03-05-2010, 11:07 PM
Time to rise and shine, sweetheart…
With a loud, melodramatic gasp, Piper Juunanagou erupted back into the realm of consciousness. Before the thought of sitting up off the ground even made it into the forefront of her thoughts, the woman’s gloved hand shot straight to the empty holster strapped to her belt.
Do not like. Piper thought as lifted her head off the ground and noted that she was wearing what looked like a new uniform. More unsettling than that (after all, anyone could have access to your standard military fatigues) was the new jacket Piper was wearing, which bore all the correct rank, squadron, and Sentinel insignias. The only way someone would have access to the uniform design would be if they’d stolen one, acquired one illegally, or been stalking the organization. All three of the possibilities were equally troubling, especially given the fact that the woman was now realizing that she was in the middle of a small circular tent.
“Just great,” Piper muttered to no one in particular as she rose up off her haunches and up to a vertical position. Glancing back down at her figure, the woman rolled her shoulders and arms back and allowed her jacket to slide off. Pulling her left hand forward, she grabbed the coat with her right hand and draped it over her shoulder. It wasn’t the proper means to carry her uniform coat, but she figured she could get away with it based on the situation at hand.
“Hello there,” the blond whispered as she reached down and loosely wrapped her fingers around a small plastic device on her belt. Although she had never actually seen one in real life, the woman could see that it was supposed to be a mildly archaic pager device—like the one that doctors carried around on television shows. Last she had checked, she hadn’t bothered to invest in one seeing as how they lacked much practical purpose outside of TV dramas.
“What the hell am I doing here?” Piper quipped as she removed her hand from the pager. Obviously she had been the victim of some robotic gangbangers, or else she’d probably be in a dumpster somewhere. But who the hell goes through the trouble of kidnapping someone just to give them new clothes and a pager? Furthermore, who is it that leaves said someone in a red and white tent?
I should have just stuck to the desk work… The woman mused as her hands slid into her waist pockets. Shifting the contents of her pockets with her fingers, she noted that she had the same items as before—id tag, some gum, backup case of pills, and her cell phone…
My cell phone! With a relieved sigh, the woman’s left hand emerged from her undersized pocket, cell phone in tow. Glancing down at the trusty device, Piper slid the front plate up and dialed the number for her headquarters’ liaison. Much to the woman’s mounting frustration, all she received for her efforts was a little box on the screen that indicated she didn’t have the service to place the call.
“What good are you?” Piper asked with a frown as she slid the phone shut and stuffed it back into her pocket. Unsure of where she was or why she was here, the soldier shrugged her shoulders and stepped toward what looked to be the tent flap. At this point, she was all out of ideas and figured she’d be in shackles right now if she was supposed to be some type of wacko’s prisoner.
Reaching out with a glove hand, Piper slowly slid her fingertips through what seemed to be a seam. With a mild degree of apprehension, the Sentinel threw open the tent flap and immediately stepped back into the tent and assumed a defensive stance. Aside from some really grating carnival music, nothing emerged through the open flap.
“Please don’t be what I think you are,” the woman groaned. On the list of places that made the woman the most uncomfortable, circuses and carnivals shared a spot near the top of the list. It was all those damned creeps and mutants they allowed to roam around. And the food…the mere thought of having to live off anything sold at a carnival made the woman cringe. Nevertheless, after a few more seconds of glaring at the exit, Piper gathered her wits and proceeded to poke her head outside the small tent.
All at once, the woman’s nose was bombarded by the stench of carnival food—funnel cakes, cotton candy, corn dogs, deep-fried Oreos, and a myriad of other deep-fried foodstuffs that not even an expert gourmet could decipher. Staving down the urge to vomit as the horrifying malodors overwhelmed her; Piper slapped a hand over her mouth and took her first few steps out of the small striped tent. When she came to a stop a few feet away from the tent, she was taken aback when it suddenly and abruptly collapsed into a small striped disc.
“Where the hell am I?” Piper croaked as she clenched her hand over her nostrils in an effort to combat the continued assault on her olfactory system. Moving further away from what had once been her tent, the woman made her way down a tiny corridor between two large big tops before she emerged onto a dirt walkway. Along both sides of the crude path was a mixture of tents and wooden stands.
