Take back the city (1-2)

Mie · Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2010 3:51 pm

Despite the fact that Ace's reprieve literally blasted open the floodgates of hell, there was a tangible relief to the pinker primate's face as it smoothed out simultaneous to her soft sigh of relief. Frankly, she couldn't have thought of any better way to wrap up the already too long ordeal, and endlessly appreciated the serval's quick and clean, but brutal and damning solution to their interdimensional Egg-problem.

That relief ebbed quickly when the danger turned from a lot of sci-fi jargon involving merging Emeralds or something, to an imminent lava burial. But non-malevolent semi-natural disasters yielded a decidedly less negative response from Jam than did Eggman's notorious disregard for safety or common sense in favor of showing off how clever he is.

"Uh-huh, good job," congratulated the monkey with a succinct urgency (but without sarcasm), as she clapped the cat on the back. "Now we need to like... leave before we die."

David · Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2010 5:48 pm

"Whoa..." All danger and turmoil aside, Toby couldn't help but be a little taken aback by the shimmering gemstone the doc had created. Any bit of serenity the boy's mind had latched onto was soon blown to bit's by Ace's attempt... and, suprisingly, success at foiling the doc. The kangaroo rat could literally feel the wind of the blast hit him, and captivated, watched on as a spurt of lava turned a hail-mary shot into a game-winning goal. It was easy enough to want to be going nuts in victory after all the crap they'd gone through, but not only was the group in mortal peril from the lava that was ever-so qhickly gushing into the cavern, but Toby couldn't shake an unsettling thought from his mind.

Seven. There were seven bright lights that shot through the portal. Those had to be the emeralds, right? Then why were there seven? There were seven emeralds in total, and green-bean had grabbed up the first one already. It could only mean one thing...

"There's eight now..." Toby muttered the words under his breath, the conclusion hitting him even as he spoke. There was no time for contemplation right now, though. Staying alive was priority one at the moment. Cotton yelled back at the group.

"I think I can manage one more on my board. Somebody saddle up! We gotta jet!" Toby tossed a glance back at Sheffer. "Green-bean, grab a partner and make use of that gear. Now, anybody got any bright ideas on how to get the rest of us out of here?"

psikeout · Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2010 6:59 pm

While everyone else was awing at what happened, discussing what to do next, and so on, Rock was already gone. He took off running without so much as a congratulations or pat on the back to Ace (The fireworks should have been gratification enough.), barely even waiting for the Egg Mobile to explode first. He leapt over a patch of the spreading lava, jacket flapping in the eye-searingly-hot air, hit the metal floor on both boots, and raced for Eggman himself like he'd never sprinted for anything before, eyes focused, fists clenched, ready to nip it in the bud like Sonic never did.

Rock may have been the most aggressive member of the group, and that was saying something with Knuckles present. He was just going to streak straight into the guy, take him to the floor, and start an old-fashioned beatdown, given even the slightest opportunity. It was seldom that simple with Eggman, though.

Diluss · Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2010 8:56 pm

Tails was staggered.

"Whaa?" he said, aghast, "how could he do something like that? The energy in the portal... he must've used the portal to siphon energy from one of the emeralds' structures to the other, but..."

He gaped for a few seconds as thoughts swirled around in his head, and then Rock ran at the Doctor as the incredibly obese scientist flailed around amidst the chaos of his disintegrated eggmobile.

He looked, and was about to give chase after the doctor, when he sniffed the air, and a eyewateringly sour-pussed expression crossed his face.

"Eeeuuhh-YEEEEEW," he gasped, and then, "The magma's leaking gas into the air! We gotta get away from the leak!"

The bubbling magma was beginning to spit and release toxic clouds of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid, and the nearby metal was covered with glass dust that had started forming as soon as the superheated rock had hit the cold artificial atmosphere of the geode.

psikeout · Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2010 11:13 pm

OOC: It's like a collab... with myself.

----

Stinky, potentially deadly gas or not, Eggman had a problem to deal with, but he was never so simple to catch—Never. Much faster people had tried on occasion, but he always had a way out. Scurrying as quickly as his legs could carry him at the sight of the approaching primate, Eggman bolted for the edge of the portal while drawing a device from his sleeve. A few quick button presses did something to the portal, presumably changing its destination, but before he was entirely finished, he heard footsteps racing up behind him, and turned just in time to see Rock, leaping at his hind-side, glowing, angry fist drawn back for a gigantic, flying punch. Wide-eyed and baring his clenched teeth in a sort of awkward grimace, Eggman staggered and tripped over his own gangly feet as he struggled to move out of the way, and in the process of his clumsiness, succeeded; he hit the floor, and Rock tumbled to the ground just a few feet away, but so did the device he'd been carrying.

Try as he might to clamber over to it, he soon realized he didn't have time, and rushed to his feet just as Rock got in his face again (figuratively, of course, as there was quite a height difference). As the primate went to sink a punch into the Eggman's gut, however, the man hopped and stumbled back just out of range, and in an awkward, kind of unpredictable flailing motion of his long, spidery arms, brought both huge hands down into Rock's face and just shoved like a kid on a playground. "Get away from me!" Both he and Rock were sent stumbling back in opposite directions. The only difference was...

... Eggman was out of solid ground.

"H-HUOOP!"

His arms windmilled uselessly as his rear foot zipped off the edge of the hole, and, with about as much grace as the combination of a sumo wrestler, banana peel, and diving board, he took a dive into the gigantic hole, to the portal far below.

Even as he fell, he jeered.

"YOOOUUU STIIILL LOOOOOSSSSE, AHAHAHOHOHOHOOOoooo..."

