Guilty Gear fic - unfinished snippet
Oct. 20th, 2007 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopHey ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
velithya assuming you get the chance to check your friends page in the near future - my brain has just spent the last couple of days trying to make me write crack Sin-origin fic, and it is all your fault. >< >< ><
Seriously, I had enough Guilty Gear fic in the works already, since (for assorted reasons I won't go into) it seemed like a good idea recently to take a quick break from that holic epic of mine by starting nearly all the GG ideas I've been accumulating and putting off for the last few months at once, and then worry about finishing them later. On the upside, I think most of them *are* going to be finished over the next month or two. It's just when and in what order that's still up in the air. Not to mention what else certain people might wind up prompting me to write in the meantime.
So I think it will be time to drag out the old unfinished-fic-meme again in the near future, once a few of these scribbles have been cleaned up a bit. But for now, here's one of the ones that isn't going to be finished. It's basically just a short piece of introspection which arrived in my head in pretty much this form months ago, but since it hasn't shown any inclination to attach itself to anything bigger, it seemed about time to just post what I've got and leave it at that.
The official bounty system paid enough for the most dangerous criminals on its list that you could make a good living out of it without having to work very often – if you were good enough, which not many other bounty hunters out there were. It didn’t hurt that he had such a reputation these days that bounties were known to give up without a fight as soon as they recognised him. A bounty that took a couple of weeks to track down could pay enough to keep him going for as many months, as long as he was careful with the money he made, and for Sol, being careful wasn’t much effort. There just wasn’t much you could do with it he cared about.
You didn’t need much to live his kind of life off, it only had to cover food, booze and cigarettes, (rarely) new clothes (which he tended to wear until they wore out in any case) and the occasional night in a cheap hotel when he got sick of roughing it. He could have afforded somewhere more expensive if he’d cared, but the higher up market you went the more questions were asked, and the probability someone would find reasons to call in the police went up too, and it wasn’t worth the trouble. Posher places weren’t his style.
Unofficial jobs were more interesting, more dangerous, more debatably legal and paid even better. Private jobs found you more often than the other way around, unless you were desperate for work, but there wasn’t any need to rely on them. As long as the main bounty office was prepared to stomach the minor hypocrisy of paying rewards to a man who’d been on a few of those wanted lists himself, life was easy.
It might have seemed pretty sweet to be able to get by without working very hard when he started out, but boredom set in more and more quickly these days. Without even regular Gear attacks to beak up the monotony anymore, too often there was nothing worth doing beyond working his way through another pack of cigarettes while he waited for the next nutjob to start experimenting with Gear cells or digging up blacktech or building their own robot army. Even tracking down certain old associates didn’t keep him as busy as he’d have liked, leads were too few and far between.
There were days he actually missed the Order, and considering he’d hated almost every minute of his service while he was there, that was patently insane. When even a life spent in low level fury at being ordered around by a teenaged religious fanatic with a near-suicidal hero complex started to sound pretty good, boredom had to be getting the better of you.
And the worst part was that it only really went away when something around him went so bad so fast that boredom looked pretty appealing in comparison.
(Presumably this was all leading into something going very bad very fast indeed. Buggered if I know what it was though. Ah well.)
velithya assuming you get the chance to check your friends page in the near future - my brain has just spent the last couple of days trying to make me write crack Sin-origin fic, and it is all your fault. >< >< ><Seriously, I had enough Guilty Gear fic in the works already, since (for assorted reasons I won't go into) it seemed like a good idea recently to take a quick break from that holic epic of mine by starting nearly all the GG ideas I've been accumulating and putting off for the last few months at once, and then worry about finishing them later. On the upside, I think most of them *are* going to be finished over the next month or two. It's just when and in what order that's still up in the air. Not to mention what else certain people might wind up prompting me to write in the meantime.
So I think it will be time to drag out the old unfinished-fic-meme again in the near future, once a few of these scribbles have been cleaned up a bit. But for now, here's one of the ones that isn't going to be finished. It's basically just a short piece of introspection which arrived in my head in pretty much this form months ago, but since it hasn't shown any inclination to attach itself to anything bigger, it seemed about time to just post what I've got and leave it at that.
The official bounty system paid enough for the most dangerous criminals on its list that you could make a good living out of it without having to work very often – if you were good enough, which not many other bounty hunters out there were. It didn’t hurt that he had such a reputation these days that bounties were known to give up without a fight as soon as they recognised him. A bounty that took a couple of weeks to track down could pay enough to keep him going for as many months, as long as he was careful with the money he made, and for Sol, being careful wasn’t much effort. There just wasn’t much you could do with it he cared about.