Unsure of how to get out of this smelly hellhole or how to find out who had sent the robots to kidnap her, Piper calmly approached one of the stands. Leaning over the poorly varnished wooden counter, the soldier propped herself up on her elbows, plopped her chin into her palms, and watched as the man inside turned to face her. Although she should have been slightly prepared for it given her situation, Piper nevertheless let out an instinctive gasp when she noticed that the ‘man’ was actually a very shoddy-looking robot in some comically oversized clothes. The unsettling fact, however, was that the robot had the most poorly designed facial features ever—his mouth was a permanent grin complete with dimples and the creepiest pair of metal, robot eyes she’d ever seen.
“Why hello there!” The robotic stand operator decreed—his voice projecting from somewhere other than behind his giant smile. As he walked toward Piper, the ‘man’s’ eyes rolled left and right, seemingly as an indicator that they were supposed to be decorative and not unsettling and panic-inducing. “Are you here to play my splendid little game? All you have to do is knock the target over!” The automaton boasted as he gestured with his dull, metallic limbs toward the three large targets attached to metal rods and mounted across a long table against the back wall of the stand. Squinting and leaning a little further toward the edge of the counter, Piper noticed that all three of the bottles were—quite blatantly, mind you—fashioned together with very thing metal bars.
“Your game is rigged,” Piper remarked, gesturing toward the middle bull’s-eye. “They’re essentially bolted together and to that table…it’d be impossible for someone to knock them down,” she added as the robot’s head pivoted back to face her.
“Nothing is impossible, my dear lady!” The robot boomed, his overwhelmingly cheer voice giving Piper an indication that he hadn’t listened to (or perhaps understood) a word she had just said. “Why don’t you give it a shot? Your first ball is on the house!” The machine decreed as a previously unnoticed hatch on his chest popped open to reveal a stack of pristine baseballs. Reaching into the open cavity, the robot retrieved a ball and plopped it on the counter in front of the mortified soldier.
“Do I have to?” Piper asked with a groan as she stood up away from the counter and called the baseball into her left hand. Tossing the ball up and down a few times, the medic turned to see that the robot was still staring at her with its permanently cheery features. Apparently it wasn’t programmed to answer that question either…
“Fine,” the Sentinel remarked as she turned her attention to the central stack of bottles. Although she’d never played baseball and thought that softball was strictly for lesbians and overweight girls, Piper was nonetheless able to hurl the ball in a perfectly straight line and hit the dead center of the middle target. Upon impact, the target simply shuddered a little bit and the ball, upon falling onto the table, rolled backwards and onto the floor. “Are you kidding me?” Piper shouted as she ran a hand through her unkempt hair in an effort to calm herself.
“Now, now, Miss,” the stand operated remarked cheerfully. “Don’t be a poor sportsman, ere, sportsperson!” The quip was the last thing the robot was able to say before Piper’s gloved fist erupted through his comically oversized grin.
“I hate this place,” the soldier growl as she yanked her hand back out through the twisted steel. Shaking her hand to help dissipate the pain, the woman turned around and began to walk down the path.
“Come back and play anytime!” The stand operator shouted—his voice garbled and warped but nonetheless booming and irksome. Clenching her eyes shut and gritting her teeth, Piper shook her head as some very terrible ideas began to form in the back of her mind. Continuing on her way, the woman fished a hand into one of her pockets and retrieved the small plastic case with her medication. Before returning the case, the soldier flicked the lid open with her thumb and popped a pair of pills into her mouth as if they were breath mints.
“Perhaps if I can just find a working phone…” Piper muttered to herself as her eyes darted to and fro in an effort to detect anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the majority of what she saw was just more stands and giant tents—all of which looked to be staffed by the most diverse collection of robots she’d seen outside of a science-fiction movie.
Ring-a-ling! Ring-a-ling!
“That’s a really irritating ringtone,” Piper spoke aloud as she turned to see a clown robot standing next to her with an archaic, oversized cell phone in his outstretched hand.
“It’s for you, Ma’am!” The robot said in a voice that sounded right out of a fifty-year-old cartoon. Arching an eyebrow, the Sentinel reached out and gingerly accepted the outdated piece of equipment from the robot, prompting him to bow and scurry off to who knows where. Lifting the phone up to the side of her head, Piper calmly cleared her throat before speaking to whoever was on the other line.
“Piper Juunanagou speaking…who is this?” The woman asked as she glanced around to make sure someone wasn’t standing nearby in a bulky trench coat.
