Logs:In Which Some Humans Make A Considerable Fuss Over A Basketball Court, And Then Bruce Makes An Even Bigger One

In Which Some Humans Make A Considerable Fuss Over A Basketball Court, And Then Bruce Makes An Even Bigger One
cw: mild violence, hate crimes, implied racist slur
Dramatis Personae Bruce, Taylor, Hulk
In Absentia	2019-05-28 "/Man/, you couldn't have /led/ with that?"
Location NYC - Tompkins Square Park
Small but popular, this tree-lined park is a perfect centerpiece to the eclectic neighborhood it resides in. Home to a number of playgrounds and courts from handball to basketball, it also houses a dog park and chess tables, providing excellent space for people watching -- especially during its frequent and often eccentric festivals, from Wigstock to its yearly Allen Ginsberg tribute Howl festival. It's been a muggy day, but a cooler evening -- pleasant, even, for a brief stretch though there are thunderstorms looming in the near future. For the moment in the short spell between sweltering daytime and the promise of a soaking-wet night, Taylor has been taking advantage of the outdoors. Out on the basketball courts with several friends, though the neighboring court is free and the park is crowded right now nobody has seen fit juuust yet to actually move in and /use/ the space. Possibly this has more than a little bit to do with Taylor himself, who -- shirtless, in sneakers and black and grey basketball shorts, is drawing a /lot/ of stares that run a gamut from repulsed to aghast. He's shed his bandaging, recently, a peppering of waxy scarring mostly-but-not-quite healed along his /bony/ arms. His myriad /other/ limbs, normally a spectacle all to themselves, are still in the process of regrowing, a sight which is drawing even more than their usual level of horror. Variable in length -- one longer but skinnier here, a stubby thick handspan there -- their skin is paler and shinier than the rest of his onyx-black, still showing through slightly blue in places. Occasionally they twitch and spasm rather independently from his own volition. It gives him overall more resemblance to some kind of alien sea slug than his usual cephalopod self. No doubt he's /noticed/ plenty of the stares (and the thoughts that go with them) but, as his game wraps up and he bids his friends goodbye, goes to reclaim his water bottle and tee shirt from the side of the court, he's doing a passable job of ignoring them. Takes a long swig of water, mops his face with his shirt. Rolls his broad-muscled shoulders (which, regrettably, causes another spasm of several of the stumpy ill-formed arms) as he heads for the court gate. Bruce wanders the winding tree-lined paths of the iconic park, looking pleased and at peace with the world. He blends in rather well here, just another non-descript white professional out for an evening walk in a moss green dress shirt, khakis, and brown brogues. His thoughts are a complex weaving dance of many streams: an analysis of the complexities of sunset colors, idle musing on whether he wants supper just yet, a running commentary on the many adorable dogs about, and the melodic strains of "You Will Be Found" from /Dear Evan Hansen./ These harmoniously arrayed mental processes twist up into a painful snarl, however, when Taylor steps out into Bruce's path. He steps in his tracks, mouth falling open, the panic rising in him as much from being overstimulated by the pileup of his own suddenly disordered thoughts as any actual fear of violence from Taylor. Taylor is in the awkward and seemingly uncomfortable process of his shirt on (it reads BLACK LIVES MATTER in all caps, the I and MATTER written in red in contrast to the rest of the white lettering) with a wince, a bit of shimmying, a bit of wriggling, only some of his arms managing to actually poke through the holes cut in it for this purpose. He grimaces once he's completed this ordeal, only then looking up at Bruce with a widening of his greyish eyes. One of the smaller arms twitches abortively up towards his head. "Hey, sorry. I, uh --" He shakes his head, sidestepping with a small shake of his head and a swig from his water bottle. "Didn't see you there." While Bruce is busy gawping at Taylor, a pair of young white men in athletic clothes who had been hovering nearby approach them. They are both eager to give Taylor a piece of their minds and possibly fists, offended that /their/ park should have to be polluted with his vile presence. "Motherfucker /finally/ stop hogging the court and now he just harassing people," says the bigger of the two, who is for some reason wearing a do-rag. He's carrying a basketball and spinning it idly one one hand against the opposing palm. His companion, rangier in build and sporting uneven, patchy facial hair, circles around to flank Taylor. "Man, this joint /nasty/ up in here! This freak is like, made of /tumors/ or some shit." Bruce's mouth is still working soundlessly, his thoughts still tangled up in a deeply unpleasant deadlock. He's trying to /do/ something, but it's very hard to tell /what/ until he shoves both hands into his