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The Good, The Bad and The AU

Old West AU

Welcome to Dry River. You're a long way from home partner. It’s the mid 1800s and this dusty little frontier town isn’t much of a landmark but the local color might make your stay interesting.

Cut some cards at the rowdy saloon. Stay at the inn and pay for a little company. Or take a job as a farmhand if you just need to make a quick buck and buy your ticket out of here.

Keep your nose clean though. Train robbers, card cheats and bandits have been known to pass through these parts. But you wouldn’t know nothin’ about that, would you?

It’s a Wild West AU. Establish yourself as a local or a stranger and rustle up some adventure or romance.

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with your western AU scene and see what kind of trouble darkens your door. Check out some old timey professions and their associated tropes if you need to.

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with your western AU characters and make yourself less of a stranger ‘round these parts.

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She waited for a moment, watching that takeoff, leaning her head on her hand. It was smooth. And her first airship ride. And she grinned. It was always nice to see a professional work. And such skill meant that her other thinking regarding Betty was more than justified.

And more than a little bit of a turn-on, really.

Once they were in a slow ascent, though, she leaned forward to pull the revolver and it's small capacitor backpack out of her bag.

"I call this," she said, putting it on her lap with one hand and gesturing in a 'ta-da' manner with the other, "the Ghost Colt. Fires a dense plasma shell that's actually a bit too large for the barrel which I redesigned to taper, so it squeezes, see, which gives it extra velocity and excites the mixture so the rounds only go live as they leave the barrel. It will pump holes into anything up to a Class Four spectre or free-floating vapor; though it doesn't dissipate them as much as my rifle does. Then, there's the grenades..."

She went on to describe them, too. Throw them at a wall, you might as well be splattering paint - but it would create no-go zones phantasms couldn't cross - to say nothing about if the detonation hit them. Blasting and herding, in one easy package.

"...it's kinda like a mobile, explosive salt circle," she finished.

Betty's eyes widened t the revolver, and a hungry smile flashed. The backpack got a skeptical look, but it could be adjusted and pinned around her armless shoulder, she figured. That or slung across like a bandoleer.

As for the grenades - she nods to a few hatches spaced evenly around the fuselage.

"I think we can manage to get those in convenient locations for our purpose," she said.

She is, in fact, already starting to work on that, casting looks over to eyeball measurements. It hadn't been designed with Betty in mind, but it soon will be.

"Shiny," she responds, and once she's made the necessary changes - a temporary pinning and she'll be thinking what a belt could do as well - she gets up and starts distributing them, tying strings to their activators.

"Aerial bombardment. The first air-to-spectre aerial bombardment. You really have a ridiculously attractive brain."

Half an eye on what Holtzmann was doing, and Betty was satisfied that she's thinking along the right lines. And beginning to feel mutually about the attractive brain.

"Hey, you made the Ketchums. I just have the equipment for them," she said, busy as she was with her flying, hand sliding easily from lever to rope, leaning into her strap like she was part of the machine herself.

But she has a moment to flick a grin in Holtzmann's direction. "Show me how attractive later."

"Promise," she replied, and then got down to business.

Once the Ketchums were ready, there was the matter of explaining the weapon. It could fire without the backpack, but that was what provided a steady supply of the plasma every time a new set of ammunition was inserted. And how it pulled to the left because of the structural reinforcements.

And that there were two replacement barrels in the backpack itself, because after about fifty to sixty shots, the barrel would be red-hot and on the verge of failure. Literally squeezing rounds had, alas, a cost.

"Help me out, then."

While cruising along, Betty took a moment to reach for the backpack, haul it over her head and adjust the strap. Much of it she could do herself after years of practice, but it always helps to have a whole pair of hands to assist.

The replacement barrels also had to be found a new home where she could reach them, but this was all relatively easy - albeit with a couple of breaks to get back to flying.

Once done, Betty had the revolver in her holster, having tried the grip and liking it so far. She wouldn't know exactly how it fired until they get there, but she was keen to find out.

She nodded out into the yellowing afternoon light at the rock formations ahead of them.

"His hideout was always around there."

Hands that may take just a little longer to do that than strictly necessary, but nothing outside the realm of double checking. She then checks over her own rifle, humming a half-remembered tune. And pulling out the last item from her own bag - a box with a handle, switch - and unidentifiable components.

She leaned in close to the pilot's seat, looking out into that.

"Ugh, so dramatic. What a shmuck. Probably only got worse when he got dead."

"Is that a thing that happens?"

She was genuinely interested, having never really encountered actual ghosts herself. Not in the literal sense anyway. "You die and suddenly get a taste for the melodrama?"

"Right, so, ghost primer," she said, folding hands in front of her face as she thought of what to include and drop.

"They're, like, a magnification of whoever you were in life? No friggin' clue why some people don't just cross over but there's a sort of...stripping away. Like, if you were cruel but tried to hide it, all the masks don't migrate over with you."

She sighed. "So this putz was likely already a dramatic sod in life - and now that he's dead..."

"Way I heard it he didn't try and hide his cruelty in life," Betty remarks. "NowI can buy him as a dramatic idiot though.

