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[Dashe]

While Teisel was busy saying goodbye to his new friends, the Bright Bats were in the midst of helping Roll and Art clean up. More specifically, Aero and Grill were in the midst of helping Roll and Art clean up, while Max and Pic were huddling by the door and shooting nervous glances at Roll every few seconds.

“The day’s almost over.” Pic whispered. “You’ve got to ask her.”

“Pic, her husband’s right there.”

“You had all day to ask her while he wasn’t right there.”

Max looked over at Roll again. Tron had to have been exaggerating about…a lot of things. “Why don’t you ask her?” he asked. “You’re always asking awkward questions. For you this would be normal.”

“We drew straws, Max. You lost.” Pic insisted. “Ask her already!”

Roll glared at the two young men and stated, “You know I can hear everything you’re saying, right?”

Max and Pic both turned bright red. “Errr…uh…that is…” Max found himself stammering before he even realized words were coming out of his mouth.

The rocket engineer walked over with a friendly smile. “Come on, you guys, I won’t bite. What was it you wanted to ask me?”

The bikers looked at each other, and then Max finally asked, point blank, “Did you really have a secret crush on your brother ten years ago?”

Roll stared at the two of them as if they'd just deliberately taken a dump on the floor. “I…beg your pardon?” she uttered. “Where would you get an idea like that?!”

“Tron Bonne wrote things down in a notebook. T-Bonne had it with him when we found him.” Pic explained. “He let us read it and it said you were in love with Mega Man like she was. She also had you stuffed into an elevator in Chapter 13.”

“You miiiiiiight wanna ease up on the details, Pic.” Max replied with a nervous grin as he jabbed the teenager with his elbow. “That’s a little too much information, if you know what I’m…”

But before he could finish the thought, Roll spoke up. “He was very special to me, but it’s nothing like what you’re suggesting,” she explained as her palms grew increasingly sweaty under her gloves. She hoped she was the only one who noticed that. “It’s not like we were even biologically related, though. Not that I gave very much thought to it or anything, since I really just thought of him as a…”

“You’re getting awfully defensive.” Pic observed.

“I AM NOT GETTING DEFENSIVE!” Roll shouted. Everyone in the lab froze in their tracks.

“Roll…” Art began. In all his years of knowing her, he’d rarely ever heard her raise her voice. “I think we should probably talk. Alone. About…that project of ours. If these guys struck a nerve over some fifteen-year-old kid’s diary, I don’t know if continuing with it would be such a good idea…if you know what I mean.”




“You know we’ve been over this before,” Roll exasperatedly sighed the moment the two of them had left the lab and believed they were safely out of earshot. “Gramps said the first time he got reset, he was a baby. We’d probably have to raise him as our son. Even if there were any chance of me having feelings for him—which there’s not—it would be completely out of the question if he were a baby again. It would even be out of the question if he ended up picking up right where he left off, as a fifteen-year-old boy. There’d still be too much of an age gap.”

“That’s not the issue, Roll,” Art shook his head. “For the last ten years, Mega Man Volnutt has been, for all intents and purposes, dead. Say, hypothetically, you’ve still got feelings for this guy. Shouldn’t you have moved on just a little? You’d think by the way you talk about it so much that he was involved in a recent accident. Between you and me, I’ve heard from a few of our friends on Kattelox that you may have had plans to marry him, even. I don’t know. I just don’t understand why you can’t be up front with me about this! We’ve been together for years and you still refuse to discuss the exact nature of that relationship with anyone, even your own grandfather. All this denial just makes me worried you’re still not over the idea of having him as a potential…partner. Maybe we rushed into this marriage a little too soon. I care about you, but I definitely don't want to just be the cheap bandage you slapped onto your unresolved grief issues.”

“If you really want me to admit it, fine.” Roll declared. “I admit I may have had a tiny crush on him back then. But I’m telling you now, after ten years, the chances of something between us ever working out are practically zero, especially now that we know what we know about him, and where he came from. You were indispensable when I first started up the weapon business. You know I love you, Art. It’s not going to be an issue if everything goes according to plan. Besides, what if the mission fails completely? For all we know, there could have been a translation mistake. All of this effort might only lead us to a giant refractor, or maybe some other ancient technology to study.”

Art frowned. “You know as well as I do that there weren’t any translation mistakes. Not the way Data was jumping around excitedly chattering when we asked for affirmation.”

“So that settles it.” Roll concluded. “All we need to do is get Teisel to agree to climb Ghiotte Summit with Data and…”

“Okay, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not doing any more digging!” Teisel exclaimed in frustration as he stepped out from behind the side of the lab. “Here I am, just walking back to the lab hoping there might be some cheese squares left over, minding my own business, and all of a sudden I hear you guys talking about sending me up Ghiotte Summit! Are you two out of your minds?!”

“Were you spying on us this whole time?” Art exclaimed. He took a step back and stared wide-eyed at the hulking giant watching them from afar.

“I swear, I was just passing by and heard my name come up next to ‘Ghiotte Summit.’"

“Teisel, there’s…something important we need to tell you,” Roll admitted. “I kind of neglected to mention it back on the Flutter, but…we actually did stumble upon some important information from Data.” She paused for a second to gauge his reaction, just in case. The older man looked a little stunned, but he just nodded, implicitly giving her permission to continue. “The memorial wasn’t the only thing that brought us to Klickelan this time. Usually we just spend two days on Volnutt Island and that’s it. We just didn’t want you to get upset when you found out…”

“Found out what…?”

“I think you’re going to want to sit down for this,” Art interjected before Roll could explain any further.

Teisel walked over to the small staircase leading into the back hallway and sat down, bracing himself against the second step with his hands. “And just when I thought this day was going to turn out alright in the end,” he muttered with a sigh. “What sort of crazy scheme have you two been planning to rope me into this whole time?”

“Where do I even begin?” Roll sighed.

“I think we should start by mentioning that Mega Man…and we’re not talking about that Bronte kid you've been hanging out with either…he wasn’t even human.”

Teisel blinked and furrowed his brow. “That’s it?” he asked. “I figured there was something going on with that back in the Main Gate. I was really expecting something a little less obvious.”

“You were in the Main Gate with him?!” Roll sputtered.

“Perhaps you should be the one sitting down, Roll.” Teisel chuckled.

“What happened down there?” Art asked. His eyes glistened with excitement from behind his glasses. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little notepad. “I’ve always wanted to ask Mega Man what happened in the Main Gate, and I never would have guessed I’d get the chance to find out!”

Teisel was taken aback by the researcher’s enthusiasm, but he tried to recall the event nonetheless. “Well, uh, it went down in a giant spiral for a long time,” he explained. “At first, we hit a dead end, so Tron and I decided to follow him the second time he came around. We figured he would unlock the door for us. But instead of finding any kind of treasure behind those three doors, he accidentally woke up a giant…floating person. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d wager that this was one of the Ancients, and it seemed to recognize the Blue Boy as…Trigger? I think that was it. Mega Man Trigger.”

“Data mentioned that name, too.” Art replied as he hastily scribbled the information down.

“I can’t believe the Ancients and my family both named him Mega Man,” Roll added. “Talk about a strange coincidence.”

“Mega Man wasn’t even a common name back then,” Teisel agreed. “I can’t speak for parents today, of course, but back to the story. This floating person, a THIRD Mega Man, who called himself, uh…Juno? Was that it? Mega Man Juno? I know I wrote it down somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if…oh, never mind. I suppose his name’s not terribly important. He said a lot of confusing, technical-sounding things, which Blue Boy here managed to guess, somehow or another, meant that this guy wanted to kill everyone on the island. Then this Juno person stuck him in some sort of force field and took off. Tron rushed in after that and kicked the trap until it stopped working. I guess from there, he defeated Juno and saved Kattelox, since you two ran into each other later and the Brontes are still selling vegetables there.”

