NationStates Jolt Archive

Hiroshi Matsu- perhaps better known as the White Fox, the name under which he worked- hadn’t been home in years. He had never married, which was a blessing, at least he was only missing a place, not a person or people. Still, for the open plains of his youth, as opposed to this sweltering city.

If his calculations were correct, and he had checked them many times, this last job should be enough to purchase a small piece of land in the plains, with enough left over to allow him to purchase the necessary equipment to shed his Ronin status, and once again become one of the Shadowed Army, the unofficially employed mercenary army in Kolvokia in which he had once served.

He glanced at the park bench next to him, where this last job was shackled. He was taking no chances, not when he was this close. What exactly the man had done to earn the reward on his head was none of Matsu’s concern. All that was his concern was catching the bus, with the man still in tow, delivering him to the police station, and collecting that selfsame award.

Still, no need to be rude. As he drew a packet of cigarettes from inside his large coat, he took two out, and offered one to the man.

Humza Achmad shook his head at the proffered cigarette, he despised the odor and the visual of smoke curling upwards to the sky after floating out of the mouth.

"No, thank you. Why have you taken me." Humza said in the tone of a statement rather than a inquiry.

Hiroshi shrugged. The man's choice. Of course, had he taken one, he might have been surprised. The cigarattes were Kolvokian made, the finest in the world, in White Fox's opinion. Pure tabacco wasn't exactly health food, but it beat the chemicals a lot of nations pumped into them to hook the users.

He took a long drag, savoring the sweet smoke before he spoke again. "You could probably answer that better than me. All I know is this- there's a price on your head, the government gave me the goahead, and the advance check cleared. Outside of that... well I don't like to learn the details. Makes it more difficult to retain a professional detachment from the job."

Humza nodded. He had a slight idea on why he may have been captured.

For years, Humza lead the protests for Buristani autonomy from Kolvokia, however, his calls were never answered. He critized the Kolvokian government ceaselessly on his talk radio show, on which he voiced his support for the Buristani Freedom Conference, a meeting of radical members of the Buristani community, hell-bent upon establishing a Buristani state, however, he had dissented from them on how to go about achieving this.

The majority of the members of the BFC advicated an agressive, violent war of independence against the Kolvokians a war that they hoped would leave Buristan with not only their traditional lands, but also the surrounding lands, filled with Kolvokian-speaking Muslims, who they believed would flock to the new Republic.

But Humza was different.


Twenty Years Ago

The young Humza sweated profusely. In his palms, the steel of the rifle became slippery, and he held it even tighter, causing him yet to sweat even more, for in front of him, a Kolovian miltary police officer stood at attention, gaurding a grocery store, ready to protect it from any sort of attack by the Buristani resistance resurging in the area for the past three months. The Invasion of the neighbor went smoothly, however, the Occupation, not. On the streets of Abdullai, Buristani partisans engaged in almost constant firefights with the Kolovian occupiers, the sounds of gunfire and lovemaking filled the tense air day and night. So when a leader of the Army of Sunni Jihad came to the Achmad doorstep, Humza ran out the door to join the fight before his parents or brother could stop him. Humza had since been in a constant rage, fueled by combinations of Marijuana, Heroin and Brown-Brown, and was ready to kill anything in his path. So he thought. But as he stood their, taking aim at the face of the young soldier, pulling the trigger, and watching his features turn to red pain, he cried the weep of a baby, for he looked in the eyes of the man on the ground, only to see no one but his brother, laying on the ground looking up at him, his eyes filled with terror and sadness, weeping not for himself, but for his assasin, an assasin who could not face him, rather, ran from his kin, to the life of a street urchin.

bump

OOC: Sorry.

IC: The man was obviously taking a trip down memory lane, and by all indications, it wasn't an especially pretty road. That was a shame. The opportunity of roads to be asthetically pleasing was all too often ignored. Granted it was normally the surroundings of the road more than the road itself. He had noticed a somewhat alarming tendency of his mind to wander since that rather nasty business with the supersoldiers.

Of course, that brought to mind the fact that this man hardly held a monopoly on unpleasant memories. Still, no need to drag the man through his own personal past tense hells. He grinned crookedly.

"Cheer up. Kolvokian prisons may not be super happy fun parks, but you'll have a roof over your head, three square meals a day, and a chance to work off your debt to society."

"A debt I do not owe, a debt that this society," Humza said with disgust in his tone, "owes to me, as well as my people."

bump

OOC: Sorry. Vacation.

IC: Hiroshi laughed, a sound filled with equal parts bitterness and amusement. "You, my legally challenged companion, are preaching to the metaphorical choir. But ours not to reason why eh?" He lets the next bastardized line of the poem, long a favorite in Kolvokia, hang unspoken. Ours but to do and die. Except when you don't. Because sometimes you won't. He laughs out loud again, this time fully in amusement. To pile Dr. Seus upon such a solemn thought.

The mark probably thinks he's crazy, but he doesn't really care. Always good to be considered a little crazy. Fear is an intricate part of what he does. Besides, what does he care what this man thinks of him? This man who's forcing him, silently screaming and motionlessly kicking through his worst memory? Making him doubt the only drive he has left?