[OUTDATED] A Day at the Arcade, A Week of War

(Jessie) Chapter 3: Help!

         Oh goodie! My turn! No time for introductions, let's go. My day started out fine: after a call from Bibi, I was called up to the arcade to debug the latest VR headsets. Normally I would have put it to later as I already have enough to fix around Brawltopia with my mom dealing with twice as many problems. Unfortunately my mom personally funded the headsets. So I had to make sure that they were working properly, otherwise I was flushing the investment down the toilet. My mom was busy at the moment with Nani in the workshop, so I was the backup plan. I sighed and fetched my toolbox and a couple of flapjacks for breakfast. She kissed me goodbye, and off I went.

        After doing some routine maintenance around the block, I ate a classic PBJ delivered by Peep, Nani's friend, camera, (and a big fat snitch). I was sitting at a cafe near Rico's toy shop munching on it for a bit where I met Max. She was usually energetic, which is why I was confused when I saw her so drained. Seeing her in this state with her head planted on a table, I felt kinda bad and well, I helped Max before, no lost screws in helping her again. I sat at her table and she told me that she was going to 8-bit's anniversary and as added favor for 8-bit, didn't bring her energy drink.

        After I helped sort everything out, and we both walked to the arcade. After the unpleasant surprise of meeting Bibi and Tara, I walked over to the new tech to see what the issue was. After tinkering around a bit, I had just found the issue with the headsets when Max waved me over urgently. I sighed once again and came to see what the deal was. I was a bit irked while walking over, but I sort of forgot about that when I saw the situation. 8-bit was down, and was ... I didn't actually have a clue of what he was doing. It was unlike anything I've seen before. Violent shaking? Green skin? He could somehow be having a seizure! And robots don't even have seizures!

        I immediately knew I wouldn't have enough time to debug this, it could take at least two months to develop an antivirus code, and by the looks of it, I didn't have two minutes. So rushing to get to 8-bit's battery was plan B. If I could power him off, then see what the problem was, then it's as easy as pie.

         I was almost there, I had the battery in my hand now, which was hidden deep in his wiring. I knew I couldn't cut the wire that was connecting the battery to 8-bit, I purposely made it as hard as steel in order to prevent someone from stealing the wires as a prank (*cough* Leon *cough*). Even if I magically had ten hours to construct titanium bolt cutters, I doubted I could replace the wire without taking 2-4 years, since I custom crafted each robot. And I had a spare, of course I did! It's just this wire was the spare. I couldn't take that option, even if the alternative was somehow worse. So I tried yanking the battery, that didn't work out if you didn't already know. It was as if the virus knew what I was doing, and deliberately put a safeguard around it. After the initial shock (Bad pun?), my hands were absolutely fried. I knew that if I kept attempting this, it would get me nowhere except to death. So I sucked the pain through my breath and took a plastic plier and slowly tried to nudge it out. I had to be careful, if the shock it gave me when I touched it was a warning, who knows how many volts it could give off. It was nearly out, it just needed one more budge, that's when I heard Bibi scream "fu**!"(if you're going to make a comment of how I'm a "scaredy cat". You've clearly never seen Bibi running at you at full force enraged, screaming about how she'll hit your head clean off like a baseball).

         So yeah, I dropped the box and then several things happened, mainly all the wrong ones. I'll just name the few things I caught. Lighting shot out the box, thankfully hitting no one, unfortunately it chained between arcade machines, which all promptly disintegrated.

        Max, me, Bibi, and several other people just all started shrieking. 8-bit then started glowing for some reason. Dim at first so we didn't notice, but then rose to become absolutely blinding. I close my eyes, but even then it left flashes. After that it was just pure screams. We all started bolting blindly to the exit. It was absolute chaos. There were maybe 10 or 20 people in there but it felt much higher from the way they swarmed everywhere blindly, running into each other, running into walls. I could barely keep myself from getting trampled. Miraculously we somehow managed to burst out the exit along with several other groups of people, like it was aquarium tank bursting open after a sledgehammer was took to the glass.