[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/MKK5m0sX/Kid-s-Hat-2.png[/img]

[i]feat.[/i]

[h3]GM[/h3]
[@Lugubrious]

[b]Level:[/b] [color=8258fa]5 (3 -> 6/50)[/color]
[b]Location:[/b] [color=8258fa][s]Hell’s[/s] [b]Devil’s[/b] [s]Gneidxick’s[/s] Casino, Inkwell Isle; Vs Mr. Chimes[/color]
[b]Word Count ([color=8258fa]Player[/color]/Total):[/b] [color=8258fa]1360[/color]/1774 [color=8258fa](+3 EXP)[/color]
[/center]

Foregoing all ceremony or introduction, the raucous chimp went hostile in a hurry, wasting no time making its first move. Hat Kid released her hookshot on her upswing to sail over an incoming note, dropping gracefully between the top two into an offensive bullet dive onto the exposed back of her suddenly inactive foe, only to bounce off of the toy monkey ineffectually (complete with rubber squeak). Distracted by the attack and prompted to act, her focus had been drawn away from the wall of cards long enough to prevent her from memorizing their faces, their backs now facing her. The good news was that she had a wide open window to try her first round of guesswork on card flips while Chimes was ‘busy’ doing his best impression of an old screensaver graphic. She started with the top corner card on the far end of the machine, flipping it over with a roundhouse kick on her turnaround as she hooked and swung back the way she came. To follow, she passed underneath Chimes to hit the bottom card on the second column, quickly detaching and reattaching her hook to gain air and reorient herself. Should she fail on her guesses, she would be sure to keep a mental note of what each one revealed.

The first card flipped by the child span around to reveal two cups with faces, their straws and noses red, one facing up and the other down. Unfortunately, her second attempt turned up a mismatched card, this one having a quartered shield with a letter in each section. A moment after the second card came up, they both flipped back around, and Mr Chimes ceased his movement a moment to shake worryingly. After that he accelerated, continuing on the same aimless path but a bit faster.

With the dormant primate’s fifty percent increase in speed, it became that much harder to stay out of his way. Kid still managed to pass over him unharmed, but only narrowly this time, slipping between the joints of the claw that held the boss aloft. Falling in a calculated arc, she tumbled and struck two diagonally adjacent cards--the middle third and bottom corner forth--in quick succession. These two revealed the rose-bedded likeness of their captor and a lettered logo of a game piece; yet another mismatch that further stirred on the idle toy chimp, his tether violently rattling from the disturbance, but the child dwelled not on the setback. She hooked on to the claw’s railing to zip to the other side, realizing too late that she was on a collision course with Chimes, who was moving twice his original speed at this point. The best she could do was brace for the hit, directing her momentum upward to roll over him the same way one would if hit by a speeding car, and while it didn’t exactly mitigate any of the damage, it did put her within reach of the top first column card. She flipped it to reveal a familiar image from earlier--one of two red-accented cups--and recalled where to go from there. She pushed off the card, latched onto the ceiling, swung to wrap around the claw cable and slingshot into the top corner opposite, bonking the card to show a matching pair.

For the first time since the start of the encounter, Mr. Chimes woke in uproarious fashion to resume clapping his cymbals, returning to his base movement speed. The manageable frequency at which he sent out musical projectiles made dodging them a fairly trivial issue for the prodigally acrobatic child, maneuvering her way around the toy simian’s attacks in an impeccable display of evasive trapeze artistry to close the gap between them. She met Chimes at the bottom of her swing, driving into him with both feet forward, and with her power Cap still on, she followed through with a quick back tuck to Burn Knuckle. The attack, while evidently damaging, did little to stall the chimp’s movement or break his sustained pattern of slapping out harmful musical notes, but it did carry her forward into the window and out of their range. With her feet planted against the glass as well as friction would allow for she turned to fire a first-level umbrella beam at Chimes to get one more hit in before he went limp once more and the cards laid out again.

The child rolled her eyes and let out a grumbling sigh of frustration at the delay before taking to the air. Whether the fight was padding itself out, or just wanted to remain consistent with its gimmick, Hat Kid saw it as an inefficient and unsustainable exercise in protraction, one she hadn’t the patience to entertain. Rather than striking a single card at a time and gradually narrowing down her task one round at a time, she saw fit to run along the wall of cards systematically flipping over each and every one in brazen defiance of the stage’s rules. She didn’t care if they reset themselves and agitated her foe. If he wasn’t actually chasing her, she could make room for herself to keep up her shenanigan until one (or both) of them got tired of it.

