I like the first-person perspective but I think I'll keep it to interludes of specific people.
This is a crossposting from my QuestionableQuesting account.
Chapter 2
"Ok, so what am I looking at, Ed?" Taylor asked while she and Ed stood inside of their garage. Taylor noticed that besides what was on the workbench in front of her she was also able to see what looked like the framework for some sort of saucer-like vehicle sitting near the garage car door.
In front of her though, on a long workbench in the garage turned workshop laid several different pieces of what looked like parts for some sort of makeshift tinker gun in various states of being built. They didn't look like they were a part of different projects to her limited scientific and engineering knowledge. However, the weird and ominously glowing green goop swirling in a largish glass bottle on the top of the workbench next to the gun parts was what really caught her eye. Taylor had no idea what it could be used for.
"This is a gun I was quickly building while I waited for my cybernetic enhancer to finish charging. Speaking of," with a flourish Ed reached into his coat and pulled out a small golden chip like object that glowed with a brighter yellow on one end and a trail of that yellow trailed towards its middle. Then he pressed a hidden button seamed into the work table that Taylor was certain wasn't there before and revealed a small screen that flipped over from the tabletop just above the button, Ed tapped his fingers over it and a circular entrance opened up on the garage floor in front of them. Out from it came a tall tube-like thing with several metal arms sprouting from the bottom and top of the inside of the tube.
"Say what now?" Taylor thought to herself as she stared at the thing in front of her. "When did he build… this?!"
"While I've got a bunch of mark one cybernetics ready to be installed, this is the big thing I wanted to show you," Ed shoved the glowing chip into Taylor's face.
"So, what do I need to do?" Taylor asked him. "If you already have something to install the… chip, then why do you need me?"
Ed moved over to the machine and started doing stuff with it, Taylor couldn't see with his body covering everything. After a moment he replied, "You weren't ever going to do the actual installation, Taylor. Cybernetics need precise handling or else the entire process will be incredibly painful and possibly deadly, we're talking about altering the human body to go beyond its normal limits here."
Ed paused and pointed at a small screen attached to the tube, "That is what you'll be doing. I purposely built this thing to require more than two people to use it and need to be biologically keyed in to start the process. It's only supposed to be used once and we don't need anyone else using it."
"Wait, when did you get biological samples of me?"
"Breakfast, took some off your dad too just in case. Also a few hairs," Ed replied. "Blood would be better but I don't have proper storage for it right now so we'll have to put that on hold. You'd be surprised at how useful blood can be, Taylor."
Taylor felt that maybe she should be a little more worried and disturbed about the fact that Ed was taking samples off her and her father. But she didn't get a chance to complain about it when the garage echoed with a ding and a gauge next to the tube's screen began to fill with some blueish liquid.
"Alright! The tube is charged," Ed said, keeping an eye on the machine for a few seconds. He poked something on the screen and part of the glass slid down to allow him entrance. Then he began to strip.
Taylor eeped and covered her now flaming red face with her hands in shocked embarrassment. She did her best to keep her head away (and not peek), "W-What the fuck are you doing?!"
"Uh, getting ready to receive my cybernetics?" Ed sarcastically asked. "What? Did you think I'd be able to do it with my clothes on? Come on Taylor..."
"I'd have at least liked a bit of warning!" Taylor shouted.
"Well, here's your warning then. You know, not everything will just wait for you to stop being embarrassed. You gotta learn to just go with the flow sometimes and put shit off so you don't have to think about it," he said as he unbuckled his pants and dropped them to the floor. His coat and shirt followed and he stepped into the tube of the machine, the glass side closing behind him. Taylor felt like her head was now on fire and breathed a small sigh of relief when she noticed Ed's privates were basically covered by the control screen.
"Alright," Ed started. "Put your hand on the screen and then press the green button. Then you'll press it again in thirty seconds, do not take too long to press it or-whoah!"
