Coyote Vs ACME: Pre-Counsel

[I cannot believe you're suing my cousin], Roadie complained, his beak twisted into a rare frown. He held his Sign out towards Wiley with one large, taloned foot, making sure he'd see it.

Wiley was busy stuffing a few not-nuclear-bombs-he-promised into an already overflowing briefcase and thus had no free hands with which to pull out a sign of his own. Instead, he answered out loud, his voice coming out vaguely cultured yet scratchy and low from regular disuse. "I've been that cretin Crestfeather's beta-tester for nearly eight decades, now, my featherbrained folly of a life goal."

Roadie's near-everpresent grin came back, at that. Wiley had some really funny ways of saying 'friend', but that was okay, because Roadie still always knew what he meant and loved them all. How could he not, when they were from Wiley?

"Why, if anytoon should know how dangerous his products are," Wiley continued, grunting as he repeatedly slammed his forepaws against the top of the briefcase from behind, "it would be meeeeee!"

Just as it seemed the briefcase had finally shut, it snapped back open with a pop, scattering its contents over the floor and flinging Wiley across his cavernous den to hit straight into a stone wall. Roadie ran over to the pile of rubble that had once been part of that wall, perching on top and craning his neck to look at Wiley. The coyote was partially buried and staring up at the ceiling with a flat expression that Roadie had long ago learned to ignore. The roadrunner brought out his Sign again.

[It's beta-testing, Wiles!], he cheerfully reminded him. [Stuff always goes wrong in beta-testing!]

Wiley sighed and pulled himself out from under the heavy rocks, coughing from the cloud of unsettled dust that flared up around him as he did. His body came out partially flattened and very bent; he stuck his thumb in his mouth and blew hard, inflating himself back to his normal size and shape in an instant. Wiley took a moment to glare at Roadie, who was now at eye level with him thanks to the added height of the bird's impromptu perch, only to startle back when the bird gave him a cheerful meep-meep! directly in his face.

Rubbing at one of his sensitive ears, Wiley turned away and marched back over to the briefcase, growling.

"I know that, you simpleton. You do not need to educate me on the finer points of an occupation I've held for the better part of a century. This is different than the mere mishaps one might expect from such a career." Wiley started stuffing incomplete inventions, scribbled blueprints, fizzing bombs, and a kitchen table back into the briefcase. "Not a one, a single one, of the products I have had the misfortune of testing should have made it to the shelves without significant retooling first."

Wiley paused in his work, considering.

"Well," he mused, scratching at the bottom of his muzzle thoughtfully, "except perhaps for the ACME Brand Bouncing Ball For Babes And Birds™." He jabbed a clawed digit at Roadie, scowling. "But only because it got you out of my fur for four glorious rotations."

Roadie didn't respond. He stared off into the distance, momentarily distracted by the bittersweet memories of the large red bouncing ball that had roamed Melody Desert for such a short time, only a few years (decades? Months? He'd never been good with time) ago. It had met its premature end a few days in by hitting a cliff too hard and causing an avalanche, burying itself (along with the door to Wiley's den, just as he was trying to escape from an experiment that had decided to explode at that precise moment) under several thousand tons of rock. He sighed wistfully. That ball had been so much fun...

"I don't know what game your cousin is playing at," Wiley continued, breaking Roadie from the nostalgic daze he'd gotten caught up in, "but it is high time that I ceased going along with it!"

Wiley seemed like he had more to say — and wasn't that weird? Wiley having things to say. Not bad-weird, though. Roadie thought he could get used to Wiley actually talking, explaining, speaking to him like this — but he was too out of breath from the struggle of packing. Currently, he was trying rather futilely to fit a grand piano, a full-sized floor lamp, and Droopy Dog in the briefcase all at once.

Taking pity on him and wanting the conversation to continue on unimpeded, Roadie zipped around the den to help. He didn't know what Wiley wanted to pack or not, so he just grabbed all of it — the thing above the bed that Wiley called a dreamcatcher and Roadie called a waste of good nesting materials, the artbooks and the paints, the bed, the rack of seasonings with funny names, a whirring thing that he could already tell was going to be a lot fun to outrun, all of it — and shoved it inside the briefcase.

He pushed his wing softly against the lid, easily shutting it with a gentle click.

Wiley blinked, taking a moment to process as he looked around his now empty den. He was used to the blurring motions of the roadrunner, after so many years, but he wasn't used to them utterly surrounding him like they just momentarily had. "Oh. Er... Thank you." He rubbed the back of his neck for a moment, raising a confused eyebrow at Roadie.

Roadie, with his tongue sticking out and his gaze pleasantly empty, tilted his head to the side and looked back at him. The coyote cleared his throat awkwardly and spun around, grabbing the heavy briefcase and attempting to drag it behind him as he made his way to the exit hole.

Roadie sprinted lightly after him, immeasurably slow by the usual standards of the hyperactive avian, in order to not outpace the other. He held up another Sign:

[I'm sure Cousin Crestfeather fixes the junk up before selling it!], he protested. Then, flipping the sign around, he added, [You do tell him how to, don't you?]

