Strikethrough

“You’ll never get an apology out of me, bitch.
I can never take back anything I do because it’s done.
There is no point second guessing it because of that.
If I did it, it must have been the right thing to do!”

-Duckie in regards to Firecracker’s brother.

FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK! Why?!

Mr. Duck lives and I have a serious headache over it. I beat that bitch there, he was mine. He couldn't do anything. ANNNNYYYTTHING. He was fast a fucking sleep! I could have casually strolled up and SLIT HIS THROAT! No more Duck… no more PAIN…. But that screaming. The constant fucking SCREAMING. I can still hear it in the walls. I keep punching them but they won’t stop! Shut up. SHUt Up. SHUTTUP!

West is hardly a worthy distraction with his ridiculous fucking bear-ness! That is to say he is a big scary fucking bear of a man! His ridiculousness fit right in with Trent. Birds of a feather have no personality together! And then that fucker called me needy!

I should really try to straighten this out into some sort of order.

1. Went with bitch to find Mr. Duck.
4. Did not find Mr. Duck.
9. Received anonymous tip telling us where Mr. Duck was.
10. Beat bitch to Mr. Duck.
12. Fail to kill mister Duck. THERE WAS NO CRYING!
15. Go home.
28. Bitch and Bear show up at home with Mr. Duck.
31. Punch screaming walls! FUCK WALLS
32. WEST IS A RIDICULOUS FUCKING BEAR
33. Find out bitch and bear aren’t leaving.
36. Smother self.
1003. Come back as zombie and write STUPID fucking progress report.
-299. Fail at list making.

I think I need to go kill something. NEED painting materials.

Mission failed, are you fucking happy Mr. Rock Monster!
I hope your ridiculous granite body finds a way to burn in hell!
Firecracker

Blue Font

“Silly, you’ll find no rest while you’re at war with yourself.
Just make a decision and promise yourself you’ll stick with it in the morning.”
            -Sierra

Heeeeellllllllooooooo~

This is special designation ‘Firecracker’ reporting in on behalf of the lord of fire and feathers, Mr. Duck. I’ve also been known to respond to ‘Picasso’ and on the rare occasion ‘Fucking Maskless’.

Mr. Duck is apparently suffering from sleeping problems and can’t find time to post in between not sleeping and hunting and we are having a hard time finding Mr. Fracture so Mr. Duck said I get to file a report and so here I am. He gave me a few rules to follow. I’ll go ahead and lay those out to make this report seem longer than it actually is:

             1.      “Do not mention that we are looking for Fracture. I do not want him to be expecting the shovel

                     when he gets back.”

             2.     “Do not mention that I am having sleeping problems. Just tell them I am busy hunting.”

             3.      “Do not break rules 1 and 2.”

             4.      “Do not talk about yours or anyone else’s fighting style or abilities. Whenever you need to express

                     that you killed someone, just say you did. Fuck them if they want to know more, they can stalk me

                     in person for details.”

             5.      “Lie to them.”

             6.      “Make your own account. I don’t want you posting on mine.”

Hmm… looking back over those I already broke 4 out of 6 of his rules. Whoops. Oh well, it serves him right for throwing lit fucking firecrackers at me!

Pettiness aside, I think this is going really well. What else to talk about? Umm…

Oh! I killed a guy yesterday.
After we tracked down our list item, Trent scared him down an alleyway and I dove down on him from a fire escape. In hindsight, the joint trauma of falling on him and forcing a knife through the back of his ribs probably killed him on the spot. That didn’t stop me from screaming at and ripping into the corpse for ten minutes before I finally realized he was already dead.

After I got off of him I cut off his thumb and used it to draw operator symbols on the walls in his blood. My favorite symbol is the triangle with the uppercase ‘L’s attach to every edge. Once the body started to smell I figured I should probably get going so I called our cleaning guy, Trent, and told him to get to work. I could tell he was scowling at me from the other side of his mask. He hates it when I call him from five feet away to tell him to do things over the phone.

Then I helped Trent with his disposal duties and we headed back to New York to report to Mr. Duck and retire for the day.

On an exciting end note, I hear Mr. Duck is going to make Trent give the next report. I can’t wait to finally hear the mute’s opinions of us and his surroundings. Should be fascinating!

Laters!

