The Most Dangerous Gamer, part 2: The Adventures of Human Gina

Jajaqin stared. He may have squealed a scream of alarm, he couldn't be sure.

The human bared its teeth at him, swooping down from the branch and, planting a foot on his thorax, wrenched his hunting implement out of his grip in one swift tug. Dancing about him like a qinqabet, it snatched his knife out of his belt too. It squeaked something at him, so high pitched it almost hurt his ears.

His translator laughed, "I got your gun!" How did the damned gadget impart the amused tone?

Jajaqin stared as Human Gina leapt gracefully back into the tree. Graceful, not like a dancer or a waterfall, but graceful like the flight of that same qinqabet, a hungry blade slicing through the air, strong and sure.

The creature was talking to him. In his life's experience as a professional hunter, that was a new one. His translator made sense of its ear-tingling chirps. "What's your name, friend?"

"I am called..." he rattled off his name, then remembered how the creature had abbreviated its own designation. "...but just 'Jajaqin' is fine."

Human Gina looked around herself. Her body conformation was terrible, she seemed to have a front and a back and if that was indeed the case, was entirely blind to her rear. Right: rocky world. His own species had spent the first half of its evolution floating. Danger might come from anywhere, and his own shape and sense organ arrangement reflected that.

And she had surprised him anyway.

"So, Jajaqin. Are you wearing cameras or are they trailing you?"

"Wearing."

"Can you turn them off?"

"Briefly. There is a privacy interrupt available, but it is temporary and turns itself back on, if I don't turn it on myself." Human Gina turned around again, scanning the distance and apparently satisfied that no danger lurked.

"How are you enjoying the hunt so far?"

Wretched creature. "Not much." He peeked at his locator and noted that, indeed, no other hunter was close. They were alone.

"I have you and your companions at a disadvantage, you know. Because of how our respective species evolved, I'm far denser than any of you, generally stronger. I'm also faster on land than any of you."

"What is your point?"

"My point is that in a contest of strength and personal combat, I have evolved advantages that are extremely difficult for any person native to this system to beat."

"You are boasting."

"Nah. It's a fact. Not trying to be rude. I mean, a couple of people I have met in the system are actually from one of the Jovians, the big gas giant planets."

"You met a," and he heard the human's translator make a sound he couldn't describe.

"Yes, that's them. Wonderful people. Absolutely astounding singers. But if I were to try to visit them in their home, I'd just die. It wouldn't even take long. I would be at the disadvantage there."

"Again: what is your point?"

"I wanted to really challenge myself. The blob guy I fought a while ago, Algo - he was a serious challenge, at least at first. But one-on-one contests just aren't getting it done, so I decided to put myself out in front of a hunt."

"Why?"

"The payday is just too good, Jajaqin." She grinned at him again, a tiny mouth full of even tinier teeth. How did these creatures get enough food to stay alive? "I mean, you're not doing this for free, either. Are you?"

"I could have. I am a popular contestant in the hunts. I would be rewarded regardless. But no, I put up money for the privilege of hunting you."

Human Gina made an expression he hadn't seen before. Its eyes got wide and the corners of its little mouth turned down. "Really? I'm flattered!" She turned around again, scanning the distance. Jajaqin stole another peek at his locator. Still alone. "May I make a suggestion?"

He was perplexed and let it show, turning a deep magenta in his extremities. "I'm listening."

"Gang up on me."

"Excuse me?"

"Turn off your camera for a moment."

Wordlessly, he did so.

"How much time do we have when you do that?"

Jajaqin told her, pausing while her translator provided converted units.

"About five minutes. Plenty of time. Okay, listen: you hunters have spread out so that each of you might have a chance at taking me down on your own, right?"

"Of course. The purse is far larger for an individual than for a team."

"What is the purse for bringing back nothing?"

"Not much. I will make a decent profit, but only a fraction of what a successful hunt yields."

"Less than being a member of a successful team?"

"Much, much less, yes."

"So gang up on me. If you don't gang up on me, I'm going to use my natural advantages against each of you hunters, one at a time, and nobody is going to have any fun."

"You don't believe one of us can take you?"

"Do you remember the first words I said to you?"

Jajaqin seethed, embarrassed. "I do."

"I got your gun. I will get all your guns, I will get all your knives, I will throw all of your hunting animals into the trees. One. By. One. If you each come at me independently, I will take each of you out, nobody wins a big purse, the viewers get disgusted and nobody has any fun."

"Fun?"

"Nobody's in this to try to actually eat me, are they? Nonlethal weapons, right? I volunteered for this for the challenge, for the contest! So come get me! All of you!"

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because this hunt is a game! And what's the point of playing if I can't lose? What's the point of playing if you can't win? Change up your strategy, all of you, because one-on-one, you won't get me."

Jajaqin considered. "Okay. That makes sense."

