The Babbler
Writing Prompt from Writing Excuses - Season 01 - Episode 17 - This Sucks and I’m a Horrible Writer
Build a story off of this first line, “Barry knew his mumbling was going to get him killed someday.”
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Barry knew his mumbling was going to get him killed someday.
Mumbling is usually attributed to people who are shy, distracted, drunk or just don't care. Barry was not really shy, he wasn't drunk at the moment and his attention was completely focused on the issue at hand.
He also cared a great deal about not dying.
Barry simply had some trouble speaking most times because of his giant tongue. It wasn't freakishly big or anything, he wouldn't be breaking any records with it, but it was so wide and long that if he wasn't careful he'd bite it several times a day.
Eating was a constant struggle, he had to do it slowly and at a measured pace. You'd think that he would grow accustomed to it or would grow callouses, but at twenty-two his tongue hurt every time he bit into it just as much as it had when he'd done so as a kid.
Even so, eating was a private thing. Nobody really noticed his issues because it was all hidden behind his pursed lips. Speaking was the bane of his existence. If he wasn't careful while talking with people, he'd tear gashes into it and freak folks out when he started spewing blood-speckled drops of saliva everywhere.
As a child he'd learned that people are generally awful, and will make fun of anyone who is different, so he'd learned to keep his mouth shut most of the time. When he did speak, he did it through clenched teeth usually, and barely moved his lips.
He'd been making his quiet and unassuming way through life when he'd been drafted into the Exo Marines.
Sadly, a giant tongue wasn't a disqualifying handicap and after six months of torturous boot camp, where he'd earned the nicknames 'Barry the Babbler', ‘Tower of Babble’ or the most popular ‘Babble-on 5’, he'd been shipped off to Callisto for low-grav conditioning along with his squad.
Barry hated space. The helmets were too confining, the suits were itchy and the food was terrible. Thick, soupy pastes that stuck to his teeth and clung to his tongue like glue for hours after each meal. He'd have been happier back on Earth, working in the ozone factories or the sun shield generators, but being a citizen meant that you were able to be drafted at any moment.
During peace times draft refusal might mean being expelled to the northern continents, where the harsh weather made life miserable until you could work yourself back towards citizenship, but during war times there was no real option. Refusal to join when drafted meant a quick death sentence.
The three-week interplanetary jump had been a picnic compared to the endless drills and repetitions of low-grav conditioning on the cold and pockmarked surface of Jupiter's moon. After another five months, they'd been ready for combat.
Just in time, too. The alien attack ships had begun expanding from their base on the once-planet Pluto. Their destination was Earth and their purpose was assumed to be the complete annihilation or enslavement of mankind. There had really only ever been one option once they'd vaporized the diplomatic vessels humanity had sent to meet them. We had to kill them before they killed us.
The Exo Marine forces had been keeping them at bay for a year on Ganymede, while the fleets held a sort of stalemate around the entire planet. The ground troops would be the deciding factor. The aliens had some sort of mission that required them to set up shop on the ground, installing huge, mysterious machines that intelligence seemed to suggest served as some sort of communication arrays. There was speculation that they were merely the advance scouts for a larger invasion force.
The Exo Marine's primary mission was to take out these stations and inflict as many casualties as possible on the odd-shaped, multiple-limbed aliens. The fighting was frantic and without mercy, the only sounds were those that came over each of their personal communication devices, so screams, grunts and death rattles made up the bulk of the experience for Barry.
He'd been trained as an explosives specialist. It was his job to follow closely behind the vanguard so he and his team could place the charges next to what the orbital scanners identified as the machine's power sources.
They hadn't been able to penetrate the enemy's defenses in sector twelve until that day.
With more than half of his squad lying dead, dying or drifting away as ashen clouds, Barry was the last one of the explosives team left alive. Lance Corporal Simmons was yelling at Barry as he set the charges.
"Babbler! ETA on charges!?"
"One minute and thirty seconds!". Unfortunately, between the dying screams of their comrades coming through the comms and Barry's giant tongue, the first part was garbled and misunderstood as a grunt, so the rest of the team thought they were on a tighter timetable than they actually were.
"Are we clear for evac!?" There was a harried tone on his squad leader's voice a few seconds later. They were sheltered behind one of the alien machine's support legs, the three remaining soldiers taking turns squeezing shots from their plasma rifles in coordinated movements, trying to keep the aliens pinned back as long as they could.
Barry was turned away from the fighting, concentrating on engaging the arming mechanisms on the remaining bombs and making sure they were attached properly to the hull of the strange structure they were trying to destroy.
"I have two more to set!" He mumbled. He heard his squad mates suddenly yell and curse, so he tried to speed up as much as he could.
He finished setting the charge he was working on and glanced around to find himself alone.
