ArchivedLogs:Bark and Bite (with nuts)

Bark and Bite (with nuts)
Mutantfight!
Dramatis Personae Jim, Masque	2013-03-12 This was never a good idea.
Location <NYC> Quality Motel - Lower East Side
When all you've got is only slightly more than nothing, Quality Motel will be glad to take that off your hands, too. The owner's son runs the check-in desk and is almost always just sober enough to squeeze a conversation out of. The wallpaper must have been a lovely shade of not-mudcoloured once upon a time, and if you ignore the mold that's taken over some corners of the carpet, it's almost possible to imagine this place ever having been taken care of. Staff seems awfully hard to come by and visitors, though frequent, rarely stay long and usually bring scantily-clad persons of questionable acquaintance. But hey, cockroaches and noisy neighbours aside, most rooms have at least one bed, a mostly unclogged toilet and sink, a functional little TV and phone, and no one asks questions you don't want to answer. It's dank and dreary, it's the Quality Motel approaching night time. As the shadows grow darker and slink deeper in the the city, they urge out some of the skeevier types of people living in it. One such person is Masque, dressed in the thing that everyone is now pretty definitely sure he actually sleeps in, now - an oversized red coat with a hood drawn up over his head, dusty and streaked with dirt as if he'd recently taken a fall in a mudpuddle and got right back up again without a care in the world. His face, on the other hand, betrays the fact that he cares /very much/ for what he is doing at the moment, scowling angrily at a vending machine just down the stairs of his room's door. The left half of his face seems somehow angrier than his right, muscles pulling and twitching ineffectually below warped skin. There is also, for some reason, a tattoo of an Asian-style dragon curled halfway across his features, there, straight across one eye. The vending machine stands, somewhat sadly, with its see-through plastic front hanging off, occasionally flickering pathetic bursts of light outward and into the dark. Most of its contents have been pulled from its guts already, save for a few packs of peanuts /all the way in the back/. Masque's main dilemma right now, it seems, is whether he is hungry enough to try and stick his arms in there far enough. He looks like he's leaning towards 'yes', reaching a thin hand to pry and the plastic off further. What a life. The dim lighting is knifed through by a shadow; broad shoulders, a fedora hat in silhouette, it lands on the ground at Masque's heels. Then: the flick of a lighter. The dry inhale of a cigarette. An insousiante smoker's voice admitting: "Not exactly what I was expecting." GOTCHA. A split second before Jim's presence is announced oh so smoothly, Masque opposite-of-smoothly manages to wrap his fingers around one of the packets of peanuts. The voice piping up is a direct cause of him /yanking/ that arm back toward himself, scraping it painfully across the see-through front, before the plasticwrapped nuts get lobbed directly at Jim's face. "FUCK." The hooded figure grabs his arm, then shakes it roughly as though that will somehow convince the scrape to hurt less, before the scowl he was already lugging around is aimed directly at Jim. "You fucking idiot. Ain't an imbecile in this town that--" Jim's words finally seem to hit somewhere that sticks, and he pauses with a darkening glare. "... Wait. What?" Crap, /nuts/. Jim actually catches them in a neat 'smack' against his palm, and /then/ makes a face that very clearly says he had not INTENDED to catch anything, staring down at the makeshift projectile in his hand with brows furrowed. What's there to do other than throw them right /back/, "I've been looking for you." He says it kind of casual - well except for the subtle 'uff' of breath from the FORCE of his fastball pitch of peanuts. The peanuts hit Masque in the gut, before unceremoniously tumbling to the floor, apparently no longer wanted by the man now angling his head to get a better look at Jim- his left eye isn't what it used to be, thanks to the tattoo. He squares back his hunched shoulders, causing the fabric of the hood to pull back ever so slightly just as the vending machine spits out another flash of light across his features. "Get in the god damn line." The words are spat out rather than spoken, through gritted teeth and a complete lack of enunciation. He turns to leave already, grabbing the rusty railing of a rickety metal stairway upward along the motel with enough force to cause it to emit a short whine at its base. Jim... gets in the god damn line. In that he steps forward - stooping to snag up the peanut package along the way - and heads up the stairs right behind Masque as though he'd been invited. Rufflescuffle; he's opening the package as he goes, following at a distance and watching Masque's ascending back up the stairs through the hard line of his eyebrows. "You attacked a girl," he says. Like