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randomwriteronline · 14 days ago

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"Did he tell you how he got that, by the way?"

Kopaka's hand immediately went to cover his forehead, and he glared so potently at Gresh that the temperature around him dropped by a good few degrees.

Pohatu took turns glancing between the two of them before settling his puzzled gaze back on the Glatorian: "How he got what?"

"The cut on his face elder Ferfax had to stitch shut for him."

The Toa of Stone immediately reached for the hand his friend had clamped around his head. He fought briefly to pry it off of him, but the Ko-Toa could do little to stop him as he was much less versed in hand-to-hand combat: once both wrists were caught in a solid rock grip and rendered useless he tried to turn his face as far back as he could, only for his last gamble to be made null by Pohatu's other hand simply grabbing the top of his head and forcibly turning it around.

"Huh," he said. Somehow his monotone conveyed more concern than any sliver of emotion might have. "There it is. I can't believe I didn't notice something like that."

"It's nothing," Kopaka tried to grumble.

"Marendar threw him against a rock when he bit his arm off," Gresh ratted him out: "If he had bones instead of protodermis he would've split his skull in half."

Pohatu made a very expressive face at the both of them, though it was hard to determine what emotion he was displaying beyond 'doing his best to carve his eye sockets wider so that his bulbs would simply slide right out of them while trying to clip his entire jaw through his upper teeth'.

Thoughts collected, he turned to his fellow Toa and told him flatly: "You are insane."

Kopaka frowned hard.

He pulled his lip up to snarl something; a finger slapped it shut.

Before he could glare harder at him the Stone Toa sprung up a second one with an eloquent tilt of his head.

He huffed, allowing him to go on.

"Did you put your mouth in the seams of its shoulder and yanked its whole arm out from there?" the other asked very slowly, putting a lot of emphasis on certain words. "With your teeth?"

After a moment of embarrassment, he replied: "Yes."

Pohatu loudly clapped his hands on his friend's shoulders and leaned his head back to stare at the sky: "That must have looked amazing," he mused in awe. "Wish I'd been there to see that. And also catch you before you slammed face first into a boulder."

Kopaka's eyes twitched, whole face turning sour. For a moment he thought of commenting on what a shame it was, that Pohatu had instead been busy being trapped with the Great Beings for their amusement after using himself as a bartering chip for a deal that hadn't even been respected.

His throat twisted itself, not letting him speak his thoughts into reality; so instead he mumbled: "I could show you."

"You would?" the Po-Toa asked, snapping his neck back down.

"You would?" Gresh echoed, more baffled than thrilled.

The Toa of Ice shrugged with a small motion that could have almost been mistaken for a show of discomfort: "If I had something roughly the same size and shape as Marendar at my disposal, I could."

His friend beamed.

Vican was lightly startled by the sudden slam of the workshop door, which meant that he did not immediately try to latch onto the ceiling dropping whatever he happened to be holding in that moment and instead only snuck under the nearest table while clutching tighter onto the broken down engine in his hands.

The sight of the two alien-looking organic creatures soothed him slightly: "Oh! Hell-ow," he greeted (bumping his head against his hiding place as he got back on his feet a bit too hastily).

Kopaka nodded in his direction, softly greeting him back.

"Are you here for more modifications?" the Matoran was quick to ask: "Trouble with the steering? The brakes? Berix and I just went out salvaging and got a few new engines if you want to look at them - well, they are pretty old their condition is not what I would call, uh, good, but if you give us a day we can-"

"Someone there?" Nuparu's voice interrupted him from behind a pile of junk the Onu-Toa was no doubt working in the midst of.

"Kopaka again! And Pohatu!"

"Ah - hold on, hold on-"

As suspected, the lanky black armored body spurted from the masses of bone, metal, glass and wire like some kind of majestic aquatic Rahi bursting out of the waves, accompanied by a cacophonic symphony of various bits and pieces clattering (or shattering) to the ground.

He waved at them while he tried, failing, to step over a smaller pile without completely demolishing it: "HELLO," he shouted over the ensuing rockus, "WHERE'S THE VEHICLE?"

"Not here," Kopaka replied once the other was close enough not to accidentally send any more scrap flying.

"Well, that's half your problem."

"I didn't come here for it. It's a different matter."

"Why'd you tell Vican otherwise?"

"I did not say anything."

The mutated Matoran shrank in his shoulders, awfully embarrassed, and tried to mumble an apology; all three Toa reassured him there was nothing to worry about without words, each using instead a completely different kind of gesture that somehow still managed to convey the exact same message.