“So you actually helped save our lives?” Art asked. From the puzzled looks on their faces, neither of the Sparks-Casketts were quite sure they believed what they’d heard.

“I didn’t really do anything, personally.” Teisel admitted. “Tron was the one who thought to kick the force field generators. I just kind of stood around like an idiot.”

“Big deal. Tron helped him out once.” Roll muttered under her breath. “Let’s just get back to the real discussion here…”

Art just shook his head in exasperation. It was painfully obvious that she still had feelings for this guy. “Here’s the deal,” he began. “We mentioned how we figured out how to understand Data before, right? Turns out Data has Mega Man’s memories and genetic material backed up inside him, like some kind of sentient USB drive. He says that the mythical treasure hidden under Klickelan Island called the Klicke Lafonica is, in fact, a tool the Ancients used to recreate extra bodies for themselves—which includes our old pal Mega Man, the First-Class Purifier Unit. All we need is a digger with enough skills to figure out how to find this thing.”

“When Aero mentioned that you’d been digging in the ruins here, we thought that solved everything.” Roll elaborated. “We wanted to send you up with Data to see what you could find, but…well…I wouldn't want to pressure you or anything if you'd rather not.”

Teisel didn’t know what to say to that, but this time, he was glad he’d taken Art’s advice and sat down. He felt completely numb for what seemed like an eternity, until a spark of rage suddenly began to flicker to life within him as he realized what, exactly, this meant in regards to his own situation. “You’re telling me…that my sister killed herself over a guy who wasn’t even entirely dead to begin with!?!?” he roared, jumping up and grabbing Roll by the collar. “MY BROTHER DIED BECAUSE SHE WASN’T AROUND TO MAINTAIN HIS LIFE SUPPORT! DO YOU REALIZE HOW COMPLETELY POINTLESS THIS MAKES EVERYTHING I’VE...HEY!” he snapped as Art struggled to pull the two of them apart. He seized the blond man’s arm and practically threw him to the ground, and before he even realized what he was doing, he’d already clocked Roll in the face. “WHY WOULD EITHER OF YOU EVER THINK IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO GET ME INVOLVED WITH THIS RIDICULOUS CHARADE?!”

“Help! I need some backup here!” Art shouted in the direction of the lab as he scrambled to his feet, ignoring the throbbing pain in his tailbone and hoping with everything he had that the Bright Bats would hear him from all the way inside as his wife staggered toward the door to the lab. “Someone’s gotta hold him down before he does anything completely insane!”

“I’ll show YOU who’s COMPLETELY INSANE!” Teisel roared as he lunged for Art again in a rash attempt to externalize his intensifying resentment. “YOU’RE the one running around TALKING TO YOUR MONKEY!”

Before he knew it, though, Max and Grill had grabbed his arms and pinned him to the spot. It took far more effort than either of them expected to keep him from writhing his way out of their grip. “Dude!” Max exclaimed. “Knock it off!”

“Do you have any IDEA what those two just TOLD me?!!” Teisel hollered in his friends’ ears as Art and Roll retreated back into the lab. “MEGA MAN VOLNUTT WAS TECHNICALLY IMMORTAL! THEY WANT ME TO HELP THEM BRING HIM BACK!”

“What?!” Grill balked. In his confusion, he accidentally loosened his grip and allowed Teisel to shove Max off of him.

Teisel raced to the back door to try and pry it open, but Roll and Art had already locked him out. He tried to ram the door a few times, but all he was able to accomplish was bruising his shoulder. “Tron...YOU IDIOT!” he shouted as tears started streaming down his face. “YOU KILLED BON OVER NOTHING!”

“T-Bonne…” Max began. He stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants, but found himself completely at a loss for words. At least everyone else had gone home for the night, so he wouldn’t be too much of a safety hazard, and this wouldn’t have ended up becoming the story on the front page of the gazette the next morning. “Please don’t hurt yourself,” he finally uttered as his strategist wedged himself up against the door and hugged his knees to his chest as hard as he could.

“It’s just not fair…” Teisel whimpered.

“You’re right,” Grill replied once the magnitude of what Roll and Art could have disclosed to Teisel hit him full force, “It’s not. I mean, running around attacking people is pretty horrible, too, but…I don’t know. This is really complicated. They might call the cops on us, and since Goodwin's running the show there, that wouldn't do us any favors.”

“Can I have a hug?”

“Of course you can, buddy,” Grill said as he and Max walked over and sat on either side of him. They slung their arms over his shoulders and rubbed his back while he tried to shift his focus toward keeping his breathing steady. They were both beyond relieved that Teisel wanted their company. As awful as having to physically restrain him from causing permanent physical damage to Art and Roll had been, the fallout could have been a lot worse. “We’ll get you through this. Promise.”




Inside the lab, Aero was so livid that she almost made Teisel look harmless. “Why is it that every time Teisel winds up alone with you two, you end up telling him something that sends him spiraling out of control?!”

“Aero, we’re not trying to do this on purpose,” Roll tried to explain as she held a pack of ice against the side of her head. She could feel a lump swelling up anyway. “We had no way of knowing about that…time thing at the beginning of the week, or…”

“This isn’t about that!” she snapped back. She paced across the room while Pic sat idly on the couch. He seemed to enjoy watching the argument play out as he finished up the snacks. “You’re both smart enough to build a rocket and decode the Ancients’ language. Can you explain to me why it never occurred to either of you that telling a guy you know to be emotionally fragile that the boy his sister killed herself over happens to be revivable might not be a good idea?”

Roll and Art looked at each other. “We’re really sorry about that, Aero,” Roll admitted. “The last thing either of us wanted to do was upset him. I honestly don’t think I was thinking this time. We needed a digger pretty badly.”

“You do realize Klickelan Island is swarming with better diggers, right?” Aero replied, massaging her forehead in frustration. “I’m not saying his attacking you was okay, and I’m definitely going to talk with him about that later, but you can’t just go dropping something like that on him and expect him to take it well. For what it’s worth, I really hope this is the last thing he didn’t know about Tron’s suicide, because I cannot for the life of me imagine how this situation could possibly get any worse.”

“I feel really awful about all this,” Roll responded. She clutched Art’s hand. All Art could do was nod his head in agreement. “Is there anything we can do to…”

“Yeah. Leave him alone.” Aero cut her off. “Like you said, you’ve got no way of knowing what he does or doesn’t know yet, so maybe it’s just better to keep you and Teisel apart, at least until he’s in a state of mind where he can hear something like this without losing his crap. You two are like an emotional minefield for him!”

“Uh…about that…” Roll argued. “I should probably warn you that Teisel’s always been a little…unhinged. Even before Tron and Bon, he used to flip out over a lot of really trivial things without much of a warning ahead of time. Everything is an emotional minefield with that guy. I’m guessing he didn’t tell you about that time he ravaged Kimotoma City and tried to use a priceless statue as a shield to keep Mega Man out of the ruins…did he? Or that time he razed Paulan Island and tried to kidnap me to force Mega Man to give Tron our supplies, all because she was having a bad day? And don’t even get me started on what he did when they cancelled his favorite show...”

“The book backs up Roll’s assertion.” Pic remarked from the sidelines as he munched on some crackers.

