Horse People: The Precursor Legacy
Chapter 14: Chapter 12: The Great Jailbreak with Jailbait
Previous Chapter Next Chapter“How should I start?” Thomas asked his diminutive lover as they stood upon the dreary platform in the dungeon.
“With these.” Luna hopped over to the bag Honey had dropped and opened it. “These are clothes we managed to find on our way here. Hopefully, they fit.”
Thomas reached into the bag and pulled out the first garment he touched. He stretched out and revealed a lacey black thong before him. Now, it was his turn to look at Luna with a WTF expression.
The ottsel rolled her eyes. “If you could not tell from the size, that one was clearly meant for Surprise.”
“Ah.” Thomas took another look at the thing, confirming it was indeed too big for him. “My excuse is that I was recently injected with dark energy and that my mind has been left fuzzy as a result,” he deadpanned.
Grinning, Luna shook her head good-naturedly and pulled out his real clothes, as well as a new communicator. “Just hurry and change. We need to find the others.”
“Oh, right. They’re here too,” Thomas recalled while complying. Seeing that he’d gained Honey’s attention as well, he decided to take his time disrobing, swaying his body around in whatever way got the biggest reaction from the ladies. “You said you were all split up?”
“Indeed,” Luna replied, watching his movements like a cat with a laser. “I dare say that these loathsome Krimzon guards knew exactly where we would land before we did so.”
“Possible,” Thomas agreed as he bent over, dropped his pants, and shook his bare rump for his ladies to enjoy. “Erol said I was shorter than he’d expected.” Using the chair for support, he looked over his shoulder to watch his ladies’ expression as he parted his legs and rotated his butt around. “So, clearly, they were expecting something.”
“Somethin’. Yeah,” Honey said distractedly before shaking the dumb off. “Like Luna said, we’ve been dealin’ with a time… a time… thingy.” She licked her lips.
“A time skip,” Luna corrected, never tearing her eyes from the show. “Much like in a story when a period of nothing important happens, the author skips ahead to a more relevant scene. Strangely, this particular skip seems to have affected all of us differently.”
“H-how so?” Thomas asked, momentarily distracted. His body resembled that of a professional athlete, with muscle distributed evenly across his frame. Disappointingly, his penis didn’t seem to have changed at all. Probably have Moonlight to blame for that, he mused. But no matter. He tried bending down to touch his toes.
“F-for you,”—Luna stuttered—“it may seem as if only minutes have passed since our separation. For us”—she gestured at Honey—“those two years have passed over the course of four hours.”
“Princess had ta work as an exterminator,” Honey chuckled. “Ah was a barmaid. Made decent money ‘n’ kept an ear ta the ground lookin’ fer ya’ll.”
Thomas grinned and lifted his shirt. Now fully naked, he pretended he wasn’t being ogled like a piece of eye candy while performing various warmup exercises, bending his body in every which way he could think of. “I’d played the Daxter spinoff game, but I didn’t really care for it. Didn’t expect it to sneak its way in there… or here… whatever.”
“I found it rather enjoyable,” Luna admitted. “It was most interesting to play the part of a lowly exterminator, saving the city from a menace foolishly disregarded as a nuisance. ‘Tis a shame I lost my gear on the way here, but I can go over the details in full once we’ve reunited with the others.”
Feeling as though he’d drawn out his teasing long enough, Thomas decided he was overdue to get dressed. His new outfit was similar to his old one, with the same color scheme of a blue shirt with tan trousers. He had proper boots instead of open-toed foot wraps, and his shirt had sleeves this time. The metal plates for his arms and shoulders were still present, along with the metal ring tied with leather straps over his chest. Once dressed, he hopped from foot to foot and threw a few punches, tested the feel of his new wardrobe, and acclimated in seconds. “So, where to?”
