[MMK and GAVOK stand up and start jogging around the theater.]
MMK <Gryphon>, GAVOK <Zoner>: Hike, hike, hike, hike, hike, hike...
>down the dusty tarmac, and
> if we had tried it in daylight, even discounting the detection aspect,
> we'd have been sweating like pigs. As it was, we kept up a brisk
> walking pace that kept the chill off, and had a pleasant evening
> stroll,
S.D.: Awww... how romantic.
RACE <Gryphon>: I'm a self-important Godboy who enjoys long walks along dusty tarmacs in the dead of the night...
>if you disregard the nerve-shattering tension.
ARL <Gryphon>: We're going to miss Sanford and Son!
> It took us
> half an hour to reach the man door at the back of Building 19,
GAVOK <singing>: Make a belch and turn the nob! Open it and be a slob! Iiiiiiiit's the Man Door!
> and a
> minute ten for Meg to pick the cheap padlock in the dark.
> The hangar was dimly lit and smelled of dust, metal and stale
> kerosene,
MMK: Simon and Garfunkle were going to sing a song about it, but "rosemary" sounded better.
> and though it was enormous, it was entirely dominated by a
> single item.
> Unlike Zoner, I had never heard of the Bionic Six before
> meeting Meg. Living a sheltered life in the woods of Maine,
RACE: --raised by wild monkeys--
>not often
> watching the news, isolated from all but the most pervasive marketing
> efforts (hey, we missed 'Robotech', too), I'd never seen a picture of
> Sky Dancer, which, I think, made seeing the real aircraft there in
> front of me all the more impressive.
> It rather resembled a Concorde SST, though a bit blockier. I
> don't know how big a Concorde is, so I couldn't make a guess as to
> relative scale - I'm lousy at judging that kind of thing by eye
> anyway. It was, anyway, a big plane, longer than the Prince of
> Thebes, although with faster and less spacious lines. We did a slow
> walkaround, silently taking in the aircraft's graceful, sweeping
> lines, while Zoner's practiced eye examined the control surfaces and
> the ship in general for airworthiness. At length, after a complete
> lap around the plane, we stopped underneath the rather tall landing
> gear, near the nose.
> "Think you can get the belly ramp open?" Zoner asked Meg.
> "If they didn't change the security codes, I should be able
> to," she replied. She pushed back the sleeve of her uniform jacket -
> that wrist computer was back - and tapped a couple of keys. Then she
> frowned thoughtfully at the display for a moment, brightened, and
> tapped a few more.
S.D. <Meg>: It erased my FreeCell scores.
> Sky Dancer thought about it for a moment, and then the ramp
> began to descend. Zoner grinned, took off his uniform jacket,
> loosened his tie, and started up the ramp with Meg right after him. I
> followed, and stood near the back of the flight deck as Zoner strapped
> himself into the pilot's seat and Meg took co-pilot. I wasn't miffed;
> she knew the aircraft a hell of a lot better than me or Zoner, so the
> seating arrangement made sense.
ARL: So why in hell didn't Meg take the pilot's seat?
>I busied myself by finding a storage
> locker and tucking my tiki mask into it.
MMK: Tucking the tiki? Hey, that sounds pretty cool! Say it with me, Shady! Tucking the TIKI!!
S.D.: ...leave me out of your twisted mind games, Knight...
> She gave him a quick run-down of the controls as she
> remembered them, and Zoner's instincts took care of the rest.
> "This is a good instrument layout," he remarked. "Very
> intuitive, everything's well-marked and easy to reach. Ahead of its
> time."
> "Everything about us was ahead of its time," Meg replied, a
> bit wistfully.
> Zoner called up a full diagnostic on the center video display
> unit. "Looks like they stored her ready to run. Good, I was half
> afraid they'd have formally mothballed her."
> "We didn't have a support staff," Meg explained, "so they
> built her to be self-maintaining. Automated systems keep her ready to
> fly under pretty much any conditions."
> "Amazing," said Zoner. "Howard Hughes would've loved that
> system."
