Gulls cried overhead.

A couple laid on towels under the sun on an empty, undisturbed beach. The tide rolled in and out. Fine, light sand had been blown into little waves and rolling dunes. Palm fronds swished and swayed overhead.

It was a pair of primates laying on the beach. There was something a little off-kilter about their relaxation; the white one had some reddish marks, apparent wounds, and a visible bruise on his face, and the red monkey matched in her own singed, battered way. Some sort of portable computer sat atop a cooler next to the two, along with a portable radio propped in the sand, while a burly-looking, armor-paneled, grey and black dune buggy equipped with what looked like jet engines was parked some twenty feet behind them, pockmarked with bullet dings and black scorch marks.

It was quiet.

Save of course, for the snoring.

It wasn't a particularly loud or disruptive rumble, and in fact, was mostly lost in the natural din of the wind and the waves, but being right next to its source, Rock most assuredly heard her.

She laid sprawled on her back, taking up precisely as much space as was physically possible for a girl her size, as though having fallen asleep in the middle of making a sand angel. Peaceful though it seemed, the sun-kissed simian's towel-top nap was punctuated by the occasional blip of a subconscious sneer (with accompanying growls), and involuntary limb twitching.

While inadvertently playing footsie with the radio's volume knob, their tranquility ebbed, gradually replaced with the clean, articulate monotone of a news broadcaster, stirring the simian responsible into a into a fit of sleepy grumbling.

"... no one really knows who 'Chimera' really is, or if they exist at all. Some speculate the organization is merely a conglomeration of empire loyalists, or a front put on to..."

Rock reeeached out for the radio, bending at the waist with a sore-sounding grunt, and gave it a few clumsy slaps before successfully seizing it from its frustratingly just-out-of-arm's-length distance to drag it closer and manipulate the knob. Radio was okay. That was not. It dredged up too many thoughts of an earlier... recording. So, he changed the station.

"—that great taste that rings my bell, it's SNOOFLEPOPS—"

He visibly winced at the jingle and kept the dial turning.

...

Music. They had found actual music on the radio. It seemed they caught the tail end of a song. As it faded, though, it quickly, regrettably transitioned into yet another news report. It had just been that kind of week.

"We'll be delivering updates on the Central City situation as they occur. Since the beginning of yesterday's siege by Dr. Eggman, UF officials have not been forthcoming with information, and continue to decline to comment on the sudden resurgence of the..."

That. That hadn't been a good day.

---

No one had expected Dr. Eggman to recover and recollect his forces so quickly. The attack had come as a total blindside to everyone.

Central City's streets were ablaze with machines in no time. Clustering around Eggmanland, the doctor's newly-built city-factory-amusement-park-nightmare smack in the center of the capital, robots emerged en masse to remind the world that Eggman was not finished, not by a long shot. Somehow, the virus and the rewrite of user credentials that enabled Eggman to be robbed of his forces in the first place had been overridden by his own personal intervention, albeit in a limited capacity, and only within the borders of Eggmanland itself.

It just so happened that was the location with the greatest singular concentration of robots, too, though.

With a rebuilding G.U.N. able only to offer the most scant and ragtag forces, it fell to "Chimera" to show up with its fleets of airships and its own robotic shock troops, all hastily rebranded from Dr. Eggman's livery with the EE symbols painted over and obscured. It made for a nasty conflict, but soon enough, Eggman's comparatively limited forces fell back into their stronghold, and the artillery pounding in the heart of the city slowed.

Things had been tense ever since, and more and more of Central City was suffering for it. The parts that weren't burning to the ground were evacuated, and the parts that weren't being evacuated were... barely in the city at all, frankly, either high in the hills of town, or right by the bay.

---

But that was over and done with. It was just a reality they'd have to deal with, and one that, in the long run, Rock had banked on being useful. He still didn't enjoy thinking about it at the moment, though, and frowned and slowly shook his head in suppressed annoyance that the radio was making him think about it. He twisted the knob again.

