[hr]Episode One: Snipe Dreams[hr]

A lone figure stood in the crimson desert, walking against the sandblasting Martian winds. They wore a Lunar spacesuit, markedly different from Martian, Terran, and Jupiterean models by the off-white color of the exosuit, thick gunmetal rebreather and cyclops-model HUD eyepiece, giving the traveler a single red eye. All around, the eye dotted around the horizon, instinctively combing through the Martian landscape in search of scrubs of cacti or shrubbery. It was in vain, as it always had been. At least on Earth, the traveler thought, even the desert showed a pulse in the plants and animals strong enough to scratch life out of the arid landscape. On Mars, there was no such comfort. Any traveler could tell you the Martian desert was nothing more than a graveyard of the first Japanese colonies, mining sites, and the shells of various early robots left to erode for centuries past. It was an inhospitably dry, airless remnant of humanity's past, and for all its eerie abandonment, it had not until recently been [i]dangerous[/i]. 

The traveler hunkered down, placing their rifle on the legs of its bipod and laying on the hard, red dirt. They fiddled with the sight for a moment, turning the various dials and switches on the scope as a cool, blue light began to eminate from the rifle's barrel. This continued for several moments -- The sniper would look through the sight, readjust and recalibrate, and check the scope again. Through the rifle's sight, they tracked a cargo truck some two hundred yards away, puttering down the familiar tire tracks of a trade route, steadily leading the rifle's crosshairs in front of the truck. Though the dome cities connected to one another by tunnels, the valuable oxygen therein was too precious to be used by combustion engines, and so the Martian government decreed that nothing bigger than a bicycle could be rode through the tunnels. Shipments of all kinds made their way through the harsh, unoxygenated Martian desert in windowless trucks named for their resemblance to an extinct species of woodlouse from Earth commonly called "Pillbugs". Pillbug trucks were about as long and wide as an old-fashioned commercial airline plane, using treads rather than air-filled tires, and built to be resistant to punctures from meteorites, gunfire, explosives, sand abrasion, crashes, and the melting effects of solar winds. That being said, it was not resistant to plasma. As the sniper had learned, very few things were.

The sniper kept their crosshairs steadily in front of the pillbug as the rifle's barrel continued to hum, slowly glowing more and more until the rifle's blue glow became a dull white light. The sniper's sole red eye twitched for a moment, their finger's grip tightening on the trigger, calculating the rifle's trajectory and shifting their aim in small microadjustments before squeezing, firing a bolt of plasma at the pillbug in the complete silence of the airless desert. Though too fast to track by sight, a white, glowing ball the size of a fist shot from the rifle's muzzle, tearing through the thin atmosphere with a low whistle and crashing into the pillbug almost instantly. Despite the plasma bolt's small size, it tore through the hull of the truck with the momentum of a freight train, knocking the tremendous truck to its side, spinning slowly in the red dirt as it skidded to a halt. The sniper stood up, slinging the rifle over their shoulder and   stretching, before walking towards the crashed pillbug as slowly and calmly as they had been before. Within minutes, they approached the smoldering wreckage of the pillbug's hull, turning off the gravitational enhancements on the sides of their spacesuit's boots and hopping upwards onto the overturned truck's side, and into the truck's interior through the gaping hole. There were three metal crates about half as large as the sniper himself, slowly floating upwards in their newly-depressurized quarters. The sniper pressed a large button in the center of the closest crate's lid, opening it with a hiss of air.

Civorite crystals, and a [i]lot[/i] of them, neatly packaged in hexagonal glass casing like a box of lime-green honeycomb. They were used to charge the thrusters in spacecraft engines, synthesizing with fuel to work as a "nitro boost" of sorts. Not particularly useful to the sniper, though expensive and sellable nonetheless. The sniper pulled a cord from the back of a belt around their suit's waistline, closing the trunk and attaching the cord to the trunk's handle with a small hook. The sniper grabbed the other end of the trunk, hefting it up weightlessly to their shoulder and hopping towards the pillbug's cockpit. There were two pilots, both twisted into the grotesque expressions of their final moments of depressurization. The sniper paid no mind to the bodies, floating towards the cockpit's windshield and pulling a small can of spray paint from their suit's belt, drawing a quick, precise kanji on the windshield. After examining their work for a moment, the sniper turned and hopped towards the cockpit's exit, still carrying the crate over their shoulder. By now, the rest of the crates had been floating long enough to be bouncing around the hole in the truck's side, teetering around the edges of the smoldering plasma burns of the hull. The sniper pushed them out of the way, hopping out of the truck and onto the hard martian sand, pressing the gravitational enhancement button on the side of their left boot, then right. As quickly as they had entered, the sniper began making their way away from the truck, to disappear into the Martian craters and plateaus, leaving the pillbug to erode away with the rest of the Martian desert.

[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/NU0lTyz.png[/img][/center]

[hr][hider=Summary]We learn two things about the sniper; They are willing to kill two innocents for fuel to sell on the black market, and they can at least write Japanese.[/hider][hr]