Post by rantinan on Apr 22, 2006 9:18:43 GMT -5
Again, this was written by my fiance. Balthus Darkstorm and Big Kev remain the interlectual property of the people who created them, and if you're foolish enough to admit to doing so in a public place you get what you deserve.
Gummi’s Bad Day
Chapter 2: Things Can Always Get Worse. Or Better.
Gummi sat alone and silent in the dark. He was nervous, and he was brooding. In other times, or on other worlds, this would be perfectly normal for a policeman on a stakeout, with no clue which particular moment is going to be the one where things go to hell, but in Blue City, where the squadmates of the PKB could vidcom to each other seamlessly with no risk of detection, Gummi’s reticence was a worrying thing.
Light rain sheeted off the Gojulas Giga as it waited crouching in a blind alley, hidden from view except from straight on, but itself with a full view of the front of the Blue City chapel of the Unified Church of Zi. Today was shaping up to be the sort of day that only came along once in a lifetime, a real milestone for civilization. Today some crazy zealot was going to attack a wedding.
Gummi’s palms were slick on the controls of his Zoid as he remembered hours earlier informing those inside of the threat they’d received.
RD had turned pale, and started shaking all over, mumbling something to himself repeatedly, just quietly enough for no one else to have been able to hear it. Gummi hadn’t needed to hear the words, you start to recognize the rhythm of “This can’t be happening,” when you’ve been on the bureau for a while.
Pop’s paranoia had been of use for once, bandages in the briefcase kept Sweet from being in too much trouble. She’d been trimming flowers to assemble the bouquet, but had twitched sharply enough in shock to have cut herself. Instinct made Gummi turn away, she’d bit her lip rather than screaming, which meant it was a minor cut, and so there was no reason for him to get involved when the sight of blood spilt over this madness would just get him more unsettled.
Blake was the real worry. “How dare they! Don’t those insolent fools understand that this is a sacred occasion? Give me their names, I’ll annihilate them myself!”
Gummi was grateful for Dee’s quick reflexes, “Ah, no, you won’t. They’re intent is specifically TO attack the wedding, so we’ll have to ask the wedding party, the whole wedding party, to stay safely inside and let us handle it.” Gummi hid a small sigh of relief, he certainly hadn’t wanted to deal with Blake’s reaction to finding out that the threat was anonymous, and they’d yet to unearth so much as a clue.
Luke took it worst, though. It was a good thing the caterers were honest, he certainly wasn’t in any condition to provide overwatch on them anymore. He was crying hard enough Gummi doubted he could see his hand in front of his face. Helmut was trying to comfort him, which was good. Gummi was certainly on occasion prideful of his own unflappability and capacity to be the port in the storm for others when things went bad, but he knew full well that Blue City’s real champion in that regard wore a mask, not a cowboy hat.
After that, Gummi, Chow, and Dee had gone back outside to take up their respective positions hidden surrounding the church. Which was when the waiting had begun.
Initially, they had talked back and forth, made efforts at false joviality to keep each other’s spirits up like any other stakeout, but a few terse grunts, and eventually, a forcible disconnection of the signal from Gummi had made it patently clear that this time he was quite clearly not in the mood.
A wedding, for Eve’s sake! What kind of sick, twisted, diseased individual would attack a celebration of joy? Who would want to destroy the unification of two people in mind and heart?
What sort of sick people would let them?
Oh, Gummi understood the reasons behind the plan, he just didn’t like them. He didn’t like them at all. He recognized that the city council was getting irritated with the Bureau’s way of doing things, of being willing to arrest first and prove later, and that by letting these… terrorists, whoever they would be when they showed up, at least take one shot, with the PKB recording, there would be no doubt whatsoever of their intentions and their guilt when arrested, no “We were only thinking about it, and had decided not to when we got attacked by those licensed thugs!”
But it did not sit well with him. Sure, if it was a robbery, or trespassing, that’s not a problem, stolen goods can be returned, but stolen happiness? Gummi knew that there were some people who thought that money could replace stolen joy, but he liked to think he knew better. He was fairly certain the group inside this church, a group that had only a few years ago been a pair of factions with one bent on no less than the other’s utter anhillation, yet today were gathered together as friends for a rite of celebration, Gummi was sure that they knew better as well.
