2024-01-03: A Step Forward

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  • Cutscene: A Step Forward
  • Cast: Cascade Vermilion
  • Where: Various
  • Date: 2024-01-03 (and others)
  • Summary: Cascade steps into a new life.


DECEMBER 14

"I would like to rent your transport shuttle," Cascade Vermilion said.

Cascade was in a Vulture camp, near the X Point. She had simply walked in, wrapped in a black cloak with red lining, and started asking questions. Those questions had brought her to one Debina Lone, a dark-skinned woman with one eye - a Vulture who made her living picking through the X Point ruins. Cascade had picked her because she had fallen on hard times, as her current dig - and the two before that - had had no luck. Which means her transport was sitting idle, and she was broke, and therefore probably desperate.

"And why should I let you?" Debina was not happy to be bothered, here, in what passed for an office - a rented room in the Wild West-like Vulture camp where she planned digs with her gang. "We use that shuttle for - "

Cascade's hand slipped out of her cloak. With a *thunk*, she let a gold bar land heavily on the battered desk. Debina's eye immediately locked onto it like it was magnetically attracted. It was not, as these things go, a large gold bar. It was a mere kilogram; the size of a phone. But it was extremely eye-catching.

"I would like to rent your transport shuttle," Cascade repeated.

A few moments later: "I have a location I would like to retrieve some items from. This is a deposit; I will also hire your crew. In exchange, when I have finished taking specific items I want, you may salvage the rest of it."

"...How do I know you're good for it? Or that you won't take everything?"

Cascade just looked at her for a few long moments. "I can't take everything myself," Cascade says. "What I want consists of one mobile unit, which is already biometrically locked to me," which was technically a lie but close enough given how it was actually locked, "and several items that are of little use to anyone else. There should be a large number of parts there that I don't have any need for."

"And as for me being good for it..." A second one-kilogram bar joined the first. "There. A down payment. But if you vanish with the money, I will find you." Cascade's hair gleamed, just for a moment - and then snapped forward, carving both the bars precisely in half with a single curved swipe. She pushed one of the half-bars toward the now wide-eyed Debina afterwards.

"Do we have a deal?"


DECEMBER 23

The actual process had gone well.

Cascade had known of a location in Mongolia. It was used by the Iron Masks, mostly, but with the death of Dr. Hell and his lieutenants, they'd abandoned it. Debina had sworn when she'd seen it, and gotten really creative with the swearing when she saw unfinished kikaiju parts inside. Cascade didn't care about those. She doubted Debina was skilled enough to actually finish any of them, which means they'd be disassembled and sold for parts or raw materials, which wasn't anything that hadn't been salvaged many times over the last decades. There weren't even that many here. BioNet offered more on a regular basis.

But what was here was supplies for Cascade. She'd taken the entire set of equipment for an infiltration she'd never had to do, which had been the largest part of the transport, but just as important to her is that she'd taken a chemical printer that could make her synthetic skin; while she wouldn't be able to do complete repairs on herself, she could at least make sure she looked human. There had been some other things, too, which she'd packed away, leaving the kikaiju and the actual structure to the Vultures.

On her way back to the shuttle, though, the sight of something completely unexpected made her freeze.

It was a helmet.

An enormous helmet, granted; it would be a bit big for even a Mobile Suit. But it was significant because it was an item she had collected herself; a Christmas gift for Baron Ashura. It was historically important, probably, from an archaeological dig. But to her, it meant the first time she had done something just because she wanted to. She'd done it to be praised, perhaps even loved, and though Baron Ashura had never told her that... they'd kept the helmet, rather than throw it away or pass it up to Dr. Hell. Her eyes watered for no reason she could put a name to, and Cascade stared at the helmet for about two minutes, barely moving, before she blinked rapidly and then signaled for Debina.

Once she'd pulled Debina away from leading one of the teams stripping the facility, Cascade spoke. "That," she said, pointing at the helmet. "I am adding that to my portion."

