Bonus V
Birthdays were a boisterous affair in the Guardian organization, and the widely varied origins of its members didn't help matters much. When you shoved dozens of computer operators, scientists, former mercenaries, a couple of kids, some delivery men, Mega Men, Cédre (who was a category all her own), scouts, soldiers, and one or two minor psychopaths in the same building-slash-vehicle, a little chaos was inevitable. Quite frankly it was probably healthy. All those people needed some sort of outlet while being cramped into a single airship on a regular basis, and birthdays were one of the most innocent ways to make a mess of things without causing too much permanent damage to the place. And so, for the past hour, Vent and Aile had gamely borne all the off-key renditions of the Happy Birthday song and cobbled-together cakes that could be thrown at them. One or two were thrown rather literally. The coupe-de-grace of the whole event happened on the bridge, right where they expected it. No cake this time, thankfully, but sparklers, birthday poppers, and confetti all blasted out of nowhere as they entered the room, many loud cheers greeting them.
"Hey! It's the man and woman of the hour!"
"Happy Birthday you two! Another year down, and many more to go!"
"Happy birthdays, bosses!"
Before they could respond, yet another rendition of the birthday ballad was warbled out by everyone on the bridge. The two laughed at it all, a little embarrassed. Colourful scraps of paper and glitter landed on them, Aile brushing some of the confetti off of herself subconsciously. Nearby, Pandora and Prometheus looked around wildly, a little shell-shocked at all the fuss that was occurring. They'd clearly been dragged into the affair against their will.
Prometheus blinked as he gazed around at everyone in the room, "Huh. I wondered what that was all about."
"Remind me to never… tell anyone our birthdays…'' Pandora complained softly to her brother. He nodded emphatically in response.
Suddenly, loud screams pierced the air, along with several crashes, bangs, and primordial growls. More than one of the voices yelling out were familiar. Anguille, a mechanic who had been oddly MIA for a bit, dashed into the room as pale as a sheet, "I swear he made me do it! I had no idea he was gonna take me seriously, oh my god, how did we pull that off, I didn't even know you could do that-"
"What is happening here!?" Prairie commanded, standing up. Anguille, who had been blabbering incessantly, shut up. The eccentric man with teal hair was well known for being reserved but supportive, so seeing him like this was rather concerning. A fellow Mechanic, Silure, stood up to calm him, but the Mega Men in the room all but ignored these events. Their attention was solely focused on the pandemonium rapidly approaching them from the hall.
"Let us go, you brute!"
"We will not allow you to do as you please!"
"If you don't shut up I am turning you into scrap!"
"Why do you need us to be quiet? What are you planning, God of Destruction!?"
That's when Omega, who had also been AWOL for the last few days, showed up unannounced. With him were some rather unexpected guests, each and every one of them screaming blue bloody murder. Vent and Aile stopped dead at the sight. Pandora and her brother stared. Prairie, Ciel, and every other Guardian in the area were frozen in disbelief, a few downright gaping as they tried to process the mess evolving before them. "Happy Birthday!" Omega laughed. Nobody moved as silence dominated the room. No one seemed to know how to react to this rather baffling turn of events, more than a few of them turning to their immediate neighbours in a stupor. Wind whistled past the windows.
Prometheus was the one that finally spoke up, "You know what? That's actually kind of adorable."
Omega looked offended at the comment. "Shut up, poke-stick."
"How many times do I have to tell you, it's a goddamn scythe you piece of-!"
"You found them? Our biometals? Just for us?" Aile began, more than a little teary. Indeed, within Omega's arms, or hanging out of a bag he'd no doubt stolen from some unlucky bystander, were the five missing biometals that had been taken from them or lost in recent years. Each colourful piece of sentient metal shifted, as if realizing that the man who'd acquired them wasn't actually about to turn them to scrap as previously threatened.
Omega scoffed, looking away. "Don't make a big deal of it," he grumbled aggressively, "I just wanted to fight some different mega-merges. And since you won't let me go after Grey and Ashe and all their different A-Trans forms…"
Model L shot out of his grip like a rocket, shrieking, "Vent! Aile!" Model H followed shortly after, radiating a little bit of jealousy because of Model L somehow outpacing him in the air. Model F tried to wriggle out shortly after, though Omega didn't seem too bothered in trying to stop him. He didn't even quirk an eyebrow. Instead, the long-haired reploid released the last biometals nonchalantly, watching as they began to float. Model Z went over to Ciel immediately, and the two seemed to have some sort of moment staring at each other. Seeing as it was rather heartfelt and awkward, and clearly personal in some way, everyone unanimously decided to be polite by promptly pretending they didn't exist. Or something.
