Grizz in Space

“Damn...!” Grizz finally muttered, as he gazed out into the blackened nebula at the beast within.  “An' I thought the crystalids was fucked up.”

This thing, on the other hand, defied such simple description.  The Mayor-class creature glided through the darkness on biomechanical wings, sinew and cable twisted together into a skeletal suggestion.  Three spokes jutted out from a central stem on each side, and between the spokes, Grizz could see glimpses of the nebula's starry purples.

What really got to Grizz, though, was its body.  Something about the writhing mass between the Mayor's wings brought to mind vague images of human bodies wrapped tightly and completely in ribbons or bandages.  These mental images were consistent every time he looked toward the center mass of the creature.  At the same time, though, Grizz could tell he wasn't seeing the creature itself.  Similar to the wings, he perceived on some level that he was looking through something, rather than at it.

“...the fuck...?” Grizz mumbled.  His confusion was so great that he very nearly neglected to dodge the Mayor's next lunge.  He dipped away just in time for the creature to go spiraling by, leaving a glittering wake in the darkness.

“What is that thing?” Nicole asked, as if Grizz knew.  “And how do we stop it?”

Grizz didn't know that either.  “Uh...kill it?”  He wasn't sure if such a creature even could be killed.  As he pondered the question, though, the Mayor flapped its wings in front of itself, pointing the spokes Grizz's way.  With every flap, the spokes of its wings released laser blasts in his general direction.  He kept his ship pointed squarely at the creature, both because it helped him dodge the attacks, and that's the way his own gun was oriented.

“Well?” Nicole demanded over comms.  “Don't just wobble around over there!  Shoot back!”  Grizz growled reflexively into his mic, and Nicole was on his case about it immediately.  “Oh, shut up!  I don't have any guns, and I'm not ramming into that thing!  So this one's on you, Mr. Nebula Expert!”

“Hey!  My expert opinion was to not come to this damn place at all!”

When Nicole didn't respond, Grizz growled again and clutched at his controls.  Usually he would fight with his machine arm, but like Nicole, he dared not make contact with the Mayor.  With his forward-firing solar gun and his forward-looking flight pattern, the only thing Grizz could do was face the Mayor head-on.

“Fine, fuckhead!” he shouted.  “Let's do it up!”

“Uh, who are you talking to?” Nicole asked.

Grizz didn't bother answering her.  Instead, he slipped in closer to the Mayor, firing a few bullets of bright energy its way.  He was focused mainly on dodging its lasers, and watching the effects of his own attacks.  The Mayor's wingbeats caused the vast majority of Grizz's solar bullets to become lost in ts wings.  They seemed to sail directly into the purple nebula of its wings, only to disappear.  Whatever was happening there, it didn't seem to bother the Mayor.

What it did react to were shots to its body(?).  When Grizz managed to sneak a bullet past its wings, its wingbeats briefly became frantic, and so too did its laser barrages.  The lasers moved slowly enough in the strange dark space that they began to clutter Grizz's present course, and he had to slow down to navigate them.  This gave the Mayor enough breathing room to pull its wings to its sides and prepare another lunge.

Grizz stayed where he was.  With the Mayor's wings at its side, this charge was ironically his best opportunity to attack, sort of like Nicole had done to the Cuprina ships.  He pulled his ship back as the Mayor burst forward, giving himself time for a few extra bullets before he pulled away from its path.

As he pelted the thing, though, Grizz couldn't help but notice his own reaction.  At first, he hadn't noticed, but lined up with the Mayor like this and landing so many shots had welled up a dull ache in his crotch.  It felt just like the sympathy pains he'd get from watching video footage of a man being hit in the crotch.  The phenomenon was awkward and uncomfortable and it made Grizz worry about exactly what it was he was shooting, but shooting the Mayor there was the only plan he had.

