Chapter 4

[Here we go again]

-:-

The Garage

Kzyil Plateau, Planet Veldin

-:-

It was about 11am the next morning, and I was feeling completely bored.

The early morning hours were what I could call "busy": at 9am, I began work on a job I had gotten yesterday evening which involved fixing up some guy's hoverboard that wasn't doing what it's namesake says -hovering. I spent at least 45 minutes on that, followed by a few minor household chores which lasted about 25 minutes, before Clank sent me off to clean up the garage. The garage cleaning itself took the rest of my time until 11, when Clank came and brought some food for me.

After that, the day itself pretty much hit dead slow: there were no new jobs to keep me busy -other than the one I had already received payment from. Everything had been completed within those 3 hours, surprisingly. I could even call it a record. But now my day was full of blank slots, and I found myself plastered on a small makeshift chair in the garage, leaning on one of my mini work tables with my cheek resting on the palm of my gloved hand and sighing loudly. I detest being bored, so I kept my eyes focused at the normal average scenery going on outside and began to count how many clouds there were in the sky.

Zero, zlitch, nada.

Yay...

I heard my stomach growl slightly. I peered down to my other hand which held a cup full of tea that my pal Clank had prepared for me earlier in the day. Beside the small breakfast sandwich I ate, it wasn't enough; I hadn't touched my tea. It was still full -not because it was bad, it was pretty good tea- but because I wasn't in the mood to drink it, even if my stomach was growling.

All it did was bring back memories about the time I had recently recovered from being sick...

-:- -:- -:-

'Ratchet, you need to take this.'

I woke up from a light sleep, poking out from a small hole I created out of my blue blankets. My eyes were blinded and I could feel the small pain that comes with an intense exposure to a light source but it didn't last long. It took just a slight minute to readjust to the filter light that shone through a small circular window so it didn't bother me. At least this side effect was decreasing little by little, and I was regaining my strength, luckily.

When I was able to see, I happened upon Clank up in front of me, standing on what I could only guess was a small box to reach my side of the bed. In his mechanical robotic hand he held out a pinkish red liquid, it's heat visable by the steam coming out.

I frowned.

"It's hot, Clank...do I need to drink this?"

He nodded, nudging the tea closer. "It will make you feel better, Ratchet."

Sigh. "Yea, that's true.. but I don't need to drink this stuff everyday, pal. The doc said I just need to rest. Nothing more, so don't worry too much."

Clank frowned a little, and his saddened face made me feel bad for trying to refuse. But it was too much already, I didn't want to keep drinking the sickly sweet beverage anymore. I've already been drinking it for the past week and it was driving me crazy.

I watched as he looked down, placing the cup on a bedside drawer. There was silence afterwards; he kept his gaze down and away from me. I could tell he was trying to say something as he remained silently looking at what seemed to be a small piece of paper on the floor , but he was trying to find the words to say it. I just looked away and lay down on the bed again. Just focused instead on the patterns created on the covers on me.

"I missed you, you know." Clank said suddenly.

I smiled. "I know you did. I missed you too, pal-"

"You do not get it."

I stopped talking and frowned. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him staring at me as he continued speaking.

"We all missed you, Ratchet...we worried about your health. Do you know how long we had stayed with you when we were allowed access to your room at last?"

Pause. "...a lot, I'm guessing."

"I called Talwyn and Sasha -Quark came on his own when he found out by word of reporters. They were all worried...we could not even leave the hospital."

I stayed silent. I had something witty to say to that, but I didn't know where Clank was going with this so I kept it buried for now.

Clank looked up at the ceiling. "We thought that you were going to lose your struggle, Ratchet. I thought that I was going to lose a friend. I do not know what I would do if you had passed away. That is why I am worried, even if you have been released and checked out. I want to make sure that you are stronger, for all of us. Especially for Miss Talwyn."

There was silence once more in the room, and somehow I didn't like it. His words struck a chord in me, and I fought to keep back my tears as I pictured how sad they would have been. Just the thought alone made the room grow dull and depressing. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in.

"I think I get where you're going, and I give. Can you pass me the cup, pal?"

He smiled at me, and I laughed in return...

-:- -:- -:-

I kept my eyes focused on the red intensity of the tea water, smiling in a dream-like way before bursting into laughter as images of what happened next during that time flashed in my mind's eye.

Funny how I didn't release somebody actually staring at me the whole time.

"What's so funny, may I ask?"

I quit laughing to look up at the direction of the voice. In front of me stood a medium sized, average build stranger- a male Cazarian, I guessed- staring at me with his backpack slung over his back and sporting what seemed like an 'Archaeologist" styled khakis getup that reminded me of Talwyn's dad. He seemed amused.

"Nothing.." I downed my tea. "Uh..Just thinking about something. Are you here for a job? How long had you been standing there?"

