Scene #8307: The Eggverse Layer 1

Owner	Pose
Kuroto Dan	A new advertisement for the up and coming joint collaboration game that has been talked about for weeks eventually produces something tangible in an actual venue and some more details, with perhaps the most stand out of them all being that not only is it free, but the players themselves will be the ones to profit. How? Why? Who knows? Whether it's to find out if this is actually some sort of hustle or to simply enjoy the game, both goals lead to the same place. Casino Egg Zone, a glamorous and glitzy area modeled after Los Vegas full of, rather unsurprisingly, a lot of machines and games focused on making you lose money with the promise of earning even more. Or rather, it /was/ called Casino Egg Zone, but there seems to be a recent addition to the name due to the partnership, a large black and purple sticker slapped across multiple billboards and signs promoting the zone's name, with all of them reading 'Featuring GENM from GENM Corporation!'. Even Eggman's robots are in on the joint promotion, as they're all stamped with the pink and white logo of GENM Corporation, like some sort of weird badge of honor. One of those robots walks up to the group however, and begins ushering them into a new looking building, built from the ground up to incorporate the black and purple color scheme rather than just having a sticker slapped on it. Its interior on the other hand, is not nearly as colorful, being both disturbingly white and empty. "Welcome to the first ever collaboration between the Eggman Empire and Genm Corporation. Please wait calmly while the game room is set up and the rules are explained. Failure to follow instructions will lead to immediate expulsion from the premise as to not create any potential safety concerns." The robot plays a recording of a voice that's not its own. Kuroto's voice, to be exact, as it closes the door behind it. Immediately, the room begins to rearrange itself a single square at a time, spreading out until the featureless room is now a gaudy, oversized pinball machine that everyone is now standing inside. The words BUTSUKARU PINBALL flash in the air with a 3d pixelated effect, while the robot seemingly waits for the group to get situated before continuing.
Futaba Nuki	Futaba knows that anything promising free profits has to be too good to be true. She also knows that other people don't know this, and it's her responsibility to make sure that no amount of shiny lights or cool games will lead impressionable humans down the wrong path! The fact that there's a lot of shiny lights and cool games to stare at in the meantime has nothing to do with that, nor does the fact that she's totally staring at all those lights and games make her intent any weaker. She's just scoping the place out! In plain sight, too, and following the robot like she's part of a tour group or something. "Safety concerns, eh? Maybe the doctor's finally trying to turn things around..." She comments with a satisfied hum, stroking her chin briefly before sticking her hands into her jacket pockets. "And if he's working with /the/ GENM Corp... It should be fine." Confident in her own assessment, Futaba remains still while the room rearranges itself, oohing and aahing at the pinball machinery moving into place around her. The flashing words has her squinting just a bit, though, but not so much that she's recoiling. Instead, Futaba squats in place with her tail batting the ground idly behind her as she waits for the ball to get rolling!
Remee Halcyon	"... A new game? Well, I guess I need a distraction..." Remee has some late-breaking reservations on walking in, about giving Eggman's empire any of her money, but... well, she takes care of those reservations by ignoring them. "Yeah, safety concerns don't seem to be on brand, but who knows," she says. Remee's in her anthro form today, arbitrarily chosen instead of her more common human form just because she needs a change. "Maybe it's the Genm side of things." She glances around as the room rearranges. "... Huh. Some sort of... virtual reality thing?" she says. "Aren't we supposed to be wearing headsets?"
Timespace Riders	"Wow, Mr. Dan and Dr. Eggman have really outdone themselves with this," beams Sougo Tokiwa, as he and his retainer are ushered on by the approaching robot. "Don't worry," he says to the robot. "We'll play by the rules, right, Woz?" Woz's expression looks like he's only here to humor Sougo--and like the face of a man who really prefers not to play by any rules but his. "Pinball, huh..." Sougo's eyes light up, despite how famously bad at video games he is.
