The GLYPH trio arrived at the Bell Garden apartment community after a few minutes’ walk. It was an old building with five floors of units, but despite the rather poor conditions of the facilities, the rent they charged would bring just about anyone to tears.
Standing outside the building, Ace called to Annabelle with a nod. She kicked her leg out and gave him a salute with both hands in response. “Awaiting orders, sir!”
“Run a scan on this place, would you? Find what unit the BUBBLE’s in.”
“Aye-aye, abuela!”
BB snorted, mockingly mouthing “ha ha, grandma” in Ace’s direction. In the meantime, Annabelle angled her face up towards the apartment building. Her bright blue glowing eyes grew brighter, bluer, and glowing-er, and her two partners could even hear a faint little whirring from some machinery coming from her skull.
The next time she blinked, her eyes returned to normal, and she kicked her leg out and repeated her salute. “Fourth floor! Unit 22! Master bedroom!”
“Alright, gold star for you, kiddo,” he said.
BB raised a brow. “How’d ya know she could do that shit?”
“She did it before. Saved a lot of time searching.” He brought a hand up to the side of his mask, tapping his fingers against a little button on the side of the neck. A green light washed over him, extending out from the mask and covering his body. As it progressed around him, his appearance changed. From light skin to dark, from a black business suit and tie to a dark blue jumpsuit, and from a glossy high-tech mask to an unremarkable, normal guy face with a slightly unkempt beard, and tired eyes. For whatever reason, the briefcase he’d brought with him was not affected. “Alright. Let’s head inside.”
BB leaned away from him. “Bro, that shit is weird.”
“What? The disguise system?” He shrugged. “Hey, it’s like a teenage boy: it comes in handy all the time.”
BB walked in first, shaking her head all the while.
The trio made their way inside, and began to head for the elevators, until they were called over to the front desk by a security guard, who gave them all a not-too-friendly look. “What are you folks doing here? Residents only.”
“Maybe we’re deliverin’ food, baldy,” BB replied, not appreciating the guard’s attitude. She smirked and wiggled her hips around. “See? Brought a big-ass cake with me.”
“If you don’t have business here, then leave.”
“Tch. Fuck you, bro.”
Ace waved BB off, knowing she had a real shot at ruining their chances of resolving this situation peacefully. “Hi, sorry, don’t mind her, she’s still a little cranky from the trip down here. We’re with HITCH – the moving company. We’re here to help the Andersons in Unit 22 with an apartment move.”
The guard’s eyes wandered from Ace’s disguised face, to BB’s disgusted face, to Annabelle’s distracted-by-a-flickering-lightbulb-in-the-overhead-fixture face. “You guys hired a little girl?”
Ace chuckled. “She’s my little girl. It’s her first job.”
After a few more seconds of looking at the trio, the security guard slowly leaned away, giving a nonchalant wave and turning his attention back to his laptop. “Alright. Fourth floor.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Inside the elevator, BB asked, “How’d ya know the name of the tenants for the apartment?”
Ace snorted. “I pulled that out of my ass. You think a security guard at a dump like this knows everybody’s names? Do you know all of your B&B guests’ names?”
“I do, smartass, but that shit’s different anyway. My guests are only around for a few days. People live here.”
“True. And my heart goes out to them.”
On the fourth floor, they followed the signs posted on the wall (though it was a bit hard to read with all of the dicks that had been drawn over it) and took a right turn towards their destination.
When they arrived at the door to Unit 22, Ace nodded his head at Annabelle again. “Was there anyone inside when you scanned the place earlier?”
Annabelle saluted and kicked her leg out. “Negatory! There are no people currently in the apartment!”
“Alright. Guess there’s no one around to let us in, so we’ll probably have to pick the-”
With a meaty BAM!, BB stomped her foot into the door, blasting it wide open, before strolling inside like she owned the place.
“Alright. Guess that works, too.”
The apartment was…standard. Whoever the tenants were, they didn’t seem especially interested in decorating, though perhaps that could be attributed to not having any money left over after getting robbed through their rent payments. There wasn’t much in the living room besides an old loveseat and an old recliner, neither matching aesthetically with one another, along with a pretty old TV that had the mount attached to the back, but was not actually installed into the wall, instead sitting right on top of the entertainment center.
The kitchen looked sparse, too, with the only appliance on the countertops being a tiny little toaster, with only two bread slots. Pathetic.
