Writing Challenge: Wreck-It Rita

Posted on Sat Jun 23rd, 2018 @ 6:26pm by Commander Rita Paris

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: USS Hera, E Deck, Intel Pod
Timeline: 2395

Writing prompt: #13 - Insane video game boss with narration

"The sensor platforms are up on E deck. I'll go hit the hard reboot, then you calibrate them for this dark matter ionic cloud and maybe we can plot a shorter course out of here before we end up murdered in our sleep by Mickey Mouse with a straight razor," Paris offered to her assistant chief, the colorfully-plumed Ensign Mona Gonadie. She'd go risk herself in a remote part of the ship, leaving her subordinate on the bridge in the safer situation, ready to finish the job and make sure the ship succeeded.

Which had seemed like a really good idea at the time. Now, maybe not so much as the lights flickered and flashed, sometimes blinding, sometimes dimly lit at best. With the shipwide holographics going haywire, and Paris presumed the structural integrity field generators with them, that meant that literally anything was possible. The XO had given a speech about how they might all lose their lives out here, but he had failed to mention the 'fate-worse-than-death' category with which Rita was all too familiar.

Of course, he had dismissed her expressed concern because he was also very willing to rely on the transporter safeguards. The shipwide holo emitters also had similar safeties, to prevent them from harming anyone either, and she could see how well those were working right now. But apparently she was a lone alarmist on that front- or at least she hoped so, although the hairs on the back of her neck that had yet to relax since being jolted awake in this storm remained unconvinced.

Leave it to the high-tech future to find a way that the entire starship, on a whim, might just try to kill any number of the crew with alarming capacity for just such an action. With the ship's computer database to draw upon, one might be facing a Capellan power cat in the galley, a sudden waterfall drop of a hundred feet in one's shower or a T-Rex chasing you out of the engine room.

All of which had been reported so far today.

On the course they were currently heading, at impulse speed, it would take the Hera twelve years to clear the cloud. But if Rita and her assistant could reset these navigation sensors, then there might be a much shorter course out of this dark ionic storm cloud. Which would make everyone's day a lot better. As is, when the space in front of the turbolift had tried to turn to quicksand on aft deck 18, where she had traversed to catch the lift to the intel pod, the lost navigator had barely managed to pull herself free. This was getting nasty quickly, and it seriously made Rita question the presence of so much advanced technology that could turn on the crew so easily.

Not even three weeks had she been aboard- first it was her possessed shipmates trying to kill her, now it was the ship itself. So far, the future was nerve-wracking.

As she moved into the pod, Paris was staring at the PaDD in her hand, trying to work out just where to locate the control panel that would enable her to input her access and hard reboot the nav sensors. So she wasn't paying attention to her surroundings. Which under ordinary circumstances would not be a problem- the corridors of the Intel pod weren't particularly treacherous nor dangerous. Under ordinary circumstances.

Today most definitely did not count as ordinary, even for the USS Hera.

What caused her to look up was when her bootheel skidded on the deck, as she reached the rounded edge of one of the large round discs that now comprised the deck. She stumbled and fell on her well-rounded rear before taking a step up onto a neighboring disc, which was a bit difficult to navigate even in the chunky-heeled explorer's boots she wore. Looking around, she now stood on a field of such large discs, in an uneven arroyo that she could feel mild seismic rumblings from below. Apparently this was a caldera of some short, the edges of the volcano looking like molten chocolate jutting into the skyline. A sky which was a dark burnished crimson and jade.

The scent of mint hug oppressively in the air.

As she looked around, trying to gain some sort of orientation, that was when something slammed into her midsection, knocking her back into the wall of the volcano, driving the air from her lungs and bashing her already bruised posterior. At least nothing had broken, as far as she could tell, so Rita looked up to see just what had hit her.

