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“This may be worse than when he found that bedazzler,” said Julie, looking at her new present with a critical eye. The cat face on the coffee cup looked back at her with a grin, one eye at least an inch lower than the other. No one could claim Texas was an artist. Least of all Texas.
Mike looked at his own new cup. ‘Hot Grandpa!!!!’, written in flames, blazed back at him.
He took a sip of his coffee.
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It had all started when a group of Kanebots attacked a settlement just north of Lake Erie. The Burners had rushed out, only to be met with at least 10 medium sized bots tearing through the local buildings. They were easy enough to take down, but not before one errant blast had put Stronghorn through a collapsed wall.
Not too bad.
What was bad, was the fact that the collapsed wall, forgotten by the people around it, led to an abandoned craft store. The bane of all Burners existence (you know, besides Kane), as it soon turned out.
“Texas! Are you okay?”
“Tex!?”
“Whoa, whoa, take it easy, Texas is fine,” he answered. Stronghorn was made for blows like that. His dashboard was fritzing out, the icons of the other Burners fading in and out. He looked out of his window to see where exactly he had ended up, but all the dust was clouding up the outside.
“We took out the last bot, but it looks like you fell a bit. We’re going to try and get in after you, but you need to check if there’s an easier way out first,” Chuck put in, his avatar frowning. Texas could hear him doing some more nerd stuff.
“Yeah, yeah, okay, ram my way out, got it.”
“No, just look for now! We don’t know about the infrastru-.”
The last line was lost on Texas as he leapt out of Stronghorn’s window. In the crash, he had knocked over 3 aisles, so he could safely assume he was an a store of some sort. As he stepped forward, his feet crunched on a paper brochure which happily read “MEL’S ART SUPPLIES”, with a picture of a zebra in a tutu. He grabbed the brochure from under his foot and began leafing through its pages.
He shut the brochure and looked back around the store.
“Boo yeah.”
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“Yeah, Texas knows all about decoration now.” He waved a magazine with a picture of a living room on it. The color scheme was all lavender. “Though Texas made it better, of course. I call it Kung-feng-shui....fu.”
“Uh,” stated Mike.
“Um,” agreed Dutch.
The ‘Lounge’ as it was now called (judging by the horrible blocky orange banner by the door), was a study in color. A turquoise loveseat sat opposite to an off pink table, which held some terrible wooden contraption as a centerpiece. A junkyard light fixture shaped like a dolphin hung sadly in the corner giving off a blue tinted light. There were three beanbag chairs which looked to have been soaked in dirty water laid across from the loveseat. There were fake trees propped up next to the wall, where they started to sway to the side.
“No need to thank me. Texas knows you can’t do better.”
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“MAN, NO, WHAT ARE YOU DOIN’ TO MY SHIRTS?!” yelled Dutch. He could only stare in dismay at his balled up shirts, tied together by rubber bands.
Texas sat by the table holding different colored bottles of dye. He had already poured some of the dye onto the shirts.
“Calm down there, hotstuff, Daddy Texas is fixing your junk for you.”
“How is this fixing anything?!”
Texas answered that by squirting a large amount of purple dye onto another shirt. Dutch wheezed in dismay, clenching his fists and trying to keep calm.
“Texas, you need to give me back my shirts. Right. Now.” Nice and calm, nice and calm, nice and calm.
“Don’t worry, Dutch, you’ll get your shirts back. And hey! Good news. Texas already took care of your pants for you!.”
RAGE AND FURY.
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“And this was when Texas took out the giant alligator bot that was trying to eat the highway.” Texas punctuated the ‘highway’ by placing a sticker of a car and a rainbow next to the picture. All around him were scraps of cut paper and glue bottles. On the table was a large book that he had filled with pictures. No one was entirely sure where he got the pictures.
He turned the page and uncapped a glue stick. Picking up another photo, which he had lovingly cut into the shape of a star, he glued to the back and placed it onto the next page of the book.
“And this was that time Chuck ate all those jalapeno candies and horked all over the waitress!” He placed a sticker of a cake right on top of the picture, in which Chuck looked majorly embarrassed as the waitress looked majorly disgusted by the mess all over her dress. What a good dinner that had been.
Chuck, sitting across the table from him working on code, put his head in his hands.
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“Do you want the clown or the dinosaur? Yeah, Texas agrees. Dinosaurs are much better than clowns! Oh, oh! What if,” he lowered his voice, leaning in towards Roth, “what if, we put the clown on top of the dinosaur. Like he’s riding the dinosaur! Yeah, I know, good idea.”
Roth sparked as Texas attached another two magnets to his frame.
“I know, I know, I’m really good at this. Texas gets that. A lot.” He turned back to the magnet maker, pushing down the lever to get a perfectly good cut of a velociraptor.
Man he was good.
Roth must have agreed, because he started to make a gurgling sound that Texas had never heard before.
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“Guys, stay sharp!” Mike yelled, reaching for the skull.
The three Kane bots started to circle the group of Burners, aiming their lasers towards them. Each of the Burners pulled out their own weapons, waiting for one of the bots to make a move. Mike pulled the skull piece out of his jacket and it whirred to life, revealing the zippo staff.
As well as instantly exploding out a cloud of rainbow glitter.
“Oh. Yeah, Texas almost forgot. Your stick thingy needed more pizazz. Or as Texas likes to put it: Tezazzle!”
Luckily, the glitter seemed to throw off the bots enough to allow the team to shoot them out.
Unluckily, glitter doesn’t get out of clothing that easily. Or ever.
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“Texas?” asked Julie, peaking her head into the new...Lounge Room.
“Yeah?”
“Is that....” she licked her lips, trying to think if this was even worth saying. What the hell. “Is that a laserbeam shooting out a dragon holding nunchucks while also shooting lasers out of its eyes?”
Texas looked up from his knitting, stopping on a pearl.
“Well, yeah, duh. What else would it be?”
He kept right on knitting.