Baa-Ram-Ewe!

-Moon Cell Realm, Midgar, Inner Upper City, two hours later, Pom-

Several destroyed vending machines, five Potions, some snacks, two taken territories and a bath later, we were as ready as we were going to get.

I had actually been hit by the Thousand Gunner several times, but flesh wounds weren’t exactly an issue apparently. Well bleeding out was still a problem for me, but Potions helped a lot with saving on the few Sitrus Berries Dormarch transported to us.

Cait Sith and Shanty had been successfully extracted from Mog Wash to Castle Alexander still trying to work its way inwards. Moby Dick was apparently fighting someone, a single person was managing to give that deadly thing a lot more trouble than it bargained for and it was the same guy we crossed paths with… gods speed to him. We didn’t want Moby anywhere near the Eaters where it could possibly get taken over.

Merak was obviously having problems with the Eaters, he couldn’t really focus as many of the cities defenses on us as he wanted to and we were currently sitting at a stalemate at the front door to Merak’s last line of defense, the tower.

Three PLANTs worth of Berserker Moogles was actually managing to hold the small foothold, on the defensive the moogles were holding the territories indefinitely from the EPs. Their raw physical strength and being ludicrously tough was our boon at the moment, even if they weren’t very special at other things.

The three motorcycles Sami was using were being repaired for our ascent through the tower, which Dormarch was currently scouting. Apparently… there were no defenses around the staircase…. none, none whatsoever… but why though? All it would take is us going through a few floors of the parking garage, we’d be able to enter the staircase and we’d bypass a monumental amount of the buildings defenses. The elevators would be faster, but would be absurdly protected and under Merak’s direct control.

I wasn’t under any illusion that Merak wouldn’t be ready and waiting for us to invade, he knew we were here and about to do so. He had to be well prepared for us near the top of the tower, a tower heavily surrounded by aerial forces.

Kind of wish Ocellus hadn’t sent me a visual of the Mother Eater, it was tearing the city apart and taking over it one bit at a time and swarms of Eaters were going everywhere like the Bombs in the Lower City. At least the bombs weren’t eating everything, just setting everything on fire and blowing up a lot of stuff.

We at least got some warning to our allies to avoid them at all through Mundo flying through enemy airspace again. Lucha Mundo was a hero to our estranged allies that attacked me once, still didn’t know what that was about and I needed a talk with the two named Artoria and Mash to clear the air.

Getting any more people into the inner upper city was not going to be easy, at least not until we had Merak entirely distracted with whatever huge fight he was going to put us through to get to him on the upper floors. There was nowhere else he could be really.

Fou’s forces were being held back a little bit by the ceiling cannons in their invasion point in the Lower City, we only destroyed the power to the cannons of the section of the Lower City we invaded.

Our allies were actually managing to sneak through the enemy territory and were managing to not alert the ceiling cannons to their presence as their APs assaulted the walls.

Merak’s attention had to be all over the place, that or mostly squarely on us. Didn’t know, but Elise said he was a lazy genius, so he probably put the most defenses into what would be our path while he prepared.

I felt Dormarch on the approach for our current base of operations, a ritzy hotel lobby. Never been in a hotel this fancy before. Even the palace in Huoshan doesn’t do this much gaudy frippery, at least the hotel rooms were not overdoing it as the lobby entrance was.

“Hey, everyone, the staircase seems to be entirely unguarded from what little I’ve been able to determine, I still don’t know why though.” I’ve had time to think about it Dormarch and the answer was fairly easy given what Elise told us about Merak.

“I have an idea.” Drawing attention of everyone present, which was Canard, Sami, Peppercat, Krosserdog, Rokusho and Metabee. Dolly was being lazy on a pillow nearby and complaining that it wasn’t as nearly as comfortable as I was… which was a compliment to my talents to being very fluffy and soft.

Dormarch was the only one able to get through the defenses without possibly serious injury using his Search Hunter signature ability, so currently we didn’t have much support here and we were the ones that had to get into the tower to start the process of taking Merak down.