Kuroto Dan	"The rules for this game are simple. Your goal is to simply destroy enemies by crashing into or attacking them and collect as many points as possible before time is up by controlling a ball that will be shot into a playing field. Various bumpers and panels can be used to your advantage to achieve this goal. While you're free to use whatever abilities you have, we wish to incentivize a certain playstyle, and for that reason, larger point bonuses be rewarded to those who actually make use of the playing field to deal with their enemies. That said, I wish you all the best. Please try to earn the largest amount of points to earn as many Shells as possible." With the recording finished, the ground underneath everyone collapses suddenly, as they each fall into <s>a Zorb</s> a transparent energy field. A brief wordless tutorial video plays in the background explaining that you can launch any sort of attack through the sphere without fear of breaking it or falling out (probably via some sort of contextual video game magic.), before they're suddenly dropped even further down. It's very dark with no light, and eerily quiet, up until the sound of a spring being tension breaks the silence as something slams into the gamer party's balls, sending them flying through a tunnel and into... What is clearly a themed pinball board, based clearly on a Casino strip. There's bumpers there's paddles, and probably, somewhat distressingly, there's a bunch of lesser Bugsters, dressed as various Las Vegas themed things like magicians and performance dancers, and completely unfettered by gravity as they just sort of walk around aimlessly across the field. Sadly, gravity still applies to everyone else, and they immediately begin falling towards the bottom of the pinball field unless they do something about it.
Remee Halcyon	Remee's not entirely paying attention. "Crash into things? I don't know what you - ah!" Remee ends up in a giant ball. Reflexively, she's on all four legs by the time she lands, looking more than a little bit panicked. "Why are we crashing into things? What's - what's with all these machines! Why are the enemies just floating there? Why are we in balls!?" And they're dropping. "WHY ARE WE DROPPING!" Remee starts running in her ball, steering it. They're falling, and presumably something bad happens if they fall all the way, so maybe she can catch her ball on one of those flipper things- When the ball makes contact, the flipper flips, and abruptly she's flying upwards. "WHYYYY?" yells the wolf, spinning wildly in all directions inside her ball as it starts bouncing all over the place. She is, actually, doing pretty well just by her chaotic undirected patterns of movement? It's the pinball equivalent of button mashing.
Futaba Nuki	"Crashing into stuff... Huhu, that's practically my specialty!" Futaba announces proudly, already getting ideas on how to use the field to her advantage and knowing the context of pinball machines in an extremely general sense. "Maybe that's why they don't want us using headsets, though. They'd be real easy to break if we start rolling around." She suggests to Remee, already starting to adjust her own shape while looking over at Sougo and Woz. "Huh. I didn't know you played pinball, too. Riders really gotta know how to do a lot of stuff, don't you?" Yelping as the ground swallows her up suddenly, Futaba lands almost flat on her back in that field with only her tail to break her fall. Staring at the tutorial video, she reconsiders adjusting her shape, then instead considers what to actually do in that field. By the time she falls into the next area and gets launched by the sudden spring smashing, though, it's becoming clearer that this is... Almost exactly what she thought it was going to be! Trying to figure out how to aim her ball at the themed Bugsters, though, is going to be the trickiest part. She knows enough to avoid the bottom of the field, at least, and shrinks herself before running around the orb at a rapid clip. Somehow, that translates into running faster, and that in turn gives her more momentum to work with as she slams into the side of her energy zorb with a mighty dropkick to send herself at one of those bumpers that, ideally, might send her into the high score zone and bounce around so many of those lesser Bugsters!
