❛ A GIRLBOSS MECHANIC, A DELUSIONAL BOUNTY HUNTER AND A BIO-CHEMICALLY ALTERED RODENT WALK INTO A BAR...I'M PRETTY SURE YOU CAN FINISH THE JOKE. ❜ | Calypso Orellano had a sailor's mouth, a punch of steel, and zero tolerance for scruffy bounty hunte...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
VARGO, 2008.
LET ME BE CLEAR, I'M WELL AWARE OF the many, many mistakes I've made in my life.
Some have said my choice to take my first breath is my first. Some days I agree. But I feel like I've racked up such a litany of other bad choices, mistakes and 'wrong places, wrong times', that my birth (which wasn't even my fault, let's be real here) kind of falls short.
From hitchhiking with serial killers, to running my mouth in a bar literally crawling with Krellian mobsters, to making a bet that I could take on a Spacehog with only a socket wrench, there's been a lot of really stupid choices. Some that I've barely survived, some I come out crawling and covered in blood (sometimes my own, sometimes someone else's) and battered and bruised for months. Freelance work is no joke, and neither is being a woman in this universe.
But out of all the choices I've made in my twenty-eight years, asking to be dropped off on Vargo is definitely the one I regret the most, right now.
Let me just say, snow gets really old, really fast, when you're an idiot who forgot to buy a proper coat.
My padded bomber jacket might as well have been made out of paper. Against the freezing winds and the flurry of snow cascading around me, I'm defenseless. A swearing and struggling flea on the back of a Kra-Kamel. There's snow everywhere on me, slipping under my collar, down my face, down my back. Every time it melts, a mountain more falls to coat me. Everything aches. Everything's cold. And of course, this is the day public transportation fails me.
"You run every other day," I snark under my breath. With every word comes a puff of white, hot hitting the meltdown of cold around me. "You run every day, but today's weather too much? What a joke."
No one else is around me, because no one else is stupid to just wander into a blizzard like I am — so I don't feel as stupid bickering with the storm.
"Great Krite. You're such an idiot. Such an idiot!" I swipe a hand under my running nose and scowl. "Only you would think to strand yourself here. Only you, Orellano."
After what feels like a thousand years – it's only been twenty minutes, but I think I'm privy to some exaggeration – I reach my destination. Amidst the swirl of snow and ice, it's hard to even see the large, brown box of a building. A glass bay door looking out into a deserted parking lot, paired with a shoddy side door harshly painted red. I can only barely make out the dilapidated sign the owner half-assed as advertising, the messily written 'REPAIRS AND REPARATIONS' slapped onto the front of the building.
I've always wanted to point out that 'repairs' and 'reparations' are basically the same thing, but my boss is a bit of a nightmare. I'm not losing a hand because of a stupid sign.