“Well?” Canard asked looking a little impatient as he watched out for EP attacks that might surpass our Berserker Magitek Moogle Monster defense line. He was almost as paranoid as I was, even then he still got in a personal shower too to wash off all the sweat from being so close to death constantly.

“I recall Elise telling us that Merak was lazy genius… anything that seems like exercise would be his anathema, he probably wouldn’t expect anyone to take the stairs and to use the much faster and obviously highly trapped elevators.” Even if they were trapped they would get us through the building much faster than taking the stairs… if we intended to do it on hoof. Sami’s moto bars could put a skein flyer in the space the staircase winds their way up the building and we could just fly up the space between all the stairs. “As for what we’re going to do, we’re taking the stairs instead of whatever Merak has planned for us. Since we’re going to be sneaking through the garage, we’ll see if he has any machines waiting for us there… but otherwise once we exit the garage to the lobby we take the stairs. Something that Merak likely won’t expect because he wouldn’t do it himself.”

“So we’re using his personal bias against him?” Yes that is exactly it Dormarch, who was my intelligent and cuddly three tailed Dalmatian fish boy! You were, cuddles and petting ensued as I gave him my affection. Dolly wasn’t in the mood apparently and was relaxing before we got into the real meat of the problem here. “The elevators are big enough to carry a Thousand Gunner on them so, probably for the best we don’t get into a fight between the two elevators as we rise up the building.”

“It would have been cool to do though.” Dolly stated as she stretched out and got up to slap her helmet on her head, grab the stone bone and get her skateboard slung around her body.

“No not cool, for one the elevators are mostly glass on top and we’d be hit with a storm of broken glass at the start of everything! There’s the Thousand Gunner on the neighboring elevator sure, but you’re forgetting that the elevators are also exposed to aerial EP attacks and you’ve got a recipe for the kind of insanity that mom really cannot take right now after how we got here!” Dormarch was so sweet to worry about my sanity, I really shouldn’t let either him or Dolly know that it has been slipping for quite a while. First time on a motorcycle and I never want to get on another one for as long as I lived… which wasn’t going to be for very long even if I don’t become a Chrysomallus. “Mom… can’t take much more of this…”

“…” Dolly didn’t say anything and just looked into my eyes and whined a bit.

“Right, we’re taking the stairs after we break through the garage to the lobby. Hopefully they don’t have any active Manufactured in there, all their heavy combat machinery has to be out running defensive with the Eaters present so the garage will have to have minimal defenses until we can reach the lobby and then enter the staircase.” It sounded like Canard was ready to go and get this over with. “To that end… we’re on a tight time limit here. We need to deal with Merak to take the realm, we need to do something about the Eaters if taking the realm doesn’t stop them… it hadn’t stopped them when we took out Saber Jack Blade Wolf until we collapsed an entire city on them and destroyed the Excelsus which might have been an anchor point for the realm being taken. Bombs are causing major problems, but apparently Fou is taking care of those for us already. Our allies are trying to meet up with us here in the upper central city region, the two of them were strong enough to get this far. We know how we’re going to get to Merak, but how are we going to stop the Eaters after we’ve dealt with him?”

There was quite a terrible silence after he asked that.

“Well… what if we drop the upper city out from under them?” Metabee stated drawing our attentions to him, any suggestion even from someone as hotheaded and loose cannon as he was is welcome at this moment.

He quickly moved over to a holographic station here in the hotel, the Digibot started working on it.

“Explain, usually you’re not the idea guy and the shoot first and hope to never have to ask questions later unless your opponent can be talked down by Rokusho.” Peppercat stated as she sat up and looked at Metabee in surprise.