Timespace Riders	"Simple enough," says Woz, with a slow nod of his head. The ground opens up beneath them--both the Demon King and his retainer seem startled by this, although Sougo's surprise is definitely the more amused and benign of the two. Each of them in a separate pinball, they both reach for their transformation belts as they race through the darkened tunnel. The inside of both pinballs is briefly awash in pink and green light: o/` Ka-meeen Rider! o/` ZI-O. . . KAMEN RIDER WOZ? WOZ?! Two watch-themed riders roll out onto the board. Zi-O, in pink and silver, resembles an analog watch via his cuirass (wristband) and helmet (face.) Woz, on the other hand, resembles a smartwatch, through his similarly styled cuirass and more sleek, glowy-faced helmet. "...Bugsters? Huh..." Zi-O pantomimes scratching his head as his ball rolls out. "Mr. Dan must have made fake ones for the game, or something," he says. If cope had a smell, he would reek of it. "My Demon King," says Woz, changing the subject, and pointing to a bumper. "A bumper approaches. Prepare yourself--I will strike you into it to send you towards the enemies nearby." Conjuring up a green-tipped spear with a four-button touchscreen just past the head, Woz rolls over to Zi-O and strikes his ball with the haft of the spear. Zi-O makes a buffoonish cry of surprise, clumsily managing to stay on his feet as he's launched towards a bumper and sent careening towards a few dancing Bugsters!
Kuroto Dan	The dancing Bugsters are truly enjoying themselves. They're learning to laugh, love, and live. Kamen Rider, however, puts a stop to these foolish ambitions, as Zi-O crashes into them, the funny little virus men letting out a turkey like gobble as they're suddenly vaporizes and a giant 259 POINTS appears above both his and Woz's head. Apparently, the game is tracking the two as one entity, for whatever reason. Futaba's trick to launch her into the highscore zone works! The dropkick technique is truly something to behold and while she would have destroyed many a Bugster, her time in being a big shot is short lived as she accidentally bounces off one of the viruses and directly into a chute that leads her back down to the lower zones, roughly back where she's started. To add insult to injury, there's an audible sad trumpet sound that plays, as a 55 appears above her head. Remee's button mashing does pretty well at keeping her afloat, and the current Bugsters don't even put up a fight to really give her a problem. Not that they'd know what to do, as they're just as freaked out over her freaking out as she is freaking out over playing video games. Truly, the wolf should be grateful that this game is accessible to even the most basic of Facebook moms. Either that or she can lie to herself and say she has epic Gamer skills. A 355 appears above her head, indicating that she is apparently doing very good. Somehow. As the group starts to thin out the crowd of bugsters, new ones begin to take their place, coming into being by cardboard cutouts flipping up before transforming into actual 'living' enemies. They are, however, a lot less benign than the previous batch, now dressed up as mobsters with tommy guns as they begin shooting at the players. At the very least, it doesn't seem to be doing any actual damage to them, but it is pushing them around, which the mobsters are using to their advantage as they try to push the players all the way into the bottom zone.
Remee Halcyon	It becomes incredibly, blindingly clear... That Remee doesn't know how to play pinball. She's just sort of flailing around, aware that going 'down' is bad but not really performing any sort of strategy or planning aside from 'don't go down'. On the one hand, this makes her an easy target for the bugsters trying to push her downwards. On the other hand, this also makes her movements entirely unpredictable. "WHY ARE THEY SHOOOTING" yells the spinning wolf, tumbling head over heels as she flies by.
Futaba Nuki	As Futaba recalls a smidge too late, pinball is actually one of those games she's never been particularly good at. She understands the rules relatively enough, but something about figuring out what angles to hit things and when just never really clicked for her enough to not hurl her ball right between the bumpers every other attempt. Indeed, it seems her timing here is just as terrible, and the sad 55 gets an irritated grimace from the tanuki while she rolls along the surface of the field. "Stupid... Tilty board. At least they're not doing anything." She mutters in irritation, shortly before the gun-toting Bugsters come out. Grinning confidently, Futaba shrinks herself reflexively at the sight of the guns to make herself a smaller target, but she realizes a bit too late that dodging the bullets themselves doesn't help much when it's the sphere around her that's getting shot. "Geh...! Hey, that's just not fair!" She complains while trying to steer the ball back out of the bottom zone, transforming into a some kind of freaky-looking Futaba/centipede hybrid to scuttle along the surface of the orb in order to try and right her orb's movement. Once she's got some semblance of control again, she once again launches herself into the flippers, this time aiming for the center of it. Once it launches her, she continues trying to steer the orb from the inside, aiming for some kind of crazy bouncing bullshit between those mobsters and smashing the orb towards them at the last moment with an oversized bug-like leg.
