For continuity's sake, we'll be continuing with Lan's POV, but if I manage to, I'll switch to Chaud's POV later in the chapter.
Hey, who wants to bet that Acrobat and Foreigner are gonna do the stupid thing and try to take on both Inkys at once?
Profiles!
/022fbi8b2zj7
Zoet.
/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!)
Let's get straight into this. I love cliffhangers, but they always make next-chapter ANs seem really tacky.
I don't own MegaMan Battle Network/NT Warrior, on with the show!
OOOOOO
"Well," Arin muttered, "I guess we know how the Area got cut off."
Lan glanced at her questioningly. "What do you mean?"
"An Inky virus generally makes its nest in an Area of any network," the crazy scientist explained. "They're pests, but very dangerous pests, and usually you can see the signs of when one is trying to move into a network - there's usually Inklings everywhere and you can find black goo all over the place, mostly concentrated in the Inky's nest. Normally, one Inky on its own isn't enough to shut down an entire Area of a network, but with two Inkys at once . . ."
Lan's eyes widened. This was even worse than he'd thought - forget the Life virus, these Inky things were definitely worse!
At the same time, Acrobat and Foreigner had gotten into a heated argument about whether or not to try and take on the two viruses without any assistance. Acrobat seemed to be going for withdrawing and getting reinforcements, but Foreigner was of the opposite opinion.
"If we leave them as they are, it'll just get worse!" he argued. "We don't have time to go and get reinforcements!"
"Are you suicidal as well as stupid?" Acrobat snapped. "You're the smart one, think it over - we can't take on one Inky, nevermind two of the damn things!"
"Arin is right there, we don't even need to-"
"We have a cover to maintain and a secret to keep, unless you wanna end up outing everything we've worked for over the past few decades!"
"Is keeping a secret really more important than this?" Foreigner demanded, gesturing to the situation on-screen.
"It's not just about a secret, you fucking idiot, it's about trust!"
"That's enough, both of you," Arin said sharply.
Acrobat and Foreigner stopped arguing immediately, though they continued to look at each other through their helmets. Lan got the feeling there was a very intense glaring contest going on there.
Arin's interruption in their argument reminded Lan a little bit of how his mom had stopped himself and his friends from arguing with Chaud. He suddenly thought of both of them now - Mom, who had decided to go out and find some ingredients for a proper home-cooked meal tonight, and Chaud, who was off doing god-knows-what.
Maybe if Chaud were here and MegaMan uninjured, Lan could do something about this situation. ProtoMan and MegaMan working together could overcome pretty much any challenge that was thrown at them - they were among the most powerful Navis on the entire planet. They could take on both of those Inky things and beat them.
But Chaud wasn't here and so neither was ProtoMan, and MegaMan was injured, so there was nothing Lan could do.
His friends were still here, though.
"Guys," he said, turning to face them.
Maylu and the others were wearing identical looks of grim determination. They already knew what he was going to ask.
"We know," Maylu agreed. She raised her voice to the two Shades. "Hey, if you'll let us, we can help out too!"
"No way in hell, pinkie," Acrobat snapped, whirling around to look at them. "If we're not qualified then you guys ain't either."
"At least let them try," Foreigner suggested.
Acrobat looked at him over her shoulder. "You want your friends' Navis to get deleted, too?" she snapped.
Lan was almost about to ask her what she meant by 'friends', but he supposed that was because he and his friends had been really nice to Foreigner to try and make him feel welcome. And, as everyone told him, he was pretty famous for making friends with almost everyone, faceless secret NetBattlers included.
"I'll help out, everyone else can get out," Arin announced. She gestured to the team of scientists still in the room. "You guys, get everything you can off the network and then leave - I'll need some of you to go and warn everyone else in this building as well. The entire network is in danger here, we can't take any chances. We may need to delete the network in order to save it." She waited a moment to make sure her orders were being followed, and then turned back to Acrobat and Foreigner.
Meanwhile, Lan was in shock. Delete an entire network to save it? Not even in Electopia had things ever gotten this bad.
"Maybe we shouldn't try to help, if it's this serious," Tory said, a worried frown on his face.
"Oh please, we've been through way worse than this," Yai scoffed.
"Lan's been through worse than this," Maylu corrected her. "We only helped out most of the time. Now we don't have MegaMan, and our Navis are nowhere near as powerful."
"I'm sorry," Lan and, surprisingly, Dex said at the same time.
They both looked at each other.