Taylor, in her still embarrassed mood, just wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. She nearly shoved her hand through the screen and smashed the button next to it, causing the metal limbs in the tube to grab ahold of Ed and begin the cybernetics process.
"Taylor! You started it too soon! I needed to tell you about the-!" Ed was cut off as a limb had used its pincers to grab his tongue and stretch it a bit out of his mouth as another mover under it and got to work.
"That might have been a mistake," Taylor winced as the limbs got to work. She noticed a small countdown timer on the screen and pressed the green button when it reached zero.
The limbs were done and let go of Ed's tongue, "Alright, Taylor, when the screen flashes yellow you need to press the red button and then keep all of your attention on me no matter what!"
"Ok but why though?!"
"Because as soon as the surgery lasers finish they'll start sparking! It's what I was trying to tell you about. I haven't gotten all the kinks out of this thing so they start sparking when each part takes too long, you need to manually shut off the lasers or else I'll be in extreme pain until you do!"
The screen flashed yellow and Taylor hesitantly pressed the red button.
Then the limbs grabbing his arms lifted him up and bent him backwards with a small surprised exclamation from him. In order to compensate for the smallish area to work with, the machine was forced to bend his legs behind him and shove his bent and spread knees to the opposite sides as he was lifted in the air. All this caused his junk to end up at level with the glass in front of Taylor's face.
Taylor's jaw dropped as Ed's entire manhood was essentially a foot or two from her, only a small glass barrier between them. She was frozen in place as her brain caught up to what she was seeing.
"Aaah!" Taylor screamed and ducked under the control panel to hide away from the sight.
"Taylor!" Ed yelled as the lasers did their thing. "Focus, Taylor! You need to focus or I'll be in extreme pain!"
"I can't!" Taylor yelled back. "N-Not with your… junk right in front of me!"
"I can't do anything about that! Just ignore it and focus on the lasers!"
"I can't ignore it! It's right there in front of me!"
"Taylor, you're a teenager! I know teenagers are all about watching porn and furiously getting off to whatever they can see but you gotta get past that!" Ed yelled back. The lasers made a few crosses on different areas over his chest and started turning off one by one. "Just ignore it! The lasers are already finishing, you need to just stare at the metal limbs and press the green button as soon as they start sparking!"
Taylor trembled as she tried to work up the courage.
"Oh shit!" Ed exclaimed as he widened his eyes as he saw the sparks start forming. He began yelling in pain as the sparks danced across his skin, the metal limbs keeping him from escaping.
Taylor's head snapped up as she momentarily forgot her embarrassment at the situation.
"Necessary… this is necessary!" She chanted under her breath before pulling herself back up. The sight of Ed's manhood was still in her view but even as her face reddened she pushed past it to slam her finger over the green button.
Immediately the sparks stopped and Ed breathed a sigh of relief as the metal limbs began lowering him back to a standing position. "Whew, that was a thing," he said, slightly singed while the tube opened and he was able to start getting dressed again.
"Never make me do that again!" Taylor yelled, breathing heavily as what just happened finally caught up to her.
"Whoah, whoah, alright. Just take it easy, jeez," Ed held his hands up and leaned just a bit away from the finger Taylor had just jabbed into his chest.
"No more," Taylor growled out before storming away back into the house, her face still red as a tomato. "I'm going to my room!"
"Go and be a teenager, Taylor! You only live once an infinite amount of times!" Ed cheered out as he went to put the final touches on the makeshift gun on the workbench. Taylor didn't say anything, just slamming the garage door to the house shut in reply.
"Man, and here I thought she was supposed to be a bullied and withdrawn girl," Ed just shook his head and continued to work on his new gun. It didn't take long for him to finish as portal gun was mostly finished before Taylor helped him. As he inspected it for any faults he couldn't help but comment to himself, "Well, whatever, now that this portal gun is finished and I'm mostly safe I can finally start getting shit done."
