Re: LAST. THING. STANDING. [S!1][ROUND ONE: TELEVISION LAND]
03-12-2012, 10:27 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by BlastYoBoots.
"Mrrgphrrmrmmmphm. Mmmgm."
Exhausted grousing bubbled unintelligibly out of a dark technicolor puddle of paint, a spectacle probably in a showy token protest of his current misfortune. Most of the possible onlookers, however, were insulated from the visuals by a crate-fort prison or a lack of visual senses.
"...I'm getting the feeling you know who did that."
"Yeah, it's pro-" "Flipping christ on a pancake on a picture of Sarah Palin's head, that hurt!" "It's Tschichold. The painter."
"So, Chuckled the Psycho Painter. How much trouble is he?" "I heard that! Never trust boring chrome cargo crates. Smarmy fucking bastards."
"He's not... alright, I'm not really sure. I haven't seen him do anything untoward to anyone, he just sort of... stumbles around and paints things—?" "I art things you uncivilized jackass, it's a goddamn verb. I remember you, you sound like the guy in grey rags who was talking to a jellyfish like it was a rediscovered Renaissance work. I don't think you were even high! So why'd they stuff you in a crate, for the crazy or for dressing like a color-blind bum on the sidewalk? Nobody ever stuffed me in a crate. You know why? Because I was a not-color-blind bum on the sidewalk."
"He's... certainly gotten chattier since I saw him last."
From the sound of things, he's decided that his chief role in this contest is to waste our valuable time. We'd profit more by collecting his hallucinogenic paint and selling it on the black market than we would entertaining his drivel.
Tschichold jumped as a loud BANG rung from the pile of crates, shifting his canvas just as he was making a precise stroke of orange; though angered by the redirection, the jagged resulting line actually gave a nice flow to the quick image so far that wasn't retarded, so he graciously dropped the point with the offending surface.
"There's some light. Now we need something sharp to break these cables."
"Wait, you just made a massive dent in a steel box with one foot. Can't you just pull apart the bonds?"
"Yeah, 'cept it'd snap your wrists like twigs if I did. Believe me, I'm tempted after seeing you standing cackling over pools of blood. Since your smartass floating drug-deal dropoff of a sidekick kept insisting, I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and just smack you around a little once we get out of this place."
That shut Aaron up, reminding him (to Change's impatient chagrin) that he should be sulking about what he'd done. Freefall wasn't actually sure at all that a simple break would hurt him much, if at all. Maybe she was going about this whole escape thing a bit more slowly and cautiously than she could. Maybe she was concentrating on the heavily aching, fresh as all hell bruises on her arms where some mooks had held her, firm grips amplified by that temporary taser-induced lightness to deal deep and massive damage. Maybe she didn't want anyone to notice that despite the brave face she was probably too good at putting on, every automatic move forward to escape and face those taser-wielding troops brought back the shocks she just endured, each carrying the month-old pain of a stomach wound from an electric incident that still-
An impression of a clutch of eggs, a female mate, the impression of searching—
Would you shut up about your eggs? The inherent risk of our situation demands mitigation by escape first, not—
"—just a stupid, stark metal setting with worthless fuuuture accoutrements, oh look at meee I'm from the FUuuuUTure and obviously people in the future are so uncultured and boring to think that paint is obsolete—"
—impression of askance, a lack of understanding, this-female-one-of-criticism and questioning directed thereof—
Did you fall into the least profitable profession imaginable as a fluke, or would it be too much to ask you to do something valuable for once in your life and cut my wizard loose—
"—and well, dammit, now all that psychic blind thing's babbling has me painting eggs everywhere. Eggs! If I really wanted to do something as unoriginal as death and rebirth i'd throw myself off a tall building holding a carton of farm fresh—"
"Would you all just SHUT UP and maybe look for at least one way out of here? I'd break Allen's wrists here just so I could plug my ears if two of you didn't have blaring psychic voices. I mean I've met psychics before, at least they have the courtesy to talk on an as-needed basis instead of Nipple the Two-Year-Old Telepathic Squid here-" Nizzo felt her attention finally redirected to him, reiterated his request for information regarding a precious clutch of eggs, a- "-oh would you can it you lousy piece of sushi??? I'll start frying up omelettes if you can't shut up for at least two fucking ow FUCK OW OW WHAT THE HELL!!?"