Firecracker

Leading is Hard

First off, I am impressed with Fracture. He seems to have recovered from whatever was in the cylinder rather fast. Granted I haven’t seen a lot of him around, he keeps sneaking of to somewhere. But when I do see him he is chipper and impatiently awaiting orders.

That brings us to the more title related topic; I’m struggling with this order giving thing. It’s kind of a pain in the ass. I realize the merits of team work and getting shit done faster and more effectively but when I look at my squad I really want to just tell them to go home and then hunt the marks myself.

I mean, what if they do it wrong? What if the mark gets away? What if they get the wrong person? What if they miss something important on the corpse?

Fracture tells me that it’s my job to train them to make sure they do it right. I was unaware leading them made me their mentor as well. That can’t be right. No one trains collectors. You get the list and you figure it out or die. That’s really what it comes down to. Besides, the idea of training my own replacement kind of sickens me. If I’m going to be replaced I’d prefer it be by someone who found the strength by their own merit.

In fact the more I think about it the more I think that is what this really is. They are having me train my own replacements. I want to go run the both of them through and see if either of them are worthy of that. I already know Firecracker isn’t. I don’t hold high prospects for mister never talks ever.

I… need to calm the fuck down.

So I’ve been doing all the hunting on my own. I think that was the point I was trying to get out. The list is getting out of hand though. Four red marked names came up last night, each with the same 24 hour time limit. That is insanely unheard of in my experience. I've never seen anything listed beyond a yellow and I certainly had lots more time to deal with the situation than this.

I can’t get all of them, they are too spread out. I think Fracture might have fucked with my list to create this situation. I mean he can apparently have my list locked out, I don’t see why he couldn’t fuck with its listings. I’m sending Firecracker and Trent to deal with the two out of town marks, Fracture is going to track one of our local names for us, and I’m going take out the remaining guy with the bold printed name. “Creeger.”

Fracture, I swear to god if I find out you are fucking with my list I will break your legs again.

No more time to waste writing.
It’s time to kill Creeger.
Swan out.

This is What Happens When You Put Something Off Too Long.

So in an interesting turn of events, early yesterday morning while I was reporting in after a fun little round of commenting a car came crashing through the front door of our second floor motel room door. I had to double check to make sure subject 926 was still in the room with me and wasn’t on the drivers end of this little stunt as he has been known to pull this antic when he is particularly piss off at his mark and I thought he might be trying to blow off steam of something. You can never quite tell what a lunatic is going to do when troubled.

Out of the car emerged Picasso. By that point Duckie had already sprung to his feet on the bed and was in his ready stance. I started to give him shit about wearing shoes to bed earlier this week but apparently he does it in preparation for shit like this. Picasso started flinging throwing knives at Duckie. He dodged most of them and even caught one of them. She was going for a gun when I pulled one of my own and opened fire. I grazed her arm.

She growled and took off firing a few blind shots in what I assume was an effort to deter following. I turned to say something witty to Duckie about how his girlfriend seems to want his attention or something. I can’t remember, the moments passed. It passed because he was already gone. I didn’t see much more than a moment of him disappearing out the window in what I assume was him leaving to chase after her. He took his knife, his coat, his gun, and if I’m not mistaken a few of the throwing knives too because I found more holes in the wall than I did knives.

I gathered the rest of our shit and left. I am so not paying for property damage.

Before I forget I should probably take a moment to tell Duckie where he can find me. I’m at a hotel, in a bed once full of ember, and watching the movie Next. He should get it. He’ll probably be really pissed off after he does, but at least he’ll find me. Not to say I couldn’t just call or something.

I fear this may be the last we ever hear of Picasso. I don’t think he’s figured out this non-lethal thing yet but I don’t know that he’ll delay the issue any further after what she did. It’s a pity really.

She was looking rather terrible though.
 I thought Duckie looked like a rabid dog but she’s absolutely lost it. He apparently broke her mask the last time they fought right? It looked like she super glued it back together on her fucking face. She had a piece (And I’m just assuming glued right now.) glued to her forehead, each cheek, her chin, and her nose. When we brought her in for this she wasn’t anywhere near this fucked up.

To be completely honest though? I consider it a personal victory that I was able to help push her this far over the edge, even if it is counter intuitive to even my own wishes and wants.

