Logs:Surprise Party

Surprise Party
Dramatis Personae Amo, Jax, Scramble
In Absentia Storm, Punch-Eyes, B, Natasha	2024-09-11 "Aight, so maybe I am that drunk."
Location <MOJ> Times... Square? - Mojoverse / <MOJ> Outside the Village
<MOJ> Times... Square? - Mojoverse This place is definitely big, and definitely surrounded by Tall Things, and there are definitely large screens all around it (they've all got various images of Mojo flashing on them), and it is also crowded with an odd mix of aliens pretending to be humans pretending to be tourists. It would all be a little overwhelming and a little bit insane if you'd never been to actual Times Square but if you have then maybe they've got some of the vibe almost kind of right, honestly. This is sort of the central hub of what passes for downtown in the Games District, cluttered with a potpourri of stores selling "I ♥️ I ♥️ NY" or "I ♥️ 🌏" merchandise and overpriced junk food from a dazzling array of alien cuisines. Given all the aliens cosplaying games contestant it's oddly a pretty decent place to get lost in the noise for a bit. Another day come and gone and yet again people have largely survived today's round of -- who knows what exactly it was, some kind of life sized messily explosive whac-a-mole type oddness. Here in "Times" "Square" the Weirdos from Planet Earth fandoms have started to become more heavily factionalized -- not, necessarily, strictly along team lines, but the aliens are growing deeply invested in the various dramas and intrigues developing between the contestants. Currently, a fierce group of STORM aficionados are burning an effigy of Jean in the center of the square, very somberly, to seal some kind of pact they have made with the PUNCH-EYES crew. So it goes. Somewhere, silent and watchful, the frankenbot that B and Amo had been diligently cannibalizing and re-assembling is watching all this. Approvingly? Disapprovingly? Who knows. It is robot. At the moment as its programming ticks away is keeping its own counsel. Jax is probably not actually wearing a colorful party hat, stripey and festooned with streamers, but there is nevertheless definitely currently one perched on his head as he stumbles out of the Champion's circle to fetch, a little wobbly, up against the abandoned stall beside the Frankenbot. He's squinting over at the burning Jean with a snort and then a grimace. "Oof. She better fall in new-love quicklike. Who we got on the market?" Scramble has been laughing a lot, and she's laughing again as she staggers out in Jax's wake with an illusory party hat of her own sitting improbably at a slight angle atop her afro. Her birthday clothes are just the same old black ribbed tank and blue jeans that she happened to have on when they arrived, with a glittery party sash that reads "Birthday Girl!" for anyone who's still having trouble telling humans apart. She doesn't seem to immediately recognize the effigy, but when she does sucks a sharp breath through her teeth. "Life is rough for 'and friends' 'round here," she laments. "I been single for a hot minute and I kind swore off white girls with red hair, but that was before..." She waves a hand at -- all of this. "I can take one for the team if she's down, but c'mon, they'd make an adorable thruple." Amo is out shortly behind Jax and Scramble, not quite so wobbly, but still not as sure footed as she probably should be. She barks out a laugh--mostly out of surprise rather than humor--and leans against the shoulder of the Frankenbot, flicking out a hand towards the effigy, "Shit- look at'em go." She tilts her head back and to the side to think, illusory birthday hat magically staying on, "You'd do that for us? That's real sweet." She tilts her head the other way, "Could be a quadruple though aye???" Maybe it is Amo leaning on the bot. Maybe it is that the bot has just finished running the latest of many of B's probing tests at the security vulnerabilities in the strange and closed-off alien capsule they are in here. The Frankenbot is moving beneath Amo's arm, though, its hacked-together display shifting in its readout. And then, the world behind them is also shifting. It isn't much, -- if they weren't standing right there it would be hard to notice anything at all. An odd kind of split in space where the robot once attached itself to the stall's back door -- the space where the door should swing open into "Times" "Square" now swings -- it's hard to say, actually. Maybe it's the booze; look at it too long and their eyes feel a little unfocused. Is there a draft? For Jax, definitely, the light itself past the door feels noticeably, drastically wronger. "Might hafta coach Scott a bit about --" Jax is flailing a hand sort of vaguely. "Like, forget the Games, he might have a heart attack if --" He tapers off here. The colourful party accessories warp and then blink out, and he is at first looking a little more intently at the grim ceremony in the center of the square before he turns to refocus toward the