Scene #8175: The Aftermath Of The Errandboy

Owner	Pose
Sylvi	Phreak had it pretty good for a while. He made a big score, he gathered up his allies, and undertook a huge adventure into a digital world where his skills mattered a lot and his worldview was challenged. Phreak had it pretty good for a while. And then his messenger client got an alert. > Phreak. We didn't catch up. > We should. > No excuses. > You know the bar, but if you forgot it's-- TIR, In the realms of Rubi-Ka... ... within the HAPPY REBEL. Slouched at one of the booth table by the windows, Sylvi takes up space, elbows on the table, phone before her eyes while her thumbs mash away at the impact resistant glass. The screen already has spiderwebs of cracks, but Sylvi doesn't care about the discoloration on the screen. She wears a pair of black athletic shorts whose thigh-cuffs are just visible in her sitting stance beneath a large dark grey T-shirt with a neon green negative-space spray of the word BITCH shamelessly deformed across her front. Her mane of unkempt white hair sits tied with a black scrunchie.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	"Hey." An opifex enters the bar. The gold eyes brimming with mildly sullen energy, the boyish features at work to create an air of being above it all--yes, this is Phreak. A shiny silver jacket with a high waistline complements a red crop top, the far-future ensemble rounded off by a pair of black tights with a star print and matching hi-tops. Sliding into a booth with some mild discomfort at being seated across from a notorious bully who has indeed bullied him before, "What's there to catch up with?" He squints, then, as a thought takes him. "Is this more of that 'make sure you're not slowing Berc down' shit from before?"
Sylvi	Sliding into the booth across from the notorious snake gunbarrels her idle slouch, broad-shouldered phonebuggery, and wide sitting casual stance. She doesn't look up, doesn't shift her eyes, just narrows her stance and slouches into the bright glow of her distorting screen. A fingerpress with the center of her thumb that lingers makes the gentle glass-crunch symphony of tension-creaking glass. A palpable pressure-aura rolls off of Sylvi, like gravity seeping in from under a door and washing oppressively outward. Atmospheric 'slight distaste'. The same under-the-thumb pressure she applies to her phone, vexed in a minute sense. "Phreak." Snarls Sylvi. "I can hear those mewling thoughts in that head of yours, taste how much of a brat you're being. I don't care if you're Bercilak's bed warmer he's sweet on." Then, and only then, does her eyes come up. The pressure increases, pouring down onto Phreak, daring him to rise up or demanding he submit. "Everyone catches feelings for a favorite fuck. But this? This attitude?" "Is that how you're going to ssspeak to me?" "Answer." She demands.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Sylvi can also feel the anger boiling over the general background brat noise. She struck a nerve, somewhere. Maybe he interpreted her initial tirade as 'that's all you're good for.' Or maybe he took umbrage at the last part. Either way, it flows from his mind and out of his mouth. "I sure fucking am. You said we needed to catch up. Then the first thing you do is talk shit. It doesn't matter what I am to him. What matters is, I can sweat you just as hard as he can." "Do you actually wanna catch up?" Asks Phreak, looking down his nose at her (cocking his head to do it for the heigh difference). "Or do you just wanna wear yourself out catching up to me?" Unwisely, he adds, "Because if that's what you want, I'll give you the first swing for free. Try and put your hands on me. Right here in this booth."
Sylvi	Sylvi's right eyebrow raises, a whole side of her face quirking up in a growing, slowly building feeling. A specific emotion. Phreak sees it bloom in slow motion: first a slow incredulity, then a building sardonic amusement, and finally a fang-hung lower lip as the snake rattles and sniggers. She laughs at him. Sitting back, arms spread out over the back of the booth, with her left hand around her crunchily-abused phone. Her right rests flatly on the wooden booth-table. "I'm going to make this real clear. Very clear." Her lips split into a too-wide smile, too-toothy. Her smile curls, grotesque and fanged. The lower canines in her jaw elongate, curling into thick tusks that cross with the knife-long fangs that hang over her jaw. Her tongue lolls out, forked and air-tasting, and her laughter rolls into a serpentine rattle. "That's how, ah, you're going to talk to me, aha, ahaha..." Sylvi breathes, and rolls back her neck. "We could talk about your little job that we bet on, but I've never turned down a free swing." The back of her head rests softly against the booth-top behind her neck, and Sylvi draws in a breath nasally. She draws and draws, and then drops her chin forward, to loll her head in an exhale. Her eyes come up, gazing green out of the top sliver of her visible face, and as soon as she locks them with Phreak, Sylvi shatters the table going through it, splintering wood like sand to jam her bare knee into the hacker's crotch and aim to grip him by the throat with her hand, gripping and yanking. "Show me something to gain, then, bedwarmer brat. If that's the game you want to play!"
