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Chapter 27: Experienced Digger Wanted

Teisel, who had, against all odds, returned in the middle of the night and fallen asleep right away, found himself rudely awakened by a persistent knock on his bedroom door for the first time since the Gesellschaft had been destroyed. "YO! T-BONNE!" he heard Max shout from the little hall at the foot of the sub-basement stairwell. Somehow or another, he managed to pull himself off of the bed and plod over. As soon as he opened the door, the gang leader thrust a page from the local paper into his hands and exclaimed, "You've gotta read this! Right now!"

"Surviving Bonne Brother Forges Unlikely Alliance with Mega Man in Surprise Attack...?" Teisel read aloud as his cheeks turned pink. After a night like that, he'd expected waking up on the tenth anniversary of the morning he'd found his younger sister dead in her garage to be a lot more difficult than it had actually turned out. Having a printed reminder of the one unbelievably good part of the previous day was quite the pleasant stroke of luck. One of those photographers actually got a decent shot of him laughing and pushing the boy on the Strudelmacher, right in the midst of a deadly toilet paper assault. "Who comes up with these headlines, anyway?"

"Aw, come on, I think it's adorable," Max candidly retorted. "So maybe it wasn't front page news. It's still hilarious. You should cut out the article and hang it on your wall next to that dorky calendar."

Teisel looked back at his calendar, where Rover the Reaver was smiling creepily at him as he rolled away from the Kattelox Inspector. It was actually a pretty good idea. "Yeah, thanks. The walls could use a little sprucing up...maybe I'll go get myself a bulletin board or something the next time I feel like going out again."

Once Max had retreated back upstairs, Teisel scanned through the article. He couldn't remember the last time he'd read something good about himself in the paper. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd read something average about himself in the paper.

It quickly became obvious that Roll had been the one to explain Teisel's situation to the press. A quote of hers popped up in the story directly, about halfway down the page. "I'm just glad to see him happy, even if it's only for the afternoon. The last ten years haven't been easy for him, and it looks like he's just starting to get his life together again. Even if his family's caused us a lot of trouble in the past, Tron was indispensable during the construction process, and we're glad to see him moving forward." The article then went on to state that, at Roll and Art's request, they'd opted to refrain from pursuing a direct interview for the rest of the day.

Teisel was stunned. Here he was, distraught to the point of violence over the fact that all of that time he'd spent struggling just to survive, both physically and mentally, could have been completely averted if it weren't for Tron. Knowing that the messengers who'd delivered that news were, in part, responsible for how well the day had gone to begin with convoluted the situation even more than he could've imagined. He didn't even doubt that with the profits she'd been hauling in from weapons sales, Roll was probably able to pay for any equipment damage sustained during that "attack" as well. It was a relief to know he didn't owe QCTV a new boom mic.

On the other hand, he still couldn't help but feel a burning resentment at the fact that there was a possibility that Roll could get Mega Man back, while his own family had to stay dead just because they hadn't had the good fortune to have been born as a bunch of weird, revivable space robots. Helping the Sparks-Casketts out directly was out of the question, but the fact remained that he had a key component to reaching the Klicke Lafonica on his person.

At the very least, he felt obligated to apologize for beating them up, and to tell them about the card keys and their locations. He set the article down and scrambled up the stairs after Max. "Hey Max, I need to borrow your phone," he announced once he'd made it to the common room.

"Max ran off to order a pizza," Aero tensely replied without even looking up from the book she was reading. Sure enough, Max was nowhere to be found. Neither were Grill and Pic, for that matter. It was just Aero, sitting on the workbench stool over in the corner.

"No work today?" he asked.

"Nobody needed me," she shrugged.

"Look, I really need to call Roll," Teisel explained. "Can I use your phone? Please?"

Aero didn't respond right away. Just when Teisel opened his mouth to ask if there was something he didn't know about, she swiveled around on the stool, set her book down, and spoke up with a distinct quiver to her voice that he'd never heard out of her before. "I don't think talking to her is a good idea. It makes you...you get all upset, and last night she told me you were always like that. I got scared, Teisel. When she said that, it r-reminded me of my p-parents, and..."

Teisel hadn't expected that to escalate so quickly. "Aero...are you crying?" he asked before she could get any farther.

She vehemently shook her head even as the tears rolled down her cheeks. "I've spent enough of my life worrying about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, so hearing that you attacked Roll and Art b-because of something they didn't think too hard about saying...I...I can't risk anything like that happening to the guys or me!"

Before she even realized what was happening, Teisel had pulled her into the warmest, gentlest hug she'd had in a long time. "I don't attack family...no matter what." he confided right before he let go.

Aero could only stare at him in stunned disbelief. "But I...uh...that is..."