MMK: What was that about "Amazing" and "Howard"?
> "I think he invented it," said Meg. "I know he was on the
> project... " She looked momentarily alarmed, then sheepish. "Uh, you
> weren't supposed to hear that."
> "My lips," said Zoner with a smirk, "are sealed. Guess it's
> time to see if she'll start up."
> "Shouldn't we open the hangar doors?" I wondered.
> "Hmm... y'know, that might be a good idea," Zoner replied.
> "Yeah... I'm new at this whole aeronautics thing, but I kinda
> suspected that would be a useful thing to do."
ARL: God, can't he go for *five minutes* without being smarmy?
TBS: No. But that's what makes him so loveable!
[TBS giggles in a disturbingly high-pitched voice. ALL eye him warily.]
> I went back down the
> ramp and surveyed the huge door at the front of the hangar, hoping
> like hell I wouldn't have to open it by hand with a chain-fall or
> something equally obnoxious. But no, there was the power actuator
> control, in the corner - a typical industrial-green metal box with a
> green button and a red button.
TBS <announcer>: The red CANDY LIKE button! Will he hold out? Can he hold out?
GAVOK <Stimpy>: NO I CAN'T!
> I hit the green button a half-second before I noticed the
> security keypad in the shadows next to it, and a howling alarm
> promptly filled the hangar.
> "Ahh, shit!" is a fair summation of my reaction.
> I ran back up the ramp.
> "What the hell happened?" Zoner asked.
> "I fucked up," I replied. "The damn door control has a
> security keypad next to it and I didn't see it until it was too late."
> "Shit!" Zoner growled, his fingers flying over the controls.
MMK <fingers>: WHOOSH!
> "Well, let's hope she's ready to roll in a hurry. Think you can get
> that door open?"
> "I'll try," I replied, and ran back to the control. There
> wasn't time to be clever with it, so I grabbed the conduit running
> down the wall and into the keypad box and yanked it off. The wires
> sparked a bit,
S.D.: Frying Gryphon where he stood with 50,000 volts of electricity?
>graciously identifying the live lead for me.
[S.D. snaps her fingers.]
>I took it
> and its mate by the insulation, jammed them together, then hit the
> green button again and hoped.
RACE <Gryphon>: Please let Dr. Sam Beckett find his way home!
> Another siren joined its voice to the first, and a red
> strobing light filled the hangar as the door began to open. Still
> holding the leads together, I looked around the corner as the door
> swung up. A few hundred yards down the flightline, I could see
> headlights swerving out of the Building 9 garage, heading this way. I
> turned back and watched the door. Behind me, Sky Dancer's engines
> rumbled to life, and her flashing marker lights and whining engines
> added to the visual and aural cacophony.
> Zoner slid one of the cockpit windows back - a feature not to
> be found on the Concorde, I'd guess - and hollered, "That's good, we
> can clear it now!"
> I let go of the leads - and to my dismay, the door started
> closing again.
> "Ahh, shit!" I repeated, and pushed them back together.
> "What's wrong?" Zoner cried.
> "The goddamn door won't stay open unless I hold the leads!" I
> shouted back. "Go on, get going! I'll find my own way out!"
ARL: So he's going to sneak *out* of Area 51.
TBS: Yup.
ARL: ...a very high-security location.
TBS: Yup.
ARL: ...which is currently on full alert.
TBS: Yup.
ARL: ...on foot.
TBS: Yup.
ARL: ...and you're not paying attention.
TBS: Sure I am, Jak.
ARL: Excuse me?
TBS: I said- Oh! Right, sorry Arl.
RACE: Have you been seeing other compulsive nitpickers behind Arly's back, Snot?
> "Are you sure?" he replied.
> "Look, if you hang around, we'll -all- get caught, now get
> moving!"
MMK <Gryphon>: Besides... <Wolfgang> that's exactly as I planned it!
[RACE nearly chokes on his soda. ARL blinks.]
GAVOK: Retro *rules*!
MMK: Yeah, it does!
[MMK and GAVOK high-five.]