Wiley paused, looking back at the roadrunner. His nemesis, his eternal quarry, never ceased to baffle him. He was possessed of: a nature that swung unpredictably between mildly mischievous, usually in the manner of meep-meeping Wiley off of cliffs, and incredibly helpful to the apparent extent of helping Wiley pack; the vacant air of someone who would most likely stare blankly at a card reading 2+2, perhaps ultimately coming to the conclusion that it might be edible and trying to peck at it; and a seemingly unwavering belief in Wiley's intelligence that rivaled even Wiley's own.

He really, truly believed that Wiley instantly knew how to fix every single device that ACME had ever sent him, didn't he?

(And of course Wiley knew how to fix them — perfect them, even. He was Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, after all; it would take far more than a prototype ACME product to stymie him. If there was one thing he never doubted, it was the base fact that he was utterly, unapologetically, undeniably brilliant)

(But it was... nice, having someone else besides himself acknowledge that. Even if that someone was the blasted bird)

"Well, of course I do, you overgrown cuckoo," Wiley replied at last, with not nearly as much venom as he meant for it to carry. "But he never listens to me!" he added, frustration cracking his voice as he threw his arms up and looked heavenward. He had stopped believing in a god decades ago, but old habits died hard. He lowered his arms, ears drooping, and looked over at Roadie. Roadie met his gaze, tilting his head the other direction than before, radiating confusion. Wiley frowned.

He shouldn't say what he was thinking of saying.

He didn't like the roadrunner. Of course not. But there were some lines he wouldn't cross — this was Roadie's cousin he was talking about, for god's sake. Coyotes believed very strongly in things like family, and that was something Wiley had never lost despite all of his other eccentricities.

On the other paw, however, he was just so tired. And his mind, his brilliant mind, was spinning with what he'd discovered. A near century-long scheme, uncovered by taking just five minutes to actually look at the facts.

Congratulations, he had thought dazedly when he first realized, they really are out to get you.

They were out to get everyone.

He'd suspected it for a long time, of course, an idle little theory that popped up in the back of his head every once in a while. The other option was that he was a complete and utter failure, incompetent beyond measure, and that just didn't make sense to him. It had never been the case before chasing Roadie, after all. Before going to work for ACME to fund his obsession long-term research project.

And he had his entire underground den to work into the equation. It had been dug out, fortified, and ventilated by his own work. It had never once collapsed nor suffocated him, and had survived intact through countless accidents and explosions within it. Which meant that his work was still good, that his skills hadn't simply decayed over the years. Which also meant...

Oh, how he hated being right, sometimes. Ah well, such was the burden of genius, he supposed.

Wiley slumped, slightly, shaking his head tiredly. "ACME products are dangerous, Roadie," he said, not noticing his use of the moniker in the same way he never noticed the rare times he used it. "And I now have reason to believe, quite strongly, that they are made that way on purpose."

Roadie reared his long neck back, eyes wide and headcrest stiffening. [What??]

"It has taken me nearly eighty long years to realize it, you damnable blur of a bird," Wiley told him, smiling ruefully. "But I have not merely been ACME's beta tester — I have been their unknowing coconspirator, their tool, their experiment," he spat this with all the venom he was missing earlier, though none of it was aimed at Roadie. Despite everything, he found that he couldn't direct any real hatred at the bird. "In all this time, the only thing my reports have been used for is to see how much a Toon can take. What they will put up with and still buy the next product. What corners can be cut without losing business!"

He was being a tad louder than was strictly polite, Wiley realized, and endeavored to calm himself back down. The Roadrunner, whose volumes were 'silent' and 'LOUD', didn't seem to notice. Wiley sighed.

The worst part of the whole scheme was that it worked. Everytoon bought from ACME, and yet everytoon knew that ACME products were dangerous, that they tended to misfire or explode or just not work. Or they'd malfunction in the most absurd, nonsensical way possible, like the parachutes that had a 20-45% chance of containing heavy objects and/or silverware rather than an actual chute (he had calculated the figure himself, once, and sent 205 pages of diagrams and extensive notes about it to ACME; the Pull-It-And-Go Parachutes™ had made it to market anyways, within the month).

Which led to his second theory, because at that point it couldn't just be about dangerous extremes of saving money. He thought that there must be some level of entertainment to it as well, which–

He was a Toon, okay? He understood entertainment. He lived for it, to be it, on the same base level that every Toon to ever be drawn did.

But he had his limits, and they'd been reached around the four hundredth ACME Brand Do-It-Yourself Kaboom™ detonator that blew up in his face, instead of the bomb it was attached to doing anything remotely resembling exploding.

"ACME doesn't want improvements to their designs, and they never have," he informed the uncharacteristically-still bird, still unsure if it was right to say anything of the sort to him. "The only thing they want to know is how disastrous they can make things turn out for their customers without consequence to themselves, and they have been using my genius to do it."

