he wears a ten gallon hat to contain his fifteen gallon head, and ten gallons plus that stache can also just mean Texan with a capital T. But no, this man was never from the original Texas on Earth like he claims (“Texas Classic”); the man has never even flown through DFW. No, he’s in fact from the PrivCit districts of the Chicago MPC. Guess how he became a Privileged Citizen? He took the loyalty oath and got his Six Months of Training. 11 years patrolling pleb sectors, with a stellar arrest record, plus 9 bodies. Yes, this motherfucker is literally a cop.

But he does a hell of an impression of a Texan, of that upstanding, square-shouldered, stoic good guy type. A man-mountain with a male-pattern skullcap, about 50 years of solid seniority, he’s the sort of dude that people seek strength in, because he runs a tight ship. A tight orderly ship. Extremely oriented with order. Order is what he has to offer, at all cost. That’s his strategy, along with Freebird and Jackie, to show that the other way is nothing but chaos in the pursuit of some unclear, unreachable justice, an ideal that can’t logically had because somehow, it’s against the very laws of nature to do better than the brand of capitalism he endorses. Because he truly that a cell is an adequate place for people to live, just so long as the walls are neatly painted and the laundry gets done. If they want to do better, they can put in the effort, so he says; it’s not his job to keep them out, just to put them in if they slip. Fair is fair, and if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

I wish this guy was more of a caricature. I think he’s going to be one of the ones that really eats shit. 

Yeah, no, I just really hate this guy and, again, I feel I'm going to wind up making him suffer in death. I guess every Canine story needs a Caesar.

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Jackie Santana - The Magistral Asset; Much Too Friendly to Be a Union Buster

You know that person who has the aura of menace that surrounds them because they are just wayyyyyy tooooooo friendly off the very first meeting. Like, they aren’t friendly in that tentative, greeting sort of way that begins to segue to a natural sort of comfortable, no they just immediately jump to buddy-buddy in a way that’s going to set you the fuck off if you’re a more introverted type. They aren’t building a relationship with you, it’s like they’re a parasite trying to burrow into your world. If you happen to be white and they are as well, you also just get this really sinking feeling with them, too. Because deep down, you know, sooner or later, when you’re one on one, they’re gonna say something so racist it makes you want to garrote them and ditch their body in a dumpster fire. And when they do inevitably do it, and you check them for being a racist dick, they try and make it about you having a problem with their “sense of humor.”

This is a personal story. It’s also personal stories, plural. I have encountered multiple of these motherfuckers, to the point that I can only assume this is a problem faced by other white men who treat White Supremacy like a vampire to be staked.

Yeah, see, that’s the thing. Jackie was the solution to a problem that was more difficult than it should have been. You know, at least at the level of a “probably” in the minds of the NuWay staffers that had to troubleshoot it. See, Magistral Resourcing is a family collective, built literally from the ground into space by 5 families. 5 Tejano families- the Alvarez, Chavez, Saracino, Saldana and Villagómez families. NuWay, or at least, the people allowed to be close enough to important operations at NuWay? They’re all white people. Fuckin tech companies. What they do have, is friendly guy Jackie Santana, who HR will note has Iberian DNA because, of course they keep that sort of detail on file. They can’t just list it as “Heritage: Spanish”, no it’s gotta be “DNA: Iberian”. And this is why Magistral has been such a tough nut to crack, because Jackie only has this too-friendly PR guy approach to fall back on when the bottom falls out on his weaksauce codeswitching. This guy couldn’t be farther from the culture he’s trying to infiltrate, a family-operated cooperative built on trust and hard work put in by individuals working as equals in their specific roles. They picked him because he tans real dark and can speak Spanish. He is a weak link, and really the only reason why he hasn’t been caught out as being a Union Buster is because at the moment, nobody sees him as much of anything to anyone inside of Magistral, aside from someone whose adequate work is tainted by being just too friendly to be anything other than a slight creep. The man’s got no sway on the docks.

This is just the best NuWay can do here, at this juncture.

The last time this happened to me, it was the literal last work-in-an-actual-room-with-a-uniform-on job I had, and it took the motherfucker 17 shifts, two hours and about 20 minutes before he decided to let me in on this knee slapper he told to a black customer. You'll never guess why he told it. But it was okay, he had black friends, which is why I was wrong for thinking he was an asshole for making a racist joke as a white man to a black customer. To this day, I don't know how I resisted the urge to cave his stupid skull in. Tried to get him fired, but the managers 'needed him' somehow, despite him being a complete stumblefuck that, like Mr. Ross, could not read a room to save his worthless life.

