Scene #7952: Meat Tests and the Mysterious Thirteen

Owner	Pose
Cantio	The meatland base that Cantio's been operating out of is coming along rather well considering the circumstances. The prefabs that were left in the region initially have become covered in meat, the slightly pulsing substance growing from the ground to cover just about everything that hasn't been nailed down by this point. Drones still float around from place to place, feeding data into wherever they're transmitting that stuff to so Cantio can eventually try and parse it out into something halfway useful. Cantio herself is tending to a tree with bark that looks like jerky, pushing aside some crunchy-looking branches and holding up a lighter to one. She observes the change in color, jots it down on a tablet, then continues her rounds of note-taking. Her coat, once white, has long since turned a distressing shade of pink and brown. Everything still smells like meat.
Xion	First, the portals open, void-black and limned in pixel yellow, and disgorge vaguely disturbing Pac-Men With Teeth, yellow orbs tumbling out of haphazard tears in space. Some fall on drones and begin chewing haphazardly, easily damaging unarmored segments and steadily molar-ing through even armored plate. However, the mouths are 'picky eaters', quickly disengaging from non-attacking drones in lieu of continuing their fall towards... the meat so that they may continue their consumption unabated. They eat, and they eat, and they eat, and when they are full, they pop, imploding on themselves. Like Pac-Man! With teeth. Soon, there is another portal, ground-level, that splits open far more gently than some pixellated yellow tear, blooming like a black velvet flower with a center-sworl point, and lingering in a flat, two-dimensional black void that ripples dark magenta. Xion, wearing a yellow short-sleeved t-shirt over a black long-sleeved shirt, black leggings, and violently white sneakers, steps out into the MEAT DIMENSION looking at her phone. "Okay! This is where the Munch-Men wanted to... Lunch-Men? Well, gig apps are gig apps." She shrugs, looking up. "So how far have you come, Cantio? I took this quest because I heard you were doing things with meat, and..." A laugh. "You don't disappoint." Her head tilts. "Done anything you regret?" The mouths wakka-wakka. "Here with all this meat?"
Cantio	At first, the appearance of the Munch-Men has Cantio quirking her brows in curiosity rather than concern. They might just be more uncommon fauna of this weird place, after all, and even their chewing of her drones doesn't worry her too much until they actually start biting through the machines. "... Huh. So there are things strong enough to do that here. That's going to need some extra-" And then they start popping. The confusion is apparent on Cantio's face, and it actually gets her a little more worried as that popping might be a threat to the more sensitive of her monitoring equipment. "Wh... H-hey! Ease off of there! I'll get you some more fo-" Wait. Do drones count as food? She's not too happy about feeding relatively expensive machines to strange animals, and so she brings out her sword to start golf-swinging at them, trying to send them flying away and buying some time to figure out how to proceed. She's still confused-looking, though, up until that ground portal opens up with a familiar face coming out of it. "... Xion? Hi! It's been a while." She lets out a semi-relieved sigh, then gestures at the remaining Mlunch-Men before taking a swing at another. "You came just in time. I've been doing tests on the meat-I mean, everything's meat here, but I've been doing tests, and then these things showed up and-" Breathe. She inhales, exhales, then laughs with just a bit of awkwardness. "It's mostly theory right now, but no. Nothing I regret yet." A beat, then a more pensive sigh. "'Yet'. I don't plan on doing anything regrettable, but..." She rubs her arm, looking a little bit more awkward than that. "... Is it that predictable?"
