Crash felt the ground rush to meet him far too quickly. He landed on his feet, but lost his balance and tripped to land inelegantly onto his stomach. Gasping for glorious oxygen, Crash felt wetter than he ever wanted to feel again. Rolling over to lay on his back, he stared up into the worried face of Coco standing over him. He groaned.
"I hate water."
Coco breathed out an obvious breath of relief, and fell to her knees beside him. She wrinkled her nose.
"You look awful."
Crash managed a half-hearted smile between desperate inhales. "Gee, thanks Sis."
Coco helped Crash up into a hunched sitting position. Crash grimaced as he squeezed buckets of water out of his hair.
"I'm getting too old for this."
"By human calculations Crash, you're only a few months older than eighteen years." Aku piped up from behind him.
Coco smacked her brother hard on the back with a large grin. "Yeah Bro, you're at the height of your game."
Crash shook off the water still clinging to his fur, and then shakily got to his feet.
"So, can I get a towel or something? Or am I just going to stand here and drip dry?"
"Well, if you get going to your next destination, you'll dry pretty quick I think." Coco said as she wandered to her laptop.
Crash still felt completely sopping. "Yeah?"
"You're after the fire shard next." Coco explained, rummaging through some boxes. "And it's located in the most obvious spot ever. Inside a volcano."
Coco tossed Crash a towel, and the latter thankfully dried off his wet fur.
"Uh huh?"
"According to my research, this volcano had been dormant for quite a while. It only recently became active, directly after the time some secret forces started mining some valuable ore down there."
"That right?" Crash was only half-listening.
"This is the difficult part. It seems that Cortex has interfered in the process, that or he was behind it all along. Anyway, I think he has a hint where the fire shard is, and so there's a good chance they'll be setting a trap."
"Usually works out that way."
Coco clicked the side of the keyboard in contemplation. Crash finished with the towel and had tossed onto a nearby table, and then started off toward the door. Coco whirled around.
"Where are you going?"
"Taking a break."
Just before Crash reached the open door, he felt an iron grip grasp his arm. He rotated around slowly and swallowed in fear. Coco was glowering at him.
"Come on Brother. We're half way done now, you've gotta keep going."
Crash was about to give her a perfectly legitimate reason why he deserved a nap, when Coco dragged him back to the portal.
"You're very strong…" Crash whimpered.
"You have to hurry Crash. Cortex may find that shard at any moment, and then Uka will probably destroy it."
"That's correct." Aku agreed. "If Uka Uka finds any of those Elemental shards he will be quick to dispose of them as quickly as possible. If he does, there is no way to imprison the spirit."
"I'd say that two Elementals on the planet are not as bad as four."
"True, but these remaining two are Py-ro and Lo-lo. They are the most powerful Elementals of all."
There was a moment of silence, and then Crash dropped his chin in complete and utter dejection.
"I…just got rid of the weaker ones…did I?"
"Don't feel bad Crash. You're doing your best." Coco offered in a sugary tone that made Crash cringe.
Crash stood there under a black thunder cloud a moment more, and then finally straightened up.
"Alright then, let's get this show on the road shall we?" He turned to Coco. "What's the plan?"
"First," Coco said with a slight smile. "Maybe you should take those goggles off."
Crash flipped the massive things off his head in a rapid second.
"Now what?"
Coco was trying her darndest not to smile, pressing her lips together in stubbornness. "Okay, well, since you'll be cruising through the belly of a volcano, I made you a suit to withstand steaming hot temperatures. I mapped out the volcano and the only place that isn't guarded or under surveillance is a tunnel that goes right over a canal of lava. They obviously assume no one will ever get in that way."
"Which is understandable, all things considered."
"Aha!" Coco exclaimed as Crash jumped. "But they don't have what we have."
"And what do we have?"
Coco revealed what looked to be a jumble of sticks thrashed together and a less-than impressive power pack. Coco held it before her with stars in her eyes. Crash shrugged.
"Still waiting…"
"It's a copter-pack meathead." Coco snarled. "It'll allow you to hover over the steaming waves of lava and into the factory without being noticed. And I'll want a little recognition; this is the coolest thing I've invented yet."
Coco looked so extremely proud of herself that Crash didn't have the heart to make a witty reply. Crash smirked instead.
"Alright, how's it work?"
"Turn the handles right to go right, turn the handles left to go left, pull them up to go down, and down to go up. To go forward, you just need to squeeze down the triggers on the bars. Got it?"
Crash stored this information away for later, which was a smarter way of saying he already forgot. He clapped his hands together.
"Anything else?"
"Yeah, put this on."
Crash's jaw dropped when he saw the bright red suit Coco displayed before him. He finally recovered after a speedy lifetime of shock.
"No way."