Grizz darted forward, through the Mayor's covering fire.  As he did so, his dangerometer danced near its upper limits.  Grizz wasn't some clueless caveman; his ship still had the galaxy-standard sensors and alarms, fine-tuned to his ship's specifications.  But rather than watch separate gauges for temperature and incoming collisions and all that, Grizz kept an audio visualizer on his dashboard, and mapped all those sensors of external threats to one equalizer-looking meter.

When the dangerometer died down, Grizz realized the Mayor had vanished from sight entirely.  He'd cleared the lasers it had shot earlier, but he couldn't see any sign of the Mayor otherwise, not even its distinct trail of glitter.  Now that he was free of the fray, he took in his surroundings and sensors.  He was still trapped in that featureless black void, with only one stationary signal on the radar, that of Nicole's ship.

“...wait,” Grizz mumbled.  He'd known Nicole for such a short time, but he already knew she wasn't one to sit still.  Without another thought, he sped her way.  “Nicole!” he called out over his microphone.

There was no response.

When Grizz made his way to Nicole's spot on the radar, though, he didn't need her to say much.  Through his canopy, he could see the Mayor looming behind Nicole.  The vague mass at its center had sprouted a third appendage between its wings, a biomechanical hand that gripped her spaceship.  Scraps of crimson flesh swirled away from it, as if Grizz's mere gaze was intense enough to rip them away, until this hand too was nothing but a mess of tendon and power cord.

Grizz flexed his arm, and took a deep breath.  This was not a problem he could solve with his hand tied behind his back.  With a quick whip of his arm, he urged his ship's hand into action, and threw Nicole's precious crystal right at its center mass.  Whether or not that did anything was no concern of his; he was immediately lunging forward to grab the Mayor's hand with his ship's hand.

That was the only way Grizz could think of to get the delicate movement necessary to free Nicole.  Guided by his will, the fingers of his giant hand began to pry away at the Mayor's fingers, just enough to give Nicole a chance to escape.  As he worked, his speakers were overcome with intense static.  If this is what Nicole had been enduring when she'd been captured, he didn't blame her for not responding, if an outside signal could even reach through such a state at all.

Somehow, through all this, the dangerometer on Grizz's dashboard was empty.  Then again, something about this thing had managed to avoid setting off the Mayor alert too.  Even so, he felt much more at ease observing the situation through his pilot's instruments than through his own eyes.  After all, it was easier to account for their malfunctions than to let the creature linger on any of his senses.

When Nicole's signal slipped away on the radar, Grizz redoubled his effort to grapple the Mayor.  Its hand was about double the size of the one welded to his ship.  Even so, it gave him a means to tether himself to the Mayor's blind spot, away from everything else in its arsenal.  From here, he could bend his ship around to aim his solar cannon at its dark core.

“Fuck off!” Grizz shouted.  He moved his chair along the dashboard, diverted all the power he could spare to his gun, and fired one huge shot.

As soon as Grizz's shot made impact, he could hear the static over his speakers congeal into a scream.  He already had it turned down low, since the static had been so loud, but something about this scream made him mute the sound entirely.  He wouldn't be able to hear Nicole when or if she called out to him, but he wasn't sure he wanted to, right after such a strange fight.

Instead, Grizz kept watching the Mayor, or rather, watching past it.  The charged shot he'd put so much of his ship's power into had left a sort of exit wound, a hole in both the Mayor and the darkness.  The longer he stared, the more it grew, until it had swept around him and his ship.  The darkness was gone, he was once again in nebula space, and all that remained of the Mayor were its mechanical aspects, now scattered and inert.

With a sigh of relief, Grizz slouched tiredly in his control chair.  He finally returned his audio volume to normal, only to be greeted with a quick blast of Nicole shouting for him.

“—idiot!” she was saying, because of course she was.  “Grab the crystal already!”

Grizz groaned.  She really couldn't lay off this stuff for a moment, he noticed.  Among the Mayor's leftover detritus was the crystal he'd thrown at it.  As far as he could tell, the largest chunk and all the smaller bits were still there.  Perhaps that one Cuprina on the brink of death had pocketed a shard or two, but they could keep it.

