Logs:Mojo Extravaganza
| Mojo Extravaganza | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
|
2024-09-06 "We having fun yet?" |
| Location | |
It's once again a glorious lovely day for some glorious lovely games. Sunny and pleasantly mild and even if the sun is fake it feels so real who could really notice? After a week of wacky fun -- aren't we all having fun?! -- the Brotherhood is entering this first all-team matchup with a solid lead and it's showing by the riot of red and purple that dominated the stands as the teams filed in. The opening credits have expanded, over the days -- more of the competitors are getting stage names, more of them are getting cheers. Mojo's face is all too familiar by now, menacing grin seeming almost cemented in place. "What did I tell you, folks? Can I pick 'em or can I pick 'em? And we've just been warming up -- don't touch those dials because things are about to get real wild with our weirdo friends!" The camera is panning across the faces of the teams -- do they look any the worse for wear for their abduction? For their surreal game show experience? For their probably insufficient diet? Who is to say, their audience is likely not the best judge of human health anyway. Around them the stands are disappearing, the arena shifting into something that looks kind of like if a beautiful lush bit of forested parkland had been crossed with a segment of some Donkey Kong stage, hovering platforms and hanging vines clearly meant for jumping and swinging on for No Reason, waterways criss-crossing the terrain with bobbing barrels to jump on to get across them. "Hope you've all been paying good attention," Mojo is saying this perhaps to the audience or perhaps to the teams themselves, it's a little hard to tell, "'cuz all our champions have already shows you how it's done! This should be easy-peasy. All we've done --" His grin is, somehow, growing wider, which seems hardly possible, "is mash all your challenges together! One great big team EXTRAVA-'GANZA'! If you've learned from each other you should have some idea how this goes." On the sky-slash-scoreboard there's a bold list, now, and much of it is, indeed, familiar from past games. TARGETS: +2pt ea "EGGS": +500 pt ea KEYS: +5 pt ea ANIMAL ROUNDUP: +50 pt ea OBSTACLES: +5 pt ea DODGEBALL: -100 pt per hit! TOKENS: +10 pt ea "You all got very confused about the eggs last time, by the way," Mojo is saying, with a screeching sound that is, contextually by now, supposed to be a laugh, "so we went ahead and labeled the real eggs for you this time. Very clear. Very clear! Good luck!" Easy, right? His face vanishes from overhead and the contestants are scattered into the wilds of a glorious, lovely arena. --- OK, sorry, belay that. We may have overpromised on the lovely part. A little bit. The sun is still shining, that part is true. A lot of the water has proven to be maybe a little bit acid to touch for no good reason whatsoever, hope everyone here has very good balance bobbing from wobbly barrel to wobbly barrel. The place is absolutely teeming, it turns out, with snarling, ravening alien wildlife of a startlingly wide and vicious variety, springing and charging and swooping and diving from every corner. The "obstacles" were designed by whoever designed Bowser's castles. The -100 points per hit in "Dodgeball", much less of a worry than getting liquefied by the startlingly violent range of alien weaponry the opposing alien "dodgeball" team is playing with. Has anyone found the "Eggs"? Unclear. There are still plenty of fake eggs around. They no longer explode into confetti and paint, though they do, unfortunately, still tend to explode. Somewhere, there's a scoreboard, still keeping score, but as the day wears on, possibly the teams have developed some other priorities. Jax's, at the moment, is making sure that his team doesn't get eaten by -- well, who knows what these creatures are, a lot of limbs and a lot of teeth and -- he's not really sure what those other body parts are, they don't come standard on any earth animals. He wasn't actually trying to round the creatures up, exactly -- that's come kind of secondary to putting up a solid wall in between them and the slavering mass, but at the moment they are sort of contained, pressed back in a makeshift enclosure of deceptively solid soapbubble wall. He's very pale and very shaky -- is that because of the clawmarks scraped down his arm or because of how little he's eaten this week? Maybe a little of each. Where has Joshua been, who ever knows. But he's reappearing now, refreshingly blood-free if looking deeply haggard. Arms crossed over his chest. "Eggs are people," is his bland report. His eyes are narrowing at the beasts champing behind Jax's wall. "Thought they're safer where they are, till." One of his shoulders hitches up fatalistically. Blink is also kind of pale, and though she hasn't been very visibly clawed she is liberally splattered with blood that's probably not human. Statistically speaking. She opens up a portal under the animals penned