RACE: You were waiting for another Hutchins 'fic to appear just so you could use that line, weren't you?
MMK <^_^ing>: Mmmmmaybe.
TBS: Just when you thought it was safe, old catchphrases from ages long past sneak up on you like an angry midget wielding a fish.
[TBS nods sagely.]
> He looked at me for a long second, then nodded and closed the
> window. Sky Dancer's engines spooled up from a whine to a shriek, and
> she eased out of her place, rolling out onto the tarmac.
> The second her tail was clear, I let go of the leads and ran
> like hell for the other end of the hangar. There were a few crates
> lying around the periphery of the space that had once held Sky Dancer,
> but nothing big enough to hide among. Under the howl of the alarm I
> could hear the sirens of the approaching security vehicles, the squeal
> of tires on tarmac as they stopped outside. The door slammed down.
MMK <Door>: Dominos!
> One piece of good fortune, anyway - they probably wouldn't be able to
> open that one from outside now.
> I looked at the door we came in through, then immediately
> disregarded it. Air Police, or worse,
ARL: Joan Rivers.
GAVOK: TWO Air Police!
> would be coming through that
> door any second now. Struggling to keep calm, I looked around for
> another escape. Outside, I heard gunfire, then the roar of Sky
> Dancer's engines as Zoner threw in the afterburners and took off. It
> occurred to me that they probably didn't know anyone had been left
> behind.
> Then I spotted it - a manhole, no, more like a storm drain
> grate, set in the middle of the hangar floor. It must have been put
> there to provide drainage in case aircraft were washed inside the
> hangar or some such. I didn't know if it would offer an escape route,
> but at the very least, if I could get it open, it represented a place
> to hide. I knew there was no way it ran off base.
S.D.: Well, you snuck into a military base, went through a room full of crates... may as well try it. You've hit every other point on the first-person shooter cliche checklist...
> That only worked
> in the movies, in real life they never did something as stupid as
> running a drain tunnel to the outside world.
GAVOK <Gryphon>: But then I remembered, "I write this!" and teleported to Disney World.
> But I figured at least
> it would give me a lead on the APs, and some distance from ground
> zero.
> I was lifting the grate out of place when the door we came in
> through opened, but only one man came in. To my shock, it was even a
> man I recognized, and as he spotted me, the same startled recognition
> flowered in his own eyes.
> Captain William F. Guile, USAF.
LOONS: Hi, Bucky!
> Former test pilot, now a sort
> of free-range security and intelligence agent attached to the Joint
> Special Forces Command. Charlie Nash's best friend - and a fellow
> holder of the World Warrior ranking in the World Circuit Martial Arts
> Tournament Series. We'd met a couple of times on the circuit, fought
> once back before either of us was a World Warrior. He won.
MMK <Gryphon>: ...I let him.
GAVOK <Gryphon>: ...with both hands tied behind my back.
RACE <Gryphon>: ...while I had the German flu.
> We stood there regarding each other for a few seconds, trying
> to figure out what to do next;
RACE <Guile, thinking>: Is my fly open?
TBS <Gryphon, thinking>: Should I tell him his fly is open?
> then Guile turned, leaned out of the
> doorway, and told someone I couldn't see that the hangar was deserted
> and that he'd secure it himself. Then he stepped back inside, closed
> the door, set the inside bolt lock, cracked a sardonic grin and spoke.
> What he said wasn't exactly comforting.
TBS <Guile>: They aren't releasing Rob Zombie's Night of a Thousand Corpses. Sorry.
> "Well, well," he said. "You, my friend, are in serious
> trouble."
MMK <Guile>: Go to your room!
> "Really."
TBS <Guile>: No! Not really!
[ALL laugh in a completely fake manner for a few seconds, then stop abruptly.]
> "Really," he replied. "I've suspected you and Zoner weren't
> all some of our intel people think you are ever since I found out you
> use the same style as M. Bison. Tell me, was it on his orders that
> you came here to steal Sky Dancer?"
> "Don't be an idiot," I replied scornfully. "I've never even
> -met- M. Bison, and if I did I'd do my damnedest to take him down.