Xion	The Munch-Men are here to munch. They only smile on the moment of their horrific implosion, hopefully to their home dimension. Sometimes, while golfswung into the distance, they implode instead, gaining the physics of punctured rubber bags, flapping loosely into disassociated pixels. Xion, in her own pac-man yellow and black, adjusts her stance to a right fist-on-hip askew with an incredulous look, and drops her chin, while she disappears her phone with a close of her hand and a dark 'pouf' of inventorying. "It has been a while. Though, not really, right? Only subjectively. And maybe objectively, dang, it has been a while. Maybe a whole year. Isn't that sad to think? It was before the tree, and Lilian's sharpening herself, and... a lot of important events." Xion nods, holding out her hand. For a moment, it seems beckoning, welcoming, and then her fingers close around a hilt and a line of light. With a 'shwink', her Keyblade appears, dipping with a lightly real weight. The keychain unfurls, an empty star. "You grew stronger, Cantio. A lot stronger. And those keys, those things you made, and that thing I made, and them together - that could do a lot of things." Xion's swordarm turns, pointing the combed tip of her blade towards Cantio. "It could help people. People aren't -people- any more, don't get to -live- outside any more, because of what you did, Cantio, and you're telling me you've... you've 'not done anything you regret with it', -yet-?" Xion sighs, her swordtip dropping. Shadow-eyed, she motions like a laugh, silently, and then draws in a breath, her chin coming up while her bangs hang over her eyes. "That answer sucks, Cantio." Xion mutters, and then her form blurs and glitches, stopped in-frame. Another Xion - a real, moving Xion - two-hands Starlight down-diagonal across Cantio's right side from behind, the force of the blow flowing through the meaty ground and hamburgering the terrain in a blast patter beneath Cantio's left flank.
Cantio	Implosions and pixelization. How terrifying! Cantio gets tangled up briefly in her own coat as she golfswings one more of the Munch-Men away, then takes it off to toss it over to a waiting drone. Underneath, she's... Unfortunately, she hasn't gotten hotter and ripped'ier during that whole span of time. She actually looks almost exactly the same as that day many months ago as far as body-shape goes, even if her expression is somewhat more worn down. "Has it been a year already? It's definitely been a couple of months, but... A lot of the changes were good, at least, right?" She laughs, trying to keep her spirits up, but her mind is already going to darker places that Xion is already on top of confirming. Cantio raises a handle near her head as pieces of purple metal float towards it, assembling themselves into a heavy-looking blade that eventually rests upon her shoulder. "I... Have, haven't I? I wonder if I'd be a able to help my sister on one of her..." It's always that 'yet' that gets her in trouble. It's that 'yet' that got far too many of her own people killed by her own hand, after all. "It's... I know. I don't like it, either. But... What do I do?" Xion's gambit goes unnoticed by Cantio at first, but a warning chime from one of her drones tips her off to the real Xion's attack from behind. The strike comes in too quickly and too widely for her to defend against it cleanly as the meaty earth barrages her with some surprisingly solid-sounding impacts, but Cantio's movements take her toward Xion to press her own attack instead of trying to fall back and catch her breath just yet. "Every time I get a hold of something with great potential, my work... It never stays on track to help improve people's lives. It always comes back to fighting!" There's frustration in her tone at that last bit, and she lets loose with that frustration as she grasps that sword with both hands to bring it down at Xion with a similar meaty blast from the downwards impact. "Power, weapons... Even this meat place is no different. It just keeps happening!" Cantio's focus shifts to the tip of her blade as she flings it back up at Xion from the side, trying to catch Starlight right where Xion's holding it to disrupt her flow.
Xion	"You're making it too complicated from the start." Xion reasons, her wide stance on pivoting through her strike holding there, her weapon tip-down in the meat-divot as she breathes. She moves slowly and deliberately, stepping one leg up to square her stance with Cantio's retreating motion and follow her with the tip of her sword. Under her hair, her eyes glow ocean blue, staring. "Just do something good. It's easy. You built and you built and you built, Cantio, and got helped and handed to." Cantio has a pure speed advantage on Xion, and her power strike smashes down into the ground, flinging meat back at her. Backstep-retreating an armlength quickly, Xion lifts away her right hand from her grip and opens her palm, summoning a sudden portal to disappear the wave of meat -- but the 'feint' works to Cantio's pure speed advantage, the sudden advance of her blade-tip clanging against Starlight's thick handguard and divesting wielder from blade, her hand coming free rather than contest the thrust. Now both hands free, Xion pivots her whole upper body into a forehead-aimed palm strike, the intimate distance allowing her to put a raw reversal onto the table. Starlight arcs off into the Meat Tree, twang-clattering into the trunk with an unwell sound. Xion forces Cantio's skull towards the ground, and without contest will simply drive her into the meatground. "You were born with a sword in your hand, Cantio, and you've done too much to just shrug at it all with an 'it always happens this way'." Now she's shouting. "If it always happens this way, doofus, CHANGE something!" "If it always happens this way, then maybe power isn't your problem!" "I handed you an incredible sword, one you could use well, one that was yours." "Where is it? Why aren't you excited to show me? What have you done, while I was gone?!"
