03-06-2010, 02:18 AM
It had been a year. A year since the namekian mafia known as Bjorken had stormed the Temple of Guru in Ur. A year since a circus runaway had escaped to Namek-Sei, learned to teleport between planets, and discovered she was the princess of an almost-dead race. A year...since she had joined the monks and settled down with a family.
She had almost entirely forgotten the horrors that came with being the main attraction in a circus titled "Freakz." Since then, she had settled in and become a warrior monk, protecting the villages and the lower quarters of the city of Ur, populated primarily by namekians. She had been happy to just know she had a place somewhere, and a choice to leave if she wanted it. Which she didn't.
"I can't believe it's been that long," Alura murmured out loud. She had her elbow on the bar with her chin resting on the palm. The other hand was holding a glass of water as she gazed at her friend behind the counter. "I've been on this planet for a year."
"Yea," Chuck agreed as he washed the bar-top down with a rag. "You put Bjorken in their place, became the protector of a village dedicated to Burter himself, and become a monk. Not too bad for a lizard-girl."
Alura giggled at the pale android and nodded in agreement. "Not too bad," she echoed. "I can still remember old life. The carnival was hell. The circus was a nightmare. But thinking about it now...it makes me think that it was all in my head, like it's somebody else's life and I'm just watching it on TV. This life, what I've got now, I don't want it to end."
"Doesn't have to," Chuck assured, which got him another smile from his favorite patron.
The lizard heiress had been told that eventually, the man called Burter would find her and try to bring her to Reptilia, the homeworld of her ancestors. But she had no intention of following that prophecy, no matter how convincing the storyteller was. Alura had found a home and she was quite happy dealing with petty thugs and criminals with her teleportation. The last thing she needed was fighting ultra-powerful bad guys like she saw on the news-vids all the time. That was Burter's thing, but one trait the two Reptilians did not share.
Chuck made a nod towards the street. His bar, which was actually just a stand in the market district, over-looked one of the main business streets in the slums. "Machine," he warned, "Hostile."
Alura looked back over her shoulder. Chuck had been a good friend thus far for the last year; it helped that Alura had saved him from a loan shark and in return, he gave her free food and information, as well as a good ear to talk into. Being an Android, it also gave him the advantage of sensing other robotic programming in the air...a very broad version of hacking. Stealing information. "Where they going? The Temple of Guru?"
"Can't read them. Too well protected," Chuck explained. The robotics was clearly just that...obvious robots with no sign of humanoid parts. They weren't hybrid, it was all mechanic. In a crowd of mostly green aliens, they stood out pretty strongly in the middle of the business district. "They look like they're scanning for something."
Alura looked around for anything particularly menacing. While she was an expert in hand-to-hand combat and could teleport out of a sticky situation, she had no real experience in fighting robots. Not to mention, there was absolutely no logical reason for them to be scanning for anything with hostile intentions in the middle of some innocent slums in a random Namekian port-city.
One of the two large mechs gazed it's leering red eyes towards Chuck's bar-shack and stopped scanning. Chuck immediately tensed, which caused Alura to raise up off of her stool, as if being prepared to run for it. The robot that had caught her in it's crosshairs made some kind of gesture to it's partner, which caused both of the drones to look her way. Nobody else in the market seemed to care that these two giant mechs were glaring right at Chuck's shack, or at the only blue alien in the area.
"Look out!" Chuck warned, but it was a second too late. The bright red laser blasted from the front of the single circular eye, completely shattering the bottom of the market-stand. Alura managed to dive sideways as the entire wooden bar crumbled into itself, the ensuing explosion hurling Chuck backwards into his kitchen.
Without thinking, Alura thought about Earth, intending to teleport away as quickly as possible. A sharp electrical shock zapped that idea, causing her to spasm and fall from her knees to her side, trembling. When she looked up, one of those massive hulking droids was standing over it, once again scanning her scaly body with it's red eye.