The three players started by exploring the cellblock with Luna perched on Thomas’ shoulder. The walls were an eerie, grayish green, with a strange green gas being pumped in from vents along the walls. Given that the gas had been spewing since the Baron was present, it seemed safe to assume that it wasn’t dangerous. Two stories of cell doors lined the walls, with even more down in the pit surrounding the operating table. Overlooking the pit was the platform Thomas had been held on, complete with the operating chair and a large, menacing machine positioned directly overhead. Why anyone would think it was a good idea to place such sensitive equipment in the middle of a cellblock was anyone’s guess. They checked each of the cells, hoping that even if they didn’t find their friends, they could at least get a prison riot going. Alas, all cells in this block were empty.
“Can I just bring attention back to the bottomless pit?” Thomas asked as he leaned over the side. “You know, besides the lack of railing.”
“What bug’s crawled up yer butt this time?” Honey asked casually.
“There are cell doors down there,” Thomas began. “And given that we can’t see the bottom, it implies that this prison may have been designed to hold a population that might even rival that of the city. Now, at first, that implies that whoever built this place is a tyrant who anticipated he’d have to lock up a lot of political dissidents and the like. However, given that this guy has been in power for less than a decade, and his policy is mostly shoot first and take prisoners second, this prison must have been built well before him.”
“A reasonable conclusion,” Luna assessed. “But to what end?”
“Exactly! What’s the point of a prison that can hold a thousand people when I don’t think there are even ten thousand in this city?”
“He’s got a point,” Honey agreed. “Ah mean, this place ain’t that small, but compared ta what we got back home, callin’ it a proper city does seem like a bit ‘f a stretch.”
“Sorry. Just needed to get that out of my system,” Thomas admitted. “That and all other bottomless pits we’re going to find in this building alone. We can go now.”
Once the cellblock had been used up for all forms of exploration—and the one orb that had been left lying in the corner, despite how much more valuable these things were supposed to be—they moved on through an opening in the upper wall. From there, it was the standard fare of jumping between platforms that had no rational business being where they were in order to escape this supposedly fortified prison. The alarms did eventually go off, but it took several minutes before they saw their first guard.
“Ah really hope we’re in the low-security section,” Honey whined as she snuck up behind the guard and put him in a sleeper hold. “Security this lax is jus’ beggin’ folks ta break out.” She stood and clapped her hands clean. “What’chya lookin’ at?”
“That guard,” Thomas said as an idea started to form. “Doesn’t his armor look my size?”
The woman and ottsel grinned sadistically, liking where this was going.
Thomas had to disrobe in order to fit into the guard’s armor, but it wasn’t too bad. It even came with a snazzy new rifle, a communicator to hear where all the guards were heading, and a pass that let them move through most secure areas, barring the occasional guards in need of subduing.
“Well, hello, little lady,” Honey greeted the guard that Thomas had just shocked with his rifle. “Looks like yer in quite the pickle, huh.”
“G-get away from me, you amazon freak!” the guardswoman stammered. With her helmet off, the others could see that she had rather coarse skin, dark tattoos on her face, green eyes, and dirty blonde air, but overall, she was still pretty. She tried to back away from the towering amazon, only for Luna to block her way.
“Boo!”
“Ah! Talking ottsel! Keep it away!”
“Ya know, if we had some shaving cream, we could make her look rabid,” Thomas offered.
“What do you even want from me?” the guard cried.
“I agree. We should be using the direct approach,” Luna said, grinning as the guard woman flinched. “You see, my dear, your people took some friends of mine about two years ago, around the time when those ‘comets,’”—she said with air quotes—“fell into the city. Now, if you were to tell me where they are, then I won’t have to-”
“Cellblock C-38!” the guardswoman blurted.
Luna blinked, not expecting to have gotten the answers so quickly. “How exactly did you—?”
“They’re, uh, kind of the talk of the barracks. Legendary femme fatales,” she laughed nervously. “They’re pretty, but I hear any guard that enters their cells only has a one in ten chance of coming out alive.”
The players looked curiously between each other.
“Moonlight, maybe,” Thomas allowed. “But that kind of killing doesn’t seem like Surprise’s style.”
“Have they been awake for as long as us?” Luna wondered.
