<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cd/75/a8/cd75a83054ed718f94fe8a8070eab748.jpg)</div><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: impact;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 18pt;">Combat Trainer; Perfect 10 PL 10 (150 PP)</span></span><br/><br/><strong>Real Name:</strong>Unknown<strong>Identity:</strong>Secret<br/><strong>Alias:</strong>Agent X<strong>Occupation:</strong>SpecOps<br/><strong>Bases of Operations:</strong>Washington, D.C.<strong>Affiliation:</strong>U.S. Army<br/><br/><hr/><br/>At that very moment, X had been trying to forget how Avery had died.  He did not die with dignity.  Instead, he was killed like a dog, and there had been nothing that X could have done to stop it.  Avery was a skilled engineer who piloted a powerful mech, but when his cockpit had been breached, he was just an ordinary human.  X had almost pushed out the memory of his dead friend lying in his arms, bloodied and disemboweled.<br/><br/>"It's just nerves.  After what happened to the last Hardware..."<br/><br/>A pregnant pause.<br/><br/>X had been there.  He closed his eyes, took a deeb breath, and reminded himself that this job was dangerous.  Avery signed up for it.  He had autonomy, and he signed up willingly.  No one had forced Avery to join.<br/><br/>"So when is this thing supposed to start?<br/><br/>"The announcement was scheduled for noon," X said.  LIGA, or rather, the marketing folks at LIGA, always shared the company's good news around noon on Mondays, and bad news towards the end of Fridays.  Their marketing cycles ebbed and flowed around the stock market, their purpose always to raise the price of their stock, which was at $1,534.75 a share, or mitigate losses.  If they could, they'd always announce the death of a supe on a Friday with a long four-day weekend.  When the Chattanooga Hauler died, LIGA had asked the team to act like nothing had happened for three weeks until they could make the announcement for the Fourth and Fifth of July, which celebrated American Independence and the Water Wars Armstice, respectively.<br/><br/>Avery's death had been quite public, though.  There was no denying it, and LIGA's stock tumbled fifteen percent.  No Avery meant no HARDWARE, and LIGA sank billions into that tech every year.<br/><br/>Cassandra brought up an interesting point, though.<br/><br/>"Still, we can do something, we have to. Public perception and all..." she said.<br/><br/>The notion that they could just fabricate some sort of announcement hadn't crossed his mind.  X was a lot of things, but he wasn't duplicitous.  In a lot of ways, he was a realist, but he could also be somewhat naive.<br/><br/>"That's... a little out of our pay range, isn't it?" X said.   "But it's an interesting thought, Cass."