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Marksmanship-522 was a Clockwork Cherub, a Senior Agent of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' elite taskforce the Scarlet Wings.
Description
Personality
Marksmanship was known for relative candour, as evidenced by his straightforward choice of a name. (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race) He was extremely efficient whenever he had a plan to work with, and competent at devising such plans himself, but tended to emotionally go to pieces if he was thrown into a chaotic situation without a workable plan, albeit only to pull through anyway. (PROSE: Peace and Quiet) He enjoyed his rest in-between stressful missions, (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery, Peace and Quiet) being fond of lighting lavender-scented candles by his bed as he slept, (PROSE: Peace and Quiet) and collected stamps to calm himself, a hobby he shared with Philatel-426. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery)
Powers & abilities
Marksmanship was considered one of the best bowmen in the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race) He was also a talented strategist. (PROSE: Peace and Quiet)
Biography
Early adventures
Marksmanship-522 participated in a number of noteworthy Cupid endeavours. He notably “led the team that romanticised the Zyargaff Beast in Dimension 42µ” and fired the first shot in the Second Great Spaghetti War, (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race) during which he “managed to sneak the entire royal family of the Zorkal Realm out of enemy territory disguised as a simple orange salesman and his pack of enormous oranges”. Other exploits of his, all of which involved careful planning ahead of time, included having “led the charge on the Fortress of Scallions” and “effortlessly beaten back the entire Rebellion of the Rogue Rhinoceroses”. (PROSE: Peace and Quiet)
Involvement in the Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix
On one occasion, Marksmanship was sent to an alien planet in the Prime Universe to romanticise a mere two people, Lilathia and Brutus. When he first arrived, he was surprised he had been assigned to something this easy and low-key. However, it soon became clear that the two were the last remaining warriors of two feuding species. He first visited the house of Lilathia, who took him to be an assassin sent by Brutus, capturing him in a burlap sack.
Even after Marksmanship managed to clear up the confusion, his troubles were far from over, as Lilathia and Brutus, overjoyed at finally having a neutral party to fill the position, forced him to act as referee for a Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix that would allow them to finally determine a victor to their conflict. To prevent him from chickening out, Lilathia crashed her Void Ship into Marksmanship's Fog Ship. He was then made to ride along on Lilathia's ship throughout the faster-than-light, interdimensional race.
When the two ships completed their run and returned to Lilathia and Brutus's home planet, Marksmanship was barely coherent, completely dazed by the trying experience of high-speed interdimensional flight. He confessed that he had been unable to determine whether either ship had got back before the other, and declared the Prix a tie. To his surprise, Lilathia and Brutus were pleased by this development, as, they explained, they wouldn't have known what to do with themselves if they'd had to stop feuding. Content that they were “happy” doing something they “loved” doing, Marksmanship returned to the Cupid Homeworld with no further attempts to romanticise the pair, aboard Lilathia's speedster, which she gifted to him as reparation for destroying his Fog Ship. (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race)
Back in the Homeworld
Once he arrived back in the Cupid Homeworld, Marksmanship gave Lilathia's pan-dimensional speedster away to the Department of Transportation and typed up a report which he handed in to the Department of Completed Assignments, containing an exhaustive list of all the new universes he'd briefly passed through on the Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix. (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race)
Thereafter, he greatly enjoyed his rest day on April 29th, 2019. He dropped by the Cupid Post Office trade some stamps with his fellow collector Philatel-426, but did not find him in his office and returned to his home, where he tried to take a nap. Before long, however, his house was broken into by the Blue Feather, who were investigating the theft of a mailbag from the Post Office and had become momentarily convinced that Marksmanship was the culprit. He was able to convince them otherwise, though not before he found himself once again captured in a burlap sack. His testimony that Philatel had been missing from his office at the time the crime was committed was ultimately instrumental to Acquaintanceship-982's solving of the mystery. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery)
As one of the senior operatives of the Scarlet Wings, Marksmanship had the right to attend Cupid Parliament sections. He was present for the ninth day of debate about Stenographer-123's typewriter, on the day of the faceless magician incident. When the argument started to devolve into a fistfight, he tried to wrestle Foreman-964 off of Taskmaster-523, but was unable to do much, although the fight was soon broken up by the onslaught of magic rabbits. (PROSE: Magic Trick)
Foiling the Salamandyrs
Marksmanship was once assigned to romanticise a “mid-sized” sea serpent. He planned to do so while the creature was asleep, descending alongside several other person-sized submarines, but the serpent woke up earlier than he had anticipated and began attacking one of the submarines, forcing Marksmanship to abandon his original plan and shoot an arrow at the serpent through a small crack on the hull of his own failing submarine.
