ArchivedLogs:Laws of the Land

Laws of the Land
Dramatis Personae Masque, Jim
In Absentia	2013-07-16 The inevitable follow up to Murphy's visit.
Location <MOR> Welcome to the Freakshow
Wider and more spacious than many of the surrounding nooks and niches, this chill cavern is the central hub of the Morlock's underground network. With tunnels branching off in many directions, it takes a while to learn to /navigate/ from here to where you want to go, but there's generally plenty of more experienced people around to teach newcomers the ins and outs of the pathways. Here, though, is a safe place to come and relax, for what value of relaxation can be found among moss-covered walls and the occasional stagnant puddles on the floor. There's been furniture brought in, a mismatched assortment of crates, mattresses with busted springs, a few broken and subsequently repaired chairs, a folding table in a corner. Shelves along a wall hold entertainment; books, a smattering of board and card games, sometimes snacks. There's even electricity, wiring none too safe and visible in places where the wall has been broken open; the naked light bulbs flicker often and the lone outlet has had so many power strips attached it is undoubtedly a fire hazard. Time is all relative down here in the tunnels. Towards the hub of the Morlock domain, there's something /more/ of a suggestion that it's evening, or the approximate consensus of one, with snoozing mostly humanoid shapes draped on dragged-down mattresses or piles of blankets, cardboard sections. Some have dispersed to adjoining tunnels, slumped shapes leaning in shadows. And then, there's further. Jim has taken the southern tunnels for his evening shift - marked by the tell tale rush of suddenly /green/ smells from leaves rapid-growing in a very short amount of time. Slumped against the wall, Jim resembles on first glance a compacted and doubled over stubborn root, or a fat gnarly vine, grown fastened to a rough mortar wall. A closer look sees arms, crossed against his chest, a semi-separation between his legs, molded together in a tangle at the feet, sticking out from below the hem of his Whomping Willow kilt. He's partially obscured further by the thick rustly leaves of kudzu, expanding out from him like threads of a spider web, reaching far, far up the throat of the tunnel. A stranger passing in these tunnels wouldn't likely even notice him slumped there in the dark, where treading feet over his leaves would rouse his attention. But - for now. His eyes are closed. Unbreathing, unmoving, just another plant grows in the sewers beneath New York. A less than pleasant end to a confrontation earlier (though it could have been much worse, still), has seen to it that Masque's been absent for the remainder of the day. It's only now, when all is quiet and many of the residents of the tunnels appear to have either taken to sleep or moved themselves elsewhere, that he returns. Where from? Who knows. But where he's going is easier to figure out, seeing as he's not exactly the dilly-dallyin' kind. Drip drops of moisture slip down from the darkened sides and back of the older Morlock's coat every few seconds, a souvenir from patrols. It'll dry soon enough, with some of the summer heat making it through even in these tunnels. Masque's moving along, steps not quite his usual shuffle drag but instead a more calculated affair, though his face does little to hint at the fact that he's putting any effort into it. Stepping over stray roots and reaching little bits of green like a spider maneuvering calmly, /boredly/ past the corpses of its kin. To get where? Masque stops in his tracks in front of the gnarled root of a person just long enough to discern its shape properly, before promptly taking the last few steps over - careful to let his heavy boots fall on as little plant matter as possible - before reaching STRAIGHT for those crossed arms, fingers and thumbs sliding from their tops to the sides and onto where they're resting, dragging with them as much of the planty flesh as he can gather to attempt to graft them straight fucking down. Hello again, Jimmy. Jim's eyes snap open, instantly alarmed for the moment his brain kickstarts from plant-base to the mayfly mammal-awareness with all its adrenaline and instinct - bizarrely there's not a lot of shock to come with it. Because before him is Masque, and the familiar sensation of skin warping, sliding out of place, and without a pause for consideration in his blank wide-eyed stare, he /SLAMS/ his forehead down into Masque's face. And with how adamant as Masque is to keep leaning in close to mangle as much of that root-looking flesh into one another, the headbutt meets its target with ease. His head turns away from the action, but not until after his oft-broken nose has suffered another crackle and twist sideways of Jim's head colliding with it. Masque's prey is relinquished and he stumbles back in a flurry of red coat and a new kind of drops joining the previous trail of wetness on the floor- blood streaming from his nose and both hands lift to his face under his hood, as though to catch the precious liquid where he stands, hunched over and hissing out an incoherent curse. An ominous rustling, a rushing slither of rapid movement, and Masque's ankles, then calves, then his knees all find their movements restricted. In length by length, individual kudzu vines don't tend to form thick stocks or stems, but en /mass/ they twist and twine around one another, knot and link and then