Review Responses:
Blackberry Avar - It is interesting to think what would have happened had that warning shot not gone off, though it's likely that the man with the dark glasses would have shot at them anyway. Though perhaps Sixclaws would have had enough time to intervene?
Chapter 32: Insurrection
East of Possibility
Late Afternoon
"What is the meaning of this?!"
The soldiers surrounding the clearing edged forward, General Sixclaws taking a step back as his own troops readied their weapons. Maple warrily looked around at the assailants, vivid flashbacks to earlier that morning running through her head. Even from within the giant metal dragon, she still felt intimidated by the formidable army.
"I've been waiting a long time for this, you know?" the man with the dark glasses stated, briefly taking off his spectacles to wipe them with a cloth, his insidious grin never fading. He pulled a small gun out of a holster on his side, pointing it directly at Sixclaws.
"Wha...this is Treason!" the general shouted, "You'll be thrown from the forces for this, and your parents won't be able to help you either!"
"Oh quite the contrary, really. My parents are the reason I'm here speaking to you now." the man explained. Maple could tell by Sixclaws' neutral reaction that this was no surprise to him.
"As you know, my parents aren't all too fond of Thorn." the man with the dark glasses continued.
"Get to the point." Sixclaws growled through gritted teeth. Maple squinted her eyes at the general for a moment. He seemed to be whispering something to Reggie, and passed him something too small for Maple to make out, which Reggie promptly stuck into his ears.
"Well, in short, my parents believe that, with the help of this amazing technology that these aliens have been so kind to bring us, we could place a new, more capable queen on the throne. Maybe not as capable as Burn would have been, though."
"You mean a more easily manipulated queen?" Sixclaws sneered, "I assume all of these troops are under Lady Muskrat's influence as well?"
"Astute as always, I see! Maybe Thorn wasn't so clueless in appointing you after all. Still, her time as queen, and yours as general, have come to an…."
"THAT'S QUEEN THORN TO YOU!" Sixclaws shouted, hurling a small device towards the man with the dark glasses. It hit the ground a short distance in front of him, and immediately unleashed a piercing screech that tore through Maple's head.
Many of the surrounding soldiers quickly fell to the ground, clutching their ears, while others began firing their guns furiously amidst the chaos. Sixclaws and his troops began backing up into the safety of the shuttle, many of them holding large body shields to protect against the oncoming torrents of gunfire.
Maple noticed Reggie making a mad dash towards her, and instinctively lowered the Reggie-tron's wings to shield him as he slid between its legs. She slammed the cockpit shut, the sound of bullets pinging off of its metal armor all around her.
"Get us outta here!" Reggie shouted, grabbing hold of one of the Reggie-tron's hind legs. Maple lifted the mecha up onto its hind legs, preparing to take to the sky, when a blast from one of the armored vehicles near her sent her reeling backwards. She accidentally crushed the front of one of the four wheeled vehicles beneath one of the Reggie-tron's metal feet, as another shot from one of the armored vehicles struck the Reggie-tron's left foreleg.
A diagram of the Reggie-tron flashed before her, red lights flashing near the spot where it had been hit, and Maple realized that the left foreleg wasn't responding to her commands.
"Come on!" Reggie shouted.
Maple gritted her teeth, and swung her arms down, propelling the Reggie-tron into the air, the grass beneath it burning to cinders.
She spun and weaved as gunfire continued to spray up from the ground, a couple more shots from the armored vehicles whizzing past her. Reggie clung to the Reggie-tron's leg as tightly as he could, reminding Maple of her own harrowing flight atop Bippy earlier that day.
She cleared the layer of sparse clouds, now well out of range of the soldier's fire, when her forward momentum began to decline. She turned to the diagram of the Reggie-tron, another red light flashing by one of its rear talons. Maple looked down to see smoke sputtering out of its thruster, some stray fire having damaged it. She turned her attention back to the Salvation, so close now that she had passed the clouds.
Come on, just a little bit further!
The open hanger door was just within reach, and Maple could see Hidden sticking his head curiously out to look at her. He quickly ducked out of the way, though, as she came careening into the hangar, sliding to a stop on the hangar floor. Reggie had leapt off of the Reggie-tron's leg, rolling along the floor as the smoking machine came in for a crash landing.
"What in blazing moons happened down there?!" Maple heard Hidden shout. She rolled the Reggie-tron over onto its back with its good foreleg, opening up the cockpit and pulling herself up out of it. She felt nearly as queasy as she had after her ride on Bippy, and the world was still spinning around her.
"Maple! You alright?" Reggie shouted, running over to the downed Reggie-tron. Maple gave him a shaky thumbs up, struggling to get to her feet atop the machine's metal belly.
"We need to...ugh...we need to get to Ricky and Xavier…." she struggled to say, her vision gradually starting to stabilize. "We need to get outta here."
"What about all those dudes with the tanks? What about Sixclaws?" Reggie asked, gesturing to the open hangar door.
"Tanks? You mean those big things with the long guns?"
"Yeah, and they're gonna kill him if we don't do something!"
"So he didn't tell you to go on without him?"
"Well, he did. But why would I do that!"
Maple grinned. Even though she'd only known him for a few minutes, she didn't feel like leaving the General stranded down there either. Still, the Reggie-tron was out of commission, and they likely wouldn't be able to do much without inadvertently killing people, something else she really didn't feel like doing.