On a side note, something seems to be missing from our collection of stuff and I can’t quite put my finger on what. I don’t think I left anything behind though. How curious.

Whatever,
Fracture Out.

A Little Something Special

“There is no such thing as a normal proxy. He picked each and every one of us for a reason.”

            - Mentor Turner

This is what one of my trainers told us after showing us something special. Something I’ve yet to see repeated in all my years in service. We were to understand that some of would be special and some of us were talented. But for whatever reason, even if it was just to die, we were picked and because of it we were special.

For a long time, I was just talented. I would hope so at least. I mean I haven’t died or… oh yeah.

Hmm… rambling.
Anyways, I’ve developed an anomaly of my own and to my great misfortune Fracture found out about it.

See, we were driving down the street and Fracture was being extra bitchy. He insisted he couldn’t take driving any longer and I was going to have to take a shift. After much protesting, and after slugging him several times, I finally gave in. Now it’s not that I’m a bad driver or anything but apparently I was going too fast to make a turn and we skid right off the road and hit a tree. My left window shattered and the shrapnel of glass cut me up pretty bad. I got out of the wreck to find Fracture literally unscathed standing at the top of the hill. He apparently dove out of car. From there we were towed in by ‘friends’.

When we got to our motel room, Fracture set to work on removing the glass from my skin. That’s when he noticed something was off. Half of my cuts had closed and the skin around the extruding pieces had sealed around the glass. It didn’t take him long to figure out what was up. God, that glare of his is absolutely piercing. He was very insistent, against my own protests, that I report this in so here it is. I have a regenerative epidermis.

But it’s literally just the epidermis. Everything else has to heal naturally but my epidermis seals right up after a good minute. That may sound cool but its applications are few. I won’t bleed for very long, I don’t have to worry about infections, and much to my own miss fortune I won’t scar anymore. This ‘gift’, as Fracture calls it, is apparently why I my face isn’t fucked up anymore and is likely the cause of all my scars going away.

Fracture spent all day today testing out its limits. Cutting, frying me, burning me, and I think he stuck my finger in acid at the end. That was where I had to draw the line. I tried to keep myself mannered for his stupid little tests but he got punched in the face for that one, a few times. I didn’t bother to count how many it took me to finally stop.

I have no illusions about this. This is not a gift. This is another punishment. I mean really think about this. My anomaly grants me the unique opportunity to be cut over and over again in the same spot. And it’s not like it stops hurting after the first cut. That shit hurts each and every time it gets sliced. That I won’t bleed out on the floor only serves to prolong the length at which some asshole can sit there and flay me until I finally bleed out internally.

But I suppose I’m not being punished if I keep this in the dark so whatever.
Bring it assholes.

Violence and Broken Honor

Designated ‘Fracture’ here.
Reporting in to ‘Whisper’ and associated underlings. I seem to have gotten through to subject 926. He’s talking again (Although back to constantly bitching would probably be more accurate.) and is back to his old self in general. It may be possible he’s even a little better for this experience but I find it unlikely. Patients like subject 926 are slow to change and adapt.

I must admit that my method wasn’t exactly medically sound…
Even still, all subject 926 understands is violence and his own broken sense of honor. As I cannot begin to understand the twisted contradictions of his code, I found I had to appeal to him through brute violence and angry yelling. I do hope it does not reflect to incredibly poorly on me. Rather than explain what happened myself I had 926 type up an explanation so he could show case the parts of the experience that meant most to him. Subject will most likely be angry when he finds out how I reported it back to you.

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I was sitting there marking myself with a marker when it happened. I mapping where I intended to cut myself in an effort to recreate old scars. That’s about when I heard Fracture enter the room. I assumed it was Fracture at least. His footsteps were off and he was moving a lot faster than I had ever heard him move when he walked. Looking back on it, had it been someone who wanted to kill me I would have been slain. Those are all the non-visual signs of an intruder and I just couldn’t bring myself to care. I was too wrapped up in my own petty grief.

I heard him rush toward me. Still I did nothing. Not until it would have been too late. Not until I felt the sharp painful sensation of a sheet of metal being brought down on the back of my head with force. I was dazed but my training started to take over. Before I knew it I had turned to face my attacker holding my marker as though it was a knife.

