Chapter Text
Bravado woke up. Not with a jolt, nor a start, nor any kind of urgency.
His eyes drifted open, and took in the bright bright bright blue sky, the smooth rolling clouds, and the sun. They then snapped back shut, and he let out a huff. It was too bright.
Open a crack, let them adjust to the just-before-noon-day sun.
Bravado sat up and then blinked repeatedly.
Right!
My dream journal!
He reached out blindly for his nightstand… wait, not a nightstand. He had slept this last night away on a hammock by the beach. Seaspray had seasoned his sleep, and he had dreamt of a journey across the ocean, with new and exotic bots just beneath the waves…
Already, it was slipping away from him.
He rolled over the side of the hammock, then landed snout-first in the sand, legs to pins-and-needley to keep him upright.
Rolling over, dusting himself off, he reached for the dream journal and the pen used as a bookmark.
The dream was mostly gone, now, but he still had just enough to fill out the first block of the dream. They had been sailing to another continent, but a chance encounter with the often-rumored, never-sited Kraken had rerouted their journey. Beneath the sea they’d found a cave with a pocket of air, and traces of…
Of…
Sighing, Bravado snapped the journal shut and set it down inside the hammock, standing straight and stretching his arms wide. It had been something amazing, but not it was a hazy sense of wonder.
Onesie pyjamas; covered in nuts and bolts and screws and rivets.
His maw opened wide with the stretch, exposing each pointy little fang of his.
He was Bravado. ‘Swift fox’ was his species, explaining his slight limbs, nimble frame, his long snout, big ears, and his speckled orange-brown-grey coat of fur. His eyes were wide amber, and rounded all over the edges. He was told that he looked overly polite, when he wasn’t called cute.
His phenotype was ‘dog.’ In his hometown of Scavenger’s Landing, in the eyes of the law, the many species of Botworld were condensed to a few specific phenotypes. Based on how they tended to act, how big and strong they—usually—were, and of course what they looked like.
Oxes, cats, dogs, lizards and rats were not the only recognized phenotypes, but were by far the most common ones. It was an inexact science, but it was enough to tell what kinds of diets or sleep cycles each person needed.
As a ‘dog,’ even though he was really a certain kind of fox, Bravado best slept about half of the day, split over a number of nice and comfy naps. He could manage with less when out of town and on jobs, but it got taxing quickly.
Bravado set his arms back down from his big stretch and sniffed experimentally. Ocean salt was the dominant smell… there was also that of roasting fish, delicious, coming from behind him. The market.
His stomach didn’t offer a well-timed gurgle, but he was hungry. Not urgently so… he’d rather get dressed than buy from Fishmonger in his jammies.
Bravado stretched again and turned to the docks. Some of the biggest and sturdiest structures in Scavenger’s Landing, carefully treated and weathered wood affixed in rows. Botmasters like him often lived in decently-sized boats, so a number of berths were expected to be occupied.
It wasn’t his home, the great big scrap-hewn boat that Bravado’s eyes fell upon, but it was close to it.
It was Bigweld’s boat. Bravado just worked for the guy as a ‘recruit.’
An unassuming name, but recruit meant something special for burgeoning botmasters like Bravado. It meant that you gave up some of your scrap, and did jobs for, your boss. In a pinch, they might be called out to the field to back them up.
In return, recruits got access to the boss’s own bots through a kind of lend-lease system, to kickstart the recruit’s botmaster career. In return, the recruit got officially sponsored by the botmaster, and any job they were sent to proxy on, they’d be taken exactly as seriously as the botmaster themself, with all of the hazard and extra pay that that entailed.
And Bigweld was the world champion of the arena. His name was big one, his time a hot commodity.
Those with a fraction of the prestige that Bigweld carried had two or more dozen recruits, all running jobs as much as 6-days a week, earning scrip to rent high-grade bots for a day or three.
Bigweld, though?
He did things a little differently. Sure, there was the scrap-share, and the proxying, but…
Just three recruits, Bravado included, and total unrestricted access to his entire share of bots. Because they weren’t recruits, they were family, almost. The bots, too. Bigweld loved and cherished the little guys much more than anyone Bravado knew, a love that pretty quickly ended up contagious.
