10 - REUNION

After Master Chief and Brain had exited the lab complex, the next destination on the list was Red Base. Along the way between these two locations was Brian's former base, Blue Base Iota. Brian wanted to ask Master Chief if it would be all right to visit them for a short while. Master Chief said nothing, so Brian decided that it would be fine.

Coming up on his former base, Brian could see the familiar two-story building connected by an intricate ramp system, with the same old gravity cannon allowing accessibility to the roof. Several dozen Blues were mulling about the area around the base entrance structure when Brian and Master Chief approached. Several of them looked up when they saw the two of them. "Brian?" one of them asked.

Brian nodded enthusiastically. The others rushed over to him. Immediately Brian and his old friends started to catch up on everything that had happened since Brian had left and joined the Yellow Army. Master Chief had flown past the base, but when it realized that Brian was no longer behind it, it rushed back and discovered the former Blue socializing among his several Blue friends. The orb gave a long roll of its single eye.

Brian was deeply engrossed in his conversation now. Everyone was making wild hand motions and laughing. Then a very loud throat clearing sound make everyone turn their heads. A Blue soldier wearing several paper metals scotch taped to his chest, and ravenously indulging on a microwave snack pastry, was attentively observing the group.

"Commander!" Brian shouted as he ran over to the soldier.

"Brian," the Commander of Iota Base acknowledged as Brian approached him. "It's good to see you." Then he put his hands at his sides. "You're Yellow now."

Brian nodded slowly. "Yeah. I joined them."

"The same Army who destroyed Kappa Base less than a week ago and also killed another hundred of my soldiers during the ensuing battle in the canyon the next morning."

"Um…yes," said Brian. "Well, I was actually kind of captured. I didn't go over to them of my own free will. But I'm really starting to like them. They have cookies. And waffles."

"Your voice is different also," said the Commander as he took in a particularly large bite of his pastry. His sentence came out somewhat slurred because he was talking with his mouth mostly full. "It's very deep, not normally pitched like us Blues still are."

Now that the Commander mentioned it, Brian agreed that his voice had changed. His tones were lower than he remembered them being, less sing-songy and more serious. "The other Yellows, my basemates, don't take their helium regularly," Brian explained. "Some of them, I don't think they breathe helium at all. It's almost like they don't need it or something. But I still take my helium. Whenever I can, at least. That part of life, here, has still stuck with me."

"There is still some Blue left in you!" the Commander exclaimed. He reached out and slapped Brain on the shoulder with his free hand. When he removed his glove, his attitude had changed slightly. "Speaking of Blue bases, I need to show you something. There's a movie I need you to see."

"Okay," said Brian. "I'd be happy to. It sounds fun."

Master Chief flew in front of Brian and shook itself, then looked towards the war torn bridge that led further towards Red Base.

"Oh, c'mon, Master Chief," said Brian. "It'll only take a little while. Isn't that right, commander?"

"Oh yeah. Not very long. Between ten minutes, maybe a couple of hours and a sleepover. Not too much time." He and Brian began walking towards Blue Base Iota's entrance structure, but Master Chief flew into the doorway and created a square wall, which it placed to block entrance.

"Master Chief, please!" whined Brian.

Master Chief shook itself and then pointed its eye back in the direction of the bridge.

"Whatever you are, I order you to remove that thing you placed," the Commander stated while taking a break from his pastry to observe the orb.

Brian sighed. "This is Master Chief," he explained to the Commander. "Some Greens I know found it in another universe. Then they left for something, and while they've been gone I made awesome friends with it."

"Okay," said the Commander while going back to chomping on his pastry because he had to think about what he had just heard and what to say. Eventually he settled on: "Can you tell it to move?"

"Master Chief, please move," Brian said to the orb. "This is important."

Master Chief was not convinced and stayed unmoving.

"Okay," the Commander said as he thought about what to do next. "It's news that someone wanted to relay to the Yellow-Green Alliance. By some people who had their sleepover interrupted at another Blue base."

Master Chief was still not convinced.

