née sadie wright

Nothing could substitute for real world experience, of course, but it could be nice to get some practice in when the bullets that were shooting at you weren’t real. Gideon hadn’t really given any thought to whether the Arcade would be occupied by the time he got there. People were in and out all the time, so even if he had been alone, chances were he’d have been interrupted before long anyway. Not that he minded. A flicker of intrigue flashed across his features, a lopsided grin and a head tilt greeting the other agent. “Bit of a rebel, are we? Well, I very much doubt you’re going to rub off on me. I like my head firmly attached to my shoulders, thanks very much.”

He unzipped his sweatshirt to reveal the shirtless chest beneath and spread his wings, his six foot three commanding stature becoming immediately even more interesting. “But I don’t mind a bit of company, especially from someone so easy on the eyes.” Acedia agents could be trouble. Often they felt they had nothing to lose, assuming they were going to be left for dead on a mission once they’d accomplished their goal anyway, but Gideon had never been afraid to flirt with danger, even literally.

Sadie rolled her eyes in irritation at the sudden flirtation, waving one hand to shut down the simulation and scrolling through the computer to find one that would be more physically challenging for someone with wings but still possible for someone without. She bounced slightly on the balls of her feet and rolled her shoulders to loosen her muscles. “People usually use more extreme terms for me than just a bit of a rebel, but it’s a fun change of pace.” Her tone was casual even as she regarded the other, cataloguing weaknesses she could take advantage of in a fight. There had been a point in her life where doing so would never have occurred to her, but that time was long past.

The first level of imitation foes rose out of the ground, weapons drawn and ready to fire and Sadie dropped into a crouch, reaching for the bag of blood clipped to her belt. “Okay, flyboy, go and get through this with your head on your shoulders.” With a grin she reached up and grabbed one of the ledges that jutted out from the wall, hauling herself up to a more advantageous position.

As much as it hurt to see the other agent, Shay couldn’t help but feel a flutter of excitement at the prospect of them working together. It had been fun, in the past, to be Sadie’s second set of eyes. Much more so than plenty of other she worked with regularly. “I haven’t really looked. Usually people come in here and have a program in mind, and I just tag along.” Did she sound as stupid as she felt? There was a reason that she had cut off the other agent. But here she was, still fawning over the sight of her. Even as Sadie held bags of blood, even with those thoughts, nothing made a difference. “Maybe an extraction?”

Brushing past the Vainglory agent, Sadie could feel the slight uptick in the other woman’s pulse but ignored it to focus on the computer in front of her. She scrolled through several missions before selecting one which looked promising. “Here, extraction of an unconscious agent from a military base. Intel says they’re behind several layers of biometric security.” A few clicks later and several walls began to rise out of the ground, a whirring sound coming from behind them. Sadie settled into a position that would allow her easy movement and nodded at the other agent with a smile. “Alright, lead the way.”

Jules’ grin curled into a more genuine, though no less mischievous, smile as she realized who had walked through the door. Sadie was someone Julienne definitely was not expecting to meet after she finally made it through all of the hooks Hellfire had put her through. She was skilled and more than lethal, but she definitely had a bit of chaos swirling around in her. Perhaps that’s why she had taken to the other woman so quickly. Why she found herself genuinely curious about Sadie- beyond trying to determine what advantages “befriending” her might yield. 

Hanging out with Sadie was always a good time, even now- despite the fact that the other girl had been transferred to the Acedia group. The transfer had changed the dynamic of their friendship a bit- not to mention the fact that she knew Sadie was often frustrated by her own lack of conviction when it came to usurping the agency- but for the most part, they were able to continue on as they always had: causing a bit of trouble and having fun doing it.

“In this economy? Pretty much anything. Just name your price, gorgeous.” Jules drawled, leaning back in her chair. As soon as Sadie withdrew a chocolate bar, she grinned, clearly remembering the stuffy looking agent who had left it there an hour earlier. Getting to her feet, she sidled up to the other girl, plucking the chocolate from her fingers and the piece into her mouth without hesitation. She had no doubt she’d pay for this later, but she felt zero remorse as as the chocolate hit her tongue. “Mmmm, thanks babe, you’re the real MVP.”

