Cataphractoi

If you'd like to read more, please consider checking out my other works!

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Slaying Aliens and Infringing Copyrights (A Stray Cat Strut Fanfiction)

Conventions were a funny place. Everyone was in costume, so nothing looked out of place. I could walk the stalls dressed in hundreds of pounds worth of power armor, strapped to hell and back, and not a single person questioned it. I got a lot of compliments on how amazing my ‘cosplay’ was from people I passed and not even one question about all the guns.

Of course, that also meant that no one asked my mom what the fuck she was doing wearing a Feferi costume in the year of our lord 2056.

“Hey, mom,” I greeted her as I reached our meeting spot. “I see you decided to undercut my blackmail by using it to torture me instead.”

“I have no idea what you mean, sweetie! Is that new? It’s amazing! You might want to consider leaving the Eyebot at home unless you want to make a Fallout cosplay, though…” my mom replied, giving me a hug despite the armor. I patted her on the back in turn and tried to scrub my brain of the image of my mom in tight-fitting sleeveless top and multi-colored skirt that was shorter in the front.

“About that…” I said as I reached up to remove my helmet. “It’s not cosplay. It’s real. I’m a Samurai now.”

It took a good four hours to cover the entire story of my last week. Mom wanted every detail, so I couldn’t just skim over parts of it, and Juny helpfully kept giving her information I would have preferred to leave out like my many, many injuries. And of course she insisted on grilling me about my relationship with every woman I’d met along the way in the hopes she’d have a daughter-in-law in the near future.

By the time I was done the occupants of the café we’d settled in had cycled in and out several times over. I took a sip from my third drink to wet my throat as I finished telling the part when the Mountaineer and Monster Rancher had arrived and finished off the Antithesis for good. Mom was silent for a few moments- she’d been talking a lot less since I got to the part about the massacre I’d committed.

Although mom had always been supported, I supposed there was a pretty big difference between reacting to your son telling you she’s actually your daughter with ‘thank god you told me now, there’s still time to alter you cosplay from Male!Shep to Fem!Shep before the con’ and being okay with said daughter killing over seventy people in an afternoon.

“…you’re a fucking idiot, you know that?” were the first words from mom’s mouth after I finished the story. I was reeling from that response when she kept going. “Do you even realize how many times you almost died? You should know better than to just stand in the open like that! I know for a fact that you know what cover is! How did never occur to you to buy a damn barricade!?”

Right. Forgot she had been a gamer for twenty years longer than I’d been alive and had played all the original cover-shooters.

“And you even bought armed drones at one point, but you never thought to keep some around to watch your back? Sure, the shield drones were a good idea, but you didn’t even use those consistently once you thought of them! Good lord Erica, it’s like you wanted to die,” my mom continued as she reviewed my combat tactics instead of commenting on any of the stuff that was actually morally questionable.

“That’s what you’re concerned about? Not the fact that I killed a bunch of people?” I asked in disbelief. This conversation was not going the way I imagined.

“We’ll get to that. Now, you had access to grenades almost from the start, so why didn’t you start every fight with one? You could have avoided some ambushes if you led with a grenade. And why didn’t you have stealth drones checking rooms before you enter them?”

“Because I…didn’t think of it?” I replied dumbly. Apparently this was now an after-action review.

“Clearly! Hell, why didn’t it ever occur to you to ask for clarification about what kind of weapons you’d need to kill a Twenty One? Erica, I love you, but you are alive right now because of luck,” mom concluded. While dressed as a character from forty years ago and with her skin painted gray.

“Okay, I get it! I could have done a lot of things better! I’m an artist, not a soldier,” I replied in exasperation. She had a lot of good points, but I did the best I could think of in the moment. Mom sighed and leaned back in her seat.

“I’m just worried about you. And scared. I had no idea you were in so much danger this whole time. Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, putting one hand to her forehead.

“I knew you’d worry. I didn’t want you to spend all that time wondering if I’d make it through or not,” I admitted, looking to the side.

“What about next time? And the time after that? You’re walking around in that armor so I have to assume you intend on continuing with this.”

“About that…I think you should move to Boone,” I told her. Mom’s face instantly was painted over with confusion. “Alana and I are going to be taking over the Stalking Tigers HQ and turning it into our own fortress. If you’re living there you’ll know everything I’m up to.”

“That can’t be all there is to it. You were so excited when you moved out and got your own place. You wouldn’t just suggest that for no reason,” mom observed, narrowing her eyes. She’d seen through that pretty quickly.

“If you stay in Charlotte you’ll have a target on your back. The companies invested in Boone have been quiet so far but what Thompson said has me worried. There’s something in Boone, something we haven’t found yet, that they were really concerned about…and I think it’s buried under the outer town,” I explained.

“But you’re a Samurai. Everyone knows what happens when a corpo goes after a Samurai. If you’re so worried, couldn’t you do something now, or have your AI look into it?” mom asked. She was raising good points, but this time they weren’t ones I hadn’t considered.

“I’m not her AI, I’m Juny!” my floating torture device threw in. I rolled my eyes.

“You’re both,” I corrected. “Anyway, the answer is that I’ve tried to have her hack into their networks, but she didn’t find anything. Our theory right now is that any data was scrubbed or on a non-networked device to begin with. We’re working on excavating the outer town, too, but it’s going to take some time even with Protector equipment, and we can’t devote everything to that since we’ve got an obligation to clean up the air and rebuild the inner town too. I can’t even be sure Thompson was telling the truth…even if I think he was. But I don’t want to just start killing people and blowing things up on a hunch.”

Mom stood and walked around the table, giving me a tight hug.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she told me. I knew she was referring to the events with Thompson specifically. I’d largely made my peace with it, but that didn’t mean I was eager to go through it again.

“Thanks,” I said, patting her arm.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing more of my daughter, but I’ll need a bit of time to arrange things,” she said as she let go. “I’ll call you when I’ve got everything taken care of.”

“Hell no,” I insisted. “I’m not going anywhere. I might just be paranoid, but I’m not going to give anyone a chance to target you while I’m away, so I’m sticking with you until we have you moved to Boone.”

“Oh, fine,” mom relented. I’d expected more of a fuss, but she must have understood the gravity of the situation. “Well, we’re here anyway, so let’s go enjoy the con before we get on with the serious stuff.”

Well, there was no harm in that. After all, Juny was already in full control of the security systems.