"Alright, sweetheart, where am I dropping these bombshells?"

"Then you're gonna be seeing some things today," she replied, with just a hint of grimness to her voice, "because it all shows in the appearance, too."

As for the rest...

"Honestly? I didn't know I'd have aerial dropping capacity. Maybe clear us a nice landing area? Somewhere we can fall back to that won't be filled with ghost if we need."

She pauses.

"Oh, and when we're down there...if I say duck? Do it fast."

"I seen things," Betty said with a touch more grimness herself. "Ain't nothing dead that can scare me."

Bold words, she knew, but she figured they were likely true.

As they approached she eyeballed a good flat area, and swung the machine around, dropping the grenades around in a perimeter. There were a few left, so she headed up to the peaks as well, dropped a few around to keep the ghosts within the area, if the Ketchums did as promised. Then she retreated down to the landing site.

She grinned as each grenade hit.

She pats her on the shoulder. It's what people always say, before they encounter mobile, hideous proof of the existence of an afterlife. It's not a matter of bravery or experience, more it's something that tends to read past down all a human being's defenses to something deep, and dark, and primal.

Something that came with human kind since they huddled around the fire at night, looking for glowing eyes in the dark. In short, she'll be more than a little surprised if she maintains that level-headedness the entire way.

But that sort of precision, given their altitude, and wind-speed.

"Well shit," she said, "you're even better than I thought." She leaned in, whispering in Betty's ear. "Yeah, I'm gonna do so much more than kissing."

Machinery, professionalism, a beautiful and clever lady? Tick off every box she has why don't you.

If Betty had a spare hand, it would have been up by Holtzmann's head, keeping her in place. Lucky for the task they were doing that she didn't, so she couldn't create a distraction she coudn't afford.

"They called me Bombshell, during the war."

Back when she was James Barnes, young and stupid. Rather than now she was older, and apparently still stupid.

But she was not being overtly brave when she said she wasn't afraid. Not after those days, what she saw then.

"As nicknames go," she said, doing her last check, "that's a pretty sexy one."

There was a strange thrumming noise from her rifle as the chemicals started to power up.

"Ready to gun down some ghosts?"

"Damn right."

Betty had to take a few minutes to secure everything, deflate the balloon slightly, fold up the wings, but the she had her hand on her revolver, and felt the hum as it charged itself.

"Lead the way."

She leaped out, onto the ground, with the weapon immediately up. It looked like a shack, ahead of them. But she had a feeling.

"They're tunneled into the mountain. Let me guess, old played-out mines?"

Because the departed had habits, it turned out. Those in her field only had guesses as to why.

But then one of them lurched clean out of the ground, a haze of blue smoke and elongated features, fingers the length of whole arms. The scream it produced was...well, unholy was a vastly inadequate term. It was a scream of rage and unearthly pains and desires. To the uninitiated, it often looked like hell rising to drag them down - for her it was a slow-motion show as she pulled the trigger, the rifle kicking into her shoulder and emitting a ball of bright, scintillating vermilion as the energy flew free.

The creature - the ghost - was hit center mass and ruptured, exploded in a burst of blue fire and then green slime, splattering all over the ground and, thankfully, only on her shoe.

This was the matter of a few seconds, and then she was standing there, shaking it off her shoe, pulling back the bolt on the rifle.

"Ugh, I hate when they do that."

Betty stood behind her and enough to the side to have given her a decent view of the scene that, while horrific, had still elicited any reaction more girlih than a widening if the eye and a readying of her pistol.

"They bleed green."

Impressive - but what damage had caused that? Short term, very useful. Long term, what to make of it...

"It's not blood, it's ectoplasm. It's what they're made out of, it can just sort of..solidify, I guess that simplifies it."

"Don't sound that different from blood."

She lowered her revolver, not ready to holster it just yet, and gave the green slime on the ground a hard look, long enough to take just one breath. Then she glanced back up at Holtzmann, and nodded towards the mineshaft entrance.

"I assume there's more?"

"Devil's in the details," she replied, "you aren't literally a blood sack. Which, sort of, they are. And also the sack. If indeed there's actually a difference. It's complicated."

She nodded, though, moving carefully.

"Well if that butt-face is any indication, then yes. Some of the more powerful ones can...draw others in. Not control, really, but...again, complicated."

Again, Betty drew behind Holtzmann, to the right side to give her a clear view and ease with her revolver, but two steps behind so the experienced woman could take the lead.

She became quiet though, now moving almost as silent as the spectres they were hunting, as she prepared for the inevitable firefight ahead.

What she wouldn't give for the nascent electrical technology to catch up to what she needed. It'd make life a lot easier if she could deploy constant-stream capture technology.

This way is messier, less efficient. And merely disperses energy that will, likely, one day be taken up by another spectral entity. But you do what you can with the tools that you have.

She approaches the shack, slowly.

"Got any of the grenades left?"

"Couple."

But she had to present her back to Holtzmann, including backpack, to let her get them out herself.

She fished one out, priming it.

"Because I ain't walking into ambush junction without knocking first," she replied, nodding towards the door.

"You kick it in, I toss."

And for good measure, she retrieves another one.

Old West AU

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