Model F was halfway over towards Aile when he halted, the fiery biometal's whole (admittedly tiny) body turning towards Prometheus, "Uh. Okay. Not that I'm not glad to see you all again, but. What on earth happened while we were gone?"
"Uhm. How much do you remember? After these two kidnapped you?" Vent asked, flicking a thumb towards the former Model W Mega Men.
Mode F paused. "To tell ya the truth? Diddly squat."
"Albert," Pandora said before anyone even asked, and that pretty much answered the 'how' of the biometals' rather inconvenient amnesia.
"Well, long story short, that world leader guy called Master Albert forced you to work for him via some other Mega Men, I think, there were a lot of fights in the meantime, Model W showed up as a giant airship, was piloted by afore-mentioned corrupt politician who wanted to kill us all, seriously screw Albert, but we won against him anyways with the help of another pair of Mega Men you haven't met yet. Also Omega kind of stalked us for a few fights before most of all that because he was bored. We won against him, too, uh, most of the time?" Aile took a breath as she studiously ignored Omega calling bullshit in the background, "Then Pandora and Prometheus fought us again after all that junk occurred, as we were repairing the base from after the fight with Albert. And then they joined us as well because… uh. Stuff and things?" Model H gave Aile an unimpressed look, and the poor Mega Man backtracked, "Hey, it's been non-stop shenanigans and tomfoolery since you left, and I'm still reeling from half of it. I'm trying, okay?" she explained.
Meanwhile, Vent looked at Model P, who hadn't really moved from where Omega had dropped him mid-air, "Aren't you gonna try and escape him or anything?"
"Your concern is appreciated, but now that I know what's going on, I'm currently unbothered by his presence," Model P responded, oddly relaxed about the whole affair. Then again he was the ninja and infiltrator of the group, so being right next to massive threats to his existence and not batting an eye was sort of his thing.
Omega blinked, "Huh. Who knew the guy who seppuku'd would be the chill one."
Model P twitched in irritation and levitated away, "I must suddenly retract my statement."
As Omega laughed once more, one of the bridge's navigators turned from her console. She tapped a few keys almost absently as she watched the proceedings, while the glowing console in front of her continued to run programs as if nothing abnormal had happened. "Hey, uh, hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but… If you managed to retrieve all the biometals, what happened to the other Mega Men who were using them…?"
Ciel spoke in reflex, "You're not out of turn at all, Tulip." She crossed her arms as Model Z floated at her side, "In fact, that's a very good question. How did you two manage all this?" she asked. Her tone was forcefully flat, but no one was fooled for a minute. The woman was curious, and concerned, and happy that her friends were back. She was quickly distracted as the other biometals noticed her as well, yelling joyfully as they raced towards her upon realizing her identity. They hadn't been there when it was revealed that she was still alive, after all.
"Oh my gosh. You're never gonna believe what we did," Anguille chirped, puffing himself up in pride.
Omega harrumphed, "I don't know why you're acting like it's such a big deal. We just hacked a few transporters and jumped around those secret government labs Pandora and Prometheus told us about. Even with those biometals silenced, I could tell when we were close to them. Took us about two days to get the transporters up, but only ten minutes to actually find the things. Thomas needs way better security."
"Dude. Dude, we did more than that, " Anguille boasted. His arms gestured madly as he went on, his eyes lighting up as he explained, "I was running the transporter circuit while Omega did all the brute work! Did you know you can physically materialize inside of cyberspace? I just dumped this guy into some of the teleportation servers and he took out all the defense programs! It was insane! And then, when all the programs were down, he just made me 'port him right into the middle of the labs! He didn't even care that we didn't have blueprints to tell us where the walls and structures were! It was just, poof! God of Destruction out of nowhere! And if there were no biometals there, all we had to do was yank him out and do it again for the next lab! Legion didn't have any time to react to us either, because he took out all the alarm programs too! All they had left were some dumb cameras he shot out as we went! Plus one or two scientists who are probably wondering what the heck knocked them out behind their backs." Anguille was clearly over the moon about what had happened. Omega tried to play it off, but the quirky man's tirade was clearly stroking his ego in all the right ways, "By the time we left, that Model H loser, Eelus or something? Poor guy was just scrambling out of bed and into the first lab we'd hit! The dude had bed-head like you wouldn't believe!"
