Scene #7389: Twas The Fifth Of Jan For The ZZ Top Man

Owner	Pose
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The Green Knight isn't in his armor--but that has never been an obstacle to finding him. Even as the music of the dingy dive bar blares, you can still hear his thunderous laughter from outside. And even if you couldn't--you'd be able to see his green military surplus hoverbike, painted with decals of hounds after alien prey, lined up with the choppers outside, easily twice as large as any of its fellows. Inside, rising high above those around him even in his seated position, he is currently engaged in a contest of 'skill.' The poor bastard on the other end of the table, a stout and portly bald fellow with a black goatee, is being goaded on by his friends, all chanting 'chug' when it's clear that he's about to fall over. The Green Knight, huge arms crossed, looks on with a grin, his own stein empty.
Sylvi	There's a tinge to the air outside the roadside dive bar, an actinic crackle that flashes in the sky outside the shuttered and dirtied window. What follows isn't a peal of thunder but a suffering-squeal of the heavens' guts turning over. Fat droplets of rain begin to pelt the ground like a flop sweat. The door doesn't burst open, and the bell barely rings before it clicks shut, an unimposing and rather pathetically soaked 'girl' in a Sin City sharp red hoodie and black skirt that barely shows beyond the hem of her soaked top. A tumble of black hair hangs like a brushstroke across the scarlet neck of her zippered top. The bar, collectively, looks over. The bar, collectively, grunts and goes back to what they're doing. It's coordinated, a collective 'bwuh?' and then simultaneous 'muh'. Addressed and forgotten. The girl in the violently red hoodie drips her way around the table, as all eyes are on the chugging bastard. Their cheers time her footsteps. The scent of coins. "So Santa knew you, didn't he?" Comes the snarl from the girl in her blood-drenched outerwear, a bloody hand grabbing Bercilak by the head and driving his skull meteorically into the table. "Then you get the special service." The Redcap-girl declares, bringing her fists to her palms and cracking each knuckle slowly.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	As the music ends, and the girl cracks her knuckles, Bercilak scoots his chair back. The legs scrape noisily against the floor, amidst a sussurus of conerned murmurings. Slowly, he stands up, previously having been one of those 'bwuh?' then 'muh' heads which turned to acknowledge the girl. He wears a leather vest which was formerly a jacket, prior to having its sleeves ripped off, and when he turns, she can see his shirt, a red tee strained notably by his pectorals, which reads in black text: I'M NOT GAY, beneath that a pair of sunglasses, and beneath those, BUT YOUR HUSBAND IS. His motorcycle boots thud against the scuffed wooden floor as he takes a step forward. He nods, with a grin. Santa knows him. "Yeven it unto me," he fires back. When her fist cracks against his face, his head is forced to the side. Unlike most of the things Sylvi hits, nothing goes flying--not his head or his body. There is a round of 'ohhhh' from the guys and girls around him. A dark green bruise wells up and heals in moments, and the Green Knight's grin only widens. He cracks his neck. "Thou'rt as strengthi as thou art belde. I liken that wel." That might've been all the Special Service was--but he wants more. He wants to see just how strong and just how bold she is. And so he returns fire with a blow of his own, a meaty green fist swinging up from below to take a crack at her jaw.
