[TheRaisin]

Sorry about the delay, been a bit tired as of late. But now I be back, and here is Chapter VII.

Tak, Plik and Cedar arrived in the capitol early the next day. Upon seeing the streets crowded with people, they decided to park the tri-helimotors in a nearby parking area. When they saw the exorbitant parking fee, however, their hopes fell.
"We can't afford that!" Tak cried. "We just barely have enough for a room at an inn and a few meals!"
Plik coughed and cleared his throat in an embarassed way, and Cedar turned on him.
"Out with it, Plik."
Plik acted bashful.
"Well, when we tied those robbers up, one of them dropped... this."
He produced a bulky sack from a pouch on his belt. It clinked slightly as Tak took it, and it was amazingly heavy. When Tak looked inside, he gasped. The bag was full of gold coins.
"There must be.... geez...." Tak struggled for words.
"Two-hundred and sixty-two pieces. I counted them last night." Plik said, a small bit of satisfaction showing in his voice.
After paying for the parking spaces, the trio set out. They quickly found that walking was no easier in the crowded city than driving. After an hour of walking, they had only gotten a matter of blocks.
"This is tough. The people are nice enough to move aside, but you still have to fight for each step," Tak observed.
Cedar stepped into a small alcove, set back slightly from the main crowd, and Tak and Plik followed.
"We can't waste any more time. The Ket have had days now to prepare, and I think they're getting ready to make their move. Got any ideas on how to get out of this traffic jam?"
Plik shrugged, Tak looked around dully for anything that might help them or give him an idea, and Cedar scanned their surroundings with a penetrating and critical stare. Suddenly a shadow passed over them. They looked up quickly and saw a huge ornithopter passing in front of the sun (Ornithopters are large flying devices. Their chassis are sleek and boat-like, and they have large fan-like wings made from a stiff, thin fabric stretched across a spine of super-light wood. They are extremely light, modeled after birds, and powered by powerstones). Suddenly Cedar's face lit up.
"You're not thinking of riding an ornithopter, are you? The nearest station must be a few miles from here, and they're almost always booked solid," Tak said.
"Not the ornithopter," Cedar replied. "We're just taking a slightly different route."
She leapt onto a drainage pipe attached to a nearby building, and shimmied quickly and sinuously up to the roof of the building. Tak and Plik followed suit, and a collective "wow" went up as all three of them looked across the crystal rooftops. They stretched for miles like a sea reflecting the midday sun, and outshined the ocean itself as they stretched toward the coast.
"Now we can move a little more quickly," Cedar said.

They raced at top speed over the rooftops, bounding over the gaps between buildings and hurdling over chimneys and drains. From the ground, a few D'naathi caught a brief glimpse of them as they sped toward the Royal Palace. Ornithopters flapped and swooped about, sparse towards the edges of the city, but like stars in a star cluster towards the center. Suddenly a small and sleek ornithopter swooped directly over their heads, pivoted it's wings and back-stroked to slow down, and began hovering above a rooftop a few yards away. Two figures dropped out of a hatch in the bottom, crouched on the guard-rail of the roof, and jumped fifteen feet, landing in front of Tak, Plik, and Cedar.
The two D'naathi were tall, lean, and muscular. They wore triangular aromored vests with horizontal spikes protruding from the shoulders, with the bottom point coming down to their navels. Their heads were protected by fierce-looking helmets, with forward-swept pointed face-guards on either side of the head and a similar protrusion along the tops of their snouts. In their clawed hands were long gold-plated pikes with golden thorns just below the six-inch pointed blade. They also had curved short-swords attached to their belts, along with crude powerstone beam weapons. Their insignia declared them members of the police force of the Crystal City, specifically of the elite King's Guard. They were quite possibly the best-armed, most ferocious-looking soldiers any of them had ever seen. One of them spoke.
"It is against the law of the King and the City to travel by rooftop. Do you have an official decree authorizing you to be up here?"
"Um, no," Tak said.
The soldier grunted. "Then you will be taken to a police holding area until we can schedule a court hearing."
"Sorry, but see, we're on an important mission and we don't have any time to spare," Cedar replied curtly.
The soldier was not to be dissuaded. "If you are on a mission officially recognized by the King or one of his representative agencies, then this can be cleared up at the station with a background check. If not, then you have broken the law and will be tried in court."
Tak's eyes narrowed menacingly. "I don't think so."
Unable to use their pikes effectively at such short range, the soldiers reached in a very meaningful manner for their swords. Seeing the movement, Tak spun and whipped his tail in an attempt to disarm them. One soldier was caught off guard, but the other was prepared. He grabbed Tak's tail and spun him around by it, then let go. Tak crashed into and shattered a chimney twenty feet away and lay there. Plik swept his tail low to try to knock the soldier whose hand had been hit by Tak off his feet, but he was warier this time and avoided it by jumping. Cedar boosted herself off Plik's shoulders and tackled the soldier in mid-jump, cracking the roof slightly as she landed on top of him. The other soldier prepared to run her through with his sword, but by now Tak had recovered: he hurled a chunk of crystal from the broken chimney at the soldier. It hit the back of his helmet, and he fell to his knees groaning as the metal helmet rung in his ears. Plik delivered a solid whack to his head with the pike the other soldier had dropped, and he collapsed unconscious. Cedar pinned her opponent and firmly pinched the pressure point between his shoulder and his neck, putting him out as well.
By now the ornithopter pilot had seen what was happening, and the wings of the machine began beating furiously as he tried to gain lift.
"Stop him!" Tak cried out.
Cedar used one of the discarded pikes to pole vault herself twenty feet to the roof the machine was hovering over, then used her legs and tail like one giant spring to propel herself upward. She grabbed the open hatch by the tips of her claws, and pulled herslef up into the flying machine. There came the sound of a few hard punches from the cockpit, then it was silent. Slowly, the ornithopter turned and came toward the roof where Tak and Plik stood. Cedar dropped through the hatch, the ornithopter pilot draped unconscious over her shoulder.
"Now we travel in style," she said.