Jimmy struggled in the robot's grasp. It felt like that moment with his father all over again. He had already cried his eyes dry, and was trying to figure out how to escape. He STILL didn't have a shirt to slip out of, which meant that the robot now holding him had its arm wrapped around his waist. They had walked, or at least the robot had, to a hallway with a dead end in it. Jimmy had smiled then, thinking that it would be easy for Cleave to find him, until a wall had disappeared. From then on, he hadn't been able to do much other than get more scared by the second. He was somewhere close to wetting himself by the time they had stopped walking. He had seen robots being made! Watching an anthro being fused together with all that metal had been enough for him to be sure he'd have nightmares for months afterward. A human was waiting for them at the end, which had scared him even more than the other things he'd seen. But that wasn't the worst. The worst had come when he'd seen a small robotic suit that looked like it had been made just for him.

Babe had gone with the red dragon. By now he'd found out that the dragon's name was Max, and that Max had been one of the most against robots. He himself had blown up a factory, just like Dana had, but his little adventure had gone off without a hitch. He was the leader of the base Babe had rescued Dana from, and had been the leader for ten years straight now. "Why did you offer to come with me?" He asked as they searched a corridor Babe knew was really a dead end. Max was walking in front of Babe and didn't turn around as he answered. "Well...I have to admit it, Babe. You are nowhere near what a robot is supposed to act like. In all my life, I have never seen a robot cry. In short, Babe, you fascinate me more than anything ever has before." Babe smirked. "You sound just like one of my old friends." "Really? Who was that?" "His name was Billy Brown. He was my mechanic when I became like this... If he found anything new, he wouldn't stop examining it until he EVERYTHING there was to learn about it. He said something close to the same whenever he met someone that had a 'problem'. I miss him..." Max stopped examining a wall and looked at Babe. "Wait a minute. You mean THE Billy Brown?" "There isn't more than one, is there?" "No--no, you don't understand. Billy Brown was one of the greatest scientists of all time. He made the Protector..." Babe laughed. "No he didn't! He might have kept the Protector in good repair, for a while, but he certainly didn't make the Protector!!!" "Then who did?" Every bit of humor left him before he spoke. "Why are you even asking me? Why would you trust a robot?!!" "Because Jesse does. He seems to think you are on our side, and I have always valued his council." "Is that so? Then why were you about to kill him?!!" "He had betrayed us... I don't think he did, but everyone else did. I had to act by what the people wanted. I had no choice." "You always had the choice, Max. That's the whole thing that made me like this. Choice." "What do you mean?" Babe sighed and sat down. "If I hadn't been taking drugs, I wouldn't have met the drug dealer. If I hadn't met the drug dealer, I might have lived a normal life! But I met him, took his drugs, and got shot in the back when I didn't want them anymore!!!!" "What does that have to do with--" "EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!! DON'T YOU GET IT?!!!!!! I WAS THE DAMNED PROTECTOR!!!!!!!!!! I FORCED MYSELF INTO THIS LIFE, AND I DON'T HAVE THE GUTS TO LEAVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!! Never make a choice you know you'll regret, even if it seems like the right one. It will haunt you for the rest of your days.... Believe me, I know." Babe leaned back against a wall, his fury thoroughly spent. He kept going...

Max grabbed Babe before he fell all the way and looked at what they'd found. He brought his walkie-talkie up and called Jesse. "We've found something. Are you two coming?" They waited a few minutes as Dana and Jesse found their way to them. Once all were there, they walked down the new passage, each thinking something different as they ventured deeper and deeper into the robot factory. "HELLLLLLLP MEEEEEE!!!!!!!" Dana gasped and ran ahead to where Jimmy's voice had come from. Babe activated his wings and flew ahead of everyone, while Max and Jesse guarded the rear.

Steve had followed them as well, using a bracelet of his own. He waited five minutes before following, then started walking down. Just a few seconds later, he heard a cry for help, but didn't bother to hurry. He wasn't about to let them know he was trailing them. He scanned the area as he walked, always shifting his gun to a new position just in case something might be hiding. Then, without any warning, something clubbed him over the head with a metal bar... A human carried him away in another secret passage.

