WARNING
This series is a collection of disjointed, disparate episodes within the Infrared universe that I would use to characterize different characters, free from the current restrictions regarding psuedonyms which are dramatically slowing down my work flow.
These episodes are (hopefully) canon to the future events in Infrared, and would be re-released as chapters in the story or work as side events parallel to the main events.
I am experimenting with many writing styles. Tragedy, slice-of-life, action, drama, and romance are several genres I want to utilize here.
Sometimes there may be events which may "spoil" the future chapters of the Infrared storyline. If you don't want the Invincible treatment for many of the story's villainous characters, do not read these pages.
Quixote and Quisling
ARK-Georgian Calendar 3235, November 29
BANG!
A shot rang out, echoing through the metal hallway. The bullet's sonic boom whizzes past, and echoes back to the shooter in a lowering pitch from the doppler effect of its velocity.
Antoine is chasing the mastermind of some of the worst atrocities of the Modern Acorn Republic. The totalitarian technostate has subsumed the entirety of his old country leaving nothing to come back to. His eyes burned. The color of his eyes match that of a 20 thousand kelvin star, and he has the rage to match it. It doesn't change the fact that the light flashed into his eyes allowed his adversary to escape.
"WORMTONGUE!"
Antoine didn't know where Grimer was going, but he was determined to put his machinations to an end. Grimer may not have created the roboticizer but he was responsible for many brutal things. Grimer brutalized the democratization process that Sally's parents wanted to push through to put them on level footing with humanity. He claims that the poverty inflicted by Acorn's "technological backwardness" necessitated the use of "emergency powers".
His dictatorship wasn't established for the revolution. His revolution was established for the dictatorship.
And most important to Antoine, Grimer sought to destroy the culture and identity of the great kingdom. Grimer sought to replace it with one of his own design, one that would also serve the interests of his superior.
Doctor Ivo Robotnik.
His vision clears. He sees the green scaly skin. The lab coat, washed of the blood of thousands of mobians. For an aging, unhealthy mistake of nature, Grimer is extremely fast. Even so, Antoine adjusts his course, and takes aim, palm over the hammer.
BANG
BANG
His Whiteoak No. 4 revolver may be antiquated, but a weapon is a weapon. One of the bullets, aimed at center mass, grazed Wormtongue's shoulder and throws off his balance, causing the middle-aged lizard-man to tumble. He fell, and slid a few meters on his wounded arm.
Seeing an opportunity to get closer, Antoine forgoes reloading his revolver and unsheathes his sword. He speaks in his native Acornite tongue, which sounds and conjugates almost analogously to the romance languages on earth but with a complex and heavy emphasis on nasal vowels, clicks, and consonants that could exhaust novices.
For the sake of simplicity, the speech is translated to English.
"I will take your head. I will bring joy to Knothole! I will bring victory to Acorn!"
The blade whistles through the air.
A fire about to be snuffed out.
A collapsing guillotine.
A broken foundation.
Legs, pushed away.
Antoine falls to the ground as the ground was swept from underneath him.
"You're not just extreme, you're patently insane!"
Grimer's response was labored by his exhaustion and injury. His chest rises and falls rapidly, and even if he's down he's still in his element - the corridors that they're fighting in are warm and humid. If it was any colder, Grimer would have been desperate to get into a warmer place and his muscles would've been stiff. Lethargic. Not here, and not even with the adrenaline (or the chemical analogous to it in mobians) shooting through his body to manage the pain.
When Antoine was down Grimer grabbed the revolver and pointed it at the back of D'Coolette's head. He pulls the trigger.
click
The bullets were expended. Antoine responded fast, swinging his sword at Grimer again, this time horizontally.
thunk
Grimer dodged, and the sword lodged itself into a rusted blackwater line running down the wall. Sewage spewed out of it, covering both fighters. Antoine tried to pull out the blade, but it only dug deeper.
"You think killing a defenseless man would bring glory to your petty reactionary Freedom Fighters?! Killing someone who tried to do what's best for his country only to be sentenced to death for his efforts?! Humanity thinks of us as a curiosity! A joke! You think that more of the same is going to change that?!"
"Who said that you know what's best for our country?!"
Antoine gave up trying to dislodge his sword and went for an alternative approach. He isn't the strongest fighter, but his fist still dug into Grimer's stomach, sending his target reeling across the hallway. He smashed through the metallic panels that housed important electrical circuitry. Grimer was lucky that the water covering him didn't cause a short, or worse.
While Grimer struggled out of the hole that he was punched into, Antoine freed his sword from the sewage line. The water sprayed everywhere, and Antoine got a very, very bad idea.