That crazy fucker, he had bashed the back of my head in with a fucking shovel of all things. His casts were gone too. I don’t know why he picked a shovel. He wasn’t very good with it. I dodged every swing of it and returned it in kind by jabbing the marker hard into his ribs or gut. We went on like that till I had him back again the wall.

I started choking him. I could feel him struggling against me as he forced out words at me, angry words. But they weren’t his words. He was quoting someone at me, someone I once knew. They must have a record of the old pep talks my trainer use to give. I think they were his words. I loosened my grip on him and he continued to yell at me. Now he was using his own words.

He said a lot of things I’d rather not repeat. The gist of it was that I wasn’t a child anymore and that I couldn’t afford to keep acting like one, throwing fits and rebelling when I don’t like my orders and then moping around like an injured puppy when things don’t go my way. He explained that I could keep my rage and my scorn but that I needed to bend it into something more useful to ‘father’.

I suppose I will quote one line while it’s still fresh in my head. He was particularly passionate about it.
“For the love of god quit beating on your poor siblings because you’re a traitorous violent bastard. Your behavior is not a reflection of your peers.”

To be perfectly honest, what I summarized and what little I was able to quote is about all I got out of his two hour yelling session. I spent most of that one way conversation marveling over the fact that he came at me with a fucking shovel. Who does that? Seriously?

I suppose I should get back to work soon though. I bet I still have more tests though…
So I guess I’m pretending to be back to work so my loyalty can continue to be questioned.
That doesn’t quite have the same push to it.
Umm… to murder!

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Short analysis: Don’t use a shovel next time. It’s apparently distracting.
Fracture out.

I Thought I was Better Prepared for This

Designated ‘Fracture’ here reporting to proxy ‘Whisper’ and associated underlings. We have a problem.

Subject 926 returned from his assignment a few nights back in a huff. He came in, threw a bag full of canned foods on the floor, sat down in the chair, posted his report, and then just sat there staring at a wall. It occurred to me that something was wrong after he hadn’t moved for three hours.

I started talking at him trying to coach him through whatever the hell was wrong with him but he didn’t seem to be listening. He just continued to sit there. At some point I realized his lips were moving though. So I leaned in to see if he was actually saying something.

“La, la la….”

That probably wasn’t a good sign. I was short on options in the way of trying to help him. Therapy does you a fat lot of good when you refuse to listen. So I started reading off updates from some of the other blogs hopping something would grab his attention and give me what I needed to get through to him. He didn’t really respond to most of it until I hit Beneath Stone Skies. I got about midway through the entry when he sprang up, took the laptop back from me, and posted his little comment.

He still wasn’t listening though. After that he sat right back down and continued to ignore me… kind of. He continued to ignore me but he didn’t stay in his seat long. He started roaming around the motel room. He was seated for about 5 minutes, got up and listened to his radio for about 5 minutes, watched 5 minutes of TV, started cutting up the mattresses for about 5 minutes….

And he’s been going on like that for about a day now and is still ignoring me. He looks like shit as I’m not sure he slept or ate in that time. I’m pretty sure he’s having some sort of mental breakdown which is something we anticipated. I was unable to anticipate just how incredibly resistant to help he was going to be. I need to get through to him.

I think back on it and the only thing that really had any effect on him was the Stone Skies post and I believe that’s because it pissed him off. It kind of gives me an idea on how I might get through to him but I really don’t want to do it. I’m probably going to have to but I intend to stave that particular option off as a last resort until I absolutely have to.

Report over, ‘Fracture’ out.

Closing In

I think Fracture might be a creeper. His face absolutely lit up when he heard the Doc may still be alive and may have turned proxy. Or maybe I’m misreading him and he’s all giddy because of the severely small chance this gives him to consort with another individual in the medical field. I’m not sure how many doctors exist in/under the Bureaucracy.

I’m beginning to think my overseers might hate Fracture more than I do. I didn’t get in trouble for beaming him with the laptop. I just got a short call later informing me that my conduct was inappropriate and that I was not to do it again. I swear I could almost feel the man who said it winking over the phone. This mutual distain is kind of taking the fun out of mistreating him. I need to move past my conflict oriented nature so I can properly hate him for who he is.

