Express flight to Soleanna

[Tails]

Tails flies high above the clouds and checks his radar screen to find Robotnik's fleet. Eventually something clicks on his radar screen and it shows a massive fleet formed into a V and there appears to be other smaller feelts within the V formation don't seem friendly.

Tails searches further through the radar screen and it appears that there's something beside the fleet. As for what he doesn't know. It doesn't seem to register as much of anything.

He waits patiently to get passed the formation. He's high enough above the clouds that, unless you had ultra sensitive hearing, you would never know he was there.

[Giichi Twinkieland]

Giichi felt happy that Dulcy was nice enough to get them just above the pod...although he didn't think he wanted to be this close. A little miscalculation or a sudden rise in altitude by the pod, and he'd get squished rather painfully between them.

So, understandably Giichi felt eager to get out of the pouch. The pod looked like it had a hatch on the roof with a circular handle, so he grabbed for that. Once he got his hand around it, the cat easily slid out of Dulcy's patch, thanks to his small size.

The cat quietly started to turn the handle...not wanting to alert whoever or whatever was driving this thing. In any case, it gave him something to do while he waited for Falina to catch up. But in about 30 seconds, he could feel that the handle would turn no further. Giichi gave the handle a small tug, and he could feel it move up slightly. The hatch was ready to open.

He looked up and waited for Falina to arrive, since he wanted her to handle the driver. After she landed, he would say "I'm going to pop this open. As soon as I do, you spot whoever's driving this thing and strike him down. Then I'll come down and take the controls, ok?"

((For Falina's next post, feel free to assume that Giichi pops the hatch open for you when you're ready to attack)).

[Dr. Robotnik]

The swatbot pilot below continued to fly on, unaware of the handle turning above its head. However, Giichi opening the hatch allowed in a small rasp of wind noise. The swatbot immediately whirled around to see what was the matter. But since the noise ceased so quickly, the swatbot just presumed that it was a noise of the ship. It began to run a systems diagnosis for its own craft, just to be sure.

[Falina]

Falina looks over at Chadin as he squeezes her shoulder gently and reassures her that she'll be fine. She smiles and leans over to lay a tender kiss on his cheek. "Thanks Chadin, you be careful too!" She says warmly, then carefully crawls over to Dulcy's side to jump down to the ship below them. She swallows hard and tries to steady her knees as she feels like they are rattling like crazy. She could only hope that Dulcy would truly be able to catch her if she didn't make this jump.

'No turning back now...' She tells herself softly, then takes a deep breath and leaps off Dulcy's back, landing on the ship just a moment later. However, it's not a great landing, as her hooves slip on the smooth hull of the ship and she falls firmly on her butt, then starts to slide toward the edge of the ship. She quickly scrambles to roll onto her stomach and crawl back toward the middle of the ship's top. She breaths a sigh of relief now and kneels next to the hatch, waiting for Giichi to open it. She nods to him to let him know she's ready, knowing they should probably hurry as surely whatever is inside heard her hooves slamming into the top of the ship.

Giichi quickly opens the hatch and Falina jumps down into the hovercraft, drawing her sword in mid air as she gazes forward at the pair of swat bots. She takes hold of her sword with both hands and thrusts it into the shoulder of one bot as it turns to see what came through the hatch, and lands a kick to it's leg joint to knock the bot off balance. Then, as the other one is already facing her, it raises it's laser arm and aims at her, saying in a robotic voice "Freeze intruder!" Falina wastes no time, and quickly stabs her sword through it's vision sensors. She pulls her sword out of the bot's head, turns and stabs the other bot through the head just to make sure it's disabled too, then puts the blade away, looking back up at Giichi as she catches her breath. "Well, that wasn't so bad... Now if you can manage to fly this thing, and our cover isn't blown at a bad time... if not already, this plan may just work."

[Dulcy]

Dulcy waits till Giichi gives the message that Falina took care of the bots inside the hovercraft, then watches as the cat enters the craft and closes the hatch. She then looks back at Chadin. "Ok, they're in, better back off before someone sees us." She says as she backs away a bit and moves into a cloud, keeping near the edge so that she could still see what was going on. She hopes that Giichi can manage to learn how to fly that craft, otherwise this plan is going to become a whole lot more complicated and dangerous.

[Chadin]

I doubt even my fur could hide the blush coming off my face after Falina kissed me on the cheek like that. It certainly was a shock to say the least. I know we've always been close friends, but... I never expected something like that.

The rustling of Dulcy's harness as Falina jumped down onto the hovercraft below us shook me out of my shock just in time to see Falina nearly fall right off the ship. I just about jumped off Dulcy right then and there to try and catch her, but she luckily managed to right herself without any help from me. It felt like my heart was slamming against my rib cage like a jack hammer, but once I saw Falina go inside and Giichi soon follow after I started to calm down a bit.