Bravado rubbed his snout. Alright, enough time in the sun. With a wide smile, he got to walking. Across the sand, up to the pier, across the pier, and Bravado was stepping up to the deck of Bigweld’s boat.
The hatch to the recruit cabins opened with a steady creak, and Bravado ambled down the ladder-stairs. Three bunk beds across the room, marked this as the common room plus communal sleeping. All kinds of decorations, of course, from posters to figures to an unopened present atop a shelf.
From the cabinets beneath his own bed, Bravado retrieved his clothes.
Down the hall took him to the kitchenette and dining table, then past that to the restroom on one side, utilities—washing machine and the like—on the other.
Above the deck there was plenty more space for them to stretch their legs, of course, but bots weren’t allowed down here. For calm mornings and easy sleep, since most bots didn’t have to do that.
Bravado thought of Nova and laughed under his breath.
He showered, ample shampoo for his fuzzy body, and then got dressed. His botmaster outfit was color-coded to match Bigweld’s, and the rest of the recruits—the four made an arena team after all, the Radical Dreams.
That was dark blue and a nice stark red, though readily personalized. Bravado’s own outfit was a set of armor—for form, not function—based on some of his old idols growing up, the Wolf Pack Scrappers.
Later in his childhood, he’d learned that they were crooks and bandits by trade… but he still liked the look, even if he threw in some of his own style to distance himself from them.
Corrugated steel sheets painted in team colors, welded a few layers thick for added protection. Cut to size and hammered to shape to account for his joints. Short sleeves, but with long gloves up to the elbows. Big stompy boots, with matching sheets of metal covering up the laces.
Lastly, his visor. One-piece goggles, fearsome orange, tinted to keep the sun out. It was dark under the deck, so maybe covering his eyes was a bad call. Up to his forehead, then covering his eyes again once he was standing on the deck.
The visor connected to his botpack for its H.U.D. Once he got his botpack on, he could view his remaining repair energy, the status of all his bots, his jetpack fuel… and on and on.
Hack had pulled another all-nighter servicing his botpack for long-distance flights. The nozzles had gotten cracked on his last trip back from Frozen Wastes, so he had held back from visiting ‘danger-zone’—the name for places most distant from civilization, where the most dangerous high-level bots wandered, and where all the best scrap was—until then.
Hack. All-nighter. A tight grimace, and Bravado pulled open the door to Hack’s lab.
Hack was a legend amongst botmasters, for all the gadgets and devices and—yes, hacks—that he pulled out, and Bravado was eternally thankful that he was a good friend of Bigweld’s. Botpack repairs were finicky at best, and nobody else could do them quicker or cleaner than Hack.
Bravado stepped in, put on a nice smile, and waved to Hack. A rat with yellow hoodie eternally oil-stained, both safety glasses and goggles perched on his brow, and a toolbelt around his waist.
Bravado reached out and snatched away Hack’s cup of coffee, weighing it in his hand and finding that—thankfully—it was still full, nary a sip taken from it.
Hack’s eyes focused like lasers, right on the cup that Bravado had taken. They shifted up and down, matching the motions of Bravado’s wrist.
“Is it done?” Bravado asked.
Hack’s brow lowered a little more. “...Yeah,” he said.
“Can I have it back?”
Hack pointed at the coffee.
“You were up all night,” Bravado said back. And rats need even more sleep than I do. “Get some sleep and I’ll buy you another cup. I’ll… even pay you, uh, five gems if you do.”
“No you won’t,” Hack crossed his arms. “You’ll be on a job later today. A week-long one, right?”
Bravado frowned. He knew he had job duty, he would be meeting with Bigweld over it soon, but he hadn’t known it would be so long, and not that it was starting today.
“Uhm.” Bravado cleared his throat. “Ask Roar or Tinker then. You know I’m good for it.”
If there was one thing Bravado took near as seriously as bot-battling, it was debts and favors.
Hack sneered, turning his head up and looking down his nose at Bravado. Though a rat, he was still taller than Bravado. “...Alright, alright, fine. Mad Scientist has something for me, and I need to be ready to duck just in case.”