“Well, I might be exaggerating a little,” the guardswoman cut back in. “But I knew this girl who went into the little one’s cell. Got kicked in the groin so hard, she needed spinal surgery. Also, my name’s Shelly, by the way. Nice to meet you, fine, um, bad guys?”
“Ah can see that,” agreed Honey. “Care ta show us the way? These halls ain’t exactly easy to navigate.”
The guardswoman pursed her lips. “Do I have a choice?”
“And here we have yet another bottomless pit,” Thomas casually indicated as he leaned over the side. “Is there some weird zoning law you guys have to comply with?”
“Um, the pit isn’t actually, uh, bottomless,” the guardswoman corrected gently.
“Really? Care to prove that?” Thomas replied with a wicked smile.
The guardswoman finally caught the hint and led them to the correct cellblock. “There they are,” she indicated at the far wall while handing over her keycard. “Cells 13, 15, and 17, And no, that arrangement isn’t a coincidence.”
Thomas hurried forward with the keycard in hand. Between the guardswoman’s ‘legends’ and Luna’s talk about this time skip, he started getting really worried about what these three might have gone through. Forgetting to ask who was in which cell, he made for the nearest, swiped the key, and entered. “Hello.” He looked around, strangely finding the cell empty. “I’m here for—GUHR!”
All of the air left Thomas’ lungs when a body swung down from the ceiling and kneed him right in the gut. He’d been knocked back, his guard armor scraping as it slid across the metal floor, but the perpetrator was on him before he could even sit up. Before he knew it, the woman with orange-tinted skin had pulled him into a headlock. “M…M…” he struggled to say, but his airway had been constrained.
“Moonlight!” Luna cried in alarm.
The barely clothed woman snapped up and grinned at what she saw. “Luna! Honey! You’re alright.” In her elation, her hold only tightened. “I’m so relieved to see you.”
“Uh, sugar. Ya might want ta let the little guy go.”
Moonlight frowned and stared down at the Krimzon guard in her grasp, only able to see the back of his un-helmeted head. “Besides them holding me captive for no apparent reason, the last guard to enter my cell thought it might be fun to goose me,” she growled, only for her smile to turn sadistic. “Sent that bitch to the hospital. And since we’re apparently escaping, we should probably subdue every one of these jerks we come across. So why is this one any different?”
Luna buried her face in her palm, unable to watch this scene unfold any further. “Because he’s Thomas.”
Moonlight froze. “He… wat?”
“Little fella stole a guard uniform ta help us get around,” Honey elaborated. “Probably not too pleased ‘bout being choked fer his trouble.”
Moonlight immediately disengaged her hold. The guard fell a short ways, coughing and sputtering before she snatched him up again and spun him around. “Thomas!”
Thomas gasped again when the air was pushed out of his lungs a second time, only now by a fierce embrace. Fighting against the strength of the orange woman’s arms, he reached around and gave her back a gentle pat. “There, there.”
“I can’t believe I just did that,” Moonlight whimpered. “I’m a terrible mare!”
“Nah. It’s all good,” Thomas allowed. “I was surprised more than hurt, anyway.”
“But I attacked you!” Moonlight asserted.
“And I shocked her in the butt,” Thomas indicated the captive guardswoman, hoping to lighten the mood. He hated seeing any of his ladies hurt. “You didn’t know it was me.”
“That’s still not something a mare should ever do to her stallion!”
Thomas merely shrugged and stole a peck of the woman’s nose, making her momentarily go cross-eyed. He laughed. “I’m just glad you’re doing alright. I was worried about you.”
“Me?” Moonlight laughed incredulously. “I’ve been stuck here worrying about you for the last four hours.”
“But not alone,” Surprise called from another cell. “Hey, guys.”
“Anytime you would like to let us out would be most appreciated,” Silver added.
Figuring Moonlight still had some things to work out, Luna scurried over and used the keycard to unlock the remaining cells. Both women wore the same loose green shirts and trousers as Moonlight. The garments did little in the way of providing coverage or support, and looked like they might slip off if their wearers moved too much. “So you have all been conscious for the full four hours?”