Aero reflexively glanced back toward the hallway. The ruckus seemed to have died down outside for the moment, but she felt her stomach lurch in apprehension as she realized she might have prematurely begun to let her guard down around the newest addition to their gang. Vivid images of Teisel upending the living room earlier in the week flooded her mind. Wasn’t this exactly the reason she’d been concerned about letting him join the gang in the first place? “He’s never hit anyone before, though, has he?”

“Aero, he’s shot people before.” Art corrected her.

“But has he punched anyone before tonight?” she persisted. “It’s one thing if he just overreacts. Like it or not, he had a pretty solid reason for completely losing his crap just now. But would he literally start attacking us if, one day, he woke up in a bad mood and discovered that we were out of coffee?”

“I don’t know!” Roll flinched as she desperately tried to recall everything he’d done while they were living together. Unfortunately, paying attention to Teisel Bonne hadn’t exactly been high on her list of priorities back then. “Everybody who’d be able to answer that question for you is dead!”

“If it helps, though,” Pic added, “That book also has him taking the news of Tron and Mega Man’s relationship a lot better than Roll takes it.”

“That doesn’t help.” Roll said through clenched teeth while Art just heaved a defeated sigh.

“Are you sure I’m not just the consolation prize, now that Mega Man’s out of the running?” he said, more to himself than to Roll.

“I don’t know what to make of this anymore.” Aero declared. She raised her hands in surrender and backed away toward the front door. “I’m going to go warm up the boat and think. Pic, tell the others we’re leaving in fifteen.”




The ride back to the base was a long, tense one. Nobody spoke at all, and Teisel ran off to try and find Sprocket as soon as they docked at Teomo Harbor. Pic wandered off after him once he was sure Teisel wouldn’t notice him leaving, at Max’s request. He thought about refusing and citing his first attempt at shadowing the older man that day, but he ultimately did as he was told. Even if all Teisel did was vent at his dog, it wasn’t worth the risk of letting anything happen to him while he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. The rest of the Bright Bats just headed to their rooms and turned in for the night.

When Aero wandered into the kitchen the next morning to read the paper, she found the place unexpectedly empty. She took a glance at her newspaper and silently read the “Ten Years Without Our Planet’s Hero” headline. There was a picture of Roll and Von Bluecher below it. Aero briefly wondered if it was worth the read before she kicked her curiosity to the curb and flipped straight to the classifieds. Thinking too hard about the sort of person Teisel might have really been, and about the sheer scope of the psychological damage the Bright Bats had agreed to deal with when they took him in, made her feel a little queasy. It had already cost her several hours of sleep, and she had to be in top form if she wanted to find a job that day. Whatever the papers had to say about the previous day’s events would have to wait until she got back from work.

[Aiyumi]

Interesting project. Finally something about the Klicke Lafonica coming from a source related to the ancients. I hope they also find a way to resurrect Carbonnes... Err, I mean Carbons.

[Dashe]

Teisel, who had, against all odds, returned in the middle of the night and fallen asleep right away, found himself rudely awakened by a persistent knock on his bedroom door for the first time since the Gesellschaft had been destroyed. “YO! T-BONNE!” he heard Max shout from the little hall at the foot of the sub-basement stairwell. Somehow or another, he managed to pull himself off of the bed and plod over. As soon as he opened the door, the gang leader thrust a page from the local paper into his hands and exclaimed, “You’ve gotta read this! Right now!”

“Surviving Bonne Brother Forges Unlikely Alliance with Mega Man in Surprise Attack…?” Teisel read aloud as his cheeks turned pink. After a night like that, he'd expected waking up on the tenth anniversary of the morning he'd found his younger sister dead in her garage to be a lot more difficult than it had actually turned out. Having a printed reminder of the one unbelievably good part of the previous day was quite the pleasant stroke of luck. One of those photographers actually got a decent shot of him laughing and pushing the boy on the Strudelmacher, right in the midst of a deadly toilet paper assault. “Who comes up with these headlines, anyway?”

“Aw, come on, I think it’s adorable,” Max candidly retorted. “So maybe it wasn’t front page news. It’s still hilarious. You should cut out the article and hang it on your wall next to that dorky calendar.”

Teisel looked back at his calendar, where Rover the Reaver was smiling creepily at him as he rolled away from the Kattelox Inspector. It was actually a pretty good idea. “Yeah, thanks. The walls could use a little sprucing up…maybe I’ll go get myself a bulletin board or something the next time I feel like going out again.”

Once Max had retreated back upstairs, Teisel scanned through the article. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d read something good about himself in the paper. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d read something average about himself in the paper.

It quickly became obvious that Roll had been the one to explain Teisel’s situation to the press. A quote of hers popped up in the story directly, about halfway down the page. “I’m just glad to see him happy, even if it’s only for the afternoon. The last ten years haven’t been easy for him, and it looks like he’s just starting to get his life together again. Even if his family’s caused us a lot of trouble in the past, Tron was indispensable during the construction process, and we’re glad to see him moving forward.” The article then went on to state that, at Roll and Art’s request, they’d opted to refrain from pursuing a direct interview for the rest of the day.

Teisel was stunned. Here he was, distraught to the point of violence over the fact that all of that time he’d spent struggling just to survive, both physically and mentally, could have been completely averted if it weren’t for Tron. Knowing that the messengers who’d delivered that news were, in part, responsible for how well the day had gone to begin with convoluted the situation even more than he could’ve imagined. He didn’t even doubt that with the profits she’d been hauling in from weapons sales, Roll was probably able to pay for any equipment damage sustained during that “attack” as well. It was a relief to know he didn’t owe QCTV a new boom mic.

On the other hand, he still couldn’t help but feel a burning resentment at the fact that there was a possibility that Roll could get Mega Man back, while his own family had to stay dead just because they hadn’t had the good fortune to have been born as a bunch of weird, revivable space robots. Helping the Sparks-Casketts out directly was out of the question, but the fact remained that he had a key component to reaching the Klicke Lafonica on his person.

At the very least, he felt obligated to apologize for beating them up, and to tell them about the card keys and their locations. He set the article down and scrambled up the stairs after Max. “Hey Max, I need to borrow your phone,” he announced once he’d made it to the common room.

“Max ran off to order a pizza,” Aero tensely replied without even looking up from the book she was reading. Sure enough, Max was nowhere to be found. Neither were Grill and Pic, for that matter. It was just Aero, sitting on the workbench stool over in the corner.

“No work today?” he asked.

“Nobody needed me,” she shrugged.

“Look, I really need to call Roll,” Teisel explained. “Can I use your phone? Please?”

Aero didn’t respond right away. Just when Teisel opened his mouth to ask if there was something he didn’t know about, she swiveled around on the stool, set her book down, and spoke up with a distinct quiver to her voice that he’d never heard out of her before. “I don’t think talking to her is a good idea. It makes you…you get all upset, and last night she told me you were always like that. I got scared, Teisel. When she said that, it r-reminded me of my p-parents, and…”

Teisel hadn't expected that to escalate so quickly. “Aero…are you crying?” he asked before she could get any farther.

She vehemently shook her head even as the tears rolled down her cheeks. “I’ve spent enough of my life worrying about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, so hearing that you attacked Roll and Art b-because of something they didn’t think too hard about saying...I…I can’t risk anything like that happening to the guys or me!”

Before she even realized what was happening, Teisel had pulled her into the warmest, gentlest hug she’d had in a long time. “I don’t attack family…no matter what.” he confided right before he let go.

Aero could only stare at him in stunned disbelief. “But I...uh…that is…”

“If you’re worried about last week when I lost my temper and threw that pillow, everyone’s got to vent sometimes,” Teisel sheepishly added. “But I never laid a finger on you or any of the gang that day, and I never will. Besides, weren’t you the one who actually broke furniture when you got upset?”