The Cazarian slyly shook his head and made his way in. "No, no no, I don't need any repair work done -I'm actually an inventor, I'll have you know. And I've been standing here for about...6 minutes. Maybe."

An inventor? Interesting...

I put down my cup down on my work table before speaking. "That's cool. So am I -in a way. What's an inventor doing on this backwater planet? I'm pretty sure it's not about my electro-shock scatter bat I made out of boredom...unless it is. Then I would love to have it patented."

The Cazarian smiled

"Um no...I came to ask for help with something. Happened upon this shabby place when I landed...thought I could ask the residents about a specific location..." he replied as he set down his backpack and moved closer to my area. I shifted over slightly, a little unnerved by his approach. But as soon as I was about to say what he had wanted, I felt my hands being jerked away by his and he shook then hard with sudden excitement. I nearly fell from my seat in the process.

"...and I'm surprised I ran into you!" He exclaimed with pearls of laughter. "What a miracle, huh? Out of all the people I could ask, I happened to run into you! The galaxy's heroes - at least one of them, though. It's an honor! Hahaha!"

I joined in shaky laughter as he kept on shaking my hand up and down while giving me a happy grin. The whole meeting to the point was getting kinda weird, especially with this guy yelling like crazy just because he met me. But then again it was pretty a normal reaction for me, especially with Clank's and my reputation for saving the galaxy from constant danger when it hit. I guess it didn't faze me that much, but being singled out alone was still kinda new to me. I'm just not a "famous people" person to like the attention.

At that moment, Clank walked into the garage from the living room after hearing the guy's loud remarks to investigate. I thought he was just going to give a small wave and then walk back, but as soon as he saw who I was talking too, he ran over to my side with a smile.

"You are the Archeologist Talos Seraph!," he exclaimed as he shook the guy's hand.

"Wait, Wha?" I interjected. "I thought you were an inventor!"

The Cazarian -Talos- looked at us before giving a great big booming laugh that surprised me a little.

"Yes, I am, Ratchet," he assured as he placed a firm hand on my shoulder and partially hugged me. "But I'm also an Archeologist-"

"-albeit not a well-known one," Clank told me before turning his attention to our guest. "You have just started into this career, am I right? I have heard about you on the news recently -most importantly about your research into an unlimited power source from long ago. I heard your papers have been rejected by the Historical societies you have been working with."

"Yes, yes...I'm sure you have, little one," Talos replied dryly.

He then began muttering silently to himself about something I couldn't make out. It was eerily weird for some reason, and I ended up looking at Clank, doing hand/face signs to show how completely amused -in a sense- I was about this guy's total change in face when he mentioned the rejected papers. Clank shrugged back in response, before deciding to change topic -somewhat.

"Is there anything we could help you with?" the small robot asked.

Talos snapped out of his muttering parade and stood silently. His eyebrows furrowed; I could tell he was thinking hard about what to respond back with, so I helped him along.

"You said somethin' about needing help with direct-"

Talos's face lit up. "Oh yes! I needed directions to the cave!"

The Cazarian proceeded to move things out of the way from my work table. We watched as he placed his bag on the top and went digging inside for something. He pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper; very old due to the yellowing of the edges and some tattered parts. There was a string that held the paper in a rolled up position, and as he untied it, he smiled at us.

"Well, as you both know now, I'm an Archaeologist." He reiterated.

We both nodded in unison to show that we were listening.

Talos continued. "Lemme backtrack first: I happened upon this piece of paper during one of my travels. A colleague of mine happened to receive this paper from some odd blue fella who happened to be nearby fixing some type of rotor-shutter panels outside of his workplace-"

Odd..blue fella...?

"By "odd dude", are you by any chance referring to the plumber?," Clank asked.

Talos's face turned to that of confusion. "The Plumber? Whose that?"

Huh. "Well, If the guy you're talkin' about is blue, has hands for manual labour and seems overweight, then it's the guy we both know as the Plumber," I said, thinking about the times we had encountered the guy. "You know it's him if you remember seeing his crack showin'."

Clank shook his head at me when I said this, and I laughed. "What? Its true, pal. Can't deny that."

Talos laughed. "Well, then I guess it was. My friend did say that he told the man to pull his pants up... What a very mysterious guy, I guess. But either way, I still have no idea how this plumber managed to get his hands on this paper, but I'm glad he did. This is an exciting find for me!"

The Cazarian began to dance around the room, filled with glee and excitement. It kind of reminded me of Quark's dance when he had to go to the bathroom three weeks ago. At the time I was upset that he managed to get a hold of Alister's Praetorian wrench during the time I was sick. When I happened to pass by the wall where I kept it hanged, I noticed scratch marks, freshly made. In retaliation, I purposely stayed locked up for about an hour or so, using the excuse of diarrhea just so I could take my jollies out of the situation before Clank kicked me out with science. I laughed, slightly amused about the thought as we waited for the archeologist to stop and collect himself.

