ArchivedLogs:If You Give A Mouse A Cookie

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie
Happy Birthday, Masque!
Dramatis Personae Masque, Jim, Hive
In Absentia	2013-03-13 It's almost win-win for everybody (except the mangling, shooting, stabbing, battery and kidnapping!)
Location <NYC> 214 {Jim} - Sunrise Apartments - Clinton
Jim's apartment is not big, the living room area L-shaped with the entrance at one end and a kitchenette found at the other. Furnished by a scuffed wooden curb-found coffee table, a saggy green couch upholstered in a scratchy burlap material and two chairs, the habitat manages to just barely function as a one bedroom rather than a studio by merit of a walk-in closet sized bedroom you would have to cross through to reach his cramped bathroom. In here, water damage stains the walls. As does rust, around the showerhead in the cramped shower stall. Jim has taken his damn time getting around to following Dr. Hive's orders, sitting back on his sunken hobo couch with his feet up and his squished arm in his lap. He's stopped trying to grow and shape singularly and at the moment has split twain a set of rather slender sapling-soft branches that fork off rather neatly where the radius and ulna bones of his forearm would otherwise exist. With a length of twine gripped tight in his teeth and a deranged one-eyed squint of concentration, he's using his other hand to tie off the branches in a /vaguely arm-shaped position/. As is the manner of training a plant, really. THERE. With it thusly bound, he hoists himself up to his feet, breathing a little roughly, and heads into the bedroom. Where he has a man tied up. Suddenly the gay jokes make more sense. He kneels down behind the chair and pulls his gun from the holster at the small of his back and sets it by his knee. And begins to saw through the ducttape keeping Masque secure. It takes a bit. He bound him pretty thoroughly, ducttaping a pair of dishwashing gloves /onto/ Masque's hands, and then taping said arms to the chair. And his chest. And one leg. The last leg is propped up on a foot rest and freshly bandaged. It'd be funny if this /wasn't/ the foot he shot. Masque upon waking up might find things not /entirely/ right with his head -- and not /only/ because of all the head blows he's taken. Though those undoubtedly don't help. But there's -- /something/ else, too. It's hard to pin down. Thoughts just a little fuzzier, just a little more sluggish, through a soft-murmuring haze of mental static. Also a vague sense of having an audience. Quietly murmuring, quietly watching. But -- it's vague. And he's taken a lot of blows to the head. It's as such that he does gives Jim plenty of unintentional warning that he's about to wake. The bruised and battered fleshmangler's breathing picks up first, before, very sluggishly, his head starts rolling in an attempt to find its way to an upright position. Underneath a pistol-whipped scalp, images start coming back as though in a vague attempt to figure out why he cannot seem to immediately return to proper consciousness. Lightning, inside his room a few days ago, images of his own hands down a man's guts before pulling out a bullet. Another man's stomach, the same bullet, this time going /in/. A silhouette of a man in a doorway, glowing yellow eyes in the darkness. Streets, seemingly random, a liquor store, then the hotel room again. Jim. A gunshot. Thorns and leaves and his hand and-- << Where... the fffuck... did I... >> That's all the coherency his brain manages to scrape together for now. Masque's eyes open one at a time, vision still blurry, brows knitting together as he gives a weak pull forward. To no avail, the tape stopping him. << Spinning. Can't...? Can't move? Can't move. >> "Where--" HKK-- is he going to throw up? It sort of looks like he's going to throw up. << -fuck me, he's gonna bark up his breakfast on my god damn floor. >> Jim makes not attempt to rush his careful unwrapping. "Morning, sunshine." He says it with a rogueish cheer! Through gritted /teeth/. The watched feeling grows. But the murmurs get quieter. The sluggish feeling doesn't, though, a steady mental weight dragging down on Masque's thoughts. No throwing up, at least not yet. Masque doesn't have enough of a breakfast /in/ him. Maybe if JIM hadn't taken his hard-earned peanuts before. Pain wells up in his head and he presses his eyes shut for a moment, before the one that can actually /see/ opens again, halfway, to search the room. << Not... the motel. Not the tunnels. A /home/. >> Disgusting. The more functional side of his face gives a sneer as he, very slowly, lifts his head to see a very fuzzy image of a Jim. When he speaks again, it's hoarse, gritty and slurred all at once. "The fuck did you do." "You remember when I said it didn't have t'be this way?" Jim finishes unbinding Masque's torso and arms, leaving /on/ the pretty silver bracelets of duct tape keeping Masque's dish gloves on. They're canary yellow, with a slight ribbed texture on the fingers - for gripping-dishes pleasure. It was damn hard getting those things /on/ him. And Jim is taking great pains not to think about other things that might be hard to do. Like tying shoes. Or cutting a steak. "I guess? For you? It did." The last bit of tape falls to the ground, "Voila." He sits back, the gun loosely in hand, but apparently of the opinion it's not likely