“Full?” Silver asked.
Luna nodded. “It appears that a time skip has taken place, possibly due to the presence of an additional game Thomas failed to inform me about.”
All eyes fell on the man. “Hey. I’m the one who just got kicked in the gut here. Ease up.”
“Sounds like ya might’ve had it comin’,” Honey offered.
Luna and Honey then caught the rest of the gang up on what had happened on their end. After evading capture, they’d gone into hiding and found work as an exterminator and barmaid, respectively. They’d made a few allies along the way, fended off a number of covert enemy incursions, as well as learned the overall state of things in this region.
Haven City, as understood by its citizens, was one of the last dwellings still standing after the invasion of monsters known as metal heads, a wide assortment of heinous creatures that were equal parts metal and flesh. There were rumors of other settlements beyond the city’s walls, but the common consensus was that such places were the homes of cowards for dropping out of the war and leaving Haven to fend for itself (1). The city was ruled by Baron Praxis, who had staged a successful coup many years back and ruled with an iron fist ever since. In fact, it was the metal bugs—a lesser variant of metal head—that Luna had been working to exterminate all this time.
As they dressed in clothes similar to their old ones, Moonlight, Silver, and Surprise described their imprisonment. Unlike Thomas, they’d also been awake for the full four hours, occupying most of their time with escape attempts. Their reputation, it seemed, was a result of their escape attempts being inferred to have happened over the entire course of their imprisonment. Curiously, each of them had been taken off to the medical wing to receive injections, which had apparently been going on for the last two years, although the reasons were never given.
“The Baron’s been working on a super soldier program to help the war effort,” Thomas offered. “And now I’ve got transformation powers when I absorb enough dark eco.”
“Yes. I recall one Count Veger describing the high mortality rates of the dark warrior program,” Luna informed. “He was arguing the merits of using light eco instead, which I might have agreed with, had he not been so self-righteous about it. Clearly, his motives are less than noble.”
Thomas nodded and spied a red crate with the Krimzon guard logo on it. He smashed it, loosing globules of dark eco onto the ground. Those globules didn’t stay idle for long before being drawn towards Thomas and being absorbed into his flesh. “Seems the program wasn’t a total failure.”
“How is that possible?” the guardswoman asked in awe.
“Oh, right. Yer still here,” remembered Honey. She looked at Thomas. “We still need her for anythin’?”
Thomas shook his head, and the woman was promptly knocked out.
“Anyway, I have no idea what this injection stuff might be about,” Thomas finished.
“We can all channel eco,” Silver reminded. “It would make sense that, whatever experiments took place here, ours would be the most successful cases.” She blinked and smacked her forehead. “Which we could have asked her about.” She gestured at the unconscious guardswoman. “If nothing else, she had probably heard rumors.”
“Mah bad.”
“It’s probably better this way,” Surprise said. “Now it’ll be a surprise!” She threw up her arms in cheer.
Figuring they had little choice in the matter, the reunited party resumed their course through the prison. Thomas had discarded the guard uniform, but kept the helmet so as to keep track of any useful chatter. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any. The jailbreaks had left the prison in utter chaos, save for a few idiots who actually found the time to talk about seeing races amidst the alarms. Apparently, the guards were mostly new recruits handling what was supposed to be a simple assignment. The players, meanwhile, continued on with their platforming across improbably positioned platforms. Every hapless guard in their path was subdued with nonlethal force. Their rifles were also left behind, on account of being overall less effective than the players’ punches.
They chatted a little about some of the things they’d gotten up to. Luna and Honey went into further detail about some of the people they’d met, including a talking lurker. The former inmates compared stories about the things they’d done to their guards, all of whom seemed to utterly lack any self-control with the prisoners, and justly paying for it as the ladies took out their frustrations. When the topic eventually got around to Thomas’ transformation, Luna was most eager to describe how dangerous he looked, complete with a sensual purr and lick of her lips. That got the former prisoners looking at Thomas with newfound intrigue.
