Monday, February 18, 2008

Miscalculations

"Nice going, genius."

Raven sighed, looking down at his stone-sheathed fist and the sparking electronics falling away from it like a silicon rain. "You said 'hit the control panel'."

Lethane dropped the bank guard he was biting and let the man's limb body slump at his feet. "I didn't mean hit the controls, dipshit. I meant for you to punch in the code we got from the Radio." he looked exasperated, hissing past bloody teeth. "You know, the one to open this damned tritanium safe."

"Well, do be clear, I am still not sure we should even be doing this."

Leth just open-palm whapped him on the fore head hard enough to rock him back on his armored feet. "Are you a villain or not?"

Raven started to open his mouth in the negative.

"Before you answer no, keep this in mind." Before saying another word, the feral savage pulled a brutal looking submachine gun off his back and hosed down the far end of the hall, cutting down five guards rushing towards them both.

The ex-hero watched them fall with some regret. He did not really want to be here and these security agents were only doing their jobs. Employed by the island, by Arachnos, did not necessarily make them bad people. They were just men and women trying to make lives for themselves on the Rogue Isles.

"Keep what in mind?"

Leth pulled the clip out of his gun and checked it. "Nine shots. Lovely." Slapping it back in, he palm spacked Raven's head again. "Pay attention, Duck. This ain't Paragon City and your patroness ain't Mary, Mother of Saints. Got it?"

He nodded slowly. "I know all that, Leth. I know I have to try to fit in, if only so I can hide long enough to get to the people that did this to me."

Leth hit him again. That was getting annoying. "Wrong."

"What?"

The blue skinned marauder emptied what was left of the clip into approaching reinforcements, throwing the useless gun hard enough at the sole surviving guard hard enough to shatter his skull. "I said wrong, Duck. Deaf as well as stupid?"

Bloodraven closed his right hand into a tight fist. "Enough with the insults, Leth. Just say what you're getting at."

Sighing, the lanky slayer turned to the sheer silvery door of the vault and rested his head against it dejectedly. "You just don't get it. Being a villain on the Rogue Isles is tough." Turning his eye, Leth gazed at Raven with narrowed feline eyes. "Being a hero is impossible."

Shifting in his stone-bonded armor, Bloodraven walked over and tapped the tritanium portal with his fists. "I know. You already said you'd kill me if I didn't get with the program."

Lethane watched his hesitatnt partner in crime eye the door and its circular, inpregniable frame. "Duck, it ain't me you have to worry about. If I still wanted you dead, you'd never have survived Piercing Night." An amused smile creased the savage's lips, growing wider at the chagrined look on Bloodraven's face.

"Then who?" Raven was feeling over the door now, trying to find handholds.

Lethane was too busy to answer him at first, chucking huge chunks of marble debris at the flak-armored Guardian agents appearing in the hall. As each one went down in a shower of gore and broken rock, he glanced back and snapped, "It's everyone else, moron! And quit that! Your 'tear the door off' trick won't work here." He heaved another glittering boulder and crushed the last of the agents up against the far wall, a red smear over grey stone.

"Why not?"

"Because the whole vault is tritanium, all the way down to the hinge pins. It doesn't have a vulnerable point!" Leth snarled, his claws growing to deadly length in anticipation of the nexty wave of defenders.

"Oh."

"That's all you have to say? We have to fight our way out of here, go get a digital panel to hack into the display you just ruined and get back here before all of Atlas shows up to stop us... and all you have to say is 'Oh!'?!?"

Raven shrugged. "You didn't let me finish."

Lethane crouched low, hearing faint metallic footsteps on the bank level above. "What, Raven?! There is no fucking way you could possibly finish a sentence that starts with 'Oh' that won't make me smack you?"

Raven closed his eyes, the power of the earth beneath him rising at the focus of his will. This was still a new thing, a tenuous rapport he did not truly understand, but the contact was getting clearer every time he reached for it.

He called and the molten heart of the world itself, answered.

"What was I was going to say was, 'Oh. I guess we'll just have to take the whole vault with us.'"

And with that, his shoulders tioghtened, his back arched and he pulled against the vault. The entire building shuddered at once. Around Bloodraven's feet, the floor split and ruptured. The walls shook, massive rifts cracking in jagged lines of stone and dust. The bank screamed in lithic agony, pipes tearing like arteries, struts breaking like ferric bones!

And as Lethane watched, slack jawed, the entire tritanium chamber tore free amid a shower of ceiling stones and falling earth. Then it was moving, upwards and outwards, towards the surface. Bloodraven was pushing it forward, his weak but effective flight ability guiding it as he 'swam' through the ground, leaving a tunnel for Lethane to use.

"Okay," the cerulean elf said breathlessly as he scrambled to keep up.

"I stand corrected."