"Ummmm," said the Commander. He decided to go a little deeper into his explanation. "The information concerns something about being undercover and a bunch of Blue bases being destroyed and a giant floating hand."

At the sound of the last part of the sentence, Master Chief suddenly turned towards the door and dematerialized the square wall it had placed, then slowly floated inside the base entrance structure. Brain and the Commander looked at each other before following the orb inside. Brian realized he still had the parallel plate capacitor in his hands, and as soon as he did he turned to the guard at the entrance and plopped the contraption into his hands. "Here, hold this for me, will you?" Brian asked.

"Uhhhhhhhhh, okay," the guard replied in a slow but high pitched voice.

Brian, the Commander, and Master Chief continued into the base. The Commander led them to an elevator. The doors popped open and the three of them stepped/floated in. As the doors closed, the Commander explained: "We used to have the speakers in here rigged to play alarm claxons."

"Oh yeah!" Brian exclaimed. "I remember that. Did you ever get that figured out?"

"We did, actually," said the Commander. "It took us a while, but just last Tuesday we figured out what was going on and replaced it with something that's actually music. Y'know, most people have the idea of playing relaxing music in elevators because it puts everyone at ease. But this elevator started out different, and in the name of consistency we wanted to keep it different."

"So what did you replace the claxon with?" Brian asked.

As Brian finished asking his sentence, the speakers suddenly exploded with sound that was far louder than the claxons had ever been. Master Chief jolted in surprise. It was a constant blast of electric guitar and overly macho man shouting at the top of their lungs.

"Hard Metal Rock!" the Commander shouted.

"What?" Brian replied. "I can't hear you!"

"I said, Hard Metal Rock!" the Commander said again.

"You're as tall as a rock?" Brian shouted.

"Hard Metal Rock!" the Commander shouted a third time.

The music stopped just as suddenly as it had begun. Brian realized his ears were now ringing. Master Chief flew out of the doors as fast as it could the instant they opened. The Commander and Brian followed.

Once they were in the hallway, the Commander started to lead again. The path he led them down took them through several corridors. At a couple of points along the way, Brian came upon people he knew from when he had lived at the base, and decided to spend several moments socializing with them. This caused the length of the trip through Iota Base to last about ten times longer than it otherwise would have. Master Chief constantly tried to get Brian's attention. The orb could pick up basically any object, no matter how massive. But for whatever reason it could not pick up people…and right now, it was regretting this very much.

Finally, the three of them ended up where they had intended to go. At the end of the path, the group came to a small room that was filled with radio transmitters and monitors. As soon as both Brian and Master Chief had also made it inside the cramped room, the Commander turned and pointed to the largest of the computer monitors. "About six hours ago, we received a very important message that I really think you both need to listen to," he explained. "I could try explaining more, but I think the message itself will do a pretty good job of that." He orally smacked his microwave pastry in anticipation as he hit the PLAY button on one of the control panels.

The monitor filled with static, which soon resolved into the image of a helmeted face. The soldier's armor was colored blue, but his tacpad was the same variant that was worn by Green soldiers, and also seemed slightly out of place on the soldier's wrist, as though it had been hastily taken out and then reattached. It wasn't possible to see exactly what location the image was showing because the face and torso of the soldier took up so much of the screen. The sun could be seen in the background of the upper left part of the screen, but that was about it.

The soldier spoke: "This is Ferrero Rocher. I am currently stationed with Frizbee Rezah, and we are both undercover for the Green Army in Blue territory. What we have discovered here could easily change the face of the war even more than it already has. Whichever of you Blues is receiving this, I need you to relay this to the Green-Yellow Alliance as soon as you can. Find someone from either of those armies and let them know."

The undercover Green paused to take a few deep breaths. Then he continued: "About six days ago, our Falcon was shot down over Blue territory, and we crashed. We had to travel on foot for some time, until we came upon a Blue Command Post which we discovered had intel on the locations of all Blue bases in the Wilderness. There we met two Blues named Jim-Bob and Muffin, who we forcefully convinced to switch armor with. Now disguised in Blue attire, we originally planned to just keep a low profile until Green transports happened by us."

