A/N: OMG. I seriously had this written for four months, except for part of the battle. I am TERRIBLE a action scenes. This stuff? This right here? This is why I mostly stick to slice of life. *huff* Anyway, I doubt anyone remembers this, but here we go. Vert's mom's crazy and stuff, but they let her out of the whacko basket, so she's home. Vert now has to balance fighting aliens with family stuff, all while not allowing his mother to learn of his team's activities. 'Cept she maybe already knows and stuff? Kinda? Reviews are appreciated! And now it's of to David's Bridal to try on dresses YAY :D SMOOCH
The white-knuckle drive home from Crash Canyon had left her a bundle of nerves. After ripping the top off of the bottle and dry-swallowing a few pills more than were strictly necessary, Janet banged her head against the steering wheel a couple of times in a desperate attempt to knock whatever was loose in her brain back into place. When she opened her eyes again, the hole in the sky was closing up but still stubbornly continuing to exist, so she jammed her key into the ignition and peeled out for home. By the time she got the garage door open, she was shaking like a leaf.
The older woman poured herself a glass of water and sat down. After one sip, she chucked it at the wall and screamed, grabbing at her hair in frustration. The shattering glass sent shards flying and water splashing from the impact. Janet stood back up and made for the liquor cabinet. Never mind that she wasn't supposed to mix her medication with alcohol, she just needed a goddamn drink.
After a fifth of bourbon, Janet's nerves began to settle. The image of what she had seen played back in her mind. A blinding bright hole in the sky. She had seen a burning hole in nothing, a window to someplace else, flickering with electricity.
"Just like before," she groaned, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes.
This was not supposed to be happening. It was not real. Hours and weeks and months of talks with her doctors told her it could not possibly be real. Janet had spent years in that terrible place, being told all these wild and strange images were simply in her mind, and eventually telling herself they were, as well. She told herself these were things that didn't exist. She told herself so often that she started to believe. When she believed, she was free to go. There was no world but this one. There was no intelligent life but humankind, if you could call humans intelligent. And no matter what her eyes told her, there were no holes in the sky.
She was better now—the doctors said so, and of course anything they said was true. And Dr. Mendoza would tell her she had seen nothing, and Janet would believe her, and everything would be back to normal.
"No it won't," she muttered, finishing off her glass in another quick swig and pouring herself another.
Because just admitting she had seen something was bad enough. The second the words passed her lips, they would pull a straightjacket over her head and belt her arms down around her chest. They would pump her full of drugs and drag her back to her cell. This was the beginning of the end, she knew. And with her appointment today, there was no way of avoiding it.
Janet jumped and screamed at the sound of the phone ringing. She stared for a moment, holding her breath, as the phone continued to demand her attention. Finally, she reached a shaking hand to pick up on the third ring, holding it as if she were afraid it would explode.
"…Hello?"
"Janet, this is Dr. Mendoza," a stressed female voice intoned. "I'm having a—no, the other way! Sorry, Janet, I'm having a bit of a crisis with another patient. I'm afraid I can't keep our appointment today. Do you think we could reschedule?"
Janet blinked. "Of…Of course, doctor."
There was the sound of something crashing on the other line, and Mendoza yelped. "I know this is rather short notice. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you Janet, but I—for the love of God, man, put him down!" There was some muffled, distant screaming. "I'm sorry for the trouble."
"No trouble at all, doctor," Janet quietly assured her. "Canceling one session's not going to kill me."
"Great! Come by in a few days for your next appointment, and I'll see you then."
"Is that a siren?"
Mendoza groaned. "I've got to be going, now. Have a nice day!" She hung up.
"You too, doc." She sighed. Janet flipped her phone closed.
The former mental patient had received a stay of execution. As a condition of her release, she was to attend two therapy sessions a week with her psychiatrist, Dr. Mendoza. This cancellation only delayed the inevitable. Janet was going to have to tell the doctor about the portal.
The floor rocked, knick knacks wobbling on their shelves. The lights flickered, the air humming with electricity. Though her hands were trembling, Janet tightened her grip on her bourbon.
The tumbler cracked.
She put on a practiced smile. "What portal?" she asked aloud. "I didn't see any portal, no portal at all. Such a thing would be downright silly."
She got the broom from the corner and swept up the glass shards.
"Where was I this afternoon? Oh, no place special. I just went for a casual drive around the salt flats and sketched some of the native flora and fauna."