“I noticed something when we were flying up in Castle Alexander to the Upper City.” Metabee produced a three dimensional map of Midgar, a large round city all around the nearby Shinra Tower in the center. “Midgar’s upper city is sitting on multiple massive plates…”

The explanation Metabee gave us afterwards was that apparently Shinra Tower likely had the capacity to drop sections of the upper city onto the lower city. I found myself horrified at the idea that the corporation had that kind of power over people’s lives when dropping a plate would not only kill the people below the plate, but also most of the people living above it as well.

Metabee’s suggestion was to split off into three groups.

One was to detour and find a way to access the plate drop sequence… since we can’t drop anything like a whole city on the Mother Eater. They would also need to make sure the defenses continued to shell the Mother Eater with artillery, which was already being done by the defenses.

Merak’s defenses can’t kill the Mother Eater as it was growing too strong from what it was eating out of the upper city and producing far too many smaller Eaters. The defenses were only currently, and temporarily at that, keeping it at bay successfully. It would only be for so long before we had to cross a point of no return. As in no return on being able to outright deal with the Mother Eater unless we collapse this entire realm and our direct access to Moon Cell’s brain with it which means fighting through yet another realm.

I’m still surprised to see that it’s come back. A horror of mouths and tentacles that shouldn’t ever be fought up close and personal. Though apparently Mega Level Digimon succeeded at stopping one before… only that one wasn’t nearly as big as this one is and this one was stated to be much bigger.

We’re instead dropping the Mother Eater into the mostly evacuated lower city. Sans NPCs of course… not much we could do there for those people if they get taken by an Eater down there or up here. In fact we had to not care about the NPCs feelings on the matter as dealing with the Eaters requires us to do this within the next five hours while there’s still time to destroy the Mother Eater with a city drop.

Thankfully to that end Castle Alexander was already moving out of the way, we had access to commanding the medieval ally forces and they wouldn’t be under the plates we’d need to drop.

The second team would be setting up the ‘MAKO’ reactors underneath and around the Mother Eater’s current territory to blow up, apparently the corporation also had the capability to do that from the central tower as well.

Seeing quite a recurring theme here and upon contacting Castle Alexander to get an explanation, we found out it was much worse when the city was a place that wasn’t a Moon Cell realm. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest at this point, this place was a deathtrap and people used to live in a place like this. I’m pretty sure Moon Cell is embellishing the realm slightly to put a stopper on our plans to attack it directly, but otherwise Cait Sith had been alive when everything went down… and a lot of stuff did when he was around.

Cait Sith told us about the planets biological weapons it used against those ruining the life stream. There had been several, at least up to seven of those weapons the planet had used and possibly more… Shinra Corporation designed this city to fight them to the last, but apparently the planet didn’t bite and was trying to protect nature itself throughout many other parts of the world from being completely destroyed.

The planet had actually succeeded long enough for Shinra to be destroyed as a corporation. What Shinra were doing was definitively evil in the course of reaching for some sort of ‘promised land’ and the planet really wanted the suffering and torturing of souls in the life stream to stop. It did, and everything was fine, until Moon Cell eventually full wiped that civilization like it was trying to do to two worlds right now and it had its apocalypse causers for that. Here it was trying to do it without said apocalypse causers and it was having much more trouble doing so.

Ransei and the digital world neighbors had to be struggling while I sat here in ‘relative’ safety trying to gather my nerves for the fights ahead.

The explosion of raw soul power from the MAKO reactors would free the souls there and it would absolutely destroy the Mother Eater as the liquid energy was extremely caustic to the living, as we’ve already seen and from what Canard managed to scan of it with his digivice.

Mother Eater was technically a living entity so, the second team would be working with the first to ensure securing its destruction by timing things out together… we couldn’t actually fight that head on with brute strength even if Dormarch, Sami and Frizzle could evolve to their Mega forms. There still wouldn’t be nearly enough Mega Level Digimon to take it on given it took at least twelve of said stupidly powerful Digimon forms to take down the original Mother Eater and some of that was due in part to the indigestion of someone’s soul refusing to be consumed by said Eater until their personality managed to hang on long enough to save the situation by overriding the Mother Eater long enough to successfully fix things.

