28 Bleach Vats Later

[subconmodo]

WHO: Avery Atchison (subconmodo), Imelda Rivera (no_dejare_de_quererte), Héctor (unpocoloco), Peter Parker (made_up_names), Souji Seta (punches_fog), Shuuji Miwa (willnotbeyourneighbour), Ellie Williams (elliexir), Fakir Ansel (schwanenritter), Bumblebee (thebreakfastbug), Orihime Inoue (leekspins)
WHERE: North Dakota
WHEN: January 18th, 2019
WHAT: Obtaining funding for the Academy at the cost of one's dignity. Unless you're in the cleanup group.
WARNINGS: None atm. Will update as they pop up.
Note: Full mission details/plotting can be found Here

To Avery's credit, he had tried to prepare his students for this. The zombies had been the easy part. The corpses were slow and weak and as long as none of them did anything stupid they wouldn't be in danger. Wouldn't help the smell or the grossout factor, but such was life, death, and undeath.

Their clients were another matter entirely.

"It's not death that's going to be our enemy here," Avery had said during the briefing. "It's customer service." And if he wasn't allowed to rip into this bunch of stuck up jerks (literally as well as figuratively), neither was anyone else. He'd let minor acts of passive aggression slide, but that was it. And maybe, just maybe if they were lucky enough, Avery might be able to convince the bigwigs to let one or two of them fire off something or another.

---

The cleanup crew is much luckier. The smell may be worse (rot and burning flesh and whatever scents habe wafted up in the wake of Coldsteel's blow-shit-up-themed office party. Avery looks to be just Abbott on his last legs as he suits up alongside everyone and hands out holy water and runecasters, all the while grumbling about how he needs a pay raise.

Comments

[made_up_names]

Okay, being held in a (sorta) giant robot's hand is pretty cool. Enough to make him stop sulking about it and take a good look at the robot actually holding him right now. So this is what rune armor looks like ... He's a little jealous? Also he wants to reverse-engineer it. Maybe if Bumblebee ever needs repaired...

Oh, right. He's being asked a question. "Well - no," he admits, looking a bit embarrassed. He shift's a bit in the robot palm so that he's properly balanced. "I was gonna fight 'em, but when I got close they were too sad to be threatening."

[thebreakfastbug]

"Which doesn't men they can't be. Nevermind the fact that you shouldn't be wandering off in a firefight, even an incredibly one-sided firefight." He says as he finally retracts the battlemask and starts carrying Peter back to camp.

If he ever met Peter's original hunter team, he was going to seriously chew them out. The Autobots had made sure he'd learned basic battlefield and weapons safety before he'd even been allowed to start putting together his armor. Concepts nobody had apparently bothered to teach Peter.

[made_up_names]

Cap ... might have tried? But. Yeah Peter probably didn't receive any real combat training to speak of. Just "here, there's a bad guy, punch things and try not to die." Tony Stark in particular could use some severe judgement right about now.

"I was fine," he says with a sigh. Leaning back against the oversized robot fingers. "Like - dude, what's the point of a zombie mission where you don't even get to fight zombies?"

[thebreakfastbug]

"Look, I get it. If I could dropkick one of those guys without it turning into a whole huge thing, I would've done it by now. Coldsteel is assholes all the way down."

They had a reputation among the guilds, and it wasn't a clean one.

"Sometimes missions are boring, gross, and stupid. It sucks, but you still have to do it. Orders are still orders, even if you don't like those orders. Unless they're illegal, and that's not something that's been a problem yet.

[made_up_names]

At least it's evidence that Peter isn't a child soldier, at least? Not that child vigilante is great, but at least he's not stuck answering to orders all the time.

"Ugh," he says, making another face. "How often do we work with these assholes anyway?"

It sounds like it's depressingly normal

[thebreakfastbug]

"Like this specifically? Not that often, thankfully. If you're lucky you may never have to do this ever again. Usually it's filled up with new students who get all excited about fighting zombies and then a couple of older ones who've already been through it who get asked to volunteer despite knowing exactly what's going to happen."

Peter had one guess as to who the sucker who'd been asked to volunteer was.

[made_up_names]

"Like you," he says right away. Yep, no points for guessing. He shakes his head a little at that. "At least your armor's cool and stuff? Like, this is the most awesome thing that's happened so far."

He's impressed! And the temptation to just kind of crawl all over this armor is pretty strong, but he feels like Bee is a little too mad at him to just do something like this.