Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Four: New Battleopolis!]
09-10-2011, 04:47 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
The Purple House clearly wasn’t a part of the natural architecture of New Battleopolis. It jutted out of what used to be four basketball courts, a gleaming new and thoroughly postmodern work of ostentation bedecked with triangular windows jutting out at odd intervals. It was painted a garish namesake with gold-leaf trimmings, and loomed in a very specific way to let Jen know that it was warmly welcoming to everybody but her.
Jen’s hands were tied behind her back, stretching the skin of her shoulder over her fresh stitches. Pluck wouldn’t stop looking at her. She suspected the distant look the werewolf was shooting in her direction was somehow connected with the trail of tiny objects she was leaving in her wake: earthworms, green pebbles, golden triangle earrings and tiny Ovoids that floated into the air like bubbles, only to vanish into a place with no name. “What are you doing?” she asked him, as a trio of matching brown fedoras plopped to the ground at her heels.
”Stream of consciousness,” Pluck replied, his voice even more anxious than it was before. ”Nervous habit. It’s, um, it’s what I do, if you haven’t figured that out. I pluck your thoughts.”
Jen looked up at the approaching Purple House, the setting sun peeking out from behind a steeple. “I’m more interested in what you're thinking, Pluck,” she lied absentmindedly, considering what fate awaited her in that house. Pluck blinked, and Jen was treated to the unfortunate sight of her own corpse, flopping into existence freshly bleeding from several demonic-looking impalement wounds. H-Bomb broke her silence to laugh out loud at the sight of the corpse. So much for my unflappable self-confidence, thought Jen, a bit annoyed at Pluck.
The werewolf didn’t seem to be entirely cogent of the dead body he’d just created. ”I can’t do it on my own thoughts,” he said instead. ”Besides, no one would want to see what I’m thinking. It’s usually not pleasant.”
”You always struck me as more of an emotional being, anyway,” interjected H-Bomb, waving a hand lazily in Pluck’s direction. A bawling infant child suddenly appeared in the werewolf’s hands, which oddly enough seemed to make him more confident. ”There goes some of your infantile desperation,” the elf sniggered. ”Here, let me take care of that for you.” With a lightning-quick motion, the elf produced a whip and cracked it in Pluck’s direction. The baby stopped crying.
“Did you just kill that baby?” Jen cried.
”It was just an emotional construct. That’s what I do. Pathomancy. Converting emotion into matter and vice-versa. It’s all very unscientific, I’ve been told.” Jen didn’t get much out of that explanation, but decided that there was no room in her growing list of worries for the dead baby now lying a few yards away from the dead Jen on the road, even if it did elicit a certain visceral reaction.
They arrived at the Purple House, the door to which seemed to have opened itself for H-Bomb at some point. The elf rubbed a hand against the doorframe lovingly. Inside there was a wail of ghostly feedback, like an incompetent rock band doing sound check. ”Come on in, guys, the House won’t bite,” said H-Bomb. ”Greyve will, but that’ll have to wait for later tonight.”
Jen entered the House. There was something here that—well, evil wasn’t the word, but something that needed fixing. It tickled the back of her mind like a repressed sneeze. The House itself had a certain labyrinthine quality—purple hallways and purple staircases coiled around a large, dark purple central area that she caught glimpses of through doors that creaked uncomfortably as she passed by. After a minute of walking, she found herself led into a small side room dominated by an ostentatious vanity table, and pushed in a chair in front of the mirror. ”Makeup will just take a few minutes, Jen dear,” H-Bomb promised, opening up a drawer containing purple mascara, purple blush, purple lipstick, purple contact lenses, a purple wig, and an assortment of golden jewelry inlaid with amethyst. Pluck growled and stood guard by the door.
Jen stuck out her tongue childishly. “I can do my own makeup,” she whined.
H-Bomb giggled. ”Of course you can. Hold still.” Jen acquiesced—no one had ever died from being tarted up a little, and it might give her some time to think. While the elf went to work on her hair, she simply looked in the mirror, avoided eye contact with Pluck, and tried not to think about anything.
