Cowboy Bebop Fan Fiction ❯ Cowboy Bebop The Second Stanza ❯ Session 0 The Players ( Prologue )

This may say session 0, but it's really the first chapter in this story. I hop e you enjoy it, and please Read & Review.

 

Soupcan58

 

Session 0: The Players

 

 

A ship floated silently through the vast expanse of space. This ship wasn't too far from civilization though. It was just outside the atmosphere of Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, in the Sol System. Why a trash crew hadn't picked it up was anyone's guess, but still, something was different about it.

 

It looked like a perfectly fine craft, other than the stuff that had gotten caught onto the ship itself from the floating debris. Maybe it had been around Earth at some point in its time out. It looked like a classic model of race craft, so people just dismissed it as they came out of the gates. This shouldn't have been disregarded so quickly though. For inside the cockpit of this spacecraft, a man laid in wait for his target. Little did he know, he wouldn't have to wait very long for the bounty he was after.

 

The man was a bounty hunter, on the prowl, looking for the mass terrorist that had escaped the ISSP for the third time. The bounty had been released to the public about a week before, and every bounty hunter in the system was looking for the terrorist. When there is a fifty million Woolong bounty on your head, you know you probably will find bounty hunters galore after you.

 

Well, the bounty had just escaped the hyperspace gates, which put him directly in front of the bounty hunter on his tail. Without a moment's hesitation, the bounty hunter's ship came to life. Every panel lit up, the wings starting to unfold.

 

Before the bounty had any idea what was happening, the junked ship changed into an oncoming pursuer. He decided to activate the booster system to outrun the oncoming ship. That would be of no help to him though. The ship owned by the Bounty Hunter could outrun an ISSP cruiser with no problem. It was a Swordfish after all. Closer and closer the hunter came, waiting to collect his prize. With each movement closer, a buzzing noise seemed to come out of nowhere. He looked at his dash and didn't see any warning messages, so he continued on. But as he continued forward, it got louder and louder until….

 

 

 

BAM!

 

Jason Thoreon's alarm clock was the sound. And of course it was right before he caught up with the bounty, too. It was the same way every night. His dream would always be about trying to go and get a bounty as a bounty hunter. That was his dream when he was awake too. He wanted to be a bounty hunter. He wanted the thrill of chasing down enemies that, though he didn't know, were his deadliest. It looked like the best job in the system. After wiping the sleepy stuff out of his eyes, he looked at the clock.

“CRAP!” He yelled just before he hit the floor in a mad dash, trying to get ready for work. He only had ten minutes before he had to be down at the theater, Alpha City 7. Jason couldn't miss this day ether. Nothing special was happening really that day at Alpha City 7, it was just that he couldn't be late again. He had been late to work three times that month. The manager told him that if he was late one more time, he was fired.

“I can't loose this job! I've still got to save a bit more for the ship!” Jason thought, a sense of urgency funning through his head. The ship he's thinking about is a ship that he found while rummaging through the junkyard a while back. Ok, it was huge ship, so maybe not while rummaging. But it was a star cruiser, which would help hold the bounties.

“The ship's waiting on me! He's only gonna' hold it for a couple more days and then it's on the market again!” He thought once more to himself while watching the toaster with a close eye, the Pop-Tart not popping out of the slot fast enough. You see he had made a deal with the owner and he gave him a price of 50,000 Woolongs. That may seem like a hefty price, but it was nothing compared to what bounty hunters normally got for a paycheck.

“See ya, Lee! I've got to move! I'll feed ya when I get home from work!” Lee was the cat that he had gotten ever since he had moved out of his family's place. It made the place a bit more bearable.

Rushing down the stairs of the Apartment building he was living in, he almost ran three people over just trying to get out the door. Then next problem was that behind that door was a staircase. One that went down for three stories.

“Well, how are ya gonna get this done, Jason?” He said, challenging himself to get down the staircase as fast as he could. He started to run down the staircase and was doing fine for a couple seconds. But then people started showing up. In a desperate attempt to move faster without hurting anyone, he hoped onto the railing and slid the rest of the way down.

Once he got close to the bottom, he pushed off the railing and landed about ten feet away. The speed that he was moving down the railing had propelled him very far, very fast. He was completely out of breath, but still he knew that he had to go on.

 

Busting through the front doors of his apartment building, he ended up running into his girlfriend, Macy Coregouh, literally. After picking himself off the ground, he noticed it was Macy, which made him feel like a complete heel.

“Sorry, Mace, but I'm gonna be late for work again if I don't keep moving!” He said without taking a moment's break. With that, he started to speed down the sidewalk, hoping that he could still make it.

Without looking, Macy said, “Ya know, I could just… take… you … to…” Before she even got the word work out, he was out of sight. “Dang… he could at least wait long enough for me to finish what I was gonna say! Oh well, his loss.”

Tearing down the street, Macy not even in his mind, he could see the theater just in front of him. He then kicked it into high gear, completely passing even some of the cars on the street. I was just exaggerating about that, but he was moving really fast. When his feet finally landed on the pavement of the theater's parking lot, he came to a sudden stop. Something had caught his eye as he had been running. Macy had beet him there by ten minutes.

 

“You need to remember, lover boy, I do have a car, unlike you.” She said, a bit of a smile coming across her face.

