HOME | DD

Description
June 13, 2016; Indianapolis, Indiana

Ava and Jacob practically hopped out of the car right as it stopped in front to the Indianapolis hideout. They sprinted towards the entrance elevator, barreling inside, and Ava hastily dialed the passcode into the keypad. The elevator shook and rumbled as it carried the two down to the entrance hall, which they rushed down the second the doors whooshed back open.

Jacob rushed in, yelling. “Carter! Jess! Where are you?”

“Guys?” Ava yelled down the hall.

They rushed into the living room, frantically looking for their friends. The two Assassins in question were sitting on one of the sofas, casually watching a movie. They both jumped in surprise when their friends came busting in, shouting their names.

“Woah woah what's going-?” Jess started to say.

“Jacob?!” Carter said, surprised but clearly pleased as he saw his friend rushing in beside Ava.

“How the hell-?”

Jacob looked to Jess, holding up his hands in surrender. “Magic stick. Lucifer. Bombs. We have to go now!”

“What?” Jess and Carter said in unison.

“He's right,” Ava said. “We gotta get out of this place now before it's too late!”

“Woah woah slow down,” Carter insisted. “There's a lot to take in here.”

“Didn't we kill him?” Jess said, pointing at Jacob.

Ava groaned in irritation. “For the love of-! Short story: he's alive, on our side again, and we need to get the hell out of here now before-”

There was a crash. A window broke open up in the rafters, and all four friends turned to see the figure that leapt in through shattered glass. She strode forward like a cockatiel, huge smile on her face as she looked down at them. “Hi everybody!” she said, waving. “Yolanda Sheol has arrived! You may all rejoice!”

“Well this looks like good news,” Carter said.

“Oh hey! It's the Dusk man!” she said, looking at Jacob. “I see you finally got back to your friends! Nice work dude.”

Jacob couldn't help but smile, waving back. “Yeah, it was easy once I calmed down. Amazed you hadn't found them earlier. Anyway I can talk you out of this? Say, over a pizza or something?”

She put her finger on her chin. “Hmmm… I would. But I kinda got this whole evil gig going on right now and it would just be awkward to kinda not blow up your hideout or send in the dozens of guards I got surrounding the place.”

“You what?” Ava said.

“Oh yeah! It's awesome! Check this out.” She pulled out a walkie talkie and into it she said, “Come on in guys and gals! Let's get this started!”

On her command, the other windows and doors busted open as the goons in question came rushing in, guns and batons bared. Ava and her friends immediately got into a fighting pose.

“Okay yeah…” Jess said. “We should've gotten out of here sooner.”

“Fight… for my amusement!” Sheol cheered into her walkie talkie, giggling like a little schoolgirl having way too much fun.

And the battle began.

The first batch of goons fell upon them, swinging their batons and knives at the gang. Ava nearly got her temple bashed in, but she ducked beneath the Templar’s weapon, spinning around to his back and ripping open a gash in his flesh with a single deadly swipe of her karambit. She kept her momentum, slicing the throats of two others that came her way.

Jess had her baton out, the sparks crackling off of its electric prods. She thwacked her enemies hard, stunning them out cold. One goon tried to attack her from behind, but she reacted quickly by shoving him back before he could strike. She spun around, locking his arm behind his back as she jabbed her baton directly against the flesh of his neck, sending a deadly surge of electricity into his system.

Carter went with his hidden blades, spinning and ducking as his enemies came at him one by one. He kept his blades outstretched the whole time like a whirlwind of death, falling Templars with sliced legs and cut throats alike. Two guards tried rushing him from both sides, but they fell too when he ducked down and thrust upwards with both arms, double assassinating them and sending their bodies to the ever growing pile on the floor.

Jacob almost looked bored, extending his staff directly into the face of the guard in front of him. There was a slight crack as the guard’s nose shattered, followed by a quick sweep, knocking him flat on his back. Jacob brought the staff down, thrusting it behind him into another's gut, drawing his pistol out to finish off the first, before rapidly slamming the staff's end into the guard behind him. He retracted the staff, unsheathing his hidden blades, and sinking them into the throats of the two running at his sides.

The bodies kept piling up. The room quickly got trashed as the chaos of fighting raged on. All the while, Sheol stood on the rafters, cheering in laughing in excitement as she simply watched. “Holy crap you guys are badass!” she called to the four.

“Uh… thanks?” Carter said as he impaled another foe.

“Don't mind her too much,” Dusk said as he took one of the guard’s knives. “She doesn't have anything good to compare us to.” He cut through a number of them before flinging it into the crotch of one still breathing.

“Is that a burn on me or you?” Sheol asked, confused.

