Central City was a big, burly, sprawling, crawling, run-down, shined-up mess of a place. The result of a head-on collision between old-town stone-work and turn of the century technology, It rambled up from the prolific docks at the coast of the nearby bay, into the sloping, lopsided hills that surrounded it, with very little attention payed to topography or city planning or how either of the two concepts related to each other.

This particular day had started particularly fine. The sky was a soft and chalky blue, and a washed out sun beamed through the salty haze to illuminate the city with an oppressive heat that was matched only by the heady, salty wind that ripped in off the ocean and roared up the corridor streets of the city with a vigor.

It was a wonderful day for doing anything.

It was a wonderful day for doing...

Anything.



A particularly nondescript, glass-walled skyscraper of not very tall height sat some unnoticeable distance half-way up and half-way down one of the city's sloping hills. It was particularly unimpressive in every way, except for the large fence that surrounded it.

The fence was of medium height and built out of generic materials, for all intents and purposes. It was a kind of semi-colonial-styled faux-wrought-iron, and in bad taste. The fence also had signs attached to it.

"DANGER!! THIS FENCE IS ELECTRIFIED TO 10,000 VOLTS!!"


It was at this point that it became incredibly obvious the subtly-disguised distance between the ugly, short little sky-scraper and its sleeker, glossier brothers. There was, in fact, a large gap between it and the neighboring buildings on all sides, which had been disguised by the careful cultivation of a concrete park, with benches, planter trees, the occasional ash-tray and an ornamental rockery, which had cost about $16,000 to make and which absolutely no-one ever paid attention to or reflected upon. Ever.

This was a mistake. It was not a mistake most of the time, as the rockery was made out of large chunks of volcanic stone which had been imported at reasonable cost from the region of Marble Garden; they were ugly, jagged, and obscured the view, and were not comfortable to sit on.

It was a mistake not to pay attention to them today, however, because of the presence of a large bird that sat on top of them, with his bottom comfortably wedged in the intersection of two large rectangular pieces. He kicked his feet idly and stared out at the view, all the way down to the ocean, where various ships—like little models at this distance—chugged back and forth at imperceptible speed.

He wore an extraordinarily large coat—and this was OK, because he was an extraordinarily large bird—and very little else. The jacket was loosely buttoned to about half-way up, where it fell open to reveal large, glossy blue tufts of chest feathers, which ruffled in the breeze as their own stared out to say with all the rapt attention of a tourist.

After a few moments of admiring the day, he turned and leaned over his shoulder, where two other people waited behind the rockery, out of sight of the glass building the pile of stones ostensibly ornamented.

"Nice day for it, huh," he boomed, a slow grin forming across his face.

"...you ready for it?"


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Coop leaned back in his makeshift chair on top of the rock-heap, and for all intents and purposes appeared to be surveying the city. His beady eyes, however, were swiveled down, at the other member of the party.

"Hey, Archer, you ready to blow this Popsicle stand?"

He grinned, making his natural glare look somewhat more deranged.

"Heh."

Underneath the eagle's monstrous rump, a couple feet down, affixed to the bottom-side of one of the delicately arrange rock slabs with a few chunks of re-bar and a metal plate was a huge block of what looked like tofu wrapped in pink wax-paper—the creamy, rubbery substance the block consisted of exposed to the world at the point where someone had very carefully cut through it, paper and all, with a knife. Where the waxed-paper had not been damaged were visible the words stenciled in black:

DANGER: EXPLOSI
--DETex RDX BAS
EXPLOSIVE COMPO

Three metal things like cotter pins, wrapped together with electrical tape, stuck out of the exposed part of the tofu-brick. Their ends were connected with wires to a small box which had been similarly taped on to the bottom of the brick.

On the surface of the box was a very small, red LED, which was blinking, ever, ever so slowly just to the left of a small, red label, which read 'ARMED.'

"Excuse me," a new voice from behind the horribly electrified fence surrounded the building called.

Coop's head snapped up and around, and he fixed his eyes on the new speaker. Speakers? Speaker. There was only one speaker, but there was no shortage of... other people.

A woman in a smart-looking business suit was standing behind the gate, looking at him intently.

"Excuse me, sir," she repeated, "I'm going to have to ask you to get off of there."

"Huh?" Coop intoned, cocking his head to the side before appearing to understand what the lady said.

"Oh," he added, meekly, as he caught on, "Oh, right."

He hopped down lightly around the back of the rock formation.

"Sir?" the woman called after him as he vanished from eyeline. A leathery shuffling noise was audible as two of the armed soldiers flanking her began to move around to the gate.

"Sir, please come around to the front where I can see you!"



"Right," said Coop, a big, bright grin tearing up his face, "here we go."

He pulled something from one of his coat pockets and shed the coat itself, shrugging it off his shoulders to expose, contained within a pair of bandoliers, enough explosive to do serious damage to... well, just about anything.

"Ok, you know the plan; when I say go, you run for the edge of the tree-line like crazy until you hear all hell break loose, then..."

The massive eagle shook his head in silent reverence for the sheer destruction they were about to unleash.

Elsewhere in scene, a loud, raucous buzz echoed around the mini-park as the gate in the electric fence opened, and the sound of boots could be heard rapidly approaching the rockery where the three were concealed.

"Remember how to survive an explosion. Just relax. Now, go."

