Diruktober Day 23: Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles

   Diruktober is a DIR EN GREY themed inktober challenge by re_be_ka_f. I chose to use them as writing prompts to join in on the fun. 

Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles cassette art

A distress signal from an unknown ship had them gear up. It was their job, after all, as a space vigilante duo.  

Distress signals always had both Yo-Yo and Kaz defensive. Sometimes it just meant they had to spare some water or food. Other times it meant they were too late. Either way, they usually gained something or other out of it. 

With Yo-Yo in his violent yellow straps to match Kaz's electric pink ones, they loaded their belts and backs with oxygen, sustenance, and the highest quality smoke and mirrors they could find in their searches. 

Of course, Yo-Yo's trusty laser piztol was included, a hefty metal weapon shined to perfection, engraved with silver thorned vines throughout. It stayed on his hip. 

Once the calm but clumsy Kaz docked their makeshift ship against the on in distress, the alarms echoed throughout both. After settling from the loud thud of the ships gently crashing in a kiss to one of the many entrances of their own, Yo-Yo leaped with joy. 

Gun in hand, his battle cry was a reckless, “Yahoo!” that could only faintly be heard by the captaining Kaz as he watched a signature bouncing leopard cowboy hat disappear into the dim emergency lights. 

“Manic little gremlin,” Kaz mumbled to himself. It had become a term of endearment over the years. 

Kaz’s own styled purple spikes brushed the top of the doorway as he followed, ensuring diligent protection over his reckless companion. 

The target ship was much different from their own. Where the walls of their ship was crafted in shoddy exposed mechanics for easy adjustment and inevitable repair, these were smooth and well-finished. They allowed him to run a hand across without fear of being stabbed or shocked by shoddy work. “Some kind of federation issue,” he assumed. 

Sirens wailed in monotony, otherwise silent save for Yo-Yo’s inelegant stomping. Kaz found him easily, and just in time to witness a fairly common form of giant parasite crawling out of the unfortunate pilot’s disemboweled and distended corpse.

“Yo-Yo, don’t be reckless,” Kaz scolded as he raised his gun to shoot the imminent looming fleshy worm that had raised its front in attention. It could have easily swallowed Yo-Yo’s small figure whole. The worm fell defeated in a heap of wet tissue and teeth and the only thanks Kaz received was an extra toothy grin. 

“Look.” 

Hoping to get out of the imminent scolding by his partner in piracy, he pointed to the control panel of the ship. 

It was then that Kaz realized that this was no standard vehicle. On the control panel were makeshift controls, always a point of interest. The modification, as far as Kaz in all of his shoddy mechanic knowledge could tell, was of top-notch launch buttons. It was cleaner than he could have done, certainly. Though if he could pull off snagging them, they could make off with two giant missiles added to their collection for only the cost of a few bullets lost to worms. 

This prize had redirected Yo-Yo’s scolding for now. 

“Oh, wow,” Kaz instead gushed over the work, eyes for nothing else despite being framed by the struggle of it all as he stepped into the room, surrounded by corpses of previous parasite’s successes and failures alike, all dead. 

“Keep watch,” Kaz commanded, not so immune to distraction as he’d liked to have thought. 

Yo-Yo agreed in the form of marching off in the direction from which the gruesome parasites had come in the hopes of more target practice. His own looting interests lied in more impractical things such as fashion and trinkets from around the galaxy to make him feel flashy.  He’d only drug Kaz into it to the extent of painting him up every once in a while, but he was sure he’d lure him into his own made-up alien aesthetic yet. 

Yo-Yo only sort of kept his promise as he tended to do. Perhaps were it a less familiar challenge, he would have been more reliable, but these worms were slow as dirt, he always said. He ran forth until he happened upon a nest of the creatures. They were curled and knotted into one another, inching around in lazy pulses. Yo-Yo could only see their outlines beneath the flesh of other members of the crew, a pair of bodies writhing from the inside. 

“’Like shooting fish in a barrel’ should be changed to ‘like shooting a nest of space parasites in some old dude’s guts’,” he thought to himself as his beloved piztol made quick (and gorey) work of the pupating bastards. 

“It doesn’t have much of a ring to it, but ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ probably didn’t either, at first.” 