Her makeup artist was the chatty type, it seemed. ”You remind me a lot of myself,” she decided. ”The real me, back in my battle. I was… conflicted. I had all these feelings I didn’t know what to do with, except usually burn things, and… when I awoke as a copy, that all just compounded. I was a mess. So I decided, to hell with emotions. I’ll just scrub myself clean, get rid of everything I can.” Pluck was starting to shed hair; he shook out the sleeve of his jacket and it fell to the floor in brown clumps. It wouldn’t be long now. She felt sorry for the werewolf. Unlike most of the personalities she’d met in this battle, she had the feeling that circumstances permitting, Pluck would have functioned best as a perfectly normal member of society. If he hadn’t been turned into a wolf or gained thought-plucking powers or been drafted into a Grand Battle or died or been resurrected as a clone, she could see him just getting an apartment in the city, collecting all fifty state quarters and settling down with an overw—
Clink!
A coin appeared on the vanity. On its face was an astronaut, a biplane, and the words “OHIO—Birthplace of Aviation Engineers.” Jen thought, They had to really reach to find something interesting about Ohio, huh, then, God dammit, Pluck, what are you doing? From then on, she tried not to think about anything other than quarters, which were the least dangerous thing she could think of to think of. H-Bomb kept blathering on. ”So I turned my Pathomancy to use and just… purged myself. I got rid of the positive emotions first, to make it easier for myself, then the negatives. You should have seen the things that came out. I made an octopus, and it tried to strangle me, and that only brought up more emotions.” Quarters quarters quarters Clink! The Minnesota quarter advertised “the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.” Thrilling. ”It took hours, but eventually I got the job done. Blissful indifference to everything around me. But there was something else. A feeling that wasn’t my own, but had been hiding behind all the rest of my emotions. A little purple bruise on my heart that wanted out. So I let it out.” Jen found herself thinking of all the things she didn’t want to be thinking about when she got Plucked—QUARTEEEEEEEEERS—Clink! The Alaskan quarter had a bear on it. Jen tried not to think about the bear, looked up, and saw Pluck chewing on his claws. The claws were shortening, and so were his fangs. ”And the House rose up all around me. It transformed me. It gave me a new deck of emotions to shuffle through, a whole outlook on life. The House speaks to me.” Clink clink clink! The Alabama quarter was centered around Helen Keller, the Wisconsin quarter showcased a cow and a wheel of cheese (which seemed almost like self-parody to Jen), and the US Virgin Islands quarter… there’s a US Virgin Islands quarter? If she didn’t know it existed, how did it pop into her head? She looked back up in the mirror. Pluck’s snout was starting to shrink into a regular ol' nose, but thankfully H-Bomb was putting on the finishing touches, affixing a purple bobcut wig over Jen’s natural hair. ”Now when I’m in the Purple House, I only have the one feeling. I don't think there's a word for it. I can turn it into fireworks, and it never runs out. Get up, we're done.”
Jen got up. The wig made her head feel imbalanced, and her surgical scar itched like hell. She was in no condition for a swordfight. H-Bomb seemed to disagree; the elf led her out the door and down a dark, silent hallway. As the hallway began to widen out, Jen could see it becoming less dark, and hear it becoming less silent.
To use the blanket term “cheers” would be to ignore the mammoth degree of horrifying diversity in the sound. There were hoots and hollers and applause and whistling, but there was also cackling, roaring, hissing, grinding, mechanical whirring, a sound like a fire tossed about in the wind. There were deep telepathic thrums of excitement, and flashes of penetrating light that carried a smell of magic and passion. There was music, too, loud and simple, music to chant to, not to dance to. It was the sort of music you hear at sports games, vaguely-familiar riffs that spoke of communality and adrenalin, an unending crescendo to bloodlust.
In the center of the Purple House there was a stadium, and H-Bomb was already there.
Well, the elf standing in the middle of the stadium and dancing for the amusement of the audience was distinguishable from the elf leading Jen onto the field in one key aspect. That being, she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Besides which the smile she flashed H-Bomb and Jen upon their entrance conveyed more sadism than genuine happiness. ”You’re late,” she chided.
”Well, I trust in your ability to work the crowd, Bae,” replied the original H-Bomb. ”I look good on you, by the way,” she added with a wink.
”MAKE OUT!” came a helpful suggestion from the crowd. “Bae” laughed and turned to Jen. Where’d Pluck gone off to? Jen searched the crowd, but the ultraviolet floodlights illuminating the arena made it difficult to survey the seats.