We didn’t have the luxury of a soul fused into this Mother Eater to cause problems and fight long enough to stop it from eating everything, this was a Pure Mother Eater and not an Eater that was incidentally fused with an intelligent being that could heroically bring the strength of their soul together long enough to stop a multiple world ending terror.

I’m so glad that none of us were a part of the first Mother Eater problem, I however am sad that we’re dealing with the second… for a second time since we last saw the thing in Mare Melum! Mare Melum was doing just fine by the way, no Eater activity… I think I know why the Eaters were here and I wasn’t about to voice the opinion of an anti-magic wool having being in a magical computer system might be the problem.

I was causing glitches in Moon Cell by existing, said glitches attracted the Eaters interest and the usually benign creatures then appeared and started going crazy since they shouldn’t be on our plane of existence.

Deal with the Mother Eater and all the other Eaters produced by it would evaporate, including the zombie data things that were identified and reclassified as ‘Eater Gekkos’ that started showing up with them in the city. Said Gekkos were trying to infect EPs and anything near them to make it easier for the Eaters to spread.

Then… there was what the third team would be doing… my team. We’re the ones that had to deal with Merak directly and I had a feeling we were going to be in for one Tartarus of a fight given the ‘Manufactured’ Merak had already thrown at us.

Ocellus tried to hash out a way to get us some aerial support, but until Moby Dick went down or the PLANTs that produced flying EPs were dealt with the airspace around Shinra Tower was a veritable hot zone of death that even the Eaters were having problems getting through and they were stupidly tough things, it’s only their speed that was stopping them from being successful so far and even then they just may overwhelm the defenses in the next five hours.

Canard would lead the team to dropping the plates, with Krosserdog and Sami. Sami was the designated hacker for that team, being a virus type digital entity she was a veteran of breaking systems and surviving harsh situations.

Team two was being led by Rokusho, with Dormarch and Metabee. Dormarch was the backup hacker and was really good at searching out data to manipulate, as a ‘Search Engine’ he was fairly good at finding specific weak points in the computer systems when it comes to a need to hack into things. It just went over my head, but they seriously needed Dormarch.

My team was consisting of myself, Dolly and Peppercat. Notably we lacked sustainable long range specialists that the other teams had and it was understandable why Rokusho and Metabee stuck together given their digital fusion evolution ability.

Unless I counted for my bark and howl attack attacks, we didn’t have much constant ranged support to deal with flying things.

Dolly could do some range support, but her limited magic capacity would mean she needs to use magic sparingly and the materia didn’t use nearly as much magic as casting the spells without them… Dolly has yet to learn the spells, but she was close to getting ‘Blizzard’ down. She had an affinity for being cool apparently, at least the way she says it.

Peppercat only had her ‘Elctroball Special’ as her mid-range attack, she was a melee powerhouse and her electrical attacks were really handy against any ‘Manufactured’ enemies we might run into going deeper inside while our other two teams set up dealing with the Mother Eater.

The one thing about the three of us… we were the most likely to survive whatever Merak had waiting for us long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

Dolly had nigh indestructible protective gear and momentum control as long as her physical body wasn’t directly hit she’d be fine.

I had the actually indestructible paralance given even Eaters couldn’t consume it and that would protect me from almost anything that wasn’t destroying the floor around my hooves or managing to knock my off balance to get at me, if it wasn’t piercing my wool would handle it.

Peppercat was built for good speed and have decent armor as a digibot, her hotheadedness and enthusiasm was the only real reason she got into trouble.

That was our three teams of three, but we weren’t going to split up until after we surpassed the unguarded staircase. After that point, my team would be the first to split off and keep looking for Merak moving upwards while the other two teams find the necessary security systems to break.

Throughout all of this Jeanne and Ocellus were to keep the Eaters at bay and help with containment while staying away from them and would spent time building up an aerial force to send us backup while trying to take as many territories as possible in the intervening time.