"Ok, they're in, better back off before someone sees us."

"Good idea." I could do little now that Falina and Giichi were both inside. All I could do now is shuffle up to where Falina had been sitting to get a better grip on Dulcy's harness and hope that Giichi can figure out a way to pilot that ship.

[Tails]

Within the radar screen, Tails observes the small dots become a little less. He assumes that the creatures entered the ship and that's the two of them disappeared on the radar screen. Whether or not they're the good guys he didn't know. He's too far away to video tape the events going down there in the ships.

He makes sure that he stays undetected and it'll be easy to do that. He continues to watch the radar screen.

there's a lot of things I have to worry about.

Tails feels ready to help, but he knows that he'd rather wait for himself to be needed instead of creating a riot. He's ready to prove himself in front of no one yet again.

[Giichi Twinkieland]

Giichi watched from above, admiring Falina's handiwork. He certainly could not have handled two bots like that in an enclosed area, which is why he'd sent her in first. He started to speak in response to Falina's comment, but realized it'd probably be better to reserve chit-chat until he'd had a look over the controls.

So the cat hopped in and immediately went for the yoke, making sure to hold it steady. That was the easy part. Giichi could feel a twinge of panic beginning to surge through his body, as he examined the other controls.

"Uh..."

He felt like a character in a movie who'd just been told to operate a complex machine he had no training for. Cue shots panning over the vast array of dials, switches and buttons of the expensive machine. That's exactly what this cockpit was like. Nearly all of the controls had complex acronyms and descriptions he couldn't even begin to guess at the meaning of. Giichi's eyes rapidly roved all over the place, his head twisting so much he practically looked like an owl as he did it.

But his eyes finally settled on a small blue button, with white text written on it: Auto Dock

Should I press it? If it does what it says it'll do, then that should get us on one of the ships. If it doesn't... Well...what the hell...

They had no time left anyway. So with that in mind, the cat let his finger settle over the button.

"Here goes nothing..."

And Giichi pushed it in. For a few seconds, nothing happened, and Giichi let out an exasperated sigh. But then green boxes appeared on the heads-up display of the craft. The ship appeared to be altering its course to fly through them. And the trail of boxes led back to a small docking bay on one of the large airships, towards the back of the V-formation. He could see the doors opening up for them.

"I think that did it..."

He didn't allow himself to sigh with relief, because they definitely weren't out of the woods yet.

"We still need to escape the ship somehow after we sabotage it. And I bet that means we'll have to escape in this same pod, because we don't have a good way to signal Dulcy for when and where we're ready for pickup. I'll see what I can learn while we're docking."

So as the ship auto-docked, he went over the controls again, this time with a steadier eye since their immediate problem was solved.

[Dr. Robotnik]

Egg Ship 5's docking door's neatly slid open as the pod came in. What looked like a giant clamp began to open up, and reached out to the pod as it closed in. The clamps neatly closed around the ship, pulling it back inside as the docking doors closed up.

An array of cleaning and maintenance bots hurried over to the pod. Unlike the humanoid swatbots, these were mostly large cylinder-shaped bots on hover jets that stored an array of tools inside themselves. Compartments on the sides of all of them began to open up, exposing things like drills, welding tools, and the like.

They would see one starting to fly towards the pod's windscreen. A spraying nozzle with window washing fluid and a robot arm with a rag on the end unfurled out of it. If the heroes didn't hide themselves and the swatbots under the control panel, they'd definitely be seen.

[Falina]

Falina watches as Giichi comes down to join her in the pod, and moves to take a look at the controls. She was almost as nervous about the idea of him flying this thing with no real idea of what he was doing, as he was. Certainly as she gazed about at all the various controls with cryptic labels, she was glad it wasn't her job to fly it.

She watched then as Giichi rested his finger on a button labeled 'Auto Dock' then watched as he pressed it, holding her breath as she waited to see what the pod did in response to the button. She exhales slowly as the pod lays out a course on screen toward one of the large ships and begins heading toward the dock, which then begins to open. "This is way too easy..." She mutters anxiously, expecting some alarm to go off or Robotnik's face to appear on the ship's computer screen, saying that he knows they are in here. But, she takes a deep breath and tries to push that from her mind as the pod enters the large ships docking bay.

It wasn't long though, before the maintenance bots began to come up to the machine, and Falina hadn't the slightest inkling of an idea that they would be disturbed so soon, none the less, she does start trying to stuff one of the Swat Bots down a storage hatch.