As promised, an entire chapter of Chaud, Zoet, and their Navis, going through a mission from the Underground NetBattlers. I'm launching straight into the mission right from the start of this chapter, because I can't be bothered to write a brief scene of Zoet choosing the mission (we already know how it works anyway, and Chaud's not likely to refuse when he can't read what other missions are available since Zoet could easily choose something else he doesn't like) or the two of them changing into their battle suits.
Rest assured it all happened, and it was suitably funny, so there we go.
Profiles!
/01ndi1falgd8
Virus.
/0784ncmxtbv
Flight.
/026mkj34tsh1
The map.
/01lqxk014x6q
And the battle suit.
I wrote an easy thing for it all last chapter, so I can just copy-and-paste it all without having to write everything out over and over again. I hope you guys are actually paying attention to them.
(If these links don't work/can't be seen, just PM me for the links and I'll give them to you personally, I'll be more than happy to!)
I don't own MegaMan Battle Network/NT Warrior, on with the show!
OOOOOO
Their latest mission was titled 'My Daughter Is Missing', and it had been posted by a worried father who thought that going to the police would bring too much attention.
"Thank you for coming so soon," he gushed, shaking Chaud's hand enthusiastically. When he went to shake Zoet's hand, she backed away a little, and he looked a little confused but didn't question it. "You Shades are always so busy, I was afraid you wouldn't come, but you did . . . Oh, thank you, thank you!"
They were wearing their battle suits. Chaud, despite looking through a black visor, could see clearly as if he wasn't even wearing it - a result of having ProtoMan downloaded into the suit, Zoet had explained. The Navis could control everything about it if they had to, from vision to air con, and the visors could also act as glasses for those who needed them.
The battle suits were very convenient.
"I wasn't even sure the email would get through," the man admitted as he led them into his house - a solid but small place near the edge of the Jungle District. "I mean, people say that the Shades will come if you know how to contact them, but that email address is . . . pardon the expression, it's a little shady."
"It has to be," Zoet pointed out. To Chaud's ears, her voice sounded exactly the same, but to anyone not wearing a battle suit connected to her communications system, her voice would have been altered. Chaud's voice as well. The battle suit disguise wouldn't do much good if people could recognise them by their voices, after all.
"Yes, I know," the man agreed. "I was just . . . Ah, here we go. This is my daughter."
He picked up a picture from the fireplace, of a man and a young girl standing side-by-side with their arms around each other and grins stretching across their faces. The man was their current client, and the young girl was obviously his daughter. The man handed it to Chaud so he could examine it.
"Seven years old," ProtoMan said in Chaud's ear, listing her description and storing it in the suit's memory for future reference. "Short blonde hair. Brown eyes. Pale skin."
"What was she wearing the last time you saw her?" Zoet asked the man.
ProtoMan went quiet as the man replied.
"Her favourite dress - it's such a pretty thing, green and frilly, she loves it so much," he sighed, and took the picture back from Chaud, placing it back onto the fireplace.
"Anything else that may help us to identify her?" Chaud spoke up.
"A green bow in her hair," the man said. "And green shoes. That . . . that's her favourite colour, green. She asked me to paint her entire room green, even asked for a green carpet."
"We'll find her," Zoet promised the man. "On our honour as Shades, we promise."
"We promise," Chaud echoed. That was sort of the 'begin mission' phrase, and so far Chaud had yet to say the full phrase for himself. Zoet had promised he could say it next time, if only because he was still trying to figure out when exactly he was meant to say it. She said it differed from operative to operative, but she preferred to say it after she'd met the client and gotten as much information about the mission as possible from them.
They let themselves out, leaving the man in the house to look at the picture of himself and his daughter forlornly, and made their way down the street. As they walked, they got a few looks from various passersby, but only quick looks. It seemed that Shades were respected enough by everyone that they could walk around the various districts without being questioned.
