No More Tricks, No More Excuses

Not the End

They all arrived at the surface, N having flown Khan and Thad, and V having carried Lizzy and Doll. Uzi risked flying herself, and received no interference from Cyn. Parts and pieces of whatever old lot they emerged in were now split-level with each other, and the surrounding frozen landscape was beginning to break up further.

"Oh. There you are." Cyn greeted them, human disguise now fully discarded, leaving the little once-sweet robo-child adjusting the bow in her hair. "I_was worried you might miss_out on, movie night." She mockingly finger gunned just N had years ago as a butler, when he'd suggested the same thing.

In Russian. "We're not allowing you to get what you want." Doll was the first to actually respond.

Followed by Lizzy. "Prepare to get beat, Freak."

"Yeah!" N agreed, back to being himself, enough so to activate cool sunglasses on his visor. "By the power of Friendship!"

Cyn's eye twitched. "Cringe."

"Oh yeah!" N happily agreed.

"Straight up!" Thad met him with a fist-bump.

N's looked over to V, finding her of course with a much more intense, combat-ready face. But when she shared the briefest look with him, he saw her eye do a swift roll before letting her eyelid lines down.

"Oh-hoh," Khan proudly offered his pre-finale bit, "if you want Cringe, I've got plenty of door-related dad jokes to tell that would probably kill you."

Uzi's face fell forward into her palm with a groan, but the glass of her visor then dragged against her fingers as her head turned to the side. She gave her dad a weak side-smile while the kind of blush lines she was most accustomed to appeared on her display : humiliation.

Further quaking of the ground stopped anyone else from speaking, and they all looked to the evil little goober standing in the middle of the frozen lot. She was now rising gradually from the ground, being lifted by more and more tentacles that burst into existence from her back. Not just the crab clawed ones they were used to seeing, but now also ones that resembled extremely lengthened drone arms . . . ending in human hands. They all propped her up, leaving her body more hanging from where they met than anything else.

And the rumbling quakes were soon joined by the sound of rock splitting open. From the nearest cracks in the crust, some unnatural light began to shine, revealing itself to come from enormous, golden-glowing tendrils creeping up from below the ground like aberrant plants springing into life.

"Oh come on!" Uzi complained.

Perhaps because of the absurdity of it, it ended up being N who exposited an exact observation. "She's absorbing the planet's geothermal energy and using it to create giant glowing plasma tentacles!"

"Ugh, more tentacles?" Lizzy was unimpressed. "Is that the only gimmick this chick has?"

"No." Cyn snapped her fingers, conjuring a [ Null ] orb into existence. "I_have, other gimmicks."

The null was thrown, and froze mid-flight, Uzi's raised hand bearing a solver symbol rotating one way then the other. The same battle of contradicting commands occurred as before, with the object erroring itself out of existence.

Cyn rotated her head in renewed annoyance, nearly inverting it before winking at Uzi and sending her visor glitching out.

Uzi would have collapsed to the ground again, if not for being caught by the shoulder and helped to stand by Doll of all people. And she saw . . . Doll's facial display was trying to glitch out too, and her movements appeared stiff, but with the russian teen it seemed, Cyn wasn't winning.