The Cure - I

[Proto Man]

He knew that he probably should have treated the woman with a little more kindness than he had. After all, he was certain she had lost much in her struggle with the Blight. Just because her loses weren’t quite as personally didn’t make them any less painful. Even so, he kept his would-be condolences to himself… maybe if they kept this as something closer to a business deal he wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about her situation.

So the preteen machine kept his mouth shut for the time being and instead tried to move forward. “Do you have transportation? We can cover more ground on mounts than just by walking… trust me,” before Whirda had a chance to respond, Proto Man fished out a small whistle tucked beneath his black body suit. He played a short little melody—the same melody he would play to sooth himself when he was a younger ‘child.’ In reality, he didn’t need to play the song, because his wireless transmitter was what did the real work, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to play the whistle melody.

“What was that?” Whirda asked without answering the original question.

“A whistle,” Proto Man replied as he stuffed the little musical device back into its hiding spot. “Do you have a horse?”

“I do not,” Whirda replied.

“Give me a few minutes…” Proto Man held out his buster arm and started to channel the needed sOmnilium. He didn’t do this very often, so it took him a moment to find the correct app to funnel the material into the barrel of the weapon. As Whirda watched in silence, the minutes trickled away as the youth released the rainbow-colored amalgam and continued to channel into it. By the time a horse was standing there, neither prime was quite sure how long they had stood around, but as Whirda went to acquaint herself with her mount, Proto Man turned around and restarted the process.

After the infected woman finished ensuring that she could ride the horse properly, she glanced over at her new associated. A grin spread across Proto Man’s features as he leaned back to ensure that the barding he had created would fit its intended wearer. “What sort of horse is going to wear that?” The woman inquired as she led her own mount over to the youth.

“She’s not a horse,” Proto Man muttered as he pointed behind Whirda. She craned her neck around and squinted until she spotted a large, bipedal bird gently galloping across the Moors. “She’s my Chocobo, Salsa,” he concluded in such a matter-of-fact manner that the woman had to question if this was some sort of common, everyday knowledge.

“Oh… I see.” After that, Whirda just kept quiet as the boy jogged over to embrace the large, fluffy bird.

“How’ve you been?” Proto Man asked with a smile as he held up his palm. The bird let out a shrill qweh and smacked his palm with her beak—the closest thing to a high-five the two could share. “Were you able to find Roll and the others in Coruscant?” Salsa nodded. “They’re doing okay?” Again, the bird gave an enthusiastic nod. “Okay, excellent… let’s get you suited up for business.”

The bird, upon seeing the barding and sharing a fleeting glance with Whirda, quickly processed the gravity of the situation. With a firm nod, Salsa dropped down to the ground to give the preteen a much easier time in slipping on the combination of leather and metal plating that would protect the bird if they got into a confrontation. Once the armor was snug around Salsa’s fluffy figure, Proto Man gently slipped the helmet around her head and tightened it until it was secure, at which point she gave him a qweh and shook her head to show the helm wouldn’t come flying off mid-run.

“Okay, we’re ready,” Proto Man said as he hopped up onto the bird’s saddle. Salsa stood back up and took a few moments to walk in a circle to get used to the extra weight. After all, it had been more than a few months since the bird had galloped into war against the dragons in Camelot.

“So am I,” Whirda replied as she gracefully slung herself up onto her horse—a stern-looking animal to match a stern-looking woman. “You have the route in your head so would you mind leading the way, Blues?”

“No problem.” Unlike a horse, chocobo’s had no easy way to hook up a bit, bridle, and reins, but even if they did, Proto Man didn’t think he’d want to use them anyway. He and Salsa had a good enough bond that he knew she wouldn’t freak out and run off in the wrong direction. “That way,” Proto Man said as he leaned over and pointed so the chocobo could spot its trajectory.

“Qweh!” And just like that, Salsa bolted, leaving Whirda a bit bemused at how fast a scrawny bird could travel with such a load. After a short delay, the woman grabbed the reins and moved out to follow the boy.

***

For more than a few hours, the only sound that either the woman or the robot processed was that of their mount’s feet smacking on the short grass beneath them. Their route skirted around the forests near Darkshire and took them out across a rather plain expanse that had little more than an inch of grass and the occasional shrub. The land would have probably sustained little more than nomadic bands with a few heads of cattle. How did this verse sustain such life at one point? Part of Proto Man wondered what the Moors had looked like eight or nine years ago, when the place was fresh and free from the scars of corruption left upon it by years of demonic warfare.

It wasn’t until past noon that Proto Man dropped his pace until Whirda caught up to him. When her horse and she were alongside the machine and his giant bird, the woman glanced over, probably expecting an update about their trek.