Of all the hostile thoughts and intents he'd felt traded throughout this battle, this was by far the most vile and chilling he'd heard. A threat to his spawn, not even hatched – the impression of devouring them, no less! – went far beyond reprehensible and straight to a nigh-immediate danger. This-female-one-of-criticism could not be allowed to follow him back to his young.
Aaron felt the girl behind her shift wildly between densities, kicking and yelling violently for a half-moment; some of those lead-heavy jerks of hers were putting a serious strain on his arms and back, too. "What?! What's going on??"
"That fishy piece of shit just bit me!"
"Girl, even if it had a mouth or stinger, I highly doubt-" She means psychically, Aaron. And if you'd regarded what I've been telling you for the past half-hour or so to have any semblance of value, you would have paid attention when I told you that this 'harmless' creature effortlessly destroyed a roomful of minds!
Never having attempted to devour a truly sentient equal before, Nizzo was frightened to find that this-female-one-of-criticism did not in fact die, but rather painfully repelled his mental 'straw' with the normal defenses offered by a thoughtful consciousness. He recoiled and silenced his mental broadcast, waiting cautiously for the predator's next move.
Freefall slammed herself and Aaron's way out of the heavy crate pile with some hard headbutts, trying to silence the buzzing migraine induced by Nizzo's failed attempt at swallowing her mind.
"Well, whatever you did managed to shut it up. Everyone wins!" Tschichold strolled over to the heavy cargo bay door, finding a nice circular canvas that he hadn't covered in echoes of sea life and weird jellyfish.
"Alright, see: super-psychic jellyfish. Now that makes more sense in a battle to the death. Got this sense that he considered what he was doing 'eating', too; better be careful not to piss it off or it'll start trapping the minds of a city 'bout round two or three, grows to enormous fucking size, we'd have to beat the shit out of it to turn everyone back to normal..."
Freefall pulled Aaron with her out of the nasty gap she'd made between two crates. Headache aside, she was almost thankful for the distraction from the thought of tasers. Keep it together, you're a hero: you're right, you're awesome, and you're pretty much fucking invincible. Insta-vulnerable electric shocks aside... Aaron, however, cast a suspicious glance over at Nizzo's oddly quiet plastic holding cell.
So, do you finally accept that this 'Nizzo' is a serious liability?
"Relax, I'll just stay the hell away from the jellyfish for now. I was never that good with animals. ...and nobody say anything about his eggs, alright? Alright."
The psychic creature allowed himself to relax a bit at her metaphorical retreat, tuning his broadcasts up to relatively quiet levels. His vaguely frightened wariness regarding this-female-one-of-criticism continued, bouncing somewhat audibly between his occasional telepathic questions.
His rare flirt with radio silence, however, hadn't gone unnoticed. The pair of heavily-armed copyright agents covering the cargo bay doors had ignored the noisy bruiser of a girl's typical banging, but the fish doing anything other than shoving oblivious nonsense into everyone's heads was a dead giveaway that something was wrong. They hit a keycode that signaled a few beeps, then the whirr of heavy hydraulics, just as Tschichold was bringing his hands widely to bear in the center to top a nice mauve hill.
And each got a faceful of that mauve as his arms fell through the sudden gap.
"Wha- no no nonononono-"
Tschichold chased his artwork as it parted to either side of him, wet paint smearing and ruining their attempted conveyance as the door walls squeezed and retracted against the edges of their frame. When they finally stopped, he spent a second or two cursing blithely at the heavy futuristic contraption before noticing the pair of guards it had unveiled on the ground in front of him, twitching and hallucinating.
A pause, a glowing eye peering from paint-soaked black into their respective tacky future sunglasses and drooling mauve expressions. The wizard and hero behind him followed his gaze.
"......hey, you pricks just ruined my landscape- oh for crying out loud why am I yelling at dead guys I need to see a doctor. And maybe a tea shop. Some tea would really work right now."
Tea tasted like shit since it blended with his paint when he drank it, but it was almost a good consolation for lost work.
As the flagship of the series inched precariously closer to this maelstrom, a wispy arm would pass through the ship every few minutes, leaving it quaking subtly and its passengers' visions and senses clouded by a perturbing fog of black and white fuzz.
