From st214@elroy.uh.edu (Dep't of Happy Mammals, may I help you?)
Newsgroups: alt.pub.havens-rest
Subject: [Louis/OI] 'Restward Bound
Date: 9 Oct 1993 22:39 CDT


[ADMIN:  When last we left our intrepid rat-girl, Oberon, Inc.'s 
factory had been stormed by TARN or something, Jerry Wycoff had been 
kidnapped, and Kevin had done took off after a tussle with the bad guys'
troops.  And this is what happened just after he scrammed.]


        Louis was, basically, scared.
        First off, the entire building had shuddered violently, and a
toppling snack machine almost flattened her, and nearly amputated the
end of her pink, naked tail.  Then soldiers in tan started sweeping
through the halls, and she'd had to hide inside the thing, skittering
over busted glass in her bare feet, surrounded by spilled money and bags
of pizza flakes.  After a few moments' thought, she was soon surrounded
only by bags of pizza flakes.
        Next she heard from Kevin, via her still-new wrist thing, that
the entire place was being stormed, and was given a location to run to
and hide while the soldiers mowed down any Oberon, Inc. employees who
got in the way.
        Louis managed to not get in the way.
        After ending up in OI's factory several levels below ground, she
was directed to jump off a catwalk onto a canvas-covered cable car a
short distance below.  (Ordinarily, this would not have rated very
highly on her list of things to do, her being as clumsy as she was
lately not being a big plus, but the echoes of shouted orders and rapid
footfalls approaching helped decide things.)
        Then the cable cars jerked to a start abruptly, rolling Louis
onto her head.  All the other machinery in the factory came to life
also, busily machining parts for floaters and jump-capable
three-wheelers.  Terrible racket.  Kevin explained she'd almost been
discovered, and he'd had to do something, and that, by the way, she
probably should get her *tail* back in the car.
        Louis blushed under her fur and did so.  It sort of felt around
a few moments before going still, and starting to look a bit bruised
where the snack machine's casing had pinned it to the ground.
        And so Louis waited, listening to her pulse, as the train of
cable cars trundled around in a twisty loop, suspended from the
factory's ceiling.  Fortunately, it didn't dump her into a vat of molten
steel or anything.

        Roughly half an hour into the two hours Kevin had suggested as a
safe wait time, Louis's voice came over the comm line in the long, low,
gray-and-yellow Excalibur trike parked unobtrusively in the shade just
outside OI's administrative building.
        On its grayscale main screen, a figure clad in boots, camo
pants, and a combat vest sprung up from where he was leaning against (a
monochrome rendering of) the trike's front fairing, dropping a heavy
book (its cover read:  87 97 114 32 38 32 80 101 97 99 101) with a
heavy-bass audio thud.
        "Hey, Dark, you alive?"
        Dark, the enigmatic, wireframe-gold-and-brown-eagle
clutching-atomic-bombs-in-its-talons-over-a-constantly-rippling-
wireframe-blue-white-red-flag-of-indeterminate-origin 'tattoo' on his
chest standing out against the lack of color in the rest of the trike's
screen, flipped an onscreen switch.
        "Not something it occured to me to be worrying about," he said,
"but we'll pretend yes for the purpose of this conversation." 
Triangulation schemes flashed on the screen.  "You want me to stop the
cable car train?"
        There was a slight pause while Louis (probably) blinked a few
times.  "Uh, well, yeah.  Yeah, that would help some.  I think it's
starting to make me carsick."
        Dark shook his head, drumming his fingers on his knees, sitting
on the edge of the (onscreen, monochrome) trike's seat.
        "Hey, what do you mean, 'no'?" Louis protested, noting the
head-shaking on her little wrist-comm's littler monitor.  The sound of
factory machinery was audible in the background on Louis's end of the
line.  Her voice dropped some decibels.  "Are they still out there?"
        The MI looked around, the parking lot somehow extend far enough
to panoramically vanish to a point on the horizon to either side.  "Left
about twenty minutes ago.  They were after Kevin and Jerry, apparently. 
They settled for just Jerry after Kevin fought back a little.  His Ex
got chewed up some.  Kevin's now in charge of the place, and Watts has
started tentative cleanup.  There's been like zero on the newsfeeds
about this.  I would guess, in my clever little machine-intelligence
processor banks, that it's perfectly safe to come out and play."
        During the brief monologue, Dark showed a creased family
album-type picture of Kevin and Jerry Wycoff making strange faces at the
camera, with little red arrows pointing at the two of them, then had
Jerry's half of the picture tear away; two pictures of a trike similar
to 'his' gray-and-yellow one, the AFTER one identical to the BEFORE one
except for massive combat damage; a view of the rear gates to OI, fuzzy
spots where he'd blurred out those cut down at the outset; a sequence of
color video showing Tom Watts drinking from a mug of coffee at his desk;
then a caricature of a shoebox labeled 'b R  a i N'.
        "Anyway," Dark said, "the machinery in the factory is beyond my
(honorary) Obe Ink access.  Or yours."
        On the trike's screen, an old-fashioned, metal, paper-mail
mailbox appeared in front of him.  Dark dropped a waiting letter into
it, then the mailbox disappeared as noiselessly as it had come into
existance.  "Watts, though, I can ask for you."
        Louis absorbed all this information.  She felt sort of stupid
for not thinking to ask her wrist-thing for a link to someone who
actually worked there.
        "Oh, well, good," she said.