pockets, the left one closing around--a string of beads. The touch of the beads, polished smooth yet distinctly textured, grounds him instantly, and a new thought stream springs into being: a Sanskrit mantra, simple and regular with a rhythm like slow-moving water, coaxing the scattered processes back into motion. Bruce draws a deep breath and nods once. His other hand comes out of his right pocket and pushes his glasses up so that they focus right and he sees Taylor /properly/ for the first time. "S-sorry," he blurts. "I was just--a bit--" He doesn't quite get to the word "startled' before the non-ball-playing interlopers arrive. The thought streams that had just begun to establish their spiraling orbits around the Heart Mantra go shaky again, struggling to adjust to the addition of a threat assessment process for the newcomers. Sweat beads on Bruce's forehead. 'This joint,' Taylor mouths this with a lift of eyebrows. /Eying/ the bigger man's durag, shaking his head with a small chuff. "Yeah, uh -- dudes. Court's all yours. Knock yourselves out." He gestures with his water bottle back towards the court (a sprinkle of water splattering out towards the other men and the ground alike as he does so.) He swigs at the bottle after this, squirting a little into his hand and splashing it on the back of his neck. "S'all good," he says to Bruce, his smile a bit thin. "I'm kind of used to it. They're just arms, though. Not, uh. Tumors." "Don't spray us with that nasty shit, dog!" cries the scruffy guy, jumping back a step, when Taylor's water splashes him. << That shit just don't look right! >> "/Arms?/ The fuck kind of /arms/ are those?" Du-rag recoils, face contorting with disgust. << Shit, is mutantanity /contagious/? >> The fear behind this thought spins out rapidly into an impulse that he acts upon before it's clearly delineated in his mind. He flings the basketball hard at one of Taylor's stubbier, more tender-looking appendages. Scruffy might have been thinking of retreat before, but the moment his buddy commits to violence, he's down. He rushes in and tackles Taylor from the side, trying to drive him up against the chain-link fence delineating the ball court. If Bruce was struggling inwardly to keep calm before, he's /thrashing/ now. "H-hey," he stutters softly when the larger man hurls his ball at Taylor. "Stop that!" comes out even quieter as his thought streams spin off into chaos, his chanting lost in the noise. Panic /does/ overtake him, now. There's a weird sort of mental /pressure/ behind his frantic conscious thoughts, a sense of something rising up, /pushing/ out from some part of him that doesn't correspond to any physical location. << Oh no oh no oh no I have to get away-- >> Taylor hisses, several of the stumps twitching when the basketball comes at him. His eyes widen, and he braces as the scruffy man comes toward him. << Mutancy is /hella/ contagious, assholes. >> shoots back into the minds of both the wannabe gangsters. The chain links rattle as he's pushed back against them -- where two of his smaller arms have scraped against the metal, droplets of dark blue blood well up. Truncated though he may be Taylor does, still, though, have the use of at least /two/ of his arms. One of his hands has curled into a fist -- which is driving hard towards the lower edge of Scruffy's ribs. "Get the hell off me." Once his initial momentum and the element of surprise is spent, Scruffy is no match for Taylor's strength. The fist catches him squarely in the ribs, knocking the air from his lungs in a startled "Hrrrrng." His eyes slide over the sight of the blood drawn from Taylor's half-regrown arms, but the weirdness doesn't quite register against the backdrop of pain and shock. Du-rag wades into the fight a bit more cautiously than his fellow, his eyes focusing with a wave of nausea on the /blue/ blood smeared against the fence where Taylor scraped against it. "Shit Ed, did you /hear/ that?" He's terrified, but also ashamed of leaving his much smaller companion to fight the freak alone. Finally he overcomes his revulsion and comes in with an uppercut aimed at Taylor's jaw. Bruce's mindscape has tumbled into utter pandemonium as the fight breaks out in earnest. He screams at his body wordlessly to run away, get away, /turn/ away, even, but he seems frozen in place. Absurdly, the most coherent stream of thought he still has is the broken fragments of song surfacing between surges of overstimulation. << Even when the dark comes crashing through, when you need a friend to carry you... >> The pressure builds and builds, and his awareness starts to fall away--inward. There is pain, but it registers only distantly, the sickening sense of his muscles and bones /rearranging/ in ways they were surely not meant to do. The /something else/ rising out of him is also an awareness--a /mind/. It is only half-awake as yet, confused, frightened, but completely clear in its determination to /protect/. << ...when you're broken on the ground, you will be found. >> Bruce cries out, and so does the other mind, momentarily struggling for control of the body's