Putting the whiny pettiness of my day to day aside, I finally found my mark. The assigned hunter for this one is long dead. She apparently threw herself off a building jumping at another mark on a roof. I’m thinking she might have been a little new to the game. It didn’t leave me with a lot to go on. I managed to track the mark a town over and a hot lead brought me to the hotel he was hiding out at. I just need to try to keep tabs on him until tonight.

I’ve been waiting for activity near the roof access door. He hasn’t come down though. He must move at night. I’m curious what this one looks like. There wasn’t a description attached, just a name. I want to just go up there and be done with this one but I’d prefer it if I could catch him freshly asleep. I’ve got fracture moving in so he can keep an eye on door while I take a nap. With any luck this will be good and settled by this time tomorrow.

That’s a knock on the door. It must be Fracture.
Nap time.

Please Don't Encourage Him

Seriously, the last thing I need is you assholes egging on that violent sociopath. I shouldn’t even be here. Subject 0926 should have been executed for half the shit he did. The rest of his traitorous deeds should have merited him getting his skin peeled off first, but at this point I would just settle for him being put out of my misery.

Oh, Fracture here by the way. That’s probably important. I’m posting on behalf of my host, stupid “ugly fuck”. Captain ass hat is out chasing his mark. I need to finish this before he comes home and notices I’m posting on his stupid little blog and breaks my ribs or something. He tells me he’s been eyeing the third one down on the left side which is incredibly fucking peachy.

 ----------------------------------------
Subject 0926 Early Assessment
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0926 suffers from a marinade of personality disorders. Recent developments seem to imply that list of disorders is ever increasing.

Old Issues
Subject is extremely paranoid of those around him. He is paranoid to such an extreme degree that you cannot sit within arm’s length or make eye contact without getting slugged or worse.
 Subject is constantly on the defensive and never seems to take any downtime. I have a hard time keeping track of whether or not he is still in the house. He does not make noises when he moves. When I have seen him home, he comes in and immediately plops down on the bed. If he isn’t sleeping, he’s on this computer or eating.
Even his sleeping habits seem to exhibit a constant defensive state of paranoia as he does not sleep for more then 2-3 hours at a time. When he comes out of his sleep he literally jumps to his feet with his knife in hand braced for a fight. I find myself paralyzed when he does this. I fear movement may draw his knife to me.
Further defensive behavior is prominent in the way the subject handles our therapy sessions together. He sits there for the full hour and stares at me. At times his attention seems to be drawn to my chest. I think he is eyeing my rib. More progress is actually made in the 15 minutes following a session.

New Issues
Identity :
I don’t know who this man is. He certainly doesn’t look like subject 0926. 0926 was covered in scars from head to toe, the worst of which were on his face. This man’s skin is almost flawless. I was still unconvinced of his identity until I had spent time with him these last two days. He acts like 0926, he remembers 0926’s life, and seems to believe he is 0926. Regardless of who he may actually be, I must work under the assumption that he is 0926.

Death/Delusions of Grandeur :
Working under the assumption that this is actually 0926, I find it hard to believe he actually died. I find his explanation for his resurrection even more suspect. The subject claims that ‘the master’ not only killed him, which is the one part I would actually believe, but then immediately brought him back from the dead. When I asked him why, he explained with an analogy about breaking the bones of a cat.
“If you kill a cat it’s dead. It can’t be punished. But if you keep it alive you can make it scream and suffer. You can take your time and break every little bone in its little body. When the master was done killing me he decided I hadn’t suffered enough.”
The issue here is he believes the slender man cares enough to pull this kind of thing off. On some level he must understand how grand a claim this is.

Hallucinations :
Another reason I have a hard time believing this is really 0926 is how forth coming he has become. I caught him staring at a wall nodding his head. When I asked him what he was doing he explained he was listening to the children sing.
Me : “What children?”
Duck : “The children, the ones who are always singing. La, la la, la la, la la. La, la la, la la, la.”
He apparently suffers from auditory hallucinations. He claims it’s constantly in the background, that is gets quieter and louder but it’s always there. He’s says he’s jealous of other people because their hallucinations are more fun. They see things or hear screaming.
“I just hear them singing.”
I tried to ask him more questions about it but I seem to have lost him entirely for a little bit there.
“La, la la…”

Schizophrenia :
I’m unsure of this one but the condition lends itself to paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and hallucinations. The concern here is that this condition can be purely mental in nature but it can also stem from the brain decaying. He is going to need to have himself tested to determine if this needs to be treated.