back of the stall. He's peering there in confusion first, and then at Scramble. He rubs at his temple like maybe this will clear the uncomfortable feeling from it, but when this fails to work he is, instead, warily eying the door. "Hey," he asks Scramble, in a stage whisper. "Did we go crazy." "That just adds to the drama." Scramble seems fairly unconcerned -- about Scott's sexual orientation, about the burning in the square, about celebrating her birthday in an incomprehensible alien zoo. "Summers being stoically in over his head is prime entertainment, and Ion can create chemistry with anyone." Now she's frowning, and decides to backtrack to "Almost anyone, he's got -- wait, you seeing this, too?" She comes slightly more alert. "I'd remember if I scrambled you, I ain't that drunk. Am I?" Maybe not, but she's drunk enough to stagger through the door without investigating any further. Amo hums in agreement, then shifts as she feels the robot shift, raising an arm curiously to look underneath it, "What're you doin'?" Her eyes track downwards, then behind them, and she takes a small step back. She blinks, harshly, and shakes her head. She looks over to Jax and Scramble, and raises her hands, "I didn't do it." She takes another step back and blows out a breath, "This another challenge o-?" She stops mid sentence as Scramble walks through, and she opens her mouth to attempt to say something but no sound comes out. She looks over at Jax, eyes wide, "She just walk through?" She's asking strained, and she steps closer to the door to see where Scramble's gone. Scramble does appear to simply be gone. The doorway still appears to simply be weird. Scramble, on the other side, is having no more "Times" "Square" at all. Across the doorway, the world has -- changed. <MOJ> Outside the Village This is, quite suddenly, a wide open space...of some kind. There are kind of squiggly columns that pulse in abstract colorful patterns to either side of the "door", but nothing beyond them, the tall non-buildings bordering "Times" "Square" nowhere to be seen. The same workers and machinery they've seen in the village are bustling around here, too, though more of them are airborne. The gravity is noticeably stronger than Earth's, and the ground is oddly smooth -- not quite slippery, though traction isn't great -- and firm, but has an alarming amount of give, as if it were made of rubber. The air, though breathable, is thin and clammy and faintly metallic. It's not dark, but the illumination is extremely uneven. The sky is dominated by a huge sphere that does emit light, but is probably not a sun, given the light in question is mostly coming from a patchwork of immense screens displaying media that range from the familiar games feed to abstract colors and shapes that make no sense to the human brain. Here and there, tall and colorfully glowing structures rise up to connect with the sphere, though they look much too flimsy to be supporting it. It's difficult to judge size and distance without any meaningful reference to familiar objects, but the foreshortening of the nearest ones suggest that the sphere above is quite far away. So far that the screens on its surface, in order to look the size they do, must be imponderably immense. Countless hovering vehicles of many shapes and descriptions traverse the space between the sphere and the...ground. If this is ground at all, which may be open to question. The open space goes on and on, without anything that Weirdos from Planet Earth would readily interpret as buildings. The only visible static features of the landscape are many more glowing columns that squiggle in various different heights and configurations and many more identical thin structures that go all the way up to the giant TV in the sky. If that is a sky at all, which might be a philosophical question at this point since there doesn't seem to be a horizon. Despite the apparent flatness of the "ground", the tall structures keep going and going and going up into the hazy distance, still connecting to the sphere. It's disorienting but the only logical conclusion is that this entire world is concave, on the inside of a bigger sphere. Scramble's arrival has caused some amount of disruption in the bustling activity that is ongoing. Not a lot of disruption, but -- some. There's a flurry of hovercraft shifting from their bustle and eventually one veers over. It is piloted by, as far as Scramble can discern, a large and soft pink blanket all balled up in the seat, and veering in a circle to do a closer inspection of the Weirdo. Can a blanket look disapproving? It has nothing resembling a face but it is pulling back with a small huffy shift of its folds and scooting away, fast. "-- she just walk through," Jax confirms, oddly cheery about this now. He's following Amo, and then following Scramble, poking first his head and then the rest of him through the doorway. His first reaction is a full-body shudder; around him everything goes suddenly several shades