A Quick Death in Texas Prewriting: Loadout Technical Writing

NOW WE LEARN WHAT EVERYONE HAS IN THEIR POCKETS

Hi, welcome back to prewriting. Today, well, I think I don't have to use the italic text here, because I was kinda being really explanatory as to the purpose of what I was doing with this. I was rubber ducking bigtime, especially with this preamble here. Anyway, as usual, enjoy!

Fuck It, Let’s Do Loadouts

Yep, loadouts. This might not be a game, but it’s important to know what these characters are carrying when it’s gametime in their world. Consistency is key when you write speculative fiction, because if you don’t define what it is your characters carry and what it’s all capable of, you run into the frustrating problem of characters that are godmoding off tech/magic/magic tech with a primary defining characteristic is “it can just do what’s needed.”

Characters in Section 99 don’t carry tricorders, and I don’t say that as a means to disparage Star Trek in that distinctly awful NUUHHHH, not your GRANDAD’s science fiction, UHHHHHHNGH sorta way. Tricorders are a more utopian piece of technology than people in the Terran Timeline have, just like how compression-pulse phaser rifles (hell yes I know the tactical breakdown of Trek weapons, why wouldn’t I?) are a more advanced form of personal weapon than you’re likely to see in the hands of a 99er. This doesn’t mean Freelanders are playing in the dirt with rocks and sticks, like the Consortium likes to say. It’s anything but, in actuality. The tech is made to be recognizable with its equivalent in our timeline, but advanced by decades of intermingling with elevating elements. As a result, a lot of the guns still shoot bullets, but they’re very fancy bullets, but the rest of them? Directed energy. Sure, you mostly can’t dial it up or down between fancy stun or kill settings (at best, they let you do less dead/more dead/EXPLOSION!) but, still, it’s directed energy. People wear body armour vests still, but those vests can also mount reactive potential arrays, which can effectively turn glancing hits to places not protected by the armour from painful scratches and tears, to shallow bruises- this is what shields look like inside of Section 99. 99ers don’t have tricorders, but they do have smartphones, with mods and paired gadgets, because in this setting, it’s not utopian tech, it’s advanced and oftentimes specifically working class tech.

The other reason I’m doing this? So I can have a good idea of how feasible it is for these folks to comfortably stay in the fight, so I know when to start ratcheting up tension over lost ammo. The only thing more annoying than a hero in a shooty story that doesn’t worry about their ammo count, is a hero that doesn’t even need to reload.

(Obviously, if they’re on the back foot, folks aren’t walking around with all this stuff. But when it comes time to kick in the doors and drop the roof on people, this is what they roll out the back of the truck with.)

Van

• Van’s loadout suits his characterization as a close-in brawler, an individual who will end anyone or thing he can get inside of his 15 meter killzone. The last time we saw him get tactical, he went in lighter than he should have and not only wound up facing tactical problems he had to improvise solutions to- when you violate the NAP, you might as well violate the fuck out of it, am I right? -he also ran out of ammo. Van isn’t a dude who puts a lot of forethought into his plans as we’ve seen at this point, but he learns from his worst mistakes and doesn’t simply rely on ‘haha, bionic bits, don’t give a shit’ like a more arrogant cyborg might. 
• He’s keeping his armour, too- it did its job, so he just recycled it into a fresh suit, as it was a little beat to hell after everything that happened on Insomnia. Lastly, Van came to the sad realization that he’s not going to have an easily throwable ancap douchebag to use as a distraction device, a pair of stun grenades in a grenadier’s pouch on his carry rig will nicely fill that need. Anything else he needs is something he can handle via his own bionic augmentations- doors he can’t smash in have a way of announcing themselves, while the Canine copro and the systems parented beneath it are themselves a cutting edge security subversion suite in addition to being a combat assist suite. All of this means that Canine is an utter nightmare of a close range combatant, an individual who can point shoot a 9+1 capacity shotgun in a disruptive environment and connect every shell with hostile anatomy, while maintaining the threat that if anyone gets within his reach, he can either crumple their skull like a Solo cup, or chokeslam an idiot-shaped crater into the floor.

