Fandom (Glitch Techs Crossover) GT×: Gnu Fork

[Lady Moldoma]

As Goreilla approached and brought both of his fist down attempting to smash Zoe, she would flip out of the way, summersaulting over MCHS' turret, the impact causing him to preemptively and reactionarily fire off his main-batterie, which would explode directly on Goreilla. "Ты идиот! Ты попал прямо на путь моего взрыва! Мы могли бы прикончить ее прямо здесь и сейчас!" The mechanical resurrected dictator shouted (Rough Translation: You imbecile! You walked right into the path of my blast! We could've finished her right then and there!)

"And everyone knows once you've dealt with the treads... You go for the money shot! Which means, I go for the ammo on your back!" Zoe says, bringing her bat up in one hand and gripping it with both. "Consider this my Finishing move! MERCILESS DRAGON THRASH-GATLING!" She slams her bat down once, then twice, then three times, and gradually begins to ramp up the speed of the hits, until she launches fully into a flurry of hits, wearing down the armor on MCHS' back and striking into the cavities with his ammunition. If it worked like it did in the games, this would cause an explosion, which she at least intended on jumping away from before it fried up her clothes.

MCHS would rotate his turret again, this time aiming directly at Zoe, and would fire off a shot, which she paried directly into the hole she had created. "BYE BYE, DOTTIE!" She shouted, before jumping off as the mass of ammunition exploded and caused an instantaneous meltdown of MCHS' (in lore) internal nuclear battery.

 

[Sir loin of beef]

As Goreilla approached and brought both of his fist down attempting to smash Zoe, she would flip out of the way, summersaulting over MCHS' turret, the impact causing him to preemptively and reactionarily fire off his main-batterie, which would explode directly on Goreilla. "Ты идиот! Ты попал прямо на путь моего взрыва! Мы могли бы прикончить ее прямо здесь и сейчас!" The mechanical resurrected dictator shouted (Rough Translation: You imbecile! You walked right into the path of my blast! We could've finished her right then and there!)

"And everyone knows once you've dealt with the treads... You go for the money shot! Which means, I go for the ammo on your back!" Zoe says, bringing her bat up in one hand and gripping it with both. "Consider this my Finishing move! MERCILESS DRAGON THRASH-GATLING!" She slams her bat down once, then twice, then three times, and gradually begins to ramp up the speed of the hits, until she launches fully into a flurry of hits, wearing down the armor on MCHS' back and striking into the cavities with his ammunition. If it worked like it did in the games, this would cause an explosion, which she at least intended on jumping away from before it fried up her clothes.

And an explosion there was. One Doctor X was Grateful wouldn't probably wreck the Portal the council of Doom had worked hard on by violently exploding, well unless his Nuclear power core was ignited, THEN the Council was in Trouble. Okay granted this new worlds rules weren't the same as the rules in each of the villains worlds so a nuclear explosion killing them all wasn't that likely but it was still something to look out for.

 

[Gadg8eer]

And an explosion there was. One Doctor X was Grateful wouldn't probably wreck the Portal the council of Doom had worked hard on by violently exploding, well unless his Nuclear power core was ignited, THEN the Council was in Trouble. Okay granted this new worlds rules weren't the same as the rules in each of the villains worlds so a nuclear explosion killing them all wasn't that likely but it was still something to look out for.

The blast didn't actually do any damage, as Wolfenvania - unlike its successor, GORE 3D - did not have Load-Bearing Bosses and therefore the pixellated explosions and the horrifying scream that had inspired a few internet creepypastas about the third-party developer eGO Software who made Wolfenvania did nothing other than be big, loud and flashy.

The defeat did at least grant Zoe 5000 XP, according to her Tech Gauntlet. Of course, also according to her Gauntlet, for reasons beyond mortal comprehension, defeating Mecha-Clone-Hitler-Stalin was only worth $50 USD. The irony that a being which was a combination of two of history's greatest monsters was defeated by a bootstrapped TV host robot and worth well less than a tank of gasoline was not lost on Gadg8eer, who saw the "+5000 XP" over the destroyed MeCHS and honestly not impressed by Hinobi's devteam's choice on the matter.

50 bucks for defeating the freakin' Holocaust?! Gadg8eer thought, Shinobi Man gave more points than that! What a ripoff!

It was still pretty impressive seeing Zoe in action, however, it distracted Zoe long enough that she hadn't realized her bots' auto-derez function hadn't captured Robo-Goreilla or Cog Man, who had instead become aggressive clouds of static-charged PLixel tech mesobots seeking a new program to follow...

They quickly found new hosts, rushing terrifyingly towards the captive janitors, but thankfully their screams gave way to relief when they realized that the weird creepy static had seemingly disappeared after a few seconds of the two panicking and closing their eyes as they shouted.

