Beginning Author's Note: Hello, hi, I have no self-control. Like my Power Rangers fic, this story is pure self-indulgence based on one of my favorite shows from when I was younger, and Eli Shane continues to be probably my first and one of my favorite fictional crushes. Characters are slightly aged-up and Eli's 18 instead of 15. Mari's set to be a few months older than Eli (in above-world terms, her birthday's on Halloween), and her mecha-beast is modeled after a blue and white snow leopard.

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If Marielle Grey had known that Eli Shane was going to give her a metaphorical heart attack that morning, she would've rather asked her Tazerling slug Circuit to electrocute her than risk Will Shane's son startling her when she had been least expecting it. Honestly, she hadn't even met him, let alone ever been expecting to see him in the 99 Caverns, even after his dad had disappeared.

But, the Maker consistently proved that they liked to mess with Mari's luck, so Eli accidentally sneaking up behind her really should've been the universe's fault, rather than Mari's own. She refused to believe that it was on her that Eli had unknowingly startled her.

Mari was peacefully riding her WI-LLO mecha, nicknamed Willow (ignore the complete unoriginality), through Wild Spores Cavern towards Will Shane's former hideout, to pick up a few things before she went on her way to the tournament that was being put on a little ways away in Herringbone Cavern. Mari had no desire to enter the tournament herself; she was confident enough in her abilities and her arsenal not to need to add anymore right at that moment (or risk losing some), but the brunette had been acting as the 99 Caverns' Protector in the absence of a Shane for long enough that her face and name was enough to act as an extra added boost of security whenever the situation called for it.

Hence, a need for her presence at the tournament.

As she made her way through the cavern, the sudden sound of some shrubbery rustling at the top of a small hill nearby caught her attention. Pulling Willow to a stop, Mari tilted her head towards the clump of bushes where the rustling had come from and listened.

Wild Spores was generally a peaceful cavern and had never really been one to get hit with any sort of crime, but then again, there was a first time for everything. Just in case, Mari took Circuit from where the Tazerling's blue glass slug shell was clipped to her belt and inserted the electric slug into her blaster, stepping off of Willow and to the side, pointing her Tazerling-infused blaster in the direction of the still-moving bushes, Circuit practically vibrating, the small slug was so excited at the prospect of potentially reaching velocity and transforming.

Suddenly, just when Mari thought that it had been a false alarm, that there was nothing in the bushes except for a herd of Floppers, there was a startled and distinctly human-sounding shout from the top of the ridge before someone came tumbling out of the bushes, too fast for Mari to see any identifying features, and too fast for her to get out of the way in time before the tumbling person knocked into her.

Mari's blaster, with Circuit still inside, went flying out of her hand and into the nearby foliage as the eighteen-year-old was knocked clean off her feet by whoever had fallen down the hill, the small Tazerling shrieking as she was accidentally thrown into the bushes. Mari and her mysterious assailant went tumbling down the slope for a good while before the young slinger managed to catch herself on a protruding root and yank both her and the unknown rolling person to a stop.

The eighteen-year-old braced one hand against her head as she regained her bearings, before looking upward and finally getting a good look at the person, or rather, the guy, that had run into her and rolled both of them down the hill.

Maybe a few inches taller than her but looking to be about the same age, the young man in front of her had dark black hair and tan skin and was wearing clothes that Mari had seldom ever seen. As in, you know, never. The style just wasn't common around anywhere. An orange and gray zip-up sweatshirt, pale green pants, and orange sneakers. The only reason Mari recognized the style at all was that Will Shane had told her about the style of clothing that abounded where he came from when she was younger before he had disappeared.

And, judging from the orange and yellow slug that hopped up onto the guy's shoulder, giving Mari a greeting-like chirp and waving one small stubby arm at the brown-haired human girl, there was only one person around the 99 Caverns who had ever used a slug such as that, and he had disappeared half a decade ago.

"Burpy?" Mari asked, growing even more confused the longer she looked at the Infurnus slug, and Burpy chirped again as if confirming that it was, in fact, him. But, if Burpy was here, and Will Shane was still missing, that meant...

Eli Shane, still smarting from his tumble down the hill, snapped his head upward when he heard the girl he had knocked into call his dad's slug by name, and he turned, managing to maneuver himself into a sitting position as he and Mari both stared at each other, both of them trying to figure out who exactly the other one was.

In Eli's eyes, the girl he had fallen against had curly brown hair that had been tied back into a ponytail behind her head with dark brown eyes and was dressed in a white shirt, cropped light blue-and-white jacket, and black pants tucked into a pair of heeled knee-high boots. Her belt held the blue capsules that slingers used to carry their slugs and load them into their blasters, but as he quickly glanced around, Eli didn't see a blaster anywhere.

A small squeak caught Eli's attention, and he skittered backward again as a slug leaped out of one of the capsules clipped to the girl's belt and all but jumped at his face, squeaking some more and sounding quite indignant at being pushed down a hill.

Eli might've grown up on the Surface, but he wasn't completely ignorant of Slugterra's native breeds of slugs; his Dad had taught him a lot about how to recognize each type of slug and what they did before he had disappeared five years before, so he knew a light-inducing Phosphoro when he saw it.

Lightly poking the blue-and-aqua slug that was still squeaking at him, Eli couldn't help but let out a small laugh as the Phosphoro gave a second-long glow, like someone flicking on a light switch for a single moment before switching it back off, but the girl Eli had run into grabbed the slug before it could yell at Eli anymore, in the way only slugs were able to.

"Glowy, quiet," the girl said, using one finger to rub the top of the Phosphoro's head, right between its antenna and almost instantly calming the little slug--that is, Glowy--down. A few dots connected inside Eli's head, and he gave the girl in front of him another look, this time with much more interest.

He thought it was cool when slingers named their slugs, but besides his Dad, he only knew of one other person with a Phosphoro, and more importantly, one named Glowy. The thing was, though, he hadn't spoken to her in years.

"Mari?" he asked, still not entirely sure if the young woman in front of him was the same Mari who had been the only other person he knew, aside from his Dad and Uncle, who had any knowledge of the world that existed beneath the surface of the Earth.

On the other side, from Mari's point-of-view, she remembered how there was always a certain uncanny resemblance that existed between all of the male members of the Shane family, so aside from obviously being younger than his father had been the last time she had seen him, Mari knew who Eli Shane was when she finally got a good look at him.

"Eli," Mari responded, not voicing her observation as a question like Eli had. Even though the two of them had been communicating for years up until Will had disappeared, this was the first time they had ever actually met in person, since this was the youngest Shane's first time in Slugterra, whereas Mari had grown up here her entire life.

"I can't believe it!" the younger Shane exclaimed, getting to his feet and being enough of a gentleman that he helped Mari stand as well before he wrapped the older girl in a hug that momentarily caught Mari off-guard. "Oh, wait, I have something for you,"

Mari, still slightly freaked by Eli's sudden burst of energy, could only watch as the young Shane walked over to the beige cylindrical bag that he had presumably brought with him and unzipped it, reaching inside and taking out a medium-sized box wrapped clumsily with a blue ribbon.

"Uh..." Eli stared at his box for a second, giving an embarrassed-sounding chuckle before he held it out to Mari. "It's not anything special, but I wanted to get you a birthday present for when we finally met. You know, in person,"

For a few seconds, Mari could only stare at the box, before she finally gained enough control of herself to take the box gently out of Eli's hands and undid the ribbon. Her birthday had been a few months ago. But, with Will having suddenly disappeared without a trace, and her mother suddenly thrusting her into taking up her legacy as the new "Grey of Slugterra", a title almost as historical and famous as that of the Shanes...well, to say it had caused the last five of Mari's birthdays to completely slip her mind would be an understatement. She hadn't even remembered Eli's birthday, she'd been so busy.

"I didn't get you anything," the girl said quietly, fully not expecting anyone to have gotten her a present for her 18th birthday; her mom sure hadn't. She also hadn't been expecting to ever be able to communicate with Will Shane's son again after the previous Shane had vanished, let alone meet him, even though Eli's birthday was only a few months after Mari's. But, in response, Eli just shrugged, signifying that Mari not getting him a gift wasn't as big of a deal as the older girl was making it out to be.

"You teaching me even more about Slugterra will be present enough," he told her, before flicking his eyes down to the box that Mari still held in her hands, and while the brunette had undone the ribbon that held the gift's lid in place, she hadn't opened the box yet. "Open it,"

Slowly, Mari reached forward with her free hand and flipped the lid off of the box itself, pulling apart the tissue paper that hid the birthday present within. When the gift was finally revealed in its entirety, all Mari could do was stare.

It looked as if it was a crystal statue, facets of the translucent mineral reflecting the glow from the bioluminescent mushroom trees above their heads that acted as daylight within Wild Spores Cavern. Even more outstanding, Mari realized as she studied the small statue closer, was that it seemed to be cut in the likeness of a Phosporo slug, one so much like that of her slug, Glowy.

"How'd you get this?" she whispered, staring down at the statue in awe as Eli walked over to the clump of bushes Mari had been standing beside when they first met and pawed through the foliage, finally extending a hand and retrieving both Mari's blaster and Circuit, the small Taserling chittering indignantly as Eli walked the electrical mollusk back over to Mari. "Where'd you get this?"

Eli suddenly looked sheepish, and he lightly scratched the back of his head as he handed Circuit back to Mari, the brunette taking the Taserling from him and clipping her blaster back onto the hooks connected to the holster around her thigh.

"There's a place on the Surface that does custom pieces," he said bashfully as if he was nervous that Mari wouldn't like the gift, when in fact the other eighteen-year-old had never received something so nice before as a present of any sort. "It wasn't too hard to have one made of Glowy, especially since the business does a lot of..." he trailed off for a moment, making Mari glance up at him before Eli looked down at his sneakers. "Nevermind,"

"Thank you," she told him sincerely, and Eli gave her another smile.

One other thing to know about the legacies of the Shane family and the Greys...as long as there had been a protector from each generation of the families, and provided that the Shanes trusted the partner from the latter familial line enough to debate risking everything for them, the Greys were the only other people in Slugterra who knew of the Shane family's biggest secret, and the one they kept nearest to their hearts.

There was indeed a world above that of Slugterra itself, and the Shanes had been the ones originally tasked to protect it from the knowledge of anyone who might harm it, including those who may live in Slugterra itself. Even the Greys of previous generations never divulged the secret to their successor until the current Shane told them it was okay first, and it had stayed that way for years and years and years.

Will Shane had been partnered with Mari's mother, Hannah for over a decade before he told her anything about the world above, and it had only been with explicit permission from his father that Eli had told Mari through a letter delivered by Will when the younger two had been ten, three years before Eli's Dad had gone missing.

At first, Mari had felt slighted at the thought of her family and the people she was closest to lying about a whole other world that existed hundreds of miles above her head, but Will had helped her see that, by trusting her with the secret when she was so young, it meant the Shane family trusted her enough to believe her to be able to keep the secret, well...a secret.

Mari still thought that was a lot of responsibility to drop onto the head of a ten-year-old, but whatever.

"It's about time you became the Shane," Mari said quietly as she returned the Phosphoro statue to its box and placed it inside her messenger bag before the brunette climbed onto Willow again, the snow leopard mecha standing calmly in place as Mari spoke to Eli. "Your father might've been one of the best, but when he disappeared, everything pretty much went to shit,"

"Yeah..." Eli said quietly as he, with Burpy chilling silently on his shoulder, walked slowly along beside Mari and Willow. The Shane hideout wasn't too far away from the hill Eli and Mari had rolled down, so it wouldn't take the two of them long to reach it, which is where Mari assumed Eli had been heading anyway. "I kind of figured that,"

Realizing that she had dampened her childhood friend's mood, Mari maneuvered Willow sideway and lightly nudged her foot against Eli's hip, making the Shane turn and look at her.

"You're here now, though," she told him quietly as the hideout finally appeared through the brush. "And that's all that matters,"

This particular Shane hideout, which was one of the oldest and had been in Eli's family for years, had been fused with a mushroom tree, the fungal plant growing through the center of the hideout, with the building having been built around it. The hideout itself looked like a half dozen white, spherical eggs stacked horizontally on top of each other, with bulbous blue windows situated at various spots around the building up and down the mushroom tree's trunk.

"I didn't tell you Happy Birthday," Mari realized a moment later as she and Eli made their way to the entrance of the clubhouse. Leaving Willow at the edge of the thick and viny trunk that acted as a bridge connecting the Shane hideout tree to the rest of the trail, Eli and Mari balanced their way across the bridge, and Mari glanced up at Eli as the two of them reached the front door. "Happy Birthday,"

"Even though it was technically yesterday," Eli said, shrugging and giving Mari a grin, to which the brunette girl just glared at him. "Thanks,"

Then, Eli reached forward and pushed the double doors to the hideout open, the old wooden doors creaking with misuse and bringing forth a cloud of dust that made Mari sneeze.

The Grey hadn't been back to the hideout since her 18th birthday a few months earlier, and she hadn't exactly made her camp the night before close by, so she had momentarily forgotten how messy and run-down the hideout had become since Will Shane had gone missing.

"Kind of a mess, isn't it?" Eli spoke up once he had gotten a good look around the abandoned and derelict clubhouse and glanced at Mari. "You don't live here, do you?"

"Me?" Mari echoed, before shaking her head. "No,"

Eli looked at her expectantly, as if he were waiting for her to continue, but when Mari didn't divulge anything else about where she was staying for the time being, a slightly awkward silence descended upon the two teenagers, with Eli shuffling his feet against the entryway floor of the clubhouse before Burpy chirped, drawing the Shane's attention momentarily away from the girl in front of him to where the Infurnus slug had hopped onto a nearby table, and was pointing with one stubby little arm at a large gray cabinet that sat just inside the door to the clubhouse.

As her childhood friend pushed the big red button on the side of the cabinet, causing the doors to slide open, Mari poked her head around Eli's shoulder to see what was inside. When her mother indoctrinated her into the Grey family's legacy concerning the protection of Slugterra after Will Shane's disappearance and her early retirement, Hannah Gray had expressed the importance that the then-thriteen-year-old Mari never open that cabinet unless she was with a Shane.