Blackouts :
The subject has been suffering from blackouts. The trigger for this is apparently the act of killing. Be blames the slender man for this claiming this condition was inflicted on him in an effort to punish him for his disobedience. I believe the onset of this condition is what the subject was referring to when he originally reported in claiming his one love had been stolen from him following his ‘death’.
Given the fact that blacking out does not stop him from carrying out his kill effectively, I believe this condition is dissociative in nature. I believe the act of killing weighs far heavier on the subject then he lets on and when forced to face his own mortality following his own ‘death’ he disconnected himself from this part of his life.

Final Assessment
Is unchanged. The subject is still a dangerous sociopath and he’s going to kill me. Please for the love of god let me go home. Kill this man and be done with it.
Assuming that’s not going to happen though, he needs various brain scans and regular therapy sessions from someone else. He was gotten significantly worse since I first assessed him four years back and I have no reason to assume he will get any better.
I would also like it if we could confirm if this is really subject 0926. I am unconvinced.

There we go. I’m all done, yay done.
Typing with a cast on is draining. I’m going to go take a nap before captain ass hat gets back. I’m going to need my strength for when he sees this and comes after my ribs.

Refresher Course

Oh dear master. How could I have forgotten? This has happened before.
I should probably actually report what happened before I get into that.

So I had to go see the assigned hunter about the unusual comfort his assigned mark was permitted to live under in the year he was supposedly chasing her and that meant I was going to have to be within arms reach of another proxy which… typically ends in violence for me.
I do believe I have mellowed out a fair bit in the short time I have been writing these but… I just can’t not hurt people and for some reason that goes double for my masked brothers. I knew if I went to see him someone was going to get hurt and if it couldn’t be him that meant it was going to have to be me.
So I remade a teaching tool my trainer use to use to encourage use to try harder. He called the pin glove. It’s quite simple really. You just take a glove and have sharp little pins come out of each finger tip. And then you wear the glove. Whenever someone needs encouraging you give them a tight little squeeze on their shoulder to inform them that they need to try harder. It works wonders and I was going to need a little self encouragement to get thought this.

Once the glove was made and ready I went to see him at the crappy little motel he had been operating out of. I called ahead, naturally.  I knocked on the door and as soon as I had I could feel myself starting to panic so I forced the gloved hand into my sleeve and I gave myself a nice little squeeze on the arm. Fortunately I was done cringing by the time he answered the door. The conversations went something like this.

“Hello are you-” he started.
“Yes. It’s… Duckie,” I quickly responded pushing in the pin on my pinky finger just a little deeper at the irritation of my own designation. I dug the rest of them in deeper as he started laughing. It was all I could do to fight the urge to give his neck a squeeze.
“I’m sorry. Sorry. That’s probably not cool. What the hell did they send you here for,” he said pausing to snicker some more, “Duckie?”
“I’m a collector here about your elusive mark,” I grumbled out. I could feel blood starting to soak into the glove a little.
“Oh,” he said pausing. And then he studied me. His look confirmed my every suspicion that he had not been doing his job.
“Can you maybe do me a favor and not hunt this one, Duckie” he asked. I could see he was tense. The door knob made a noise as he clenched it.
“Why?” I asked trying hard to keep my cool. I wanted more than anything to have my damn mask on so he couldn’t study my expressions. “Got a personal grudge with this one?”
“No, I-,” He started pausing. “I’m kind of seeing this one. Could you have not found her for me?”

He looked so desperate. He was risking his life for this girl. He didn’t seem to know I had already ruined those efforts. That stupid shit had barely bothered to hide her. I had to fight back a laugh. It must have caused me to smile because I could see him calming his stupid ass down.

“Ya,” I said biting my lip a little, “I think I can do that.”

After that I said my good bye and left. I hadn’t even gotten the glove off and my phone out before I started looking over the immediate area again in preparation for the planning stage of killing this man. First thing was first though; I needed to get permission from my overseers. I sent my handler a text informing him of the relationship between the mark and the assigned hunter and requested a recommended course of action. I was curious if they might have shown leniency. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t and she was ready dead but I still wanted to know.
I got a text back from another number, which is how this typically works, informing me to kill the girl and leave lover boy to stew in his punishment. I stilled planned on killing him at this point. I don’t need enemies that I can’t actively stalk. Regardless, I sent them back a text reading ‘Already done.’
Their next text, ironically enough, sparked a memory. It read, ‘I see you remembered.’

