exsiliumlogs | Operation: Roll Out

Entry tags:

Operation: Roll Out

Date & Time: January 31st - February 4th, Present Day Exsilium Time
Location: Neo Las Vegas, in what formerly was called Turkey.
Characters: All Transports!
Summary: Transports have been sent to Neo Las Vegas to gather information on the origin point of the United Earth and the UE AI. Conference sabotage and the rest is expected and invited!
Warnings: Gambling and alcoholic beverages quite likely! Please PM the mod account for anything else.

By day, the landscape isn't desert, precisely, so much as it is dry. Winter's settled in and found in the biting chill of the wind when it finds you standing on the street. Hovercars and taxis thrum down the cobblestone streets, cavorting and honking like a noisy crowd of inelegant, overweight geese. Men walk by on stilts half in make-up, on their way back to their stage for the next night. Walks of shame are taken proudly in this district, one of the few approved and sanctioned vacation zones in the United Earth.

Evidence of law enforcement can be found all around, but they seem altogether too pleased to be there too. Talk with any one of them about crime rates, and they're liable to laugh at the idea. Those who come to gamble know the house is rigged to win. It's not about making or breaking the bank -- people whose funds dip too low are politely escorted back to their rooms and given a set of normal playing cards -- but it is about enjoyment.

Of the flesh too, and it'd be difficult to find anyone working in Neo Las Vegas who suffers from modesty, or anyone visiting who seems unwilling to politely ask visitors and staff if they'd like to keep them company for the night. In fact, Transports may find themselves needing to turn down multiple such requests! The refusal is always taken well. These are people looking to have a good time, and that's all.

No chance taken, nothing gained, right?

At night, the city really comes alive, the lights in all the hotels and casinos turning the Neo Las Vegas Strip into a carnival of sensation. Drinks and recreational drugs are freely passed around, men and women engage in a variety of sexual and other hedonistic excesses without regret, and the beautiful interiors and ostentatious or playful exteriors of the buildings hide and reveal a rich tapestry of events, delectables, and desires waiting to be fulfilled.

Neo Las Vegas is a fun place, and it is a safe place, and it is Where the Conferences For Our Future Are Made. Playtime is on, gang.

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"A little," she said, shaking her head as she laughed. She braced herself, waiting to let go of Stan until she felt she was secure on her own two feet. "When they said we were heading to Vegas, the last thing I was expecting was the laundry room."

It's what she saw in Los Angeles, and as a personal ongoing joke between herself and another, it seemed to color a fair share of her experiences in Exsilium. Her better ones, she hopes.

"Who cares? We're free." He claps Collette on the shoulder soundly and makes for the door. She's good enough there, right?

...

The next time he sees her, he's perched on the edge of a rooftop, enjoying some recreational vertigo. She seems to be a little dizzy herself, actually. When she gets close enough he tries to get to his feet to help her down gently, cause it would suck if she fell off the roof or something. He speaks to her, because she doesn't seem to have seen him yet and he doesn't want her to startle when she notices him. It's a little precarious where they're standing for that.

"Colette. Hey."

Jesus where did Stan go her life became a whole mess of STAN, STAN? WHERE ARE YOU STAN!

Which is to say, Collette finds herself blinking and listing to the side when she stops, placing Stan's voice a little late. "Stan?" She grins, waggling her fingers at him in an odd sort of wave. "Stan!"

She stumbles to the side, twisting around to hit the edge of the roof with the side of her leg. Her flop sideways is a scramble to catch hold on the lip of the roof, which she manages, along with a slightly too high giggle and extraordinarily wide eyes.

"Oh boy. We're up high, way high."

Stan's eyes widen a bit and he drops down beside her on the roof's edge again, looping an arm over her shoulders just to be safe. "Yeah. We're pretty high."

Her heart hammers in her chest. Collette startles as he loops an arm around her shoulders, sending her shifting further back -- toward the edge of the roof. If she were more clear headed she would have calmed down and not added to the overbalancing, but between an ongoing inability to rely on her lower body to assist in acts of balancing and anchoring, and her own state of inebriation, mixed with Stan and all the rest, it's just enough to send them off.

With slow dawning horror, Collette feels them tumbling off the side of the roof. There's no way to survive this that she knows of, but survival isn't her first though. Grab the edge is her first thought, but then here she is holding on to Stan instead, fingers locking into curled fists in his shirt, pulling him closer as the air leaves her lungs.