And considering she had never been one to stray from following any of the rules set by her mother, Mari had listened to Hannah, and for the last five years, had combated her curiosity as to what might be in the mysterious cabinet. As it were, when she did finally see what was inside, Mari found herself overwhelmingly underwhelmed.

All that was in the cabinet were a few changes of clothes more relevant to Slugterra's style of attire, even closer to that of the uniform that the previous Shanes had worn for generations, along with a few extra slug shells, likely having been left by Will Shane for his son to inherit whenever Eli would eventually make the journey down below.

Mari knew that Will had prepared a letter with instructions in advance for what he wanted his son to do when he finally reached Slugterra once Eli turned eighteen, so hopefully, Eli knew that the changes of clothes were to help him blend in, lest he wanted his surface-style clothes to receive a lot of strange looks and unwanted questions. Well, Mari hoped that Eli had at least found the letter, to know the basics of what he needed to do once he made the Drop.

Regardless, the brunette turned to the Shane next to her a moment later and looked him up and down.

"Take your clothes off," she said bluntly, and Eli whipped his head around to look at her, his eyes wide and cheeks turning a bright red as even Burpy let out a startled-sounding squeak. Only several seconds later did Mari realize just how sensual her words sounded, and this time, she was the one avoiding Eli's gaze, feeling her face heat up as she scrambled to pick up the shreds of her dignity. "Not like that!" she exclaimed, reaching inside the cabinet and tossing one of the changes of clothes to Eli, who only just managed to catch them before they hit him in the face. "Your Surface clothes give you away. You need to change so you look like you belong here, instead of coming from somewhere no one else believes exists,"

Eli only nodded once to show he understood before he looked between Mari and the pile of clothes in his arms, his expression still devastatingly sheepish.

"Could you..." he didn't finish his sentence, but Mari was able to catch the gist of what he meant to say, because she felt her face flush again, and the eighteen-year-old girl practically sprinted out of the clubhouse, slamming the double doors behind her before leaning her back against them, putting her face in her hands and letting out a groan.

Her first time meeting Eli Shane in person, her first time even communicating with him in five years, and she had made a fool of herself almost five times in less than half an hour: Marielle Grey, everybody, the master of flawless first impressions.

A few minutes passed of Mari momentarily hitting herself for being an idiot inside her head before she felt the door move behind her back and stood upright again just as Eli pulled the doors open from the inside, now dressed in his new Shane uniform, and looking distinctly less out-of-place than he had when he'd been wearing his Surface clothes.

"What's next?" Mari asked as Eli fiddled with his gloves, making sure they were completely on and straight before he glanced up at the young woman in front of him. Mari didn't know the contents of the letter that Will Shane had left for his son, so she was hoping that Eli, at least, knew what he was supposed to do after he got dressed.

Diverting his gaze from Mari, Eli reached into the pocket of his pants and withdrew a folded piece of paper, upon which Mari assumed Will Shane's letter was written. Unfolding the paper, Eli skimmed the contents for a few seconds before looking back toward Mari.

"Garage?" he asked, and Mari tilted her head. "I think. I assume that's where you guys keep mecha beasts, or maybe it's different down here and that's another Slugterran custom that I have no idea how it works," He flicked his gaze back down towards Will's letter, and Mari could see his eyes roving back and forth as he read and reread the contents, as if there would suddenly be something in there that he had missed when he'd read the letter the first dozen times.

"You'd assume right," Mari gave a small laugh, hoping that the momentary awkwardness from earlier had dissipated, before nodding her head off to the side. "We call it the service bay, but come on, I'll show you where it is. It's not far,"

Maneuvering along the thin path that wound along the trunk of the mushroom tree and towards the entrance of the clubhouse's service bay, Mari was abruptly reminded once more that it had been several weeks since she had last traveled to the abandoned Shane hideout because she knew for a fact that as run-down as the building had become in the five years since Will Shane had disappeared, the rusted and clunky looking FRND-O model mecha standing in the center of the service bay had not been there the last time she had.

If that had been the mecha Will Shane had been planning on giving his son for Eli's 18th birthday, the older Shane's gift-giving skills were severely lacking. Maybe Hannah Grey had stopped by recently to drop off the birthday present as a favor for Will, considering the latter was nowhere to be found, but Mari's mother had hardly even left the Grey's home cavern in the last half-decade, much less made the long journey over to Wild Spores.

Eli and Burpy--the small Infurnus slug seemingly taken up a permanent place on Eli's shoulder--looked equally as unimpressed as the two humans walked inside the service bay and stared at the rusted mecha in front of them. Mari was even able to hear Circuit and Glowy let out callous-sounding chirps from within their glass cylindrical shells.

"Thanks, Dad," Mari heard Eli muttering to himself as he walked over to the FRND-O mecha and lightly poked the jaw of the beast-like vehicle, the rusted screw holding the thing together coming loose and causing the jaw to sag. "Though, I was expecting something a little...cooler,"

Mari couldn't help but let out a snort before she glanced around the service bay again and her eyes landed on a tarp-covered and distinctly mecha-sized mass that stood on the other side of the "garage", as the Shanes apparently called it on the Surface. So, while Eli was still muttering to himself about his missing dad and Will Shane's lack of gift-giving skills, Mari walked over to the other side of the service bay and whipped off the brown canvas tarp, revealing the object underneath.

It was another mecha, and it was one that the older girl was pretty sure was made to fit Eli's style more than the FRND-O mecha did. The orange and white LKE model mecha looked quite familiar to Mari, considering it was almost identical to the mecha that Will Shane himself had used before he disappeared, though this one had been updated with new tech, and was now at the very least five years old, it didn't seem as if the tech was out of date or anything.

"Oh, cool," Eli murmured once Mari had manually turned the younger Shane's head from studying the FRND-O mecha and turning towards the LKE instead. "LKE model? How about we call you...Lucky?" Lucky didn't respond (obviously) but Mari couldn't help but let out another snort. Slugslingers never had been ones for originality in naming their mechas, she supposed, given that her mecha's nickname was already a shorthand version of its model designation.

With Eli's mecha now properly found and named, it came time for the new Shane to finally get his hands on his first blaster, a task that drastically dropped Mari's faith in Eli the moment the eighteen-year-old opened the storage cabinet that was off to one side of the service bay, revealing a stocky white-and-blue blaster, along with even more empty slug shells.

"Please tell me your dad at least taught you how to shoot a blaster before he disappeared?" Mari asked as Eli pointed the blaster around the room as if he were the star of an action movie, acting so much like Max Jackson it was almost creepy. At least Eli knew how to hold his blaster correctly.

As it were, the blaster Will Shane had left for his son wasn't one that Mari would've ever picked for herself, the design was way too blocky and cumbersome to be of any good use in the chaos of battle, but she supposed it would be good enough for Eli's first couple of duels. At least until he got enough slugs to afford a newer one.

Burpy even hopped into one of the empty slug canisters and chirped, as if he wanted Eli to load him into the blaster that Will Shane had left for his son and finally shoot it. Mari's slugs, on the other hand, looked remarkably unimpressed, and even a little freaked out if Marielle were being completely honest.

"Of course, he taught me how to use a blaster," Eli countered Mari's previous inquiry, still swinging his blaster around the empty service bay. When he accidentally pointed the blaster at Mari, the brunette pushed it out of the way with two of her fingers and gave Eli a deadpan look, raising just one of her eyebrows. Eli gave an embarrassed-sounding chuckle and holstered his blaster by clipping it to his belt before he shrugged. "I've just...maybe...never fired a blaster before,"

All Mari could do was give a heavy sigh in response and pinch between her brows with two fingers as she realized that, as much as Eli did know about Slugterra, there was also so much that his dad hadn't been able to teach him before a clatter from behind the two of them had the Grey whipping around and pointing her blaster in the direction of the noise, Circuit already loaded in again and ready to be fired, the small little Tazerling chittering with anticipation.

All in all, the entire action took place in less than four seconds. Eli, on the other hand, just placed a hand on top of Mari's, eyes wide as he tried to push the older girl's blaster down and away from where she was pointing it.

"Geez, Mari, relax," he told her quietly, though Mari still kept her guard up. "It's probably just a mouse or something. I doubt it's anything to be worried about,"

"What's a mouse?" Mari asked, not having recognized the word from any of Eli's letters or Will's lessons on the Surface from before the elder Shane disappeared. Eli gave the older girl a funny look as if he had momentarily forgotten that the two of them hadn't actually grown up together on the Surface, just as more clattering came from behind the door of a nearby closet, and with it, this time, came a voice.

Mari couldn't make out exactly what was said, but she knew that whoever, or whatever was behind the door, was having a difficult time doing whatever they were doing, aside from, you know, blatantly trespassing.

"Do mouses usually make that much noise?" Mari asked, glancing at Eli and raising her blaster towards the door again, her question making the Shane give her another look.

"Uh, it's mice," he corrected her gently before he followed Mari's lead and pointed his father's old blaster towards the door as Mari reached for the handle. "And no. Mice don't usually make that much noise,"

In hindsight, Mari figured she probably should've had Eli open the door to the clubhouse, while she pointed her blaster at the would-be intruder since she was the more experienced slugslinger out of the two of them, but as it were, the added threat of Mari knowing what she was doing wasn't needed, as the intruder to the clubhouse was less than intimidating, for several reasons.

Without another glance toward Eli, Mari whipped open the door to the clubhouse, causing the intruder to roll to a stop in front of the two eighteen-year-olds. Or rather, in front of Eli. Mari paused as she realized the intruder was a molenoid, who seemed to be having quite a bit of trouble wrangling his slugs, the mollusks chirping and hopping away as the molenoid tried without success to hold them within his hands again.

"Don't shoot!" the molenoid shouted in an accented voice, skittering backward as he held up his hands in surrender. "Don't shoot!"

"Who are you?" Eli asked, still pointing his blaster towards the solenoid, the latter of which looked almost offended at the young Shane's lack of recognition of him, though why that would be, Mari wasn't sure. She had never seen the molenoid before today.

"Who am I?" the molenoid echoed, popping back up to his feet. "I think the real question is, who are you?"

"I asked you first," Eli retorted, and Mari had to admire his confidence, the young Shane didn't waver from his grip on his blaster, no matter how inexperienced with handling it he was. "And I'm the one holding the blaster,"

"Ah..." the molenoid trailed off for a moment, placing his four-fingered hands on his hips before studying Eli again. "I see you are as clever as I, young man. Pronto," the molenoid suddenly swept himself into an exaggerated bow, bending almost down to the floor as he introduced himself. "At your service. Tracker, explorer; molenoid of many talents,"

"Funny," Eli deadpanned, and judging from his voice, Mari knew that he wasn't buying this Pronto's act. "Dad never mentioned you. Mari?" this time, Eli glanced over Pronto's shoulder at where Marielle was still standing behind him, and Mari walked over to stand beside Eli as Pronto whipped his head around, obviously having not realized that the eighteen-year-old girl was even there. "You ever heard of this guy? Your mom ever mentioned him?" Eli asked, and Mari glanced between him and Pronto.

She was able to see the moment that Pronto connected the dots between Eli mentioning his and Mari's parents and the location in which the three of them were standing, just as Mari looked towards Eli again.

"Nope," she said, barely able to restrain herself from grinning, knowing she and Eli had caught Pronto red-handed trespassing. Out of the corner of her eye, Mari saw the molenoid swiftly glance around as if debating how fast he'd be able to try and escape before Mari started chasing him, but instead, Pronto just pointed a slightly shaking finger in the direction of the two teens.

"Your father is Will Shane?" he asked Eli, who gave a small and slightly confused-looking nod, and Pronto turned his finger towards Mari. "And your mother..."

The molenoid trailed off, but Mari knew what his unfinished question was going to be, and the brunette gave a nod of her own as her answer.

"Hannah Grey," she said. If it was possible, Pronto's eyes widened even more, before the molenoid gave a nervous-sounding laugh and seemed to metaphorically pull himself together before he spoke to Eli and Mari again.

"Of course!" the molenoid said quickly, skirting around Mari so he was now standing on the brunette's opposite side, and Mari had to turn around to keep an eye on him as Pronto steepled his fingers. "I have a perfectly good explanation for this, you see?"

Glancing once at Eli, Mari knew that he was just as unconvinced by Pronto's 'explanation' as she was, so in response, all the two of them did was hold up their blasters, Circuit and Burpy growling at Pronto from inside their respective ammo feeds.

As if he realized that lying would end very badly for him while he was faced with the youngest Grey and Shane, Pronto heaved a heavy sigh, the molenoid throwing his arms up in the air before he told Mari and Eli the truth.

"Alright!" he conceded. "I never actually...met Will Shane or Hannah Grey. But, if I had..." At this, Pronto whirled around, and it gave Mari enough of a chance for the eighteen-year-old to glance over at Eli and quirk her eyebrow, the Shane just giving a helpless-looking shrug in response. He was as clueless about Pronto's antics as Mari was. "Oh, there would be no doubt! They would've both begged me to be on their team! As should the two of you!" Pronto whirled around again, pointing his finger close enough to Mari's face that the brunette slapped it away. "After all," Pronto added a moment later. "What are a Shane and a Grey without a tracker to lead them on their adventures?"

Hannah Grey was the last person Mari knew who would beg anybody to do anything, especially if the 'anything' was begging someone to be on her team. Luckily, even Eli seemed skeptical about letting Pronto join up with him and Mari, if they did end up working together because he consulted the letter that his dad had left for him once more.

"Dad didn't mention anything about needing a tracker either," Eli said, and Mari gave a nod of agreement from where she was still standing beside Eli, arms crossed.