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	"Oh, we're not talking about shit now," growls Phreak as his eyes tear up from the impact. "You pissed me off." "YOU TWO! OUTSIDE BEFORE I CALL THE SENTINELS!" "Call them, bitch, and tell them Elineve Smith said Simon Silverstone can gargle his balls," Phreak calls back. If there was any doubt that Sylvi struck a nerve, it should vanish the moment Phreak displays enough contempt for her grasp to stare her down, procure one of his oversized SMGs, and press it to his temple, squeezing the trigger. With nothing but a stump above the shoulders, the fixer's body slides from beneath her, his skull and muscles reforming as his back impacts the splintered fragments of the table. He's back on his feet with a kip-up, patterned rubber treads walking their way up Sylvi's midsection as the skin grows back on his face, the final step a kick from the back of her head that launches him into a frontflip. Expert control sends two arcing parabolas of lead her way before he's touched the ground again. By the time he does, he's out the door. It's a chase--and Phreak is already on his hoverboard waiting for Sylvi, fully armored up, by the time she makes it outside. He looses a hail of finger-sized projectiles from either mismatched gun upon her exit, then rockets off, across a decorative pond, using the wash from the board's turbines to spray her with the water, before weaving through two alien palm trees. A kickflip over the top allows him to shoot straight down as the board turns in the air beneath him, loosing two heavy, stone-like fruit that crack pavement on their impact.
Sylvi	Phreak tears up, and Sylvi leans close in in the moment, expecting it, relishing it. He can hear her breathe it it. He can feel her tongue, flicking up his tears with a delicate touch. "How much of a bitch you are is delicious." Sylvi rasp-chuckles. Screaming, the needs of others, do not exist to Sylvi. Her eyes see only Phreak, struggling beneath her, and his expert defense breaks the crushing hold by sacrificing things that don't matter - like his skull, and face - to kick up her front and spin away. Bullets impact Sylvi's shirt, pumping holes in the cloth and thunking against her body beneath. The snake's daughter grunts, wiping her hands from her temples back through her hair. Her face smooths while Phreak leaves, and Sylvi strides purposefully and unhurriedly out the door. Phreak is already blasting away. Rolling her eyes, Sylvi reaches down to tie her shirt about her upper chest with a frontal knot. "He's actually going to give me the run-around. What a fucking brat." Watching Phreak hook around the fountain, Sylvi takes a runner's stanced start, but the leap after isn't some heaving leap - no, she simply changes and grows after the hoverboarding hacker, at first a growing mass of flesh, and then, with a flare of color, aphotic blue-green scales sprouting in 'chase', really filling the streets of Tir with some endless serpentine mass. At the fore, at first, is just more scales and a peeling point of genesis, which is stopped momentarily by two heavy obstructions in the way. It heaves, curling and crashing, around the obstacle, rolling with-- Laughter? Laughter. Once more, it laughs at Phreak. It rattles, countless points of frictious scratchings against the surface of Tyr. It peels and parts, a truly enormous serpentine head, two hard eye-ridges opening and nictating to stare down -- stare at, with Phreak airborn, and level with the forming face -- the angry man. Sylvi's voice sibilates within Phreak's mind, violatory and cool in the heat of his anger. 'Why are you mad, little boy? What inflamesss your heart ssso deliciousssly?' If he seeks a chase, the snake delivers it, crashing through more of the city of Tir with the bulge and roll and coil of seeking scales, the bulk not realy shifting or moving but simply growing into place, endless.