Aug 16 12:09:02 105 PA
From Chronicles
The current game time is: Sun Aug 16 12:09:02 105 PA.
Lunchtime at the arcade finds a cacophony of lights and sounds, ringing bells and buzzing buzzers, flashing flashers and blinking blinkers too, not to mention the canned and overenthusiastic cries of 'Ultra Crippler Mega-Damage Super Combo!' and things like that. It's a place to draw the young and the young of heart in Kingsdale, where twitchy Hyperion juicers rub shoulders with sly leather-clad cyberpunks in a spirited bout of D-Bee Dance Evolution GTX 4.
Rebekkah's here too, glittery earbuds dancing with internal pink lights to the beat of whatever music she's deafening herself with. She's armed with an oversized red plastic handcannon, regrettably tethered to one of the machines, and blasts away with reckless abandon at the stream of zombies, vampires and zombie-vampires that come at her on the screen.
Incoming is Minnie amid an additional quartet of city youths, slouching and shouldering their way through the entrance like a lazy avalanche of leather, chains, and limbs. Their numbers are comprised of two girls and three boys, and that in itself is a Super Gender Combo of Power, don'tcha know. Uneven pairing takes the pressure off by avoiding the double-date stigma. The females are certain of an overabundance of attention paid to their silly selves. And the boys? Well, they get a 66.6% chance of ending the evening with a good grope. Them's good odds. A few burbly guffaws point to a state of mild liquid intoxication for most, if not all, of the group, as they end up knotted behind Rebekkah to watch her rollicking solo mission against the Improbable Allies of Doom.
Heads explode and arbitrary numbers float up out of the carnage superimposed over the gratuitous blood and brain matter. There's a health kit in the tree! Rebekkah shoots it and, defying numerous laws of reality, is healed by doing so. Something winged and leathery and with lots of teeth swoops down and leaves a bloody bite mark on the screen. The gun bucks wildly in the girl's hand, her nerves are rattled as a dozen zombies all rise up at once and shamble towards her en masse. A bloody claw mark streaks across the screen, and then another. Continue? Apparently not. Rebekkah sighs and stuffs the toy gun into the holder on the cabinet and turns away from the game in disgust. That's when she notices she's gained an audience, and just in time to watch the Miserable Failure on Level Six. Her eyes skip from one face to the next, counting up her odds of ending the night with a grope, maybe, the irises bleeding their chrome-silver color and being replaced by vivid azure. She glazes over Minnie, then snaps back when recognition takes its sweet time coming to her. A tug on a wire pops one of the flashing buds from her ear and she gives the other girl a big smile. "Hey, graveyard girl!"
Minnie is buffeted around between her taller friends like a puppy caught underfoot at a rave, while the teens attempt to regroup into a loose semicircle along the demarcated perimeter of the shooting game. She pulls her hands up near her chin like a boxer (but not a Boxer puppy), and fends off stray waving arms and elbows, all the while trying to watch the mad skillz that Rebekkah employs against the twink-mob of zeds in order to...lose? A chorus of groans strays up from the audience, but it's mock-pain and suffering really. When the station is abandoned, two of the guys hustle forward to lay claim and then spend the next few minutes in earnest drunken debate over which one will be commandeering the Hero's garish red desert eagle, and who will ride shotgun on the Sidekick's eww-green Beretta. Minnie observes the ocular color shifts with the placid acceptance of a woozy person in a room of flashing lights, her brows perking higher as she and Rebekkah focus upon one another at roughly the same time. "Hey? O-right!" she fairly hollers over the din. Her left-over companions glance between the two, then drift over to join the other discussion.
The dangly earbud broadcasts little more than a tinny hissing sound at any distance other than right next to the eardrum, but Bek keeps her other ear flooded with the rich fullness of the sound while she tries to have a talk with Minnie. It's not doing her balance any favors and she leans her head and body both a little to the left unconsciously, but it helps her blend in with the drunk kids. "Thought the zombies got you!" she shouts, and leans down to get closer so the shouting can actually be heard.
"Hah! Nah!" Minnie's lips curl back tight over her big grin. If Rebekkah only knew how many times Minnie was able to play the 'kung-fu zombie' card after that chance encounter in the cemetery...well, maybe not a *lot*, but let's just say there's a gaunt Japanese guy out there who thinks Minnie quite an odd, misinformed lass. "Turns out they were really just riftees from th'Itchy Province," she relays, passing around a little more ignorance. "Hamahama-sanwich, r'whatever, he's gotta farm'n'crap. Sells veg when he's not chopping bodies'n th'boneyard." How weird is that? she communicates the query with a cross-eyed shrug. "Y'one'f 'Liza's mates?"
"Huh?" Bek yells incomprehendingly. The shake of her head, complete with shimmering black ponytail doing the jitterbug against her back, gets the rest of the point across. She reaches for Minnie's elbow with the intent of leading her through the place to the little counter where people get to trade in tickets for kitchy plastic doodads and cheap Black Market electronics. "I'm not anyone's mate," she tries to explain on the way. "Single!"
Minnie eyes the hissy earbud distractedly while unconsciously craning forward a little to look up into Rebekkah's slight stoop. Must be used to being manhandled to a certain extent, since she goes along to the counter without even a flinch in the taller girl's grasp. Behind them, the roles have been sorted out between the two young men, and the game is now poking along at Stage One: Slow-Ass Undead and Annoying Bats. They're having a blast though, bless their dear tipsy hearts. "Not mate...*mate*!" Minnie amends, again applying a strange pronunciation to the word so that it comes out more like "mite". "Means pal, n'another language!" Not quite, Minnie. And stop mangling Janus's quaint accent while you're at it. "Like 'Liza's *my* mite! I'm Minnie." She tries out a lower pitch now that they're out of the main arcade.