"So thanks," the brunette added, inclining her head slightly as she, quite literally, looked down on Pronto. "But, no thanks,"

Pronto sighed, his eyes turning misty, and somewhere, deep down inside herself, Mari felt bad. "And so," the molenoid began again, pressing his clenched fist against his forehead for a moment before beginning his walk across the service bay to his mecha, which turned out to be the rusty FRND-O beast that Eli had originally thought belonged to him. "A dream dies...Perhaps we will meet again. If ever you pass through the Low Rock Caves, by way of the Northern Cavern or, uh...Scorched Sparks?"

Mari gritted her teeth as she realized what Pronto was doing. Guilt-tripping had never been something that completely worked on her, she'd endured too much of that particular phenomenon from her mother to get phased by it anymore, but from the corner of her eye, she could see that Eli was beginning to get swayed by the molenoid's smooth talking. Mari could've easily navigated herself and Eli through almost anywhere in Slugterra; she had lived here her entire life after all, and she had been acting as the 99 Cavern's protector for long enough in Will Shane's absence to not see the need for the molenoid.

"You know..." Eli began before Mari was able to stop him, and Pronto turned towards the Shane from where he was sitting on the FRND-O mecha. "A tracker might actually come in handy,"

"Yes!" Pronto cheered as he bounced off his mecha and over to Eli, shaking the eighteen-year-old's hand quite vigorously. "You have made a wise choice, young Shane,"

Next, Pronto went over to Mari, but the brunette just sent him a glare, making the molenoid back off and causing Pronto to give a small, nervous-sounding laugh, giving him second thoughts before he went to try and shake her hand.

"My name's Eli," Eli introduced himself properly to Pronto while giving Mari a nudge and a look that warned the older girl to be nice. "And this is Mari,"

"Good names, the both of you," the molenoid responded before he spun around and braced one hand against his chest. "Not as good as Pronto, but good, nonetheless,"

Mari couldn't help but roll her eyes at Pronto's antics as the molenoid continued to bask in his own perceived greatness, but the eighteen-year-old also assumed that the clubhouse's intruder could've been someone a lot worse. Like...Blakk, for example.

"You two, young Shane and Grey," Pronto continued, gesturing between Eli and Mari respectively as he puffed out his chest and stood in front of an increasingly enthusiastic Eli and an equally as dubious Mari. "Will not be disappointed,"

Mari just huffed out a breath in response, crossing her arms again as Eli glanced between her and the molenoid for a moment before finally turning back to Pronto, with Burpy hopping back up onto his shoulder.

"Good," the Shane began, grabbing one of the empty ammo feeds off of the bandoleer on his chest and holding it out towards Pronto. "Because if I'm going to fight evil, our first order of business is to catch me some slugs,"

"Well, as the Shane," Pronto began. "You must have an impressive arsenal of slugs. Show them to me," the molenoid gave a dismissive shrug for only a moment before making grabbing motions with his hands, as if mentally visualizing the slugs that he thought Eli had, even though it was obvious that Pronto didn't realize that, aside from Burpy, Eli had no slugs.

Mari had known that, given the distinct lack of Will Shane being around to show his son the ropes of being his successor, Eli would have to figure out most of how Slugterra operated on his own, aside from what Mari herself could tell him, but the eighteen-year-old hadn't thought Eli would be flying in, so to speak, almost completely blind.

In response to Pronto's request, Eli just held out a hand, and Burpy hopped off his shoulder and onto the other given perch. Pronto, though, just gave another dismissive wave towards the Infernus, obviously not impressed as he should've, especially considering how rare the Shanes' partner slug probably was, since Burpy was the only Infurnus Mari had ever seen. She had grown up around Will Shane almost the entire time that the protector spent down in Slugterra when he wasn't on the Surface visiting his family.

"Yes, yes," Pronto mumbled to Burpy. "You are very nice. But, uh..." the molenoid trailed off for a moment before glancing to either side of Eli, as if the younger Shane's suspected army of slugs was somehow hiding behind his boots. "Where are the rest?"

"There aren't any," Mari said simply, causing Pronto to whip his head in the brunette's direction with the most shocked expression the Grey had ever seen. "He's new," she added, nodding her head at Eli as if that explained everything.

"Yeah, but Burpy's awesome," Eli piped up as Pronto's mouth fell open in sheer horrified astonishment, and Mari glanced over at the other human.

She could admit that the experienced Infurnus was probably one of the coolest slugs she had ever seen, but even she knew that Eli would never survive down in Slugterra with just Burpy. Eli had to know that as well; surely Will had drilled into him how important it was to have a variety of slugs in a slinger's arsenal, regardless of whether or not the slinger preferred a certain type.

"You only have one slug?" Pronto asked, his voice quickly rising in pitch and volume the longer he spoke, and Mari figured it wasn't often that the molenoid met someone her and Eli's age who was set on becoming a slinger, but had less than an impressive ammo collection. But, as it were, the molenoid seemingly got over his surprise fairly quickly, because Mari could practically see the idea appear inside Pronto's brain an instant before the so-called "expert tracker" said anything. "You need to win some experienced slugs in a battle!"

Eli suddenly looked very nervous, and Mari was reminded that this was the young man's first day, probably, in Slugterra, and the idea of him going up against unfamiliar slug-slingers, even ones that showed up at tournaments like the small-town one that Mari had originally been planning on attending before she'd made the detour to the Shane hideout, made her nervous, as well.

"You'll be fine," she told Eli and the Shane gave her a grateful smile before Mari tilted her head and gave a small shrug. "Maybe,"

Eli's smile abruptly disappeared, and Mari honestly felt a little bad about teasing him (it was his first day in Slugterra, after all), but Pronto jumped up onto his mecha and made his way outside before Eli or Mari could stop him.

"And I know just the place," Pronto was saying, completely oblivious to the fact that Mari had just teased Eli about the fact that his emerging career as a slugslinger was about to start in probably one of the worst-case scenarios you could imagine. "It is a small local tournament. The competition should be no problem for a Shane,"

Pronto had a lot of confidence in Eli's slug-slinging abilities--of which Mari knew Eli possessed exactly none--and she knew that the confidence was, in part, simply due to the sheer recognizability of Eli's name. Shanes had protected the 99 Caverns for generations; thus, Eli, by genetics, had to be good at slinging.

The only problem was, as of the last letter that Eli had sent to Mari, delivered through Will a few months before the elder Shane had disappeared, the younger Shane still hadn't shot a slug out of a blaster, and Mari doubted that Eli just had one laying around his Surface house for him and Burpy to practice with after his dad had disappeared.

"What's the hold-up?" Pronto asked, finally having noticed that Eli and Mari had stopped following him. "We have slugs to win!" When Mari glanced over at her childhood friend, she saw Eli staring down at his new blaster, enough awe in his gaze for Mari to know what he was thinking.

"You ready?" she asked quietly, and her question technically had two sides to it. Mari asked if Eli was ready to go to the tournament, and she asked if he was ready to enter deeper into Slugterra and start his position as the Next Shane.

"Just one thing I have to do before we go," Eli said, grinning and holding up one of his many empty ammo feeds towards Burpy as Pronto scrunched his eyebrows together. "Been waiting my whole life to do this,"

"What?" Pronto asked, now sounding thoroughly confused and befuddled. "Waiting to do what? Shoot a slug out of a blaster?"

"Yep," Eli answered simply, before glancing at the Infurnus on his shoulder. "Ready, Burpy?"

The slug chirped, and Eli transferred the blue-glass shell into the blaster, before pointing it (thankfully away from Mari and Pronto) and firing. Burpy went flying out of the muzzle of the blaster, quickly reaching velocity and transforming. In his protoform, Burpy was orange, with markings in the shape of a pale yellow flame on his forehead and belly. As a velocimorph, though, the flame designs disappeared, and instead, Burpy's stubby little slug arms turned into a pair of muscular flaming wings, with an even longer tail of fire trailing after him.

The Infurnus slug flew towards Pronto, the molenoid ducking for cover, but he needn't have worried. As powerful as Burpy was, he posed no threat to Pronto or any other ally of the Shanes/Greys. Mari, though, had no desire to be in the shoes of Dr. Blakk whenever he crossed paths with the Infurnus again. Burpy swirled above Pronto's head in an elaborate series of loops and spins, leaving an entire field of fire in the air after him.

Mari had thought Burpy had disappeared when Will Shane had, but obviously, the clever slug had somehow found his way up to the surface to Eli, and now, five years later, they were both down in Slugterra, with Eli here for the very first time, while Burpy was finally returning after half a decade away from his original home. The eighteen-year-old Grey didn't exactly know how things on the Surface worked compared to Slugterra since it had been so long since Eli (or Will, for that matter) had been able to tell her anything about it, and her mother, though she allegedly knew about it, had never made the journey to the world above.

Will had never divulged that part of the secret to his partner before he disappeared.

"Way to go Burpy!" Eli exclaimed, his burst of exuberance breaking Mari from her thoughts, and the brunette turned towards him just as Burpy turned around in midair and sped back towards the three slug-slingers, flying dangerously low over Pronto's head before finally slowing down enough to return to his protoform, landing solidly on Eli's shoulder with a soft 'plop'.

Mari could see Pronto staring at Burpy's fire display for a few moments more before the flames disappeared, and Eli wandered over to his mecha, managing to get on Lucky's back easily enough, but then, as Mari once more hopped up to sit astride Willow, she could see that the young Shane was staring down at the control panel of his mecha beast and looking very confused.

"Eli?" she asked, pushing Willow a few feet forward so she was beside Eli, and he looked over her, his expression equals parts bemused and excited, which was, Mari figured, going to be Eli's standard mood for a while before he got used to everything down here. "What's wrong?"

"Uh..." Eli trailed off for a moment, flicking his gaze between Mari herself and the mecha control panel. "I don't know how to start one of these."

For a few seconds, all Mari could do was stare. She knew that Will had disappeared before he was able to teach Eli everything the elder Shane knew about Slugterra, but not even knowing how to start a mecha...they were all doomed.

◂❧💙🧡💙❧▸

Eli figured out how to start a mecha. It wasn't difficult, Mari had been riding Willow herself since she was eleven, but she supposed since Eli hadn't grown up around mechas (from his letters, it didn't seem as if the Surface had them; instead, they had something called cars), learning how to ride at eighteen wasn't completely out of the ordinary, especially if Eli was going to stick with his cover story about growing up in a super remote cavern away from everyone and everything else, which was, along with the excuse the Shanes had used in Mari's childhood--before she had known about the Surface--whenever the young Grey had always asked to visit Eli whenever Will would leave to deliver her letters, what Eli had explained to Mari was also going to be their excuse with Pronto, in a rushed whisper while the molenoid was distracted with getting his FRND-O mecha up and running after Burpy's fiery display back at the clubhouse, the rusted mecha beast seemingly very stubborn.

Now, however, the three slingers, with Eli holding onto Lucky's handles as tight as he could as the wolf mecha sprinted through the mushroom trees, were thundering through Wild Spores, making their way towards Herringbone with less time to make it to the tournament than Mari would've liked, but she was too caught up in Eli's infectious shock and awe at finally being down in Slugterra stepping into his father's shoes to care too much about the passing of time.

"A flock of Flaringos!" the young Shane exclaimed as the three mechas ran past the small herd of fire-type slugs. "Check it out, Burpy!"

Agni, Mari's own Flaringo, popped his head out of the canister he was in around Mari's belt and leaped onto the brunette's shoulder beside Glowy before waving with one stubby little arm towards the other Flaringos, with Burpy giving a wave of his own from atop Eli.

"You know them, Agni?" Mari asked, glancing down at her Flaringo for just a moment, long enough to see Agni give her an excited nod and subsequent chirp in response, with the Flaringo waving one more time towards the flock before jumping down to stand in between Willow's handlebars, just as Pronto let out a scoff from ahead of both Mari and Eli.

"Wait," the molenoid began, waving his hand around and giving Eli and Mari an indignant stare over his shoulder before continuing. "You both give your slugs names?"

"Don't you?" Eli asked, sounding genuinely confused before Mari tilted her head towards him.

"It's not exactly common," she explained, before shrugging. "Most slingers only see their slugs as ammo, not as actual living creatures. Some will name their slugs if they've had them since childhood, like me and Glowy," Another nod, this time towards the small Phosphoro, who had been with the youngest Grey since she learned what a blaster was, having saved Mari from many a nightmare when she was younger by simply glowing like a lantern and shooing the shadows away. "But, it could take years before most adult slingers are bonded with their slugs enough to warrant giving them names,"

Mari had also figured out it was a lot more convenient having names for her slugs to differentiate them from each other, instead of having to say "Hey, you!" whenever she had to try and catch a slug's attention.

If anything, though, Eli looked even more confused after Mari's explanation, and the eighteen-year-old couldn't exactly blame him. But, before she could say anything else, potentially something that would make him less confused, Pronto cut in again, this time concerning his Flatulorhinkus, the stinky-slug having released a fetid cloud of toxic purple gas, chittering out a laugh as Pronto whipped around to stare at it.

"Bah!" the molenoid spat out. "What's more common is this scurrilous beast," he shook a fist in the direction of the Flatulorhinkus, who only continued to laugh at Pronto. "Vexing me!" Mari rolled her eyes again, as Eli gave a small shrug before glancing over at the older girl.

"I...guess that's a name?" he said, accidentally phrasing it as a question, and all Mari could do was shrug herself.

Pronto, though, was quick to change the subject, obviously fed up with debating on Eli's stance on giving names to his slugs, because a moment later, the molenoid sped up his FRND-O mecha, swinging his head around to shout at Mari and Eli over his shoulder.

"You know," Pronto began. "My skills in observation are highly refined. It seems many common things are...unfamiliar to you," the molenoid had turned back around to face forward before he had finished speaking, but Mari was still riding beside Eli, so she was able to see the way the Shane's face almost instantly paled, the eighteen-year-old momentarily struck dumb at the fact that the circumstances of his childhood were about this close to being found out.

Luckily, though, it only took Eli another second or two to decide that yes, he was going to stick with the excuse about the Shane protectors having an uber-secret hideout where they had hidden away the youngest member of the family for the last almost two decades.

