Take back the city (1-2)

psikeout · Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 11:05 pm

Rock had started to say something along the lines of, "We're professional wine tasters, that's why I've got a shotgun and combat boots and I'm on a ghost island," but got cut off somewhere in his sardonic spiel when Jam popped up to finish their introduction. For some reason, though, rather than advancing, Rock quickly snagged the girl by the wrist with one hand, and held a tiny stone outcropping with another.

Reason? Their small perch, after Toby had the initial idea to power leap onto it a few seconds prior, didn't quite have the stability for a gathering of three people, and almost immediately gave way and crumbled weakly. Rock was left hanging over the resulting twenty-five-story fall, but didn't seem particularly bothered by the setback.

"Jumping's flashy, climbing's safe," grunted the abrasive monkey. "Swing for that ledge over there," he added in quiet instruction to the girl he was left supporting, ready to help sling her in its general direction, and continue onward.

David · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 12:06 am

Toby blinked a few times as he processed the pink primate’s explanation. “Huh… Well, different strokes for different folks, I guess.” Toby shrugged, mimicking the girl’s gesture. “Aaaand what would your na…” Toby got about half way through asking Jam her name before Rock threw out his two-second lecture on the dangers of jumping. “I guess I just prefer ju… WHOAGEEZ!” As the platform beneath him began to tremble, Toby instinctively leapt into the air… without looking.

Several stories above the crumbled flat, Toby frantically searched for something to grab onto, or somewhere to land. “OOoooh… WHOOOAA…”

Down about three stories on a small outcropping, Kyle was flailing wildly, attempting to get the attention of his larger look-alike. “Awoo… Awoo!!!” The tiny ball above his head turned quickly into an exclamation point.

Toby’s eyes darted down to the chao on the would-be landing pad. Thinking on his feet… or rather, off them, as the case was, Toby shifted his body and kicked a small protrusion on the cliff-side, sending him towards the ledge. Luckily for him, Toby managed to hit his mark, almost losing his board as he braced himself from the fall. He stood still for a few seconds, and fell on his back, heart beating like a rabbit’s.

“Ho… Oh man. Thanks Kyle.” Toby turned his head to the chao and grabbed him up, rubbing his head. “We’re even…. We’re totally even. Phew!!”

The little jelly-belly obviously delighted at the attention and affection, eyes closing contentedly as his head was rubbed. “Juba… aaaah!!”

Toby slowly sat up, looking back at the two monkeys hanging below. “Most dangerous introduction…” Toby’s eyebrows rose. “ever. You guys okay?”

Diluss · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 1:06 am

It was some uneventful, exhausting time later that the three of them finally washed ashore. Tails had, at the point that waves began to form approaching the island, decided to let himself largely drift--keeping in mind to stay away from the under-tow.

This had worked well until he felt capable of paddling again. It wasn't, of course, that the distance to the island was incredible, but the sheer effort involved in staying above the rolling swells meant that he made very little horizontal progress until the waves began to work with him, and by that point he was too tired to work with the current.

Water-powered drifting turned into paddle-powered cruising as he regained his strength, and this--as he now rapidly approached the island, had turned into body-surfing--an exhilarating experience, to say the least. On waves of the size that were breaking on the beach of the island, actually trying to body-surf was like being tied to a couple of hammers with a bungee cord and repeatedly being shot out of a circus cannon at the same time as several teams of firemen, with hoses, kept trying to blast you out of the sky. The fact that he was carrying an emergency pack with him that continually threatened to tear from his arms and flee into the ocean, never to be seen again did not make the situation any better. It buffeted him and yanked at his hands and at one point it very nearly felt like his arms were being yanked out of their sockets.

Eventually, they had made it. Tails felt...

He felt fine in fact, uplifted even, besides that he was slightly nauseous from drinking too much sea-water, and his legs and arms didn't seem to want to move or support his body weight and there was a faint ringing in his ears. He half-walked, half flopped onto the beach, dragging the onerous emergency pack behind him, and eventually reached a point far enough beyond the tide-line where he felt comfortable falling face-down in the sand and not moving for a while.