"...AAAAAAH- ...w-we're okay?" the younger of the two 60-somethings said. Fortunately they were right. Unfortunately, they failed to consider they were never the hosts that the glitches were seeking to take a cue from.

At that moment, the glitches materialized as the Crystal Crush Saga version of the Narwhalrus, and as a little blue bird with an X on it's chest that fluttered up and down as it tried to fly straight towards Zoe. The former, being a Boss, was the larger threat, while the Fleety Bird struggled to stay aloft and missed Zoe entirely, tweeting right over her head and out the door into the open air, where an errant lightning bolt struck the unfortunate glitch and caused it to veer wildly off-course towards the northwest...

"Cures! Voiled again!" Dr. X said in his hammy accent, deciding to take his leave as the Narwhalrus gave him a mean look he didn't like. He got back in the vehicle he had brought from (the "highway tutorial" stage of) his "homeworld", tapped the dashboard button he'd re-assigned to the garage doors of the City Works, and sped away the moment the doors were open tall enough.

No longer concerned with the fleeing mad scientist character, the Narwhalrus turned its attention to Zoe...

 

[Lady Moldoma]

She pointed her bat out at the Narwalrus and let out a warning. “You know if you approach me. I’ll be forced to use my special attack!” She begins.

The narwalrus briefly looked confused. Didn’t she already do her special attack?

“That’s right. I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve! And if you don’t submit yourself to being de-rezzed, I’ll have to use it! Believe me, it’s more painful than anything I’ve had to use thus far!” She says.

She simultaneously sends a text to Gadg8.

ZoeIRL: “@Gadg8eer, I know you’re not super great with combat, but my heat sinks are reaching their limits, I’ll have to blow out my exhaust soon, and I’m a total sitting duck when I do that. Can you please think of something? If bluffing doesnt work then I’m probably gonna end up losing an arm or worse.”

 

[Gadg8eer]

ZoeIRL: “@Gadg8eer, I know you’re not super great with combat, but my heat sinks are reaching their limits, I’ll have to blow out my exhaust soon, and I’m a total sitting duck when I do that. Can you please think of something? If bluffing doesn't work then I’m probably gonna end up losing an arm or worse.”

Gadg8eer: On it. Do your best to stall.

He switched back to the hallway camera, thankful his new, smaller body had allowed him to hide so easily as he checked for any more glitches or other issues (there were none) before bolting across the hall from inside the cleaning cart into the previously-locked server room...

---

As the commandeered convertible pulled into the City Works Yard, Dave and Zeke spotted the flourescent green glow of the Perfectly Electric Vehicle that Zoe and Gadg8eer were now assigned. An early prototype that was eventually saddled onto GNU Forks in favor of its younger siblings, the Hinobi Motors Tech Van and later the production version of the 2020 Hinobi Motors Cybervan, at all official Hinobi Stores. Since it still worked but was not compatible with newer features without an AI+ module, the extremely limited capabilities of the Perfectly Electric Vehicle (or PeV for short) meant that the store only ever used the van when there was no other option. Being a contractor rather than an official Hinobi branch office, GNU Forks wasn't exactly rolling in money and that meant making due when push came to shove.

"Looks like they made it here without getting their van destroyed, that's a good sign." Dave said, preparing his gauntlet. "We might have come here about Bolypius, but this behavior from glitches is..."

"...extremely concerning..." Zeke guessed.

"Exactly. We're going to have to go straight to them, otherwise I can't guarantee the evidence will be preserved for CSIS and Corporate to go over. Which way did they ent-"

At that moment, the garage door opened and a vehicle which was unmistakably the car form of Dr. X's transforming limousine-slash-RoBoss from Atom Girl 7, Auto Bot, sped out the door and past the two experienced Techs.

"Revenge vill be mine!" a familiar voice shouted through the slightly open but tinted rear window of the self-driving vehicle before it headed southbound...

"What the hack was-" Dave began to say, when a blue bird narrowly passed over his head towards the northwest. "...and was that..."

"Fleety Bird."

"Fleety Bird?"

"Fleety Bird."

"Fleety Bird?!"

"Fleety- Ow." Zeke stopped at the light jab in the arm. "Someone's phone must have been caught by a raw Glitch..."

"Well, at least we know that smartphone games are cheap as $#!+ and their game AI is just as bad." Dave responded before the convertible pulled in front of the garage door. "Newbies! I got the message, but-" he began to say, until the Narwhalrus suddenly turned around and looked angrily at the convertible and its two occupants. "Oh fsck."

 

[Lady Moldoma]

Zoe continued to stand-off. "Not gonna come easily are you?" She asks the Narwhalrus, she continued to point at it menacingly with the end of her bat. "That's fine. The electrolyte cloud my body is about to release is a death sentence for glitches if you even get near me." She lies about the nature of her exhaust. Moving her hand to her skirt and pulling it up, allowing her exhaust to blast out of her body. She hoped that her bluffing would at least keep the Narwhalrus pre-occupied, assuming it could even understand her.