        Tom Watts wasn't excessively tall.  Louis even less so, at only
four-thirds meters tall.  She was tempted to stay on the
self-stabilizing ladder they'd used to get her down from where she'd
been however many meters off the floor in the cable car, because Watts
looked four meters tall and made her fold her ears flat against her head
by body language alone.
        "If you've heard from Kevin," he said, looking at something
directly behind her skull, "then that's all there is to it.  Do you
think you can make it there okay?"
        Louis nodded a few times, fast.  Watts had a few hairline cuts
on his face, which stood out from the rest of his face, which was
deathly pale.  His hair was a mess, and his shirt sleeves were rolled
up, and the security personnel who had survived by not being in line of
sight of the soldiers were distinctly wary of Watts, and Louis could
almost hear him grinding his teeth together.  Watts was furious.  Louis
thought Watts was furious at *her*.  She was afraid he might hit her,
and she was afraid he was angry enough to do her serious damage, and all
she could think about was how heavily-laden her pockets were.
        Watts said, "All right" in a way that almost asked for a report
to be on his desk in the morning.  Then he wished her luck, and asked
her to tell Kevin that 'Tarn' had only begun.
        He gave her a terse apology for being so brusque, then turned
and ordered someone turn turn the machinery the fuck off, and left the
factory, personnel falling in around him like iron filings to a
horseshoe magnet, running his fingers over the touch-sensitive display
of his pocket secretary and seething.

        Louis swung her leg over the seat and climbed off of the trike,
wearing the loose-fitting OI jumpsuit she'd gotten at the same time as
the Ex (they'd even managed to machine in a hole for her tail).  Crash
helmet under one arm, she adjusted the earbuds with one paw, making sure
they were snug.  Her tail flicked once, the white bandage she'd wrapped
around the hurt part giving her an almost comical, cartoon alley-cat
look.
        "Radio check," she said, glancing around.  No one suspicious.
        "He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he
sees the ghosts," said Dark, in stereo.
        Nodding to herself, she glanced past the assorted parked
vehicles at the 'Rest's main hatch.  "'Kay.  Well, I'm going inside to
wait.  Lock up."
        "Tell you if anything happens."
        Louis mm'd assent, and patted the trike on its plastic 'armor
plating', and brushed her way past cars and a crater and wandered into
the 'Rest.  She almost felt relaxed.  She didn't even mind too much when
she entered, and the little weapons-droid, which had been having an
off-day, asked her to turn over any weapons even though it could tell
she didn't have any.


Donovan / Louis
--
"Zoiks!  Scoob!  It's the Gruesome Twosome!"  --Shaggy