Then she screams. Piercing, curdling, sincerely terrified: Collette screams.

Edited 2014-02-01 07:16 (UTC)

He's not sure what goes wrong. Collette shies back from him, maybe? He doesn't even have time to register that and adjust his arm-okay, he should've asked first probably, but he hadn't been making a move on her, really!- Except that whatever happens, he's not able to adjust fast enough. Collette isn't that heavy, but unfortunately neither is Stan. The full amount of her weight and the forward momentum are too munch, especially with both of them drunk and suddenly flailing.

The arm that's around Collette tightens in some bizarre natural instinct to cling to her as they plunge over the side, but the other he manages to command to his will enough to grasp for the rooftop. It isn't enough. All he gets out of it is a lurch and a snap of pain so sharp that his vision goes black. Collette screams and Stan joins in, suddenly very much in pain and scared out of his mind to boot. They're going to die.

They're seriously going to fucking die because they got drunk and fell off a rooftop. How is it possible that his jerkass granfather was actually right about something after all? Damn it...

They're both screaming, and Collette feels adrenaline give her a sharp focus she hadn't had in the fuzzier, warm moments before they both tipped over backward. What penetrates through the fear, as she keeps her death-grip on Stan's shirt, is how this doesn't feel like falling. As an expert in that very thing, she expects a tumble from a building to feel like a break-neck speed fall through the air.

But that's the thing. It felt like they've thumped into something, and they're not falling anymore.

Not to say she stops screaming, since she doesn't, not until the air runs out of her impressive lungs and she breathes in through her nose to stop another scream from clawing out of her throat.

Ah, she thinks, some small part of her mind noticing a spreading warmth in her pants, I peed myself.

She resolves right then to never, ever, ever drink again. (For the third time.)

"Stan!" Her voice comes out croaking, a gasp of a word. "Stan, we're not falling!"

He's stopped screaming long before Collette, but he's not actually any less panicked. It vaguely registers with him that he's got someone else's piss on him...again...but what's even more disconcerting is the fact that they seem to be hanging midair. Vague memories of a trip to Chicago a few years back surface, and he wonders dumbly for a moment if maybe they're in Chicago now, or just a glass-bottom elevator in this city, or what? Because the only other alternative is that he's so much higher than he realized. It's his own fault, too. He knows that mixing anything else with magic cacti is kinda asking for it.

Well, fuck.

"Wait, are we still on the roof?"

Because if they are he looks like a total fucking tool right now.

Collette forcibly unclenched her first from his shirt, sliding it past Stan to touch the air behind his head. Her hand stays there, prevented from going any further by an invisible force.

She thinks of Paris. She thinks of Blue.

Her heart hurts, and she shakes her head, feeling embarrassed and relieved all at once. "No," she admits. "But we're not falling anymore. I, um. Force-field?"

She supposed it had to be something of that very sort.

"Oh." He answers, still sounding unconvinced. He wouldn't hallucinate Collette, right? That would be kind of weird.

Confused, Stan sits up, and hisses in pain. Okay, he fucked his arm up. That sucks. Whatever, there's gotta be a hospital around somewhere. No doubt people need to get their stomachs pumped here like all the time.

"Sorry. You okay?"

"I peed myself," she says, blinking rapidly. "Um. Other than that, I'm okay. I kind of want to vomit."

She has to avoid looking down. "What's hurt?" She shifts away from him, loosening her other hand, pretending the invisible barrier was a kind of elastic bubble she was willingly moving around on. This is fun, not frightening. Fun, not terrifying. Fun.

"Can we get back on the roof now?"

"Yeah." Stan agrees. He noticed the pee, but he wasn't gonna be the one to say it to her. They just fell off the fucking roof, after all. Or almost did, anyway. He's not sure what actually happened, but it probably doesn't matter all that much. Not now that they aren't dead, anyway.

He swallows hard at her suggestion of vomiting, though. He's feeling a little queasy himself. Must be the short and sudden drop with the quick stop. Or the drugs, but more likely the fear. Still, since Collette called dibs on puking he'll just have to let her go first. Shakily, he glances around. Can they get back on the roof? ...Yeah. But there's a ladder involved. His arm and shoulder aren't as up for that as they were like a minute ago.

"Uh. How sturdy are you?"

Shit, is that his voice? It totally is. His embarrassingly high voice.

...Whatever, at least he didn't piss himself. She can't laugh, right? There's a code.