“I hate it when you do this crap to me!” Jason replied, kind of ticked off.

“What crap,” Macy replied, now starting to get just as mad as Jason. “You're the one who blew me off before you remembered that I could take you in because we work in the same place!”

“Oh… yeah… he he he he he.” Jason completely forgot that fact.

“Well, at least you made it on time. You won't get fired today. That's nice to know.” Replied, seeming truthfully cheery about that fact.

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me that the boss'll do anything to get me out of the theater and on the street.” Jason said, being reminded of past close calls. “I swear that man hates me!”

“I have to say, I agree with you completely.” Macy said, surprisingly. Jason thought she was still mad at him. “It's like he's got something against you, know what I mean?”

Jason then stopped in his tracks. Something came back to him. A scream pierced through his ears as the sight of a man, shot through the heart, clawed on the floor towards him, then, all became normal again.

“Another memory of times past…” Jason thought to himself. There was one thing that the people of this area of Mars didn't know, or at least, he didn't think they knew. From the time he was 17 till two years before, he had been on his own, living a life of a man with nothing to live for. Basically, a man of the Syndicate. With nowhere he thought he could go, he was turned to the Red Dragon Syndicate by a man dressed in black. The man, with hair as white as the snow yet not very old, had become the leader of the syndicate after the original leader, Mao Yenrai, had been murdered by someone inside the syndicate. The man in black was the new leader, only known by the name Vicious. He had promised Jason a place to stay, food to eat, and money, if he would work for the syndicate. Two years after Vicious recruited him, Vicious was killed by a man who seemed to be his mortal enemy. A bounty hunter named Spike Spiegel.

After his death, there was no safety for him inside the syndicate. He somehow got out of the syndicate before anyone had realized anything about his leaving. That was a good thing too. He didn't want anything from the syndicate to follow him out. That was one year before. He had moved to Alpha City, about as far as you could go on Mars with out having to worry about the red dragon syndicate. Though it looked as if none of the members followed him, the haunting memories of what he did while in the syndicate were buried in his mind, letting loose a fragment of that past every time something from that time came his way. Like the recognizing of a person, place, or thing. It would probably haunt him till the end of his days.

“Jason? Are you alright?” Macy just reached out of him and pulled him from his past. “You just stopped on your tracks and turned all pale.”

“Yeah, I'm fine. Just felt a little weird that's all.” Jason said, lying through his teeth, to a certain degree.

“Well, at least you aren't sick. You have to work concessions today. We can't have you making the patrons sue!” It was his boss, Mr. Gleason. Jacob Gleason, though he sounded like an older adult, was actually right around Jason's age, around twenty-two.

“Mr. Gleason… um… hi!” Said Jason, stumbling for the right words to say to keep his job. He already knew he was on thin ice with him, and he didn't want to add the proverbial campfire on that ice, melting it down more. “I'm not really sick, something just started to bug me. My mind playing tricks, you know the deal.”

In his usual gruff voice, Mr. Gleason replied. “No, I don't. So just stop playing in your fairy tale world and GET TO WORK!”

Walking away, towards the concession stand that was the be his home for the next six hours, he leaned over to Macy and said, “Man, what's up his butt? Yeah, he's normally mean and all, but that was the worst I've seen him.”

“Well, what would you expect? It is the anniversary of his Father's murder.” Macy replied, trying to get a bit of understanding out of her boyfriend. “I would expect the exact same from…”

Jason never heard the rest of the statement. He had been teleported, in his mind, back to his last day in the Red Dragon Syndicate. The bloodiest day as well.

This day will live on in his memory, not just for the fact of his escape, but for the things he did to make that happen. The day had been one of the bloodier events he had ever seen in his life. It was also the last time that the syndicate would truly have it's last fearsome fight. The thing is, it took place in Tharsus. It didn't come without it's regrets though. He had to kill a store owner to create enough evidence for the rest of the syndicate guards that were there was an attack. When they started to fire, Jason ran like the wind.

Earlier that day, he had bought a rail ticket to get him out of the red dragon infested town. When the train pulled out of the atmosphere bubble that covered the city, he knew he was finally free of the syndicate. The memories came with him though, so, unconsciously, the memories of those times were suppressed. That is all but a few things.

“Jason, how's it hangin' man!” The voice broke Jason out of his stupor. Mostly because of the fact he could recognize of the voice. A voice from a time he didn't remember. It was of his old friend, Blake McBern.

“It's going down great man.” Jason replied, not noticing the pang of despair in his voice.

“Jason don't lie to me! I can tell when you're lying to me! Tell me what's going on with you as of late, man.” Blake said, obviously trying to help.

“You can tell when I'm lying? HA! That's an even bigger one than when you said you had talked to Radical Edward!” Jason still didn't believe that Blake had talked to him, or her, or whatever Rad Ed was.

“I told you that really did happen! I'll prove it to you one of…. Wait! You're putting me off subject again! Now I really know somethin's up. You don't have to talk about it now, but still, you know I'm here for anything.”

“Same with me!” Agreed Macy.

“Well, at least I know that much.” Jason thought to himself. “Well, you two have convinced me. I tell you about it tonight at dinner, when I make my big announcement.”

 

See Ya Later, Space Cowboy