A loud bang distracted the group: a leg that looked a lot like Berix's attempted to wriggle itself out of a pile of twisted and bent metal wires as they watched.

Berix himself peeked through the mess to better look at them, seeming calm, so hopefully the limb was still attached to him.

"IS IT THE STEERING WHEEL?"" he asked loudly.

"NOT ABOUT THE CHARIOT," Nuparu replied. "WHAT IN KARZHANI WENT DOWN BACK THERE?"

"GRIP SLIPPED."

"AH! IT HAPPENS."

"Do you have a big Toa-like bugger back there?" Pohatu took the chance to ask.

The Agori looked behind himself, searching through the seas of parts and trash, before turning back to him and replying at a noticeably less shrill tone of voice: "Define 'Toa-like bugger', please?"

"Something shaped roughly like a Toa, or a Glatorian, I guess," the other explained, gesturing to indicate the general width and build of his own body. He raised a hand up to roughly the top of his head, but hushed with an uncertain grimace; he glanced back at Kopaka as he lifted his palm in short jerks, silently asking for confirmation until his friend nodded in approval of the height he was approximating. "A bit taller than one, maybe."

"Oh, there's that broken Exo-Toa," Vican piped up.

"Hm! Yes, that might work," Nuparu nodded as they all moved towards the mess (Berix dove back into the metal waves, no doubt on the prowl for the mentioned machine) "A couple Vortixx dragged it in. Though I should warn you it's essentially unusable - its circuits are completely fried and it doesn't activate even if you try starting it up manually. Trust me, we tried."

"So it can't move?"

"Not at all. If you needed it for some heavy work-"

"Oh no, don't worry about that," the Toa of Stone waved his words away amiably: "What are your plans with it?"

The other shrugged: "We're just gonna dismantle it for parts, really."

Pohatu beamed with the strength of twenty suns shining through an equal amount magnifying glasses: "Can Kopaka help?"

The Ko-Toa replied to the inventor and his assistant's puzzled stares by deploying onto them an unreadable blank gaze, lending no further clarification on the strange request.

Vican scrunged his face, looking up to his companion for guidance.

Finding only a confusion identical to if not double his own, he hazarded a tentative: "... yyyes?"

Pohatu grinned.

He instantly swiveled towards his friend, finger outstretched to touch his nose: "You said you would."

"I said I could," Kopaka corrected him.

"Which means you would," the other insisted triumphantly, as if he'd won a bet: "Or you wouldn't even have mentioned that you could."

The Toa of Ice flicked his hand away, earning a chuckle.

Vican and Nuparu remained utterly perplexed.

Berix shrieked something in their direction, triumphantly reappearing from the ocean of trash as he waved at them with frantic motions. His little jumpy frame stood in stark contrast next to the headless figure of metal and tubes that silently casted its shadow across him, stoic and solemn much like an ancient pillar: a slightly closer look revealed however the Exo-Toa's more than poor conditions as what first might have seemed like unusual games of light and shadow caused by the reflective nature of the materials revealed themselves to be dents, punctures, scratches, acid burns, cracks and holes littering the otherwise smooth armor.

The Agori skittered to the group with a proud expression: "I got it back on its feet all on my own," he gloated - which he had every right to do, considering how spindly he was and how many several dozens of kilos that thing likely weighted more than him. "But, if you - did Nuparu tell you it doesn't-"

"We did, we did," Vican reassured him, "But they don't need it whole."

"Oh! Oh, just, for scraps? In that case can I ask you if we can- I'd like to keep the, uh, the--" and he made a weird gesture, as if trying to convey the feeling of some kind of smooth, glassy coverage through miming alone. "--That? Because I was thinking I could- you know how the sand comes into the chariot and your eyes and everything, and I thought maybe that could be a, a useful sort of, kind of--"

Pohatu waved amiably, unbothered by the quick pace of the other's speech: "You can keep the whole thing, don't worry! Oh, unless - do you need the tubes and circuits?"

"Well, t-the circuits are fried, so... No..." Berix replied, trailing.

He was a little distracted due to his increasingly confused focus being diverted towards Kopaka, whom he watched leave the small congregation in order to scout around the garage, evaluate a set of options of which only he was aware, and begin to scale a perilous yet miraculously stable pile of hazardous sharp metal angles without a single word.

Pohatu was blissfully none the wiser of his nonsense: "And the tubes? Are they still useful or..."

"The what?"

"The-"

"OH, the tubes, yes! I mean, uhm, no, those are - those are also, uh, completely worthless. To us, maybe not to you... B-but we didn't clean them so there's still--"

A terrifying groan covered any further explanation he might have attempted to offer.

