rp – Page 63 – Siblings-a-Fixin'

The great white tilted his head as the other pulled the magnet from his hammerspace and set it against the floor. “What d’ye think I should do with this?” Bruce asked, gliding closer towards the hold where the Repairman fell and dipping his head closer to catch sight of the other Toon in the darkness. “Might frizz up m’ electroreceptors gettin’ close to it, but I s’ppose ye reckon it’s necessary, eh?”

The Repairman stopped his descent and looked up.

“You’ve never seen a tin can phone?” he asked. “It’s so we can talk. I only have the magnet there to keep your end up. Wouldn’t want it to slip.”

He paused. Electroreceptors? He had no idea what those were, but they sounded important. Still, their means of communicating needed securing, and the Repairman doubted Bruce could hold the can, being a more realistic shark.

“If it’ll mess you up,” he called, “we need another way to keep the can up there. Any ideas?”

“ Yeah, especially that one movie with their piano battle: I loved that! I had it on tape, too, ba-haah!! ”

Because Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a universal constant. Or, at least, cartoon characters were, to an extent. Hey, if a Mobian could reach Toontown, cartoons had to be a thing there, right?

“ Well, these days, I’m not really doing that much. I guess I’ve just been out and exploring Mobius without destroying it. ”

The Repairman laughed in return, but somewhat hesitantly. He remembered that perfectly well (what Toon didn’t?), and it was a good performance, but he never felt comfortable with…well, real humans.

“Well, you’re quite a ways away from Mobius,” he remarked, looking at Scratch oddly.

He opened his red toolbox and pulled out a stepladder and some spray adhesive. Distracted as he was, he had to do this job.

“Yer time’s gonna be real lousy,” Doris snarked.

“So far,” the Repairman said, somewhat truthfully, “this is going to be my best.”

As the other sudden disappeared from his line of vision, Bruce turned about, an unadulterated expression of worry spreading across his face. “Mate! Ye’lright?” the great white shouted until his gaze finally settled on the other, having dropped from his current location. At the sudden rickety movement of the panels, the shark squinted under the light, making out a narrow hole. “Well, looks like you can fit through.”

“I can,” the Repairman replied, turning back around, "but what about you?“

Bruce, despite his Tooniness, was still a rather large shark, and CG characters tended to have a harder time squeezing through smaller spaces.

He considered the problem for a moment, then pulled a tin can telephone from behind his back. Suddenly realizing his companion had no hands, he pulled out a small horseshoe magnet to secure one can to the metal floor.

"There,” he said. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“ That doesn’t seem too far off. Eugh, I’m glad I’m able to branch out now! Being stuck in 1993 gets old after 23 years, give or take… ”

Scratch. Scratch, please don’t make more cracks in the 4th wall. The poor bloblike fellow doesn’t need anymore work…

“ My question is, who didn’t those days? Like you said, go big or go home! Even if it does mean betrayal of one’s own brand! ”

The chickeny robot winked and gave the Repairman a teasing smile. The bird knew just what he was doing. Badniks will be Badniks.

“ Hey, we were pretty much kids who just wanted to have some fun. ”

The Repairman tried to think about being in one year for several years. After the slight headache, he quickly stopped trying.

“Hmm,” he nodded, “I guess br– world loyalty doesn’t really matter that much. I’ve seen Donald and Daffy working together, after all.”

He began to put his toolbox back onto his cart, while pulling a red toolbox from the top shelf.

“So, what are you two up to these days?”

“ ’Decent lackey’ is probably pushing it a little. But, a mechanic? Woah! Reminds me of the time he’d made Sonic a bike. WAIT, CREW? There’s more than just the two of them now? I guess I shouldn’t be TOO intimidated by them. ”

Scratch chuckled when the Repairman asked if his brother’s other weapons were any friendlier.

“ Well, I don’t know. How friendly would you classify chainsaws, mini-missiles, guns and lasers, among other equally-as-dangerous-and-destructive things? Also, sometimes he used to just have a cannon on one arm and he’d pretend he was MegaMan or something. Geez, I wonder where all our games and consoles are right now, I should go dust ‘em off and play some! Nostalgia for days! ”

“You must’ve been on that version of Mobius for a while,” the Repairman remarked. “There’s been more than the two for quite some time now.”

He was about to reply to Scratch’s point about weaponry, but stopped. He realized the chicken had a point.

“Well…” he said, struggling to figure out why he felt those were friendlier.

He had a nagging suspicion at the answer, but decided not to pursue that line of thought. He didn’t want to sabotage his own job again.

“…I guess if you’re a henchman, you go big or go home,” he finished, jokingly.

“Wait a minute,” he said, realizing something. “You, a SEGA character, had a Nintend—”

He clapped his hand over where his mouth would be, but it was too late. He sabotaged his own job again.

Doris suddenly shouting “Seven minutes!” didn’t help.

“ Yeah. Tails. We um. Kind of held him hostage a lot of times. I hope we didn’t super screw him up. ”

The chicken’s eyes lit up momentarily at the mention of a drillish individual, but quickly re-faded.