Sylvi	One does not have to wonder overmuch about those husbands the Green Knight preys upon. The Ghost Of What Has Come (ZZ) Top-Ass has his maddened wiles. It probably involves figurative and literal bears. It certainly involves forests. As for the 'fight' - it's a slugging match. Of course it devolves into a slugging match. There's no other possible way it could go. Not with either of them. Bercilak's fist comes up and 'connects' with the bloody hoodie'd girl and there's a meaty moment of impact, and then - like a fairy tale - the odd feeling of the pea beneath four matresses shifting. A quiet pop, a resounding crack, and the involuntary turn of her head is all that he 'feels' through her sandpaper skin under her chin. What he hears, though, as she raises on her toes a bit to soak the force, is: "Agh damnit! Guoh!" Sylvi spits, eyes flecked green and vertical-slit. She spits a few times, coughing, before a cracked tooth falls out of her mouth. It isn't a molar, but some megalodon knife of thing, split half-ways down the centerline with a fissure. "Sure, those grow back, but--" Her eyes narrow. "That hurt." She doesn't understand -- or expend the energy to try to understand -- his muddied words. She's still livid about the tooth as she swings back, a right cross that feints into a full-body tackle, dripping cloth spattering blood all over his chest and front.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The Green Knight's red irises are alive with excitement. A slugging match is exactly what he was hoping for--and seeing her reaction to his blow, it would appear they have both, this day, met a foe capable of bearing the other's brute strength quite heartily. He is tackled, and he is heavy--but her strength is more than enough to lift him off his feet and carry him through the back wall of the place, out into the dusty lot behind it. He laughs the whole way, thrilled to have gotten a good fight handed his way after having just drank a supposed tough guy under the table. The other bikers aren't thrilled. In fact, as Bercilak elbows Sylvi to get her off of him, she will hear the rumble of several bike engines roaring to life and blazing down the road. Nobody wants their babies getting hurt, after all. As his body heals and forces the splinters free of his jacket, the remade legend wrestles with the demigod, rolling around in the rocky dirt, attempting to pin her and pummel her with a barrage of blows from above. They're not as strong as the uppercut--the Green Knight is trying to marshal his strength and pace himself. He has to, if he wants the fun to last, because, "Thy strength is grete." He is grinning the whole way through.
Sylvi	Smashed out into the rain as the bikers mutter and disperse because not only is there a slugging match that would look SUPER NORMAL is actually between two people who are incredibly strong and tough. It's not, really, their reaction to each other's blows that are telling, but the way the rain bends around the force coming off the blows that just slide off the 'redcap's' stomach, the force of the breath pushed from her lungs. Right as she sweeps up his leg and forces Bercilak down to the ground to pummel him, the same leg shoves off, heaving Sylvi clear of her time of promised beatings. She doesn't hit the ground gracefully, landing in the wet earth outside the bar in a wet dirt-clod cascade, brown overtaking Sin City scarlet. She leans on an elbow, her form revealed with the tug of the top of her hoodie, a cascade of white hair and a thick neck. Green, hateful-slit eyes. A snarl of sharklike teeth white and meanacing in a slightly-too-wide mouth. The lock of black and other demure features slide off her in the rain like paint, leaving truth behind. "Shut up, Odin. I don't care which version you are. I don't care if you sell canned peas and bad carrots to poor people now, you jolly green piece of trash. I despise you. I'll wipe your whole line out, stem and root, and hang you again under your precious tree when all is said and all is done." She rises, not like a man, but like a single sinewey muscle, simply righting herself from a sprawl while unzipping her hoodie, casting the dirty top into the mud and closing her fingers into a fist again. "Now take your medicine like a man. I expect you to see it coming." Sylvi clearly has no idea who the Green Knight is, but as she launches herself just off of foot strength like a railgun at Bercilak, a localized earthquake of a crack as the force she leverages spiders down into the bedrock below. And he does see it coming, much like someone who is shot can percieve the muzzle flare, as Sylvi flies into a scissor kick aimed to just lock his head between her thighs and crush it like a grape. Failing that, it will 'merely' corkscrew him in the air like a deathroll and piledrive him groundward. Merely.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Her fist collides with his face, this time actually deforming it slightly as bones are broken and rapidly reset. Rearing up to attempt a counterattack, his fist smashes into the ground, sending up a geyser of mud and solid, as-yet-undampened clumps of earth wrenched free from the sheer force of his blow. She's skilled, possessed of a keen instinct for battle as well as being strong. Good. He rises to his feet with a wild grin, red irises gleaming as her face his revealed. She is a vicious creature, majestic in her aggression. Precisely the sort of vision which makes his chest swell with excitement, precisely the sort of foe he loves to test himself against. Eagerly, he listens as she hisses her threat--good! Good, let that enmity out, pour that spirit into... wait. "Odin? ODIN?!" His face screws up into a confused snarl, like a roided up wrestler being asked to inventory a shipment of priceless antiques. Until... "BAHAHA!" He does see it coming, of course. For all his bulk, he is actually fairly quick. In one moment, she is upon him, and yet, just as her thighs rap around his head, his fist is already on its way up to batter her ribs. One, two, three, four strikes does he get in, each delivered with a deadly mix of practiced grace and terrible strength. But it isn't enough to save his head. Under the might of her grip, his head does indeed burst in a grisly display of gore. Yet he remains standing--and, grabbing her by the hair, flings her back towards the bar, aiming to send her crashing through the wall as she did with her tackle. In but a few shocking moments, bone, sinew, implants, flesh, hair and eyes return to their proper place. "YEA!" he lies. "'TIS I, ODIN! IF THOU WOULDST QUELL ME, THANNE COME AT ME WITH ALL THY STRENGTH! LET US BRAK OURE SELVES AYENST ONE AN OTHER IN MARVILOUSE BATAIL!"