"You've got nothing to be sorry for," they both said, once again in unison.
"Alright, quit it, I thought MegaMan was your twin, not Dex," Yai said irritably.
Lan rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment while Dex laughed awkwardly.
"Get back! Get back now!"
Foreigner's voice, raised in panic, brought them back to their current situation abruptly.
They turned to the screen and froze in horror when they saw Red Shade trying to jump away from one of the Inkys - a giant, black, dripping mess that resembled some sort of demonic white-eyed cat - which kept chasing after him. It moved slowly but it was somehow able to keep up with him, easily flowing up datablocks that Red Shade tried to get on top of in order to escape from it. The way it moved so easily probably had something to do with the goo that was all over the place.
A quick glance at Vital Shade showed them that it wasn't doing much better, although the Inky that was going after it appeared to be more curious than hostile, unlike Red Shade's Inky, which was definitely trying to delete him. Lan would've wondered why the Inky going after Vital Shade was acting differently, but he didn't have the time.
"Battle chips don't work on these things," Acrobat snapped, as Foreigner reached for a small pack that was attached to a black belt on his waist. "That's why most Navis can't go after them - you need to delete them in one hit in order to get rid of them completely, otherwise they'll just keep regenerating over and over until your Navi's nothing more than burnt data on the net. Most basic attacks can't do even a hundred hit points' worth of damage, forget the amount of hit points these things have!"
"There has to be something we can do!" Foreigner protested.
"Jackal's making his way over there as fast as he can, but I don't know how long it'll be before he can make it," Arin told them. "Just run them around until he shows up."
The Inkys on the screen suddenly started spitting black acid that burnt everything it came in contact with.
"Acid Fire!" Acrobat warned her Navi sharply.
"Do not let it touch you, Red Shade," Vital Shade said. Lan almost wondered if its AI was as low as GravityMan's - it certainly didn't sound very worried, despite the danger it and Red Shade were currently in.
"I kinda figured that out for myself," Red Shade replied, pausing briefly to stare at a spray of acid that was eating through some data that had probably been important at one point, but was now nothing more than a sizzling husk.
Now that the Inkys were spitting acid everywhere, Lan could understand why these things were so dangerous to Navis. If it was true that battle chips didn't work on them and they could regenerate at will, then whoever or whatever had created these viruses obviously made them for purely destructive purposes. Although he had to wonder - if these things were so dangerous, what about other Savaron viruses? Most countries had the same sets, more or less, but from he'd seen it looked as though Savaro was on an entirely different level to the rest of the planet.
"Those Inky things are creepy," Maylu muttered, shuddering a little. "They don't make a sound, and they're just as dangerous as the Life virus."
"I know what you mean," Lan agreed quietly. "At least with most viruses they roar or scream or whatever. These things just . . . stare."
"What're you kids still doing here?" Arin's voice cut into their conversation, and they looked up to find her looking at them with a frown. "I told everyone to get out. That includes you."
"We thought we could help," Maylu explained, but Acrobat's scornful voice interrupted her.
"I already said, if we're not qualified for this shit, then there's no way in hell any of you morons're gonna be of any use," she snapped. "Stop offering to help - or better yet, just get lost already. You're making it hard for either of us to concentrate here."
"Z- Acrobat," Foreigner protested weakly.
"What, you think I haven't noticed? You're uncomfortable as hell around those idiots, and if this keeps up, Red's gonna get his ass deleted and who'll be to blame?"
Why would Foreigner be uncomfortable around us? Lan wondered. Judging from what Acrobat said, Foreigner was only uncomfortable around Lan and his friends - no one else.
But Foreigner had called him a hero! And they'd been nothing but nice to him since he'd shown up, so why?
"I'm not uncomfortable," Foreigner muttered, shifting from one foot to the other. Even Lan could tell he was lying through his teeth - his body language just screamed uncomfortable.
Acrobat clearly thought the same thing. "And the Sun Pyramid's are bright pink," she retorted. "Just keep an eye on your Navi and get on with the-"
She broke off abruptly. For a moment Lan couldn't understand why, but then he spared a glance at the screen and his eyes widened.
Apart from the two giant Inkys, there were tons of little versions of them - Inklings, he guessed - and they were everywhere. They'd crept up on the shadow-cloaked Navis as thy had been dodging around the two Inkys, unable to do much because their operators had gotten into an argument and couldn't give them any proper orders, and now the Inklings were trying to swarm them.
