Rathien is fast. Every bit as fast as Salem knows he is. He's going to die, here and now, and he knows it. He knows he has nobody to blame but himself. And maybe Thienal, but that's taking the easy way out. Each of Rathien's words hits home, like a dagger in its own right. Guilt, regret, loss... these feelings are not unfamiliar, but somehow this is different. This time, Rathien's words strike a place closer to home, a place buried so deep he's nearly forgotten it's there.
But it is there. And it hurts.
What comes out of his mouth, however, is "You nutjob! Let me... Oof!" He finds himself flat on his back, Rathien astride him. This, also, is not unfamiliar. He winces as he hears his Shredder land in the dirt beside him. He looks up into Rathien's eyes, for just a moment, feeling a mixture of anger and confusion and, somehow, relief, and a whole lot of regret and, of course, the rush. The familiar, heart-pounding, nonsensically giddy glee he feels at being in a tight spot, a dangerous situation, staring death in the face.
Al's right. He should probably start seeing someone about that.
He doesn't give Rathien time to think. With his knees pointed to the sky, the bottoms of his boots face the ground. With a single thought-speak command, he activates them, and their embedded antigravity lifts propel his feet skyward with enough force to flip his own weight end over end.
"What... in the world was that? Why, Jeffrey Barnes, this hunk of junk seems to think you're a psychic of some kind." The old-radio voice from the hovering black thing laughs. It's a genuine, amicable sort of laugh. "I am a machine, I suppose, if you're into labels, as it were. Maybe I'm even..." there's a dramatic pause, "Two machines." It laughs again. "But no, I'm just one machine sitting inside of a bigger machine. My name is Al. You may call the floating black hunk of junk the Little Brown Punum. Or... whatever you want, I suppose. It's certainly not particular."
"Why hello there!" says the voice, sounding excited, to the other man that approaches. "Jeffrey Barnes and I were just getting to know each other!" It pauses. "It works by magic! You can't see it, but I'm doing jazz hands." The voice drops to a whisper. "Magic!"
"But no, not really. It's complicated. Uhhmm..." the voice wavers, seeming to think. "The surface of this thing is capable of channeling energy very precisely. Some kinds of energy more efficiently than others. Inside is all sorts of stuff for generating, storing, releasing and even changing the form of energy, all through the kind of boring technical mumbo-jumbo that I can never stay awake long enough to hear about. There are also several pairs of underpants that I swear I told him to pick up." The voice sighs. "But that's unrelated. Anyway, Jeffrey Barnes, a moment ago, it was happily nomming some of the heat from your finger. And a bit of the breeze moving across the surface. And a bit of the starlight shining down on it. And some of the emotional and spiritual energy of this place. And a bit of the time passing around it. And you saw what it could do when that process is reversed. It gave off a fair bit of light earlier. It's still giving off a little bit of... well, of gravity energy, in essence. Just enough to negate its own weight. And sound energy. Which has less to do with the energy channeling of the surface and more to do with its limited flexibility, since sound isn't energy in its own right, its just our interpretation of a particular type of motion, so when the surface vibrates and... Uhhmm..."
The voice seems to reconsider its ramblings. "It's complicated."
