Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

[Mickey Mouse]

Vacation.

What did that word even mean? Mickey Mouse hadn’t even thought about sitting down and just taking a breath in what felt like years. And now he’d somehow found himself on a beach? Sipping piña coladas with his wife?

The business in Nippur had been a fool’s errand. There was no circumstance where the people of that city would ever think of either half of the Proto Mouse as a friendly agent, and Mickey had learned that all too well once Jafar had him where he wanted him. Luckily, the street boy, Aladdin, had shown up just in time with Minnie and Simba and broken him out of the dungeons of the castle.

Parting with the young thief had been bittersweet, but the royal couple and their lion bodyguard couldn’t afford any extra weight as they continued their efforts to avoid the (now many) people who wanted their blood. So Aladdin left the couple with a parting gift — a shiny lamp he’d unearthed no doubt while thieving — and disappeared into the wind, as young, mysterious characters were wont to do. And Mickey, Minnie, and Simba left the Endless Dunes for greener pastures. Or, well, bluer ones.

They had thus far gotten lucky in their travels in the Vasty Deep — it had been merely by happenstance, in fact, that they had stumbled upon a pirate ship coasting near the shores of Costa del Sol and bummed a ride on it just in time to avoid the Empire’s wrath.

Mickey and Minnie’s sojourn with the pirates did not last long. Their captain had been abducted, and the pair took comfort in being able to give them a purpose for a little while — smuggling a fugitive king and queen seemed right up their alley — but the time eventually came when the pair stumbled upon an island that seemed just uninhabited enough for their liking, and in the night they slipped off of the ship undetected.

And for the past however long, that was where they had remained. The island natives seemed nice enough and disinterested in the couple’s colorful past. No one asked questions. No one minded the fact that they were primes. No one batted an eye when they erected a small hovel of their own on the outskirts of town, completely out of omnilium.

Best of all, no one even thought to bother them. Simba kept them well taken care of, not only serving as a de facto butler but also keeping his eyes open for threats, though they had gone so long without one Mickey doubted the lion king would even know what to look for anymore. Other than him, they mostly lived in solitude. Occasionally, one of the island families would make the trek up the hill to their cottage on the cliffs to check on them. A nice gesture, and one the mice appreciated.

“We should really invite that nice girl and her sister to dinner sometime,” Minnie said, breaking the silence of their beach rendezvous for a moment.

She squeezed her husband’s hand, looking at him sitting in his own beach chair a little ways away. He peered out at the ocean over too-big sunglasses, and nodded slightly. “Okey-dokey,” he shrugged. He’d become comfortable in their hermit lifestyle; it had become clear that the best way to avoid threats in this Omniverse was to avoid basically any contact with the outside world. But this family seemed kind. “Tonight?”

Minnie giggled. “Sometime,” she smiled, and took a sip of her own piña colada. She slurped up the last little bit. “Tonight would be nice.”

“Tonight it is, then,” Mickey grinned, glancing over at her. “After all — you’re the boss.” He winked at her, which only sent her further into a fit of giggles. She slid off her chair and yanked him onto his feet, pulling him into an embrace and placing a little kiss on his mouse mouth. Mickey scrunched his brow. How in the world was he so happy?

“You don’t think she’ll bring her weird pet, do you?”

[Proto Man]

He limped.

Warnings said that the joint would give out soon, but he had to push it for all it was worth. Energy levels were at a critical low, but he had to keep moving forward. Yellow had turned into white long ago. White had given way for blue, but despite the change in the background noise, the shadow remained the same.

War shouts cut through the buzzing in his head. The dent in his helmet had collapsed part of his skull, impacting a series of processors that dealt with audiovisual functions. When the ailing joint failed, he would have to drag it, but the gyroscopic balancers were failing with every labored lurch. Bolts of heat sliced at him, but he had stopped feeling the individual sensations miles ago. Temperatures had hit critical levels long ago in the yellow.

Up ahead, the solid gave way into bobbing, wet blue. Was there enough to maintain buoyant force?

No time.

He stumbled and jumped as the left leg joint let out a final sigh as it snapped and went all-red. For a moment, everything was the bluest blue.

Then everything was black.

The red and gray figure was half-buried in sand. Every now and again, a wave would wash over top of it before receding back into the ocean.

Bursts of energy slammed mercilessly against the chunk of aged stone. The small figure crouched behind the fallen obelisk winced as flecks of sandstone whisked over his head.

“Come out and play!”

Proto Man grimaced as he glanced down at his half-smashed hand. Sparks of electricity still skittered across the three crushed digits anytime he tried to make his index finger or thumb move. The damage had rendered the appendage offline, which prevented him from shifting it into a Proto Buster.

His other hand?

The preteen machine scowled at the broken remains of the other limb. He knew that ‘phantom limbs’ was a human thing brought about by some sort of psychological issue relating to lost arms or legs, but he had enough sapience to at least feel a great deal of discomfort at the loss. Anytime he tried to move what was left of his left hand and forearm, his system would provide him with a polite reminder that the area had sustained ‘Severe Avulsion resulting in Primary Systems Failure.’ In robot parlance that was the equivalent of ‘You F**ked Up.’

