Power of voodoo
Who: Flynn, notglitching, and anyone else who would be involved.
Where: Outlands
When: Now
What: Actions, reactions, attempting to reason.
Warnings: Probably some mind screwery. Attempts will be made to keep violence to a minimum.
( Who do? You do. Do what? )
Where: Outlands
When: Now
What: Actions, reactions, attempting to reason.
Warnings: Probably some mind screwery. Attempts will be made to keep violence to a minimum.
( Who do? You do. Do what? )
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The cage was less adaptable.
Below the walls, Rinzler could hardly view the devastation at the crash site. But partitions fragmented, blocks suddenly disjoint, lines splitting as the code around him unraveled. Just slightly.
Enough to see. Enough to feel. Walls fractured, the former black solidity a sudden spiderweb of flaws and imperfection. Force transferred along hard-coded lines and rigid structure, vibration riding through vibration, shaking, tearing, wrecking the unbending dark walls.
And lighter ones as well.
The clear barrier in front blanked and split, fine lines of instability shearing out in all directions. A grinding slide of voxels on voxels as a large slice of the upper half fell away ( ... )
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And suddenly, he and Rinzler were face to face, with was nothing at all of any significance between them.
Their eyes might have met across the broken section of wall, except that the breakage hadn't extended to That Confounded Helmet(tm).
Then Rinzler was goneRam pulled in the breath he'd forgotten to take a moment ago. The top of the maze would normally have been too high for him, but that was without the place suddenly being full of convenient rubble ( ... )
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This wasn't good; not with the color of the Recognizer, not with the damage it had caused, and not with the familiar figure that jumped out of the vehicle. Nor with the defenselessness of his friend down there, nor with the escape of his other friend.
He took a sharp breath, and then he was already moving.
"Roy. Make sure that Ram is safe. Yori..." Quick glance her way. "If you can stay up here and make sure we don't miss anything because of limited field of vision?"
And he was already moving back down.
From what he could see, the structure was no longer holding Rinzler. Which meant that it was only going to get in the way now. He needed to be able to see, so as soon as he touched the ground and could focus on the code, the walls would start retracting down into the ground he'd built them from.
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Two more steps, a leap off a shattered wall as it crumbled and slid below him, and Rinzler landed on a jagged shard at the edge of the crater. Huge, angled, the slag of broken structure half-joined with a chunk of the recognizer's leg, all skewed in a heap of code and fragments that still burned with the heat of destruction. Rinzler didn't care. Disk and hand dug in equally as he clung on, swarmed up the side as it destabilized beneath his weight. The Recognizer would have been easier. Safer. But Rinzler didn't care about that, either. The Recognizer was further. And all he needed was height.
He pulled over the top, past the top, baton snatching free of his side. A quick jerk apart as the world rushed closer, disk snapping back ( ... )
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Yori wasn't conscious of making any kind of decision. She was following, that was all. The turn she pulled sent the maze and the Grid spinning under and above her, and none of it mattered right now but Rinzler.
All Tron's friends below would understand. No matter how much they disapproved. They could disapprove later, when Yori had time.
Yori arced her jet upward, with a high-pressure twist crushing her toward the controls but bringing the Grid back to its usual orientation.
She didn't want to follow too closely, she wasn't targeting Rinzler and had no wish to make him think she might. But she dumped what few extra drops of energy that allowed into gaining altitude. He would try to shake her. She intended not to let him ( ... )
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I did that.
It was the biggest set of errors she'd ever caused. It was rad.
Abraxas would have been pleased.
But why did it hurt......?She'd managed to hide the more obvious aspects of her infection well enough to fool the pilot, but the impact had accelerated the process. Sickly yellow-and-black veins inched down over her skin. The remote possibility that she might have enough energy left to infect part of the maze as well was nixed as her arm gave out beneath her. Collapsing to one side with a squeak of surprise, she toppled over a broken edge and out of sight into the jagged rubble ( ... )
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No. (She was there.)
Rinzler's jet was a dark streak through the air, splashes of red-orange glow burning out in sharp contrast. Rise, twist, past the plateau, evade, evade. He was better in the sky, there was no one who could match him here, he knew this.
She still followed.
Behind. Above. She'd started with height, and the blue-white jet slipped upwards still, cutting him off. Not cutting him off, not blocking, angle of the nose skewed, wrong for attack. He flattened against his own jet as it danced up closer, flipped for a better angle, he could show this-no, no, wrenched aside, down, away. She couldn't be here, he couldn't...