“It’s not that,” Aero explained. “It’s…you just called us family.”

“It’s what you are,” he nonchalantly shrugged, but he couldn’t suppress the grin that broke out across his face to save his life.

Aero sat up a little straighter. “I’m holding you to it, then,” she warned, even though he could have sworn, for a fraction of a second, he saw a flicker of a smile light up in her eyes too.

Teisel raised an eyebrow and asked, “So, back to the original question…”

“Erm…right…” Aero pursed her lips and tried to remember what the original question had been.

“Borrowing your phone?"

“What did you need from Roll, anyway?” Aero countered. “I’m not about to take back what I said. Talking to her is a bad idea. Is it really that important? You don’t seem to be able to hold a conversation with Roll without having some kind of mental breakdown, and even though she’s been nice before, to both of us, she’s definitely changed over the last ten years. She’s still as caring as she ever was, but she has…different priorities, I’d like to say? I mean, I’d hope you’d have different priorities in your teens and in your twenties, but in this case, it seems to me that while she’s genuinely glad to see you again, she has no idea how fresh all of this new information is for you, or how ready you are to handle it.”

“Yeah, the sort of things we went through tend to have that effect on people,” Teisel conceded. “I can say, without question, that I’m not the same guy I was before Bon was born, but I can’t blame Bon for any of this, and as tempting as it is right now, I can’t blame Tron for making it worse. And I certainly can’t expect Roll to be able to read my mind and figure out if something will end up completely blindsiding me in advance, either.

“Still, she’s one of the few people who can really say they understand what it was like, being there on, uh, Volnutt Island…and she tried. Knowing her, she probably didn’t want to see me upset any more than you, Max, Grill, or Pic ever did. I know if it were me getting a chance to revive Tron or Bon or my parents, even if it were just one of them, I’d do whatever it took. I mean, I don’t know if I’d be able to choose between them, but…

“The point I’m trying to make is that I have, in my possession, one of the cards she needs to get to the Klicke Lafonica. I know Russell has the second, and I know Russell is more than capable of finding the third and getting their monkey to the heart of the ruin network.” Teisel concluded. “So yes. It’s pretty important that I get ahold of her.”

“Maybe I should be the one to call her,” Aero offered with an awkward cringe. She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out the phone in question. “You’ve had more distressing surprises to deal with in this past week than any one person should have to face in a lifetime.”

Teisel bit his lip and nodded. “Yeah. Better safe than sorry, huh?” he asked. “Tell her I’m really sorry for beating her and Art up back there. While you take care of that, I think I’m going to go see if Bakerly’s seen Russell lately. It wouldn’t do any good for you to offer Russell’s services if we can’t find him to begin with, now, would it?”

“Go pick up a cell phone for yourself while you’re out there,” Aero added as she flipped through her contacts and he walked out the door, “it’ll save you a lot of trouble the next time you need to find Russell quickly.”




As Teisel walked down the sloped streets towards the cobblestones of Teomo’s marketplace, he found that the faces around town seemed unusually friendly that day. A few people actually said hello as they passed him by, and a teenaged boy even gave him a high five out of nowhere. “Nice one, bro,” the kid said as he kept right on walking, without so much as a hint of sarcasm. Evidently, Aero wasn’t the only one in Teomo City who read the newspaper.

It was a strange sensation, being recognized for something that didn’t involve blowing up a bank or leveling a town. It was even a little off-putting for him, enough that by the time he’d reached Bakerly’s Bakery, his ears were burning and his face was almost as red as his eyes. “Teisel! I was wondering when you’d stop by!” Bakerly exclaimed as he handed the former pirate a jelly donut. “This one’s on the house. You know, all those times you stopped in here, you never mentioned any connection to that rocket crew!”

“Hey, you’ve got your secrets,” Teisel pointed out. “All that ‘I’m just a baker, really’ stuff tends to rouse more suspicion the more you mention it.”

“Don’t change the subject!” Bakerly quipped as he opened up the cash register and pulled out a card. “Your friend Russell noticed you in the paper this morning when he stopped by for a muffin and pointed it out to me. I told him you’d stopped by a few times to try and catch him, so he gave me his card and told me to pass it along. You should give him a call sometime after sundown.”

Teisel just stared at the card and slowly chewed his pastry. “That was…why didn’t he just do this earlier?” he asked with an incredulous expression. “I needed to talk to him months ago!”

Bakerly shrugged. “He must be a busy man. In any case, you’ve got his information now, so I’m not sure why you’re making such a fuss about it.”

“Thanks, Bakerly,” he replied with a smile. He pocketed the card and headed back out into the streets. Positive public acknowledgment might’ve been a little intimidating, but he had other errands to run, the least of which included picking up that model glue he’d left at the hobby shop.




At the end of the day, after borrowing Aero’s phone one more time to get ahold of Russell, the two of them agreed to meet later that night at the local pub to discuss the search for the Klicke Lafonica.

“Now let me get this straight,” Russell reiterated. “You’re telling me that a robotic monkey told Roll Sparks-Caskett’s husband that the Klicke Lafonica doesn’t actually make old people young again and that it’s really only useful for the Ancients?”

“That about sums it up,” Teisel sighed. “Sorry if the news foiled any kind of a comeback plan you might have been concocting over the past year.”

“I guess it’s better to find out about this now that it would have been if I’d found the Klicke Lafonica on my own and tried to use it,” Russell sighed. "I should have realized something fishy was up with that Volnutt boy when he managed to score a Class S license at fifteen." He gulped down his drink and slammed the mug on the counter. He motioned for the bartender to fill it up again, then turned back to Teisel and asked, “Tell it to me straight, Green Guy. Where do I come into this operation?”

“Roll would need you to find the third card, go in there with the monkey, and let the monkey use the device to revive Mega Man Volnutt. I shouldn’t have to explain why I’m not going to go in and do this myself, now that you and everyone else on this island know about my…erm…connections with that whole…thing.” Teisel glanced around the dimly-lit bar just to make sure none of the other patrons were listening in on the conversation. Having a voice with a tendency to carry definitely had its drawbacks.

“Don’t worry,” the veteran digger replied, “I think I know what you’re probably getting at, and even if I’m a little off with my guess, I’m not going to try and force it out of you. Not with a job like this. This is a Class S endeavor if I’ve ever seen one.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean!?”

“Come on, now, Green Guy, you said yourself that you weren’t interested in going back underground,” Russell chuckled at the expression on the other man’s face. “Besides, I’ve got another prospect for you. Something that may be a little more up your alley, if you catch my drift.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’ve already found the third card key. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the person who dug it up decided to donate it to the Klickelan Island Museum, and the curator won’t accept any amount of money in exchange for it. Not even after I explained what that card’s really used for. So while I go off and explore the ruins until I get to the top of the main tower, I want you to put your, erm…unique skills…to use and get me that card so I can get that monkey where it needs to be.”

“You want me to rob the museum!?"

“Sheesh!” Russell cringed. “Couldn’t you have said that a little more quietly?”

“Sorry.” Teisel whispered as he hunkered over the bar in embarrassment. If the bartender or anyone else had heard him, they definitely didn’t show it.

“Do you think you can pull it off?”

“To be honest, I don’t know,” Teisel admitted. “Without Tron’s machines, I was never really good at that kind of thing, and even then, I’d only ever gotten into the business to try to fund legitimate business endeavors so the three of us could return to our normal lifestyle. In hindsight, I think I may have set the bar too high on that one. We were pretty well off before this whole mess began.”