in by Jax's shield to dump them unceremoniously -- and possibly minus a couple of appendages -- into one of the (hopefully) more secure holding areas. "Should we just go and collect them at the...end?" She sounds very dubious about this, and looks up even more dubiously at the great scoreboard in the sky. "Let's keep moving before something else finds us." "Mmgh," comes gritted out and sort of faint; Scott is running on fumes, too, as well as a twisted ankle. He glances up at the scoreboard, too, mouth pulling into a frown -- "Yeah, good thought. When is the end? Wish they gave us a progress bar. Doesn't Super Mario give you a progress bar?" Does Scott know anything about Super Mario, doubtful. Does he even care, also doubtful. He's trudging ahead, quick on his feet even as he's favoring one leg. Lickety, you should know better than to tempt the fates! There's a SWOOP coming down from the sky, a WHOOSH, a BZZT BZZT BZZT, this alien dodgeball team are here not for the first time and it probably won't be the last. They're on some kind of small hovercraft and while they look like small and veeeery adorable Popple-like creatures they have murder in their several eyes as they get in a staggered flight formation, veering rapid by the X-Men to unleash a small and rapid barrage of explosive energy ordnance down towards the team on the ground before the (adorable!) air team bzzts back away. Up ahead there is a sudden rumble of the ground -- was that someone's obstacle, hopefully it was not someone's obstacle, because abruptly it has become something of an avalanche of rocks and fallen trees blocking that particular path. The BZZT comes followed swift enough by a sudden ozone crackle in the air. Avalanche and ordnance and when the dust settles the X-Men are +1 Brother in their midst -- at least it's this friendly one, bedraggled though Ion looks, filthy and covered in a fair heaping of grime and blood. Who's team is he on, anyway; the jolt of his passage seems to have pulled them just-so out of the dive-bombing of the "dodgeball" strike team. "We having fun yet?" For once he's not even smiling, teeth clenched, wide-eyed, arm pulled in tight across his body. A part of the avalanche keeps going when the rest of it has rumbled to a stop, a cluster of rocks launching after the hovercraft full of murderous plushies. Kiri makes an improbable and impressive arcing leap over the fresh spill of debris to land beside the X-Men and her Brother. "I already didn't like the dodgeball before." She is also grimy and bloodied but clearly not in anywhere near as bad a shape as Ion. "Now I don't like it more. None of you die yet?" This doesn't sound like a taunt, but it is a bit flippant. "Wait, who? You think that's like, the Round 1 folks?" Jax's shield vanishes after the alien beasts do, only to reappear almost instinctively overhead at that first incoming WHOOSH. It disappears again at Ion's swooping save and he's too flustered or too exhausted to manage a thanks. He grinds his knuckle against his eye, glancing helplessly up at the sky. "Would they tell us if someone had done?" Scott stumbles out of this instantaneous rescue, doubling over with hands propped on his knees, but after a moment his spine unfurls again, and he gives Ion a very light (but still manly) pat on the shoulder in thanks/welcome. "Let's hope we don't find out." Blink had been facing entirely the wrong direction to be ready for stuffie dodgeballers, and her hands are glowing purple when Ion swoops them out of harm's way. "Ohmygod thank you!" She's looking over Ion with very wide eyes, which look creepily cartoonish with her pupils dilated wide in the middle of her too-green sclera. "Not that we know of, but you look like you're --" She cuts herself off and looks up again. "Well, I haven't heard any cannons. Plenty of lasers and energy rays and missiles, though." There is a brief blur of motion, with a couple of false eggs (are they even false eggs? Are they actually just regular rocks?) being launched by Heather's well-practiced pitching arm at the hovercraft to cover the retreat of both X-Men and fellow Brothers. "HelloIfoundapuzzlegoodbyestaysafe." And then there is nothing but wind in her wake as she disappears, weaving past obstacles to her next destination. Joshua is shivering from the brief electrical re-settling. His eyes shift slowly over Ion, and his jaw is tightening slowly. He glances up above, too, briefly looking towards the timer overhead, and then back to Ion. The clap of his hand to Ion's shoulder is longer, a slow squeeze that comes with a very -- very -- measured trickle of healing, targeted to the worst and most vital of Ion's (many) current injuries; even so this triaged dose leaves him visibly a little more wan than his already haggard look. He shakes his head, frowning at the now-blocked path, and picks a different branching unblocked one to trudge down. Well! It was unblocked, anyway. That was then. This is an exciting new world. The path around them is shifting as Joshua moves -- it feels, somehow, excited