Some Experience Necessary
1.5
The desert sun beamed down on the string of zoids wandering through the desert, harshly reflective and definitely an odd group. Raven had put the entire comm system low enough to not be a bother as four girls asked questions, moaned, complained and asked where the bathroom was. If something came up, he'd hear it, but right now he had a course to chart and they weren't helping.
It was an over-nighter, and nothing too strenuous, which Raven was glad for – there was a dig about forty miles away out into this sandy area which had often been picked over and later used for training purposes by the Guylos Empire. It made sense to go out there, battle a couple of RevRaptor sleepers, get into the ruins, retrieve an item and then come home – there shouldn't be any kind of issue, nor trouble, it would be over. Quick and simple. Except they'd would have to look for said item carefully because it had been hidden, and this was to be played out as if it were real.
Prozen had said to think of it as hunting for an organoid.
This almost instantly got Raven's back up, but then he'd had the joy of watching four very, very angry young ladies come out in their piloting uniforms, all of which looked like they were about to kill him, or in Lumina-La's case, drown him in tears.
The Energyliger plodded along, groaning in the heat, its armour pinging unpleasantly. "Raven. RAVEN."
The singsong way in which Grace tried to get his attention put his back right up. Too bad she wasn't trained or he'd have a right to slap her because nothing was better than a good, equal scrap. Raven didn't trust a girl who didn't automatically go for the eyes in a bare-knuckle fight. "What, Grace?"
"I was wondering how long we'd be wandering around out here. It's hot."
"Yeah. It is, isn't it." Raven looked back down at the clipboard, balanced on his knee. One hand held a pencil, the other leaned against the Fang's control column – the zoid was practically on autopilot, quite content to ignore the circus following it.
"Aren't you going to do anything about it? You're the great Raven, top of the class, surely you could-"
"Great Raven my ass."
"Shut up, Rosalita, don't you know who this guy is?!"
Time to turn the volume down again. Not before making a point however –
"Ladies, this is what we call an open comm line. Pretty much anyone can hear us right now, yeah? Sleepers, other patrols, and oh yeah, the enemy. Now we're lucky enough to be well within the border of the empire and the republic, but could I just point out, y'know, just for a second…Shut the fuck up or I'll come back there and shut you up myself. You don't like the heat? Why did you sign up? Don't like the mission? Welcome to the military. Don't leave ass-smudges on the door when you leave."
"Why are you so mean?"
"He's Minister Prozen's boy, it's hardly surprising." Grace was really getting into this. "Why, I'd be afraid for my virtue if he was any older!"
Virtue? What the hell was she talking about? Raven rolled his eyes, and realised he'd lost his place on the map.
Behind him, the KonigWolf was now standing to attention, ears pricked as its pilot stared in horror at this realization. He's Prozen's son?!
"This mission is doomed no matter how much you plan." Harmony's voice floated back, her zoid being well out of the way of the others. It was a Deathpion, coloured silver with red joints. Ugly, evil little bastard. Raven hadn't even realised it was there until she'd hopped in. Deathpions should be banned for simply existing. "There's a great evil amongst us, waiting to feast upon our souls."
Out of the corner of his eye, Raven noticed that Harmony's own eyes were glowing.
He put it down to bad lighting. "You guys keep this up and we're turning around and all of you fail. If you're peeved at the pace, blame Grace and Lumina-La and their zoids."
"It'd be fine if you let me fly!" Green curls bounced. If that girl cried any more, her eyes would fall out of her head.
Raven shrugged, picking up his place again as they passed a few large, natural stone pillars that seemed to loom out of a dune quite spectacularly. The Giant's Fingers, the trainers called them. The geological strata made no sense for such stone to be there, but there they were. "Then fly."
"I…um, I need an organoid."
"I can fly too!" Grace cut in. The Energyliger bounded ahead a little bit, but being on the spine of a dune and then moving to it's sides was a mistake for the top heavy beast. With a lurch, and a small scream, the whole thing toppled over and landed heavily on its side, wings flapping comically and only serving to pull it into sand faster. "Oh my God! Oh my God! My daddy's going to kill me!"
Rosalita managed a laugh, and Harmony was watching all of this with an evil grin on her face. The flying-unicorn-thing Orudius – quite inappropriate to be out here in the first place – trotted down the dune and tried to use it's headspike to right the struggling Liger except it only caused more damage. Raven watched the pantomime with interest, especially when the Orudius decided to reject its tape deck in disgust at its pilot's inability to pilot. Raven had been born after the compact cartridge evolution, so watching the little rectangle opening on the zoid's control panel and covering Lumina-La with threads of black tape was both disturbing and hilarious.
Taking pity on her as she struggled beneath the black spaghetti, Raven soon joined her, nudging Lumina-La's best intentions out of harm's way. In the end it took all four of the righted-zoids to fix the wronged-one, although Harmony probably only made things worse when she dug her Deathpion's massive claws into the circuits of the Liger's legs, pulling it roughly. The Liger screamed in protest, but they eventually fixed it up, congratulating themselves loudly in the process.
All except Raven, of course. Seeing all the zoids moving clumsily about, he wondered if they were going to make it at all.
"You okay, Grace?"
"My zoid is scratched. Harmony did it on purpose!"
"You're using a zoid with a high center of gravity in an inappropriate environment. It doesn't matter what Harmony did to you, or what anyone else did to you – it's your responsibility to make the damn thing work. Don't blame the machine or anyone else on your own mistakes." Although it was easy to do. Raven hoped none of them knew he was just parroting back what he'd been told time and time again, but in the heat of the moment it was kind of hard not to blame the machine for failing you when you needed it most. The only difference was that Raven did know how to use the zoid in question; Grace was mucking about and making a right mess.
They resumed their journey, and when they passed the third marker – signalling to anyone who knew that they were venturing into Sleeper territory, Raven paused for a moment, bringing the Fang to a stop. "Okay kids-"
Rosalita spluttered. "Excuse me?"
"I am over a thousand years old. Do not speak down to your obvious superior, mortal." Christ, Harmony was on some serious trip there.
"Keep an eye on your radar – we should be moving into a Sleeper zone. If the team's already gotten off their asses and updated them by radio, they should be on the look out for us. Points go to whoever doesn't trip a platoon and makes it to…" He scanned the horizon. "There."
"What is that?"
"An old munitions outpost." Raven left out the part about the village it had been attached to right before the war forty years ago decimated it…and the consequent attempts to repopulate that was all met with failure. Place gave him the creeps, but he wasn't about to show that. "We camp there for the night."
- To be continued