"I, uh," Eli cast a glance toward Mari as if silently asking her if sticking with this particular plan was the best course of action, but Mari just jerked her head towards Pronto, signifying that Eli better say something before Pronto got even more suspicious. "I grew up in the Shane's most secret hideout. It was really out of the way. Only the Shanes and Greys know about it,"

Mari barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes again, wondering how exactly Eli had managed to rope her into being part of his alibi, but she couldn't fault him for it; it was nice, to finally have another person who was able to tell her about the Surface (a.k.a the "most secret hideout") without thinking she was crazy. Mari was pretty sure that even her mother, who had been partners with Will Shane for over twenty years before Will's disappearance and had known about the Surface for at least half that amount of time, had never really believed the Surface even actually existed.

Hannah Grey had never been told how exactly Will Shane got back up to the Surface, so in her eyes, if she'd never been there, who was to say it even really existed at all? The Burning World was already an old Slugterran legend. Hannah probably just figured the Shanes were really, really into their folklore.

"Ah, yes," Pronto's voice once more drew Mari from her thoughts, the eighteen-year-old turning around again so she was focused on the trail ahead. "Of course,"

Mari wasn't entirely sure at first whether or not the molenoid believed Eli's excuse, but in the end, he seemed to buy it, at least for the moment, because he dropped the line of questioning altogether.

From then on, the three of them rode in silence, with Marielle too lost in her thoughts to speak about much of anything, and she must've been giving off waves of 'leave me alone' because even though every so often she could see Eli glancing over at her, obviously wanting to say something, he kept his mouth shut.

It wasn't until the trio were about three-quarters of the way to Herringbone Cavern that anything of note happened, and Mari gritted her teeth together as she saw that a thin blond man was getting mugged and robbed by a bandit significantly taller and buffer than him. Weeks ago, Mari had prevented another slug-delivery robbery on this very road, and judging from the quick once-over she did as she, Eli, and Pronto began to pass by, the same guy was trying to commit the crime again.

"What's going on?" Eli asked as Mari hung a sharp right towards the clearing where the blond man's wagon was stopped, Pronto letting out a sharp gasp and abruptly covering his face with one hand.

"Avert your eyes," the molenoid said quickly. "We want no part in this,"

As it were, Eli was significantly less of a coward than Pronto seemed to be, because the Shane looked wildly between Pronto and Mari, who was still sneaking forward towards the wagon as quietly as she could to catch the thug by surprise.

"That guy looks like he could use some help," Eli began, but Mari, who wasn't all that far away from Eli and Pronto, turned around to send Eli a sharp glance over her shoulder.

"Stay there," she told him firmly, and Eli stopped in his tracks. "You've been the Shane for less than a day, and I don't need to get yourself killed right away before you can even do any good as the Shane. So, stay,"

Without another word, Mari turned around to continue towards the wagon, but by now, Eli was getting jittery. He was the Shane now, it was his job to help people, and Mari was his partner now too, shouldn't she need his help, as well? Pronto, it seemed, noticed his internal dilemma and the molenoid spoke up again a second later.

"Without a Shane around to keep the peace," he began. "And since Hannah Grey all but disappeared five years ago, the caverns of Slugterra have gotten--how shall we say--a little rough around the edges? Your friend Mari has done what she can, but even she can't be everywhere at once,"

That admission alone was enough to make up Eli's mind for him. With one final glance at Pronto, Eli shrugged.

"Well, the Shanes and Greys are back now," the eighteen-year-old said, and Pronto, oblivious to the way the youngest Shane diverted from the molenoid's original track, just blabbered on with his 'wonderful' advice for the newest of the young Slugterran protectors.

"This is none of our concern," Pronto told the air where Eli had previously been peacefully riding Lucky beside him. "I'm sure you'll agree that a wise hero must choose his battles. Marielle can handle herself, and you, Eli Shane, are untrained, and..." The molenoid continued, too enamored with the sound of his own voice to realize that Eli was no longer beside him.

Mari, meanwhile, was inching ever closer to the wagon that the thug had been trying to rob. The victim spotted Mari over his assailant's shoulder, but the Grey quickly held up her hand to sway the other man from saying anything, to dissuade from potentially alerting the wagon robber to her presence, and as the larger man dug through the back of the wagon to see if there were any valuable slugs within the wagon that were worth stealing, the blond man just gave a hurried nod.

"This all you got?" the bandit sneered as he finally popped out from within the wagon to glare at the blond man. Or at least, Mari assumed the bad guy was glaring, she wasn't quite sure; she couldn't see his face. "Ah," he spat out. "Nothin' but Floppers in here,"

Mari had just grabbed onto the handle of her blaster, ready to load one of her slugs into it and incapacitate the bandit before he was able to do any more damage, but before she was able to move any further, a blur of movement that the eighteen-year-old was only just able to recognize as Eli blasted past her.

"Eli, no!" Mari hissed, but it was too late, Eli had already hopped off of Lucky and loaded Burpy into his blaster, pointing it at the thief's back.

"You need to go," Eli said, sounding surprisingly firm considering this was his first time facing off against a bad guy.

The "bad guy'" though, didn't seem very impressed at the thought of someone trying to step in on his turf, so to speak, because as the original owner of the wagon booked it in the opposite direction, sprinting so close to Mari and Willow as the eighteen-year-old rounded the front of the wagon to try and box in the thief from behind, that Mari almost fell over, all the would-be thief did was give a condescending laugh.

"Heh," he spat, holding his hands in the air because even though he was at least twice Eli's size, there wasn't much anyone could do with a blaster at point-blank range to the spine. "I got the claim to this trail. Unless you're Will Shane or a Grey, you better keep on movin',"

"Will Shane's my dad. I'm picking up where he left off," Eli said simply, giving a swift glance over the thief's shoulder toward Mari. "And I'm assuming you've met my friend, Mari,"

The thief turned, and if it was possible, he looked even more inconvenienced. But, Mari didn't fire her blaster just yet, because as able as she was to take down the bandit by herself, she wanted to see just how much Eli was able to handle himself, if the younger Shane was really set on taking his father's place as Slugterra's Protector.

The bandit seemed unimpressed at the fact that there was allegedly a new Shane in the 99 Caverns, and considering Mari had dealt with this particular bandit before and he kept coming back like a cockroach that refused to get squashed, he didn't exactly seem impressed with Mari's skills either. Which was fine by her, she was more than confident enough in her abilities to not care about one person thinking she wasn't as good as her mother had been.

Mari wasn't just going to be as good as Hannah Grey. She was going to be better.

"Will Shane was someone to be afraid of," the bandit snarled, before looking over his shoulder at Mari, who was still tensed and ready with Circuit in her blaster, should the bandit make any sudden moves. "And no one was willing to mess with Hannah Grey if they wanted to leave a duel in one piece. Doesn't matter if you've been doing this 'protector' thing for five years, Marielle Grey. You're both just kids,"

For a split second, from behind the bandit, Mari saw Eli look rather bemused as if he had only just realized how long Mari had been doing herself the job their parents had done for decades. But, a moment later, the new Shane visibly shook himself, before readjusting his grip on his blaster and pointing it again towards the bandit.

"Maybe," Eli admitted, and Mari sent him a swift look, silently asking him why he was agreeing with the bandit, but he continued before Mari could say anything. "But, we're the kids holding blasters. You willing to try us?"

Looking back, Mari would kick herself for not apprehending the bandit sooner, but right at that moment, she wanted to see what Eli was capable of. The bandit, though, was both twice as tall and twice as wide as the young Shane, so really, with no training, poor Eli had never stood a chance.

Mari saw the bandit tense a split second before the man turned around, grabbing a blaster that Mari hadn't previously noticed from within the wagon, the blaster was already loaded with an angry Hop Rock, and the bandit swung around to point the blaster at a now-shocked looking Eli. Mari was just able to see her childhood friend's eyes widen as the bandit curled his finger around the trigger before she fired her blaster, with Circuit hitting the bandit in the back, electrocuting him and throwing him forward into the small ridge that ringed the clearing where the wagon had originally been ambushed.

Another thing that Mari should've done but didn't, because at the moment, the eighteen-year-old was too worried about Eli, was to make sure that Circuit's Tazercoil move had taken out the bandit, but, she hadn't, and that mistake would come back to bite in a few minutes.

"You okay?" she asked, bending down so a returned-to-protoform Circuit could hop back into her hand, and when Mari glanced up again, Eli was staring at her with wide eyes and an expression of relative awe.

"Wow," Eli breathed out a moment later, reaching out to lightly rub the top of Circuit's head, the small Tazerling chittering with appreciation, apparently having already forgotten the fact that Eli was the one who had knocked her down a hill earlier that morning. "That was so cool. Kind of wish I'd gotten to use my blaster for real, though,"

"You will," Mari told him simply. "You can't expect to win every one of your duels right off the bat. You're still new; you'll learn,"

Mari sent Eli a smile, and because she was facing him, Mari was able to see the instant Eli's gaze snapped away from her own to something over her shoulder, an instant before something slammed into the both of them, knocking the two young slingers to the ground.

Eli hit the ground first, and Mari landed on him with an 'oomph', a split second before she rolled off, this time loading Agni into her blaster and spinning around onto her back, pointing her blaster up in time to see that the bandit had not been taken out by the Tazercoil, considering his blaster, which Mari had forgotten to disarm him of--since she had been more worried about Eli--was now pointing straight at the both of them, the Hop Rock from before letting out a growl.

"Some protectors you are," the bandit muttered, before spitting to the side and curling his finger around the trigger of his blaster again.

But, before the bandit was able to fire, the sound of a different blaster firing came from off to the side, and both Mari and Eli turned in time to see an Arachnet come flying, the spider-like slug spinning a web that wrapped around the thief instantly and knocked him to the ground.

"Thanks, Pronto," Eli said as he picked up his blaster and got to his feet, with Mari walking over to make sure the bandit had, this time, actually been defeated.

The brunette nudged him roughly with her foot (really, it was more of a solid kick) and while the thief grumbled unintelligible at her, she could see that there was no way he'd be able to get out of an Arachnet's web that easily.

"Who's Pronto?" a familiar voice made Mari snap her head up and look away from the thief in time to see a red-haired young woman riding a BOOM-R mecha, and when she saw Mari, the redhead smiled. "Who's your new sidekick, Mari? Don't you know you shouldn't let the new guy do everything by himself?"

Mari had run into Trixie Sting before, and the other young woman was Mari's main source of information for criminal activity around Slugterra, but she wouldn't exactly call the two of them 'friends'. Mari didn't have time to make any friends; she worked alone (a/n: lol, ok Batman). Or at least, she had worked alone. That is, until Eli.

Trixie was nice, though and Mari figured that if things had been different, if she hadn't been so focused on protecting Slugterra as well as she could, as a way to try and live up to her mother's legacy, they probably could've been close.

Eli, meanwhile, was less than impressed with someone thinking he was a sidekick, so as Trixie continued to smirk from her spot on Boomer on the road, the young Shane waved around the hand holding his blaster, and for someone who allegedly knew the ins and outs of blaster safety, Eli wasn't exactly fueling Mari's confidence in him, considering the eighteen-year-old ended up smacking himself in the temple with the barrel of his blaster, causing Mari to heave a sigh.

"I'm the Shane!" he retorted, but Trixie just laughed, obviously not believing him, and honestly, if Mari hadn't known who Eli was already, she wouldn't believe him either.

"Yeah, right," the redhead said, before giving Mari a two-finger salute (to which the Grey just gave a half-hearted wave) before revving her mecha's engine and hurtling down the road.

"I promise I know what I'm doing," Eli muttered once Trixie had gone, but Mari said nothing, instead holstering her blaster and returning to a waiting Willow, just as Pronto finally managed to make his way back to the other two slingers, having realized that they hadn't heeded his advice at 'not getting involved'.

"There you two are!" the molenoid exclaimed, glancing over at the fallen marauder and completely oblivious to the glare Mari sent his way, silently conveying that she did not need his input right that moment. "Already dispensing the justice, I see?"

"Hardly," Mari said simply, climbing onto Willow and revving the mecha beast's engine. "Let's just go before we run into any more unwelcome surprises,"

As it turned out, though, things were never that easy, because as a bemused Eli clambered onto Lucky from behind Mari, the Grey heard the marauder start cackling from over her shoulder, back where he was still cocooned within the web from Trixie's Arachnet.

"You're going to need a lot more than a blaster and a molenoid to make anyone believe this one," the bandit jerked his head towards Eli. "Is a Shane,"

There wasn't anything else Mari could do with the bandit with him tied up like he was, and by now, she'd be cutting it close if she wanted to make it to the tournament on time, so instead, Mari didn't dignify the bandit with an answer, and instead, just turned around, directing Willow back towards the road that they'd been on before this whole mess started, and Eli and Pronto followed a moment later.

It wasn't long before, as the three of them were reaching the edge of Herringbone Cavern (the cavern where the tournament was being held), Eli finally spoke.

"I thought being a Shane was supposed to mean something," he began, before tilting his head to look at Mari, who'd been quiet ever since they'd left the clearing with the bandit. "And what did that guy mean? When he said that you've been the protector for five years?"

For a few seconds, Mari debated not answering Eli at all, but when she looked over at him, he looked so earnest she knew that she had to say something. So, in the end, she ended up telling him the truth.

"After Will disappeared," she said quietly, and even Pronto stopped his self-obsessed monologue to listen. "Hannah Grey went into early retirement. I was thirteen, but my mother was adamant that with a Shane gone, it was up to the Greys to protect Slugterra until the next Shane--" she nodded towards Eli himself. "Came of age and could help. Nine times out of ten, I'm able to handle guys like that bandit pretty easily. Today was a fluke,"

Mari couldn't--or wouldn't--admit to herself that a big reason the bandit from earlier had been able to get the drop on her so easily when she would rarely ever be able to be caught off-guard like that, was because she was more worried about Eli, and how the youngest Shane would be able to handle himself in a real battle. And, as it turned out, they had both gotten their asses handed to them.