Sadie looked down at her hands then back up at Jules, her mouth open in faux shock. “How could you?” The indignation in her voice was betrayed by the smile that she couldn’t keep from appearing on her face and after a moment she laughed quietly and hopped up to sit on the counter, feet dangling below her. “I can’t help but question the tactical decision here,” she continued, gesturing at the other agent with what remained of the candy in her hand. “You ask what you can offer me in exchange for something you want and then just take something else? Is this what they’re teaching you guys in the Lust mission briefings?”

It was nice, being around Jules like this. There were a couple others who she could chat with, mostly other members of Acedia who were as fed up as she was, but pretty much all of them were guys and she missed hanging out with other women around her own age. Less exhausting and irritating. And Jules was fun, not perfect, but entertaining and interesting, unlike many of the other agents MKHellfire who had picked up.

“I am gorgeous, thank you for noticing,” she teased, before pursing her lips as if she were deep in thought. “I do have some of my alcohol ration left, but I’m not sure what to ask for. There are just so many options.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes at the comment, almost tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard what Sadie had say. So many of the Acedia agents had such a chip on their shoulders that it was more frustrating than anything to sit and listen to them feel sorry for themselves. “Not what I was thinking, but whatever,” she eventually answered, stepping more fully into the room.

She’d been prepared to wait for Sadie to finish her level, but impatience and irritability won out and Eva place her hand directly over the console and let her mind meld with the piece of equipment. Compared to most of the things she worked with, it was a fairly simple piece of tech, so it only took a few seconds to sweep through all of its components and back out again. “Frame rate issues. Had another agent moaning about not being able to achieve the facility record because of performance issues, but now I know he was being a salty little bitch like always.” 

Even eleven months later, Sadie still wasn’t used to being the person people didn’t like. She’d always had friends in school and at work, and for the first years of her employment at Hellfire it hadn’t been a struggle to find people who wanted to spend time with her. Given that information, it almost seemed strange how little she cared about the weird tension in the air and the sharp spike in so many pulses when she came in the room. But there wasn’t a lot she cared about these days.

“Eva, I’ve told you before, you can’t let every fool here whose porn isn’t loading fast enough use you as their IT department.” She leaned back on the sofa and watched with the same low-level interest with which she regarded the powers of the other agents. “Got any pet projects you’re working on?”

Level C was easily Julienne’s favorite place to spend her downtime. When she’d agreed to join MKHellfire, she thought it would end up being like an old Bond movie. Extravagant riches everywhere you turned, the best food, finest drink, and most beautiful women, and all of it would be readily available. Unfortunately, Tartarus was an overly strict military base at best, and a prison at worst. It seemed like most agents preferred to spend their time either training or keeping to themselves, which left her feeling an entirely unfortunate mixture of bored and restless- neither of which ever resulted in anything good. 

Spinning around aimlessly in the swivel chair she’d commandeered from the leisure room, waiting for someone to enter the kitchen. She often found herself in this same position on her “Grey Days” as she called them, days that nothing quite satisfied her and all she wanted was her freedom. Grey Days rarely lasted more than just a day or two, but by some unfortunate turn of events, she was on day three with no end in sight. So instead of holing up in her room, trying to decide a terribly ineffective plan to escape the compound, she sat in wait, attempting to devise the best approach to coax the next person to enter into surrendering their alcohol ration to her, free of charge.

Hearing the door slide open, Jules planted her feet on the ground, stopping herself mid rotation as a sly grin came to her face. “So, what’s a girl got to do to be offered a drink around here?“

There were some days when the anger in Sadie’s head became so loud that it was hard to concentrate on anything at all. Those were the times when she lost herself in fighting, locking herself in the Arcade and running herself through program after program until the energy was less. Never gone, of course. The anger hadn’t completely stopped since the black bag zipped closed over Tasha’s face, but with enough exercise it became manageable. After leaving the Arcade she had stood in the showers, listening to her own pulse loud in her ears as the water washed away the blood and sweat that had accumulated during her training session.

Her stomach growled and she glanced at the clock, realizing that it had been hours since she’d eaten. Wringing out her hair, Sadie threw on the first clean clothes she could find in her locker, ignoring the other agents in the washroom who all shuffled slightly away when they saw who it was. She slid open the door to the kitchen, already thinking of where the most likely source of chocolate was when she saw Jules. A small smile appeared on her face, more genuine than it usually was these days. The other agent wasn’t a member of Acedia by any means, but at least she wasn’t like the people who followed MKHellfire executives like dogs hoping for scraps.

