Diamond Dogs Chapter 9

"And when he scratched himself with one of the thorns, in comes the Blue Fairy! Whoop-De-Doo!" I chuckled a little at Eraqus' over the top performance exaggerating the events as the elevator door opened to a friendly(?) face adorned with big round glasses and a big Sci-Fi helmet. His labcoat adorned with various futuristic tools I didn't even know could and certainly have helped develop the many innovations he masterminded, yet I paid no attention to him, prefering to hear Eraqus' story to the end. "We bailed on Adam, and we never saw the little twerp again!"

"Guess you're the fellas sent to deliver the device?" He glanced down towards us and let out a light chuckle as he took the Console Screen off of the belt. "Knew you'd be a bit young but... god, to think I'd get this puppy back from a bunch of kids around Wilbur's age."

"Wilbur, that's your kid, right?" The man nodded and rotated the screen for a glance at the attachment slots. "Care to explain what this thing's for?"

"Space Exploration." The man, Cornelius, started to fiddle with the gizmo. "Can easily manifest a digital spacesuit in the physical space, more specifically, onto a person's body."

"Like Tokusatsu?" the fact that Eraqus knew a term like that made me smile, "You know, 'Morphin Time', 'Beetle Blast', 'Trooper Transform' and all that."

"The fact that you watched these shows as a youth doesn't change the fact that your little comment has nothing to do with anything, right?" Yen-Sid was about Sixteen, pushing seventeen so he was clearly the designated driver in this operation.

"You can blame Taaffite's access to Netflix for that." I flashed an ear-to-ear grin in awkward compliance to the brainiac in front of me. "Gotta show my thanks to Tony Oliver for showing he and his friends care for the children of the world."

"Hear North Montana's finally getting it up in their neck of the woods." Joked the Inventor Extraordinare, fiddling with the two blades in his hands. "Hockeyheads really deserve it up there."

"I'm surprised we still have Netflix" I dunno, maybe they've adapted with the times over the next two decades, after all, it did start out as a DVD rental service. "So, you think you know what kind of spacesuit's packed in this thing."

"Well, this being the original template, this is a modular system with variable weapons system." This word left me feeling dirty, and apparently so did Eraqus and Yen-Sid. Xehanort, well, he's a bit hard to read. "Never know what we could find there."

"I can relate to that sentiment" Eraqus, being from a far-off world, clearly wasn't wrong with that allusion. "But still, Isn't it strange that you're working on what's pretty much the space WMD equivalent of a swiss army knife?"

"Well, life takes many turns." Cornelius sounded stiff, like he was being strung along by an outside force. "Hence the reason we have some comrades at SOLDIER test out the duplicates I've manufactured."

I recoiled in shock, Bonnie doing the same. Shinra's own SOLDIER division were involved in Robinson Industries? How is this even possible?! "Come on out, gentlemen."

One by one, I saw these armored soldiers step forward with a range of firearms. The one thing to all of them is that their suits of armor were unique to each SOLDIER. The leader clad in bright white donned a golden ring over his shoulders, the blue one had a baby blue plate on the midsection and the outline of a heart on the bottom of the vizor, the one in black sported lightning-bolt stripes in certain areas, the one in a dark salmon red had an actual buster sword strapped to his back, and the troop in teal had an arm-mounted laser cannon with the word 'BORK' written on it. There were other soldiers on hand, but these were the ones I noticed right away.

"Now, you know the rules, no gunfire til the enemy's in their patented armor, and no one should even dare damaging my equipment." Cornelius blathered to the troops as if they were their commander. "Got it memorized?"

"YESSIR!" the troops march in step, closing in on me. They wanted to gang up on me, a small army of Soldiers (#NoPunIntended) against a helpless young girl. How unfair was that?