separate, washing up Masque like a fast-motion green /wave/ of pretty round leaves. Jim in the meantime is cursing and hissing as well, "-fucking /cunt/-ass old man." His crossed arms have gotten a lot more /crossed/, deep finger-marks dragging them together like fork tine impressions passing through pie crust, and he's just - reflexively /biting/ at these points, struggling with hard yanks to /separate/ them with crunches of treebark stripping away under his teeth. Though there's a reflexive swipe and tear when the vines and leaves start to blanket him, Masque doesn't appear to exert much effort beyond that. It's an inconvenience, but he doesn't look overly /surprised/ at this development of having been trapped where he stands. "Morning, sunshine." He twists and twitches to face Jim from his green little spot. His next words are /spat/ out with venom in his tone, his breath sending droplets and splatters of red past crooked lips and hands onto the complementary colours of the newly appeared leaves. "... Got yourself in a bit of /trouble/?" "What the /fuck/!" Jim spits right BACK, /tree bark/ gripped in his teeth, slumps against the wall for balance as he continues to try and rip his arms /free/. He's rapidly pulling in his roots to regain legs, which does nothing to pull in the vines that only continue to thicken and bind Masque's legs, climbing up his coat as well. They'll have his waist, soon. Jim doesn't seem to even have any visible investment in this invasion, uttering with a sudden /wounded/ inability to handle idioms, "It's not even FUCKING MORNING." Masque just sort of stands, as though the vines were instead a bunch of determined children latching onto him- as if he doesn't quite know what to DO with them, but he doesn't look convinced of the fact that they'll stick around long enough for it to matter, either. Jim is thrown nothing but the deadest of stares, as though he's fallen asleep right then and there. Only then does he speak - just two words, dry like month old sunbaked roadkill. "You done?" "Almost." Jim says down to his arms, dragging up the answer like fingernails digging through mud. He bites down on his arm and /snarls/, possibly in pain for /biting/ himself, and then just- drops back more firmly against the wall, the back of his shoulders propped, heels dug into the ground. The back of his head thunks against the wall soon after, panting. "--ok." He says through his teeth. But not until he's made a brief 'pthu' sound to get bark-grit out of his mouth. "I'm done." Hff. /Hff/. ... Hmh. Masque continues watch Jim, unmoving, bad posture and leaves and vines and all, blood still trickling down his face and through his teeth and down his chin with nary but an occasional twitch of his eyelids denoting the fact that the source must actually, truly hurt. The center of his face's getting used to punishment, it seems. "You can have 'em back," He grates, his displeasure much more evident in his guttural excuse for a voice than his body language, ruined as it is by years of defaulting to contempt for all things that be, "when you've convinced me you know when to use 'em." Jim /sort of/ laughs. A laugh that conveys 'oh my fucking god he IS doing this', his head still dropped back. Just. Ggh. Propped there. Thump. Thump. He's bouncing the back of his skull on the wall. "I'll give you /this/, Masque." He tug-tug-/strains/, grinding down his jaw with a snarl forming to either side of his nose as skin strains /against/ being torn. Sssss. THUMP. "You got grudges down to a god damn /art/." Nhah. Hah. Grimace. "Ain't got /many/ hobbies." But it's implied that perhaps holding grudges is one of them. Watching Jim and his organic straight-jacket gets boring, apparently, because Masque's head lowers to a point of where his coat's hood allows his face to slip into darkness. Both bloodied hands lower idly to his sides. His tone of voice continues to grow more disdainful, as if the look of the plant life below and around him inspires yet newer levels of hatred. A calm, seething sort. "Question is," He spits out, into the vines - who cares, a thick mix of saliva and blood, "without a collar, without them, without the clubs and when you ain't got the luxury of not havin' to make your own decision. Whaddya do now?" "Get really fuckin' /pissed/, to start." Jim has nothing better to do than slowly /roll his head/ around against the wall while glaring at the ceiling. Now that he's fully awake, grinding down his teeth and still reflexively seeking to /tear/ himself loose of... himself. God. Dammit. He's also reeling in what counts as reflexive defenses. Tight, fresh /green/ grip of the vines claiming Masque's lower half grow frail, withering up and drain of their vibrant green color, beginning to curl and dry. Like Masque is made of /plant poison/. Fleeeee. "You tellin' me just to sit back an' let you do whatever you want?" It's not actually - angry. Just kind of flat-grim, his blue eyes, faded, dead-hard but present, sane, dropping down to watch the old bastard at his work. Masque does not rush to move away from his spot, does not brush down his coat for any stragglers around his legs or feet. No, he simply waits. Right where he damn well is. "This ain't about wantin', Jimmy." /Now/ he moves, stalking slowly away while lifting a hand to his own head to push the hood back, so he can curl a hand around the collar of his coat and pull it forward to peer down into it. Bled all over himself again, tch. His nose wrinkles. "Some fuck comes down here, threatenin' to