Anchor

• Anchor is an individual who came prepared for the sort of war that brings a lasting peace, one way or another. He’s already seen the worst day of his life so far, and it’s still really raw in his memory, but he’s also got the blessing and curse of having emotions in a logical machine-mind. This means for as angry and aghast he is at the line of graves where his social circle used to be, he’s still operating with a highly cold and preparatory logic- the paradox of the empathic psychopath, sharpening his knife in front of a list of enemies, who signed their death warrant for hurting others, and making him miserable as a result. They caught Anchor the Militiaman in their sights, and made the mistake of making him a sole survivor instead of hitting their shot; now, they get Anchor the Heavy, who is prepared for any sort of battlezone bullshit they might pull. 
• This starts with his combat suit, which onto his already formidably durable synthetic frame adds an extra 45 kilograms of dedicated alloy exo-armour plating and ablative standoffs to the core, shoulders, upper arms, pelvis, and thighs, mounted on an integral carry frame that is itself wrapped in a thermal-treated kevlex jumpsuit. It integrates a Zeinan Logic Solatrix-90 shield array, capable of polarizing Anchor’s armour with enough Reactive Potential Energy (RPE) to reduce a full magazine of AK bullets to airgun pellets before it runs out of juice. This is the gimmick of personal shields in Section 99- imagine a static field of potential energy that you can charge a surface or even another sort of energy field with, that when impinged upon by a sufficiently high input of incoming kinetic energy, it reacts like explosive tank armour, “pushing backwards” against the kinetic incursion as hard as the field’s emitter arrays can manage, with the current amount of power left in their battery. All in all: Small caliber? Not hurting him. Secondary projectiles? Might as well be coarse language. Close combat? Try offending him with bad breath instead. The last detail of Anchor’s armour is a grim one, and that’s that he wears his old, metal “death mask” face- like Caesar in A Good Man had a death mask face -as sort of a snap-in-place protective helmet a la The Guyver, protecting his biopolymer “baby face”. Recycling disused anatomy is a thing cogitoi engage in without a second thought, and the sheer fact that he wears his old skull as a secondary, protective skull? Creeps a lot of people out. 
• His choice in primary weapon says everything about his headspace- it’s still a militia weapon, a Marine’s weapon, but it’s big, angry and it has enough ammo for everyone. It’s a mean automatic rifle with a booming report and a disregard for personal armour systems, while he’s all armoured up to take as many hits as possible. In other words, this man is looking to turn a battlefield into his own personal therapy session. One specifically about the unique intersection of his survivor’s guilt and his emergent superiority complex based around being a literal war machine in a world of flesh and bone. The Pipecleaner, his custom Fenix combiarm prosthetic, is mounted in place of his standard left arm (he stores that wrapped up in a towel in his foot locker when he’s not using it, no shit), giving him a distinctly lopsided outline when he’s geared up. This is fine though, because through its employment, he can turn about 15 meters of enclosed corridor into 15 meters of Surface of The Sun for a few seconds at a time, which is a decidedly nasty CQB surprise. As further backup, because using such a weapon as a sidearm is like saying your standalone grenade launcher is your sidearm, he carries the Bronson P475 heavy kinetic pistol, an automag chambered in 12mm MAX, a round more typically found in stopping pistols than combat pistols. You can generally trust it to put down an alien dinosaur inside of 15 meters, depending on the type and hunger-level of said alien dinosaur. Just as icing on the cake, he keeps a cogitoi-forged VECT0R commando knife at hand, to ice close-in cakes with. He finds the mathematically sound geometry of the blade pleasing, as well as the look of distress on the faces of biologicals when he spots them considering what those mathematically sound angles might do to their squishy bits. 
• He keeps a brace of grenades on hand, nothing exotic, just functional- one helping of bang-fwoosh, two helpings of thump-krack-aughhh-my-stupid-biological-meatbits. The man’s a cogitoi, and he falls into the 82% of cogitoi to whom baseball is an art, science and sport all at once, so of course he can put those grenades exactly where they need to go, out to a distance you’d typically expect from an outfielder infielding a ball. Lastly, Anchor is a shock trooper that’s armoured for direct combat, but he doesn’t have a death wish. To that extent, he keeps a synthetic aid kit on his rig, both to patch up damage a standard IFAK might not cover for his nonbiological anatomy, and patch up his combat suit should it suffer sufficiently compromising damage. He also keeps an emergency shield charger directly plugged to his array, linked to his internal systems to do a full recharge dump on his go. The second his shield goes flat, he can spend it and keep the glass-skin going for a second round of “oh jesus god he won’t die, why won’t he die.” He’s sort of like if the T-800 was plucky and had moments of emotional vulnerability, this Anchor. 