Sylvi	Paff. Paff. Paff. The feeling in the knuckles, of striking something that is hard enough to rattle back, vicious and violent velocity pulsing in waves back along the bone and among the muscles to the elbow, the shoulder, the collar. An unsatisfying density wreathed in a layer of elasticicty, the clear outline of scales along her sandpaper-skinned belly that texture her stomach in immovable plates. She wrenches, with her legs, to twist away from the blows anyway, forcing together her knees and feeling-- 'Guzma.' Sylvi whispers, sibilant, into her radio. 'The way things pop, and snap, and crumble in my hands. There really isn't a better feeling.' Her triumph lasts well into when her hair is grasped, nothing solid to grab onto but gore and crushed pebbles of bone and metal - having spent her hold to obliterate. Thrown into the bar, the whole place detonates outward a far-too-big crunch as Sylvi is hurled into it. The storm around fizzles, the dust like a thick wet mud-cloud in the wet air - a soup to divine through. The shape that rises seems visually close, in the fog. The silhouette of something large enough to relatively be adjacent, but then distant, through the fog. The brain processes it, gauging distance and thus relative height. The body that rises out of the shattered foundations of the bar is titanic, cloud-scrapingly huge. A deep peal of a voice like terrible thunder drowns out the torrential rain. "Then die , Odin." Looms the voice, as the sound of thunder heralds the fall of one building-sized falling heel to wipe out Bercilak and most of the rest of the lot he stands in. Those bikers who left on their bikes minutes ago were clearly the ones gifted with the Raven's foresight. The rest are not so lucky.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The form of the titan which rises from the wreckage is the same as the woman he's been fighting--but now, something closer to her true strength has been revealed. He must test himself against it--he must know if this is who he thinks it is. Could it be? The only way to find out is to break himself against her, or to see her might broken against his. Still without his weapon, without even his steed, he charges. He isn't a mortal man. Scientifically, one might call him homo sapiens solitus, some thirty thousand years down the evolutionary line from those straggling men and women currently imperiled, possessed of neurological and physiological divergences which make a number of things possible for him even absent his extensive augmentations. But he is no more mortal than Sylvi, or the object of her hate, the Allfather. Not any longer. There is little and less which can remove him from the world of men permanently, just as he is sure there is little and less which can match this woman's strength directly. But he must test it. He must know if she is who he thinks she is. And he must also safeguard those whose eagerness for a spectacle has now endangered them. Running towards her descending heel, he calls for his axe. It appears in an instant. One hand reaches up, palm out, to stop her descent. The impact breaks his arm almost immediately, sending out a shockwave of force which sends those stragglers flying. His axe arm rises not to cut her heel with the weapon, but to drive it into the muddy earth. The stragglers from the bar, who sought to remain and see a clash of strength, are hurled perilously down the highway by the shockwave, some astride their bikes, some clinging for dear life to the very same, some screaming in terror as their heavy vehiclespasses, the beard hooking onto the handle bar. In a gory mess, the arm is torn free of the mangled body, dragged behind the bike. From that limb there sprouts a man, first bone and nerve and sinew to hold it together, then flashing, motorized cybernetic implants affixed to the same, then flesh. Then, armor--not to preserve his modesty, but to show his respect to a foe who has earned it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9hFuhG9GY0
