We got another fun piece up ahead!

It's about time we got Cyber Sunset into the action. He's paired up with Becky who's continuing her story from her last piece. It's interesting to say the least!

 
Becky Joy's flush face revealed any number of emotions. Fear for her safety and that of the innocent family she'd promised to reflect. Anger and excitement at this new threat, even though it looked harmless. She'd been assured the bugs she now faced down were quite dangerous, and if words and the conviction of her new traveling companions failed to convince her, the horrific event unfolding in front of her and the family surely drove the morbid point home.

The creatures were feeding on a not quite yet dead animal.

Becky could feel the terror from her new friend who was called Amy. More than anything, the bugs reminded Becky of filthworms, but with scarab-like armor. Each bug looked at least twice the size of something out of a swarm of angry A's as well. Curious Becky popped into Becky's mind to ask what the "a" was abbreviations of, but Becky didn't know! Smart Becky popped into her mind to tell here maybe the "a" was an abbreviation for abbreviations!

Becky felt a surge of strength; she felt stronger than ever!

And she felt like a fight, but she just wished she had help!

Cyber Sunset flew by on his biplane overhead and saw a swarm of bugs. Thankfully, the monstrous ragman had loaded the plane with several pounds of napalm, which Cyber Sunset was happy to drop on the dangerous looking insects. "Two major problems handled with one stone," said Cyber Sunset as he flew away. "Hope no one was down there..."

Phew! Becky froze the explosion in place after it killed the bugs but before it killed Becky and her friends! Unfortunately, it left them comically charred.

"That was pretty lucky that someone tried to kill us," Becky said.

"Nu-huh!" said the young girl, tugging Becky's arm. "That was pretty mean of whomever flew by on that mechanical dragon."

"Yeah, good point!" Becky said, rolling up her sleeves. "You stay here and keep walking down towards wherever we are going and I will go talk to this person that might have attacked us!"

"Besides, being blasted and froze might not even stop these bugs," Amy's father said. Becky was tearful as she watched the family hasten into the distance, but she froze her own tears in anger and turned, aiming her concentration at the bi-plane (the mechanical dragon as she called it) in anger.

Cyber Sunset noticed an alarming amount of ice forming on the wings of the biplane. He reached for the defroster, but cursed under his breath when he realized that the technology in this place was still far behind that available in Honorburg. As the plane began to stall when the ice reached the engine, Cyber Sunset thought about the chances of him being able to repair all of the damage in time and deduced that such an event was unlikely.

He glanced out the side of the window, and saw the roaring flames, somehow frozen as a crystalline ice. He grinned. "Well, looks like someone was down there after all... but the good news is that it looks like they could handle themselves..."

Steering the plane to crash into what looked like a more distant, safer area, Cyber Sunset concentrated on the solid flame below and vanished into a twinkle of green light, appearing on the ground in the midst of what, if not for Becky, would be a raging inferno.

Becky spun around, growled, and caught Cyber Sunset firmly in the chest with a powerful blast of ice! It was enough to send him crashing back into the block of ice Becky had frozen the explosion in.

Cyber Sunset shook his head. The snarling ice-hurler had looked like one of the Loathing people...Betty or Becky or Bevy or something like that...but he wasn't expecting an attack, even if he had accidentally dropped a firebomb over her head. He slowly got to his feet. Was this an evil counterpart for this universe?

"You're...you're one of the folks from Loathing, right?"

"My head hurts!" she said, looking ready to attack him again.

"So....that's a yes?" Cyber Sunset stretched to try and work out the force of the impact. He thought back over the message that he'd been told about the drugs in his system...and he wondered if the others hadn't been able to get better yet like he had, thanks to the nanites in his blood stream. He tensed and readied for Becky to act unpredictably.

"It means you made my friends vanish before, like Aleenie the space elf and Dash the swords person!" Becky held her hands up and an ice storm suddenly formed over Cyber Sunset's head, causing him to have to avoid falling icicles. "Now you wanna fry me and my new friends. Becky says 'No!' to this agenda!"

Cyber Sunset frowned as he sidestepped the icicles before teleporting a short distance away, hiding behind one of the frozen flames. Clearly, she wasn't acting rationally, and should be avoided. On the other hand, she might be a danger to innocents. Before Cyber Sunset could plot his next move, the ground below him turned to solid ice! The ice itself started creeping up Cyber Sunset's boots and legs. Quite disturbing and unnatural, actually.

Cyber Sunset frowned and flashed to a different location, further from Becky and hopefully out of range of whatever she could throw his way. "This'll be problematic," he said. "I didn't make your friends vanish!" he shouted across the distance. "I vanished, too!"

"Yeah, when we got here, you made them telly-port! How do I know you didn't make everyone telly-port! I wanna punch you!" Becky took a step to move towards him, fist cocked, but she immediately slipped on her own ice and fell! The ice started to melt away as she sat up, frowning and sobbing lightly.

Cyber Sunset sighed and stepped out from behind his pillar of ice. "For starters, I can't teleport other people that well or that far...and more to the point, I wouldn't want to. Becky, you're under the influence of some sort of chemical in your system that's making you angry and eager for a fight. You can't just give in to it, or the bad guys win. They want us fighting each other."

"But if they want us to fight each other, we have to," Becky said, looking up at him with a resigned look. "But don't fight that family, okay? I have to protect them!"

Cyber Sunset grinned. "Why do we have to fight, Becky? We can just walk away. See, we're not fighting right now, are we? There's no need to fight anything unless it's actually trying to hurt us. And right now the only people who are trying to hurt us are the ones who want us to fight."

Becky frowned. "But I feel sick if we don't fight."

Cyber Sunset thought about this, not sure how to respond. "That's...probably your body trying to cure itself when it realizes that you're not supplying the endorphins that the adrenaline of combat would," he said, not sure how much of that science was applicable. "If you don't feed the sensations, you'll have to get better. We're all sick...I just got better faster because I heal really well."

Becky's eyes crossed for a second. Seemed she was thinking about it. She stood up slowly. "Will you teach me to heal fast? Will you go with me so I can protect the family? Did you ever carve your initials into a tree when you were young? Is it okay that I wanna beat up that jerk Kwadlin?"

"I don't know if I can teach fast healing," said Cyber Sunset, "but if I get back to Honorburg I might be able to help the process. I can help protect the family. Yes, I carved my initials into the tree."

"Ohhh, cool!" Becky offered him a handshake. "The bugs scare me. They can eat through walls, and they made Amy's family have to move. I didn't like carving my initials into the tree, I'd only carve 'Joy' which is my last name."

With that, Becky pointed towards the direction the family was walking in.

Cyber Sunset turned to follow after, thankful that this fight, at least, had passed by easily. They family seemed a bit nervous when Becky and Sunset caught up with them, but once Becky explained he was a friend, and tried explaining what happened, they seemed okay with the new stranger.

Best RP twist: Logic actually works on Becky. Not much of a fight, but it didn't have to be; Sunset was smart to focus on calming her down with words. Becky and Sunset will run into a couple other familiar faces later on. But Summer and Wildfall are up next and then it's a rare official interlude.