“Sorry if I came off as cross earlier,” the machine said as their mounts casually leapt over a small ravine. Up ahead it was obvious that they terrain was going to become increasingly complicated—something that the robot hadn’t encountered on his first voyage into the interior of the Moors. “It’s just… ever since I left Coruscant, it’s been nothing but broken bones, dead friends, and lingering agony. After a while, you start to feel you’re the one responsible for it all. And I may be many things, but chief among those is someone who is sick of death.”

Whirda nodded but kept her eyes glued on the uneven landscape that lay before them. “I can understand what you mean, Blues. I’m not sure I’ve had many pleasant memories during my time here in the Omniverse.”

From her expression—or lack thereof—it was clear that she could handle the burden easier than the machine. What did that tell him about Whirda? What kind of life had she lived before the Omniverse? Would these two even bother to exchange such stories?

Turning his focus back to their journey, Proto Man’s scanner and GPS tried to provide him with the simplest route, but he had a degree of difficulty factoring in the difference between Salsa and a horse. He had plenty of routes… if push came to shove he could have the bird fly up out of danger, but for all he could tell, Whirda just had a horse. It was a hearty-looking animal with an expression as dire and hardened as its owner, but it was a horse nevertheless.

Over the period of the afternoon, the steppes gradually gave way to a rockier and more uneven landscape. Slopes became more prevalent, as well as the occasional ravine that would force the pair of travelers to reroute themselves, oftentimes causing them to lose over a half hour of travel time. As a result of their attempt to cut directly through the badlands, they wound up still deep in the thick of what were now becoming small mountains and deep, jagged valleys by the time the already scant sunlight began to fade.

“I think we may have to stop for now,” Whirda spoke after catching up to a stalled Proto Man. “We’re about to lose the sunlight, and I don’t want to push this animal too hard.”

“You want to take a break, Salsa?” Proto Man asked.

“Qweh! ” To Whirda, the squawking probably sounded like nothing, but to the Proto Man, he understood that the bird was more than ready to have a few hours to relax.

“Let’s get up there,” Proto Man whispered, pointing to a small cave barely visible beneath the shadow of a landform almost tall enough to be a small mountain. “We should be safe from anything with designs to cut our throats in the middle of the night.”

A rustling sound behind the twosome caught their attention immediately. Before Proto Man could even swing around on his saddle, Whirda was already on the ground and fully armed. “Something tells me we’re not going to have to worry about being attacked later rather than sooner.”

The boy hopped down from Salsa and turned his eyes toward what had once been their rear. Even in the low-light, he could spot the approaching crowd of humanoid warriors. As they drew closer, he noticed that they were flanked on each side by two giant… spiders? No, those weren’t spiders. They bottom halves were, but the rest was vaguely humanoid.

“It isn’t very often that surface dwellers disturb our mountains,” the central figure said—a woman dressed in tight leather clothes with the occasional piece of polished metal providing additional protection. Like her peers, her attire and weaponry had what seemed to be a spider motif, with much of the artwork resembling spiders or their webs.

She held a scepter in one hand and a curved, glistening blade in the other. As she drew closer, Proto Man noticed that her skin was a color of obsidian and her hair was a almost perfect shade of white. Oddly enough, her eyes and her features in general were quite similar to those of Mireya, the half-night elf he’d befriended in the Tangled Green. This woman’s eyes were a deep shade of red, and her expression was hard and malicious.

“We’re just passing through,” Proto Man replied as he glanced to Whirda out of the corner of his eye. He noticed that the woman seemed more on-edge than he’d ever seen her before, even when they had that less than cordial discussion before departure. He turned his sights back to their less-than friendly visitors, and his scanner app started to work its magic.

“We rule the darkness beneath these mountains, which means we own the surface as well.” A malicious grin spread across the slender features of the purple-skinned woman. “You can only imagine how we felt when we detected the presence of two primes violating our realm.”

“We’re just passing through,” the robot reiterated as an infobox popped up on his internal display. The info blurb told him that he was staring at someone well-versed in magic, combat, and subterfuge, but that was all it could muster without further time to grind data. So slow… He would need to invest in a speedier processor if he ever had some downtime.

“Unfortunately, we’re not going to let you just pass through,” the woman replied as she tapped the tip of her scepter to her sword, causing a series of runes along the blade to glow in a dull red light. “The pair of you will make wonderful sacrifices to the Spider Queen.”

