《Imaginary Railroads》chapter nineteen
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(“What's the plan, Luna?,” asked Gen. He held his dice in his hand.
“I plan for Jumbo to eat anyone who tries to get close, before we make our escape,” said Rabbit. “Hopefully Jeeves will be able to get away with our guy so we can keep questioning him.”
“How far away are the rest of us?,” asked Cyrus. “Should we be helping Luna, or trying to deal with the Skulljacks before they get their retaliation?”
“Is this their retaliation?,” asked Itchy. “I did help the one guy survive. He might have called everybody on his contact list and sent them after our guy while Rabbit was taking him down.”
“Good point,” said Cyrus. “Are we all converging on Luna?”
“Luna didn't have time to tell us about Buckshot, did she?,” asked Cyrus.
“No, she didn't,” said Gen. “The bad guys showed up before she could make the call.”
“I think we should help Rabbit out, figure out where Buckshot is, and see if he knows anything about the guy hiring the Pythons to hit people,” said Itchy.
“Do we know where she is?,” asked Kay.
“I know where she should be trolling,” said Itchy. He pointed to the highlighted section of the city. “I don't know where she would be exactly, but I should be close enough to hear gunshots.”
“Fox will be coming from her clinic, but I don't think she would be hurrying,” said Kay. “She might have if she thought Luna would get into trouble.”
“The great and mighty Luna doesn't get into trouble,” said Rabbit. “She crushes it with her great and mighty monsters.”
“I think Ultraman would be flying into the city from the Tower to take care of business,” said Cyrus. “He is definitely monitoring any net calls for reports of trouble that might involve the others.”
“Sana is stuck at the Tower until he can regain some of his strength,” said Ken. “I burnt a lot of points on stopping the hurricane.”
“It's okay,” said Cyrus. “We can handle this rescue well enough, we're going to need your location spell when your character has the points again. I think that will be the fastest way to track him down.”
“I'll need something he owns to cast the spell,” said Ken.
“I don't think Luna got anything to help with that except whatever she could get from her prisoner,” said Rabbit. “The great and mighty Luna I am saying.”
“We'll work on that,” said Cyrus. “We might have to round up everybody on the ground for the police to deal with while we look for him.”
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“How do we stop this war from continuing?,” asked Kay. “That seems the next card we should be concentrating on.”
“We need to take prisoners and squeeze them until they give us something,” said Itchy.
“I think Itchy is right,” said Cyrus. “We can use his streetwise to point us at the next level of things until we settle everything down.”
“It looks like it's time for the Fox Fireball until we have something,” said Kay.
“Luna is going to have to fight five minutes without you guys,” said Gen. “She might be able to get a win before someone shoots her.”
“How many rounds is that?,” asked Rabbit.
“Four rounds in a minute. Five times four is twenty. Twenty rounds, Rabbit,” said Ken.
“This is going to be over in two,” said Rabbit. “The great and mighty Luna has said it.”
“You get to take the first action,” said Gen. “Obviously a giant slime busting a house open is cause for surprise.”
“How many cars decided to show up?,” asked Rabbit.
“Three,” said Gen. He placed the cars on the street in a rough triangle. “They're really close to the house.”
“I'm going to have Jumbo jump on the top of the closest one,” said Rabbit. “He weighs a couple of tons. That should do some damage.”
“Death by pumpkin,” said Itchy.
“A great and mighty pumpkin is what you should have said,” said Rabbit. She dropped the dice to see how much damage her minion did to the car.
“That's a quarter of the car's damage,” said Gen. “It's enough to dent the roof down on the guys inside and flatten the tires.”
“One car down,” said Rabbit. “Let's see what we can do about the rest.”
“Roll initiative,” said Gen.)
The gangsters started getting out of their cars after watching a giant slime squash one of their vehicles under its vast weight. They started pulling weapons to shoot at the beast.
Luna directed Jumbo to jump on the next car. He came down on it and crushed the passenger compartment. He missed the four guys fleeing the vehicle.
The gangsters opened fire on the giant slime. They couldn't miss. He leaped at the closest group of humans with a squeaking roar of fury. They went down under his weight, but he was full of holes and leaking everywhere.
Luna had Jumbo drop her behind a car and dismissed him as the remaining four guys took cover themselves.
She would teach these clowns what it meant to hurt her Jumbo.
She could only summon one slime at a time. Bullets whined around her cover, blasting out the windows and ripping up the tires. She threw a slime back at the nearest shooter. The slime landed and blew up. The guy went flying from the blast.
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Luna cackled as she tried to spot the last three. Maybe they wanted flying lessons too. She readied a bomb slime as she looked.
The three survivors shot at her car again, flattening the tires and putting holes in the engine. None of that came close to where she hid.
Luna told the slime to walk over and deal with one of the thugs as she readied another one. All she had to do was keep out of sight until the slime bounced over and did its job.
The three survivors decided the best thing was withdrawal. They started slipping from cover to cover to keep her from blowing them up.
The suicide bomber slime bounced after the one in the rear. It was going to do something to one of them. It was in its inner jelly. The gangster saw the little monster at the last moment and tried to dodge. He flew into the window of a clothing store and mannequins fell on top of him.
“The great and mighty Luna always wins,” Luna said. She cackled.
Sirens brought her back to reality. She could not be caught at the scene of a massacre. The police would try to strip her of her outlaw status and clothes. She had to get away before they arrived.