One week later…
Taylor was back at school and still miserable while attending. She had hoped that Ed had managed to at least chase them off for a bit with his brazen attitude, out of sheer incredulous disbelief at the very least. In truth she only managed a single day of relief before things went back to normal, though Emma had been a bit more vicious with her words and Sophia had left a few bigger than normal bruises. It was only the first month of school and Taylor was already basically done with it.
Taylor's cheeks still sometimes burn when she remembers just what had happened last week. As Taylor left lunch and went to her locker to get ready for her next class, she was stopped by Ed randomly appearing.
"Taylor, I need your help. We need to go on an adventure," Ed suddenly came up behind her while she was standing at her locker, making Taylor jump in surprise. She'd been on edge ever since managing to avoid the trio during lunch.
"What? What do you mean by adventure?" Taylor asked, getting over her surprise and putting away one of her textbooks.
"That vehicle I'm working on, I need a few crystals and parts that I can salvage from a junk world," Ed explained, then pulled out his portal gun and shot at the closed lockers next to her. Many students shouted and moved away in shock at the display. "I tapped into intergalactic frequencies to get the coordinates. Now come on… shitty school with shitty classmates or an alien planet? Not hard to choose if I'm being honest," Ed motioned at the portal with his hands.
Taylor took a moment to think about it, then looked over Ed's shoulder and saw the trio standing in the crowd. She took a moment to savor their stupefied expressions for a moment and really thought about what crazy thing Ed was offering. Alien planet, or dealing with the three worst people she knew and all their yes-men tagalongs? Does she want to see something new, or does she want to do the same thing she has done since high school started?
Taylor shrugged, "Sure. But this better not be like the cybernetic thing."
"I can make no promises," Ed told her. "Adventures can have some weird shit."
Taylor walked through the portal with only a little bit of wariness, securing her school bag over her shoulders. Ed cheered and followed behind her without bothering to look at the students gawking at them.
A purple alien ship flew from the dirty brown skies skies of Junk Planet, a personal craft large enough to only carry a small group of people and not be threatening. A ship one would normally overlook if it wasn't currently on fire and smoking from one of its thrusters.
As the ship came crashing down it smacked into one of the towering piles of junk that the planet was so aptly named for, sending debris and garbage flying everywhere. The hard crash knocked pieces of the ship loose and worsened its descent, only making it hit more piles of junk until it finally slowed down enough to only be lodged into a pile.
An insect-like alien popped the top off the spacecraft, coughing and hacking up blood as it laid across the top of its ship badly hurt. The alien sighed as it came to terms that it wasn't dead yet but it's relief was short lived when a couple of other alien ships came onto the planet. These were larger and were obviously meant for transport of larger groups.
With a pained grunt the insectoid alien picked itself up, grabbed a futuristic suitcase and a laser pistol and began running for its life.
The other aliens landed on the planet and troops of insectoid soldiers came running out of them. Small squads ran around and secured the areas around their ships as they quickly began to look for their target. The fugitive managed to mostly avoid the searching soldiers and ducked behind a trash pile, securing the suitcase against its chest and heaving a sigh of relief.
He was promptly crushed by a heavy pile of junk falling on top of him.
"Ow!" Taylor cried, rubbing her butt in pain on top of the pile. "Couldn't you have picked a better spot to portal in? The ground gave in as soon as I took a couple of steps!"
"Well, geez, sorry, Taylor," Ed rolled his eyes and hefted his portal gun. "This thing is pretty imprecise right now until I can make a better one. And if I want a better one then I need a ship and materials to make a device that converts materials to other materials. Just be glad we didn't land on something dangerous."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Taylor muttered. She looked over the side of her junk pile, "Ew what's that blue stuff pooling around me?"
Ed stepped from his more stable position and reached down and picked up the insectoid's hand still clutching the laser gun. He gave it a bored once over, "Eh, looks like blood. Judging by the hand I'd say a Gromflomite."
Taylor shrieked when she saw the hand and tried to back away from it, only causing her to fall over the side of the pile and land her left shoulder into the blood pool. Taylor shuddered in revulsion and shook her arm to try and rid herself of the blood.