Vital Shade had reacted very quickly and had shot off with unnerving grace towards the entrance of the goo-filled nest, but Red Shade, who had been taken off-guard and had accidentally allowed himself to get surrounded in every single direction (even above and below), had no such luck and was currently attempting to fight the Inklings off with two swords.
"Blade Cyclone!" Foreigner quickly ordered.
Blade what?
Red Shade began to spin, his form taking on that of a whirling red cyclone - again, very familiar, and a sneaking suspicion began to form in Lan's mind - and he began blowing away all the Inklings near him.
But there were far too many. Whenever he blew away some, even more would take their place, forming up out of the surrounding black goo endlessly. The only way to stop the things from showing up completely would be to get rid of the black goo, but it was pretty clear the only way to do that would be to delete the Inkys themselves. Which was apparently impossible.
One of the Inkys decided to have a go at coming after Red Shade, and unlike its Inkling creations, it didn't seem to notice the Blade Cyclone at all. It just sort of flowed towards him, and then its head tilted - dripping ink all the time, and the tilt was more of a weird spasm than an actual, well, movement.
And then it spat acid into the cyclone.
A split second later, an ear-splitting scream filled the air - and notably Foreigner's head, as he twitched violently and tried to rip his helmet off with a yelp (Acrobat quickly stopped him) - and then Blade Cyclone died down so abruptly that, had Red Shade been a human, he probably would've ended up with a limb ripped off.
But he was a Navi and so only ended up being flung away from the crowd of ink viruses, bouncing along the ground and coming to a stop in a tangle of limbs at the edge of the cut-off network. For a moment Lan wasn't sure where he'd been hit, but then Red Shade struggled to his feet and lifted his head.
His face had been burnt off.
There were more injuries too, more burns where the acid had hit him, but the worst was his face. He made a sound that was almost like a choke, and collapsed again. There was a moment of shocked silence, and then it was broken by Foreigner.
"PROTO-" he began to scream.
Acrobat kicked his legs out from under him, and then spoke to her own Navi while he crashed to the floor beside her. "Vital, get him outta there, now!" she snapped.
On the screen, her Navi nodded to confirm its order, and then it began to move swiftly over to where Red Shade was. Red Shade himself was glitching heavily, the way that Navis did when they were mere moments from full deletion.
The Inkys and their Inklings were also flowing over to him, but moments before they reached the two Navis, a massive bolt of lightning pushed them back. When the lightning vanished, a large black dog-like Navi jumped from out of nowhere and snarled at the viruses, a clear warning to keep back.
Without taking his eyes off the viruses, he called back to Vital Shade. "Is he alright?"
"His data is damaged too heavily to move him without the risk of deletion," Vital Shade reported emotionlessly. Lan was beginning to think there was something seriously wrong with that Navi.
The black dog-Navi muttered a curse and glanced up, out of the screen and directly at Arin.
Lan realised with a start that he was probably her Navi.
"What do we do?" he demanded. "I can get rid of one of these things easy enough, but two and a few hundred Inklings is far beyond my power. We'd need someone like Mythril or Livid if we wanted to make a dent in these damn things!"
"Jackal, just try and keep them back for now," Arin told him. The dog-Navi nodded and shot a bolt of lightning at a few Inklings that had tried to slip past him to the injured Navi and the creepy Navi that was trying to help him.
While the two Inkys paused and studied Jackal as if he was some sort of particularly interesting piece of data, Vital Shade was trying to give Red Shade some recovery chip data - but the acid had burnt Red Shade too much and whatever it had done, it had made Red Shade unable to accept any chip data.
"Oi," Acrobat said abruptly, nudging Foreigner with a none-too-gentle foot. "Try giving Red some recovery chips, mine aren't working."
Foreigner, still sitting on the floor where he'd crashed after Acrobat had kicked him, nodded and picked out a battle chip from the pack on his belt.
"Please let this work," he whispered desperately, and then he downloaded the chip into the silver bit on his wrist.
A moment passed by, and absolutely nothing happened. Red Shade continued to glitch and Vital Shade stepped back, glancing up at its operator.
"What do we do?" it asked. Seriously, that monotone voice was freaking Lan out. Even GravityMan hadn't been this bad.
It took another moment for Acrobat to reply. "Fix his data," she eventually ordered.
Vital Shade actually stiffened at that, its clawed hands curling slightly. That was the only sign of its discomfort, though.
