Casey's mouth pulled tight to its corners and his eyes bugged out a little at the sound of the sudden raging gunbattle happening on top of the freight car he was hanging onto. It wasn't a look of fear so much as... pressure. He had to do something! Things were going very badly, and he had no idea what to do whatsoever, mostly because it wasn't clear who to even shoot at.

When the little deer stepped virtually right behind him (and maybe a little beneath, to be technically accurate) and started chattering on a radio, however, he was momentarily derailed. Still hanging there with his arm intertwined in the ladder, he glanced down with a scrutinizing look. Had he heard what the guy said? Could he hear it with all that noise?

"Don't come out here, it ain't safe," he barked. It was the crook's lucky day; the big pig with the gunarm had not successfully overheard him conspiring.

The rat was silent as the cat in front of him pointed out the flaw in his speaking. His face froze still in a frown, and it was clear that from behind those sunglasses, he was glaring daggers at Ace. The fight raged on above the train cars, but it didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.

With a curious hum, he took off his sunglasses, revealing dark green eyes that were indeed locked on to Ace, unblinking. Another detail was a small diagonal scar just over the far corner of his left eye. Drawing a yellow kerchief, he wiped off a few flakes of snow on the tinted lenses.

"...Roublard..." he whispered. Putting the cloth back in his pocket and replacing the shades in his face, he relaxed, shoved his hands back into his pockets, resumed his earlier casual pose, and allowed himself another confident smirk. "Has anyone ever told you that you're not as stupid as you look?" He bowed his head slightly and chuckled for only a moment, and continued, "But the fact of the matter is, I am an agent. I was given intel telling me that there was going to be an 'incident' on this very train, and I have been assigned here to guarantee the safety of the passengers while my colleagues intervene. The attackers range from four to eight, the train guard is approximately three or four, they're all heavily armed, and the passengers...well, there are some things you cannot account for, eh?"

He shook himself, feeling the cold of the luggage car getting to him. "So, Mister...ah, I don't need to know your name. You comprehend the situation I am in, yes?"

"Has anyone ever told you that you're not as stupid as you look?"

"I get that a lot," Ace answered snidely, irritable with the time already wasted. The hankerchief was just to stall for time, and he knew it. All the more reason to skip to the point when his turn to speak came. "I comprehend you're about to get your ass thrown off this train if you don't call off whatever's going on up there, right now." His shoulders tensed, and his body tightened, like a catapult pushing against its bonds. "Last chance."

---

The gunfire stopped almost as quickly as it started, and the man at the head of the group (signified by the bandolier strapped across his chest) immediately shouted an order of some kind over the noise. It was unclear what he was saying, obviously, but the word "Eggman" could've likely been heard amid the rest of his foreign words. Abandoning their futile pursuit of "shoot it until it dies", the band at large scattered as well as they could on the comparatively narrow roof, and rushed them. But just because the man with the energy gun had less of a chance to hit all of them that way didn't mean he had any fewer targets, and to of them was hit directly at their feet-- they flew off the car like a leaf in a strong breeze, and toppled helplessly over the side. It was probably a good thing nobody could see what had happened to him, because it probably wasn't pretty.

The rest of them were alive enough to see Geoff slam his way into the battlegrounds, and several were caught off guard, as if unsure how to respond themselves. Bandolier man shouted another something-- and they ultimately continued their rushdown. If given the chance though, none of them struck out at the hedgehog, so it may have been safe to assume that they weren't out to get him, at least for now.

The rodent man was still as a statue as Ace's words sank in. For a moment, he said nothing, did nothing, simply stood where he was, blank.

Then he bent over and laughed. Not a hearty laugh, a dry and cold laugh, barely above a chuckle and lasting only a few seconds. He looked back up to his opponent.

"You know, I think I kind of like you. I'm telling half-truths and you're easily filling in the blanks. Then again, maybe I just haven't been practicing my tricks enough."

He leaned back against the wall with his hands in his jacket pockets yet again, clearly a favorite pose of his.

"So, I will stop wasting my breath with half-truths. You want to know the whole truth? Fine."

With his left hand, he withdrew a handheld transceiver, black plastic with a little antenna. He held it up, letting it hang from his grasp, as if taunting him with the device.

He began to speak again with a small smile and a hint of cheerful mockery in his voice, "With a little call and a good excuse, I could call all this off, possibly.. But the truth, is that those aren't my men attacking the train. They belong to someone else, a...'partner' of mine. I'm only a supervisor sent to keep an eye on things and handle any problems that I can. There is a chance that they would listen to me and retreat, but there's a chance they wouldn't heed my orders. Either way, I'm certain I would greatly irritate my associates."