“My name is Gamer,” the person on the other end of the line answered after a momentary silence. From the speaker’s pitch and the nasally accent of his voice, Piper felt herself inclined to believe she was probably being addressed by someone younger than herself. “How are you enjoying yourself in my little world, Sergeant Juunanagou?”
“Where the hell am I?” Piper demanded as it dawned upon her that she was talking to the person behind her kidnapping. “Actually...why don’t you just tell me where the hell you are?” The thoroughly irritated Sentinel barked as she began to scope out the roofs of the nearby shacks and tents.
“What makes you think I’m lurking in the shadows, Piper?” The man-child on the other end of the line declared in a haughty, almost self-righteous tone. “Trust me, I’m not going to endanger myself by exposing myself to an unbalanced, over-medicated soldier,” he added with a chuckle as Piper’s grip on the phone began to tighten. “But don’t fret, you’ll be able to put all that frustration and self-loathing to the test in no time, Sarge,” Gamer replied with yet another long-winded bout of cackles.
“Screw you!” Piper screamed into the phone as she pulled it away from her face and crushed the midsection with a squeeze her gloved fist. Scowling heavily, the woman opened her hand and watched the pieces of the broken phone careen down to the walkway.
“Piper?” The oddly familiar voice pulled the woman out of her miniature tantrum. Glancing to her left, the soldier found herself staring at Kaden, Sophia, and a man with spiked red hair. Before Piper could open her mouth to talk, a translucent bubble popped up in the bottom left-hand corner of her field of vision.
“‘Piper has joined your party’?” The woman read aloud as she turned to face the others. As she moved her gaze, the first word bubble was replaced by another one that listed Kaden’s name and two strange nicknames followed by some numbers and abbreviations that Piper didn’t understand. “What is going on around her?” She inquired a fourth name popped up below the other three.
[I]Sarge – HP 1050/1050 MP 1050/1050
“Well I guess that’s me,” the solider remarked, punctuating the remark with a roll of her eyes. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean,” she added as she turned her attention away from the bizarre text and over to the group she’d encountered.
“Nice to see you all but could someone please tell me what’s going on around here?” Piper asked as she walked over to the trio of fellow carnival ‘guests.’
With a loud, melodramatic gasp, Piper Juunanagou erupted back into the realm of consciousness. Before the thought of sitting up off the ground even made it into the forefront of her thoughts, the woman’s gloved hand shot straight to the empty holster strapped to her belt.
Do not like. Piper thought as lifted her head off the ground and noted that she was wearing what looked like a new uniform. More unsettling than that (after all, anyone could have access to your standard military fatigues) was the new jacket Piper was wearing, which bore all the correct rank, squadron, and Sentinel insignias. The only way someone would have access to the uniform design would be if they’d stolen one, acquired one illegally, or been stalking the organization. All three of the possibilities were equally troubling, especially given the fact that the woman was now realizing that she was in the middle of a small circular tent.
“Just great,” Piper muttered to no one in particular as she rose up off her haunches and up to a vertical position. Glancing back down at her figure, the woman rolled her shoulders and arms back and allowed her jacket to slide off. Pulling her left hand forward, she grabbed the coat with her right hand and draped it over her shoulder. It wasn’t the proper means to carry her uniform coat, but she figured she could get away with it based on the situation at hand.
“Hello there,” the blond whispered as she reached down and loosely wrapped her fingers around a small plastic device on her belt. Although she had never actually seen one in real life, the woman could see that it was supposed to be a mildly archaic pager device—like the one that doctors carried around on television shows. Last she had checked, she hadn’t bothered to invest in one seeing as how they lacked much practical purpose outside of TV dramas.
“What the hell am I doing here?” Piper quipped as she removed her hand from the pager. Obviously she had been the victim of some robotic gangbangers, or else she’d probably be in a dumpster somewhere. But who the hell goes through the trouble of kidnapping someone just to give them new clothes and a pager? Furthermore, who is it that leaves said someone in a red and white tent?
I should have just stuck to the desk work… The woman mused as her hands slid into her waist pockets. Shifting the contents of her pockets with her fingers, she noted that she had the same items as before—id tag, some gum, backup case of pills, and her cell phone…
My cell phone! With a relieved sigh, the woman’s left hand emerged from her undersized pocket, cell phone in tow. Glancing down at the trusty device, Piper slid the front plate up and dialed the number for her headquarters’ liaison. Much to the woman’s mounting frustration, all she received for her efforts was a little box on the screen that indicated she didn’t have the service to place the call.