"Good." She looked around again. Clearly humans had evolved with their blind spots; Gina's regular check of her surroundings was natural and thorough. "You want your gun back?"

Jajaqin's camera beeped, warning him that whatever privacy he had needed was about to come to an end. "Yes."

Human Gina plucked his hunting implement up from the branch and tossed it high in the air. He followed its arc and moved to be under it, catching it deftly with his dorsal arm. But by the time he had clicked the safety off, the human had already leapt from the branch and was receding into the distance, far too fast for him to follow.

The Most Dangerous Gamer part 1: The Adventures of Human Gina

 Jajaqin looked around. The forest was absolutely silent.

The hunting party was spread out, keeping in touch by translators and locators so they weren't likely to fire on each other, but still. A hunt was always a risk. The hunting implements deployed today were supposed to be nonlethal, but hunting is hunting. People get hurt. It happened.

Some hunts against particularly dangerous prey, they used live ammunition and the buy-in was far higher, safety not guaranteed but the rewards could be tremendous. They never hunted anything that wouldn't be eaten, and of course the most dangerous food was the most highly prized, so the hunters' greater risk-adjusted share was of a naturally larger total. A skilled hunter could attend an eight or two of hunts and retire for the rest of its life, comfortably wealthy and revered as a celebrity.

Or it could wind up dead. It happened.

This hunt was not with live ammunition, however. This hunt introduced prey that had never before entered the consciousness of the greater community, and it wasn't a food animal. Of all things, this hunt was...a demonstration? Or an exercise. He hadn't made up his mind exactly how to view it.

The creature called itself human. In Jajaqin's own language the sound was gibberish; in a couple of other hunters' languages the sound was quite rude and in another one yet, a subtly erotic exclamation of pleasure. Privately Jajaqin guessed that the rude translation was related to the pleasure translation, but he was only moderately curious about languages, not skilled enough to actually pursue the idea. No, his pursuit was far more visceral.

Jajaqin knew of the promoter Booj by reputation since they moved in similar circles, and had wondered if the human Booj brought to the public consciousness was fully sapient. Watching it in the news feeds, Jajaqin had concluded that it indeed was. So he had been astonished when Booj had announced that the human had offered itself to be the target of a hunt.

The idea of a sapient prey was...decadently fascinating. Even the smartest prey were never more than animals. They didn't plan; they fled or attacked. Always Jajaqin's skills in hunting were about contending with those two circumstances. How did you hunt something that might do something different? And how different could it be?

The human had been the startling contestant in a number of combat sport bouts, beginning with a few bar fight-level contests consisting of rough-and-ready shiphands in dockside bars, to a few increasingly strenuous context matches that drew large numbers of viewers from across the entire system. Booj's reputation as a promoter had grown exponentially and so far, the human had proven unbeatable.

He would have to stop using the word human in his mind. It was making him vaguely aroused, linguistic indifference notwithstanding. Jajaqin had entered the bid lottery early, certain he would never luck out on a chance at the bidding round as the lottery round was a recordbreaking size, but his name had come up and he had entered his top bid immediately. A few heartbeats later, the system announced that all bids had been evaluated. His own and seven other names were announced.

He didn't wonder how the system had evaluated the bidders. Obviously highest bidders got first consideration, but the system was well known for its process. Jajaqin could have entered an empty bid and been on the short list of contenders; he knew he was a popular contestant with skill, integrity and just enough style to be a fun watch. Even offering no money up front, Jajaqin would draw in the paying viewers and be a sure moneymaker.

The silence of the forest was unnerving. Usually that meant that there was not a large predator nearby, but a swarm of smaller, nimbler ones that could easily chase down the usual sources of noise. Little brachiators would usually stay close and fuss at Jajaqin for straying too close to their nests. This quiet, however, was just eerie.

Jajaqin fired up the info screen of his locator, looking up more details on the human. Some general descriptions of the species - singularly unappealing to look at, and some of the arousal around the word went away - though the tuft of cilia around the topmost appendage was at least interesting to look at. He flipped through entries to examine notes on this specific human.

"Terran Human Gina Rassmussen," the entry read. It went on to specify that the creature was female, originally from a far distant solar system and only here by an accidental meeting, an orbital miner by trade - interesting, a miner who worked alone. That spoke to her skills and resilience, mining was not for the weak or stupid, and gamely exploring far from home suggested she was uncommonly fearless. Height and width, not big at all. Body mass...damn. That much?

That much. Human Gina weighed at least as much as Jajaqin himself, while being only about one-fourth his volume. Ah, there was why. Her planet of origin was a rocky world with...damn again. She was from a very heavy gravity planet. Where the human came from, the surface gravity would squash him flat. And she stood erect under it. Ah, there it was: bones. Muscle. Fascinating. If rendered for her meat, the human GinaRassumussen - no, wait. He remembered this from the news vids. "Just 'Gina' is fine." Human Gina represented a mass of meat that would feed him for nearly two turns, and that would be if he was eating only meat. He couldn't do that in any case, his digestion got bad if he didn't have a salad once in a while.