He looked up at her, absentmindedly punching another attacker in the throat. “Yes. How much longer till those bombs go off? You haven't set them up yet, have you?”

“Oh yeah, I did that while you guys were fighting down there!” She smiled giddily as she held up a remote with one big red button at the center of it.

“You've got to be kidding me…” Ava moaned. She hacked open the throats of a few more guards, that little bit of Apsarini taking the wheel as she spun and slashed.

“I know. I'm awesome. No need for applause.”

“I am going to enjoy beating the crap out of you,” Jess scowled as she zapped more foes.

Dusk had made his way to a wall and was smashing someone's head against it, shouting “Why Can't We Be Friends” as loud as he could. He seemed to be getting slightly more violent as the fight went on.

Sheol started strolling back towards the window she came in from as the gang reached the end of the fight and the last of the guards became corpses on the floor. The four could hear the whooshing of helicopter blades coming from outside. “I'll give y'all a 15 second head start, how bout that?” Sheol said as she stepped out onto the ladder that hung from her escape.

“Make it 30? I won't come after you and exact my revenge.”

“Aw but where's the fun in that?”

“Can we just get out of here already?!” Ava asked, already sprinting to the exit with Carter and Jess.

“Bye everybody!” Sheol smiled as she hopped onto the ladder and her ride hoisted her away.

Dusk started whistling to himself as he jogged to the door, grabbing dropped weapons he saw on the ground. Ava ran beside her friends, cycling back around the hallways as fast as they could until they reached one of the exit doors and outstretched their arms anticipating to bust through and keep sprinting. But that plan didn't go quite as planned. Just as they hit the doors, the bombs reached the end of their countdown. There was a massive bang behind them all as they were suddenly thrust out the door by the sheer force of the shockwave. All four of them went painfully rolling across the pavement as a flurry of ash and debris rained down on them. They painfully rolled into a sitting position and watched in horror as the entire hideout came crashing down on itself, its whole structure being ripped into a burning shredded skeleton of what it was. It didn't take long for the complex to collapse entirely into a heap of metal ruins, bathed in the demonic orange light of the flames. The four friends just sat there, staring. The sounds of the explosions and fires lingered in the air for a while until they dulled enough for the sounds of police and fire sirens to be heard as the emergency authorities rushed to investigate from across town. The only thing that was able to take their gaze from their former home was the sight of Sheol’s helicopter flying away into the night, mocking them as she went.

“I am really, really going to enjoy beating the crap out of her,” Jess snarled, breaking the silence.

“Damn…” Carter said, still staring in disbelief at the sight in front if him. “200 years of Hoosier Assassin history just… gone…”

“What do we do now?”

Ava looked at the burning building, listened to the white noise of the flames and the sirens. She thought back to Aveza’s memory of the Davenport Homestead being destroyed by Andrew Jackson and his army of Templars. She remembered Shikoba asking Connor that exact same question after the attack. And so she gave the exact same answer he gave when he planned to build this exact hideout as a replacement.

“We rebuild.” She stood up, marching away in a furious determination. “And we bring Lucifer to his knees.”

------------

June 14, 2016; Battle Ground, Indiana

The whole gang stood around a tv monitor, mournfully silent in the Temple of the Angels as they watched the news coverage of the police and fire department handling the destruction of the Indianapolis Assassin hideout. All of them had grim looks on their faces, save for Kiki, who was just gently hugging her daughter. Chelsea was the most displeased, using up all her energy not to let old grievances blind her and make her start blaming Jacob for the entire thing. She simply kept her arms crossed and a scowl on her face. Carter definitely seemed more upset than anything else, never expecting to lose such an important part of his career. Ava herself simply frowned as her mother, girlfriend, and Ben tried to comfort her.

“Man…” Ben said as he watched. “This… this sucks…”

“No kidding…” Ruby said.

“At least you got out of there alive,” Kiki said, far too passive for Ava's comfort. “The only thing you lost was some giant old warehouse.”

That made Ava turn red. She shook her shoulder out of her mother’s hand. “It wasn't just some giant old warehouse to me, Mom!” she shouted. “That was our entire base of operations! For the past few months, it's been a second home! It was an archive and a tribute to the entire history of the Hoosier Assassins and it was all just obliterated by some crazy bitch with an army!”

“Lower your voice, young lady! You don't speak to your mother like that!”

“I'll speak to you any way I damn well please, Mom! I would've thought you could maybe give me a little support every now and then but no!”

“I support you all the time!”

“Yeah in living the cowardly little life that you built for us!”

“How dare you?”

“No, don't pull that with me, Mom! I'm not six anymore! That isn't gonna work! I am so done with you trying to force my life along the path that you and only you want.”

