quickly as he could. The men continued after him.
“I still don’t like you,” Mest called back as Arthur trailed slowly behind. “I’m going to ignore you. Stop following me.”
If she had bothered to look back, she would have seen Arthur writing out hasty explanations and apologies, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she saw them anyways. She would have just ignored them.
“In any case, you still apparently see me as some sort of witch so obviously you don’t like me either, so why don’t we agree to disagree and part ways?”
If she had bothered to look back, she would have seen Arthur writing out hasty warnings, but it already was too late. Mest let out a squeak of shock when, all of a sudden, something large and metal landed right in front of her, creating a shockwave that pushed the walls of boxes back a few centimeters. Beta looked her over and said, “You aren’t Selachi.”
“I, I, I,” Mest stuttered, his eyes wide. And then he noticed that he was a ‘he’ now.
“Oh, but you look like a scientist,” Beta continued, sounding a little hopeful. “Perhaps you can help.”
Mest fingered the lab coat over his shoulders and adjusted his glasses. He was slowly getting used to the scientist’s body. In fact, he rather liked it. Especially now that he knew things he never knew before. He was starting to learn a lot about Beta as well. “You really think I’m a scientist,” he said, sounding a little amazed. Beta stared at him questioningly. The good thing about a robot with artificial intelligence, Mest was slowly finding out, was that they were never wishy-washy. Things were either something or they weren’t. And right now, Mest was a scientist and no other perception of any other person could overturn that.
“Do you need anything specifically?” he asked in the most businesslike tone he could make. He almost grinned. He had never sounded this serious before.
“Several of my functions may not be working properly,” Beta replied dutifully. Why would she think of him as a scientist, though? Mest thought about this a little and almost missed the next part of Beta’s response. “But I feel that I must find Selachi first, and perhaps the others. There are potentially some useful items stored here. It would be beneficial to all of us if nobody died just yet.”
“Right, right,” Mest nodded in a scientist-like way, still thinking about why he was actually a scientist. Maybe the robot just didn’t have enough imagination to imagine anything else. “Finding everybody quickly. Let’s build a radar that detects life forms.”
Arthur had been lurking around, uncertain of what to do, but upon hearing this, he drew himself up on some boxes and wrote, ‘Are you serious how does that even work besides it’s only going to find two people it certainly can’t track Mephistis’
“Oh shush, I can do this, I’m a scientist,” Mest said dismissively. “I just need some spare parts.”
‘You don’t even have any tools’ Arthur pointed out.
“Hey, you don’t know what Beta can do, but I do. She can definitely help with most of the work and stuff. Do you have anything?”
“Of course,” Beta replied impassively, unshouldering the pack she had made. “I picked up a few items that I thought may be useful…”
Mest considered the various objects seriously. Arthur metaphorically rolled his eyes. ‘It’s all just junk’
“No, I can do something with this. But I’ll need, like, some sort of wires…a speaker, a battery if I can’t connect it to you…a receiver too, actually…”
“Understood. Wait here.” And she was off, picking up towers of boxes as though it were nothing and peering inside for any sort of useful items. For the few minutes she was gone, Mest was no longer a scientist, and she sighed, already missing all that intelligence.
Soon, Beta was back, and she tossed down a few more objects to add to the paltry pile. A digital clock, a stereo, a doll, a two-way radio and anything else she thought could be of some use.
“Right,” Mest clapped her hands together cheerfully. “You can do what I tell you, right? We’ll need to take apart several items…hey, you, make yourself useful and watch out for anybody that might come our way, something like that. I’m pretty sure there’re guards wandering around here.”
‘I’ll be surprised if you actually manage to make anything out of this junk,’ he wrote out before leaving.
“Well prepared to be surprised then! Okay, so first, we should make the display…that’ll be made of the glass. So we need to sort of melt down these fragments and…”
The next half hour or so was spent making this radar. Beta was an incredibly fast worker who sometimes even managed to anticipate some of Mest’s commands. Every once in a while, Arthur would come around to check on the progress and to report that nobody was around. Eventually, he just stopped and watched as the radar was completed.
