Plasma Girly (work in progress)

Chapter Two - Six Years Later

The training bot was gray metal with bits of rusted brown. On top, glowing sensor nubs adorned a scuffed and dented sphere, inside which the bots brain clicked and whirred. A short, sturdy neck-tube fed data cables from the sphere into a worn stack of cylinders that were its torso — they held mechanisms that drove the slender, multi-jointed arms branching from its sides. Similarly built legs kept the contraption bipedal and provided locomotion. For a thing that was absent of human curves, it moved with impressive grace through Dad's Dojo, a hollow ridge in a sea-surrounded mountaintop. 

The hollow protruded like a rocky maw that was forever open but a little too elevated to drink from the abutting waters. Jagged rock lined the back and tapered off on the right, leaving a short cliff with a wide view of the dark, endless ocean. Above, a craggy, twenty-foot-high ceiling contrasted with the hollow's smooth stone floor, whose only imperfections were burned divots caused by a history of falling plasma. 

The bot stopped near the center. Its mellow voice carried over the rumbling sea, asking, "Ready?" Lee Jeffersun stood across from it, watching the horizon on the cliffside. The overcast sky looked unusual. "Ready?"

"Neuma yeah!" Lee snapped. "I heard you the first time." Her scowl at the bot softened as she pushed ocean mist from her short black hair. "Sorry." She faced the horizon again, muttering, "It's just . . . the sky — " She unsuccessfully searched. "Never mind." 

Lee's green pleather jacket purred as she raised her unlit plazsaw. In-kind, the bot raised its unignited weapon. Lee lowered her stance, jingling her coat's metal belay loops along with the small, hanging gear on the belt threading her black utility pants. Watching the bot calculate, she took a breath, pulling the smell of sea salt and the scent of the machine's lubricants into her nostrils. At nineteen, Lee was a bit closer in height to her father when he died, and the bot stood two feet taller. Despite years of familiarity, it could still intimidate her with its plazsaw raised.

It rushed her, metal feet clicking on the stone.

Lee met its whooshing downward strike with a horizontal block that metallically rang their unlit shafts. It drew back and delivered another attack she evaded with a side step. Lee followed with a lateral swing the bot blocked in a ringing clang. She avoided its thrust, setting herself up for a beautiful counter-attack when a booming crash distracted her. Before Lee realized it, the bot's shaft smacked her thigh in a stinging swat. "Ouch!"

The bot froze. "Sorry," it said, still mellow. "You told me not to hold back."

"Yeah, I remember," Lee grumbled, rubbing the pain and turning in search of the crash. She followed the weathered line of the seaside cliff. BOOM! Lee pivoted and moved to the short boulders where Dad's Dojo ended and the natural harbor began. Its waters churned and broke in an expansive oval of jagged rock, neighbored on the right by a massive wall of gray stone. The rock stretched and rose in uneven lines and planes, wrapping around the harbor's far side in a tremendous pinnacle of dizzying height. 

Lee peered down into the harbor's hypnotic waves, where bits of twisted ship ruins poked through the harbor's rough surf. She looked through her fingers to lessen the sea mist in her eyes and saw a sheet of loosened metal lolling about in the waves. Lee guessed the rolling breakers had sheared it over time and now cracked it against the stone. She lingered, waiting to see it bang again. Instead, distant thunder rumbled. 

Lee turned to the horizon and tilted her gaze skyward, stopping short of the rock canopy sheltering Dad's Dojo. Black clouds churned from the eternal gray sky, flaring with cracks of light. Lee growled, "Doquah mega storm," as thunder shook the ground. She strode to her courier pack on the rocks near the entrance to the hidden path that snaked up the peaks cradling the harbor. Lee dug her smart-goggles from the pack and pulled the small black lenses over her eyes. Their circular housings spun and whined as a priority notification appeared in the air before her. 

DPN ALERT: APPROACHING MACRO_STORM. 

CCOs TO CLOSE SURFACE DOORS ASAP.

"Great." Lee gestured the alert away with one hand while her other squeezed a trigger on her plazsaw, retracting the shaft into the grip with a satisfying snap. She pressed the compacted weapon into the torso harness under her coat, then rushed to the training bot, saying, "Go to sleep, Shlungus." The bot squatted. Its arms and legs folded in a melody of whirring internal mechanisms until it was compact enough to carry. 

Lee flinched when the metal sheet crashed in the harbor behind her. "Remos, what happened to my alerts?" She lifted the bot with a grunt and brought it behind a tall boulder near the rear stone wall. "Remos?!" Lee shouted over thunder and whistling gusts. She lowered the bot into a plasma cut hole in the ground containing a weatherproof box. A hard stomp closed the box's lid and dislodged a chunk of raw vormanite ore from her boot. "Remos, wake for admin!" 