”And what have we here?” asked Bae, obnoxiously perfect breasts bouncing up and down with excitement. ”I’d heard the rumors, ladies and gentlemen, but the truth is just so much... cuter. A human in our midst, and she’s a real live Grand Battler besides! You’re a very fashionable item, young lady.” Bae briefly discorporated into a mass of colorless goop before reforming as a perfect (mercifully fully-clothed) duplicate of Jen. ”Everybody’s doing it,” she announced, grating Jen's nerves with every slight deviation from her own voice. ”H-Bomb, be a dear and get the poor girl’s hands free. I want to dance with her.”
H-Bomb cracked her whip. There was a slight sting and the ropes binding Jen fell away. She shook her arms out experimentally, before Bae lashed out and grabbed her wrists with deceptively strong copies of her own hands. ”Come on—Jen, is it?—let’s give ‘em a show.” Bae pulled Jen by the arms and whirled her around the arena, leading a demented waltz.
A fortuitous collusion of dizziness and surreality afforded Jen a moment of strategic clarity. They’re feeding off the theatricality of it all, she realized. This place is the bind that holds all the non-humans together. They’ll kill me no matter how many demon samurai I slay, unless I can make them want me to live. “Two can play at this game,” she said just loud enough for Bae to hear, and took the lead in the dance.
The ex-monarch and the shapeshifter spun around the stadium hand in hand until the whole world was reduced to motion blur and the cold chill of sweat on their shoulders. It was Jen who brought the two of them to a halt, wrestling Bae to the ground with a flick of her wrist. Before Bae could react to being knocked into a childlike sitting position, Jen pressed her momentary advantage, addressing the audience. “Alright,” she asked in her best impression of Bae’s impression of her, “Who’s lost track of which one is the real shapeshifter, and not merely an imposter? Take your time now.”
The crowd burst into a discordant, species-neutral laughter. H-Bomb cracked her whip threateningly and pulled Bae to her feet. ”Sorry about the clown, Jenny-poo,” she reassured the shapeshifter. Bae plays a little ro—“
”Get your hands off me!” shrieked Bae, transforming back into a nude H-Bomb. The audience roared.
Jen, on the other side of the arena, took a bow and shouted, “Us non-elves must all look the same to your host. That’s racist, H-Bomb!” The laughter of the audience intensified.
When the uproar died down, the two identical elves were still glaring at each other with an awkward mutual antagonism. There was a comedically appropriate second of relative quiet, before some brave soul broke it by shouting out, ”MAKE OUT!” Without overlong hesitation, H-Bomb and Bae gave precisely synchronous noncommittal shrugs and shoved their respective tongues down each other’s throats.
The room exploded with excitement as the shapeshifter and the elf embraced, fireworks shooting off at odd angles around them. Jen, unable to match that for theatricality, was at a loss. She wasn’t even able to take advantage of the distraction to make an escape; the gates on both sides of the arena were firmly sealed.
H-Bomb shoved Bae off of her with a playful flick of her whip, sending the shapeshifter to disappear into the crowd. All eyes were in the elf once more, which seemed to be how she liked it. She shaped her fingers into well-manicured handguns and shot some fireworks up near the ceiling, where they burst in a kaleidoscope of light and heat.
”Well, as fun as that all was for most of us,” H-Bomb began, ”I think it’s time we all moved on to the main event. Now, we here at the Purple House by no means advocate battles to the death, but… I think it’s important that we all indulge ourselves a little, don’t you?” The crowd hollered assent. ”That's the spirit. In this corner!” A glaring spotlight shone on Jen’s face. ”An actual, honest-to-God Grand Battle contestant, miss Jen… I didn’t get her last name. Who cares, anyway? And in the other corner!”
Some sort of enraged, terrifying caricature of a pissed-off warrior burst through the gate at one end of the arena. Tall, dark, with muscles just a hair too large to be practical, Greyve would barely have passed for human at all even if you ignored the horn growing out of his forehead. The sword he carried was longer than Jen was tall, and he held it like he knew how to use it. His eyes were glazed over, but his nose eagerly sniffed his surroundings. He looked towards H-Bomb, then towards Jen. ”Foytin’?” he asked simply.
H-Bomb unstrapped Uncle from her back and threw it at Jen’s feet. ”Yes, Greyve,” she laughed maternally, backing off into the audience. ”Fighting.”