Their blood leaked purple while the mucous they writhed through was a thin red, making painting the walls with their fluids a striking affair. 

After ensuring the worms he’d encountered had been blasted to bits and gathering his bounty through the wreckage, he swung his gun around his finger. He sang a casual whistle as he wandered into what tended to be his favorite part: the living quarters. While Kaz worked at dismantling missiles to steal, Yo-Yo was keen to find the more personal spoils.  

These strange federation defectors didn’t seem to have completely unwound yet, though, as he found little in the way of fashion, valuables, or even drugs. 

In defeat, he returned to Kaz to actually do some dreaded work. It was just another run-of-the-mill looting, except this time, they’d made off with two monstrous missiles. 

It was almost a relaxing run. 

With weapons heavily regulated, the duo found themselves often caught up in a chase for beauties like these. 

“Got the eggs for the bounty?” Kaz greeted Yo-Yo upon his return, so conveniently having been finishing up without his help. 

Yo-Yo’s relaxed gait paused to raise a sachet bulging with the terrors. 

“Yep! Let’s hurry though, cuz these things are hot, heavy fistfuls of snot and this bag ain’t doing much.” 

He raised it in illustration of its leaking like a sack of summer garbage. 

“Let’s go.” 

The often regal and composed Kaz was so confident in his clean skill that he’d kept his lace gloves on, now riddled with holes from rogue wires. Nevertheless, the transfer was complete, and while he’d been able to mount them to their ship, the only thing left was to install the controls. 

While the two’s personalities often clashed, they could, just as most any other hooligan alike, enjoy cashing in a good bounty together. 

Getting rid of parasitic pests was the most honest of the work they did, a rare overlap where seedy underbelly happened to benefit the skettle and the Feds all the same. 

And speaking of skettle, Yo-Yo was eager to get back and enjoy the finer things in life in their favorite place outside of federal jurisdiction: the Outfort. 

“Shit,  I feel like the ship is heavier with goodies. What do you imagine these bad boys can do?” Yo-Yo asked, legs draped over the arm of his chair in a distinct lack of caring for navigation to which he was assigned. He estimated the difference in “heft” by flicking his yoke with a heavy hand that lashed out in a drop from where he lay. Kaz simply adjusted each time, pulling back to put them on a straight path. He was too pleased with his as yet unprogrammed new stock. 

Yo-Yo didn’t get much chance to wear him down, either. From his space, he leaned back in his chair and muttered, “We’re being followed.” His words trailed off as he finallysat up, feet planting onto his pedals. 

“Probably someone else looking for distress signals,” Kaz tried to sound dismissive, but the uncertainty in his voice couldn’t be hidden from Yo-Yo, not after their familiarity had developed as much as it had in the past few years. 

Without mentioning that they looked like Central Federation ships much like the one they’d just left, Yo-Yo challenged his flighty companion with a sickly sweet grin. 

“Floor it.” 

For the second time that day, Yo-Yo was happy to cheer a “Yahoo!” as Kaz took heed of his command. His acceleration knocked Yo-Yo backward into his seat as he clasped an arm over his head to keep his cowboy hat on. As soon as he was firmly planted in his spot, he began flipping through the camera feeds on their shoddy monitor. 

Living quarters, kitchen, engines, jet bay, the inward cameras all scrolled by, the space pirate equivalent of a bachelor apartment flashing in momentary glances on the screen before he got to the outward cameras. Front and sides proved nothing, but behind them were three large, sleek ships. Kaz caught a glance of them to realize they were of the same standardized type as their looted ship.

Kaz continued his panicked navigation and Yo-Yo couldn’t make out if they shared the same missiles or modifications. It didn’t matter much to either of them, especially when a booming projection made its appearance to tell them to halt made its appearance. 

Yo-Yo snatched the receiver of their own announcement system and yelled a simple but effective response of “Suck my dick!” 

It gained a guffaw and praise from Kaz, even with a brow furrowed in his task of navigating the rapidly approaching territory that was familiar enough in which to lose the pursuers. 

“I couldn’t have said it more eloquently myself.” 