"That method is untested on other Navis," it replied. "I am only able to do it with my sister because she is my twin, and her data is still fundamentally similar to my own despite the virus data within me."
"Try it anyway," Acrobat told it.
"Red Shade has no relation to my data whatsoever," Vital Shade protested tonelessly. "He is not even a Savaron Navi. I have doubts that this would work on him."
"Shove your doubts up your nonexistent ass and help him," Acrobat barked.
Vital Shade continued to stare at her in silence for a few moments, and then, after an eternity, it nodded once and turned back to Red Shade. It began to open up various windows and screens around its injured friend and began tapping at them, dismissing and calling up new windows as it needed. Occasionally it would draw some data from the windows and screens and try to give it to Red Shade, whose glitching body was still refusing to accept any help given.
Acrobat's Navi paused, and then tilted its head. It reached down and took hold of something inside Red Shade's chest with the tips of its claws - presumably a NaviMark, though Lan couldn't see one through the shadow-cloak. Data sparked between the invisible NaviMark and Vital Shade's clawed hand, and then died down.
Vital Shade was still for a moment, and then it went back to work on the windows. It eventually took some more data from the windows and attempted to give it to Red Shade, who actually accepted it this time. Whatever Vital Shade had done with the data sparks had fixed whatever had prevented Red Shade from accepting any helpful data.
Satisfied, Vital Shade dismissed most of the windows except for three of them, all of which it used to draw data from and give to Red Shade. Gradually, Red Shade's burns began to heal and fix themselves, and eventually all that was left was his face - which Vital Shade focused all three windows on, leaning over Red Shade for better focus.
Meanwhile, Jackal was still trying to fend off the Inkys and their Inklings, with varying degrees of success. He was managing to hold the majority of the viruses back, but one or two managed to slip behind his defence and dodge around his blasts of lightning when he tried to get at them. One of the Inkys flowed forwards and Jackal's gaze snapped right to it, eyes narrowed dangerously.
"Electro Tomb!" he shouted, snapping out a hand to point at it.
Four weird-looking tombs rose up around the Inky, which looked at them with no expression. Jackal gestured and the tombs sprang open, and then let loose four massive bolts of electricity that held the Inky in place and electrocuted it. Jackal sent a couple of electric balls at the virus just to make sure the damage was being done, and to Lan's shock, the Inky began to dissolve into decaying pixels.
But the Electro Tomb took up a lot of Jackal's attention, and he was forced to allow the other Inky and several more Inklings past him before he could fully delete the Inky in his Tombs.
Vital Shade snapped up its head to look at the incoming Inky, but it couldn't tear itself away from its work on Red Shade's data. It got its feet under itself - Lan caught a brief glimpse of flesh-coloured talons - but before it could do anything, a massive thorn-covered vine erupted out of the ground and whipped around at everything in front of it.
Three more vines joined the first as everyone stared in amazement (not to mention relief for the Shades and Arin, who seemed to know what was going on, and confusion for Lan and his friends, who had absolutely no idea what was going on), and they began whipping at every single Inkling in sight. The remaining Inky vanished into the black goo and reappeared far away from the thrashing vines, peering at them blankly.
"What moron doesn't check their networks for Inkys?" an entirely new voice demanded.
Another Navi dropped from above, this time a green and brown squirrel-like Navi, who didn't look too happy. He seemed to be directing the vines with flicks of his hands and bushy tail, deleting Inklings at a very rapid pace.
"Woodchip," Jackal greeted him, relieved. "I didn't think you were coming."
"I almost didn't," the squirrel-Navi, Woodchip, confessed resentfully. "Mythril's on my case about her 'shinies' again, you know how she gets. I convinced her the lives of our operatives are more important than things she can easily get herself."
"She's gonna bite your head off later," Jackal commented.
"Oh, yes, but at least I can delete a few Inklings and their Inky boss before I myself get deleted at the claws of a forty-foot dragon," Woodchip huffed.
"You do realise we are still in a tremendous amount of danger," Vital Shade called.
"Zip it," Woodchip snapped.
He turned towards the Inky that was still watching him with what would've been a wary expression had it not been so horribly blank and drippy, and then gestured. At once the vines vanished, but the Inky and its Inkling minions didn't get a chance to move before eight more vines burst out of the ground all over the place, surrounding them. The vines, at Woodchip's direction, began whipping and shredding all over the place, and fairly soon all of the Inklings were gone and the Inky was nothing more than bits of black goo struggling to put itself back together.
