"Explain to me again why he's coming along," the green-skinned man jerked a thumb unseen to the general direction of the human sitting in the mobile suit behind him.
"Cuz he’s a jerk, and he's bored," replied the winged one over the closed circuit intercom. "It's not like I care anyway. Kris employed me to find her husband, and I'm obliged to do so. Tag-alongs are the least of my concerns." Zlaktaa checked his own suit for the interesting trip ahead. "You sure this thing can get us to Li?"
Mewkoe rolled his eyes, once again without the benefit of being seen, "It got me back from Neo, didn't it? I've made improvements since then. I already have a lock on his position. The rift he left through was natural and hasn't quite faded from the basic scanners yet. My gate projector should work fine."
A voice interrupted from a different circuit. Still, no one bothered to open a video line, "Are we leaving yet, or what? I'm not getting any younger, and for all we know, Li's not getting any older. Let's drag his carcass back home so I can see Kris kick him around for being reckless again. Maybe she'll let me join her," Logan's smirk was almost audible.
The AI from the red mobile suit Mewkoe currently piloted interjected, "Regardless of what will happen to him later, we have to retrieve him from unknown conditions now. It would be in our best interest to hurry this mission along." The deep voice proclaimed over the open intercom, "My dimensional gate projector will work and is the most practical tool to get us to Li's location. If it were not, you would not have called us."
"Quite right, Dynamo. After I lost contact with Li's watch, I investigated the area he was last, here namely, and gave you and Mewkoe a call once I thought I had deduced the reason for his disappearance. I alerted Mrs. Makswel shortly after." The calm voice ticked off the previous day's events mechanically, "Now it is just a matter of bridging the divide that the Neo-en have so readily mapped to bring him back. Dimensional travel is truly their forte, and without them, this excursion may have been much more distressing."
Logan occupied the cockpit of the most recent speaker and grunted, "Whatever, let's just go already. I don't want to be cooped up in this stomping blue motor mouth any longer than I have to."
"I could easily oblige that request…" Vernious referred to his interim pilot without a trace of bitterness in his voice before he was interrupted by a small female voice that ushered from the green mobile suit.
"I hope he's all right," she sighed electronically.
Another voice, this one male, came from the same mobile suit and sought to reassure the normally cheery AI, "He'll be fine, Tiamat. Li can take care of himself."
"He also still has a knack for getting on people's nerves, Taklaaz, which is why the sooner we get going, the better. There's no sense in risking him pissing some strangely powerful resident from whatever world he managed to get himself marooned on," said Zlaktaa.
"All right! I hear ya, already! Dynamo, keep that lock on Li and boot the gate projector. We'll ride his own wormhole straight to him," Mewkoe instructed. Without a word, the mobile suit carried out his orders. A beam of light spread outward from the crystal in the giant mech's chest and stopped in mid air. It seemed some great flashlight that illuminated a vortex of swirling energy that led to the unknown. Dynamo ushered the other two suits to enter the portal. After they had stepped through, he entered himself, leaving behind Li's personal junk yard.
The tunnel through reality stretched out before them, Tiamat, then Vernious, and Dynamo. At the very end, a light could be seen. Around the halfway point, Tiamat alerted them to a minor problem, "Um, I'm not sure how to explain this, but I appear to be shrinking."
"What?� Zlaktaa looked around the cockpit.
"She is not the only one," said Vernious. "I, too, am becoming smaller the closer we get to the end of this tunnel. If it continues at this rate, I would suggest that all pilots disembark immediately." As if to demonstrate his point, Vernious's chest split open at the bottom, and the cockpit door opened. Tiamat and Dynamo did the same.
"You can't be serious," Logan grumped. "We have to get out?"
"Yes, I would prefer to keep my cockpit free of pulped human," Vernious said. Zlaktaa and Mewkoe had already started to climb out. It was then that they were all grabbed by a lateral gravity. They were being sucked more quickly toward the light at the end of the tunnel. As they traveled, it started to become very obvious that the mobile suits were becoming very much smaller. By the time they reached the end, they had shrunk from about ten stories tall to ten feet tall. They appeared several hundred feet in the air. The mobile suits grabbed their pilots and used rocket power to land on the ground, except Tiamat, who simply floated, and Zlaktaa, who spread his wings and glided down with the aid of an enchanted wind. Once there, they took in the surroundings, including the craters they'd landed in and the picnickers sitting nearby. Logan struggled free of Vernious's grasp, and Dynamo set Mewkoe down civilly.
"What the hell happened?" Logan drilled his ride down.
The mobile suits, now nothing more than robots, looked at each other. Vernious shook his head, "I did not foresee this outcome."
"I feel so tiny," Tiamat chirped. "It's kind of neat!" She still towered over the flesh beings among her.
Taklaaz's voice followed hers from the same speaker, "Something about the magic of this world is different. Herculium is a highly magical metal. It must have reacted with this world's physics to yield this." Tiamat's arm waved out to indicate all of the mechs' problem. "We'll probably return to normal when we return to our own world."
"Systems are still functioning normally, Dynamo?" Mewkoe looked to his customary mode of transportation.
"Nothing is abnormal apart from the obvious."
"So do you still have a lock on Li's watch?"
"He's in that direction," the robot pointed toward a village in the distance.
"Then that's where we're heading," Zlaktaa announced.