“Hey there,” she replied, laughing a little as she opened up one of the fridges and began to scan the shelves. “That’s a good question. What’s a girl willing to do to get offered a drink around here.” Her eyes landed on a chocolate bar labeled with another agent’s name and she grabbed it, peeling open the wrapper and snapping off a piece before leaning against the counter and facing Jules.

@vampiricwright

She’d been told to go to the Arcade and do a simulation, but no one else was there, and Shay was done with timing herself while she completed maze after maze. So instead, she stood by the entrance, waiting for someone else to show up for a session. It would be boring to play support again, especially when it was all she did in real life, but it was definitely the better option. The entry area was bare, and Shay half-watched the doorway, bored out of her mind, looking for someone to join in.

Finally, someone walked in the door. Without thinking, she began- “Do you want to do a team-” and then stopped, making eye contact with Sadie. Swallowing, she nodded at the other woman. “Oh. Hey.” The two hadn’t talked in what must have been months, at least outside of missions. And even that dynamic had changed.

Before entering the Arcade, Sadie stopped and tapped her fingers against the metal locker that held a few bags of blood. It wouldn’t make sense to fill the training dummies with it, and she’d learned firsthand how little MKHellfire liked having their workers harmed, so these were her only options when doing exercises in the Arcade. Well, that and the blood in her own body, but that was a little too painful for everyday training. She typed in the code and waited impatiently while the eyes in the walls decided whether they were going to let her in or not, then rolled her eyes as the little door swung open. “A-thank you,” she said, reaching in to pull out two of the small bags.

Pushing the door open with her foot she stopped upon seeing Shay. Yet another person who she had been close with (very close, her mind supplied), who had bailed the second Sadie’d had enough with MKHellfire’s crap. It would have been easy to just leave, probably would have been easy to try and bully Shay out of the room, but there was a part of Sadie that missed the other agent. Instead she stepped inside and nodded with a crooked smile. “Got any good team exercises lined up on the computer?”

Even before Hellfire, friends were not something Eva had a lot of. The short childhood that she’d had, had been mostly spent indoors. Any possibility of making friends at school diminished with each year that she skipped, and as it turned out, most college students weren’t interested in making friends with a 16 year old know-it-all. Only when she’d finally graduated and made it into the work force, had Eva finally found people who she could relate to. Then the only problem was that they all lived for their work and preferred doing overtime to socialising with colleagues. It was the reason she treasured the few friends she had, and why the moment she’d landed in Tartarus she’d sworn to herself that she’d never let herself get attached to anyone again.

 Their lives were not their own to live anymore. Sometimes agents went out on missions and never returned and Eva did not want that kind of distraction in her life. The only problem was that she hadn’t taken into account just how tenacious some people were, and how sometimes despite what her brain had to say about it all, her heart found itself doing the opposite, leading to a few people managing to make it through the walls she’d built up (not that she’d tell them). Sadie had been one of those people. Had. Now she was just an Acedia agent that Eva had made the mistake of becoming attached to. She wasn’t about to make that mistake again. 

Eva hadn’t been expecting anyone to be up in the arcade at that time. It was why she’d picked it, so that she could perform a tune up on the console without having to worry about interrupting anyone’s session. She was hoping she could just slip out before Sadie noticed, but clearly her pulse or something else had given here away. “I’m not here to play. I just need to check something and then I can leave you to whatever it is that you do.” 

Sadie startled at the sound of the voice, one that had barely addressed her since the Incident almost a year before. It felt strange to remember that not that long ago there had been people she had liked, people she had allowed herself to care about. No one quite like Tasha, of course, but people she had been open with and laughed with and fought for. Eva had been one of those people, she was smart and fun and pretty, and was one of the reasons Sadie hadn’t snapped a long time before she did. But then Tasha had died and everything had broken apart and Eva like so many others turned her back and hid away. As if not engaging with the problem would fix it.

Her fingers tightened on the controller and she nearly ran right into one of the enemy soldiers before shooting it down with renewed irritation. “I’m not going to go psycho or whatever it is that you all think I’m going to do. Dinner sounds like it’s going to be pretty good tonight and I won’t get to eat it if they’re scraping me off the walls.” She turned her head to properly look at the other agent. “What are you checking on?”

“I will seat back and watch,” he said with a chuckle on grin on his face. Ray knew almost every agent, how could he not when he was always on mission as support, after all he was one of the doctors and agents. He was the go to when someone needed healing, taking on their pain and wound. The agent had learned how to block out the pain and numb it. “Maybe next time we will play a game.” 