Another punishing blast hit the toppled sandstone, shuddering the massive slab and threatening to reduce it to a pile of dusty chunks rather than a semi-comfortable wall of cover. In front of him, he could spot what seemed to be a gate. Had he somehow circumvented Carrefore and the Town during his haphazard flight from the interior of the Dunes?

His GPS and scanners had gone offline half a day ago. Even so, his ears worked well enough to tell him that there was still two dozen heavily armed marauders ten yards behind him. If he made a run for it, he’d have to hope he could juke them well enough to avoid being torn to shreds by their weapons.

All he had to do was get into the Nexus. They weren’t after him for a bounty… just to humiliate him and drive him from their domain. If he could just get another fifty yards, he’d be okay…

Two fingers clenched tightly into the wet sand as their peers feebly tried to do the same. The tide has receded for the day, which meant this section of the beach would be bone dry in an hour or so. After that, there’d be a few hours of blistering heat before the sun dropped down below the horizon once again.

The deliberate movement by the seaweed-coated body was the first in a few days. Partially rusted fingers that were more orange than red squeezed through the loose beach. The motion appeared less about finding balance and more about proving that the willpower remained to move the derelict mass.

Nippur was a distant memory, but the shark had smelled the blood.

Proto Man had been one his way back toward the Town with No Name when the Tsartan and a horde of his technologically mutated slaves fell upon him. Many of them simply emerged up out from the sand with ill-intent in their glassy, cyborg eyeballs. The first wave had been easy to dispatch. They didn’t fight back as hard after Proto Man started to chop out knees and smash a few of their jaws with a quick series of closed fists.

As the last of them stumbled back, the preteen machine thought he’d avoid another bizarre little run-in with the troupe.

Unfortunately, two dozen more had been lurking in the periphery. They all came uncloaked just in time to release a hail of bolter fire at the red robot, who managed to block away part of the onslaught with his shield. His lack of a 360 defensive mechanism made it a little hard to deal with the other 350 degrees.

In desperation, the machine threw his shield forward and charge for the opening he had created. He bulldozed through the two masked marauders, smashing the chest of one as he used it for a jumping pad to create more distance between the others, who were fanning out to find new angles of attack.

The red robot tucked his head and sprinted, but he only managed to get ten yards before the ground exploded from underneath him. Thrown thirty feet into the air by the blast, Proto Man landed on his left knee first and felt the joint buckle and crunch inside of his organic exoskeleton. Unable to stick a vertical landing, he crashed down onto his right shoulder. He quickly threw out his left hand to steady himself, but the moment it smacked down onto the sand, he heard the ting of steel on steel and saw the flashing light between his two fingers.

There was flash of light as the mine blew up beneath Proto Man’s extended limb.

From the dried sand, a face lifted itself up from its personal world of blackness.

Through it saw little more than shapes, the visage, which had just enough flesh and muscle left to resemble the corpse of a child caught in a meat grinder, fixated on the green and brown that lay off the beach.

A rusted hand reached out, and with every inch, the exposed servos in its shoulder and elbow whined in outrage.

The broken heap of metal and flesh shifted a little more deliberately as fingers dug into the sand—this time with intent. Dragging itself forward, the tortured mass willed itself from the beach.

[Proto Man]

The android woke up.

Pop-ups on his internal display informed him that his last ‘login’ had been nearly a month earlier.

With a labored groan, the preteen machine grabbed the closest solid object and pulled himself into an upright position. His visuals took a few moments longer to stabilize, but when they did, he noticed that he was in a small hut. The solid object to his right was an armrest, and a look at the lower half of his body revealed that he was lying in a beaten-up chair. In an attempt to make it feel more like a bed, the recliner had been tilted all the way back, but a quick glance revealed that there wasn’t any sort of lever to shift it back into chair mode.

“Where… where am I?” The diagnostics showed that his body had been hard at work repairing the wealth of damage he had sustained on his exodus from the Endless Dunes.

I’ll be back one day…

At the moment, the ‘Tsartan’ was too powerful for the cyborg to deal with on his own. He’d only managed to defeat the ruthless barbarian with the aid of others, and in one of those instances, his ally had been slain trying to stop the madman. One day, Cell Delta would have to face justice for what he’d done to Heat Man and countless other innocents in his mad quest for power.

“Ugh,” Proto Man groaned as he slipped his legs over the side of worn recliner. The healing process still wasn’t complete—he could still detect places across his body where the plating had yet to fully repair itself. Most of his systems were fully operational, including his wireless connection and GPS, so he knew he was somewhere in the Vasty Deep. A quick map showed that he was more than a few days’ worth of travel removed from any of the verse’s Gates. His location? The map didn’t specify a name or any details beyond the fact that it was an island with a mostly tropical climate.

Stumbling and lurching as he moved, Proto Man made it to the entrance to the little room. Outside of the hut, he could see a few palm trees and what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, a beautiful beach ripped straight from a newspaper ad for timeshares down south.