Oh yeah, there's also a little bit of the shitheel marketing director that effectively killed the gamedev startup I worked for once in there. The guy who told me to make the game faster so that the gameplay trailer would be more impressive. For an edutainment game, aimed at school children. What a wretched geek that guy was.

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Lucky Kellog - The “It’s Fine, Nothing’s Gonna Happen to Me” Snitch

Some people are born middlemen, those who get it into their brain that if they can just abstract themselves out of ever having to face the consequence of any action they take, of any venture they’re involved with. These people can be involved in the greasiest ventures imaginable, yet think that because they’ve abstracted and depersonalized themselves from the heart of things (at least in their minds) they think they can just save themselves from getting caught out by being the biggest, most compliant rat. After all, they weren’t a player in the game, they weren’t even standing on the sidelines; they were off in 12th dimensional phase space, rotating at high speeds and claiming the quarterback’s aura was throwing the game, that’s how far out of the game they were.

Lucky Kellog is both an individual capable of that level of personal compartmentalization, with all the charm and social adroitness he needs to blend in everywhere. Because when all’s said and done, Lucky Kellog isn’t just shaped by a society where being a snitch is rewarded, he’s one of the dominant species in that ecosystem: the compliant nice guy. In the grand scheme of NuWay in New Laredo, all Lucky is, is a sneakernet courier between the union busters, working under the guise of the friendly neighborhood donut guy. All he’s entrusted with is the occasional package between three people, and for that, he gets his privileges. But he’s not so deep that he’s got bloodsplatter on him, not so deep that he’s actually in the room where the parcels he delivers are opened, not so deep in matters that he can’t be pulled off the ledge by singing like a bird the second he is Confirmed Busted by whatever he deems to be the local authorities. He is only the messenger. Nobody shoots the messenger. Right?

I hate people like this, namely because they think they're some 2000 IQ master intellect by having no code, no community and no sense of decency. They think that being nice is good enough, and that when things get rough, it's time to just get compliant and start trying to walk between raindrops, by giving up everyone they associated with to the enemy. That's the opposite of respectable, that's something only a fascist society based around spying on your neighbors values. I'm not going to claim that Martha Stewart was any sort of antigovernment or criminal icon, because insider trading is a bleached-white collar crime; but Martha Stewart didn't snitch a single associate. Not a one. She did her time, with her mouth shut. Tell me there isn't at least of whit of respect to be had out of that. Then compare her to Takashi SixNine, the cops' squawkiest rap game bird. Now, Lucky Kellog in no way looks anywhere near as stupid as SixNine does, but he's about to absorb the stool-pigeon reckoning he deserves. So enjoy, I guess!

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Carly Ross - Entirely Too Qualified for This Bullshit; Largo’s Not-Worthless Sister

The character of Carly Ross is one that’s nuanced, but also one that can be relatively easily explained in a quick sentence: Carly Ross is the practiced antithesis of her older brother Largo. Her entire life, she’s been shaped by the favor her parents placed on her older brother, due both to the Consortial Arissiyan cultural influence placed on terran society to favor the eldest child, both because frankly, her parents wanted sons, not daughters. Considering the utter void of ability her brother is, and his demonstrated lifetime history of failing upward like his ass generates antigravity, Carly is functionally powered by a fusion heart of spite to achieve at all cost.

What has it bought her? A position as a mid-level mover in a crooked Freeland collective that was made for her with the snap of the fingers of her big brother. She lives with this every minute of every day of her life, and it’s made her every bit as sharp as you’re probably assuming. Thing is, it’s not even unwarranted, because you try to not feel sanded down by the unwinnable situation of “constantly upstaged somehow by the worst person in your entire world.” This is the state of crisis she’s in at the current moment- a woman who is splitting time between coming apart at the seams because of the constant humiliation and stress of her work, and finding a strange serenity that, if she wanted to, she could just put on her casual clothes, dye her hair, wander off down the road and, I don’t know, start working in an orchard or something.

That’d be really nice, after all this, she’s been made to do. Maybe after she fucks over her brother once and for all…

So yeah, out of all this list? She probably the only one I can confirm will not die, because at the end of the day? She’s one that actually doesn’t deserve it, has good reason to flip, and will do so at the first clean opportunity, and, this is very important: she will not fuck up her part, because she’s not the fuckup in the family.

Sometimes, you don't need to find a crack in the defenses. Sometimes, you don't need to hit the inner circle. Sometimes, you just need to find out that the senior watchman, the one with the masterkey? They hate their job and wish they could watch it burn down from the outside.

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And lastly, we're going to do a bit of writing about New Laredo, the culture and the lay of the land. Then? We're ready, I think. So stay tuned.

-G