darker. He closes his eye tight, and then opens it again. "Is this another challenge?" This does not sound quite as cheerful. "Maybe we should get -- back to the..." He's turning slow and unsteady in place and frowning, deep, when "Times" "Square" is very much not where they left it. Scramble blinks at the blanket, or whatever was driving that hovercraft. Blinks up at the mega-jumbotrons. Blinks at the distant Inception-esque "sky." Backs slowly toward the door. Or lack of door. "Aight, so maybe I am that drunk," is not completely nonchalant, but also probably not as concerned as she should be in their present circumstances. She puts a hand on Jax's shoulder, even though her power does not need contact to work. "You don't feel no crazier than you did before, and I don't feel any saner." She looks up again. "Maybe a lot less. So, signs point to 'it's another challenge'. I feel like somebody ought to say 'that's no moon', but there's not as much punch when we don't know what thee hell it is." Amo's reaching out as Jax walks through, and she stands there for a moment. She stands there longer, waiting to see if they'd walk back through. She mutters a quick,"Fuck," under her breath, and looks around once. She rips off the hem of her shirt, still stained with some blood, ties it around one of the stand posts, and allows armor to spread across her shoulders as she walks through. "You're both eggs you know th-" Her words are cut short as she takes in--or attempts to take in-- their surroundings. She spins, slowly, the skin around her eyes pinching, and she suddenly whirls to find Jax and Scramble. She blinks, once. "Doors gone." Is all she manages to say. She looks down and jumps a little to test the ground--stumbles, nearly eats shit--then looks up, "Ground's bad." There is someone else approaching them, at a fairly fast clip -- from where? Distance is a little bit hard to make out in the oddly-distorted dimensions of this place, but it doesn't actually seem like there was anywhere there -- just a person appearing in a blink out of something-like-nowhere in the uncanny flat landscape around them and skitter-sliding, ungainly along the floor towards them. Among the bustle and mess this one is, at least, recognizably human, brown-skinned and wild spiky-black-haired, short with a flattish face and wide frightened eyes, dressed in some odd unidentifiable scraps of rubbery substance more or less fashioned into some kind of a baggy shapeless sack of a clothing. This new person is ducking, quick, between some quick-moving slug-hovercraft and a much slower-moving rolling mass of oily-looking tentacle-things and skidding their way up to the group. "Howyou..." they start in a harsh whisper, thick Madripoor-English in their accent, and then frown at Scramble's sash, drawing themselves up sharply. Their brows raise. "... happy birthday? This is stupid party." Jax's shoulder is intensely hot beneath Scramble's hand, and as the birthday accoutrements flicker back into being so does one single egg-shaped crystal perched just atop Scramble's hat. "We are not they been labelling the eggs now real clear. I do not think this is a game, this sun -- there ain't no sun. S'making me kinda --" He does not finish this thought, but he's looking fairly woozy, the uneasy darkness around him shifting. He's almost started to walk again -- careful, careful, after seeing Amo's unsteady footing -- when the newcomer approaches. His very first instinct is to bestow a hat upon them, too, bright and colourful, though it vanishes again a moment later at this insult to their festivities. "Trust me, friend, we did not choose the venue. You --" He frowns, squints into the distance. "... where'd you just come from? Where'd you come from?" Scramble clicks her tongue disapprovingly. "Yeah, see I'm clearly labeled," She gestures at her party sash, unable to see the added egg, "as a..." She trails off when she catches sight of someone actually walking (sort of) toward them. "Thank you." She sounds vindicated, presumably about her label, before her somewhat addled double take catches up. Then she does a third take, checking Jax's sight line as if it were possible he was addressing someone else "Shit, are you crazy, too? The party's sposed to be back in our uh..." She flails an arm back in the direction of the non-door. "...bar? But you're not wrong." "I know eggs when I see'em." Amo's eyes narrow towards Jax in a slight concern with his wooziness, and she shifts just a little closer--very carefully watching the ground, then the person approaching. She herself attempts the skitter-slide they were doing, and manages to catch herself before she nearly face plants again, "Could be worse. Probably." "You weirdos," the newcomer is saying, huffy and accusatory, to the Weirdos. They're keeping a restless eye over their shoulder at the constantly shifting flux of traffic, the flow of aliens that seem frequently to appear and disappear to- and from- nowhere. "Here is worse. Go play