Ch. 14: History
Tails had confronted Drobot about his dislike of him, but Drobot had found an excuse to avoid it in that he had to fly onto the ship. Tails, not one to let such a thing dissuade him, took a moment to switch back to Pop Thorn, then inflated himself and followed him up. By which point Drobot had hidden below decks, and, even though it was technically his ship, Tails had no idea that it even had a 'below decks' and so lost him.
Bash, Chill, Hoot Loop and Tails, now back as Camo, were working on fixing the hole in the ship. Hoot Loop was teleporting in steel girders and stuff, as he so aptly described it, Bash was strengthening and holding them together with various specialised rock formations, Chill was encrusting the gaps with ice, forming some rather nice windows, and Tails was spreading his vines throughout the whole structure, reinforcing it tenfold. Blast Zone had taken the helm, and according to the GPS Tails had pulled out of some Skylander-related video game or other about events that had happened a year ago which Blast Zone couldn't be bothered to recall anything about, they were nearing the Cloudbreak Isles. With a week and a half to spare.
The new appearance of the hull gave the ship an interesting look of half broken old pirate ship, half swanky ocean liner.
"Hey, just out of curiosity, are things always this easy?" Tails, still in Camo's guise, asked Cynder. "No, we usually get attacked by ghost pirates or Arkeyans or something or other at this point. But we've been sailing peacefully for the last day, and nobody's being unduly mean to me. It's very disconcerting," Tails took a moment to think about his new friend's statement, and realised it meant that she was uncomfortable because she was at peace, and realised that that meant Cynder had had a seriously messed-up life. Realising that his multiple thorn-like horns were uncomfortably weighing him down, he switched out of Camo and back to Polar Whirlwind. There was something soothing about that white, feathered, female body that Tails really enjoyed.
He hoped that the fact that Polarus was male, but his avatar was female and almost every other Skylander had their gender represented correctly in their avatar wouldn't cause any problems with a potential friendship with him.
"Blast Zone, how long until we reach Cloudbreak?" Bash asked, for lack of anything better to do.
"About five seconds until we're in the Cloudbreak region. As for an actual island we can dock at safely, well, let's just say I hope the inhabitants of Motleyville remember that time me and the other fifteen Swap Force Skylanders saved us from that giant robot crab a hundred years ago," the fire knight replied.
Tails pricked up his ears, which, considering the long, rabbit-like ears attributed to unicorn-dragon hybrids like he currently was, was quite an impressive feat. "Robot crab?"
"Yes, a grey crab who tried to take over Motleyville a hundred years ago. He was in league with Linagarnix, an evil Portal Master who attempted to corrupt the Cloudbreak Volcano a hundred years ago. Me, Hoot, Boom, or Boom Jet as most know him, and Rattle Shake went there to ask Colonel Sharpfin Eartheater the Second for directions to the Terrasquid, one of the four Elementals who cause the volcano to erupt every hundred years. Linagarnix was trying to corrupt the Elementals to evilise the volcano's eruption. You know, I believe she is the mother of this Kaos guy who keeps attacking Skylands. What's that look on your face for?"
"That is almost exactly the plot line of the third Skylanders game, Swap Force. Tell me, in the end, did you trap Linagarnix in a mirror?"
"How did you know that? Strangely, that should have been the end of it, but apparently a battalion of her minions escaped and attacked us just as the volcano was erupting. Not sure what they were trying to achieve, but even as we defeated them on the lip of the volcano, we got sucked into the eruption, and, well, you know the rest,"
"Intriguing! If the events of the video game up till the 'Motherly Mayhem' boss battle happened a hundred years ago, then, what happened to the Cloudbreak Core boss battle with the giant Kaos? Wait, if that hasn't happened yet, but everything else has, then when the volcano erupts, Kaos is going to attempt that and get transformed, just like the video game, and - Great Scott! And I sound like that professor from Back to the Future. And the Skylanders are good, but this isn't a game, and I don't think they're that good. Meaning that I'm going to have to make alternate preparations for that battle - but how? Hey, I've got a week and a half. It'll come to me,"
Tails' thoughts were interrupted by a shout from Free Ranger of 'Incoming!"
Free Ranger was on lookout up in the ship's crow's nest. He was a bird, after all, and birds were supposed to have good eyesight. Unfortunately, chickens seemed to be the only exception to this.
And Free Ranger was a chicken in almost every way. How the heck he got a Legendary Statue, nobody knew.
"Wha t'is it?" Chill shouted up at him, her abnormal accent blurring the two words together in her frustration. "I don't know, but it's headed towards me, and I don't want to get hit by it!" And with that, Free Ranger formed his tornado and flew down, panicking. "I thought 'incoming' meant something was about to hit," Sunburn pointed out, "not that you could see something in the distance,"
"And I thought dragons were supposed to be smart, but you're just a pathetic representation of a dying race," If there was one thing Free Ranger was good at, it was acting without thinking. He had forgotten that, other than Sunburn, there were three, four counting Tails, who was quite happy to count himself as one, other dragons on board the ship. And all five, as Drobot had appeared out of what seemed to be absolutely nowhere, had come over when they heard this and ganged up on the chicken.
It was quite literally the first time Cynder and Drobot, or Bash for that matter, had agreed on something. Ever. Nobody other than Spyro, Tails, and some of the other Undead Skylanders trusted her, so it was unusual standing beside them. It was possible that Drobot's past experiences with Undead dragons (see 'A Technical Tail') had put him off them, but he would not allow insults to dragons pass. Even if he was being backed up by her.
