Car Shark

You are being sent to Wampa Tampa Island, where a mad scientist has constructed an enormous totemic lighting rod which has proved to be a menace for all manners of vehicles trying to sail or fly past the island, as they get targeted by highly concentrated lightning strikes sourced from the totem. Your task is to take down this device, but beware; a brutish creature created by the same mad scientist, a mutant shark named Timmy, has made the island his home, and he protects the totem at all cost. Timmy has enormous physical strength, and many other grotesque abilities, but most importantly, he is almost never seen without his state of the art racing kart, which he uses to run down his foes. And his expandable fish minions with their own vehicles are there too.

(Summary by Reece)

Suzie Mackenzie, an elderly Hotshot, and Cordelia Maris Undine, an Oceanographer, port-in to a small, tropical island, which appears idyllic at first glance—with palm trees, seashells, and gentle surf—though this is somewhat undermined by the dark storm clouds overhead, the frequent flashes of lightning, and a continuous, mechanical screeching emanating from the island’s centre, where a mechanical totem, several stories tall, rises from the caldera of an active volcano.

The agents’ arrival soon draws the attention of the island’s inhabitants—grotesque, bipedal fish, with huge, bulbous eyes and gaping maws—which begin emerging from reed huts scattered chaotically around the beach. At the same time, Suzie hears the approaching engine of some manner of off‑road racing vehicle and recalls one of her old designs, which she thinks would be a good fit for this environment. Cordelia, meanwhile, has no familiarity with land-based vehicles, having spent her entire life undersea, so darts behind a palm tree, attempting to hide until the threat has passed.

Then a massive, somewhat humanoid shark bursts out from behind the volcano, riding a tiny kart, comically small for his size. Like the fish, he is almost cartoonish in his proportions, though much more muscular, and with a wildly enthusiastic grin. At the same time, more fish begin emerging from their huts, these ones riding ramshackle motorbikes. From her visualised image, Suzie conjures a hovercraft-car with inflatable wheels and paddles. She hops in and takes off, heading directly for the shark, which attempts to ram her, only for Suzie to spot a nearby sandbank in the nick of time. By riding into the bank, she’s able to use it (and the shark’s face) as a ramp, flipping her hovercraft over in midair before landing safely.

At the same time, Cordelia is charged by multiple fish on their rickety, unstable motorbikes. She attempts to dash to a nearby pool of water to take cover in more familiar environs, but quickly realises that at the speed they’re moving, the fish will run her down before she makes it there, so to buy time, she hurls a canister containing a locally extinct species of plankton, which luckily makes contact with a fish and bursts explosively, spreading its slime like a squid spraying ink, causing the fishy biker to swerve aside and collide with another which was also closing in on her. In the ensuing chaos, Suzie and the shark make it to the pond first, but after a bit of driving around it, Cordelia manages to dive past them and into the water, magically expanding the pool’s scope in the process, to reveal a small cavern with a layer of volcanic glass at its floor, which she begins hacking away at with a resource extraction tool.

A fish follows her down while Suzie and the shark race off towards the volcano in the centre of the island. Just before the fish can reach her, Cordelia summons her submersible mecha, which the fish collides with hard enough to daze itself. Her magic then tears up the remaining obsidian and uses it to coat the mecha in an additional layer of power armour, enhancing it and causing it to resemble a cyclopean, black crab, at kaiju scale. After slipping into the mecha, she has it burst free of its containment, startling the biker fish into suddenly rethinking their plans, fleeing from Cordelia rather than running her over.

The volcano’s slope is unstable and as Suzie ascends, loose boulders begin tumbling down. She’s able to magically reinforce her vehicle enough to tank some hits, but rather than doing likewise, whenever one nears the shark, he simply catches it, hefts it, and lobs it back up at her. Just as her pursuer is about to catch up, though, Suzie leaps free of her vehicle and allows it to be struck by a boulder, causing a collision when it slams back into the shark’s kart, sending him tumbling down the slope.