"The girl was last seen in the eastern sector of this district," Zoet said. Her voice seemed to come right from inside his own head, so Chaud guessed she was using private communications so there was no danger of anyone overhearing them.
He switched to private communications as well. "I have a question," he began. Zoet turned her head towards him, but he couldn't see her expression through her visor. "Why is a missing-person case listed as a regular mission? I thought this type of thing would be a mission given out by Kris or whoever."
"If it was something like a kidnapping, it would have been," Zoet replied. "But since we have no evidence that the kid's been kidnapped - not yet, anyway - it's being treated as a simple missing-person case, and therefore it's not so serious that it needs to be assigned to a specific operative. If it turns out that she was kidnapped, then we'll deal with it accordingly, but otherwise we're continuing on with the assumption that she's simply wandered off and gotten lost. She's only been missing for a few hours, don't forget."
Chaud nodded. The information about the mission that Zoet had on her PET was fairly specific - a plea for help in finding the man's missing daughter, who he hadn't noticed had vanished until well after it had happened. He'd last seen her in the eastern sector of the Jungle District, but she was too young to have learnt how to get home on her own, and this district was the second-largest in all of Nowhere. Details would be explained upon meeting the client, which he had done, and now Chaud and Zoet were heading towards the eastern sector to find some clues as to where she could be.
He was still a little puzzled as to why the man hadn't gone to the police and had instead decided to ask the Shades - the Underground NetBattlers - for help, but Zoet had said that it wasn't their place to question people's motives in choosing them rather than any other organisation. Their only concern was completing the mission, whatever it may be.
"Chaud," ProtoMan spoke up. "I've created a digital image of what the girl should look like, based on that picture and the client's description of her."
"Show us," Zoet ordered, having also heard him.
An image appeared on the visor's HUD, of the same little girl in the picture wearing the clothing that the man had described. Or at least what ProtoMan assumed the clothing looked like. It would be good enough to show people, however.
"Right then," Zoet said, "we'll split up when we reach the eastern sector. Show the picture to as many people as possible, ask if they've seen her and if they have, where, and then go to those places and see what you can find. She may not have been kidnapped, but she's still a little kid, so we need to find her as quickly as possible."
"Got it," Chaud and the three Navis replied. Well, Virus said 'understood', but same difference.
oooo
He'd shown the digital image to everyone he could stop - which turned out to be almost everyone, apparently people would listen to a Shade even if they were kid-sized - by using the holographic image program installed into the jack-in gem. It was pretty useful for these kind of things, and Chaud once again felt a little bit disappointed when he remembered that he wouldn't get to keep the battle suit after his time with the Underground NetBattlers was over.
Despite having shown the image to several people, no one he asked seemed to have any information about the little girl. One or two had actually seen her, but she'd been with her father at the time, which wasn't much help at all.
"How much luck do you think Zoet's had?" Chaud wondered as he turned away from yet another person who knew nothing about the girl.
"I'm not sure," ProtoMan replied. "Why don't you finish this street and then I'll contact her? If she's got any info, we could meet up and keep going from there."
Chaud nodded and made his way over to a couple walking their dog, dodging around a passing car. The Jungle District's streets were like forest paths, the dirt tracks being the roads, and he could certainly see why Zoet was so concerned about the kid being in danger even if she hadn't been kidnapped. It would be easy for her to accidentally wander into the road and get hit by a car or something.
When he showed the couple with the dog the image ProtoMan had created, they said they'd seen her - not even half an hour ago.
"She was a few streets over," the woman said, pointing in the general direction. "There was a man with her, I think it was probably her father."
Chaud's interested piqued. The girl's father had been at home, worrying, but perhaps he'd decided to come out himself and had managed to find her after all.
"Did he look like this?" he asked, showing them a digital picture of the girl's father just to be certain.
To his horror the woman shook her head.
"No, he was cleaner," she said. "He didn't have stubble, but his hair was longer and tied back. Was . . . was that not her father, then?"