Tails was perhaps getting a bit too deep into the mindset of the various dragons he was consistently taking the forms of, and it felt surprisingly natural to count himself as a dragon at this point. As he realised this, he also realised that most people would probably be worried about this, but he wasn't, because he enjoyed being a dragon, and it felt so much more natural and, well, right than being human ever had. Which should be worrying in itself, but once again, wasn't. He absent-mindedly rubbed the golden unicorn horn that currently protruded from his forehead with his front paw as he thought. 'And the fact that that is a normal statement now just shows how messed-up my life has become in the last thirty hours,' he added to his train of thought.
Lightning and fire crackled through the small gaps in Cynder and Sunburn's jaws, the tip of Tails' horn glimmered with all kinds of colours, and the crystal eye-liners Drobot used to create his lasers started to glow. Bash lowered his head and pointed his triceratops-like bronze horns at Free Ranger. "Don't ever insult dragons," he growled at the storm chicken. Free Ranger, backing up, swapped with Blast Zone into Free Zone, and rocketed away from the dragons. The five dragonoids and Blast Ranger, as he now had the bottom half of Free Ranger, watched him soar back up to the cockpit - where the incoming object that everyone had somehow forgotten about, narrowly missed him.
It was a large dragon that seemed to be not quite an adult, but nearing it. It was black and red, and it's tail-tip was on fire. It's horns were bone-white, and there was something about it that was oddly familiar to Drobot.
Dragons generally reached adult size at the age of thirty. Considering most dragons lived to four or five thousand, it was a strange evolutionary blip that they reached such a size at such speed. Of course, when they reached a couple of thousand years old, they were the size of an average Skyland, but such early growth was still surprising.
"Well, I assume these are the Skylanders that mum sent me to destroy. Yah don't look like much,"
"That is exactly what a stereotypical villain would proclaim, only a matter of minutes before, as my friend Polarus would say, the Skylanders totally kick their butt," Drobot boomed up at the dragon, who was hovering above the ship.
"Shut it, punk! I am - well, well, well, if it isn't my old friend Potestatem. Did you miss me? I'm going to enjoy tearing you to shreds all over again, roboy. And this time, I'll make sure you can't build yourself robotic replacement limbs - because you won't have any to start with!" Behind his metal face-plate, Drobot's eyelid was twitching. His laser software was going crazy.
"Arkor, charge all stored laser energy into a bladegear, load the bladegear into slot designated tail-launcher and tell me when it is ready," he whispered into his suit. "Affirmative, Activator-Potestatem. Beginning process now,"
"What happened to Cogshine, Insidae and Burn? Did they finally recognise you as pure evil and abandon you?" he taunted in the meantime.
"For your information, Cogshine and Burn remain my closest friends. Insidae died to save my life," Shadeblazer replied. Drobot frowned, and instructed Arkor, who he had built into his suit, to run vocal analysis on her last statement and determine if she was lying. He replied that his software told him that she believed she was telling the truth, and if she was incorrect, she was ignorant of the fact that she was so.
"Really. Insidae, sacrificed herself to save you? We're talking about the same Insidae here, right?" Drobot absent-mindedly noticed that Tails had disappeared. He had probably gone to get some kind of weapon from some video game or other to deter Shadeblazer from attacking. Whirlwind, Polarus, and Camo would be devastated. They had really believed in Insidae's wish to do good, rather than evil, and the female Life dragon was Camo's long-lost sister.
"Shut it, punk!" the dragon roared at him. The truth of the matter was, the four of them had happened on a mysterious giant geode, partially amethyst, partially jade. Cogshine thought it could be powerful, but also dangerous, so Shadeblazer naturally ordered Insidae to touch it first. And it was a good thing she did. The crystal sucked the dragon inside it, before blasting off into a reach of Skylands Shadeblazer couldn't see. She had never seen Insidae or the crystal again, but, misjudging Insidae's loyalty to her, or lack of it, she assumed that if Insidae had survived, she would have returned to her, so she naturally thought the Life dragon was dead.
She swooped, and her sharpened wing ribbing appeared, slicing the mast in half. The wind caught the sail that had previously been furled, it pulled the ship in the wrong direction, and the craft sped away from Shadeblazer at full speed. "Blast Ranger, please tell me you can stop this thing!" Stealth Elf hollered from the prow, where she had dug her daggers into the wood of the ship.
"Sorry, Stealth, the tiller's broken!" Blast Ranger shouted back at the elven ninja.
"Don't - call - me - Steeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaalth!" she screamed back at him, which turned into a scream of fear as the ship barrelled towards a large, forested Skyland that appeared to have a large village built literally in the trees. Shadeblazer watched, decided that when they crashed, there was no way they could survive, and a couple of dozen innocent lives would be lost too, as a bit of a bonus. She turned and flew away.
Ooh, Shadeblazer's first appearance in 'The Dragon Chronicles'. And a fairly decent cliffhanger. I did say in the newest chapter of 'A Technical Tail' that Insidae would escape Shadeblazer at some point, and that has been mentioned here. I intend to go into more detail as to Insidae's disappearance in a later chapter of 'A Technical Tail'. And what do you know, the spoiler that I was so worried about didn't even show up in this chapter. It still will, of course, but later. As a matter of fact, I think Insidae's fate will surprise everyone. When it's revealed, at some point or other. Of course, that could take a while, so let the speculation begin! Peace!
Oh, and I almost forgot, did everyone see the new cover image? Well, that's the official cover of 'The Dragon Chronicles', and a hinter towards the second part of the trilogy. Now, for real this time, Peace!