College writing, Rana Room

    Rana stepped into her room; it had been a long day, and she needed to unwind. She looked at a large board on the wall, where spent ammunition shells were arranged in three columns, labeled at the top “WINS”, “DRAWS”, and “LOST”. The latter two columns formed a fourth category, “AWAITING REMATCH”. Each shell had a name, date, and place etched into it; additional marks and symbols denoted kills, wounds, or bloodless victory. Well, the victories were comforting, but there were all the rematches she hadn’t gotten to yet…no, she needed other ways to de-stress.

    The workbench had a weapon on it that was in the middle of being field stripped, upgraded, and repaired. Or at least one of the three, anyway. Rana picked up the parts, turning the cool steel and fabricated plastic over in her fingers, then setting them back in their places. She picked up a wrench, tossed it to herself a few times before she fumbled it and it clanked down to the table next to its fellow tools. No, working on weapons wasn’t good when she was jittery.

    Nothing else for it then; she took the rifle from her back, unfolded it into firing configuration with a satisfying snap-chack! of metal hinges and locks rearranging. Next, she put two of her pistols onto their hip-mounted brackets, so she could aim and fire them hands-free. Her shoulder pads hovered up, revealing themselves as networked combat drones. Her tactical visor showed feeds from the drones, as well as the status of all her weapons—training mode, ready to fire; ammo levels nominal.

    Satisfied, Rana strode over to the practice range that took up the entire back section of the room. It was a hundred feet on a side, roughly cuboid, and currently quite devoid of furnishings or decoration. As Rana stepped in, the surroundings shimmered with holograms to make the space look more interesting. A wall slid quietly shut over the entrance, and it too was blanketed with fake scenery. Forcefields would give solid shape to the objects and buildings in this virtual space.

    Mmm, yes, she could feel the tension in her nerves. It resonated with this place, rather than jangled against it. This room was thick with the smell of gunfire—burnt metal, the ozone tang of plasma discharge, and an undercurrent of wanton hell. She had no idea what the practice range would throw her way, and that was exciting. “Start,” she said.

    The quiet hum of the room exploded, and Rana dove for cover as bullets screamed past her ears, so close she could feel the air tear apart from the miniature sonic booms. She took aim at the armed mercenaries that had appeared all around her, and her own weapons added their rattling thunder to the sudden chaos. Oh, yes, this was just what she needed—it would be very relaxing.

    Rana’s sensory perception was alive, flooded with so much data that anyone else would have curled up in a ball, overwhelmed. For her, though, this lightning storm of thought and information was the closest she could get to an adrenaline rush, a wild high not of overload, but euphoria. Her ears swiveled back and forth, picking out targets from the clatter of their weapons cycling, the stark reflections of their radar images, opaque shadows of dense armor and weaponry against the near-transparent outlines of wood paneling and stucco.

    Most of the targets were in cover, scattered around the street. Rana took a running dive from where she crouched over to the building with the most enemies inside; her drones made three shots, she fired another two from her rifle. Two wounds, two kills, one superficial. Right, targets had good armor, drone strikes needed to either ramp up the power or hit weakpoints. Rana understood this even as she crashed through the glass of a window and tumbled across the floor. Her personal shield deflected the jagged shards; she experienced a brief moment of sensor scatter, as the cloud of fragments disrupted visual, radar, and infrared targeting. That left only the instincts, honed by practice; by the time Rana rolled to her feet, two more of her targets were expelling blood through the brand new holes in the front and backs of their helmets.

    As she reached the stairs, more bullets whizzed down, pinging off her shield and armor. She responded by dialing in the range and firing a grenade from the launcher slung under her rifle, ducking into cover in the split second of travel time. The grenade exploded just a bit past the top of the stairs, shrapnel and a plasma detonation wave tearing through everything in their path. The whole building shook with the blast, mortar and paneling raining down from the ceiling. In an instant, a significant portion of the interior space filled with choking dust. Vision obscured, radar and infrared still working. Rana checked the situation through the sensors of one drone—targets down, stairs and a portion of the floor damaged, not serviceable.

    Rana started the drone on the task of finishing off what targets the blast wave hadn’t, while she got a running start, leaping up the crumbling, blast-damaged stairs. Just as they gave way underneath her, she took a flying leap, using the rocket boosters on her feet to help her clear the hole at the top where her grenade had blown the floor apart. There were still more targets to hunt down, all of them armed and determined to shoot back. Just the sort of fun she needed.