'let me come with you'
No. The sky flew past, twisting from light to dark, bright outline above to the black rocks and jagged canyons below. Twisted like mirrors, twisted like lies and broken blue-edged voxels and he was breathing harsh and fast in bursts of static and everything was sharp and he couldn't-not againThe black mask dipped, and the red-orange shape hovered, skipped ( ... )
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An old game, this, testing Tron's reflexes and Yori's ability to track him, but over the unfamiliar territory Yori could only hope to trace expanding paths of best probability--he'd choose the sheltering cliffs, the harder turns, the ones she couldn't even see. Always had. And Rinzler now was feeling hunted enough that nothing short of complete exhaustion would stop him.
Chasing Rinzler into crashing or stranding himself in the Outlands was so totally the opposite of what Yori wanted that she slowed, saving her energy, reassessing.
There behind, a glint of blue. Ram would insist. She couldn't blame him under the circumstances, but Rinzler faced with Ram was demonstrably less able to resist the deep-coded aggression ( ... )
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If Rinzler was going to ground, they'd never find him alive.
"Tell her," he whispered into the dead air. "So I can take her home."
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Always words.
The quiet voice cut through the open channel, wrapped gently around him as orange lined hands clenched desperately tight on the controls. She would crash. She would leave. She needed to leave. Needed to know. He couldn't help her, couldn't stop her, couldn't-
...he didn't talk.
'Tell her.' The black mask dipped, form drawn in, rigid. And he opened a channel.
Sound ticked out in the harsh rattle, stuttered, skipped. Noise. Just noise. He wasn't damaged, wasn't hurt or broken. He was better, always better-but he had no voice. Sound scraped, out, a rough and snarling burst of static, glass-edged and wordless and furiously desperate.
He was fine. There was nothing wrong with him. But the words weren't there, noise caught fragmented and unsteady with error and limits and lie, and he was flying ( ... )
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"All right," Yori whispered, realized probably no one had heard the painful rasp. She cleared her throat, dragged her jet's controls into a sharp loop, looking for Ram. "I'm going..."
Hard to see anything with tears in her eyes. The friendly jet was a bright, misshapen glitter. At least she was in no danger of colliding.
"You take care of yourself," she added, wishing she knew what Rinzler thought of any of this. She had no idea what she thought of it herself, except that it hurt, razor edges raking through her code. Memory and analysis, too jumbled to be worth anything, memory and the clouds over the Outlands. Hands and words both working automatically, without room for thought. "Get some rest when you can. I love you--"
She hadn't meant to say that at all. Yori shut her eyes in pure horror and turned off the comm before she did anything ( ... )
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He held his own words in, knuckles white on the controls. Nothing he'd had to say had done any good before.
Tears were clouding his vision too. He shook them away and scanned grimly for any sign of what Yori's words might have done.
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But there was another branch, too. A tenuous thread of awareness, confusion, painfully desperate focus. Holding on. Listening.
(It mattered.)
She was going. (Relief-so much relief.)
She wanted him to take care. (She shouldn't-it was a lie-no-it was wrong.)
She loved him.
Rinzler stalled.
Internal. External. Cognition looped, visuals fractured frame by frame. He was flying/falling/gone, there, and she loved him and she loved him and why. The hot crackle of reprimand, edged lines closing him in but he was broken and she was there/gone/missing. And the world was bright blue voxels across a smooth black floor, and Clu's voice on reboot (cold, cold, wary), and he couldn't speak and he couldn't think, and he wasn't made-
There was a crack.
Crunch. Splinter. Senses snapped back, disordered and ( ... )
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A cry of desperate denial hurt her own ears.
Neither Tron nor Rinzler would ever be so simply derezzed. He was still active down there, still alive, he had to be, or else she'd--
Yori smacked transmission back on. "Ram, stay in the air," she ordered bluntly, even as she dove. "Stay in the air. He won't hurt me. I need you able to fetch the Users."
She didn't know if he'd listen. Yori probably wouldn't have listened. She hoped Ram had more sense.
Crash site there, trajectory, angles, an active program's energy right here. Yori cut all thrust and slowed to drop as gently as possible into the rough cliff formation, deactivated her jet and bent her legs to cushion the rest of the momentum. She'd come in too fast for grace.
The ground was a painful jolt, shoving her roughly against a lower ledge; her helmet cracked against an outcropping. Yori stumbled upright and shook away the dizziness, running toward the limp dark form. "I said I'd go if you were all right," ( ... )
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