Whirda, weapons already at the ready, started to back up as the two giant spider-man monstrosities started to skitter their way toward the pair of primes. Proto Man grimaced as half dozen figures slowly approached them—their swords and crossbows at the ready. Before the machine had a chance to speak once more, the air was filled with quarrels. As the robot dropped back and dove, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Whirda as the woman gracefully leaped up to a nearby outcropping and readied herself for the two approaching creatures.

“It’s okay to cry, child,” the dark-skinned woman hissed as a second quartet of crossbow quarrels zipped through the dusk sky at him. This time, he reacted by swiftly summoning his tower shield to absorb the impact of the wooden projectiles, which thundered viciously against the reinforced surface of the barely mobile bulwark. Proto Man gave it a moment before he dove out and fired a stream of blasts at the shins and feet of the elves. By the time the robot completed his roll and righted himself, he had two curved blades whizzing down for his face.

He had the opening he needed to fire a burst of energy up into the elves chin, but Proto Man knew the attack would kill his attacker. It was one thing to put darkspawn or rogue creatures out of commission, but despite his beliefs and motivations, these warriors were people, and the robot didn’t have it in him to kill them.

So he took both hits.

The first collided above his right hearing sensor, denting the material and leaving a nasty scar in the paint, and the second caught him on the chin, leaving a crimson ribbon across the exposed part of his face. Unfortunately for the elves, they expected the reaction of a child. What they received was kick and a stiff punch to the knees as Proto Man barreled passed them. Once he was on the other side of them, Proto Man pivoted and bashed both of them once more—this time in the small of the back with the side of his buster arm. Before he could continue the combo, he felt a blast of heat between his shoulder blades.

Thrown back in front of the two warriors, Proto Man hit the ground hard and left a three-inch strip of uprooted earth and rock behind him before his momentum finally faded. At the end of his flight path, the android flipped himself over and rose up to his feet once more. A popup told him he’d suffered some concussive damage and superficial burns over his back but no lasting damage to the underlying infrastructure. He turned around just in time to intercept a knee with his chest.

This time, the impact knocked him off his feet and down into a two-story ravine. Through a mixture of luck and awareness, he managed to hook an outcropping and stop himself from slamming into the floor below. Before he had much time to ‘breath,’ the youth was set upon by the other pair of arachnid centaurs. Much to his horror, they came at him with a flurry of bladed appendages as well as two pairs of curved, dark elven blades. Releasing his grip on the rock wall, Proto Man sprayed a handful of energized pellets at one of the creatures before turning to charge the other.

As the robot ran, his body flashed white as his system unlocked the necessary resources to overclock his central processor and auxiliary hardware. When the flash subsided, the youth was decked out in additional padding and felt just a little more spring in his step as he closed to gap between himself and the man-spider-horse abomination.

Bladed legs and two swords swung down at him as his feet left the ground. The boy landed on the body of the creature, just behind where the humanoid part emerged up from its arachnid abdomen. Holding nothing back, he laid into the creature with a series of crippling blows to its skull, shoulders, and spine. In the process of trying to fight back, it managed to slash him across the arms once or twice with its swords.

The creature slumped forward into a twitching heap. It would survive, but it certainly wasn’t going to threatening him anytime soon. Jumping off the monster, Proto Man charged his gun-arm and released the energy shot at his second opponent, which nimbly avoided the attack by jumping up onto the wall of the ravine and continuing its movement along that completely vertical surface. It lunged when it got close enough, but it was too bulky to land atop of the preteen robot, who slipped out of its path and continued to punish it with a barrage of low-intensity energy bursts. When it spun and tried to once again brings its weight advantage to bear down on him, he placed a succession of quick shots at the legs still planted in the ground.

With an all-too human roar, the arachnid centaur fell toward, crashing down to the earthen floor of the ravine. Proto Man gritted his teeth and punched what could have very well once been a dark elf square in the side of the head. Much like any humanoid, its eyes rolled up into its sockets and it fell into an almost still heap. He hadn’t been his most humane, but Proto Man knew that this was better than putting a blast of energy through their chests or stabbing them through the brain with an energized blade.

Looking up, Proto Man jumped up as far as he could and grabbed hold of the same uneven part of the ravine wall that he’d found on his way down. Once he steadied himself, he planted his feet and shoved off and up one more time. On this occasion, his fingers were able to find the lip of the ravine, and he quickly pulled himself up over the edge and onto ‘solid’ earth. With a stern look on his face, he raced forward to deal with what remained of their aggressors. The sun was long gone, and he feared that any strength advantage held by Whirda and he would vanish now that everything was varying shades of darkness. He at least had the benefit of sensors that would alert him of nearby objects, but with her seemingly human eyes would Whirda fare as well?