The stark white cloud of exhaust blasted out from the ventilation in her thighs, clouding up around her body, hopefully giving her brief respite from combat with the Narwhalrus. Who she presumed to be too stupid to realize she was juking it but not so stupid as to not understand her.

 

[Gadg8eer]

Zoe continued to stand-off. "Not gonna come easily are you?" She asks the Narwhalrus, she continued to point at it menacingly with the end of her bat. "That's fine. The electrolyte cloud my body is about to release is a death sentence for glitches if you even get near me." She lies about the nature of her exhaust. Moving her hand to her skirt and pulling it up, allowing her exhaust to blast out of her body. She hoped that her bluffing would at least keep the Narwhalrus pre-occupied, assuming it could even understand her.

The stark white cloud of exhaust blasted out from the ventilation in her thighs, clouding up around her body, hopefully giving her brief respite from combat with the Narwhalrus. Who she presumed to be too stupid to realize she was juking it but not so stupid as to not understand her.

The AI of the Narwhalrus wasn't anything special, so unfortunately it was not turned away from the expensive convertible. Instead, it fired off several tetrid-shaped blocks as Zeke and Dave dove out of the 2025 Quadra, somehow compacting the vehicle as they randomly came down.

"Uh oh." Zeke gulped, looking at the vehicle.

"Zeke! System reset the car, I'll handle-" Dave began to shout, but then the Narwhalrus shot a line piece at them, causing the sporty car to flash along with the rest of the completed tetris crystal crush and de-rez itself, before zipping off to find a new piece of intelligent software to host. "...aaaaand that's not good."

---

Inside the server room, Gadg8eer shivered a bit from the refrigeration system cooling the device in the center of the room via the dedicated HVAC unit above it sending the heat out through the vents on the roof.

The Krei Tech Industries Z-XP was an oddity among its kind. Supercomputers early on took up buildings because of sheer inefficiency, while modern supercomputers were essentially just fancy server arrays with more cores in their multi-threading CPUs. In contrast, Krei had a design that fit between them, that time from the late 70s to the early 90s when a supercomputer could be small enough to be a centerpiece. Originally envisioned for efficiency of the wiring, the Krei Tech supercomputers that were the progenitors of the Z-XP all used the same stylish, corporate art piece look; an abstract-shaped "icy cooler-fountain" with a circular bench around its base for both practical reasons (sitting on your knees installing the wiring would have otherwise been painfully uncomfortable) and because it looked freakin' awesome. The design alone kept them in business until newer generations of electronics made the ultra-low temperature cooling system unnecessary.

As he stepped forward to approach the machine, his Profiler already triggering the wifi connection at his command, the door suddenly slammed shut behind him.

"Nothing personal, kid..." Snare said, sneering. "All's fair in the business of war, after all."

"You." Gadg8eer said, spinning around in his tracks and lashing out with both his yo-yos at the same time. "This is for your final boss fight in Dr. Babushka's Tetragon Fortress, you overpowered piece of pre-programmed scrap!"

---

Meanwhile, a good 5 km away, the sound of chip tune music from a rhythm game came from inside a house before lagging out slightly. 2 blue pixel things poofed around and one of the two, being a red Pentagon-like creature, looked around. The second was the antagonist of the video game, a large pink outlined circle with a cat-like appearance.

The game in question had been left on all night when Ready_Player_Juan, the soon-to-be freshman at the VGHS Institute of Technology - or the Video Game and Hinobi Software Institute of Technology - got an emergency call as he was playing a game on the flashcast-animation-site-turned-archive-slash-delete-Miko's-browser-history eGroundsFark.com to relive the days when his older brother had showed him the wonders of uncensored comedy skits.

Pentagrammophone Beets was a fan game of Hinobi's forgotten competitor's Hinobi 64 platformer Pentifer's Living Hell, a surprisingly R-rated raunchy comedy game made by Berserker Studios and published by Blairware in 2001. Not that Win the Pentagrammies, which was also based on Hinobi's famous new decimal time standard - the Beet - and the accompanying release of the first Hinobi smartwatch at the turn of the millennium, was necessarily faithful to any of its source material.

Of course, Hinobi devices were temperamental at the best of times, and with the piece of unofficial software running on the now-retired Hinobi Sting Player that hadn't been updated since the old laptop was replaced by a (then new, since replaced) Viper Cobra 3 gaming laptop one Christmas when Juan was 13, and the storm outside wreaking havok on the city of Grand Forks' aging infrastructure, it was inevitable that God's Wrath, so to speak, was about to strike.

The game itself glitched as typical, sure enough, with the protagonist lifted from the illegal ROM of the Hinobi 64 title not helping matters, but the character simply followed its display demo programming, until suddenly...