"If you're worried about last week when I lost my temper and threw that pillow, everyone's got to vent sometimes," Teisel sheepishly added. "But I never laid a finger on you or any of the gang that day, and I never will. Besides, weren't you the one who actually broke furniture when you got upset?"

"It's not that," Aero explained. "It's...you just called us family."

"It's what you are," he nonchalantly shrugged, but he couldn't suppress the grin that broke out across his face to save his life.

Aero sat up a little straighter. "I'm holding you to it, then," she warned, even though he could have sworn, for a fraction of a second, he saw a flicker of a smile light up in her eyes too.

Teisel raised an eyebrow and asked, "So, back to the original question..."

"Erm...right..." Aero pursed her lips and tried to remember what the original question had been.

"Borrowing your phone?"

"What did you need from Roll, anyway?" Aero countered. "I'm not about to take back what I said. Talking to her is a bad idea. Is it really that important? You don't seem to be able to hold a conversation with Roll without having some kind of mental breakdown, and even though she's been nice before, to both of us, she's definitely changed over the last ten years. She's still as caring as she ever was, but she has...different priorities, I'd like to say? I mean, I'd hope you'd have different priorities in your teens and in your twenties, but in this case, it seems to me that while she's genuinely glad to see you again, she has no idea how fresh all of this new information is for you, or how ready you are to handle it."

"Yeah, the sort of things we went through tend to have that effect on people," Teisel conceded. "I can say, without question, that I'm not the same guy I was before Bon was born, but I can't blame Bon for any of this, and as tempting as it is right now, I can't blame Tron for making it worse. And I certainly can't expect Roll to be able to read my mind and figure out if something will end up completely blindsiding me in advance, either.

"Still, she's one of the few people who can really say they understand what it was like, being there on, uh, Volnutt Island...and she tried. Knowing her, she probably didn't want to see me upset any more than you, Max, Grill, or Pic ever did. I know if it were me getting a chance to revive Tron or Bon or my parents, even if it were just one of them, I'd do whatever it took. I mean, I don't know if I'd be able to choose between them, but...

"The point I'm trying to make is that I have, in my possession, one of the cards she needs to get to the Klicke Lafonica. I know Russell has the second, and I know Russell is more than capable of finding the third and getting their monkey to the heart of the ruin network." Teisel concluded. "So yes. It's pretty important that I get ahold of her."

"Maybe I should be the one to call her," Aero offered with an awkward cringe. She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out the phone in question. "You've had more distressing surprises to deal with in this past week than any one person should have to face in a lifetime."

Teisel bit his lip and nodded. "Yeah. Better safe than sorry, huh?" he asked. "Tell her I'm really sorry for beating her and Art up back there. While you take care of that, I think I'm going to go see if Bakerly's seen Russell lately. It wouldn't do any good for you to offer Russell's services if we can't find him to begin with, now, would it?"

"Go pick up a cell phone for yourself while you're out there," Aero added as she flipped through her contacts and he walked out the door, "it'll save you a lot of trouble the next time you need to find Russell quickly."

As Teisel walked down the sloped streets towards the cobblestones of Teomo's marketplace, he found that the faces around town seemed unusually friendly that day. A few people actually said hello as they passed him by, and a teenaged boy even gave him a high five out of nowhere. "Nice one, bro," the kid said as he kept right on walking, without so much as a hint of sarcasm. Evidently, Aero wasn't the only one in Teomo City who read the newspaper.

It was a strange sensation, being recognized for something that didn't involve blowing up a bank or leveling a town. It was even a little off-putting for him, enough that by the time he'd reached Bakerly's Bakery, his ears were burning and his face was almost as red as his eyes. "Teisel! I was wondering when you'd stop by!" Bakerly exclaimed as he handed the former pirate a jelly donut. "This one's on the house. You know, all those times you stopped in here, you never mentioned any connection to that rocket crew!"

"Hey, you've got your secrets," Teisel pointed out. "All that 'I'm just a baker, really' stuff tends to rouse more suspicion the more you mention it."

"Don't change the subject!" Bakerly quipped as he opened up the cash register and pulled out a card. "Your friend Russell noticed you in the paper this morning when he stopped by for a muffin and pointed it out to me. I told him you'd stopped by a few times to try and catch him, so he gave me his card and told me to pass it along. You should give him a call sometime after sundown."

Teisel just stared at the card and slowly chewed his pastry. "That was...why didn't he just do this earlier?" he asked with an incredulous expression. "I needed to talk to him months ago!"

Bakerly shrugged. "He must be a busy man. In any case, you've got his information now, so I'm not sure why you're making such a fuss about it."

"Thanks, Bakerly," he replied with a smile. He pocketed the card and headed back out into the streets. Positive public acknowledgment might've been a little intimidating, but he had other errands to run, the least of which included picking up that model glue he'd left at the hobby shop.