“I saved up so that you could go to college! I did everything I could to give you a normal life as an independent girl! I wanted to give you the options I never had!”

“By restraining me to one option and only one option: the option that you wanted me to pick. What if I didn't want a normal life, Mom? What if I wanted to make my own adventure, live the way I wanted to? What if one day I got tossed into an ancient war and decided that I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps?”

“Your father-”

“My father what, Mom? Saved the universe? Fought the Devil himself? Raised me with a love I wasn't allowed to remember? You say you wanted to give me options but all you did was strip all my choices away from me! Well I've had it! I’m-

“You’re going to stop yelling at your mother for trying to give you a safe life,” Jacob said, walking over to the two. But even though his voice was calm, his fists were clenched. “She kept you from a whole other life. A life that has almost killed you multiple times. I would have given up anything for my mother to have done something that selfless.”

Ava turned to him, her expression unshifting. She walked towards him, slowly, getting close to his face. “And I'd give everything to stop this universe from being annihilated, to make sure my Dad didn't get murdered for nothing.”

“Did I say she was right? She did all that because she loves you. She was scared that you’d end up dead as well.” He looked over to Kiki, smiling. “And she probably knew you’d find out eventually. And hate her for it.”

Kiki stood silent, mouth slightly open. Ava looked at her, scowling. Her lack of confirmation of what Jacob said was somehow more painful to her mother than openly saying he was right.

Ava bitterly turned and walked back towards the Animus, picking up the headset and shoving it over her face. “Ruby, take me back to Evelyn,” she asked.

“You sure that's a good idea, Champ?”

“Ruby.”

“Alright alright.” Ruby walked over to her laptop and started loading up the program. Ava found herself floating in the digital void of genetic code.

“Hey, Champ,” Ruby said as she was about to start up the next batch of memories. “I'm sorry…”

“It's fine…” Ava said.

Ruby nodded, and she flicked the final switch. Ava's mind suddenly felt itself being thrust backwards once again as the machine molded it like wet clay into a form long past. All the tension between her and her mother was quickly replaced by other concerns. The cool Temple room was replaced by the hot humid climate of the Dakota desert. The sun shone bright in the afternoon sky above her. Her boots crunched against the rocky desert terrain. She wiped some sweat from her brow as she made her way back towards her camp.

Description
June 13, 2016; Indianapolis, Indiana

Ava and Jacob practically hopped out of the car right as it stopped in front to the Indianapolis hideout. They sprinted towards the entrance elevator, barreling inside, and Ava hastily dialed the passcode into the keypad. The elevator shook and rumbled as it carried the two down to the entrance hall, which they rushed down the second the doors whooshed back open.

Jacob rushed in, yelling. “Carter! Jess! Where are you?”

“Guys?” Ava yelled down the hall.

They rushed into the living room, frantically looking for their friends. The two Assassins in question were sitting on one of the sofas, casually watching a movie. They both jumped in surprise when their friends came busting in, shouting their names.

“Woah woah what's going-?” Jess started to say.

“Jacob?!” Carter said, surprised but clearly pleased as he saw his friend rushing in beside Ava.

“How the hell-?”

Jacob looked to Jess, holding up his hands in surrender. “Magic stick. Lucifer. Bombs. We have to go now!”

“What?” Jess and Carter said in unison.

“He's right,” Ava said. “We gotta get out of this place now before it's too late!”

“Woah woah slow down,” Carter insisted. “There's a lot to take in here.”

“Didn't we kill him?” Jess said, pointing at Jacob.

Ava groaned in irritation. “For the love of-! Short story: he's alive, on our side again, and we need to get the hell out of here now before-”

There was a crash. A window broke open up in the rafters, and all four friends turned to see the figure that leapt in through shattered glass. She strode forward like a cockatiel, huge smile on her face as she looked down at them. “Hi everybody!” she said, waving. “Yolanda Sheol has arrived! You may all rejoice!”

“Well this looks like good news,” Carter said.

“Oh hey! It's the Dusk man!” she said, looking at Jacob. “I see you finally got back to your friends! Nice work dude.”

Jacob couldn't help but smile, waving back. “Yeah, it was easy once I calmed down. Amazed you hadn't found them earlier. Anyway I can talk you out of this? Say, over a pizza or something?”

She put her finger on her chin. “Hmmm… I would. But I kinda got this whole evil gig going on right now and it would just be awkward to kinda not blow up your hideout or send in the dozens of guards I got surrounding the place.”

“You what?” Ava said.

“Oh yeah! It's awesome! Check this out.” She pulled out a walkie talkie and into it she said, “Come on in guys and gals! Let's get this started!”