Gummi’s eyes strayed to a pair of covered switches, one next to each of his thumbs. His eyes always sought these buttons out during a stakeout, but nothing ever came of it. He always knew that the buttons were primarily there because the knowledge that he could push them kept him from wanting to. Sure, officially they were for emergencies, but everyone knew in a real emergency that every zoid pilot in the city would pitch in to help, and the problem would be half-solved by the time word of it had traveled three blocks.
Gummi was getting nervous, none of this felt right to him, and he was feeling temptations he hadn’t felt since before joining the PKB, since back when he was the same sort of young punk kid RD was today, what’d they call ‘em now, death zombies, or something? He was ashamed that part of him hoped that the approach would come from a vector being covered by Chow or Dee, and he wouldn’t have to deal with those temptations.
Zoid footsteps. No such luck.
Gummi thumbed a button, signaling the activation of the camera hidden atop the building he was hiding behind (another aspect of this plan he didn’t approve of, skulking was something for the bad guys to do), and gave a low whistle. Two zoids, easily recognizable too, from how they’d been modified. Gummi knew the pilots, by reputation at least. The Dark Spiner with its tail and back hackjobbed to add holes for particle intakes could only be the infamous Kevin, and the hideous mutant offspring of a porcupine and a tyrannosaur had to be Balthus Darkstorm and his GenoArsenal. His grip tightened on his controls. Those two were bad news, certainly, though since they were renegade battlers there wasn’t any official information on their skills or capabilities, the rumour mill had provided plenty of tales from those who were a little too underarmed or a little too inexperienced for the hazards their particular escort job had encountered. But nothing had suggested they would go so low as to assault a wedding. It seems they got ‘born again’ into the wrong religion.
Gummi’s eyes went hard as he watched them moving into the church’s parking lot, and a calm descended over him. Politicians be damned. Public Opinion be damned. If in this case it must, then even the Law be damned. There comes a time when a man must choose between what is Just and what is Good, and Gummi knew in his heart that he was a man who would choose to hit the philosopher over the head with a beer bottle and trust his instincts to take the proper course. His thumbs twitched.
Balthus Darkstorm laughed maniacally. “Today, today Kevin my friend we will have our glorious revenge against those who dared to shame us! Today we will destroy all who stand in the way of our vision!”
Kevin wasn’t listening, his Dark Spiner’s head ranged back and forth over the area, and he started to charge his CPG, “The enemy is made up of a Liger Zero Falcon, Liger-Falcon Type, an Evo-Flier, Microraptor Type,” Kevin paused. He didn’t recognize the modifications on the Evo-Flier, it looked like… ribbons? He didn’t like an opponent he couldn’t read, he needed to figure out what they did. But suddenly he flashed back to his childhood, to bicycling around the villiage with his boyhood friends. Of course, the ribbons made the Evo-Flier go faster! It was so obvious! He continued, “There’s a Koening Wolf Mark 2, Wolf Type, a Command Wolf, Wolf Type, a LeoStriker, Lion Type, and a Gairyuki, Tyrannosaur Type.” He paused theatrically to grin despite the fact that no-one could see him. “And they will all flee or fall before my mighty Dark Spiner, Spinosauru-“
With a sound like the war cry of some ancient and horribly offended deity, one of the largest bore slugs ever mass-produced on the planet Zi was fired at proportionally point-blank range, tearing through the Dark Spiner from shoulder to shoulder, the head and neck falling to the ground, twitching spasmodically with its last gasps of existence.
The GenoArsenal turned in shock, crouching to lunge, roaring defiance, and the second shell took it full in the face, stretching its mouth but for an instant like the star of the wrong sort of movie before crunching through its particle emitter, tearing along its back and ripping the tail clean off at the point where it became narrower than the bullet that claimed its life.
The day was saved, lock, stock, and two smoking supercannons.
It was then that Gummi realized his comm was still off, and turned it back on to hear Chow and Dee both screaming at him that he should have told them the terrorists had arrived, that something could’ve gone wrong, and then go silent when they saw the smoking wrecks of the two zoids. He knew there was going to be trouble over this, so to get an official count before the adjusters set in on it, he called back to HQ to get Susan to come do their own damage assessment. Later, he knew, he would regret the decision he had made, but now, right now, he knew that he could not possibly have made any other, and continued to be a him he could face in the mirror each morning, and because of that, he was happy.
