With Em rifling idly through a brochure and the most pressing questions of the moment answered, Hammond was out of things to do. He was back to just spinning his fork again, he supposed. How boring... At least he'd finally gotten good at something other than killing people which was more than he could say about some other mercenaries.
"Hey, what's the pinging noise?" Em asked.
He hadn't even noticed it before, but now that she mentioned it that pinging noise was really annoying.
"Nothing to worry about, little one," came Gron's reply, "We'll be at the docks soon."
"Alright then." Guess Em was okay with that. Hammond was okay with it too. He actually thought it might be nice to remain ignorant if some people were attempting to kill him, just this once. To drown out the pinging noise Gron turned the radio on, though it did little. If anything it just made the pinging more obvious. This was going to be a long journey indeed...
[hr]
After a couple of hours, which was far too long for Hammond to have ever thought 'soon' could possibly have meant it, they arrived at the docks and he jumped out of the car. Ari and the woman clad in white were already out of the truck, but Gron and Em got out with a touch less urgency, leaving Hammond to wonder why there were people waiting to greet them. There were 6 of them, dressed in huge cloaks that concealed all but the bottom halves of their masked faces and were almost definitely armed with sharp weapons. Honestly, they were hardly the welcoming committee he was hoping for. Even though, Hammond thought he should draw people's attention to them.
"Oi, Gron, who're these guys?"
The giant of a man flicked his head in their direction and then motioned to Hammond's scythes, giving nothing in reply. He went to the boot of the armoured car they had been travelling in and popped it open to reveal a warhammer that was as large as Gron himself was. Only once he was armed did he utter the phrase "Jabberwock thieves."
"Wait, what's a Jabberwock... and why are they stealing it from us?" Em questioned this, but Hammond was equally clueless. Jabberwock was... er, the company that building they destroyed belonged to, right? Or was it something else entirely? Considering he hadn't even been able to remember to eat at regular intervals it was a wonder he could hold on to such information at all. Whatever, this was getting silly now. He shrugged, "And here I was looking forward to a leisurely boat ride. Ah well. Let's get this over with."
He strode forwards, spinning his scythes to illustrate no point whatsoever, and smashed the metaphorical ice between the two groups with a question, "Who the fuck're you guys and what the fuck're you doing here?"
One of them tilted its head slightly at him and grinned widely, looking almost as though it was incredibly pleased Hammond had began with conversation, and deigned to respond in kind. "Who the fuck're we? Who the fuck're you?" The voice was digitised, obviously not the sort that should be coming from a normal person.
"We the fuck're who are asking the questions here. That's who the fuck we are. Now how about some answers for my questions?"
"And why the hell should we? We don't know you, we certainly aren't allies. And you're all armed!"
Em took the opportunity to run back towards the car, citing that she had dropped her shoes... Hammond sort of ignored that particular comment, since it didn't seem to make anyone else confused. Ari took the opportunity to leap into the conversation. "Alright. Say we lowered our weapons, ignored each other and tried to carry on our way, would there be a problem between us?"
For a moment the figure didn't respond, but then did so with an uncharacteristically empathetic nod and "Uh huh!" That didn't even sound like it did a second ago and, now that he thought about it, sounded suspiciously like Em... Ari continued to attempt to diffuse the situation, regardless of how weird that was. She didn't even seem to notice the change.
"What problem would that be then?"
"You killed us before. How can be sure you won't kill us again?" The other cloaked figures weren't even moving. Unnerving...
"Because we had a job to guard a thing. Now we don't. We're just trying to go somewhere. If you're so concerned about us killing you then move away to where we can't. We aren't going to go out of our way to do it."
It stopped again for another moment, apparently taking Ari's words into consideration, before appearing inches from Ari and staring right into her eyes. It was no longer wearing its hood either, revealing that it was... Ari.
"I..wha...the...how...?" Ari started to back away, obviously disturbed from being stared at by a precise mirror image. It was fairly easy to tell them apart as long as Hammond could keep track of the real one's movements, which wasn't really all that hard right now.
"So which is it; doppelgangers or illusions? Neither would surprise me."
Ari ignored Hammond's comment, instead shooting off a death stare at Ari. "We don't appreciate it when armed people threaten us, especially when they've already killed us several times."
Ari then shot back at Ari. "We haven't threatened you at all! Wait, several times? We've only ever seen you once." Okay, this seemed like it may go on for a while yet, and that would make things confusing. Plus, if the enemy was going to be using there own appearances against them they might as well kill as many as possible first.
With that in mind Hammond pulled his heat-vision goggles over his eyes and, in a single movement, sliced cleanly from Ari's shoulder to her stomach.
"What the hell are you doing!?" It was impossible to overstate exactly how shocked she looked right now, though the fact that she wasn't completely and utterly dead already made it obvious that he hadn't gotten messed up anywhere and managed to kill the real Ari. That was good, he supposed, but it would be better if the fake was de-
Before he finished that particular thought, Gron delivered the final blow. By which I mean he reduced the fake into chunky, bloody paste beneath his ridiculously proportioned warhammer. It was... effective. Really effective.
