Part One:
"Stupid Leo, stupid Ami", Meg groused as she subtly applied pressure to the lever in her right hand, setting off a cascading chain reaction of binary commands that ended with a minute adjustment of her cybot's automated balancer, causing it to lean partially around the wall the gigantic red machine was concealed behind.
"I'm supposed to be number one", she continued her rant as her eyes combed the screen in front of her alert for any signs of her remaining two opponents.
"Damnit, I deserve more respect than this Leo!", she shouted into her audio pickup, sparing a moment to glare down at the restraints that the mechanic and a certain pint-sized hacker had used to make sure she didn't bolt before completing all if these ridiculous simulations.
"Yeah right", Ami's voice came over the cockpit speakers, "Coming from the girl who can't even remember to get dressed before taking a call".
"Ami", Meg's voice was low and threatening, matching her rapidly souring mood. She really, really didn't like wasting her time doing boring things like this. Computer games, which was all this basically was after all, were more Ami's idea of a fun time, not hers.
"What's all this about nude calls?", Leo's inquisitive voice came over the other fed.
"Not a word brat", Meg growled, realising even as she said it, that referring to Ami as 'brat' was not the best way to ensure cooperation.
"Our esteemed professional here forgot to put on a bra… or anything else for that matter before turning on the video-fed when I called her today", Meg was sure she could hear the younger girl smirking, "I saved some screens, I was gonna use them for new ads, but you can have a few copies if you want Leo".
"Hmm, I may take you up on that", Leo managed around a chuckle.
"Dead, both of you are so dead when I get out of this thing", Meg promised darkly, pouting in the dim light of the cockpit's display as laughter echoed over both channels.
Anything else she was about to say was cut short as the wall she had been hiding behind exploded, hurtling her and Jango back under a rain of red-hot concrete splinters.
"Bastard!", Meg shouted angrily as she flipped three switches in rapid succession and hauled back on the controls in her left hand, setting Jango into a backward roll as his metallic spine hit the dirt.
Waiting until her status screen and inner ear agreed she was upright again, she slapped another switch with her right hand, the previous three snapping back to their default setting and causing Jango to straighten out of his roll.
Not bad, the response is more than half a second faster, she thought admiringly as she feathered the pedal under her left foot, launching Jango skyward as another explosive round detonated where he had come out of his last manoeuvre.
"Not this time pal", she said with a predatory smirk, finger tightening around the triggers on her controls as Jango drew the mammoth twin replicas of the guns Jo had left her, the display narrowing and highlighting the form of a smaller, silver bodied cybot, a list of meaningless data scrolling past too fast for her to really read it.
A set of crosshairs appeared, flashing and pulsing rhythmically as Meg adjusted her aim.
At the peak of her arc, she depressed the trigger and a high velocity round, bigger than a small car tore from the barrel of her cybot's weapon, crossing the distance in a heartbeat and shredding the other machine's sensor bank as it tore through it's 'head' just above where the left eye would have been on a human.
Suitably blinded the mobile suit staggered for a moment as its AI attempted to balance it while seeking other means to identify and eliminate her.
"Night, night", Meg called cheerfully as Jango touched down, sliding back a few feet before she could check his movement and levelled one of her guns at the blinded enemy.
A shot rang out, but it was not hers.
Jango's hand exploded in a flower of steel and circuitry, the gun it had been holding sent flying into the distance, obliterating a small wall and effectively burying itself in the resulting rubble.
"What the-", scanning quickly left and right, Meg located her attacker, the second cybot stood atop a small rise, the stock of its riffle tucked close against one metallic shoulder while it sighted down the scope affixed to the top.
What's going on here?, the sims had never done anything like this before. They had cooperated a number of times, but never this efficiently, and they had never tried to defend each other before.
Jango made a prodigious leap, another round glancing off the armoured suit's shoulder plating as it sailed through the air, landing with a hissing of hydraulics and a dangerous groan amongst the ruins of an old warehouse complex.
Good, Meg thought as she swiftly moved Jango alongside the wall facing her opponents last known position. The new balancer was working just as well as Leo had promised it would, having enabled Jango to retract into a successful jumping position and execute the move vital seconds faster than he would have previously been able to with herself at the helm.
Of course, this was only a simulation, but if the real thing came even close to this kind of performance…
Meg eased the controls forward a fraction, sidestepping Jango over to a narrow crack in the wall that would be out of line with her enemies riffle for long enough to catch a quick glimpse of his current position.
Meg imagined she could hear Jango's sensory cameras whirling and clicking in imitation of the way she stared intensely at what they revealed, at once both relieved and worried.
