When in Rome, Nevada

**Criminal Princess Saga: Part 2** (Part 1) (Part 3) (Part 4)

After Aiza Salcedo, also known as "Criminal Princess," escaped Carson City, she decided to assemble a team of the greatest criminals she could find to preform one huge felony together. She started her search for allies in a town famed for its outlaws, Western Rome, in her home state of Nevada.

About a year and a half ago, the entire perfectly circular town had been painted red (specifically one shade of red: scarlet) by J. H. Skarlett, also known as "The Red Bandit." Skarlett had been put in jail for the crime, but no one had bothered to paint over the red, so to this day Western Rome remained monochromatic. Skarlett's jail sentence has since run out, making her now free to roam the streets once again.

The first place Aiza entered was a local nameless bar, where all types of chaos ensued. X. Terminate, also known as "The Cheating Varmint" was currently trying to cheat in a game of checkers against Krisper Kreme. When he failed, he turned around and murdered the two buffalo gals behind him out of frustration. Billy Dudehog, also known as "The Fastest in the West," was skinning an alligator that had just walked into the bar. And Don Bonfire, also known as "The Fireman," was harassing the bartender with his fire-breathing guitar.

A train car crashed through the wall, knocking down Don Bonfire. Billy Dudehog sped out of the bar faster than anyone could comprehend, getting a start on her next quest for speed. Multiple people got distracted by the bulletin board posted by the door, which was a recent addition, making it the only object in the entire town that wasn't red. X. Terminate, still frustrated at his first failure to cheat in years, went outside the bar and flipped it, after which Don Bonfire burned it to the ground with his guitar. The combined flipping and burning caused the death of most people inside the bar, including the bar tender and Krisper Kreme. As it turned out, by complete coincidence, only the hardest, most sinister criminals survived the destruction of the bar.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, J. H. Skarlett stole a worthless one-trick pony from a bank vault. Later, the rightful owner of the pony was relieved to find that it was gone.

Since Aiza could no longer sit and observe goings on from the bar, she decided to watch the goings on of Western Rome from inside the train that was constantly circling the border of the town. So she headed for the train station, stole a ticket, boarded a passenger car, and watched from the shadows.

What Aiza didn't know, but was pleased to find out, was that Billy Dudehog's plan was to attatch rocket engines to the train to make it go fast. Previously, Billy's only crime was surpassing the speed limit, and she was dying to do something even more against the law.

X. Terminate had relieved his frustration by flipping the bar, but now he felt like he needed to do something more, something bigger. He headed to the train track, which marked the perimeter of the town, put his little moth hands under the dirt, and pulled. He was attempting to flip the entire town. Krisper's wife, Schoolmarm Kreme, was nearby and noticed X. Terminate's efforts. She decided she would come and help him. Because he was a moth, X. Terminate probably couldn't have lifted the whole town himself, but with the help of Schoolmarm Kreme, they managed to flip half the town.

In a few seconds, Western Rome went from being a perfectly circular to being shaped like a taco. Luckily, the layout of the town was perfectly symmetrical, so the only major difference now was that all the buildings were twice as tall as they were before. The train continued to follow the border of the town, causing it to be upside down about half of the time.

Schoolmarm Kreme and X. Terminate then gallivanted around the new Western Rome, cheating as much as they could at anything that could be cheated (the arcade was their best stop). They eventually ended up on the train, planning to cheat in a game of multi-track drifting. The schoolmarm decided to leave her husband for X. Terminate, without even knowing that he had died, and certainly without knowing that his ghost had teamed up with J. H. Skarlett.

Skarlett, her new partner Krisper the fiendly ghost, and the one-trick pony decided that they had bigger and better towns to paint red, so they too went to the train station. However they accidentally got on the wrong train; they boarded the one that circles the town rather than the one that actually goes anywhere else.

On the train, Skarlett noticed a locked car that contained a safe. She isn't usually one for robbing banks, but having just come off the heels of stealing the one-trick pony from one, she thought "what the heck, why shouldn't I try to break into that safe?" Then she proceeded to break into the safe. Aiza Salcedo had also noticed the safe car, and the temptation had simply been too great to resist, so she also broke into it, from the other side. When the two met in the middle, Aiza had made her decision: J. H. Skarlett would be her first choice for the criminal team.

In a tragic magical accident, Don Bonfire burned his mouth off, leaving only blank skin where his mouth once was. Luckily, he had always worn a bandanna over his mouth-area, because he thought it looked cool, but now he actually had a reason. He never had any reason to get on the train, so he didn't.

After several failed attempts to attach rocket engines to the back of the train, Billy Dudehog finally succeeded. She climbed back into the train through the window, and activated the engines. The train lurched off its tracks, moving at a speed insurmountable by any other train on Earth. Billy had achieved her greatest goal yet, she was euphoric as the train sped on its way. Due to the fact that the train was at the highest point in its arc when it was launched, it flew for quite a while before its wheel's touched the ground again, and then, without any rails to follow, it sped into the sunset, leaving Western Rome behind.

To be continued.