Something was bound to go right (Ch. 2: Day 13) [Epilogue]

Mie · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 1:53 am

Her head fell to the side along with her soaked-then-air-dried hair as she frowned thoughtfully at the questionably clean garment.

"Probably, but so would a garbage bag, an I prolly wouldn't look half as ginormous, either."

A mischievous smile spread over her face as she set her hands on her hips, and added in an almost macabre dream-like whimsy, "If would be pretty awesome, though, if I ever ran into the little asshat again... F'he lived."

Quick to snap upright, she patted the unnecessary dust from her thighs, and assented in a tone appropriate for bartering, "Right, I got dibs on that until we find me a better battle trophy."

"I was kinda really wantin' that --" She awkwardly groped at an imaginary something at the back of her head. "Y'know, crazy-ass can a' Chaos Drugs he had stickin' outta his skull."

psikeout · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 2:07 am

Rock pursed his lips and looked vaguely disappointed that she called dibs, but couldn't argue. She did score the win, after all. After a little thinking, though, he was onto something. "I think that thing had an emerald in it," he thought aloud, tying the sweatshirt around his waist. "I left my bag on a bike rack by th'tower. Radar might still be good if nothin' smashed it..."

He looked around for orientation, to figure out which way the tower was.

"Wanna go hunt for battle loot?"

This had to say something profound about the two monkeys' life outlooks.

Mie · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 2:24 am

Someone else might have thought it was utterly distressing the way Jam's face lit up , and practically answered for her, but if that alone wasn't clear, she was already loping towards the tower, giggling (???), about twenty yards away.

Rachel · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 7:27 am

The smell of the salt water, and the decaying fish washed up upon the shore was the final straw. Whatever weariness that held Jack asleep released her with a hoarse cough as she slowly pushed herself off of her belly and sat up on her knees.

She glanced around brushing sand off her face and out of her hair. Being covered in sand and mildly dehydrated wasn't such a bad result all things considered. The Griffin sat herself on her butt and pulled her boots off dumping sand out of them. Grumbling about wet socks as she put them back on and started to trudge. Everything looked kind of flat now. So she wasn't sure where she was going, luckily she hadn't landed far from Coop. She stepped over a sand dune to spot not only the heroic black bird but her red friend as well.

"Ember!" Jack said as she fumbled through the sand towards them. "Am I glad to see ya'll! Is anyone hurt?"

Greens · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 3:27 pm

With Jam merrily skipping her way towards yesterday's battleground, and Rock sure to follow, the pair of monkeys, and whoever else they might have brought along wouldn't have to look far to learn where the other couple was spending their time. Or rather, they could just look up. There, sitting/laying side by side in the corner of the arch a certain serval was sniping off of not hours ago, a cat and a mole could be seen sharing a lovely view of the sunrise... and a pair of ice cream cones.

"Y'know somethin'?" Ace asked aloud, gripping the cherry-flavored delight in his hands. "I just realized I haven't had a single cigarette, in like... a week." A disbelieving bout of chuckles followed shortly after.

"Seriously?" The mole nearly choked on her own treat, something dark and fudgey and rapidly diminishing. "Well good for you! This day just keeps gettin' better an' better, huh? I was fine with just like, living today."

"Yeah. Maybe all this adventuring is just keeping me... occupied, or sum'n, I dunno. Always thought that'd be the, one thing I'd never be able to quit."

"Aside from me, of course," she beamed.

"Yeah, of course, heheh."

Ace was feeling especially jovial it seemed, in light of their recent, miraculous survival, and probably for good reason. At least for the time being, it seemed they'd earned their rest for the weary. He still had lingering worries about the whereabouts of certain other members of their crew, but those were settled when he turned to give Caz a lover's playful-ruffling-of-hair. For with his eagle eyes, he spotted not one, but two primates fast approaching.

So while Caz hastily fixed her trademark 'do with a cry of "Nyeeeuuh!", the serval waved a friendly hello to those down below. "Oh, f**k," he said, realized he was waving with his ice cream hand, and awkwardly catching the frozen delight with his other.

psikeout · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 6:33 pm

It may have seemed bad that they'd gone looking for goodies before teammates and friends, but, it was clear that Rock was never really worried about Ace or Caz for a second. He merely gave them a casual, two-fingered mock-salute wave from the temple without much haste to head over and talk. Instead, he stopped some distance away, where he had left his duffel on the bike rack.

"..."

It looked... a little bit too wrapped around the bent steel rack, given some of the rigid objects it was supposed to contain.

Rock gingerly, wincingly untangled it and picked it up. It sloshed in reply. It was supposed to be almost completely waterproof, but the zipper had gotten moved just so in the course of being battered by floodwaters and debris, and, well, the rest was history. He unzipped it, tilted it, annnd... water and little bits of electronics poured out. Probably a good gallon or so.

As he went about fiddling with what used to be his stuff, he looked up and yelled to Ace and Caz, "You guys seen any'f our other people yet?"

Mie · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 6:51 pm

"Lame," muttered the monkey, as, with hands on her knees, she watched the contents of Rock's duffel pour onto the ground.

Immediately giving her quest up for a lost cause, or perhaps just momentarily forgetting it in light of new old company, Jam grinned, and jogged toward the nearest leg of the tower, and squinted up at the pair with a casual wave.

"Hey," she called, no doubt wanting to know how their end of the fight went, or if they were alright, or...

"Where'd you get ice cream up there?" ... other equally important matters.

Greens · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2011 8:05 pm

After... ungracefully plopping his scoop back on his cone, and looking at his red, sticky hand with some uncertainty, Ace quickly made time to save face by... pretending the mishap never even happened. He scootched both legs over the opposite direction. "Not yet!" he shouted out. "Saw the turtle guy helping with the clean up, but that's all!"