it's an offered topic: GO. "Yup." The answer leaves Masque with utter disinterest dripping from his voice. Creak. Creak. The weight of the two men causes the stairway to give with every step, like a metal beast. But it's a beast Masque has come to know far too well over far too long a time, and his hand slams heavily upon the railing with every slow step upward. Almost like he's daring it to buckle. Interest in continuing this conversation seems sorely lacking. "Y'wanna change her back?" Jim asks with great mildness, eating a peanut. Not smiling. Masque reaches the top of the stairs, and drags himself past the first door in a row of many. First room, lights off. Second room? There's a calm discussion inside of it. Third, a fight. Or sex? It's hard to tell. Fourth, lights out. "You're gonna have to be more specific than 'girl'." He breathes out something that's right between a cough and an attempt at a chuckle, but never quite makes it to either one. "Depends on if they've done their job, after all. Ain't pretty, but ain't a liar either." "Bet she could get that dragon off your pus." Jim cracks another peanut in his back teeth, skirting the loudest of the doors with an utterly shameless distrust that it won't be thrown open in his face. Oh. THAT one. Two more doors over, and Masque reaches his destination. It's a little... abused. Someone seems to have violently torn the door from its very hinges quite recently, and what surrounds it is more splinters than doorway. It's not locked, possibly unsurprisingly, and Masque pulls it open with a crackling of bending timber. Even after he enters and flicks on a light, the inside's hardly any brighter than what lies outside. The only furniture in sight is a bed that hasn't been made in years, a lamp that no one has bothered to put back on its nightstand in a long while, and an outdated-looking wooden chair. "And I bet," Masque's voice grates as he proceeds inward, making no attempt to close the door behind him, "that she'd try and take off a lot more if she got that close." There is, admittedly, a bit of amusement on the good side of his face as he says it. Bitter amusement, but still. "Why, you got a tramp stamp you're real attached to? That's about all she can take off you." Jim eyeballs the broken door while he enters, then sweeps eyes across the ceiling, the walls, the bed. He'd go poking around if Masque wandered into the bathroom. You can SEE it. "You get some other house calls recently?" He raps his knuckles on the door frame. "I'm a popular guy." There is no humour in Masque's voice. For all anyone can tell, he /means/ this. "And she would do more." He glances at Jim, as if just to make sure he's inside, before dragging the wooden chair to face his guest and sitting himself down on it with a laboured breath of relief. It, too, fits in with the rest of the motel in the sense that it looks like it's about to fall apart when it's actually put to use. "You'd be surprised what people'll do when they want something they can't have." As he sits, hunched and his elbows poking into bony knees, he turns his eyes to Jim somewhat more... permanently, now. Confidently. As for the room, there isn't much to poke around /at/. Some sheets, a few empty booze bottles. The nightstand's drawers are already half open but empty. A few balled up pieces of tin foil. Something in one of the corners that... was probably a pool of blood at some point. Okay, maybe there's /a little/. "Not surprised by a lot anymore," Jim leans his back against the wall facing Masque, ankles crossing. "So how's it work? She says it didn't even hurt." He holds up the peanut bag and rattles it - offer? His mouth is set grim, but still affords the interrogative upward tip of a brow. The combination of the question and the offer is met with Masque's confidence growing even thicker, showing clearly through the way lifts himself from the seat enough to reach forward, in one somewhat surprisingly smooth movement, without so much as a hair of hesitation. Not for the peanuts, though, but directly for Jim's wrist. 'Click.' Jim's non-peanut hand holds a small revolver at gut elevation when Masque's hand clamps onto him. The texture under Masque's hand is dry, the flaky psoriasis texture a shade rough under his hair-man wrist. "Works like that, huh?" "Exactly." Masque replies dryly, though apart from his long, bony fingers retaining a very, /very/ tight grip on the other man's wrist, the confidence falls somewhat in the way he now carries himself. Muscles tight, and his face twitching into a look of contempt. But his grey, dead eyes stay on Jim's, unwavering and steely. "Now the question is..." The worse side of his face attempts a squint. Is he enjoying this? "... Who will act first? 