"I need you to tell me exactly what he looked like," Chaud demanded instead. "Everything you can remember about this man - even small details will do."
"Is this kid in trouble?" the man spoke up for the first time. He looked very concerned.
"It may end up being nothing," Chaud replied, not wanting to cause a panic, "but I need to know all the same. Please."
The couple exchanged a glance, and nodded. Chaud suspected it was more their respect for the Shades than anything else that made them actually answer his demands, but either way, by the time he was hurrying away from them, ProtoMan had built up a clear image of what this mystery man may look like.
"Send it to Zoet and tell her to meet me at . . . what street is this?" Chaud asked, searching for a sign that would tell him where he was. He found one and scowled at the unfamiliar letters. "Dammit, I need to figure out how to read Savaron."
"You have me to translate," ProtoMan reminded him. He brought up a window on the visor's HUD, which scanned the sign and translated it to Electopian within moments.
Serenity Street, the sign read. It certainly didn't feel serene, not after what Chaud had just learnt.
"Thanks," Chaud said gratefully. "Right, send that image to Zoet and tell her to meet me here. Where is she, anyway?"
ProtoMan didn't reply for a moment, too busy sending the message to Zoet.
"She's just a few streets away," he reported after a pause. "Flight says she's coming over as fast as she can."
Chaud nodded in acknowledgement and went to the end of the street to wait. There were three other streets here, making this a sort of cross-shaped intersection, and the street that the couple had indicated was over in the right direction.
He only had to wait for a few minutes before he noticed a dark shape practically gliding across the rooftops to his left. Chaud turned to face the dark shape as it jumped off the last building, grabbed hold of a vine hanging off a branch walkway overhead, and then swung down onto the ground with an impressive backflip, startling several people as it landed in a crouch right in front of Chaud.
"So I guess this turned out to be a kidnapping case after all," Zoet greeted him, standing up.
" . . . How did you-" Chaud began.
"Oi, idiot, this is my home district," she reminded him. "And how do you think I can break into your room so easily? Now are we gonna stand here discussing my amazing acrobatic abilities or are we gonna go and rescue the little kid?"
"Rescue the little kid," he replied.
"Good. Where did those guys see her?"
"Five streets over, to the right," ProtoMan informed her. "But it was half an hour ago, so it's unlikely that the girl and the mystery man are still there."
"We're going anyway," Zoet decided. "She may not be there anymore, but we can still find out where she went and if anyone else saw her."
"And since it was so recent," Chaud pointed out, "there's bound to be more people who've seen her."
Zoet agreed to that with a nod, and took the lead to the street ProtoMan had indicated. This street was called Bough Avenue, and the road was lined with small trees (small in comparison to the walkway trees) that Zoet said were actually real.
They asked around and showed the picture to everyone they could, and Chaud turned out to be right - a lot of people had seen her, and when asked, they all confirmed that they'd seen her with the mystery man, who had been leading her somewhere. No one seemed to know exactly where, and Zoet and Chaud were ready to head off in the general direction, when they asked a man who seemed to know the sector better than anyone else.
"I think I know where they were headed," he mused, frowning. "There's an old block of empty houses that're scheduled for demolition next month, and that's the direction they were going. I should know, I'm a building supervisor, after all."
"Thank you for your help," Chaud replied. "Where exactly is this block of houses?"
Their Navis recorded the directions the man gave them, and then provided them with a fully-detailed map that they could use to get there. It took a little over ten minutes to find their way to the block of houses, which, when they arrived, seemed more oppressive and hollow than anywhere else in the district.
Chaud wasn't sure if it was because the place was empty, or because a potential kidnapper could be waiting for them inside one of those houses.
The biggest of them was right in the middle, looking more like a small warehouse than an actual house. No one wanted to make any assumptions, so they decided to check the smaller houses first, in case the mystery man had gone into one of those with the little girl - and in case neither of them were there to start off with. For all they knew, they could have just passed by this place and they were wasting their time searching it.
