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Rocket Raccoon Lore

Ace Agent of the Universe

After Quill went and crashed the Milano — because he wasn’t paying attention to what Rocket was telling him, naturally — Rocket had noted that they were in the middle of what looked like a huge ship graveyard. Great, he thought. Let me go find parts, get the Milano patched up, and we’ll be out of there in no time.

So that’s what he was doing, only most of the ships were so old that they didn’t have anything useful for the Milano. He’d marked a few that might be worth closer attention, but mostly Rocket was not finding what he needed in this massive junkyard.

"Figures," he said to nobody in particular. "Looks like I’m gonna have to engineer something tricky."

There was movement among the hulks of ships off to his left. Rocket watched, but he didn’t see anything else. This Klyntar place had a strange vibe: Big spaceship boneyard, big monumental spooky ruins, all of it surrounded by a jungle made of the weirdest plants Rocket had seen on any planet. No visible sentient life, but all the same he felt like he was being watched. Also, there was a huge fire burning at one end of the boneyard, not too far from where Quill had crashed the Milano. Rocket considered checking back with the group before he explored much more...but nah. He could handle whatever came up. He sure didn’t need Quill, and Groot had said something about bonding with the local plants. Let him. Weirdo.

Uh oh. More movement.

They came out of the shadows so smoothly that for a moment, Rocket thought they were shadows. Then their motion gave them shape, silhouetted against the background of the spreading fire. Strange, elongated black life forms, no two the same except for their long teeth and claws. They sprang from the wrecked ships toward Rocket, but he didn’t waste any time. He racked his blaster and started shooting, running as he went.

He’d taken off in a more or less random direction, firing as he went to keep the monsters away, but ahead he saw a complex of buildings, in a weird monumental style that made him want to do literally anything other than go inside. But more and more of the toothy black monsters were hot on his tail, and Rocket prided himself on having better than average common sense, so he headed for the buildings, hoping to barricade a door, maybe. Anything to keep them out.

Right before he got to the doorway, Rocket dropped a miniature gravity well behind him. He had been toying with black hole tech for a bit and the temporary void annihilated the closest monsters, buying him enough time to get inside the building and jam the door with various bits of debris — and a weird-looking statue he knocked over and shoved in front of the doorway.

Okay, he thought. The monsters started to bang and scratch at the door. They weren’t getting in at the moment, but he wouldn’t have all day to execute the plan he hadn’t yet come up with.

So, he had to do a little scouting, see what he had to work with, but not waste any time.

As it turned out, quite a bit of scouting was required. Whoever had used these buildings, they had been very much into weapons and containment technology. This, Rocket reasoned, meant that it must have been some kind of jail, maybe? Or maybe they were trying to contain the living goo he had just escaped. Whatever its former use, he was going to turn it into a little fortress until such time as Groot and Quill decided to come looking for him.

His ears remained perked and alert, as he expected some of the monsters were in the building with him. This helped him dodge the blast from a wall turret as Rocket was trying to strip some quantum circuits out of a panel way down at the end of a long dark hall. He was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t even hear the self-defense mechanism arm itself, only jumping backwards a moment before it fried him. He looked back to his score, a fresh new hole in the quantum circuit cluster he was attempting to pry out. "I was looting that!" Rocket shouted at the inanimate object. Only the turret wasn’t there anymore, smashed to bits by one of the creatures he was expecting.

The creature snarled back, and Rocket blew it away. In the darkness, he heard others moving and breathing. "Spooky," he said. "Remind me not to book the reunion here." He was talking just to hear his own voice, and keep himself calm while he figured out what to do. Truth was, only one course of action made sense. He couldn’t go back outside, so if he had to stay inside that meant getting rid of all the monsters, or activating the rest of the tech.

Rocket looked up and down the long corridor, noting how many side passages and intersections he could see. "Nah, too open." He thought back to the building’s entrance. Just off the big front door, there was a smaller side room. It only had one door, and if he had oriented himself right, one of its walls was an exterior wall. So, if the monsters got in, he could always blast his way out through the wall. If he could retrofit the defense system before it took him out.

Not the best plan in the world, but it would do for now.

He zig-zagged along the passages back to the front of the complex, slowed down a bit by all the gear he was dragging. A monster flashed out of a side passage, but Rocket had smelled it a split second before. Another one dropped from the ceiling, but Rocket’s whiskers sensed the disturbance in the air. Again, he was ready. His blaster lit up the darkened halls every time one of the monsters got near. The closest one of them got to him was a weird crab-looking version that ripped some hairs out of his tail before Rocket reduced it to a puddle of goo.

Then he stopped in his tracks. Right there in a doorway was an energy barrier projector. Like the kind you might set up in a Xandarian prison. Rocket knew a little bit about those.

"Aw yeah," he said, ducking into the room and keeping his ears perked up while he fiddled with the barrier projector’s control panel. He was close to the entrance, close enough to hear the other monsters snarling outside the front door. This little room would be a perfect citadel, if he could get the other bits of the self-defense system online.

One of the monsters loomed out of the darkness. Rocket dropped his tools and blazed away at it until it was gone. Then he got back to work, knowing his time was running out. Kree, Shi’Ar, Skrull, Xandarian, so much tech had been retrofitted into this panel, Rocket was surprised it wasn’t his own invention. It looked like there wasn’t a power source but he had hotwired a few quantum circuits int his time. So he put the finishing touches into the console, paused to splatter another few monsters, and then hit the power button.

Aha! The energy barrier thrummed to life, with a few turrets in front of it, and because Rocket was exceedingly clever and also a little lucky, he was on the inside and the monsters were on the wrong end of a Kree turret. Just as an experiment, Rocket tried to shoot one of them through the barrier. Blam! It worked!

"Aw, yeah," he said again, louder this time, and then he was lighting them up through the barrier like there was no tomorrow. Which, if he didn’t figure out a way to get back to the Milano and get off this terrible monster rock, there wouldn’t be.

Hey, he thought. I bet I could use some of this stuff to reconstruct the containment fields in the Milano’s engines.

The idea lit up the inside of Rocket’s brain. He saw it all come together. It would totally work. All he had to do was get a plasma array, set of the couplings that would link it to the Milano’s magnetic field resonators, then wire the whole shebang into the acceleration chamber that was damaged when Quill crashed the Milano. Because, Rocket repeated in his mind, Quill was not listening to Rocket at the time.

More of the toothy black monsters that survived the turret onslaught threw themselves against the barrier. Rocket blazed away at them, and they fell back again.

Man, he thought. This is a mighty elegant solution to a real tricky problem. Guess a few other unfortunate souls worked together to try and survive. But I guess whatever works...

Only problem was now, Rocket had to get out of the protected room, and the complex, with all the components.

And that was going to require some finesse, because there were more of the monsters coming, and those doors weren’t going to hold forever.

Rocket racked a fresh charge into his gun, held it on the door, and waited.