As the machines skitter across the sandy beach, Emi can sense a strange magic that fuses one life form to another.
Under the water, the many machines are ‘becoming one.’ There is a simple life force within each machine, and a very powerful living entity that is connected to all of them.
Whatever force is messing with Randy’s equipment does not persist.
Following the tug on his 'Bone'...
Randy races to attack a group on a rolling tsunami of earth.
Randy gets the satisfaction of rolling a few of the spidery droids into the sea in pieces. One remains on the causeway, crushed and partially split open.
There’s a greenish vapor that soon dissipates in the breeze. When it’s safe to look, you can see there is fungal matter all over the wires, and the red eye of this droid has several mushrooms—like the mushroom “beard” as seen on a zombarian or two.
XIII says to Randy, “If you want to hurt those things, you will have an opportunity. Our shore needs protection, and whoever controls the machines is prepared to destroy us all.”
She turns to Badia. “I am a shield. I am not a warrior.”
Alarms blare throughout the city square warning the people to evacuate. Most of them figured that out when Bullet Hell broke loose. Now the gawkers look like they’re about to shit their pants. Instead, they flee.
XIII apparently willed the alarm. Now she wills three cannons to rise from a wall overlooking the eastward sea.
___________ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ______________
Causeway \______________/ Sandy Beach
. . . . . . . . . . .U . . . U . . . U. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Badia leaps over to the central cannon, ready to fend off the enemy!
2
You rolled center position; I rolled monster position.
Based on your roll, left is aimed at 4, center at 1, right at 3. Any cannon can be adjusted one position left or right before the yet-to-be-seen enemy can act.
But all you need to know is: you effectively won initiative.
I intend to begin the battle tomorrow, but will post tonight if I can. House guests and grill duty, y’know!
As a pink moon begins to rise in the twilit horizon, there is a disturbance in the sea bubbling several hundred yards away.
A colossal silhouette rises from the deep. You can only make out its shape—that of a distorted person, impossibility large—a titan.
The three eyes on its elongated head begin to glow…
There was a lot of time for Emi to act while XIII was talking and activating cannons.
Happy 4th!
And again, thank you all for the breakneck pace of this quick little one-shot! I truly appreciate your contributions!
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Badia rotates the cannons as fast as she can, aiming them towards where the leviathan will likely surface. When she sees the glowing eyes, she shouts, "BANGOOOO!" and opens fire!
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Emi-na decides to keep the scroll in reserve, considering that she didn't know its true effects yet. She hated the thought of the magic running out before the end of the fight, or the titan figuring out a counter to it mid-battle. Besides, there was a sandy beach. Unlike the wizard Donny, she was in her element.
With a grandiose motion raising her arms up, Emi-na draws the sand up into a massive bulwark to hold the incoming titan at bay and to protect the cannons.
Randy touches the earth and commands Gas, Oil, and Coal to gather around the leviathan. He hoped it would be ignited by the cannon fire.
Badia puts the bang into her ‘bangoo’ with her first shot. A blinding white-yellow beam carves into the creature, blasting several chunks of metal and a gooey substance from the shoulder!
Emi sees Badia’s amazing attack, so she tries a different tactic: defend the orcish huntress firing the cannon!
Randy’s magic is not quite strong enough to strike oil or the titan.
The creature fires a beam of black light. It cuts through the air, filling the void with a deafening thunderclap!—it parts the sea!—it fuses Emi’s defensive wall into glass! The glass bubbles, warps, refracts the beam, and shatters! Shards fly… then a wave washes over the broken glass. Water fills the steamy void. Badia and the cannons are unharmed.
The titan tromps closer, charging its next attack as our casters and Badia’s cannon recharge. Our heroines get a better look at the metal beast! Its body is made of ships—the tech wizard’s ship with the T logo, a warship, a cruise ship said to have been a floating castle. The broken ships are fused together by conjoined assassin droids and other machines, and among the twisted metal, tendrils fine as poison ivy and thick as oak trunks worm through the titan’s metallic “skin.”
"Keep attacking! Give it all you've got!" exhorts Badia as she fires again.
Collecting metal swirls above Randy's head. He launches himself to be injected into the titan's lung.
As Randy conjures ore from the stone, the creature turns to face him.
