Ch. 1: The Fall of a Failure

A young boy, a human, sat on the couch in the family playroom, a Wii U Gamepad clutched in his hand, and a Skylanders Trap Team Traptanium Portal with the Trap Master Wallop standing upon it. The game was plugged in and he was playing through The Ultimate Weapon, the final level of Trap Team. Lying in his lap, was a single toy that he had finally obtained.

A shiny, black, obsidian-like Kaos Trap.

X

Wallop paused, his twin hammers slung over his shoulders, as a weird floating speaker drone that looked a lot like Kaos' ugly bald scalp appeared in front of him, and Kaos' voice ranted from the speaker. "Hello, Skyloser! I hope you're ready for your ultimate DOOM!" Wallop rolled his eyes. "Yeah yeah, we've all heard that one before,"

The next phrase took him for a turn, though. "But wait, why am I even talking to you?" Wallop blinked. "Well, who else would ya talk to?" he questioned out loud, but after a couple of minutes of waiting, the speaker remained silent. So he unslung one of his hammers and knocked the drone out of the sky, where it silently fell into the void.

"I reckon he's finally lost it," Wallop muttered to himself, before jumping on the Bounce Pad and being catapulted to a platform mounted on the side of the Ultimate Weapon. Where, joy of joys, another bald speaker, that looked exactly like the first one appeared. "Well, looks like your Poser Master didn't listen to me," Kaos commented. Wallop rolled his eyes and crushed it between his hammers before it could even finish. "Absolutely insane," he muttered to himself.

X

The young boy rolled his eyes at Kaos ranting at him through the speaker on the Traptanium Portal. "Hello, Portal Master! Can you hear me? I assume you can, and you are too busy quivering in fear to respond,"

"Or maybe your stupid transmitter only works one way," he commented.

Curiously, rather than continue the rant, Kaos didn't respond. Instead, the boy heard another kind of rant. "Jack! Lucy's here!" his mother shouted down the corridor.

Seconds later, a mousy brown-haired girl with her hair in twin miniature ponytails and wearing what was unmistakably a school uniform summer dress bounded into the room, clutching an S1 Echo figure in her hand. "Hey Jack! Look what I brought!" she shouted at him, waving the figure in his face.

"And look what I got," Jack smiled at her, pausing the game and holding up the Kaos Trap. "Awesome!" she squealed, before snatching up a Wii Remote, placing her Camo on the Traptanium Portal and joining the game in 2-player mode.

X

Wallop had just finished clearing out the platform of Thornpies and other assailants when he heard panting from behind him. Looking around, he saw that Echo had just landed on the platform. "What took you?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Some Mabu obsessed with building a machine that could make money out of nothing. Like we don't already have enough cash from all those villain bounties," Echo sighed, rolling her eyes.

"Hey, having spare cash is never a bad thing," Wallop pointed out as the two walked over to a door that led to the inside of the machine. Echo shrugged and nodded. "I guess, but it just piles up and we have nothing to do with it, y'now? Food Fight's, like, a millionaire at this point,"

Wallop gave the Lock Master Puzzle barring the door a good whack, and as it rotated like crazy the mechanism eventually came unscrewed and fell to the ground. "Don't know why they try to get us to actually solve these things, it's just a waste of good time. Smashin' em's much easier," he complained, as the two Skylanders moved forwards down the corridor.

As they entered the room, another ugly speaker showed up. "Hey Skylosers! Remember when I said it was too late to stop me? Well now, it's even later than that! Muhuwahahahaha!"

"Well, no clam-shucks, Sherlock, time has a habit of moving forwards regardless," Echo commented. "Oh, so we have a smart-mouth here, do we? We'll see what your comments are after you have been UTTERLY DESTROYED!"

"They'll still be degratory and aimed at you," Echo dryly replied.

"Whatever. Good luck solving this totally unsolvable laser puzzle!" the speaker told them, before flitting off. Wallop watched skeptically as it crashed into the wall, then the ceiling, before collapsing to the ground in a battered, smoking heap. "Kaos really needs to take better care of his toys," Echo distractedly noted, bobbing her head to the beat of her seashell headphones.

"You talk too much," Wallop decided as he calmly moved around the room, pulling switches and allowing a laser pulse to travel around the room, revealing a bridge and opening a door. "Onwards, we advance!" Echo joked. Wallop skeptically glared at him. "Wish Zap or Slam Bam were here," the water seahorse/dragon hybrid muttered to herself.

As they progressed to the next room, yet another obnoxious flying speaker appeared out of nowhere. "Okay Skylosers, whatever you do, don't press that button! I'm warning you!"

X

"Obvious trap, right Lucy?" Jack skeptically asked his friend.

"Let's hit the button!" Lucy exclaimed, excited, and Echo rushed forward and jumped on the button.

X

"What did he say? Push that button?" Echo questioned, adjusting her earphones, before running towards the button while Wallop was still answering her question. "No wait, don't, it's a -" Echo landed on the button just as Wallop rushed after her to stop her. The platform immediately dropped out from beneath all six of the two Skylanders' feet.

"Trap," Wallop frowned at his fellow Skylander, throwing a hammer in mid-air. The hammer lightly cuffed Echo's leg. "Hey!" she complained folding her forelegs petulantly. "It's not my fault I didn't hear him," she complained.

"Hah! Fooled you!" Kaos shouted over the intercom, just to rub it in.