There was a hideous scream some few minutes later, and Gummy winced. Susan’s approach always made everyone else nervous, with how she took corners, one was never sure if it was the car screaming in agony, or hapless pedestrians. They’d modified the Noctus Schadenfreude into a proper PKB vehicle, proudly painted in the blue and white. They’d also given her an anti-zoid rifle, after all, while the PKB wasn’t much liked among the underbelly of the city, the groups that had the money to have zoids too big for the rifle to handle would have enough dignity to not attack someone in a mere car, and the smaller groups, well, while no crack-shot, she could hit a Sandspeeda or a Sinker SOMEWHERE, and that probably would be enough. Her brakes screeched as she skidded to a stop right behind the carcass of the GenoArsenal, which was blocking the ramp for small vehicles to get in off the main road.
He was going to get on the comm. and tell her where to find another entrance, really he was, but he was too shocked when she popped the switch and the roof of her car hinged open. She hefted the rifle, aiming at the Geno Arsenal’s crotch almost directly above her, “Official PKB business, move your zoid immediately or face the consequences!”
Gummi winced, okay, extreme priority of getting her trained up on exactly what her weapon can and cannot do, but gotta tell her to stop soon, it’d be horrible for her morale to see the shell just bounce right off such a large zoid, and who knew where it could ricochet to…
Again too late, but the bullet did not deflect. It penetrated through the Geno Arsenal’s armor, into the internal systems, and back out through the upper plate. This surprised everyone enough that they stopped work with the jaws of life getting Balthus and Kevin out of their broken cockpits long enough for the bullet to do the same thing some few feet further up the Geno Arsenal on the way back down.
Balthus screamed. “My armor! My special impenetrable laminate armor!”
Dee sniggered, “Does this mean we gave her a gravity rifle?”
Gummi’s response was cut off amongst the most blistering string of curses he had ever had the misfortune to hear over a microphone, he’d only heard Chow swear this heavily that one time he’d thought to get her some raspberry soda to try to get her mind off that guy from the circus she’d had a crush on who turned out to be a thieving ninja of some sort.
After a few minutes, she calmed down, “I’ve heard of armor being called tinfoil, but this really is! Laminate tinfoil! Laminated onto more tinfoil! Around a core of yet more tinfoil! It’s all bleeding tinfoil!”
Balthus’s eyes crossed perplexedly, and his handcuffs jingled as he failed to bring his hands in front of him to try to do some emergency math, thankfully for all and sundry, Dee had a calculator. “Well, I guess that makes sense, anything heavier and the legs would crumple under the weight of all the guns whenever it did more than a slow walk.”
This brought laughter from everyone except Balthus and Kevin, and therefore from everyone who mattered, and they swiftly escorted the captured criminals back to the station.
Eight hours later, the wedding had finished without a hitch, and Susan was getting finished with the damage assessment as well. But someone else was arriving. Reverend Frederick Phillips, leader of the Church of Zoid Adam, was driving slowly into the lot, a remote detonator clutched in one fist. The Noctus clipped his rear wheel on the way past, and he fumbled to avoid dropping the detonator to the receeding cry of “Official PKB Business!” He sighed with relief as he held it safely squeezed in both hands.
He pulled up to the very front of the church, and paused to savor imminent victory. He would take the bomb from the trunk of his car, plant it under the altar, and then detonate it during the wedding tomorrow, cleansing the world both of the abomination that would otherwise take place, and a priest of the hideous corruption of the true religion who would give such filth his blessing.
Meanwhile across town, questioning was going poorly. After several hours of their denying knowledge of the threatened attack, Chow’s patience had snapped, and she had suggested that perhaps they didn’t actually have knowledge of anything, and they should check for basic arithmetic and spelling before asking for more complicated information like their names and license numbers. Things had understandably gone downhill from there.
Reverend Fred calmly walked around behind his car, smiling with satisfaction as he popped the trunk open, and suddenly went from victorious glee to absolute horror, as he spent the last five seconds of his life trying to recall the exact angular positioning of his fingers some twenty minutes previously, as his mind tried to prove that what he was seeing was absolutely impossible and that he could not have accidentally started the countdown to detonation when catching the detonator after the crazy woman had clipped him, despite the blinking red evidence before his eyes.
