Promotions are a crapshoot

I know...it's been awhile...again. Piss off about it, hey?

So remember last time I mentioned passing the close quarters combat retraining and getting promoted afterward. And I mentioned that I was going to post after I got into it. Yeah...didn't work out like that. I've been busier than a ant on speed for the past couple of weeks.

After I got back to the compound, I was sent, under heavy escort by a few Elite Guard Henchman, to the command chamber for She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named(seriously, that is one of her fucking titles and don't get caught using even her SuperVillian name) to get promoted.

Right here is where I should mention that my boss is HOT.

Like...holy shit, 34-22-36 with red-blonde hair and gray eyes. And she was wearing black vinyl with purple trim.

Keeping a straight face and not staring into the 6 fucking inches of cleavage she was rockin while she pinned on new rank onto my uniform was goddamned near impossible. I suppose my eyes did wander because when I glanced back up as she finished the pinning procedure--which so happened to squish her boobs together and make them even more noticeable--she was looking at me with the most evil stare I've ever seen. Which was odd really because she did absolutely nothing with her face or eyes.

Then she smiled at me and turned to walk away. I'm pretty sure the ass-shifting model stride was done on purpose.

I'm not sure which scared me worse: the evil look or the smile.

Don't even want to think about the ass in the black vinyl, mind wanders to places it shouldn't go. So anyway, I was escorted out and taken back to the main elevator. There, we went to a new floor I hadn't ever been too. I was now a Level 3 Henchmen Sergeant, which apparently means I get my own squad and some new weapons. I got kitted out with some new body armor, all black and red and badass lookin. Also got issued a new rifle, which was actually pretty kickass. They gave me a SCAR modular combat rifle. Fun part about this thing is that it comes with a box of parts for switching out and changing how the rifle works. You can change the barrel and breach and make it into a heavy assault rifle or light machine gun. Can also turn it into a shotgun, which is quite frankly fucking sweet.

I got introduced to my new crew, a squad of 5 guys. Three of them are identical; pretty sure they're related. They squabble constantly like brothers do. All same height, size, and coloring. The other guy is huge, like also the size of the guy I fought at the combat course, silly thing is that he has a really quiet voice and is really intelligent. And the last guy is this little tiny scrawny guy with a REALLY bad attitude. The 3 brothers are really militarily minded and very proficient in it when they aren't arguing. The big guy reads a lot and is not that good a shot, but he'll beat the hell out of you in a fist fight without paying attention.

The little guy though? INSANE. I'll explain in a minute.

Over the past couple of weeks, we spent the time training for urban combat situations. Lots of shoothouses, flashbanging or breaching doors, and putting live rounds into wooden cut-outs of superhero-types(that's a lot more fun than it sounds and only slightly ridiculous). Between shoothouses, we were subjected to some rather intense physical training. Pretty sure one of the training instructors used to be a Navy SEAL chap; he certainly uses a lot of their tricks. There was at least a 3 day stretch of being soaking fucking wet, half-naked, and carrying around really heavy things on our shoulders as team-building exercises. Given that one guy is way taller than all of us and one way shorter, that got awkward fast and involved a lot of swearing on the little guy's part.

Anyway, we finished that and got to go back to the shoothouses, except this time the wooden targets were human-sized robots and shot back with non-lethal airfoil rounds. THOSE FUCKING THINGS HURT. The robots also reacted basically like humans do so flashbangs and breaching charges really fucked up their day.

So...onto the bit about little dude being crazy.

We were all set to clear a room, 3 of us on either side of the door. Tiny(the big dude) laid a breaching charge on the door and clicked the button.

BOOM

The door blew inward and smashed a robot with a shower of sparks, We'd developed a method for entering rooms we called the Zipper. One guy from the right folds into the room and prays he doesn't get shot up, followed by a guy from the left and so on like that til we were all in. This go round, Number 1(one of the brothers) folded in first and got tagged in the side by a bot in the left corner of the room. Tiny followed him in, dropped the bot that shot #1(who was on the ground, groaning), and moved toward the left front corner of the room. #2 followed him in, I followed him, and so on, with the little dude(whom I call Barky for reasons that will be made clear in a moment) bringing up the rear. We each fanned out across the room, dropping 4 more bots. But there was a problem.

One of them had a little robot as a hostage, gun to its head.