There were quite a few dishes piled up in the sink, which was a bit strange. There was a dishwasher in the unit, but from the layers of dust on the handle, it didn’t appear to get any use at all. Why not? The tenants were clearly too lazy to simply wash their dishes immediately after finishing their meals, so why not use the machine that just cleaned them for you? And don’t give me any bullshit about “oh it’s a waste of electricity and water” – they left the faucet running, and the TV was still on, as well! They clearly don’t care about that! Just use the dishwasher if you don’t want to wash dishes by hand! It’s okay!
Ahem. Sorry. I got a little sidetracked.
Anyway, our heroes easily found the master bedroom, as well as the BUBBLE they were in search of.
It could best be explained as a big ball of something halfway between water and hot air, distorting the view of everything on the opposite end of it when looked into. It was positioned right beside the bed, floating a few inches off of the floor, and was roughly the size and shape of your mother.
“BUBBLE found!” Annabelle saluted and kicked, her foot snapping the floor lamp standing next to her in half and throwing both pieces over towards the bathroom. She then awkwardly returned to her regular standing position, swiveled around towards the broken lamp, and saluted its destroyed corpse, though fortunately her foot went through the open doorway rather than the wall. “Apologies, appliance!”
“So what’s the deal with this one?” BB asked, reaching out with her silver baseball bat and poking at the BUBBLE. It rippled and jiggled from the point of contact, and let out a low hissing noise. “Somethin’ ‘bout gas or whatever?”
“Poisonous gasses, yup,” said Ace. “Doc said we’ve got about forty-five minutes to get in, snatch the FORMA, and get out.”
BB led the way, stepping into the BUBBLE without hesitation. Ace and Annabelle watched as she completely disappeared from their sight, consumed by the waves washing over the surface of the BUBBLE. Ace held his hand out towards it. “After you, little lady.”
“Alrighty, amigo!”
When the three were all on the other end, they found the environment around them completely changed. Rather than a small bedroom in an overpriced apartment building, they were inside what appeared to be a massive tunnel of dense rock in all directions. Stalagmites and stalactites, many larger than their entire bodies, jutted out from all directions, with the only source of light being thin little veins of some kind of glowing, green crystals growing out from the rocks.
They also immediately came into contact with the poisonous gasses they’d been warned about. The tunnel was jam-packed with the stuff – it was like they were wading through ugly green clouds, barely able to see much into the distance.
BB waved her hands in front of her face, coughing. “Fuckin’ balls, it smells like shit in here!”
Chuckling, Ace shut down his disguise, reverting to his normal uniform, along with his high-tech mask. “Oh? I can’t smell anything.”
BB reached over and flicked him right on the goggles. “Fuck you.”
He gave Annabelle a little pat on the back. “You’re good in here, right?”
This time, her salute ended up cracking the top off of a nearby stalagmite. “Aye aye, aniki! The gas does not affect my systems in any way!”
“Lucky you,” BB grumbled, pulling up the top of her shirt to cover her nose and mouth. “Better tell me she can find the card, too.”
“Annabelle?”
“Scanning!” The bright lights of her eyes pierced through the darkness of the tunnels, giving them a better field of vision, which was nice. Not that there was anything to see, but still. “FORMA located! 0.96 miles to the southwest!”
Smiling beneath her shirt, BB patted the android girl’s head. “Ey, attagirl. Yer pretty cool!”
Most of the trip through the tunnels was uneventful. It was a long, winding stretch of nothing but gas-flooded caves, and a shit-ton of rocks. Just out of curiosity, Ace had Annabelle scan the crystals in the walls, as well as the gas, but she had no information on either of them as well. It made sense; they weren’t on Earth anymore, so she had no knowledge of anything around them, really.
Eventually, they began to hear noise – the cranking of metal carts, loud, painfully ugly scraping noises, the rustling of heavy footsteps, and voices. Voices they could not understand, but recognized as speaking. Sort of. There was something off about the way those voices hit the ears.
The reason became clear soon enough as the tunnel they emerged from led the trio to a vast empty cavern hundreds of feet tall, connected to dozens of other tunnels in all directions and at all elevations. They themselves were about 50 feet above the ground level, and when they looked down to observe the floor, they witnessed a horde of seven-foot-tall, green-scaled, humanoid lizards.
Each one was tall and muscled, with a series of jagged spikes protruding from the backs of their skulls and running along the lengths of their spines, down to the tips of their tails. Many were covered in scars or had chunks of flesh missing, but they moved through the cavern and the tunnels without tiring, almost robotic in a way. They spoke aloud to one another with snarling, spit-filled words the trio could not even begin to understand – spit that burned little pores into the rocks as they struck the ground.
“What the hell…?” BB asked, squinting her eyes to get a better look at the lizard men. “They’re like dinosaurs or some shit!”
