“Alright, here’s the rules,” Left said as Right hung up the net which had been suspiciously hidden behind the disabled Replicator flagship this entire time.

Now that Perry’s anger had cooled a bit from the name-calling, he was starting to get the suspicion that these guys just wanted to play volleyball, had absolutely no idea how to go about asking people, and were willing to give up on a six million dollar piece of hardware in order to pressure people into accepting. There was no way they’d been combing the beach long enough to know ‘the laws of the beach’. Today was the second day after high tide. There was only one other opportunity, and they obviously weren’t old enough to have been here last High Tide. They were making it up.

So…They’re rich, overconfident, socially awkward, and naive?

That about summed it up.

That is a laundry list of character defects. Some of which are going to be rectified today. Perry was still pretty steamed, even if it had chilled from murderous to simply vindictive.

“No tech, no powers, game is to fifteen points, winner gets the battery.” Left continued, unable to see Perry’s machinations behind his aluminum helmet. “Mechsuit has to play because he wants the part. Second teammate is up to you.”

“Deal,” Hardcase said, her modulated voice severe.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Perry asked Hardcase.

“I want that battery,” Hardcase said.

“Yeah but…” you’re buying into the narrative that they’ve established. There’s literally no Law of the Beach. The moment you agree to their terms you’re already at a disadvantage.

If two guys practiced their poses, you can bet they practiced their volleyball game.

“Good luck, I guess,” Perry said with a shrug. It was too much effort to explain it to Hardcase in just a few seconds, and likely to land on deaf ears.

Hardcase’s cockpit opened with a his, the armored exterior opening to allow natural sunlight to enter. The panel swung away to reveal Hardcase adjusting a domino mask before she climbed out of the cockpit and onto the ground.

Hardcase stood about four foot nine, had long, thick black hair tied in a braid, and faint freckles peeking out from behind the domino mask.

She was also wearing a blue one-piece swimsuit that didn’t cover much of her butt or sides.

Not bad, Perry thought internally. Hardcase was small but proportional. The swimsuit seemed like a bit of a daring choice for someone who’d been fairly reserved in every interaction Perry’d ever had with her.

People will surprise you, I guess.

“We were going to the beach!” She protested as everyone stared at her. “I thought we might hang out for a while in the safe area once we were done beach combing, and I might need a swimsuit, okay!?”

“Oh. You’re a girl.” Right said, freezing in place.

“Is that a problem!?” Hardcase demanded.

“No. No, it’s cool, it’s cool.” The two power-suits protested hastily.

“Are you gonna come out of your suits or what?” Hardcase demanded before rounding on her companions. “Who’s playing with me?”

“I’d love to help you babe, but I suck at volleyball, so…” Warcry said with a shrug.

“Wraith, if you wouldn’t mind…” Perry said. Heather had always been the more physical of the two.

“I’m gonna flush these turds.” Heather said, hitting the release latch on her armor and stepping out into the sand, squishing it happily between her toes.

Heather was wearing a two-piece bikini a couple shades darker than her hair.

“Am I the only one wearing normal clothes under my armor?” Paradox asked.

“It’s the beach,” Wraith said with a shrug. “You’re the weird one in this scenario.”

“Wow, um…are you guys all girls?” Left asked.

“Yes.” Paradox said, a vindictive plan beginning to surface in his mind. Warcry gave him a sideways glance, but Wraith and Hardcase were too focused to pay attention.

“Get down here and get ready to lose, you punks,” Heather said.

The two expensive armors opened up to reveal…

Teenage nerds who were more skin and bone than anything else, their skin blindingly pale in the afternoon sun.

They too, were wearing swim-trunks and domino masks.

This is ridiculous! Nobody is going swimming! Perry protested in his mind. Swimming in the ocean was sort of dangerous in the best of times, and right now it was freakin’ suicidal.

Still, that beacon of sanity in the dark abyss of teen madness had nothing to do with Perry’s plan for payback.

…Although, it was a good choice to pencil in a swimming pool at the motel.

Perry was momentarily distracted from his vendetta by Hardcase’s swimsuit and the possibility of seeing her in it on a more frequent basis.

“You know, I just realized, we don’t get anything if we win,” Left said.

“That’s right, I mean, the battery already belongs to us,” Right said.

“How about this, if we win, you girls get to go on a date with us.”

Perry didn’t think he could roll his eyes harder without snapping them off.