It occurred to him after twenty seconds or so of lying there with his nose buried in sandy gravel that beaches were often habitat to a frightening array of wildlife, not so far as to say enormous hairy spiders, and he jerked his head up again, away from the sand, propping himself up on his elbows to keep his face free of the dust.

He looked around at the nearby rocks.

"Wow..." he breathed, and flipped over onto his back, sitting up and staring around at the wind-blasted rocks.

"There's nothing here," he addressed whichever of his companions happened to be listening, possibly there was no-one, "not even any seagulls!"

Greens · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 10:32 pm

"Yeah... well..."

Ace was still dragging his legs along the wetter sands when Tails perked up. He was a tough man to wear down himself, there was to doubt. And maybe he was just getting older (not likely), but Tails' insatiable spirit seemed tough to match. Or maybe he just hated getting every article of clothing he had soaked to the core, with the sudden, unwelcome briskness of the sea breeze freezing him up.

"With all the time, we wasted... I doubt... it'll stay that way for long..."

With that, he wasted no more, and promptly... removed his jacket, and started wringing it out the best he could, before finally tying it around his waist.

With his arms bare, the cat warily examined the pouches on his wrists. He flicked the button open on one, and was pleasantly greeted by the contents within seeping out: a full deck of soggy, wrinkled, and completely useless playing cards, and about a pint of seawater. Unbuttoning the others revealed discouragingly similar results.

"Awww, damnit."

With a sigh, he reached his hand into a pocket of his jacket, and produced one carton of Jackpot cigarettes. He plucked one out, and it fell apart in between his fingers.

"Aaaaawww, daaamnniit."

Mie · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 10:51 pm

While it certainly couldn't be said that Jam was unsurprised by the ground crumbling beneath her feet, she was by no means freaked out by Rock's cat-like reaction to it, either, and though she never really knew why he did what he did immediately, she never found herself ungrateful for it in hindsight.

Dangling from the other monkey's steadfast grip as she watched the rubble plummet with a raised-browed how do you like that sort of expression, she quickly snapped out of her reverie, and obliged to the whiter primate's quiet instructions with more haste than she probably otherwise would have (which may or may not have had something to do with the aforementioned 25-story drop she was just making eyes with).

With minimal scrambling creditable mostly to Rock's assistance, the salmon-hued simian mounted the ledge, and proceeded to offer her (probably unnecessary) assistance to her snowy compatriot, while calling a distracted, "We're okay" in reply to the sunny air-surfer's query.

psikeout · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 11:01 pm

Rock indeed passed on her help, but only because he felt it might've been a little more difficult than it was worth to get to the same place he'd helped her swing to. Instead, he just climbed up a little further, and took pause at the next reasonable outcropping he could find (though it was really only as wide as his shoes, so he was pretty much glued to the wall).

He turned around, and leaned back against the stone as he looked down.

"It's gonna be like this from this point on, except probably more dangerous," he called down to Toby. "So, look, I dunno who you are or if you really wanna be gettin' into this right now, but personally, me and her, we're only here to try to keep a bad situation from turning worse. If you don't have any reason to be out here fightin', I'd say you oughta just go home and take care'a your family. Otherwise, you're welcome to follow, if you can just keep quiet and careful."

Rusty · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 11:09 pm

No sooner had Ace said that than a very deep whooshing sound became audible and grew louder, as if something large and heavy was rapidly approaching. If they happened to look up they might have been able to make out a shape pierce the bottom of the mists near the top of the cliffs and scream down at them; they'd have precious instants to react--

The shape smashed feet-first into the sands, landing about two feet in front of Tails. An explosion of sand burst everywhere, a wall of dirt and debris obscuring it, and for a second it felt like the whole island quaked.

When the proverbial smoke cleared, the machine rose from its bending position to its full height. It looked twice as tall as Ace, with spines reminiscent of a certain blue hedgehog, but while the thing clearly had once been painted silver and black, it looked rusty, almost a dark red, ghastlier than it once had been in an ominous way. The color of its massive steel, rocket-boostered feet remained a dark red. Its webbed orange eyes glowed brightly against the dark backdrop of the cliffs, and its left hand whirled suddenly, big gun-fingers interlocking and suddenly looking like a gallery of cannons.