'Cause if you're in a shootin' mood, you better do it quick." Jim's eyes, faded-denim blue fit in a natural squint, are not dead - but they're hard. He lowers the gun and shoots Masque in the foot. Shit. Masque lopsidedly sinks to the floor almost simultaneously with the shot, knees giving way to pain much more easily than the rickety stairs outside. The injured foot contributes a new trail of blood to the carpet as his leg folds beneath him, but to his credit-- his purchase on Jim's wrist stays even as half of him is lowered to the floor. And after a short, very colourful bout of cursing, he snaps his attention back to Jim's face. "An--" He winces, having trouble getting /very comfortable/ at the moment without the pain that shows so easily on his face, now, "eye, for an eye." Masque's grip loosens...? No. No it does not. The flaky skin on /Jim's wrist/ starts to loosen as pressure increases with the influx of pain, tendons underneath stretching thinner. "Tss!" Oh, that's... not good. Jim presses /forward/, gun still gripped low and pressing up against Masque stomach. His flesh is changing in more ways than one now. The loose flakes thicken, pile up, harden, darken in layers and ridges. They snap and crackle in a wave around the sides of his face, making the grit of his smoker's teeth look /starkly/ ivory white against flesh transforming rapidly into treebark. Mesquite treebark, specifically. He's been /saving/ this one. A plant endowed with a natural arsenal two-inch long thorns, one of which forms /beneath/ the twisting flesh, and spears into Masque's palm. Or through it, if he wants to hang on. Oh, he does. And how he does. Unfortunately, however, the Rolling Stones prove themselves right in the sense that no matter how much Masque WANTS to hold on, his willpower finally fails him when the thorn presses its way to breaking the skin on the back of his hand. And even then, there's a chance he only let it get that far because he was /way/ too busy looking confused as all hell when Jim proves to be at least a /little/ more interesting than the usual pushovers he sees around this place. Because he's... a tree? The room's owner reels back in a stumble, now, accidentally knocking the chair over behind him as he attempts to straighten up. The hood falls back onto his shoulders, and Jim receives a look of /pure rage/ from behind wiry, grey strands of hair. "Ooh." He breathes, his tone slathered in contempt, "The dog /bites/." His hand, trickling red, is clutched close to his chest. But he does not stay put. He moves, limping and wincing with every step, stepping to the side. /Circling/ Jim. Meaning to position himself between his guest and the door. A few green shoots have begun to unravel from Jim's joints and shoulders, thickening in their stalks to become small branches, many imbued with other sharp spikes. "Nah," his teeth stay bared in a shape that could serve as a grimace as easily as a /grin/, not daring to take his eyes off Masque to even /look/ at what's become of his arm yet - squished in and misshapen through the wrist, packed up against his abdomen. "That's just my bark." He circles as well, gun still held out, "Doesn't gotta be this way." "Oh, and how--" Masque pauses, a grunt escaping him against his will. A thing that seems to annoy him possibly more than the fact that he's busy dragging more blood across his floor on a limb that he's not quite sure how to walk on without pangs of contained agony. His eyes close ever so briefly as he licks his lips - dry, tensed into a gritted scowl - before his attention re-settles on Jim. And though he may be closer to the door, now, he gives much more the impression of a cornered animal than anything else. "Pray tell. How /does/ it have to be? I'd like to know." And through the pain and anger, he sounds genuine. Curious. Come on, then. Try me. In spite of what the movies say, waving a gun around one-handed is /not/, in fact, the most effective way of drawing a bead. Jim would /like/ to grip it with both hands, but a single glance down to it and a /visible/ thickening of his throat as his gorge knocks on his tonsils and gets swallowed are an abject lesson of wishes in one hand, /shit/ in the other. So he sets his eyes back on Masque, looking more than willing to kick a cornered animal right about now. "Fix the girl. She fixes that dinosaur off your face. And we call this a mother fucking draw." Hmm. Masque, part fascinated by what he's seeing in front of him and part wounded desperation, really does seem like he'd be better off taking the deal. All things considered, standing down now would be a Good Idea. Alas. He /drags himself/ forward then, toward Jim, with equal amounts trouble moving and determination. The clutched hand released to allow him to push back his shoulders and open his arms in gesture. "And what if I don't? Two limbs left before you've got to start wondering how much bleeding an old man can take." "Oh, christ above, save me from martyrs," Jim mutters from behind his gun. "Dude, I don't gotta do anything." Aside from /thump/ the butt of his gun down on Masque's head. Not /gently/. There's not enough time for Masque to be able to respond beyond his expression, once overtaken by rage, shifting quickly to surprise. No fear, no regret, just... huh. "D-dddh..." Thud.