We cleared and Barky comes in, taking position in the door. At least 3 of us had clear shots on the bot but the principle was that if you went for a headshot here, trigger finger spasms and kills the hostage so none of my guys wanted to take the shot. Barky had turned and was looking at the two robots and I swear he was fucking growling like a dog.

Now here's the thing: we're henchman for a supervillain. Hell do we care about hostages for?

I found the whole concept absolutely preposterous and so I responded as such. I was crouched off to the bot's left side so I shot it through the hip sideways. I should mention I had turned my rifle into a heavy assault rifle so the round punched through this things hip like it was paper. As it crumpled, its arm flew out and loosed a stream of airfoil rounds. Directly across Barky, who had been crouched next to #1. The bot hit the floor and took a shotgun shell to the face from #3 that stilled it. The little robot, freed, deactivated and stood there blankly.

It was about that time we heard a stream of profanity from the front of the room.

It was Barky, doing his best angry mini-doberman impression. He sailed across the room and pounced on the fucked up robot and started stomping at it, growling, barking, and cussing enough that I think the air around him, was actually turning blue. We let him rage for a moment, twisted metal and wires flying across the room, til he worked it out of his system and looked up.

At this point, the rest of us burst out laughing. Even #1 sat up to laugh at him.

Needless to say, this just pissed him off worse and got a volley of curses flung at each of us, imprecations that we all liked to sleep with our mums the least of his colorful diatribe.

So...yeah. That's my squad and that's where the fuck I've been. We trained like that for another few days before being released to rest up and take a week to relax. Apparently, we get to go learn how to drive some kind of new vehicle the Science & Tech division had recently built.

Oh...and Barky flipped out on at least 3 more times. Love that guy, absolutely priceless temper tantrums.

And he really hates being called Barky.

What a fucking week....

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's been fucking forever since I posted. Get over it. It's been a retarded few days.

So after the incident with Captain Eyesore, apparently the Powers That Be decided us lower tier guard henchmen needed to go through a hand-to-hand combat re-training course since Captain HolyFuckMyEyesHurt whipped our asses so handily. Well...this brings to mind a military-style Basic Training kind of solider training camp.

Yeah. I wish.

The motto our intructors at Camp Kickedmyass(Camp ******) use is "Train as you fight." This would imply a certain level of realism but these guys take it to a WHOLE different level. Myself and 59 other members of my guards unit spent the last 4 days? 5? getting the shit kicked out of us. I don't know what style of martial arts these guys use but seriously...I've never been put in some many joint locks in my life. Miss a punch? Tossed on your ass, arm-bar. Land a kick wrong? Tossed on your face, ankle-lock. At least 15 guys went down to broken bones and fractured or dislocated joints within the first day.

I think they got off easy.

Anyways...after extensively getting my face kicked in and twisted into a pretzel more times than I care to try and recount, they put us through a kind of "live combat" course which strangely consisted of getting sprayed with a firehose while trying to dodge tennis balls being launched at you at high speeds and fighting off the instructors, who were attacking dressed up as ninjas.

Fuckin' really?

Completion of this course was basically achieved by surviving the onslaught for 10 agonizingly painful minutes. You wouldn't think that the cold would matter when the water is hitting you that hard but, oh yes, it fucking matters. Was the only time in my life I ever peed my pants to stay warm. Not that it matter; the water powerwashed it off me inside of a minute. The tennis balls were actually only mildly distracting. After getting knocked around so much by the instructors earlier in the course, dodging them was pretty easy.

It was the goddamn ninjas that were the hard part.

If anyone ever tells you ninjas suck, slap the shit out of them. Seriously.

I fought off no less than 20 of them in that 10 minutes. Apparently, I was one of the only ones out of my unit able to make it the whole 10 minutes OR fight off all the ninjas. I say this because I got selected for the special "graduation" ceremony. Ya know...that sounded cool at first.

Fuck, I hate being wrong.

Graduation consisted of a full-on no-holds-barred fight with the lead instructor. Who happens to be like 7 feet tall and 300 lbs of muscle. This dude looks like he could walk THROUGH a brick wall without pausing to punch a hole in it first. Worse, he's really fast. Like...I don't even know how it's possible for something that big to move that goddamn fast. I swear to god, getting kicked by him is like having someone use a tree trunk as a whip.