In a bright flash of divine, or perhaps the opposite, inspiration... well, okay, from a random bolt of lightning... the house that the glitch had materialized into (which, it should be noted, was host to Juan's overly religious grandparents who had literally put up an obnoxious bright red billboard with oppressive white text on their fenced-off yard to demand visitors to the city only be Catholic) had its power blown and internet access suddenly cut as more electricity than it could handle coursed through the SpaceB SatLink dish that the house was using as its internet source due to the discontinuation of CompuGlobalHyperServe's last dial-up internet access in 2026 and his grandparent's refusal to use fiber-optic "because its spun like a web of lies".

As much as tech companies like Hinobi had proven at the very least to be disturbingly intrusive in the eyes of the general public (and they weren't wrong), the days of bipartisan politics had waned and his grandparents were just holdovers from the extremism of all stripes that had plagued the world about 10 years prior (~2018).

Of course, whatever the reason for the jolt of electricity, when the power went out and the old laptop behind the being that had essentially just been "summoned for a final rap boss battle with Satin, the Rouge Angle of Depth" was left running off it's (long-expired) battery, the conditions of the situation... unknowingly... were just right to reproduce something that hadn't happened since GALE was first shipped to arcades in the early 80s...

( Behold. Welcome to the RP, wendigo, this just got interesting. )

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

The AI of the Narwhalrus wasn't anything special, so unfortunately it was not turned away from the expensive convertible. Instead, it fired off several tetrid-shaped blocks as Zeke and Dave dove out of the 2025 Quadra, somehow compacting the vehicle as they randomly came down.

"Uh oh." Zeke gulped, looking at the vehicle.

"Zeke! System reset the car, I'll handle-" Dave began to shout, but then the Narwhalrus shot a line piece at them, causing the sporty car to flash along with the rest of the completed tetris crystal crush and de-rez itself, before zipping off to find a new piece of intelligent software to host. "...aaaaand that's not good."

---

Inside the server room, Gadg8eer shivered a bit from the refrigeration system cooling the device in the center of the room via the dedicated HVAC unit above it sending the heat out through the vents on the roof.

The Krei Tech Industries Z-XP was an oddity among its kind. Supercomputers early on took up buildings because of sheer inefficiency, while modern supercomputers were essentially just fancy server arrays with more cores in their multi-threading CPUs. In contrast, Krei had a design that fit between them, that time from the late 70s to the early 90s when a supercomputer could be small enough to be a centerpiece. Originally envisioned for efficiency of the wiring, the Krei Tech supercomputers that were the progenitors of the Z-XP all used the same stylish, corporate art piece look; an abstract-shaped "icy cooler-fountain" with a circular bench around its base for both practical reasons (sitting on your knees installing the wiring would have otherwise been painfully uncomfortable) and because it looked freakin' awesome. The design alone kept them in business until newer generations of electronics made the ultra-low temperature cooling system unnecessary.

As he stepped forward to approach the machine, his Profiler already triggering the wifi connection at his command, the door suddenly slammed shut behind him.

"Nothing personal, kid..." Snare said, sneering. "All's fair in the business of war, after all."

"You." Gadg8eer said, spinning around in his tracks and lashing out with both his yo-yos at the same time. "This is for your final boss fight in Dr. Babushka's Tetragon Fortress, you overpowered piece of pre-programmed scrap!"

---

The game in question had been left on all night when Ready_Player_Juan, the soon-to-be freshman at the VGHS Institute of Technology - or the Video Game and Hinobi Software Institute of Technology - got an emergency call as he was playing a game on the flashcast-animation-site-turned-archive-slash-delete-Miko's-browser-history eGroundsFark.com to relive the days when his older brother had showed him the wonders of uncensored comedy skits.

Shapes 'n Beets was a fan game of Hinobi's forgotten competitor's Hinobi 64 platformer Pentifer's Living Hell, a surprisingly R-rated raunchy comedy game made by Berserk Studios and published by Blairware in 2001. Not that Shapes 'n Beets, which was also based on Hinobi's famous new decimal time standard - the Beet - and the accompanying release of the first Hinobi smartwatch at the turn of the millennium, was necessarily faithful to any of its source material.

Of course, Hinobi devices were temperamental at the best of times, and with the piece of unofficial software running on the now-retired Hinobi Sting Player that hadn't been updated since the old laptop was replaced by a (then new, since replaced) Viper Cobra 3 gaming laptop one Christmas when Juan was 13, and the storm outside wreaking havok on the city of Grand Forks' aging infrastructure, it was inevitable that God's Wrath, so to speak, was about to strike.

The game itself glitched as typical, sure enough, with the protagonist lifted from the illegal ROM of the Hinobi 64 title not helping matters, but the character simply followed its display demo programming, until suddenly...