Those situated in the cargo-bay-cum-brig – however the brig itself got so full as to warrant alternative space – understood the intermittent fraying of reality, the buzzing of color and tingling graining of vision as a TV antenna not entirely disturbed from receptive position, perhaps better than the ship's typical occupants. However, everyone aboard the ESS Pyreness essentially got the gist of it.
They were running out of time.
"Would you mind putting a little more oomph into it? My wrists aren't that sore."
"Aight'. Got it."
Aaron and Freefall continued raking their bonds against a jagged corner the latter had squeezed out of a crate. The bonds quickly relented, and each wasted no time in their intended directions: Aaron heading to loose Change from a plastic prison, and Freefall strolling over to the silhouette busy painting the uniforms of a pair of intoxicated guards, cracking her knuckles.
Change fluttered out into the air, looking as irked as a school of currency can be. Miss, just what do you think you're doing?
"I'm gonna give Chuckles the Clown here what for."
Aaron turned to regard the girl and painter, and the decreasingly boring uniforms of the guards at one's feet and brush. "I don't think he actually killed them, if that's what you're concerned over."
"Didn't he just drive them terminally insane with poisonous psycho-paint? Fake TV-person or not, that's still a pretty horrible way to go–"
Tschichold took a look at the gurgling faces of agents too devoid of creativity to hallucinate anything even vaguely amusing, and promptly returned to his work. "Nah, the high lasts like fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour sometimes, I don't really keep track."
"...Oh."
Freefall glanced back at Aaron and Change, waiting for them to get caught up in argument over the psychic jelly they were freeing before putting her heel through each of the guards' discarded weapons. Don't want Team Scrooge going full Die-Hard again. But her attention quickly drifted back to the painter, who it seemed maybe had the ability to... no, now, wait a minute. This doesn't quite make sense.
"So this painting all over them like, lemme guess... Turns 'em into mind-controlled minions?"
"Lady, if I could control these bastards I'd have convinced them to wear something that maybe a postal worker wouldn't think was an excruciatingly boring uniform."
"Then what does the paint do?"
"It paints things! And gets you high, I guess, so it kind of sucks being covered in the fresh dripping stuff and not being able to see your fingers move in a straight line of baby goddamn blue. What, did they not have paint on your planet or– eugh." Tschischold had just gotten up and turned to... whatever the fuck that jumpsuit of hers was. Guess he was right.
"Let me get this straight. You drip LSD paint."
"Are you gonna start licking my paintings like acid stamps?! I have the right to refuse a sale, you know!"
"And you paint things. And that's it."
"Uh huh."
"Then how the hell did you get put in a battle to the death!?"
"Maybe I wasn't brought in as a contestant, you ever think of that? Maybe this was 'cause the one cultured producer out there looked at this battle line-up and thought, 'Gee, these crazy zombies and birds and suits of armor look like absolute shit! Let's find someone who actually knows what the word color means and throw him at them to keep our viewers from gouging out their eyes.' I mean, good christ–" ...Tschichold looked over the green (actually indigo) sterilized jumpsuit that even bulletholes and scorchmarks hadn't made look any less safe, the eagle emblem on the oh god that thing is a brand isn't it she looks like she belongs on a supermarket shelf... "–they probably saw my work and thought sweet jesus we need an expert like that I mean you look like the side of a can of off-brand peas holy cripes that's bad—"
The two continued to gaze in increasing horror at each other, Freefall's stare descending to Tschichold's midsection and gradually, gradually realizing that thick, gooey paint was the only barrier between his nether regions and the outside world.
"...Are you naked?!" She flinched back, her eyes ratcheting away to something less disturbing.
"Hey, I don't tell you how to live your life. Better being naked than wearing that... horrible THING, that parasite on your probably dull identity! Lemme just—"
Tschichold managed to put a thick, bright diagonal stripe of nigh-fluorescent yellow on her front before she batted his hand away (hard). She poked an accusing finger in his eye and looked as if she was about to ignite.
"This suit costs two-hundred-fucking-thousand dollars each." <font color="#814444">Oh god she's a materialist– "Y'know why? So it's light enough for me to fly without stripping down to my underwear. This one goddamn suit has to last me all the way to when we escape this battle. If it doesn't, I can't fly. And if I can't fly, I'll be spending plenty of time on the ground rearranging your face."</font>
"Fine, fine, we can go minimalist, sheesh. Just a broad stripe of—"
Freefall knocked his hand away again. "No extra weight, not an ounce. Paint in-fucking-cluded." "But if I just—" "No."