"—armed conflict and high-speed pursuit following the destruction of two G.U.N. missile silos rampaged across Central City just minutes before the threatened launch of a full-scale nuclear assault on the orbital warship..."

Brows raised and eyes shut, Rock scratched at his forehead.

"I'm having a thought;" announced Jam suddenly, and with surprising coherence, as she sat up onto her elbows, looking pointedly at the squawk box. "Radios -- communication -- Not something you wanna bring with you, when trying to get away from it all."

She shifted her gaze, deeply suspicious, to Rock, after rearranging her features into something a little more friendly, but still not entirely pleased. "I think," she continued, "That this actually constitutes bringing some of it with us."

"Hey, leave it be," replied Rock defensively, craning his head back with arched brow. "We didn't think to bring anything else for music."

"Yeah, okay, I'm all for a good groove when the mood's right, but here's a weird concept:" prefaced the pinker primate, her tone chiding, but still playful, as she rolled over onto her stomach, watching the other monkey out the tops of her eyes.

"We could just have... Wait for it -- No music. Stillness. Quiet. You know? Or does that go against your pathologic compulsion to have music playing at all times, no matter how inappropriate?"

Rock sat half-upright and propped himself up on his elbows. "'Inappropriate'?" he echoed, almost offended-sounding in jest.

He'd likely not have gotten past the first syllable of the word before finding himself at the mercy of the most implicitly half-lidded, expressionless stare Jam was capable of.

---

"WILL YOU STOP SCREWIN' WITH THE DAMN RADIO, AND DRIVE?!"

The armored dune buggy bu-bumped across something a little too big and solid to qualify for a speed bump, and jostled wildly, nearly ejecting one of its passengers in the process. You know, the screaming one.

"I AM DRIVIN'!" Rock shouted back as he swerved into a tire-screeching, back-end-kicking powerslide that clipped a sidewalk corner and popped the vehicle onto two wheels for a disconcerting several-second wobble. It eventually slammed back down on all four of its big, knobbly tires again when an explosion went off uncomfortably near to their left side, forcefully knocking it flat again. Music blasted all the same.

Following Eggman's reappearance, GUN's brass had decided it didn't quite trust the new overseers of the empire so much. With a giant destroyer in outer space, capable of untold firepower, and Dr. Eggman himself rapidly regaining control of forces that were supposed to have been taken from him, they reasoned that it was only a matter of time before he reclaimed everything.

Thus, it was time for GUN to attack. Only, it was too bad that they had never managed to get Rock's SpE1 clearance revoked and removed from their systems by SecDef before the initial takeover; this made it especially easy for Tau to find the location of the hidden silos, which, as it turned out, were right there in Central City. This is why GUN now had a full-fledged high-speed pursuit through the city on its hands, with APCs and trucks barreling down the road, smacking into civilian cars, rattling their machineguns nonstop, firing explosive ordnance right in the middle of already-nigh-decimated city streets, and doing all that they could to halt the fleeing bombers, who had just set off another subterranean nuclear explosion at GUN's expense.

Powerful motorcycle engines whined into earshot; black-and-white armored, sleek, high-tech GUN bikes shot past the ranks of other pursuers and closed the gap alarmingly easily. Rock glanced in his rear view mirror, cued by the noise; he had to lift his head to see past his low-hanging black hood. He was wearing some big-honking goggles and a black handkerchief mask across his mouth, too, presumably to mask his identity. (One had to wonder if there'd be any point in guarding it once all his "friends" got back from Chun-nan and spilled the beans, though.)

"Switch out!" he shouted urgently, already lurching halfway out of the seat with a hand clutching the roll cage, leaving only a hand on the wheel and an outstretched foot on the gas pedal. "Take it, switch!"


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For whatever reason, Jam wasn't keen on arguing. Maybe it was that she realized it wasn't a good time, or that she'd spotted some incoming threat that Rock was better suited to dealing with. ...Or that she just didn't have any real say in the matter. One particularly violent jostle effectively dismounted the pot-shotting primate from her perch, and dumped her unceremoniously into the front passenger's seat. Head first.