"Okay..." Eli said slowly, and Mari could see him processing all the information she had just dropped on him before Eli turned back towards her. "But, Mari, you were thirteen. Your mom didn't stop because of an injury or anything?" Mari shook her head. "So why didn't she help if she was still able to?"

For several seconds, Mari was quiet, because frankly, she didn't know what to say. Will and Hannah were alike in that regard, she figured, wanting their children to fight their own battles, so to speak, but at least the Shanes still held themselves to some sort of standard, not letting Eli take up his father's mantle until he was eighteen.

Hannah hadn't even been retired for a week after Will Shane had disappeared before she was all but kicking her daughter out of the Greys' home cavern and thrusting her straight into the spotlight as one-half of the 99 Caverns' next generation of Protectors. Sometimes Mari wished her mother would've waited until Mari had turned eighteen to pass on her responsibilities of being "the Grey", if only so she and Eli would be able to figure things out together, instead of Mari having to do a majority of it on her own, but she had been doing this for too long by now to care anymore about having people to rely on.

Her mother had more than proved that.

By now, Mari had been silent for several minutes, lost inside her head, and from behind her, Pronto and Eli exchanged a glance, both of them gesturing for the other one to be the one to catch the Grey's attention again, and maybe make her reveal more about the underlying issues between her and her mother, but before either of them spoke, Mari twisted around in her seat again to look at the other human and the molenoid, both males giving the young woman their most innocent expressions.

"You're new," Mari told Eli, doing what she did best whenever someone pried too deeply into her life outside of Protecting: changing the subject. "This morning might not have gone well, but if you really want people to start taking you seriously as a slinger and as a Shane, you'll need to prove yourself,"

"How?" Eli asked, tilting his head, and if he noticed Mari's blatant lack of answer to his previous question, he didn't confront her about it.

Pronto, on the other hand, had more than enough to say, because the next instant he was perched on the seat of his mecha beast as if he were the hero out of one of the old Surface "fairy tales" that Eli had used to tell Mari about in his letters when they were younger. The molenoid, though, did not exactly scream "knightly hero" when viewed with a cursory glance.

"You must prove yourself on the field of battle!" the so-called 'navigator' exclaimed, shaking a single fist in the air. "Like Pronto the Brave!"

Eli did not look reassured, but the trio reached the edge of the tournament grounds before the Shane was able to voice any lingering apprehension about potentially living up to his dad's legacy.

Mari had reached the grounds much later than she'd originally planned (she'd picked up a few strays along the way) so a majority of who the eighteen-year-old assumed were the competitors were already there. A riotous bunch, that was for sure, and Mari was pretty sure she even saw Locke and Lode practicing at a line of targets a ways away from where the participants' mecha beasts were parked, though why those two knuckle-heads were there, Mari wasn't sure; they'd been pretty loyal to Dr. Blakk for longer than Mari had been working as the Caverns' Protector.

There were more than a few other competitors that the Grey would need to keep a close watch on while Eli competed if only to make sure no "unruly business" happened under her watch. That was the last thing she needed after everything else that had already happened that day.

But, while Mari's spatial awareness and all-around cautiousness were steadily climbing the longer it took for her, Pronto, and Eli to make their way to the tent where the check-in sheet was still, thankfully, laying out, the latter was staring around at the entire grounds with a look of abject awe on his face, and after Eli almost got ran over by another mecha beast, Mari grabbed onto his arm and yanked him down so he was eye-level with her.

"Hey!" she hissed, keeping her voice low so Pronto, who was walking a few meters in front of them and yammering to himself again, couldn't hear. "Can you at least try and act like this isn't the first time you're at a tournament and that you know what you're doing?"

"But, I don't know what I'm doing," Eli whispered back, but all Mari did was give him a look, one that crinkled her eyebrows together and made Mari scrunch up her nose.

"Then, bluff," she retorted, before abruptly letting go of Eli's arm and instead grabbing onto the Shane's wrist and dragging him behind her, if only so Mari would be sure that Eli wouldn't get run over.

"If Eli wins this tournament," Pronto began as the two neared him again. "People will know that a Shane has returned to fight for justice and protect the innocent, and Slugterra's strongest partnership is once again whole,"

Mari wasn't sure she'd go that far, she and Eli hadn't even technically met until he'd knocked her down the hill in Wild Spores that morning, and the last time they'd communicated was when they were both thirteen. Half a decade, plus the disappearance of Will Shane, had no doubt changed both of them drastically from the children they'd been before the incident.

"What happens if I don't win the tournament?" Eli asked, his arm still dangling in Mari's grip, but he still got jostled by another civilian all the same, the other man smacking into Eli's shoulder and sending the Shane a dirty look as if it was Eli's fault he had gotten run into.

The other man obviously didn't know who Eli was, but the man's gaze jumped to Mari standing next to him a moment later, realizing that, whoever Eli was, he was in Marielle Grey's entourage, and he quickly breathed out an apology before hurrying away into the crowd.

"Chaos will continue to rule," Pronto added, doing little to boost Eli's confidence. "And you will be forever branded as a, uh, hopeless fool. Of course," Pronto chuckled a moment later as if what he had just said was completely ludicrous. "This will never happen. You have this competition in the bag!"

From the corner of her eye, Mari saw Eli's jaw slacken, and she assumed that her childhood friend had just realized that with his, albeit limited knowledge about blasters, and dueling in general, to say Eli was at a disadvantage would be an understatement. But, really, they didn't have another choice.

"You'll be fine," Mari said, finally dropping the Shane's wrist and crossing her arms as she faced him. "A majority of the slingers here probably couldn't hit a stationary target a foot away from them. You'll beat them easily,"

"Really?" Eli asked, his face momentarily lifting.

"Nope," she answered simply, and Eli's face fell again, with even Burpy's mouth falling open from where the Infurnus sat in one of the slug shells on his bandoleer. "You'll probably get demolished the minute you step into the ring, but hey, at least you tried, right?"

"You're not good at pep talks, Mari," Eli said, his voice dry, but Mari just shrugged. She was just being honest. If Eli actually managed to win the qualifier round of the tournament, she'd be vastly impressed.

Mari stepped to the side a minute later, finally giving Eli a chance to sign in. As the Shane slowly walked up to the table and readied himself to sign his name on the sheet, one of the organizers, whom Mari had worked with before when she'd done security work for other tournaments, turned around and grinned when he saw the Grey.

"Hey, it's little Grey!" the balding man exclaimed, throwing one arm out in some sort of grand gesture in Mari's general direction, but the eighteen-year-old just glared at him. She had yet to say she got along with the tournament organizer. The fact that he was also consorting with some of the less moral of the competitors was enough to drop him several pegs down in Mari's List of People She Tolerated. "Finally decided to grace us with your presence? Who's your sidekick?"

At this, he jerked his head towards Eli, who had just finished scratching his name onto the sheet with the provided marker and was by now a little miffed at having been referred to as Mari's sidekick twice in one day.

Mari didn't dignify the tournament organizer with an answer, and instead just let the older man grab onto the clipboard and skim over the line where Eli had written his name, only for the organizer to let out a condescending-sounding wheeze a moment later.

"Shane?" he asked, holding the clipboard with the sign-up sheet back out towards Eli and Mari, obviously thinking that they were joking. Mari couldn't blame him. She'd probably think she was joking too if she hadn't already known Eli beforehand. That didn't mean she had to appreciate the patronizing, though. "Check this out!" the organizer said, abruptly raising his voice as he waved the clipboard around, catching John Bull's attention, along with about every other competitor within the immediate vicinity of the registration tent. "This kid thinks he's a Shane!"

A majority of the onlookers started to laugh at the sheer unbelievableness of a Shane finally returning to Slugterra, five years after the previous one had vanished without a trace, but Mari could see Eli starting to shrink in on himself, looking fairly uncomfortable at all the sudden unwanted attention and ridicule, so what Mari did was slap her hands down onto the registration table, startling the organizer and making him drop the clipboard again, before staring at the eighteen-year-old in front of him with wide eyes.

"Hey," she all but snapped, and out of her periphery, Mari could see Eli staring at her, eyes the size of dinner plates. "I vouch for him. He's Will Shane's son. That counts for something, doesn't it?"

But, the organizer just scoffed again, swiping the clipboard out of the way so he could leer at her, but Mari had dealt with plenty of people (and men) like him over the years she had been working as Slugterra's Protector, and wasn't willing to back down quite that easily.

"In name maybe," the tournament organizer retorted, giving a dismissive glance towards Eli over Mari's shoulder before turning back to the Grey. "But not skill. The kid looks like he barely knows what a blaster is. What Shane acts like that? He won't last a minute in the tournament,"

He'll win," Mari shot back, refusing to admit to herself that moments before, she had been the one doubting Eli's slug-slinging abilities. Albeit silently, and to herself, but she had still thought about it. That didn't mean though, that she was going to let anyone else do it.

"We'll see," the organizer finally relented, leaning back before Mari was able to sucker punch him in the jaw before giving one last dismissive glance at the clipboard as he picked up the sign-in sheet again. "He got the last spot in the qualifier. Good luck," the organizer said to a still dumbstruck Eli, before giving one last glare to Mari. "He's going to need it,"

As the organizer walked away, Mari felt her heart drop as she suddenly realized that Eli would need all the help he could get if he wanted any hope of moving further than the qualifier. The sort of initiation duel that determined whether or not a slinger advanced onto the main rounds of the tournament. And considering Eli had never dueled anyone before, he was pretty much screwed.

Mari groaned and rubbed her face with both of her hands, before finally turning to Eli, who had been looking as if he wanted to say something since Mari had first confronted the tournament organizer, but had wisely decided not to intervene.

"Uh," he began slowly as Mari tried not to completely hate herself for realizing she had pretty much just signed the young Shane's death warrant in her own hand. "Not that I'm not totally grateful for you defending my honor, or whatever. But..." Eli trailed off, glancing between Mari and Pronto, and honestly, Mari had forgotten the molenoid was even standing there, he was being so uncharacteristically quiet. Mari had known Pronto for less than a day, but already she knew that the so-called 'tracker' would be one of the loudest people she'd ever known. "What qualifier?"

This time, Pronto was the one who answered Eli's question, waving a dismissive hand around in the air for a moment before the molenoid spoke.

"It's just one little duel to get you into the tournament," Pronto said simply, waving his hands again in a vaguely reassuring gesture so Eli would know he didn't need to be worried about anything. "Nothing to worry about,"

"Yeah," Mari agreed, and Pronto gaped at her, shocked that the abrasive young woman was agreeing with him, before Mari continued, placing one hand on her hip and giving Eli a look. "Unless you're someone who's never actually dueled anybody before,"

If it was possible, Pronto's mouth dropped open even further, and he snapped his gaze towards Eli, whose expression had turned sheepish.

"What?" Pronto's shriek was enough to make several nearby people turn and stare at them, and Mari grabbed the molenoid's arm and yanked him towards her and Eli; making sure her next words were much quieter than Pronto's scream from before.

"He was sheltered, remember?" she hissed, ignoring the faintly insulted look Eli sent her as if what Mari had said wasn't completely true. "Which is why you're going to go and find someone who will help him practice before the actual qualifier round starts, got it?"

Pronto nodded quickly, and Mari dropped his arm, and the molenoid almost immediately ran off, ducking between the legs of the other competitors as he tried to find Eli a sparring partner in the rapidly shortening time they had before the qualifier started.

Once he was gone, Mari heaved a breath and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hands again. She was starting to get a headache with how stressful this day had already been, and it wasn't even past noon.

"You think I can win this tournament?" Eli asked, as Mari grabbed his wrist again (if only to make sure she didn't lose him in the crowd) and the two of them started to make their way around the rest of the tournament grounds. For a few seconds, Mari didn't say anything, before finally turning to look at the boy next to her.

"Try to make it past the qualifier," she told him. "Then you can worry about winning the tournament,"

Eli seemed to accept that as a qualified response, and Mari could see his face scrunch for a moment or two as they continued to weave between spectators before the Shane spoke again.

"Why aren't you competing?" his question was a valid one, and Mari figured if she was a few years younger, more headstrong and stubborn, she would be competing in the tournament. As it were, though...

"Right now," she told him. "I'm just some added security. When you're the Protector, sometimes you're putting criminals in jail, other times you're breaking up brawls because someone fired a Hop Rock where they weren't supposed to,"

The two of them had paused behind a line of people firing their slugs at a row of stationary targets several yards away, and as she watched for a minute, Mari realized even further how stiff of a competition Eli was going up against.

Suddenly, a voice from behind them caught Mari's attention, and the two eighteen-year-olds turned to see Trixie standing a few feet away, holding her ever-present video camera, having presumably been filming when Mari and Eli had unknowingly interrupted her.

"Excuse me," the redhead had said before Mari and Eli moved out of her way. "You two are in my shot,"

"Sorry, Trixie," Mari said quickly, tugging Eli away from where Trixie's line of sight had been, and Mari assumed the other girl had been filming the other slingers at the stationary targets in front of them.

"You going to introduce me to your new friend now, Mari?" Trixie asked, flicking her gaze between Mari and Eli, and Mari quickly waved her hand between her two...friends? Acquaintances? They were something.

"Eli, Trixie. Trixie, Eli. There, done," the way both Eli and Trixie sent her a look after Mari's relatively lacking introduction to the two of them was frankly, a little bit weird, and Mari crossed her arms a moment later, refusing to look at either of them.

"You told the organizer he's a Shane," Trixie said a moment later, and this time, Mari did turn and look at her. "Is it true?"

"You'd think I lie?" Mari asked, quirking an eyebrow as she tried not to feel insulted and Eli, sensing a rising tension, at least on Mari's end, who never liked to feel as if she were being ridiculed, quickly tried to intervene as a mediator.

