- Part One - [i]"Your move, vagrant."[/i] The words rang in his head along with the soft hiss of his very own capacitors' uncompromising charge and discharge. He had often wondered if he'd go mad if he ever stopped hearing it - he liked to think of that high frequency hum as his thoughts. For a pristine production Exo, Bardo-105 was hauntingly inquisitive about all things human. Perhaps Exos intrigued him most of all, and that was the reason. Although as Banshee-44 had once confided over a table of revolver hammers and rifle bolts, "[i]You, me, your gun - we're all the same, Guardian. We'll never know how good a cigarette tastes in the morning.[/i]" He thought that was intriguing enough. For a Hunter like Bardo-105, a gunsmith is a good friend to have. A Hunter like Bardo-105 is like to spend months on the Frontier. Because a Hunter like Bardo-105 does not just hunt Bounties. [i]A Hunter like Bardo-105 hunts guns.[/i] Sometimes they would come as a welcome surprise - on some Archon's loot or hidden away by a desperate Guardian. But most of them he spent weeks, months just to track, and twice that to get. This particular mark had eluded him for the past five months. "[b]Sadeski's Premise[/b]" it was called. Almost everyone had heard of Tex Mechanica's rumoured "only" Scout Rifle, but very few knew something more than the made up tales passed around the table over a pint, and fewer still knew anything that'd help track down the damned exotic. Bardo-105 just had to have it. As the moon turned dark for the sixth time that year, Bardo-105 was about as resolute as his consensus algorithms allowed to give up the search for now. However, in what humans would describe as a "stroke of luck" (but that Hunters like Bardo-105 are more wont to call "probabilistic mockery"), an event would turn his transistors cold. While sitting on his cloak - after tying it like a hammock - in the Earthly Western Frontier, he spied a man walking carelessly through the green pervasion of shrubbery. His mechanical retina gently scraped against the curved glass of his sniper rifle's scope. He suddenly wondered why he was carrying this old [b]Longbow [/b]around, but it made no matter now. As the man disappeared behind a tanned ruin of a building, Bardo-105 gave chase. His Ghost - which he never cared to name, because "[i]machines don't get to name machines[/i]," Banshee-44 had said - kindly warned him that he had crossed outside his mission area. The tiny thing did not even bother to try coaxing him to turn around, it would be futile. Trained Exos are fantastic stalkers. Years ago, when he was making it up the ranks, Bardo-105 had replaced all his joints with noiseless rotors, modified all his cooling engines to use magnet synchronous motors, and had the old gunsmith carve a liquid technology coil out of a vintage Omolon pulse rifle. He could run as silently as a lizard of the night. However, after he contoured the tanned ruin, he had lost the man. Even his enhanced tracker did not show any signs of motion, and his Ghost was clueless. He did not like being in the open though, so he vaulted into the shadow of the ruin. He leered through the cracks in search of motion, to no avail. Then he heard something he heard almost everyday, but that scared him more than anything had in a long time. He heard an unbeckoned human voice. ~ Part Two available here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/174237317 ~ ~ Table of Contents : https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/175908765/0/0 ~ // Thanks for the encouragement!