The Pokémon Companions and Valora forces were up for the second task while the first was a big ask considering the Eaters could kill any of them on contact. No one had any idea what happened to Lit after an explosion and a lightning strike hit a section of the wall heading in the direction of Fou’s forces, so that was thankfully the only MIA at the moment.

No one doubted that Lit was still alive as to get a KIA on that guy would take something like the Mother Eater sitting directly on top of him… for like an hour. Lit was the most ridiculous little bug I’ve ever met.

We definitely had the harder job here… but we had the capacity to switch some APs out and we needed some Caerbannogs to help us get in.

I was not going to point out the obvious that my team was the fairly animalistic one with me having to watch out for two wild cards like Dolly and Peppercat, while most of our intelligent and cool headed members went to the other teams.

I had to take up the leadership position of this team… I knew Dolly would follow me anywhere, but I didn’t know if I understood Peppercat well enough that she would listen to me if I told her to do something.

-Thirty minutes later, assault on the Shinra Tower garage-

The Troopers were all on alert throughout the garage, all of them had their machine guns at the ready unless they were doing something important like maintenance work.

There were no Manufactured aside from a Thousand Gunner in disrepair and incapable of shooting its guns… its body was obviously heavily scorched by numerous Bomb explosions that had thoroughly made it incapable of attacking, but not incapable of moving. The rest of the vehicles in the garage for the Trooper EPs to get around, but weren’t equipped with major offensive weaponry and were more just armored transports.

There were a lot of Guard Hounds around on patrol, their head tentacles ready to whip at any intruders and these were in particular the kind that could spit fireballs unlike their more melee oriented counterparts used in the lower city. The upgrade to fireball spitting wasn’t enough to make these particular Guard Hounds an elite version of an Enemy Program though, an elite was usually bigger or more capable in some way.

The garage was heavily patrolled yet something was starting to become amiss to the Trooper programs as they looked about.

One Trooper EP noted there was less Guard Hounds and Troopers than there had been a second ago, but it wasn’t enough for the EP to go on alert. Before the Trooper could call in a lockdown of all nearby entrance a rope whipped out from underneath a vehicle, bashed the back of the troopers head into said vehicle dazing them and then dragged them underneath before they could make a sound.

This situation was familiar, but instead of down, several figures were making a path up as the Guard Hounds near the patrolling Trooper were slowly disappearing before they could get off a single bark with knives buried up to the hilts in their diaphragms making it entirely impossible to alert anyone of the trouble currently plaguing the garage.

Several Shadows moved around the inactive Thousand Gunner and started to meticulously mess with it. A Manufactured that wasn’t capable of combat, but could still move would be useful if it was stolen and refurbished for a much better cause later. Said Thousand Gunner was soon rolling away and into the streets by itself, nobody the wiser that it wasn’t heading out for a mission, but was being stolen.

A Guard Hound had noted something and its ears were erect and its tentacle was as raised as its hackles. A fireball built up in its mouth as it looked about for a target, it didn’t get a chance to do anything as a knife buried itself into the Guard Hound’s spine between a bit of cartilage and connecting it’s digital program brain to the rest of its body.

It was slowly lowered to the floor by the bipedal bunny and slowly dragged away. Soon a sneaking group of nine individuals made their way through the area led by a Caerbannog. This garage had fallen really fast and Merak hadn’t noticed the loss of the Thousand Gunner yet, as it was programmed to head to Castle Alexander for Welch to poke over.

What many would say about the Assassin Class was that they weren’t good in direct combat, but again, direct combat is for suckers when indirect stealth takedowns made sure the enemy never saw it coming.

Pom’s assault group approached the guard station and the helmet wearing Trooper like figure just opened the path towards the lobby and gave a thumbs up and several more Trooper figures showed up and didn’t shoot at them and instead took up the positions that the Troopers were originally in.

-Shinra Tower, Executive Suite, Merak-

Something was up… I looked into the security system to the garage, one of the most noted points of entry for my enemies and I saw Troopers patrolling around and Guard Hound lazing about.

