[Open Class] Robots!!1! [Rojo]

[Smerdle]

attempt 6

This time, when he reached the bottom of the waste disposal chute, Rojo found his easy exit closed and locked. The path that remained let him out near the creepateria, well away from the trashbot facility. Seeing as how he had found the place by sheer chance, Rojo was momentarily at a loss. Where was he meant to go? He decided to head back to where his adventure had begun. The edge of the forest.

Luckily, the trashbots were on a semi-regular schedule and it wasn't long before one scooted past, slow enough for an awkward skeleton to follow behind. Several minutes later, Rojo was back, looking out over the interior of the fortress of janitorial solitude with calculated concentration. The nearby bots moved in a pattern that he finally identified, now that he was paying attention. He could probably manage to run between them... if he could move quickly enough.

Without warning, he darted ahead, tripping across the path of one of the bots and sending it off course. Rojo crashed to the floor, and to his surprise did not lose a single bone.  

[Smerdle]

He hopped back to his feet, still in shock that he was intact. With a bit of a stutter in his step, Rojo slid forward past the bot, tripping it along the way as well. The robot took down a number of others in its slow crawl toward deactivation. Even in the wake of such destruction, however, the space around Rojo was soon silent, lacking even the rasp of harsh breathing a fleshier creature of FEAR might have produced. He held completely still, watching as a trashbot up ahead turned toward the commotion. There were others coming, but they hadn't yet noticed anything was amiss. The dumpster was across the room. It had provided adequate cover before, but Rojo wasn't sure he could make it all the way there now.

Instead of rushing out onto the floor like he wanted to, the skeleton carefully stepped closer to the wall, flattening his hands against it with a dainty click. He ducked and hurried on, bypassing the single alert trashbot easily.  

[Smerdle]

Rojo broke into a run once he was past the suspicious bot, not realizing that another was right around the corner. As it turned out, he did not make the best doorstop. The trashbot tripped over the boil, crashing to the ground and taking his arm with it. The limb snapped off so quickly and cleanly that he didn't notice it was gone at first. He kept running until his attention was caught by the appearance of a random gnome which he immediately inferred he could use as a distraction. He reached out to grab it, only to realize he couldn't. Sad.

With no time to wait for his wayward limb to rejoin him, Rojo raced back over to the bot, dodging flailing pincer-tipped trashbot limbs and disembodied jaws to retrieve it. Once it was firmly resocketed, he stood by and watched as the machine went into some sort of fit, spinning in place and beeping loudly. At first, it turned so quickly that it was little more than a blur, but it soon slowed then clanked to one side, its momentum forcing it to jitter across the floor until it stopped completely.  

[Smerdle]

The calaca moved on, hoping that no additional robots would cross his path, and for a while, they didn't. The next living thing he saw, in fact, was that gnome from earlier. That perfectly-trashbot-collector-sized gnome. It waddled just ahead of him, seemingly unaware that he was so close. It didn't even panic when another giant robot rolled up and loomed in front of it, though Rojo certainly did. He strained to pick up the creature with his recently reattached arm and deposited it into the robot's gaping maw as he ran to safety.

The bot paused, all of its attention focused on the boil's retreat. For a moment, Rojo was certain he was done for, but then, with a whir and a chipper clank, the happy trashbot continued in the opposite direction.  

[Smerdle]

He slowed to a stop in what was probably the worst spot he could have done so. Rojo's sense of smell was rather weak, but even he had no trouble determining that this particular spot reeked. The odor almost seeped into his bones it was so insistently horrible. And that wasn't even the worst part. No, far worse than the smell was the fact that the stench had attracted another trashbot. It sat between him and a door he could only presume was the exit, beady eyes boring into... the bag to his right?

"Aha!" Rojo said, wishing he hadn't. That bag! It was the answer to everything!

The boil threw himself at its slick, black surface and struggled to lug it up near his chest. The smell grew stronger the longer he handled it, and for the first time since he had been a child, Rojo wished he had a nose to hold. The trashbot advanced, slowly at first, but it sped up soon after, gunning for him like he was its long lost son.

When it was ten feet away, Rojo threw the bag.

It caught on the trashbot's antenna, bursting in a shower of brownish-green sludge that coated Rojo, his clothing, and the trashbot itself. The boil froze in anticipation of his doom, but before he could feel any regret over the end of his almost-victory, the bot turned and fled, flinging itself down the master chute.

The skeleton could only stand there, stunned.