“What good are you?” Piper asked with a frown as she slid the phone shut and stuffed it back into her pocket. Unsure of where she was or why she was here, the soldier shrugged her shoulders and stepped toward what looked to be the tent flap. At this point, she was all out of ideas and figured she’d be in shackles right now if she was supposed to be some type of wacko’s prisoner.
Reaching out with a glove hand, Piper slowly slid her fingertips through what seemed to be a seam. With a mild degree of apprehension, the Sentinel threw open the tent flap and immediately stepped back into the tent and assumed a defensive stance. Aside from some really grating carnival music, nothing emerged through the open flap.
“Please don’t be what I think you are,” the woman groaned. On the list of places that made the woman the most uncomfortable, circuses and carnivals shared a spot near the top of the list. It was all those damned creeps and mutants they allowed to roam around. And the food…the mere thought of having to live off anything sold at a carnival made the woman cringe. Nevertheless, after a few more seconds of glaring at the exit, Piper gathered her wits and proceeded to poke her head outside the small tent.
All at once, the woman’s nose was bombarded by the stench of carnival food—funnel cakes, cotton candy, corn dogs, deep-fried Oreos, and a myriad of other deep-fried foodstuffs that not even an expert gourmet could decipher. Staving down the urge to vomit as the horrifying malodors overwhelmed her; Piper slapped a hand over her mouth and took her first few steps out of the small striped tent. When she came to a stop a few feet away from the tent, she was taken aback when it suddenly and abruptly collapsed into a small striped disc.
“Where the hell am I?” Piper croaked as she clenched her hand over her nostrils in an effort to combat the continued assault on her olfactory system. Moving further away from what had once been her tent, the woman made her way down a tiny corridor between two large big tops before she emerged onto a dirt walkway. Along both sides of the crude path was a mixture of tents and wooden stands.
Unsure of how to get out of this smelly hellhole or how to find out who had sent the robots to kidnap her, Piper calmly approached one of the stands. Leaning over the poorly varnished wooden counter, the soldier propped herself up on her elbows, plopped her chin into her palms, and watched as the man inside turned to face her. Although she should have been slightly prepared for it given her situation, Piper nevertheless let out an instinctive gasp when she noticed that the ‘man’ was actually a very shoddy-looking robot in some comically oversized clothes. The unsettling fact, however, was that the robot had the most poorly designed facial features ever—his mouth was a permanent grin complete with dimples and the creepiest pair of metal, robot eyes she’d ever seen.
“Why hello there!” The robotic stand operator decreed—his voice projecting from somewhere other than behind his giant smile. As he walked toward Piper, the ‘man’s’ eyes rolled left and right, seemingly as an indicator that they were supposed to be decorative and not unsettling and panic-inducing. “Are you here to play my splendid little game? All you have to do is knock the target over!” The automaton boasted as he gestured with his dull, metallic limbs toward the three large targets attached to metal rods and mounted across a long table against the back wall of the stand. Squinting and leaning a little further toward the edge of the counter, Piper noticed that all three of the bottles were—quite blatantly, mind you—fashioned together with very thing metal bars.
“Your game is rigged,” Piper remarked, gesturing toward the middle bull’s-eye. “They’re essentially bolted together and to that table…it’d be impossible for someone to knock them down,” she added as the robot’s head pivoted back to face her.
“Nothing is impossible, my dear lady!” The robot boomed, his overwhelmingly cheer voice giving Piper an indication that he hadn’t listened to (or perhaps understood) a word she had just said. “Why don’t you give it a shot? Your first ball is on the house!” The machine decreed as a previously unnoticed hatch on his chest popped open to reveal a stack of pristine baseballs. Reaching into the open cavity, the robot retrieved a ball and plopped it on the counter in front of the mortified soldier.
“Do I have to?” Piper asked with a groan as she stood up away from the counter and called the baseball into her left hand. Tossing the ball up and down a few times, the medic turned to see that the robot was still staring at her with its permanently cheery features. Apparently it wasn’t programmed to answer that question either…
“Fine,” the Sentinel remarked as she turned her attention to the central stack of bottles. Although she’d never played baseball and thought that softball was strictly for lesbians and overweight girls, Piper was nonetheless able to hurl the ball in a perfectly straight line and hit the dead center of the middle target. Upon impact, the target simply shuddered a little bit and the ball, upon falling onto the table, rolled backwards and onto the floor. “Are you kidding me?” Piper shouted as she ran a hand through her unkempt hair in an effort to calm herself.
