Rogue

[Albert Wesker]

Rarely was panic ever a good thing, but at times it was unavoidable. Emotions were delicate things, as anyone who had them could tell you, and even with an iron grip on them you could lose yourself to a chaotic storm of mangled feeling when presented with a looming threat you were ill-prepared to deal with. It could make logic crumble and give way to blind desperation, trying anything and everything that might have even a chance of getting you out of a bad situation, even if it was a very minor one. Or one that made sense only because of just how addled and out of it you were in your frazzled emotional and mental state. It was rough business, and almost never paid off in any sort of long term. Or short term. No term at all, really. It was almost always a bad thing to fall into the grip of blind panic. When in the face of a dire situation, you needed to keep calm and think clearly. Logically.

Cricket knew all of that, of course.

But knowing and being able to follow through on something were two very, very different things. As he doubled over, grasping at his imprisoned leg with both hands and tugged for all he was worth, it didn't take a genius to realize just where he sat on the 'knowing-doing' sliding scale of disaster preparedness. "Oh, no, no, no! Not good! Negative good! Everything bad, not positive, very negative! Bad situation! Poor timing!" he wailed, wrenching on his hostage limb, the sound of straining metal clearly audible over the low crackle of the massive firewall drawing ever, worryingly, dangerously closer. "Very much not good, oooooh this is what I get for my lapse in spatial awareness!" His grip exhausted itself, and with a grating of metal on metal he was sent comically flopping back upright, and arced right back down, smacking against the stream of hard-code on his backside.

"Ooooh....I fear this will not end in any manner that could be construed as positive...I wasn't rated for temperatures as high as direct contact with an inferno!" He hauled himself back into an upright, sitting posture, lifting both arms up, palms facing outward, toward the firewall. Desperate times called for desperate measures. "Maybe...if my timing is spot-on, I can...!"

Both hands flashed with bright blue, glowing neon wireframes materializing around the outstretched appendages and rapidly solidifying into the form of...nozzles. Just like on the end of massive firehoses. To a casual observer, it probably looked silly. Very silly, indeed. But as they collected in more detail, finally losing their wireframe blueprint design and morphing into solid, physical objects, they were revealed to be sporting something very much akin to a set of crosshairs, and an underslung magazine. Clearly a weapon of some type, and likely one that used liquid of some description in its design. It still looked ridiculous, but in his panic-addled state, Cricket seemed to think it was worth a shot to try whatever it was he had in mind with the odd weapons.

"Battle chip: Bubbler! Bubble Spread!" he shouted, as if announcing his new weapons to the world. And as he named each one, a blue light blinked on the strange apparatus on the end of each arm with a muted beep. "I don't think...I'll get more than one shot at this. Going to need to time it just right..."

"Time what right, pray tell?" an inquisitive voice piped up from behind the frantic, trapped navi.

"I'm going to use an aqua weapon to try and extinguish a section of the firewall and pass through while it's down, of course!" Cricket snapped, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Oh, that'll never work, you silly thing! The timing would need to be so exacting as to be impossible to calculate by eye alone!" A dizzying series of beeps and clicks, as of many switches and lights flickering on and off, sounded after that pair of exclamations. "It is lucky that I happened by and saw you stuck here, or you might have had a meeting with the cleaning crew on the other side." Another short series of beeps. "....or their brooms, at any rate."

"Wait, what? Who?" Cricket finally realized he wasn't alone, spinning about at the waist to face his unexpected guest. And the sight he beheld was not at all what he had expected. Hugely tall and lanky, all spindly limbs and joints, with a massive head full of a dizzying array of lights, blinking and flickering in crazy patterns, and an electric-orange pair of eyes peering down at him. "Where did you come from?!"

"I am here to save you. I am called Number Man. And I frequently come this way, as I have clearance to pass through here." A series of beeps and light patterns accompanied the mathematical navi's speech. He lifted one hand, bearing only three digts, and tapped his rather large dome. "I run numbers, you know. Calculations and recordkeeping. Very valuable to have around, for certain types of business. But that can be discussed at length later, when you aren't facing down an incinerating, yes?"

"I, er, uh...y-yes!" Cricket agreed hastily, shoving his confusion aside by sheer strength of panic, flailing his weapon-bearing arms about wildly and gesturing at the wall of flaming death that they were still serenely drifting toward. "Just-- Please, you mentioned saving me?!"

"Oh, yes, right!" Numberman chirped, his hands rotating on the end of his wrists. "Allow me a moment, I will secure you passage." He stood upright, his eyes blinking and flickering along with the light in his head, as a blistering series of beeps, clicks, whirring noises and stuttering noises echoed from his vicinity. With barely ten seconds to spare before they hit the firewall, the plate over the number-running navi flipped open, and a reel of paper roll out, covered in writing and code. "And here we are. One temporary pass, for the little lost navi. Expedited, for emergency purposes."

Cricket snatched it without thinking, and as soon as he did, a section in the wall of flames simply stopped being, spreading out to the approximate size of a doorway, and rising up to admit even Numberman's great height.

"This certainly has been my most exciting commute to work in recent memory," the lanky navi mused. "Mostly I just find the occasional bit of ash stuck in the data streams. It's always nice to find something different!"

Cricket could only stare nervously at the flames as he was carried through the sudden doorway that appeared in their midst, thankful more than ever for the occurrence of random coincidence. And with a renewed belief in random happenstance. "Yes...and fortunate for me, I guess..." he muttered, slowly letting his hands morph back to their default state. No sense having the guns ready if they wren't going to be used, anymore.

"Oh, yes, very fortunate indeed. This is the only day I am scheduled to work this week!" Numberman offered, all too cheerfully. "And to top it off, I am actually running a few minutes late, due to some messageboard reconstruction and data re-routing. You are quite fortunate, my little friend!"

"Oh...well, that's good."