he'll be needing it. Masque's hands lift, an inch or two, before coming right back down again. Oof. His nose wrinkles and he opens both eyes to give Jim the weakest murderous glare he's ever glared. << 'voila'? What a fucking... fuck... my head... someone is going to die. >> The combined efforts of the wextra weight on his mind and the concussions he must have suffered are being unkind to him. Yet the degree of that unkindness does not seem to have gotten through to him just yet, and he promptly pushes his hands down to stand. Only to lose his balance halfway up when the bandaged up foot reminds him where the gunshot he remembered was aimed at, toppling over with a muffled complaint that seems somehow more proportionate to dropping a piece of macaroni than to possibly falling down face-first onto an unfamiliar floor. Jim stands with a little 'uff', his creepy tree-skeleton left arm dexterous enough at least to cross with the other loosely against his chest. He watches Masque rise and fall with hard eyes, "Yeah." He agrees, though Masque had said anything yet. "Don't stand up too fast. You're a little fucked up, my friend." Then he walks forward, around Masque and out of his bedroom, into the livingroom, running down a list of things that could go wrong in his mind: << Bloodloss, shock, anemia, concussion, infection, seizure, stroke, when the fuck has this guy last eaten... >> He's heading for the kitchen. << Let's see what I got any food that's /not/ going to piss me off if he throws it across the room. Or at my face. >> Maybe Jim is thinking of MARHSMALLOWS. Squeak. That would be the noise of Masque, on the floor, dragging one yellow-gloved hand over the other in an attempt to remove them. Frustration washes over his thoughts, replacing blind anger now that he has something to focus on. << Oh... that is just. >> "This's just great." He calls out as loudly as he can, which isn't very, as he rolls and thuds onto his back. Still on the floor, clawing at his hands with the coordination of a cat trying to pry their satellite dish collar off after a Visit (with a capital V) to the vet. Which is pretty much what he feels like, coincidentally. Eventually, he just /gives up/. << Focus. Gitcher head back together... get up, get out... grab any part of him you can on the way, figure out where you are. Out. >> Masque has reconnected. << What the hell's he doing thumping around in there WHY did I think I'd have any fucking food at all jesus jumping christ, I didn't know mold turned pink. >> This is Jim's inner workings from the kitchen. He responds back to Masque's first Real Boy words with, "You can eat /gluten/ right? I got some fucking... Bread." Something about that sentence... no, /nothing/ about that sentence makes sense to Masque. << What the fuck is gluten? Bread? >> Another few thuds, and Masque's got himself rolled onto his side, uninjured hand pressed to the floor first, then the chair to help him up. His head still throbs in at least three different places and there's some /ringing/ on top of it. And... whispering? He stands, swaying slightly left and right, << Out. Out out... out there's the doorway why is he talking about... bread oh /fuck/ the doorway. >> Thunk. Halfway out the bedroom, Masque holds onto the doorway for dear life, a scowl on his face as he closes his eyes again. "What in the fucking world're you on about. You /shot/ me, then I--" Flashes of a meal come to mind as his stomach audibly complains. Flashes from several days ago, and of 'food' that was none too appetizing, "I wake up and you offer me /food/?" << or poison. What if it's poison. Out. >> << Not poison. Eat. >> It surfaces in Masque's mind, and it doesn't feel like someone talking at him, it feels like a thought surfacing from him. Except somehow at the same time it feels /off/. Masque's thought, but Masque's thought with other whispered foreign feelings echoed underneath. "I shot you in the foot," Jim specifies /dryly/ from the kitchen area, just barely visible from the bedroom door. Jim stands there, holding two pieces of bread in either hand and looking back and forth between them with disgust. "To be fair, I /offered/ you a peanut first. You /could/ have taken the peanut." << ...fuck, saying it out loud makes it sound stupid what the fuck, Jim. What did you think you were -- oh, hey, jam. >> "If I wanted to kill your ass I'd have done it while you were having your beauty sleep." << Too bad it didn't /work/, this guy's got the face of a dropped pie. >> He goes on to spread jam - Smuckers strawberry - across /both/ pieces of bread and then set it on the coffee table in the livingroom. And then leave it there to go back into the kitchen to make coffee. Clack, clunk, clutter, he is not very graceful in the opening and closing of cabinets. The imported knock-off thoughts are accepted into Masque's mind without fuss, his stomach helping to sell the point of Maybe Food is Good. << he should have just shot me in the chest so I'd have a reason to... die I guess I didn't really think that one through. Least I would have died attempting to reconfigure his face. >> "Why..." He starts, the next words floating around in his head for a while before he finally manages to put them in the right order, "... did you drag me all the fucking way over here just to let me go again? I overestimated you when I called you a fucking idiot." << Or