Declare

Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun was a ‘good guy,’ and while she would never admit it, that title had given her many privileges that she had come to expect.

One of those was the instant trust and respect from every character she ran into. Another seemed to be the never-ending drinks at Tapper’s, her every attempt to pay so far having been refused by the eight-bit barkeep. A third, and perhaps the one she enjoyed the most, was the ability to move throughout the arcade without having to answer to anyone.

“Sorry about this, Ma’am, but if you would please step to the side? I need to ask you a few questions.”

Raising her eyebrow at the blue-colored spirit that had materialized before her the moment she had exited Hero’s Duty, Calhoun waved at her men to dismiss them before following the Surge Protector, leaning against the side of the socket as he flipped through the papers on his clipboard. Although they had had a limited amount interaction during the few years her game had been plugged in, the two of them often got along well when circumstances forced them to meet. Sergeant and Surge Protector, they were both characters of order and discipline, ready to do whatever was needed to protect their homes. So long as she kept her men and the cybugs in line and he warded off any damages that could happen to a consul during a power surge, they got along well. It was because of this mutual respect that Tamora waited for the officer to speak instead of demanding to know what was going on.

“I know that this is irregular, Ma’am,” Surge said apologetically as he finally reached a clean sheet, his pen already hovering over it to fill out what he needed, “but my sensors detected something strange when you lot passed through the barrier. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I still need to keep a record. I’m sure you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” she replied with a nod, waving at the sprite to continue on. While he still did a good job, it was well known that the physical protector was getting old, and even the best of systems occasionally got bugs in them. She would humor him. This time, at least. “Continue on, soldier.”

“Right. Now, I’m going to need your name and the name of everyone who left the game with you.”

“Sergeant Calhoun. My second in command, Kohut. Green, Johnson, Silivan, Baldwick, and, for the first time in a while, Markowski. Next?”

“Where are you all coming from this evening?”

“Hero’s Duty,” Tamora said, biting back a sigh as she pointed over her shoulder with her thumb at the game. She respected the Surge Protector, she really did, but sometimes his questions proved just how limited earlier technology really was.

“Did any of you bring unauthorized equipment with you?”

“Better not have,” Tamora growled, her eyes turning to narrow in on her men’s retreating backs. “Far as I know, all we have are our standard issue blasters. Which,” she cut him off with a raised finger, “shall remain tucked away until they’re needed. You know for a fact, Surge, that if any of my men even think about pulling something out of their code in the middle of the GCS, I’ll drop them in Zombie Apocalypse naked and covered in meat tenderizer.”

“And that’s something we all appreciate, Ma’am,” Surge replied with a nod as he straightened his glasses, peered at his list of questions for a moment before continuing. “Where are you lot heading?”

“Over to Tapper’s for a few rounds, then the pussywillows are heading back this way and I’m going over to Fix-It Felix Jr. for the night. We didn’t plan any game jumps, so that should be it until morning. Anything else, Surge?”

“Just have to ask if you have anything to declare, Sarge.” Lifting his head for the first time to smile at her, the Surge Protector waited with his pen poised to jot down her final statements. Again, although their number of interactions could be counted on one hand, the two got along well, partly because she was one of the few characters in the arcade who always had a good word for him.

“Doing a great job, soldier,” Tamora said with a grin as she pushed herself off the wall, her hands falling onto her hips as she nodded her approval. “Keep it up.”

“Thank you, Ma’am. Sorry again about the inconvenience, and say hello to the mister for me, would you?”

Disappearing in a haze of blue static before she could reply, the Surge Protector left Tamora standing alone, confident that that would be the last she heard from the character for the next few months. Figuring that he would soon have the issue fixed, thus allowing him to focus on the real threats that existed for the station, she had quickly set off to catch up with her men, ready for a few hours of doing nothing more than relaxing, tossing back a few before heading home to her husband, and a couple attempts towards paying the barkeep for their drinks. Reaching the entrance of Tapper’s, she was expecting a quite night of fun.

“Sorry about this, Ma’am, but if you would please step to the side? I need to ask you a few questions.”