Greyve cracked a smile quicker and more dangerous than the elf’s whip.
The Purple House clearly wasn’t a part of the natural architecture of New Battleopolis. It jutted out of what used to be four basketball courts, a gleaming new and thoroughly postmodern work of ostentation bedecked with triangular windows jutting out at odd intervals. It was painted a garish namesake with gold-leaf trimmings, and loomed in a very specific way to let Jen know that it was warmly welcoming to everybody but her.
Jen’s hands were tied behind her back, stretching the skin of her shoulder over her fresh stitches. Pluck wouldn’t stop looking at her. She suspected the distant look the werewolf was shooting in her direction was somehow connected with the trail of tiny objects she was leaving in her wake: earthworms, green pebbles, golden triangle earrings and tiny Ovoids that floated into the air like bubbles, only to vanish into a place with no name. “What are you doing?” she asked him, as a trio of matching brown fedoras plopped to the ground at her heels.
”Stream of consciousness,” Pluck replied, his voice even more anxious than it was before. ”Nervous habit. It’s, um, it’s what I do, if you haven’t figured that out. I pluck your thoughts.”
Jen looked up at the approaching Purple House, the setting sun peeking out from behind a steeple. “I’m more interested in what you're thinking, Pluck,” she lied absentmindedly, considering what fate awaited her in that house. Pluck blinked, and Jen was treated to the unfortunate sight of her own corpse, flopping into existence freshly bleeding from several demonic-looking impalement wounds. H-Bomb broke her silence to laugh out loud at the sight of the corpse. So much for my unflappable self-confidence, thought Jen, a bit annoyed at Pluck.
The werewolf didn’t seem to be entirely cogent of the dead body he’d just created. ”I can’t do it on my own thoughts,” he said instead. ”Besides, no one would want to see what I’m thinking. It’s usually not pleasant.”
”You always struck me as more of an emotional being, anyway,” interjected H-Bomb, waving a hand lazily in Pluck’s direction. A bawling infant child suddenly appeared in the werewolf’s hands, which oddly enough seemed to make him more confident. ”There goes some of your infantile desperation,” the elf sniggered. ”Here, let me take care of that for you.” With a lightning-quick motion, the elf produced a whip and cracked it in Pluck’s direction. The baby stopped crying.
“Did you just kill that baby?” Jen cried.
”It was just an emotional construct. That’s what I do. Pathomancy. Converting emotion into matter and vice-versa. It’s all very unscientific, I’ve been told.” Jen didn’t get much out of that explanation, but decided that there was no room in her growing list of worries for the dead baby now lying a few yards away from the dead Jen on the road, even if it did elicit a certain visceral reaction.
They arrived at the Purple House, the door to which seemed to have opened itself for H-Bomb at some point. The elf rubbed a hand against the doorframe lovingly. Inside there was a wail of ghostly feedback, like an incompetent rock band doing sound check. ”Come on in, guys, the House won’t bite,” said H-Bomb. ”Greyve will, but that’ll have to wait for later tonight.”
Jen entered the House. There was something here that—well, evil wasn’t the word, but something that needed fixing. It tickled the back of her mind like a repressed sneeze. The House itself had a certain labyrinthine quality—purple hallways and purple staircases coiled around a large, dark purple central area that she caught glimpses of through doors that creaked uncomfortably as she passed by. After a minute of walking, she found herself led into a small side room dominated by an ostentatious vanity table, and pushed in a chair in front of the mirror. ”Makeup will just take a few minutes, Jen dear,” H-Bomb promised, opening up a drawer containing purple mascara, purple blush, purple lipstick, purple contact lenses, a purple wig, and an assortment of golden jewelry inlaid with amethyst. Pluck growled and stood guard by the door.
Jen stuck out her tongue childishly. “I can do my own makeup,” she whined.
H-Bomb giggled. ”Of course you can. Hold still.” Jen acquiesced—no one had ever died from being tarted up a little, and it might give her some time to think. While the elf went to work on her hair, she simply looked in the mirror, avoided eye contact with Pluck, and tried not to think about anything.