your game." They're gesturing, just a little impatient, to the glowing columns framing what should be a door but definitely does not any longer appear to be. "Or," here they sound a little sharper, a little vicious, head tipping up to scrutinize some of the hovering aliens above, "stay. Someone will take you." Birthday Egg, Scramble's clearly-labeled sash is now reading. Jax isn't actually paying it that much mind; he's looking up, too, his brow creased. "... I mean, you welcome to come back with us but that place kinda sucks, too." Jax's slow squeezing blinks are shockingly not making him sober any faster. The darkness clinging to him is starting to lighten, though. He's peering, steadily thoughtful, at some of the erratic streams of traffic. "...where is," is his first almost-question, but then, eye slightly wider: "Are all those portals? Where do they go?" Scramble clearly has not noticed the change in her egg status, but she does look back the way they came again when this new (old?) Weirdo gestures at it, too. "Ion even know how we got out here, but if getting plastered was gonna do it several of us would've been falling outta there on the regular." Her eyes widen at Jax's words, and she picks a hovercraft at random and follows it -- or tries to, her gaze isn't any more steady than the rest of her -- until it vanishes into thin air. "You get one tiny crack in the universe on your planet and it's a slippery slope to this kinda bullshit."She narrows her eyes at the stranger, now. "Waymint, are you from uh. What'd they call it?" She's looking to the X-Men for help. "Episode One?" Amo prepares to jump after Scramble, but lets out a breath when she doesn't follow one of the hovercrafts into one of the portals. She tilts her head, "Volume One? Like the first set of contestants?" She looks to the newcomer, "Where even is- here?" She gestures around, "Do you know you're way 'round all this?" The spiky-haired person shakes their head rapidly. Their shoulders are tight, their eyes narrowed sharply. "Doors -- yes. Mostly... mostly doors." Their head is still just shaking, harder now, and their sharp breath is kind of a scoff. "I -- no. Not a weirdo. Just on Earth." Their hand makes a kind of drawing-up motion, accompanied by an uncomfortably slurping noise. "Earth then here. Sucked up. Sister and me. She was Weirdo. Volume One. No good at the games. You don't listen? Here --" With a wide, expansive gesture towards the whole enormous dizzying sphere, "is Mojo world. Here," smaller, nearer to them, "Mojo City. Here," much smaller, now, just the few pulsing pillars closest by, "your games. Maybe you die in there. Maybe you die out here." "Oh," Jax says, and then, "Oh -- did -- oh, I'm real sorry." He's considerably paler, out here in the wan not-even-faux-sunlight. "... how many more of you's left 'round here?" He's still staring off at one of the not-too-distant portals, for several seconds before he blinks abruptly. "You probably right. We oughtta be getting back." Scramble is slow to process this explanation, but when she finally says "Shit," it does sound like at least some part of it has sunk in. "I'm sorry. I sure never thought they was gonna let any of us go, but damn." She looks around again, which was perhaps a poor idea as she is starting to grow wobbly even standing still. "Well, thank you for the tour and the uh." Her brows crinkle and she has to search much too hard for the word and still doesn't seem sure she means, "advice?" She rallies to Jax's "we oughtta" with a quickness that suggests she has not, in fact, thought through why, exactly, they ought "Aight, so it's what, still here and we just --?" She stretches her long arm out comically far to feel for a door frame, and has just enough presence of mind to steady herself against Jax before she overbalances. Amo’s mouth presses into a line, and she looks away briefly. “I’m sorry.” She is suddenly looking a little more alert, glancing over her shoulder at the hovercrafts, “You want to come with us?” She’s asking quickly with a jerk of her head, shifting very carefully to follow towards the pillars, “You can. I don’t think they can tell us apart too well anyways.” She offers a lopsided smile, one that’s probably meant to be encouraging. “Air feels a whole lot better.” The (totally not weird) earthling hesitates, looking once more over their shoulder at the shifting masses of alien life. "Hrrr," they say, with an uncomfortable shiver, and though Scramble is trying to steady herself they are pushing at her and Jax alike, nudging them toward the glowing pillars. "Go quick." They themselves are darting through the pillars and vanishing -- -- back into the bustle and noise of "Times" "Square", its ghastly surreal chaos almost comforting now with its refreshingly breathable air and un-crushing-gravity, and they wait only long enough for the weirdos to join them before pulling the tear in space firmly sealed and slipping off to vanish with a practiced deftness into the crowd.