It fit over the side of Beta’s head. “It’s gonna sort of work like echolocation but it can also maybe pick up heartbeats of faraway targets. It’s probably a little distracting to look at a screen with one eye and everything else with the other, but I guess you might manage.”
‘It can’t possibly work,’ Arthur said. It worked.
“Ha! Never doubt science!” Mest crowed, though to be honest, he was sure he wouldn’t have normally known how it worked either.
‘I don’t think it’s actually science how could anything there be put together to make that where did you get the microchips or the programming or whatever to build that’
“If it works, it works, okay?” Mest snapped back. “Anyways, now that that’s done…since there’re guards about, there are going to be more than two blips on the screen, of course, and only two of them are going to be Vander or Selachi, so you should probably—hey! Wait!”
Beta shot off, climbing the box walls again, this time with a destination in mind. Mest watched sadly as she was back alone with Arthur and thus, vaguely witch-like again. “Damn,” she said sadly. “I was hoping to find Vander…”
‘Why don’t you just whip up another one of those scientific radars, hm? It worked last time.’ Mest was slightly amazed how sarcastic chalk and paint could be.
Selachi crept around, uncertain about what to do now. Every once in a while, some guards may pass, but he had been lucky so far. Apparently, they weren’t yet looking around for him. They only knew about Mephistis and apparently something else that managed to kill another guy. He bet it was Beta.
More guards passed and as he pressed himself into the shadows, he heard one guy complaining bitterly about ‘underemployment.’ At least that meant that he was unlikely to run into many. He slunk off once they passed.
It was probably a bad idea to go the way the guards came from, but he couldn’t help but want to find where the ‘base of operations’ was. Or whatever they called it. It was better than staying in the box maze.
He made a few random turns in hopes that he was more likely getting closer rather than farther. And then he noticed a curiously smoking wall of boxes.
It was probably a bad thing to lean in closer to the smoking wall, but Selachi did anyways, apparently filled with a need to sate his curiosity. He stared as he walked. The smoke seemed to be pushing itself in between the boxes…although smoke couldn’t just push itself out. But it didn’t seem very likely that there was something in between the boxes that was producing smoke…so…
With a start, Selachi realized that the smoke was purple. He backpedalled quickly, but it was too late, and soon, all of Mephistis had pushed its way through the wall of boxes and swirled before him. He seemed just as surprised as the shark boy. But shouts behind the wall caused him to flinch and hiss, “Hide me and run.”
“Wha—“ Selachi managed to get out before the wall of boxes exploded towards him. Before he could react, Mephistis slid up his sleeve, surrounding Selachi under his clothes. The shark boy had no idea what to think about this and, honestly, didn’t really want to think about it. Lucky there were other things to think about, then. Like the very threatening men crowding around him as boxes continued to fall from the sky.
“What are you doing here?” One masked man demanded, holding up some sort of gun, maybe. Selachi instinctively raised his empty hands and they flinched. Shoot. They must have never seen a guy with webbed hands before.
“Alright, what are you?” One rudely said, causing him to scowl. He hated this. He hated this whole thing. It was a headache. Even more of a headache. And now he had a burned hand and a possibly killer robot and poison gas inside his clothes and rude men gaping at him and actually if Mephistis was billowing about in his clothes now did that make him look pudgy?
So it may have come to nobody’s surprise that Selachi was very anxious at the moment. Being anxious made him even more jittery than usual and he shuffled about, juggling between fury and anxiety before finally jumping up and surprising everybody by biting off the end of the gun.
He spat out gun fragments, as well as a few teeth that were quickly replaced by the hundreds of other teeth he had, and stared sheepishly at his shoes. He felt a bit lucky that nobody had gone and shot him yet.
“Uh. Shorry,” he said.
“I think you oughta come with us,” one of the masked men said sternly. He had a gun that was quite intact and Selachi was pretty sure he couldn’t go up and bite the barrel off again now that they knew he could.
He sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I got it…” Mephistis seemed to stir under his clothes (god he will never not think that anything but awkward) but he ignored it as best as he could and allowed himself to be led by the masked men. One spoke into a radio and after a brief conversation, it was decided that only two would be needed to take him back to wherever they were taking him. He found it a little insulting. But he would also rather that he weren’t led at all.