In a bright flash of divine, or perhaps the opposite, inspiration... well, okay, from a random bolt of lightning... the house that the glitch had materialized into (which, it should be noted, was host to Juan's overly religious grandparents who had literally put up an obnoxious bright red billboard with oppressive white text on their fenced-off yard to demand visitors to the city only be Catholic) had its power blown and internet access suddenly cut as more electricity than it could handle coursed through the SpaceB SatLink dish that the house was using as its internet source due to the discontinuation of CompuGlobalHyperServe's last dial-up internet access in 2026 and his grandparent's refusal to use fiber-optic "because its spun like a web of lies".

As much as tech companies like Hinobi had proven at the very least to be disturbingly intrusive in the eyes of the general public (and they weren't wrong), the days of bipartisan politics had waned and his grandparents were just holdovers from the extremism of all stripes that had plagued the world about 10 years prior (~2018).

Of course, whatever the reason for the jolt of electricity, when the power went out and the old laptop behind the being that had essentially just been "summoned for a final rap boss battle with Satin, the Rouge Angle of Depth" was left running off it's (long-expired) battery, the conditions of the situation... unknowingly... were just right to reproduce something that hadn't happened since GALE was first shipped to arcades in the early 80s...

( Behold. Welcome to the RP, wendigo, this just got interesting. )

(Glad to be here. Also... The game is legit called Just Shapes & Beats. And the fact you're using Conker's Bad Fur Day as a basis for a game Pentifer would be in is awesome, I love it.)
Pentifer's eyes darted around the room in confusion, while the larger being just began raiding all the cupboards he could find for something to eat. Pentifer proceeded to then hide under a table for 10 minutes while trying to figure out why he was now in another world. "WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!" He quietly mumbled to himself after the larger being went off elsewhere to see what chaos it could cause. Nobody had seen the two beings yet, though, so what mayhem would ensue they didn't know.

 

[Lady Moldoma]

As the smoke-like heat exhaust obscured her location, Zoe used the nature of the surroundings to her advantage, moving around the various items and structures in the room as best as she could to stay out of the sight of the Narwhalrus. Deftly evading what she could only assume was its line of sight.

She had her bat down low, and once she had made it behind the narwhalrus, she rushed it from a distance of a few meters and let her shoes skid against the concrete as she entered a seiken stance. Zoe aimed a direct slam onto the top of its head, heaving the bat in an arc to increase the striking power of the blow. She planned to hammer the bat down directly onto the Narwhalrus' head, sliding the tip of her bat on the side of its horn as a guide.

"CRACK-.." She began the strike "THIS!" She planned to call out as it struck down on her opponent. Zoe's movements were, even after just a night of fighting glitches, starting to adapt themselves better to the usage of the bat. She had become more confident in putting just the right amount of power behind her swings, and balancing herself properly. That being said, she was already fairly skilled, if the previous opponents were any indications.

 

[Sir loin of beef]

Gadg8eer: On it. Do your best to stall.

He switched back to the hallway camera, thankful his new, smaller body had allowed him to hide so easily as he checked for any more glitches or other issues (there were none) before bolting across the hall from inside the cleaning cart into the previously-locked server room...

---

As the commandeered convertible pulled into the City Works Yard, Dave and Zeke spotted the flourescent green glow of the Perfectly Electric Vehicle that Zoe and Gadg8eer were now assigned. An early prototype that was eventually saddled onto GNU Forks in favor of its younger siblings, the Hinobi Motors Tech Van and later the production version of the 2020 Hinobi Motors Cybervan, at all official Hinobi Stores. Since it still worked but was not compatible with newer features without an AI+ module, the extremely limited capabilities of the Perfectly Electric Vehicle (or PeV for short) meant that the store only ever used the van when there was no other option. Being a contractor rather than an official Hinobi branch office, GNU Forks wasn't exactly rolling in money and that meant making due when push came to shove.

"Looks like they made it here without getting their van destroyed, that's a good sign." Dave said, preparing his gauntlet. "We might have come here about Bolypius, but this behavior from glitches is..."

"...extremely concerning..." Zeke guessed.

"Exactly. We're going to have to go straight to them, otherwise I can't guarantee the evidence will be preserved for CSIS and Corporate to go over. Which way did they ent-"

At that moment, the garage door opened and a vehicle which was unmistakably the car form of Dr. X's transforming limousine-slash-RoBoss from Atom Girl 7, Auto Bot, sped out the door and past the two experienced Techs.

"Revenge vill be mine!" a familiar voice shouted through the slightly open but tinted rear window of the self-driving vehicle before it headed southbound...

"What the hack was-" Dave began to say, when a blue bird narrowly passed over his head towards the northwest. "...and was that..."

"Fleety Bird."

"Fleety Bird?"

"Fleety Bird."

"Fleety Bird?!"

"Fleety- Ow." Zeke stopped at the light jab in the arm. "Someone's phone must have been caught by a raw Glitch..."