Back to our regularly scheduled vendetta.

If the disgust on Heather’s face was anything to go by, these guys were about to lose a game of volleyball.

But Perry didn’t plan on taking any chances.

“We didn’t get your names. Do you refer to yourselves individually as the Dynamic Duo?” Perry asked.

“Maximum Overdrive,” Left said, flexing nonexistent muscles.

“Terminal Velocity,” Right said, posing as well.

I’m just gonna keep calling them Left and Right.

“Hardcase,” Hardcase said.

“Wraith,” Heather said.

“Warcry,” Warcry finished for them.

Perry glanced over at their armors, chest-pieces folded out to reveal the guts of the machine.

“Wow, is that dead-gel in there?” Perry asked. Dead-gel was a Tinker tech that absorbed and diffused an insane amount of force, allowing the person inside to ride out shockwaves and blunt force relatively unscathed.

Perry could probably do the same with oobleck.

“You’ve got good eyes, babe,” Right said. “That stuff cost a pretty penny, but it’s worth it. Not only does it protect, it’s also modified to keep the user a comfortable seventy degrees no matter what.”

“These things are really top of the line,” Perry said, moving closer to the suits and peering in. “Is this a shield generator? I’m so jealous!”

“Yeah, it’s pretty tight,” Left said, smirking. “The armor’s made out of an advanced ceramic put together by nanobots with graphene filiments strewn throughout that act both as structural reinforcement, processing and wiring. It can learn and grow as the connections form, and the exterior plating is immune to any form of radiation.”

“Yeah, any kind of tinker ray you can imagine, it’ll just bounce right off of it,” Right said. “Lasers, shrink rays, death rays, you name it.”

“Sounds like these things are a work of art,” Perry said, genuinely sorry to destroy good armor owned by bad people.

“Hell yeah, baby, maybe I’ll give you a ride in it sometime.”

Then again…

Click.

Melt.EXE

The two flamboyant armors collapsed into puddles in the sand.

Perry glanced over at the two kids staring at the colorful puddles on the ground.

“Wow, It’s a good thing I managed to stop that prawn before it got to you,” Perry said, pointing at an obviously dead Prawn mostly buried in the muck and covered in sand, some fifty yards distant.

“Shame your suits were in the way. I figured they were immune to Tinker rays based on what you said, but I guess not.”

You’re in my narrative now, Jerks!

A thin, reedy whine emanated from Right’s slack mouth while Left swallowed a lump of heartache, his expression the picture of grief.

Heather picked up on the narrative shift quick, breaking into a malicious grin.

“Quick reactions, Paradox, It’s a good thing you didn’t let that monster sneak up on us while we were playing volleyball. We could’ve been seriously injured. Even killed. You saved everyone.”

“Nice save, Paradox,” Warcry said with matching venom.

Hardcase seemed lost.

“But…umm…what – was there actually a prawn attacking?” She asked, glancing around nervously.

“What-you-what the you-how,” Left spluttered, impotent rage beginning to boil over.

Perry basked in it, breathed it in like ambrosia.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe now. You guys can go back to your volleyball game.” Perry said. “Just to be perfectly clear though, we’re taking the battery. And you’re not getting a date.”

“You wretched – you attacked us, and now you’re trying to rob us!”

“I don’t think you’ve seen me attack you.”

Perry’s Big Friendly Swords swooped down from above and penned the two in like a gigantic pair of scissors that would have no difficulty whatsoever snipping them in half.

“Would you like to?” Perry asked.

The silence was deafening as they stared each other down.

“Run, little piggies,” Perry’s modulated voice rumbled out of his helmet, his swords scraping against each other as they closed around the two.

That was all it took to break their bravado, and the two teens began sprinting toward the wall.

“That was cold, Paradox.” Heather said, nodding. “I approve.”

“You’ll regret this!” Left shouted over his shoulder as he ran.

“The dynamic duo never forgets a slight!”

Perry did regret it, and much sooner than he’d anticipated.

When the Dynamic Duo was about a hundred feet away, the sand of the beach burst upwards as a damaged Replicator hauled itself out of the damp seafloor, towering over the naked Tinkers.

Left and Right skidded to a halt and began backpedalling as the mud refused to hold them upright.

