XENOGEARS: A ROPE OF ROBOTS
(part eight)
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Fei and Elly both get out of their giant robots and agree that only losers do drugs. Fei is adamant that there is absolutely no reason for them to fight, none at all! Except that they are on opposite sides in a war, which apparently would not have occurred to Fei had Elly not pointed it out. But, you know, aside from that!
They part ways on good terms, and Fei goes back to join his team and get into poistion, while Elly just fucks off, presumably. Meanwhile, back on the Yggdrasil, Maison is washing dishes and breaks Bart's #1 ASSHOLE PIRATE PRINCE mug.
Well, now the party is just boned. Good going, Maison! Bart, Sigurd, and Citan have gotten into Fatima Castle, uh, somehow, and are now hashing out whatever their plan is. What, did everyone swim in? Are those weird pants of Citan's all sopping wet now? But now that Maison has broken a mug it is all pretty much irrelevant.
They are completely surrounded by armed guards! They seem to have found all the guns they had misplaced the last time Bart was here.
Miang leaves. But she should have stuck around!
Because that is when Masion flies in with Citan's land crab! Yes, the one our heroes left back in Blackmoon Forest, unless Weltall has been carrying it around all this time, which probably would not have gone unnoticed. Before anyone can say "how do you even know how to drive a land crab" or "you stole that, I'm suing," Maison ushers everyone on board, hits a button, and the propellers fly off! That was probably the wrong button. Never fear, though!
They hop away instead. So it flies and it hops, as you would expect from a machine named after a crab. Shakahn just gazes after them forlornly.
Bart and company make it back to the ship, but now Gebler is in pursuit. Meanwhile, Fei's group spots Vanderkaum's ship and they move in to attack! Vanderkaum's crew leaps into action and start issuing many smart, well thought out orders.
This is apparently not unlike trying to hit a stock car with a shotgun. His crew objects, pointing out that their ship actually does have guns that can be used to hit giant robots.
They attempt to shoot Fei with the cannon, but God gave Fei at least enough sense to not stand still in front of cannons, so he makes his way up to the ship without getting hit pretty easily.
Where he then stands still in front of a cannon. Eh, some people, what can you do. Fei destroys the cannon! At least someone in this stupid plan is making progress. The ship's crew evacuates and Fei's team all exchange giant robot high-fives.
And then a friggin' tank busts its way out of the wreckage of the ship. A really goofy-looking tank that is also a giant robot because everything is indeed a giant robot. It's Vanderkaum, who can't even get a giant robot right. Fei and the others fight him, even though they are bored with this fight now and want to go home. They win, high-fives, etc. But then! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...!
It's a giant robot, what am I even saying. It's Grahf! Could somebody please get a restraining order on this jerkoff.
Grahf gives Vanderkaum the power, which is apparently a laser beam to the face. The giant robot face. Well, that's what he gets for not knowing the difference between a haiku and not a haiku at all, actually. Grahf flies away to find a more cultured audience. MEANWHILE, back on the Yggdrasil, Bart is flipping out. He wants to head back to Nisan, since they were idiots and left Margie there, but Sigurd and Maison tell him that Ramsus totally kicked ass at the border off-camera and they need to withdraw. They haven't heard back from Fei yet, so clearly this plan has just fallen apart utterly. The Yggdrasil is suddenly attacked from behind! It's Ramsus, in his own tricked out sand cruiser!
Everyone goes all cold war submarine drama as Ramsus fires on the Yggdrasil, and they try to evade and fail. The blast takes out the whoosits in their whatsits and they have to surface before their engines fail and they sink! Because, as we have learned, this is how deserts work.
Wait a second, why is Miang here with Ramsus? Wasn't she just in Bledavik? MAGIC.
Flashback time, it's flashback time! Not as good as cocktail time.
This narration made that last part up. Anyway, Ramsus is hesitant to completely blow the Yggdrasil out the sand, because Sigurd totally stabbed him in the back once. Huh. In any case, he demands that Bart surrender. Back at the border, Vanderkaum is totally killing everybody!
One of Fei's people reports that they are getting a distress call from Bart! And then Vanderkaum kills him.
Fei's people tell Fei to get back to the Yggdrasil, because he is Bart's friend, and they don't want anything to happen to him, and it's not like he really has the authority to order them around anyway. They then all walk off to their deaths, because... well, because none of them have character portraits, clearly. Fei watches while twitching.
Meanwhile, the Yggdrasil is surrounded, and Bart is steering it manually from the roof in his giant robot.
Because the Yggdrasil's designers asked themselves, "What if somebody wants to steer this ship with a giant robot? We should put a three story steering wheel on it just in case." That is why engineers make the big bucks.
You should probably get back in the car first, Bart. Ramsus and Miang think this attempt to live is just adorable and prepare to attack them again. But suddenly their sonar picks up a giant robot that is tearing up the entire fleet! It's heading straight for them!
DUN DUN DUN DUNNNN
Bart notices it, too, and he is somewhat less thrilled.
The red giant robot smacks Bart's giant robot and he's thrown like a mile away from the Yggdrasil. Hmm, this could be a problem.
Ramsus and Miang show up in their giant robots. They are just having a giant robot party here.
Ramsus attacks the red giant robot! The red giant robot proceeds to tear Ramsus's giant robot's arm and leg off.
If all gear battles were like this they would be a lot more interesting.
They fly off again, Ramsus cradled in Miang's arms, which would again be sort of hot if it were not giant robots. This leaves Bart alone with the new guy.
That goes right up there with having a bad feeling about this! The red giant robot totally owns Bart with a single hit, and he is not even pretending not to use Fei's attacks. Everyone on the Yggdrasil is panicking! Sigurd works out some insane equation in his head, introduces the Bernoulli effect to entire generation of puzzled gamers, and orders the ship to leap into the air. Not unlike a sand whale breaching, one assumes. It lands on the red giant robot. Consider this puzzle solved.
Ha ha, he is not okay. The ship suddenly buckles, and Sigurd can't figure out why the engine didn't fall out, but that is really the least of his worries. Because, even though this is not Eva...
You know what, never mind.
Bart, unfortunately, is terrible at catch. Everyone on the ship is regretting its lack of seatbelts and going over damage reports, which pretty much all read, "Yes." Sigurd shoves Citan into an escape pod in the confusion, tells him that if he meets Ramsus and Miang again that he should give them both a shiner for ol' One-Eye, and ejects him. Citan's escape pod is carried by the wind to the Kislev border, as Aveh has mean goddamned wind, apparently, and he eventually comes to a stop at the wreckage of the battle site that Fei got caught in. He goes to investigate!
Wait, wait, if he was in an escape pod, where did the giant robot come in? Did they shove him into a robot and then shove the robot into an escape pod? Couldn't the entire bridge crew have fit into an escape pod big enough for a giant robot? Why not just kick the robot out the door?
WHATEVER, DOC. |
