OOC: I'm gonna' skip ahead to the castle. 'Kay Wolfie? And forgive the abruptness. Essential for second part.

IC: The stealth chopter landed silently. Well, that was to be expected.

The group slowly approached the door, aiming weapons. They all agreed to take it stealthy. Or at least, they were supposed to have.

Angel kicked the old wooden doors open after they crossed the drawbridge. He then stepped it and looked for something to shoot. Nothing.

A laughing echoed through the halls, and eventually (and un-eventfully) they found it to be a speaker. Angel shot it. There was a note attached to a disk-drive. Simply, it read.

Angel tore it off. Simply, it read, "Insert disk here. If program not inserted, castle explosion in five minutes. If second chance wanted, come to same location, but in Cyber World."

Angel showed it to everyone. "Maybe...maybe we should leave..."

OOC: Clarification, it wasn't a stealth chopper, it was a stealth/cloak jet. And I see your abrubtness, and use equal abruptness in order to keep things flowing.

BIC: Wolf nodded "Good idea"

This was all a setup. he thought as he started running. The rest of the Cyber Force tailed him out of the castle.

"Beowulf, get this plane up and out of here and hightail it back to Chicago. The castle was a trick to get us all killed!"

"Killed how?"

"How does 'massive explosion' sound?"

"I see..."

The jet rocketed back into the sky. Moments later, the ancient castle was blown apart from the inside by a small fusion bomb.

***

En route back to Chicago, Wolf radioed Knight. "I need you to set up your Cyber World jack-in systems to get my team into Cyber Scotland as soon as we arrive."

"Why? What happened in RW Scotland?" Knight asked.

"We were tricked...sort of. Mastermind is playing mind games with us, and blew up a perfectly good part of my heritage in an attempt to eliminate CF-Alpha. Now we have to go to the same location of the castle we were at in the Cyber World."

"I see...all right. I'll have everything set up for you for when you get back."

"Good."

*** (OOC: AND THE ABRUPTNESS CONTINUES!!!)

Knight was as good as his word. By the time Wolf and the others arrived, all was set up. Once Wolf entered the coordinates, everyone was jacked into the network.

Hopefully, Angel's search will end here. Wolf thought as he entered the Cyber World.

OOC: SS you can take it from here.

Wraith follows one step behind Wolf, cigarette hanging from his lips and still sporting a single belt of knives. Wolf glances at him and asks, "Is that all you're carrying?"

Wraith answers while staring at the castle, not even looking at Wolf and removing the cig to blow a puff. "I like a good challenge sometimes," he starts, then smiles. "Besides... in simplicity there's beauty."

Bringing the cig back to his mouth as he speaks, he continues to stare while taking another drag.

It was the exact same castle. Exactly the same. Except for a few small details.

It seemed to be up ON A MOUNTAIN and there were automated machine guns sticking out of the landscape. The only way up was climbing a perfectly slicked cliff-face, or a long winding path.

Aside from that, it seemed just as deserted as last time. At least until they looked into the window, and saw some scary looking Italian guy and Angel's fiance. The latter was pale, looked tired, scared, and like Kaitlin had before Wolf's little rescue.

Angel saw this, and said in a voice barely indentifiable as his, "SONUVABITCH!"

He then started to run forward. At least until a bullet punched into his calf. Involuntarily he fell, and forced himself to roll away.

Being beaten, stabbed, kicked, dropped, thrown around, run over and (almost) incinerated were things he could handle. But of all the things in the known world, the one thing Angel hated the most was being shot.

So, when he rolled back to the group, an expression of pure fury etched on his face, it was little surprise. He forced himself to speak lucidly, and said, "How do we get there?"

Coyote hacked his own system but did it in such a way his kids could Isolate it and know who really did the hacking.

<Oh the cleverness of me. I can now feed mastermind any cock and bull story I want. Hmm what to say.>

Wolf tapped a few keys on his PDAP, and a KI-550 Sniper Rifle appeared in his hands. He peered through the scope.

"There are three snipers inside fortified locations. However..."

Three shots from the rifle sounded, and Wolf saw the soldiers crumple.

"Snipers removed." he said. "Despite that, those turrets are covering the area far too well. The path is out of the question."

Wolf flicked his wrists, and a pair of climbing claws unsheated from beneath his trenchcoat.

"So we climb the cliff side."

Kaitlin produced a similar pair of claws. "I suggest you let us lead." she said to Angel. "Worst case, you'll know where not to climb really fast."

"Exactly," Wolf said grimly as he started climbing the cliff side.

Angel looked at Kaitlin, then unfurled his wings.

"I think I win this one."

He then flapped and started hovering beside Wolf as he made his slow journey up. "Hey, if you get a spare moment do you have a first-aid kit? I can't upload stuff."

Wolf hung from the cliff one handed and uploaded a First-Aid kit. He caught it as it fell and tossed it up to Angel.

"Here ya go."

He then resumed his climb.

***

The team continued their arduous climb up towards the cliff.

"We're almost there." Kaitlin reported.

Suddenly one of the dead snipers fell from his precarious perch and landed with a thud right next to Wolf.

"...Why are we walking like this?" Wolf asked as he stood up. Apparently, they hadn't noticed that they had finished climbing the cliff.

"All right...let's figure out a way into the castle...without getting shot at too much."

OOC: A nod to the greatest series that never was...Clerks.

OOC: A moment of silence for the endless greatness of Clerks.

IC: Angel was crouching, wincing a bit from his freshly bandaged leg.

"I'm willing to bet you could toss a flare to distract that gun, and I could get in and cut it up before it could respond. Hopefully."

OOC: All right...time to go Splinter Cell on this gun. And thank God I'm not the only one who knows that joke.

BIC: Wolf drew the KI-42 he was holding and loaded a flare into the Multi-Pupose Launcher (MPL) slung beneath it.

"Okay...as soon as the flare goes off...start moving."

Wolf took aim and fired the flare all the way to the other side of the gun's field of fire

"Go for it, Angel!"