Rooster

• Rooster is a frontier guerilla, whose priorities are based around her ability to move quickly and at low profile, so she can more easily disappear into surroundings she knows better than her enemies, where she has the advantage. Her loadout is the polar opposite of Anchor, a highly motivated wall of guns, ammo and armour, which is to say that it’s the packload of an operator who is perhaps audacious in her own ability to do a lot with a little. 
• Rooster is the sort of person that needs to be convinced about body armour, because she’s that confident in her own combat survivability and ability to simply knock bullets clear of her with a dismissive sneer, from a True Texan. But denim and flannel is not ballistic armour, even in the Terran Timeline, and so at the urging of Big Razz, she adopts a level 3 open country scout suit, the Sitting Bull pattern. Because it’s only fitting that a science fiction take on Annie Oakley would have Chief Sitting Bull watching her back. This way, she’s at least covered from jerks trying to take potshots at her with intermediary-class rifles at her typical engagement range- level 3 on the Freelander armourer’s classification scale can stop a 6.4x40mm Colonial Standard Intermediary rifle round even in close. It may only stop one, but that’s something. 
• Rooster’s weapon of choice is her Ranger repeater, the “Rooster Strut” custom pattern she’s built for herself over the years. Its optic is a Kitzaroh Steppe Scout-II 1.2-4x variable zoom digital holosight, a well-liked and trusted Rhidling commando combat optic. Its zoom distance can be toggled with a haptic switch she’s mounted on the upper receiver above the triggerguard, allowing her to quickly swap between her “I need my field of vision open and ready” mode and her “okay, but show me that fucker in particular, way over there” mode. She’s modified the loading ramp for the internal magazine, swapping out the stock bare-metal polished ramp for one coated in lowfric polymer, effectively putting an end to any hitches or resistance when slotting in a new en bloc clip, which can be an issue with base-model Rangers- reloading is like sliding a wine goblet over a glass tabletop, then levering the bolt shut. Speaking of, the lever on the Strut has also been modified, remaining relatively stock towards the front and rear, but having been opened up at the center into more of an eye shape. This gives her fire control hand two points of positive purchase at either extreme of the lever in order for her to cycle the weapon in a typical way, but she’s also capable of flipcocking the rifle. You know, without breaking her wrist. Yeah, fun fact, that’s what can happen if you try that without a lever you haven’t customized. She claims having the ability to do this gives her an advantage, something about making the gun more versatile. While folks say this additional versatility comes in the form of “you can use it at a Western shooting show,” most will nod and admit that it probably helps out when you want to cycle the rifle when you’re shooting it from an odd position. Lastly, she mounts an In2It Range Hawk compact linear rangefinder, parented under her optic. Activated by a haptic switch in the forend of her rifle, it will range whatever is downbore of her weapon with an ultra low signature beam, out to a range of 2 kilometers, then send that data directly to her optic. Contrary to what others believe, that’s the only aim assist she uses in her optic- that’s all, the rest is talent and practice. With this in mind, consider her choice in a sidearm, a completely stock (well, except for a lanyard around the lanyard ring, but that doesn’t count) Vaquero Super-6 revolver. Nothing but six shots that are equal parts high powered and accurate, out of a barrel or swing-out cylinder built for two things: to sink heat and stay straight while doing it. She might not be able to pull the same impossible trajectories and ranges with it as with the Rooster Strut, but she can drop targets with a similar turkey-shoot casualness while point shooting with it in her reaction hand, while holding the Strut in her fire control hand. For close work, she keeps a pattern-welded Damascus steel Bowie knife in a scabbard on the back of her belt, about 20% past the typical fuck-off big size you expect from a Bowie. This is literal compensation, as she’s not quite where she’d like to be at as a knife fighter. But that’s okay, because her Padre/Life Coach taught her that “God didn’t create us to be all things at once, because that would deprive us of the gift of neighbors to share life with.” Her Padre is surprisingly chill about a lot of stuff, like learning knife fighting. 
• The last element in her pack is for explosive mischief-making. She has standard smoke grenades for both masking and signalling, but the real centerpiece of her ordnance pouch is the Double Horseshoe “Texas Firecracker” multi-deployment explosive devices. Once used as chained explosive charges in shaping the ranch grounds, their current pattern developed during the, uh, tensions now both allows them to be planted as small demolishing charges (or booby traps), or set to detonate on a time delay, like a more typical grenade. There is absolutely going to be a scene in which cowgirl here just upends her satchel on some deserving shitheels, who to no avail try pitch her rain of definitely not Firecrackers back up to her, before she casually presses the DET. ALL option on the conveniently-linked phone app.