XIII sees this and dashes to shield Randy, but—
All she can do is watch in awe as the earth mage launches himself!
“So unpredictable… I can never fully simulate the human mind,” says the fembot in a tone programmed to denote awe.
Seeing the sheer destructive force of the titan unleashed against her sand barrier, Emi-na's resolve falters. She hastily tries to restore the barrier, launch an attack, or something, but her magic doesn't work as well on glass as it does sand.
Badia again blasts the creature with a white-hot beam, striking the chest! She’s pretty sure a few of the pieces flying off are those spidery droids—and are those human bodies?!
Randy uses earth magic to draw pure ore from the natural stone! He then fuses the metal to himself and speeds toward his target like a human bullet!
In his flight, he can see that the spidery droids are now attached to the titan’s body like human-sized barnacles! The broken hulls of wrecked ships clothe the titan—a crude suit of armor over a walking fungus bigger than a whale on stilts!
Another detail Randy glimpses before he plunges through the creature’s “breastplate” is a “necklace” made of withered human corpses!
Emi sends more sand from the beach to fuse with the shattered wall. Her magic is just strong enough to make a wall that might dilute the titan’s attack!
The titan turned to Randy to blast him from the sky, but Randy was too quick! Unable to strike the technicolor human cannonball, the titan turns to the next target.
The beam shatters Emi’s wall, blasts the center cannon to smithereens, and leaves a hot mess where Badia once stood! (XIII checks the skies, hoping the Leaper got away unscathed.)
___________ . . . .XXXXX . . . . ______________
Causeway \____XXXXX____/ Sandy Beach
. . . . . . . . . . .U . XXXXX . U. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
__________________________________________
• Randy embedded in Titan’s Chest
• Badia on Left or Right Cannon?
• Emi on Sandy Beach
Though Randy’s attack is incredibly brave, the titan is not a creature anyone wants to get close to. Its tendrils wrap Randy up, seemingly intent on having him join the other bodies attached to its neck!
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The inside is soft Fungus! Use the wound I created to scour the insides with ripping sand! Begs Randy of Emi.
XIII’s jaw drops as Randy’s risky behavior proves highly effective! He has exposed a soft target—a fleshy fungal heart!
“According to my calculations, this outcome is highly improbable!”
The beam hits Badia nearly full blast. She cries out in pain as patches of her flesh are burned away, but she yet stands. The huntress staggers over to the right cannon and fires it at the Titan, determined to take the monster down before it takes her down!
The damage both to her allies and to the titan shakes Emi-na out of her panic. The monstrosity has been drawn in close enough, she hopes, that whatever the magic in the scroll does it will be enough.
She unleashes the copper scroll with a scream.
The beam hurts like hell, but Badia fires back, blasting a hole clean through the belly of the beast. The hulls of broken ships snap from the sheer weight of the upper body, and grotesque tendrils writhe and grasp desperately.
The creature falls, splashing into the shallow waters at the shore. Broken pieces of ship remain semi upright like markers in a giants’ graveyard, but Randy is no among the dead here. He swept onto the beach in the giant waves, along with a few withered corpses.
XIII observes the corpses. “These are among the most brilliant minds of the Southtopian province.” She names a writer, a governor and a psychologist that non of you have ever actually heard of. When she points out the one seemingly female corpse and the bearded skeleton next to her, she refers to them as Dr. and Dr. Mayne. “It is for the best Raptor-Woman did not see her parents like—yaaah!”
The fembot shrieks when Emi screams! She gets swept in a swirl of copper sand!
♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
The copper magic does for Emi as it did for the enemy: fused life to life. But there is an additional catalyst Emi was unaware of: the lives are fused to technology as well.
Emi finds herself enveloped within a very large body made of sand. Naja feels like a goddess in her thirteen-foot-tall humanoid form. As for XIII, she tells Naja, You are a shield.
There is a rumble under the ground. A lid to the sewers bursts into the sky.
And you all hear a woman’s baritone eloquently speaking your preferred language:
The most powerful minds of your kind have weaknesses that are easily exploited. You are not intellectuals, yet you have spirit. Spirit I shall take pleasure in crushing.