The two Skylanders landed on a platform near the bottom of the machine. Wallop peered over the edge, which seemed to reveal that the great machine had no bottom. Had they not landed on the platform, they would have fallen out into the void that was the bottom of Skylands.

X

"Lucky we landed there," Lucy commented. "You know the game would have automatically put us on the platform anyway, right?" Jack pointed out.

X

"Whoa, that was waaaay too close for comfort," Echo obnoxiously noted. "How did I get stuck partnered with you of all people?" Wallop moaned to himself.

They quickly jumped over a fence and pounded on a few more Thornpies and Rocket Ravens into oblivion, before reaching a door and being interrupted, for once not by Kaos. A droning, mechanical voice echoed through the machine. "Raising power levels to 50%,"

"Wait, raising to 50%?" Wallop questioned, concerned. "It already captured the entirety of Time Town in Traptanium - are you seriously telling me that it did that at less than 50% power!?" Echo gasped, shocked. "Meh, we'll just have to beat him before it reaches 100%," Wallop shrugged it off without a care in the world as he exited the machine's innards - thankfully this door was not obstructed wIth any irritatingly pointless puzzles - and beginning a long trek up a mostly barren ramp that led around the outside of the lower part of the superweapon.

Echo jumped aside as a laser pulse passed nearby her. "Ever heard of interior decorating, Kaos? As in, replacing the deadly lasers with something brighter and less deadly?"

X

Ben and Lucy jumped as Kaos' voice suddenly echoed out of the speaker for no reason. "What are you talking about? I designed the decorations myself, Skyloser! And they are awesome, you hear me! UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME!"

Then Glumshanks' voice echoed through the speaker. "Uh, sir, you're holding down the taunt button. The Portal Master is hearing you, sir, not the Skylanders, sir,"

By now even Lucy had realised something was up, and both were staring at the speaker set into the Traptanium Portal. "Huh? Oh, er, whoops. Nevermind, Portal Loser!"

Ben looked at Lucy. "You get the feeling something's not quite right?"

"All the time," she replied, a guarded, almost haunted look on her face.

X

Echo cocked her head. "You ever get the feeling you've missed something?"

Wallop rolled his eyes, and muttered, "I've been missing my sanity ever since I got partnered with you. Why didn't Bushwhack or Lob Star or Snap Shot or somebody get to be your partner, they'd enjoy it more,"

"I heard that!" Echo shouted as they reached the top of the ramp. "Oh joy, another crystal puzzle," she sweatdropped in irritation.

"Doesn't it just drop down that ramp over there?" Wallop questioned, gesturing to a moss-green ramp. Echo nodded, smiling. "Yup. You got an idea?"

Wallop smirked, and, in a single fluid movement, threw both of his hammers above the ramp, where, improbably, they hung in mid-air, steadily growing larger and larger, regardless of how much that defied the laws of physics, until they both crashed down on the edge of the ramp in perfect synchronisation. Echo applauded, impressed, as the broken mechanism failed and the metal sheet dropped down, providing the perfect makeshift ramp. "I always love smashing villain machinery," Wallop smiled as they ascended the ramp.

The second Echo cleared it, it collapsed to the floor. "Guess we aren't going back," Echo commented.

Making the jump to a platform with a luckily unbarred door back into the machine's innards, the duo entered a large room with various metal platforms.

A hulking, two-legged figure perched, looming, atop one of the platforms several metres above them. Echo, looking up, immediately saw it as it let out a maniac battlecry of "Where there's smoke, there's fire!"

Wallop's hammers began to glow ominously. "You're Smoke Scream, aren't you?" he asked, keeping a calm tone despite the well-concealed yet obvious worry in his eyes. The figure crowed triumphantly, and Echo could make out the silhouette of a troll sitting atop the ostrich-like figure.

"Yup!" the maniacal troll crowed, and the robot jumped to the ground, merely a couple of metres from the two Skylanders. Echo saw that it was a large brown-and-grey cockpit adorned with five blood-red spotlights, mounted atop a huge furnace, being carried by two big, mechanical legs. The troll sitting in the cockpit laughed maniacally, before beginning a speech. "I am the last of the villains who escaped from Cloudcracker,"

Echo sighed. "Oh boy. A monologuer," Smoke Scream continued, uninterrupted. "The only one who has managed to avoid recapture. As you might guess, I'm rather proud of my own win streak right there. And in order to continue it, I'm sorry about this, but you'll have to get a little bit," he seized the controls and belched a plume of fire at them. Wallop and Echo hastily jumped back, only just avoiding the blast. "Burned," Smoke Scream finished, as he yanked furiously at the robot's controls, and burst into a bout of maniacal laughter.

X

Jack smiled. "Piece of cake,"

Lucy's face matched his own. "Fire trap," she smirked, holding up a red Traptanium Crystal.

A/N

A/N

Hey hey, y'all! I'm Solar, if you don't already know that, and this is my first fiction. I was going to have the entire gameplay of The Ultimate Weapon in this chapter, but I figured, what the hell, I wanna get this out there!

Also, if anyone thinks Echo acts a liiiiiiittle OOC in the earlier parts of the chapter, originally her role was going to be filled by Camo. I only changed that about two-thirds of the way into this thing. So hopefully that explains that.

I have yet to come up with a cool sign-off (Hootie, should you read this, I'm a big fan of "That's owl for now!") so for now, buh-bye and please R&R!