When he did, he excused himself for a 'quickie' and left off to use the bathroom, leaving us alone with the map.

Clank nudged my arm once the guy disappeared through the hallway. "Ratchet, you may want to take a closer look at this."

I looked at him. "Do I?"

"Yes," he said. "It has something to do with the Lombaxes."

Normally, by how this whole meeting was going, I wouldn't have bothered to take a glance at whatever Clank happened to find interesting. 90% of interesting things he pointed out were more science oriented -things I'm not that into. 10% of what he pointed out did catch my interest: mechanical blueprints, hoverboard racing gossip, the latest in new weapons released. Anything that had to do with what I loved doing: fixing things. Anything...including thing that had to do with my kind, the Lombaxes.

This here making the correlation between Lombaxes and big secret things like the Dimensionator, for example. That in itself explains why I was interested, and worried too.

This being a piece of old important paper and a guy looking for something who was an Archaeologist...my ears perked; I leaned closer to the table and the paper. I noted that it was a map: On it there were lots of scribbles with blue or black ink scrawled next to what I remembered from Talwyn were Lombax words, lots of circles with x's on certain sections where there were bigger circles that Clank pointed out were planets in the Solana Galaxy, due to the star system design on the paper itself.

I noted a planet that looked like Veldin. It was the only one not x'ed out by the barrage of ink and I pointed it out.

"It is Veldin," Clank said as he read the Cazarian language next to Lombax, "and the cave he is looking for...is located about 216 miles west from Kyzil Plateau."

My brow furrowed. "Enryax Cave...the outback wastelands?"

He nodded. "It appears so. But why would he-"

We both heard heavy footsteps and dropped our discussion.

"So you know where it is? Can you both take me there?" Talos said as he ran back to us and snatched the paper from the table before either Clank or I could continue reading it further. "I would pay you-"

I picked up my hoverboots from their place on a small shelf above my candy jar and began to make my way towards the hallway of the garage entrance. As I did this, I felt eyes staring at me, and I smiled as my actions grabbed the attention of the archeologist/inventor and shut him up.

"I'd like to be paid with a tag along -if you don't mind, of course. Because it seems your little journey might keep me entertained...for now."


Enryax Cave

The Outback, Kyzil Plateau

Planet Veldin

-:-

The trip took about 46 minutes, which was funny because when Clank and I normally came here, it took only half that time span.

After I came down from changing clothes in our room, I grabbed my omniwrench and closed up shop as fast I as I could. We then made our way towards the Plateau's mechanical bridge that connected our area to the neighboring steppes, where the planet's shabby fast food joints and other city like places were established here on the outback.

...But the bridge wasn't on. I ended up having to use my hovershot that I also had clamped to my gloved arm and swing my way to the other side to get the power back on so that we could continue. I banged my knee on the landing though, which I then received a comment from Talos about my agility and had no idea whether it was sarcasm or real.

About halfway through crossing the main streets, Talos asked me for the seventh time in a row why we were going away from the mountain like area that we saw on the Plateau and steppes, and heading south.

"There's another way that leads to where you want to go," I said with a small rise in tone as I struggled to maintain my cool. "... but that's blocked by a...recent...landslide that occurred..."

Clank stopped walking and looked at me. "Was this your doing, by any chance?" He asked with a frown.

I quickly looked the other way and whistled to avoid the outburst that was going to happen next.

"Ratchet! I told those people that you were not capable of blowing a hole the size of a continent just so you would get your revenge! They cancelled the monthly hoverboard challenge because of that incident!"

Talos laughed as Clank shook his head and began to list off things that were going to be out of my reach for the next 3 weeks as punishment.

The next 34 minutes were then spent talking about each other -or more like explaining ourselves more in depth to Talos. I talked about how I met Clank, my interests and our countless adventures that involved saving a girl who then double crossed us, a small ego-maniacal Tachyon and everything else that was worth mentioning for the moment. In exchange, Talos talked about his most recent invention that he was trying to get into stores and some small historical stuff he had done.

He somehow avoided talking about what he was looking for, though. That raised some red flags.

After walking through more mini rocks and jumping across a few gaps of the land, we all found ourselves facing a large rocky terrain littered with what seemed to me like dozen of broken ship parts, hoverboard parts, repression batteries, chairs and other materials I had no idea what they were. This place looked like a massive garage dump, or like the remnants of an explosive battle. It was just totally littered than what I remembered from the last time I visited this place.

Talos's destination -Enryax Cave- lay beyond the tattered wasteland. Joy.

"Wow, what happened here?" The Cazarian breathed out with surprise as he gawked at the amount of junk laying around.

"This? this is what you get when you have thrill seekers and crazy people from Veldin come here when they're bored," I said.