Woodchip looked at it with a disgusted expression and brought his hand down as if he was slapping something. A vine crashed down on the remains of the Inky and started grinding into it, and then a burst of decaying pixels signified that the Inky had finally been deleted.
Almost at once, the black goo in the cut off Area began to disappear as if it had never been there before, but there was so much of it that it was pretty obvious it would take a few days at most to completely vanish.
"There was a Navi in there, before the Area was cut off," Arin suddenly spoke up. "Can you hear it?"
Jackal looked around, searching with his ears pricked, and then nodded. He bounded off in a seemingly-random direction while Woodchip glanced over his shoulder to check on Vital Shade's progress with Red Shade, and then Jackal came back a few moments later with a standard Navi held over his shoulder.
"He's the only Navi I could find," Jackal reported. "If there were any others, they've been deleted by now."
In all the panic, Lan had honestly forgotten the Navi. He was pretty sure Acrobat and Foreigner had forgotten as well, but then again, it wasn't really their fault. Things happened and it was pretty understandable that they couldn't keep track of everything.
Looking at them now, he was actually surprised to see Acrobat crouching beside Foreigner, who was just sitting quietly. If she was trying to comfort him, she was doing it weirdly - she wasn't even touching him, just muttering to him. Lan almost wondered why they weren't at the screen, trying to talk to their Navis, but then he remembered that they had those HUD things on their helmets and they could see their Navis anyway.
Acrobat stopped muttering for a moment, and Foreigner said something too quiet for anyone but her to hear. She nodded, stood up, and walked over to Arin while he slowly got to his feet.
"Where's the recovery place here?" she asked.
"There'll be no one there, I ordered an evacuation," Arin reminded her.
"Vital can figure out how to use the equipment."
Arin considered that, and then nodded. "Go back to the lobby and then go through the grey door. Go left at the first turn in the corridor and then keep going until you get to a door labelled Recovery Unit."
Acrobat nodded, and glanced at Foreigner, who had come up behind her while she was talking. In unison, they raised their hands to the computer that everything had started from, and jacked out their Navis. They left without a word to anyone else.
Arin waited until the doors had closed before sighing and stretching her arms above her head. "Man," she said, "that was insane. Never thought an Inky would get into this network. Never thought two would get in, either."
"Apparently the network has holes we didn't know about," Jackal agreed, with a glance at Woodchip.
Woodchip sighed. "I suppose that's my job," he said. "As if I don't have enough to do with special assignments and normal missions and everything else."
"I thought you enjoyed looking for holes in firewalls."
"Yes," Woodchip admitted, "I do. But not when I have a million other things to do."
And without so much as a goodbye, the squirrel-Navi vanished. Now the only Navi left in the network was Jackal, along with the unconscious Navi, but Arin soon fixed that by jacking them both out.
"Oh, I forgot you guys were even here," she said, upon spotting Lan and his friends. "Uh, ignore everything you just saw. And heard."
"Arin, you are an idiot," Jackal sighed.
"Ah, shut up," Arin replied cheerfully. "Right, now where's that lady, I need to give her back her Navi . . ."
Arin left the room next, leaving Lan and his friends still standing there, completely bewildered.
" . . . I'm not even sure what I just saw," Yai eventually admitted.
"Me neither," Tory agreed.
Lan, on the other hand, was too busy with his own thoughts to join in. He kept going over everything despite what Arin had just told them to do, replaying every single word and action and trying to piece everything together. He just knew there was something going on here, and he needed to figure it out - he had a feeling it was important. Very, very important.
I only know one Navi with a move called Blade Cyclone, he thought, mind whirling. Red Shade's voice was familiar to me, just like Foreigner's, but both of them sounded different so I couldn't be sure. And yet, when Red Shade got hit by the acid . . .
"PROTO-"
"Vital, get him outta there, now!"
Not Red Shade. Not even just Red. Proto.
Proto . . . as in ProtoMan? Lan wondered.
And if Red Shade really was who he thought he was, then that had to make Foreigner who Lan thought he was, as well.
I know exactly what you've been up to now, Chaud, he thought.
oooo
"Are you sure you're alright?" Chaud asked again.
"Yes, I'm fine," ProtoMan replied patiently. "There are no traces of the Acid Fire in my programming, and Virus's healing method held off the worst of the damage before the Recovery Unit's machines were used to fix everything else. Really, Chaud, I'm perfectly fine."