The explosive was big enough, and loud enough, to be identifiable from the PKB offices, and from the upper floors they could see the smoke rising from in front of the church’s steeple. Kevin turned triumphantly to Gummi, “NOW do you believe us that we were just there to challenge Blake and Luke to a rematch?”
Gummi nodded slowly, “Yeess, I think that there’s finally been a piece of convincing evidence in your favor, boys. You’re free to go.”
Balthus’s expression turned transparently cunning, “Not so fast, there’s still the matter of our zoids you destroyed without justification!”
Gummi smiled, “Well, I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on those money matters, we’ve got someone to deal with that. Here, Ms. Johansen just got back, that’s her desk right over there, you need to go talk to her.”
Gummi hid a smirk as he watched them timidly shuffle over to the mousy woman half their size, suddenly thrown completely out of their depth as she gave them an appraising look. Where Balthus had been firm and superior in voice declaring their intent to seek redress from Gummi, suddenly his voice was meek and supplicant.
And flattened by a steamroller.
“Why, naturally of course the PKB will pay for damages to your zoids, but of course there’s the matter of fines incurred for other illegal activities you were involved in at the time when apprehended, even though you were not, in fact, the ones the stakeout had been set for.”
Balthus blinked, and nodded, unsure what had happened, as it sounded like he’d already won his point. Kevin spoke up, “What sort of fines?”
“Oh, well, there’s the one for illegal parking, towing, 1703 counts of littering, behaving in a manner likely to breach the peace, conspiracy to cause an affray, violation of the tinfoil conservation act of 1086, attempting to instigate a zoid battle without proper licensing, attempting to instigate a zoid battle inside city limits…”
Gummi sat back and began to tune out as he watched and listened to Susan handing them their second defeat today, part of Gummi still was worried that it wasn’t moral to let her do the things she did like this, but he couldn’t be sure, and when Gummi wasn’t sure about something, he ignored the parts he wasn’t sure on, and decided solely from what he was. He was sure that Chow and Dee thought it was alright, and he was sure he liked his coffee. He smiled. Earlier today had smelled like blood and dust and tears, like suffering and indecision and shattered hopes and broken dreams. And he knew he had fixed all that, because tonight, tonight smelled like coffee
Gummi’s Bad Day
Chapter 2: Things Can Always Get Worse. Or Better.
Gummi sat alone and silent in the dark. He was nervous, and he was brooding. In other times, or on other worlds, this would be perfectly normal for a policeman on a stakeout, with no clue which particular moment is going to be the one where things go to hell, but in Blue City, where the squadmates of the PKB could vidcom to each other seamlessly with no risk of detection, Gummi’s reticence was a worrying thing.
Light rain sheeted off the Gojulas Giga as it waited crouching in a blind alley, hidden from view except from straight on, but itself with a full view of the front of the Blue City chapel of the Unified Church of Zi. Today was shaping up to be the sort of day that only came along once in a lifetime, a real milestone for civilization. Today some crazy zealot was going to attack a wedding.
Gummi’s palms were slick on the controls of his Zoid as he remembered hours earlier informing those inside of the threat they’d received.
RD had turned pale, and started shaking all over, mumbling something to himself repeatedly, just quietly enough for no one else to have been able to hear it. Gummi hadn’t needed to hear the words, you start to recognize the rhythm of “This can’t be happening,” when you’ve been on the bureau for a while.
Pop’s paranoia had been of use for once, bandages in the briefcase kept Sweet from being in too much trouble. She’d been trimming flowers to assemble the bouquet, but had twitched sharply enough in shock to have cut herself. Instinct made Gummi turn away, she’d bit her lip rather than screaming, which meant it was a minor cut, and so there was no reason for him to get involved when the sight of blood spilt over this madness would just get him more unsettled.
Blake was the real worry. “How dare they! Don’t those insolent fools understand that this is a sacred occasion? Give me their names, I’ll annihilate them myself!”
Gummi was grateful for Dee’s quick reflexes, “Ah, no, you won’t. They’re intent is specifically TO attack the wedding, so we’ll have to ask the wedding party, the whole wedding party, to stay safely inside and let us handle it.” Gummi hid a small sigh of relief, he certainly hadn’t wanted to deal with Blake’s reaction to finding out that the threat was anonymous, and they’d yet to unearth so much as a clue.
