ArchivedLogs:Thugs and Puppies

Thugs and Puppies
Dramatis Personae Maya, Noah Ringe	2014-01-28 (Takes place directly after hugs and puppies.)
Location <NYC> East Village
Historically a center of counterculture, the East Village has a character all its own. Home to artists and musicians of many colours, this neighborhood is known for its punk vibe and artistic sensibilities. The birthplace of many protests, literary movements, it is home to a rather diverse community and vibrant nightlife. A heavily spined, thick black mass of... something... lays directly out across the sidewalk, between a small convenience store and an even smaller diner. It's about two feet tall or more due to the spines, looking much like a stegosaurus's tail, just draped out towards the gutter, no doubt leading to a creature that's back out of sight for the moment. Smart passerby switch to the other side of the street, just to not deal with it at all. It's accompanied by sounds from that alley of dumpster being rooted through, and a cardboard box topples out and flops over once into the gutter. Being, in fact, /one/ of those smart passersby, Maya is at this moment attempting to do just that, and switch to the other side of the street. Unfortunately for her, she is also attached to the lead of a large and curious canine who, for tonight undeterred by the harsh loud noise that accompanied their /previous/ experience, wants to Investigate. And so /Ratri/ is trying to tug her way /closer/ to the creature as Maya tries to find the nearest crosswalk back across the street. "-- Ratri, come /on/, we're going the other /way/," Maya insists with a weary resignation. "It is /so very cold out here/ do you /really/ need to make this walk longer?" But yes, yes, apparently the large Bernese does. Sniffsniff/sniff/, she really wants to check this out. Maya sneakily shortens her leash every time she takes a few steps closer. /Eying/ the alley with a furrowed brow and tugging her dog geeeently back. The chatter -- or coincidence -- causes that big spined tail to lift slowly (and relatively gracefully, other than a shake at the upper arc that suggests the thing is damn heavy), up to about head-height, and swing slowly back into the alley. The alley is hardly silent: no, some footfalls of the creature repositioning, possibly turning around by the way the tail lifted and moved, which suggests that the business end of the monster may be coming towards the sidewalk. There's no scary screams or growls, just a bunch of shuffling noises as he troops around on the cardboard remnants and shreds a plastic bag, that dumps some mixed rice and beefy remnants onto the ground and his feet. Maya's grip on Ratri's leash tightens, mitten curling around it slowly. There's a quiet click, click, click, as she ratchets the adjustable leash in to shorten it as fully as it will go. "C'mon," she murmurs, softly, to her dog. "Heel, girl." She nudges the dog around to her far side, putting as much space in between the alley and her as possible as the dog starts to growl, now. A slow warning grumble deep in Ratri's throat. "Shhh, stay calm, alright?" She keeps the dog on her far side, one calf pressed up against Ratri's side as she scoots slowly past, nearly in the street for the sake of staying as far from the alley as possible. "See? We're just going home." Without any particular warning, the big mutant steps out onto the sidewalk, tail arched high, scraping loosely against part of a fire escape up behind and to his left as he comes out. He's covered in the biological looking, dully shiny black plates that make up the spiked surface of his body. Limbs are too long and narrow, then suddenly taper into heavy taloned hands, as if a burst of overgrowth of the black mess spun out of control there, the same way as it did on all of spine, shoulders, and at various areas all over his body, particularly the head, which is merely a mass of tangled barbs. A car rushing past veers far away from the sidewalk, and there's a loud burst of a horn from a car coming the other way which swerves to miss it: a closs call. The mutant's attention, or at least the direction head is roughly directed in, tracks that first and then moves directly to face the girl and dog. "/What?/" comes a young male's voice (if he were a very very heavy smoker with a weird partial echo) without moving jaw or anything else, in a challenging, defensive tone one would probably expect from a horrifyingly ugly mutant like this one, that tends to cause traffic problems by existing. Ratri growls sharply, but her posturing is -- not very /effective/ posturing because just as quickly, when Noah makes himself more /visible/, her growl turns into a whine, a whimper, and the big dog goes cowering behind Maya's legs, quivering and shaking. And still kind of growling, admittedly, though there's just as much whine to it as rumble. "Shh, Ratri, shh," Maya says, though admittedly /her/ eyes are huge and wide and /her/ grip on the leash is tight, /her/ legs trembling as she backs up a step. "-- Nothing, sir," she says in a meek voice, "I'm just walking home." "'Sir?'" Noah queries, as if that response definitely tickled him in some way. Perhaps he finds it ridiculous. "That's /right/ 'sir'," he agrees, a smirk in his tone, but obviously not on his face, due to lacking a face. He does seem quite pleased by what he's taking as her respectful attitude. He drops to half-squat, half sit on his tail, which cuts his mass down a great deal, although going from 7' to 5' isn't exactly that small anyway. "If your pet tries to bite I'll kill it," Noah says simply, in an informational tone, not in a threatening one. Just as if he found that statement perfectly factual: it isn't even a warning, since by his tone, he doesn't care one way or another about it. That may suggest he's either not very intelligent, or he's playing a game. "That's my new rule: if things shoot me or bite, they don't just get away with it," Noah adds, matter-of-fact. Maya doesn't actually say anything in response to this, at first. Her brows crease very deeply, her mittened hand tightening hard around the leash, holding Ratri very close to her side. Her weight shifts back, keeping Ratri behind her, pushing the dog back away from Noah. "We're going the other way, then," is what she finally says, turning around to -- do just that, turning on a heel and holding her trembling dog /very/ close to her side. For probably no apparent reason, Noah drops his head some, and the oddly hinged lower jaw opens, twisted black spines far more like fangs in this iteration-- and releases one of his chilling shrieks, in a pulse of sound that rattles the windows of the adjacent buildings, sends two cars parked nearby into car alarms, and echoingly bounces off more of the buildings down the street. The jaw closes after a few long seconds of the pulse, but that is all he does: simply that sonic burst, and nothing else, merely stands there, as if soaking in the result of the screech. The screech only serves to hurry Maya and Ratri along, hastening their steps down the street until they disappear, out of sight around the very first cross-street.