Lance Corporal Simmons was leading the leftover squad back across the bottom of the crater, the other two Marines- Barry thought they were Ivanovich and O’Malley- were firing in every direction to give them the cover they needed to reach the relative safety of their attack ships.
Barry froze, his fingers going numb and dropping the last charge. They left him. How could they leave him? He didn't say he was ready yet!
Even as the cold clamp of fear tightened on his spine and left him dizzy, the burning flush of anger he felt creep up his neck at that moment spurred him into action. He picked up the last charge and went about arming it. The others would draw attention away from him, giving him the time he needed to finish the mission, even if it meant not making it back alive.
He tried to ignore the pitiful cries of his fallen comrades, the desperate yells as the corporal realized that he was missing a soldier. He could do this.
If by some miracle he made it back to Earth, he was getting that damned surgery.
He muted the comms channel. He needed to concentrate. Softly, he whispered to himself while he worked, detailing the delicate procedure he was engaging in, finding strange comfort in his stumbling sentences. When he was by himself, he didn't sound strange at all.
As he placed the last wire on the detonator and activated the timed countdown that controlled all charges, he saw from the corner of his eye a long, bluish appendage much like an oily octopus leg wrap around the bottom of the support beam he crouched next to. His mission complete, Barry swung his plasma rifle around and waited for the ugly bastard to show its face.
One minute and fifteen seconds to mission completeness, the timers read.
It was eerie, watching the alien peek around the corner in perfect silence. The thing didn't seem to have eyes, but its wedge-shaped head turned towards Barry. He fancied that there might've been a wrinkling of what passed as a forehead as the barrel of the rifle pressed against it.
Only the sounds of his breathing rasping into his lungs- sharp and brief, almost hyperventilating- accompanied the gory explosion of purplish flesh that spewed across Barry's field of vision after he squeezed the trigger. The lower gravity made it seem like an instantaneous replay of one of the football holovids that were shown in the mess halls.
The slow moving cranial explosion was misleading. Time was still running out. He glanced at the detonator.
One minute and five seconds to mission completeness.
Not much time to reach the attack ship, and the half kilometer of killing field in front of him gave him a twinge of hopelessness, but since he had nothing else to lose he set off at a breakneck dash across the rocky surface. He had one last card to play.
He turned his comms back on and the noise flooded back into his helmet.
“Babbler! What the hell happened?!” Lance Corporal Simmons’ voice cut through the other chatter.
“No time to talk! I still have some juice in my drop jets, I’m going to try a ground launch to see if I can reach you!”
“What?!”
“I said I'm going to try… Ah, screw it!”
Forty five seconds to mission completeness, his HUD showed.
One of the first things they taught on Callisto when practicing low orbit insertions is that your drop jets are never, under any circumstances, to be used anywhere less than a hundred meters above the surface you're dropping to. The rocket propellers attached to the solid mesh around your torso took very careful calibration for each gravitational environment and you could just as easily snap your spine in half as simply blow up if you didn't have the necessary clearance underneath the jets.
Barry didn't really think he had a choice. As the ground around him began to be crisscrossed by iridescent beams from the strange energy weapons the aliens used, he took a running leap off a high boulder, fired his plasma rifle into the ground, adding a couple of more meters of height to his arc, and engaged the drop jets thruster.
He must've blacked out from the G forces that slammed into him, because the next thing he saw was the top of the Exo Marines attack ship approximately fifty meters or so below him, the barely distinguishable faces of soldiers peering up at him through the viewing orbs with open mouths. He heard a crackling through the comms but couldn't make anything out.
What he could see clearly was the ground rushing up to meet him. He remembered to shut off the propulsion jets and tried to assume the best crash landing position. Tuck and roll, they taught at boot camp, but none of the exercises really covered this particular scenario.
Ten seconds to mission completeness, he saw in the faint green letters inside his helmet.
He smiled grimly as the countdown wound closer to zero. He was moving at a good clip towards the ground, but before he hit he had the satisfaction of seeing the alien machine, transmitter or whatever it was, rock onto its side as the micro thermite warheads tore through the bottom of it. He turned back just in time to sigh and make sure he wouldn't bite his tongue as he landed.
His recovery took about eight months. He’d broken both his legs, his right arm, had shattered his pelvis and had to be kept in an induced coma for a week while the swelling in his brain subsided after his cranial fracture. It was a miracle that his suit or helmet hadn't ripped or shattered as he'd tumbled for almost a kilometer across Ganymede’s lifeless surface.
His superiors called him a damn fool, even as they pinned a medal of bravery to his uniform and promoted him to Lance Corporal, assigning him to a training post on Callisto teaching advanced combat techniques and critical thinking while he recovered. Barry didn't worry too much about it. He was happier with the new nickname he heard whispered as he passed by the new recruits.