Luke took it worst, though. It was a good thing the caterers were honest, he certainly wasn’t in any condition to provide overwatch on them anymore. He was crying hard enough Gummi doubted he could see his hand in front of his face. Helmut was trying to comfort him, which was good. Gummi was certainly on occasion prideful of his own unflappability and capacity to be the port in the storm for others when things went bad, but he knew full well that Blue City’s real champion in that regard wore a mask, not a cowboy hat.
After that, Gummi, Chow, and Dee had gone back outside to take up their respective positions hidden surrounding the church. Which was when the waiting had begun.
Initially, they had talked back and forth, made efforts at false joviality to keep each other’s spirits up like any other stakeout, but a few terse grunts, and eventually, a forcible disconnection of the signal from Gummi had made it patently clear that this time he was quite clearly not in the mood.
A wedding, for Eve’s sake! What kind of sick, twisted, diseased individual would attack a celebration of joy? Who would want to destroy the unification of two people in mind and heart?
What sort of sick people would let them?
Oh, Gummi understood the reasons behind the plan, he just didn’t like them. He didn’t like them at all. He recognized that the city council was getting irritated with the Bureau’s way of doing things, of being willing to arrest first and prove later, and that by letting these… terrorists, whoever they would be when they showed up, at least take one shot, with the PKB recording, there would be no doubt whatsoever of their intentions and their guilt when arrested, no “We were only thinking about it, and had decided not to when we got attacked by those licensed thugs!”
But it did not sit well with him. Sure, if it was a robbery, or trespassing, that’s not a problem, stolen goods can be returned, but stolen happiness? Gummi knew that there were some people who thought that money could replace stolen joy, but he liked to think he knew better. He was fairly certain the group inside this church, a group that had only a few years ago been a pair of factions with one bent on no less than the other’s utter anhillation, yet today were gathered together as friends for a rite of celebration, Gummi was sure that they knew better as well.
Gummi’s eyes strayed to a pair of covered switches, one next to each of his thumbs. His eyes always sought these buttons out during a stakeout, but nothing ever came of it. He always knew that the buttons were primarily there because the knowledge that he could push them kept him from wanting to. Sure, officially they were for emergencies, but everyone knew in a real emergency that every zoid pilot in the city would pitch in to help, and the problem would be half-solved by the time word of it had traveled three blocks.
Gummi was getting nervous, none of this felt right to him, and he was feeling temptations he hadn’t felt since before joining the PKB, since back when he was the same sort of young punk kid RD was today, what’d they call ‘em now, death zombies, or something? He was ashamed that part of him hoped that the approach would come from a vector being covered by Chow or Dee, and he wouldn’t have to deal with those temptations.
Zoid footsteps. No such luck.
Gummi thumbed a button, signaling the activation of the camera hidden atop the building he was hiding behind (another aspect of this plan he didn’t approve of, skulking was something for the bad guys to do), and gave a low whistle. Two zoids, easily recognizable too, from how they’d been modified. Gummi knew the pilots, by reputation at least. The Dark Spiner with its tail and back hackjobbed to add holes for particle intakes could only be the infamous Kevin, and the hideous mutant offspring of a porcupine and a tyrannosaur had to be Balthus Darkstorm and his GenoArsenal. His grip tightened on his controls. Those two were bad news, certainly, though since they were renegade battlers there wasn’t any official information on their skills or capabilities, the rumour mill had provided plenty of tales from those who were a little too underarmed or a little too inexperienced for the hazards their particular escort job had encountered. But nothing had suggested they would go so low as to assault a wedding. It seems they got ‘born again’ into the wrong religion.
Gummi’s eyes went hard as he watched them moving into the church’s parking lot, and a calm descended over him. Politicians be damned. Public Opinion be damned. If in this case it must, then even the Law be damned. There comes a time when a man must choose between what is Just and what is Good, and Gummi knew in his heart that he was a man who would choose to hit the philosopher over the head with a beer bottle and trust his instincts to take the proper course. His thumbs twitched.
Balthus Darkstorm laughed maniacally. “Today, today Kevin my friend we will have our glorious revenge against those who dared to shame us! Today we will destroy all who stand in the way of our vision!”