“Not what I was expecting,” said Ace, adjusting tiny little knobs near the goggles of his mask, which allowed him to magnify his vision, and also filter through night, heat, and X-ray vision settings. “Looks like their hearts are in their stomachs. Weird.”
As he moved from lizardman to lizardman, his eyes eventually settled on a circle of them standing by the back of the cavern. They were huddled together, looking at something that was physically obstructed from his view, but he was willing to bet it was the FORMA they were after.
He tapped on BB’s arm, pointing at the circle. “I’m thinking our friends over there are the ones with the FORMA.”
BB rolled her neck and started stretching her arms. “Aight. I’ll go grab it.”
Ace snatched her arm to stop her from dropping down onto them. “Aaaand how do you plan to get back up here afterwards, exactly?”
She nodded towards the baseball bat on her back. “My bat’s got a rocket thingie on it. I can use it to jump back up here. Easy.”
“Uhhh, did you forget we’re surrounded by gas right now? What if your little rocket bat ignites it all and scorches the entire place?”
“Then I’ll be done with this dumb job forever. Sounds good to me.”
Ace sighed, knowing BB wasn’t the type of person to listen to reason much, despite only having interacted with her a scant few times. He held his briefcase up. “Well, lucky for you, I happen to have a grappling hook in here. So I’ll go down there with you so we can return back here with it.”
“Whatever, bro.”
He then turned to Annabelle. “Can you keep watch up here? Make sure no one comes in from behind. And I’ll use you to remember which tunnel to grapple back up to.”
She saluted. “Affirmative, Anglo-Saxon!”
“You sure have a lot of those little alliterative nicknames…”
BB clicked her tongue. “Oi. Let’s hurry the fuck up.”
Ace nodded. “Alright, let’s land over-”
BB immediately jumped off of the ledge, descending to the ground floor. He sighed, then followed.
Managing to break her fall by drop kicking an unsuspecting lizardman on the back and flipping off of him to her feet, she began marching towards the circle of lizardmen that Ace had pointed out. “Oi! Gimme that shit!”
All of the lizardmen in the area spun around to face her, wild confusion on their reptilian faces. They pointed claws at her, turned to one another, and repeated the same incomprehensible word to one another. I don’t speak lizardian, so I can’t say for certain, but many of their voices had a sense of panic and excitement mixed together.
The closest of the circle stepped to meet BB halfway, pointing at her and speaking, his acidic spit flinging around the area. One droplet managed to hit her on the forearm, burning her for a moment. “Ow! Bastard!”
Like a cat, Ace dropped to the ground gracefully without having to strike any of the lizardmen. His eyes immediately focused on a sheet of paper held in the taloned hands of one of the members of the circle – that was definitely the FORMA they were after.
Trying to avoid a fight, he jogged up beside BB and pushed her back a bit to take over. “Sorry, sorry, she’s very sorry for kicking your friend over there.”
“No I ain’t.”
He pointed towards the one holding the FORMA, and mimicked the shape of it with his fingers to convey his interest in it. “Hey, that FORMA kinda belongs to our world – Earth – and we kinda really need it back. So if you could just hand it back over, we’ll be out of your hai- uh, scales – and you guys can go back to your…mining, or whatever it is you do.”
The lizardman clutched the FORMA to his chest, while the two on either side of him leaned in. They talked amongst each other, then looked back at Ace and BB.
And they snarled.
At first, it was merely those three, but it spread like a virus, until every single lizardman in the cavern had joined in. When harmonized, their ugly, monstrous voices had Ace and BB twitching and scratching at themselves from discomfort, making sure to avoid getting any of the acidic spit on their bodies.
They stood back-to-back, looking in all directions as the lizardmen began to surround them.
“Guess they don’t feel like giving it back,” Ace muttered.
“Tch, if they want an ass-whoopin’ that bad, then they’re gettin’ it,” BB replied, grabbing hold of her silver baseball bat.
“Lemme make sure I reiterate, uh: do not use the rocket inside of that fucking thing. Please.”
She smirked. “Why? Ya scared to die?”
“Scared? No. But I have a few items on my bucket list I’d like to scratch off first. Like fucking your ass, for one.”
She reached around behind her and gave her booty a quick little smack. “Heh. If yer a decent fighter, maybe I’ll letcha hit it after this.”
Ace brought his briefcase up in front of him, fingers rolling through the five-digit combination lock dial until they settled on one sequence: 12061, accompanied by a tiny little digital chirp signaling the success of the combination.
He clicked the briefcase open, and from it emerged what looked to be a strange combination of a sledgehammer and a shotgun, made of glossy black material similar to his mask.
“BB cheeks, here I cum.”
