"This is a stupid idea, and I never should have agreed to it." Valera said as he lay on top of a muddy hill, thick rain pattering down on all sides.
"Come on, STALKER!" Stepa, his companion for this job, said to his right. "Buck up! You've been through fields of radiation bigger than your mother's ass. What the hell is the problem with this?"
"The fact that I am lying down in the mud, my helmet's visor is splattered with it, and I am waiting to capture a potentially dangerous pony that will be along here any second. I am doing this as a job for an entire race of mutated bugs, who also happen to be the ones paying us." Valera said, his voice filled with resignation. "Why do I always pick up the shit jobs? First the Anomaly, and now this. Fuck you, and fuck my life."
"Cheer up, Valera." Stepa replied. "At least your SEVA suit blends in. Mine is a blue and grey abomination, and as such I'd be seen at a mile away if it was not for this rain."
"If yours is blue, you'll fit in perfectly here." Valera sarcastically remarked. "See all the water in the air?"
"Well fuck you, and the leader of my Private Contracting company." Stepa replied.
"Shush, I think it's coming." Valera said, causing both to quiet down.
Two hundred meters away, a stone road ran through a small valley. Nobody would dare travel in such weather, with the rain coming down in such quantities that it reduced vision to half a kilometer. In other words, the perfect conditions to do what they were going to do.
Up ahead, down the road, a faint silhouette could be seen. As it came through the rain, more and more details could be worked out. It was a flying chariot, plain and simply, going only twenty feet above the ground. It was pulled by two of the winged ponies, both of them in dull, silver-colored armor. In the back was light blue pony with a horn on its head: Their target.
Valera slowed his breathing down as he aimed through the scope of his Vintar BC, aiming ahead and above the chariot. Letting his breath out, he slowly pulled the trigger.
A faint ping emitted from the rifle as a single 9x39mm round passed through the first, and then the second pony pulling it, punching through their armor and killing one of them, wounding the other. The chariot tipped down and crashed into the ground a moment later, spilling the unicorn onto the ground.
By this time, Valera had already put his Vintar BC away, as he and Stepa both sprinted across the field. For Valera, he had already pulled out his Chaser 13 shotgun, while Stepa had brought up his GP-37.
They reached the downed chariot within twenty seconds. With the SEVA suits aiding in their movement and Stepa's Moonlight artifact aiding him, along with Valera's Flash artifact, they had easily made the two hundred meter dash. The wounded 'guard' pony was struggling to stand, while the blue unicorn was out cold.
Valera raised his shotgun and blasted out one round, putting the wounded guard out of his misery while Stepa moved over, slinging the light blue unicorn over his shoulders.
"Ready?" Valera asked as he loaded a round into his shotgun. He quickly went for the small bags each 'guard' had carried, finding forty pieces of gold ('bits', they were called) and a small booklet, keeping both.
"Ready." Stepa said.
The STALKER and the Merc quickly jogged away from the area, entering the forest two minutes later and following a thin path towards their destination. At the clear sat a bored-looking Changeling, who turned to look at them.
"You got the unicorn?" The Changeling asked, looked and them and finding Stepa. "Good. I'll teleport us all back now."
With that, all four, counting the unconscious unicorn, stepped into the clearing. With a glow of the Changeling's horn, all suddenly found themselves in the room they had always teleported back to, with almost a dozen Changelings in front of them, including 'Chrysalis'.
"Well done." Chrysalis said as the Changeling who had teleported them picked up the unicorn with a green glow, walking off with it. "That pony will be the keystone of our next few plans."
"Wonderful. When do we get paid?" Stepa asked.
"Right now." Chrysalis said, two bags surrounded in a dull green glow floating forward and into Valera and Stepa's hands. "The agreed-upon sum, of course. You may return to your rooms."
With that, the STALKER and the Merc quickly started to walk back, entering their room a full ten minutes later. With that, both of them sat down on their beds, quickly starting to take off their armor.
It had been almost twenty hours since the Controller had gone away when a Changeling had contacted them for a mission. Valera and Stepa had both agreed to it, to rid themselves of boredom if nothing else. Twenty minutes later, they lying down on that hill. A full hour later, and they were back.
"Well, they do not lack for easy tasks, if nothing else." Valera said as he finally finished unlatching his chestpeice, the last part to his armor he usually took off.
"Yes, certainly." Stepa said as he went through the motions of taking his SEVA suit off. Being an off-the-shelf suit with almost no modifications, it was harder to take off than Valera's, as well as being less advanced in most of its systems.
Meanwhile, Valera picked up the bag, looking through it. As had been agreed, inside sat twenty of the '100-Bit' gold pieces. Valera put it, along with the forty 'One-Bit' pieces, on a shelf next to his bed, adding them to his growing amount of the local currency.
With that being done, he took out the small booklet he had taken from the dead pony, opening it to the front. Apparently, front the writing it the front, it was the guard's journal. While most men would be put off by that, Valera always kept such things, as a reminder of the STALKERs he had been forced to kill. He had almost thirty individual journals or notebooks on his PDA, some of them almost textbooks, while others were of a more personal nature.
Making a decision to himself, Valera put the small booklet inside one of the waist pockets of his SEVA suit, the tough Nomex material resistant to almost anything the Zone could throw at it, and certainly anything in this world as well.
With that being done, Valera propped his weapons up against the wall, stacked his SEVA suit in a pile next to his bed, and hopped down on the bed, content to another day of boredom.