"You are not welcome here."

Silver Sonic II's voice was so loud, deep and full of bass that the statement reverberated through the ground they stood on.

Diluss · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 11:51 pm

"Yikes!"

Tails scrambled backwards with his feet as he tried to get upright.

"Gh--whoa..." he swayed slightly as a head-rush swirled across his vision. There was a brief moment as he attempted to regain his balance, then blinked and at his eyes with his sodden gloves. He stared up at the machine, there on the beach.

"M-Metal Sonic?"

David · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 1:15 am

Toby contemplated the words coming out of Rock's mouth. That little experience was a bit frightening, but Toby was in the business of thrills and spills, and at the very least, was a bit more used to dare-deviling than the average joe. To be honest, he had come here as much for the sake of adventure as he had for the sake of figuring out just what the heck was going on. By all accounts, it seemed like Rock and Jam were headed right where he wanted to be going. Plus, if he could lend a hand and help put things right, then by his figuring, he was obligated to do so. Toby nodded his head, agreeing with himself.

"I'm in. I'm flying blind here, but if you guys know where to go and what to do, lead the way." A wide grin spread across Toby's face. "Kyle an' me will help out however we can. We can be pretty tough when we need to be."

Kyle flitted about, making little exaggerated muscle-man poses. "Ah bi suba!! Grrrrr!!" Shaking his head back and forth as he growled, Kyle put on his tiny game face.

Greens · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 2:09 am

Ace's suddenly found his backside slapped with a big wall of sand the moment he plucked a stainless steel lighter from one of his many pockets. He would've almost seemed oblivious to their new host, if not for the fact that his brow seemed to start twitching in irritation soon after he sprayed him full of dust. The darn thing wouldn't light no matter how hard he flicked the wheel, and it was hard to tell which was flustering him more.

He closed his fist on the contraption. Between his cards, and his smokes, this cold, and their crashed, sunken plane, Ace's day was suddenly going very poorly. "You have got one... sh**ty sense of timing...," he said, wheeling around and sharply facing the newcomer. "You KNOW that!?"

The cat's blurting of "know" was punctuated-- not only by bold font, but by a baseball-like hurling of one chaos-charged Xippo lighter at the Pseudo Sonic's metallic face. Not knowing quite what he faced, or willing to find out head-first, it was immediately after that that Ace began hauling ass for cover.

Mie · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 2:55 pm

For a while, the watermelon-colored monkey watched the pair of potential additions with speculative eyes. Despite assurances that they were up to whatever they were getting into, they still gave off an exceptionally strong Hilltop Drop-chugging, thrill-seeking, probably-backflip-to-turn-off-light-switches vibe to Jam; a concern that was only expressed in the dubious, but silent glance passed to Rock.

Still, she wasn't so callous as to actually vocalize any of these sentiments, but she certainly wouldn't let the (admittedly naive-seeming) guy go on thinking they had any kind of formal concept of what they were doing.

"W'll, hang on, dude. Like he said, you're welcome to come along, but we're not flyin' with any more visibility'n you -- We only got the vaguest idea where we're goin', and even less of a clue what needs to be done, save for 'stop the robot zombies.'"

psikeout · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 3:25 pm

A minute or so later, Rock set his hand upon the top of the cliff—Or at least one of the lower portions of its jagged crest, the first navigable ground they'd come across yet. Hesitant to hoist himself up too quickly, he craaaned his head back, and very carefully peeked over the top, to make sure there weren't gun emplacements or something insane like that waiting to mow them down.

"... Looks clear," he called down quietly, before pulling himself the rest of the way up.

There was nothing of interest just yet. Tracks were visible on the ground where wheeled and legged robots of reasonable size had probably been, but otherwise, there was nothing but piles of rock, stony spires, and some forest foliage. However, the greenery wasn't too thick; with the sun already mostly set, one could see that there was some sort of artificial light coming from somewhere not far within the tropical forest.