Chaud had asked the exact same question at least three times every five minutes for the past two hours. He didn't feel like going back to the Haven District just yet, but he wasn't going to hang around the Underground NetBattler's HQ when Zoet had already gone back home. She had seemed mildly reluctant to leave him, but Chaud had insisted - and now he was regretting it, because at least with her there he didn't have to deal with people trying to talk to him constantly.
It seemed that every Savaron-native operative wanted to know what it was like to live in a different country, and Chaud was vaguely uncomfortable with the fascinated looks he kept getting. With Zoet around, he could ignore the worst of it because everyone tended to avoid her (for very obvious reasons), but without her there, there was no one to stop the operatives from hounding him.
So he'd left, and his feet had somehow taken him to a park that was themed somewhat like an archeological dig in the Historical District. He was sitting against a tree with his PET propped up on his lap, ignoring everything around him in favour of constantly checking on his Navi.
"You're absolutely sure?" Chaud had to wonder whether or not he was annoying ProtoMan with all this, but ProtoMan had been nothing but patient and hadn't shown any signs of being annoyed at Chaud's constant need to be reassured that he wasn't about to burst into pixels spontaneously.
"One hundred percent," ProtoMan answered. "No trace of the Acid Fire. Look."
He pulled up his stats once again - he'd done that every few minutes just to give Chaud some extra reassurance, but it wasn't helping at all.
"No viruses, no Acid Fire, no missing data, nothing out of the ordinary," ProtoMan reported, swiping through the data to show Chaud.
"What's that?" Chaud asked, suddenly noticing something he hadn't before. There was a little glitch in one of the stat files, mostly around the core data. The thought of ProtoMan's core data being corrupted made Chaud's heart skip a beat and he almost felt like he couldn't breathe for a moment.
"That's nothing to worry about," ProtoMan calmly said. "Virus explained that the healing method it used sometimes causes minor glitches in Flight's systems, and it guessed the same thing applies for me. The glitches will vanish in a few hours."
ProtoMan's matter-of-fact tone actually managed to calm Chaud's worries a little bit, but not completely.
"And . . . and you're certain there's nothing else?" he asked.
"Completely," his Navi replied.
Chaud tore his eyes away from his PET and leaned back against the tree, looking up at the rocky ceiling of the massive cavern way above his head.
"That . . . that's good," he mumbled.
"It is, yes," ProtoMan agreed. He was silent for a moment. "Chaud . . . are you alright?"
Chaud glanced down at the PET's screen. ProtoMan was frowning, clearly just as worried about Chaud as he was about ProtoMan.
"I'm fine," he replied automatically.
"Right," ProtoMan said disbelievingly. "Now give me the answer that wasn't conditioned into you by your father."
Chaud winced and tried to hide the flash of anxiety he felt, but ProtoMan was better at reading him than just about everyone else he called friends.
"You're not fine," ProtoMan went on quietly. "I'm the one who was injured, but you felt the pain just as much as if you'd been hurt too, didn't you?"
"I . . . I wasn't actually hurt . . ."
"I'm not talking about physical pain," ProtoMan said bluntly. "Chaud-"
"Can we drop it?" Chaud asked, somewhat desperately. "Please? I-I don't wanna walk about this."
ProtoMan just looked at him in silence for a moment, and then he finally nodded. "Okay then," he agreed grudgingly. "But this won't stop me from being worried about you."
"Yeah, I know." Chaud held back a smile.
The sudden sound of footsteps heading in his direction made him look up, and he sat up in surprise when he saw that Zoet was making her way over to him. She stopped in front of him, raising an eyebrow and frowning down at him.
"You like grass, or something?" she asked.
" . . . I'm just sitting down," Chaud defended himself, mildly confused. "I wasn't aware that was a crime."
"It is when you're probably sitting on dead bodies."
"What?"
He jumped up, disgusted, and hopped off the spot he'd been sitting on for the past couple of hours. Then he heard a quiet snigger and turned to glare at Zoet.
"Only an idiot would fall for that," she said, still smirking. "If there were actual dead bodies here, they wouldn't let five-year-olds play on top of them."
"Technically speaking, the entire Earth is full of fossilised commodities - dinosaurs, people, plant life, dung, and so on," Virus spoke up. "So your prank may actually end up being true, if we dug deep enough into the ground."
"Thanks," Chaud muttered. "I really needed to know that."
"You are welcome."
