Chapter 8:
Consulting the Book of Armaments
Another soundless explosion flared in the darkness, lighting the void of space with an orange-red brilliance for only an instant, then subsiding; debris bouncing off titanium plating as the only sign of its occurrence.
Fox depressed one of the many buttons on the console before him. "Good shot, guys," he complimented. "Which one of you did that?"
"Me," said Falcon's voice.
The assigning of posts on the Silver Arrow had been rather easy. Fox was given the pilot's seat, due to his abilities, and Mewtwo was given the computer core for the same reason. The other four had no choice but to man the gun turrets, though only Falcon had any experience with operating them.
"I should have guessed," muttered Fox. "Why don't you let the others try to hit some, rather than destroying them all yourself?"
"What was I *supposed* to do? Let the rocks hit us? If you'd just stop the ship, the others could hit some stationary targets, and we wouldn't have to worry about collisions!"
Fox sighed. "We've been over this before, 'Captain,'" - Fox used this term mockingly, as both of them knew he had been unanimously rejected any position of leadership by the other five heroes - "Mewtwo says we need to make as much progress as possible, and that means no stopping. The ship _does_ have armor, so just cease fire and let the others try for a little while, okay?"
"Fine, fine."
Apart from the mild asteroids, the trip had been uneventful. Mewtwo gave the course, and Fox followed it. The Cornerian wondered about the challenge that surely lay ahead of them, but really didn't know what to expect. He only knew that Mewtwo could sense the general direction of the Zeg'ra by their psionic presence, and that it was exceptionally strong.
After another few minutes of blasting space rocks, Mewtwo passed the order to stop firing completely, as they would need to let the ship's Emerald recharge a bit before leaving the asteroid field.
"Hope everyone's buckled in," Fox announced over the comm system. "Wouldn't want anyone splattered all over one of the back walls."
Sonic's nervous gulp could be plainly heard before he replied. "Are you SERIOUS!?"
"3... 2... 1... Hyperspace!"
Briefly the outside of the ship cackled with white lightning before winking out of sight, traveling so fast it didn't even look like a blur. Coming out of the jump, Fox spotted a dull brown planet in the distance.
--Hmm... Land there,-- Mewtwo instructed.
"I thought we were hurrying-"
--Just do it!--
Wordlessly, Fox complied, and he began the landing procedure within minutes.
----------------------------------------------------
Shadow looked out upon the planet's surface as he slid down the rope to join the others. They had landed on the outskirts of what looked to be a once great, but now ruined city, surrounded by barren wasteland. "Care to enlighten me as to why we're here again?" he asked.
--I sense something unusual. It feels as if this planet was swarming with intelligent thought maybe a day or so earlier... but now its devoid of every scrap of life.--
Link gritted his teeth, and clenched his fist. "The Zeg'ra did this."
"How could they have possibly wiped out all life on the planet?" asked Falcon.
--I'm not sure. The race that inhabited this place was obviously very advanced technologically, so in their quest for natural resources they may have actually been the cause of these lifeless deserts.--
Falcon put a hand up to his chin. "If this planet got attacked by the Zeg'ra, they might have some records or something from the battle we could look at."
"Did Falcon just have a good idea??" asked Fox, mocking a heart attack.
"Hey, shut up!"
While the two spacefarers bickered once more, Link and Mewtwo headed into the city. Walking along one of the suspended highways there, Link observed the same type of devastation from back on Earth. Walls smashed in, roads wrecked, and debris everywhere.
Sonic ran up. "Hey, anyone else notice there's no vehicles or anything in the streets?"
--Perhaps this city was evacuated, like yours.--
"I guess. But even then there were still a *few* left behind..."
"And where would they go?" asked Link. "There's no roads leading out of the city, just... land."
--Point taken. It just doesn't add up.--
"Whoah!"
"Falcon?" Sonic called. "Is that you?"
"Down here!"
The three stepped to the edge of the suspended path they'd been walking on, and sucked in their breath when they beheld the sight below. Millions of crumpled piles of scrap metal lay strewn about in heaps, like so many bodies on a battlefield. Each one beared a horrific resemblence (yet still obviously artificial) to a spider flipped on it's back; its legs curled around itself in death.
--Now I see...-- said the awed psychic.
"What? What is it?" questioned the Hylian.
--The city.. it must have been run entirely by a race of machines!--
"Is that even possible?" asked Sonic.
