Agent Vermont (Red Vs Blue OC)

Cheering Up Caboose

I sat inside the base. For a while I had been working on using wood and leftover cloth to make my own private space. Tau had gone into temporary shutdown for a while, leaving the homemade scanners active.

Yes, I was uneasy of this empty jungle. Using metal, pieces on the ship, and Tau's help I was able to create scanners that detect heat signatures. I made five before I ran out of materials and Tau had access to each. It also gave him something to do. 

But, at the moment, I wasn't working on hanging up cloth for my private room or making odd candles out of the thick sap of the nearby trees. No, right now I was carving a game of connect four from some wood. I don't particularly like to show I have a love for art, takes away from the bad-ass freelancer look but since joining the reds and blues I have enjoyed making crafts from odd objects. It's actually how I made money for my large amount of sweets, mostly because of my odd creation of water bottles made to look like abstract art but the people who bought it thought it looked like flames and paid me a lot for it. That was back in Blood Gulch.

I blew away dust and went back to carving. I heard knocking on the wall nearby my cloth curtains.

"Come in." I said, focusing on carving.

I looked up to see Wash.

"What you need, Wash?" I asked.

"What aare you making there?" He asked, dodging my question.

"Something to hopefully cheer up Caboose, why are you here?" I asked, carving more away.

He was silent for a bit.

"That's Maine's knife, isn't it?" He said.

I put down my project and the knife.

"How did you figure it out?" I asked.

"Well, even after you left I wasn't completely unobservant to Maine's care for the knife. He spent every night polishing it." Wash said.

"Observant." I said, fingering the knife, "Fine, yes, it is Maine's knife. When we were at the power plant with Carolina I looked around and found it on the ground, probably abandoned by him during our time trying to take down Project Freelancer. Its.... the last gift he gave me before I left Project Freelancer." I said, pulling out the knife's twin and showed them.

"How were you able to fight him? That's the real question I've been wanting to ask." Wash said.

"How? He wasn't Maine anymore, Wash. The A.I.'s drove him insane and when they were destroyed he was still not himself. I spoke to him, Wash, he didn't recognize me. I fought him to protect the reds and blues, I fought him because he wasn't Maine. He was The Meta." I said.

Wash looked down.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"I'm just trying to understand how different you are. I mean, the nicest you ever were to me in Project Freelancer was when I was asked to bring you food. Beyond that you either ignored me or sent glares at me when I did something stupid." Wash said.

I snorted, "Wash? Nothing seems stupid or weird to me anymore. Try to understand this bit of information. When you met the reds and blues? They were actually pretty tame compared to their previous actions. I think that tells you enough to understand why I have changed a lot. This is one example. In exactly one day we all went through a portal to stop Omega, each ended up in different crazy places. Sarge and Caboose ended up fighting a creepy group of reds and blues who died and were resurrected every 20 mins. Grif and Church ended up locked in a prison on Sidewinder by the remaining reds, Simmons ended up in a nexus to portals, Tucker, Donut, and Tex remained behind and Tucker was left bleeding on the ground for a while as I searched for any medical supplies. Then we all ended up on Sidewinder and found out Sarge implanted a bomb in Church's gut and Omega had taken Lopez and created a weather machine, thus convincing them all that we time traveled when the Church bomb went off. That was just one day, I spent 5 years in that canyon." I said.