Timespace Riders	"Amazing!" Zi-O exclaims, pumping a fist in the midst of his running, balancing stride. "You're really good at this, Woz!" At least he can acknowledge that he's getting hard carried by his retainer. Of course, the flip-side of being carried is making the other person's back hurt. Attacked by the mobsters, Zi-O forgets that he's in a pinball and jumps out of surprise, slamming into the top of his ball and rolling helplessly inside it like a hamster outrun by his wheel. He collides with Woz, sending both of them tumbling for the strike-out-zone... Until a second Zi-O appears from further down their trajectory, bouncing off of a flipper to smash into the both of them! Woz and Zi-O both utter cries of surprise as they're flung upwards, splitting off into opposite directions to criss-cross between bumpers and the sides of the board at high speed, barreling through a few mobsters on their way! The present!Zi-O slows first, falling down and disappearing into a wave of pink energy, traveling into the past to complete the time loop he just benefited from.
Kuroto Dan	Remee continues to flail and somehow fail upwards with absolutely zero gameplan, her constant flailing and crying somehow gaining her more points and preventing her from being dumpstered. A few Bugster mobsters (Mugsters? Bobsters?) in her path look at each other in confusion in their last brief seconds before being reduced to digital atoms. The Timespace Trio and Futaba have a similar idea of simply powering through the bullet wall to prevent themselves from being pushed down. They both crash through a good chunk of them, killing them instantly between a combination of... No, it's all just brute force. The game stage, perhaps in one act of defiance against its players, opens up in the center, revealing a giant pirate ship, covered from head to toe in flashing lights and gold trim. It's clearly one of those decorative ones you find in actual Casinos that don't actually work, but here, it's a bit different, as there's an active crew manning this one, all loading the cannons to bombard the players, restrict their movement, and overall just make them very miserable.
Remee Halcyon	"WHY IS THERE A PIRATE SHIP!" Remee struggles to right herself. She is, at least, getting a handle on the whole problem of rapidly spinning around. She does not have nearly enough of a handle on the pinball part to get anything done with that, though. By sheer luck, one of the cannon shots corrects her course enough that she goes up a ramp, but then her ball ends up jumping out over the rails as the miserable wolf flails around, and she lands... on the pirate ship. "WAIT WHERE AM I NOW?" Aimlessly, dizzily, she ends up rolling right into one of the cannons, shoving the barrel around till it's pointed right down towards the deck of the ship...!
Futaba Nuki	"Wait... What's the the theming here? We went from casino crew to yakuza dudes to... Pirates?" Futaba seems confused even in her buggy state, slipping every now and then in her haste to keep that ball rolling and charging into so many of the Bugsters in a row before she's forced to fall back towards those flippers. "It makes sense for those gangsters to be shooting at us because they're gangsters, but... Pirates shouldn't even be on land!" Futaba clearly has no idea how pirates work. She yelps again as the shockwave from the explosions nearby send her orb hurtling towards the abyss once again, and it's another last-second body slam that has her moving back towards the relative safety of the flippers. Motion sickness still sucks, though, so she's more than ready to try and finish this next and hopefully last stage of the people-sized pinball playtest. The flipper launches her past the pirate ship, but she scuttles along the orb to guide it along the upper rim of the pinball field before coming back down towards the ship from above. "We better get-urp... To put our names in for high-scores after this!" Futaba scoffs briefly. "Stupid 55." And then she transforms back to her people-y shape, then starts hammering on the outer edge of her orb with a flurry of wild fist-punching, throwing haymaker after haymaker at it to keep guiding/slamming her orb back into the pirate ship each time it might bounce off and fall away rather than towards it. She's probably punching it way too often for it to be effective, but... She really wants to get out of this motion sickness hell.