…What? Bravado looked at that, cogs turning steadily in his mind. Just as steadily, Hack walked out, and the door was slammed shut behind him well before Bravado could think to ask any of the many questions that sprouted from that statement.
Hack knows Mad Scientist?
Mad Scientist was an officially recognized terrorist for a while… though, admittedly, Bravado had kind of felt that that designation was kind of phoney. Regardless! Apparently Hack was friends with her? More than friends, even? They had so much in common…
Bravado shook his head and re-focused on the important questions he’d missed the opportunity to ask. Like where’s my botpack?!
But as soon as Bravado blinked, shook his head, and ran out the door after Hack… he heard the rumbling of a jetpack, and Hack was well into the sky.
A huff. Bravado resigned himself to searching through Hack’s lab, which was always an odyssey of its own.
Back inside, Bravado swept his head across the room, a quick visual scan. Botpacks were distinct, and yet nothing jumped out at him. An open and overflowing toolbox atop a filing cabinet; the filing cabinet had all of its drawers replaced with normal shelves, which mostly held a coffee mug collection.
They also held a small “open-concept” server on the bottom shelf.
Papers and diagrams and blueprints, shockingly none coffee stained, covered a table in its entirety. Full circuit boards with soldering irons now fully cooled resting atop them, some still plugged in to computers. A lounge chair with a single teddy bear resting in the corner. Rare pieces of scrap like jars of liquid matte simply resting on any given flat surface; Hack would be showing off his wealth if it wasn’t all so clearly functional.
Bravado let out a slow breath. This was going to take a while.
A while later, Bravado had his botpack in hand. He stepped back on to the deck and swung it around his shoulders.
The hum of the botpack’s power core, the warmth of its thrumming circuits against his back…
Botpacks were what made a botmaster. They had space-folding pocket storage, where one kept the scrap they found on expeditions, and where one kept their bots when not in use. They had repair canisters, amazing little pieces of technology that patched up bots from one battle to another.
The power core that fueled their bots, of course, and the many modules—active abilities—that botmasters used to give their teams an edge. Mapping and GPS, remote communications with world-wide range, or the jetpack-and-parachute combo that was nearly synonymous with society by now.
With it steadily powering on, Bravado felt like he could take on the whole world. And not wrongly so, considering what some of his bots could do…
But!
Before he could gather up his team, he had key business to attend to.
By now, his stomach was ready to growl with prime comedic timing. He was hungry, and delicious fish still lingered in his nose.
He strolled back out to the pier, and swept his eyes across his home. Scavenger’s Landing.
The largest settlement on the whole continent. The jewel of Scrapper Coast.
…compared to some of the cities he’d learned about recently, it was a downright backwards fishing town.
Houses were made out of scrap; stacked boxes hewn of corrugated sheets or shipping containers, cut and welded and greebled together to offer space. Nice and weathered wood, the only really waterproof material, was all used up in the piers, the boardwalk, and stilts that held up other buildings.
Half of Scavenger’s Landing was built on land, including the mighty arena, but the other half was built over the water. It was a fishing village, and large posts held larger nets adrift in the water. That wasn’t even mentioning the fishing boats…
Of course, the on-land half of the town was all walled off. While there were gates mainly for caravans, much of the pedestrian traffic came in the form of people zipping into the sky on their jetpacks, or descending on their parachutes.
Right as Bravado was turning his attention to the arena, his stomach growled. He aimed himself towards the market and began to march.
The arena sold common scrap by the hundreds of units. Rare goods were expensive but also often available—sometimes, caravans came by town and dropped off entire unbuilt botframes or even bot essences. Despite the hefty markup of those, they were easily worth it, and Bigweld watched the incoming scrap-caravans like a hawk.
The market was also home to Fishmonger.
He was almost single-handedly why Scavenger’s Landing was a fishing village. His business acumen was one thing, but nobody could fry a fish like him. Fishmonger meals were a tradition among botmasters coming home from a long job—at least, among carnivores like Bravado.
And somehow, no matter how popular his latest special dish, the line was never too long to be worth it.
A few minutes later, Bravado had lightened his coin pouch and filled his belly, and he was on his way back to the boat.