"Yeah, whatever," she grunted, awkwardly righting herself with considerable effort, and actually taking the wheel with her tail initially. "Y'can't drive fer s**t anyway!"

Cue promptly squealing tires, and a timely grazing collision with a fire hydrant, which of course, erupted in their wake.

"Shut up!" retorted Rock with immeasurable wit. He swung around the outside of the vehicle, around its roll-cage and into the back as if maneuvering around a jungle gym. There in the truck-like bed, he grabbed some sort of three-barreled hand-cannon, about the size of a burly shotgun, and with just about as much aesthetic tact and charm.

The three barrels lit up one right after another in a rapid cycle, spewing glowing, streaking blasts like water out of a hose. The motorcycles were not long for this world; one had its front wheel blown clean off, another was so badly concussed by the shots that missed that it slide sideways and wiped out in a spray of sparks, and yet another had its rider peeled straight off, and continued rolling for a good hundred feet before veering, wobbling, and thrashing into a wild, flipping crash.

The trucks were still behind them, and firing. Bullets that would have otherwise peppered the buggy and its rider struck mostly-invisible field of some sort wrapping the vehicle like a barrier; it flickered visibly with every registered hit. Hastened by the need to not let it get taxed any more than it already had, Rock dropped his gun haphazardly and seized a large, cylindrical launcher and hefted it onto his shoulder, his reddish-pink eye peering down the reticule.

The gun jolted violently as glowing, energized orbs of raging-hot plasma ripped out at a steady, drum-beating pace. They moved erratically and almost seemed to writhe through the air to their targets. Rock visibly had a difficult time aiming and controlling the weapon, which appeared to constantly want to climb off the back of his shoulder. (Jam's driving didn't do his stability any favors, either.) Nonetheless, when shots finally started connecting, the results were catastrophic for the inadequately armored trucks, which went from looking like pieces of usable military hardware to flaming scrapyard bonfires on wheels in mere seconds of focused fire each.

*WHU-WHOMP!* went any remaining semblance of stability along with the driver's front wheel, and the overall wholesomeness of the suspension as Jam's discernment of what could and couldn't safely be driven over proved less than judicious. Her gunman's aim notwithstanding, it likely did some interesting things to the contents of the vehicle, as, well, who really had time for fiddly things like seatbelts in battle? The driver, herself, went airborne a couple of disconcerting seconds, which removed and reapplied her foot from the accelerator in a short, random, and emphatic patterns.

The dune buggy lurched and jumbled in protest, but forged onward dutifully, even as flaming slag rained down across its hood, and tires without vehicles bounced after them.

The wheelmonkey's arms blurred as they flew hand over hand, juking them into a very nearly 90° turn that only missed a meddlesome eighteen wheeler by mere inches. Her own black hood had given up on her head long ago, and she no longer had the hands to insist otherwise. A quick glance at the rapidly growing helicopter in the rearview mirror (which of course, was closer than it appeared) suggested she had bigger concerns at present.

"Uh, okay!" Jam called over her shoulder. "I'm rethinking the whole 'you can't drive' thing!"

Rock had to pick himself up from his inverted position in the back before he could take the wheel.

---

Rock plucked his cup out of the sand and took a sip through the straw.

"Your rank-ass sense of direction got us into worse trouble than any music ever did," he accused.

"Sense a' direction's got nothin' to do with it," countered Jam, confiscating the cup with a mite more venom than was warranted; she drained it with obnoxiously loud slurping sounds inside of a few seconds. "But my bad for not being the all-knowing roads and infrastructure RSS feed you are."

---

"Why we even goin' this way?!" Rock shouted in a cry that sounded almost amused—inappropriately so, given what was going on. He swung haphazardly around the roll cage again to take the driver's seat back. "Why are we on Mission Street? Why! I had us headed for 101, and— and put your hood back up!"

"The 101's a mess this time of day!" protested the monkey, as she swung out the passenger's side of the roll cage with almost choreographed synchronization with Rock's entrance. "You wanted to get to South Island; I was getting us there via the Mission on-ramp to 280!"

