The Wake

[Stoic]

The Wake


A hero has died. Trent "Cnail" Silver paid the ultimate cost, sacrificing his life for his team.


SPEAR makes the arrangements. A week after you return from Saguro a wake is held at a funeral parlor in Omaha. It is a closed casket event (obviously) and when you arrive, no one else is there. Please take the time to share a memory of Trent, explain how you may have interacted with him in a previous mission, or just describe what you do at the wake. Anyone who posts gets a benny which carries over to next quarter.

[Simon CROSS Harris]

"Well at least Trent chose his time and place."

"Trent and I have been on more than a few of these soirees. A few of those times we ran in the same squad."

"One such soiree was in Milan Italy. Working a fashion photo shoot. Some psychic was reported on the runway. SPEAR was in keep things from getting messy when the cameras started flashing."

"I was sent in undercover, as a model. The runway was full of action gear. Pose with a skido. Lounge with a tobogan. Even had a rock climbing arrangement. The last piece on the runway was an actual bomb. Trent had more than a few action shots he sent away to a private contractor for action toys."

"Trent later told me before the debrief that I was not really assigned to go undercover. He thanked me profusely for the poses and scuried off and missed the debrief."

"Somehow I think he was buying two times as many action figures but it never showed in his collections."

[Keiko]

Keiko trudged over to the casket and frowned at it. She was ninety-nine percent sure there was probably nothing in there. Maybe dog tags, if they'd been able to find those. Probably not. It was theater.

"I didn't know him," she said. "We barely ever talked. I think he...wasted his life, doing what he did. We could have stopped it another way."

Slowly, Keiko shook her head. "It seemed like he was looking for an excuse or something. Wanted to go out a hero, but really just wanted to go out."

"It's sad. I feel sad for him. He should have people here who really cared about him, and really knew him. I...I don't think any of us do. And now we never will."

She leaned over and put the fingertips of her right hand against the casket.

"I wish you'd stuck around longer. You seemed nice."

[Marcus]

Marcus had little to say about Trent. The awkwardness of not really knowing the man was getting him thinking. Did he really know anyone anymore? He expected to feel sorrow or pain for losing a comrade, but instead he felt a little jealousy, at least Trent got to go out a hero and does not have to deal with this stuff anymore.

If anyone knew what he was thinking they would likely hate him for it, but it was what it was. Trent, found a quick way out, he no longer had to deal with the adrenaline of the fights. With the cold chill that sets in when the fight is over and you cannot stop your body from shaking as your muscles react to the adrenaline flushing out. Yeah, Trent went out the right way, but Marcus did not weep for him, Marcus was jealous. When people spoke to him or around him he only nodded, trying to stay low key. People knew he did not speak well anyways. Everyone knew stress made it near impossible for him to communicate. Well maybe they would assume he was stressed here.

[Kelly]

Trent's death hits Kelly pretty hard. Of course, she knows all of the method's for dealing with sudden tragic loss, but explaining those to someone and actually doing them yourself are two totally different things.

Most of all, Kelly feels guilty for not really knowing much about Trent. The days before the service, she obsesses over finding out as much as she can about Trent. She pours through his old case files, trying to get to know him better, and finds out that he lived through some truly tragic missions. It's no wonder he was so eager to lay down his life to save his team. So many of them had died...

She tries to stop by his house to meet his family, and offer her condolences, maybe some suggestions on grief counselling. Or at least that's her pretense. She still can't get Trent's last words out of her head.

"Just make sure Numen doesn’t kill my family.”

Who was Newman, or was in Neuman, or Numen... Kelly finds dozen's of people in SPEAR with the name, none with any obvious connection to Trent. Her multiple trips to Trents listed address, are fruitless, with no one answering the door. It would seem suspicious, but nothing else about the house is amiss. No piling up mail in the mailbox, no stack of newspapers lying on the porch.

At the services, Kelly continues with he search for Trent's family. Surely they would be here at the wake.

"Have any of you ever met Trent's family? You think they would be here but... Well no ones SEEMS to be his family..."

Kelly spends the services quitely slipping through the crowds, discretely attempting to read the minds of anyone who it seems might be related to Trent. One man, seems visibly shaken, but she find out that he is just upset that he had actually wished for Trent's death after Trent was the only surviving member from a mission to Malaysia that the man's brother had died on. Another woman, weeping openly during the service, had secretly loved the computer whiz, intentionally downloading multiple computer viruses in hopes that Trent would be assigned to fix the issue. There were a couple of her memories of Trent's comatose "dives" into the network that made Kelly blush and quickly break the mental connection.

Let it go Kelly... you are burying your grief in this obsession and you know it... Kelly thinks, as she sighs after reading the thoughts of the last likely "family" candidate she spotted. Giving up for the moment, she focuses on the services, and within a few minutes tears flow freely down her cheeks despite her best efforts.