Waterworks

Well!





He definitely won't be coming back from that.

>Tubs: Tip hat to Flush for the timely Pillar.

Really though, if you had your pillar from the get-go, this would have been over before it started and you wouldn't have had to waste five perfectly good minutes on the guy.





Anyway, now that their muscle's out of the way, the three of you should be free to go back underground and continue looking for that briefcase.

...You've got the nagging feeling that you're forgetting something.

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it's an awesome flash but, dman, I feel like a jerk saying this given how much effort went into this but this felt a little.. disapointing to me.
I mean, make no mistake, it's very well made, as usual, just... guess I was just really hoping this flash would be it, the end of this long intermission on a high note, maybe mix some of connie vs the Hivemind in it, and the return to the main plot.

You're disappointed? I'm the author of an adventure whose plot has been stuck underneath several layers of flashbacks for at least five years!

Not to discredit everything that's happened since then, but I understand why you feel this way. I would have loved to have ended the intermission with the flash itself, but there are a few things I have planned that would have made it difficult. Admittedly, one of the reasons that I put the animation here is a bit of a selfish one - I've had to either shorten or outright cancel at least three separate flash animations over the course of this intermission alone, and things still took as long as they did. I had to put my foot down and power through this one for its own sake. Hell, even then I still had to cut stuff out of this one - the next few updates were originally supposed to be part of the animation.

I've been trying to outline my current plans for the adventure, but I might not have been clear or public enough: The following weeks will see us wrap up the intermission properly and also put an end to the flash-forward with Connie and José in the bar.

Once this is done, the adventure will go on another hiatus (hopefully the last for a long time) while I work on one more animation. This one will peel away the remaining layers, resolve the conflict between Connie and the hivemind, and put us back in the Waterworks where we belong.

I have every intention to finish this adventure, but I need to do it properly. I guess to sum it up, my level of desperation is high enough where I'm willing to do some extreme railroading to tie up plot points that should have been closed long ago, but not high enough for me to hand-wave the past 5+ years with a few standard image updates. Thank you for sticking with me through this mess, despite having every reason not to.

>Tubs: Remain unfazed at the ludicrously-huge rifle tower firing a ludicrously-large gunshot propelling a ludicrously-big bullet at ludicrously-fast speeds.

>Flush: Get blown away by the shockwave.

> Tubs: Never mind, it's probably not important.

Tubs: Wonder aloud where José is at. Glance at Rifle Gun. Remember.

>And what happened next came to be known as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World Jr."

>Rifle Tower: *Click, chuck clink chuck chuck clank...*
**BOOM**

> Jose: Whilst you're lying on the floor waiting for this gun to go off, can you tell us how you and Mike know each other?

>tubs: aw crap

>Rifle Tower: Jam, subsequetly failing to fire

> Tubs: You don't get hit by bullets. The bullets get hit by you.

Bullet: Blow a hole clean through the dirt, throwing the coveted briefcase high in the air, where all can see it.

José: Have both eardrums burst. only takes a month for them to grow back apparently.

>Rifle Tower: Do your job a bit too well

>Tubs: Commence with further hat tipping, once Jose stumbles back, presumably dazed and confused. If he does not stumble back, find him inside the rifle tower, pick him up, and proceed with hat tipping. Once hat tipping has occurred, pose as a team, because it is unlikely shit can get any more real.

>Have you ever heard of overkill?

It's like they say, there's no kill like overkill.

Quite a bit of time spent deep-frozen later:

Big Endian: get picked up by aliens

>Now keep firing the rifle tower to build up rythem!

>Big Endian: pass through a wormhole that send you though space and time and from the other end crash on alien planet in the past. From your charred corpse a little bit of black goo that got in from the lab creeps out... dun dun dun

...Okay no that would probably be a terrible twist, nevermind.

Tubs: Proclaim that you're too old for this shit.

Or, alternatively

Tubs: Shed a single tear of admiration/sorrow at the death of your worthy opponent.

>A job well done. Claim your prize and drink in the success.

>Drinks are on José!

Might as well go back into the base and see if there's anything important-lookin there for the nabbing.

Man, I really kind of feel bad for Big Endian. At this point, the base is destroyed. He could have easily just left and survived, but he stayed to fight, and I feel like his reason for doing that was the death of Little Endian. I mean, they worked together as a muscle/decoy duo. Big Endian raised his hands to protect Little Endian every time, and gave him Caddie's indestructable helmet to protect him. He didn't have to do that; it didn't protect himself at all. That makes me feel like they were probably best friends, and Big Endian's reason for staying to fight was solely to get revenge on the Blue Boys for killing Little Endian. And then after all that he just has a somber look of acceptance on his face as he dies to the biggest bullet on the face of the planet.

I can't believe I'm making myself sad over a one-off Waterworks villain, but I actually am. God damn it.

Might as well go back into the base and see if there's anything important-lookin there for the nabbing.

I initially misread this as "go back into the sea" and had a mental image of the boys in blue walking into the ocean and stuffing undersea treasure into the beatnick's bag.

Tubs: Shed a single tear of admiration/sorrow at the death of your worthy opponent.

Your brow is too furrowed for your tear ducts to work properly!

Might as well go back into the base and see if there's anything important-lookin there for the nabbing.

Yes. You still need that briefcase.




The shot from the rifle tower cleaved a huge trench out of the ground. Looking down, you can see it go deep enough to reveal the rubble from the top level of the base.

...But first, you should get the rifle tower back. It's probably got a couple shots left in it, and you wouldn't want to that sort of thing sitting around for other people to stumble across.

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Small updates for now as I try to ease back into this...