"Well, at least we know that smartphone games are cheap as $#!+ and their game AI is just as bad." Dave responded before the convertible pulled in front of the garage door. "Newbies! I got the message, but-" he began to say, until the Narwhalrus suddenly turned around and looked angrily at the convertible and its two occupants. "Oh fsck."

The AI of the Narwhalrus wasn't anything special, so unfortunately it was not turned away from the expensive convertible. Instead, it fired off several tetrid-shaped blocks as Zeke and Dave dove out of the 2025 Quadra, somehow compacting the vehicle as they randomly came down.

"Uh oh." Zeke gulped, looking at the vehicle.

"Zeke! System reset the car, I'll handle-" Dave began to shout, but then the Narwhalrus shot a line piece at them, causing the sporty car to flash along with the rest of the completed tetris crystal crush and de-rez itself, before zipping off to find a new piece of intelligent software to host. "...aaaaand that's not good."

---

Inside the server room, Gadg8eer shivered a bit from the refrigeration system cooling the device in the center of the room via the dedicated HVAC unit above it sending the heat out through the vents on the roof.

The Krei Tech Industries Z-XP was an oddity among its kind. Supercomputers early on took up buildings because of sheer inefficiency, while modern supercomputers were essentially just fancy server arrays with more cores in their multi-threading CPUs. In contrast, Krei had a design that fit between them, that time from the late 70s to the early 90s when a supercomputer could be small enough to be a centerpiece. Originally envisioned for efficiency of the wiring, the Krei Tech supercomputers that were the progenitors of the Z-XP all used the same stylish, corporate art piece look; an abstract-shaped "icy cooler-fountain" with a circular bench around its base for both practical reasons (sitting on your knees installing the wiring would have otherwise been painfully uncomfortable) and because it looked freakin' awesome. The design alone kept them in business until newer generations of electronics made the ultra-low temperature cooling system unnecessary.

As he stepped forward to approach the machine, his Profiler already triggering the wifi connection at his command, the door suddenly slammed shut behind him.

"Nothing personal, kid..." Snare said, sneering. "All's fair in the business of war, after all."

"You." Gadg8eer said, spinning around in his tracks and lashing out with both his yo-yos at the same time. "This is for your final boss fight in Dr. Babushka's Tetragon Fortress, you overpowered piece of pre-programmed scrap!"

---

The game in question had been left on all night when Ready_Player_Juan, the soon-to-be freshman at the VGHS Institute of Technology - or the Video Game and Hinobi Software Institute of Technology - got an emergency call as he was playing a game on the flashcast-animation-site-turned-archive-slash-delete-Miko's-browser-history eGroundsFark.com to relive the days when his older brother had showed him the wonders of uncensored comedy skits.

Shapes 'n Beets was a fan game of Hinobi's forgotten competitor's Hinobi 64 platformer Pentifer's Living Hell, a surprisingly R-rated raunchy comedy game made by Berserk Studios and published by Blairware in 2001. Not that Shapes 'n Beets, which was also based on Hinobi's famous new decimal time standard - the Beet - and the accompanying release of the first Hinobi smartwatch at the turn of the millennium, was necessarily faithful to any of its source material.

Of course, Hinobi devices were temperamental at the best of times, and with the piece of unofficial software running on the now-retired Hinobi Sting Player that hadn't been updated since the old laptop was replaced by a (then new, since replaced) Viper Cobra 3 gaming laptop one Christmas when Juan was 13, and the storm outside wreaking havok on the city of Grand Forks' aging infrastructure, it was inevitable that God's Wrath, so to speak, was about to strike.

The game itself glitched as typical, sure enough, with the protagonist lifted from the illegal ROM of the Hinobi 64 title not helping matters, but the character simply followed its display demo programming, until suddenly...

In a bright flash of divine, or perhaps the opposite, inspiration... well, okay, from a random bolt of lightning... the house that the glitch had materialized into (which, it should be noted, was host to Juan's overly religious grandparents who had literally put up an obnoxious bright red billboard with oppressive white text on their fenced-off yard to demand visitors to the city only be Catholic) had its power blown and internet access suddenly cut as more electricity than it could handle coursed through the SpaceB SatLink dish that the house was using as its internet source due to the discontinuation of CompuGlobalHyperServe's last dial-up internet access in 2026 and his grandparent's refusal to use fiber-optic "because its spun like a web of lies".

As much as tech companies like Hinobi had proven at the very least to be disturbingly intrusive in the eyes of the general public (and they weren't wrong), the days of bipartisan politics had waned and his grandparents were just holdovers from the extremism of all stripes that had plagued the world about 10 years prior (~2018).

Of course, whatever the reason for the jolt of electricity, when the power went out and the old laptop behind the being that had essentially just been "summoned for a final rap boss battle with Satin, the Rouge Angle of Depth" was left running off it's (long-expired) battery, the conditions of the situation... unknowingly... were just right to reproduce something that hadn't happened since GALE was first shipped to arcades in the early 80s...