Hmm… I better get my ultimate weapon ready anyway, just in case something is up.

Wait… did they actually managed to repair the Thousand Gunner that fast? No… so what I’m seeing is likely...

Setting all the traps around the elevators and every floor up to this one up and sending all assault programs into an even higher alert.

Something was off with those Troopers in the garage too.

They had been compromised already… they had to be!

He sent the orders to not let the enemy get to the elevators easily. He’d have his assault programs make them fight for access to them and if they did try to use them, then he was absolutely ready for it.

-Garage Assault (Continued)-

The numerous paralyzed Guard Hounds, were left laying positions that made them appear lazy. The Caerbannogs had succeeded in making it look like nothing was going on throughout the several floors of the garage when the cameras were being checked. Unfortunately Merak was already on to them anyway and soon the Guard Hounds would be taken out and the still enemy controlled PLANT in the garage would be taken out by a remotely detonated explosive left behind by Sami.

The Caerbannogs were wearing the guards stolen clothing too, this is why no one ever wanted to mess with killer rabbits. They knew the game would eventually be up, but they had successfully managed to help the three teams infiltrate through the garage and silently got a bonus objective out of it as well.

The Caerbannog leading the team in the disguise of the Trooper stopped and heard the alert level raising drastically, it immediately silently informed the three infiltrating teams that Merak was on to them and then quickly ran off to infiltrate several other Troopers ranks unknown, unseen and unheard for a time when it was needed further to act.

Pom’s team had already made it to the lobby, the front was heavily fortified… the staircases up the entirety of the… accessible after a quick hacking of the door by Dormarch and there was nothing on it stopping them from using the Skein Flyer recently programmed into Sami’s Motor Bars to fly up the many numerous flights leading upwards.

They flew up the space in the middle of the long winding saircase and bypassed a huge amount of trouble that was waiting for them otherwise and without a hint of Merak knowing they were flying up said staircase.

Pom thought the lobby had been nice looking at least, in a grand mansion foyer kind of way with how the corporation set it up.

-Rising up the unguarded staircase, Dolly (Music: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 3)-

“Gee, this would have taken forever to climb… good thing we have these duck wingers.” I said as I watched the various floors passed by one at a time slowly while sitting on the back Skein Flyer piloted by the robot Salt Felinid with Pom as we slowly ascended almost straight upwards. “How tall is this place again?”

“Slightly over seventy five stories not counting roof access and helicopter landing pad. What that terms as the basement being anything below the towers front entrance we passed by, which sounds like more cruelty towards the people living below them in the lower city, the whole tower would be much larger if we count everything built below it. Also this tower has to be the most maintenance intensive thing in the whole city. If we were to include said ‘basement’… given how much space there is in the lower city and a possible elevator directly leading into the underground facility below that we probably never even came close to seeing… and the likeliest main reason why the facility was blown up in the first place after we managed to mostly deal with the problems in there.” Dormarch was running some quick calculations above us with Team 2’s Skein Flyer. “Somewhere in the three hundred stories ballpark if we’re counting the underground facilities.”

“Yikes, and I thought living in a three story home with our brothers and sister was big.” Hard to imagine how high up we would be, we’d be so close to those thundering lightning clouds where all that rain was coming from nonstop. Being in the air didn’t scare me though… getting hit by a lightning bolt totally did and the sound of thunders hurts my ears, at least everyone got used to Dylan using a vacuum cleaner and eventually stopped barking at it when he turned it on. That devilish cleaning thing was created by some evil god I just know it…

“If the rain doesn’t say it all about how corrupt this corporation was… it’s like the echoing tears of the planet were never allowed to fully stop when Moon Cell built this realm after the civilization that came from this place was destroyed.” Yeah, it had been raining nonstop since we got to the upper city Pom and it really messed with my ability to see much beyond all the neon and lighting fixtures everywhere, plus it’s hard to pick up smells with everything being so wet. “This city is so horrible… I can’t imagine what Cait Sith must have been through when it was that actual place and not Moon Cell’s slightly altered representation.