The masked men at his sides didn’t make good conversation. They walked and pushed him along and stared straight ahead, always silent. Silence made Selachi nervous. At least he was already moving so that he didn’t need to fidget.
“Shoooooo, what’sh thish plashe all about anywaysh?” he said, lisping like crazy. One guard glanced down at him.
“…You don’t know?”
“Look, I jusht got here,” Selachi said rather irately. “I shwear I don’t know anything that’sh going on right now.”
The guard stared at him now. “You’re saying that you’ve infiltrated the largest warehouse in existence, the carrier of everything anybody would need and then some, the storage for the world, and you don’t know that you did?”
Selachi glared up at him from under his hair. “No. I didn’t.”
“You didn’t come here to steal anything or to get something for someone or….anything?”
“Does that happen a lot?” Selachi asked.
The guard thought for a moment. “No, not really.”
“Well, I didn’t come here to any of that.” Selachi resumed glaring sullenly at his shoes as they continued walking.
“I see,” the guard said, obviously not seeing at all.
“Get their masks off,” Mephistis hissed under his shirt (uuugh he was still shivering about that).
“What was that?” one of the guards asked.
“Hm? Did you hear something?” Selachi asked innocently.
The guard glanced around for a bit. The other guard joined in. Both had to concede that there was nothing there. “I guess…not…”
“I’m not gonna do anything,” Selachi said.
Thinking that he was referring to them, the guard replied, “Yeah, but we still need to take you in. Unauthorized people aren’t….authorized to be here.”
There was no response from Mephistis. Selachi decided that he had gotten the message.
The place they were taking him was indeed not part of the box maze. They went in an elevator and went up several floors before stopping at a rather clean hallway. It was white, almost blindingly so, and the guards pushed him down this hallway towards a door at the end. There were windows overlooking the whole warehouse, and he gazed out at them, trying to look impassive but failing. The box maze might have been dull, but he would prefer to be down there than up here now. He held in a breath when he noticed that, at the far end was an open dock. He tore his eyes away from the inviting waters and stared at the doors they passed instead.
And, quite suddenly, the windows burst inward behind them.
The guards turned around swiftly, holding up their guns and shouting out, “What—“ but already that took up too much time. One guard was kicked to the floor roughly with a loud ‘crack.’ The other guard opened fire, but, unfortunately for him, bullets don’t work well on robots. He was knocked out as well. Selachi stared as Beta was suddenly in front of him, looming, staring down coldly at him.
Then the door opened behind him as several other employees had heard the gunfire. Only a few surprised exclamatory shouts were allowed before Beta incapacitated them as well. During this time, Selachi felt Mephistis trickle out of his sleeve and, with a rush of air, flew out the broken window.
Oh, right, thanks.
Beta was done knocking everybody unconscious and turned around and stepped towards him. Selachi instinctively stepped back. Beta halted suddenly, a strange look on her face…a pained look on her face.
Selachi’s mind reeled a little bit as he thought about what exactly this meant. Because surely robots don’t actually have emotions. Or wait, did they? There were a lot of sci-fi books and movies about this sort of thing, right? But then again, that was fiction. But then again, this certainly felt like a strange fiction.
“I…uh,” Selachi said, suddenly feeling incredibly awkward, more awkward than having plumes of smoke snuggle in his clothes and that was saying something. The air was feeling thick and he started shuffling around, suddenly unable to keep still again.
“Is your hand okay?” Beta asked, her voice cracking slightly. He assumed that was from the damage she took from the last round.
“I…uh,” Selachi repeated, flexing his burned hand a little. It probably wasn’t a smart move. He noticeably winced. Still, he said, “Yeah, it’s…alright. Or something.” Pretty okay for a second degree burn, he almost said, but stopped himself. He really shouldn’t be spiteful. He was the one who grabbed onto her like an idiot. I mean, what could possibly happen to a robot? Well, maybe she would have broken apart, but wasn’t that what he had wanted? Even though the mirror had lied to him, he couldn’t get that image of Beta killing him out of his head. So maybe she wouldn’t do it now. But sooner or later, she would have to, and why would she ever hesitate? Certainly not because she felt bad for him. For one thing, he didn’t really need anybody’s sympathy. Also, robots don’t feel things. So why the hell was he afraid about hurting her feelings? Gaaaah.