Eventually, the players found a rather large hole in the side of the building with a floor smooth enough for them to just slide out. They dropped down about two stories to the broken cobble road below, with minimaps appearing on each of the players’ new HUDs. While Honey and Luna were loosely familiar with the things, the former prisoners tried grabbing at the images in the corners of their eyes. Thomas explained the new feature’s function, rationalizing that it was a representation of their character’s natural environmental awareness. Based on the decrepit state of the nearby concrete buildings, this was most likely the poor part of town. Thankfully, they had come out in a dead-end alley with no pedestrians to witness their escape.
“These guys don’t look very happy,” Surprise commented upon seeing her first civilian. It was a woman with a lime green top and black hair that came down to her jawline.
“They’re being oppressed by a totalitarian regime with an imminent threat of invasion by monsters,” Thomas informed. “You wouldn’t be happy about that, either.”
The group continued on their walk, taking note of the electric billboards lining the upper levels of the buildings. Additionally, there were numerous vehicles flying overhead that the players all instantly identified as zoomers. Rather than a patchwork labor of love like the one Kiera had made, these were more standardized in reflection of their assembly line origins, coming in a preset variety of shapes and colors. Further, and perhaps sadder, the name ‘zoomer’ seemed to ill-fit the vehicles traveling barely faster than walking speed.
“Boo!” Surprise jeered at a random driver. “Zoomers are supposed to go zoom. What are you people even doing?”
“But if they were to fly too fast and crash, that would pose a hazard to the pedestrians below,” observed Luna.
“Then why are they not flying over their own roads and leaving this, ugh, poor excuse for a street to the pedestrians?” Silver asked as she kicked some errant debris across the uneven and cracked path.
“I don’t think this place was built with those in mind,” Moonlight observed.
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.
“Well, city planning is a very complicated process. You have to take into account things like drainage, building spacing to handle fires, and, in this case, defense.” She studied a sleeker zoomer lazily listing along overhead. “It appears that someone built the city, and then added in zoomers as an afterthought.”
“Ah think ya might be onta somethin’,” offered Honey. “We’ve been explorin’ around a li’l bit ‘n’ there are some areas that do have separate roads.”
“Which would imply that the zoomers are a relatively recent addition that the city as a whole has yet to fully adjust to,” Moonlight theorized.
Before the players could go any further, an old man approached. He had long white hair that reached down below the belt line of his blue robes and carried a walking staff. “Hello, strangers,” he greeted in a quivering, elderly voice. “My name is Kor. May I help-”
“CUUUTE!” Surprise screamed with such a high pitch that canines for miles were set to howling. Her provocation for such a declaration was quickly made apparent when she barreled past Kor and scooped up the little boy hiding behind him. “He’s just so precious!”
The boy was dressed in blue overalls with brown hair beneath his cap and an odd insignia hanging around his neck. His head was as round as a baby’s, while his other features were not that dissimilar from Thomas’. Knowing what this meant, Thomas did not find this boy to be especially cute on his own. Although the way he was being hugged and smothered by Surprise was rather amusing, especially with how the woman’s breasts nearly engulfed the kid’s front. Thomas was about to tell his robust lover to ease up, but Moonlight had words of her own to share.
“Gimme!” And she swiped the boy from Surprise’s embrace, holding him close and nuzzling aggressively.
“Ah get a turn too, right?” inquired Honey.
“Age before beauty, mind you,” Luna politely asserted.
The boy, meanwhile, didn’t seem all that upset at the rather aggressive displays of affection. If anything, he seemed rather grateful to be at the center of attention. Hugs and nuzzles were returned accordingly, which only made the women squeal even more.
Kor reached out in a vain hope to try and extract the young boy from these affectionate kidnappers, but he thought twice when he got too close and beheld the murderous intent in their eyes.