He sheaths his sword, aware of what happened last time he tried using it to cut up a high voltage line like the one in front of him. Instead he starts kicking at the sewage line to point it at the electrical panel.
Grimer's eyes filled with terror. He sees what Antoine's doing and desperately tries to untangle himself from the wires. More sewage sprayed into Antoine's face. He's too busy wiping it off while bending a pipe with his foot to notice Grimer almost achieve freedom. Grimer was indeed about to run away, but his leg gets caught in the wires. He pulls, hard. The wire snaps at one end but the other will not relent.
Antoine's face was cleared of solid contaminants and he sees a beautiful sight - the sewage is approaching the electrical panel, and with the loosened wires a short circuit, well...
FFBOOOM
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Antoine's eyes instinctively close as the flash of light and heat swallows both him and Grimer in a destructive fireball. Antoine was knocked back. He rolls on the floor trying to put out the flames on his fur. Grimer was in an equally unfortunate situation, and is screaming as is skin is covered in first-degree burns as well as being shocked by the current going through the wire wrapped around his leg and the sewage that is completing a circuit on the floor between himself and the infrastructure that he commissioned.
The heat, light, and smoke would have set any fire detection system off. Sprinklers activate, putting out the fires that would have otherwise killed both of them and furthering the electroshock therapy session that Antoine booked for Grimer.
Grimer's screaming became completely unintelligible as new paths for electron flow formed all over his body. Fortunately, no paths went straight through his heart or brain, but that was a case of extreme luck on his part.
After two seconds of the harrowing ordeal the power cut out as the load on the electrical system became too much for the building to handle.
Grimer's muscles ached tremendously, exhausted by the uncontrolled spasms and with neurons tingling from being almost burned out by the shock. However, he willed himself to push through and free himself from the copper-plastic hairs that shackled him. And not a moment too soon, as Antoine leapt over him to deliver a swift axe stomp to the neck. He barely dodged. Antoine lets out a scream.
"I have the spark! I am the eye of the storm!"
"Stop pissing that Oakwood religious crap!"
Another sweeping kick to Antoine's legs was a no sell with his firm, low stance providing little opportunity to balance Grimer's much stronger opponent. Grimer adjusts, using the leverage he has against Antoine's boot to push away from the madman.
"I will strike you down!"
Antoine drew his blade again and slashed at Grimer, who was gaining distance against the Freedom Fighter again. He attempted another swing but missed. Realizing the futility of remaining in melee combat Antoine backtracked to get his revolver from the mess of wires that used to hold a breaker system. He finds his piece and starts loading it. But then rounding the corner he sees two SWATbots watching the corridor and a disheveled Grimer escaping to safety. A flash of light was the only warning. Grimer and Antoine ducked into whatever cover was available.
The end of the hallway was hit with a strobe of high-powered laser fire, brightening the end of the hallway in a sickly violet light. The weapons are inefficient but with the energy abundance in the Modern Acorn Republic means nothing really precludes the use of such armaments. If Antoine was caught by those weapons his fur would have ignited instantly.
Antoine's mind went from sure in purpose and confidence to completely afraid of his better armed opponents. Even after over five years of conflict, the novel and strange weapons still never fail to elicit primal fear in anyone who faces them. The stimuli never becomes normal, and in cramped spaces, even if you didn't die from the effects, the heat and light and possibly toxic burning metal/plastic fumes of the aftermath throws all instincts into a state of confusion. Antoine whined a bit under his breath. He rushed in, overestimated his abilities, and is now trapped.
He wants desperately to prove his valor to his dead father, his friends, and to himself. He wanted to avenge the many victims of Wormtongue's brutal "modernist" regime. He can stand and fight, or egress.
He knows he can't just run away in the path that is left open to him. Robotnik's wise - he could have set up a trap to intercept him.
He has to fight, even for just a little more. He loads a blank cartridge into his revolver, and a rifle grenade into the barrel.
POP
The payload flies across the hall, soaring towards the two SWATbots that are covering his position.
KABOOM
The bomb shatters the two robots. The flashing stops, and Antoine peeks out to investigate where Grimer went.
Antoine found a grate open. He hears movement in the ventilation. Knowing Grimer, Antoine concludes that his adversary thought to be clever and make use of the ventilation system to escape rather than the main passageways. To give credit to Grimer, Antoine did have several ambush points to strike down the collaborator in case his efforts fail, and Antoine was able to overwhelm his security detail. He climbs in, struggling to accommodate the cramped dimensions of the new passageway. It's extremely small, but he recognizes the distinct smell of burnt skin and sewage that would've covered his target. He pushes into the direction where the surface was wetter and the stench stronger. But he knows that Grimer's gaining some distance and if Antoine doesn't come across a section with more elbow room he's going to have to abandon his pursuit.