Ed flicked the hand away and put away his portal gun and newly acquired laser gun to grab Taylor by her clean arm and haul her away from the junk pile.
"I want to go home," Taylor muttered, staring at her now blue shoulder with a thousand-yard stare.
"Taylor, you can't give up now the adventure hasn't even started!" Ed complained. "Just give it a bit of time, then the shock should wear off. If it helps, don't think of it as blood, think of it as… I dunno, crushed blueberries or something. Now come on, search around for anything interesting."
"Right…" Taylor stood in her spot, still not willing to move until a small cylinder tube containing a glowing red liquid fell from the now opened suitcase that flew up from the force of the impact and landed slightly slanted on the large junk pile. The tube bounced around until it came to a slow stop and bumped into Taylor's shoe.
The tinkling of the tube brought Taylor back to her senses and she did her best to repress everything until she was back in bed. She reached down and picked up the weird tube, giving it a curious look. Taylor glanced over at the suitcase that it came from. With a shrug she walked over, doing her best to avoid looking or stepping in the blood and wrenched the suitcase free from the pile to peer inside.
Two more of the tubes were secured inside the suitcase on one side and several curved rectangular devices on the other.
"Hey Ed, is this something interesting?" Taylor called out to Ed while he was busy happily ripping a strange vehicle apart with some tools he kept inside his coat.
He paused while dismantling the vehicle and came over to her with his arms holding lots of different parts. He stared down at the tubes then set his pilfered stuff down on the ground so he could take a look at one of the rectangular devices.
"Don't know what the tubes contain, but these look like storage devices. Probably contains notes on what that stuff is." He shrugged, "Might as well take it. If it's useless then I guess I can just sell it for something else."
Ed placed the device back inside the suitcase before turning his head. His eyes widened and he grinned, "Oh fuck yeah! A Meeseeks box! I need one of these!"
Taylor closed the suitcase and tossed it into the pile just to watch Ed run over to some blue box and bring it back to the pile of ever growing junk as he went around and collected as many things as possible.
"Well, at least one of us is having fun," Taylor grumbled, not really knowing what to look for. She looked up at the sky and marveled for a bit on how she, a human, managed to be one of the first of her kind to visit an alien planet. A small smile ghosted across her face, while this had a bad start maybe it won't be as bad as she thought.
Then a laser streaked past her face and struck one of the junk piles across from them. Taylor shrieked and scrambled away, more lasers barely missing her and striking the ground around her only to leave black marks as she moved behind an alien fridge.
"Shit, there's more of them?" Ed asked while holding the laser gun he took from the dead alien, ducking his head when a laser hit the cover near it and returning fire at their attackers.
"Oh shit, oh shit," Taylor muttered, eyes wide and scared shitless at the random violence. One of the alien Gromflomite soldiers peered over her cover with its weapon ready to shoot Taylor but a shot blew a hole through its head and its body hit the ground at Taylor's feet.
Said girl grabbed her legs in fright while staring down wide-eyed at the dead alien.
"Grab the gun, Taylor!" Ed shouted while firing his pistol over his own cover. "There's a lot of them over there!"
"Nononooo…" Taylor muttered, slowly shaking her head.
Ed grumbled and ducked behind cover, switching his laser for his portal gun. With a deep breath to ready himself he rose from cover while lasers flew by and shot at the pile of collected stuff, sending them through the portal and into the garage. Once the portal disappeared Ed quickly put the portal gun away and brought the laser pistol back out. Ed rushed from cover, using the pistol to unleash covering fire so he could reach Taylor.
Ed grabbed the dead alien's laser rifle and slung it over his shoulder before snatching Taylor by the arm and dragging her away from the battlefield. Ed furrowed his brow and fired his pistol at the aliens, managing to land a hit on a few more enemies before his view was obstructed by more junk as they fled from the soldiers.
"After them! They must know where the suitcase is!" One of the alien soldiers commanded.