to be shifting! Like it's been waiting for this. Eager. If a path had a tail it would be wagging. In fact, the world is shifting, a little disorienting-ly -- there are rocks sprouting here, trees growing there, a whole waterway where there wasn't one before! By the time the shifting stops it has quite split the party. Scott and Ion are bobbing in the middle of the water on some rather unstably floating barrels -- there are some very long-clawed creatures in the water that seem very eager to reach up and snap at them; Kiri and Blink are beseiged by a teeming endless horde of -- are those mosquitoes, they are quite large and armored and seem quite ravenous, maybe they are a different dodgeball faction; hopefully Jax will brush up quickly on his math skills because the puzzle room he has been relocated to is very much underneath the water altogether. Joshua is still on the path he chose, although, nobody else is, anymore, the trees now thick to every side of the road and an enormous spiky boulder rolling down the path towards him. Kiri is quick to reorient herself but lets out a startled "Ayah!" anyway as she hurls the nearest bug away from them, using it to knock down any that happen to be behind it. "Eh X-Girl, what you called?" She grimaces, whether at their foes or at the situation overall. "Your name. Not what these {shit-eating motherfuckers} call you." Blink probably does not speak any dialect of Genoshan, but the inflection and context communicate who Kiri means clearly enough. Maybe in another lifetime, Ion would be quicker to reorient to this kind of chicanery, would be quicker on his toes, but even with Joshua's pick-me-up this is not that lifetime. It's probably only Joshua's pick-me-up that keeps him from tumbling immediately headlong into the water, but as-is he's scrambling, losing his footing (it's been unsteady enough on solid ground) as he tries to get his new bearings and clinging, wet and twitching somewhat spastically, to one of the barrels as stray flickers of energy jolt over him. He does, at least, look grimly satisfied at the fierce jolts this also gives any claw-hand-monsters that try to swipe at him. "Ey, Puncheye. What you imagine. When you sign up for..." This kind of trails off, though, unfinished. He digs his hook into the barrel, though this does little enough to help his unsteady-twitching grip. Scott is a little more stable on his barrel, but only barely, crouching down to lower his center of gravity; his initial effort to carefully wobble the barrel closer to shore is curtailed when he pulls back sharply from a long sharp claw snapping up out of the water. Scott's inscrutable red gaze fixes on Ion just for a moment; his only answer to this is a dispirited, clipped-short laugh. "Oh {fuck that son of a bitch's mother and eighteen generations of their ancestors!}" All of Blink glows purple as the ravenous horde descends on them, but Kiri speaking aloud reminds her she's not alone here and the glow shifts to her hands. "Blink!" she answers, kind of breathless, "and I'm guessing you're not 'Clout' either. I'm going to get us past them. Stay close but do not get ahead of me!" And she's sprinting into the gap Kiri made in their attackers ranks, right at the ones pouring in to fill it. Just when it looks like they're going to reach her she opens a portal right through them and hops over their severed body parts to emerge somewhere beyond the thick of the swarm. "Quick!" she cries, spinning around, ready to close the portal as soon as Kiri is through. Jax did not go to art school to learn math thankyouverymuch and he isn't starting now. He has been in the team box all week, though, and has learned well from his teammates; he studies the puzzle boxes for approximately half a second before several shields dice them into several pieces. Unfortunately the actual process of fitting the keys into the locks still takes a moment; by the time he's unlocked the cage and sliced through some of the -- grabby -- clawy -- things outside it's all he can do to pull himself to the surface, gasping for breath as he grabs onto a barrel at the top. Joshua is staring down the oncoming boulder for a brief, blank moment. He doesn't sigh. Maybe there is no sigh left in him. He vanishes, reappearing by Scott to frown down at the grabby-hands claws, clap a hand to Scott's shoulder and blip them both to shore. "... where's..." Who was he going to ask after. He is frowning into the water, and doesn't look much more relieved when Jax breaks the surface. He glances up at the clock. His jaw tightens again, and he steels himself before blipping -- very gingerly, very, very quickly -- to corral Ion to shore with the briefest of taps. Ion is still twitching, once he's on dry land again, muscles clenching in erratic spasm that take some time to calm. Eventually he manages to sit back up, struggles to his feet. "Shit, we got, what. Another. Two fucking hour. Ain't no fucking slug kill me today." His middle finger raises towards the obnoxiously cheerful sky. "Game on, fucker." | |