At a nod from Zoet, they split up once again and started at the houses at the very end of the block.
When he got to the first house, Chaud hesitated, and then tested the front door. It didn't open.
" . . . What were you trying to do?" ProtoMan asked him.
"Just trying to see if the door was unlocked," he replied. "It'd be easier if it was, but no, of course not . . ."
"They are scheduled for demolition," ProtoMan pointed out.
"Doesn't hurt to try," Chaud said. He shrugged, and raised his fist up to the electronic lock on the door. "Alright, jack in, Pr- Red Shade!"
The jack-in gem on the back of his hand flashed and a beam of red light shot out of it and connected to the lock. A moment later, a window materialised on one side of his HUD, showing the network of the electronic lock - and ProtoMan himself, standing at the very start, wrapped in the cloak of red-tinted shadows from the Shade program.
"I'm in," ProtoMan reported.
"Unlock the door and then find a way into the house's network, if it has one," Chaud told him. "And be on the lookout for viruses. We only know a few Savaron ones so far, and if we come across one we don't know, we may end up having to abandon ship."
"Understood," ProtoMan agreed, and he started moving through the network.
Luckily the only viruses that showed up were a few packs of Kitty viruses and Mettaurs (it seemed the Mettaur viruses were the one single virus that every country shared), so ProtoMan had little to no trouble opening the lock on the front door.
As his Navi moved deeper into the house's network, Chaud went inside the house and began searching as silently as possible. He kept an eye on ProtoMan's screen but mostly concentrated on his own surroundings, but by the time he'd finished crawling through the entire house, he'd found nothing that would suggest anyone being here, recently or otherwise.
He recalled ProtoMan and moved on to the next house.
The next couple of houses went more or less the same, but the third contained a virus that Chaud and ProtoMan had yet to encounter - it was some sort of giant black cat with blank white eyes, although it looked more like an ink monster the way it was dripping black goo everywhere. It didn't seem to notice ProtoMan when he snuck past it, nor did it react when he took a picture of it to show Zoet later, and they managed to get through the house in the real world and cyberworld without disturbing it.
"They seem to like cat viruses here," ProtoMan commented as Chaud moved on to the fifth house in his row.
"We've come across like four so far, including that one - if there's any more, I'd say they have an unhealthy obsession," Chaud agreed.
"Screw both of you," Zoet's voice snapped over private communications, surprising them.
"That was an Inky by the way," Flight added. "They're normally pretty chill, and don't attack you unless you disturb their nest."
"An Inky's nest is typically a large section of a network, covered almost entirely in black ink and infested with Inklings, which are smaller and less powerful versions of the Inky," Virus explained. "The Inky you saw in that house most likely only began to create its nest a short while ago, otherwise you would have encountered Inklings in the network. The Inklings are somewhat like the Kitty virus in that they attack in packs, but do not take this to mean that they are just inky versions of the Kitty virus. If the ink they drip gets on your body, your hit points will begin to decay slowly - you can fix that by jacking out."
"Would these Inklings alert the Inky to our presence?" ProtoMan asked it.
"They would not," Virus replied, to Chaud's relief. "The Inky itself does not leave its nest unless it is chasing a trespasser. If, for whatever reason, you set foot in an Inky's nest, it will not stop hunting you until you leave the network. It is very dangerous and only very skilled and powerful NetNavis are able to delete them."
"We're skilled and powerful," Chaud retorted. "I'm pretty sure ProtoMan and I could take one down."
"The Inky requires a different level of skilled and powerful, I am afraid," Virus shot him down. "It will take more than fancy sword arts to delete one. Only Navis such as those who work with the leaders are able to take the Inkys on with confidence. If you come across an Inky's nest, do not attempt to engage."