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	[BGM] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCbx5960Spw Images flash across Phreak's mind, plain as day for Sylvi to see. A laughing mutant exulting in a boy's helplessness. A father figure lecturing a young man that he isn't ready. A snake--her--sweating him about slowing Bercilak down. The pinnacle of humanity, openly, casually stating that everyone (him included) ought to be grateful for her magnanimous mercy shown to what she perceived as helpless infants before a force of nature. Don't you fucking call me that. The response to Sylvi's serpentine spread through the city from the Sentinels is immediate. But Phreak responds to their presence with even more anger. "FUCK YOU! MIND YOUR OWN GODDAMN BUSINESS! I DON'T NEED ANY FUCKING HELP!" Rust-armored, skull-helmeted shock troopers are shot at, as Phreak tears on a downward spiral. High caliber bullets tear through armor; white plasma fired in retaliation is avoided with agile twists of the hips, bends at the waist, board tricks put to use in evading while an oppressive stream is kept up through deft, rapid reload. The first wave cut down, forced to Reclaim terminals to deal with the infamous 'resurrection sickness.' He isn't finished. Whipping around the domed roof of a weapons store, Phreak makes a vertical plane of the board, kicking just in time to put his strength to use. With a sound of wrenching metal and buckling mortar, the sign is made into a projectile, while Phreak coaxes the board into a backflip to funnel momentum for another pass. Keeping low to the street, he makes tight turns, shoulder-checking shouting reinforcements near the center of town. The man-made canals in the center boast guard rails, the space beside them colonized by Sylvi's scaled coils. Popping the board upwards to grind along the rail, his heel stomps on an afterburner, hot flame belching from the rear of the board, making him into a blur along the rail and belching fire at Sylvi's coils. One arm back, that gun fires along the burnt scales, while, face forward, he forces oncoming Sentinels into cover with accurate, controlled bursts.
Sylvi	With incredible ability - a heroic feat, were a poet to see it and commit it to a scroll or a wall somewhere, should any walls remain in Tir to be etched with the truth of what transpired - Phreak cuts a path through the city and rides the wave of scales and ground and buildings and bodies. Sylvi, having a riot of a time, continues to emit the sibilant, cold rattle of her laughter, shifting down the city in a billion frictive ways. The sound is indescribeable, as everything loses to the muscle-motion grinding of sandpaper skin. The goons that tumble back into the crevasses may scream or not, but they're lost in the turns of the pursuing snake. All his blasting strikes and bonks back the onrushing tidal focus, like holding back a tsunami with a chattery PDW. Sentinels only exist as a threat to Phreak in the direct sense - the great muscular adjustments of the snake send building-levelling ripples through the city, and the city's defenders are as much window dressing for Phreak's stunting as they are fighting alongside him in the defense of their home against an unknowable, terrain-scalloping tentacle of scales expands and crushes the surrounds. 'You mussst think you get to make demandsss, ssstill. Cute. You're a cute brat.' Now, Sylvi simply disrespects the terrain, the flow of things, the chase. There is so much of 'her' around, in every direction there is a loop of her, a wall of armor and power. She loops and compacts, closing in around Phreak, and at the top of an encircling, enclosing darkened world of coils, two green eyes burn from the peak, becoming the only sources of light besides Phreak. The walls close in, with only moments to maneuver.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	If someone were brash or reckless enough to try and hold off a tsunami with a PDW, it would assuredly be Phreak. He makes a twirling short hop on the board, twisting through shattered shards of what was once a water processing plant. Massive steel pistons fall from the crumbling building, and Phreak takes to the air, looping under one and over the other--before he's caught in Sylvi's snare. He manages to escape the squeeze--but not being clotheslined by the coils that attempt to do it. The board races past him, but even on foot he's blisteringly fast. He runs along the outer length of her coils, heart pounding in his