You didn’t need much to live his kind of life off, it only had to cover food, booze and cigarettes, (rarely) new clothes (which he tended to wear until they wore out in any case) and the occasional night in a cheap hotel when he got sick of roughing it. He could have afforded somewhere more expensive if he’d cared, but the higher up market you went the more questions were asked, and the probability someone would find reasons to call in the police went up too, and it wasn’t worth the trouble. Posher places weren’t his style.
Unofficial jobs were more interesting, more dangerous, more debatably legal and paid even better. Private jobs found you more often than the other way around, unless you were desperate for work, but there wasn’t any need to rely on them. As long as the main bounty office was prepared to stomach the minor hypocrisy of paying rewards to a man who’d been on a few of those wanted lists himself, life was easy.
It might have seemed pretty sweet to be able to get by without working very hard when he started out, but boredom set in more and more quickly these days. Without even regular Gear attacks to beak up the monotony anymore, too often there was nothing worth doing beyond working his way through another pack of cigarettes while he waited for the next nutjob to start experimenting with Gear cells or digging up blacktech or building their own robot army. Even tracking down certain old associates didn’t keep him as busy as he’d have liked, leads were too few and far between.
There were days he actually missed the Order, and considering he’d hated almost every minute of his service while he was there, that was patently insane. When even a life spent in low level fury at being ordered around by a teenaged religious fanatic with a near-suicidal hero complex started to sound pretty good, boredom had to be getting the better of you.
And the worst part was that it only really went away when something around him went so bad so fast that boredom looked pretty appealing in comparison.
(Presumably this was all leading into something going very bad very fast indeed. Buggered if I know what it was though. Ah well.)
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 03:37 am (UTC)that fic sounds like Sol :3
no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 05:12 am (UTC)Then at least I can count it as good practice even if it doesn't seem to want to go any further.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 09:52 am (UTC)Seen you around and DustLoop and FanFiction.net, and I'm really glad I stopped by. I'm really diggin' your Guilty Gear fanfiction, and that one Holic AU one too <3
Anyways! Do you plan on writing more of this? It sounds super promising, and there aren't a lot of good Sol-centered/POV fics out there D:
I like the bounty hunting aspect you put in too, especially the whole "they 'forget' that Sol has a bounty on his head too"
no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 12:11 pm (UTC)Always hate it when that happens. LJ should have some kind of function to let you reset it or have them email it to you though - assuming you haven't lost the password to the email account you signed up with as well. ^^; That would get a bit awkward.
Seen you around and DustLoop and FanFiction.net, and I'm really glad I stopped by. I'm really diggin' your Guilty Gear fanfiction, and that one Holic AU one too <3
Thanks! Glad to hear it - it's always a great boost to hear people have been enjoying my writing. ^_^
I don't think there'll be any more of this particular fic - I'm really not sure where else to do with it at the moment. But if it counts, there are a couple of other Sol-POV fics among the others I have in the works.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-22 07:50 pm (UTC)Ah, it's a shame to hear that you won't be adding more to this (even fragmented snippets D:?), but I'd love to see more Sol-POV fics (actually, just other Guilty Gear fics in general~) Your style of writing is definitely refreshing~ ^^;;
Looking back at this, I wonder if the IPF approves of the bounty hunting system. Maybe during the Drusades and post-war, but since governments and organized order had time to develop, there's probably been a lot of skirmishes between the police and bounty hunters.
Haha, I bet Sol fought with Ky in official IPF assignments to get the bounty XD;;
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 01:38 am (UTC)It's pretty much just a case where I've got all these other ideas which I know how to finish, and then this little orphaned snippet which I have no idea what to do with (unless I add it to the backstory of one of the others, but it doesn't quite fit anywhere very neatly). Maybe I'll come up with something more to go with it at some stage once my current WIP pile has gone down a bit. ^^;
Hey, I wish there were more Guilty Gear fics being written in general too. *pokes
Looking back at this, I wonder if the IPF approves of the bounty hunting system. Maybe during the Drusades and post-war, but since governments and organized order had time to develop, there's probably been a lot of skirmishes between the police and bounty hunters.
It's one of those parts of the GG world they've never bothered telling us very much about, but I can't think of any time Ky's ever expressed an opinion on it - not even when the PWAB was manipulating the bounty system for its own ends. On a vaguely related note, I found out recently there's a little part in the Lightning the Argent novel where Ky finds a recent bounty was turned in by someone working under the name 'anonymous' and guesses right away that it's Sol. It could well be that they'd rather have people like Sol hunting down real criminals for them instead of taking random jobs for whoever else might hire them.
Haha, I bet Sol fought with Ky in official IPF assignments to get the bounty XD;;
Ha, oh yeah, I can see that happening every other week with those two. Although where Ky's concerned, I can also see him finding out that Sol's on the trail of the same criminal he's after, and then telling his men that they can leave this one because it's already taken care of. He has some interesting ways of dealing with Sol sometimes. Hah, like I needed more fic ideas right now.