Cobblestones crumble. A figure rises to the height of Naja’s sand-goddess form—it is worming tendrils, bulbous fungi and periscopic eyes large as a whale’s! They are under a glass dome and copper hull. Spidery tendrils allow the creature to move quickly, but fleeing would do you no good…
Randy is altered into a hyper feminine form. The transformation caused a brutal realigning of bone and muscle. The Misfit lashes out with a lance of granite bursting up into the mother brain.
Badia dodges away before the enemy can create a ceiling of whirling tendrils above her to stymie her leaping. ”You may be smart, big brain, but you look dumb! Now, taste froggy justice!” she shouts as she bounces off a cannon, aiming it up at the glass dome and leaping away as it fires!
The combined form rises up out of the sandy beach like a leviathan clawing its way out of the depths. Naja's humanoid form is proudly at the front, her two arms ending in powerful pincers. The rest of the sand body becomes armored like a massive scorpion, with a tail curling back and over its body ending in a vicious barb.
Within the sand form, Emi-na reels underneath the Mother Brain's attack. She remembers her lessons of magic, taught in secret because she wasn't meant to learn such powers as they were only reserved for those of the priest caste. She wasn't, so she was unworthy, un--
She shakes her head out of that bitter remnant of doubt. She directs the giant pincers to take hold of the Mother to let the sting strike at her weak spots.
The Mother Brain has no trouble exploiting Randy’s weakness. She takes great pleasure in this mind! You are a man of many vices? Let me get you in touch with your feminine side!
But the brain learns the hard way that Randy’s made a living off of exploitation. He takes advantage of the beast’s unprotected underbelly!
Badia gets out from under what may be an illusion or may be real! She sees the glass dome and correctly assumes it will not shatter easily—but the cannon’s beam is nearly as powerful as the titan’s beam was—it warps the dome concave! The dome is pressing against the brain and beginning to crack!
Emi wills Naja’s form to morph into a scorpion shape. Her pinchers get a crushing grip on the brain.
XIII feels her thoughts. I agree, Emi. Randy has struck where armor does not cover. Badia found a weapon that weakens the protective dome. The brain exploits your weakness—you do the same to her!
The Mother Brain sends her thoughts to all of you: So you found my one and only flaw. Lightning does not strike twice! I’m invincible!
The Mother Brain bends her copper hull inward by sheer will. No stone lance can penetrate her again! Her tentacles strike the ground—cracks form—the two remaining cannons are swallowed into the earth!
(For someone who has only one flaw, she seems to be protecting herself against two of them!)
Emi holds fast to herself and refuses to give the Mother Brain an opening. All the while, she wracks her own mind, trying to identify a weakness that the brain may have.
"Ah! The copper domes of Imhotopia's great cities can turn away the strongest spear, but the grains of sand find their way into everything!" She sends a blast of sand at the Mother Brain, dispersed and seeking, working their way around and inside the brain's hull.
"Argh!" Badia is too slow to jump away from the cracks that form in the earth. She is caught in the rift that forms, the rocky walls and cannons battering her as she plummets into the depths. The collapse nearly knocks her out, but the half-orc summons the last of her strength as she pushes off the falling cannons, using them as stepping stones to hop, skip, and jump back to the surface. Eat your heart out, Legolas!
With a ragged cry of "Bangoo!", Badia launches herself at the Big Brain. Though she may die trying, she swings her axe at the glass dome, bouncing around in a circle as she tries to hack though it!
Still reeling from the last attack, Randy can feel his back hurt by the weight of his now enormous breasts. Still, His large hips give him a lower center of gravity. His dodges are more nimble now.
Randy puts his hand to the ground. His magic calls a geyser of molten lava to erupt. The glowing liquids rock spews all over the Brain's protective copper shield turning it into a copper skillet. "Brain flambé anyone?"
Emi resists and fills the dome with sand! Mother Brain responds, Such insolence! Perhaps you envy my hourglass figure! The dome becomes an hourglass. It’ll take an hour to get sand in the brain now.
Unless of course the dome gets smashed to bits by a rampaging orc! Badia sees the cannons falling straight to hell, and after leaping from falling brick to falling brick in a way that no elf believably could, Badia’s axe shatters the brain dome and starts hacking into actual brain!