thought it, anyway. >> A second later, and he's pulling away from the doorway again, toward the table. And food. And a chair to sit on. Once he's done that and masters not falling over straight after, he begins picking at the tape around his wrists again, making absolutely zero attempt to hide it. << Off. Off and then out. /Food/ and then out. Unless the door is locked. Then food, mangling, then out. >> "'Cause I'm a fucking idiot." Jim gruffs, slamming a cabinet and opening another on a quest to find his last remaining coffee cup. There are a few in the sink, likely from the /last/ time Hive was over before the raid ever happened, which pisses him off in an inarticulate << ^$*# >> stormcloud. He pours his coffee, checks the cream in his fridge just to make /sure/ it's gone bad with a not-very-hopeful sniff and grimace of regret << why do I ALWAYS sniff it I KNOW it's bad, what the fuck - oh. >> Then he remembers Hive brought him new half and half ASSHOLE. He wheels at this moment to /wing/ the last remaining slice of bread, the /heel/ at Masque like a frisbee when he picks at the duct tape, "Knock it off." The 'knock it off' comes with mental reinforcement. << Forget the gloves. Eat. >> is, like before, a strange not-foreign foreign echo. And, then, "I want some fucking coffee," is -- similar. In that Masque is saying it, Masque is thinking it, but /something/ is riding aalong with this thought, pushing it to the surface. The slice of bread hits Masque in the ugly side of the face, with very little sign that he's actually even noticed it colliding at all, beyond a twitch of that one blind eye. His mind is reeling with all the mental energy he can muster at the moment, bouncing half-finished thoughts back and forth. The coffee line in particular is repeated at least five times after he hears himself say it. More doubtful every time, until... << I haven't had any in /years/. >> Suddenly it DOES sound pretty good. And so does eating. The gloves are soon forgotten, in lieu of reaching for the sandwich from before. He tears it in half before it is promptly stuffed into his mouth, gaze still somewhat glassy and unfocused. Not even anywhere close to finished chewing, he adds in no particular direction, "You're a tree." That bread? Hitting Masque in the face? Jim stands with a fist on his hip and feels quite suddenly that /that/ sums up pretty much this entire day. Possibly crippled for life? Sure. Deranged flesh-melter in your apartment? Okay. Let's Have Some Fucking Coffee. He goes about even one-handedly washing another cup for the occasion and precariously transferring /two/ cups to the coffee table. Then he plops down in a chair opposite Masque. "Pretty much," he scrubs an eyesocket /hard/ with the heel of his palm. The rest of the sandwich disappears down Masque's throat with an unsurprising lack of dexterity. More stuffing than chewing, really. << Much better. What is this, jam. It's been a few years since I... >> When the coffee is within reach, it too is claimed with a /swipe/ of his good hand. The drink spills over the rim and over the fingers of his gloves in the process, seemingly without notice. At least the vaguely heat-proof things are good for something. As he brings it to his mouth, cupped in both hands regardless of its freshly brewed temperature, his eyes finally manage to land on Jim again. He cocks his head slightly, his good eye squinting. << ... wouldn't be hard. There's the gun but he's not the killing type. Also, he fucking needs me if he wants to fix the girl. gotta think of a way outta that. >> He downs half the coffee in one go without thought, followed by a solid bout of cursing in his head along the lines of << shit fuck hot coffee >>, but outwardly there's nary but a wince and a tightening of his grip. Jim's got a real talker on his hands. << Fix the girl, >> is the notMasque thought that Masque thinks this time. << He's got a gun, it's not worth the hassle. Fucking foot. >> Watching Masque eat is kind of fascinating. Or it /should/ be. But anything that's able to keep Jim /staring/ for this long is impressive, with his good hand clapped over his eye and his mind a /miasma/ of dour thoughts. << How the hell are we going to get Shelby to /not/ be a fucking Teenager when he's fixing her. As much a chance she'll go axe-crazy psycho bitch on him as there is that she'll be too freaked out to want to get near him again. And this guy, what the hell are we going to do with him. Hand him over to the /mutant crimes/ division for attacking a girl on the street and he's pretty much dogmeat. Hive can't just keep him. This is the kind of fucking guy that's been kicked out of every door he's darkened. And god help me, I can't wait to kick him outta mine. I'm too old for this shit. >> Jim, apparently, is just as chatty back. He clears his throat. "So." Expectant-so. "You gonna do it?" "Fucking foot." Masque mutters in an echo under his breath, eyes only belatedly trailing a path downward. A brief look of confusion crosses his face. As his head clears further with time, his thoughts become less segmented. Curt and strategic. The mind of a man who has had to separate his intentions and his wishes far too many times, calculating the risks of each and making sacrifices where needed. << Gotta find a way to think straight. More coffee. >> Down goes the rest past yellowed, crooked teeth and through an already partly coffeescorched throat. << The girl is going to attack me. >> There is no doubt, there. Not a speck. << Use that, somehow. Fix her. Use her. 