"We had a deal," Debina said. "Mobile unit parts, except for that complete machine you took, are mine."

"Everything else is still yours. But that has significance to me and I didn't expect it to be here. I am taking it."

Debina had, by this point, figured out what Cascade was. She had figured 'Gamia' from the cutting hair and from exactly what facility she'd been brought to, though Cascade had never admitted it. (Neither had she given Debina her 'Cascade' name, of course. Keep the identities separate.) Which means, ultimately, she was a little too afraid of Cascade to object more than a little. "...Fine. But don't think you can keep adding everything else. My men won't stand for it. I don't even know what you're going to use it for; it won't fit on your machine."

It wouldn't - even Androktasia's head was the wrong shape for it - and Cascade didn't know what she was going to do with it either, but she simply said, "You don't need to."


JANUARY 1

Cascade had almost entirely broken with her past. Baron Ashura, her parent, was dead; killed by her own actions, at least in part. Dr. Hell, who'd created her - also dead, also partially because of her.

She did not regret having done either, especially Dr. Hell. She had put aside thinking about it while she had a plan and a project, something to spend her time and attention doing, but now she'd retrieved what she wanted from the facility and had left Debina to her salvaging. Which means she was alone with her thoughts.

If she was being honest, she'd spent most of the time brooding. It was weeks later and she still hadn't processed everything about Goragon. Not the actual events - those were complicated, but concrete, she could handle those. But what she felt about it; that was hard.

Cascade had tried to pick apart her emotions around the event and largely failed. She'd tried to just move on, but she'd failed at that, too; it kept coming back to her. What Baron Ashura had said to her: live on, if only for spite. LiSA's... death, or vanishing. Things Koji and Sayaka had said to her, in their meetings. The people in the strange worlds of possibility, and their choice of love over all - and what she, Cascade, had said about it. She couldn't get it out of her head. She didn't know if she'd ever work her way through it. Maybe this kind of confusion and uncertainty was something everybody felt.

But she couldn't brood forever. There was one thing that she still had to do, and today she was doing it.

Cascade, cloak wrapped around her, looked down from where she perched on the side of a craggy mountain. Winter wind whipped at her cloak and her hair, but she barely seemed to feel it.

It had taken even her time to get all the way out here; you couldn't land a transport plane, there was nowhere to land. She'd done it in a helicopter, with Androktasia set to automatically follow. After she'd paid Debina, she'd only had a couple gold bars left; she wasn't used to having to actually count her money. She'd turned them into cash and spent some of it to 'borrow' the helicopter, this time from a smuggler... and she'd found and cut out the tracking system built into the transponder, so that he wouldn't know where she'd gone. From here, she could just barely see where she'd put Androktasia, inside a massive cave entrance - and one that hadn't been there before Androktasia dug it; it was little more than a pit into the mountain.

Androktasia, whose very name meant 'slaughter'. Maybe once it had felt like her, but Cascade had been more and more uncomfortable with it as she moved further and further away from being the obedient killing machine Dr. Hell had wanted her to be. Every time she sat in it, she thought of NX-1, and how she would act.

It felt like a chain, pulling her back to the way she used to be.

But she couldn't bring herself to destroy it. It was, in its own way, a work of art, and not just in the ways of killing. This had been the compromise; hiding it away in a place nobody lived, where nobody was going to come across it. There were no battles here that would lead to salvage teams. It was just... empty.

Cascade took a breath, let it out in a cloud in front of her, and gave Androktasia its remote command. With a pulse of gravitational energy, Androktasia blasted outward - and then pulled inward, collapsing the entrance to the cave and dragging rocks on top of it. Snow from the mountain, and more rocks, tumbled down, completely obscuring it. Once it snowed a few more times, you wouldn't be able to see it at all, and there was snow predicted overnight. Cascade fixed the image in her mind, and then turned away.

"Goodbye," she said to the open air, as she turned to walk into her new life.