“Shit.” Perry muttered, lunging forward before the sand even cleared, his jets sending up a spray of sand and mud as he tore along the ground. Having disarmed them, Perry viscerally felt that their safety was his responsibility.

“EEEK!” Hardcase squealed, backpedalling towards the safety of her mechsuit.

“Crap!” Heather bolted forward, heedless of her abandoned power armor. Seemingly without conscious thought, her legs lengthened as she ran, giving her inhuman speed.

“YES!” Warcry bellowed in exaltation, riding a wave of neon purple energy into the sky.

“Oh god, oh god,” Left was muttering, even paler than before as his friend tried to pull him out of the mud he’d fallen in.

The massive replicator was missing an arm, arcs of electricity snapping from its ruined stub. The creature’s armor was torn asunder revealing the damaged circuitry and engines that had taken the place of a living creature’s organs. Its sensors were cracked atop it’s massive bronze-colored head shaped like a bunker, and a long prawn mandible was embedded in the creature’s skull.

The replicator’s remaining skeletal limb was deceptively thin, but absolutely massive when compared to the cowering Tinkers in front of it. The robot’s head swiveled a hundred and sixty degrees to peer down at the sounds coming from beneath it.

The robot’s arm, longer than Left and Right standing on top of each other, rose above its head as it carried out its End-Of-Life Protocol.

When a replicator knew it wasn’t going to survive, it didn’t hesitate to take as many enemies of it’s species down with it as possible. And they were a lot smarter than prawns.

“Get back!” Perry shouted, his Big Friendly Swords arriving before he did, catching the lumbering machine’s metallic arm and pinning it above its head.

The creature spun in place, the joint in its restrained arm able to make a 360 degree turn without difficulty, bringing its other arm to bear with the intention of frying the hapless dudebro wannabes.

Thankfully, they had managed to scramble backwards when he’d caught the arm, and were just a few feet out of the robot’s range.

Perry set Melt.EXE to a tight beam so he didn’t hit bystanders and fired a shot.

The robot reacted with stunning swiftness, moving out of the way barely a blink of an eye after the spell had begun, it’s reaction time nearly incomprehensible.

Most of Perry’s shot went wide, possibly ruining some beachgoers day.

The creature slipped out of Perry’s hold and tapped its side, where he’d softened the metal a bit, before looking back up at him.

The few functional sensors remaining in the robot’s ‘head’ constricted, focusing on Perry’s arm.

“Oh cra-“

IIIIIII

The silver bowl’s resonant frequency blasted out of the robot’s body, focused and highly directed, causing the spellframe to explode against Perry’s arm.

HP: 2

Perry bobbed and weaved as a massive metal arm whipped past where he’d been standing. When he got a moment, he peered at his arm. The armor had been punctured by an exploding bit of silver, a testament to the sheer amount of energy that had been injected into it.

Or more likely some softening took place when the sound travelled through the part of the armor that holds the Flacidity mixture. I can’t see silver making it through the armor otherwise.

An unforeseen weakness, but making it so that the mixture is created on demand would add unnecessary extra cast time.

Solution: Add sound insulation to the container.

“WHOOO!” Wraith shouted, jumping high in the air, aiming for the robot’s face.

It smacked Heather out of the air, her spine wrenching violently, and for a heartstopping moment, Perry thought his friend was dead.

Then she wrapped around the arm and started crawling up it like a snake, cackling all the while.

The robot, unimpressed, touched Heather’s stretched out body to its damaged arm.

“OW!”

The electricity caused Heather to snap back to solidity an instant before getting punted far into the distance, arms flailing as she screamed, her bikini fluttering to the seabed.

Huh.

“Heads up!” Warcry shouted from above.

The energy-wielder rode a massive sheet of purple energy down into the robot. The creature dodged, losing a foot to the energy guillotine and firing back with a backhand.

Perry interposed his swords, but the replicator bulled right through them, catching Warcry in the abdomen.

The swords and hyperweave absorbed a majority of the blow, but Warcry still went flying.

The robot peered down at its missing foot and adapted instantly.

It adopted a terrifying, lurching two-legged gait involving its good leg and arm, aiming for the unarmored pair, head sticking off the side like ornamentation.

It’s algorithm recognized that they would be the easiest to finish off before it died, and had prioritized them.

Perry grabbed the two with his beach-combing armaments and played keep-away, putting himself directly in front of the machine’s charge.