Coop pounded his wings, accelerating into a dead run away from the scene. Alarmed shouts and warnings could be heard as the soldiers, unsure of what to do, attempted to discourage anyone from leaving the scene without actually putting a bullet through anybody.

If they had slightly more time they might have made a decision and pulled the trigger, but as it was, Coop had, at the moment he said 'go,' flicked the cap off of some something lying in his palm. There was a button underneath the cap.

At about five seconds into the run, he pressed the button.

The world went white. Then it went yellow, then it went orange and then red. An earth shattering boom ripped through the park. the bomb had gone off.

Several tons of rock lifted into the air. Most of the rock did not get very far before tumbling back to earth—the rockery's sheer mass and careful structure prevented the blast from going very far in any direction except sideways—but one rock in particular flew, with a vengeance.

The rock that had the bomb attached to its underside, weighing in at about 1.3 metric tonnes of volcanic stone, pinwheeled across the park, and slammed through the electric fence, through the soldiers on the outside, through the re-enforced glass, through the soldiers on the inside, and a wall, before skidding to a stop somewhere down a hallway it had carved a huge, long gouge out of.

About two seconds after that, the alarms started going off.

Coop turned around and punched the air.

"YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!" he howled.

The other object in his hand was a peculiar welding mask that had, with some care, had a large notch cut in it, from the bottom of the mask to the beginning of the eye-piece.

He slipped the strap of the mask on over his head, and flipped the mask down. His beak stuck through the cut in the mask, giving him—combined with the square aspect of the mask and vacant eye shield—the appearance of one of the very old-fashioned robots from ancient sci-fi horror movies.

He slung a glossy, cylindrical weapon off his back, tucked the stock against his shoulder, and squared up to face the blaze, and hopefully wherever his two companions had ended up.

"You guys okay?" he yelled over the noise of screams, flames and collapsing metal.

"Mmahahaha," Coop laughed to the llama, burbling slightly as he was from the adrenaline rush, "I'll be good for walking, thanks!"

He was bouncing back and forth on his toes, watching Tracer and Archer head through the hole, and was just about to head up the rear, when he heard a car approaching at unnerving speed. He turned, and saw Rekk's car as it hurtled towards them.

He cocked his head, and his mask glinted, reflecting the light of the sky behind the smoke. There was a split-second of silent eye-balling before he had apparently made a decision. He raised the grenade launcher against his shoulder and, without very much thought as to where he was aiming save leading the target, pulled the trigger.

Click.

WHOOMPFH.

Coop had flipped open the grenade launcher and was fetching another from the depths of a pouch when he saw the cat clambering out of the back of the charred car, accompanied by the two floating shield generators.

He stopped.

As Rekk brought his gun up to fire, he lurched back and down behind the rubble, and was away before any of the shots affected him.

"Hngh," he muttered, and then, pressing a hand to his ear, he spoke into the radio tucked against his jaw, "The guy's still up, this'll just take a second."


For all appearances, from the outside, Coop had disappeared.

The Llama's HUD started flashing as the roar of an engine was rapidly gaining on them. As the government car rounded the corner towards them she whipped around. Her faceplate hid her grin as she watched Coop remove the problem with a respectable amount of efficacy. She didn't linger to watch though, she paused long enough to offer the opening on her board to the archer, but it was a breif pause. A moment later and she'd be rocketing into the building.

Archer also turned at the sound of a car speeding towards them, only to be delt with almost as quickly as the threat had arrived. With a smirk, he turned and looked at Tracer. The board was a bit small for passengers, but for the purpose of saving time, he accepted the offer, stepping onto the board behind it's owner.

No sooner had the deer jumped onto the board did it suddenly lurch into the building. He better hold on tight because Tracer, despite not really knowing what to expect she charged into the narrow halls, flattening any poor souls brave enough to try and get in front of her. When she took the corner at the end of the hall she took it so hard the board scraped against the wall, chipping the plaster and throwing sparks against the steel beneath.

At this point, she was greeted by a hail of gunfire from the waiting soldiers around the corner. Crouched inside the nearby cubicles, they had very little time to prepare, and had spent most of their time scrambling for information. As it was, they were not well oriented, and the sight of a heavy machine swinging it around the corner of the office hallway did nothing to improve their aim.

Tracer rounded the corner having lost some speed when she took the turn hard the sudden burst of resistance was met with little more then irritation. There was no way she wanted to waste her time with this, not when the prize was still so far away. She could pause to squish hopeless bugs on the way OUT. So the shoulder cannon dropped over her shoulder as the slowed gear started to pick up momentum again. The cannon buzzed for a moment as it charged before letting loose a beam of CE into the wall they where now rapidly approaching. It immediately started to buzz again as she continued to fire into the reinforced wall.

There was a low drone, from the hall. Drifting gently around the corner, like a pair of dangerous, gun-toting, glowy-eyed balloons, came a pair of GUN-bots. Largely modified and bulked up in gray and black steel, they still looked too close to Eggman's egg-robos to be anything far from a coincidence. One of them mumbled something garbled through a low-toned vocoder.

Then the pair of them, in sync, raised their guns and began firing smaller versions of Tracer's chaos beams down the hall where the Llama and the Deer's situation was rapidly becoming more hectic.

As the fire hissed and roared, and gunfire echoed inside the building, it might have almost been possible that anyone standing where Rekk was would've been able to hear something like a faint clatter from inside the blown-out cavern that had been bored into the side of the building.