A few of the Guardians in the room had burst out laughing at the retelling, clearly amused at the events, as well as Anguille's version of them. Omega huffed fondly, "After that, we just blew up the transporter we'd hacked to cover our trail. The biometals were too quiet considering the rude wake-up call, so I just smacked 'em around until they smartened up, and came back here. A much simpler mission than I'd expected, all in all."
"So that's where the headache came from," Model H grumbled.
Prometheus chuffed, "Man, they're gonna be so pissed when they realize what you snagged out from under their noses!"
Any further celebration was cut short by Prairie, who was looking at Omega with a rather unreadable expression, "So you're telling me… that you hacked government property, materialized yourself in cyberspace multiple times despite not knowing what sort of resistance you'd meet, teleported in and out of multiple secret bases without a clue about what was in there, assaulted civilians as you trespassed, destroyed the public trans-server you hacked the moment you escaped and didn't need it anymore, purposely damaged the confidential biomechanical weapons you stole, stuffed them in a neon pink purse you probably also stole, and then ran straight home in time for your leaders' birthdays?"
"Yup. Pretty much."
Anguille glowed, "Neon pink has never before been this manly. I am totally keeping this purse now." Omega wordlessly handed over said object as if it were far more important than the five biometals currently giving him the stink eye. Knowing the irreverent reploid, it probably was more important in his eyes.
Vent groaned in exasperation and chided them loudly, "Do you have any idea how dangerous that sort of thing is?! Or what that kind of thing could mean?"
Omega looked at him, pondered for a moment, and shrugged nonchalantly. "It means it's a Tuesday?" The look of confusion on his face was genuine.
"You do this kind of shit for fun, don't you," Prometheus spoke up admiringly.
"Absolutely. Why else do you think Weil shoved me in a giant set of armor? Nothing else was slowing me down."
"May he rest in pieces," Ciel muttered murderously. Model Z nodded in silent agreement.
Aile coughed, "Regardless of your apparently insane luck in not teleporting yourself into a floor-"
"You have no idea how many times that almost happened," Anguille cut in, looking haunted.
Aile strategically ignored this contribution, "-You really should take more precautions than that. It's madness to keep tempting fate like this! Even if we discount the very real possibility of you pissing off the largest and most powerful administrative organization in the world, we don't need you getting hurt or going crazy again."
Omega's eyes widened innocently, even as Pandora and Prometheus shot Aile a startled look at the revelation, "Look, I know what I'm doing! You can trust me! I'm a lot more mentally stable than I used to be."
"Says the senile old coot who bunked in frickin' Area N," Model L snarked.
Omega looked at her as he whooped at the insult, "Hot damn! No mercy! I can respect that." Seeing as Area N was well known to some of the Guardians as an utterly insane, reality-and-mind breaking middle finger to every physicist, cartographer, environmentalist, geologist, engineer, or reputable scientist you could think of, she wasn't exactly wrong. The place was a nightmare. Considering that there was some sort of weird inverse black hole in the sky, fragments of data solidified midair, or bits of terrain floating upwards despite every law of gravity that should have been pulling them back down, even thinking of the place was a genuine cause for alarm. Vent shuddered at the memory.
"There's times I really wish I could hear what those biometals were saying," Marguerite, a navigator, mumbled.
"Trust me, sometimes, you really don't want to know," Ciel moaned. Seeing as she was the one who'd made most of them, and undeniably had the highest IQ in the room (by a frankly insulting amount), the operators all took her advice at face level. The thousand-yard stare probably helped too.
"I can hear 'em, and I still can't make sense of half of what they say," Prometheus snorted.
Aile smirked, "Probably because we left all sense back in Area N. Speaking of that, we should totally take you there. It's a pretty place!"
"You're in for a treat," Vent guffawed. Pandora did not look reassured by the Guardian sibling's conspiratorial glances at each other.
"Regardless," Prairie began, pointedly avoiding engaging with any of the tomfoolery happening around her, "this is still a big gesture. Thank you, Omega. You acted without permission, there's no doubt about that. But, I can't exactly say any of us are mad about it. Rather the opposite! Although I must ask… Please, please tell me you weren't followed."
Her hopeful face was met with a cheshire grin. One they all dreaded to see, but expected nonetheless. "No guarantees!"