“What’s going on, Surge,” Tamora demanded as she followed his request and moved so that she was out of the main entrance, her frown deepening as she watched the other characters that had been following her pass through the red grid without a problem. “This is the second time tonight that you’ve pulled me over when yesterday you let me pass just fine. What gives?”

“Sorry, Ma’am,” Surge said with a frown of his own as he looked over the papers that he himself had just filled out not even five minutes beforehand, the end of his pen scratching at his electric comb over. “But each time you walk through my sensors, I pick up an irregularity. Not quite sure what it is, since it’s so small, but it’s there nonetheless. And that means I need to make a report whenever you try to leave or enter a game.” His eyes narrowing for a moment as his searching gaze gave her a quick once over, he half turned his board to point at one of her responses. “Are you sure that you didn’t bring any unauthorized equipment with you?”

“Who do you take me for, Wreck-It,” Tamora scoffed as she refused the Surge’s question, her jab at Ralph’s tendency to steal fruit from Pac-Man all in good fun at the not presently there villain’s expense. Once, Surge had let it slip to her that he knew when the character was stealing the food, but truly couldn’t care less since all he ever did was eat it. Attached as he was to the Game Central Station, the Surge knew all. And if he didn’t, he soon found out. “I have nothing to hide, so you have no reason to keep detaining me.”

“Sorry, Ma’am,” Surge said, his words a mixture of confusion and sincerity as he once again looked at the board. “You’re right; you don’t have a reason to hide anything from me. Still, I have to make a report, and it might be better if you skipped Tapper’s for tonight and headed on home. If you don’t mind, I’ll walk you to Fix-It Felix Jr. while I’m asking my questions, and, hopefully, the issue will be fixed before tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tamora sighed, running her hand through her hair before falling into step with him, her voice monotone as she gave the exact same answers to the exact same questions a second time in a row. It was annoying, to say the least, but for tonight she would accept it. The Surge Protector was a good twenty three years older than her, so she would cut him a little slack. But only a little. Finally reaching the entrance to Fix-It Felix Jr., Surge asked one last question before letting her go, his pen once again hovering to write down her answer the moment she said it.

“And do you have anything to declare?”

“Try to get this bug figured out tomorrow, Surge,” Tamora said softly, her head turned to make sure that no character was too close to hear her as she reached out to pat his shoulder. “You’ve been a good Protector, and I would hate to see the others lose faith in you if they found out that your scanner was making mistakes.” With that she left, passing through the red grid to find her husband.

His eyes narrowing as she did, a small bell went off in the back of his head, informing him that something was wrong with the standard coding that he had come to accept as the general makeup of Sergeant Calhoun. It was something small, something that hadn’t been there the day before, but there it was. His scanner was not wrong.

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By the time it came for her to return to Hero’s Duty the next morning, exactly one hour before the arcade was due to open so that she could make sure her ladies were in tip-top shape, Tamora had been certain that Surge’s problem had been fixed. It had been hours since he had first pulled her aside, so that should have been more than enough time to locate the issue and destroy it. With this in mind, she had confidently kissed her husband good bye, saluted the few Nicelanders who had come to see her off, and flown down the cord on her cruiser, expecting to just pass through without an issue.

“Sorry about this, Ma’am, but if you would please step to the side? I need to ask you a few questions.”

“I thought that you said you were going to fix this, Surge,” Tamora hissed as she casually complied, making it look as if she had just decided to chat with the blue sprite instead of him having pulled her over. Slowing her cruiser to an abrupt halt, she sat so that she was hovering above him, one leg swinging free as she rested her chin on the other’s knee. Turning her head to glance at their surroundings, she was glad to find the station almost empty, the other characters taking a few more minutes to rest in their game of choice before returning to their game of origin. This was starting to get embarrassing, and she was glad that no one was there to see his mistakes.

“I did, Ma’am,” the Surge Protector said in a casual tone. “Spent the entire night searching the station to make sure that everything was in tip-top shape. Even went out onto the power grid to recruit some of the extras to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. And everything was perfectly fine. Sure, there were a few patches that needed to be done, but nothing that would cause the kind of problems that we had last night. Which would mean, Ma’am, that the issue is with you.”