Janet dumped the contents of the dustpan into the trash.
"It was quite relaxing, but otherwise my day was pretty uneventful."
The smile never left her face as she cleaned up the water with a paper towel, and she began to snicker. Apparently, she had missed some of the smaller shards of glass, too, because her hand was now bleeding profusely.
"Nope, nothing interesting happened today," she cheerfully insisted, taking the stairs two at a time and cackling like crazy. "Nothing interesting at all. I just had a nice, quiet day to myself."
As she made it to the bathroom to clean out the cut, she looked up at the mirror and realized there were tears streaming freely down her madly grinning face.
"It. Was. Nice."
So who was she trying to convince?
"Everyone steer clear of the lake!" Vert ordered. "That metal is molten hot!"
"Technically, that statement is correct, Captain. However, the contents of the lake are almost entirely Mercury, which is liquid near room temperature."
Vert rolled his eyes as he sawed through a Red Sark. "Okay, so steer clear of the lake not because of the heat but because of the deadly poisonous heavy metals."
"That is an astute warning, Captain. I will endeavor to follow it."
There were days when Vert was very happy that Tezz was adjusting to normal human social situations. The Russian was emotionally crippled when first they met, a being of logic who spoke literally at all times and kept his teammates at a distance. As he slowly emerged from his shell, he began to understand, and even employ, certain turns of phrase. These were things that helped him to socialize with people on some normal level, and that was healthy. But somewhere along the line, some idiot had thought it prudent to teach Tezz the concept of sarcasm, and that person was someone Vert desired to track down and strangle on a regular basis.
But Vert was pulled from these thoughts by a dozen or so Sark scouting drones that swarmed the Saber. The BF5's fearless leader threw it into reverse, engaging the blades as he went, and performed a twist in mid-air. As he landed in the black sand, he lost traction and spun out, but he turned into it rather than struggle against it, and as such, managed to keep from crashing into a pillar of gray stone.
Stanford was having a bit more luck, if one considered being relatively ignored by an army of killer robots to be luck. It seemed to him that the more battles the team engaged in, the more the enemy would focus on Vert. Sure, Vert was a thorn in their side, but it made the royal wonder if he himself had any real reason to be there.
"Anyone got eyes on the key?" Vert asked gruffly, in the middle of some complex maneuver involving his blades.
"No luck, mate," Stanford said, picking off a few Sark from his leader's tail. "We're having a spot of bother with that. No eyes in the sky today."
The air in this zone was slightly toxic as a result of all the mercury fumes. Zoom had been left behind due to the exposed nature of his vehicle, and AJ passed over in favor of another. Today's active duty roster consisted of Vert (naturally), Agura, Stanford, Tezz, and the Cortez brothers.
Since the destruction of the original keys shortly after the Red Sentient 5 were first released, most of the battle zones they went through were repeats. And each of those zones had a new key, so apparently the battle zones could reproduce the keys if they were destroyed. Stanford did not understand how that worked, though he sometimes pretended he did to make himself look cool.
But this zone was not a repeat. No, Stanford would remember the ominous black sand and rocks, the oddly lit green sky, and the mercury lake. This was new territory, and the key was still in parts unknown. Today might actually be a challenge.
Stanford drove further out from his teammates, making his way up a rock outcropping. From his vantage point on the isolated cliff side, he managed to snipe a respectable number of Sark away from the rest of the team. But finding the key was still the important thing to do, and Stanford was a respectable professional. (He was not in the least respectable, and only mildly professional, but again, the Brit had very different ideas about himself than the rest of the world.) Unfolding the Reverb's side-mounted speakers, the royal sent out a series of sonic vibrations to map the zone.
The grid laid out on his heads-up-display showed something Stanford had failed to notice from the lower ground. Indeed had he noticed the crazy-tall, oddly phallic stone pillars arranged in a circle. But Stanford had not seen the platform in the center. His echo map revealed the platform, and from his new high vantage point, he could see the telltale glow of hadron energy.
"Eyes on the prize, Vert!" Stanford called over the comm, but before he could elaborate, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
Shifting his hawklike gaze, the expert marksman scanned the ominous, black mountains that towered behind him, dwarfing his little cliff. There it was again, something slithering across the dusty rock and heading right for him. He could not get a good view, but for all the life of him…
Stanford knew it was impossible, but he could have sworn he had just seen a man in a black suit.
"Stanford, do you copy?"