"Crazy people..." His face quickly turned to that of concern. "Oh, no...Did they go inside the cave by any chance?"

I placed my hands on my hips and surveyed the scene. "Yea... but I'm pretty sure no one found anything worth mentioning." I sighed. "We would have known of it in the form of news, headlined: "Death at the hands of mother nature", or something to that effect. Besides, the caves themselves are pretty unstable..."

Talos titled his head a little in confusion when my voice faltered slightly.

"Ratchet had first hand experience," Clank clarified.

"Yea...plus some poor sap died by rock while on a thrill seeking adventure inside. Hence 'Enryax' Cave. In memory to a fallen hoverboarder," I added with a shiver.

Talos nodded simply.

"Ah, you did not mention that, Ratchet." Clank titled his head slightly in response.

"Yea...well, there's a lot of things I didn't say outright..." I muttered.

We left it at that.

As we began our trek towards the opening of the cave, my pal brought up the long story about me and my daring trip inside. I grew slightly bored and began to poke around the littered mounds to find if there was anything worth my interest. I found some small rifle barrels that probably belonged to a heavy weapon, some board game pieces and a moldy piece of sandwich that someone didn't bother to finish eating after the first bite. I made a mental note to come back for the latter later. The place was a gold mine for spare parts.

It was during my search though that I saw something shine nearby, and big smile broke across my face when I saw what it was. My tail began to swish rapidly and I jumped in excitement.

"Oh hey, look!" I laughed aloud and pointed rapidly to the object. "That's my makeshift hoverboard from a while back! And it's still in one piece... barely! Clank, it's been a long time!"

Clank and Talos looked at me; I could tell they were both worried about what I do for fun when I kept singling out several other junk of were mine laying around during out walk.

7 minutes of miscellaneous explanations later, we arrived at the entrance to the caves.

"Well, here we are, guys." I waved my hand over to the black hole in front of us. "Whose going in first? Because there's no way in hell, I'm stepping in without assurance that I'm not walking into a giant deathtrap."

None of us made a move. I'm guessing we were all scared to walk in.

"Its dark." Talos commented. "Very dark.:

"I know. It gets darker the more you go in." I added, flashbacks about my endeavor passing by my eyes.

"The natural formation of the rock is unstable; are you sure whatever you are looking for is in here?" Clank asked worriedly. "It is quite dark."

Talos slowly took out his paper map. He muttered quietly to himself about hoping that he was wrong for a few before smiling at us with a nod.

Great.

As he placed back the map and rummaged for his flashlight, Clank pulled me to the side and we both talked amongst ourselves in low whispers.

"Do be careful, Ratchet." Clank warned as he took out my mini shoulder clamp light from his small compartment. "I do not have a good feeling about this."

"Great, that makes two of us."

I double checked that the light was pinned securely on my shoulder strap before turning around towards the cave. It was big, and its eerie look made my blood run cold. I had to force back a lump in my throat before I was able to even move my shaking legs forward and follow Talos. I mentally began to chant a mantra to calm myself down.

Nothing bad's going to happen, everything will be alright...nothing bad's going to happen...everything will be alright...

I only hoped I was right.

[Here we go again-END]


Author's Note:

Sorry for the late upload! I had a bunch of things to take care of, and I also had to rewrite some parts and edit out a few things...college stuff and comic book stuff is a pain, and I failed Orgo chem midterms...with a 21% sigh...

So this is the 3rd chapter (4th, in this website's case) I hope it was interesting to read. We are now slowly getting to the interesting part...and it will take off on its own afterwards. I have the whole story progression planned out with mini sticky notes!

By the way...I made up Enryax Cave, but that's because I needed a setting. The outback is made up, but sound legit, yeah?

Thank you to those 4 people who commented on my story: Vengarl, Bebuzzu, StarRider152 and Crescent Moon. I also had some new people who commented: Destiny (a guest, if you are reading, ty :)) and Feonix Nightshade (who also faved and commented my story Obsidian mind) THANK YOU TWO! I will do my best to make this story interesting to read...hopefully you guys will like it (I might even do a part 2 and 3 soon after)

The reference was from a Black Lagoon line said by Balalaika. shes boss.

now, as usual: READ AND REVIEW! God knows how much I like it when people comment on this, and it gets me going through my hellish days full of schoolwork and comic work. Plus its cool when people enjoy it. TO ALL THOSE PEOPLE WHO PASS BY AND READ THIS: I know when you do^^, please comment if you like! it motivates me to keep on going!

Reminder: this story will have references to events that happened before or after Obsidian Mind, so read that before this.

Also, Ratchet and Clank plus other characters (minus Talos) are not mine-Insomniac

-AUselessMicroFluff

PS: I hope to have the next chapter done on friday (hell yea, Xursday!) . If not, then saturday I WILL POST! (HOPEFULLY)