On her command, the other windows and doors busted open as the goons in question came rushing in, guns and batons bared. Ava and her friends immediately got into a fighting pose.

“Okay yeah…” Jess said. “We should've gotten out of here sooner.”

“Fight… for my amusement!” Sheol cheered into her walkie talkie, giggling like a little schoolgirl having way too much fun.

And the battle began.

The first batch of goons fell upon them, swinging their batons and knives at the gang. Ava nearly got her temple bashed in, but she ducked beneath the Templar’s weapon, spinning around to his back and ripping open a gash in his flesh with a single deadly swipe of her karambit. She kept her momentum, slicing the throats of two others that came her way.

Jess had her baton out, the sparks crackling off of its electric prods. She thwacked her enemies hard, stunning them out cold. One goon tried to attack her from behind, but she reacted quickly by shoving him back before he could strike. She spun around, locking his arm behind his back as she jabbed her baton directly against the flesh of his neck, sending a deadly surge of electricity into his system.

Carter went with his hidden blades, spinning and ducking as his enemies came at him one by one. He kept his blades outstretched the whole time like a whirlwind of death, falling Templars with sliced legs and cut throats alike. Two guards tried rushing him from both sides, but they fell too when he ducked down and thrust upwards with both arms, double assassinating them and sending their bodies to the ever growing pile on the floor.

Jacob almost looked bored, extending his staff directly into the face of the guard in front of him. There was a slight crack as the guard’s nose shattered, followed by a quick sweep, knocking him flat on his back. Jacob brought the staff down, thrusting it behind him into another's gut, drawing his pistol out to finish off the first, before rapidly slamming the staff's end into the guard behind him. He retracted the staff, unsheathing his hidden blades, and sinking them into the throats of the two running at his sides.

The bodies kept piling up. The room quickly got trashed as the chaos of fighting raged on. All the while, Sheol stood on the rafters, cheering in laughing in excitement as she simply watched. “Holy crap you guys are badass!” she called to the four.

“Uh… thanks?” Carter said as he impaled another foe.

“Don't mind her too much,” Dusk said as he took one of the guard’s knives. “She doesn't have anything good to compare us to.” He cut through a number of them before flinging it into the crotch of one still breathing.

“Is that a burn on me or you?” Sheol asked, confused.

He looked up at her, absentmindedly punching another attacker in the throat. “Yes. How much longer till those bombs go off? You haven't set them up yet, have you?”

“Oh yeah, I did that while you guys were fighting down there!” She smiled giddily as she held up a remote with one big red button at the center of it.

“You've got to be kidding me…” Ava moaned. She hacked open the throats of a few more guards, that little bit of Apsarini taking the wheel as she spun and slashed.

“I know. I'm awesome. No need for applause.”

“I am going to enjoy beating the crap out of you,” Jess scowled as she zapped more foes.

Dusk had made his way to a wall and was smashing someone's head against it, shouting “Why Can't We Be Friends” as loud as he could. He seemed to be getting slightly more violent as the fight went on.

Sheol started strolling back towards the window she came in from as the gang reached the end of the fight and the last of the guards became corpses on the floor. The four could hear the whooshing of helicopter blades coming from outside. “I'll give y'all a 15 second head start, how bout that?” Sheol said as she stepped out onto the ladder that hung from her escape.

“Make it 30? I won't come after you and exact my revenge.”

“Aw but where's the fun in that?”

“Can we just get out of here already?!” Ava asked, already sprinting to the exit with Carter and Jess.

“Bye everybody!” Sheol smiled as she hopped onto the ladder and her ride hoisted her away.

Dusk started whistling to himself as he jogged to the door, grabbing dropped weapons he saw on the ground. Ava ran beside her friends, cycling back around the hallways as fast as they could until they reached one of the exit doors and outstretched their arms anticipating to bust through and keep sprinting. But that plan didn't go quite as planned. Just as they hit the doors, the bombs reached the end of their countdown. There was a massive bang behind them all as they were suddenly thrust out the door by the sheer force of the shockwave. All four of them went painfully rolling across the pavement as a flurry of ash and debris rained down on them. They painfully rolled into a sitting position and watched in horror as the entire hideout came crashing down on itself, its whole structure being ripped into a burning shredded skeleton of what it was. It didn't take long for the complex to collapse entirely into a heap of metal ruins, bathed in the demonic orange light of the flames. The four friends just sat there, staring. The sounds of the explosions and fires lingered in the air for a while until they dulled enough for the sounds of police and fire sirens to be heard as the emergency authorities rushed to investigate from across town. The only thing that was able to take their gaze from their former home was the sight of Sheol’s helicopter flying away into the night, mocking them as she went.