chest, his anger stoked further and further by every mistake, every bit of doubt that-- I'm good enough to make demands. It's my fucking turn to make demands. Broken bones mend themselves, as pulses of illicit, cracked medical nanoprograms practice kitchen sink butchery inside him. Reaching the apex of her coils, he leaps off of her, holding down both triggers to stream an 'X' of brightly burning lead aimed for the serpent's face. The stomach-dropping distance from here and the ground is cut off, when Phreak hooks the lip of the renegade board with the foregrip of his left gun mid-descent. A spent clip of some indistinct, futuristic make falls below, steam rising off of its glowing red core. Another falls, and Phreak vaults over top of the board just in time to avoid being scraped off by a shifting mass of serpent. Both guns are tossed into the air, while Phreak pulls a dizzying loop. His empty hands are aglow with a wash of encroaching light, two new clips fabricated from storage. Two guns plummet towards him, each jammed with a new clip, twirled around and held upside down for another burst fire. "AM I TOO SLOW FOR YOU? TOO WEAK? HUH?! HUH?! I'D HATE IT IF YOU WEREN'T HAVING A GOOD FUCKING TIME! THAT'S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, RIGHT?!" The normal and hinged outburst is followed by an inarticulate shout of fury as his next pass on Sylvi is interrupted by a would-be vigilante with a grenade launcher. The explosion is avoided with a sharp dive--which also puts the board's nose straight through the shocked engineer's throat, before his souped-up bodyguard bot can retaliate. His rust colored armor spattered with blood up to his revealed jawline, Phreak's golden eyes burn holes through his visor as he focuses on the serpent again, pulling up and hanging low to pop an ollie at breakneck speed over her scaled mass, letting the bike's powerful rotors slice into her as he passes. The sky is a tangled mess of multicolored energy projectiles at this point--but all he can focus on is her.
Sylvi	He has to escape, knowing the direction to go only because of the dim pull of gravity, and the dark twist of crushing shapes. He gets pinched between a roll of armored muscle and is mushed once more, but his augments and promises hold him together, again. Together, long enough to shoot his way out of the soft cap of Sylvi's eyes, the 'top' of her neck, at the top of the scaled mountain that rose in Tir. Phreak shoots his way out, screaming. The eyes shut, against the assault directed towards them, and the nose retreats, opening a path for Phreak to grind and slice down. The back of his board, the blades that work against it, grind and complain, gumming up and shattering even as they peel open flesh like a great meat balloon. On the inside is a steaming, acidic sponge, making any slowing down awful. But he rides down, into the crushed streets of Tir and the smashed, scalloped-out surrounds of the town that had been rampaged through. Up, the whole of the leviathan peels and shudders into an evaporating lump of steaming foam, and then a thick, ichorous rain of tarry liquid that smears in a coal-toned rainbow, sizzling to the touch and etching to the channels of the earth, and the Daughter of the Snake's titanic form disappears. But not her presence, pressed like a face into film of the digital. Not her gravity, hanging and dragging on Phreak's scream-shaking shoulders. Not her voice, slithered around inside Phreak's head, cold and sibilant and happy. 'That isss the only thing that mattersss. You have entered into a pact, with me. And now you are being a ssscreaming brat about payment. A brat to your better.' In the desolation, a dripping-wet Sylvi stands in the center of the ruined fountain square of Tir, her t-shirt having come undone, the greys and blacks and greens bleaching out and dripping off of her arms and down her thighs. In the rain of her own 'gore', she tilts her arms up and opens her mouth, holding out her tongue and nasally laughing. Her cold mind-voice seizes around Phreak's inner ear. 'It's not your turn to make demandsss of me. Come down here, and get down where you belong, when you're before me. On your kneesss, unlesss I asssk.'