Spooky 

• What Spooky’s loadout is an example of is how a specialist combatant would outfit themselves to meet a head-on fight. What even does that gibberish mean? Consider: Spooky’s most powerful weapon is between her ears, and not in that inspirational sense of “hey, you’re really good and creative.” No, in the sense of “she can pull a few molecules’ worth of reality within the airframe of a helo out of alignment with spacetime, then let it snap back into place like a rubber band, unleashing a highly localized and sundering spatial/temporal shockwave.” Which is more tangible firepower, rather than positive emotional firepower. The ability to perform this feat is directly impacted by their ability to assume a loosely focused posture, one conducive to the engaged meditative state a quantum needs to mentally maintain in order to hold their displacement field in its active phase. What did THAT quantity of gibberish mean? It means quantums are functionally walking a mental tightrope when they attempt to focus and direct their displacement fields in big, significant ways, so anything they can get out of their way, that they don’t need to think about, don’t need to feel hanging on their person, don’t need to get tired out by? Get rid of it. Spooky is not a heavy gunner that needs to carry a big weapon and lots of ammo, they are the heavy gun, and heavy guns need room to operate. 
• This is why she has chosen something that’s functional, but slimline and low footprint.  Her choice in armour is of the Nythene-series of heat sinking shield carriers, a device that’s as much designed to be the mounting system for a shield array as it is body armour vest. While being relatively non restricting and unencumbered, it provides a good deal of protection for her against the enhanced threat of thermal damage she faces as an arissiyan- arissiyans heal very quickly, due to an energetic cellular structure, one that’s vulnerable to heat-based weapons that cause their tissues to very easily catch fire or even sublimate. The shield has a way of taking the brunt out of a laser pulse, or even a plasma bullet. It’s maybe not the best way, but it’s a way. Her choice of weaponry is similarly pragmatic, light, but not too light- the Valiant is a shoulder-fired combat laser that will make a close quarters combatant wish they were a noncombatant at home and in bed, with a withering cyclic rate and no appreciable recoil. The Rebel remains one of the most trusted heavy pistols in the Freelands, for the It Just Works simplicity of it all. The trigger drop will turn functionally any fascist arissiyan into an abruptly terminated scream from inside an explosion of bloody ash, as long as the shot connects with their unarmoured anatomy. Which is basically an antifa magic wand when you think about it. Her close weapon? It’s a zap stick, that telescopes into a small pouch and can be flicked into the face of someone on draw to blind them with a broken nose. It bonks, it shocks, it makes people stand still while you manipulate the fabric of reality to fuck up their entire bodily composition. Again, pragmatism. These are small, light weapons and armour, backed up by a decent helping of ammunition that’ll keep her in the shooting fight, in between bursts of her doing her own thing. Her own, really powerful thing. 
• Which leads into the actual centerpiece of her loadout, the Erishanon Othereye q-amp, an ornate fusion of wearable art and neural tech that keeps her hair pinned neatly back with pretty silver combs, those same combs containing the conductors that parent the device into her sympathetic nervous system. Crafted with care by the quantum psychoamplification specialists and therapists at Erishanon Neural Dynamics, the Othereye was designed specifically to assist quantums who suffer issues with anxiety, particularly those with trauma related to the use of their symptomatic abilities. The elevated state it promotes in the mind can be described as a highly controllable state of dissociation, where the user is fully themselves, save for missing inhibitions that may otherwise be enforced by excessive or irrational worry, ritualized behaviors, emotional distress, psychosomatic discomfort, or any of the myriad other, more obscure upsets quantums in Spooky’s symptom group can experience when engaged with their abilities. The name comes from the feeling of altered perception reported by those that can properly use the device, of a feeling of the user’s actual physical eyes becoming passive, asleep, possibly even vestigial, while seeing through a better, clearer, unblinking eye that ‘sees’ from between the hemispheres of the brain. Besides being a very stylish (if bulky) piece of hair jewelery, the Othereye positively juices Spooky’s already highly lively quantum symptomatic abilities, turning someone that can effectively localize a shotgun blast inside of a few meters, into someone that can shoot their brain like a tank cannon over significantly longer distances. Spooky has been using this amp for functionally all her adult life, and its therapeutic properties have greatly opened up the depths of her abilities, due to its highly functional relief of her anxiety. Like all quantums, Spooky can more or less send and receive mental ‘radio messages’ via spacetime frequency bridge- this is how Canine was getting talked to at the end of A Good Man, and it’s kinda unpleasant? But it works very well. She can do hers out to around 150 meters, with is pretty impressive among her combat-trained peers, definitely above average. She is also capable of manifesting a number of functional spacetime anomalies via her overt kinetic manipulation, through this amp. She can actively raise sustained barriers of ‘phantom density,’ creating regions of space that are significantly harder and heavier than their natural surroundings. She can’t create the typical all-resisting force fields with this, but she can stimulate molecular cohesion in materials under stress, or even make bulwarks of supercondensed atmosphere that can effectively block small arms fire. She can also extend her displacement field over physical surfaces, which allows her to alter their friction coefficient- she can grease floors with her mind, or just decide “that door doesn’t open, because it’s gotta slide and I don’t like that.” 
• Assisting her mental weapon, are some doses of the stim Lucid. Stims are nano-memetic non-narcotics that folks use as temporary performance enhancers. Lucid is a Freelander-brew, used by folks for everything as an abortant for shock and panic attacks, to practical or recreational relaxation. Quantums use it because it has a distinctive way of taking the edge off of the stresses of using their abilities- picture something like an aspirin that you can jam in your head like it’s a new magazine, and suddenly, no headache. She also keeps a literal handful of mini-stun grenades on hand, just for extra versatility- way she sees it, sometimes she only needs a little, and if she needs a lot, she can just throw all three at once in a scatter.

That's all for now, hope you enjoy, and more to come, hopefully this week!

-G