Gerard would be killing twice as many dracs right now if his fucking spacebar would quit sticking. He spilled Mountain Dew on his keyboard last week and it hasn't been the same since, even though he turned it upside down to drain on a towel right away. It was probably a towel, anyway. Some kind of linen-y thing that had been balled up under his desk long enough that it'd probably already had worse things spilled on it than Mountain Dew.
"Quit jerking off and join us, would you, Poison?" Ray says over voice chat. He fires at a drac that's about to get Mikey, but he's too late to head it off, and Mikey gets a laser blast in the arm. "Goddammit. Poison, help me out here!"
"Sorry, sorry, it's my fucking keyboard, it keeps--" Three more dracs come around the rocky outcrop, and he breaks off to pound at his spacebar. He manages to down two of them, but the last one gets close enough for Mikey to knock it out with a roundhouse kick. Gerard pivots his view to get a look behind him and spots two more white cars with tinted windows fast approaching. Fuck.
"You're all morons," says Grace in his ear.
Gerard breathes a sigh of relief. "Steam! Thank god you're here, we're in serious trouble. They're dogpiling us like crazy."
Grace snorts. "They're not, you guys just don't appreciate how many of them I always pick off before they get to you. I'm behind the rock on your left. Try not to kill me this time."
"That was
once
," mutters Mikey.
"Uh-huh," says Grace. "Why do we even let him have a ray gun?"
Dracs start piling out of the cars, and there's no more time for teasing. It takes a while to kill them all, since they keep hiding behind the cars and there's no cover the gang can use to get behind them. Mikey is badly in need of a first aid kit by the time they're done, and no one has a pack on them, so they have to head back to base. Gerard and Ray do a quick check of the cars and corpses first, but there's not much to scavenge.
Their base is currently an abandoned gas station in Zone 5. They set off toward it, keeping Mikey in the center of the group to avoid any accidents wiping out the last of his precarious health bar.
They're done with the fight and they won't be crossing any major roads, so they drop out of VoIP to use text chat instead.
turbosteam: whyd you start without me?
the_kobra_kid: we didn't start anything
the_kobra_kid: the dracs were the ones picking a fight
turbosteam: hanging out around route petrichor for no reason IS picking a fight
turbosteam: obviously there's gonna be dracs there
JetStar: Kid was looking for his white whale again.
turbosteam: jesus christ
the_kobra_kid: he wasn't there this time
Mikey is convinced that one of the dracs is out to get him. Apparently the same drac has shown up on multiple occasions to finish him off. Never mind that finishing off players is what the dracs
do
, and never mind that there's absolutely no way to tell dracs apart. Mikey won't hear it, no matter how much the rest of them make fun of him.
PartyPoison: For fuck's sake IT'S AN NPC
JetStar: Are we really still bothering to argue with him about this?
the_kobra_kid: i can tell which one he is
the_kobra_kid: he does this shifting thing with his feet and his beady little eyes are always on me and nobody else
the_kobra_kid: he never shoots at anyone else either
the_kobra_kid: i have to get him before he gets me
the_kobra_kid: it was an important mission that could not wait for steam to finish her homework
They're passing by the dusty shell of a fast food restaurant. There's someone trying to climb up onto the roof. Gerard has tried that a couple times, but he's never put in the kind of effort this person seems to be investing in the attempt. He appears to be trying to jump from the top of a car onto the building. It's just a little bit too far, and he falls down every time, but he keeps trying. Presumably he doesn't have the keys to the car, or he'd move it closer.