Her makeup artist was the chatty type, it seemed. ”You remind me a lot of myself,” she decided. ”The real me, back in my battle. I was… conflicted. I had all these feelings I didn’t know what to do with, except usually burn things, and… when I awoke as a copy, that all just compounded. I was a mess. So I decided, to hell with emotions. I’ll just scrub myself clean, get rid of everything I can.” Pluck was starting to shed hair; he shook out the sleeve of his jacket and it fell to the floor in brown clumps. It wouldn’t be long now. She felt sorry for the werewolf. Unlike most of the personalities she’d met in this battle, she had the feeling that circumstances permitting, Pluck would have functioned best as a perfectly normal member of society. If he hadn’t been turned into a wolf or gained thought-plucking powers or been drafted into a Grand Battle or died or been resurrected as a clone, she could see him just getting an apartment in the city, collecting all fifty state quarters and settling down with an overw—
Clink!
A coin appeared on the vanity. On its face was an astronaut, a biplane, and the words “OHIO—Birthplace of Aviation Engineers.” Jen thought, They had to really reach to find something interesting about Ohio, huh, then, God dammit, Pluck, what are you doing? From then on, she tried not to think about anything other than quarters, which were the least dangerous thing she could think of to think of. H-Bomb kept blathering on. ”So I turned my Pathomancy to use and just… purged myself. I got rid of the positive emotions first, to make it easier for myself, then the negatives. You should have seen the things that came out. I made an octopus, and it tried to strangle me, and that only brought up more emotions.” Quarters quarters quarters Clink! The Minnesota quarter advertised “the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.” Thrilling. ”It took hours, but eventually I got the job done. Blissful indifference to everything around me. But there was something else. A feeling that wasn’t my own, but had been hiding behind all the rest of my emotions. A little purple bruise on my heart that wanted out. So I let it out.” Jen found herself thinking of all the things she didn’t want to be thinking about when she got Plucked—QUARTEEEEEEEEERS—Clink! The Alaskan quarter had a bear on it. Jen tried not to think about the bear, looked up, and saw Pluck chewing on his claws. The claws were shortening, and so were his fangs. ”And the House rose up all around me. It transformed me. It gave me a new deck of emotions to shuffle through, a whole outlook on life. The House speaks to me.” Clink clink clink! The Alabama quarter was centered around Helen Keller, the Wisconsin quarter showcased a cow and a wheel of cheese (which seemed almost like self-parody to Jen), and the US Virgin Islands quarter… there’s a US Virgin Islands quarter? If she didn’t know it existed, how did it pop into her head? She looked back up in the mirror. Pluck’s snout was starting to shrink into a regular ol' nose, but thankfully H-Bomb was putting on the finishing touches, affixing a purple bobcut wig over Jen’s natural hair. ”Now when I’m in the Purple House, I only have the one feeling. I don't think there's a word for it. I can turn it into fireworks, and it never runs out. Get up, we're done.”
Jen got up. The wig made her head feel imbalanced, and her surgical scar itched like hell. She was in no condition for a swordfight. H-Bomb seemed to disagree; the elf led her out the door and down a dark, silent hallway. As the hallway began to widen out, Jen could see it becoming less dark, and hear it becoming less silent.
To use the blanket term “cheers” would be to ignore the mammoth degree of horrifying diversity in the sound. There were hoots and hollers and applause and whistling, but there was also cackling, roaring, hissing, grinding, mechanical whirring, a sound like a fire tossed about in the wind. There were deep telepathic thrums of excitement, and flashes of penetrating light that carried a smell of magic and passion. There was music, too, loud and simple, music to chant to, not to dance to. It was the sort of music you hear at sports games, vaguely-familiar riffs that spoke of communality and adrenalin, an unending crescendo to bloodlust.
In the center of the Purple House there was a stadium, and H-Bomb was already there.
Well, the elf standing in the middle of the stadium and dancing for the amusement of the audience was distinguishable from the elf leading Jen onto the field in one key aspect. That being, she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Besides which the smile she flashed H-Bomb and Jen upon their entrance conveyed more sadism than genuine happiness. ”You’re late,” she chided.
”Well, I trust in your ability to work the crowd, Bae,” replied the original H-Bomb. ”I look good on you, by the way,” she added with a wink.
”MAKE OUT!” came a helpful suggestion from the crowd. “Bae” laughed and turned to Jen. Where’d Pluck gone off to? Jen searched the crowd, but the ultraviolet floodlights illuminating the arena made it difficult to survey the seats.