“Oh, come on. Even assuming that you’re not interested in taking risks like that anymore, aren’t you forgetting that you live with Rebel Riders? They’d probably even help.”

“You’re not going to let me get out of this, are you?”

“It’ll be fun,” the blond man insisted with a confident grin. “If your spotter’s okay with it, I think I’d like to borrow him during my explorations. You know, in case I run into trouble. For all of his sarcastic remarks, he actually has a pretty good head on his shoulders, and he really pulled through for us the last time you went underground. I certainly don’t want to get myself trapped with no way out again.”

Teisel shuddered at the prospect. Even six months later, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness he'd felt up in the auxiliary tower came back to haunt him in his dreams more than he cared to admit to himself. “Did you ever find out if we really were the first to spot a Reaverbot like that one?” he tentatively asked.

“No luck,” Russell sighed. “It’s a rare sight, but apparently it was called a Jaikronke. There was a second discovered over on some remote island on the other side of the world about twenty years back.”

“I’ll have to look it up the next chance I get,” Teisel mused. “It would’ve been nice to be able to read up on it before we wound up face-to-face with one, but that’s life for you.”

Russell shook his head in amusement. “Just so we’re on the same page, though, are you alright with letting me borrow Max while you take care of the card?”

“Do I have much of a choice?”

“Do you want your friend to get her brother back?”

“It’s complicated,” Teisel admitted as he rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, “but it’s the least I can do for them. We didn’t really part on good terms back then, and there have been quite a few unfortunate mix-ups in the last week. Still, I know from more years of gaming than I’m comfortable talking about in public that helping them out is the right thing to do. I know I’d want the same from them if our situations were reversed.” He bit his lip and thought hard on the proposition. “I guess we’re going to just have to go for it. You and Max can find a path into the main tower, and the rest of us will focus on getting that last card out of the museum.”

Russell grinned and knocked back the last of his drink. “Now that’s what I like to hear, Green Guy!” he exclaimed. “Better head home and rest up. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day!”

[Aiyumi]

The newspaper, hahahaha! We even get to see the picture! ... Okay, not me, because of my visual impairment, but anyway...

Sweet moments with Aero.

Russell will be doing the digging. No more Digger Teisel action, then?

[Avegodro]

Kinda sad to have Teisel not digging anymore but he has good reasons. Glad he's able to get his life together bit by bit. Really looking forward to this museum heist. 

[Dashe]

Just because Teisel's opting out of finishing the digging job himself doesn't mean there won't be any more action. It'll still play like Legends! Er, that is, a Legends where anybody can die and character death has consequences. I'm sure if this were a game, the gameplay would still feel true to form considering the direction Capcom would've gone with Legends 3 anyway. There'd be more variety for sure. Russell and others may very well end up hypothetically playable.

[Dashe]

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Grill expressed zero interest in helping Teisel rob the museum. “Sorry T-Bonne,” he replied upon hearing the plan the next evening, after he and Aero had returned from work. “I never cared much for that part of being a Rebel Rider, if you know what I mean. If it’s alright with you, I think I’ll focus on figuring out what that weird purple crystal’s supposed to be instead. That should be worth something, right?”

“That’s fine,” Max replied. “I can’t see you being able to escape anywhere undetected, really.”

“I resemble that remark,” Grill snickered.

Aero, who had been slurping up a bowl of soup all the while, added, “You should call Roll and Art about that and look at it together. Art likes researching weird stuff, and Roll’s probably the best mechanic on the planet right now.”

“Can Aero, Pic, and I really handle this on our own?” Teisel faltered.

“Yeah, sure,” Max explained. “You may be the ‘official’ strategist, but I’ve known this gang for a long time. Pic and Aero are probably the only two Bright Bats you’ll need. Pic’s crazy-good at sneaking around and popping up when you least expect it, and Aero’s been tapping the police radios for ages. Add your driving skills to the mix and there you go. You’re set. Thief, lookout, getaway chauffer.”

Teisel raised his eyebrows and stared blankly at Max. “That’s actually really helpful,” he stated after allowing himself some time to process the suggestion.

“A gang leader who doesn’t know his gang better than he knows himself isn’t much of a gang leader,” Max shrugged.

“Then it’s settled,” Teisel declared. “Aero and Pic and I will scout out the museum first thing tomorrow!”

“Sorry Teisel,” Aero frowned. “I took a couple of days off already, remember? I’ll definitely help you out when the time comes, but I’ve got to make rent this month and pay my phone bill.”

“Okay then. Pic and I will scout out the museum first thing tomorrow!” he corrected himself. “In the meantime, Max, you get in touch with Russell. Grill, you get in touch with Roll. We’re going to wrap up this Klicke Lafonica quest once and for all, or my name’s not Bonne!”

Once Teisel had wandered off to the kitchen to grab some dinner for himself, Max leaned over and whispered to Aero, “Meet me at Johnny’s tonight. We’ve got to start thinking of other things to call him.”




Since Klickelan Island’s museum was located close to the harbor, Teisel had never actually visited the place before. It was, as many museums the world over had a tendency to be, a fairly opulent building. However, this one was also squeezed into a row of shops and apartments with nothing but a tiny alleyway on one side to allow access to the back door. There would be no breaking in through a skylight with a bungee cord here, that much was for sure. Teisel paid both his and Pic’s 500 zenny entrance fee and grabbed a copy of the visitors’ map before the two of them set off in search of the final card key.

Pic had been quiet—even moreso than usual—when the subject of his experience with robbing high-security locations came up earlier that morning. As soon as the two of them were granted access into the building, he took off on his own. Whether he’d run off to go investigate a decent point of entry for himself or to just look around at the exhibits for fun was anybody’s guess, but Teisel figured it would be more prudent to assume the latter.

Near the back of the museum, on the third floor, there appeared to be a section that had been cordoned off with caution tape. A security guard stood watch nearby. Behind the guard was a little room that seemed to be in shambles. Broken glass littered the floor, and a table looked to have been thrown across what he could see of the room. “What seems to be the trouble here?” Teisel asked.

“There was a break-in last night,” the guard explained. “A couple of petty thieves tried to make off with a valuable diamond, but they tripped the lasers without realizing it. The system just sends a silent signal directly to the police station, so we don’t usually have to deal with the perpetrators freaking out and causing a mess of collateral damage like this. For some reason, though, this time the thieves actually broke through a window in that room back there on their way in. Goodwin caught ‘em, of course, but they made a terrible mess all the same…so as you can see, nobody’s allowed past the yellow tape.”

“There isn’t a mysterious black and gold card back in that section, is there?” Teisel asked as he glanced around looking for any sign of a security camera. He made sure to keep his head perfectly still while he scanned the room. This was definitely one of those few instances where the mechanical eyes came in handy. Not having any pupils or irises to speak of made it a lot harder for him to get caught casing the joint.

“I don’t think I’m familiar with that exhibit,” the guard admitted. “If you can’t seem to find it anywhere else, then there’s a good chance it's back here, but keeping track of what’s where isn’t in my job description. If you can’t find it listed on the map, you could also ask the curator if you’re really just interested in learning about the one thing. He might be able to help you out.”

“Thanks,” Teisel replied with a nod as he walked off. Coming in straight off of an earlier break-in sounded like it would make their job a little easier, and something within him hoped that the card itself was still in that ransacked room. Then it would only be a matter of Pic climbing in through the hole in the wall, grabbing it, and leaving. Teisel didn’t doubt that Pic knew how to climb a three-story building without getting noticed.




