Saints without sparks (Ch. 2: Day 7, pt. II)

Mie · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 10:47 pm

It didn't take long for the multitudinous roar and general bedlam to overcome one audience member's desire to stick around for the post-fight interviews, curiosity be damned. So after a surprisingly few moments of warring with the buffeting crowds, she and her fellow former spectator turned down a decidedly less-populated hallway leading toward the competitor accommodation block.

Despite her still-ringing ears, however, it wasn't the mob they had just escaped Jam referred to when she breathed a hushed, but excitable, "That was insane."

Her tone was saturated with awe, concern, and anxiety all at once; all the moreso when she cast a wide-eyed stare to her accompaniment, covered her mouth with her hand, and clarified, "I seriously hope you don't wind up fighting him."

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psikeout · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 10:56 pm

Rock strode alongside, a distant look in his eyes, but no visible signs of being fazed by the chaos.

"Two matches down the line," Rock answered abruptly, then clarified a few seconds later. "If I beat this next guy, and he beats his, I'll be up against him the match after next."

After pushing through the very last, sparse remnants of the crowds, and heading through the corridor to the competitor accommodations, he led the way to a heavy metal door with reinforced glass. The squeak of the hinges and clatter of its metal bar latch-handle echoed through the mostly barren, unused concrete stairwell. He hadn't taken the elevator at all since he started training.

Mie · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:05 pm

The slighter, pinker primate frowned as she skittered along next to Rock's decidedly longer gait, looking dreadfully serious from the waist up, and somewhat pitiful from the waist down, rendering any attempts to maintain an even vaguely concerned posturing utterly comical.

"That's... crap," she deduced, mindlessly following the white fighter's lead. There was a full second of percolating silence before she abruptly asked, "You're not worried?"

psikeout · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:16 pm

Rock glanced back at her as he half-jogged up the stairs.

"Are you?"

Mie · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:33 pm

Apparently sufficiently off-guard enough to bristle at the question, Jam momentarily stopped in her ridiculous attempt to match Rock's stride (which worked out to be two steps at a time for her).

"Well -- No. I mean. Maybe. I--"

Pausing just long enough to lift her sheepish gaze, and notice that she'd fallen behind, she sped forward once more, continuing to feebly grope for the right words.

"It's not like I don't... y'know, have faith in you, or nothin', but-- It's just... Did you happen to recognize the dude he just beat? Like... at all?"

psikeout · Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2010 11:54 pm

"Yeah," the white primate answered simply, "and I'm not sayin' it'll be easy, or I'll even win. But Sonic didn't know what the hell he was doin'." He made his way up to the fourth floor door as he explained. "Don't matter if he can take out a thirty-story nuclear-powered robot with a flyin' axe kick. This is a sport. It's got rules, conditions, tricks,... parameters. You know what I'm sayin'?" The door clanked loudly as he opened it, and let her through first, more in absent-minded conversation than real chivalry. Not wanting to make her struggle to keep up anymore, he relaxed his pace as they continued down the hall. "Sonic just showed up—probably expected to just jump in and win. Velo's been in the gym since we got here, though."

Mie · Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2010 8:33 pm

Chewing her lip in the heavy silence that followed, Jam mentally weighed her desire to ascertain that Velo's wantonly calm future opponent was taking the fight sufficiently seriously against her desire to not be a killjoy. Her concerns were not allayed by the prospect of Rock fighting the one who'd been training since they arrived (and who knows how long before that), however, so she opted for a cautious middle ground.

"Yeeeeeah, okay, well how 'bout this?: How do you feel about standin' toe t'toe with I-Can't-Believe-it's-Not-Sonic?"

psikeout · Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2010 10:08 pm

Without pausing for consideration, Rock looked to her again, answered, "I'll do what I can," and smiled with a "shrug" of his brows (for want of a better term).

He stopped in front of their door, produced his keycard, and popped it in. "I'm gonna be workin' on my legs for some speed. I might have to wait for him to make a mistake before I get anywhere, but..." He swung the door open and stepped inside. "We'll see..."

