Unfortunate Series of Events / USEE

Unfortunate Series of Events [USEE] – How It All Began

After serving in the UEE Navy, and subsequently working for various corporations such as Outbreak, Darkness Inc. and Stonedogs, Monfreid retired from active duty to start a new life as a caffeine connoisseur. It wasn’t long, just short of a decade, before he could no longer ignore the calling of his heart – to follow his dreams and seek misfortune, misadventure, and mischief, among the stars once more.

Monfreid deduced that he had to break free from the chains of his mundane life as a subcontinental beverage supplier [for one of Earth’s leading global distributors] while digging in his garden one day. Events had taken a turn for the worse and were not going to improve. He recalled the digital screen outside the local Nimbus Mall he’d seen the day before, that was advertising vacancies for ArcCorp security personnel, in a star system called Stanton, which seemed to be quite lucrative. Although he’d certainly heard of ArcCorp he didn’t know much about the corporation, or Stanton. He thought about speaking to his wife about it and sharing the idea of uprooting and taking a proverbial leap into the unknown, but then quickly realized why he was digging up the garden. “Wrong time, wrong place,” he mumbled to himself as he turned and gazed at his wife, laying motionless, just a few meters away from where he toiled.

Monfreid paused for a moment while his mind strayed into the past. He recalled when he and his wife were courting, remembering her elderly relatives, and how they used to tease him at other family’s and friend’s weddings, saying, “You’ll be next!” They soon stopped that though, once he started saying the same to them at funerals! He reminisced about when their family’s pet dog died, only a few years ago. His wife was heartbroken over the loss of her beloved canine. He tried to comfort her by procuring an identical one, which made her even more upset. He recalled how she screamed at him uncontrollably, asking, “What am I supposed to do with two dead dogs?”

Monfreid chuckled as he grasped his wife’s body by the ankles and dragged it into the awaiting hole in the ground. “Well,” he said as if his wife were still able to hear him, “If I burned you to ashes at the crematorium I’d be showing respect. If I burned you to ashes at home I’d be destroying evidence. You know how I hate double-standards, so I’m burying you instead.” Then he grabbed his garden shovel once again and began to transfer the pile of freshly dug soil back into the hole with much zest. “Next time your partner offers to take you on a romantic afternoon walk, so ‘we can carve our names into a tree’, ask yourself how emotionally unstable someone must be to take a FSK-8 Combat Knife with them on a date!” he snickered, “When I die, I’d like to go out as your grandfather did, passing away peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all his passengers did, moments before impact, in the MPUV-1P taxi he was flying at the time!” Monfreid completed shovelling all of the soil into the hole and then jumped up and down on the protruding mound for several minutes to compress its displacement. “Look at it this way,” he said to the trampled patch of earth, “The doctor gave me two more years to live, and I fully expect a judge would give me, at least, 30 years for this. So, problem solved!”

After a good, hearty dinner that same day, Monfreid travelled over to his wife’s parent’s home, where his mother-in-law lived alone after her husband died three months prior of a heart attack, brought on by a new mobiGlas update causing ‘pace-maker internal pulse generator superfluity’, which effectively ended him. He’d already made plans to take his mother-in-law out in order to expunge her bereavement. There’s nothing quite like being a trained ex-military UEE Navy elite sniper to get the job done quickly and efficiently!

If there was one thing that Monfreid could never tolerate, it was intolerance in others, and his wife and mother-in-law were like two peas from the same pod in that respect. Fanaticism. Psychological rigidity. Captious know-it-alls who don’t actually know very much at all. Those who have a deep knowledge of rules and procedures that they follow, and expect others to do the same. To hell with them all, literally!

Monfreid had become jaded, of his unchanging life on Earth, and the autocratic Sol system in general. He needed to get away from it all and start over. After considering his options for a minute or two, he decided that his next move would be… to Stanton! And that’s exactly what he did.

On arriving in Stanton, several weeks later [after going to great lengths to avoid Earth’s security forces in order to flee the Sol system] he applied for a position within ArcCorp as a member of their elite security detachment. His application was swiftly rejected, as the UEE had claimed possession of the Stanton system in 2903 and were pro-actively monitoring all potential security threats, and risk factoring assessments, within its jurisdiction. Because Monfreid hadn’t taken any steps towards remaining undetected, or the time to conceal his mother-in-law’s body [deciding instead to leave her corpse slumped on the front porch of the house with half its head missing from the P6-LR sniper rifle shot] it resulted in him being formally charged with homicide and receiving a crime status 3. So, he was considered a wanted criminal in UEE space, which included all security forces within Stanton and beyond. A bounty contract was also put on him for 10,000 aUEC, which meant anyone and everyone was a potential hostile who’d get paid quite handsomely for effectuating his demise. The only way he could avoid being apprehended or executed was to seek refuge at the Green Imperial Housing Exchange, hidden deep in the Yela asteroid belt [and beyond the influence and prying eyes of the UEE and Stanton’s security forces]. The former Housing Exchange station had been operating under the assumed name of ‘Grim Hex’ for some time, and Monfreid had already heard the rumours, back on Earth, that pirate hordes had successfully taken it over by force. “Better the devil you know,” he told himself. “Honour among thieves, and all that.”

One month later, on 22 January 2944, the Unfortunate Series of Events [USEE] Organization was established by Monfreid, at Grim Hex, and the rest is USEE history…

___

No history. No future. Nobody to blame.