"280's a half-destroyed chaos-distortion-zone mess!" Rock argued. "There's pieces of it missing!"

This was all conversed as casually as it could be when half-shouted while running behind, around, and then alongside a rampaging ATV and its throng of heavily armed, violent admirers. The buggy meanwhile jostled, its burly springs and shocks jumping and jerking as it cut the corner on a sidewalk, utterly obliterating a park bench into splinters and sending a newspaper machine's contents flying through the air. It screeched out around the next bend, sliding with tires screeching and thudding across some cable car tracks, before taking the next bend in the twisty, old street. Whoop! Surprise, this one was a drop down a nearly 40 degree angle hill.

Perhaps the bigger surprise was the bottom of the hill, where the buggy bottomed out with a mighty crash and a spray of sparks from its undercarriage. Rock's forehead went womp on the steering wheel from the sheer force of the landing, but he was still unaffected enough to glance back at Jam and repeat himself, his grimace invisible under his disguise.

"I said put your hood back up!"

With a tepidly obliging flip of her hood, Jam slowed pace and fell behind, casting fervent, calculating glances over her shoulder, and at her surroundings. Suddenly swerving off toward the left side of the road, the trailing simian kicked hard off the ground with a grunt, cleanly and effortlessly snagging the apex of an overhanging streetlamp, which she swung around for a single revolution, before springing off with gymnast-like grace, straight at the oncoming chopper.

Even as fast as it all happened, her own velocity combined with the helicopter's approach shouldn't have been enough to secure a favorable trajectory, but with a nigh inaudible *BZZRRRT!*, her direction suddenly altered course from forward and down to collision with windshield. The monkey was quick to relocate, however; a decisive drop and another double jump later, and she was dangling between the landing skids via her tail and a single hand, a searingly white orb, while all manner of unsettling pops, sizzles, and snarls began to belch from the aircraft's innards.

In Rock's mirrors, it didn't look like much more than superficial damage... until the whole whirlybird started to veer hard to its left, before launching into a nauseating 1080° spin that ended rather abruptly when a building got in its way. The ensuing explosion might have been resume material for a demolitions expert, but Jam had no time to admire it; she sped along the street, shield-less, and looking just a little buzzed as she caught up with the dune buggy, and threw herself into its bed, faintly smoking.

"Okay, that—" *KRSHHUMPKSH* (Another undercarriage bottom-out at a terrace.) "—that was actually pretty good," he conceded.

---

"Yeah, okay, that part was actually pretty good," Rock echoed, now much later, and from a much more comfortable place, sitting under the late-day sun on a beach. "I didn't expect you would just jump all up in the helicopter's grill like that."

Jam just grinned in a plainly self-satisfied way, reclining back into the sand.

"That's what they said."

"Ff, whatever," Rock puffed, giving her a flat look in return for her cockiness, though his expression soon softened a little. "Y'did good, though, really."

"Resisting arrest, reckless endangerment, destruction of public property, injury and destruction of military property, countless moving violations..." recounted the monkey chidingly, listing her accomplishments off one finger at a time. She grinned, redirecting her too-fond gaze to to the other primate.

"Well, what can I say? I had a good teacher."

Rock put on a jestingly deadpan face, mouth frowning blandly, brows raised, and eyes half shut, and shrugged his head from side to side. "I'unno. Put it like that an' it just sounds like a regular night out."

---

No matter how chaotic their lives normally were, it really didn't stack up to their afternoon.

They were headed for the waterfront; they had been ramping off terraces and down huge hills littered with traffic, cable cars, and all manner of attempted roadblock, but finally, they were almost there when the motherload of all roadblocks appeared in front of them around the next bend: GUN all-terrain vehicles, a bunch of what basically amounted to white and black Jeeps with guns mounted on them, had set up along with a bunch of wooden police barricades, and somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred troops, a large number of whom were wielding missile launchers.

This was the "oh crap" moment.

"Don't stop!" Rock yelled as he grabbed something from an open metal crate, sprang straight up and... out-and-out vanished from the back of the dune buggy in a flash, Nocturnus tech officially in play.