A green-coated fingertip (clawtip... brushtip??) ascended at a comically slow pace from Tschichold's side, heading up to Freefall's arm. His visible eye darted between his destination and her unamused expression, trying to discern just how close he can ge—
The ball of her palm connected with his temple, sending him sprawling to the ground, unconscious. Left a sticky bit of sunset orange on her right hand.
Aaron bolted around at the noise of painter-on-metal, swaddling a freshly-freed Nizzo in his arms. "What in blazes did you do that for?!"
"What? Look, Allen, I just—"
Miss Freefall, I can understand the defense of your valuable property, but that man mentioned a zombie, bird, and armor. You just incapacitated our only timely source of possibly vital—
Static swept through the ship again, nearly knocking them off their feet as it irresponsibly abused the Photoshop film grain filter on their vision.
It cleared after a few moments. The aurumancer regained his footing, trying to find a comfortable place for a squirming, frightened jellyfish-thing. "You just knocked him out! Weren't you just saying we need to get out together, you hypocrite?"
"It's fine, god! He'll only be out five minutes!"
"You don't know that!! And it's beside the point—"
"Actually yeah, I do know that, Goldilocks! He's a scrawny male, maybe a hundred-fourty pounds, and that was a clean hit. Five minutes. You can time it." Freefall smiled the defiant smile of a man who just found his missing car keys, oblivious to the fact that his house is burning down around him. It's an expression she wore fairly often.
Aaron took a deep, calming breath. I suggest you take charge, Change voiced none too quietly to him. Miss Freefall clearly does not understand the rapidly appreciating value of a swift escape.
"Oh, like I'm letting the psychopa—"
"No no, please lead the way, Freefall," Aaron remarked with a tired yet sudden grin, eyes fixed on the rapidly spreading puddle from the downed painter. "We should really get going. Oh, but would you mind carrying Tschichold along? I do believe my hands are full."
The girl's smug smirk vanished instantly.
In light of all he'd been through and the senseless murders he'd so recently committed, some of this nonsense seemed strangely comforting.
"Mrrgphrrmrmmmphm. Mmmgm."
Exhausted grousing bubbled unintelligibly out of a dark technicolor puddle of paint, a spectacle probably in a showy token protest of his current misfortune. Most of the possible onlookers, however, were insulated from the visuals by a crate-fort prison or a lack of visual senses.
"...I'm getting the feeling you know who did that."
"Yeah, it's pro-" "Flipping christ on a pancake on a picture of Sarah Palin's head, that hurt!" "It's Tschichold. The painter."
"So, Chuckled the Psycho Painter. How much trouble is he?" "I heard that! Never trust boring chrome cargo crates. Smarmy fucking bastards."
"He's not... alright, I'm not really sure. I haven't seen him do anything untoward to anyone, he just sort of... stumbles around and paints things—?" "I art things you uncivilized jackass, it's a goddamn verb. I remember you, you sound like the guy in grey rags who was talking to a jellyfish like it was a rediscovered Renaissance work. I don't think you were even high! So why'd they stuff you in a crate, for the crazy or for dressing like a color-blind bum on the sidewalk? Nobody ever stuffed me in a crate. You know why? Because I was a not-color-blind bum on the sidewalk."
"He's... certainly gotten chattier since I saw him last."
From the sound of things, he's decided that his chief role in this contest is to waste our valuable time. We'd profit more by collecting his hallucinogenic paint and selling it on the black market than we would entertaining his drivel.
Tschichold jumped as a loud BANG rung from the pile of crates, shifting his canvas just as he was making a precise stroke of orange; though angered by the redirection, the jagged resulting line actually gave a nice flow to the quick image so far that wasn't retarded, so he graciously dropped the point with the offending surface.
"There's some light. Now we need something sharp to break these cables."
"Wait, you just made a massive dent in a steel box with one foot. Can't you just pull apart the bonds?"
"Yeah, 'cept it'd snap your wrists like twigs if I did. Believe me, I'm tempted after seeing you standing cackling over pools of blood. Since your smartass floating drug-deal dropoff of a sidekick kept insisting, I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and just smack you around a little once we get out of this place."
