A Tattoo Revealed

Latin gives unease in America, with the Vatican being entirely Catholic and speaking Latin fluently as if it were their first language. And though America prohibits hate crimes against anyone, people tend to be leery of anything Latin or Catholic-related—especially if you’re currently in a territory that the Vatican is trying to take over. Before Cody went to sleep the night before the alarms of war, he experienced this unease from his peers.

“I noticed in the shower you had tattoos etched on you?” Stephanie asked. Just before the group was retiring, the late-night jitters of having a new roommate were affecting everyone.

“It was written in Latin. What religion do you put your faith in, Cody?” Ashley asked accusingly.

Cody sighed and said, “I got it because I fought too much and held grudges for far too long.”

“Do you happen to be Catholic?” Stephanie asked.

The mood changed entirely at this mention of religion. Either directly or from the corner of their eyes, they stared at Cody. But Cody just sighed the sigh of a tired old man.

“No,” he simply said.

“May I examine your shame ink?” Tiffany asked.

“No,” Cody said, rolling in his bed to hide under his covers.

Tiffany poked his back in a very ticklish spot, making him jolt upright. “Is it because it’s in an inappropriate region on your body?”

“No.”

“I can give you an accurate reading of its dialect. For you to think you have something written really meaningful, and it says ‘special order takeout number 7’ instead. This may result in a most embarrassing outcome you’d rather have avoided,” she added, this time poking him on his shoulder.

Cody turned to face the girl who couldn’t have been more than a teenager, if that. But her eyes were cold, lacking any innocence a child would normally possess.

He sighed and spoke the phrase…

“Oculus pro oculo totum mundum caecum reddit!” Cody shouted at the enemy Vatican warrior.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind!” (translation)

Cody now ripped his useless hammer arm off with his free hand and swung it to hit the enemy M.U.‘s laser sword hand to the side. It still sliced at him deeply, probably immobilizing his M.U. permanently, while Cody’s second swing crushed the sword arm at the shoulder, rendering it useless, and pulled the Vatican M.U. off him before his crash landing.

As he smashed into the water, he heard the last prayers coming from the Vatican under him fall silent. The hand that gripped him let go.

Cody ripped himself free and managed to use his leg, but not by much. The boosters were useless. Bending his leg while he felt his footing sink into the water like a ship going down, he knew he would have to deploy his suit’s inner tube to keep from drowning.

“Inner tube!” he shouted, unable to keep himself from panicking. Its lever showed on his screen with a neon blue light surrounding it, an AR aid from voice activation.

The enemy M.U., with its sword arm rendered useless, was returning to finish the job. It would shield-bash Cody in the head, crushing him or drowning him if he lived. Either way, Cody would die—or so he thought.

Just before Cody would meet his fate, he used his own free hand to throw his towing cable at the Vatican M.U., who didn’t even bother slicing at it, probably thinking it wouldn’t matter when Cody was dead, and he could just untangle himself afterward.

Cody dived to the side, literally on his last leg, a futile attempt to dodge without his boosters working. His final leg was severed under the shield bash, and the cord ripped him back to the enemy.

Cody connected, deploying his M.U.’s inner tube just as yellow goop began pouring out. Foam attempting to prevent another major impact to the head was now surrounding him, making it harder to move. The M.U.’s last-resort backup plan for defensive measures.

Cody used his hand to bash at the shield again and again.

The cord and giant flotation combo had entangled them both, and when Cody finally lodged his hand into the shield, the entanglement became permanent. He pulled his head forward against the enemy’s own.

“Madness!” the Vatican warrior shouted. The sound of yellow draining in the background of his enemy’s voice confirmed successful damage to the enemy’s head.

Cody used another headbutt, creating an opening in the Vatican’s helmet where the foam spilled out. He did it just hard enough to not kill himself or the other.

The foam was barely wide enough to hold him as he broke free. He then pressed the sprinklers that would destroy the remaining foam in his own pod, pulling the ejection button. Though it disabled the AR in his helmet among everything else, including the radio, he could no longer call for aid.

He pulled forward, seeing the light flood into his pod as it temporarily blinded him. His eyes adjusted while he ripped the helmet off himself.

Before him, the other M.U.’s foam was dissolving due to his own M.U.’s sprinklers showering close enough to the enemy’s.

He saw the Vatican warrior look at him with horror in his eyes as the cut-up, bloody man lunged at him with the ferocity of a dog.

The pod was 7x11, the perfect terrain Cody had fought in for so long, hearing the others place bets on him outside the room in the back of his mind—a past he wished never to remember.

Prosopagnosia is a form of face blindness—being unable to recognize faces, sometimes even their own. It can be caused by brain damage, among other things. Perhaps all that blunt trauma to Cody’s head made it so he stopped recognizing the faces of those he killed. Or maybe he no longer cared, being too many to remember. He hoped it wasn’t the latter.