Kaz had his own strains while Yo-Yo kept a close eye on developments. Space was space. One didn’t have to navigate much for most of it. There also wasn’t much to find there. That’s why their searches were often contained within borders or just outside of them. Most of those borders had been erected by the Central Federation, of which Kaz and Yo-Yo were not a part, leaving them vulnerable to laws of breaching those boundaries. They were part of the surrounding, lesser societies instead, often makeshift masses of land rather than colonized planets. Those were the very outskirts where modern and fabricated federation housing gave way to shacks salvaged from space garbage and a lot of character. 

Slipping back into borders meant being surrounded by the infrastructure that came with them, leaving Kaz to his white-knuckle focus. Almost home. 

“Yo-Yo, do you still spot them?” Kaz asked, knowing it had been suspiciously too long since hearing from him. 

The only response was a few muffled grunts. Kaz whizzed around between dodging ships and docks to see Yo-Yo with a parasitic hatchling halfway down his throat. Kaz wailed in panic with one hand on his yoke, trying now to divide his decimated attention between the parasite, the pursuers, and the increasingly packed obstacles as they closed in on their destination. 

Summoning a knife from his pocket at the same time as Yo-Yo would pull his gun from his waistband, the poor creature had no chance. It was sliced in two from one side and blasted to indecipherable hunks from the other in the very next moment. 

That climax provided only enough relief for Kaz to return to navigation, just in time to swipe the frame of one of their doors off on the side of a building they had known. He overcompensated in a rookie move in his panic, which sent unbuckled Yo-Yo flying into the side of the control room where piles of fresh hatchlings were thrown atop him. 

Strings of gratuitously repeated curses left each of them as they took frantic action. Wheezes and whines of parasites could be heard with each gunshot, magnified by the chamber in which they were fired. Finally home, Kaz made his way to the only place he knew he wouldn’t crash into anything else. The struggle only ended when Kaz crashed in a clumsy landing in an empty lot. 

He was sure that the antics of his entrance would have gained them attention. 

“Don’t shoot!” Kaz warned as he opened the closest doors and ran to rip the parasites away to contain them again. Dozens of slimy worms as big as his forearms were wriggling around, and he often couldn’t tell which was dead or alive. Shoving the rest of the now writhing, angry, and hungry things back into the tattered sack took both of their struggle against the putrid-smelling defensive slime. 

“Wait, the ships!” Yo-Yo was leaping out the doors the moment he was free enough to deem containment Kaz’s job. 

The cameras were useless when they were still, which had him crawl up the steps and jump right into a giant, grey-skinned, menacing-looking man. 

The ships had disappeared somewhere along the way. Perhaps they’d gotten lost in the sporadic driving or perhaps they really had been Central Federation ships, which had no jurisdiction here. 

Outfort was a safety net, considered by some a den of debauchery and bo others simple a necessary evil. What they were there for was bounty, a job orchestrated by, but too messy for the fed guys. 

Yo-Yo had only realized he’d bumped into a friendly face when the intruder sprayed a thick fog into the ship meant to subdue the parasites. 

“Malik!” Kaz cheered in a huffed sigh of relief. He stepped from the ship to hurriedly hand his sack of half-hatched spoils to the bounty handler. 

“You boys are going to need more than this to pay for the damage to Miss Madir’s place,” he exclaimed in good faith, or so it seemed by his booming, cheerful voice, “I’ll bring your pay when I tally this mess up, huh?” 

Malik was their agent. He worked here. These were his people, bunched in this small camp confined to seedy but mostly well-meaning folks. He collected the pests and separated the troublemakers from it all. Although with how much headache they often caused, Kaz was sure that they recklessly danced the cusp of that label. 

There was a moment in which they both breathed a sigh of relief. Yo-Yo rubbed where he’d slammed his head in the wall to find he’d cracked a huge gash into it and was covered in head blood in his struggle. Kaz peeked back into the control room, making one last sweep to ensure Malik, in all of his helpfulness, hadn’t left any beasties behind. 

They’d made it through government ships, live parasites, and a crash landing, but both were nervous to face Madir, whose building they’d damaged along the way to the ground. Madir’s inn, they saw as they looked up, had a huge chunk taken from its side. The humble inn and pub where they’d found most of their joy and networking was now baring thick wiring and framework to the world from behind concrete encasement. 