At the end of the day, after borrowing Aero's phone one more time to get ahold of Russell, the two of them agreed to meet later that night at the local pub to discuss the search for the Klicke Lafonica.

"Now let me get this straight," Russell reiterated. "You're telling me that a robotic monkey told Roll Sparks-Caskett's husband that the Klicke Lafonica doesn't actually make old people young again, and that it's really only useful for the Ancients?"

"That about sums it up," Teisel sighed. "Sorry if the news foiled any kind of a comeback plan you might have been concocting over the past year."

"I guess it's better to find out about this now that it would have been if I'd found the Klicke Lafonica on my own and tried to use it," Russell sighed. "I should have realized something fishy was up with that Volnutt boy when he managed to score a Class S license at fifteen." He gulped down his drink and slammed the mug on the counter. He motioned for the bartender to fill it up again, then turned back to Teisel and asked, "Tell it to me straight, Green Guy. Where do I come into this operation?"

"Roll would need you to find the third card, go in there with the monkey, and let the monkey use the device to revive Mega Man Volnutt. I shouldn't have to explain why I'm not going to go in and do this myself, now that you and everyone else on this island know about my...erm...connections with that whole...thing." Teisel glanced around the dimly-lit bar just to make sure none of the other patrons were listening in on the conversation. Having a voice with a tendency to carry definitely had its drawbacks.

"Don't worry," the veteran digger replied, "I think I know what you're probably getting at, and even if I'm a little off with my guess, I'm not going to try and force it out of you. Not with a job like this. This is a Class S endeavor if I've ever seen one."

"Hey! What's that supposed to mean!?"

"Come on, now, Green Guy, you said yourself that you weren't interested in going back underground," Russell chuckled at the expression on the other man's face. "Besides, I've got another prospect for you. Something that may be a little more up your alley, if you catch my drift."

"What are you getting at?"

"I've already found the third card key. That's the good news. The bad news is that the person who dug it up decided to donate it to the Klickelan Island Museum, and the curator won't accept any amount of money in exchange for it. Not even after I explained what that card's really used for. So while I go off and explore the ruins until I get to the top of the main tower, I want you to put your, erm...unique skills...to use and get me that card so I can get that monkey where it needs to be."

"You want me to rob the museum!?"

"Sheesh!" Russell cringed. "Couldn't you have said that a little more quietly?"

"Sorry." Teisel whispered as he hunkered over the bar in embarrassment. If the bartender or anyone else had heard him, they definitely didn't show it.

"Do you think you can pull it off?"

"To be honest, I don't know," Teisel admitted. "Without Tron's machines, I was never really good at that kind of thing, and even then, I'd only ever gotten into the business to try to fund legitimate business endeavors so the three of us could return to our normal lifestyle. In hindsight, I think I may have set the bar too high on that one. We were pretty well off before this whole mess began."

"Oh, come on. Even assuming that you're not interested in taking risks like that anymore, aren't you forgetting that you live with Rebel Riders? They'd probably even help."

"You're not going to let me get out of this, are you?"

"It'll be fun," the blond man insisted with a confident grin. "If your spotter's okay with it, I think I'd like to borrow him during my explorations. You know, in case I run into trouble. For all of his sarcastic remarks, he actually has a pretty good head on his shoulders, and he really pulled through for us the last time you went underground. I certainly don't want to get myself trapped with no way out again."

Teisel shuddered at the prospect. Even six months later, the overwhelming sense of hopelessness he'd felt up in the auxiliary tower came back to haunt him in his dreams more than he cared to admit to himself. "Did you ever find out if we really were the first to spot a Reaverbot like that one?" he tentatively asked.

"No luck," Russell sighed. "It's a rare sight, but apparently it was called a Jaikronke. There was a second discovered over on some remote island on the other side of the world about twenty years back."

"I'll have to look it up the next chance I get," Teisel mused. "It would've been nice to be able to read up on it before we wound up face-to-face with one, but that's life for you."

Russell shook his head in amusement. "Just so we're on the same page, though, are you alright with letting me borrow Max while you take care of the card?"

"Do I have much of a choice?"

"Do you want your friend to get her brother back?"

"It's complicated," Teisel admitted as he rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, "but it's the least I can do for them. We didn't really part on good terms back then, and there have been quite a few unfortunate mix-ups in the last week. Still, I know from more years of gaming than I'm comfortable talking about in public that helping them out is the right thing to do. I know I'd want the same from them if our situations were reversed." He bit his lip and thought hard on the proposition. "I guess we're going to just have to go for it. You and Max can find a path into the main tower, and the rest of us will focus on getting that last card out of the museum."

Russell grinned and knocked back the last of his drink. "Now that's what I like to hear, Green Guy!" he exclaimed. "Better head home and rest up. Tomorrow's going to be a long day!"