"But things didn't really go as planned. Just hours after Jim-Bob and Muffin had left, we encountered sightings of soldiers in red colored armor. This was, of course, before the Red Army had made its presence known, and so Rezah and I decided to investigate. Pursuing the Red soldiers while staying hidden, we discovered that the Red soldiers were hijacking Blue weapons supplies and taking them to a secret location, presumably to construct something. It took Rezah and I a few days, but we eventually were able to locate and stake out this location, which is an abandoned Blue warehouse that is about ninety kilometers northeast of the Halothrii Wilderness. Looking inside, we could see that these soldiers were taking the stolen Blue machinery through some kind of interdimensional portal."

"Undergoing a risky stealth mission, we managed to sneak through the portal. On the other side we found a giant metal hand. And I mean, it was huge. Even some classes of frigate in the Green Navy are smaller than this thing was. We haven't figured out what they plan to do with it yet. They were using the stolen machinery to add onto and continue building the hand. We also noticed similar portals around the hand, most of which lead to the other side of this planet. We figure that that is where the contingent of Reds we originally spotted came from. We couldn't gain that much intel on the operation, unfortunately. They had quickly rotating patrols on the other side of the portal, so we had to get out of there pretty quick."

"So for awhile after getting back and regrouping, we didn't really know what the heck to think about what we had just seen. That was two days ago. But just a few hours ago, we saw the hand again. On our planet's side of the portal. And it was floating."

Rocher took a few more deep breaths, then proceeded to talk. "It just hovered for awhile over this one Blue Base. Then it let loose with some kind of giant red laser. The whole place was just…gone. We barely got out alive ourselves. Then the hand proceeded to travel to more Blue bases. Destroyed them too. It's taking out a lot of this sector. I think what the Reds are doing is erasing any trace of the bases they stole machinery from. Trying to cover their tracks. They don't want the other armies to know that the hand is composed of stolen Blue machinery. But whoever gets this message, send this to the Green-Yellow Alliance. They need to know. The hand is a superweapon. And it has lasers. Oh my God were all screw-"

The Commander of Blue Base Iota hit the STOP key. "That's the end of the message," he sighed. "We did already know that bases are disappearing from our territory in the sectors northeast of here. But because Rocher specified that he also wanted the Green-Yellow Alliance to know, we decided to let the first Green or Yellow who came by this base see this message."

"The hand is composed of stolen Blue machinery," said Brian. "And it can fly and shoot lasers." He looked at Master Chief. "I think this might be bad."

"Sure thing," the Commander agreed as he chomped down on more of his microwave snack pastry.

"That was a valuable message," said Brain. "Me and Master Chief have some things to do, because we're on this really important mission that I thought was for a cheese sandwich. I'm not actually sure what it's for anymore. But as soon as we get back from it, and go back to this base of Yellows that I'm staying with, I'll let them know."

The Commander nodded. "Excellent."

As Brian began to head out of the room, the Commander then called to him, "Oh, and Brian?"

Brian turned. "Yeah?"

"It is good to see you again."

Brian nodded. "Yeah, you too Commander."

Brian and Master Chief exited the base and headed for the bridge, in the direction of Red Base. They were about halfway across the bridge when they realized that Brian had forgotten to pick up the parallel plate capacitor from that guard he had handed it to earlier. So they rushed back to Iota Base. Fortunately, the guard was still standing there holding it.

"Oh, hello," the guard greeted as soon as he saw them approach. "I've just been standing here, holding this for you. For half of an hour. Thank you for coming back."

Master Chief impatiently yanked the parallel plate capacitor out of the guard's grip and plopped it onto Brian's arms. Then the two of them started off for Red Base again. As they returned to the bridge, Brian noted that the structural integrity of the bridge had deteriorated significantly since he'd last been on it. Large sections of the bridge which had been there before now weren't, and the whole structure overall just didn't feel as stable as it once had.

Brian was thankful to be off of the bridge as soon as they had finished crossing it. Up ahead, he could see the giant wall perimeter that marked the courtyard of their intended destination: Red Base.