"Think about it," answered Shadow, appearing on a ledge above. "Androids wouldn't desire to expand their civilization, nor would they need vehicles to get around."
Falcon came up to the path of the others, followed shortly by Fox, who said, "You're telling me that the Zeg'ra wiped out a city full of self- consious robots, who, by the look of those things down there, probably had a large part of their programming devoted to warfare?"
Mewtwo only nodded.
"Well, at least there's one good thing about all this," continued Fox, "It's likely that for all these robots to be working in such harmony, there must be a central unit of some sort controlling them. If we find that, maybe we'll find whatever info these things collected on the Zeg'ra."
"Worth a shot," Sonic commented. "C'mon, the city center's just ahead. Let's look there!" And with that, the six warriors ran the short distance down the suspended highway and entered the city's large central building.
A few busted doors and navigated hallways later, the heroes found what they were looking for. Three huge spider-bots stood like statues in the dark room, unmarred by battle scars, yet devoid of life.
"This must be the central unit," Link concluded.
"Yeah," agreed Fox. "Now how do we crack 'em open?"
--They're not designed to have their files accessed by anything other than themselves. We can't just plug it into a computer and do a search. I'll have to psychically read the electrical impulses left in its memory and see if I can decipher them.-- The poke'mon then closed his eyes and began to probe the robot's artificial brain, while the others anxiously waited.
Sonic turned to his ex-rival. "Do you think those machines know anything more about the Zeg'ra than we do?"
"I'm not sure," the black hedgehog replied. "I suppose it's possible."
"It kinda depends on how long the fight lasted," Link mused.
Fox noticed Mewtwo open his eyes again. "Well? Did you get anything?"
The psychic took a deep breath, sorting out the complex sequences of data that would have overwhelmed most minds into familiar words. --These androids were called the Kanaa, and were, for reasons unknown, bent on wiping out all sentient life.--
Shadow's brow furrowed in thought. "It's like some sort of sadistic fad..."
--Their strategy was to send small spy robots, Kanaka, to different planets, who would gather information on the planet's weaknesses and strengths. Now that their base of operations is destroyed, however, they no longer possess any threat.--
"That's a relief," stated Falcon. "What else did you find?"
--The Zeg'ra struck here not too long ago, and in a different form. These spiders were attacked by one-celled organisms that got inside them and drained their power supply.--
Fox gasped as he suddenly figured it out. "They're evolving!"
--Exactly. It seems every time we've met them, they've appeared in a stronger form. At first, the Kanaa planned to simply salvage what they could and move to another planet, but then they too realized that the Zeg'ra would come after them. So, they took the strongest of weapons from each of the worlds, built one of their own, and improved it, hoping they would be strong enought to defeat the Zeg'ra once they evolved into a large enough form to hit. --The weapons were completed, but the escape was cut short when it too became drained. Apparently, some of the organisms avoided detection in one of the Kanak units, or workers, and spread to the shuttles being built.--
"Weapons?!" Link asked, in disbelief.
Shadow smirked. "This could give us just the edge we need..."
--Accessing project Stop Menace And Save Headquarters...--
Falcon frowned. "They gave a project a name like that? It's so lame..."
Fox glanced at him. "They're robots. They have no imagination, and no creativity."
"Obviously. I mean, 'Stop Menace And Save HQ?' That's just terrible!"
"It doesn't matter-" Shadow started.
"I mean, if you're gonna come up with a stupid title like that, you should at least make it into a set of initials!"
Fox was getting annoyed. "How the heck does initializing a phrase make it cooler?"
"Just try it. C'mon, there's no way that 'Stop Menace And Save Headquarters' is as cool as SMASH."
Shadow crossed his arms and sighed. -Idiot,- he thought.
A huge door at the back of the room could be heard unlocking several times, then opening. "Bingo!" yelled Sonic, rushing through it.
Mewtwo sighed. --Yes, go right ahead. Don't bother to take such precautions as say, checking for dormant security systems.--
A row of black cases sat before the warriors, unlabled and unmarked. There weren't near enough for an army, so they must have been the weapon prototypes.
"Woah, these things are heavy!" exclaimed the F-Zero champ. "We'll have to make more than one trip to-" A rumbling in the earth caused him to stop. "What the...?"
"Earthquake!" Link cried. "We must get back to the ship!" The tremor repeated, and this time it didn't stop, confirming the Hylian's fears.
Sonic's eyes widened in a panic. "Grab a crate and go!"