"Welcome to the boss level!" a cheerful and cartoonish voice echoed across the off-white plain of what Paris now realized to be gigantic candy mints. Looking up, Rita could see a ghostly pale complexioned humanoid with yellow eyes, wearing a helmet bearing a red 'T'. Then his face pixilated and suddenly looked like a kindly old man with a tiny crown perched on his head, around his neck a collar of delicate and stylized lace. Then it reverted to the helmeted head, flickering like a faulty video image. As he spoke, large insectoid legs began to fold out from behind him.

"Because of you, Ralph," the figure rose, the four rear legs holding him erect so that the long arms ending in wide sharp humanoid claws could gesticulate as he pontificated. "I'm now the most powerful virus in the arcade!" then he chortled evilly- again, it was cartoonishly exaggerated. That was when Rita realized that the rendering of the world around her was just that- a cartoon, an art form that was still available back in her day, at least.

"I can take over any game I want!" the boss villain gloated. That was when Rita realized that she had seen this one before, she was sure of it. A movie about game characters. "I should thank you... buuuut it'd be more fun to kill you."

With that, the insectoid humanoid crossbreed charged at Rita Paris, at a speed she very much did not expect. Waiting until the last instant, she threw herself to starboard even as one of the sharp-clawed hands smashed into one of the mints comprising the deck before violently yanking it out. Somehow Rita suspected the mint had more structural integrity than her torso, and she began wildly casting about for a way out of this.

"Come back here, little guy!" the video game boss chortled as he repositioned himself for another strike. As his insectoid legs came crashing down, each singular part of the carapaced horror was the size of her entire body. Ducking and weaving, she ran until she encountered his upside down head looming in her path. On instinct she poked him in the eye, never ceasing her forward running momentum.

"Wreck-it Ralph, that's where I am!" she realized, even as the bug boss fluidly snaked out in front of her, whipping his tail out to slap her across the field of mints. Landing in a tumble, now she was bruised, battered and she was pretty sure she had cracked a rib or two as she remembered the villain's name. After all, he was willing to give her a hint.

"Have some candy!" said King Candy, the usurper who had taken over the racing game Sugar Rush. Now Rita remembered, but this was no help to her- after all, she was no Wreck-It Ralph, and she was a poor physical match for the adapted Bug King Candy. As she got up, holding her left side, King Candy rushed her again. "Where do you think you're going? Hahhuhhuhhh, I'm not through with you yet!"

With that, he grabbed Rita by her black boots then yanked her off her feet. Just as she impacted on the hard minty surface, furiously beating wasp wings hauled both of them into the sky at an alarming rate of speed.

I'm going to die in the Intel Pod, cause of death unknown but appears to have been a fall from a great height. Unless he decides to tear me apart just for fun. Think, Rita... how can you get out of this? All of these bizarre scenarios seem to have some element of the possibility of fairness to them, so there has to be a way...

That was when she saw the rainbow bridge at the edge of the horizon, and the three figures there. But only one of them mattered to her- Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun. Rita remembered seeing this vid when she was a child, and remembered that she loved the tough-talking, no nonsense lady space marine with the short shock of blonde hair, who was tough yet tender, strong yet feminine, in charge and heavily armed. Rita had decided that she wanted to be Sergeant Calhoun when she grew up, until her father had convinced her otherwise.

But maybe...

Rita reached up to tap her comm badge, the old Starfleet command insignia serving just fine as a modern comm badge. "Computer, arm and equip me as Sergeant Calhoun of Hero's Duty!" While the computer had often as not been unresponsive to appeals of late, this one apparently got through. Maybe because it was a part of the scenario that it currently had loaded, or maybe a short circuit worked in her favor for a change. But her uniform shimmered and twinkled with a brief transporter effect, which likely would have sent her into an anxiety attack were she not already in mortal danger.





When the effect faded. Rita Paris was now clad the mylvar and ceramic plates of armor of a marine from Hero's Duty. Her bangs seemed longer and her honey blonde hair was a shade more platinum, but Rita wasn't about to complain. Because in her right hand, she now carried a rather large and she suspected quite potent pulse rifle, one designed to fight one foe in specific.