Oh yeah, well…
Randy resists the brain’s attack, then turns her defensive tactic well to his advantage! The already scrambled Mother Brain is fried as well! Delirious and desperate, the brain uses its strongest attack!
…you can only beat me—in your dreams!
You are Badia the Sofa Jumper! You are the size of an eight-year-old human girl, clad in a kilt, white blouse, and black sandals with socks. You are jumping on a sofa in front of a box that depicts the image of a gray-skinned man promising to send his gray-skinned wife to the moon.
Your mother—or rather, Mother Brain dressed as a six-and-a-half-foot-tall green-skinned woman sporting curlers in a brain three times the diameter of her orcish head—puts one hand on the hip of her studded leather apron, and with the other, waggles her +2 Rolling Pin of the Unleavened Helldough at you. “Stop it! Stop that this instant, young lady! You’ll end up just like your human father!”
Your human father is a beardless dwarf with a silly mustache. You’ve never seen this person in your life, but when he says, “It’s a-meeeee, Daddy-o!” you momentarily take his word for it. He is wearing a green jumpsuit with a frog head as a hood. He says, “C’mon, let’s a-go!”
He leads you to jump from sofa to refrigerator top to rooftop to cloud to the moon (on which a gray-skinned couple picnics happily) to a series of platforms floating in outer space. There you are attacked by a fire-breathing brain with a spiky turtle shell that renders it jump-on proof.
Your father proves this by jumping on the brain and immediately impaling himself on a spike.
Across the platform is your axe, which is conveniently placed next to a rusty chain which you somehow know is the only thing holding up this structure.
You are back in Imhotopia. You are at a table, ready to feast.
The waiter opens a can of peanut brittle. Poisonous snakes lash at your face! You’re immune, but it’s still very very scary!
“Ssssssnnnnake Surprizzzzze!” the waiter announces, “And for dessert, Chilled Monkey Brain!”
The Velvet Ape busts through the wall, killing several Imhotopian diners as falling bricks and rafters bash their heads in. You can only see him from the neck up, until his hands—which suddenly seem bigger than YOU!—rip the ceiling open!
The ape’s head is that of Mother Brain, but with a huge simian mouth.
“I scream for dessert!”
You find yourself ON the long table now. The dead diners appear as giants—or is it you that is suddenly a few inches tall? Mother Brain sits at the table—she is wearing a black tuxedo and in each of her ape hands, she is gripping a fork.
Forks stab at you! You run! Eventually the ape’s foot grabs you like a hand and flings you into her mouth.
You stand there on her tongue, and her uvula taunts you, “You… dummy.”
That’s all she’s got. The uvula twists into a confused expression as it tries in vain to come up with a wittier put-down.
You find yourself in an old banged up horseless steam-carriage. A masculine woman clad in a technicolor dreamcoat, matching hat, and dark goggles sits at the control panel.
“It’s one hundred six miles to Shítopia. We’ve got half a tank of water. It’s dark. And we’re wearing sunglasses.”
Your line is ‘hit it.’ You realize this after you don’t say it.
“BOOOOOOOOOO!” says the studio audience.
They throw tomatoes. One hits your costar, who says, “What’s your problem? I didn’t blow my line,” only the word line comes out more like AAAAAAAAAAAH!! as the acidic juices burn though the dreamcoat, and all of his skin. A still screaming skeleton collapses to the floor, smoldering.
You RUN.
You dodge acidic vegetables as best you can. A pie fight busts out as you run though a cafeteria. Pie plates decapitate pie-fighters. The cherry-bomb-on-top blasts several people to flaming pieces. There’s so much blood you’re almost certain to slip on it!
You eventually get onto the highway, and use your thumb and/or leg to stop a steam truck. You get in, and the driver calls herself Large Marge but once she accelerates to 106 MPH, you realize it’s Mother Brain at the wheel.
Change the radio station to one you like! Take the wheel! Fight for control of the truck—the dream—your mind!!!
She giggles as she hops around after her father. Her laughter dies as he impales himself. ”No! Papa! Papa! Papa, can you hear meeee? Papa, can you see meee? Papa, can you find me in the night?”
All is sobbing and showtunes, her nearby axe all but forgotten...
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Emi-na's heart sinks as she sees that she really hasn't escaped Imhotopia after all. She sulks at the table, waiting on her soon-to-be-husband and the wedding feast.