Returning home exhausted but victorious, Marksmanship tried to get some rest, but was prevented from doing so by Larrikin-1029's shenanigans, with the Mark XI being engaged in crashing Fog Ship after Fog Ship next to Marksmanship's house as he practiced his characteristically chaotic piloting skills. Having no more luck trying to sleep in an abandoned warehouse (which turned out to be scheduled for remodeling by Foreman-964's Department of Construction) or in the Department of Postal Services' building (where Lord Thymon found him unmoving in a mailbag and thought he had stumbled onto a murder), he decided to try his luck outside the Homeworld altogether and took his Fog Ship to the Interdimensional Tavern.
There, he ran into Darius, and, realising it wouldn't be safe to leave his Ship unattended, was about to leave again when he was abducted via tractor beam by the Order of the Automata's Void Ship. The Automata explained that their dimension of Automatia was once again under attack from their enemies the Salamandyrs, and that they believed Marksmanship was their fated saviour as the reincarnation of their legendary founder, the Ancient One. When he proved uncooperative, the Captain elected to have him trapped in a synthetic burlap sack and then teleported onto the Salamandyr Emperor's Void Ship whether he liked it or not.
Aboard the Ship, Marksmanship panicked at his lack of a plan and absurdly decided to revert to his original intentions, taking out his pillow and lavender-scented candle and preparing to have a nap right there and then. This proved fortunate, as the Salamandyrs turned out to have a genetic allergy to lavender, which caused them to turn into tiny, ordinary salamanders. As the Emperor's Ship teleported back to Salamandyria, Marksmanship was ejected back down to the surface of Automatia and quickly threatened the rest of the Salamandyr War Fleet into fleeing too, running from Ship to Ship brandishing his candle.
As the Automata hailed him as a hero, Marksmanship tried once again to convince them that he was not the Ancient One, and was finally proven right as the real Ancient One made his glorious return, apologising for his resurrection having been slightly behind schedule due to “traffic in the Underworld [being] terrible”. While the Ancient One caught up with the Automata, minor robot 21-419 was tasked with flying Marksmanship back to the Tavern, where he recovered his Fog Ship. Returning to the Homeworld, he found that Larrikin's din had abated, and he settled down in his own bed at last. He was startled by one of the shrunken Salamandyrs, who had stowed away in his Fog Ship seeking revenge, but easily chucked it out of the window, whereupon it fell on Foreman, scaring him rather badly due to his long-standing irrational fear of amphibians and causing him to take the rest of the day off, thus guaranteeing Marksmanship a full afternoon of peace and quiet. (PROSE: Peace and Quiet)
Fog Ship accident on the Mainland Cloud
In December 2019, after Celebration-665 introduced Christmas to the Cupid Homeworld as the “Festival of Giving”, (PROSE: Larrikin and the Christmas Pudding) Marksmanship's life intersected with the fairly chaotic festivities in an unpleasant way when the sudden appearance of Larrikin-1029, running through the Mainland Cloud to deliver a Christmas pudding to the Department of Documentation's break room, caused Marksmanship (driving his Fog Ship) to swerve right into a street sign. Larrikin, being in a hurry to deliver his cargo, did not stop to chat or explain himself, and barely apologised, leaving Marksmanship to contemplate what was left of his destroyed Ship. (PROSE: Larrikin and the Christmas Pudding)
During the Rifts Crisis
Marksmanship-522, Bibliophile-962 and Tracker-764 were among the few Cupids trapped outside of the Cupid Homeworld during the height of the Rifts Crisis. Travelling together with the Hound, they eventually found the home base of the Consistency Imperium, who had been unintentionally accelerating the spread of the Rifts due to the deceitful advice of the alchemist Mandragora-257.
After they were returned to the Homeworld by the Faction of the Fooling Fish aboard their tachyonic sailing ship, Marksmanship recommended Tracker for a position in the Scarlet Wings. Interviewed for comment by The Cupid Courier, he stated: “I feel that Tracker is just the person we need with us if we’re going to be tracking down rifts and getting rid of them. His unique approach to dangerous situations (and his famous resolve to never give up any task) makes him particularly well-suited to this sort of thing. Besides, there’s no Cupid I’d rather have by my side in a tricky spot”. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)