Dr. Prime had only been back for three hours, he had been on a mission medical mission collecting and making sure a certain research was correct and did not fall in the wrong hands. The agent was tried after a meeting but he could not stop without saying hello with one of his good friends. “What are you up to?”

Ray was one of the harder of the agents to place a label on. He was certainly not the rebellious type of person she wanted to spend her time with, but he also wasn’t all that bad. He was also one of the prime examples of the way Hellfire used its agents like tools, like they were disposable and forgettable. His entire job was to take the pain and wounds of others and place it on himself, like a storage chest with a personality. Sadie liked the time she spent with him, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the day when the blood she felt pulsing inside of him would cease. And MKHellfire would shrug its shoulder and zip him up in a bag and toss him into the flames. Instead of saying as much, she shrugged and shot down one of the enemies whose shitty programming had made it pop into view to shoot at her. “Yeah, maybe next time. And hey, they like you, so maybe you can see about getting a new one of these, I’ve beaten it way too many times.”

Jack stopped at the entrance of the room, looking across to see some video game up on the screen. Funny how a simple thing like that could make you recall childhood and the first SEGA system and PS4 you ever got. Passed that, he hadn’t played too much. Life had kind of been a video game of its own; why play Call of Duty when he had lived it. He gave a huffed chuckle as he crossed the room over to where he spotted the other controller. “Don’t worry about it, been there and done that already.” He picked up the remote and sat down on the couch, “So passed pressing all the buttons at random, which ones do I need to know about?”

The mission had gone wrong.

It had been the Sloth agents’ fault for not having the right tactics or it had been the Gluttony agents’ fault for not finding the right information or maybe it had been all of MKHellfire’s fault for putting them in this position. It didn’t matter who was to blame exactly, because Tasha was dead and no matter what powers any of them had, she wasn’t going to come back. Sadie was silent as she halted the blood inside of the attacker’s heart, she was silent as the other agents grabbed the documents, she was silent as they pulled her and Tasha’s body up onto the roof.

It was only when the Hellfire staff arrived with a black bodybag that she began to scream. As Tasha’s body was shoved in unceremoniously and tossed without concern into the back of the helicopter, something that had been shaking inside of Sadie for months finally snapped. Some guy, Mark or Clark or something else like that, came to seize Sadie’s arm to pull her onto the helicopter, and before she had time to think she was reaching out for the life inside of him, building the pressure as his face twisted in horror before the skin split and he was covered in red. Sadie doesn’t remember what happened after that. More people came and more blood was spilled and changed and sharpened, but after the haze of red there was a prick of pain on her neck and then...darkness.

how did project MKHellfire find them?

Sadie had only recently received her nursing degree and begun work when an incident occurred in her area that required the action of Hellfire teams. One was injured badly in the combat and through a multitude of errors and confusion, ended up at the hospital where she worked. MKHellfire quickly retrieved their misplaced agent, but not before Sadie had realized that there was something not quite right about the patient. Never one to give up or back down, Sadie began to research. And research. And research. She hunted through every section of the internet that she could find: credible and less so, watched hundreds of video clips and conspiracy theories, and eventually found herself at one conclusion.

There were people with powers out there.

It didn’t take long for MKHellfire to approach her, both interested in removing a potential threat to their security and in seeing who was dedicated enough to find them. It was initially expected that she would most useful as a worker within the walls of Tartarus, but the preliminary tests showed that her mutated aptitudes lay elsewhere. Both she and MKHellfire would eventually regret the agreements that were made there.

how well can they control their ability? 

Well enough to survive, the phrase meaning something quite different than it does for her fellow agents. Her ability to manipulate and control blood certainly protects her in the field, but it also protected her from a swift execution. Her misdemeanors piled up slowly at first: testing how far she could get out of the base before being pulled back, asking too many of the wrong type of questions, and ignoring orders while on missions. The final straw came after her last mission as a member of Wrath. Her friend had died, body quickly collected and destroyed by uncaring agents. Sadie refused to return to Tartarus and nearly killed several members of Tartarus staff before being sedated and brought back to be evaluated and eventually reassigned.

All of which is to say that she is quite skilled with her abilities, though she prefers the speed and drama of brutal attacks than the more subtle measures that she is also capable of. She has to be within 10 yards of the blood that she is affecting. She can harden it, halt it, increase the flow of blood out of a wound that has already been inflicted, as well as several other tricks.

do they get along with their teammates?