Zone D -- The Foam

[The Future Warrior]

She'd long since lost track of time she spent sitting there, staring out at the rain. Maybe it had been only a few minutes, maybe it had been a few hours. All she knew was that a while into it, Archer had tracker her down and mentioned he was going to be getting some sleep. Been on the island for two days already, apparently, it was getting to be about time for it. Cell didn't need the sleep, and neither did Graowr, but the bio-android had his own things to take care of. Like getting some further attention for his eye. Something about rummaging around for medical supplies in their downtime and he disappeared off into the depths of the bunker.

It left the majin alone with her thoughts and the sound of rain. She didn't mind at all, really. As she'd said on the dataverse quite recently, she liked the rain. Watching it, listening to it, even getting caught out in it. The only thing she didn't really like was fighting in it, especially at high altitudes, right in the middle of it. It made things messy. Wet and slick, hard to keep solid footing and obscuring vision. As long as she had her ki sense or scouter, the latter could be mitigated, and if she could fly, the former wouldn't be a concern either. But at the moment, she had lost so much of her ability, even something as basic as sensing ki signatures was beyond her. She couldn't quite figure out how to get that function working into her scouter, either. She'd done all the tinkering and messing with it she knew how, falling back on the basic instructions she'd been given on how to calibrate it properly for differing power ranges. It just wouldn't work. All the settings were right, it just...just didn't work.

Looking around the dataverse, asking questions, and talking to people she'd run into around the Omniverse in general, she'd started to come to some realizations about that kind of stuff, though. The main reason she couldn't get it to work right was because she couldn't do it herself, yet. She couldn't make an item that did something she couldn't do, or at least not one that just worked constantly. It was something weird about this place, the rules and physics of the Omniverse. The Omniphysics of the world, people said. The peculiar, very particular way the world Omni had created was ordered and set up. Even people who had been here for years (as far as they could tell) didn't really understand it fully.

Really, it just gave her a headache.

Somewhere among her idle time, letting her mind wander and ponder over this and that as thoughts came and went, she found herself sitting outside of the bunker proper, just at the edge of the rain. In a bout of brilliance, she'd removed her scarf and gloves, to let them dry out properly. Her boots had joined them, propped up upside down to drain. She knew it wasn't going to do much good, really, with needing to go back out into the rain and flooded not-quite-jungle sooner or later. She could jump pretty far, especially with a running start, but she doubted there were enough footholds out there for her to jump between to get back to dry land without taking another dunk. Maybe...maybe she could convince one of her two taller friends to give her a lift and keep her out of the water. At least then she'd only need to worry about the rain, and she had a coat for that sort of thing tucked safely away somewhere. It was in there...with the items she'd picked up and her tablet.

Except her tablet wasn't really stored away safely, at the moment. Currently it was in her hands, being used to do a number of things, as the whim or idea struck her. More carefully inspect the map of the island, the locations of previous drops and item alerts, observe the goings-on in other places around the island, and check in on the fights going on up in the Colosseum. There was Jak, fighting that weird bloody guy with the sword and...someone else. It was kind of crazy. Jak was going all out with some kind of transformation. And...yes, there he was! Zedd, and three others, just about to start their fight! She'd tuned in just in time to not miss anything!

Of course, she had only been watching for a few seconds before the sound of stumbling footsteps behind her dragged her out of her focus. She looked up, blinking in confusion, before turning to look back over her shoulder. There was a distinctly still somewhat soggy-looking Archer, but one who looked somewhat better after a few hours of sleep. "Oh, hey. All rested and stuff?" she asked, entirely sincerely. The only response was a wordless groan from the agent, who ran a hand tiredly over his eyes. That just earned a tilt of the head in confusion from the blue majin.

"Kind of hard to get any ssleep, in a placce like thiss." The voice was unmistakable, and its owner came slowly plodding into view moments after it spoke up. He had added a makeshift eyepatch of clean, white cloth. Probably cotton or something, maybe? She couldn't tell. But it did look to be stuffed and occupying the empty eye socket. Combined with the sunglasses, it did take...mooost of the ghastliness away from the injury. "But we're all ready to get back on the road again. As much fun as it is, ssiting around thiss placce, we're not going to find anything."

"Yeah, yeah...bug-man's right..." Archer groggily mumbled. "Should get a move on, back toward dry land." He looked out at the rain and frowned. "Though I guess 'dry' might be...nowhere, right now."

"Oh, we're heading out already?" Graowr hopped up to her feet. "Okay! Luckily it's not that far back to the beach and out of the flooded area. I think there's even some buildings and stuff we can head to to wait and keep out of the rain for a while, while we wait for the next item drops!"

"Ssuper," the bio-bug muttered, rolling his eye.

"Oh, also, hey!" Suddenly the little blue abomination held up a hand. "Could one of you carry me until we get back to shore?"

She got a near-identical stare from both of her allies of the moment. "What."

"With the rain, the water's probably gonna be rougher than before. And probably deeper too. It was pretty bad already, but now I dunno if I'll be able to really walk or keep up that well." She looked from one of them to the other, doing her best to put on a pleading expression. "Come on, just until we get back to shore?"

Several long, silent moments pass, with the small blue creature just staring, unblinkingly, from secret agent man to bio-roach man with a curious expression. Eventually, they seemed to reach an unspoken agreement, and they each lifted one hand, curled into a loose fist. In unison, they brought them up, then back down.

Archer spoke up. "One..." And they repeated the motion again.

"...two..." Cell, this time. And another repetition.

"...three!" A third time their hands came down, Cell's shifting to a flat posture, as if he was about to deliver a chop to someone. Archer had his index and middle fingers extended, spread apart.

The secret agent just grinned, while the bug-man fumed. "Fine!" he hissed, before they both dropped their arms and the bio-bug turned to leer down at Graowr. "Only until we get back to dry land. Not a ssecond longer! You hear me?"

She nodded energetically. "Yeah! I'll hop off once we get close, promise!"

"And thiss never leaves the island. I sswear." He turned away at that, lumbering off for the doorway.

As Graowr retrieved her discarded clothing articles, and Archer went to do the same, none of them noticed the Syntech camera drone, hovering by a nearby window, catching the entire thing. Turns out, it had already left the island.

Colosseum Bros: Moving out from Safehouse D to D14