“I am really, really going to enjoy beating the crap out of her,” Jess snarled, breaking the silence.

“Damn…” Carter said, still staring in disbelief at the sight in front if him. “200 years of Hoosier Assassin history just… gone…”

“What do we do now?”

Ava looked at the burning building, listened to the white noise of the flames and the sirens. She thought back to Aveza’s memory of the Davenport Homestead being destroyed by Andrew Jackson and his army of Templars. She remembered Shikoba asking Connor that exact same question after the attack. And so she gave the exact same answer he gave when he planned to build this exact hideout as a replacement.

“We rebuild.” She stood up, marching away in a furious determination. “And we bring Lucifer to his knees.”

------------

June 14, 2016; Battle Ground, Indiana

The whole gang stood around a tv monitor, mournfully silent in the Temple of the Angels as they watched the news coverage of the police and fire department handling the destruction of the Indianapolis Assassin hideout. All of them had grim looks on their faces, save for Kiki, who was just gently hugging her daughter. Chelsea was the most displeased, using up all her energy not to let old grievances blind her and make her start blaming Jacob for the entire thing. She simply kept her arms crossed and a scowl on her face. Carter definitely seemed more upset than anything else, never expecting to lose such an important part of his career. Ava herself simply frowned as her mother, girlfriend, and Ben tried to comfort her.

“Man…” Ben said as he watched. “This… this sucks…”

“No kidding…” Ruby said.

“At least you got out of there alive,” Kiki said, far too passive for Ava's comfort. “The only thing you lost was some giant old warehouse.”

That made Ava turn red. She shook her shoulder out of her mother’s hand. “It wasn't just some giant old warehouse to me, Mom!” she shouted. “That was our entire base of operations! For the past few months, it's been a second home! It was an archive and a tribute to the entire history of the Hoosier Assassins and it was all just obliterated by some crazy bitch with an army!”

“Lower your voice, young lady! You don't speak to your mother like that!”

“I'll speak to you any way I damn well please, Mom! I would've thought you could maybe give me a little support every now and then but no!”

“I support you all the time!”

“Yeah in living the cowardly little life that you built for us!”

“How dare you?”

“No, don't pull that with me, Mom! I'm not six anymore! That isn't gonna work! I am so done with you trying to force my life along the path that you and only you want.”

“I saved up so that you could go to college! I did everything I could to give you a normal life as an independent girl! I wanted to give you the options I never had!”

“By restraining me to one option and only one option: the option that you wanted me to pick. What if I didn't want a normal life, Mom? What if I wanted to make my own adventure, live the way I wanted to? What if one day I got tossed into an ancient war and decided that I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps?”

“Your father-”

“My father what, Mom? Saved the universe? Fought the Devil himself? Raised me with a love I wasn't allowed to remember? You say you wanted to give me options but all you did was strip all my choices away from me! Well I've had it! I’m-

“You’re going to stop yelling at your mother for trying to give you a safe life,” Jacob said, walking over to the two. But even though his voice was calm, his fists were clenched. “She kept you from a whole other life. A life that has almost killed you multiple times. I would have given up anything for my mother to have done something that selfless.”

Ava turned to him, her expression unshifting. She walked towards him, slowly, getting close to his face. “And I'd give everything to stop this universe from being annihilated, to make sure my Dad didn't get murdered for nothing.”

“Did I say she was right? She did all that because she loves you. She was scared that you’d end up dead as well.” He looked over to Kiki, smiling. “And she probably knew you’d find out eventually. And hate her for it.”

Kiki stood silent, mouth slightly open. Ava looked at her, scowling. Her lack of confirmation of what Jacob said was somehow more painful to her mother than openly saying he was right.

Ava bitterly turned and walked back towards the Animus, picking up the headset and shoving it over her face. “Ruby, take me back to Evelyn,” she asked.

“You sure that's a good idea, Champ?”

“Ruby.”

“Alright alright.” Ruby walked over to her laptop and started loading up the program. Ava found herself floating in the digital void of genetic code.

“Hey, Champ,” Ruby said as she was about to start up the next batch of memories. “I'm sorry…”

“It's fine…” Ava said.

Ruby nodded, and she flicked the final switch. Ava's mind suddenly felt itself being thrust backwards once again as the machine molded it like wet clay into a form long past. All the tension between her and her mother was quickly replaced by other concerns. The cool Temple room was replaced by the hot humid climate of the Dakota desert. The sun shone bright in the afternoon sky above her. Her boots crunched against the rocky desert terrain. She wiped some sweat from her brow as she made her way back towards her camp.