--Sonic, forget about the crates, I'll grab one for you, just get to the ship and start it up for us!--
"Got it!"
Everyone hurriedly snatched up the nearest container and made a beeline for the ship. Most of the buildings rained debris while they ran, but at least they held up enough so as not to bring walls down upon the six of them. Then the chasms started opening in the earth beneath them, and everything got worse. The very soil they stood on seemed like water as it slid away, sucked into huge rifts resembling gaping maws of utter doom.
Somehow, though, they all made it back to the Silver Arrow, taking off before even having a chance to tie down their new cargo. From orbit, they watched the as the planet crumbled into chunks and dust, like hardened clay under a sledgehammer.
"The whole planet..." Falcon gasped. "Gone..."
Even Mewtwo's usual solid expression broke into a look of astonishment in light of what had just happened. --It doesn't make sense... How could it be?--
"Dear Lord," Fox breathed, "the Zeg'ra did this."
Shadow looked his normal, skeptical self. "How can you be so sure?"
"Something like that would have had a much worse effect on the planet. We would have seen magma spilling out of the rifts back there. Maybe the planet would have even exploded... but it just broke like an empty shell. The Kanaa weren't responsible for the wastelands we saw, it was the Zeg'ra! It's like they sucked the planet dry, stealing the energy for themselves." His expression darkened. "To evolve again."
--It appears I've vastly underestimated our foes. They're even more powerful than I feared.--
"Well," sighed Sonic, "let's just hope that whatever's in those crates can help us out."
"Of course they will!" cried Falcon. "... They have to."
Mewtwo smirked. --Bring them here.--
----------------------------------------------------------
"Is it the Festival of Life already?" asked Link, as Fox handed him a crate.
Shadow looked up from his box. "A holiday from your world I assume?"
Link nodded. "It's a day where we celebrate the anniversary of Hyrule's creation and honor the goddesses by showing our loved ones how much we care."
"Which you do by showering each other in gifts?" Shadow asked, getting another nod of approval.
"Sounds like Christmas," Sonic commented.
"Yeah, yeah. Let's just open them!" exclaimed Falcon.
"Alright, just calm down," said Fox. "Just remember: opening it doesn't mean you get it. We'll distribute the weapons afterward according to skill. Falcon, you first."
Eagerly, the racer undid the latches on the case and slid the small bolts out of place. Slowly, he lifted the lid, his eyes wide with anticipation for the prize he knew lay within--
"WHAT THE HELL!? This isn't a weapon of mass destruction!" he yelled, holding it up for emphasis. "It's a frickin' bouncy ball!!"
--Wait!-- said the psychic. --That's a pokeball!--
"A WHAT!?" yelled everyone else in unison.
--It's used for storing powerful creatures in data form. But, I've never seen a platinum-colored ball before...-- To Mewtwo, it looked (or maybe *felt,* he wasn't sure) like something beyond any pokeball he'd see before, even the legendary Master Ball. --I'll examine it more closely later,-- he said.
Fox sighed. "Whatever. Uh, Shadow, you go."
Shadow opened the box with a neutral expression, not savoring the suspense at all. "I can already see how invaluable _this_ will be," he remarked, holding a baseball bat in one hand and sarcasm in the other.
"A baseball bat!?" Sonic cried. "What were those robots thinking??"
Fox sighed again, heavier this time. "This isn't going the way I hoped," he said. "Someone else open one."
Link obliged, revealing what looked like a small black cylinder, except it had two small extensions on the end, and contours that seemed all too familiar to the Hero of Time.
--And what might this be?-- Mewtwo inquired.
"Well, it looks like a sword hilt, but" ::click:: All at once, a solid ray of crimson energy shot forth from the device, singing a bit of blonde hair as the Hylian jerked his head away in the nick of time. Then the beam halted, the energy shaping itself into a formidable blade.
Shadow blinked, his mouth agape. "Well, that's encouraging."
"I hope mine has something that good!" Sonic wished, opening his crate as he spoke. "Yes!" he shouted, triumphantly holding up a potent-looking firearm. "A laser gun!"
"Our luck's changing," Fox remarked with a wide grin. "Go ahead, Mewtwo."
Link's eyes lit up as he beheld Mewtwo remove the treasure from the box, recognizing it instantly, for he was always collecting them wherever he went, and he considered them more valuable than any amount of rupees could describe. "A Heart Container!"
--You know what this is?--
"Good," added Shadow. "I was starting to think Mewtwo opened a box of Valentine's day decorations."