sensory and motor sensors, then winning handily. The changes come /fast/ after that: bones lengthening, muscles expanding, skin turning deep emerald green. His clothes split open as his body doubles, triples, quadruples in mass. When the enormous humanoid creature standing where Bruce had mere seconds ago draws breath to cry out again, the voice is deep, sonorous, nearly palpable in its power--not a scream but a /roar./ One of Taylor's arms twitches, to no avail. His head turns sharply with the blow, the fence rattling again. He catches himself a moment later, pushing off the fence to -- -- Probably he /would/ have struck at Durag, but the tumult coming from where Bruce had been catches him off guard again. His fists drop to his sides, his eyes wide and shoulders tensed. There's a moment when he backs up -- back pressing to the fence again with another smear of blood. But then gradually, gradually eases, a smile making its way crooked across his face as he squares back up, more confident in his stance as he raises his fists again. Lifts a chin to the giant green creature. "/Man/, you couldn't have /led/ with that?" Durag, aglow with triumph, has just wound his arm back for another punch at Taylor's face when the roar stops him short. He turns around with horror-film slowness, eyes widening and mouth dropping open when his eyes take in the roaring green monster. Whatever other thoughts he had spinning through his head, they've dissolved into wordless panic. He's not the only one. Scruffy is loosing a steady stream of nonsensical invectives beside him, pulling out a /switchblade/ of all things from a pocket of his shorts and flicking it open, little though he actually expects the 3-inch knife to protect him against /whatever that is./ Other joggers and pedestrians nearby also stopped initially, a few approaching but coming up short of actually interfering, but now all of them are backing away. Most are /running/, but some have retreated to what they consider a safe distance to film the scene with their cameras. Nearly all are terrified, though, and think that Taylor and Bruce are the aggressors. A few are dialing 911. The Hulk -- yes, even in their terror and confusion, they think of themselves as "Hulk" -- roars again and reaches out to swat Durag away from Taylor. They hardly have to /reach/, actually. Hardly have to exert much force at all. Durag goes tumbling away into the grassy lawn to one side of the trail. "NO KNIFE!" Hulk bellows at Scruffy. Taylor lowers his fists again. Slow. Brows hiking up at the /ease/ with which the man in front of him goes tumbling. "Hey," he says, swallowing, "man, thanks. I really appreciate the backup. I think we ought to go. There's gonna be mad cops here soon." In the midst of his own panic, Scruff has a brilliant idea. << He'll back down if I got his friend! >> He acts on it in nearly the same instant, waving the knife up in the general direction of Taylor's face once he has let his guard down. "Yo 420, you better chill the fuck out or Imma cut this ni--" Hulk's immense brows wrinkle at Taylor's statement. "MAD COPS SHOOT GUNS!" they declare, their memory registering in fragmentary flashes of bullets striking their immense chest, though probably no one else but Taylor would guess there was any /fear/ behind those words. Their pale green eyes go huge when Scruffy turns the knife on Taylor, though, and they lunge forward, smacking the weapon from Scruffy's hand--though it's not a /precise/ operation by any means, given their strength and size, likely to snap the man's arm in the process. "HULK NO LIKE COPS!" they continue, as if Scruff hadn't just attempted to /stab Taylor in the face./ There's a moment when Taylor has frozen -- eyes narrowed, body tensed, he looks entirely more furious than frightened despite the knife that was just pulled on him. He shakes his head deliberately, jaw clenched when he looks away from Scruffy -- eyes still narrowed -- and up at Hulk. "I hate cops too, man. I don't want to be here when they come. Come on, yeah? Let's go?" He gives Scruffy one last look before snagging the water bottle that he dropped earlier and moving away from the court to nod toward the street. Scruffy's knife does, indeed, go flying off into the bushes. Scruff's forearm also makes an /audible/ crack where Hulk dealt it a mere glancing blow, and he clutches it to his abdomen, loosing a shriek of agony. The pain, too, dominates his thoughts, now, and he scrambles back away from both Taylor /and/ Hulk. Apparently the approaching police aren't reassuring /enough/ for the bravely lingering onlookers, many of whom had fled when Hulk dispatched Durag. The rest are also scattering now, even as the flashing lights of the police cars start glinting off the glass along Avenue A. The Hulk, for all their strength and terror and loud, single-minded desire to make sure no one can hurt them--and, evidently, Taylor--ducks their head slightly at the explanation. "FINE, HULK GO," they grumble, though even this is booming by human standards, as they lope after Taylor, startlingly fast for such a ponderous being.