> We're students of the same master,
ARL: Which is exactly why your fighting style is so similar to Rose's and Bison's. Right.
> but we're not on the same path."
> "So why is it you're the one who's breached security at one of
> the most tightly guarded places in the United States? And by
> impersonating an officer, too. That's a serious offense in and of
> itself."
> I shook my head. "This is above your level, Guile.
S.D. <Gryphon>: We're doing it in Zoner's pursuit of [NOOKIE]. [NOOKIE] rules all.
> It's not
> your job to interfere with an operation you don't need to know about."
> "It -is- my job to enforce the security of this base," replied
> Guile evenly.
RACE: So he replies in the same style as the top of his hair.
> "I don't care what you claim you're up to, it can't be
> legitimate if it involves breaking into and out of Area 51."
> "You've got a lot of repressed feelings, don't you, Guile?" I
> observed. "Must be what keeps your hair up."
> "You aren't funny, bud," replied Guile, flat and humorless as
> always.
ARL: It's like he's *reading my mind.*
> I could see the uncertainty in his eyes, though. He was
> wavering... I just had to find the right key.
> I sighed. "Don't be such a hardass, Guile! This thing is
> way over your bushy head, and if you take me in, when the paper
> chase is over the only fingers pointing anywhere will be pointing at
> -you-."
ARL: How, exactly? The entire thing is set up so that it winds back on itself. Ignoring that, you're *still* a civilian that impersonated an officer to sneak into a top-secret military base.
> "It's my job," he repeated, firmer.
> "Ahh," I replied, gesturing dismissively. "Do me a favor.
> Show a fellow World Warrior some professional courtesy."
> Guile snorted. "Some World Warrior. You got into the bracket
> by beating up on a teenage girl."
> "You've obviously never met Cammy," I replied. "And while
> we're on the subject, which of us was it that got his ass kicked by
> Chun Li last month?"
> Guile flushed angrily.
MMK <Guile>: Stupid turd! Go away! Crap, where's the plunger?
> "She's no girl," he said darkly. "I'm
> not 100% sure she's human."
> "You are -such- a paranoid," I replied. "What is she, then, a
> warrior android from the Hunan Galaxy?"
> "Forget it," Guile said. "I was trying to make a joke."
GAVOK <Cameron Poe>: Thanks for telling me.
> "Oh. Y'know, it would help you get that message across if you
> were to smile."
> "I'm on duty," replied Guile stolidly.
> "Of course." I sighed. "Look, I'm not going to just let you
> take me in. I've got things to do, and they don't include spending
> time in the cooler at Area 51. Frankly, the sooner I'm out of this
> desert the happier I'll be."
> "You don't have any choice. You're under arrest."
GAVOK <Gryphon>: But I don't like that! I prefer Oh! My Goddess!"
[OTHERS groan.]
> I rolled my eyes. "All right, fine. If you want to handle
> this like we're back in fifth grade, fine."
ARL <Gryphon>: You and your "federal laws" and your "fraud" and your "breaking and entering"... well I'll have you know...
> I took off my uniform
> jacket and threw it aside, loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and
MMK <Gryphon>: ...tucked my Tiki.
> stepped toward Guile, settling into a ready stance. He narrowed his
> eyes at me and readied himself as well.
> On the occasions I'd had to watch him fight, I'd formed the
> opinion that Guile's style was mainly generic Special Forces training,
ARL: Because being in the Special Forces teaches you how to toss around fireballs and leap several feet into the air with flying kicks.
> with a smattering of what looked like Muay Thai he'd picked up while
> stationed out that way - that is to say, lots of knee and elbow
> attacks, most of them cheap shots. He was faster than me, but that's
> not all that uncommon.
MMK: Being a cube and all.
> I was pretty confident I could handle him, as
> long as I stayed clear of his elbows.