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Sylvi had crushed the Whom-Pahs early on, the public Grid terminal as well. For the moment, the smashed-up city is totally isolated from instantaneous reinforcement. Smashed and shot-through Reclaim terminals have long-since bounced bewildered, slain residents across the planet. His hoverboard flags dangerously in the air as nanites work overtime to keep it airborne, smoke streaming from the struggling turbines. "My better?!" calls the hacker, as his board comes down low to street level. Whatever retort he had in mind dies in his throat when Sylvi's remark about being on his knees tugs at just the right strings. Anger is briefly derailed, violently, by other emotions, as a dark grey blush spreads across his face. Phreak takes a step forward. Then another. A howl of frustration and the beating of gun-frame against his temple manages to slow his approach, but not stop it. "When IS it my turn, huh? Never? That's what it always is with you people. Fuck that! I'm not your fucking plaything! I'm not some little toy that you and all the other big shots just boss around and brush off. You want me on my knees, you fucking earn it. I drew my line in the sand," he calls back, stomping into the chest of a pinned Sentinel attempting to raise a gun to him. Phreak splatters the Sentinel through the skull-helmet without sparing a look his way. "I dared you to cross it and you did, and I'm not finished with my 'or else.' It probably put me on Silverstone's hit list, I'm probably a goddamn terrorist now, and I don't give a shit. Fuck your pact. I'm not finished!" He dismounts the hoverboard and charges in on foot, easily fast enough to keep pace with the civilian model transports that have long since fled the besieged city. He runs through sizzling ichor, and his body fizzles away into a blue polygonal wireframe silhouette. The polygon-Phreak's SMGs are still very real, and when he gets within swinging distance of Sylvi, he ducks into a slide, dipping under and past, holding both triggers down. Elbow down on ichor-melted pavement. The wireframe bounces up, twirling in midair to make a swipe with the absurdly sturdy gun in his hand across Sylvi's ribs as he zips past.
Sylvi	The rain settles to a mist, a miasma, like pitch in the air. It burns the skin, irritates the eyes, slickens and smooths off all the color and points of objects. It drags on the grid armor, smears his wireframes, drips electric blue beneath his slide. Vexingly, perhaps, it smells like her, a scent that etches itself in the sinus. In his approach, Sylvi is smiling again, rolling her shoulders and groaning happily. Her breaths move her chest heavy, greedy, and slow, exerted and pleased within that. "Finally... You get to throwing your first punch. I've been waiting. Indulging this bratting, just to see it. Feel it. Come on. Talk to me. Tell me something with those hands worth saying." Sylvi challenges, tongue rolling and lolling out of her mouth as she speaks, rolling sibilant, throaty rattles into the challenge. Laconic, she really gets into it, taking her time now that the chase is over. All the motion, the expanding and crashing, tapped power that she now did not have to spend with all the tiring pursuit. The SMG's roar their defiance with his howling voice, and Sylvi brings her arms forward to gruntingly block the bullets with her bare skin, arms tensing under the assault but, at her personal density, broadly unphased. It doesn't even slide her back in the wet ground, set to take the frustrating strain like a hose being directed at her, not a hail of bullets. The bullets ding, deformed, and ricochet off her, and she spies the hacker from behind a fist -- and takes a bullet to the eye, stingingly, for a moment, her sucking in a breath while he skids in. His gun-swing strikes her ichor-wet bulletholed shirt, and the sandpaper-rough skin layer beneath, and the tops of the weapons simply shear off into clouds of planed-off data. Sylvi pivots and drops her hand to catch Fighting Phreakologon Team Phreak with an enlarged mitt of a arm for a moment. "Let me be clear. It can be your turn with other people. I don't give a fuck about what you do!" Pushing down and in from the grab, downthrowing Phreak rather than trying for any long hold, Sylvi drops her knee and tries to pin Frame Phreak there, underneath her. "The man's side bitch doesn't get to talk shit to me. Your feelings don't matter. Fuck your feelingsss, and learn your place, and we'll get along just fine. Great, actually." "Get it?" She snarls.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The wireframe Phreak is snagged--if she thought he was evasive before, this lighter frame seems to have made him infuriatingly so. It's all she can do, enlarged grabbing apparatus be damned, to keep a hold on him, however short-lived it might be. She manages to catch him by the ankle and go for the down-throw that way. Her knee pins him--but then it pierces right through. Nothing is inside. No bones, no muscle, no blood--just empty air, and a strange dancing light playing at the inner walls, like the motions of fire reflected on the inside of a glass. "Then we're not gonna get along." Phreak throws another punch--this time without the heavy frame of a gun. His fist is a blur, arm working like a pneumatic hammer to deliver three superhumanly fast rabbit punches to her stomach, as his knee crashes into her back. Rolling to the side, the wireframe man gets to his feet, the hole in his chest closing. "You want a story?" Phreak's blue hand finds a shorn brick, waiting for her to get to her feet, tossing it up and down, up and down. "You think just because you're hot and strong and you can look in my head for the right buttons to push... you think that means I'm gonna roll over?" He hurls it, the displaced air making an audible crack above the panicked din of the city of Tir. He isn't a practiced fighter in close quarters, like Bercilak is--but Sylvi is very good at egging him on, as evidenced by the utter destruction all around. "Minus the mind shit, that's half the fucking people talking shit on that radio every day. My whole life, I worked to get where I am right now. For you to call me a side bitch and nothing else." An eye-straining flurry of haymakers that peels the data from his fists in bits and pieces as they connect with her sandpaper skin. "Fuck you," he says, spitefully, exhausted, still pushing himself to surge forward in a blue blur and tackle her to the ground. Just as the Grid Armor goes offline, he headbutts her, totally willing to crack his own skull just to bruise hers. "That's my story," he says, spitting blood aside. "Now," he pants. "You gonna get me on my knees, or was that just talk?"