put us at risk with /his/ plan for /his/ people." He lifts his left hand to drag it across his face, perhaps in an attempt to wipe some blood away. He just ends up spreading it further across his cheek, however. "You ain't been taken and forced to enjoy your fistfight-filled vacation, you'd still be /them/." Hauling himself away from the wall, Jim lumbers along beside Masque, his arm-melted position forcing a slump-shouldered posture into his heavy-built frame. From a distance, next to Masque's shuffling shape, it has the appearance of someone woeful, insecure. HUGGING himself. Save that his face is fixed more sour, the straight jacket mental-patient look accentuated with his overgrown lank trucker-hair fallen forward and caught up his eyebrows to one side. After one attempted twitch of his head to dislodge it, he just gives it up. "That little /vay-cay/'s how your pasty ass got back down here too, buddy," pff-ffffh, okay, he does /blow/ at the hank of dirty gray hair. It flops up, then flops back down again. In /pieces/. His grainy shovel-through-dirt voice chuffs flat, eyes directed forward, but there's a long lingering silence that hangs around with his brows furrowed. No one does deep thought quite like a tree. "He's the guy, y'know." He mutters instead, blandly. "That found us all, down there." There are so many answers one could give in response to that factoid. Masque's choice? "So /what/." It's the most rhetorical of whats, that much is made clear by his sidelong glance at Jim, from just under the rim of his hood, as if to check that the other man's absolutely serious in thinking that bringing this up would even make a /difference/. When he looks ahead again, it's with another reach for his own face. This time with his fingers trailing a careful path down from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. "Give or take a- /disagreement/ or three," chrk, goes his nose unpleasantly, and his bloodied hand drops by his side again, "been here since my back was straight, my teeth were white and I could still smell the fucking difference between sewage and summer rain. It's been a long. Fucking. Time. You NOR him've proven yourselves yet." Simple as that. Though it is fair to assume he probably wouldn't be sharing this while wandering along with with Murphy. Jim ships Masque a bulging side-eye - the eye on the farther side squints down to balance it out in a stinky wink. Pondering, maybe, beneath all the deep dirt and scratchy bark of his mind what a /young Masque/ might look like, under all the ugly years layered up since, "-How long've the fuckin' Morlocks been /staying/ down here?" Bah, if Jim /had/ a hand he'd be waving it. "You're getting me wrong anyway. I'm not /selling/ him t'you, I'm telling you - that's the fucking kinda guy he is, when he gets his head up his ass. Rearranging his ugly face would just make him wanna come on harder. I been up there. That only means I /know/ these people." There are likely many lessons James Morgan should have learned by now, in his life. And he seems to take a person pride in applying none of them. He hastens his pace only long enough to slip to the side and turn, his arms fastened snug to his chest, and stops in Masque's way. It's where you go, apparently, when you want to seek eye contact, head dipping down like Masque will have to literally butt /heads/ if he keeps coming forwards. Heels dig in. "And you're not /using/ that." If that first question was ever going to receive an answer, Jim ruins his chance of getting it by moving where he does. Butting heads almost seems imminent right up until the point that it suddenly does not, and by the time Masque stops, he does so with bared teeth (and bared gaps where teeth really should be) and a very, /very/ calm inhale and subsequent exhale. As though a single one of Jim's movements beyond this point might actually cause his head to split clear in two. Even the less functional, hanging eyelid on the left side of his partially caved in face gives a violent little twitch. Breathe, Masque. "Jim." The name is spoken loud and clear, almost /clean/ - despite its source. The next words do decidedly more to match the face they're coming out of, caked in blood and slow oncoming swelling and /broken/. "You're gonna give what you just said some thought. And then you're gonna remember that you've tried to stop me from doin' something before. And then, you're going to fuck back off into a dark corner." He reaches out a hand toward Jim, almost close enough to brush past his disfigured arms, to reach long fingers for a shoulder. No violence. No maiming. Not even a tight grip. Just sort of... pat. And a dead stare straight into Jim's eyes plus a gentle reminder of his cold hand to move. The fuck. Aside. Jim's shoulder is a hard solid stump; there's no rough texture to suggest defensive foliage, just stubborn base Jim-ness that stays right where it is when patted. Head still lowered like a bull, it falls into, eventually, a slow shaking back and forth. "Masque, man." It sounds almost like /masked man/! Except without any enthusiasm. Nor even anger. Just flat. It sets off a chain reaction that slowly rotates his body like a door on a hinge, rotating just enough that Masque can continue his forward hobble. He stars at the wall as this happens. And hisses softly. "Masque." He turns to walk in the opposite direction, embracing himself and stooping forward to compensate his balance. And growls low. "Don't think I'm not hearing you." And then he's off.