> He sidled toward me, fists up in a boxing guard, shoulders
> rolling, and shot a jab at my face; I weaved a bit to the left and
> launched a snap kick at his knees. It didn't do much damage, but it
> pushed him back a little bit; undaunted, he used the extra room for a
> roundhouse kick. I blocked it with a flared forearm, feinted, and
> swung into a three-punch combo, left jab-right hook-left uppercut,
> unloading the flare in my left fist on the uppercut. All three
> landed, and Guile stumbled back a step.
> "SONIC - BOOM!" he shouted, bringing his fists across in front
> of him in a sweeping crossover that
MMK: --spanned all of the company's May titles.
>threw a dazzling arc of energy at
> me.
S.D.: Note to self: If I ever get caught in some sort of bizzare fighting game-based world, I will *not* shout the names of attacks as I perform them. Warrior tradition be damned, it's cheesy.
> Hmph. Where'd he figure out how to do -that-?
ARL: Charlie.
> Maybe they teach
> it to everybody in the Joint Forces Task Group.
> I tried to jump over it,
ARL: Instead of doing something sensible, like ducking under it or employing the THIRD FREAKING DIMENSION!!
TBS: He can travel through space?
ARL: HE COULD HAVE *SIDE-STEPPED* IT, SNOT!!
TBS: Okay, okay...
> but a little too late; it caught me
> in the ankles like a clothesline and hurled me to the tarmac
> face-first. I hadn't quite roused enough neurons to get up after that
> when he thumped me in the middle of the back, which seized up my lungs
> for a second and hurt like hell. That was good; it made me mad, which
> is the surest way I know of to clear out the cobwebs.
RACE: ...for when Benjamin Hutchins gets mad, a startling transformation takes place...
> I scrambled
> sideways to my feet and launched my double kick at him, left, right,
> two solid hits, and it was -his- turn to sprawl.
> I was tempted to give him a good stomping while he was down
> there, but I try to avoid doing stuff like that to anyone who hasn't
> -really- ticked me off, and he hadn't earned it yet. So I let him get
> back to his feet in peace, and we more or less started over. The
> glint in his eyes had changed a little since we started. I'd like to
> think the new element I saw was respect, but it might also have been
> annoyance.
> He came at me with a double-punch-and-knee combination which I
> mostly avoided, taking the punches glancingly on my shoulders and
> blocking the knee completely;
ARL: ...and while we're on the subject-
RACE: We weren't on any subject.
ARL: We are now. What's with the whole "blocking" thing? Sure, you're raising your arms to keep from getting a knee to the face, but don't most forms of martial arts teach you anything about parrying attacks?
MMK: Gryph can't parry attacks.
ARL: Why?
MMK: He's in the wrong Groove.
ARL: ...
> while I was busy doing that, though, he
> caught me in the side of the head with an elbow that almost dropped me
> back to the ground. I stumbled and he followed up by sweeping my feet
> from under me; I fell face-first.
> Guile hadn't expected me to recover so fast, though; I caught
> myself on my hands and turned the facefault into a handspring, and
> brought my doubled fists down squarely on the top of his flattop
> hairdo with a resounding KLONK that smacked his teeth together.
TBS: Didn't muss his hair one bit, though.
> He
> stumbled back a step, and I helped him back with a flat-palm to the
> middle of his chest that knocked him over with a deep "whoof" of
> out-knocked wind.
> He was a quick recoverer, too; he caught himself on one hand
> and did a spiffy pommel-horse-like spin that was supposed to be a leg
> sweep, except I saw it in time and jumped over it. Then he was back
> on his feet, then off them again as he came at me in a curious jumping
> sideways spin kick that turned him, at one point, completely upside
> down.
MMK: Ha! Hair-boy messed up the Hienzan! Serves him right.
> I got tagged pretty hard by that one, but it was worth it to
> see him do it, the move was that neat. I wobbled back a step, and
> steadied my stance in time to see him hurl another Sonic Boom at me.
> I took one running step toward it, turned my back, then
> drifted left with the little dance-step I'd learned from Cammy to add
> to my spinning backfist,
RACE: Would it be left foot up, right foot right, left foot down, right foot left, left foot up by any chance?
> letting the Sonic Boom pass harmlessly by.
