After the frantic concert music bowling Grean across the Cafe dance floor, Grean attempted to talk with Tahlia, his supposed daughter. She was just putting away her guitar on her back when he came up to her.
"Excuse me," he said.
Tahlia whipped around. She glared at him.
"I'm tired of people asking me out!," she snarled. "Every time a concert is over, I get asked out by some pinprick shithead noob!"
"No, no," Grean insisted, "I'm not asking you out."
Tahlia's anger diminished. "Oh?" she asked.
"Yeah," Grean said. "I just wanted to ask you where you were born, and when, because if it's one of the planets in the Great Cowl of Clockwork then I might have been involved."
Tahlia stared at him. Then realization hit her. It hit her very fast and caused her to scream and punch Grean in the face. Grean sprawled backwards, then scrambled up.
"You abandoned me!," she raged. "You left me on the planet with an armada closing in. We had to live under the armada for years, until I went away into the future and made my living! But it was miserable!"
"If I did," said Grean, "I never meant-"
There was an explosion from the main room. Grean and Tahlia looked over their shoulders. They ran into the dance room. There was a conspicuous hole blasted into the wall. The lighted tiles near the impact had been broken, blasted, melted, and generally smashed to bits. The lights were scattered, and some had even flown back into the back wall and pierced right through. But there were no enemies.
Grean was just looking at a suspicious OBCer who was standin near the hole with a guilty look on his face when the OBCer's throat was slit by an invisible force. The OBCer collapsed, bleeding and quite clearly dead.
"The enemy's invisible," Grean said to Tahlia. "We should set aside our differences and find this guy, or girl, or whatever."
"I still hate you," said Tahlia, but they still took out their stored weapons. Grean had his deletion hammer, or delhammer. Tahlia had a rocket launcher. They both fired or swung at patches of empty air. All the while more people were being killed by the invisible enemy. Then two people were killed at once. Grean saw this and called to Tahlia, "There are more than one of them. We can split up and track them down."
"Here," called a voice, and Grean saw Ketsuban with a paintball gun. He handed the paintball gun to Grean. Grean eyed it.
"Why?" he asked.
"An invisible dude is still solid," Ketsuban said. "So I think we could use the paint to expose the noob."
"Good idea," Grean said, "but how are we going to cover the whole room?"
"Watch," Ketsuban said. He pulled the trigger of his, and a spray of paintballs shot out like shot from a shotgun. They landed and revealed nothing. "See," said Ketsuban, "he wasn't there. But he's somewhere..."
A player had his throat slit, not just slit but actually decapitated. Both Grean and Ketsuban pulled their triggers and the paint sprayed onto the dead corpse and the remaining users. But not, Grean noted, on the invisible man or woman or whoever this unknown assailant was. He shot again, and this time when he shot a small splotch appeared in midair. The splotch, halfway into slitting someone's throat, paused. There was a slight rustle as a finger wiped away the splotch. But this finger actually amplified the splotch, so now there was a streak hanging in midair. Grean now took out his delhammer.
"It's visible," he said to Tahlia. "Let's kill it."
"Yes," said Tahlia. They shot and beat at the splotch as it now ran away for cover under a table. They surrounded the table and Tahlia shot a rocket at the invisible assassin. The rocket hit and exploded in a small fireball. The assassin's pieces shot everywhere, now revealed to be a Noob with a couple wrist daggers and a cloaking device.
"OBC noob," said Ketsuban
As the pieces stopped moving the remaining people slowly resumed their partying. The music started up again.
Almost as soon as the music started up there came a roar from the tarmac outside the Iron Cafe MK2, and then a thud as something large and heavy collided with the surface. Grean and Tahlia stood tensed like bowstrings.
That last statement, that they were "as tense as bowstrings", can be ignored, because from experience all species know that the tenseness associated with impending doom makes a bowstring look like it's completely stoned.
The walls shook. The roof quivered, and flakes of plaster began to fall on people's heads making them look as though they had dandruff.
Then a gigantic man came in. He looked as though he was made of pure iron, but there was no happy glint about him as he lunged into the room and started to kill indescriminantly. Grean grabbed Ketsuban and Blackrose (who had been standing nearby) and hurled himself under a table. Tahlia stopped, looking up at the man, and opened her mouth in what could possibly have been her last scream if Grean hadn't grabbed her leg and pulled her under.
"This must have come from some sort of factory on Admin Island," Grean said. "Admins are the only people who can make people like this."
"Can we pick up a signal?" asked Blackrose.
"Uh, maybe," said Grean. He crawled out from under the table towards a mobile signal finder machine lying facedown on the ground. The big guy turned to him and shot a ball of hot air at his face. It hit his arm instead, and Grean experienced hot pain. He yelled and ducked back under.
"The guy's still out there," he said. "The only thing worse than that is if he were invisible."
"Thank Baszucki he's not," Tahlia said. "Hey," she added a moment later, "he's gone."
Sure enough the iron guy was gone. Grean stole out into the wrecked room. Shuria was sitting in a corner, singing drunken songs. A receding trail signalled the departure of the aggressor.
"Where's that signal finder," Grean whispered to himself. He spotted it embedded an inch into the floor and picked it up gingerly. He flipped open the top, and the screen lit up with text saying WHAT SIGNAL DO YOU WISH TO FIND? ENTER LOCATION.
Grean typed, NEW ROBLOXIA, and the screen flashed with hundreds of seperate sublocations. Grean looked down the list until he spotted a location titled ADMIN ISLAND. He clicked on the link, and a map of the island appeared. On the bottom right hand corner there was a factory with the label ADMIN FACTORY. Grean clicked on this, then with some deft keystrokes hacked into its main databanks and tweaked a few variables.
"There," he said. "Easy enough to find a file labeled 'Iron Man' and replace it with 'Noobcake'!" Then as the Cafe suddenly plummeted very very fast towards Robloxia he dropped the signal finder and crawled under the table again.