“Let me help,” Beta said. Selachi stared at her helplessly. If she wanted to do something, it wasn’t like he could actually stop her. And he didn’t exactly want his arm broken just because she wanted to help and he refused and she insisted. That would actually be a little embarrassing.
“Yeah, okay, shure,” he said, holding his hand out and looking away with a petulant scowl, as if trying to make sure she knew very well that he didn’t actually want her care. Beta’s lips turned upwards slightly, though Selachi didn’t see, or perhaps refused to see.
Carefully, she took the leathery hand. Selachi flinched at the touch of cold metal, but still did not pull his hand away. Besides, it actually felt…nice.
Something else that felt soft and cool was rubbed on his hand, soothing the burning pain. By the time he glanced back forward, Beta was already bandaging his hand using a roll of cloth bandages that she seemed to just have conjured out of nowhere.
The roll of bandages disappeared again and now his hand was nothing more than a white mitten. Selachi found that he couldn’t really move it at all. It would probably interfere with swimming…but then again, it was very unlikely that he would even get to a body of water. Thinking about that again, he turned towards the windows and sighed. Beta followed his gaze.
Something mechanical in her hummed before she finally announced, “I am going to get you out of here.”
“I…what?” Selachi spluttered, a little flustered.
“I will take you out there. You will swim far away. It may not take you away from the battle, but it will take you away from the fight and you will be safe until the round ends. I will be trying to find a way to end this battle…or at least take it to the cowardly Gatherer.”
Selachi would have laughed if anybody else had said it, but somehow, having a robot say it made it seem all the more possible. He couldn’t think of what to say for a moment. “I…I don’t need to run away! I’ve been doing fine sho far!”
“Yes, but I still think you should get to the water. You’re more suited to be there, anyways.”
Selachi chewed on his lip and stared out to the docks again, all the way at the far side of the warehouse. He couldn’t deny that he wanted to be there. Water was good. Water was comforting. “Alright,” he finally said. “How did you find me anywaysh? Ish it that thing over your eye?”
Beta shifted a little. “It helped. I still had trouble finding you.”
Selachi’s eyes narrowed. “…What short of trouble…?”
Yet another unconscious body. Vander had no idea who had done all this, but he was both grateful and very frightened. Whoever was knocking about guards willy-nilly probably wouldn’t mind knocking him out too, where he would be rather vulnerable to any of the other contestants, easy pickings, blah blah blah whatever you wanted to say for ‘not dead but might as well be.’ He suddenly regretted the guard disguise.
Actually, the person knocking all the guards unconscious was probably a contestant and if so, he was sure that they would see past his rather stupid disguise and kill him instead.
He almost jumped out of his skin at the sound of pattering footsteps, but grinned with relief when he heard they were guards. They were in a panic. He supposed they found the unconscious bodies too.
However, they were headed his way, and this wasn’t something to be relieved about. Thinking quickly, he hid his thick tail self-consciously behind his back and covered his face and moaned loudly, stumbling out of the hall. He screamed and put on quite a good show as a guy who had been attacked horribly by some unspeakable madness lurking about in the warehouse.
He also didn’t need to bother with hiding his tail because he had misjudged something, and that was which part of the hall the guards were in. He had jumped out assuming they would be in front of him. They were actually behind him. Where his tail could clearly be seen.
“What the hell,” someone shouted and Vander quickly realized his mistake. Still keeping up his act, he lurched around and tripped over towards the group of guards, who were rather quick to retreat. Seeing as he could no longer hide his lizardness, he let his hands widen to at least show some of his face. He moaned a little more for good measure before gasping out, horror and dread dripping off every word (not saying much because there was only one), “H-help—“
One reaction he hadn’t exactly expected was a gunshot. He recoiled quickly and shouted “HOLY CRAP, god damn, I didn’t mean like that you morons!” He probably shouldn’t have snapped like that. But getting shot was a pretty scary thing to happen to you. The guards stared at him, unsure what to do now. Vander stared back as he slowly realized with mounting horror that both his disguise and his act was just plain useless now.