Rock, on his knees with hands clutching the edge of the hole, watched as the doctor fell through. It was a long way to look, but he could see that the portal was open about a half mile above what looked like a smoky, industrial city (not entirely unlike the one they'd just finished conquering, but certainly elsewhere), and, whatever the place was, it certainly belonged to Eggman. An Egg Mobile zoomed up to catch the scientist as soon as he was on the other side, and then, the portal changed to something else random—A dark, tumultuous ocean in the middle of nowhere, from the noise and smell of cold, salty air blasting up from the pit.

Not where he wanted to go.

He looked off to his side, spotted the controller Eggman had dropped, and made a harried all-fours scramble to it and snatched it.

It had a small LCD touchscreen, a numeric keypad, and some esoterically labeled and abbreviated buttons. There were countless fields, data entry boxes of some sort, all over the screen, also similarly abstruse.

... Unwilling to just mash buttons for fear of opening a portal in the middle of space or a sun, or something, he quickly stood and looked for Tails, ready to thrust the device at him at first opportunity.

Diluss · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2010 7:20 pm

Tails had been running fairly aimlessly as he scurried away from the lava jet that was rapidly enhancing the size of the non-usable living space in the cave. Glowing, fluid lava sizzled and burbled as it slipped along the ground, cooled, bunched up, broke open and flowed again for a little while before it began to cool all over.

At the sight of Rock standing there, holding the complex electronic instrument with all the buttons and dials and things, his mind regained focus again and he ran, carefully skirting the expanding pool of molten rock, and increasingly molten floor, as he did so.

He ran over to Rock, nosing in front of the screen of the thing instantly, little caring about the distance between it and the monkey's torso and instead focusing on instantly wedging his head into rock's personal space in order to get a better look at whatever the device was.

"Eggman dropped this! It looks like some kind of remote control for the portal device!" He said to anyone who might have had to be listening at the time, "These... look like... the symbols for a spin frame, which means that these numbers are some kind of—oh, they're auto-updating! This must be attached to a computer somewhere! These numbers look like the mass of—"

Tails' hands slowly affixed themselves to the electronic pad, and gently began pulling it away from Rock, although the diminutive fox seemed absolutely unaware that he was doing so as he began talking in great length about things that sounded like "the radial motion of the planet," and "n-dimensional space" and possibly "non-radial Bianchi identities".

There was abruptly a faint crackling sound from the portal, and the image in the portal began moving, racing randomly across the ocean as Tails fought with the controls, and then—

Yellow. Yellow light spilled out of the portal. The image in the portal was extremely yellow as well, and incredibly featureless, with an equally featureless grey stripe up the right side, and it just might as well have been a portal to no-where, when—

"Hahh! That's the ground, look, there's grass in it!"

The enthusiasm on his face trailed off has he took in the grass he was pointing to. The sparse, brown stubble was not encouraging in either its sparseness or its obvious lack of hydration.

"It doesn't look like a very good place to land..." he trailed off.

Kazz · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2010 8:29 pm

Mako took one look Tails, then at the portal. He opened and closed his mouth several times like he was searching for the word, and eventually decided on a nice, resounding:
"No."
He paused, blinked a few times, and then he added a somewhat sheepish, "... It looks dry." Nope-- dryness, at least judging by the sparse, probably dead, definitely brown grass the fox had pointed out, was not exactly the friend of a creature meant for water.

Before he could continue his complaint, the shark took one sniff of the lovely aroma in the air, made a face that not even a mother could love, gagged, and looked between his options. On one hand, evident unpleasant conditions. On the other... magma, certain death, et cetera.

"... who wants to be first? Heh... heheh..."

Mie · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2010 10:32 pm

What was it with her and that whole "outta the frying pan and into the fire" adage? Perhaps it was her mentally repeated, "can't get much worse than this" mantra that kept damning the group at large, but for whatever reason, Jam's fault or not, the liquefied super-heated rock gushed forth, reflooring the room, while the crazed, comic-book-esque super villain responsible blasted off again to fight another day. In other words, as par the course (or so it certainly felt by now), things proceeded in a timely manner from bad to "hell on earth," and the continuously taxed pink monkey felt that they had more than over-stayed their non-welcome.

"Yeah," was Jam's preliminary response to the furry whiz kid's techno-time-and-space-physics jargon, as she pushed forward towards the portal. "Well, this don' look like a very good place t'stay."

She cast a quick glance back to whatever members of their party didn't look packed and ready to go, and gave an indicative jerk towards the yellow unknown, before at last turning her attention to Rock.

"After you?"

psikeout · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2010 10:47 pm

"After y—"

Rock seized her hand and jumped.

He had not minded Tails commandeering the situation at all. Rock may have seemed egotistical, but it was really all a matter of getting things done. He often felt he was the best to do the job, cocky as that may have been, but the very second he felt he wasn't the best, he was immediately willing—No, desperate—to step aside.

Sure enough, the little fox had worked his magic, and what looked like solid ground lie far below, and as such, he and Jam took a dive. The desert's night air was dry and cool,refreshing from the burning hot sulfuric smell from above. That yellowish glow turned out to be the street lights and lamps around what looked like a modest park area, next to a fairly freshly paved blacktop road. At the center of the park was a statue of someone looking rather proud and important, and around the vicinity were park benches, a gazebo, and other such general niceties.

Rock landed on that dainty little gazebo, and nearly crushed its roof in. A glowing glob of lava landed on the statue, and immediately blackened and began to solidify on the wilting, drooping metal structure. Dry grass similarly began to get spattered and catch fire, while a small fender bender caused by driver shock at the scene turned into a several car pile-up.

The monkey hopped down from his crunched perch with a solid thud, and headed for the safety of the sidewalk. He could do a headcount after he got out of the portal's lava-pooping range.

OOC: New thread up, both to break this one up, and acknowledge the new location. See the Yellow Desert forum.

Take back the city (1-2)

Who is online