Sylvi	Sylvi's gut is worked, her knee leveraging nothing but air and data. Light surprise, a kind of drunk understanding oofing out of her, as the fists work her more potently than the bullets. She staggers back, stepping up and rolling onto the back of her heel and her posture dips back. The brick swings up and smashes against Sylvi's skull, crumbling into pieces. Her eyes blink, and when her eyes open, nictate vertically as well, a heaving and groaning sigh working out of her. "Yeah. It's because I'm hot, and strong, and can blast your brain with juice and make it leak out of your nose." She giggles, wet and bubbly, more ichor leaking from the corners of her mouth and nostrils. "That's it, exactly." Hitting her is like a sandpaper sack around bricks. There's some natural flexibility, but she's dense. Even dense and near-invulnerable, the nightmare eventually is punched out of her. She falls back onto the ground, sat down and braced with one hand in a slight ridge created by the scrape of her previous coils, bent-kneed and wide sitting. "Yeah, that was what I wanted you to do in the first place. Glad you got it." She sighs, spent. "If you wanna get down here and get on your knees still, I'm not gonna get up for a minute." She hangs like that, casually. "But you made your point." She looks around, grinning ear to ear with satisfaction. "Worth it for you, baby? Because blowing me would make it real worth it for me."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	He made his point. Without any shadow of a doubt, this incident will make global, galactic and Multiversal news. All of this, because Phreak so badly needed to prove a point that Sylvi hadn't even directly countered--not until she bothered looking into his mind, anyway. The city's canalways are full of rubble. The famous arena is a crater. The Sentinels are scattered across the planet, the city disconnected from the Grid and the Whom-Pah network. The Council of Truth have undoubtedly retreated to some bunker somewhere, and have just as likely called in for reinforcements from across the planet. But he made his point. Phreak sighs, foreseeing all kinds of complications from his insistence on being a 'big shot' now that the ruins of that decision are all around him. "Might as well," he shrugs. Might as well get something out of it besides a spot on a most-wanted list. He'll be on his knees, after all--albeit with a gun close at hand for anyone else that didn't take his point.
Sylvi	Sylvi laughs throatily again, spitting ichor out of her mouth and grinning with bloody teeth. He made his point, and now he was either the one who brought the snake to the city or the one that 'defeated' it after it suddenly showed up. Shakily, the city tries to breathe in the weirdening, ground-seeping tar that Sylvi had bled all over the place. Oops! Tir is weirder now. And it's all Phreak's fault. Sylvi is openly pleased with Phreak as he drops down to the ground with her, reaching the hand she isn't spent bracing up to Phreak's hair to muss with the one way 'soft' stroke of a scaled palm. "It'll never be your turn before mine, baby, but we can figure out a turn for you once I'm satisfied." She rattle-purrs, her hand lifting off Phreak's head to her stomach, then lower, looping a thumb over the band of the color-drained elastic of her pants. "Let's catch up for a while." And for a desolate evening together, Sylvi even is soft to Phreak. But only because he made his point.