He couldn’t help but think about how much this sucked.
Luckily, he didn’t have to think about it much more because, suddenly, two of the guards in the back fell over, downed by what seemed to be a gun. The rest turned around, gaped in terror, and started wildly firing. Vander noticed this did nothing. He also noticed that it was mostly because what they were firing at didn’t exist.
While Arthur distracted the remaining guards, Vander knocked them all on the head with his tail, whipping it around swiftly so that they fell down, stunned. He was somewhat startled to hear several more shots ring out and in that instant, all of the fallen guards were dead.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Vander said, wide-eyed and shaking as Mest approached casually. Or at least, she tried to look casual. She was obviously shaken too.
“Look, they were all about to… I dunno, capture you, or at worst, kill you. I didn’t want you to die. Aren’t you supposed to be a spy?”
“Would you stop assuming things about spies!” Vander shouted, almost ready to throttle the young, naïve, lizard girl in front of him. “Whatever you heard about spies, wherever you got your knowledge of them, it’s all wrong, okay? We’re not suave, we don’t have any super secret spy powers or anything, we may be some training, but I’m just a regular guy, okay? I’m…” Vander looked away and sighed. “I’m not even a real spy.”
Mest stared. “Okay. You’re a pretty cool spy in my book and you’ve survived ‘til now, so that counts for something.  I don’t really know what else to say though. You’ve just made this a little awkward. And I was going to tell you something important too.”
“What?”
‘She’s figured out a way to kill Mephistis,’ Arthur wrote out on the wall.
“Ah.” Vander paused, collecting himself quickly. He would have to find time later to be embarrassed. It was time to ignore all blubbery unmanly emotions. “…How?”
“Wait a minute, first, do you have something useful that comes with that uniform?” Mest said quickly.
“Well…a map…? It’s pretty—“ She yanked the PDA out of his hand before he could finish his sentence. Vander debated snapping at her again but decided to wait to see what she had to say at least.
“Ah! Great! This is perfect!” she cried out gleefully and Vander couldn’t help but lean in closer to see what she was making a big fuss about. She at least let him see the map. “Alright, look, this part of the warehouse,” she said victoriously, jabbing a finger at a part of the screen that was labeled ‘Frozen Goods.’ “Obviously they have to freeze whatever is there.”
Vander shuddered involuntarily. He didn’t particularly like the cold. “Okay, so what?”
“Well if you know your science, obviously you would have known that with change in temperature comes change of state of matter. Gas to liquid. Liquid to solid.” Vander stared for a moment as it slowly dawned on him what Mest was suggesting. “Right, you see, don’t you! What better way to kill poisonous gas than freezing it!”
“Are you sure it’s cold enough, though?” Vander said nervously.
‘They probably have some sort of temperature control for that,’ Arthur wrote.
Vander sighed. “Alright. So we’re going to lead Mephistis to this giant freezer and hope he doesn’t catch on, is that the plan?” Mest nodded rather cheerfully, still happy that she managed to figure out a way to actually harm a collection of smoke. “…How did you figure this out, anyways? I thought we were going to have you stick around with Mephistis alone…”
“Beta sees me as a very smart scientist,” Mest explained. “I don’t think she is capable of imagining anything else. In any case, let’s head over to the freezer at least…”
“Wait, what about finding Mephistis?”
Mest waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll probably come across him on our way there.”
“Isn’t…this place a little too big for people to just randomly come across each other…?”
“We ran across you, didn’t we? Not to mention I saved your ass.” Vander sighed and gave up. Especially when Beta happened across them by chance.
“It’s a good thing you got here,” Mest said happily once everybody managed to get back on their feet from the sudden crash landing from above. To Vander’s slight surprise, he found that Mest was now, indeed, a scientist-looking character. “We might need your help finding Mephistis! There’s something important that needs to be done and it can’t be done without him. Now that you’re here, maybe we can build some sort of tracker for poisonous smoke…”