Prairie's expression dropped into a well-worn, long suffering look of acceptance that they knew all too well. Vent shook his head, "Damn it, Omega, not again."
"If I'd known how batshit these dorks were, I would have joined a lot sooner. This is fun," Prometheus whispered to Pandora as she giggled.
"Albert wouldn't have had… any hope of victory."
"Nope! Not a snowball's chance in hell."
Ignorant of the former villains' conversation, the operators in the room had all turned to their consoles in a panic. Data began streaming at unprecedented speeds, information networks were opened, research programs sent off to look for even the slightest sign of impending danger. Shouts rang out, plans were made and instantly shot down, defenses were checked, and everything else was done that needed doing in preparation for the inevitable repercussions. It was organized chaos at best. Somewhere, someone yelped as something hit a wall with an audible thunk. Ciel grinned when no one else was looking. Yup. Organized chaos. It was rather nostalgic for her, and just how she liked it. All in all? It was just another ordinary day for the Guardians.
Well, minus the birthday cake everywhere…
Bonus VI
Pandora and Prometheus looked out at Area N, stared at each other in astonishment, and then back at the ZX Mega Men, who had made good on their threat, er, promise, to take them to see the place. Strained smiles were the only response he got from the annoyingly chipper pair. The scythe wielder, tight lipped, was the first one to form a coherent sentence after viewing the unholy mess that was Area N's scenery, "...Well then. This was kind of unexpected."
Aile nodded knowingly, "I know, right? To think something like this was just sitting down here the whole time that mess with Serpent was going on."
"Ah, some good times there," Vent said fondly, but despite his nostalgic expression, some shadows of the past clearly pained him as he looked around the place. A worn down ruin was behind them, rust and grime covering its surface, while ahead of them was a bright but eerie landscape. Crystalline structures dominated the area. The otherworldly aura of the place was enhanced by the mutated cyber elves that could occasionally be seen in the distance, countless hexagonal structures adrift in the oozing sky, and a green, glowing ground that looked radioactive to the touch.
Pandora said nothing. She merely blinked, expression utterly emotionless, and backtracked the way they'd come. The others followed her back to a small cavern with a trans server, the old teleportation device sitting innocuously between Area M, a place the Model W pair had once spent a fair amount of time supervising, and Area N, where all four of them had just come from. The door closed behind the group as they entered the room. Pandora stared at it. Then she simply turned, lined herself up with the wall next to it, and smashed her face into the surface. "He was here the whole time."
"Yeah, not ten feet from where you guys had that Model W unearthed. It's pretty nuts, right?" Vent snickered.
"He was here. The whole time."
"That's what we said!" Aile grinned.
"He was here the whole time."
"Yup-"
"-THE WHOLE TIME!" she squeaked, so incredibly loud and sudden and utterly indignant that Aile choked on her spit and fell over half coughing, half giggling her guts out while Vent leapt three feet backwards and brained himself, rather unfortunately, on the staff Pandora had left floating in the air nearby. He fell to the floor with a clunk, bonking into the trans server on the way down as Prometheus pointed and laughed. Said Mega Man didn't keep up the antics for long, instead turning to his sister as she screamed into the wall like it was the world's biggest pillow.
His smile fell. "Hoo boy. Omega was smack dab under our noses all along, and the Model O was right there with him. I can't believe it." He leaned back and sighed, resignation clear in his tone, while Vent managed to recover from his stunned state (albeit a little clumsily), "Things could have been so... different. What was it we said? That we were gonna do as little as possible down here to annoy the snot out of those megalomaniacs?"
"Shut up Prometheus."
"There was a mysterious door not even ten feet from the trans server. And you ignored it."
"Shut up, Prometheus!"
"Man. What a screw up."
"Uuuuughhh!" Pandora screamed again, the sound muffled due to her face currently being mashed into the side of some ancient ruins.
Aile got herself under control with a few wheezes, "If it makes you feel any better, we ignored it at first too." She was clearly trying to throw them a bone; if she hadn't been laughing for five minutes straight beforehand, they might have even accepted the patronizing, if somewhat warped, emotion in her voice
Prometheus chortled, "You guys had to worry about the residential area Serpent had us go bomb. That, at least, was a good excuse to overlook it." Pandora groaned again, in a tone that Prometheus well knew heralded something being thrown at him. Unfortunately for her, there wasn't any obvious ammo around. He smirked, "Area N, sis. Right there."
She somehow found ammo anyways.