“ Y-yeah! My little brother! Grounder! That’s who you’re thinking of! I don’t know why he didn’t use his drills more often. I guess one’s more enticed to use a weapon rather than their bare drill-hands, hah. ”

“Eh,” the Repairman replied casually, “don’t worry about it. That’s par for the course for many Toons. I bet you were a decent lackey if you got to do that.”

He looked up, having finally found the clipboard.

“Besides,” he continued, “he’s the mechanic of Sonic’s crew, last I heard.”

He looked down to see his best time. It was then that he realized that he didn’t have a best time; this was the first time he tried timing his travels.

Sheepishly, he tried to make sure Doris didn’t see his mistake as he put the blank paper in his hammerspace.

“Grounder, eh?” the inkblot repeated. He noticed the chicken brighten up, so he figured it’d be nice to remember this name, as well.

“My guess is that other weapons are…” he looked for the right term, “…friendlier than drills.”

Scratch took Doris’s business card and squared it away in his shirt pocket. He might as well lok into it.

“ Hopefully that’s the case, if I ever encounter him again. ”

Well, Scratch certainly had left impressions on audiences and Mobius alike, both not necessarily positive ones. Names like “dumb cluck”, “chips-for-brains”, “scrap metal”, and “hey isn’t that the youtube poop chicken” probably don’t leave their owner with a high esteem.

“ I-I don’t know how they could forget… We were. Uh. I think we made a pretty major impact on a four-year-old fox kit. ”

“Oh, Tails?” the Repairman asked.

He suddenly remembered two things. One: this was a robot that apparently fell apart a lot. Two: Tails is now known for being a mechanic.

“Yeah, I think you and whoever that drill belonged to did influence him a bit.”

He pulled his blue toolbox in front of him to better talk to Scratch while he searched for his clipboard.

The surrounding tunnel gave an immense shutter, and outside, the shark could hear- even feel- crumbling of rocks from outside the underpass. Bruce braced himself, instinctually moving closer to the other as the environment around him moved. Then all of a sudden, all the rumbling and earthquake like motions came to an abrupt halt.

A beat passed, and Bruce arched a brow. “Did it work?”

The Repairman fell into the panel with an “oof!” as the quake started. Miraculously, his inky form did not hit any of the outlets.

He clambered out once the motion stopped, feeling slightly dazed. After a moment, he looked around, then sighed.

“I guess not. I… guess I could check–”

Click. The incandescent lights suddenly turned on.

“Gah!” he exclaimed, shielding his eyes. “I guess it did.”

When he could see again, the Repairman noticed the doors were still closed. However, a smaller panel on one of the walls was being opened, revealing a robotic hand.

He began to approach it, hoping it would lead to a way out.

[[continued from: http://askthefwrp.tumblr.com/post/144331095486/oh-good-news-electric-malfunction-never]]

@chainsxwsmile

“Do underpasses usually require automatic doors?” the shark asked, glancing around in the near-darkness. While limited to light visually, the great white able to sense electrical signals and where they bounced off, to a degree. Using that, combined with the electrical signals from the wires, the Repairman, and himself, he could navigate the darkness of the tunnel.

But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the doors were sealed shut.

“Any wire look familiar in there?”

“Let’s see…Arm Control…Arm Control…Arm Safety…”

The Repairman unplugged the cords as he went. No sense wasting power on these.

“Arm Safety…Arm Sanity…Three-Laws-Compliance…”

None of these wires seemed to control the doors, or even the lights.

“…Nope. Let’s try the switches…”

He practically had to have his face on the labels to see them this time; they were all red, much like his siren light, and were smaller than the outlet labels.

“Power 1…Power 2…Power 3…”

There were ten in all. All of them were on, except for the one labeled “Power 4.”

Without a second thought, he flicked that switch.

“ …No, I. I don’t. And I’m keepin’ a safe distance from that blue pipsqueak, ‘cause I’m really not in the mood to get busted up again. ”

Scratch shifted his attention to Doris for a brief moment.

“ Er. I think I’ll pass on bein’ a wakeup call. ”

He watched the glue can be tossed, but he never actually saw where it went, or what it did.

“ Though, I’ve heard he and Tails have gotten a little older. Geez, maybe they don’t even remember me. Wouldn’t that be somethin’! ”

“Alright,” replied Doris, “Just come by if ya need anythin’.”

She held out a business card with her second hand.

“Makes sense,” the Repairman nodded. Sonic might not have known that this was an ex-Badnik.

The chicken’s speculation gave the Repairman some pause for thought. Scratch, at least, had had his showtime, and probably left at least some impression to an audience, not to mention his world.

The Repairman, however… True, he ran a blog these days, but he never had a proper show, or an identity outside Fourth Wall repairing...

He mentally shook himself. He shouldn’t think like that.

Hoping none of that showed on him, he laughed half-heartedly, saying “Yeah, it would. Might not even need to worry about him.”