Hmm. Nonlethal hunt, though. I wonder what human tastes like.

Never mind. Don't eat sapients. Don't hunt...well, okay, this time we do. Probably too tough to eat anyway. You'd die of starvation, still chewing the first mouthful.

A brachiator squeaked from the massive tree branch directly above his head, startling him badly. He jerked and looked up.

Human Gina was right there.

End of Part 1

The Diva and Her Daughter, Part 2: Aftermath

*note: if you are new here, read Part 1 first

A sound outside.  It’s kind of late, certainly wouldn’t expect anyone.  Not on a school night.

Sheila’s in bed.  She went padding down the hall wearing a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt, my beautiful little girl.  She had accepted the discussion of how it’s important to eventually let up on an opponent, but I could see that we would have to revisit that topic soon.  It’ll need some repetition to really sink in.

But what is that sound?

Both bikes put away.  Bungees across the trash cans because raccoons, car doors all locked, no windows open even though it’s cool enough out that it would be nice to flush the house with some fresh air.  What did that sound like?

Creak.  Ah, okay.  That’s the steps by the kitchen door, right next to the garage.  The lock on that door is a good one, and the door itself is too.  Normal people won’t come through that in a hurry.  But I know a lot of people who are far beyond normal.

Getting outside silently is easy.  Getting around the house silently, not quite so much – the euonymus by the garage is overgrown and really needing a trim – but then I’m behind him.

Not him.  Her.  Under this full moon, those hips are clearly female.

Everything I did earlier today, especially the Kaplan, left me a little raspy but pulling hard I crank up the ultrasonics and give her a blast of a rusty Costa – Mary Costa is still alive, the voice of Princess Aurora, would you believe it? – and she goes down.  While she’s dazed, wrap her up in some ziptie cuffs and drag her into the yard, away from the house.

Dogs up and down the street are howling and yarking.  They’ll settle in a minute.

“How the hell did you find my house?  Who else is coming?”  I give her head a shake with one fist tangled in her hair, but not too hard.  A Costa at close range is pretty disorienting and I want her to get her thoughts in order, quickly.

“Yearbook.”

“Longer.”

“We got pictures of your kid as you were riding away from the bank.  You got the whole crew and just rode away.  But we got pictures of your kid and my IT guy had the idea of shopping her face onto a neutral background and Googling for similar images and it came up with a name.”

“Longer, some more.”  But I think I could put it together from there.

“The name came up from the Facebook page of her preschool, and from there we got into their records and found your name and address and Jesus don’t pull so hard.”

Give her another little shake, but then relax the grip.  “Keep it down.”

She had the gall to laugh a little.  “If I’d known before now that The Diva lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in the ‘burbs I might have just not bothered with this.  But we needed that crew, we needed that score.  What did you bring out of there?  We need it.”

“Nothing.  We just walked away.  Biked away.”

“Nothing?  Are you sure you’re The Diva?”

“Are you daring me to yell at you?  At this range?  I could explode your eyeballs.”

She blanched.  “I’m sorry.”

“Is that why you’re here, you’re trying to salvage something from that botched job?”

“That branch was supposed to be staging a delivery, we were going to gaslight a snooper into their system to backdoor access for the real job.  The smash and grab was just to front the disruption.  Two of those guys were patsies, the one whose fingers you destroyed was the real operator.”

“And the other one?  There were four.”

“Well, that was my cousin.  He wanted to come.”  Her face turned dark.  “He might not be able to have kids now.”

“He had a gun at my baby’s head so I’m not very sympathetic.”

She writhed in her restraints.  I had ziptied her wrists together, and her thumbs, so that her hands were back-to-back.  With another ziptie around her elbows, it’s a really uncomfortable position but the important thing is that she can’t put her palms together.  She’s not an adept fighter but makes up for it with a kind of power move.  She has to be able to put her hands together to make it work though, so it always looks like she’s beating everything to pieces with a Spock chop.  It’s the worst fight move ever but when you can knock a hole through a Buick with it, “worst” isn’t really relevant anymore.   As long as she can keep her palms together, she’s incredibly dangerous.

But I can keep out of her range, no problem.

“You didn’t take anything out?  No haul, not even intel?”

“Even if I hadn’t gone straight I wouldn’t help you, you’re going to get yourself and others hurt, you know that?”  I can’t remember her name.  What does she call herself? Doesn’t matter.  “You need to get the hell out of here.”

“I’m coming back.  You can’t do this to us.  The boss wants into that system and he’s going to keep sending others, more like me, to try to get intel on the bank out of you, or else just to eliminate you as a possible leak on his plan.”