"I've spotted the key, Vert!" he crowed triumphantly. Stanford gunned his engine and made his way back to the action. "There's a platform with a weird statue smack in the middle of that Stonehenge mockup. The key should be right on the tippy-top."
"Tip-top form as always, Stan," Vert cheerfully praised him. "Agura, we got this. Think you could make a grab for the key?"
"Grab and go, got it!"
A Sark revved up and shot straight for the huntress, but was easily batted away by a swift movement of the Tangler's claw. Agura leapfrogged over enemy vehicles and made her way to the platform at the center of the stone columns. Vert's commands to her teammates faded into the background, everything around her slowing to a crawl until it froze. The huntress allowed herself a split second to gaze at the gray stone in awe.
The colossus was hideous. Had she seen something like this in the human world, she would write it off as the product of a twisted mind and back away slowly. However, Agura knew that the statues and glyphs left behind in battle zones were not mere works of art, but monuments to what had come before. Once, they had found a statue of one of Stanford's ancestors, a warning to watch out for treachery and deceit. Somewhere in the multiverse (hopefully long ago and far away) this disturbing creature had more than likely existed. The statue seemed to be of a roughly humanoid figure shown from the waist up; it had a torso, and arms, and something that Agura thought was supposed to be a head. It also had a pair of bat-like wings sticking out from between its shoulders. Thick rolls of fat hung from the ribcage under a flabby pair of manboobs. The pudgy but powerful arms ended in large hands with thick, webbed fingers and wicked claws. And, as previously stated, Agura was pretty sure the thing was supposed to have a head—but it looked more like some dude was wearing an octopus as a hat. The statue had sort of a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' vibe going on, vaguely human in shape with tentacles rearing out from where its mouth should have been. Two tentacles curled upwards from either side of the beast's demonic, six-eyed face, reaching at least five stories above the top of its head.
Floating delicately between the tips of those tentacles was the battle key.
The moment passed, the world revved back up to normal speed, and Agura grinned. The Tangler pounced and began its climb.
Agura was halfway up the statue's tentacles when she heard an all too familiar shriek and braced for impact. The easy climb turned into a fight for her life. The Tangler's arms strained against the weight of the Venikus. Kyburi's hissing laughter rang in the huntress' ears. Claw met claw. Each put their every effort into knocking the other off their perch.
Back on the ground, the boys continued their own fight. Between the Reverb's sonic booms and the Saber's blades, the Sark's numbers were dwindling. Tezz's electromagnetic blasts would have been useful, but the genius was too busy scanning and cataloguing glyphs on the stone pillars to help out too much. The Cortez brothers were forced to cover his oblivious ass.
"Dude, the hell?" Spinner demanded over the comm, swinging the Buster's mace in an ark and taking out a Sark that got too close. "What are you even doing, Tezz?"
"I have never seen markings like these before, yet they are clearly arranged in a pattern that belies a message. This language must be deciphered."
"Tezz is right!" Sherman cried, sideswiping a trio of Sark attempting to drop in from behind them. Determined to keep his comrade safe, he circled the Buster around the Split Wire, guarding. "Remember when we found that giant statue of Stanford's ancestor in a battle zone?"
The Russian paused in confusion. "You found what?"
"The glyphs took a while to translate, but they were a historical account of Æðelstan the Red's betrayal of mankind to the Vandals in exchange for power. The Sentients built a war memorial to caution future generations against blind trust in their leaders." Sherman grunted and butted the front of the buster into a group of Sark. "The Sentients wouldn't build this ugly thing without a reason. The message they left behind could be important."
"Message, important, great," Agura huffed, thoroughly annoyed. The Tangler slipped another foot, but she managed to regain her balance before she tumbled to the ground. "Little help here?"
"Just a tick, love," Stanford said. He took aim.
"Rhodes, you idiot—!"
The sonic blast headed straight for the catfight. Kyburi screamed as she was sent flying, another blast disintegrating her before she hit the ground. Agura barely managed to duck the Tangler out of reach, but she could still feel the throbbing bass echo through her vehicle's frame.
And the statue.
Quick as a wink, Agura snatched the key, leapt down to safety, put the pedal to the metal, and GTFO'd.
The delicately balanced tentacles of the stone behemoth cracked and crumbled, sending rubble careening down around their ears. With the key in hand, the Battle Force 5 booked it back to Earth.
A/N: As previously stated reviews are appreciated!