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!"

...And while they're busy with the one turret, Wraith's busy trying to hack into the other turrets' control systems using a remote transceiver, apparently unnoticed yet, by AI or otherwise.

Angel opened his wings and launched himself at the turret. The latter was busy shooting the flare into almost non-existance.

By the time the gun finished, Angel neatly sliced the barrels off, spun, and cleanly severed it from it's base. It started to rotate as it fell, but Angel skewered it on his sword.

"Okay....so what next?"

Wolf thought. "Well, bursting in guns blazing is not a very good idea...especially since we don't know what the interior of this place is like."

He turned to Wraith. "Wraith, ghost through the walls and let us know what it's like in there."

"Just a moment..." he replies almost absent-mindedly.

"...What are you doing, anyway?" Wolf asks, scooting over.

"Hacking into the guns' control grid..."

"...I didn't know you were a hacker..."

"I'm not, but in my line of work..." Wraith looks up at the turrets, pausing for a moment in distraction. "...You've kinda gotta be a jack-of-all-trades..."

Some of the turrets in the outermost perimeter seems to click and whirr, spinning a bit this way and that slightly, then stopping. A small smile crosses Wraith's face. "I'm not very good at it, but I do know a little trick or two."

He then stands up and walks towards the guns, not even flinching as they target him and scan, then stand down. He reaches the rock face ahead and turns ghost, entering the compound.

(( Nooooooooooo, I'm not making up new skills as I go along, mm-mm, nosireeee... >.>

I'm not feeling like myself this week, so if ya'll want, someone can take control of Wraith and have him do something. I'll stick check in, of course (just not regularly...), but ya'll can control him for a bit if you like. ))

OOC: The hacking skill is fine. It's kind of a given that every member of Cyber Force knows at least some hacking skills, some are better at it than others (Jade and Coyote, for example). I can control Wraith for you until you recover...but then again SS needs to tell us what's going on inside the castle...damn my head hurts now.

BIC: Wraith silently moved in ghost form down the hallway he had entered. There were some guards, but he kept in the shadows, making himself even less visible.

OOC: That's all I've got for now...SS take it from here and give us an idea of what to expect in here.

(ooc: am i meant to be here yet? just give me some background info, like, what you're doing and where you are, i'll include myself)

OOC: <sigh> I gave you an opening about a week ago...and you kind of missed it. I'll try to find a point at which to get you into this really quickly.

OOC: We should really make a new thread.

IC: The castle definitely broke at least two of the laws of physics. The first it broke was that, from the outside it seemed relatively small. Inside, it literally looked to be the size of a football stadium, complete with shops and parking lots.

The second was that there were walkways on the ceiling, thousands of doors, and no definitive way to see the actual destination of the doors.

Angel muttered, "Holy hell..."

That, and the guards were travelling in groups of two. And they were wearing heavy body-armor, as well as carrying very big guns.

OOC: then it shall be done.

Gentlemen, BEHOLD THE NEW CHAPTER!