”And what have we here?” asked Bae, obnoxiously perfect breasts bouncing up and down with excitement. ”I’d heard the rumors, ladies and gentlemen, but the truth is just so much... cuter. A human in our midst, and she’s a real live Grand Battler besides! You’re a very fashionable item, young lady.” Bae briefly discorporated into a mass of colorless goop before reforming as a perfect (mercifully fully-clothed) duplicate of Jen. ”Everybody’s doing it,” she announced, grating Jen's nerves with every slight deviation from her own voice. ”H-Bomb, be a dear and get the poor girl’s hands free. I want to dance with her.”
H-Bomb cracked her whip. There was a slight sting and the ropes binding Jen fell away. She shook her arms out experimentally, before Bae lashed out and grabbed her wrists with deceptively strong copies of her own hands. ”Come on—Jen, is it?—let’s give ‘em a show.” Bae pulled Jen by the arms and whirled her around the arena, leading a demented waltz.
A fortuitous collusion of dizziness and surreality afforded Jen a moment of strategic clarity. They’re feeding off the theatricality of it all, she realized. This place is the bind that holds all the non-humans together. They’ll kill me no matter how many demon samurai I slay, unless I can make them want me to live. “Two can play at this game,” she said just loud enough for Bae to hear, and took the lead in the dance.
The ex-monarch and the shapeshifter spun around the stadium hand in hand until the whole world was reduced to motion blur and the cold chill of sweat on their shoulders. It was Jen who brought the two of them to a halt, wrestling Bae to the ground with a flick of her wrist. Before Bae could react to being knocked into a childlike sitting position, Jen pressed her momentary advantage, addressing the audience. “Alright,” she asked in her best impression of Bae’s impression of her, “Who’s lost track of which one is the real shapeshifter, and not merely an imposter? Take your time now.”
The crowd burst into a discordant, species-neutral laughter. H-Bomb cracked her whip threateningly and pulled Bae to her feet. ”Sorry about the clown, Jenny-poo,” she reassured the shapeshifter. Bae plays a little ro—“
”Get your hands off me!” shrieked Bae, transforming back into a nude H-Bomb. The audience roared.
Jen, on the other side of the arena, took a bow and shouted, “Us non-elves must all look the same to your host. That’s racist, H-Bomb!” The laughter of the audience intensified.
When the uproar died down, the two identical elves were still glaring at each other with an awkward mutual antagonism. There was a comedically appropriate second of relative quiet, before some brave soul broke it by shouting out, ”MAKE OUT!” Without overlong hesitation, H-Bomb and Bae gave precisely synchronous noncommittal shrugs and shoved their respective tongues down each other’s throats.
The room exploded with excitement as the shapeshifter and the elf embraced, fireworks shooting off at odd angles around them. Jen, unable to match that for theatricality, was at a loss. She wasn’t even able to take advantage of the distraction to make an escape; the gates on both sides of the arena were firmly sealed.
H-Bomb shoved Bae off of her with a playful flick of her whip, sending the shapeshifter to disappear into the crowd. All eyes were in the elf once more, which seemed to be how she liked it. She shaped her fingers into well-manicured handguns and shot some fireworks up near the ceiling, where they burst in a kaleidoscope of light and heat.
”Well, as fun as that all was for most of us,” H-Bomb began, ”I think it’s time we all moved on to the main event. Now, we here at the Purple House by no means advocate battles to the death, but… I think it’s important that we all indulge ourselves a little, don’t you?” The crowd hollered assent. ”That's the spirit. In this corner!” A glaring spotlight shone on Jen’s face. ”An actual, honest-to-God Grand Battle contestant, miss Jen… I didn’t get her last name. Who cares, anyway? And in the other corner!”
Some sort of enraged, terrifying caricature of a pissed-off warrior burst through the gate at one end of the arena. Tall, dark, with muscles just a hair too large to be practical, Greyve would barely have passed for human at all even if you ignored the horn growing out of his forehead. The sword he carried was longer than Jen was tall, and he held it like he knew how to use it. His eyes were glazed over, but his nose eagerly sniffed his surroundings. He looked towards H-Bomb, then towards Jen. ”Foytin’?” he asked simply.
H-Bomb unstrapped Uncle from her back and threw it at Jen’s feet. ”Yes, Greyve,” she laughed maternally, backing off into the audience. ”Fighting.”
Greyve cracked a smile quicker and more dangerous than the elf’s whip.