His voice trailed off as he slowly ventured farther in. He couldn't see fully into the room because of the structure of the walls (the bathroom was near the door, creating a sort of foyer-like entry to the hotel room with limited visibility into the room itself), but something had caught his attention. The primate didn't look extremely concerned or anything, but very... curious, and maybe a tiny bit leery. What tripped him up?

The faint aroma of perfume—a youthful, but mature fragrance, he noted. And, sound—a low, static hiss, like a poorly tuned radio with the volume turned down.

His mind suddenly abuzz, he found himself mentally retracing his path, confirming the absence of cleaning carts from the hall on the way to the room, and finding it doubtful that it was a maid's lingering scent. He ultimately didn't have to wonder long, though. As casually as he could, he moved into the main part of the room, surely to encounter whoever or whatever laid in wait.

Rouge · Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2010 10:53 pm

Whoever laid in wait was not immediately apparent, although as Rock progressed further into the room, the source of the noise was. A number of small discs—almost like department-store ink tags—were stuck to the windows. Another was placed in the mouth of an open air-return, which had carefully had its grate removed. Still more had been placed at seemingly random places around the apartment, stuck to the walls with tacky, low-adhesive painter's tape.

Every single one of them emitted a low hissing noise—the combined effect forming a gentle wall of sound that masked all immediate background noise, and made simple sounds difficult to pick up from the wall of static.

As Rock moved towards the center of the room, a voice spoke up from the corner of the room immediately to his right.

"Lazarus Lochert?" It was abrupt and loud-sounding in the dim anti-silence. It was an alarmingly pleasant voice for a surprise attack, however, and was not accompanied by aggressive high-kicks, temple-height jabs, or sudden elbows to the wind-pipe, and so in this regard was possibly less frightening than it would have been had it not been the connection of that voice, immediately after, with that of a frighteningly languorous figure draped against the far wall.

The figure was a terrifying spectacle. Wrapped in an array of materials not beknownst to mortal man, hair-sprayed, made-up, fitted and bodiced to inhuman specifications, the over-archingly feminine visual product known as Rouge the Bat lay against the wall, only inches away from seeming totally at ease with the situation, but with a delicate balance maintained in her legs and in the palm of one hand against the wall behind her that betrayed a careful position of defence.

Her brow furrowed, in faintly appraising look, before she appeared to become at ease with the situation. She let herself lean against the wall with no remaining traces of tension in her poise, and a warm, but ultimately unreadable smile twisted up the corners of her lips.

Mie · Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2010 11:17 pm

For once, Jam didn't need Rock's outward physical cues to know that something was up. Although not nearly as analytical about it as the sleuthy simian was, it was hard to miss the wall of white noise they'd walked into, and even harder to not notice the scent of unfamiliar perfume wafting around your boyfriend's hotel room.

With a half-lidded stare above pursed lips, she cast the whiter primate a little "brow shrug" of her own immediately subsequent to the bat's decidedly familiar greeting.

"Friend of yours?" she asked calmly, after the smallest of deliberate, punctuated coughs.

psikeout · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 12:19 am

There was something special about when a couple of "professionals" met. Tension was simultaneously invisible to the naked eye, yet thick enough to cut with a knife; near-combat-posturing was intense, yet undetectable.

Rock settled his hands on his waist and relaxed his posture as he glanced briefly between the many devices all over the room. His mind must have been racing with the possibilities. He may have known who she was, but simultaneously, that may have been who she wanted him to think she was, which in itself was a whole other conundrum. Or perhaps he had no idea whatsoever, and was going to simply pretend he did. There was no telling.

"Mmmaybe," he mumbled to Jam with a glance. His voice peaked upwards on the last syllable, piqued with genuine interest. Without further delay, he looked back to and answered the bat.

"You got my name right," declared the similarly-colored, but considerably taller primate calmly to the almost overtly mysterious bat. "I don't think I know yours, though."

Rouge · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 1:18 am

"Mm, it's so mysterious, isn't it?" she smiled in amusement at some internal joke.

She tipped forward, away from the wall, and stepped towards the two of them.

