Gone Soft

Reckon it's time I stopped swoonin' over girly stuff like romance and dresses and emotions and got my head back where it needs to be - on the situation at hand. Lotta serious stuff goin' down out on the rim lately, and here's me, moonin' like some lovesick cow. What the hell's got into me lately? Guessin' posin' as a Companion's started rubbin' off on me more'n I'd like to admit.

T'other day, I was on Hale's Moon. Ain't seen much of Seana and Sabrina, and Td's been over there workin' on some stuff for the town. Ain't rightly sure how it happened, everything sorta blew up as I got there, but Duncan Cooperstone, the captain of the local crew of the Raivenn, had got shot by a bounty hunter, and also one of his crew, little boy named Jin that he looks after. Seems there was an alert on the cortex with a price on his head from when he went to rescue Ben, Pod and Lily a bit back. She wanted to draw Mr. Duncan out of hidin' so she shot the kid in the arm, then ran across Mr. Duncan before Jin had even found him, shot him, but didn't kill or disable him. Pod had managed to wing her on her way offworld and crippled her ship, groundin' her on our little moon.

A wise man once said, "In order to flush a snake from the grass, one must beat the grass." So, I decided to stomp the shit outta the grass and went scoutin' to flush her ass outta hidin'. It didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, the bitch managed to get the drop on me, puttin' a round in my back 'fore I even saw her. But it did have the desired effect of drawin' her out, and Mr. Duncan was able to gun her down.

It pissed me off somethin' fierce, though, that she got the drop on me. That never woulda happened before. I used to be a badass. Somewhere in all the stuff't's happened recently, I lost that edge I'd honed so painstakinly for eleven years. I almost fell apart at Lily's trial, I got snuck up on by a gorram bounty hunter, and I let myself get all ripped to shreds by Reavers earlier today. Been happenin' before then, too, with the bots and the gorram Loyalists, me takin' hits I wouldn'ta taken six months ago.

That ain't me, and I don't like that I'm turnin' soft and sloppy. Maybe it's time I startin' hittin' Td's new dojo and gettin' back to sparrin' and takin' on some jobs as they come up to get my edge back and keep it. Cuz for me, ain't nothin' worse than bein' useless. An' right now, I feel useless.