Kevin wasn’t listening, his Dark Spiner’s head ranged back and forth over the area, and he started to charge his CPG, “The enemy is made up of a Liger Zero Falcon, Liger-Falcon Type, an Evo-Flier, Microraptor Type,” Kevin paused. He didn’t recognize the modifications on the Evo-Flier, it looked like… ribbons? He didn’t like an opponent he couldn’t read, he needed to figure out what they did. But suddenly he flashed back to his childhood, to bicycling around the villiage with his boyhood friends. Of course, the ribbons made the Evo-Flier go faster! It was so obvious! He continued, “There’s a Koening Wolf Mark 2, Wolf Type, a Command Wolf, Wolf Type, a LeoStriker, Lion Type, and a Gairyuki, Tyrannosaur Type.” He paused theatrically to grin despite the fact that no-one could see him. “And they will all flee or fall before my mighty Dark Spiner, Spinosauru-“
With a sound like the war cry of some ancient and horribly offended deity, one of the largest bore slugs ever mass-produced on the planet Zi was fired at proportionally point-blank range, tearing through the Dark Spiner from shoulder to shoulder, the head and neck falling to the ground, twitching spasmodically with its last gasps of existence.
The GenoArsenal turned in shock, crouching to lunge, roaring defiance, and the second shell took it full in the face, stretching its mouth but for an instant like the star of the wrong sort of movie before crunching through its particle emitter, tearing along its back and ripping the tail clean off at the point where it became narrower than the bullet that claimed its life.
The day was saved, lock, stock, and two smoking supercannons.
It was then that Gummi realized his comm was still off, and turned it back on to hear Chow and Dee both screaming at him that he should have told them the terrorists had arrived, that something could’ve gone wrong, and then go silent when they saw the smoking wrecks of the two zoids. He knew there was going to be trouble over this, so to get an official count before the adjusters set in on it, he called back to HQ to get Susan to come do their own damage assessment. Later, he knew, he would regret the decision he had made, but now, right now, he knew that he could not possibly have made any other, and continued to be a him he could face in the mirror each morning, and because of that, he was happy.
There was a hideous scream some few minutes later, and Gummy winced. Susan’s approach always made everyone else nervous, with how she took corners, one was never sure if it was the car screaming in agony, or hapless pedestrians. They’d modified the Noctus Schadenfreude into a proper PKB vehicle, proudly painted in the blue and white. They’d also given her an anti-zoid rifle, after all, while the PKB wasn’t much liked among the underbelly of the city, the groups that had the money to have zoids too big for the rifle to handle would have enough dignity to not attack someone in a mere car, and the smaller groups, well, while no crack-shot, she could hit a Sandspeeda or a Sinker SOMEWHERE, and that probably would be enough. Her brakes screeched as she skidded to a stop right behind the carcass of the GenoArsenal, which was blocking the ramp for small vehicles to get in off the main road.
He was going to get on the comm. and tell her where to find another entrance, really he was, but he was too shocked when she popped the switch and the roof of her car hinged open. She hefted the rifle, aiming at the Geno Arsenal’s crotch almost directly above her, “Official PKB business, move your zoid immediately or face the consequences!”
Gummi winced, okay, extreme priority of getting her trained up on exactly what her weapon can and cannot do, but gotta tell her to stop soon, it’d be horrible for her morale to see the shell just bounce right off such a large zoid, and who knew where it could ricochet to…
Again too late, but the bullet did not deflect. It penetrated through the Geno Arsenal’s armor, into the internal systems, and back out through the upper plate. This surprised everyone enough that they stopped work with the jaws of life getting Balthus and Kevin out of their broken cockpits long enough for the bullet to do the same thing some few feet further up the Geno Arsenal on the way back down.
Balthus screamed. “My armor! My special impenetrable laminate armor!”
Dee sniggered, “Does this mean we gave her a gravity rifle?”
Gummi’s response was cut off amongst the most blistering string of curses he had ever had the misfortune to hear over a microphone, he’d only heard Chow swear this heavily that one time he’d thought to get her some raspberry soda to try to get her mind off that guy from the circus she’d had a crush on who turned out to be a thieving ninja of some sort.
After a few minutes, she calmed down, “I’ve heard of armor being called tinfoil, but this really is! Laminate tinfoil! Laminated onto more tinfoil! Around a core of yet more tinfoil! It’s all bleeding tinfoil!”