To his utter disappointment, however, the third card key was safely stowed away under a thick sheet of glass in the main exhibit room on the fourth floor. “Reaverbot Core Fragment?” Teisel read aloud from the placard. “This chip is believed to have come from within the central processing unit of an unknown Riverboat…oh, you have GOT to be kidding me!” He groaned. “They can’t even spell ‘Reaverbot’ right on the placard?! This has got to be the most embarrassing excuse for a museum I have ever seen in my life! No wonder they’ve already been robbed!”

Teisel thought hard on the situation. There seemed to be cameras all over the place, and the guard had mentioned a substantial silent alarm system, at least. What this curator lacked in brains, he clearly made up for it by having a lot of money to throw around on security, and he definitely had a strong link to Gonzo Goodwin.

Even though he knew Aero’s radio could be used to tip Pic off if he tripped the system, the last thing Teisel wanted to do was get the police on their case again. If he had to be the one to get the three of them back to the base, he didn’t want any distractions while he was driving. The last time he found himself on the run from the law proved to be so disorienting that if Pic hadn’t come along to save him, he’d have been caught without question. Either that, or he’d have been run over by a car. He would need to do a much better job plotting out this one heist than he had done planning out any other attack in his last decade of piracy, without question, or he might as well just turn himself in to Chief Goodwin so he could get his jail time over with early.




After about ten minutes of wandering the museum in search of the Bright Bats’ information gatherer, Teisel found Pic staring intensely at a painting of a scantily-clad woman posing suggestively with a Sharukurusu crystal fossil on the second floor. A little too intensely, if anyone were to ask Teisel’s opinion. This really was the worst museum he’d ever visited. However, even though it looked like bad fanart, he could have sworn the boy was drooling a bit anyway. “How long have you been standing around here gawking at that third-rate pin-up garbage?” Teisel fumed in exasperation.

Pic nearly jumped out of his skin when he noticed his partner in crime scowling at him. He blabbered some kind of an answer that didn’t sound like any language Teisel could understand.

“There’s something a little more important up on the fourth floor, you know,” Teisel groaned as he all but dragged the gawky young man back toward the stairs. Incompetent staff or otherwise, this was going to be far from an easy task. His entire plan thus far hinged on Pic being able to swipe the card key without tripping the security system, and if Pic could wind up so easily preoccupied, then he really had a problem on his hands.





While Teisel further contemplated the impending museum heist, deep inside the ruins, Russell trekked through tunnel after tunnel looking for some sign that he might be getting close to the main tower. While he couldn’t use the elevator with only two cards, he could still make sure it was where it was supposed to be and get rid of any traps or guardian Reaverbots that might be standing in his way early on to save himself the trouble later.

“Max, am I getting any closer?” he asked for what felt like the millionth time that afternoon. “You’d think if you were able to pinpoint Teisel’s location when he and I were stuck in that first tower, you’d be able to tell me how to get to the more important one!”

“I keep telling you, Old Rusty!” Max groaned. “My map data depends on how well you explore the area!”

“Yeah, sure it does,” Russell grumbled. He ducked into a passage off to the side and picked off a few stray Guruguru. “And it sure picks the most convenient moments to just fail completely!”

“Do you want me to just pack up and go home?” Max threatened. “T-Bonne sure made it seem like you really wanted me spotting for you, but now that we’re here, all you wind up doing is complaining about how crappy I am at navigating! You were the one who was so sure that using the Class A entrance would put us right at the bottom of the tower!”

“Fine, fine!” Russell submitted with a sigh. “Let’s just focus on finding a way to the elevator. The sooner we check the place out, the sooner we can go back and get that last card.” He spotted a cracked wall out of the corner of his eye and fired a volley of rockets straight for it.

“Dude, what are you doing?” Max demanded. “Don’t you have a limited ammo supply on that thing?”

“I’m getting us into the main tower,” Russell asserted as the dust cleared and he stepped into an impossibly tall chamber with a spiral staircase wrapped around the inside walls. Unlike the rest of the ruin, the walls here were a dull black with a gold circuitry pattern, just like the one on the card keys. There was a wide column in the center of the room. It extended to the top of the stairs, and if Russell squinted hard enough, he could see a catwalk linking the stairway to the top of the central pillar. This had to be the elevator shaft. Unfortunately, parts of the staircase seemed to be missing. It appeared as if something enormous had smashed the place to bits and left substantial chunks of debris all over the inside of the tower. “See? Piece of cake!”

“Actually, no,” the spotter reminded him, “I don’t see anything interesting. The only thing I’ve got is this lousy radar, remember? I mean, I can kind of figure from these weird lines you’re in the middle of a tangled web of ruins directly underneath the…HOLY CRAP, YOU’RE THERE! What are you standing around for?! Get climbing, pops!”

“Are there any Reaverbots up ahead that I should worry about?”

“If you can’t see ‘em for yourself, there probably aren’t any there,” Max shrugged, still completely oblivious to that one time his own strategist got caught in a nest of cloaked assailants. “I guess if it makes you happy, I’m not picking up anything.”

Russell smiled. “Great. As long as the room doesn’t fill up with any lava or dump some giant defense system on me, we should be in the clear. From the look of things, someone’s explored this place already. There seems to be another entrance on a ledge a few stories up, and some signs of a pretty significant fight that went down a while ago. I’m seeing major structural damage on parts of this staircase.”

“You can still use it, though, right?”

“Of course I can!” Russell guffawed as he bounded up the stairs. “I’m just going to have to land a bunch of difficult jumps, that’s all! Nothing a Class S digger can’t handle!”

And land them he did…until, about a third of the way up, the area he’d landed on turned out to be structurally unsound enough to collapse with him on it. Russell hit the stairs below hard and tumbled down a few steps, only to fall off the edge to the ground floor with a sickening crunch and a wail of agony that, even over headphones, made Max jump in his seat.

“Russell?! What just happened?!” the leader of the Bright Bats shouted in a panic. “Are you dead? You’d tell me if you were dead, right?!”

For the longest time, there wasn’t any reply, but just as Max was about to have a nervous breakdown, Russell said, “I think I might have broken both of my legs, Max. I can’t move ‘em at all. The pain’s too…”

“How the heck am I supposed to get you out of there if you can’t walk?” Max interrupted before the digger could elaborate. “Well?”

Russell mumbled something, but Max had no idea what he was trying to say, so the amateur spotter decided to take matters into his own hands. “Rusty, stay right where you are!” he shouted, as if the old man had much of a say in the matter. “I’m going in there!”

[Aiyumi]

Nov 22, 2014 16:37:27 GMT -5 Dashe said:

Just because Teisel's opting out of finishing the digging job himself doesn't mean there won't be any more action.

I was hoping for Teisel action, in the ruins, with Digger equipment including a weapon made by Roll. So, I put a curse on Russel so that something would happen to him... And it actually did! (I'm not usually one to do this kind of thing. Sorry Russell!) Now let's see if this forces Teisel to come back or not.

Dashe said:

I'm sure if this were a game, the gameplay would still feel true to form considering the direction Capcom would've gone with Legends 3 anyway. There'd be more variety for sure. Russell and others may very well end up hypothetically playable.

A Strudelmacher minigame would be nice too!

[Dashe]

Nov 27, 2014 17:06:39 GMT -5 Aiyumi said:

I was hoping for Teisel action, in the ruins, with Digger equipment including a weapon made by Roll. So, I put a curse on Russel so that something would happen to him... And it actually did! (I'm not usually one to do this kind of thing. Sorry Russell!)

I've been a member of this forum for ten years and I have never seen anybody successfully place a curse on a fictional character. I may need to take advantage of this skill of yours in the future, if there is ever another Tuttle's Legendary Travels contest for me to bet on.