"Rouge the Bat," she introduced herself, "the world's greatest thief!" Here, she elaborated on the glamor of her occupation with a very small sashay, before continuing: "You'd think I'd be here just because of that… little advertisement on TV that's been popping up the past few days, but aaactually" she smiled, again, at some joke that only she seemed to be aware of, "I'm here because of you."

"Layla Bostwick?" she turned to vividly colored monkey at Rock's side, enquiringly, although requiring very little prompting to go on, "you two called a friend of yours the other day—a Mr. Rekk Rogers—and he called a friend of his at GUN, and he called an… associate in counter-espionage, and they," she finished, "called me."

"…and here I am."

She dipped in a modest curtsy after this announcement—something lesser woman might have had trouble doing in a catsuit—and stepped across the room to a briefcase, which lay, closed, on Rock and Jam's bed. She leaned over the brief-case, and after a few moments, the clasps on it clicked open. She removed a piece of foam from the briefcase, and a very small, black box from beneath the foam. The box had a small keyhole, the key to which dangled from a small plastic coil-bracelet she had looped around her wrist. She flipped the bracelet from off her wrist with a twist of her hand, and extended it, and the box, towards Rock.

Mie · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 7:24 pm

Jam could already tell she and this... person that Rekk was apparently responsible for foisting upon them would never become BFFs. In fact, something about their visitor's posturing, tone, and something else the monkey couldn't quite put her finger on produced a strong knee-jerk inclination to be affronted, though without much justifiable reason.

Still, if anything was clear, it was that she was here for business purposes, and even in the midst of her nagging distaste for their new coworker, even the hot-tempered monkey knew better than to start a sass war with any potential means to an end; she sufficed to hold her tongue for the moment, fold her arms over her chest, and glare suspiciously at the noisy little discs dotting their walls.

psikeout · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 10:03 pm

He remained silent as he took the package and its key. He didn't overtly eye or examine it, but it was noteworthy that, as he inserted the key, he turned the box away from himself such that it would open in their unexpected guest's general direction—just in case it held something unpleasant in store.

He watched her intently as he turned the key. When no mysterious vapors rushed out, and no shrapnel flew to kill anyone, he casually rotated the box again, and examined its contents.

"I would ask for credentials," he mused quietly, "but if you went to this much trouble, you'd have a good I.D. anyway." He produced a small, neatly folded wad of cash from within, flipped it over, thumbed through the bills with a single hand, holding them such that a single leaf of paper remained half-extended for him to hold up to the light. Satisfied, he stuffed it into his pocket.

"Have you already been briefed on the specifics?" the permanently-surly, but perhaps more relaxed-looking primate asked as he offered the box back to her.

Rouge · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 10:52 pm

“Ohh,” she said, tilting her head in apparently idle consideration, “I know enough, but I’d certainly be interested in hearing anything that this can’t tell me.”

Rouge lifted from another section of the briefcase a slim folder of documents, made almost twice as thick as its real depth by the addition of somewhere around thirty or forty brightly colored post-it notes.

She offered him the folder, retaining a fuchsia cover-sheet, from which she read with a laconic dutifulness that almost verged on boredom.

“Dr. Eggman is recorded as having created a series of special super-powered emeralds… bringing together two dimensions in the process to do it,“ she clicked her tongue in disapproval, “and now one of these is being offered as a prize at a fighting match.”

“Very dangerous and volatile… and—“

She stopped abruptly. “There’s something censored here, about the Yellow Desert incident.”

Rouge leaned over to Rock and inserted a silk-gloved index finger between a page and a post-it, prying upwards to open a gap in the sheaf of paper.

“It’s strange. Nearly a whole page and a half, gone, except for a date-stamp and the words ‘yellow desert’, over and over.” She glanced back and forth between Rock and Jam. “Is there anything in here that you can fill in the blanks on?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, of course” she added, after a few seconds, standing upright again and removing her finger from the papers, “that’s not my job. I’m just interested in what you know.”

Saints without sparks (Ch. 2: Day 7, pt. II)

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