She isn’t in the clear yet, though, as helicopters piloted by fish appear, with more of the biker fish leaping onto them in pursuit of Suzie, now that they’ve been disincentivised from chasing Cordelia. With her previous vehicle totalled, Suzie conjures a jetpack in its place, using that to ascend the caldera while dodging the fish dive-bombing her from their helicopters. She soon reaches the totem, noticing that it rises from amidst the lava pool, giving no indication of how far down its foundations actually go. She can see that the totem is made up from cylindrical segments depicting the forms of screaming animals, all rotating at varying rates. The uppermost segment appears to be a stylised lemur, though as Suzie watches, a pair of lightning bolts begin coalescing in the hands at the end of its tiny, outstretched arms.

Zooming closer to the totem, she’s able to put herself in a position which keeps it from easily targeting her, and descends dangerously close to the lava while lightning bolts slam down into the lake of molten rock all around her. She lowers a lengthy tube from her jetpack, with which she begins vacuuming up lava, filling a tank from which she’s able to launch a molten ballistic at the machine’s lower segments, detonating with force sufficient to destabilise the titanic structure… though not quite enough to actually fell it.

Meanwhile, Cordelia comes face-to-face with the shark when it tumbles down the mountainside. She plucks a palm tree out of the ground with her mecha’s pincers and smacks around the shark like she’s playing first baseball then whack‑a‑mole, all to no avail, with her foe being seemingly indestructible. Using a loudspeaker built into the mecha, she’s able to make periodic, island-wide announcements, keeping Suzie informed about the timescale she’s operating on when it comes to taking down the totem. However, as the shark first tears off the crab’s pincers, then shreds its shell, leaving the cockpit exposed, then finally circles the mecha, tearing off its legs one-by-one, Suzie realises that even with her lava-fuelled charges, she’ll not manage to take down the structure before the shark finishes off her fellow agent.

So she expends the last of her jet fuel to boost herself back out of the caldera and swoop down to land atop the shattered remains of Cordelia’s mecha-crab, conjuring another vehicle in the jetpack’s place, though by this point delirious from essence exhaustion, Suzie’s mind drifts to her love of baking as she’s trying to visualise the vehicle, and she ends up with a tiny, banana bread car. She then drives down the mecha’s remains—which rest at an angle—directly towards the shark, which of course revs up his vehicle before rushing to meet her, aiming for a head-on collision, only to be taken completely by surprise when Suzie pulls off a trick which results in her own ride being flipped over and tossed unceremoniously aside, whilst the shark and his kart are catapulted through the air, towards the volcano.

Cordelia sees none of this, abandoning her ruined mech through an escape hatch in its underside before enlarging the nearby pool again with another magical dive into its waters. She then takes the risky move of trusting Suzie to hold off the shark whilst leaving herself vulnerable for an extended period, slipping into a semi-conscious state of torpor as she takes in both energy and mass from the water all around her, slowly swelling like a sponge. Unbeknownst to her, though, her badge begins pinging mere moments after she enters this state: the shark, launched by Suzie’s manoeuvre, colliding with the precariously-leaning totem and finally toppling it, collapsing the side of the volcano and sending lava pouring down its far slope.

After Suzie topples from her now-rather-squashed vehicle, flopping out on the sand, with her Essence spent and barely clinging to consciousness, she just barely manages to work up the will to tap her badge and pingout. Not long after, Cordelia once again bursts from the pool as a towering kaiju, though this time with no mecha required. She notices her badge pinging, but moves to check on Suzie before departing, though as she inspects the banana bread car—noting the old woman’s absence—she spots the shark returning from behind the volcano, coming straight for her. Her initial reaction is to hurl the remains of the baked vehicle at her foe, but when that doesn’t even slow him, she just barely manages to slap her badge before he would’ve cannoned into her.

• Suzie Mackenzie (aka Madam Driver)

• Ms Cordelia Maris Undine unregistered