“Now, now, Miss,” the stand operated remarked cheerfully. “Don’t be a poor sportsman, ere, sportsperson!” The quip was the last thing the robot was able to say before Piper’s gloved fist erupted through his comically oversized grin.
“I hate this place,” the soldier growl as she yanked her hand back out through the twisted steel. Shaking her hand to help dissipate the pain, the woman turned around and began to walk down the path.
“Come back and play anytime!” The stand operator shouted—his voice garbled and warped but nonetheless booming and irksome. Clenching her eyes shut and gritting her teeth, Piper shook her head as some very terrible ideas began to form in the back of her mind. Continuing on her way, the woman fished a hand into one of her pockets and retrieved the small plastic case with her medication. Before returning the case, the soldier flicked the lid open with her thumb and popped a pair of pills into her mouth as if they were breath mints.
“Perhaps if I can just find a working phone…” Piper muttered to herself as her eyes darted to and fro in an effort to detect anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the majority of what she saw was just more stands and giant tents—all of which looked to be staffed by the most diverse collection of robots she’d seen outside of a science-fiction movie.
Ring-a-ling! Ring-a-ling!
“That’s a really irritating ringtone,” Piper spoke aloud as she turned to see a clown robot standing next to her with an archaic, oversized cell phone in his outstretched hand.
“It’s for you, Ma’am!” The robot said in a voice that sounded right out of a fifty-year-old cartoon. Arching an eyebrow, the Sentinel reached out and gingerly accepted the outdated piece of equipment from the robot, prompting him to bow and scurry off to who knows where. Lifting the phone up to the side of her head, Piper calmly cleared her throat before speaking to whoever was on the other line.
“Piper Juunanagou speaking…who is this?” The woman asked as she glanced around to make sure someone wasn’t standing nearby in a bulky trench coat.
“My name is Gamer,” the person on the other end of the line answered after a momentary silence. From the speaker’s pitch and the nasally accent of his voice, Piper felt herself inclined to believe she was probably being addressed by someone younger than herself. “How are you enjoying yourself in my little world, Sergeant Juunanagou?”
“Where the hell am I?” Piper demanded as it dawned upon her that she was talking to the person behind her kidnapping. “Actually...why don’t you just tell me where the hell you are?” The thoroughly irritated Sentinel barked as she began to scope out the roofs of the nearby shacks and tents.
“What makes you think I’m lurking in the shadows, Piper?” The man-child on the other end of the line declared in a haughty, almost self-righteous tone. “Trust me, I’m not going to endanger myself by exposing myself to an unbalanced, over-medicated soldier,” he added with a chuckle as Piper’s grip on the phone began to tighten. “But don’t fret, you’ll be able to put all that frustration and self-loathing to the test in no time, Sarge,” Gamer replied with yet another long-winded bout of cackles.
“Screw you!” Piper screamed into the phone as she pulled it away from her face and crushed the midsection with a squeeze her gloved fist. Scowling heavily, the woman opened her hand and watched the pieces of the broken phone careen down to the walkway.
“Piper?” The oddly familiar voice pulled the woman out of her miniature tantrum. Glancing to her left, the soldier found herself staring at Kaden, Sophia, and a man with spiked red hair. Before Piper could open her mouth to talk, a translucent bubble popped up in the bottom left-hand corner of her field of vision.
“‘Piper has joined your party’?” The woman read aloud as she turned to face the others. As she moved her gaze, the first word bubble was replaced by another one that listed Kaden’s name and two strange nicknames followed by some numbers and abbreviations that Piper didn’t understand. “What is going on around her?” She inquired a fourth name popped up below the other three.
[I]Sarge – HP 1050/1050 MP 1050/1050
“Well I guess that’s me,” the solider remarked, punctuating the remark with a roll of her eyes. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean,” she added as she turned her attention away from the bizarre text and over to the group she’d encountered.
“Nice to see you all but could someone please tell me what’s going on around here?” Piper asked as she walked over to the trio of fellow carnival ‘guests.’
Quote:Vad's Whimsical Whimsicalisms: Men. Good stuff there.
![[Image: Viper-Mini-Sig-Piper.png]](http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b318/ThundercatsHO/Viper-Mini-Sig-Piper.png)
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning,
but anyone can start today and make a new ending.