#wss366

#ReturnToTheFateGear

Chapter 12: Bat’s of Mercury

#FanFiction #OthersidePicnic #FateGear

Toriko and Sorawo were soon high in the rigging. Sorawo, bilge-green already, grew greener still watching Toriko swing fearlessly from the ropes.

“Don’t ye get enough danger with youkai?” Sorawo asked, a trace of pirate creeping into her speech.

The question slipped away as they turned their eyes outward. FATE GEAR was sailing low past Mercury at an incredible speed. The ship’s generators labored and throbbed, and steam leaked in thin whistles from escape valves.

Below were molten lakes of boiling metal. Volcanic spires smoked, belching ash that fell sizzling into the lakes or blew across the volcanic plains in mile-high drifts. Above the plains drifted ships and tangled cities suspended from gargantuan balloons.

As they watched, the ships turned toward the pirate vessel. Unless fate intervened, their pursuers would fall behind the shrieking comet FATE GEAR. But ahead, fate took shape in swarms of rubbery, bat-winged creatures rising from the valleys laying between smoking volcanoes. Their screeches shook the sails and set the bells chiming on their own.

“We must win through quickly,” Mina thundered. “The time has arrived when patience becomes a crime and mayhem appears garbed in the mantle of virtue.”

(“Heaven help us, she’s quoting Edgar Rice Burroughs now,”) the ship complained.

“You up thar,” Nana called. “Focus. If a Mergaunt so much as grazes us, we’ll go up like a Roman candle. If ye find thar mother, bring her down. Mergaunt’s be no worse than fruit flies after that.”

In the background, Mina, whipped into a fiery #lather, ranted—“‘We called ourselves Soldiers of Liberty…I was chosen captain,’ and I say, ‘Death, only—renders hope futile.’”—but the Otherside pair, like most of the crew, focused on their stations rather than her words. That changed when the whistles blew all at once in a deafening cacophony and Mina’s voice thundered through the amplifiers, “Twenty thousand savage throats arose with the awful cries of battle…eighty thousand fearsome pirates set the heavens atremble…”

The first Mergaunts came into range as the pirates issued their battle cry with one resounding voice:

     Be invincible!
     Don’t say “impossible!”
     Trample the enemies of this world!
            (Be invincible!, Fate Gear, 2022)

Oi, oi, oi!

Note: Mergaunts: Bat-like creatures resembling night gaunts, from which they get their name. These hellish creatures inhabit the valleys of Mercury’s volcanic ranges. They are fire-resistant, and their mere touch will set earthly materials on fire. The Mergaunts possess little intelligence, instead relying on hive-mind and directions from a Mergaunt Mother. If their Mother is slain, they wander until they come into range of a new Mother. (“Bats of Mercury,” pg. 66, by Nara Moore.)

#TootFic #MicroFiction #Serial #NMPrompts #NMV366
#UraPi #Steampunk #Pirates #Satire #NMRTTFG #EdgarRiceBurroughs