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	"HARK!" The bike races around her titanic form, the Green Knight's cloak of wild grasses and winter wildflowers billowing behind him as he makes use of his brute strength to pull himself one handed back onto the bike, seating himself just as his helmet appears. He pushes the machine to its limits, thrusters flaring brightly in the rain. "LET AL-SUM THIS WORLD TREMBLE BIFORE THE STRENGTH OF OURE IFIGHTINGE! KNOUE ME NOT AS ODIN, THOU COMLI, MARVILOUSE BESTE, THOU MOST BILOVED OF AL MINE ADVERSAUNTS, BUT BI MY TREU NAME--BERCILAK OF THE HIGH WASTELAND, THE GREEN KNIGHT!" Rising up and around, darting beneath and around her limbs, he brings the axe to bear against her, striking in brutal press-and fade fashion with all the might and expertise he can bring to bear.
Sylvi	Most try to run. Some are paralyzed with fear. Bercilak is one of a rare and bold few who try to clash with the weight of the world. Redirecting the force towards the muddied earth is like driving a pass through a mountain with just a hammer, an act of deliberate, constant, and heroic force applied in a matter of heartbeats instead of days. And so the axe-driving man works aside the force. The results are as one would expect: Total devastation. A crater, dry at the epicenter in a blasted friction-cake. A moment later, the blown-up mud and rain all come down in a miserable hail of muck and a curtain of water and sluice through the cracks. At the outskirts, with wrecked bikes yet saved lives, a few piteous fools are struck dumb with awe. The rest flee for the hills, no less alive than anyone else. Bercilak's charge is done into that muddy, soup-like haze, tinged purple with some form of corrupted and poisonous blood. The crater is difficult to navigate, and yet still he finds his way to the fallen foot. A chop. The fallen coil of sinew and scale. A chop. The raised shoulder of some Jotun. A chop. The last chop swings through air, his questant slash striking nothing at all. The voice is venomous, like someone tasting their own blood among their teeth and ill liking it. "If you aren't Odin--" The voice comes from front-right, but the fist suckers in from front-left, a rolling full body slug right across the jaw. Sylvi, soaked, pants on her bare feet, wearing a drenched black t-shirt, torn across the belly, and a pair of jean shorts. She hangs, gassed, in the follow-through of her blow. "-- shut the hell up about it! What's wrong with you, 'oh yeah, I'm Odin' then 'nope totally not Odin'. You're giving me mixed signals! I hate indecisive guys. Pick one and die for it." Her fist drops, and she hangs there, slouched, gassed. After a moment's consideration she spits blood into the crater with a grimace.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The bike is nearly as tough as he is--the armor plating isn't just some cheap scrap; this thing was meant to take a beating. But, even so, the laws of physics are on Sylvi's side. Her fist smashes into it, knocking it off course, denting that metal so severely that the sheer force of drag upon the vehicle would make it impossible to steer for any rider less skilled than Bercilak. Whatever unearthly power of self-mending he commands evidently works upon the bike just as him--but not quickly enough to stop what happens next. Correcting for the huge increase in drag and coming back onto course, he crashes headlong into another of her blows with such force as to crumple the front end of the vehicle. The engine whines, the thruster sputters as its last bit of strength catapults the Green Knight out of his seat. "Foryeve me," he says as he tumbles through the air. Microthrusters fire on his armor, turning a freefall into an agile series of turns which set his feet ready to plant upon her arm. "I spake les to thee, onli to espy the whol mesure of thy strength." He couldn't have been sure that she would employ it, if he weren't seen as her most hated enemy. Those thrusters fire again, in a series of agile jukes up, over, around any attempts to force him from his purchase as he races towards her face. All the while, elbows, knees, the butt of the axe, are used to strike her, from forearm to elbow. "Thy strength, thy savageri, thy shere besteli toughnes, bewicched me." He leaps, knee forward, thrusters coaxing him into a frontflip as he brings the blade down for a strike upon her shoulder. Taking flight to dart around her head, "But if thou awene me indecisif... KNOUE THIS, WOMANNE! I shalt win thy herte IF I MUST PRIE IT STIL BETINGE FROM THEE WITH MINE BARE HANDS!" Coming back around the front of her face to stare her down for one final attack, the boarish knight charges the snake head-on, thrusters blazing behind him as he attempts to headbutt her and steal victory.