( Behold. Welcome to the RP, wendigo, this just got interesting. )

Snare got hit in the face with both yo-yos, which hurt because even for a glitch that thought himself "The most powerful robot in existence*" getting hit in the face with Yo-Yo's, especially those wielded by a Bear that fought World ending Villains on a regular basis had to hurt. Though unfortunately he managed to get up from that attack with little damage.

"Really? You attack the most powerful robot in existence with mere Yo-yos?" Snare asked before firing a energy blast from his buster cannon at Gadg8eer.



*Yeah right, even if snare was the most powerful robot in existence Power isn't everything.

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

The strange Pentagon-like being slipped out of the house after a while and decided to look around, soon noticing a quarrel quite a way away from where he was. Grabbing the larger being and gesturing to the fight, the duet of pure mayhem stepped through a well-made portal and watched from behind a building.

 

[Gadg8eer]

The strange Pentagon-like being slipped out of the house after a while and decided to look around, soon noticing a quarrel quite a way away from where he was. Grabbing the larger being and gesturing to the fight, the two immediately rushed over and watched from behind a building.

((Um, not to be pedantic, but I guess you don't know I used to live in that town (I'm nowhere near it now and have no remaining social connections there)? 5km is the distance between Pentifer and the City Works, but that's the other side of the city of ~5,000 and it's not the kind of distance you can easily walk. Same reason the NPC Techs "borrowed" a car for emergency purposes, that place was not walkable.))

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

((Um, not to be pedantic, but I guess you don't know I used to live in that town (I'm nowhere near it now and have no remaining social connections there)? 5km is the distance between Pentifer and the City Works, but that's the other side of the city of ~5,000 and it's not the kind of distance you can easily walk. Same reason the NPC Techs "borrowed" a car for emergency purposes, that place was not walkable.))

((Well, not to be a b-word but Pentifer can open portals so he portalled over with the big guy))

 

[Sir loin of beef]

((Well, not to be a b-word but Pentifer can open portals so he portalled over with the big guy))

Maybe in hindsight you should've Clarified that.

 

[Lady Moldoma]

Maybe in hindsight you should've Clarified that.

Now that I think about it, nothing in his bio or in what we’ve discussed thus far nails down his power set.

 

[Gadg8eer]

Now that I think about it, nothing in his bio or in what we’ve discussed thus far nails down his power set.

(( Not to mention nobody warned me that Just Shapes & Beats was a real game. Can I come up with an in-universe name for Pentifer's game? I tend to be good at making the kind of actually-marketable fictional counterparts that feel like "original flavor" Glitch Techs games-within-a-show which most other TV shows would relegate to stylistic suck. ))

 

[Sir loin of beef]

(Back to GTX!)
Meanwhile at a Railroad Siding near the city works.

As the battle at the City works continues we now go live to a Railroad siding where a strange character Piloting a mini-Mecha that looked like the "Rider Suits" from Atom Girl Z could be seen stomping towards the Glitched up Depot, he appears to be looking for something. He has a green helmet with an antenna and a T-Shaped visor outlined in red on,

"Alright...The Box should be somewhere around here." The Renegade Psychopath said to himself as he tapped on something on his helmet that started making a sound akin to the Scouters in Wyrm Orbs X for some reason. Almost as if he was searching for the highest power level in the area.

 

[Lady Moldoma]

(Back to GTX!)
Meanwhile at a Railroad Siding near the city works.

As the battle at the City works continues we now go live to a Railroad siding where a strange character Piloting a mini-Mecha that looked like the "Rider Suits" from Atom Girl Z could be seen stomping towards the Glitched up Depot, he appears to be looking for something. He has a green helmet with an antenna and a T-Shaped visor outlined in red on,

"Alright...The Box should be somewhere around here." The Renegade Psychopath said to himself as he tapped on something on his helmet that started making a sound akin to the Scouters in Wyrm Orbs X for some reason. Almost as if he was searching for the highest power level in the area.

The nature of plixel signatures in the immediate vicinity seemed to be near baseline, except for a single intermodal container which, even though it had been plated with an electromagnetic coating to prevent observation, would periodically flare up in signature, registering an immense file-size, represented by a disturbance of around 350,000SP (350,000 Spectre, named for Hinobi designer and developer Thomas D. Spectre, who created a system specifically to analyze and identify glitch signatures by creating two pockets of both absurdly high plixel density and absurdly low plixel density, and then splitting the difference between whatever the analysis device was observing.)