“What are you trying to imply, Surge Protector,” Tamora said stiffly, her tone turning dangerous as she leaned forward to glare at him, one hand tightening around the edge of her cruiser to keep her balanced. To most it might have looked like a simple conversation between friends, their positions still casual enough to hide the tension between them. It would have taken someone who knew both of them quite well to see that, with just a single word or two, the situation could turn ugly.

“I’m not sure, Ma’am,” the Surge Protector said just as stiffly, his grip around his clipboard shifting so that his hold on it was more secure. While she was a very intimidating woman, he had never once feared Calhoun, his ability to turn into pure electricity at will and the many fights he had had to break up over the years making him more than sure that nothing would go wrong. “It all depends on whether or not you have something that you need to declare. My scanners say that something is different about your code. State the nature of this change, and I can add it to my systems so that this no longer happens. Until then, however, with all due respect, the issue is you, Ma’am.”

“And I’m telling you that you missed something,” Tamora replied, pulling off her glove so that she could show her wedding band. “If the problem isn’t with the user, soldier, it must be with the program. The only thing that has changed about my coding in the last three years is that I added this to it, and that’s something you already know. Any other changes that you detect are purely in your mind, Surge. Now, either continue to detain me for a circular conversation that I have no interest in continuing, or let me go get ready to fight some bugs.”

“Do you have anything to declare, Ma’am?”  

“Not today, Surge Protector; not today.”

With that she left, sliding off of her cruiser and throwing it over her shoulder to walk to her game. Although she was mostly just annoyed with the sprite, there was genuine concern for him as well, the very idea that he was sensing that something was wrong when it wasn’t an issue that she was going to have to keep an eye on. How could she be sure he would catch a cybug if it tried to escape when he couldn’t even read her coding correctly?

“Sorry about this, Ma’am, but if you would please-“

Ignoring him as she entered Hero’s Duty, Tamora’s only answer was to pull her gun from her coding and head farther into her game to find an early bug or two that needed to be crushed before the quarter alert.

---------------

By the end of the week, Tamora had been confined to Hero’s Duty, only allowed to leave each night when she went to Fix-It Felix Jr., and only because the hero of said game had searched him out and pulled more than a few favors to get the exception made. Eventually, the handyman had gotten the Surge Protector to agree, but only on the condition that he escorted the Sergeant to and from the eight-bit game.

Felix had agreed without a second thought, just glad that he had managed to get some form of result. His wife, on the other hand, was more than a little ticked.

“Be glad that you’re not one of my men, Surge, or else you would have been fed to a cybug already,” Tamora grumbled as she exited Hero’s Duty, wincing as the alarm that called the surrounding characters to a halt sounded. Sending them scattering with a glare, her hands tightened into fists as the sprite materialized besides her, falling into step as they hurried their way across Game Central Station. No one approached them, the obvious anger rolling off of the woman more than enough to keep them away, but they could still stare, and the last week of security checks and escorted visits had given them more than enough to gossip about.

“Well, once we figure out what’s wrong with one of us, things will go right back to normal, Sergeant Calhoun,” Surge said with a shrug as he fazed through a character that had been taking too long to get out of his way, reappearing by her side before she could take more than a step or two. Reaching their destination, for a moment he closed off the entrance, the red barrier fizzling as she gently pushed against it to see if she could go through. It was the exact same kind that kept her from leaving her game before the Surge Protector could accompany her, and she had come to hate that specific shade of red. “Do you have anything to declare today, Ma’am?”

“I can see why the villains dislike you so much.”

“Just doing my job, Ma’am. Proceed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Like sugar snacks you will,” Tamora grumbled as the barrier before her fell, allowing her to finally enter her husband’s game. Raising his eyebrow as he added a few new particularly interesting euphemisms to the collection he had started over the last few days, the Surge Protector’s ever present neutral expression fell as his system brought his attention once again to the disturbance in her coding. It was changing, growing almost, and its very presence made him glad that he had imposed an almost complete lockdown where she was concerned. Until he could determine the nature of the change, could figure out whether or not it was a virus that needed to be destroyed or a glitch that needed to be fixed before it affected the rest of her, he was just glad that he could keep an eye on her.