It had been with the weakest of conviction, the smallest of voices, and utmost foreboding that the pinker wheel monkey replied with her totally inaudible, "... okay." It was hardly a contract set in stone, but she resolved to stick to it, keeping the accelerator obligingly floored, all the while hating herself for it as her discomfort mounted. "Rrrooock," she whimpered as the blockade drew closer.

He reappeared in an identical flash of light that exact same instant directly over the roadblock, far, far ahead of Jam's buggy, and right over the troops' heads. Gripped in his black-gloved hands were two metal spheres each.

Four little safety lids clicked up and four beeps sounded simultaneously from the devices as their buttons were all pressed. Before gravity could even begin to pull him down more than a couple feet, the white primate flung the cluster of explosives downward.

He vanished again as they struck the ground below and exploded on impact. He only reappeared some twenty feet higher in the air over the same spot, though, affording him the instant necessary to produce more grenades, this time from his belt.

"Roooooock," complained Jam, now hurtling forward with one hand off the wheel, and covering her eyes.

He rained the things down as fast as he could pull, arm, and fling them. The roadblock all at once looked like it was being bombed, bursting into flame and shrapnel. Chunks of shredded pavement was flying, dust was pluming up like somebody had just started up a demolition project, troops flew without wings, and jeeps were torn apart, slagged, and set ablaze on the spot.

The overworked warp belt whined a piercing noise in the barely-audible range, and its owner seemed to flicker in the air for a moment, as if the device didn't want to function again, for a third time, so soon. He was about to drop and hit the burning mess of debris below somewhere right in front of Jam's speeding buggy if it didn't, though, so he took the risk of ruining it for good, and sent himself warping unstably once more amid the other simian's unrelenting, terrified screaming.

He ended up plastered across the hood right in front of Jam instead of in the back where he belonged. This was not optimal, and, with his bandana mask sliding down, his dumbfounded face was able to silently say it all. It was better than where he was going to land, though. For all the panicked, nervous wreck his chauffeur was, one would think she had been the one teleporting all over the sky, and dropping explosives onto the waiting army below.

---

"'Regular night out'?" repeated Jam, just a little incredulously. "Think you're sellin' yourself short. M'pretty sure a regular night out has a limit of under thirty different people trying to kill you."

Somewhere in the midst of all their fond reminiscing, the smaller of the monkeys had nudged right up against the larger. Her head lolled lazily on his shoulder, while her fingers tugged idly at the hem of his shorts. "That was noteworthy at the very least."

A puff of air came from his nose; he smiled in a way that was actually peaceful, for once, and wrapped an arm around the girl, setting his hand on her shoulder.

He really didn't have anything to say. He was in a good place — a happy place, relaxed, fulfilled, resting, and recovering... Placid.

His eyes slid shut.



...



The tiniest twitch of his eyelids segued into a very slight grimace.



...



"That damnable... hell-truck, though," he mumbled quietly.

Jam's peace and contentment was effectively shattered; her eyes opened, giving way to a perfect PTSD thousand-yard stare as she, in the hollowest, shell of a croak, whimpered, "It was... not of this world."

She swallowed dryly, shaking her head in miniscule, but jerky motions.



"Trucks just... don't do that."

---

"Hooo-lyyyyy shiiiiii—"

No sooner than the buggy blazed its trail through the shrapnel-shredded roadblock did a titanic form rampage into the street behind it, all but entirely filling all four lanes of road with its enormity: a G.U.N.-emblazoned black diesel truck greater than any monster truck, pulling a trailer the size of a small barge, flew off the crest of the next hill behind them at well over a hundred miles per hour, smashing and shattering the pavement itself as it jostled, bounced, and rapidly gained on them. Cars in its path were just obliterated by its bumper and sent flying with untold force, while even the slightest veer off the center of the road caused it to utterly flatten the sidewalks (trees, park benches, postboxes, streetlights, and all).

"Punch it, punch it, punch it!" shouted Rock as he scrambled halfway into the driver's seat to try to take it for himself.