"What about the Inklings?" Chaud wondered. And they'd come across one of those Inky things just now . . . He shuddered to think what it could have done to ProtoMan.
"Virus said they're not inky versions of the Kitty virus," Zoet spoke up, "but to be honest, they actually kind of are. They're pretty easy to delete, but if they surround you, good luck fighting your way out of dripping black acid."
"Ouch," Chaud muttered.
oooo
Zoet and Chaud finished the smaller houses at about the same time, and met up outside the largest one.
"Jack in, Vital Shade," Zoet said, pointing her right jack-in gem at the door's lock.
In less time that it had taken ProtoMan, the door was open and they pushed their way inside. They were standing in a short hallway, more like a foyer than anything else, with three doors - two on either side and one at the very end. The walls had holes in them and stains over what remained of the wallpaper, and the carpet was just as bad, if not worse.
"Okay, ew," Zoet muttered in digust. "This place is even dirtier than the others. Who the hell even lived here, rats?"
Avoiding the worst of the stains on the carpet, they moved forward until they came to the first two doors. Zoet took the left and Chaud took the right, but when their Navis opened the locks for them and they looked inside, they didn't find anything - Zoet's door led to nothing more than a small cupboard, while Chaud's just led to an empty room.
"What's behind door number three?" Flight asked, emulating the tone of a gameshow host.
"Shut up," Zoet said, unamused.
The last door led to a second empty room - except this one contained two more doors, one directly opposite them and the other to their right. Zoet quickly checked the one opposite and found nothing but a misused kitchen (something had apparently died in there, because the smell it let out when Zoet opened the door . . . Ugh. Even with his helmet on, Chaud gagged at the stench). The second door could've opened up into the empty room that Chaud had seen from the foyer, but that room hadn't had any other exits or entrances, and when they opened the door, they instead found a staircase.
It looked like it had seen better days. A couple of the steps seemed to be rotting away entirely, and Chaud didn't exactly feel like finding out what would happen if he stepped on them. There was also a large spider web hanging across the ceiling, but to his relief he didn't see the spider that had made it.
Even so, he kept an eye on the web as he took the lead up the stairs, being careful to avoid the two that were rotting.
At the top of the stairs was a small landing with a single door.
"It's been used recently, and a lot," Zoet commented.
Chaud almost asked how she knew that, but then he examined the door handle. It looked a lot cleaner than almost everything in the house, as if someone had used it but didn't want to raise suspicioun that anyone was here. A quick scan of the handle showed him that it had in fact been used recently, as recently as today in fact.
"Maybe we should have scanned the floor for footprints," Chaud said.
"Eh, too late now, let's go find out who's here," Zoet replied with a careless shrug.
She shoved the door open and went inside, and with a mental sigh, Chaud followed.
They were in another hallway, except there were more doors here than there had been in the foyer. There was also a dirty window where the front door would have been.
And here, it turned out there was no need to scan the floor for footprints - they could see them easily even without any extra help from the visor's HUDs. Whoever was here, they'd been using this upstairs hallway quite a lot, and hadn't bothered to cover their tracks. The likely conclusion to that was that they hadn't assumed anyone would come past the foyer or go anywhere near the stairs after determining that the house was empty, at least on the ground floor.
Silently, they began checking each of the doors once more, making their way down the hallway to the end. Most of the rooms were empty, and there were more on Chaud's side than on Zoet's, so by the time he was halfway down his side, Zoet was at the last door on hers.
As she was just finishing checking the room inside, Chaud noticed the door at the very end of the hallway was opening.
He didn't have enough time to warn Zoet before a tall man with long hair tied back stepped out and, with lightning speed, shot forward and grabbed Zoet's upper arm. He spun her around and held her against his chest, giving Chaud a triumphant smirk.
"Didn't think I'd get Shades coming after me," the ponytail man sneered. "But if you come near me, this one here gets hurt. Got it?"