Timespace Riders	"Haha! Why wouldn't there be a pirate ship?" Zi-O asks, as he rolls past Remee after bouncing off of a flipper at the bottom of the board. He's struck dead-on by a cannonball, nearly slamming into Woz, but his retainer is ready for the Demon King's poor gaming skills this time around, and switches into the ninja-themed Shinobi armor. The distinctive 'thonk' of a deer scare sounds, as Woz, now with a dramatically flowing purple scarf, disappears from Zi-O's path in a puff of smoke. The space above the fully manned pirate ship is host to a series of smoke-puff teleports, with Woz making an erratic path through the sky to draw fire while Zi-O languishes in hell, bounced rapidly between bumpers and canonballs. The retainer's pinball then crashes into the deck after a switch into the brute-force, robot-themed Kikai armor, mechanical manipulator arms grabbing onto rigging and the mainmast to swing himself across the deck of the ship and into as many pirate-Bugsters as he can.
Kuroto Dan	Zi-O dies by cannonball. The world does not weep, because everyone wants him fucking dead, but it's fine because Woz carries on his legacy by cleaning up the deck of the pirate ship, killing the Bugster pirates with ease as they offer an absolute token amount of resistance. One of the pirates tries to turn the cannons around to fire at him, but a panicking Remee crashes into it and him, 'saving' his life. While Woz and Remee are doing this, Futaba attacks the actual ship's haul, beating into it over and over again as the ship slowly becomes a darker shade of red with each hit. Eventually through the combined efforts of everyone, the ship just sort of phases out of existence as the entire board begins to shake. There's an awkward silence as this happens, before the words GAME CLEAR appear over everyone's heads. The game world they're all in begins to fade away, bringing them all back to the same dull white room they were in before, though there's now a digital scoreboard in the center of the room. FINAL SCORES Futaba 955 Sougo & Woz 1172 Remee 1135 The Eggman Robot, still here, chimes in with yet another prerecorded message. "I hope you enjoyed the first joint game between the Eggman Empire and GENM Corporation. I hope you look forward to the amazing things you can do with the points you've accumulated in the future. Goodbye for now!" With the final message delivered, the robot, rather rudely, begins shoving everyone out of the building.
Remee Halcyon	Finally, Remee is freed from the pinball. "Ugh..." she says, as she gets out her phone. "... Oh, I missed a call - hey!" She starts getting shoved out. "You'll regret this," she says, as she starts tapping furiously at her phone mid-shove.
Futaba Nuki	Futaba's panting lightly by the time the GAME CLEAR appears, and she lets out an excited cheer when it does complete with punching the air over her head. "Heck yeah! Pinball got nothing on us!" She celebrates pretty brazenly, not even seeming to mind too much thats he's gotten the lowest score of the group that's come today. Her mood isn't even dampened with the Eggman Robot delivers that pre-recorded message. "... Oh yeah. These points are supposed to be good for... Something, right?" She asks even while being ushered out of the building, going with the robot's flow and just sort of laying back against it to see how far it can go when she's not actually trying to walk. Also, she's turning into a blanket. Can a robot truly defeat a blanket that talks and has a leaf and gold motif all over it? "What's he gonna regret, anyway? This was pretty cool! Just... No more pinball." She's holding it together after all that motion sickness, all things considered.
Timespace Riders	"Wow! Thanks, Woz," says Sougo, under no illusion that he was much help at all--and said in the exact same adoring tone as someone who just had their significant other come in and beat a hard level. Both riders have scarcely removed their transformation devices before the two of them are ushered rudely out by the robot. "I don't know how you're not dizzy like me and her," he says, gesturing to Futaba. "We will show ourselves out," says Woz, who seems to take rudeness as a challenge to see who can be more inconsiderate. He slaps the robot's ushering limb away, then flings his scarf (purposefully facing the robot so that it flies into their face). The garment bends and stretches impossibly around the retainer and his king, before vanishing into a single point and taking both of them with it.