File under: "Don't need to tell me twice." Or at all. It would have been far harder to hear the complete and utter carnage on wheels thundering behind them, and not at least glance at the rearview mirrors. Cue the bug-eyed double-take.

"Hooooo God! Oh, God! WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT THE F*** IS THAT?!"

It should be noted that even as she attempted to make way for the reentering driver, both of Jam's feet and her tail had the accelerator pinned to the floor. It was only when she could be absolutely certain that Rock would keep the pedal flat, that she tumbled gracelessly into the back, uncoordinatedly fumbling with the plasma launcher, in between terrified glances at the gaining monstrosity. Of course, the screaming hadn't yet stopped.

"GO FASTER! CAN'T WE GO FASTER?! OH, GOD, IT'S GONNA EAT US!"

"Shut up! Shut up, calm down! We're not deer, we can turnHOLDON—"

The vehicle swayed steeply on its suspension as it screechingly rounded a corner in a tight turn the diesel truck surely couldn't have taken at that speed.

Except, it could, and it did. Against all odds, the gigantic truck barreled around the corner, "straightening" the turn by taking out a chunk of the building that stood on the corner, plowing straight through it, then crashing across the opposite sidewalk and wiping out a number of storefronts on that side, too.

"Okay, we gotta go faster," Rock abruptly changed his opinion and agreed as he rounded another turn (to similar effect from the pursuing truck), and began fiddling with the console built into the steering wheel.

The jet engines (yes, literal jet engines) on the side of the buggy whirred and wound up, then with a mighty roar, rammed them forward. It seemed there was no widening the gap from the monster-truck-and-trailer, though; its own engines screaming, it kept right on their tail, and even gained that much more.

They rocketed up the on-ramp and onto the freeway that led out across the water. The giant truck behind them destroyed the on-ramp when it tried to follow them, going straight through it and plunging onto the dirty beach under the freeway.

...

Sections of freeway started falling out behind them like slats of bridge behind some sort of fleeing action-movie-adventurer as the enormous concrete supports holding up the roadway were obliterated by the devil-truck. Rock could only look disbelievingly at his rear-view mirror.

"Weee neeeed that pick-up noooow," he declared in a tone that rose in pitch, volume, and urgency all at once.

The truck exploded up through the road in some sort of booster-propelled jump and landed thunderously right behind them. Their buggy nearly capsized as it wobbled and bounced due to the section of concrete immediately under it tipping upward and forming an impromptu ramp. They very nearly went straight into the drink, landing instead on the guardrail for a few harrowing, sparking seconds, before getting back on track.

Between Rock's evasive maneuvers, the jet engine acceleration assist (really, who, besides Eggman would put a jet engine on an ATV?), and the rapid rate of road deterioration, Jam and her little cannon-turned-security-blanket wound up on her back more often than was conducive to a clear shot. Given the... effective tenacity of their pursuer, however, she'd begun to seriously doubt it would so much as nick the windshield.

This didn't keep her from continuing to try, however, and were it not for their involuntary ramp-tricking, she might have finally hit it pretty dead-on; instead, the shot vaulted impotently skyward, much as the buggy and all its contents did. It went without saying that the horrified obscenities in varying pitch and volumes never really planed off, but at the very least, it wasn't an idle panic; as soon as they had even two out of four wheels on the ground again, up came the plasma launcher, which unhesitatingly spewed an injudicious, rapid-fire volley of bolts straight into the engine for as long as the weapon could handle the heat.

Meanwhile, something large approached from the sky.

The two vehicles streaked down the long roadway out across the water, gaining speed steadily, engines screaming, instrument panel needles burying themselves in red lines, street lights blurring together like fenceposts.

The GUN truck's grill was obliterated and nearly molten. Fire licked out. It still gained steadily on the small buggy anyway.

Rock gritted his teeth and clenched the wheel; his hood blew back as he leaned forward and practically raised out of his seat, grinding the gas pedal into the floor. Then, he glanced back and blinked.