He gave Zoet's arm a rough shake to emphasise his threat, and it was at that point that Chaud noticed that Zoet had gone very, very still.
Was . . . was she actually scared?
"I think a Shade ought to fetch a better price than a little kid," the ponytail man mused. "So how about this? You do exactly as I say, and I'll-"
Zoet stomped on his foot and the moment he let go of her with a yell, she whirled around and punched him in the throat. He choked, hand going to his throat, but before he could even complete his movement Zoet flashed up a kick that sent him sprawling into the wall. He bounced off it and coughed feebly, and then seemed to recover slightly as he looked up and glared at Zoet.
Who, as it turned out, did not give a single shit and just kicked him right between the legs.
He went down with a loud squeak.
Guess she wasn't scared, then. Just extremely pissed off.
Without a word and without even looking away from the ponytail man, Zoet raised her hand to point at Chaud, and then at the door that the man had come through.
He didn't want to get beaten up like that, so he just nodded and hurried past them. He only relaxed once he was through the door.
"I think she's dragging him across the floor," ProtoMan commented.
Chaud didn't look back to check. He didn't want to know what pain Zoet was going to inflict on the guy now.
The room he was in now was relatively small in comparison to the others that he'd seen so far, and unlike most of them, actually wasn't empty. There was furniture in here, what looked like the remains of tables and one or two small cupboards. It was also dark in here, not just because the window was dirty, but because there was an old and tattered blind drawn over it - though, despite being old and tattered, it did a good job of keeping the room in relative darkness.
"Activate night-vision," Chaud quietly told ProtoMan.
Once he could actually see, he did a quick visual sweep of the room, and at first his gaze went over the shape huddled in the further corner of the room. After a moment he realised what he'd seen, and then his eyes snapped back to the shape.
The little girl who had been missing for the past few hours stared at him with wide, scared eyes, and tried to huddle closer to the wall when Chaud looked directly at her.
He de-activated private communications and spoke to her, for the first time cursing the blank helmet. He was probably scaring her even more.
"Hey," Chaud said gently. She still squeaked in terror. "It's okay, I'm here to help you. That man - is he the guy who took you in here?"
He thought she was too terrified to reply, but she nodded slowly.
"Alright, well, my friend is . . ." Beating him senseless. " . . . taking care of him, so there's nothing to be scared of anymore. Do you know what I am?"
"You . . . you're a Shade," the little girl whispered. "D-Daddy says you're nice people."
"That's right, we are," Chaud nodded. He didn't think mentioning Zoet would do much good here. "Your dad sent us a message and asked us to come and find you. He's waiting for you."
"He- he is?" the little girl asked. She didn't look as terrified now, and even shuffled away from the wall a little. "C-can you take me home, please?"
"Of course," Chaud agreed. "Do you want to go now?" He really, really hoped that Zoet had finished beating the guy up by now.
"Y-yeah," the little girl replied.
oooo
Zoet and the ponytail man weren't in the hallway when he led the little girl out of the room, and he couldn't find either of them in the house. But when he got outside, he saw that Zoet had, for whatever reason, called the police.
The ponytail man was being hauled into an ambulance - just how badly had Zoet beaten him up, seriously? - and Zoet was talking to a police officer nearby, while others investigated the other empty houses. He quietly told the little girl to wait for him, and then went over to Zoet and the officer she was talking to.
" . . . cracked ribs, two broken ribs, a dislocated jaw, a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, all fingers on the right hand sprained, a bruised ankle, right knee shattered, left leg broken in three places, glass shards buried in almost every inch of skin, not to mention all the bruises and cuts . . . What happened to him?" the police officer asked, looking vaguely horrified.
"He fell out of the window," Zoet replied flatly.
Chaud, curious, glanced over his shoulder at the window on the second floor above the door. It was indeed broken and there were glass shards all over the ground below it, as if something had been thrown through it.
" . . . And how many times did he fall out of the window?" the police officer asked.