Bugs.

"Haw haw haw, look at that, it's your little friend," King Candy gloated as he juggled her around to change his grip on the lost navigator. But he didn't expect her to suddenly be quite well prepared for the situation, and as he casually tossed her about, Rita Paris opened fire, on full auto, at point blank range.

BRRRRAPPPP!!!

King Candy lost his grip on her, and Paris began to freefall the kilometer or so he seemed to have her up in the air, although it was maybe a few hundred meters at best. Tapping at the wrist comm that came with the armor, she scrolled through the options looking for the controls to the hoverskid Calhoun had ridden, which should be nearby. Of course, that was when King Candy caught back up with her again. Grabbing her by the ankle, he tossed her back up into the sky, even as his tail lashed out and knocked the pulse rifle out of her hand. Disarmed, he caught her in his clawed hands as his rear legs wrapped around her, pinning her.

"Let's watch her die together, shall we?" the villain intoned, his voice taking on a more serious mein.

Quickly, Rita ran through her options. The rifle was the only thing with enough penetration power to stop him, and she had only wounded the video game boss, not ended him. And while she really didn't care about the Sugar Rush princess about to die, she did recall how Ralph had beaten the malicious virus.

"It's game over for both of you!" King Candy tittered, even as Rita felt a few canisters on her belt, and she smiled. Her arms weren't free- but she had wiggle room, and that was enough. One on each side, she pulled the pins securing the grenades to her web gear, and she dropped them. Candy didn't even seem to notice. He was too busy watching the kid using her short range teleportation power to evade his troops as she raced to rescue Ralph, playing out the game's script.

"Oh, it's over all right, but not the way you think," Paris said to the insectiod would-be murderer. She was trying to come up with another quip when her grenades hit the surface of Mentos Mountain, and they exploded, sending the caldera of candies cascading down into the diet cola magma below. Which of course began producing a rather spectacular eruption that King Candy easily moved to avoid. Holding her upside down by the ankle, he brought her face to face with him.

"You think that's gonna save you?" he asked as the volcano erupted in a beam of frothy magma that reached into the sky like a beacon.

"I kinda do," Paris replied as she kicked him in the face, surprising him enough to make him release his grip on her. While he started to turn to go after her, the light drew him in, even as all of his candy-striped bug troops merrily flew to the light, like moths to a flame.

"No! Stop! Where are you going? Don't go into the liiiiight," he intoned as he too became entranced, but Rita couldn't hear him. She was far too busy bringing up that menu, which fortunately wasn't that complex. That didn't stop her from beginning to scream as the ground roaring up at her got too close. The hoverskid's arrival beneath her feet just before she impacted the ground was much to her relief. Bogeying it back up, she spun it around and paused the forward momentum to watch the bugs all fly into the light to be destroyed, even King Candy. Being a surfer girl did have advantages in moments like this.

Then she was unceremoniously dropped to the deck of the Intel pod, where her all-too-real cracked ribs reminded her of reality once more. Gone was the ceramic armor and the platinum hair, and instead of a pulse rifle she was back to a PaDD in her hand. Picking herself up and dusting herself off, tugging down her skirt Rita Paris returned to her mission. On the trail of the control panel to reboot the navigation sensors.

With her right hand holding her side and desperately hoping there wasn't another insane scenario awaiting her at the control panel, Paris muttered, "Well, turns out the XO was right about one thing- if that gear was cross-dimensionally replicated, I surely didn't notice."

"Now to find this stupid panel so I can reboot the stupid system, then I can try to figure out just where Astrogation is since I'm supposed to live long enough to report there... maybe after a little nap," the exhausted lieutenant yawned broadly, aggravating her cracked ribs.

"Ow. You always manage to wreck it, Rita..."