"Well, you can tell us about it after we see what's in-" Fox quickly opened the last crate, "-here." The Cornerian pilot weakly held up a pathetic- looking magic wand that seemed to have come straight out of a Candyland game. He tossed it aside. "That's depressing. Well, let's split these up..."
Shadow gathered up the weapons and laid them across the floor while the others bickered over who got what. Sonic looked on at them thoughtfully. "Hm. I could take that pokeyball, or whatever it's called that Mewtwo mentioned."
--You don't even know how to pronounce it, let alone use it.-- The pokemon calmly stated.
"Right, so you should have it," suggested Fox. "As for me, I'm probably best off with the gun."
Falcon stood up and crossed his arms. "Hey, I happen to be a bounty hunter. Marksmanship is practically my trade!"
"Actually, Falcon," Link began, "Fox seems much more dependent on his gun to fight. You have your powers to fight with, so the gun is better off with Fox."
Falcon grumbled, but didn't protest.
"Well, it's pretty obvious who should get the sword," Shadow commented.
"But I've never fought with two swords before..."
"Then put the metal one away, and take the energy sword, which is obviously more powerful. I don't know why we bother to drag around someone with such primitive weaponry, anyway."
Angrily, Link pulled his blade. "Is that all you take me for?" he asked. "This is no simple blade! This is the Master Sword!" As if to emphasize this fact, the sword started glowing with a purple-white radiance. "It was forged by the goddesses themselves to turn back the tides of darkness in our most hopeless hours. It is the sword of evil's bane, and you can bet it's more powerful than any weapon here." Finished, Link sat down and sheathed the blade. Silence followed.
"Fine, then. I'll take the Beamsword," said Shadow, regaining his composure.
Sonic's eyes widened. "What!?"
"I'm taking the Beamsword. After all, if Link won't take it, it really doesn't matter who has it, since we're all equally inexperienced."
"Instead," said Link, "I'll take the Heart Container."
"Dibsonthebat!" yelled Sonic.
"CRAP!" shouted the unhappy Captain. "I'm stuck with the f****** pixie stick!"
DISCLAIMER: The Kanaa aren't mine, they're owned by Japs, a kickass author if I ever saw one.
Another soundless explosion flared in the darkness, lighting the void of space with an orange-red brilliance for only an instant, then subsiding; debris bouncing off titanium plating as the only sign of its occurrence.
Fox depressed one of the many buttons on the console before him. "Good shot, guys," he complimented. "Which one of you did that?"
"Me," said Falcon's voice.
The assigning of posts on the Silver Arrow had been rather easy. Fox was given the pilot's seat, due to his abilities, and Mewtwo was given the computer core for the same reason. The other four had no choice but to man the gun turrets, though only Falcon had any experience with operating them.
"I should have guessed," muttered Fox. "Why don't you let the others try to hit some, rather than destroying them all yourself?"
"What was I *supposed* to do? Let the rocks hit us? If you'd just stop the ship, the others could hit some stationary targets, and we wouldn't have to worry about collisions!"
Fox sighed. "We've been over this before, 'Captain,'" - Fox used this term mockingly, as both of them knew he had been unanimously rejected any position of leadership by the other five heroes - "Mewtwo says we need to make as much progress as possible, and that means no stopping. The ship _does_ have armor, so just cease fire and let the others try for a little while, okay?"
"Fine, fine."
Apart from the mild asteroids, the trip had been uneventful. Mewtwo gave the course, and Fox followed it. The Cornerian wondered about the challenge that surely lay ahead of them, but really didn't know what to expect. He only knew that Mewtwo could sense the general direction of the Zeg'ra by their psionic presence, and that it was exceptionally strong.
After another few minutes of blasting space rocks, Mewtwo passed the order to stop firing completely, as they would need to let the ship's Emerald recharge a bit before leaving the asteroid field.
"Hope everyone's buckled in," Fox announced over the comm system. "Wouldn't want anyone splattered all over one of the back walls."
Sonic's nervous gulp could be plainly heard before he replied. "Are you SERIOUS!?"
"3... 2... 1... Hyperspace!"
Briefly the outside of the ship cackled with white lightning before winking out of sight, traveling so fast it didn't even look like a blur. Coming out of the jump, Fox spotted a dull brown planet in the distance.
--Hmm... Land there,-- Mewtwo instructed.