"Dunno. I lost count."
The officer stared at her blankly for a few moments, and then he sighed. "You Shades are insane, you know that?" he said. "But thank you for the help, all the same. We've been after this man for quite some time, and he'll be able to lead us to whatever sick buyers he has, not to mention the rest of the traffickers."
"No problem," Zoet replied. The police officer nodded and went off, and Zoet turned to Chaud. "The girl alright?"
"Uh, yeah," Chaud answered. "Scared, but yeah. She wasn't hurt or anything. I, uh."
"What?"
"Why did you beat him up like that?" Chaud blurted out, and then immediately regretted it as Zoet tilted her head ever-so-slightly. The blank visor of the helmet wasn't really helping the terrifying image.
"I don't like being touched," Zoet eventually said.
Now he recalled how she'd backed away when the little girl's father had gone to shake her hand. He hadn't been too curious about it before, but this at least explained why.
Although it was kind of an extreme reaction to being touched, even if the ponytail man had tried to hold her hostage. Sure, it wouldn't have worked either way, but doing all of that damage to him was a little bit . . . excessive.
"Let's get the kid back home," Zoet said. "If she's too tired or scared to walk back on her own two feet, you can carry her."
"That'd probably be for the best," Chaud agreed.
He didn't think Zoet would beat up a little girl, but this was Zoet he was talking about. He couldn't assume anything when it came to her - the fact that she'd shown up to actually apologise and had even given him a ribbon streamer as a peace offering was probably the biggest reason why. Just add this to list of things that confused him about Zoet. It was gonna be a very long list and he had a feeling it would never stop growing.
oooo
As soon as he saw them through the window, the little girl's father rushed out of his house and swept her into his arms, letting out a cry of pure relief. The little girl burst into tears and and clung to him, and Zoet and Chaud stepped back to give them a few moments.
"Thank you so much," the girl's father said emotionally, when he looked up. His eyes were shining and he seemed unable to stop smiling. "You . . . thank you. I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am, just . . . thank you."
"You hired us to find your kid, and we did," Zoet replied, shrugging.
Chaud nodded in agreement. "We're just doing our job," he added, "no thanks needed."
"Even so . . ." The little girl's father trailed off, glanced at his daughter, and then stood up and took her hand. "Wait out here for a moment, would you?"
Puzzled, Zoet and Chaud did as he asked, while he led his daughter inside the house. After waiting for a minute or two, the man came back out, and he held out his hand to them.
"It's not much, I know, but this is my way of expressing my gratitude," the little girl's father said. "Take them, I don't have any use for virus chips anyway."
Virus chips? Chaud's interested grew, and he took the chips from the man, and looked at them. There were four, and all of them seemed to be some variation of the Kitty virus. He gave them to Zoet, who put them in one of her battle chip packs.
They thanked the man and made their way to the tram station, getting a ticket to the Historical District. As Shades, they didn't need to pay or even use passes, all they had to do was ask for a ticket to whatever district they needed to go to. That, in Chaud's opinion, was probably one of the strangest but most useful benefits of having the battle suit. He was considering telling the higher-ups in the Electopian NetBattler society about all of this, but then decided not to because the Underground NetBattlers probably wouldn't appreciate their ideas being stolen.
"Here," Zoet said, nudging his shoulder. She handed him two of the Kitty virus chips that they'd just gotten. "Have some fun with that. Kitty virus chips are great to use, trust me."
"I probably won't use them, but thanks anyway," Chaud replied, putting the virus chips away.
He did wonder briefly why she'd touched him if she didn't like being touched - but then again, being touched by other people and touching other people yourself were two entirely different things, weren't they? It made sense, even if it was a little bit backwards.
"Don't like virus chips?" Zoet asked as she settled back into her seat on the tram.
"More like I prefer to use normal battle chips," Chaud explained. "I think I only ever used a virus chip once in my entire life . . . ProtoMan?"