This time, to wrangle up some bots and get his team in order. Bot teams numbered six in total, chosen to cover each other’s weaknesses and bolster each other’s strengths.
Bravado had his favored four, while the last two spots in the team floated based on what the mission called for. This time, if it was to be a long-term mission, Bravado felt that a well-balanced team that focused on shoring up every possible weak point would be best.
His core team came when they were called, and a few minutes were taken to round up the remaining two.
Roar, his fellow recruit—a cat with a mohawk and flak jacket—was busy with the first, Bullwark. A heavily armored bot with bull horns, hence the name, and an energy shield projector in place of another grasping claw.
Bravado sat back and watched as Bullwark flipped Roar to the side and tackled him. What once was wrestling soon became Bullwark nuzzling its snout into Roar’s cheek, and by then Bravado was ready to drag it away.
Next was Bullseye—another bull-type, Bravado noted to himself, almost laughing.
Bullseye manufactured its quarrels from scrap metal, or from cut branches. They were then launched, fast, from the crossbow-like accelerator tracks that ran along its back. The uneven shape of its shots made it inaccurate, but it fired fast and hit hard.
It was standing at the aft of the boat, pitching its quarrels into the water at any dark spot or odd shape it saw.
Is it trying to spearfish? Bravado thought, as he walked up and reached the underside of its chin.
Nobody quite knew why bots were fond of physical affection—hello, robots—but some just were, and it was an easy way to add them to your team.
Bravado soon had all six of his assembled, stowed within his backpack. His schedule left him some forty minutes until he had to fly Bigweld’s way to be assigned the job, but, ultimately, he had nothing better to do.
Although Bravado preferred to be proper with these things, Bigweld was an aggressively casual boss.
Figuring that Bigweld would prefer that Bravado hadn’t lazed around for the sake of the schedule, Bravado made his way to the town launchpad.
He tightened his visor, pulled down his ears, and stretched out his shoulders. Then, he engaged the thrusters.
It wasn’t a slow start. It was the exact opposite. He rocketed away from the ground and took a sharp turn once he was clear of the town walls, any buildings, or any other flyers. He followed the line of the coast for a while, before turning inland.
Too fast to navigate by sight; any time he tried to focus on potential landmarks, be it tree or hill or cliffside, his eyes unfocused from how fast they blurred past. His botpack navigated for him, printing out to the display on his visor.
Bigweld was out fishing for the whole week. A once-a-year family tradition, if Bravado remembered right, which meant he would be on the edges of Scrapper Coast, right near where Fall Grove began.
There was a humongous natural pond around there, fresh and clear water unmarked by any other goers. So tranquil that bandits rarely came there, which left wild bot packs to roam. Every time he went, Bigweld brought his personal elite team of bots just to make sure nothing went wrong.
Bravado drew near the lake and his thrusters shut off. He glide through the air through speed and not a lick of aerodynamics, until he was near enough for his parachute to deploy automatically.
A harness built into his outfit did its best to distribute the force of the sudden braking, but it never quite stopped Bravado’s back from getting sore.
Heedless of his minor grumbles, the botpack guided him to a safe landing right beside the lake. It retracted the parachute into a folded-space pocket, and begun folding it back up for next deployment entirely automatically.
Bigweld’s ears flicked, and he looked Bravado’s way. A wide grin split his lips.
A cat, with dark blue fur. It was where the team colors came from, after all. Fitting to his name, he was big. His width at the shoulders was comparable to his height, and his arms were the width of much of Bravado’s torso.
True to the name, a welding mask was affixed to his face. It was raised, though, it almost always was. His fishing rod rested in both hands, bobber following the slow waves in the pond before him.
“Nice of ya’ to make it!”
Bravado nodded, striding forward. He sat himself down in the folding chair besides Bigweld, and cast his eyes across the pond.
Didn’t seem like they were biting much.
“I didn’t want to… waste time.”
“Nothin’ better to do, huh?” Bigweld nodded. “Well if you’re here ahead of time… ya’ want the job, or you want the spare?” he tilted his head. In the cooler where he kept his sodas—first rule of botmasters, sober in the wild always—there was also a second fishing rod.