“Sorry about them,” Thomas offered, now more amused than ever by the women’s reactions as they all crowded around the young lad. “They get like that sometimes,” he laughed, recalling the last time he’d been in the boy’s position. “Care to fill us in on a few things? We’re kind of new around here.”
“Well, my polite young friend,” Kor began gratefully. “You are a ‘guest’ of his ‘majesty,’ Baron Praxis, the ruler of ‘glorious’ Haven City.” He gestured around to the decrepit buildings.
“Guest?” Silver inquired contemptuously, managing to pull herself free from the gravity well of cuteness that had apparently ensnared the other former mares. “That is a rather funny way of putting how we were ‘invited’ to the Baron’s prison.”
Kor shook his head. “Inside a cell or inside a city, walls surround us both. We are all his prisoners.” At the sound of heavy footfalls from behind, Kor spun around and turned pale with fright. “Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d move on if I were you,” he said, backing away from the approaching Krimzon guards.
The lead guard addressed the players and civilians in the area. “By order of his eminence, the Grand Protector of Haven City, Baron Praxis,” he recited, not sounding the least bit convinced. “Everyone in this section is under arrest for suspicion of harboring underground fugitives. Surrender and die!” he said as if he were grinning behind his mouth cover.
“Yeah, about that,” Surprise began, somehow manifesting behind the guard without anyone noticing. Before he could utter a word of surprise, she had already sent him flying with a punch right to the face. “Even if you’d said ‘or,’ I’d still have hit you.”
Another two guards raised their weapons and readied to fire, only to receive a flying jump kick and a dump truck tackle from Moonlight and Honey, respectively.
From there, it was a free-for-all between the players and guards, with the latter receiving aerial reinforcements from a troop transport. Honey and Surprise used their size advantage to great effect with full-body tackles, while Moonlight stuck to more traditional martial arts. Silver hurried the boy back to Kor’s side before joining the fray with a spinning back-kick to the guard who’d tried to apprehend her. Even Luna, when she wasn’t weaving between everyone’s legs, found her tail whips surprisingly effective in distracting the guards long enough for one of the others to deliver the finishing blow. Thomas had managed only a few solid hits before it happened.
All of the dark eco he’d collected during the escape bubbled to the surface as his hair and skin once more turned sheet-white, and his body sparked. The transformation was exciting, filling Thomas with a sensation of boundless energy that just begged to be let out. He accommodated this urge with fierce strikes to the Krimzon guards. He could feel how each blow was stronger than normal, able to knock out most opponents with a single hit. With his claws, he swiped and tore chunks off of their armor. Feeling creative, he even grabbed two guards by the ankles and swung them around like flails against their fellows, which probably shouldn’t have been as much fun as it was.
It wasn’t long before the transport pilot decided to choose life and bugged out.
With the last guard neutralized, Thomas stumbled and felt his body stiffen. He lurched a bit, cupping his hands over his face as he felt his body spasm and revert back to normal. Transforming, it would seem, was far smoother than changing back. When he was able to move normally again, he found the other ladies staring at him in various states of awe and intrigue, but he was most concerned with what Moonlight thought. She bit down on her bottom lip while her gaze practically crawled over his form, much to Thomas’ relief, appreciation, and mild concern. Evidently, Dark Thomas was going to be a source of much entertainment for the future.
“Very impressive,” Kor offered, this time keeping one hand on the boy’s shoulder to prevent a second ‘kidnapping.’ “What you all just did was very brave. This child is very important,” he explained, tightening his grip while keeping a wary eye on the ladies.
“I can’t imagine why,” Moonlight replied while she and the others shot knowing looks at Thomas.
“Thanks for your help, but I must get this boy to safety,” Kor continued. “As for you, you may be interested to know there is an underground group waging war against Baron Praxis. Its leader, the Shadow, could use fighters like you.”
“That would certainly have been useful to know four hours ago,” Luna dryly remarked.
“Go to the slums. Find a dead-end alley near the city wall. Ask for Torn. He can help you.” Kor concluded his cryptic message before he and the boy disappeared into the crowd, leaving the players to process all that was ahead of them.