Relieved because her latest foe appeared to have abandoned his previous post, a light trail of dust giving away his position as he moved amongst the ruined towers of the industrial complex this sim was set in… but worried because the other machine, the one that should have been disabled, was gone.
She knew from past experience that this was not how the sims worked.
A defeated unit and its wreckage would remain exactly where it was unless moved by either the pilot or one of the AI's until the program ran its course one way or the other.
In other words, she didn't have only this strangely behaving sniper-bot to worry about, but the demolitions model that she had though disabled.
Meg's finder twitched irritably on the trigger, eager to find these two and blow them to pieces.
Cybot programs sneaking around, defending each other in an almost human fashion… something about that irked her even more than being forced to sit through this ridiculous game.
"Come on… where are you hiding", she whispered aloud, jogging Jango lightly to the other side of the building and crouching him low near the remains of an ancient press machine.
A drop of sweat snaked its way down from her temple to her chin.
At first, nothing seemed to answer, but then she saw it, a faint glint of light from a polished metal surface.
"Bingo", a slow smile spread across her face as she sent Jango into another leap, vaulting the crumbing wall shielding her from her enemy, kicking off the wall to gain extra forward momentum.
The sniper-bot turned to track her movement, but too slow, it would never raise it's riffle in time…
Why? Why isn't it even trying?, even as Meg watched the solitary machine made no effort to do anything other than track her, its weapon immobile in cold steel hands.
Machines shouldn't know the meaning of futility, and thus…
Meg let out a startled cry as the explosive round hit Jango like an invisible fist, buckling the chest armour and warping the remains of the damaged arm with shear heat.
The cockpit shuck violently, battering her lithe form with vibrations she had never experienced in a simulation before.
It reverberated again as Jango struck the earth rattling Meg's teeth in her head as he scraped across the barren and dusty ground with a tortured shriek.
A seemingly endless number of alerts flashed and blared in her face, diagrams she could only vaguely identify displaying problem after problem, while a schematic of her cybot showed the most crucial areas of damage.
"Leo! What the hell was that!", she screamed, not caring that she didn't need to shout for him to hear her.
"Feedback loop, something new to this version of the program", Leo's voice came back, seemingly unperturbed by her outburst.
"And no one told me about this, because!"
"Mr S said we shouldn't tell you or it would spoil the test", Ami replied, cutting off the audio feed to the simulator as Meg launched into a list of explicatives that had Leo whistling low in admiration.
"Girl's got quite a set of lungs on her doesn't she", he commented when Meg eventually wound down, only a faint panting audible over the pickup.
"You mean a big mouth right?", Ami asked without taking her eyes off the status screen in front of her, the various biometric data collected by the cockpit throughout this little exercise lain out before her.
Substantial activity within the amygdale and frontal lobes, whatever that means, elevated heart rate and respiration but nothing is redlining or flashing so I guess she's fine for now, Ami reasoned, feeling her reflexive flash of concern evaporate.
She and Meg really did have an almost sibling relationship as anyone familiar would discern by watching them bicker, which was the reason she had taken responsibility for watching over the med data as well as the programming end of things.
Luckily her self appointed image as a girl genius had prevented either Meg or Leo from asking any questions and discovering she knew less about biology than most children her age with a highschool education.
"Yeah, that too", Leo snorted, lighting up another cigarette and shrugging philosophically when Ami wrinkled up her nose at him.
"Disgusting old man", she said when he blew a smoke ring her way for good measure.
"That's what Katsu tells me", he smirked as she paled, the hyper-intelligent young girl's brain coming up with a number of possible interpretations to that statement.
"I'm fine in case anyone cares", Meg's voice called over his deep laugh.
"Oh don't be such a baby", Ami replied as Meg fought sluggish controls to bring Jango back to his knees.
Meg raised her mid-finger in the general direction of the cockpits camera and returned her attention to the battlefield.
The two cybots that had effectively just ambushed her remained where they were, observing her silently, the charred wreckage that had once been the demolitions-bot's optic sensors hanging in a melted mess down one side of it's 'face'.
Meg checked Jango's output levels and damage summary. He had suffered greatly in that last attack. The chest plate had bowed inward, effectively sealing her in had this been for real, though it hadn't concaved enough to crush her or damage the actual cockpit or the sim would have ended already. His left hand and gun were long gone, along with most of the left arm now, only a burnt stub hanging in its place. The right knee servo was also slow to respond, though the new balancer had already compensated.
More praise be to the wonders of modern technology.
Power levels were only at sixty-percent however, and thus operating at full combat capacity in this state would drain his cells in less than half and hour.
