Stop Toying With Us! (Action Figures!)

-Toygalen, early afternoon-

Wearing her Azure Armor over her white Steel Matron t-shirt and a black skirt with black bike shorts on underneath, Victoria entered the place known as Toylaten, which was home to numerous businesses dedicated to producing toys and selling toys. Toylaten was a small place, but it compensated for being small by being clean and appealing to visitors. The main street looked like it had been recently swept and cleaned; all the windows looked like they had been washed and all of the trash cans were empty. There was not a single piece of trash littering the streets or the side alleys... the place looked more like a giant model town than a place people actually lived in.

She walked past row upon row of toy stores that mingled freely with restaurants, flower shops, day care centers, and other businesses necessary for modern life. As she walked the brunette noticed that the toy stores were not just generic stores, but rather that they specialized in selling various types of toys. Millicent's Doll House sold all manner of dolls for children while Joseph's Field Headquarters sold toys of a military bent; in addition to military action figures there were bright and bold displays of vehicles like jets, aircraft carriers, Armored Personnel Carriers, and even Main Battle Tanks for the action figures sold within.

Victoria should have deduced that toys were a vital part of the economy from the name of the place, but no one ever accused her of being a Rhodes Scholar. She was accused of having questionable parentage, of being a mistake made by her parents, and of other numerous misdeeds, but no one had ever accused her of being smart. Oh well. That was beside the point... she needed to find Sarah and learn about what it was that had brought the Sabertooth mages to this place.

While walking down the street she noticed something about the town other than its dedication to creating toys.

It was completely empty.

No customers in any of the restaurants or toy stores. No pedestrians wandering the streets. Not even a stray dog or cat running around the streets. It was early afternoon and the place should have been busy, but there was no one moving around. The lack of activity was more than a little strange.

Victoria kept walking until she saw a flash of red hair and felt a magic signature. Almost as soon as she saw the flash it vanished without a trace. Victoria was reasonably sure it was Sarah, so she went to investigate where the latter was last standing and instead came across two identically dressed twin boys wearing amulets and standing behind a box. The brunette felt there was something off about them, but it was too late to run.

"Yay! Another one!" The boy on the left said before the amulets glowed blue and the Sabertooth mage shrunk down to the size of a toy. The shrunken brunette was then grabbed and placed inside the box, which was home to growling noises and the sounds of combat. Somehow she got the feeling that this was not going to be fun... at least for her. She heard the sound of giggling as she was lowered into the box.

-Inside the box-

Victoria found herself standing inside the box just behind a red-headed figure with clenched fists. In contrast Victoria's hands were open just enough to allow her to use weapons, which was a good thing. She would need every weapon in her arsenal to get out of this tiny toy hell.

"Hey Sarah! It's a small world after all, huh?" Victoria greeted Sarah before snarking about their situation.

[Post Word Count: 628]
[Victoria's Word Count: 628/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 1,153/7,000]

"I didn't know what the Hell was going on until it was too late. I was walking around Toyville when I thought I saw your hair. You vanished and I went looking for you but found Creepy-Dee and Creepy-Dum, who turned me into a toy before I could even blink. Things can only get better from here." Victoria groused to Sarah about the circumstances that led to them meeting in a toybox. Weird stuff happened to the brunette more often than she cared to admit. First she accidentally ran into a mob princess and started an unwanted vendetta that was not settled until the princess' family had to flee Fiore after the brunette took down the crime family that gave the princess her swagger. Then there was that Night of Eternal Darkness incident in Sakuramori with the pumpkin beasts during Sakuramori's horror movie festival. Recently she encountered a panty thief who stole her clothes in the middle of Capital Crocus' bright and shiny mall in broad daylight... twice.

Ugh.

Victoria wanted to forget about the panty thief, especially the second case when the pushy woman in the underwear shop tried to sell her push-up bras before everything went downhill. The brunette was sensitive about that issue and was resentful of it being brought up in public. However, Sarah was polite enough to be sensitive about Victoria's chest, especially since the redhead did not have that problem. That was where the pair started to talk and learned that they had quite a bit in common, namely an affinity for fighting. Sarah liked to do hers in the arena while Victoria traveled Earthland dealing her own brand of justice to the kinds of cretins the authorities just could not handle on their own, like mutant reptiles and their creators.