The titanic underside of a former Eggman Empire airship lowered down atop the GUN diesel. It pressed down on its suspension and began to spray sparks from its undercarriage; its roof and top of its trailer began to crush in; the window glass cracked, then shattered; and finally, the concrete beneath it gave way and shredded and tore, ripping a truck-wide ditch through the road itself as truck wheels tumbled and rolled free, fragments of body and frame flew like loose roadway litter into the air, and the entire vehicle gnarled and contorted into an unrecognizable slagheap mess, continuously, mercilessly dragged forward.

"Hang on!" Rock shouted, and clicked and tapped buttons on the steering wheel. The entire buggy lurched and leapt into the air with a roar of jet engines as glowing thruster-wash blasted out the underside, propelling it up, and up, and up, precariously high overhead, where it was deftly scooped into an open hangar bay by the passing airship.

Only then did the airship relent and ascend, relieving what mangled bits remained of the GUN truck from its perpetual grinder treatment, and leaving them to slide to a slow, smoldering stop on the road as an unrecognizable lump.

In the back of the extracted buggy, Jam flopped haggardly onto her back, still loosely clutching the over-heated plasma launcher in one hand, and her actively escaping heart in the other. She bore a hardened thousand-yard stare into the ceiling of the airship's cargo bay, her chest heaving with tachycardic panting. She laid there, unmoving and wordless for several seconds before eventually, jerkily turning her head see if she could see the driver out the tops of her eyes.

There he was, clambering from the cockpit. He haphazardly slid headfirst over the seatback in an almost-painful fall, but caught himself on the roll cage, and just... flopped down next to her on the dune buggy's corrugated bedliner.

However uneasily, the red monkey's color-drained, cold sweat-covered face broke into a cautious grin. The white one reciprocated, then not-so-cautiously rolled her direction and pounced upon her with the sort of enthusiasm that only certain kinds of people could manage to glean from explosive combat and near-brushes with violent death.

---

"So, I was thinkin' — even as much fun as we've had today, I think it'd help if, goin' forward from here, we... didn't... try to do stuff like that all by ourselves anymore. When we don't have to, I mean."

"I totally agree," replied Jam, with no shortage of snark in her mock-graveness. "The beach is no place for two people to be alone all half-naked and unchaperoned."

"You know I meant the mission..." he sighed (without any real frustration).

The idle conversation began anew inside that same hangar bay aboard the airship, but much later on in the day — after the return from the fight, and after the visit to the beach, too. They had just boarded again, leaving another fresh set of tire streaks on the metal floor, their hair fresh with the salty-fresh smell of the surf, and their bullet-distraught dune buggy colorfully loaded with soggy and sandy beach towels and swimwear... all mixed in jarringly with the same piles of weapons and munitions they had just been using to wage a small-scale guerrilla war even earlier that day. They were just that kind of people.

A fluttering roll of her eyes and shake of her head followed in response, as, with that similarly not-as-exasperated-as-I-sound air, she answered, "And I know that you know. That I know."

Blink. "But seriously, Rock, whaddaya want? Take out a Gregslist ad or something?"

"I'unno, maybe," replied Rock indignantly as he finally pulled himself out of the vehicle by its roll cage and set his boots on the floor. "Not really, but... we just have to find some people we know we can trust."

His immediately tired, pained, squint-browed face said it all: that was an order taller than they could likely fill. And Jam wasn't likely to let a dead horse go unbeaten. Her expression soured immediately, and she popped off the bed of the buggy in favor of some meandering aloofness.

"Laz, you know I'm all for takin' some of this heat off you and me, and maybe spreadin' the love around, but..." She paused, looking very suddenly tired as her eyes narrowed at a completely innocent tool chest, while her fingers picked idly at the latches. "In case you haven't noticed, we kind of suck at picking reliable company."

Rock dejectedly sputtered some air through his lips and leaned (a little harshly) back against the side of the buggy with arms crossed.

But just like that, all the gravity dropped instantaneously out of Jam's tone as she glanced thoughtfully at the ceiling.

"Be okay with more robots, though... We've got good rapport with them."

The white primate stared at her, thinly deadpan over suppressed amusement. "That really says somethin' about us, don't it."