The soundless staring match continued, a faint simulated breeze whipping up the dust between them into a minor frenzy.
Fortunately her remaining weapon seemed to be ok, the AI reporting the firearm to be operating within acceptable perimeters as far as it could discern.
Meg trickled power into the damaged right servo and Jango eased upright a fraction more with agonising slowness.
The response was instant, but it did not come from were she expected.
The moment she moved D-bot's weapon swung to track her but when she froze it didn't fire.
"What in the…", Meg carefully requested an update on the trashed sensor bank her first assault should have left D-bot sporting, moving gradually, as if the cybots could see her movements inside the cockpit.
Meg's brow creased at the results displayed. Jango reported that all sensory modules in the enemy demolitions unit had been neutralised… so then, how was it managing to aim at her?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Ok, that's not right", Leo said, frowning at the screen and pausing to transport his cancer-stick from his mouth to his ear, "Oi, did you screw with the program or something?".
"No", came back Ami's indignant reply, the slight girl sitting a little straighter in her chair in the workstation atop the stairs to his left, "If I wanted to change something you think I'd be so sloppy and obvious about it?"
Leo conceded the point with a noncommittal grunt, tapping a few keys on the board in front of him.
All the hardware was working right, and a quick glance showed Jango knelt below them plugged into Ami's makeshift mainframe by a small hive of wires just as they had left him, nothing arcing or missing.
"Ok, so if you're not doing it, how is that thing aiming? I can tell from the readouts it can't see anything let alone target it", Leo brushed his hand across his latest accumulation of stubble and leant back in his creaky chair, "Its got to be getting targeting data somehow though".
"Let me see your screen for a moment", Ami said, leaning over his shoulder without waiting for an ok, small digits flashing over his keyboard and seeming to throw his computer into a mild fit as it spat back information faster than his aging eyes could keep up with.
"What are you looking for kid?", he asked, moving out of her way when he realised before her just what was pressing against his shoulder.
"…There…", the visual assault abruptly halted, only a single diagram remaining, showing a series of pulsing peeks and troughs.
"A comm signal? So what?"
"They're linked, the sniper is feeding data directly into the other's targeting computer, remote controlling it as backup"
Leo raised a sceptical eyebrow. It was perfectly possible to remote control a Cybot like that, but doing so tended to kill independent motion and was only possible with AI units, as a human would find it near impossible to interpret all the skewed data unless it was first processed and altered to suit their mental representation of their relation to the target.
He'd heard of people remote controlling heavy-fire units like this as backup, but never two AI's using each other in this fashion. The size of the computer core needed to run such an operation while keeping the targeting unit mobile and able to defend and attack at the same time would be immense, or at the very least expensive.
Just what was their benefactor thinking programming such an unlikely situation?
Was he just stringing Meg and themselves along for some reason, or did he really think Meg had what it took to surpass such obstacles?
Something in the mechanic's gut churned in a way it hadn't since the days he had spent dealing with Jango's first owner.
On the screen to his right, he watched as Meg made her move, chasing away all thoughts of the mysterious 'Mr. S'
Whatever the reason, it could wait for now, but he had the feeling none of them were going to like it when they found out.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thrusting both controls forward, Meg stamped her foot down hard on the right most pedal, sending Jango surging out of his crouch into a low run, straight at the sniper.
Once more the demolitions cybot began to track her, the wide barrel of its oversized grenade launcher swinging to face her as she ate the distance between herself and her target.
Come on, just a few more feet, she prayed silently watching as the blast radius diagram in the top right of her screen drew closer to the one she desired.
Still the D-bot drew closer to acquiring a lock.
An alarm sounded as the red tinted circle changed to encompass both her targets in their own blast.
Realising what she was trying to do, the damaged machine snapped its barrel upright, breaking engagement at the same moment the sniper set its feet apart, bringing its high powered riffle into shooting position and drawing a bead on her advance.
"Got ya", she smirked.
As the sniper managed to find a lock on Jango's already battered chest plate, the red cybot suddenly dropped from sight.
Using all of her built up velocity, Meg threw Jango into a diving slide, like a runner reaching for home base, flipping Jango onto his back mid dive as the powerful round of the sniper's gun shredded the air overhead.
As her cybot passed between the legs of her foe, Meg let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession.
The first shot hit nothing but air, the second ripped a path from the sniper's chin through to the top of its head and the third pierced the weak armour between the legs and impacted the power core, shorting every system within the enemy machine in seconds.
Deprived of its controller, the demolition cybot scrambled to try and complete its mission without any means to distinguish friend, foe or even just its environment and crashed to the ground as it tried to turn faster than its already stressed balancer could cope with.