Prescence identified. Secondary unknown prescence detected. Babe put more power into his wings and rocketed ahead into a huge room that resembled a laboratory. There were nine different doors in the room, but he ignored eight of them when he saw Jimmy struggling in the grasp of a human. The human was walking through the door in the center, and Jimmy was franitcally trying to squirm out of his grasp. Jimmy saw Babe right before the door slammed shut. "CLEEEEEEAVE!!!!!!!!!!" Babe activated his cannon out and shot the door down. Something wasn't right... Jimmy and the human had both disappeared again, but there were no doors in the hall for them to have gone through. "Dana, Jesse, come quick!" They rushed up by him. He told them what he had seen, and asked if they could help him figure it out. Max came up behind them facing backwards to make sure nothing took them by surprise. They all froze when another door opened. "Hey, Mike! What should I--" Babe grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. His eyes glowed red as he held the human in front of him. "Where's the boy?" The human struggled in the robots grip for a moment, then relaxed and said. "Activate code 119." He waited, expecting something, but when nothing happened, his eyes bulged. "Well, what are you doing?! Put me down!!!!" "Where is the boy?! Where did you take Jimmy?!!!!!!!" Babe tightened his grip just slightly. "Tell me before I decide to strangle you where you stand." The human started struggling again. "MIKE!!!!! One of the robots has a MAJOR malfunction!!!!! Get here before it kills me!!!!!!!" Babe scowled. "I am NOT one of your robots, human! Tell me where you took the boy, or I'll--" Another human ran in with some sort of gun. "I've got the stunner!!!! Where's the ro--" He was cut off as well when Max and Jesse tackled him, pinning him to the ground. Dana was beginning to pul out a gun of her own... She walked up, strangely calm, and pointed the gun at the second human's forehead. "Where is my son?" Babe shivered. Her tone was so emotionless that he might not have recognized her voice without seeing her say it! The human on the floor was scared as well. "He--he's at the end of the hall..." Dana nodded and fired one shot. She walked away from the humans dead corpse and pushed on the wall at the end of the hallway. Jimmy was sitting in a small room, scrunched into a ball and looking absolutely terrified. Babe shifted his attention back to the human he held. That human had died in his arms of suffocation. Babe noticed a slight bulge in the human's pocket and pulled it out. It was a strange device that had somewhere near thirty small buttons on it. There was a long extension cord running out the bottom of the strange contraption. He handed it to Max so it could be studied and left. He heard the footfalls of his friends as they followed him outside.

Greg woke with a sore neck. He rubbed it, remembering how close he had come to death at the hands of that robot. Mike was still sprawled on the floor, his blood pooling by the wall where he lay. He slowly stood up and checked on the anthro he'd captured. IT was still there in the exact same unconscious position he'd left it. "Well, I can still do the experiment... Now, lesse..." He reached into his pocket for his controler, and gasped when his pocket was empty. Mike still had his, which Greg gratefully took from him. "Don't worry, Mike. I'll make sure to turn that female into one of ours just for you." He plugged the cord into a wall socket and used it to bring three robots into the lab. He ordered them to take the anthor's body and begin preparing it for the new robotic suit they had made.

"Where now?" Jesse asked as they sped away in their tank. "Max, what do we do? You know as well as I that YOU were the only lenient one at HQ." Max frowned. "I'm thinking! This is n't easy, okay?! Let's see... Everyone at HQ will shoot Babe on sight, if I say he's on our side, no one will believe me, and you and Dana are damned to hell if you go back. Id on't see an option." Jimmy pointed and laughed at him. Max glared at the child. "What's so funny, kid?! I suppose YOU have a better idea?" "Yeah." "Well then, let's hear it." Jimmy cleared his throat. "It depends... Cleave, will you do it?" Babe glanced away from the scope. "Just so long as you don't try to take me apart, Jimmy. I'll be all for it if I'm not scrap metal." Jimmy nodded. He understood. Jesse began to see what Jimmy was thinking, but Max had no idea. Max was scratching his head. "What're you getting at?" "Why not say we short-curcuited him? That way we could 'study' him and find weak points in another robot. We could say we don't want to dismantle him so that we can see how a robot walks... How it behaves when it's signal is jammed from the enemy. Maybe that box Cleave gave you could be something the humans used to control him." Everyone stared at Jimmy. Dana blinked, then asked him a question. "When did you get this idea, Jimmy?" "The humans gave me the idea..." "How?" "They used that box thingy to make the robot hide me. I saw him pushing the buttons... Is my idea stupid?" Jesse kneeled down beside him. "No Jimmy, that is one of the smartest I've ever heard. Was there anything else that prompted this little plan?" "Well... Cleave mentioned some of it to me..." Jesse saw Babe smile out of the corner of his eye. Babe stopped the tank and spoke. "Well, if I'm supposed to be the key here, I guess I should shut down." Jimmy flinched at that. Babe laughed and patted Jimmy on the head. "Don't worry, Jimmy. It won't be like last time. I promise. Max, would you take the controls?"

Babe laid down on the back seat and started shutting off his systems. Wing function offline. Radar system offline. For a moment, everything flet exactly the same as a time one hundred and fifty years ago. He could remember laying his head down on Sarrah's lap, watching her smiling face as he shut his eye functions off to wait out the trip they had taken. A little bit of pain came back as the full memory of that day returned.

"Sarrah, how long will it take?" He asked her before the train started. She smiled and asnwered. "I'll wake you up tonight for your sugar. The trip'll last for the whole day, Babe." "There's no way to make it go faster?" "No. We don't have all the test results yet. If we did, we'd let you fly home. This WAS the first time I've ever seen any part of you malfunction, Babe." Babe fidgeted, thinking about how his wings had stopped altogether. He made his ears turn off after that, believing that they would be fine without him, and slept.

Babe smiled as he finished shutting down. His head was on her lap, and he seemed right then to be at peace... Dana thought she saw a tear fall from his face before his eyes stopped glowing. She sighed, trying to imagine what the reaction would be when they returned.

--