"What do you think, Hidden?" she asked, but the SandWing had walked further down the hangar ramp, staring over the vast precipice below.
"Hey, guys? I think we've got some company." he said, before quickly leaping back as the shuttle rose up from below, hovering in place just outside of the hangar.
Its windshield was riddled with bullet holes, matching the scuffs and dents across its hull from Hidden, Ricky and Lin's previous adventure within it. Behind the ruptured glass, Maple could just barely make out the face of the man with the dark glasses, twisted in seething rage.
"H-How…." she sputtered, before realizing that he must have forced Sixclaws' troops to fly it for him. She knew with a sinking feeling what was about to happen next.
The shuttle shot forward, straight towards the fallen Reggie-tron, and Maple sitting atop it. There was no time to jump for cover, the man was going to kill her in one last desperate move.
Suddenly, a bolt of pure white lightning shot across the hangar, sweeping across the shuttle and overloading its systems. Its engines cut out, and it harmlessly ground across the hangar floor, lightly bumping into the Reggie-tron's rear talons.
Maple stared at the shuttle in shock, before turning towards the source of the white lightning. There, standing by one of the archways to the adjacent halls with a tired look on his face, was Darkstalker.
He stared at the shuttle apathetically for a moment, before turning to Hidden and tossing him a large white device. Hidden caught it in his foretalons, looking back at Darkstalker in a mix of confusion and relief.
"Spy on me with that thing again, and it's getting reduced to ash." the NightWing growled, before walking off down the hall, the glass nodes embedded in his talons clinking against the floor.
Silence hung over the hangar, the gentle hum of the Salvation's bottom thrusters echoing throughout the chamber. Hidden finally stepped forward, briefly checking Bippy for any damages before making his way out of the hangar.
"Well." he said, turning back to the two dumbstruck humans standing by the Reggie-tron 9000, "I dunno about you, but I'm getting some ice-cream."
Northeast of Possibility
Evening
Maple and Reggie stood next to each other by one of the shuttles, Maple shoving large spoonfuls of the delicious white stuff called "ice-cream" down her gullet. It tasted even sweeter than the pancakes, though Maple still found their fluffy consistency mixed with the goopy syrup to be slightly more enjoyable.
Hidden ate his ice-cream alongside Ricky and Xavier, the RainWing covered in bandages from his many bullet wounds. They had picked up the duo hours prior, and thankfully, it seemed none of Xavier's wounds were infected. Lin was laying off on the other end of the hangar, watching them with mild interest, and Darkstalker was...somewhere.
"Once again, I'd like to apologize for the actions of my subordinate." General Sixclaws said, standing next to another one of the flying machines Maple had seen earlier that day (she now knew it was something called a "helicopter"). One of his arms was slung across his chest, wrapped up in bandages similar to those on Xavier.
"Don't sweat it! He went rogue, right?" Hidden said, sticking another spoonful of ice-cream in his maw.
"Well, you can rest assured that he'll receive a just punishment for his crimes." Sixclaws explained, stepping up onto the helicopter as its blades slowly began to pick up speed. He took one last look at the massive hangar around him, smiling. "You know, I'm grateful you turned out to be friendly." he said, "I don't know what we would've done against a ship like this."
"I mean, it's not like this thing has any weapon systems, that we know of." Hidden remarked.
"Wait, it doesn't?!" Reggie asked, staring at Hidden in shock.
The SandWing shrugged. "Yeah. What, you think Xavier and I didn't check?"
General Sixclaws chuckled, the helicopter starting to rise up off of the hangar floor. "Good luck on finding your way home! And if you ever come back again, Queen Thorn would love to meet you!"
The helicopter veered out of the hangar, and flew off towards the vast desert, the setting sun blazing brightly behind the sea of sand dunes.
"C'mon Ricky." Hidden started, motioning to the SkyWing, "Let's get outta here before another kingdom tries to blow us out of the sky."
Ricky paused, turning to Xavier. The RainWing gave him a nod, and the two began making their way out of the hangar.
"H-Hold on Hidden!" Reggie started, running up to the SandWing. Hidden paused, looking down at the human.
"You uh...you think you could fix up the Reggie-tron?" he asked, pointing a hand at the metal dragon, slumped against the hangar wall with its busted foreleg hung limp at its side. Hidden stared at it for a moment, before nodding.
"I've been reading up on some books about multiverse tech I got from Moss Town." he explained, "I think I could get it patched up."
Reggie grinned, and walked back over to Maple, as the two dragons stepped out of the hangar. "Hey, can't let you have all the fun, can I?" he asked, leaning against the shuttle next to her.
Maple yawned, stretching her arms up, having finished her bowl of ice-cream. "Yeah, well, I think I've had about enough fun for today." she yawned, already feeling bags under her eyes. She turned, walking off towards where Hidden and Ricky had gone off to. "Wake me up when we reach the next timeline, okay…." she groggily said, making her way to the one human sized bunk to catch some much needed sleep.
AN:
I drafted this whole chapter on Sunday, and didn't proof read it 'till today, so I don't know if that will effect the quality of my writing, since I usually spend more time proofreading chapters and tweaking them as I write them. With school ramping up and the SAT coming next weekend, though, I figured it would be best to do all of my work on this story on the weekend.
I'm thinking about moving more into shorter chapters to ease my workload for each week, though nothing shorter than the shortest chapters thus far. This will likely cause episodes to have more chapters.
You can probably guess who will be the next POV. Stay tuned!