"Alright! That's right, go me! I….hey!", the screen turned black and the wall in front of her cracked open to admit what to her maladjusted eyes was a blinding stream of sunlight.
Meg screwed shut her eyes under the hateful assault of the suns rays and hissed like a b-movie vampire.
"You ok in there Red?", Leo called over the PA system, receiving a repeat of Meg's earlier noise for his concern.
Her sight had returned by the time Leo and Ami made it down from the control room to the hangar Leo used as a repair bay, and she had a full view of their barely contained smirks as they looked at her sweaty, squinting and strapped down form.
"What?", she demanded, glaring when neither apparently trusted themselves enough to answer without laughing, "Why not take a picture, it would-"
She was cut short when a flash of light sent her back into the realms of blindness.
As spots danced across her vision, Meg could make out Ami slipping her palm-top back into the pocket of her pink one-piece.
"Not bad today, though I've seen better", Leo commented as he worked on her restraints, Meg climbing past him and jumping down as soon as she was free, hobbling for a moment on legs that seemed to want to cramp as protest of their recent mistreatment.
"What are you talking about", she said, straightening when she was able and tossing her hair back, tucking a few sweat clogged strands behind one ear, "I beat the stupid thing didn't I?".
"Actually, technically, you failed", Ami provided when all Leo did was offer a shrug and take another drag on his omnipresent cigarette.
"…Eh?"
"You beat them sure, but you got yourself trapped in the cockpit with no way out and little power left in the process as well as heavy damage to almost every system", the smaller girl said, checking points off on her fingers.
"You mean I have to do all of that again?", Meg whined hanging her head.
"No, like I say, it's only a technicality, you figured out that they were remote linked which was apparently the purpose of this one according to the post-sim data we got", Ami tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully, "That reminds me, how did you know what they were doing anyways?"
"…Erm, its one of those bounty hunter things, you know, like a danger sense", Meg said, smiling a trifle too widely.
"A danger sense?", Ami deadpanned disbelievingly, "You mean you charged them without knowing that the sniper couldn't fire until he put the other cybot on hold!"
"Hey it worked didn't it! I was taking them by surprise!", Meg shouted, her sheepishness gone in light of the younger girl's criticism.
"They're machines you half-wit! They don't get surprised!"
"Can I just-", Leo tried to intervene before this little debate erupted into a full blown argument.
"NO!", both women shouted at once, turning mutually fierce expressions upon him, faces that might have cowed a younger man, or at least one who hadn't been married to a woman like his wife.
"I just thought you might like to know we had company before the screaming started", he pointed out, gesturing other his shoulder with his thumb at the skinny looking guest.
Barely Meg's height without the rollerblades adorning his feet, his face hidden by a combination of ski mask and bike helmet, the young man was toying absently with the strap of his batter red rucksack while he waited by the hangar's maintenance door.
"I'm out of here", Meg said, brushing past Leo and their guest as he stepped inside, ignoring him as he tried to say something to her.
"Meg-"
"No, I've been stuck in that stupid thing all day, it's about time I went out and had a little fun! I'll call if I need anything, bye", and with that she was gone, leaving Ami and Leo alone with masked rollerblader.
"Um, yeah, sorry bout all that, can I help you with something?", Leo asked into the awkward silence.
"I have a package for a Miss Megumi Carpenter", the boy's voice as distorted by his mask, almost robot like in a cheesy kind of way.
"That was her just now", Ami answered slowly. No one should have known Meg would be here, so why was there a delivery for her to this address?
"I see…"
"I'll collect for her, she'll be back later", Leo said, his face hard as he stepped forward, hand held out expectantly.
"I'm afraid that just won't do", the courier replied with a slow shake of his head, "This package must reach the hands of the recipient only… I believe I can catch up if I hurry".
"No need, look, I'll sign for it and-"
"No", the courier's statement held an air of solemn finality, "Thank you, if you'll excuse me".
Before Leo could object again he had ducked back out of the door, the sound of wheels clacking against concrete fading rapidly into the distance.
"…Well…", Leo said, "That sure didn't seem suspicious at all".
"Yeah", Ami agreed, "… What do you think it is? A bomb or something, I know a lot of people probably don't like Meg much right now".
"No idea kid, but I don't think it's a good idea to hang around and find out, lets go".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- Author Notes---
Hey there, sorry about the long update time, but I've been trapped by a seemingly endless flow of ideas for my Love Hina universe. Hopefully it should be worth your wait.
I've had to spilt this chapter as I realised it would be to large as a whole, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait a tad longer for the gangster action originally promised.
I'll see you all in part two.
Until next time, Betweenheavenandhell