"At this point I'm used to the weird stuff, Sarah. If we go shopping there's... well, people trying to steal our clothes. If we go to a music concert there'll probably be some nutcase playing mind control music... except that time I went with the Fairy Tail mage, that squid guy who was really cool. If we go to drink... who knows what will happen, even without the alcohol. The point is that weird stuff is part of the mage's trade... along with fighting, drinking, the occasional date, and more fighting." Victoria offered her perspective on the odd adventures she had been on. The brunette had been around the block a few times as a member of Black Rose and of Sabertooth. Sarah seemed to still be learning how the world of magic worked, but she was a swift learner who had common sense and knew how to fight. Sarah would go far in the magic world. Speaking of magic, Sarah asked the brunette if the latter could still use her magic in toy form.

"Uh, let's see. Lemme try bringing out a weapon. Maybe my action figure hands can let me at least hold one." Victoria said to her guildmate while bringing out her Light Machine Gun. The weapon formed and landed in her hand, fitting just right. However, accurate firing might be an issue due to the recoil involved in firing on full-auto.

"I've got good news and bad news, Sarah. The good news... I can hold a weapon. The bad news... I can't hold it with both hands, so I might be able to hit the side of a barn if I was standing inside the barn when I fired this thing." Victoria summed up her magic to Sarah. Maybe Victoria should try bringing in her Submachine Gun. It lacked the sustained firepower and raw action movie machismo of a Light Machine Gun, but the Submachine Gun could be fired one-handed with reasonable accuracy.

[Post Word Count: 653]
[Victoria's Word Count: 1,281/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 2,315/7,000]

Victoria struggled to come to grips with the toy version of herself. Her left hand was open but held back and thus unable to grip the Light Machine Gun and her Light Machine Gun was comically oversized; it was about as long as her new form was tall. While she tried to figure out how to aim the weapon one-handed she watched her red-haired guildmate go into action against a newly deployed quartet of toy pirates armed with rifles and swords and beat them all handily after getting part of her immaculate red hair shot off. The brunette needed to remember to never mess with Sarah's hair in any way, not even jokingly. The Sabertooth mages had a few moments of peace before another toy box was set down and another quartet of toy pirates were sent after them.

"OK, I've got these clowns." Victoria confidently asserted, trying to move her legs so that she would be well away from Sarah's hair when the toy lead started to fly. After half a minute of awkward hopping she was in front and to the right of Sarah and was safe from the redhead's wrath. Victoria aimed her weapon with one hand the best she could and squeezed the trigger for a Five-Round Burst once it was roughly aligned with the pirate to the far right. The toy lead flew as her weapon chattered in a sound that was vastly different from its normal firing sound.

PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW!

Victoria cringed so hard at the new firing sound that she almost got whiplash from it. Why did her weapon sound like a toy laser weapon? This was not how Light Machine Guns were supposed to sound! At least it hit the pirate and knocked him down with a drawn-out "ARRRGH!" as he spun around and fell to the plastic ground, his pistol firing one last shot into the air. The remaining three began firing at Victoria, who was having a hard time adjusting her aim onto the next pirate.

"UGH, C'MON ALREADY! AIM, DAMMIT!" Victoria raged at the minuscule flexibility of her toy form and the sheer ridiculousness of how her weapon sounded. What was next, a rocket launcher that made goat noises when she fired it? The brunette clenched her tiny plastic teeth and finally brought the weapon to bear on the pirate, who hopped out of the way and laughed at her.

"You've gotta be shitting me!" Victoria snapped as she hopped to the left to aim again. Again the pirate in question hopped just out of her line of fire. The brunette grew more and more pissed by the second. She tried to aim again under a hail of bullets and aligned the weapon, then fired a Five-Round Burst.

PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW!

The pirate who had mocked her fell down in defeat but moments later she was winged by a toy bullet to the left side that her Azure Armor caught. The royally pissed brunette swore under her breath as she wobbled until she could aim at the offender, then fired on full auto while hopping to keep her aim adjusted. After a long and annoying burst of PEWPEWPEW noises on repeat she downed the remaining pirates.

"How do you like me now, assholes?!" Victoria angrily shouted at them. She would give them the middle finger if she could, but her left hand could not bend at all. Oh well. At least those really annoying pirates were gone.

