Calling all cops and autobots

[chargethesebatteries]

Date & Time: Pretty much any time from 28Feb throughout the month of March; specify in your comment subject!
Location: All across Exsilium!
Characters: Sergeant Calhoun and YOU!
Summary: While the sarge is out on patrol she winds up running into all kinds of people. And all kinds of trouble. The details are up to you! Wanna get busted? Wanna get rescued? Wanna get donuts? Anything goes, just be creative!
Warnings: Will be updated as necessary


Tamora had come to enjoy her duties as one of Exsilium's Finest, as it were. Not that the police force was particularly organized or notably well-trained, but she supposed they made the best of what they were given. When she'd first arrived in this place she'd been concerned that she would just go out of her mind without her job to keep her occupied, but policing the streets had become a pretty acceptable stand-in. There was a part of her that missed taking out cy-bugs (and an even bigger part of her that missed her colleagues back in Hero's Duty and the rest of the arcade), but moping never fixed anything. Tamora Jean Calhoun did not mope. And so instead she just set herself to cracking down and taking a bite out of crime and serving and protecting and all those fine upstanding things cops did.

Even if it meant dealing with her fair share of resistance. Heck, she kind of enjoyed the troublesome ones--she was a little rough by nature, after all, and figured one good hard time deserved another. She wasn't afraid to full-body tackle a suspect if it came to it, and had her share of bruises and scrapes from doing so. They might not have been laser burns or gashes from cy-bug pincers, but they were battle scars in their own rite.

She'd never been a huge fan of sweets, but she did frequent the local coffee shop when she had downtime, giving the other patrons leery looks over the lip of her mug as she sipped contemplatively at the bitter black liquid. Sometimes she tried her hand at making up ridiculous dramatic histories for the people standing in line. She hadn't bothered asking any of them if she was right or not; it was more fun to just assume the man in the fedora was a mafioso and the woman in the perfectly tailored pencil skirt behind him was his best hitman.

Even on her days off she more often than not found herself tooling around town on her cruiser, just making sure the peace was kept and everyone was coloring within the lines. Exsilium still didn't quite feel like 'home', but it was definitely something that was worth protecting, so far as she was concerned, and nothing was going to change her mind.

Comments

[chargethesebatteries]

She'd been bad at sleeping ever since Brad's death, and even after finding happiness again with Felix to help fill the hole left in her heart, Tamora still dealt with frequent bouts of insomnia. It didn't help that here in Exsilium she didn't even have Felix, and so missing him was just one more thing rattling around in her cluttered head, chasing sleep away like a spooked animal. She supposed it was good she had something to occupy herself with during the long sleepless hours, at least; idle hands had never suited her, and this city needed all the policing it could get. She wasn't getting paid for her off-duty dabbling, but it was better than staring at the ceiling in the apartment.

Cruising quietly down the darkened streets, Tamora kept a sharp eye out for any sign of tomfoolery. So far it seemed like this would prove to be a quiet evening. As she turned down a shadowed alley, however, she jumped, startled by a sound from... above? Snapping her head up, she watched in puzzled awe as a figure soared overhead, easily clearing the space of the alley to land on the adjacent rooftop. Well, she'd be lambasted.

Too impressed to really be on-edge, Tamora swung the cruiser around and made a sharp ascent, rounding the corner of the building and clearing the ledge to see if her unexpected company had lingered. Spying a youthful-looking girl with greyish skin and big yellow eyes, she blinked. Ah, perhaps this girl was a troll like Maryam? Yes, she seemed to have the same unusual orange horns, though the shape was different.

She recalled Maryam having mentioned that trolls were a race of warriors, but this one didn't seem particularly belligerent. Intrigued, Tamora hopped down off the cruiser and regarded the girl curiously.

"Pretty impressive acrobatics," she said with a shallow grin.

[moirailcompass]

Nepeta couldn't help but beam a little--her climbing skills and parkour were one of the few things she had great pride in and she was pleasantly surprised to have it acknowledged.

"Thank you." Definitely not a face she had seen before, but hey when did that ever stop Nepeta? She felt she needed to get to more people here in Exsilium, especially, and get out of this funk she'd been in.

"I couldn't help but notice your..." she tilted her head, examining a little, "floating device? It looks purrty neat, I haven't seen anything like it befur."

[chargethesebatteries]

Tamora hesitated. 'Purrty'? No, she must have heard wrong; that was a little too cheesy. Glancing back at the cruiser where it hovered quietly behind her, she smiled a bit before meeting the girl's eye.

"It's called a cruiser," she said. "Fairly standard military issue where I come from--makes it easier to traverse uneven or dangerous terrain on uncharted planets."

[moirailcompass]

Your ears did not deceive you, Tamora. Nepeta is just that cheesy and she hasn't even gotten started yet. Wait till she starts rolling out the really obtuse ones.

Her eyes brighten at Tamora's explanation.

"Really? That's so cool! Have you been to a lot of other planets? What kind of stuff have you seen?"

[chargethesebatteries]

Bring it on--the obtuse ones are her favorite!

Tamora was fairly used to people being impressed with her title and technology, but this girl was a level of enthusiastic that she hadn't witnessed in a while (probably not since Vanellope had first gotten a chance to ride on the cruiser...). Running a hand back through her hair, she quirked her lips a bit.

"A few," she said. Or, well, her backstory dictated she'd been to a few other planets, anyway. Ugh, it was complicated. "Before I got here, I was stationed on a nameless planet, charged with eliminating a parasitic race of cyborgs that could potentially wipe out life as we know it."

Sarge don't say that so casually...

[moirailcompass]

Casually said, but boy did that sound pretty exciting to Nepeta. She was all ears at the sound of this--certainly a riveting story and Nepeta was always up for stories. Hopefully she wouldn't come off as overly nosy, but you know what they say about curiosity and cats.

"That sounds exciting!" Not what one might expect of a girl who looks like her, but hey. She liked her adventure. "What were they like? Were you guys winning?"

[chargethesebatteries]

Hey, if there was one thing Tamora could appreciate it was gusto, and this girl seemed to have it in spades. She seemed a little young to have so much interest, but Tamora couldn't really find fault. After all, she'd been raised by a military father and had learned her Alpha Bravo Charlies alongside the more standard ABCs her classmates were taught.

Pausing, Tamora folded her arms and frowned a bit. What were they like?

"Well, they're called cy-bugs," she said, "which is pretty self-explanatory. They're cybernetic... bugs, more or less. Nasty critters. They can take on the properties of anything they consume, so if we lose a gun to one of 'em, suddenly we're dodging our own bullets, if you follow."

She kneaded her forehead then.

"As for whether or not we're winning... it's tough to say," she admitted. "We're grossly outnumbered, but we're determined to not give up 'til every last one cy-bug is annihilated."

Granted, if that happened the game would be over. Literally. And that would mean they would get unplugged. She wasn't even sure it was actually possible to eradicate all the cy-bugs, but she couldn't really explain that facet of it to this girl. After all, it wasn't like she would understand being a character in a video game or anything.