Cantio	'You're making it too complicated from the start.' 'Just do something good. It's easy. You built and you built and you built, Cantio, and got helped and handed to.' "That's how it's always been. I don't know how not to." Cantio admits with a pained grimace as she tries to push the advantage a little more, finding some small measure of confidence coming back to her when she seemingly manages to disarm Xion. "It always starts okay. Getting food around, finding jobs, protecting my people, but then that last part... It keeps sidetracking everything." That brief moment of confidence soon gives way to Cantio's ever present-weakness: Grappling. Xion proves to be far more potent than she can handle at such close range, not quite able to move her blade into any reasonable position before she's slammed headfirst into the ground with another heavy, gross-sounding smack into the wet ground. "Gh...! I start worrying about their safety. About mine. Too much about what I need to do that. If I'm not strong enough to keep them safe, nothing I do is ever going to stick. If I can't even protect myself, how am I supposed to make anyone feel safe? If I can't stop my enemies, will anyone ever really be safe?" Gurgling for a moment beneath Xion's hold, Cantio swings her legs up to try and get them around Xion's legs, although she doesn't swing that sword upwards to try and stab her or anything. Instead, she just focuses on trying to hook her legs behind Xion's at first, all while some shadowy figures start moving from behind the meat tree. "I know it's a me problem... But I don't know what to change! Even with that power, they... It's never enough for them!" Her gaze flicks sideways briefly as if spotting something, and then she puts as much force as she can into the back of Xion's knees to try and take her off balance for just a moment. As she does that, a pair of Cantio clones (one dressed like some kind of thief and the other dressed like a vaguely robotic version of herself) emerge from their hiding spot to swing their own blades like a pair of oars at Xion from each side. "Someone more threatening, someone that really does want to hurt me, break everything..." Even Cantio's starting to sound a little hoarse already, one hand clutching at the inside of her belt and even slipping through it a bit as though she's both trying to grab something and stop herself from grabbing something further inside. "Even if I use it again, you saw what happened last time. It didn't even... It wasn't even enough to stop you and everyone else from stopping me!"
Xion	"How can you worry about -your- safety?" Xion asks, tone cold. Her voice rises again, cool understanding. "I know why." She continues, legs locked in place. Acting more with natural physicality than anything, she stances up and balls her fist, reaching back with her elbow to deliver one punch right to Cantio's face. It still hurts less than getting hit with her sword - if at all. Twisted at the knee, Xion drops to a half-crouch, kneeling into Cantio on the ground as she's pulled down. Copies - one robotic, one thiefy - zip in from the flanks to deliver simultaneous attacks. Tensing, it all connects. One blade 'WHUMPH-s' against Xion's body, and the other - the robotic Cantio's - rests flat against her pressing right palm. The blade, and the robotic Cantio, start collecting black motes, more spreading from the point of connection between Xion and the copied Cantio-fork. "It's because this is the worst thing that's ever happend to you. The power you lack is empathy. So now I'll take your power." She closes her hand around the robo-Cantio's sword, the dark motes propogating through to the clone itself as she draws the power into herself through the blade. "I put myself on the line to stop you. With force. Not gently. Life or death, Cantio, and we both survived. Did I 'really' not try to stop you? Do you want to be powerful enough to overcome anyone who thinks what you're doing is wrong? That power doesn't exist! Not at this level! Not against a room full of people that are people to you!" "Is the only way your power helps someone is if I borrow it from you and do it myself?!"