"Here, Lee," the smart-goggles said in Lee's linked earbuds. Both bud's housings were small, brass butterflies that wrapped the ear comfortably. 

"What happened to my alerts?" 

"Before training, you said no interruptions." The voice was gregarious and playful. "What's going on?" 

"We gotta beat a mega storm," Lee said, crouched, and grabbed the smooth black ore from the ground. She stuffed it in a shielded pouch on her belt. "Turn everything back on, path trace, and scan for CCOs."

"Full system activation will accelerate power loss."

The metal sheet boomed twice as the wind increased.

"Just do it!" Lee shouted over another whistling gust. "They'll close the doors soon!" 

"Right. Powering up." Lee rushed to the path entrance where her courier bag rested and slung it over her shoulders, grateful it was lighter than when she started her deliveries that morning. Another thunderclap shook the ground, urging the sky from gray dusk toward full night. "Scanning," Remos said as Lee's lenses displayed a white digital mesh that pulsed forth from her position. It virtually highlighted the rocky incline of the hidden path, arcing up the mass behind the harbor all the way to the overhanging Central Point Cliff. There, two digital outlines appeared beside a huge horizontal rectangle. They were Chaos Control Officers milling in front of the surface doors.

BOOM! Lee sprinted up the narrow incline as if the crashing metal sheet in the harbor launched her. Between breaths, she cried, "Remos, give me stealth!" 

"You asked to be reminded when activating stealth that if you are caught with modded Remos-ware, your status will be downgraded to tier zero." 

Lee vaulted a boulder on the path and wove around a spill of stones from the craggy rock face on the right as Remos added, "As requested, I've pre-set my hardware to auto-destruct and await your admin confirmation. Note, destruction won't happen until you safely remove — "

"Deactivate auto-destruct and add a flag to work on your sarcasm recognition!" 

The perilous drop on Lee's left kept her vigilant, still, Lee couldn't help glancing at the great void between her and the fast moving storm. Two or three reckless steps and she would fall, likely bouncing along the great granite peaks on the way down before smashing to pulp on the harbor rocks. 

Remos said, "Flag added. Stealth activating" Lee slowed a bit with the vague nausea that accompanied electronic detection blocking as the goggles synced with emitters in her coat and pants. 

The CCO outlines were growing larger in her lenses as she closed the distance. Between strained inhalations, Lee asked, "What's my viz?" 

Remos reported, "Ninety-seven percent electronic detection concealment." Lee slowed and lowered her body, legs and lungs burning. Moments later, she was approaching the boulders camouflaging the hidden path from the Central Point Cliff. She repeated her status request, and Remos confirmed, "One hundred percent electronic detection concealment." 

Lee peered from her cover. The Central Point Cliff's craggy precipice housed an enormous rectangular opening. It spilled yellow light over the machined landing strip atop the large, jagged overhang where the CCOs perched. Their duster-style overcoats flapped in increasing storm winds, revealing glimpses of their rugged armor and dangling shock batons. 

Lee panned to the far end, where shimmering landing lights glowed before the dark storm. Seeing no approaching aircraft, she muttered, "The doquah fight better not be canceled." Returning her gaze to the officers, Lee quietly asked between the howling wind surges, "Remos, can you access their lenses?"

"Checking." A beat passed. "There's electrical interference from the storm."

"How about coms?"

"Checking?" Another beat. "Yes."

A squelch in Lee's butterfly buds was followed by the thin, staticky voice of one of the officers, saying, "— cause I've got a good Plaz seat, and I wanna get out of here. The Resonator is fighting." 

The other said, "Vid the Resonator, huh. The boringest Plaz Champ ever."

"You crazy! He's the best!" 

"He used to be, but he don't kill no one no more." The conversation stopped for a moment. "Helimos are turning back to Chooyu Island. We're closing." 

Lee watched the CCOs trot to parallel control panels set in the dark stone on both sides of the gigantic entryway. The large officers looked tiny compared to the mammoth opening. "Ready?" one called. The other affirmed over a wailing gust. 

"Come on, already," Lee muttered before a deep thrum shook the ground, followed by a loud, creaking grind that challenged the storm winds. The CCOs jogged into the opening as tremendous weathered steel slid from concealment in the rock face on both sides. Intermittent raindrops pattered as Lee scrambled in their wake toward the shrinking yellow light. Thunder chased her through the narrowing space a moment before the downpour released onto the Central Point Cliff. Its roar was muted with the bang of the gigantic doors coming together.