"[Blasphemic profanity], if I don't get some room sooner or later that slippery bug would get away!"
Antoine should be careful what he wishes for.
"Are you serious?! The vents led here? How could I find him now?"
Antoine reached a massive wind tunnel and lost Grimer's scent. And despite the place being a wind tunnel, the air current is relatively mild and quiet.
"He's probably downwind..."
He follows the corner to find Grimer on the other side of a large turbofan that's pushing air out of the system. Seeing his quarry, Antoine charges forth with his sword.
Big mistake.
WHIRRRRRRRR
The fan starts up again, catching his sword and causing Antoine to panic as he fights against the stronger wind current. He was able to stop in time, but the sword was yanked out of his hands and broke in half. Fortunately for Antoine, the turbofan also broke, but Grimer got more distance away from him.
Antoine's lungs grown heavy with the constant screaming of vengeance and righteousness, and he opted to take his frustration out on the turbofan and try to break it completely.
BANG
BANG
BANG
BANG
RAP RAP
BANG
Seven hard and strong hits later, the fan axel was obliterated and the blades splintered apart onto the floor of the tunnel.
Antoine climbs through to continue his pursuit, loading his handgun with live ammunition and firing more shots off.
POP POP POP
His shots go wild and ricochet through the tunnel. None of them hit. Grimer climbs through another hole leading to a new line. Antoine is yet to reach where Grimer went but he hears the vent break, indicating that Grimer dropped down and is escaping through more conventional methods. He hears a bag unzip as a door slams shut. Antoine keeps going anyway.
He dropped into the same room, and kicked open the door.
He was greeted to a dreadful ambience. The outside world bathed in a sickly red glow from the lights of the metropolis, and a flash of lightning streaked through the sky.
It was a powerful omen. A flash of lightning to indicate the death of a powerful enemy. The end of the Rule of Dusk. The Last Dragon, slayed from the skies he once ruled. It once filled people with terror, but in Antoine, who sought a destructive outcome, it fills him with confidence.
A door was slightly ajar. He approaches it to hear the distinctive whir and hum of more SWATbots lying in wait. Antoine decides to scavenge what he could to counter his new opponents. His chances are running thin, and he needs something to bring the fight in his favor. He carefully opens several doors and scrounges around for weapons. He doesn't find machine guns or grenades to clear out the SWATbot threat, and the laser blasters have little ability to penetrate walls. He looks for something else.
Something lied on the floor beside the table in the place he started. A strange device. Antoine usually was averse to utilizing strange new things that he didn't study about, but he investigates its function anyway. It has a boxy handguard with a cylindrical handle, and a hole on one end of it.
There seems to be a clear way that the weapon functions. One end is pointed away from the user, denoted with the standard hazard symbol on that end, while the other end seems to have a cap for disassembly. Antoine tests it out.
SSSRVMMMM
It's apparently some kind of plasma sword. It's a silly device, but not completely impractical. It's probably much more useful than the sledgehammer that was also left behind in the same place.
It was at this point that Antoine realized that he should all but give up attempting to finish his mission. He decides to egress. Going through the robots in a straightforward manner would be suicide, so if he can't use the front door...
He is going to make one.
He sticks the blade into the floor and makes a circle around himself. He drops down to the next floor. Then to the next one, then the next one. By this point the operators monitoring the SWATbots realize what's going on and instruct them to pursue the Freedom Fighter. Antoine was five stories down. Before he makes another hole he sees the SWATbots crowding over his escape channel and raising their weapons. He rolls out of the way as the distinctive flash of laser fire incinerates his position.
Antoine fired two shots outside to break the window and loaded a flare. He sends the retreat signal so the other fighters could evacuate the area before getting overwhelmed by their better-armed opponents. Antoine disappears into the hallway to get out of the bad situation as he hears a grainy transmission over his radio. NICOLE's voice echoes through his ears.
"All sections retreat. Target status unknown, assuming fail state. Repeat, all sections retreat..."
Now, he has to get himself out. Unfortunately for him, there's no vehicles that could facilitate his escape. He has to procure something on the ground if he wants to do things the fast way. Instead, he decides on an alternative. Antoine grabs a fire hose and rappels down the building to ground level. He heads into the sewers and tries his best to push through to Knothole.
He didn't return until two days after that mission. He was disheveled, his face scrunched into an enormous frown. He spent the rest of the day showering, doing laundry, then taking another shower. He used up an enormous amount of fresh water.