Rocketman….
Build a story off of this first line, “Barry knew his mumbling was going to get him killed someday.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry knew his mumbling was going to get him killed someday.
Mumbling is usually attributed to people who are shy, distracted, drunk or just don't care. Barry was not really shy, he wasn't drunk at the moment and his attention was completely focused on the issue at hand.
He also cared a great deal about not dying.
Barry simply had some trouble speaking most times because of his giant tongue. It wasn't freakishly big or anything, he wouldn't be breaking any records with it, but it was so wide and long that if he wasn't careful he'd bite it several times a day.
Eating was a constant struggle, he had to do it slowly and at a measured pace. You'd think that he would grow accustomed to it or would grow callouses, but at twenty-two his tongue hurt every time he bit into it just as much as it had when he'd done so as a kid.
Even so, eating was a private thing. Nobody really noticed his issues because it was all hidden behind his pursed lips. Speaking was the bane of his existence. If he wasn't careful while talking with people, he'd tear gashes into it and freak folks out when he started spewing blood-speckled drops of saliva everywhere.
As a child he'd learned that people are generally awful, and will make fun of anyone who is different, so he'd learned to keep his mouth shut most of the time. When he did speak, he did it through clenched teeth usually, and barely moved his lips.
He'd been making his quiet and unassuming way through life when he'd been drafted into the Exo Marines.
Sadly, a giant tongue wasn't a disqualifying handicap and after six months of torturous boot camp, where he'd earned the nicknames 'Barry the Babbler', ‘Tower of Babble’ or the most popular ‘Babble-on 5’, he'd been shipped off to Callisto for low-grav conditioning along with his squad.
Barry hated space. The helmets were too confining, the suits were itchy and the food was terrible. Thick, soupy pastes that stuck to his teeth and clung to his tongue like glue for hours after each meal. He'd have been happier back on Earth, working in the ozone factories or the sun shield generators, but being a citizen meant that you were able to be drafted at any moment.
During peace times draft refusal might mean being expelled to the northern continents, where the harsh weather made life miserable until you could work yourself back towards citizenship, but during war times there was no real option. Refusal to join when drafted meant a quick death sentence.
The three-week interplanetary jump had been a picnic compared to the endless drills and repetitions of low-grav conditioning on the cold and pockmarked surface of Jupiter's moon. After another five months, they'd been ready for combat.
Just in time, too. The alien attack ships had begun expanding from their base on the once-planet Pluto. Their destination was Earth and their purpose was assumed to be the complete annihilation or enslavement of mankind. There had really only ever been one option once they'd vaporized the diplomatic vessels humanity had sent to meet them. We had to kill them before they killed us.
The Exo Marine forces had been keeping them at bay for a year on Ganymede, while the fleets held a sort of stalemate around the entire planet. The ground troops would be the deciding factor. The aliens had some sort of mission that required them to set up shop on the ground, installing huge, mysterious machines that intelligence seemed to suggest served as some sort of communication arrays. There was speculation that they were merely the advance scouts for a larger invasion force.
The Exo Marine's primary mission was to take out these stations and inflict as many casualties as possible on the odd-shaped, multiple-limbed aliens. The fighting was frantic and without mercy, the only sounds were those that came over each of their personal communication devices, so screams, grunts and death rattles made up the bulk of the experience for Barry.
He'd been trained as an explosives specialist. It was his job to follow closely behind the vanguard so he and his team could place the charges next to what the orbital scanners identified as the machine's power sources.
They hadn't been able to penetrate the enemy's defenses in sector twelve until that day.
With more than half of his squad lying dead, dying or drifting away as ashen clouds, Barry was the last one of the explosives team left alive. Lance Corporal Simmons was yelling at Barry as he set the charges.
"Babbler! ETA on charges!?"
"One minute and thirty seconds!". Unfortunately, between the dying screams of their comrades coming through the comms and Barry's giant tongue, the first part was garbled and misunderstood as a grunt, so the rest of the team thought they were on a tighter timetable than they actually were.
"Are we clear for evac!?" There was a harried tone on his squad leader's voice a few seconds later. They were sheltered behind one of the alien machine's support legs, the three remaining soldiers taking turns squeezing shots from their plasma rifles in coordinated movements, trying to keep the aliens pinned back as long as they could.
Barry was turned away from the fighting, concentrating on engaging the arming mechanisms on the remaining bombs and making sure they were attached properly to the hull of the strange structure they were trying to destroy.
"I have two more to set!" He mumbled. He heard his squad mates suddenly yell and curse, so he tried to speed up as much as he could.
He finished setting the charge he was working on and glanced around to find himself alone.