Sylvi	Bercilak claims he's going to winne Sylvi's heart if she must prize it from her chest. Then he makes quite the runback at her, the roar of his motorcycle out-volumed by the splitting gong of his head cracking against hers. There's a moment of give, a crack, like the tooth. A sigh of relief as pressure finds its only place to go. His hand reaches out, and squishes meatily against something fleshy and throbbing and hot. He tears it free, Sylvi falling from his grip and down into the blasted crater and its muddy mists. Did he do it? Tear out her still-beating heart? Looking down at the prize in his hands, the blood-dripped shape of a scarlet hoodie caked with mud is compressed into a fused, soiled dryer ball of vaguely coppery blood. Her words echo in his head, more than his ear. "If you thought that was the whole of it: you're sssssssssssst-" Her voice trails off into a sharp, throaty hiss that rattles down the spine. Back down, in the crater, the only sign of Sylvi is a deep crack in the earth that lingers permanently like a scar across the land, a cracked tooth, and a little spit of blood lost in the mud.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Wow. That wasn't her full strength? Holding the hoodie in his gauntleted fist, as the rain patters down upon him, he falls back to the earth, not bothering to halt his descent with his thrusters, so excited to have met such a powerful rival. He falls, keeping that little ball of bloodied fabric within his sight all the way down. As he lands, he strikes with his armored bulk a second crater within the first. Yes. He is stupid. But the joy of being stupid without malice, of being innocently stupid, rather than cynically stupid, is finding that things were actually even better than you might have imagined. At the very least, he can take this thing to the laundromat and give it back to her, the next time they meet. Only... "Alack." He forgot to get her name! Well... maybe he can fight her some other time and ask for that as a prize. Put a pin in that, actually... Moments later his crumpled bike crashes atop him, pushing him further into the earth. Partially buried by mud and rocks, partially by his own slowly mending means of conveyance, the Green Knight stows the garment within the cloud memory of his nanite swarm. Within seconds, the hoodie is dissassembled and saved, to be called out upon his next meeting with the snake who would crush the world itself beneath her heel. He, the boar who would bear Death's touch and gore him with his tusks, shoves the heavy mass of metal off of him. It rolls down the steep expanse of the crater. Bercilak laughs and hops astride his bike as those thick metal plates noisily pop back into their proper places and bearings. The chemical thrusters give a shaky pop, and there's a groaning shudder from the engine before the vehicle, after a few unssuccessful attempts, lifts off. But he doesn't take off. Not when he sees the one remaining person here. She must surely be the owner, for the slack-jawed expression of despair upon her face, and the way she clutches her sawn-off like it would have done anything against Sylvi or Bercilak. "Ah." His axe is driven into the earth once more. The tree which saved her and the others withers, leaving a sizeable pothole in the highway. But on the edge of the crater, there sprouts a square arrangement of trees, evenly spaced. Their trunks intertwine with one another as they grow, branches doing the same, forming a square enclosure with wooden walls, floors, and a ceiling, so tightly knit as to weatherproof it, with a canopy of leaves woven over the roof for flair. A field of hops, barley and wheat is grown adjacent to the new tavern, and an arrangement of wild roses sprouting from the front of house names it: Heel's Hole. Strange... something about the area seems to have emboldened his command of plants. In any case, he's off, grinning from ear to ear.