Balthus’s eyes crossed perplexedly, and his handcuffs jingled as he failed to bring his hands in front of him to try to do some emergency math, thankfully for all and sundry, Dee had a calculator. “Well, I guess that makes sense, anything heavier and the legs would crumple under the weight of all the guns whenever it did more than a slow walk.”
This brought laughter from everyone except Balthus and Kevin, and therefore from everyone who mattered, and they swiftly escorted the captured criminals back to the station.
Eight hours later, the wedding had finished without a hitch, and Susan was getting finished with the damage assessment as well. But someone else was arriving. Reverend Frederick Phillips, leader of the Church of Zoid Adam, was driving slowly into the lot, a remote detonator clutched in one fist. The Noctus clipped his rear wheel on the way past, and he fumbled to avoid dropping the detonator to the receeding cry of “Official PKB Business!” He sighed with relief as he held it safely squeezed in both hands.
He pulled up to the very front of the church, and paused to savor imminent victory. He would take the bomb from the trunk of his car, plant it under the altar, and then detonate it during the wedding tomorrow, cleansing the world both of the abomination that would otherwise take place, and a priest of the hideous corruption of the true religion who would give such filth his blessing.
Meanwhile across town, questioning was going poorly. After several hours of their denying knowledge of the threatened attack, Chow’s patience had snapped, and she had suggested that perhaps they didn’t actually have knowledge of anything, and they should check for basic arithmetic and spelling before asking for more complicated information like their names and license numbers. Things had understandably gone downhill from there.
Reverend Fred calmly walked around behind his car, smiling with satisfaction as he popped the trunk open, and suddenly went from victorious glee to absolute horror, as he spent the last five seconds of his life trying to recall the exact angular positioning of his fingers some twenty minutes previously, as his mind tried to prove that what he was seeing was absolutely impossible and that he could not have accidentally started the countdown to detonation when catching the detonator after the crazy woman had clipped him, despite the blinking red evidence before his eyes.
The explosive was big enough, and loud enough, to be identifiable from the PKB offices, and from the upper floors they could see the smoke rising from in front of the church’s steeple. Kevin turned triumphantly to Gummi, “NOW do you believe us that we were just there to challenge Blake and Luke to a rematch?”
Gummi nodded slowly, “Yeess, I think that there’s finally been a piece of convincing evidence in your favor, boys. You’re free to go.”
Balthus’s expression turned transparently cunning, “Not so fast, there’s still the matter of our zoids you destroyed without justification!”
Gummi smiled, “Well, I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on those money matters, we’ve got someone to deal with that. Here, Ms. Johansen just got back, that’s her desk right over there, you need to go talk to her.”
Gummi hid a smirk as he watched them timidly shuffle over to the mousy woman half their size, suddenly thrown completely out of their depth as she gave them an appraising look. Where Balthus had been firm and superior in voice declaring their intent to seek redress from Gummi, suddenly his voice was meek and supplicant.
And flattened by a steamroller.
“Why, naturally of course the PKB will pay for damages to your zoids, but of course there’s the matter of fines incurred for other illegal activities you were involved in at the time when apprehended, even though you were not, in fact, the ones the stakeout had been set for.”
Balthus blinked, and nodded, unsure what had happened, as it sounded like he’d already won his point. Kevin spoke up, “What sort of fines?”
“Oh, well, there’s the one for illegal parking, towing, 1703 counts of littering, behaving in a manner likely to breach the peace, conspiracy to cause an affray, violation of the tinfoil conservation act of 1086, attempting to instigate a zoid battle without proper licensing, attempting to instigate a zoid battle inside city limits…”
Gummi sat back and began to tune out as he watched and listened to Susan handing them their second defeat today, part of Gummi still was worried that it wasn’t moral to let her do the things she did like this, but he couldn’t be sure, and when Gummi wasn’t sure about something, he ignored the parts he wasn’t sure on, and decided solely from what he was. He was sure that Chow and Dee thought it was alright, and he was sure he liked his coffee. He smiled. Earlier today had smelled like blood and dust and tears, like suffering and indecision and shattered hopes and broken dreams. And he knew he had fixed all that, because tonight, tonight smelled like coffee
