After Thoth makes his goodbyes and vanishes back into the aether, you’re content to just watch the slowly ebbing sunset as the creeping fingers of nightfall begin to envelop the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbA96EHBdmwIt’s been a long time since you’ve just sat back and let the world idly pass you by; normally you’re too busy running around for something or another.
When you’re not fighting, you’re plotting. And when you’re not plotting, you’re planning.
Maybe you really do need a break; it feels like you’ve been firing at all cylinders for as long as you can remember.
Unbidden, your memories begin to focus on your old life in the Marines, before you violently kick it back into the memory hole.
That’s just how life works. You did your best to play by the rules your whole life, and all it ever brought you was trouble.
As soon as you tossed all that junk out the window and started making your own decisions about how to think and act, your life has never been better.
Especially compared to what could’ve come to pass, if you had meekly accepted your blackballing and took the lumps that the REMFs mandated, you’d probably be hanging from your toenails in some Iraqi hellhole.
Either that, or spending the rest of your life walled away in a government hotel.
It’s darkly ironic in hindsight; that you went from fighting as one of The Walking Dead, to pulling jobs for a bonafide ghost.
The moniker was born well before your time, back when domino theory was enough to justify sending 60,000 men to die in a Southeast Asian hellhole.
The name came as the result of the battalion’s life expectancy stats, out of the 3,000 or so souls that rotated through during their tour; 800 returned home in patriotic pine boxes.
The 1/9 had the longest combat deployment and suffered the worst casualties in Marine Corps history, a record that still stands unbroken to this day. In another life, you used to be proud of the title; that you were living up to some kind of heroic ideal.
Now, you just wonder how you were ever so naive.
To encourage your mind from delving too deeply into memories that are better left alone, you steadily work your way through your smokes.
Thanks to your talents with fire magic, it’s not like it can even really be that bad for you anymore.