He grabbed his briefcase once more, a fresh wave of determination crashing through him, making it almost easy to haul the heavy luggage the rest of the way through the den and partway up the ladder leading to outside. He bared his teeth viciously as he added, "But they will regret that soon enough."

[What are you going to do?], Roadie asked, staring up at him from the bottom of the ladder. He wasn't good at climbing ladders slowly; he relied on his superspeed to correct any mistakes his mere two ladder-capable limbs made. This meant that he couldn't follow until Wiley was all the way up, lest he knock him over in a burst of wind and sand dust.

Wiley opened the exit hatch and swung the briefcase onto the desert ground outside with a huff of effort. Then, despite not having been gazing anywhere in the direction of the Sign and therefore logically having no way of knowing that he had been addressed, Wiley looked down and, with a shake of his finger, responded, "Ah-ah-ah, no spoilers now, you spoiled sonic boom made flesh and ink. You're going to have to wait and find out — just like everybody else, for once."

Before Roadie could wonder at this too much, Wiley pulled a TV remote out of his tattered, burnt old scarf. He pointed it at a box television set that had been offscreen and therefore nonexistent at the time of Roadie's packing spree.

"Coyote Vs ACME will be on right after these messages," an announcer's bright, practiced, slightly tinny voice informed him from behind the screen. Roadie looked away from it and back up to Wiley, but the coyote was already gone, the hatch shut and sealed behind him.

Roadie looked up at it for a moment more. Then, shrugging his wings, Roadie turned and settled into a plump green armchair that was now in front of the television. Unlike most that moved and thought and lived at supersonic speeds, Roadie had a terrific amount of patience, and had no trouble just sitting there for who-knew-how-long before the movie began.

He made himself comfortable while he waited for it to start, snuggling into the armchair. He noticed some stuffing poking out from a small tear in the cloth, and nearly began tearing at it to help form a more proper nest, but quickly thought better of it.

Wiley had trusted him enough to leave him alone in his den while he was gone, as empty as it was. He didn't think Wiley would like him using that trust to destroy the furniture, nesting or not. It was a big step up in their friendship, he knew, and it brought a wider smile to his beak than usual to consider it.

"Coyote Vs ACME will be playing soon!" the announcer reminded him between a commercial for transportable holes and an ACME ad that Roadie found rather ironic, given the circumstances. He glued his gaze to the screen, excited.

Even if he hadn't had much patience, he thought, a movie all about his very best friend was surely worth the wait.

Even if he was suing Roadie's cousin.

(Roadie still felt bad about that, of course. He loved his cousin)

(But Crestfeather really should've known better than to cross someone as brilliant as Wiley; when he put his mind to something, nothing could stop that coyote!)

(Roadie chirped to himself in wry amusement — he sure was glad that Wiley'd never had a grudge against him! Who knew what such a genius could think up to catch him, if he ever chased Roadie for real?)

(But that would never happen, Roadie knew. They both loved the game too much for that; why else would Wiley play with him day after day, if he didn't?)

(Roadie grinned. Wiley really was the best best friend he could ask for)

Somewhere above The Roadrunner and across the desert, on a creaking handcar that had no business still being on the tracks and on which Wiley had written OPTIMISM Mk. V for his own amusement, a coyote in a scarf with a briefcase tucked somewhere inside it paused and looked back the way he'd come.

What in God's name am I doing? he thought, simultaneously more mild and more existential than that sentence usually was for him.

ACME had been a pillar of Toon society since before some overworked stork had dropped him on his parents' doorstep. Everytoon bought from them, and it seemed to him that he was the only one at all with any sort of grievance about it.

They weren't just a megacorporation, they were the megacorporation. They did everything. Hell, he spent two days every other week teaching at a school named after them, in a town that was also named after them. It took little exaggeration to say that they ran everything.

What was one coyote on his own supposed to do against something like that? He didn't have anyone to back him up. The only people who even liked him were his family, whom he would not be pulling into this mess, a dull-witted bird that didn't seem to realize the true nature of their relationship (or, Wiley sometimes thought in the quiet moments late at night, understood it better than Wiley ever had), and a lisping cat that he ran into maybe eight times a year and whose social relation to him consisted near-entirely of complaining about the entire concept of the avian species together.

The more he thought about it, the more Wiley thought that he should just turn around and head home, go on with his life in the same manner he had for the past eight decades.

Wiley took a deep breath, turned back around, and started pumping on the lever again.

He'd only ever given up once in his life, and that once had involved a frankly terrifying bunny with seemingly no limits to what he'd do to those that interrupted his peace. Wiley feels justified, still, for ceasing with that particular pursuit.

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, did not give up. He has chased one bird around a desert nearly every day for seventy-seven years. Nearly eight decades.

If it takes him another eighty years, ACME will fall.

He just hoped that this lawyer guy was as determined as he was...

It was about time, he thought, that he had a win.