'Fix her'? >> He dips his head, thoughts tangling like spaghetti. Painful spaghetti on fire. "I'm guessing that's why you're /keeping me here/." He finally replies, through gritted teeth, slamming the coffee cup onto the table, sending another spike of pain through his head. A glare suggests he's decided that he blames Jim for that accident, for some reason. "So now all we need to know is what's in it for me." << And there it is. >> Draped heavily in his seat, Jim props a cheek on his fist, knowing this roll all too well, "What d'you /want/?" << He's damn well not going to believe me if I just /tell/ him I'll pay up if he does it. What're the options: drugs? Ehh, maybe. Money? An ounce of flesh? A motherfucking trip to Disneyland? Fuck, this is surreal as shit, if he asks me for my first born child or something a lock of hair from an unwed fisherman's son, Shelby's gonna have to just learn to guitar one-handed. I'm shooting him again. >> Masque's glare continues. Outwardly, he just looks thoughtful. Perhaps a bit bitterly so. Inwardly? He's seeing Jim's face slowly transform, skin and flesh bubbling and folding, ragged and wrong. Even through the weight, it seeps through with relative ease. A familiar and practised process, playing itself out almost without him prompting the images. Both his hands are placed flat upon the table's surface, and he fails to blink when he really should, at some point. << Again. >> In his mind, Jim's face resets. Back to normal. Then, one more, everything is slowly warped. This time, Jim's hands as well. And back to normal. << Again. >> The process repeats itself oh so neatly and cleanly, imagination running just a little wilder with each time. << Again. >> "... A favour." Those murmuring voices surface again, soft but /there/, a sussurating chorus that ripples just beneath Masque's consciousness. And then subside, but there is left a feeling of /hunger/. It might be for Jim. It jives well with the imagined facewarping. Until suddenly those fantasies are tamped down into nothing. << Don't shoot me would be a good favor. >> bubbles to the surface. Also a strong desire for more coffee. Jim doesn't lower his eyes to the hands Masque sets on the table - just steadily watches Masque's face with faded blue eyes and his cheek on his fist. "That's gonna depend what it is." In voice, he sounds just professional, leaning towards slovenly-casual. In mind: grim observation, ho. << This one's certified. He'd kill me, no sweat, and not look back. Look at his eyes. >> << Enough. >> Masque decides, as the imagination simmers down. As though it was by choice, rather than command. Also, that mug of coffee Jim hasn't been drinking? Or maybe he has, Masque hasn't paid a lot of attention to it, to be honest. Either way, it is swiped as well, without warning. Still with the complete disregard for elegance, sending yet more spilled coffee over his gloved hand and the table. << You snooze. >> "Not shooting me, for a start." A pause. He blinks, at last, leaning slightly forward in a twitchy way that betrays him still not quite having recovered from being hit over the head what feels like a dozen times over. "Other 'n that, it will remain open. Until I call upon it. And beause I know you won't accept otherwise," There is a sigh. Dragged out and dramatic as one hand curls around the mug and the other slides meticulously slowly off the table and onto his lap. "... it will not involve killing or harming anyone. It's fair enough. I'll even fix your arm on top of it." Jim taps a finger against his cheekbone, watching Masque DRINK HIS COFFEE. << ...man, you're not pushing to get me that great of a deal today, are you, Hivey. This better not be because you're still pissy. >> "Fine." He reaches into his back pocket and withdraws a pocket knife, gesturing Masque hold out his hands. All easy-vaguely bored and pragmatic, inwardly is a dark thought. << -man if Hive for some reason hasn't got this guy, and I'm cutting him loose to just /hand over/ my freaking arm- >> "I knew you could be reasoned with." Ssssip. Delicious. << I missed coffee. His is even better. I should ask for more, later. >> Upon seeing the knife, he leans back once more. Driven largely by paranoia, though this may remain unlear to anyone not poking around inside his mind already. "That's okay. You can get it /later/. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to bed." Whose bed? Jim's bed. Masque's good side gives a smile that is as brief as it is completely and utterly despise-fuelled and pushes back further, clearly still far from stable as he accidentally knocks over his chair on his way back to the bedroom. "Good night. Wake me when you've got the girl here. And some waffles. Syrup, no butter." After very nearly dizzily limping straight into a wall, he disappears off into the bedroom again, the door shutting behind him. Jim stares after Masque. STARE. And then down at his coffee cup, which has been all up against Masque's HOBOFACE. His entire apartment is going to need to be decontaminated (though who's he kidding, he'll maybe vacuum and call it done.) He runs a hand over his face, jaw clenched until he counts backwards from ten. And then gets out his phone and starts texting.