“You didn’t really do enough research on me, did you?  Got the name and address and just ran over here?”

She doesn’t want to look like she’s been caught but she looks caught.   And curiosity gets the better of her.  “…why?”

“When I was still…her…I had a different name.  Did you know that?  Maybe not.  But did you notice my little girl’s last name?  Did you think about that?”

“What about it?”

“That name sound familiar to you at all?”

My beautiful little girl is my daughter, and so has inherited some natural gifts that are very special.  She has a superhuman voice, capable of cutting right through sheet steel – have the two pieces of baking pan to prove it – and will probably one day have even more control than I do.  But the other thing she has is her father.

He is the only non-super superhero I have ever met, and the only one who was ever fired.  It was quite the news item.  His secret identity was never revealed, but through a ridiculous onion of layers of obfuscation, it was – and nobody believed it was real.  Genius and shrewd.  Never surprised, contingency plans for every possible circumstance, an utter master of gathering and compiling information, of misdirection and manipulation, and a relentless hand to hand combatant.  What he lacks in intelligence is difficult to determine because there’s almost no one who can think on his level. 

That’s the other thing Sheila Judge has inherited.  She’s a genius, and she’s shrewd.  Fortunately she’s still a little girl or I would be completely outclassed.  So far she still believes me when I tell her to ease up on bad guys, not to use her skills to outwit other kids in games that are far beneath her.  To give them a chance.

Her father had been done with giving chances at one time.

“He’s the Judge.”

That took a moment to sink in.  “The Judge?”

“The Judge.”

The only hero ever fired.  Fired, because he went over the line.  His moral compass had been getting weaker, he’d become more implacably pragmatic.  The Judge’s constant exposure to evil was making him less good.  Not evil, not quite…just indifferent.  So when it came time for him to pass judgment on a bad guy, he did.  With great finality.  The contingency plans had started to look like entrapment, like railroading.  Okay, the bad guy could have simply stopped…but he hadn’t been given the chance.

That had also been the incident that drove me to retire.  It was pretty bad.

That had been ten years ago.  It had been nearly four years getting him back out of his head, and about forty-five minutes getting him to marry me, and the years since had been so good.  So good.

If he heard about this ignorant twit coming around the house on a mission of petty retribution, it would get so bad.  Unpowered or not, he would eradicate this chick, her boss, her cousin and his finger fragments, all of them.

It was pretty much just me and Sheila that kept him from going over that line.  Mostly Sheila.  She made him want to be a good person.

“If he knows you were ever here, it will go badly for you.  I’m the only thing between you and…you know what, I’m not really sure exactly what he would do.  But you need to understand this, and listen close: he loves me.  And as much as he loves me, he adores that child.”  I started to get up.  “For the sake of your life, you should see to it that nothing bad ever happens on this entire block, and most certainly not to me or her.”

I still can’t remember what she calls herself.  It isn’t important.  She’s gone as white as a sheet.

“Is it true he doesn’t actually have any powers?”

“How badly do you want to find out?”  Might as well butter the muffin a little bit.  “He beat Maximus into submission by himself, did you know that?”  Maximus has been cooling his heels in the ultramax in Nevada for over fifteen years, word has it he has crippling arthritis now.   With great power comes great joint pain.

“I’ll leave now, if you let me.”

“You should quit while you still can.”  Standing up, I motion for her to get up and turn around so I can cut the tie around her elbows.  “That’ll give you some leverage so you can free yourself in a little bit.  Don’t try to do it here.  If I start to feel threatened I’ll defend myself and you don’t want that.”

“I’m going.”

I never even saw it happen.  From one moment to the next, nothing and then something, boom.

Whatsername turning to go, splat right into his chest.

He’s not as tall as the bad guys think.  It’s the wig.  But he’s wide, as wide as a bank vault door.  And if you walk into him, about as soft.

“Banger.”

That’s her name.

She can’t make much sound beyond a stifled wheeze.

“Call your mother when you get home.  She’s worried about you.”  The Judge looks at his watch.  He has a cup of coffee in his hand, and it is strangely sinister.  “She’s still up.”  With four steps and a flickering snick he’s circled behind her, cut her remaining zip ties and returned back to in front of her.  He’s not a super, I swear.  But it was so relaxed and yet so quick, you can be excused for thinking he is.  The coffee steams.

Banger’s hands come together, clasped tightly before her face.  Palm to palm.

The Judge raises an eyebrow.  For a moment, everything stops.  He sips from the cup.

“I’m sorry.”

“Go.  Now.”

Banger whispered a hoarse “thank you” and ran away into the night, rustling through the damned euonymus until we could hear her sneakers slapping pavement, receding.  After a couple of minutes, there was an engine roar but then even that too was gone.

“Well,” he said.  “That went about like I expected.”

“Good.”

Sip.

“Wait, what?”