[Post Word Count: 576]
[Victoria's Word Count: 1,857/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 3,408/7,000]

Victoria was exulting in her triumph over those obnoxious toy pirates with their toy pirate accessories and ratty pirate clothing and bad pirate grammar when a high-pitched voice from above vowed to make her and Sarah pay for breaking their toys. The brunette frowned. She had been so wrapped up in defeating the pirate toys and fuming about the state of her favorite weapon that she forgotten about Creepy-Dee and Creepy-Dum and the fact that they had orchestrated this whole fiasco with those magic amulets of theirs. The fact that they were children meant that she would have to pull her punches and use less-than-lethal weaponry on them. The brunette calmed down enough to listen to Sarah explain that she too would have to pull her punches because some of her techniques could be lethal.

Sarah also asked for advice on how to proceed in dealing with the children. Since neither of them even countenanced the idea of killing them, they would have to take a different approach.

"Truth be told, I'm gonna have to change my tactics too. This weapon isn't meant for non-lethal warfare." Victoria admitted to Sarah, shaking her comically oversized Light Machine Gun for emphasis. To match deeds to words Victoria exerted great effort to dispel her weapon and bring in her Tranquilizer Rifle. To her immense displeasure the red rifle was now hot pink. HOT PINK. Why was her best non-lethal weapon hot pink?

Would it shoot a cloud of sparkles whenever she fired it?

Would it have a tracer element that left a rainbow behind each shot?

Victoria sighed. At least the rifle was not all coated in glitter or rhinestones. That small mercy had been afforded to her.

"OK, I've changed to a weapon that won't kill them because it's got this super-fancy smart chip that regulates dosages to avoid accidental overdoses of sedative. They'll just feel really drowsy when each shot hits, but I doubt it'll be that simple." Victoria informed Sarah that she was now using something that would not kill the children, only make them drowsy. Now the real planning began. They had to figure out how to get to the point that Victoria could sedate them so that everyone went home alive.

"I don't know what they're planning, but we'll need to work together on this. My idea is to play keep-away and try to sedate them before they can come after us. They'll be loaded for bear, so we don't need to stay in one place too long. We need to find a terrain feature that we can take advantage of to slow them down so that we can avoid their strongest toys." Victoria went over the rudiments of her half-baked plan with Sarah.

[Post Word Count: 456]
[Victoria's Word Count: 2,313/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 4,371/7,000]

"A backup plan?" Victoria asked Sarah. The brunette was lucky that she had come up with the plan that she did because she was not a very good thinker. Still, the redhead had raised a very good point in asserting the need for a backup plan in case the half-baked primary plan did not pan out. Victoria was busy trying to think of a good plan in a hurry when Sarah came up with one on the fly. It was a solid plan for one concocted on the fly.

The short version was that Sarah had volunteered to be a distraction while Victoria readied her Tranquilizer Rifle for the shots she hoped would put a non-lethal end to the fighting. She remembered the request to avoid hitting Sarah while she was shooting and kept it in mind as she waited for an opportunity to take aim at the twins. Sarah leapt off of the table and started to enact her plan to give Victoria a good shot at the target while avoiding the plastic sword that Creepy-Dee and Creepy-Dum still had at their disposal. If anyone could pull off such a daring maneuver, it was Sarah. She had the speed and the guts to try it, so the brunette would not stop her unless there was a very good reason to stop Sarah from doing so.

Victoria looked around for any kind of vantage point she could climb to get a better shot and spotted a generic green plastic house with a brick chimney that could do the job. It overlooked the area where Sarah had vaulted off of the table and the area where the twins were most likely to appear. The brunette awkwardly hurried to it and found a convenient plastic ladder lying next to a red doghouse and grabbed it, then hurriedly set it up and climbed it. Once she was on the roof she slowly and carefully made her way to the brick chimney and propped the Tranquilizer Rifle on it for slightly more stability in aiming. The brunette wished that it had come with a bipod like her Light Machine Gun, but she would find a way to manage without a bipod.

Victoria took a deep breath and waited for the twins to put in an appearance. With Sarah running around and taunting them they would not ignore the bait that the redhead had set out for them. She just hoped that Sarah would recognize if she had bitten off more than she could chew and pull back before she got hurt. The brunette did not know if she could cast healing magic in her toy form. She also did not know if healing magic would work on plastic.

Sarah would have to balance aggression with caution, but Victoria knew that Sarah would know when to back off. She hoped. It would be up to Victoria to do her part to make sure that both the Sabertooth mages and the twins got out of this fiasco alive. The brunette steadied her aim and waited. Waiting was all she could do at this point.