"I thought we were hurrying-"
--Just do it!--
Wordlessly, Fox complied, and he began the landing procedure within minutes.
----------------------------------------------------
Shadow looked out upon the planet's surface as he slid down the rope to join the others. They had landed on the outskirts of what looked to be a once great, but now ruined city, surrounded by barren wasteland. "Care to enlighten me as to why we're here again?" he asked.
--I sense something unusual. It feels as if this planet was swarming with intelligent thought maybe a day or so earlier... but now its devoid of every scrap of life.--
Link gritted his teeth, and clenched his fist. "The Zeg'ra did this."
"How could they have possibly wiped out all life on the planet?" asked Falcon.
--I'm not sure. The race that inhabited this place was obviously very advanced technologically, so in their quest for natural resources they may have actually been the cause of these lifeless deserts.--
Falcon put a hand up to his chin. "If this planet got attacked by the Zeg'ra, they might have some records or something from the battle we could look at."
"Did Falcon just have a good idea??" asked Fox, mocking a heart attack.
"Hey, shut up!"
While the two spacefarers bickered once more, Link and Mewtwo headed into the city. Walking along one of the suspended highways there, Link observed the same type of devastation from back on Earth. Walls smashed in, roads wrecked, and debris everywhere.
Sonic ran up. "Hey, anyone else notice there's no vehicles or anything in the streets?"
--Perhaps this city was evacuated, like yours.--
"I guess. But even then there were still a *few* left behind..."
"And where would they go?" asked Link. "There's no roads leading out of the city, just... land."
--Point taken. It just doesn't add up.--
"Whoah!"
"Falcon?" Sonic called. "Is that you?"
"Down here!"
The three stepped to the edge of the suspended path they'd been walking on, and sucked in their breath when they beheld the sight below. Millions of crumpled piles of scrap metal lay strewn about in heaps, like so many bodies on a battlefield. Each one beared a horrific resemblence (yet still obviously artificial) to a spider flipped on it's back; its legs curled around itself in death.
--Now I see...-- said the awed psychic.
"What? What is it?" questioned the Hylian.
--The city.. it must have been run entirely by a race of machines!--
"Is that even possible?" asked Sonic.
"Think about it," answered Shadow, appearing on a ledge above. "Androids wouldn't desire to expand their civilization, nor would they need vehicles to get around."
Falcon came up to the path of the others, followed shortly by Fox, who said, "You're telling me that the Zeg'ra wiped out a city full of self- consious robots, who, by the look of those things down there, probably had a large part of their programming devoted to warfare?"
Mewtwo only nodded.
"Well, at least there's one good thing about all this," continued Fox, "It's likely that for all these robots to be working in such harmony, there must be a central unit of some sort controlling them. If we find that, maybe we'll find whatever info these things collected on the Zeg'ra."
"Worth a shot," Sonic commented. "C'mon, the city center's just ahead. Let's look there!" And with that, the six warriors ran the short distance down the suspended highway and entered the city's large central building.
A few busted doors and navigated hallways later, the heroes found what they were looking for. Three huge spider-bots stood like statues in the dark room, unmarred by battle scars, yet devoid of life.
"This must be the central unit," Link concluded.
"Yeah," agreed Fox. "Now how do we crack 'em open?"
--They're not designed to have their files accessed by anything other than themselves. We can't just plug it into a computer and do a search. I'll have to psychically read the electrical impulses left in its memory and see if I can decipher them.-- The poke'mon then closed his eyes and began to probe the robot's artificial brain, while the others anxiously waited.
Sonic turned to his ex-rival. "Do you think those machines know anything more about the Zeg'ra than we do?"
"I'm not sure," the black hedgehog replied. "I suppose it's possible."
"It kinda depends on how long the fight lasted," Link mused.
Fox noticed Mewtwo open his eyes again. "Well? Did you get anything?"
The psychic took a deep breath, sorting out the complex sequences of data that would have overwhelmed most minds into familiar words. --These androids were called the Kanaa, and were, for reasons unknown, bent on wiping out all sentient life.--
Shadow's brow furrowed in thought. "It's like some sort of sadistic fad..."
--Their strategy was to send small spy robots, Kanaka, to different planets, who would gather information on the planet's weaknesses and strengths. Now that their base of operations is destroyed, however, they no longer possess any threat.--
"That's a relief," stated Falcon. "What else did you find?"