Cantio	Although the idea was sound in theory, it goes about the same way most of Cantio's plans do in practice: Terribly. She takes that fist right to the face with little in the way to stop it, little room to maneuver enough to even attempt to move with the punch to minimize contact time, and also she's already laid out on the ground beneath Xion by the time she even thinks about things like follow-through. "The worst...? No, there's..." There really hasn't been anything worse than that. "I've..." All things considered, Cantio's life has actually been rather blessed. It was already touched upon once before, but it's all coming together in a way Cantio can't ignore any longer. "Empa...? No.. No! Everything I've done has always been... Mostly been for...?" Has she ever really known struggle before? A struggle for getting more power, to prove herself capable of doing things generally, or even in keeping what she's already had, sure. It's just never reached the level of struggling to scrape by, and nothing like the sort of struggle that even her clones are facing at this moment. Somehow, it seems like even the clones are more invested in a life-or-death struggle than Cantio herself at this point. "You and everyone did.. You were fighting that hard because you all cared. And I was... Was I really that stupid?" She already knows the answer. She even had a long cry about it shortly after that incident. The robo-Cantio puts up a valiant effort, trying to pull that blade away while swatting at those black motes to try and ward them off a little longer. Eventually, it lets out a tinny screech before being consumed entirely through Xion's blade, all while the thief-Cantio... She sees the writing on the wall. She looks over at Cantio Prime (who has yet to get up), then at Xion, then brings her sword up once more. There's a look in her eyes that's not quite like any that Cantio herself shows too often: Fear for her life, however temporary it may be. The clone rushes at Xion and flickers sideways briefly with a burst of speed to try and catch her off guard with another slash, but it's not nearly on the same level as Cantio at her full power would be. It'd be a simple matter to just cleave her in half or smash her to the ground at this point. She's still laying there, and she has one arm over her face to hide some rather obvious tears. "We survived, and we fought hard, but I... How am I this stupid?! I'm supposed to be..." And then she starts wailing.
Xion	The robotic Cantio disappears, sword and all. The thief Cantio, a copy of the article, spun out to be disposable. Possibility. Xion is hit, again. She doesn't even stop it. It's just damage. Chunks of red on a ring of green. What there is to feel is something real-- But not for her. Xion summons Cantio's crystal sword, reversed, the crystal purple shining a circuit-etched magenta in her hand. She hooks the copy-Cantio with the flat of her acquired sword, crooking the thief what-if into the blubbering and wailing girl on the meaty ground beneath her, and backs off a pace. Turning on a heel, she pivots to recover her own sword from the treetrunk, where the Munch-Men have made large teeth shaped dents in everything and chewed up the whole place. Two hamburger pools divot the ground where useful meat-land had once been. "Tell her, Cantio that could have been. Tell her all about it." Xion cuts the air with Starlight, the silver blade opening a flowering Corridor of Darkness near her. "What it means to fight for your life. And what it means to walk away from that. Remember it this time. I'm no longer begging you: I'm telling you."
Cantio	Without the orders pushing her along to fight to the death, the copy's self-preservation instincts kick in again to follow along with Xion's restraint with that same terror (and some relief) evident in her eyes. She nods quickly at the orders given to her, sparing a quick glance at Cantio herself before nodding once. "I... Y-yeah, I'll tell me. Her." The forked Cantio pauses for a long time, looking steadily more confused until something finally seems to click. "I'll make sure she learns it." There's a clarity in her tone as she says that, contrasting rather sharply with the somewhat messed up state Cantio herself seems to be in at this point. She's barely even able to look up at Xion or her Corridor right now. It's going to be a bit before she gets back up, too, but the thief fork will be waiting to explain it all.
Xion	Xion nods, then. "Okay. Good luck." As suddenly as she burst back into Cantio's deeply meat-themed life, the Nobody leaves it - far more complicated.