Caz was all too happy to respond to Jam's wave with one of her own. All smiles, of course. She looked left, and she looked right, but answered her question with an index finger that said 'hold on a sec'. And a sec or two later, she'd managed to hop the warped, shrunken arch and in front of Jam with nary a scratch or broken bone. Ace kept himself busy licking the remaining ice cream off his palm.

"Well," she began. "When me and Ace found out that we were both alive, we were pretty happy about that. Like, really happy. And... well, I thought we should celebrate. Just 'cause."

With a *clonk* of his boots, said alley cat slammed to the ground behind her, and rose to his feet with a grunt. "Gotta say I wasn't expecting a trip to Papa Palachi's Creamery," he said with a shrug. "But... what the hell?"

"He didn't think they'd still be open, but I know their service is better than that."

psikeout · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 4:16 pm

While the others conversed, Rock continued perusing the remains of his belongings. Much to his surprise, Coop's sawed-off grenade launcher (which Tau had returned to him shortly before the mission, but he had deemed a bad choice of weaponry against a guy who could detonate the ammo with lightning powers) was in decent shape. It had suffered some cosmetic damage, and was very wet, but after emptying it and dry firing it, he seemed satisfied enough.

He eventually put everything away, stood, and shouldered his soggy duffel.

"Well, let's see," he pondered aloud as he shifted his weight onto his heel, and looked off toward the sky. "There's you guys, saw Sheffer back that way... I'm sure Tau made it out..."

Blip. He remembered.

"The safecracker chick—" he mumbled, before dredging up her name from his memory. "Key."

She was indeed the final remaining person from their team they needed to look for. Where to even start, though?

Diluss · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:09 pm

Coop stared at Ember, with a slightly hunted look on his face.

"Uh—" he said.

"You're welcome."

As Jack crested a dune nearby, he turned to face her. He looked somewhat relieved that there was someone else to talk to—it might have had something to do with the fact that the only alternative to the Gryphon was to talk to a bird who Coop had drugged and dumped in the middle of a strange city in a duffle bag, only days earlier.

"Hey," Coop greeted the Gryphon, who was still as-yet unknown to him.

"You survived, huh?"

MuffinUnsane · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:29 pm

Hearing her name called out, Ember quickly turned in the wet sand.

"Jack! Yes! You're not dead!"

Stumbling foward in the think sand and trying to avoid any dead fish laying around, the girl made her ways towards the griffin. Once they meeted together she threw her arms around Jack and pulled her into a quick hug.

"You know," she said with a large grin on her face as she stepped back from the hug, "Apart from the flood and turning brown plus the almost dying part this week has been awesome! Guess I do have good luck! It was worth being in that duffel bag and the headache!"

Glancing back at the large eagle she flashed him a thumbs up. "Thanks dude! Guess you weren't the worst thing to happen afterall!"

The morose attitude had been swept away by a delirous joy, most likely brought on by her survial.

Mie · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 11:08 pm

"I seee," conversed Jam with a nod. Her arms were folded neatly behind her back as she rolled neatly from heel to toe and back. Although half-eavesdropping on the other conversation, a gradual grin slowly spread into a mischievous smile that so desperately attempted to deny its nature, it looked like some horrendously distorted, undulating half-smile, half frown as she looked back to Caz.

"You guys celebrated being alive with ice cream?" asked the monkey with a largely disproportionate ratio of undertone to tone.

Diluss · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 11:28 pm

"...You're welcome."

Greens · Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2011 11:42 pm

Caz looked like she was about to say something, but apparently decided that she didn't have enough air to say it, judging by the way she paused for breath. "...Well," she subsequently added. Going by how the corners of her smile seemed tugged up by invisible fishhooks, and the way her eyes suddenly seemed like magnets of identical polarity to Jam's, it may have been apparent the mole could have known what Jam was potentially leading to.

"First we had to head back to the hotel for the money, and weeeee... ehehended up stayin' a while on-"

"Hey Caz," Ace blurted for whatever reason. "Why don't you show her that important thing you found?"

For a moment, she looked behind her with her trademark pouted lips of confusion, but soon enough, the raised brows of understanding washed over her facade. "Oh! Right-- er, that's-- mhmm, yes..."

With her smile now sans teeth, the mole reached behind her, and produced something that would certainly look very familiar to Jam: A small, white gem in a jagged cast. The 'lightning' half of her once inseparable lightning ring.

"I couldn't find the other piece..." she admitted soberly. "But, I thought you'd like to have this much."

Mie · Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2011 12:57 pm

Jam had to concede that based on what she knew about Caz alone led her to believe that sentence probably finished with something akin to, "we had a pillow fight, got feathers everywhere, and splurged on room service," but based on what she knew about Ace (or lack thereof), she couldn't find it in herself to be too curious, especially when the conversation turned to potentially pertinent important things Caz found.

Of course, her very nearly one track mind inclined her towards the thought that they'd impossibly found the very trophy she'd come to search for, but for whatever reason -- perhaps its relative size to the size of size of the wave it was lost in, combined with the distance probably fell -- the little lightning shaped gem glinting out of the mole's palm seemed to be the last thing she expected to see.

The primate's jaw hung open in disbelief, and her brows crinkled discerningly, as though her eyes were second guessing themselves. For a solid chunk of time, she just stood there, staring at it. Eventually, she gingerly plucked the gem from Caz's hand, curled her fingers around it, and quite suddenly (and perhaps uncharacteristically), threw both arms around other girl in a rare, but brief show of genuine, unchecked appreciation.

"Thank you," mumbled the monkey. "I didn't think I'd ever see it again."

Something was bound to go right (Ch. 2: Day 13) [Epilogue]

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