Impetuous as ever, Hat Kid tested the design of the game she found herself in and found it wanting. She could move faster than the cards could flip, and since each mismatch could only be undone after Mr. Chimes finished shaking and sped up, she quickly started flipping the other halves of mismatched cards before the originals turned away again. The process took a moment to get going, but once it did Hat Kid’s progress spiraled out of control until the entire array was revealed.

Score one for ingenuity! The game had been won, but the battle wasn’t quite over. Having all the matches made in quick succession sparked something unusual inside Mr. Chimes. After clashing his symbols he began to scream incessantly, sending out wave after wave of musical notes. In mere moments the air inside the game machine became crowded. With his head up the mechanical monkey seemed fully vulnerable, but surviving the torrent of projectiles long enough to take him down was the aim of the game now.

A familiar angry aura, one Kid had come to recognize as the start of a new phase in the fight, emanated from Chimes, or at least it appeared that way to the child. From the first round to the next, the attack complexity went from baby’s first rail shooter halfway to diet bullet hell as the aggravated chimp clapped and rattled his cymbals at a rate that produced a veritable Saturnian ring cluster of notes for Hat Kid to figure out how to get around. She managed… with variable success. She managed to bounce and footstool off of a few of them, but the congestion of harmful energy proved too much for her to navigate unscathed as she soon collided into one, then another, then one more. She recovered from the hitstun by spending her second jump and Power Dunking at the chimp only for her hit to fall short, placing her directly between the open cymbals. She might not have narrowly avoided being smashed if not for her descending angular momentum, which she used to gainer tuck beneath them and onto Chimes’ foot.

The already frantic toy monkey went into a fit of disruptive bucking, thrashing, and continued clapping in an attempt to fling the child away. For a moment, she held on for as long as she was able before letting go in time with a hard swing of Chimes' leg to get her airborne, where she then hooked onto the claw's main joint for use as a pivot point to swing laps around the chimp while his agitated attacks missed in a trail behind her. Once just above eye level with him, Kid whipped her hook line like a rein, sending a Power Wave to run down through the line, into the claw, and at Chimes. She then took full advantage of the momentary opening she bought herself, winding her Homing Attack up for half a second longer than usual to imbue it with added power before zipping headlong into Chimes. [i]([color=8258fa]'Power [b]Bonk![/b]'[/color])[/i]

The superpowered tyke smacked Chimes right between the eyes. He shrieked, but dully, and after a moment his eyes rolled back in his head and he drooped down to hang limply from his hook once more. A second later he slipped from its grasp and plummeted down to the pile of toys below, where he lay sprawled out.

But the defeated monkey was hardly the most interesting item down there. Among all the various objects heaped up at the bottom of the giant crane game, Hat Kid recognized one instantly: an hourglass. She’d been drawn to it unknowingly, maybe even pulled in the direction of this fight in particular by it, and now it lay firmly within her reach.

That said, the hourglass was huge. If she were her normal size there would be nothing wrong, but whatever jinx Gneidxick worked to make his challengers tabletop-sized meant Hat Kid’s treasure was bigger than her at the moment.

Somehow, she hadn’t noticed the gigantified Time Piece amidst the toys during the battle, but it was nothing short of appropriate that she discovered her unforseen reward following her victory. She rappelled down and grabbed hold of the hourglass by one of its columns in a knowingly vain attempt to haul it back up to the portal with her. Alas, [url=https://youtu.be/i35mCrPzXZs?t=756]the surprising strength to carry an elder walrus to safety in one hand[/url] wouldn’t suffice this time, for her coveted reward was large enough to provide her with a platform in a pit of playthings. This was evidenced by the fact that she was now standing on it visibly pondering what to do next as far as getting it out of there.

After glancing around the ‘room’ and back at the portal above, memory of her circumstance returned to her with a realization of what she might try next. She zipped back up through the opening, flying through it at ramming speed to hit the pink die and bouncing off in a forward layout, landing atop the rim of the table to meet the casino’s dealer face-to-face. Beckoning Gneidxick over, she spoke to him in hush (covered mouth whisper), quietly, but civilly voicing her demand to him under the rationale of having rightfully won it. She added that the fight took place inside of a prize machine, so it only made sense she had her pick of the prizes within it.