The issue would have to be fixed, one way or another, and he wanted to make sure that he was there if something went wrong with it.

--------------------

It took him another three days to realize what the issue was, and by then he was surprised that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind before.

“Hey,” Tamora called as her foot tapped against the red grid barrier that kept her inside, the impatience clear within her voice as she waited for him to release her so that she could go home. It had been half an hour since the arcade had closed, leaving her one of the last off-duty marines left in her game for the night. Already the station itself was beginning to clear out, the characters that had made plans for a game jump having already gone on their way while the others were already heading towards their original games after having finished their errands. Shifting as she waited for the sprite to reply, her frown only deepened as he just continued to stare at her. “Are you going to let me out of here or what?”

“Sorry, Ma’am,” the Surge Protector said unapologetically, his shoulders shrugging as he allowed her to pass. Making sure to keep his pace slow, annoying the woman as she was forced to keep in step with him, per their agreement, he casually continued, making sure to give the impression that nothing was wrong. “I was just thinking about our arrangement.”

“Finally ready to admit that there’s a bug in your system that you still haven’t found, you electric poof,” Tamora asked with a huff, her arms crossing before her chest as she waited for a response. The last week and a half had worn on her good feelings toward him. Being cooped up when hundreds of worlds waited for her just a few steps away had been more than enough to drive her mad, and the fact that it was his fault just made her opinion of him even worse. It didn’t help that neither she nor any of her men knew a single bit about coding and that the only characters in the arcade that did had been barred from entering her turf, thus making her own search of her code for whatever ‘error’ the Surge Protector claimed impossible. However, she felt fine, better even, and so was still insisting that the problem was with him.

“No,” he replied, “because it’s not. I’ve found the issue, and, just like I suspected, it has something to do you.”

“Then why don’t you just fix it already and be done with this twisted charade of police and prisoner,” Tamora snarled, coming to a halt half-way across the station as she took in the knowing smile on his face. “Then we can get back to our lives and not have to waste each other’s time with guarded escorts and fun-filled barriers every Mod forsaken time I want to visit my husband.”  

“Sorry, Ma’am,” he replied, turning to face her as he waited for her mini-rant to end. With each word she spoke his smile only grew, crinkling the skin around his eyes as he prepared for her reaction. “Turns out that this isn’t something a simple matter of coding can repair. We’re just going to have to wait until the issue fixes itself. Not a common occurrence, so, until everything’s over or we’re able to tell how your condition would affect other games, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to keep things the way they are until it does.”

“And how long is that going to take,” Tamora asked, exasperation clear within her voice as she stalked off, forcing the shorter sprite to run after her so that she wouldn’t get too far ahead of him.

“Depends on the game, Ma’am,” the Surge Protector said, throwing up the barrier before Fix-It Felix Jr. so that she wouldn’t leave him behind. “Like I said, this isn’t exactly a common thing around here, so it might be quite a while. But no more than nine months, give or take a few days.”

“Oddly specific, for something not that common,” Tamora muttered, her eyes narrowing as she leaned against the wall besides the entrance to her husband’s game. “Can you at least tell me what’s wrong, since you seem to be so convinced that I’m the issue?”

“Well, Ma’am,” the Surge Protector said with a laugh as he reached out to tap his clipboard against the armor over her lower stomach, causing her eyes to widen as something clicked in her mind, “I really do think that you have something that you need to declare.”  

Smirking as he left Tamora staring at her stomach, suspiciously prodding at the armor that covered it before running off to find Felix, the Surge Protector could only laugh as he headed towards the arcade storage systems that he had set up when he had first been plugged in. He needed to make a couple of changes to the file he had for Sergeant Calhoun and set up a new one for the character that would soon be joining the Fix-It family.