That shut Aaron up, reminding him (to Change's impatient chagrin) that he should be sulking about what he'd done. Freefall wasn't actually sure at all that a simple break would hurt him much, if at all. Maybe she was going about this whole escape thing a bit more slowly and cautiously than she could. Maybe she was concentrating on the heavily aching, fresh as all hell bruises on her arms where some mooks had held her, firm grips amplified by that temporary taser-induced lightness to deal deep and massive damage. Maybe she didn't want anyone to notice that despite the brave face she was probably too good at putting on, every automatic move forward to escape and face those taser-wielding troops brought back the shocks she just endured, each carrying the month-old pain of a stomach wound from an electric incident that still-
An impression of a clutch of eggs, a female mate, the impression of searching—
Would you shut up about your eggs? The inherent risk of our situation demands mitigation by escape first, not—
"—just a stupid, stark metal setting with worthless fuuuture accoutrements, oh look at meee I'm from the FUuuuUTure and obviously people in the future are so uncultured and boring to think that paint is obsolete—"
—impression of askance, a lack of understanding, this-female-one-of-criticism and questioning directed thereof—
Did you fall into the least profitable profession imaginable as a fluke, or would it be too much to ask you to do something valuable for once in your life and cut my wizard loose—
"—and well, dammit, now all that psychic blind thing's babbling has me painting eggs everywhere. Eggs! If I really wanted to do something as unoriginal as death and rebirth i'd throw myself off a tall building holding a carton of farm fresh—"
"Would you all just SHUT UP and maybe look for at least one way out of here? I'd break Allen's wrists here just so I could plug my ears if two of you didn't have blaring psychic voices. I mean I've met psychics before, at least they have the courtesy to talk on an as-needed basis instead of Nipple the Two-Year-Old Telepathic Squid here-" Nizzo felt her attention finally redirected to him, reiterated his request for information regarding a precious clutch of eggs, a- "-oh would you can it you lousy piece of sushi??? I'll start frying up omelettes if you can't shut up for at least two fucking ow FUCK OW OW WHAT THE HELL!!?"
Of all the hostile thoughts and intents he'd felt traded throughout this battle, this was by far the most vile and chilling he'd heard. A threat to his spawn, not even hatched – the impression of devouring them, no less! – went far beyond reprehensible and straight to a nigh-immediate danger. This-female-one-of-criticism could not be allowed to follow him back to his young.
Aaron felt the girl behind her shift wildly between densities, kicking and yelling violently for a half-moment; some of those lead-heavy jerks of hers were putting a serious strain on his arms and back, too. "What?! What's going on??"
"That fishy piece of shit just bit me!"
"Girl, even if it had a mouth or stinger, I highly doubt-" She means psychically, Aaron. And if you'd regarded what I've been telling you for the past half-hour or so to have any semblance of value, you would have paid attention when I told you that this 'harmless' creature effortlessly destroyed a roomful of minds!
Never having attempted to devour a truly sentient equal before, Nizzo was frightened to find that this-female-one-of-criticism did not in fact die, but rather painfully repelled his mental 'straw' with the normal defenses offered by a thoughtful consciousness. He recoiled and silenced his mental broadcast, waiting cautiously for the predator's next move.
Freefall slammed herself and Aaron's way out of the heavy crate pile with some hard headbutts, trying to silence the buzzing migraine induced by Nizzo's failed attempt at swallowing her mind.
"Well, whatever you did managed to shut it up. Everyone wins!" Tschichold strolled over to the heavy cargo bay door, finding a nice circular canvas that he hadn't covered in echoes of sea life and weird jellyfish.
"Alright, see: super-psychic jellyfish. Now that makes more sense in a battle to the death. Got this sense that he considered what he was doing 'eating', too; better be careful not to piss it off or it'll start trapping the minds of a city 'bout round two or three, grows to enormous fucking size, we'd have to beat the shit out of it to turn everyone back to normal..."
Freefall pulled Aaron with her out of the nasty gap she'd made between two crates. Headache aside, she was almost thankful for the distraction from the thought of tasers. Keep it together, you're a hero: you're right, you're awesome, and you're pretty much fucking invincible. Insta-vulnerable electric shocks aside... Aaron, however, cast a suspicious glance over at Nizzo's oddly quiet plastic holding cell.
So, do you finally accept that this 'Nizzo' is a serious liability?
"Relax, I'll just stay the hell away from the jellyfish for now. I was never that good with animals. ...and nobody say anything about his eggs, alright? Alright."