"Of course, we don't think that!" he exclaimed, flinging out a hand in between Mari and Trixie. "But, yeah, it's true. I'm Eli, which...you know, already. But," he added a moment later, ignoring the way Mari rolled her eyes from beside him. "I'm just here to win a few slugs before Mari and I go off and fight crime and...stuff,"

As far as excuses go, it could use some work, and it took almost all of Mari's willpower not to roll her eyes again, as Eli tilted his head to look more closely at Trixie as the young amateur filmmaker fiddled with the zoom dial on her lense.

"What are you doing?" he asked, and Trixie glanced at him for a moment, along with a now-sulking Mari, before returning to her camera.

"I'm filming my competition," she explained. "Looking for anything that might give me an edge,"

A commotion from across the grounds made the trio turn, and Mari narrowed her eyes as she watched John Bull sparring. The large man shot a Tormato slug at his opponent, and the air-type slug turned into a massive cyclone, sweeping up John Bull's opponent and spitting him out, several yards away and thoroughly dazed, a few seconds later.

"Who's that?" Eli asked, obviously having never seen John Bull in action before today, and Mari tilted her head towards him as Trixie fiddled with her camera.

"John Bull," Mari explained simply. "If you're really set on winning this tournament, he's the one you're going to have to beat,"

"Good luck with that," Trixie added a moment later, causing both Eli and Mari to turn and look at her. "I've been filming him pretty much since I got here, and I haven't found a weakness yet. Except for the fact that he's a total jerk,"

More often than not, John Bull was relatively law-abiding, but he wasn't one of Mari's favorite people to ever encounter in public. His ego was bigger than Herringbone Cavern itself, and he was of the mind that women couldn't be as skilled slug-slingers as he (read: men) could be, which had led to Mari almost landing herself in jail for thwacking him upside the head on more than one occasion.

"If you do get far enough into the tournament and you go up against him," Mari said quietly to Eli, nodding her head towards where John Bull was now doing some sort of victory dance after his sparring match, his former opponent still lying on the opposite end of the sparring field utterly dazed and confused. "Kick his ass,"

Poor Eli looked as if he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him, and he opened his mouth, to say what, Mari wasn't entirely sure, because Trixie glanced at Eli again, her expression suddenly bemused.

"Shouldn't you be in there practicing?" the redhead asked, and Eli whipped his head in her direction, scratching behind his neck and flinching as, from off to the side, John Bull shot off a Hop Rock that demolished the stationary target in front of him.

The explosion sent debris flying in every direction, with one chunk of wood falling to the ground a few feet away from where Trixie, Eli, and Mari were still standing, the three of them staring at it as Mari felt Eli grab onto her arm and all but hide behind her, his eyes so wide, they were almost bulging out of his head at the spectacle he had just witnessed.

"Uh..." Mari saw Eli visibly swallow, as if witnessing John Bull's brutal slinging style had suddenly left the Shane's mouth dry and his self-esteem crashing down, before Mari lightly pinched his ribcage, causing Eli to flinch and turn towards her, just as Mari jerked her head towards Trixie, signifying that the other young woman was still waiting for an answer. "Our friend is getting someone easy for me to spar with,"

Trixie narrowed her eyes.

"I didn't know you had friends," she admitted to Mari, to which the brunette just rolled her eyes. "And why are you not helping him?"

Mari opened her mouth to answer Trixie, to tell the redhead that there was a reason she wasn't the one sparring with Eli before his qualifier, and that reason being the fact that she was technically already at the tournament to act as a security presence.

She might be standing off to the side with Eli and Trixie while they waited for Pronto to return with whoever the molenoid found to be Eli's sparring partner, but Mari was still in Herringbone Cavern to do a job, and her senses were currently firing on all cylinders, trying to stay focused on her conversation with Eli and Trixie while simultaneously trying to filter out any potential altercations between the other competitors or spectators that might require her intervention.

Fortunately, so far, there hadn't been anything of note.

"Fine," she said instead, if only so she could stop Trixie from questioning her further, the brunette jerking her head as a gesture for Eli to follow, before she led the Shane over to an open training field, with Trixie trailing after the both of them.

Once they were in the training field, Mari situated Eli so he was standing at one end, and she went to take up her position at the opposite end of the field. But, before she did, Mari swiped Burpy off of Eli's shoulder, both the Shane and Infurnus slugs letting out identical startled squeaks at Burpy's abrupt departure off of Eli's shoulder.

"Hey!" Eli exclaimed, trying to retrieve his only slug from the older girl, but Mari leaned backward quick enough that Eli's hand closed over open air. Burpy, on the other hand, knew he wasn't in any real danger, so he did the appreciative act of not burning Mari's hand to a crisp.

"We're only going to be sparring for now," she began, transferring Burpy to her own shoulder, where the small Infurnus relaxed. "And given your lack of dueling experience--" Eli let out a nervous-sounding laugh and rubbed the back of his neck again. "We're going to start with the basics. Burpy," Mari waved her hand towards the Infurnus. "Gives you an unfair advantage as one of the most powerful and rare slugs in the 99 Caverns. You can't rely on him for everything. For now," Mari reached down to her belt, grabbed a slug barrel, and tossed it to Eli, the young Shane managing to catch it before it smacked him in the forehead. "We'll be using Floppers,"

Eli glanced down at the slug barrel that Mari had thrown to him, the older girl's Flopper slug, Snail, giving a small wave in greeting. It wasn't often that Mari used Snail, he was a Flopper, after all, with no velocimorph or protoform abilities to speak of, but every so often, Mari would fire the Flopper as pure shock factor. Not many--or any, for that matter--slingers ever used Floppers in their arsenal, but Mari had learned enough in her short-lived training with Will Shane to know that no slug was completely useless. Not even Floppers.

As it were, a piercing shriek from off to the side made Mari flinch, before the Grey turned to see that Pronto had finally returned from his short-lived expedition to find Eli a sparring partner, if the massive blue cave troll standing behind him and effectively dwarfing the molenoid was any indication.

Then again, molenoids had such a short stature that even a shorter-than-average human was at least twice as tall as them. Either way, to say Pronto wasn't happy that his expedition had seemingly been for nothing was a bit of an understatement. But, that didn't mean he had to scream about it.

"I go halfway across the caverns--" Mari highly doubted he went halfway across the caverns. "To find our newest Shane a sparring partner as you asked me to, Miss Marielle Grey," Mari sent Pronto a look for using her full name that almost sent the molenoid skittering to hide behind the cave troll. As it were, Pronto wasn't quite done with his exclamation yet to feel much fear after being struck by Mari's glare. "And all this time, you were going behind my back to train him yourself! Why, I have half a mind to--"

He was bound to keep ranting about one thing or another, but Mari was starting to get tired of it, and she had half mind to--if Eli did manage to make it through the tournament relatively unscathed--talk to the Shane about letting this grandiose freeloader be their tracker.

"Pronto," Mari interrupted whatever it was the molenoid was talking about, and he instantly quieted down as Mari flicked her gaze towards the cave troll still standing behind him. "Who is this?"

"Ah, of course!" the molenoid exclaimed, almost instantly forgetting his earlier irritation at Mari potentially sparring with Eli instead of whoever he found. "Introductions. Mari, Eli, meet Kord Zane! What do you think?"

"I think," Eli said quietly, having made his way over to stand slightly behind Mari's left shoulder while the Grey had been getting berated by Pronto, and now looked pretty freaked out. "That this could be extremely painful,"

If molenoids were extremely short and stout, cave trolls were on the opposite end of the spectrum; they were still bulky and muscled (they were the beings most known for being Slugterra's engineers and mechanically inclined, after all) but Kord was at least twice as tall as Eli and three times as wide, and Mari had to tip her head back to look him in the eye.

Most cave trolls that Mari had met before were very nice, gentle giants, for the most part, and they were extremely good with their hands; their tough-as-rock skin gave them a further layer of protection when dealing with any of the dangerous parts of being an engineer. It also seemed as if Eli's name was going to backfire on him because Kord glanced at Eli for only a moment, before jerking his head downward to glare at Pronto.

"You told me I'd be dueling a Shane," Kord exclaimed, before waving one dismissive hand in Eli's general direction. "That's just a kid,"

"And you're a cave troll!" Eli exclaimed, sounding weirdly excited, before Mari was suddenly reminded once again, that Eli hadn't grown up down in the 99 Caverns, and thus, had likely never seen a cave troll before right that moment.

Kord, on the other hand, suddenly seemed to deflate, and he seemed more disappointed than annoyed as he tipped his head backward.

"Let me guess," he began. "You don't want to spar with me either,"

Cave trolls generally had a less-than-stellar reputation, mainly due to their large size, but Mari hadn't met one yet that she didn't get along with, and Will had taught her more often than not that every creature in Slugterra deserved the benefit of the doubt. Molenoids, though, were currently stretching her patience to the brink.

"Are you kidding?" Eli's excited voice once more drew Mari from her thoughts, and she glanced at the Shane as he waved his hands around. "I've always wanted to meet a cave troll! 'You'll never find anyone more loyal, honest, and brave than a cave troll'," It took Mari a moment to realize that Eli was spouting off of one of Will Shane's earliest lessons, a realization that was confirmed when Eli continued a moment later, shoulders slumping. "That's what my dad used to say, anyway,"

Pronto, on the other hand, whose ego was starting to seem as big as Kord himself, if not bigger, gave an annoyed-sounding huff from off to the side.

"Hmph," the molenoid grumbled. "Clearly, he spent little time around molenoids,"

"Will Shane..." Kord trailed off for a moment, seeming awed. "Said that?" Suddenly, Kord lurched forward and yanked Eli into a hug that was tight enough that Mari saw the Shane's eyes bulge a little bit. Kord's apparent appreciation of the fact that the famed former Protector of Slugterra had said such a nice thing about a group of people that so often were ostracized from the rest of society, very clearly depicted a soft heart beneath all the muscle and gruffness so usually associated with cave trolls.

Kord also didn't put Eli down after he had picked up the younger Shane, and as Mari trailed behind the two of them and Kord lugged Eli across the tournament field, the eighteen-year-old could see the way the Shane's arms were trapped pointing straight up above his head, and if Mari remembered anything about cave trolls' strength from her memories of Arran, her home cavern's resident gear head, poor Eli was probably feeling a little bit squished.

"Does this mean we're going to duel?" Eli managed to wheeze out from Kord's grip, and Mari, who was still trailing behind the cave troll as Kord made his way to another empty sparring field, could only let out a small laugh, which was caused Trixie, who was walking a few feet away from her, to send Mari a bemused and slightly intrigued look.

"I didn't know you could laugh," the redhead admitted quietly, likely keeping her voice low so the boys wouldn't be able to overhear, but as it were, as soon as she said anything, Mari instantly snapped her mouth shut, a conditioned response from growing up in a house that focused more on training for the future than living in the moment and appreciating things. Trixie, if she noticed Mari's abrupt change in demeanor (and it was likely that she did--there was little that the young filmmaker missed), didn't say anything, and instead nodded her head towards where Eli was now trying to wriggle his way out from between Kord's arms, though the cave troll kept him locked in. "Who is this kid?"

Trixie and Eli had to be around the same age. Still, Trixie had never met him before, and there wasn't exactly a lot that Mari could explain to the redhead without threatening the biggest rule the Shanes and Greys had between them: never tell anyone else about the Surface. Mari was prepared to go to the grave with that secret in her heart, and with the Shanes having been raised on the Surface in the first place, explaining almost anything about Eli's childhood before he showed up at the tournament that day would be next to impossible.

In the end, Mari decided to go with the one piece of the truth that she was able to reveal to Trixie, and said, "He's the Shane,"

It was obvious from her skeptical and dubious expression that Trixie didn't think that was a good enough answer, and truthfully, if Mari had been in her shoes, she would've hated that being her explanation, especially since it was obvious that Eli and Mari had known about each other before today, and Mari had never mentioned the younger Shane to anyone before ever, but really, what else was she supposed to do? What else could she do?

The quartet's arrival at the different sparring field gave Mari at least a little bit of a reprieve from Trixie's inevitable interrogation about Eli's origins. At this point, though, as Kord grabbed an abandoned slug rack and opened the shells, allowing about half a dozen more Flopper slugs to hop out and onto the packed dirt that made up the sparring field, Mari wished that she was the one sparring with the Shane, rather than the cave troll. At least that way she'd have even more of an excuse to stay away from Trixie's questions.

As it were, though, the eighteen-year-old Grey was relegated to the sidelines as the wild Floppers Kord had found joined Mari's Snail in Eli's new bandoleer across his chest. Pronto, who hadn't been witness to the beginning of Mari and Eli's short-lived sparring lesson across the grounds, was less than impressed when Eli eagerly allowed three of the new Floppers to hop onto his waiting forearm before he lifted them into the bandoleer.

"Floppers are not great!" Pronto exclaimed indignantly as he shook the now-empty slug rack from side to side, the vacant shells on the barrel-like contraption clinking as the glass containers bumped into each other. "The most useless slugs in Slugterra, I'll tell you that much!"

Mari rolled her eyes again as Eli sent the molenoid a glance, his expression a mixture between admonishment and consideration as he stood up again, him and Kord retreating to opposite sides of the sparring field.

"Every slug is useful, Pronto," the Shane said over his shoulder, sounding remarkably more gentle than Mari would have been had she been the one to confront Pronto, but in response, the molenoid just scoffed again.

Impatient to start the spar, and probably to avoid a bigger exclamation from Pronto on the value disparity between different breeds of slugs, Kord hefted his massive blaster (though it was proportional to the size of an average cave troll) to brace it against his shoulder and turned around to face Eli.

"So," he began. "What do you know about dueling?"

Mari turned her head towards Eli, pinching the bridge of her nose as all Eli did was shrug, grabbing Snail's slug shell off of his bandoleer and lightly shaking it in the air before he inserted it into the ammo feed on his blaster.

"What's to know?" the Shane asked, gesturing to the slugs still in their canisters on his chest. "First you choose your slug, then you sling it. When it reaches a hundred miles an hour, it transforms. Keep at it until your opponent gives up. My dad must've explained that to me, like, a hundred times,"

On the baseline, Eli was right. Those were the core guidelines for dueling, but Eli was also missing the more nuanced aspects of Slugterra's main method of combat, such as the fact that most opposing duelers would wait for him to be ready before they slug a Hop Rock or Tazerling straight at him and took him out for good.