A Strudelmacher minigame would even be awesome on its own and it would probably work somewhat like Goat Simulator, where you just rack up as much damage as possible until you break the game itself. It would probably end with Volnutt Island and the entire lab going up in flames. That would also destroy Tron's blueprints, though, so the damage meter would probably max out at "X Priceless artifacts destroyed, N-million zenny in collateral damage."

[Dashe]

It's been a while since the last bit of exclusive DLC went live. Here's some more of it, for everyone who gets their updates through MMLS! Like last time, this one takes place during the months before Teisel ran into Roll.

[Dashe]

After studying the map data until his brain threatened to shut down entirely, Max abandoned Aero’s old makeshift spotting rig for the second time in his career. He slid down the bluffs in search of that secret passage into the ruins he’d bought so many months ago. That little hole in the ground was almost impossible to spot, but after about a half an hour of searching, he stepped straight into it and landed flat on his face with a dusty thud.

Once he was sure that he hadn’t broken any of his own bones, he pulled himself to his feet and squeezed through the tunnel ahead into the ruins.

“Uh-oh...” he muttered when he realized that the Shekuten had probably respawned ages ago. Here he was, completely unarmed, dressed in street clothes, and surrounded by miniature time bombs everywhere he looked.

One of them heard his voice and sprung to attention with a mechanical whir and click. The gang leader let out a shriek that awoke no fewer than a half a dozen of the little robot’s buddies. Max sprinted through the hall as if his life depended on it, barreling straight in the direction he hoped that old hole in the wall was located as Shekuten after Shekuten detonated behind him. He didn’t even bother to look back and check for zenny. He just dove straight into the hole before any of the slow-moving Reaverbots could even hope to catch up to him.

The snug little passage was slightly damp, and the dirt packed around him was beginning to soak through his pants. “That’s it,” Max grumbled as he pulled himself through the tunnel with every ounce of upper body strength he had. “When I get back into town I am buying myself pants so epic that they’ll make this pair seem like no big loss! I will have the fanciest pants in Teomo Ci…ugh!” he suddenly groaned when he found himself face-to-face with the fork in the tunnel. “I can’t even remember which way led to a better part of the ruins and which way hit the dead end!”

He stared down the left path. He stared down the right path. He really couldn’t tell which one led where. They both just looked like dark tunnels that went on forever. “Didn’t I end up randomly choosing which path to take last time, too?” he muttered to himself as he crawled into the tunnel on the right and hoped it would be the one that led to the hub. He tried to remember how he’d figured he’d find the tower entrance from there, but there were just so many other thoughts running through his mind that it was hard for him to recall much besides the name of his favorite clothing outlet.




Max’s heart almost skipped a beat when he heard the sound of buster fire and distant explosions in the distance. “YES! I’M IN THE RIGHT TUNNEL!” he exclaimed so loudly that, had he actually had a spotter, that spotter would have had to remove his headphones. It was enough to spurn him into quickening his pace. By then, he’d already almost forgotten that Russell was lying on the ground somewhere in excruciating pain.

As soon as Max stepped out into the Klickelan hub, he fought the immediate urge to step back in. There were diggers everywhere. There were even more Reaverbots than there were diggers. One wrong step and he’d be caught in someone’s crossfire! To complicate things even further, this was also the first time Max had seen the hub itself in person. Finding himself suddenly standing in an immense, bioluminescent blue cavern numerous stories high and filled with ramps and precarious ledges was enough to leave him in an awestruck stupor until he almost wound up getting hit in the face with a bomb.

“YO!” Max shouted at the offending Horokko, which waddled toward him like it’d had a few too many drinks. “Watch where you’re aimin’ that thing! I’ve managed to get enough crap on my pants for one day thanks to that stupid tunnel, so back off!”

The Reaverbot didn’t listen to a word Max said, and spun into a whirling tackle. Max leaped out of the way in a panic as it smacked into the wall behind him. “Man, I’ve got no time to lose! I’ve gotta find the…main…” he trailed off and sighed. “Okay, yeah, I’m lost. This place is freaking huge.”




Most of the diggers Max accosted for directions weren’t exactly friendly, despite the obvious fact that he was not in the ruins to try and edge in on their territory. But just when he’d lost all hope, he finally spotted a familiar face in the crowd.

“Troy!” he shouted. He rushed over and frantically waved in the perpetually-agitated blond man’s direction as the digger drilled an Amistal until it exploded. Troy completely ignored the little drones flying around and threatening to detonate in Max’s face as the Rebel Rider trotted over. “Troy Carter! Long time no see!”

Troy resisted the urge to peg his helmet at Max. “What are you doing down here?!” he hissed. “You don’t even have a license, do you? Do you know how much trouble I could wind up in if someone from the Guild saw me talking to…”

“Look, man, I don’t have time for this.” Max cut him off.

“Lemme guess. You were spotting and now one of your diggers is in mortal peril or something?”

Max deadpanned. “How did you…?”

“So what is it that you need from me this time?” Troy frowned and folded his arms across his chest. With the drill equipped, it didn’t look like it was a particularly comfortable position for him.

“I was spotting for the old guy’s coach up in the Main Tower of Ghiotte Summit. The ground collapsed from under him as he was climbing up,” Max explained. “I think he broke his leg or something. He can’t walk like that, so I meant to come down here, find the Main Tower, and carry him back to the surface! I really did! But…I ended up getting lost right away even after trying to study the maps. Some spotter I turned out to be, huh?” he added with a sheepish grin.

Troy just stared blankly at the disheveled spotter. “Forgive me for getting a little blunt here, but you are a complete idiot, you know that?” he remarked, struggling to keep himself from completely losing his cool and shouting at the guy. “You come rushing into the ruins without a license, wearing expensive street clothes, no weapon to speak of, and you seriously think you can drag a grown man out of the ruins by yourself?”

Max felt his face turn red. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” he admitted.

“If his leg’s really broken, you’d probably screw it up even more!” Troy groaned. “Did calling the Digger’s Guild or the hospital ever even remotely cross your mind?!”

Max just slowly shook his head as an Amistal drone floated by without heeding him so much as a second thought.

Troy sighed. “I guess I don’t have much of a choice in this, do I?” he muttered more to himself than to Max as he pressed a button affixed to the side of his helmet. “Change of plans, Amanda. Think you can get me and this doofus here to the base of Ghiotte Summit’s main tower?”

The biker couldn’t hear exactly what Troy’s spotter’s response was, but it involved a lot of high-pitched shrieking. Eventually Troy managed to convince her that it was a necessary mission, if only to keep Max from getting himself killed or further aggravating any of Russell’s injuries. Max knew better than to think too hard about it. What mattered was that he finally had the help he needed, after all.




Amanda led Troy and Max all the way down to the bottom of the hub and through a dimly-lit tunnel. The passage had a greenish tinge to it that made Troy slightly uncomfortable. “I never would have guessed this would be the right way,” Max admitted outright with a nervous laugh. “And here I spent all that time studying the map readings thinking we’d need to go up instead of…”

“Shut up.”

Max took that sentiment at face value until Troy grabbed his arm and pulled him up against the wall after a few minutes of walking. “Hey, what’d you do that for?” the biker hissed a little too loudly for Troy’s liking.

“Reaverbot up ahead.” Troy whispered. “It’s a Karubun, too. Those things are tough.”

Max squinted into the distance. “All I can see is a pink hippopotamus.”

“Do not underestimate that pink hippopotamus,” the digger warned. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen one outside of the Digger’s Database. They’re said to only appear in the most dangerous areas underground. I should have never agreed to this. Once I get close to an enemy it doesn’t take much with a drill, but those things spit out bullets like they’re a mouthful of watermelon seeds! I don’t know how I’ll be able to get close to it!”