Perry’s armor might be tougher, stronger, and more powerful pound for pound than the machine by a large margin…

But the thing had quite a few pounds on him.

Perry braced his back with one sword while attacking the robot’s exposed core with the other.

BANG!

The robot’s wounded foot clubbed him hard, sending him reeling, but the massive blade reinforcing his back prevented him from going flying like the others.

When Perry’s vision cleared from the hit, he spotted his massive sword stuck deep into the creature’s torso.

It must not have been instantly fatal, because the machine was still moving, but it was now leaking glowing goop everywhere it went.

That can’t be healthy.

The heavily-damaged robot looked up at the two jerks floating high above in Perry’s magical collection bin, peering over the edge in terror.

It looked at Perry’s sword floating beside him, made of an identical material.

It looked at Perry.

It knew it wouldn’t be able to get to the easy prey if it didn’t go through him first. So that’s what it decided to do. The lumbering bot the size of a small bus began sprinting towards him on its two good limbs.

Now that I have your undivided attention…

Perry weaponized his HP.

If he could take force equivalent to a cannon, then didn’t that imply he could survive being a cannonball?

Perry turned every jet to max and flung himself wildly at the charging bot.

BANG!

HP: 1

Perry’s body didn’t rupture violently as his inertia did a paste-making about-face, but he did lose one HP.

Don’t try this at home kids.

The robot staggered back, but it’s reactions were as quick as ever, and it snatched up Perry’s face in the middle of it’s stumble, aiming to crush his head in its grip before it had even recovered its balance.

Perry brought his sword down on the creature’s wrist, forcing the single bladed buster sword down even harder by pushing the cutting blade with the back of the other one.

Perry and the creature’s arm were crushed into the sand by the force of the blow.

Perry stumbled back. The hand was disconnected but it was locked in place around his head.

“Watch out!” Hardcase’s modulated voice shouted and perry jumped back blindly.

Out of the corner of his helmet, he saw Hardcase’s mechsuit crush the robot into the mud, bringing the heavyweight to counter the robot’s heavy weight.

“Now!” Hardcase shouted, leaping aside.

The robot was unable to pull itself out of the muck before Warcry’s powerful blast bisected it once, twice, three times before the young energy user was satisfied.

Severely weakened replicator pawn defeated! +50XP

Perry panted with exertion. Despite the fight only lasting maybe thirty seconds, it felt like he’d just run a marathon.

And it busted my spellframe. Dangit.

Perry had heard replicators were quick on their feet, but experiencing it was a completely different thing.

If the robot had any inkling that Perry’s suit wasn’t pressure-wave proofed, it would’ve used the same technique to paste him inside his suit.

Really gotta get started on a Mk.III, Perry thought as he sat down to catch his breath.

“That was awesome!” Left shouted as he lowered them to the ground.

“We’re still mad at you though.” Right said, crossing his arms.

“Yeah, we rescind the date offer for Paradox. The other girls are welcome though.”

“I’m a dude,” Perry said.

“You LIED to us!?” Right demanded, aghast with honest-to god indignation.

“Why do you get to hang out with three cute girls and we-“

“Get the heck outta here!” Perry growled, pointing at the wall.

The two Tinkers yelped and ran.

“What’d I miss?” Heather asked, arriving in her armor.

“Warcry finished it off.”

Heather sighed and clenched her fists. “I need practice. I sucked. Barely did anything.”

“I dunno, it was pretty impressive you’re still alive after taking two hits from that thing with zero armor. He literally kicked you out of your bikini. Normal person would be pasted.”

“No, that was more the shapeshifting’s fault than the kick.”

“Ah,” Perry thought about it. Mom mentioned Morph having a similar power. “Maybe we can get on Youtube and watch some of Morph’s fights and you can practice moves on me?”

“Sounds good.”

“Paradox!” Hardcase shouted, her mech pointing out towards the ocean.

The pile of scrap they collected was slowly being consumed by the incoming tide. Beyond that, Hardcase’s hard-won battery was mere feet away from being submerged.

“I’d say it’s about time to head in for the night,” Perry said, scooping up all the scrap he could with the massive bin while his grabbers unscrewed the quantum foam battery.

“Agreed,” Warcry said, casting a tense glance at the ocean.

In a matter of minutes where they stood would be underwater and teeming with prawns.

They snatched up their loot and starting running, making it back to the gate a mere fifteen minutes before it closed for good.