“Hey!” Grizz snapped over the mic.  “By the way!  I ain't lettin' you talk me into goin' into a nebula...ever...again!”

As he swept up all the crystal he could into his ship's hand, he stole some glances out at Nicole's spaceship,  The Mayor's grip had bent it up pretty noticeably, and looking out at that, he was sure that she would agree wholeheartedly.  “Oh, shut up, we made it...!”

The fact that she disagreed nearly managed to knock Grizz out of his chair.  “Fine, I'll shut up now!  But if you so much as try to drag me into a nebula again, I'm quittin' on the spot!”

“Whatever.  There aren't even any more nebulas on our current heading.”

Grizz shook his head and muted his mic.  If Nicole was going to miss the point so consistently, there was probably no point in talking to her about the Mayor itself, either.  He found himself strangely curious, though; he'd never been ambushed by a Mayor like that before, not once in his life.  He'd fought Mayors before, but none that had defied his attempts to understand them the way this one had.  And having a sight remind him of something despite not actually being able to see it, that was new too.

Grizz was out of time to ponder such things, though.  Nicole was already speeding away, her bearings pointed squarely at her waypoint marker.  She would have to be doing such a thing from memory; Grizz's waypoint system was still blocked by nebular interference.

Grizz took off after her, his mind racing far faster than his ship.  After spending so much time alone and mired in routine, his first day on the job with Nicole had been utter chaos.  As he used his external cameras to stare down at the bluish crystals in his mechanical hand, he wondered anew if his pay would be worth the hassle.

“...wait,” Grizz mumbled.  “Uh...Nicole?”

There was no reply.

“Oh, uh, shit.”  He'd merely forgotten to unmute again.  “Nicole.”

“Huh?  Quit talking and start driving!”

Both Grizz and Nicole were on autopilot, so he wasn't sure what more he could do to please her there.  Instead, he continued with his question.  “The crystal...it's blue.”

“So what?”

“Was it always blue?”

“I'll ask you again, idiot...so what?!”

Nicole didn't seem too interested in thinking about that either.  “Whatever,” Grizz growled.  “An' stop callin' me an idiot, will ya?”

Nicole scoffed at the request.  “What else am I supposed to call you?  Especially when you're acting like an idiot...!”

“Where was I actin' like an idiot?  When I was savin' your dumb ass from that Mayor?”  Grizz stood up from his chair.  He would take orders from Nicole, but he sure wasn't going to take these constant insults.  “I'm Grizz, an' you'd better put some respect on the name!”

“Oh...!”  Nicole gave a short laugh and added, “That's where I know you!  Grizz...that's the guy who killed the Galaxy Patrol shithead!  I saw that on the news!”

That was a weird way to describe Grizz's run-in with a drunk and belligerent off-duty cop, but he shrugged.  He could run with it.  “Hey, Clipeus killed himself,” he corrected Nicole.  “It's just his prick of a son who don't see it that way.”

“Look, idi—uh...Grizz.  This isn't gonna cause us problems in more settled space, is it?”

Grizz could only offer a shrug in reply at first.  “It shouldn't!  I was found not guilty.  The guy came at me with a knife in—“

“Whatever,” Nicole interrupted him.  “What do you mean, 'shouldn't'?”

“Well...”  Grizz didn't even want to let the prick patrolman to so much as cross his mind, but he wasn't sure if Nicole would ever ask again.  “...it's his son.  Eyron Clipeus is a cop too, an' he's always pullin' me over an' gettin' on my nerves.  Think he's tryin' to push me into doin' something he can actually arrest me for.”

Nicole gave a short laugh over the communicator.  “If he wants to push you around, he's gonna have to wait his turn.”

Grizz could scarcely parse the sentence before Nicole's long-range boosters flared up, wild spikes of energy that coalesced into a wide beam behind her.  It was only for a moment, but he got the message easily enough.  She'd been revving her engine.  She'd been telling him that it was currently her turn, what with the employment and all.

So far, he still wasn't sure whether or not that was actually any better.