She can't bring herself to look at him, and instead focuses on the platters of food bring brought out. She doesn't really want to eat at this point, but rules were rules. She offers the servant a fake smile as they bring out a can -- so strange, why would it be a can? -- and twists off the top.
She shrieks as serpents shoot out, hissing and biting. She feels fangs sink into her skin. She pushes them away, determined to do this herself rather than call out to her betrothed. She didn't want him thinking she owed him anything. Maybe if they scarred her face he wouldn't want to marry her anymore.
"For dessert, Chilled Monkey Brain!"
The palace crumbles, crushing the other dinner guests. She finds herself strangely okay with that, but the massive ape that comes crashing in terrifies her beyond rational thought. She gets up on the table and runs away. Giant four-pronged spears jab down at her as she runs back and forth, trying to escape the brain-headed ape.
She screams again, running this way and that as the forks come slamming down around her. Sometimes she had thought that death was preferable to getting married, but now as oblivion approached she found herself terrified of dying. Part of her wanted to relent, to call out to him for salvation, but the rest of her wanted to keep fighting. To live or die on her own terms.
It was touch-and-go.
The ape's giant foot grabs her and tosses her into its mouth, and her last chance to call out to him was about to pass.
"You... dummy."
That... was odd. That wasn't an Imhotopian insult. It was childish, simple, and broke the spell, but only barely.
Ragged and raw, she spits her last strength at the Mother Brain.
"You will not have me!" she rasps.
For the first time in her bizarre adventure, Emi feels the pain of battle! This does not break her as the brain had hoped! Emi awakens with a newfound boldness—she blasts sand right between the monster’s eyes, into its exposed frontal lobe!
Naja slithers onto Emi’s shoulder. She is unharmed from her experience as a “shield.”
Badia is broken by her nightmare, crying out to her fictional father—or perhaps her real dad! She struggles to escape, as Randy also has strange visions to overcome…
…but between Emi’s blast, and Badia and Randy battling the brain from within their respective dreams, the Bad-Ass Mother Brain is overwhelmed, overpowered, and just plain over!
C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S ! !
You all come out of your dreams smashing and magicking the Mother Brain until telepathic waves emit the monster’s last seven words: a barely-intelligible empty threat, “duh” and “ow.”
A grotesque splash of brain matter confirms that enemy is defeated! If you need to lie down for a minute or ten…
Word that the king will recover is brushed off as a thing that’s nice to know, but what matters most to the people whose butts were saved from whatever the f#$% just happened is YOU… our heroines!
The people cheer as you rise from the smoldering ruins of the broken cobblestone square. Sure you’re battered and covered in brain gunk, and there’s a single tear rolling down Badia’s cheek that the people are pretending not to notice, but still… you just defeated the queen of the monsters—feared by man and beast alike—and lived to tell the tale!
What do you mean you never heard of her until she just showed up? Well… of course you didn’t. She’s a giant brain. She made people forget she was ever even—
Oh, hell. Let the investigators, historians and armchair quarterbacks piece it all together. The point is you did your good deed, and got a little taste of fame, fortune and fandom.
So now what? You can say your goodbyes, head off into the sunset, write your own happy ending, or stick around and find out who might’ve taken notice of your amazing prowess and heroics…!
Badia quickly recovers from the trauma of the nightmare, grinning like a maniac. "We did it! We won! We are the champions, my friends! Cause we kept on fighting till the end!"
Hearing the pounding sound, the curious half-orc moves to open the sewer lid...
"Hey XII." says Randy with a shrug. "If you ever get tired of bein' a cop...I have a few positions that you could fill."
You easily pry open the lid. (With your mighty orcish arms, you actually can’t even tell it was stuck.)
A frog-woman wearing a blue headband identical to your red headband says, “Thank you.” She zips up with a deft motion one might classify as ninja-like. And she’s definitely a mutant frog and most certainly NOT a teenager. More like a middle-aged mutant ninja frog.
“Oh! You have my old headband! Flo was just telling me about you, and we started talking and the two of us eventually figured out the brain monster’s whole weird convoluted plot. I was gonna warn you, but it was pizza time, and…” She looks around at the mess. “It looks like you got everything under control anyway.”