I stood there for a bit reading that over and over again. I remembered? What am I remembering? And then it hit me. I had done this before. This entire situation almost pound for pound was the same as my first hunt as a collector. This was a canned scenario. A recognized, harmless, and intentionally ignored situation they kept aside for such a time when they needed it to break in new collectors. My records must read that I’m new. More than just testing my willingness to ruin someone’s life, this situation was coordinated in such a way to create an enemy for me. It gives them someone to send after me when they decide it’s time to put me down. Realizing this meant I had to kill him.

And then I thought about it. I’m pretty sure I can take that wuss. Let them have their little ace. It will do them no good if I know about it. So this is me daring you assholes to play the card. I’m waiting for it. Idle threats aside, which is another habit I’ll chalk up to the masters will, that concluded the investigation. Well technically this report does.

Anyway, after that I started hitting up pawnshops and smelting businesses to get rid of all the jewelry and the TV. I was sad to see the TV go but there really is no place for one in the car or in the life of a drifter for that matter.
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a revolver from one of pawnshops. The man at the counter kept insisting it wasn’t for sale but he found the little wad of cash I was sitting on at that point hard to resist. He even threw in some bullets to go with them. Guess he didn’t need them without the gun. That purchase didn’t leave me with much money left after food and gas. Even less after medical supplies for my arm but it should be enough to hold me over for a little while.

Death waits for no one, time to get to the next state. Once again there are no more marks listed in this one. I got to wonder if I’m heading for another canned scenario.

Something's Off Here

I love traveling. The thought of all the things I’ll never have to see again has always been a comfort for me even if it is a lie, revisits are after all inevitable. I got to spend about a day on the road. For some reason there wasn’t a person on my list in the same state I was in. It’s not unprecedented but it is odd.

After a quick nap the hunt was on. My target had been marked for death for over a year. She was apparently very good at not being seen. Her assigned hunter had various observations from his many reported failures. I started with the locations from those reports and fanned out. I had no luck. I was about to call it a day when a lead came in.
It was a street address and a time. So I went and waited and sure enough there she was but she wasn’t what I was expecting. She was well dressed. She smiled and waved as she passed. After a few seconds I took up a spot behind someone and followed her.

From there she went to a bar, worked for a few hours, then walked back to a bus stop, and took the bus to what is apparently her apartment. She had her last name on a plate beside her door. Through the window hanging out on the roof of another building I could see that she spent the night watching television before going to bed. Something was terribly wrong. This was not the life of a runner who had managed to evade a hunter for an extended amount of time.
Making as little noise as possible I broke into her house. Up close I could see she had a nice fully furnished place. And her TV… it was huge. I snuck into her room to find her sleeping peacefully in a rather large bed. The comfort this person was able to hide away in was absolutely sickening. This would have been a most satisfying kill but once again it was not something I was allowed to enjoy.

From there I must assume that I killed her. My knife was still in her. It seems I had forced it in between two of her ribs and stabbed her in the heart repeatedly. More than that though, I had been violent about it. It looked like I broke a lot of her ribs. I was kind of angry after that and flipped the mattress she was on. I was hoping when I became a proxy again killing would stop being a joyless burden but I guess I’m still being punished.
When I finally calmed down I took another look around and figured I should ransack the place. She can’t use any of this crap now. So I took her radio/clock, jewelry, and was even fortunate enough to find a shoe box with a few hundred dollars in it. Oh and I took her TV. I don’t know that I’ll ever use it but there was no way I was leaving it.

Now, the final step of this process is the evaluation. I’m supposed to put my thoughts in on whether or not the failed hunter deserves punishment for their failure and under sketchy conditions I’m supposed to investigate further into why the mark survived as long as they did. I usually just fill ‘Hunter was clearly incompetent’ in that field but that is a gross understatement in this case.

I’m going to have to investigate this further. Tomorrow I’m going to go talk to the assigned hunter.
If I don’t like his explanation I may very well run him through.