The psychic creature allowed himself to relax a bit at her metaphorical retreat, tuning his broadcasts up to relatively quiet levels. His vaguely frightened wariness regarding this-female-one-of-criticism continued, bouncing somewhat audibly between his occasional telepathic questions.
His rare flirt with radio silence, however, hadn't gone unnoticed. The pair of heavily-armed copyright agents covering the cargo bay doors had ignored the noisy bruiser of a girl's typical banging, but the fish doing anything other than shoving oblivious nonsense into everyone's heads was a dead giveaway that something was wrong. They hit a keycode that signaled a few beeps, then the whirr of heavy hydraulics, just as Tschichold was bringing his hands widely to bear in the center to top a nice mauve hill.
And each got a faceful of that mauve as his arms fell through the sudden gap.
"Wha- no no nonononono-"
Tschichold chased his artwork as it parted to either side of him, wet paint smearing and ruining their attempted conveyance as the door walls squeezed and retracted against the edges of their frame. When they finally stopped, he spent a second or two cursing blithely at the heavy futuristic contraption before noticing the pair of guards it had unveiled on the ground in front of him, twitching and hallucinating.
A pause, a glowing eye peering from paint-soaked black into their respective tacky future sunglasses and drooling mauve expressions. The wizard and hero behind him followed his gaze.
"......hey, you pricks just ruined my landscape- oh for crying out loud why am I yelling at dead guys I need to see a doctor. And maybe a tea shop. Some tea would really work right now."
Tea tasted like shit since it blended with his paint when he drank it, but it was almost a good consolation for lost work.
***
Pulsing, twisting arms of a nebula of static swirled near the epicenter of Galaxy Guardians, their expanse far more threatening in the claustrophobic reality that was this channel's narrow scope than they would be in the vast, occasionally canon-breaking universe the show attempted to convey.As the flagship of the series inched precariously closer to this maelstrom, a wispy arm would pass through the ship every few minutes, leaving it quaking subtly and its passengers' visions and senses clouded by a perturbing fog of black and white fuzz.
Those situated in the cargo-bay-cum-brig – however the brig itself got so full as to warrant alternative space – understood the intermittent fraying of reality, the buzzing of color and tingling graining of vision as a TV antenna not entirely disturbed from receptive position, perhaps better than the ship's typical occupants. However, everyone aboard the ESS Pyreness essentially got the gist of it.
They were running out of time.
"Would you mind putting a little more oomph into it? My wrists aren't that sore."
"Aight'. Got it."
Aaron and Freefall continued raking their bonds against a jagged corner the latter had squeezed out of a crate. The bonds quickly relented, and each wasted no time in their intended directions: Aaron heading to loose Change from a plastic prison, and Freefall strolling over to the silhouette busy painting the uniforms of a pair of intoxicated guards, cracking her knuckles.
Change fluttered out into the air, looking as irked as a school of currency can be. Miss, just what do you think you're doing?
"I'm gonna give Chuckles the Clown here what for."
Aaron turned to regard the girl and painter, and the decreasingly boring uniforms of the guards at one's feet and brush. "I don't think he actually killed them, if that's what you're concerned over."
"Didn't he just drive them terminally insane with poisonous psycho-paint? Fake TV-person or not, that's still a pretty horrible way to go–"
Tschichold took a look at the gurgling faces of agents too devoid of creativity to hallucinate anything even vaguely amusing, and promptly returned to his work. "Nah, the high lasts like fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour sometimes, I don't really keep track."
"...Oh."
Freefall glanced back at Aaron and Change, waiting for them to get caught up in argument over the psychic jelly they were freeing before putting her heel through each of the guards' discarded weapons. Don't want Team Scrooge going full Die-Hard again. But her attention quickly drifted back to the painter, who it seemed maybe had the ability to... no, now, wait a minute. This doesn't quite make sense.
"So this painting all over them like, lemme guess... Turns 'em into mind-controlled minions?"
"Lady, if I could control these bastards I'd have convinced them to wear something that maybe a postal worker wouldn't think was an excruciatingly boring uniform."
"Then what does the paint do?"
"It paints things! And gets you high, I guess, so it kind of sucks being covered in the fresh dripping stuff and not being able to see your fingers move in a straight line of baby goddamn blue. What, did they not have paint on your planet or– eugh." Tschischold had just gotten up and turned to... whatever the fuck that jumpsuit of hers was. Guess he was right.