Rock started off slowly into those woods, walking very deliberately, scouring the ground and surrounding scenery with his eyes step by step. Little did he or the others know they were getting the easy side of things. On the other side of the island, a very high profile target had drawn almost all the attention, if only for the moment. But, despite that, their side wasn't completely defenseless and unattended. Soon enough, there was the telltale "beep" that Rock never wanted to hear, coming from a previously unnoticed sensor under the leafy fronds of a nearby plant.

About fifteen sets of yellow eyes lit up from the tree canopy overhead in response. Soon, there were pointed metal wings flashing every which way in the mess of dark, bird-like robots, though it was nothing compared to what they had dealt with earlier. These didn't carry the decayed styling of the robots that had attacked town, but instead looked perfectly normal—As normal as Eggman's animal caricature machines came, anyway.

David · Posted: Fri May 21, 2010 8:31 pm

“Still…” Toby smiled at the strawberry simian. “…three is better than two, right?”

After strapping his board to his back, Toby set on up the crag after whitey. Though he wasn’t exactly the greatest climber in the world, he knew the basics: find a hold for your hands, and use the strength in your legs to propel you upward. Though he accomplished the fist part pretty awkwardly, the second was cake, and Toby ended up making pretty decent time up the cliff-side. Though a few spots gave him pause, the rodent was able to pop his head above the cliff not too long after Rock began taking his first steps topside. “…seems peaceful enough to me.” Toby gave one last push off the wall behind him and pulled himself up.

Cotton took a few steps behind Rock before he noticed the tracks on the ground. “Somebody needs to check up on the gardening. The grass is pretty wrecked… looks like something’s been rolling around up here.”

Kyle draped himself over Toby’s shoulder, checking out the weird markings on the ground. “Toba, aba bi.” The chao nodded in agreement with his cohort.

Toby resumed his brisk walk. Rock wasn’t going too fast with his meticulous, step-by step checking, but the board-junkie was still falling behind. By the time Toby caught up, fearless leader had made his way into the woods.

Suddenly, with a beeping noise, a bunch of beady, yellow, robotic eyes flickered to life in the foliage above. Not good. Toby gazed upward and to one tentative step back, testing the waters. “…We’ve got party-crashers.”

Mie · Posted: Sat May 22, 2010 11:28 am

Whether it was a matter of not quite being on par with the scaling abilities of the previous pair, or simply starting from the most disadvantageous position in the metaphoric pachinko machine climb, there was at least a noticeable gap between the points when Toby's head broke the surface of the summit, and Jam's eventually followed suit.

She wasn't behaving as though particularly winded, with the exception of rubbing uncomfortably at her upper arms as she jogged after the first two, but she was perhaps a bit over-focused, completely oblivious to any telltale markings on the ground she may have run through.

The punch-hued primate arrived on the scene sufficiently late enough to miss the beep that had so effectively ruffled the feathers of her two companions, but it was hard to flashing yellow eyes, and metal wings, and ominously rustling foliage.

Without hesitation, Jam dropped into a lowered crouch, her shield igniting seamlessly as if of its own accord, while the smallest of anticipatory grins tugged at the corner of her mouth.

Rusty · Posted: Sat May 22, 2010 2:31 pm

Before Silver Sonic II was given a chance to educate the two-tailed fox on the differences between it and its metal affiliate, it clearly detected something small incoming at a high rate of speed judging by the jolt of its head, but by the time the robot noticed the object had already struck its temple. The machine staggered sideways away from Tails but remained upright, and slammed a foot into the sand to stop its teetering.

It obviously didn't have to reach up to be aware of the small dent on its forehead. Ultimately the robot seemed nonplussed, caused either by the mild success of the strike or the indignity of being hit with a lighter. It balanced itself, setting its heels firmly in the beach and thought it appropriate to return such a favor by lifting its gunhand at the fleeing serval, leading the target as it did so, before spitting off a loud machinegun burst of plasma energy toroids, little yellow suns spraying from the battleship cannons that were its left hand's fingers.

Take back the city (1-2)

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