"I think it was a Spikey virus," his Navi agreed. "And even if we don't use these chips ourselves, I'm sure SciLab will appreciate them - they're always on the lookout for new viruses to examine."
"A'right," Zoet said, shrugging. "Hey, when we get to HQ, we'll report this mission as completed and pick up the reward from dispatch - then we're done for the day. Unless . . ."
"Unless?" Chaud asked, glancing at her.
He somehow had a feeling that she was giving him a very devious smirk underneath that black visor. "Unless you wanna mess around with the VR system some more," she offered.
"VR system," Chaud and ProtoMan immediately replied.
Zoet snorted in amusement. "Knew you'd say that. There's this mountain forest level that you're gonna freakin' love to bits, it's perfect for ProtoMan's abilities. We can play Landslides."
"Landslides?"
"This game that Nowhere kids play sometimes - basically you pretend that you're about to be caught in a landslide, and you gotta get to the 'safe point' as fast as possible. First one there wins and the last one there 'dies'. It gets really intense sometimes," she explained. "You in?"
"Wouldn't it be unfair with three Navis playing, though?" ProtoMan wondered.
"Not really. The VR system can generate dummy Navis and dummy NetOps to train with, so we'll have it create a couple of dummy operators to even the odds. Flight, you'll be confined to the ground on account of the fact that you can fly at supersonic speeds." Zoet ignored her gendered Navi's cry of dismay. "Meanwhile, ProtoMan, you are not allowed to help out this dumb chicken nugget here."
"Chicken what?" Chaud repeated. He was too surprised at that to be offended about the 'dumb' comment.
"Chicken nugget. What, you guys don't have chicken nuggets in Electopia?"
"No, no, we have them, it's just . . . Why did you call me one?"
"Because of reasons."
OOOOOO
And there we go! An entire chapter of Chaud's POV, with him doing a standard mission for the Underground NetBattlers with Zoet.
Well, I say 'standard', but it kinda turned out more serious than anyone expected. That was planned by the way - I was originally gonna have the little girl be kidnapped right from the start, but I didn't want the mission to come from Kris or any of her NetBattlers team, so I changed the plot of the mission a little bit and added in the kidnapping thing after the kid went wandering off.
Also we get Zoet calling Chaud a dumb chicken nugget. I wanna have her call him this a few times purely because the phrase is extremely amusing.
Oh, and about Flight's, well, flight speed - she really can fly at supersonic speeds. In the air, she's one of the fastest Navis in all of Savaro, but on the ground she's kind of at a disadvantage. Well, what'd you expect? Her name's Flight and she has wings.
But anyway, we also get to see another Savaron virus (I'm literally just making up a whole bunch of new ones for the hell of it because why not) which is very dangerous and very powerful. Spoiler alert, but Chaud and ProtoMan will have to fight an Inky at some point, if I have anything to say about it.
The Inky is actually based on a drawing I made a few weeks ago, which was based on this weird-looking stain I found on a table in my college's workshop. The creature I designed from that looks exactly how it was described in this chapter, a giant black cat made entirely of dripping ink with blank white eyes. I love the design and concept so much that I decided to put it into here.
Anyway, I've designed something else to go with the things I've already shown you guys for profiles!
/022fbi8b2zj7
Say hi to Zoet, everyone. The sunglasses she's wearing in that design are the ones she's gonna get in the future, and she's not wearing any type of sunglasses at the moment because she's not outside and therefore not in natural sunlight. And she looks like a boy because, if everyone remembers, Chaud mistook her for a boy when they first met and Lan currently thinks Zoet is a boy as well.
/01ndi1falgd8
Virus.
/0784ncmxtbv
Flight.
/026mkj34tsh1
The map.
/01lqxk014x6q
And the battle suit.
(If these links don't work/can't be seen, just PM me for the links and I'll give them to you personally, I'll be more than happy to!)
Read and review, people!