"Let me get this straight. You drip LSD paint."
"Are you gonna start licking my paintings like acid stamps?! I have the right to refuse a sale, you know!"
"And you paint things. And that's it."
"Uh huh."
"Then how the hell did you get put in a battle to the death!?"
"Maybe I wasn't brought in as a contestant, you ever think of that? Maybe this was 'cause the one cultured producer out there looked at this battle line-up and thought, 'Gee, these crazy zombies and birds and suits of armor look like absolute shit! Let's find someone who actually knows what the word color means and throw him at them to keep our viewers from gouging out their eyes.' I mean, good christ–" ...Tschichold looked over the green (actually indigo) sterilized jumpsuit that even bulletholes and scorchmarks hadn't made look any less safe, the eagle emblem on the oh god that thing is a brand isn't it she looks like she belongs on a supermarket shelf... "–they probably saw my work and thought sweet jesus we need an expert like that I mean you look like the side of a can of off-brand peas holy cripes that's bad—"
The two continued to gaze in increasing horror at each other, Freefall's stare descending to Tschichold's midsection and gradually, gradually realizing that thick, gooey paint was the only barrier between his nether regions and the outside world.
"...Are you naked?!" She flinched back, her eyes ratcheting away to something less disturbing.
"Hey, I don't tell you how to live your life. Better being naked than wearing that... horrible THING, that parasite on your probably dull identity! Lemme just—"
Tschichold managed to put a thick, bright diagonal stripe of nigh-fluorescent yellow on her front before she batted his hand away (hard). She poked an accusing finger in his eye and looked as if she was about to ignite.
"This suit costs two-hundred-fucking-thousand dollars each." <font color="#814444">Oh god she's a materialist– "Y'know why? So it's light enough for me to fly without stripping down to my underwear. This one goddamn suit has to last me all the way to when we escape this battle. If it doesn't, I can't fly. And if I can't fly, I'll be spending plenty of time on the ground rearranging your face."</font>
"Fine, fine, we can go minimalist, sheesh. Just a broad stripe of—"
Freefall knocked his hand away again. "No extra weight, not an ounce. Paint in-fucking-cluded." "But if I just—" "No."
A green-coated fingertip (clawtip... brushtip??) ascended at a comically slow pace from Tschichold's side, heading up to Freefall's arm. His visible eye darted between his destination and her unamused expression, trying to discern just how close he can ge—
The ball of her palm connected with his temple, sending him sprawling to the ground, unconscious. Left a sticky bit of sunset orange on her right hand.
Aaron bolted around at the noise of painter-on-metal, swaddling a freshly-freed Nizzo in his arms. "What in blazes did you do that for?!"
"What? Look, Allen, I just—"
Miss Freefall, I can understand the defense of your valuable property, but that man mentioned a zombie, bird, and armor. You just incapacitated our only timely source of possibly vital—
Static swept through the ship again, nearly knocking them off their feet as it irresponsibly abused the Photoshop film grain filter on their vision.
It cleared after a few moments. The aurumancer regained his footing, trying to find a comfortable place for a squirming, frightened jellyfish-thing. "You just knocked him out! Weren't you just saying we need to get out together, you hypocrite?"
"It's fine, god! He'll only be out five minutes!"
"You don't know that!! And it's beside the point—"
"Actually yeah, I do know that, Goldilocks! He's a scrawny male, maybe a hundred-fourty pounds, and that was a clean hit. Five minutes. You can time it." Freefall smiled the defiant smile of a man who just found his missing car keys, oblivious to the fact that his house is burning down around him. It's an expression she wore fairly often.
Aaron took a deep, calming breath. I suggest you take charge, Change voiced none too quietly to him. Miss Freefall clearly does not understand the rapidly appreciating value of a swift escape.
"Oh, like I'm letting the psychopa—"
"No no, please lead the way, Freefall," Aaron remarked with a tired yet sudden grin, eyes fixed on the rapidly spreading puddle from the downed painter. "We should really get going. Oh, but would you mind carrying Tschichold along? I do believe my hands are full."
The girl's smug smirk vanished instantly.
In light of all he'd been through and the senseless murders he'd so recently committed, some of this nonsense seemed strangely comforting.