Three other green women pop up from the sewers and introduce themselves. The one in the yellow headband is Carmella Chameleon. (At first all you see is her yellow headband before the rest of her fades into view.)
In the purple headband is Shelly “Shocks.” She’s the team’s mechanic-slash-IT-guru and is really not much of a ninja—“A ninja turtle? Not to bust my own base species, but that’s almost as implausible as a samurai snail!” Shelly snort-laughs at her own joke.
Finally, in the orange headband is Coily Q. Bertha, a snake-woman—but Isotta promises you she is very trustworthy.
XIII giggles, “Oh, you humorous and irrational humans and the illogical things you say! I cannot keep up! I was just deputized today! I told the marshal how extremely brave you were, hurling yourself through the titan’s chest embedded in a metal projectile.
“And he said—” The fembot mimics the marshal’s voice perfectly: “IF HE LIKES PENETRATING BAD GUYS SO MUCH, HOW ABOUT WE HIRE RANDY AS AN UNDERCOVER AGENT?”
In her own voice, she goes on, “Semantical confusion between infiltration and penetration aside, I find it alarming that the marshal is willing to violate several rules on your behalf. Crimes you have committed warrant consequences which include barring you from employment as an officer of the law, teacher or scoutmaster, and the cumulative penalties for your felonies, if enforced, would mandate a minimum sentencing of 850 years, three consecutive life sentences and two consecutive death sentences.
“Yet because of a piece of candy, your slate is clean. Anyway, I came to make you an offer. Please consider a future in justice.”
Before you can answer, XIII presents you with a badge.
Emi-na pulls herself out of the wreckage, clutching at a small wound at her side. She looks around, bewildered, amazed that they still live. Naja hisses, and she smiles. "Quite right."
* * *
"Hello, Other Jeff," she says as the sand mage approaches. She inclines her head toward the woman she presumes is her wife. "Thank you for the scrolls. They were most useful."
She turns her face toward the water, letting the breeze blow her hair back. Somewhere across those seas was the land she was supposed to go. She had cursed her luck when she was blown off course and forced to land here in Southtopia. But perhaps she didn't feel so bad about it now.
"You mean that I can kill people all Legal like?" Randy snatches up the badge and pins it to his Technicolor Dreamcoat. "Rough frontier justice sounds hot."
O.J. introduces Emi to his wife, Bonnie.
“So you’re the one that taught an old mage a new trick. Pleasure to meet you dear!”
O.J. turns the sand beneath him a pale pink. “Your words were enough to help me find a way, Miss Amun. This is the color of the Utopian beach sand, as far as I remember. I cannot create teal sand with this method, but it is a start.
“If Utopia is where you want to go, Brandt can arrange a trip. However, my wife would like to give you a parting gift… or just a gift, if you decide to stay.”
Bonnie holds up a familiar hourglass. She turns to Naja.
“You are a curious creature. My husband witnessed your transformation. Perhaps you saw mine earlier—I was among the cheerleader squad this morning. However, I have been thinking about whether I truly want to spend my days accompanying those silly-hearts when I should be at my husband’s side.
“If I am to give this away, perhaps this hourglass would do you some good Naja. For eighteen hours a day, you can appear as a past form. Whatever you had become with the aid of the scrolls, you can have the appearance again.
“Would you want this ability?”
XIII says, “That is a Junior Police Officer’s badge. I am on Public Relations duty. And you are also confused about infiltration.”
The fembot struggles to simulate how she is supposed to feel.
“I think the marshal may agree with your methods. Please report to him Monday morning for a briefing.” She then hands Randy a bag of Skittles. “You may have this as well. The marshal does not care for this candy, despite the label clearly advertising that it tastes similar to a rainbow of flavor.”
She then wills a cruiser to self drive to her. It spins 540 degrees and halts to a stop inches from you both. XIII gets behind the wheel.
The marshal calls to her, “DON’T DRIVE OFF WITHOUT YOUR NEW PARTNER!”
“I work alone.” She puts on a pair of sunglasses. “Until Monday.” She probably winks. You can’t tell because of the sunglasses.
“DON’T DRIVE OFF WITHOUT ME EITHER!” the marshal shouts to the steam-cruiser speeding toward the horizon.
He turns to Randy. “NUTS.”