"Well, explaining," Kord responded, lightly shaking his head. "Isn't dueling. In this competition, you win, you get to pick a slug from your opponent," the cave troll lightly tapped the exterior of one of his slug shells, the Tormato slug inside wriggling for a moment before Kord turned serious again. "That means if you lose any match--even the qualifier..."

He trailed off, but Mari could see the instant that Eli understood what the cave troll hadn't said, and he looked down at his bandoleer, face falling as he stared at his only slug, the one that had been with him since childhood.

"...I could lose Burpy," Eli's voice was quiet, and Mari knew that he was rethinking this whole tournament thing. But, by now, it was too late for him to back out, so either Eli figured out how to win a duel in the next forty-five minutes, or he would end his career as the Slugterran Protector before it even got started.

"Are you really willing to put it all on the line?" Kord asked, tilting his head once more towards Eli, and Mari could see the Shane going to war with himself in his head. What she also saw was Kord inserting a Phosphoro slug into her blaster, and Mari heaved a sigh, causing Trixie, who had also caught Kord's sneaky movement while Eli had let his guard down, to glance at Mari.

"Eli's going to get his ass kicked, isn't he?" she asked, and Mari turned to look at her.

"Oh, most definitely,"

"I don't really have a choice, do I?" Eli asked Kord, not realizing that the part of dueling that Will Shane had failed to explain to his son before he disappeared was about to slam into him, literally.

"Nope," Kord answered simply, before swinging his blaster out in front of him. "Duel!"

Kord pulled the trigger on his blaster and fired the Phosphoro. the light-inducing slug erupting from the barrel and flying towards Eli, transforming into its velocimorph and erupting into its famous light show, though thankfully, Eli managed to duck and cover his eyes before the Arcalyte move could completely blind him.

Trixie burst out laughing as Eli still crouched on the ground as the sparks from the Phosporo dissipated, while Pronto slapped a palm to his face and Mari pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Not fair, I wasn't ready!" Eli exclaimed as he finally jumped to his feet and rubbed his head, relatively recovered from the Phosphoro's blast. Mari could hear her slugs giggling in their shells, but she just crossed her arms and stared at Eli across the field.

"Your opponents aren't going to wait for you, Eli!" she exclaimed, causing the Shane to look over at her as Kord loaded his Tormato into his blaster. "Dueling's not always going to be fair. That's why you have to be--"

Mari's well-meaning advice was cut off as Kord shouted "Duel!" again, and fired the Tormato. Eli, at least, had the foresight to try and run away from the resulting tornado, but was sucked up and spun around by the twister before he could move more than a few feet. It spat him out a moment later, but his hair was now severely windblown, his bangs sticking up almost completely vertically above his forehead.

"Stand sideways--you're harder to hit that way!" Trixie piped up, waving her arm in the air as she continued to film the sparring session, and Mari could see that even Eli looked confused at the redhead's sudden inclination to help.

"You do realize you're helping the competition?" Eli asked as he smoothed his bangs back into place, but all Trixie did was laugh again.

"That's cute," she murmured, glancing at Kord as Mari turned to look at her. "He thinks he's competition,"

The third time Kord yelled, "Duel!" Eli was ready and fired his blaster at the same time as the cave troll. Of course, since all Eli had in his bandoleer, aside from Burpy, were Floppers, it was easy for Kord to dodge out of the way of the speeding Snail as his own Bubbaleone inflated underneath the Shane and caused Eli to bounce up and down on it as if it were a trampoline, some Surface contraption that Eli had tried to explain to Mari in a letter when they were eleven.

"Not bad, bro!" Kord wheezed out from between bouts of laughter, just as his Bubbaleone returned to protoform, the pink slug hopping away gleefully as Eli slammed into the ground from five feet in the air, causing Mari to wince.

The time until the start of the qualifier round kept inching closer and closer, and judging from Eli's skill (or lack thereof) at the beginning of the sparring match, the Shane was going to have his work cut out for him. But, with less than an hour left before Eli would be thrown into the real ring with a slugslinger that could potentially end his career for good during the qualifier, as his sparring match with Kord continued, the eighteen-year-old Shane finally seemed to get his footing.

He wasn't good, but he wasn't getting his ass kicked quite as hard as he had been when they'd begun sparring. One thing Mari did notice, though, as Eli managed to dodge a Loogi attack from Kord's Jellyish slug, the Shane didn't exactly have a lot of variety when it came to aiming at where he wanted to hit his opponent, a weak spot that even Kord commented on, having easily dodged the next Flopper that Eli had fired at him.

"Don't target your opponent every time," the cave troll explained as he reloaded his blaster, looking remarkably more at ease than Eli did, but then again, Kord knew what he was doing. Eli was so screwed. "Try moves that mess things up around them,"

"Ah," Eli said, giving a small nod. "You mean like this?" the eighteen-year-old abruptly leaned to the side and fired another one of the Floppers, the slug utilizing one of its only semi-useful moves, the Smoke Bomb, and erupting into a cloud of thick green smoke in front of Kord.

Unlike the gas cloud that could come from a Flatulorinkhus, the smoke from a Flopper was completely harmless, if not a little difficult to see through, but it was enough of a distraction that it showed Eli was learning something.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Kord exclaimed as he shielded his face from the smoke cloud with his forearm, but when the cloud dissipated, Eli had completely disappeared.

For a few seconds, all Mari could do was blink, and she could see that Trixie and Pronto were surprised as well, with the molenoid's mouth dropping open from surprise and Trixie lowering her camera from her eye.

Then, Eli popped up from behind Kord and grabbed onto the cave troll's shoulder, causing Kord to let out a shriek, and Pronto to get over his earlier shock and throw his arms up in the air in celebration.

"Yes!" the molenoid exclaimed, as Mari gave a small smile. Maybe Eli wasn't completely screwed. "Now that is the Eli Shane that I know! Or..." Pronto trailed off for a moment and Mari gave him a bemused glance. "You know, just recently met!"

"Clever move," Kord said, tossing one massive arm across Eli's shoulders and squeezing for only a moment before the cave troll bolted away, leaving Eli standing there looking confused; it was then that Mari noticed the Flatulorhinkus standing in front of Eli's boots, the toxic-class slug letting loose a massive cloud of rancid smoke a moment later, leaving Eli no time to get away. "And so is my time-delayed Flatulorhinkus,"

◂❧💙🧡💙❧▸

Flatulorhinkus slugs were brutal, and one of Mari's least favorite breeds, simply because of the smell, so with less than fifteen minutes left before the tournament announcers would, well, announce the match-ups for the qualifier round, Mari sat Eli down on an abandoned supply crate a little ways away from the sparring field (while simultaneously staying as far away from the Shane as she could without seeming rude) and had Pronto fan him with an extra towel, as if that would help get the smell out of the Shane's clothes before the qualifier round would start.

But, maybe if Eli smelled as rancid as he did now, his opponent would get so sick they'd forfeit, and Eli would win by default.

Mari could hope.

"I don't smell that bad, do I?" Eli asked, as if noticing how the Grey was keeping her distance, and Mari, who had tried to avoid speaking lest she accidentally breathe through her mouth and gag like she had when Eli had first come over to the others after Kord had stunk him, waved her hand in a so-so motion while keeping her mouth firmly shut.

Trixie, meanwhile, cared less about Eli's current unwilling cologne and more about his utter lack of custom understanding for Slugterra.

"How is it that you've never been in a duel?" the redhead asked, but Eli just shrugged.

"I made my dad a promise," he explained. "He wanted Mari and I to become the new Protectors of Slugterra together, so I promised I wouldn't take up slinging until I turned eighteen. Of course," Eli added a moment later, giving a swift glance to Mari, who could only stare back at him as she tried her hardest to not breathe, while simultaneously not asphyxiating. "If I had known Hannah Grey was going to retire as soon as Dad disappeared, I would've started sooner,"

"Yeah, that came as a shock to everybody," Kord murmured as finally, Mari could hold her breath no longer, and wheezed out a cough, instead going to stand behind Pronto, because as long as she stayed upwind, the chances of her getting a waft of Flatulorhinkus stench to the nose was fairly minimal.

"Let me guess," Trixie added, thankfully drawing the direction of the conversation away from Mari's mother and back to Eli. "Happy birthday?"

"Yesterday," the Shane admitted, and Pronto stopped fanning with the towel, obviously realizing that he got as much of the stench off of Eli as he was going to get; when Mari took a deep breath, there was a distinct difference between the stench of Flatulorhinkus now compared to five minutes ago. It wasn't completely gone, but it was infinitely more manageable now.

"I got a good feeling about you Eli," Kord said as Eli turned his blaster over in his hands, and Mari hopped onto the crate to sit beside him as the cave troll continued. "You may not have lots of skill, but you got plenty of heart,"

"So, you think I'm ready?" Eli asked, glancing up, there were a range of responses.

"Definitely," Krod answered.

"Maybe," Trixie was being optimistic, while Pronto and Mari didn't even beat around the bush.

"Mmm...no," at least Pronto seemed to hesitate, Mari held no such qualms.

"Absolutely not," When Eli whipped his head around to stare at her, eyes wide Mari only shrugged. "I'm being realistic, Eli," she said, as Kord, Pronto, and Trixie quickly averted their respective gazes and pretended to be interested in something infinitely more important. "You did okay sparring. Aside from the Stinker slug to the face," Mari added a moment later, prompting Eli's expression to turn indignant. "But, be reasonable, with no dueling experience, and up against the slingers that are here right now, it'll take a miracle for you to get past the qualifier,"

Mari genuinely wasn't trying to be rude or diminish Eli's confidence, but as much as he had already improved during the small sparring match between him and Kord, his lack of experience with slinging as a whole was a disadvantage when compared to the rest of the competitors.

"Ignore her," Kord interjected suddenly, shoving Mari off of the crate from beside Eli and taking the brunette's place, slinging a massive arm across the Shane's shoulder and trying to reassure him, even as Mari stood up from where she had fallen to the dirt ground after Kord had pushed her and brushed herself off, the remains of her patience, which had already been wearing thin from the earlier events of that morning, rapidly waning even further. "In fact, I almost feel sorry for whatever noob you're up against,"

Eli knew that Kord was trying his best to cheer him up, even though Mari's flood of honesty hadn't done much to discourage him anyway, but frankly, the eighteen-year-old was more worried about his new partner at the moment. Aside from a streak of reddish-brown dust on the white sleeve of her jacket that Eli noticed as Mari crossed her arms, she looked unharmed, aside from the peeved expression on her face made even more noticeable when she huffed out a breath, but Eli had learned enough about the strength of cave trolls that, while Kord may not have meant for Mari to get injured, he still could've done so unwittingly.

Before Eli could say anything to Mari, though, the tournament's announcer called for all of the competitors and spectators to gather near the check-in so the match-ups could be announced, and there was nothing else Eli could do than walk with the crowd of other slingers to the clearing in front of the tent and wait for the reveal of who he'd be dueling in the qualifier.

The glaring fact of today being the first day the Shane spent in Slugterra also meant that Eli didn't know who was who when it came to the other competitors in the tournament. He knew Mari--even though the Grey wasn't competing herself--and now he knew Kord and Trixie, too, but in regards to everyone else, Eli was completely clueless.

That meant that when the tournament organizer did announce the match-ups for the qualifier, Eli could only glance around at his new...friends(?), only to see them all, even Mari, looking varying degrees of shocked and, if Eli was being completely honest, utterly terrified.

There was still a little bit of time before the actual qualifier round would start, so as the rest of the competitors and spectators dispersed to make the final finishing touches on their moves for their respective matches, Eli stood near the tent with Mari, Pronto, Kord, and Trixie, and watched as his qualifier opponent shot a Tazerling at a stationary target, the electric slug shooting a bolt of blue lightning at the target, destroying and leaving only a post of singed remnants behind.

"Uh, remember what I said before about feeling sorry for the other guy?" Kord asked, voice slightly shaky as he scratched the back of his head. "I totally take that back. You're going up against...Shockwire,"

Mari was conflicted on whether or not Eli would win his qualifier. On the one hand, he knew next to nothing about dueling, had a total of half a dozen slugs in his entire arsenal, and his blaster was bound to fail on his sooner or later, the tech was so outdated. But, on the other hand, Shockwire was a flashy and overconfident douchebag and relied too much on his small army of Tazerlings when dueling.

Poor Eli looked like he was about to puke, and Mari couldn't exactly blame him. Shockwire was way too flashy for Mari to take him too seriously, but he was still skilled with a blaster, and Tazerlings were a powerful type of slug; even an inexperienced slugslinger could make them effective against an opponent.

As Eli continued to stare at where Shockwire was practicing, looking as if he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole, the tournament organizer passed by where the five of them were standing, marking something on his clipboard and smirking at the young Shane.

"Still not too late to quit while you're alive, Shane," the older man all but sneered, and Mari sent him a glare as the organizer walked away, instantly deciding that she would make sure that Eli won his qualifier. Fair and square, and without cheating, of course.

Kord, meanwhile, had seemed to adopt Mari's views from earlier about how Eli had little to no chance of winning any sort of duel, and stared at the Shane, looking as if he were regretting even meeting Eli in the first place.

"He's going to demolish you," the cave troll said quietly as the five of them watched Shockwire continue to burn through his target, and all Mari did was roll her eyes.

"Shockwire's an over-jeweled sleazebag," she said. "Eli'll have no problem beating him. Look," she added a moment later, physically turned Eli around so he could see where Shockwire was practicing, the blond man cackling as he shot another Tazerling at one of his metal targets. "The only slugs he uses are Tazerlings. Not exactly a lot of variety when all you rely on are lightning shooters,"

"He makes good use of them, though," Kord added, as one particular shot of Shockwire's destroyed four targets at once. "Look at that!"

"I have a few tricks up my sleeve," Eli said, and all four Slugterran-born slingers turned to stare at him.