It's a little quieter here; quiet enough for people to talk without having to shout and maybe even be heard. It's actually pretty nice. "I'm Bek." Her introduction comes with a friendly and open smile and another flicker-quick color change of her eyes from bright blue to warm gold. "Is Liza the girl with the metal hands? I thought the zombies ate her too, after I left. I felt bad, disturbing her with her dad like that. Is she okay?" Rapid-fire, thoughts and questions barrel out of the girl and she scans Minnie's face for an answer immediately after each one.
"E-liza." The short girl makes the effort to enunciate so Rebekkah can get it right the next time, while her gaze sharpens and focuses on those crazy peepers as she finally clues in. What th-? Again...again! She watches like she's about to pounce. The remarks wash over her, lips parting with no sound, until it seems safe to address whatever one she happens to remember first, attention fading back from Bek's eyes so she can think. "Not just hands, all th'way up t'here!" Minnie enthuses, crossing her forearms and brushing both hands up the opposite limbs to right above the elbow joints. "They're super-go-go. N'Eliza's doin' dandy 'nough, too. Bek...so that was'r dad? Whaow, so he's a ghostie," she pauses to consider that somberly.
Rebekkah nods excitedly and her eyes widen for emphasis, but they fail to give up the goods by displaying another color change. "That's what she said, she was out there visiting or whatever. And then the kung-fu guys showed up and made it all weird, like... pfffft." She rolls her eyes, smoothly changing from nodding to shaking her head at the speed of thought. Those wacky kung-fu guys. "But she's okay too? That's good. She didn't like it when you tripped her, was she going to really shoot you?"
Minnie's eyes go big and, um, pleased. "She was? Coool." And she pauses to think back on the super-fast moment. Then with a sigh: "Nah. She would never." The girl's gaze returns to the now, and moves back to pinpoint on Bek's eyes again. "Anyways, we both live down at the Budgie...I mean, Cheapo. An' so does Kid, she's nifty too. So't's not so much a crap place, now that y'think'bout't. Body should spend th'cred'n fix't'up seein's how't's got some choice resi's-...BOO!" And so the rambling is suddenly and a little inexplicably punctuated by that impulsive yelp. All through out the mindless prattle, half of Minnie's mental resources were elsewhere, pondering the eyes with a swelling curiosity that eventually burst.
It works. Bam! Those eyes flare big and brilliant blue again and poor Bek sucks in a quick gasp as she coils back away from Minnie. A railgun-chattering chain of what -must- be curses in some foreign language pour from her pouty lips and she stares at the other girl with an almost wounded expression. "What was that for? Why are you always scaring people like that? It's not nice." She huffs, tosses her head, and finally decide to shut off the little player clipped to her belt and make the flashing earbuds go abruptly silent and dark. The blue in her eyes doesn't last long; a deep ruby red spirals in to take its place. Lucky Minnie, she got a two-for.
The Cheshire smile that curls the corners of Minnie's lips up is ruthlessly smug, and yet, innocently so as well. "That is soooo hot," she replies bluntly, without any further hint other than her own always-hazel eyes' unerring focus. But surely Rebekkah is aware of her own abilities as to need no explanation? "I'm small...like dyno-mite. Sometimes gotta go boom t'make sure bodies're listenin'," she explains with the smile mellowing out into something a little wistful. "S'Mum used t'say." Still kind of oblivious to the idea that she might have really flunked out in the Make A New Friend game here in the arcade's corner, she drifts in a moment or three of homesickness.
"Is she up in the graveyard with Eeeee-liza's dad?" Bek asks, and in some form of logic it makes perfect sense. Minnie had to be up there that night for a reason too, right? She doesn't allow for a lot of time for an answer, though. "My mom never had anything fun like that for me. She's always so serious." She draws her face down lengthwise in the tried and true theatrical representation of a serious face. Then she breaks into a sudden peal of laughter, shattering any serious pretensions. "Oh, she would -kill- me if she saw me goofing off in here right now. Zot, I probably -should- get serious and get to work or something."
Minnie's name is shouted in staggered chorus from the game machines. Her original group has since migrated over to a 4-seater racing game, and apparently her little butt needs to get strapped into one of the VR-lounge seats. "Zot?" echoes Minnie bemusedly, while briefly blanching a little at the thought of *anyone*'s mother coming in here. Because Mom Is God. "Zot. Well I gotta motor anyway," she says, hitching a thumb towards the arcade. "Don't have t'work 'til t'night. Catch y'later, Bek?"
Somewhere in there Bek's eyes mutated down to a rich mahogany brown that's noteworthy only because it's so normal compared to every other shade she's displayed. She slides deft fingers down the loose length of wire hanging down from near her jaw until she finds the bud at the end, which is carefully planted anew in her ear. A nod to answer Minnie's question, a flash of a cheerful smile making it more than mere politeness. "I might be bartending at the Nut 'n' Bolt soon. Bring your friends in sometime, it'll be glitz." A thumb presses Play, her ears erupt with noise and a mini laser light show all in pink, and the rest of the world takes a back seat.
Location:Kingsdale - Monkey Business Tags:minnie, rebekkah