Coco glared hard at him. "Crash, you're gonna put this on."
"Like hell I will."
After a momentary struggle, Coco was on Crash's back and pressing her brother's face into the floor. Crash, on his stomach with both arms pinned behind him, kicked his feet while wailing, "Uncle! Uncle!"
Aku stepped in with a disapproving look on his face.
"Children, we are wasting valuable time with this. For all we know Cortex could be moments away from uncovering that shard. We must move quickly."
The siblings sobered, and Coco bounced back to her feet.
"Alright Crash, get a move on."
Crash lifted Coco's invention in one arm, and grumbled while he slipped the ugly suit over his pants. The zipper reached all the way up to his chin, and he felt an immediate strangling sensation.
"Okay, I've got the stupid thing on so let's do this."
With a scowl, Crash marched into the platform dragging the copter-pack behind him. As he stood there wearing an irritated frown, he turned toward Aku and Coco.
"You two better not be just sipping tea while I'm off braving the earth's elements."
"We're rooting for you big brother!" Coco said with a beaming smile.
Her enthusiasm forced Crash to smirk reluctantly, and he returned her thumbs-up gesture. Coco activated the device, and the swirling lights appeared once again to whisk Crash away to the farthest corners of the planet.
--
It took Crash a quarter of an hour to find out where the hell he was supposed to go. In that time, he had nearly got himself discovered (it was lucky for him the jerks were incompetent), nearly dropped Coco's invention in a pool of lava, and nearly tripped and almost flew off the side of a cliff. He found the stupid tunnel through, and it looked far more frightening than his mental picture had been. Unwilling to waste anymore time, Crash pulled the strings off Coco's contraption. Almost immediately the pile of junk sprung into a quaint copter. Crash grinned. That sister of his was a keeper, that was for sure.
Crash strapped the belt around his waist to secure the copter, and then took the two levers in his hands. He was not really looking forward to this.
"You better be careful with my baby Crash."
Crash jumped at the sound of Coco's voice. He had forgotten he had also replaced his radio. Gosh darn it. Now he'd be forced to listen to his chatty sister.
"Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it."
Crash stepped toward the tunnel, and took a deep breath as he gathered what nerves he had left.
"Are you in there yet?"
"No. Stop distracting me."
"Are you even in the tunnel?"
"Working on that."
"Crash! What have you been doing?"
Crash grimaced. He wasn't in a mood to detail his rather embarrassing encounters.
"Coco, if you don't put a cork in it you're going to have to pry me out of this tunnel with a spatula."
"Alright, I get it. Sheesh."
Crash took another deep breath after the little interruption. He clicked his tongue as he looked into the path of fire.
Well, here goes nothing.
Crash clicked a button, and the copter whirred to life. Crash did as instructed, pushing down on the lever to rise up into the air.
"Ayii!" Crash exclaimed as a tickly feeling attacked his nerves.
He leveled himself, and then leaned forward and pressed the handlebars to hover forward. One thing he would say, the suit turned out to be a good idea. Even though his head was exposed, there was some kind of cooling mechanism built into the suit that kept everything cool. Yet the fumes from the lava were doing murder to his eyes. Blinking back tears, Crash subconsciously noticed a pair of tinted goggles handing from the hinge of the handle bar. He scowled, and snatched the goggles to place them over his eyes.
"Thanks for the head's up Coco."
"What?"
"Never mind."
Crash concentrated as well as he could on the task at hand, since it would take all his incredible skill not to bounce off the sides of the rock and into the lava below. He was tempted to ask Coco exactly how much gas was in this thing, but he didn't think he wanted to hear the answer so he refrained. Soon enough he started graduating from plain rock walls to walls with wire metal grates.
Well, I'm making progress at least.
Crash was hot, tired and impatient. He wasn't sure if he'd been at this for twenty minutes or an hour. He suspected the latter though, and he was absolutely dying of thirst. Yet he continued to hover through the tunnel that seemed to be getting longer and longer. He had been deciding on whether or not to have a chat with Coco, but he decided against that. Just navigating through this narrow took all his concentration. To top it all off, Crash could hear a sharp beeping coming from his power pack. Crash bit his lip and sighed.
Come on, not now.
Crash squinted to get a look ahead of him, and felt his pulse escalate when he saw that the tunnel was coming to an end. He was almost there! Crash leaned into the forward motion, hell bent on getting to that opening. The power pack continued to wail, but Crash ignored it.
Keep going sweetheart, you can make it.
Coco's invention began to putter with lack of fuel, but Crash was already just where he wanted to be. Ever so carefully, he eased the controls downward and touched down. Just as he did, he collapsed to his knees, utterly exhausted.
"Ugh, sweat stinks."
"What's that?"
"Why don't you build a bigger fuel tank?"