“...Next time,” Bravado frowned. Fish were delicious, but fishing just wasn’t his way to pass the time.
“You promise?” Bigweld’s grin grew somehow wider. “I’ll hold ya’ to that. Family tradition, y’know?”
Bravado leaned back in the seat. With the armor on, it wasn’t the most comfortable. “I… think I could get Tinker to come too. But… doesn’t the job start today?”
Nodding again and again, Bigweld reached for his botpack—it was a prismatic-series model, the only grade of botpack higher than Bravado’s own white-series—and withdrew a folder. A sheet of paper within, pulled free and held Bravado’s way.
Bravado took it and quickly eyed the form. It was the type of listing that Bigweld wrote, loose on the details. That meant that whoever was hiring for the job didn’t know how botmasters rolled. Not too unusual, really.
“Yeah, whole lotta trouble gettin’ the fine print down for the job. Sorry for the hurry, but I only got it finished right as I was headin’ out here.”
“What’s the job?” Bravado asked. The paper said it was a ‘joint training operation to quantify mutual effectiveness,’ but anyone he could think of worth training with knew how botmasters worked.
“Y’remember that other world that Nova ended up on?” Bigweld asked, casually.
Bravado twitched. Although Bigweld had been completely casual about it, nobody else had taken it so slightly. Nova—a legendary bot—had completely vanished for weeks. When the little thing finally came back, it wasn’t so little anymore, and Bigweld had stories about an entire other world to come with it.
A world of monsters, magic-ish (they didn’t think it was magic, but it totally was) abilities, and an entire city that floated in the sky. Among other things.
“...I remember,” Bravado eventually replied, a bit dizzy, because how could he forget?
“Well. Them’s got governments, and one of those governments wants me to show off what our bots and botpacks can do. And apparently they want to try and share some of their magic, too? I figured…”
Bravado eventually nodded. If this was about bot-fighting tactics, he was certainly a better fit than Bigweld. Not to insult his boss, but… he focused on making his bots the best they could be and letting them fight for themselves.
It worked, world champion and all, but if they wanted to know how the average botmaster acted, Bravado would be a better option.
He nodded again as he flipped through the pages. It was all so frustratingly vague…
“That, and, well, humans. You were there when I talked to Cogsworth. Actually, y’think you could get a DNA sample, too?”
Bravado looked up and set the paper back inside its folder. “You think they’re the same as our progenitors?”
“They definitely look the part…” Bigweld scratched the back of his head.
“I’ll make sure to ask about that.” Bravado, one more time—he was beginning to feel like a bobblehead—nodded. Then he smacked the cover of the folder. “This isn’t, uh, much to go by. What else do I need to know?”
Bigweld let out a gigantic sigh and slumped to the side. “...So much. Just, so much.”
Bravado let out an amused little huff. It didn’t take that much fine print to dissuade Bigweld, but it was always annoying to see it. “Well, let’s start with how I’m going to get there?”
“I’ll portal you over with Warp Grub. You’ll be in Solitas—think of it like Frozen Wastes.”
Bravado had begun shedding his winter coat just two weeks ago, and he was lamenting that fact deeply. His botpack tried to keep him warm, but this cold was worse than Frozen Wastes by far.
And the wind-chill, too. With the speed of his jetpack, he was so very grateful that the city was already in sight. What a city it was…
“Atlas City has a forcefield around the whole thing. They only let it down for scheduled arrivals, so you’ll need to be at your landing pad within five minutes.”
Sure enough, a section of the forcefield dropped away just as Bravado was getting close enough to spot those differences without the zoom of his visor. He drew nearer, and saw where the hexagons solidified and curved around a wedge-shaped entry hole.
The thruster cut out just before he crossed the threshold, and the parachute deployed just after.
He swayed back and forth on his final descent, thinking to himself, there must have been a huge miscommunication somewhere,
Because all of the soldiers and the squad of human-shaped robots—and wasn’t that something to see—had guns pointed at him.
His feet set on the ground, and his parachute retracted away, and Bravado slowly let his hands raise.
“Who are you?” a man asked. Blue eyes, black hair, white coat.