She was confused, to say the least. She could hear Chuck in the background after recovering from the blast, but she never did see what had happened to the humble android. About a moment after trying to teleport, one of the robotic arms came down and cracked her in the face.
All went black.
She had almost entirely forgotten the horrors that came with being the main attraction in a circus titled "Freakz." Since then, she had settled in and become a warrior monk, protecting the villages and the lower quarters of the city of Ur, populated primarily by namekians. She had been happy to just know she had a place somewhere, and a choice to leave if she wanted it. Which she didn't.
"I can't believe it's been that long," Alura murmured out loud. She had her elbow on the bar with her chin resting on the palm. The other hand was holding a glass of water as she gazed at her friend behind the counter. "I've been on this planet for a year."
"Yea," Chuck agreed as he washed the bar-top down with a rag. "You put Bjorken in their place, became the protector of a village dedicated to Burter himself, and become a monk. Not too bad for a lizard-girl."
Alura giggled at the pale android and nodded in agreement. "Not too bad," she echoed. "I can still remember old life. The carnival was hell. The circus was a nightmare. But thinking about it now...it makes me think that it was all in my head, like it's somebody else's life and I'm just watching it on TV. This life, what I've got now, I don't want it to end."
"Doesn't have to," Chuck assured, which got him another smile from his favorite patron.
The lizard heiress had been told that eventually, the man called Burter would find her and try to bring her to Reptilia, the homeworld of her ancestors. But she had no intention of following that prophecy, no matter how convincing the storyteller was. Alura had found a home and she was quite happy dealing with petty thugs and criminals with her teleportation. The last thing she needed was fighting ultra-powerful bad guys like she saw on the news-vids all the time. That was Burter's thing, but one trait the two Reptilians did not share.
Chuck made a nod towards the street. His bar, which was actually just a stand in the market district, over-looked one of the main business streets in the slums. "Machine," he warned, "Hostile."
Alura looked back over her shoulder. Chuck had been a good friend thus far for the last year; it helped that Alura had saved him from a loan shark and in return, he gave her free food and information, as well as a good ear to talk into. Being an Android, it also gave him the advantage of sensing other robotic programming in the air...a very broad version of hacking. Stealing information. "Where they going? The Temple of Guru?"
"Can't read them. Too well protected," Chuck explained. The robotics was clearly just that...obvious robots with no sign of humanoid parts. They weren't hybrid, it was all mechanic. In a crowd of mostly green aliens, they stood out pretty strongly in the middle of the business district. "They look like they're scanning for something."
Alura looked around for anything particularly menacing. While she was an expert in hand-to-hand combat and could teleport out of a sticky situation, she had no real experience in fighting robots. Not to mention, there was absolutely no logical reason for them to be scanning for anything with hostile intentions in the middle of some innocent slums in a random Namekian port-city.
One of the two large mechs gazed it's leering red eyes towards Chuck's bar-shack and stopped scanning. Chuck immediately tensed, which caused Alura to raise up off of her stool, as if being prepared to run for it. The robot that had caught her in it's crosshairs made some kind of gesture to it's partner, which caused both of the drones to look her way. Nobody else in the market seemed to care that these two giant mechs were glaring right at Chuck's shack, or at the only blue alien in the area.
"Look out!" Chuck warned, but it was a second too late. The bright red laser blasted from the front of the single circular eye, completely shattering the bottom of the market-stand. Alura managed to dive sideways as the entire wooden bar crumbled into itself, the ensuing explosion hurling Chuck backwards into his kitchen.
Without thinking, Alura thought about Earth, intending to teleport away as quickly as possible. A sharp electrical shock zapped that idea, causing her to spasm and fall from her knees to her side, trembling. When she looked up, one of those massive hulking droids was standing over it, once again scanning her scaly body with it's red eye.
She was confused, to say the least. She could hear Chuck in the background after recovering from the blast, but she never did see what had happened to the humble android. About a moment after trying to teleport, one of the robotic arms came down and cracked her in the face.
All went black.