“I’ll take it.” The android said with a smile as he looked around for some sign of the hut’s owner. Whoever they were, they deserved a thank you for not leaving him to rust on the beach.

[Mickey Mouse]

“Surprise!”

In an instant, a routine trip down the hill to the girls’ home had become decidedly un-routine. Minnie had scuttled into the kitchen for a moment and emerged wearing a cute little apron, flanked by Lilo and Nani, their Hawaiian neighbors down the hill, holding the world’s most beautiful cake in her hands. She had meticulously sculpted the Disney Castle out of icing—truly, outdoing any previous culinary efforts, which was saying a lot.

“Isn’t she just amazing?” Nani exclaimed, snatching it from her hands and sitting on the coffee table that served as the room’s centerpiece. “You’ve got to teach a class sometime, Your Majesty. I’d be first in line.”

“Oh, stop, Nani,” Minnie waved away the compliments, sliding onto the couch next to her husband, “And please—Minnie.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nani nodded, her olive face reddening just a bit, “Minnie.”

The Queen leaned over to her husband and whispered in his ear. “I made it out of omnilium,” she chuckled, placing a finger to her lips, “Don’t tell.” Mickey giggled along with his wife, nuzzling her neck as Lilo struck up her ukulele and began to sing. Within moments, Minnie and Nani joined in.

“Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear Mickey,
Happy birthday to you!”

Mickey grinned. Could life get any better?

“Haaaaaaaappy birthdayyyy,” a low growling noise spoke from above him, and the mouse king turned his eyes up to see Stitch, Lilo’s strange little pet, clambering on the sofa. The little blue creature leapt from his perch and tackled Mickey to the ground, assaulting his face with a variety of loving licks and nuzzles.

“Stitch! Stitch, thank you buddy!” Mickey laughed, slowly lifting the creature off of him and sitting up.

This was so strange—for months, now, all had been well. Living on this island with only Lilo and Stitch and Nani for company—and Simba to guard them—had turned out to be quite the blessing. And recent developments had given him hope that, perhaps, this new life in the Omniverse might be rehabilitation not just for himself, but for some others that had been through far too much in their short lives here, as well.

Of course, peace didn’t come without conditions. He and Minnie had been forced to keep their status as primes a secret from their neighbors. No matter how nice they seemed to be, giving them too much information would be too much of a risk. Lilo and company seemed to be yet more secondaries to hail from the Disney Realms, and so keeping their identities a secret had been a lost cause, but for the moment, they had managed to keep the exact limits (or lack thereof) of their powers to themselves.

Not that they would ever have reason to use them—if things kept going like this, then perhaps Mickey would never have to pick up his keyblade ever again. Was that too wild a dream?

“Do you want a piece, Mickey?” the younger Hawaiian girl asked as she handed the serving knife to Stitch.

“And be partially responsible for destroying that work of art? I plead the fifth!” he shook his head, gesturing for Minnie to get up and get them a piece to share. The lady mouse planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek and skipped over to the coffee table to prepare their plate.

Beep beep. Beep beep.

Mickey glanced down at his communicator and saw a message coming through from Simba. He scanned it quickly, then leapt from his seat and rushed to the window, his eyes focusing in on the cliffs their little hut sat upon.

Sure enough, there he was. Up and about.

Awake.

[Proto Man]

How long had he been in the Omniverse?

At this point, Proto Man was certain that he’d spent more time in this strange place than in the world of his birth. His time spent roaming the United States felt like ancient history compared to his time toiling around in the Tangled Green, Pale Moors, or the Endless Dunes. How long had it been since Coruscant? Proto Man disliked many parts of the Empire, but his trek through the Omniverse had shown there were just as worse—blights, dictators, and monsters innumerable.

Now he was somewhere in the Vasty Deep.

His internal systems were operational and free from any malfunctions, despite the residual soreness in his joints. The ceramic titanium would take longer to heal than the internal circuitry. A look at the time-lapse showed that months had passed since the sand dunes. How much of that time had he spent inert and unresponsive? How long had someone left him in that little building?

The Omniverse waits for no one, not even a little red android with a head full of dreams and fists full of fire.

Outside the hut, the sky was a lovely shade of blue. A bright sun shined down from overhead, and while Proto Man didn’t experience temperatures like a human, the numbers on his overview told him that the climate was wonderful by organic standards. Down on the beach, waves lazily crashed against the sand.

The preteen machine reached up and slid off his helmet. He felt no different with it on or off, but the little bit of wind was nice. He held the helmet in his hand for a brief moment as he stood near the threshold of the little building. After a pause, he left it behind as he made his way from the hut to the edge of the teeny cliffs that overlooked the beaches.

He made it a few yards when he heard the sound of oversized shoes smacking against the ground. Turning slowly, Proto Man smiled faintly at the sight of the humanoid mouse jogging toward him. When their eyes met, the two paused briefly before rushing to embrace one another.

After the prolonged hug, Proto Man smiled. “You fished me out of the water?”

Mickey nodded his head. “We thought we’d need to find Prince Charming to wake you up,” he chuckled as he looked out to the picturesque beach.