“I guess that’s next on the list,” Kaz lamented. 

“Think she’ll still let me add a drink to the tab?” Yo-Yo hopefully tacked on. 

They made their way through the streets of what was really a glorified compound. Not wealthy enough to afford a planet to inhabit, temporary pockets of atmosphere, devices that helped condone life in unfortunate and uninhabitable areas, were used. They were called synthetic atmos and as they became cheaper and more readily available, fewer accidents happened. Thanks, humanitarians. 

When they did malfunction, something that could have easily happened in the past from a collision such as theirs, carnage reigned. People dropped dead of ruptured everythings. 

Outfort, the galaxy’s trailer park, had its charms as well. One of those crumbled a few more steps away: Madir’s. The ten-story inn, built narrow and dense as most things had been in order to save space within the atmos, housed a pub on the ground floor and a casino if you were known not to cause trouble. Yo-Yo had once been banned for getting into a fistfight over the price of a live rodent he was trying to wager while drunk. 

“Life… is priceless,” Kaz remembered him starting in a line with which he occasionally still teased him.  

Here they were again, facing Madir in much bigger trouble than that. People of all kinds were still fleeing by the time they got there. The duo was still geared up and weighed down with light weaponry and straps. 

“How the hell did I know that as soon as something happened, you two would show up?” A mountainous woman from the same planet as Malik, grey-skinned and giant, towered over them at the double-doored entrance. She held a thin switch in her three-fingered hand. 

“Hey, at least we didn’t jet!” Yo-Yo scoffed. Kaz and he resented their reputation preceding them, and yet they continued to pile on the fuck-ups. 

“Wouldn’t have done you a lick of good if you had. I’ve learned your stink, you little shits, and I can have my fists around your balls so fast you wouldn’t believe it.” With a snarl, Madir swiped at Yo-Yo with her switch. He jumped back, nearly tripping over his own ankle. They’d seen her mad, and as bubbly as she could be in one moment, she was just as vicious when she saw they needed her scolding.

“Madir,” Kaz greeted with a sheepish smile and a bow of his head in submission. He worked much less delicately in the presence of his partner. Yo-Yo always made him anxious that he would blurt out something to destroy any wafer-thin framework he built when navigating these conversations. 

“We’ve caused trouble, but we've always made up for it, haven’t we? Not repairs, upgrades. Scout’s word.” Kaz raised a palm to show his honor, his empty hand in lack of weapon or offering. 

Madir pursed her lips. When Yo-Yo had been slammed through a table at no fault of his own, they paid for a whole new set. It was the only way they could keep themselves from getting their asses constantly kicked with the frequency of their mistakes. It kept them busy, too, which was of benefit to everyone in Outfort, really. 

“This is the most costly trouble you’ve ever been in, I can guarantee you that!” She spoke without breaths between words in her frustration. 

Just as Kaz feared, Yo-Yo butted in to do the damage with a gratuitous lie, “Yeah, but we got a huge bounty! It’s in Malik’s hands right now. Come on, we had a hell of a trip back, too! Cut us a break!”  

Kaz could tell that Yo-Yo was gearing up to ask for a drink and cut in yet again to soften the blow. 

“Madir, let’s talk repayment over some drinks. You know we’re always good for it for you.” Kaz’s warm smile was as genuine as Yo-Yo’s claims of a “huge bounty” and yet, a grumbling Madir turned and freed a path inside the building. A few others, apparently seasoned enough not to have been phased by the blow to the building, remained inside in a corner table of the dim pub. A sour smell of swampy wood hugged up to them, not quite mildewed and somehow comforting if only in its familiarity. 

Sitting helped alleviate their bodies which had been roughed from the crash. Kaz assumed that the blood still dried onto Yo-Yo’s face had helped their case. 

Kaz had a berryliquor soda. Yo-Yo aimed for hazard in a fireball cocktail that cast a warm glow onto the dingy bar beneath it. 

“Always a master of making something out of nothing. I wouldn’t complain if you offered us only mead and jelly.” Kaz continued to butter up a very unimpressed Madir. 

They only waited nor for a contractor to assess the damages, and Malik to tally their spoils.