"You do?" the four asked in unison, and while Kord, Trixie, and Pronto sounded almost elated, Mari was much more dubious.

Eli knew no tricks because the next thing he did was glance down at Burpy on his shoulder and whisper to the slug: "You know some tricks, right?" The Infurnus looked shocked, in his own little way (he was a slug after all), but luckily, it seemed Trixie had a plan, and Mari remembered that the young red-haired filmmaker was also something of a slug expert. At least, as a hobby, anyway.

"Tazerlings are tough little slugs," she began as Eli and Mari turned to face her, and a thunderous rumble from over the Protectors' shoulder signaled another bunch of targets destroyed by Shockwire. "But, sometimes they'll misfire if they get overworked,"

Mari saw Eli glance over his shoulder again at Shockwire as the other competitor finally seemed to get tired of firing at stationary targets. This time, though, Mari noticed that Eli's expression, instead of looking terrified, now looked more contemplative, and she wondered what he was thinking.

Unfortunately, she didn't get a chance to ask, because the time came when the competitors who had managed to make it into the qualifier would, in a display that Mari thought was quite dangerous, all things considered, come face-to-face before the actual duel.

And, much like the tournament organizer had been skeptical when Eli had first signed up for the tournament, Shockwire also seemed noticeably unconvinced that one of the 99 Caverns' Protectors had finally returned.

"They tell me you're a Shane," Shockwire sneered, his voice sounding faintly wheezy as he and Eli walked towards each other before they both simultaneously stopped about ten paces from each other, a respectable distance on the off chance one of them (Mari's money was on Shockwire) decided to get trigger-happy and fire at the other before the duel itself even started.

"That's right," Eli responded, not seeming to be someone to back down from a challenge, just as Shockwire stepped forward the last few paces and jabbed his index finger into the Shane star symbol emblazoned on Eli's left pectoral.

Mari grabbed onto her blaster but didn't draw it, on the off-chance Shockwire didn't do something to harm Eli, and Mari was the one who ended up getting thrown out of the tournament for firing on an innocent competitor. Luckily, though, it seemed all Shockwire was interested in was trash-talking.

"All's you got is a Flaringo and a bunch of Floppers?" the blond man jeered, pointing to the slug barrels on Eli's bandoleer, and Mari narrowed her eyes, realizing that Shockwire had mistaken Burpy for a slug such as Mari's Agni, and though Flaringos were quite powerful, they were nowhere near the abilities of an Infurnus, especially one as experienced as Burpy. "You crazy?" Shockwire added, leaning close enough to Eli that the two of them were practically nose-to-nose. "Dumb, or both?"

It took a few moments for Eli to think of an answer, but when he did, it made Mari throw her head back to look up at the ceiling of Herringbone cavern miles above her head. To say Eli's trash-talking skills needed work would be an understatement.

"Are there any other options?" the Shane asked, and Mari rolled her eyes. There wasn't time for Eli to realize that potentially riling up his opponent was maybe not the best idea he'd ever had, especially since the qualifier round was about to begin.

Herringbone Cavern was relatively safe, compared to some of the other caverns within the 99, but the area chosen for Eli and Shockwire's qualifier round was the most dangerous area within the cavern itself. A thick river of lava sandwiched within a giant chasm with thin stone outcroppings that looked as if they were about to crumble at any moment. There were thick vines too, hanging between some of the higher outcroppings, but Mari doubted that they'd be much help if either of the duelers got a little bit too close to the waves of heat radiating off of the lava river, not to mention the pockets of magma that would bubble up randomly on the river and burst like they were an open bag of cooking flour.

Eli and Shockwire would have the entire length and levels of the chasm to use as they wished during their duel, but as the two duelers descended the two flights of stairs on opposite sides of the cavern, the spectators cheering and jeering for whoever they wanted to win/lose (Eli had significantly less cheers than his opponent), all Mari could do was lean forward a bit and peer nervously over the edge at the lava river below, even as Eli glanced over his shoulder at her for encouragement.

All Mari could do was send Eli a shaky thumbs-up that she hoped looked steadier from where Eli was a dozen feet down the stairs, but she couldn't think too much about it, because a moment later, the announcer shouted "Duel!" and Eli had to fight for his life.

The new Shane shot a Flopper, but the little greenish-gray slug did no damage to Shockwire, because of course it didn't, it was a Flopper and instead slammed into Shockwire's breastplate with about as much force as a plant frond flapping back against you. Mari could hear Trixie, Kord, and Pronto let out gasps as Shockwire shot one of his Tazerlings at Eli, but the Shane managed to dodge the electrical blast, leaping off of the base of the stairs and down about two levels deeper into the gorge, landing hard on the rock and running across the naturally-made bridge.

Shockwire leaped down after him, and Eli had to jump down even further to avoid the next shot from his opponent, shooting another one of his Floppers towards Shockwire, though again, the little slug did no damage.

The next Tazerling that Eli dodged came way too close to hitting him for Mari's liking, especially if Eli was planning on winning the duel, and Mari's heart leaped into her throat when, after dodging the most recent Tazerling from Shockwire, Eli lost his footing, tripping over some invisible rock on the bridge and tipping over the edge, only just managing to grab onto the edge of the bridge with one hand.

Mari and the others were too far away to see the close nuances of Shockwire and Eli's duel, but massive screens had been erected on either side of the gorge, so they were still able to see most of the battle itself. Mari had no idea what Eli was thinking, continuing to use his Floppers against Shockwire instead of Burpy, and judging from the indignant look on the Infurnus's face, Burpy wasn't impressed at being cast aside either.

But, when Mari saw Shockwire reload the Tazerling he had just fired, the blue-and-yellow slug looking frazzled, she started to connect the dots. Eli let go of the stone bridge he was still hanging off of and dropped, landing on his feet on the platform below, Shockwire firing his Tazerling again, the Shane once more managing to dodge the blast.

"Why is he not using his Infurnus?" Kord asked as Eli continued to run for his life along the stone bridges, the cave troll obviously sharing Mari's earlier nerves about the Shane's chances of actually winning the duel. "Eli! You're never going to win using Floppers!" Kord added a moment later, shouting down into the gorge, though whether or not Eli heard him, Mari wasn't sure.

As it were, the brunette grabbed onto Kord's massive forearm to catch the cave troll's attention, and when he looked down at her, gestured with her free hand to where Eli was still running from Shockwire's blasts, this time tempting fate even further by leaping onto the rocks jutting out from the lava river, and even if Mari hadn't known what the Shane was planning, she was sure she'd be about as nervous as Kord was.

"Wait," she said to Kord, before turning to look at Trixie. "What was it you said earlier? About Tazerlings misfiring if you shoot them too often?"

Mari saw Trixie's eyes light up, and the Grey knew that the young filmmaker was thinking the same thing she was. Kord and Pronto still looked fairly bemused, but the four of them turned back to the duel before the cave troll or molenoid could say anything, and it was at that moment that Shockwire leveled his blaster once more at Eli, who was balancing precariously on a jutting rock.

"You're in for a shock, kid," Mari heard Shockwire sneer through the vid-screens hanging on either side of the gorge, and despite Eli's perilous position, Mari couldn't help but roll her eyes at the bad pun. But, as Shockwire pointed his blaster towards Eli, the Tazerling within the ammo feed, which was, in fact, one that Shockwire had already fired half a dozen times during that one single duel, spasmed, sending bolts of blue lightning radiating out from the small glass case and across Shockwire's body, effectively, well...shocking the blond man and rendering him severely dazed.

"That's what Eli was doing!" Trixie exclaimed, lowering her camera away from her face as Shockwire fell to his knees, and even from where she was standing at the top of the gorge, Mari could see Eli's grin. "He was waiting for Shockwire's Tazerlings to misfire!"

With Shockwire distracted and no longer focused on beating Eli, the new Shane leaped off the rock he'd been previously perched, swinging his blaster out in front of him and finally firing Burpy towards Shockwire, the Infurnus flying towards the other dueler and circling him in a fiery cyclone much like he'd done earlier at the hideout to Pronto, back when Eli had first fired his blaster.

It was only a few moments later when Mari was able to hear Shockwire's voice come from within the fire vortex, sounding panicked as he shouted his surrender.

"Call it off!" Shockwire was screaming as Burpy finally relented his circling and returned to protoform, flying back down onto Eli's shoulder. "Call it off! I quit! You win!"

Mari could see the shocked faces of almost all of the spectators as they dealt with the fact that the so-called "New Shane" had actually won, but Mari was one of the first to start cheering as the tournament announcer, who perhaps looked the most shocked out of all of them, formally announced Eli as the victor.

"Winner!" he announced as Mari watched Eli clamber up onto the top level of the gorge's stone bridges. "Eli Shane's the winner!"

As soon as she was sure that Eli was on sturdy ground and in relatively one piece, Mari sprinted down the steps and across the stone bridge, Kord, Trixie, and Pronto a few steps behind her as they ran to congratulate Eli, Mari almost knocking the Shane over as she jumped up to hug him.

Mari had never really been a hugging person, ever, but she was too hopped up on adrenaline and joy right now to care, though judging from the looks that Trixie, Kord, and Pronto sent her as they skidded to a stop a few feet away from Mari and Eli, they definitely noticed, and thought she was crazy.

"Congratulations," she told Eli a moment later, finally letting him go and dropping back down to the ground, though she kept her hands on his shoulders. Eli, on the other hand, blushed about as red as Trixie's hair, and lightly scratched the back of his head in embarrassment.

"Thanks," he said quietly, before glancing at Burpy on his shoulder. "Got a bit dicey there for a minute, but we managed, didn't we, Burpy?"

Burpy chirped in agreement, and Mari sent Eli another smile, just as the tournament announcer let out a laugh from where he had been stationed at a higher overhang above the gorge, and the sheer audacity of him made Mari's smile drop.

"Guess you really are a Shane!" the announcer exclaimed, grinning himself, before he scowled again, and waved an arm towards where Shockwire stood standing, dejected on the opposite end of the gorge. "Shockwire, get over here and pay up,"

When Mari saw Eli's face fall, she figured that, during all the commotion of the actual duel, he had forgotten what would happen if he won. Shockwire, it seemed, was less than pleased that some random kid he'd never seen before had managed to beat him.

"Yeah, yeah," the older man grumbled as he trudged over to them, taking the three slug barrels hooked to his bandoleer and holding the Tazerlings out to Eli. "Take your pick,"

"Ooh," Kord cut in before Eli could move any closer. "He's got some good ones, Eli. Hey, Hey," he added as the Shane went to walk towards Shockwire. "Let's think about this..."

"No, Kord," Eli said firmly, lightly pushing the cave troll's hand away, and Mari raised an eyebrow. "I've got a better idea," Eli, instead, walked over to Shockwire and bent down slightly until he was eye-level with the Tazerlings, before finally speaking again. "Which one of you wants to come with me? I'm a Shane, you know, and that girl over there," Eli turned his head and pointed to Mari, who gave a small wave, not entirely sure what he was doing. "She's the Grey. So, after this competition is over, you've got to be up for a life of adventure!"

"What?" Pronto burst out, obviously thinking that Eli's canvassing of the slugs was pure heresy. "You're asking the slugs? Nobody asks the slugs!"

Regardless of Pronto's views, it seems that Eli's words had worked, because the Tazerling in the middle slug barrel hopped out and onto the rim of the small glass cylinder before eventually hopping onto Eli's waiting hand. The Shane lightly rubbed the top of the Tazerling's head with his thumb, and the electric slug gave a content-sounding chirp.

"Welcome to the team, little guy," Eli said as Mari walked over to stand beside him again and Eli looked at the Tazerling again. "How do you like the name Joules?"

It seemed the Tazerling, or rather, Joules liked his new name very much, because he leaped a few inches into the air soon after, just as Eli lifted his other to introduce Burpy to the newest member of their little team, and Circuit jumped out of her slug barrel to say hello too.

"This is Burpy and Circuit," Eli said as Mari crouched down so she was eye-level with the slugs, and she was able to see that when Burpy reached out to say hello to Joules, the male Tazerling electrocuted him, causing Circuit to burst out laughing.

"You're a natural, Eli," Kord said once Mari and Eli had straightened up again. "But, now that you're in the competition..." the cave troll trailed off, but Trixie finished his sentence a moment later, crossing her arms.

"...don't think we're doing you any favors," the redhead said. "We're all in this to win,"

"Then you better get a move on," the tournament announcer interrupted, making all five of them turn to look at him as the announcer consulted his clipboard. "Round one starts tonight in Scorched Sparks Cavern. And you'll be fighting..." the announcer trailed off, before pointing dramatically up towards the top of the gorge, where Mari could see one of the Power Trips, the King of Sling, John Bull, and Jacques lurking above. "Them,"

Mari couldn't help but gulp. Eli may have managed to win against Shockwire with just a few Floppers and Burpy, but that was probably the easiest duel he was going to have in the tournament.

It only got more difficult from here.

-----

Ending Author's Note: I don't know if pronunciation is an issue for anybody, but so there's no confusion, Mari's name is pronounced like Car-ee but with an M, instead of a different spelling of Mary. :) It'll be a good while until Eli and Mari get together (they'll start dating at the end of Ghoul from Beyond) but their mindset for why they can't get together sooner is generally:

Eli: *thinks Mari's too good for him because she's been the protector in Slugterra longer than he has*
Mari: *thinks Eli's too good for her simply because he's the Shane*

Long story short, they're both idiots. :) 

Also, I know in "Into the Shadows" Eli says that his mom left (presumably having Jimmo Shane raise him after) after Will disappeared, but for the sake of not letting our boy be as sad about his lack of blood-related family as he is in the show, Eli's mom still raised him after his dad disappeared with the help of Jimmo, and they left on good terms. I do plan on continuing this story post-canon because I DESPISED the fact that Into the Shadows left on such a cliffhanger, and Ascension barely touched on it at all, so maybe the Shane Gang'll go back to the Surface at some point??? We'll see.