“Well, you’ll need to get past it if you want to get into the main tower,” Amanda declared.

Even though Max couldn’t hear a single word Troy’s spotter had said, he could tell by the look on the digger’s face that he didn’t have much of a choice but to take it down. Unfortunately, before Troy could think up a plan, the other spotter in this equation started jogging toward the Reaverbot.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” Troy shouted in a panic.

“What I do best,” Max replied with a grin, right before he broke into a dead sprint. “Being incredibly distracting!”

“Did he just say what I think he said?” Amanda asked. Troy could hear her fiddling with her headphone jack from the other end, but now that Max had just destroyed any chance of him sneaking past this Reaverbot, he wasn’t about to waste any more time. If Max wanted to divert the Karubun’s attention, Troy sure didn’t want to make that impulsive act of complete idiocy go to waste.

The goofy-looking pink Reaverbot was surprisingly fast on its four stout legs as it toddled over to get closer to Max and pitch a cluster of bombs straight in his direction. “Not cool, man!” Max shouted in frustration. He slipped past the hostile machine and positioned himself so the Karubun would need to face away from Troy to attack the loud, moving target that had presented itself.

As soon as Troy saw the opening in his enemy’s defenses, he made his move. Ignoring all of Amanda’s shrieks of protest, he silently strode up to the Karubun, poised and ready to rev up his drill the minute he got within range.

He couldn’t have been more than a few feet away when the Karubun opened the top of its head up and tossed some more bombs up into the air. One of them coincidentally wound up heading straight for Troy. The digger took a split second to react to the situation and rolled out of the way just in time, but unfortunately that roll made enough noise to entice the Karubun to do an about-face.

“Uh, Troy, I think it noticed you!” Max needlessly exclaimed as Troy ran for his life and the Reaverbot fired a steady stream of bullets after him.

“Shut your mouth and go do that distraction thing you keep telling me you’re so good at!” Troy retorted, resisting the urge to just run straight at Max to try and goad the raging Karubun into putting the biker out of his misery. Max took that as a cue to run up and give their foe a swift kick in the shin. With those steel-toed boots of his, the impact actually managed to dent the robot’s leg enough to impede its mobility.

“Wow,” Max said as the machine staggered around trying to face the source of the attack. “Maybe I’m not that useless underground after all!”

“Don’t get your hopes up, buddy,” Troy sighed as he closed in with the drill. The Karubun didn’t even know what hit it before it exploded and scattered refractor shards everywhere. “Go ahead and take half. That wasn’t too shabby for a spotter.”

Max snickered as he heard snippets of Amanda yelling through Troy’s earpiece. Just from beating up that one Reaverbot, he’d be able to replace his good pants and then some.




The passage into the main tower wasn’t too far from there. After ascending a spiraling ramp and picking off Golbesh using their bait-and-switch technique for what felt like hours, Max and Troy emerged on a landing about a quarter of the way up the inside of the tower. They spotted Russell groaning on the floor in pain right away. “That’s him,” Max explained as he scrambled down the stairs and tried not to trip over any debris. “Hey! Hey Rusty! You alright?”

Troy just stood on the landing. “Woah. I’ve seen that guy before. He’s Class S! What’s a moron like you doing spotting for a pro like him!?”

“I told you already,” Max huffed as he hot-footed it to where Russell was staring in astonishment at the bizarre situation. “He was my friend’s coach, and he needed a spotter to get him to the top of the summit.”

“Max, what are you doing down here?” Russell interrogated. “Did you not think to call the Digger’s Guild about this?”

“I don’t think he thinks about anything!” Troy pointedly assessed as he descended the staircase. “It’s just your legs that hurt, right? We don’t have a spinal injury on our hands, do we? I don’t think it’d be a good idea to mess with that. I mean, I don’t think it’s a good idea to mess with this, either, but…”

“Nothing like that,” Russell explained. He managed to pull himself into a sitting position. “See? It’s not my back, it’s my legs. I tried to land on my feet, but it didn’t work out too well. It hurts to even think about trying to move either of ‘em, and for as many hits as I’ve taken underground over my lifetime, that’s saying something. I’m no doctor, but I’d say they’re definitely broken.”

“Okay, that’s good at least,” Max replied. “Not that your legs being broken is a good thing, but at least you seem fine otherwise…”

Troy looked from Russell to Max and back again. Although he was by no means fat, Russell looked to be quite a bit heavier than Max, who appeared to have never actually used any of the exercise equipment he kept in those boxes in his room. It was fairly obvious that despite having a drill for an arm at the moment, Troy would still be the one doing most of the heavy lifting. “Are you sure you’re even going to be much help with this?”

“Let’s just figure out a way to haul him out of here, huh?” Max retorted.

“I blasted a hole in the wall down here to get in,” Russell informed them. “Head out that way. It’s pretty close to the Class A gate. Once we’re outside, I’ll have decent cell phone reception, and we’ll be able to call in a rescue aircraft.”

“Alright then,” Troy sighed. He gripped Russell around the waist with his normal arm. “Let’s see if we can get him out the door without making the injuries worse.”




It felt like hours before they made it to the elevator to the surface. Troy hit the button with his drill and the platform began its ascent.

As soon as the doors slid open, Max, Troy, and Russell found themselves nearly blinded by headlights. “Troy Carter?” A woman interrogated over the mid-sized Digger’s Guild airship’s loudspeaker. “Is there a Class B Digger named Troy Carter in your party?”

Troy felt the color drain from his face. “Y-yeah,” he stammered. To his surprise, it was dark outside. He knew he’d been down in the ruins a long time, but he had no idea he’d let the entire day slip by. “That’s me. What’s going on?”

“We’re here to pick up the man with the broken legs,” the Guild official replied. She parked the airship and opened the back hatch, where a trio of Digger’s Guild paramedics hopped out with a stretcher. She followed them out and looked over the sweaty, dirty group. “Your spotter called us about a half an hour ago. She said you were probably stuck down there and headed for this gate from the inside…but it looks like you made it out alright. Unfortunately, once we get the big guy over to the hospital, we’re going to have to bring the two of you down to Guild Headquarters for questioning. Unregistered diggers are strictly prohibited from exploring the Klickelan network…”

As the medics transferred Russell to the stretcher, Max glanced over at Troy. The digger looked like he was seconds from drilling a hole through him right in front of the Digger’s Guild rep.

This really wasn’t his day.

[Aiyumi]

Troy makes a return! And Max running from the Reaverbots! Hahahaha! More minigame potential XD.

[Kyle]

I know we're three chapters past it, but good gravy does Roll's adult look tick me off! I don't even know why, either. 

Probaby not the response you'd be expecting Dashe, but I know you extract sadistic pleasure from making people have "feelings" toward PSTC. 

[Dashe]

Any response is fine by me. It's the radio silence that drives me mad. You know as well as I do that my attention span is goldfish-esque at best. As for how not being into adult Roll goes, it could very well be that she's alive at all, looks too much like Matilda, looks too much like Candace Cameron Bure, doesn't pull off red, probably had botox, or any combination of the above plus other things I haven't thought of yet.

Max trying to get through the ruins would probably be somewhat like what I've heard about Metal Gear, maybe. Still need to play that.

[Aiyumi]

For Max's "ruin minigame," I imagined something like that part in Legends 2 where you need to cooperate with Tron. You'd need to run around trying to distract the Reaverbots and hope that Troy (controlled by the dumb computer's AI) gets things right.