--The Zeg'ra struck here not too long ago, and in a different form. These spiders were attacked by one-celled organisms that got inside them and drained their power supply.--
Fox gasped as he suddenly figured it out. "They're evolving!"
--Exactly. It seems every time we've met them, they've appeared in a stronger form. At first, the Kanaa planned to simply salvage what they could and move to another planet, but then they too realized that the Zeg'ra would come after them. So, they took the strongest of weapons from each of the worlds, built one of their own, and improved it, hoping they would be strong enought to defeat the Zeg'ra once they evolved into a large enough form to hit. --The weapons were completed, but the escape was cut short when it too became drained. Apparently, some of the organisms avoided detection in one of the Kanak units, or workers, and spread to the shuttles being built.--
"Weapons?!" Link asked, in disbelief.
Shadow smirked. "This could give us just the edge we need..."
--Accessing project Stop Menace And Save Headquarters...--
Falcon frowned. "They gave a project a name like that? It's so lame..."
Fox glanced at him. "They're robots. They have no imagination, and no creativity."
"Obviously. I mean, 'Stop Menace And Save HQ?' That's just terrible!"
"It doesn't matter-" Shadow started.
"I mean, if you're gonna come up with a stupid title like that, you should at least make it into a set of initials!"
Fox was getting annoyed. "How the heck does initializing a phrase make it cooler?"
"Just try it. C'mon, there's no way that 'Stop Menace And Save Headquarters' is as cool as SMASH."
Shadow crossed his arms and sighed. -Idiot,- he thought.
A huge door at the back of the room could be heard unlocking several times, then opening. "Bingo!" yelled Sonic, rushing through it.
Mewtwo sighed. --Yes, go right ahead. Don't bother to take such precautions as say, checking for dormant security systems.--
A row of black cases sat before the warriors, unlabled and unmarked. There weren't near enough for an army, so they must have been the weapon prototypes.
"Woah, these things are heavy!" exclaimed the F-Zero champ. "We'll have to make more than one trip to-" A rumbling in the earth caused him to stop. "What the...?"
"Earthquake!" Link cried. "We must get back to the ship!" The tremor repeated, and this time it didn't stop, confirming the Hylian's fears.
Sonic's eyes widened in a panic. "Grab a crate and go!"
--Sonic, forget about the crates, I'll grab one for you, just get to the ship and start it up for us!--
"Got it!"
Everyone hurriedly snatched up the nearest container and made a beeline for the ship. Most of the buildings rained debris while they ran, but at least they held up enough so as not to bring walls down upon the six of them. Then the chasms started opening in the earth beneath them, and everything got worse. The very soil they stood on seemed like water as it slid away, sucked into huge rifts resembling gaping maws of utter doom.
Somehow, though, they all made it back to the Silver Arrow, taking off before even having a chance to tie down their new cargo. From orbit, they watched the as the planet crumbled into chunks and dust, like hardened clay under a sledgehammer.
"The whole planet..." Falcon gasped. "Gone..."
Even Mewtwo's usual solid expression broke into a look of astonishment in light of what had just happened. --It doesn't make sense... How could it be?--
"Dear Lord," Fox breathed, "the Zeg'ra did this."
Shadow looked his normal, skeptical self. "How can you be so sure?"
"Something like that would have had a much worse effect on the planet. We would have seen magma spilling out of the rifts back there. Maybe the planet would have even exploded... but it just broke like an empty shell. The Kanaa weren't responsible for the wastelands we saw, it was the Zeg'ra! It's like they sucked the planet dry, stealing the energy for themselves." His expression darkened. "To evolve again."
--It appears I've vastly underestimated our foes. They're even more powerful than I feared.--
"Well," sighed Sonic, "let's just hope that whatever's in those crates can help us out."
"Of course they will!" cried Falcon. "... They have to."
Mewtwo smirked. --Bring them here.--
----------------------------------------------------------
"Is it the Festival of Life already?" asked Link, as Fox handed him a crate.
Shadow looked up from his box. "A holiday from your world I assume?"
Link nodded. "It's a day where we celebrate the anniversary of Hyrule's creation and honor the goddesses by showing our loved ones how much we care."
"Which you do by showering each other in gifts?" Shadow asked, getting another nod of approval.
"Sounds like Christmas," Sonic commented.
"Yeah, yeah. Let's just open them!" exclaimed Falcon.
"Alright, just calm down," said Fox. "Just remember: opening it doesn't mean you get it. We'll distribute the weapons afterward according to skill. Falcon, you first."