She dismissed the unused bomber. She wasn't going to use it on the authority unless she had to do that. She summoned a slime a little bigger than Jeeves. She ordered it to carry her away after her right hand minion before the police arrived.
She pulled out her phone and called the others to let them know to avoid the area. She wasn't sure about Fox, but Vizor and Ultraman were wanted by the authority despite what they did to help out others.
The fact they were active and helping others against the oppression that covered the city seemed to be the only reason they were wanted, unless they were also making the authority look bad like Luna did when she wanted to do good deeds.
Luna didn't like to do good deeds often, but her friends acted to keep her from doing things they considered beneath her.
Blowing up fast food workers that couldn't get her vegan burger right was high on their do not do list, even if it was justified.
Ultraman dropped out of the sky. He floated beside the bouncing slime, hands behind his back.
Fox stepped out of a shadow, white kimono and mask marking her under a street light. She looked like a ghost.
“What trouble are you causing now?,” Fox asked. She kept her hands in her sleeves to better resist throttling the summoner.
“I took a prisoner and then these malcontents showed up, and then the great and mighty Luna had to show her displeasure at having her questioning interrupted by these malcontents,” said Luna. “Jumbo was hurt, but he showed them what happened to cars that he didn't like.”
“They fled?,” asked Fox.
“Some,” said Luna. “Some were unable after we were done with them.”
“Initial police reports have identified the attackers as the rival gang,” said Ultraman. “This looks like retaliation for what happened at the bar that Vizor told us about.”
“One gang shoots, then the other shoots back,” said Fox. “Gang war starts.”
“But they didn't shoot at the others because he was a Skulljack,” said Luna. “My prisoner said it was a contract on the guy they shot at. Their chief was hired to do it.”
“Why?,” asked Fox.
“He didn't know,” said Luna. “I was going to ask him some more questions but I had to send him away with Jeeves.”
“We should find Jeeves and our prisoner and let the police clean up the scene,” said Ultraman. “They put out a bulletin for Luna. They want to bring her in for destroying property.”
“How do you know that?,” asked Luna.
“Radio built into my mask,” said Ultraman. “Let's get away from here before they widen the dragnet. We don't need to be fighting the police when we can just walk away.”
“Go ahead,” said Fox. “I want to see if I can talk to one of the Skulljacks. Maybe we can pass the word around that this was a deliberate hit. That might make them stop looking at the Pythons and go to ground.”
“They fled on foot toward the Kanan River,” said Luna. She pointed back the way she had come. “I had to let the last two go so I wouldn't get into a fight with the cops.”
“Thank you,” said Fox. “Let's see what I can do to restore the peace.”
She faded into the darkness of the night.
“The great and mighty Luna has to learn how to do that,” said Luna.
“Let's fly,” said Ultraman. He picked Luna up and leaped into the sky.
“This is great,” said Luna. She cackled happily.
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A Titan's Crusade
Erik Thayne spent most of his life being brutally ridiculed and tormented for his weight and physical appearance, among other things. A social pariah and diagnosed with an eating disorder no one has an explanation or treatment for, Erik spent years trying to overcome his issues with his personal image and escape the ridicule and vicious torment of his peers. After years of dedicated effort, and a fresh start in a town away from his childhood and adolescent tormentors, he had finally begun to truly realize what he'd been striving for all along. Only, fate apparently has other plans because in the blink of an eye, Erik found himself snatched from Earth and taken to another universe, another world, where he is offered the chance to be more than he'd ever imagined. Now, he has to fight to restore the Balance between Chaos and Order on a world of swords and magic, in a universe governed by the System's laws, which resemble those of RPGs from Earth. Erik learned to embrace the things about himself that others taught him to hate, using them to reforge his physical identity into something more removed from his old self-loathing. But can he learn to embrace the darkest parts of his mind just as he did the reviled aspects of his body and become who he needs to be to succeed in the task set before him? It might just prove easier to stalk in the dark as a monster than to walk in the light as a man... *This is my first time publishing anything I've written to a public audience. Due to formatting issues, I forwent traditional stat-screens for something a little less problematic, delineating stat screens by separating them from regular text with horizontal lines in a lighter-grey coloration. Let me know if you like them or not. Criticism is entirely welcome, but please don't hate on my work after only reading 1 chapter. This is a writing project I intend to complete but I have committment problems so we'll see how long this goes on. Also, fair warning, as the description implies, the main protagonist is intended to be someone who has been treated cruelly, developed antisocial tendencies, and ultimately has to question his own humanity--or lack thereof. This story is not intended to be brutally dark but I will definitely be trying to follow a darker theme. It is intended to be violent and some scenes later in the story might be...alarming. There will likely also be some light, non-graphic (think more implied with crude jokes and conversation than actual details, there will be no full-blown sex scenes)relationship scenes planned later and if you're opposed to either a bisexual or gay main character, stay away. I haven't yet decided which way he's going to swing but the odds on him being straight are relatively miniscule, and I've always wanted to write a story about a gay man who basically looks like a lumberjack because who doesn't like giving conventional stereo-types the middle finger? This will NOT be a harem story, and I have no intention to focus on romance over action--it's a consequence of character development where I'm concerned, not the be-all-end-all of the story. The cover-art does not, in any way, belong to me. It was an image titled the Druid King (by duskanmarkovic according to the file name) which I found on Google Images. Until I can get something commissioned, this is the best stand-in image I could find.
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