It was really difficult to tell whether or not Virus was being sarcastic in return.
"What're you doing here, anyway?" Chaud asked Zoet, deciding to just ignore everything Virus had said. "I thought you went home."
"Evidently I didn't," Zoet replied. "But since HQ has yet to assign you a proper email address for the Underground NetBattlers - the lazy shits - I'm here to deliver a message."
"And that is . . .?"
"In light of the shitshow that was today," Zoet informed him, "Mom managed to convince Kris to give us our day off a little early. Well, I say 'convinced', but all she did was ask and Kris was perfectly fine with it."
"Wait, what?" Chaud asked, blinking in confusion. "What do you mean, 'a little early'?"
"Usually operatives in school or any form of education have one day off a week - that day is either Saturday or Sunday, depending on what school or college or whatever the operative goes to," Zoet explained. "Mine is usually on Saturday, unless something like this happens, and then it'll either be earlier or later. So we got tomorrow off, be happy."
"And . . . you came all this way to tell me that?" Chaud said, somewhat incredulously.
"No, actually. Remember way back when I was giving you that tour? I showed you my house but we didn't have time to check it out cus Kris likes whirlwind tours for some stupid reason?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I thought I'd invite you over so I can show off how awesome my literal treehouse is," Zoet informed him. "You have no say in this, by the way. Agree or die."
"She is not being serious," Virus spoke up, with a sigh. "You do have a choice. Zoet would just like to invite you over because she wishes to keep an eye on you after today."
"Shut up, dammit," Zoet hissed.
"You're worried about me?" Chaud asked, unable to resist the amused grin that spread on his face.
"I will stab you with a blunt knife," Zoet threatened.
"You're a giant softie," Chaud teased her gleefully.
Zoet growled and ProtoMan coughed pointedly.
"Chaud, perhaps you shouldn't antagonise someone who can put a grown man in hospital," he advised.
"Aw, come on," Chaud protested half-heartedly. When ProtoMan failed to be amused, he shook his head. "Sometimes you're too serious, and other times you're the exact opposite. You need to make up your mind." He glanced at Zoet. "Are you gonna wake me up at ungodly hours again, or do I get to wake up on my own tomorrow?"
"Why do we have this conversation every time we have a day off?" Zoet muttered. "No, you dumbass, I will not break into your room and wake you up at the asscrack of dawn. I'll be waiting for you at the Jungle Station, be there at nine. Or nine-thirty, whatever floats your boat."
"I'll be there at nine," Chaud said, suspecting that, whatever she said, showing up at nine-thirty was probably not a good idea.
OOOOOO
This entire chapter was awesome to write, mainly because I got to do it almost entirely from Lan's POV and leave behind a whole bunch of clues for him and his friends to figure out.
Hey, in case anyone didn't get it, Acrobat and Foreigner are Zoet and Chaud.
So yeah anyway, ProtoMan gets hit by an Inky's Acid Fire and gets his face burnt off, and it turns out Virus has a secret healing method that goes really well with his hacker-level skills of virus bullshit. And next chapter we get to see the inside of Zoet's house, and I get to write a few scenes that I've had rolling around in my head for a while!
Moving on from this, and going on to something completely different, I've finished the Team Colonel playthrough from ZEROthefirst (that's the YouTuber whose name I couldn't be bothered to remember) and I'm now halfway through the playthrough of Team ProtoMan, which has been recorded by his friend, whose YouTube name I can't remember simply because it's very complicated.
As I was going through his playthrough of Team Colonel, I guess ZERO kinda grew on me, and his recording style - while being very different from RoahmMythril's and definitely not as thorough (he didn't show any post-game content, though I'm not sure whether or not there even is any post-game content for the fifth game) - is actually relatively funny.
Now, his buddy, on the other hand, is utterly hilarious. Literally every line he comes out with just has me giggling in my seat, and even though it's still not as thorough as RoahmMythril, I'm actually enjoying watching his playthrough.
In other words, I've now sort of watched the first five games, leaving only the sixth one after I've finished the Team ProtoMan playthrough. I've heard that Lan leaves DenTech City at the very start of the sixth game, so since he still lives in DenTech in this fic, I'm gonna set the time for this as between the fifth and sixth games.
Before I said that I was keeping it all vague as to when this fic takes place, but that was basically just because I hadn't watched all of the playthroughs of the games yet. Since I've watched almost all of them and I now have a better idea of what happens in the gameworld, this fic now finally has a time.
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