Logs:Dragon Tales

Dragon Tales
Dramatis Personae Kitty, Scott, Lockheed
In Absentia	2024-10-04 "Who caught you, little dragon?"
Location <MOJ> Outside the Village - Mojo World
Though not the main transit hub on Mojo World, this is a hub all the same, made of staggeringly busy throughways that arc through the air or weave around the strangely slick ground with no apparent logic, lit by the flickery glow of a thousand-thousand screens, some of them still broadcasting yesterday's games in between baffling advertisements. In lieu of signposts or guardrails or even roads, the rule of the road might seem to be "follow whoever is in front of you" but for the constantly shifting streams of transit, spiking into new branches or merging together, none of the aliens on their varying aircraft (or just whizzing by on their own) bothering with anything in the way of hand signals or blinkers. Some are moving at a breakneck speed, some are ambulating by at a crawl, somehow nobody seems to be crashing but surely not for lack of opportunity. Scott scored some kind of aircraft from somewhere, a two-seater heli-janitor's cart with a sidecar full of mysterious cleaning products and equipment, a tank of ominously bubbling yellow sludge, and multiple spidery grabbing arms, motoring along on numerous sharp-bladed rotors. He's wearing neither of his official team uniforms -- just jeans and boots and his motorcycle jacket, his (by now, unfortunately, very recognizable) visor hidden by a knockoff Magneto helmet. It probably is not road-safe, much less whatever-this-is-safe, but it is giving him relative anonymity as he wends his way through the traffic. "Still not seeing any airfields," he's saying, loud over the booming Mojo broadcasts, dropping the craft several yards down to merge with the lane immediately below. "Nothing down here." Kitty is rotating herself back into a normal-ish sitting position in the second seat, hopefully the bit of hair and eyes peeking out the bottom of the cart through the rotors didn’t give reveal too much identity to the busy-busy passersby. Her shirt probably once said "I ❤️ I ❤️ NYC", but only one heart now remains visible through stripes of bright blue paint and wood paneling striped liberally through the material in bizarre angles. When she leans forward, there is a new dark patch the same texture as the seat of the cart. "I feel like…" Her eyes flick up-around to the ever present screens. "…there has to be somewhere darker. Less noisy. Less distracting. For takeoff." How much less, she still seems to be considering. She squints -- points, hopeful, to a wind of traffic some larger crafts are heading down. "Mojo doesn't seem to do... less-distracting," says Scott, but he pulls into line behind the larger ships anyway, lips pressed thin with concentration. Even if his visor doesn't restrict his peripheral vision, his helmet definitely should, but -- as luck would have it -- no collisions, as though the airstream is correcting itself around two enormous, sluggishly hovercrafts being towed behind two valiantly struggling robots. He cranes his neck, checking for -- are there tollbooths in Mojo World? Probably any kind of checkpoint would be bad. As they glide through to the next hellish intersection, this one dotted with an assortment of businesses -- fuel-up stations, food carts, shops -- whose only uniting factor seems to be drive-through service, he falls silent again, maybe just to conserve breath, until at length, "Almost makes me miss New York traffic." Kitty lets out an airless huff that might be, at other less tiring times, when the bags under her eyes are less heavy and her nail beds less red with nerve-picked skin, a laugh. "Oh, I don't know if anything could make me miss the --" A shadow passes over the top of the cart, dark and faster than the unending winding traffic all around them. Small. Winged. Then -- WHUMP. Kitty yelps. The cart rocks and threatens to tip, strange sludge sloshing in the tank towards the new weight. On top of the side car, bright yellow pupil-less eyes peer at the X-men from under a helmet that resembles horse blinders. Maybe sideways -- the cat-sized creature has crashed on its side, the packages it was towing now pinning one purple wing down onto the unstable cart. "I said 'almost'," Scott is saying, before the whump cuts this into a gritted-teeth grimace -- he hastily jerks the cart right-side-up again before he can slide any further down the bench into Kitty, grabbing automatically at any handhold he can (this is unfortunately the controls of the