Lance Corporal Simmons was leading the leftover squad back across the bottom of the crater, the other two Marines- Barry thought they were Ivanovich and O’Malley- were firing in every direction to give them the cover they needed to reach the relative safety of their attack ships.
Barry froze, his fingers going numb and dropping the last charge. They left him. How could they leave him? He didn't say he was ready yet!
Even as the cold clamp of fear tightened on his spine and left him dizzy, the burning flush of anger he felt creep up his neck at that moment spurred him into action. He picked up the last charge and went about arming it. The others would draw attention away from him, giving him the time he needed to finish the mission, even if it meant not making it back alive.
He tried to ignore the pitiful cries of his fallen comrades, the desperate yells as the corporal realized that he was missing a soldier. He could do this.
If by some miracle he made it back to Earth, he was getting that damned surgery.
He muted the comms channel. He needed to concentrate. Softly, he whispered to himself while he worked, detailing the delicate procedure he was engaging in, finding strange comfort in his stumbling sentences. When he was by himself, he didn't sound strange at all.
As he placed the last wire on the detonator and activated the timed countdown that controlled all charges, he saw from the corner of his eye a long, bluish appendage much like an oily octopus leg wrap around the bottom of the support beam he crouched next to. His mission complete, Barry swung his plasma rifle around and waited for the ugly bastard to show its face.
One minute and fifteen seconds to mission completeness, the timers read.
It was eerie, watching the alien peek around the corner in perfect silence. The thing didn't seem to have eyes, but its wedge-shaped head turned towards Barry. He fancied that there might've been a wrinkling of what passed as a forehead as the barrel of the rifle pressed against it.
Only the sounds of his breathing rasping into his lungs- sharp and brief, almost hyperventilating- accompanied the gory explosion of purplish flesh that spewed across Barry's field of vision after he squeezed the trigger. The lower gravity made it seem like an instantaneous replay of one of the football holovids that were shown in the mess halls.
The slow moving cranial explosion was misleading. Time was still running out. He glanced at the detonator.
One minute and five seconds to mission completeness.
Not much time to reach the attack ship, and the half kilometer of killing field in front of him gave him a twinge of hopelessness, but since he had nothing else to lose he set off at a breakneck dash across the rocky surface. He had one last card to play.
He turned his comms back on and the noise flooded back into his helmet.
“Babbler! What the hell happened?!” Lance Corporal Simmons’ voice cut through the other chatter.
“No time to talk! I still have some juice in my drop jets, I’m going to try a ground launch to see if I can reach you!”
“What?!”
“I said I'm going to try… Ah, screw it!”
Forty five seconds to mission completeness, his HUD showed.
One of the first things they taught on Callisto when practicing low orbit insertions is that your drop jets are never, under any circumstances, to be used anywhere less than a hundred meters above the surface you're dropping to. The rocket propellers attached to the solid mesh around your torso took very careful calibration for each gravitational environment and you could just as easily snap your spine in half as simply blow up if you didn't have the necessary clearance underneath the jets.
Barry didn't really think he had a choice. As the ground around him began to be crisscrossed by iridescent beams from the strange energy weapons the aliens used, he took a running leap off a high boulder, fired his plasma rifle into the ground, adding a couple of more meters of height to his arc, and engaged the drop jets thruster.
He must've blacked out from the G forces that slammed into him, because the next thing he saw was the top of the Exo Marines attack ship approximately fifty meters or so below him, the barely distinguishable faces of soldiers peering up at him through the viewing orbs with open mouths. He heard a crackling through the comms but couldn't make anything out.
What he could see clearly was the ground rushing up to meet him. He remembered to shut off the propulsion jets and tried to assume the best crash landing position. Tuck and roll, they taught at boot camp, but none of the exercises really covered this particular scenario.
Ten seconds to mission completeness, he saw in the faint green letters inside his helmet.
He smiled grimly as the countdown wound closer to zero. He was moving at a good clip towards the ground, but before he hit he had the satisfaction of seeing the alien machine, transmitter or whatever it was, rock onto its side as the micro thermite warheads tore through the bottom of it. He turned back just in time to sigh and make sure he wouldn't bite his tongue as he landed.
His recovery took about eight months. He’d broken both his legs, his right arm, had shattered his pelvis and had to be kept in an induced coma for a week while the swelling in his brain subsided after his cranial fracture. It was a miracle that his suit or helmet hadn't ripped or shattered as he'd tumbled for almost a kilometer across Ganymede’s lifeless surface.
His superiors called him a damn fool, even as they pinned a medal of bravery to his uniform and promoted him to Lance Corporal, assigning him to a training post on Callisto teaching advanced combat techniques and critical thinking while he recovered. Barry didn't worry too much about it. He was happier with the new nickname he heard whispered as he passed by the new recruits.
Rocketman….