So anyway...5 of us got selected from the survivors of the "live combat" course to fight this dude. I was last on the cards. Winning consisted of either knocking him out or forcing a submission. Elimination from the fight was him doing one of those things to you...or killing you. Pretty sure at least one guy died. Least...if MY head got kicked around at that angle, I would be pretty damn dead. So...I sat, waiting for someone to put this dude down before I had to fight.

Yeah. Like I should have held my breath, waiting for that.

He walked through the other guys like it was nobody's business. So...guess who gets to fight? Yours fucking truly. I square off with him, duck a few punches and then get kicked in the gut for my troubles. I scrambled to my feet in time to avoid him landing on top of me feet-first. I threw a punch at him just in time for him to grab me and toss me over his shoulder. This worked for me though. I'd been thrown just like this like 50 goddamned times this week and never by someone with such long arms. I twisted as he threw me over and dragged him down for an armbar as I hit the ground. That didn't work out quite like I planned because the dude is stronger than an 800 pound gorilla. He shucked me off his arm like I was an anorexic kid. So I wound up flat on my back with this dude towering over me when I remembered something I'd read back when I was in the Army, before joining this henchman gig.

If you nail someone in the balls hard enough, you can kill them. Crazy shit, huh?

Yeah. They let us do this fight with boots on. I got size 14 feet. Guess where my boot went. That's right; straight up into his balls with all the force I could muster from lying flat on my back, which is quite a lot amazingly. I know it was a lot because 10 seconds later, he was laid out in convulsions and I was covered in his vomit.

I forgot that part of the bit I read back in the day.


So yeah....I got the "Official Badass" award during the REAL graduation part of the course and am apparently going to be up for a promotion review when I go back on duty tomorrow.

Go me. Now if I could just get the smell of puke out of my uniform. Dunno what the fuck that dude was eating but Jesus, it fuckin' stinks.

My job blows....

So...if anyone ever asks you if you think it would be cool to work for a Super Villain....smack the fucking shit out of them. Disillusion them QUICK. Because being a henchman to a Super Villain, even if she's a really hot one, sucks a LOT. You're going to get your ass beat. Or shot. Or randomly experimented on.

It's gonna happen. You just have to accept that.

All that being said...a guy I work with(sort of...he's in another division) started one of these and it looks like a fun way to bitch about this crappy ass job. Now I just gotta hope She-Who-Doesn't-Like-To-Be-Named doesn't read this and fire me. Or electrocute me. Or....feed me to her goddamn fish. -shudder-

So today was a pile of shit. Got woken up as some ungodly fucking hour to Captain ******* busting into the place and generally wreaking havoc everywhere. By 5am, half the guardforce has had their asses handed to them. This cat has some wicked ass moves! So anyways...he's rollin' around, tearing shit up, makes his way to my floor. I work in the Experimental Weapons divisions. So I figured we'd have some cool stuff to take him down with.

Boy, was I fuckin' wrong.

Being a member of the guardforce means I don't get to actually USE any of the cool experimental weapons. And trust me...we got some really neat ones. Like the *********. Shit shoots lightning bolts! How fucking awesome is that?! I mean...that's a shoo-in for putting a painful end to a pesky Super Hero's day! But nooooooo.....I get to shoot at him with an M4.

I mean wtf....I don't even get a good assault rifle to plug this douchebag with? Fuck man...

So anyway....this guy is handily working through our floor, dodging bullets and whooping the ass of every guard and scientist he can get his bright orange gloves on when suddenly the elevator door dings. Door slides open and BANG. A box full of CS gas grenades(that's tear gas) blows up and floods the hallway we were in. Now...either it's some kind of cosmic law or our Super Villain is just prudent...but my Guard Henchman mask has a built-in rebreather system so shit like CS is wasted on us lowly guard types. Makes sense, I guess.

Fuckin' silly part?

Captain ******** goes apeshit, coughing his ass off and blowing snot everywhere. If I hadn't been so busy butt-stroking him across the face with my rifle, I'd have been laughing. In fact, after we trussed him up(amid the cheering scientists) and sent him down to the "Re-Education Facility", I did laugh. A LOT.

So it turns out that the new guy who's blog I got the idea to start this one from was the snarky bastard who tried the CS grenade trick. Kudos to that guy. Captain Snotnose beat me up today and I was sick of him dodging my gunshots.

End-state for today's note: Guarding a SuperVillain's lair is a BITCH.