This was only common for certain low-complexity glitches that existed particularly in areas like the South Korean Plixel-Interference Exclusion zone (an area of south korea that had suffered drastic fundamental alterations to physical laws due to an incident at a Plixel-tech development plant) which would ovulate signals made up of terrabytes of garbage code. Or extremely rare high complexity glitches, generally of level 100 or higher, especially when using exotic maneuvers/special attacks. The immaterial nature of the anomaly glitches in the exclusion zone meant that this couldn't've logically been one that had been confined into a box so easily and then transported, unless Hinobi had made some sort of breakthrough in their own unpredictable technology and containment efforts.

It also couldn't be the cause of a special attack from such an entity... Could it? Even with the electromagnetic plating, the box would've been destroyed by then, right? Plixel tech was nothing to scoff at when it registered on those levels. Whatever was in that box, if it even was a glitch, had the stamina points to continuously beat its enclosure with special moves no doubt in the hundreds of levels.

 

[Sir loin of beef]

The nature of plixel signatures in the immediate vicinity seemed to be near baseline, except for a single intermodal container which, even though it had been plated with an electromagnetic coating to prevent observation, would periodically flare up in signature, registering an immense file-size, represented by a disturbance of around 350,000SP (350,000 Spectre, named for Hinobi designer and developer Thomas D. Spectre, who created a system specifically to analyze and identify glitch signatures by creating two pockets of both absurdly high plixel density and absurdly low plixel density, and then splitting the difference between whatever the analysis device was observing.)

This was only common for certain low-complexity glitches that existed particularly in areas like the South Korean Plixel-Interference Exclusion zone (an area of south korea that had suffered drastic fundamental alterations to physical laws due to an incident at a Plixel-tech development plant) which would ovulate signals made up of terrabytes of garbage code. Or extremely rare high complexity glitches, generally of level 100 or higher, especially when using exotic maneuvers/special attacks. The immaterial nature of the anomaly glitches in the exclusion zone meant that this couldn't've logically been one that had been confined into a box so easily and then transported, unless Hinobi had made some sort of breakthrough in their own unpredictable technology and containment efforts.

It also couldn't be the cause of a special attack from such an entity... Could it? Even with the electromagnetic plating, the box would've been destroyed by then, right? Plixel tech was nothing to scoff at when it registered on those levels. Whatever was in that box, if it even was a glitch, had the stamina points to continuously beat its enclosure with special moves no doubt in the hundreds of levels.

"350'000, Wherever that Signature's coming from that's Certainly what I've been sent to obtain." FETT declared even as the power level went back down again. He looked in the direction the Bolypius Box was in and started stomping in it because again, Rider armor, even if he didnt have an exact location.

 

[Gadg8eer]

The strange Pentagon-like being slipped out of the house after a while and decided to look around, soon noticing a quarrel quite a way away from where he was. Grabbing the larger being and gesturing to the fight, the duet of pure mayhem stepped through a well-made portal and watched from behind a building.

"350'000, Wherever that Signature's coming from that's Certainly what I've been sent to obtain." FETT declared even as the power level went back down again. He looked in the direction the Bolypius Box was in and started stomping in it because again, Rider armor, even if he didnt have an exact location.

Via the teleportal, the pair of glitches emerged to find FETT approaching the box. For reasons Pentifer couldn't explain, he could simple sense that whatever was in there, even the Big Guy Upstairs (the secret Bonus Boss of "Pentagrammy Beets" that was unlocked after completing a play-through of the game once and then appearing one the second attempt) would be terrified of the thing in the container.

The real question was, was Pentifer reckless enough to try a prank in such a situation, or would a demon of Pride find a limit to how powerful a being he was willing to potentially anger enough to "Turn Red" and use whatever was its' special attack? Then again, the robot in the mech armor would be a much more palatable target...

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

Pentifer let out a small gasp while holding his large glitch friend behind him. He quietly pulled out a random coin and threw it as far as he could in the direction away from himself. Gosh he hoped it would distract that person.

 

[Sir loin of beef]

Pentifer let out a small gasp while holding his large glitch friend behind him. He quietly pulled out a random coin and threw it as far as he could in the direction away from himself. Gosh he hoped it would distract that person.

"Huh, Curious." FETT briefly observed the coin for a few seconds before shrugging and going back towards the container.

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

Pentifer looked both confused and slightly nervous. The larger glitch was quick to react, placing Pentifer behind him protectively. Then it pounced, zipping out of the shadows like a cat.

 

[Sir loin of beef]

Pentifer looked both confused and slightly nervous. The larger glitch was quick to react, placing Pentifer behind him protectively. Then it pounced, zipping out of the shadows like a cat.

Fett turned his head and saw the Glitch heading towards him, Said other glitch received a punch to the stomach from his Mini Mecha that sent the glitch to the ground.

 

[Captain Wyldstorm]

Pentifer was quick to portal the larger glitch back, a nervous noise starting to build up in his throat from how much he was trembling. The larger glitch quickly got back onto its feet, took a deep breath and breathed out a huge laser.