[Post Word Count: 518]
[Victoria's Word Count: 2,831/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 5,413/7,000]

Victoria had finally gotten into a good firing position on top of a plastic house when Creepy-Dee and Creepy-Dum had decided to change things up by building a giant robot to fight with. The brunette frowned. She had wasted so much time trying to find a good place to fire her Tranqulizer Rifle from and the arrival of the giant robot had all but ruined her initial plan. Now Sarah had come to her looking for advice on what to do now. The brunette climbed down from her rooftop perch and went to Sarah's side to speak with her face-to-face instead of shouting from the rooftop.

"OK, that giant robot just changed everything. I'm thinking that we need to cripple it before we try to deal with the twins, but we've gotta be careful in how we cripple it. I say go for the legs." Victoria suggested to Sarah. Victoria had a Rocket Launcher that could fire Bunker Buster rounds. While they were made for piercing concrete bunkers and other fortified structures, the brunette reasoned that their anti-armor properties could enable them to punch through robot armor as well. However, now that the twins were riding on it, they would need to be careful because one bad shockwave could send them tumbling to a fatal fall.

"You don't need to run around as a distraction anymore, Sarah. I think my weapon will be distraction enough. Just don't stand directly behind me when I fire... otherwise you'll get burned from the backblast of rocket exhaust." Victoria offered, switching from her Tranquilizer Rifle to her Rocket Launcher. Thankfully the weapon retained its olive drab coloration instead of being repainted in some garish color like Day-Glo Orange. She still shuddered to think what alterations had been made to it to make it look more toy-like. Maybe the weapon's backblast was a cloud of glitter or it fired rockets with eyes and smiling shark jaws painted onto them.

Victoria noticed that Sarah was close to giving into despair and expressed her wish to escape this plastic life and resume normal human life. Victoria was right there with her. Being a toy with garishly painted toy weapons and only one hand with which to use them sucked. The brunette needed to find something inspiring to keep the redhead focused on the job at hand, but what could she possibly say?

"We'll get through this, Sarah. The big robot's just a big target and once we bring it down this will all be over." Victoria tried to comfort Sarah with some words of encouragement before the big fight with the robot. Going for the leg joints would be the best way to cripple it, but they needed to be careful not to knock the twins off the robot's shoulder. That was a complication that could not be avoided... the Sabertooth mages would just have to work around it until they could remove the twins from the robot without injury.

[Post Word Count: 493]
[Victoria's Word Count: 3,324/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 6,422/7,000]

Once Victoria had brought out her Rocket Launcher she was prepared to use it if need be, but sometimes just holding a weapon was the most effective use for it. If the twins backed down without her actually having to fire it at their mechanical death machine, then it had served its purpose. Victoria took a kneeling position and aimed her weapon at its right leg, but as it turned out, the brunette did not have to fire a single rocket because Sarah managed to talk them down before it came to a fight. A minute or two later and she was back to normal size and had the use of both hands again. Dispelling the Rocket Launcher perched on her right shoulder, Victoria felt something small being placed in her left hand.

Victoria looked and found an action figure version of herself with a Light Machine Gun clutched in her right hand. The figure was detailed down to her hairstyle and clothing, something that she appreciated. Even the Azure Armor was faithfully recreated down to the last stitch.

The brunette pocketed the action figure and turned to face the twins, who Sarah had promised to come back and play with at some point in the future. Since the twins had only inconvenienced them and she had known what it was like to be without playmates, Victoria could not hold too much of a grudge against them. She would probably forget the most painful details of this whole episode when the pair got to a bar and started downing drinks.

"When she comes back to play, so will I." Victoria promised the twins. Unless there was other pressing business to take care of like finding her father or beating up slavers, Victoria would keep the promise to them. Once the pair had said their goodbyes to the twins and were on the way back home the brunette looked at Sarah, who had mentioned drinks.

"Don't worry, Sarah. I won't drink too much. Maybe a few shots of Albino Gander vodka. That and some tequila. If I run over what you can afford I'll pay the rest myself." Victoria promised Sarah that the latter's budget would not be too badly dented by the celebration of them returning to flesh-and-blood bodies after being stuck in plastic forms of themselves. Victoria was glad that deeply unpleasant experience was over. Now was the time to have some fun before sleeping off the alcohol and looking for another good-paying job or two once the hangover was gone.

[Post Word Count: 423]
[Victoria's Word Count: 3,747/3,500]
[Total Word Count: 7,458/7,000]