cart's robotic arms, which flex out to the sides like the cart is pretending to glide along the traffic stream Peter Pan-style. "What the hell is that?" Scott demands, as the cart rocks side-to-side. He darts the quickest of glances aside to their new passenger, with -- well, one imagines a scowl. "You're going to have to get it off of us, Kitty," he says. "Make sure you're keeping two points of contact with the craaargh --" now they are tilting dangerously in the other direction, putting Kitty on a collision course with Scott and the courier on a collision course with Kitty. The purple creature screeches, tumbling snout over wing off the sidecar and into Kitty's side. Her arm drops instinctively down around it as she slides into/through Scott, a shiver of icy tingles going through his body where they overlap so briefly. Her arm shoots out on the final tumble, barely clinging on to one of the carts arms. The rotors are cutting harmless through her and the alien both, but her very tangible fingers are immediately losing their grip. "-- Scott --" comes a wee bit concerned, "-- I think we're gonna --" Scott tenses at the pins-and-needles chill as Kitty phases through him; "Just a second, Kitty," he says unhelpfully -- considering the sudden instability of his ride, the sloshing ooze in the tank, the dropped packages tumbling down into the traffic below, he seems fairly unruffled, like falling out of aircraft is just his home turf. They pull sharply to one side before Scott turns off the starboard-side rotors; in the sudden free-fall, faster by far than it would be on Earth, the craft yaws sharply to tilt both passenger and stowaway back into the craft. Or at least, in the craft's direction; Kitty will probably have to grab something else to stay aboard. Scott has one arm braced at his side to catch, hand outstretched, but he is somewhat more preoccupied with pulling them out of this sharply banked turn before they re-enter the line, his teeth bared with concentration. Kitty lurches up (kind of up, anyway, given the general downward falling of intense alien gravity). Her fingertips just brush Scott's before she tumbles out and over the other side, down and out of Scott's peripheral vision towards the alien slick below. For a moment. There's a flash of red-hot heat, the acrid smell of some plasticy-ironlike-sulfuric concoction in the sidecar getting ignited into a whoosh of flame. Kitty is deposited rather abruptly into the seat, dropped by the arm the alien was clinging to with short forward arms. The creature lands on the craft a second time, much more gently, empty harness tangled around its tail. It twists its head (blinders still on, falling over one yellow eye) to chirp, almost chidingly, at both X-men. They are no longer heading toward wherever the tow-bots were going, but Scott does not seem to notice or care, careening past the last of the fly-by shops in a hasty dive after Kitty, before she is suddenly dropped back in her seat. As the craft rocks upright again Scott throws a look of mild consternation at whatever just went up in flames, his free hand coming back to the controls to retract the spindly robotic arms. He hisses out a breath, somewhat faint after the fire sucked up their scant available oxygen, and shakes his head, swivels the cart to head up, back the way they came. "Did you see anything else burn?" he says, to Kitty, then -- as they merge into the traffic above them, to the alien -- "Shoo." The creature does not shoo. It lowers its head -- dull scales and deep scars on its beaky face clear now, under the bridle, and hisses at Scott. "⌇⎍⌿⟒⍀⌇⏁⏃⍀ ⏃⌰⟟⟒⋏ ⎎⍀⟒⏃☍⌇, ⏁⊑⍜⎍☌⊑⏁ ⊬⍜⎍ ⍙⟒⍀⟒ ⏚⟒⏁⏁⟒⍀ ⏃⏁ ⎅⍀⟟⎐⟟⋏☌." it says, utterly incomprehensible scratching noises that are only clear in their annoyance, tail flicking with agitation. It glances up at Kitty, bumps its head against her palm where the harness is digging into its skin. Kitty shakes her head. "I think some of the paint on the bottom of this thing is toast, though." She goes to remove the harness, lips pressing thin at the blisters underneath. "Who caught you, little dragon?" she asks, untangling the mess and tossing it to the bottom of the cart. "You don't seem very sluggy." With most of this traffic going one-way only it's not exactly intuitive to retrace their earlier flight path, and though Scott is navigating deftly along the infinite midair trails he's having to take different dips and turns around the few landmarks available in this agoraphobic landscape. "Don't get attached," he's warning. "You name it, you'll have to keep it."