Eagerly, the racer undid the latches on the case and slid the small bolts out of place. Slowly, he lifted the lid, his eyes wide with anticipation for the prize he knew lay within--
"WHAT THE HELL!? This isn't a weapon of mass destruction!" he yelled, holding it up for emphasis. "It's a frickin' bouncy ball!!"
--Wait!-- said the psychic. --That's a pokeball!--
"A WHAT!?" yelled everyone else in unison.
--It's used for storing powerful creatures in data form. But, I've never seen a platinum-colored ball before...-- To Mewtwo, it looked (or maybe *felt,* he wasn't sure) like something beyond any pokeball he'd see before, even the legendary Master Ball. --I'll examine it more closely later,-- he said.
Fox sighed. "Whatever. Uh, Shadow, you go."
Shadow opened the box with a neutral expression, not savoring the suspense at all. "I can already see how invaluable _this_ will be," he remarked, holding a baseball bat in one hand and sarcasm in the other.
"A baseball bat!?" Sonic cried. "What were those robots thinking??"
Fox sighed again, heavier this time. "This isn't going the way I hoped," he said. "Someone else open one."
Link obliged, revealing what looked like a small black cylinder, except it had two small extensions on the end, and contours that seemed all too familiar to the Hero of Time.
--And what might this be?-- Mewtwo inquired.
"Well, it looks like a sword hilt, but" ::click:: All at once, a solid ray of crimson energy shot forth from the device, singing a bit of blonde hair as the Hylian jerked his head away in the nick of time. Then the beam halted, the energy shaping itself into a formidable blade.
Shadow blinked, his mouth agape. "Well, that's encouraging."
"I hope mine has something that good!" Sonic wished, opening his crate as he spoke. "Yes!" he shouted, triumphantly holding up a potent-looking firearm. "A laser gun!"
"Our luck's changing," Fox remarked with a wide grin. "Go ahead, Mewtwo."
Link's eyes lit up as he beheld Mewtwo remove the treasure from the box, recognizing it instantly, for he was always collecting them wherever he went, and he considered them more valuable than any amount of rupees could describe. "A Heart Container!"
--You know what this is?--
"Good," added Shadow. "I was starting to think Mewtwo opened a box of Valentine's day decorations."
"Well, you can tell us about it after we see what's in-" Fox quickly opened the last crate, "-here." The Cornerian pilot weakly held up a pathetic- looking magic wand that seemed to have come straight out of a Candyland game. He tossed it aside. "That's depressing. Well, let's split these up..."
Shadow gathered up the weapons and laid them across the floor while the others bickered over who got what. Sonic looked on at them thoughtfully. "Hm. I could take that pokeyball, or whatever it's called that Mewtwo mentioned."
--You don't even know how to pronounce it, let alone use it.-- The pokemon calmly stated.
"Right, so you should have it," suggested Fox. "As for me, I'm probably best off with the gun."
Falcon stood up and crossed his arms. "Hey, I happen to be a bounty hunter. Marksmanship is practically my trade!"
"Actually, Falcon," Link began, "Fox seems much more dependent on his gun to fight. You have your powers to fight with, so the gun is better off with Fox."
Falcon grumbled, but didn't protest.
"Well, it's pretty obvious who should get the sword," Shadow commented.
"But I've never fought with two swords before..."
"Then put the metal one away, and take the energy sword, which is obviously more powerful. I don't know why we bother to drag around someone with such primitive weaponry, anyway."
Angrily, Link pulled his blade. "Is that all you take me for?" he asked. "This is no simple blade! This is the Master Sword!" As if to emphasize this fact, the sword started glowing with a purple-white radiance. "It was forged by the goddesses themselves to turn back the tides of darkness in our most hopeless hours. It is the sword of evil's bane, and you can bet it's more powerful than any weapon here." Finished, Link sat down and sheathed the blade. Silence followed.
"Fine, then. I'll take the Beamsword," said Shadow, regaining his composure.
Sonic's eyes widened. "What!?"
"I'm taking the Beamsword. After all, if Link won't take it, it really doesn't matter who has it, since we're all equally inexperienced."
"Instead," said Link, "I'll take the Heart Container."
"Dibsonthebat!" yelled Sonic.
"CRAP!" shouted the unhappy Captain. "I'm stuck with the f****** pixie stick!"
DISCLAIMER: The Kanaa aren't mine, they're owned by Japs, a kickass author if I ever saw one.