Kopaka was, presently, perched upon his newly found vantage spot whilst glaring venomously at the Exo-Toa, like the warped image of a feline or perhaps some kind of bird of prey. The horrendous sound had come from the half-assed structure onto which he held like his life depended on it - as it very likely did - when his weight had bent it ever so slightly forward, threatening to topple it at any moment.

He flattened himself against the metal.

One second later he'd pounced onto the machine.

The Exo-Toa recoiled from the impact, swaying dangerously but setting itself back on its feet right as it seemed to give in and crash onto the ground. The Toa of Ice scaled its side like a fury until he reached the massive shoulder: without the slightest hint of doubt he shoved his entire face in the joint, open jaws clamping hard onto the miriad of wires, thin rubbery conduits, weak aluminium and whatever else they could find to then yank them out in a furious frenzy. Then, accompanied by a horrible sound - something akin to both the wet squelch of rent flesh and the howling shrieks of scratched iron - he tore the limb's artificial innards apart with a ghastly spray of oily, dark, murky liquid.

The arm dislodged itself from its socket, its connection maimed beyond repair; Kopaka, face and hair and clothes soaked in grease and coolant and who knows what else, threw it aside with a deafening clang and spat the veins that had held it together.

Nuparu, Vican and Berix stood very still, eyes wide.

Pohatu recoiled hard, screaming: "WOO!", and laughed hysterically for thirty entire seconds.

Then he threw his hands in the air, yelled a second, more enthusiastic "WOO!!" and laughed even harder.

The engineers' concern skyrocketed.

They observed the Po-Toa run up to meet his friend as he slowly and gracelessly clambered back down the now one-armed mech with a slightly drunken air about him, no doubt due to the adrenaline rush slowly dying out: once close enough, Pohatu yanked a sleeve off his own shirt and slapped it with as much gentleness as his current erratic emotional state allowed him all over Kopaka's face in a well-meaning attempt at cleaning him up a little before the disgusting concoction smearing his skin dried up.

He stopped briefly once the Toa of Ice's features were back to their natural colors, though still occasionally streaked here and there with dark jagged lines or murky spots. First he squashed the cool face between his hands; then he moved his grip to the damp shoulders as if needing support before he keeled over.

Once he was somewhat stable again, Pohatu raised his head with a grin that threatened to open his face in half and shook his friend in his grasp: "You are insane!" he laughed, at a high enough volume that he could have knocked a small child clean out and back two bio.

Kopaka's scowl somehow made him look awfully proud of himself.

Nuparu opened his mouth; before he could suck in the breath that he was planning to use for a question, the Po-Toa was beaming again: "Can you do it with the other one too?"

His companion was just as quick: in a second he bolted out of the friendly grip and scaled the Exo-Toa until he was once more perched on its mighty shoulders, slinking along with formidable agility that really proved he could be called Lewa's brother; he didn't even bother to make sure his footing was secure, such was the frenzy that overtook him as he launched his assault on the other limb - his own hastiness causing him to end up upside down, pulling the cables and tubes along with himself and dousing his face with a second waterfall that now managed to drench his hair from its roots to its tips.

Pohatu hollered a third time, louder than the metal arm's clanging as it fell. He grasped his chest breathlessly and bent down, free hand on his knee to keep him from folding like a badly set camping chair, as positively crazed cackles continued to spill out of his mouth.

Face flushed dark, he grinned: "I'VE NEVER BEEN MORE SCARED IN MY LIFE!"

Berix (on account of being more aware of feelings which former inhabitants of the Matoran Universe likely didn't even know existed) was pretty sure that the emotion coursing through the Toa's veins at the moment was very much something else.

"Do you think they'll dismember us too if we ask them to stop?" Nuparu pondered calmly as Pohatu shouted at Kopaka to do his trick on the machine's legs as well.

Vican watched first the organic creature ram into the wearable mech hard enough to topple it, subsequently unleashing his carnage upon the hip seams, then his friend react to the horrible spectacle by falling on his ass in unadulterated ecstasy whilst shouting "YES! YES!!", and finally concluded in a very quiet voice: "I'd rather not try our luck with that."

#bionicle #kopaka #pohatu #gresh #nuparu #vican #berix #random writing #post organicd au because i cant even write the full story whatever literally who cares. have them be insane as a treat #kohatu #sure why not #kopaka gets covered in robot blood and pohatu has a moment about it. local lads forced to witness this are frightened

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