> The backfist connected hard with his jaw, and was flared, to boot; the
> impact lifted Guile completely off the ground and spun him halfway
> around before dropping him heavily to the pavement on his side. He
> got to his feet, but a lot less snappily than before. As I
> approached, he dropped to a crouch, and the little alarm bells in the
> back of my head started sounding.
> A little too late, I tried to Ler-slide inside his attack arc
> and get in a few face shots. Just as I did, he burst upward
> from his crouch into his trademark flash kick, doing a complete
> somersault and leaving a trail of dazzling energy behind his kicking
> foot.
ARL: ...he actually had to *charge* a Flash Kick in an non-video game environment...
[ARL twitches.]
ARL: ...and it's *Charlie's* trademark Flash Kick...
[ARL twitches twice.]
> A few inches too far away, I was just at the perfect spot for
> him to unload all that energy into me. Time stuttered for a moment,
S.D. <Billy Madison>: T-t-t-t-today, junior!
RACE: I'm guessing he didn't clean the disk recently...
> and I came back to myself maybe a half-second later, landing on my
> back and turning completely over with the momentum. He tried to
> trounce me in the back again, but this time I rolled out of the way,
> grabbed his arm, locked my legs around it and threw him. Something
> made a nasty crack, he sprawled, and when we both got to our feet, his
> right arm was hanging. I'd dislocated his shoulder.
MMK: Either that or he was preparing-
GAVOK: Whoosh-WHACK!
MMK: ...a Snake Tamer.
> He didn't seem fazed by that; instead he moved in with a kick
> series, battering at my guard and driving me back, then breaking
> through my guard with one particularly good high kick. I heard the
> crack as my nose broke, and felt the warm gush of blood down the front
> of my formerly white shirt.
MMK <Mankind>: And I realized, I LIKE THIS!
> Shaking the flashing lights out of my
> vision and swallowing the pain,
MMK <Gryphon>: Mmmm... bitter...
GAVOK <Gryphon>: Yummy pain!
[He pulls out a box of tacks and empties it into his mouth.]
GAVOK <Gryphon, muffled>: It's the breakfast of champions!
>I tried to counter with a backfist,
> but miscalculated his position and swung past him. As I missed, Guile
> tried to get a grip on me, the better to throw me, but I dug in my
> feet (and my Ler) and stopped, then used an elbow strike to break his
> one-handed grip. I spun inside his guard, bringing one knee up under
> his chin, and WHACK he was going up, over, and crashing to the ground
> on his back.
> He brought up his feet, flexed, and managed to get to
> something approaching a standing position in a sloppy kippup. I
> capitalized on this momentary lapse by landing another three-puncher;
> it seemed to snap him to, and he actually did manage to suplex me
> one-handed, which impressed me mightily. I was too busy being
> impressed to do very much about it, and ended up boosting the fiber in
> my diet with the floor.
> I knew it was starting to go bad,
RACE: Then you'd better throw that floor out instead of eating it, G-boy.
>but there wasn't much I
> could do about it. I hadn't come into this prepared to fight. I was
> tired, stiff from lurking around the desert for so long, hungry,
> thirsty and in the wrong time zone. My concentration was minimal and
> my energy level poor.
RACE <Gryphon>: ...and my shoelaces were untied, and my nose was runny, and I really needed to use the little god-boy's room.
> Bah. I'm making excuses. No doubt Rose would tell me that if
> she were here. The bottom line is that I proceeded to get my ass
> completely, thoroughly, professionally kicked.
ARL: Okay, now lets try to contain our- oh, to hell with it.
ALL: YAY! GUILE!!
> With Guile, one
> mistake is all you get, and I'd made my second one. It fell apart
> quickly from there, and if I'd had time to think about it as
> everything went dark I'd have wondered whether I would wake up under
> guard in the base hospital, or just in the corner of a cell in the
> stockade.
GAVOK: In 1998, a street fighter was sent to prison by a military guy with a flat top for a crime he did kind of commit. This man promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Worchester underground. Today, still wanted by the government, he survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the G-Team.