I really didn’t mind being wet or muddy, but this place soaked you through to the bone... I pulled out the stone bone and gnawed on it to get my nerves in line for what was to come.

“Don’t ruin your teeth Dolly.” Wasn’t gnawing on it nearly that hard Pom!

“I’m just nervous about what we’re up against this time Pom.” My honesty was met with a few soft hoof head rubs that made me feel happy inside. Pom and my little bro were just as nervous, who knows what Mario-Lick has waiting for us this time, after all the crazy stuff we did we were almost done with this realm.

“Well we avoid doing a bunch of Elevator Antics at least…” Sighed Pom as we reached the halfway point. “This is the much nicer option.”

“Yeah, can’t actually complain about that.” We all made sure we were as healthy as we could get for this, which is what Dormarch checked on.

We had healing items on each of us, because apparently healing chemicals somehow worked on our four robot friends too. The minty ones just reloaded their special abilities or gave them some extra energy towards using the abilities sooner since they didn’t have magic like Pom and I did.

Someone needed to break the mind numbing silence… or else one of us might go crazy.

“Twenty bags of kibble on the wall, twenty bags of kibble~.” I started singing and heard several audible sighs as they could understand me when I was singing. “Knock one down, drag it around and eat it down… nineteen bags of kibble on the wall~.”

“I’m beginning to think I only saw the vaguest hint of your true withdrawal symptoms when it comes to lacking kibble Dolly.” Yeah, Pom was right, I’ve been doing pretty good… maybe I don’t need kibble anymore to get over the haunting memories of losing my first mother to sickness.

No I can still feel the coping urge as being there, it’s just… highly dulled. Maybe it was being around Pom that made me handle the dependency symptoms better. That and thinking about my birth mother and my other mother Delilah made it me feel wistful of the puppy days long past.

I was a literal super hero now… and as such I was going to ignore Pom’s line of thought in the most childish manner possible! At least super hero was definitely on the list of things I wanted to be when I grew up, so that was one of the dreams that was the least tangible to ever come true. All it took was binding myself to an interdimensional alien sheep like being with many, MANY, issues.

It was too quiet and I was thinking too much, again breaking all lines of thought in the most childish manner possible now!

“Nineteen bags of kibble on the wall, nineteen bags of kibble~!” I made my singing even more obnoxious and louder. Thankfully there were no listening devices in the staircases and I could be as loud as I wanted while trying to ignore Pom’s questioning as to the fact that I hadn’t had any in a while.

“I get it Dolly, you don’t have to get louder…” Pom placed a hoof on my back gently and pressed her forehead against mine affectionately. “We’ll see to it after we’re done here when we can get some time before we have to face Moon Cell directly.”

…

She did get it… I haven’t been able to talk to anyone else in my family for a while either.

“Knock one down, drag it around and eat it down… eighteen bags of kibble on the wall~.” I wasn’t the only one singing this time, Dormarch and Pom joined in halfway through my next line of singing and soon so was everyone else.

Was it me or were the stairs above us practically endless? Wondered how people would get down or up them quickly enough in case of a fire, dad would have been so mad at the lack of fire safety in this building.

Could have stayed home and been a police dog, but that would have been more boring than all of this. Sure there might not have been much action in infiltrating the building yet, but I knew that was going to change as soon as we left this ridiculously long staircase behind.

“Snake- Eater-~” A feminine voice sang interrupting our singing.

“Okay, who in the melted hell of destroyed pucks and broken sticks was that?” Canard asked as he and Sami looked around above us.

“I think someone was just playing some background music and we’ve just been ignoring it this entire time, you know, because tensions and knifes cutting them.” Thoughtfully stated Dormarch. “I believe we were on nine bags of kibble…”

We continued to sing the rest of the song I started to get our nerves in line.