He put the walkie-talkie back in his pocket.

"And if that happened, it would practically ruin my opportunities here in Chun-Nan. To upset the people I am working with, I..." The sarcastic cheer in his voice and demeanor disappeared, "...would probably end up as dead as you and your friends will be if you try to interfere."

*Fwonk.*

Though a bear, he was not particularly huge (at least not like other bearsFLEX Geoff may have encountered), and was actually quite soundly thudded (or fwonked as the case may have been) across the metal roof of the freight car. While his barrier seemed capable of stopping bullets, piles of rock and hedgehog were beyond its capability.

The combined turning motion of the train and the blow sent him skidding off to the side, and overboard; he literally hung on by a single hand. His energy-cannon-wielding partner meanwhile turned and opened fire on Geoff, while the third wheel of the party went to try to rescue his comrade, only to get barreled over by one of the charging white-clad train robbers.

It appeared Geoff's surprise appearance alone had turned the tides, but whether it was for the better in the end remained to be seen.

The long-eared, lithe, beam-cannon-wielding foe didn't simply stand there while a stone hedgehog tried to grab his gun. Rather impressively, he instead hurtled back in what almost looked like a hands-free cartwheel over the top of one of the train robbers—literally, he deftly twirled over a charging attacker he had barely even glanced at, and shot the guy right in the back with a big, searing ball of energized gas upon landing, only to drop and sweep wide with an extended leg, taking yet another foe right off his feet.

A backward roll put him in a kneel a short distance from the edge of the train car. In an unexpected maneuver, he just... quick-stepped backward, and whoosh—vanished from view right off the side.

A quick grunt and a clench of his fist was really the only thing Ace said before pouncing forward like the serval he was born to be, in a wide-armed, low-set football tackle. He wasn't a speed demon of any sort, but in short lunges like that, Daniel was always surprisingly capable. The rat-man looked light enough to be picked up off his own feet, and if caught in his grasp, that's just what Ace would do. He wanted this over as fast as he could possibly make it.

Topside, things were quickly getting hectic at an alarming rate. While a small number of the 'troops' had been blown off the side of the train, were hanging on to dear life on the side of the train (courtesy of a sweep kick to the shin), or were otherwise occupied pulling up regrouping the others, all it took was one soldier to take one of the ragtag crew down.

The third member of that crew, a groundhog wielding some sort of electric tech mace in some sort of wide-eyed frenzy, took a mighty horizontal swing at the leader, but he was entirely too fast for him. In one swift motion, the bandolier-man ducked under the blow, actually skid along the snow on the roof behind the 'hog, and sweeped his leg as he plucked a combat knife from a sheath on his thigh. Before any of it could be comprehended, the poor soul was just that-- a soul. Not once or twice, but three times his neck was cut at before his body was hurled off the side for good measure. It was as cold as the windchill, and clearly something he'd been trained to do.

All the while, the others were quick to rush towards the big bear of the bunch after they'd all managed to regain their bearings.

The bear had been hanging on by nothing more than his fingertips, long coat flapping in the breeze, since his first wipeout by the force of Geoff's spin attack. He had tried several times to pull himself up, but the icy roof was slippery; every grope for recovery only ended in a farther backslide. A glance back and down was the worst thing he could have done, because beneath him passed just the outermost edges of a train trestle above an immense drop. He was hanging off the right side; the train was turning left around the bend of the mountain.

Before the troops could even get to him, he was gone.

"No!"

The green-colored thug who had just dropped off the other side of the train somehow surfaced from underneath the other side. In some feat of agility and acrobatics, he had swung under the train, deftly maneuvered his way beneath, and emerged in a wild swing up the other side, grasping onto the crossbar of the side door, arm outstretched to reach for the bear just as he fell.

He caught a shred of the guy's coat and nothing more.

The vanilla mouse saw the attack coming, that was clear enough. A split-second was all he needed: in little more than a blink, he leaped away from his lax position on the wall, barely dodging the incoming serval, whose hand only grazed the fine navy blue cloth of his jacket. The rat reached his hands out to stop himself from colliding with the wall of the luggage car, impacting against the metal with enough force to knock his sunglasses off, which fell to the floor with a few quiet tinks. An observant person would notice he was gripping something in his right hand, too small to see. As soon as he had his footing, and without even a glance behind him, the mouse made an attempt to escape the angry cat by bailing through the open door, hopping back to the passenger car. He turned about to face any pursuer behind him, fists clenched and teeth grit.