"Define sturdy," she asks, swallowing herself and starting to crawl toward the ladder. "I won't be lifting quarterbacks, but I can help get you up to the top, if that's what you mean?"

She hopes that's what he means.

She can morph to fix that one, she realizes. Oh man. Morphing.

She wants to laugh. Mostly, she wants to cry in relief.

"I've got you. I can get you up, no problem, easy as yogurt in a tube!"

Uh. Okay, so basically most of that doesn't make sense to him. What the fuck is she talking about? He glances around for a moment, almost worried that they might be on some sort of mid-air football field fucking things up somehow, but that doesn't seem to be the case. No he blinks in confusion and crawls after her, though it isn't too easy on one arm. Ow. Shit. Ow....

"There might be yoghurt downstairs I guess?"

"No, I mean yes, I mean maybe? I don't know. Look, Stan, I'm going to morph, so don't get weirded out when there's a big cat-thing here in a moment, okay?"

"Huh?"

He blinks in response to that, about to ask what she's talking about. And then he doesn't have to ask, because there's a...actually he has no idea what it is. There. But it's probably Collette, because she does that weir animal thing.

"Oh."

With a shrug -ow, fucking ow- he reaches out his good hand and runs it over the pelt of the big whatever it is. Cat monster thing. Collette. She's soft. Cool.

Her fur bristles out, Collette shaking her head and trying to figure out what the weird feeling under her paws is, only to conclude it's like invisible linoleum.

Her ear flicks back toward Stan. After having used her stopwatch to give herself time to morph, it seemed seamless to him. Where Collette had been, now there was a giant demon cat.

Two shoes sit on the invisible barrier's surface. Collette leans down, picking them up in her mouth. The taste on her tongue is unpleasant.

< Can you climb on? > She asks as she stays crouched, tilting her head to the side so she can watch Stanley.

There sure is a giant cat monster talking in his head today. In the sky. In future Las Vegas. After the world ended a few times and....and that's enough to short circuit his brain. He pokes at Collette's nose this time, curiously. Hey. Magical cat monster boogies. Heh.

"What?"

< Stan, > she says, ears twitching around to focus on him. < Climb on top of the furry cat's back, okay? >

He laughs. It's loud and clear and musical, surprisingly genuine. He can't remember the last time he laughed like this, but it must have been when he was pretty young. Maybe there's something about big crazy imaginary creatures that amuse in ways no other things can, and so his childhood laughter comes back to him briefly.

Only until he reaches for it with the wrong arm, though, and ends up hissing and spitting in pain again. After that the laughter dies quickly, as though it was never there at all. BUt he uses his good arm this time, and hops aboard. Why the fuck not?

Collette doesn't question why he laughs. She laughs so often, she's glad someone else has to face the absurd with amusement.

Not that he seems totally in touch, and she can tell he's injured.

Nonetheless, she pushes off the invisible barrier, pushing up into the chill night air. They pass the level of the roof, fire bursting from the joints of all her paws, and she runs through the air, higher at first, then gently sloping down. She wonders how far out this all goes, this barrier, but instead of finding out, she stays with what Caesar's intimated before.

Do we want to draw their attention here?

She touches down on the rooftop, sinking down low, until her belly fur brushes the ground. < Ride's over! I need to demorph, we can get you to someplace for your arm then. >

Woah. Woah, firepaws. That's crazy. Maybe not quite as crazy as the whole big furry cat thing in the first place, but definitely a close second.

He wants to ask about it, but then she's talking in his head again and using unfamiliar words...demorph? What?

Well...getting his arm patched up probably is a good idea, yeah. It kinda hurts. A lot, actually. So he slides off, and gives the big kitty an absent pat. Good girl.

Collette shakes herself off, her stopwatch falling out of her mouth along with her shoes. Pawing at it until it catches, Stan soon has Collette with him again, sitting on the ground and reaching for her damp sneakers.

She grimaces.

"Let me get my shoes on, then we can get going."

On the bright side, she no longer feels drunk.

It's weird how Collette instantly becomes a girl again after the big magical cat business. Maybe she's better at that than her wolf powers or something, who knows. He debates asking for a minute. She wouldn't get too bent out of shape about it, right? Well. Maybe it's better to wait until after someone patches his arm up or something. He can manage that.

"We can find a hand dryer first if you want."

The corked fingers and whatever he did to his arm and shoulder aren't exactly going anywhere. And he's still pretty tisy, unlike her. It seems like a reasonable suggestion. Her shoes are wet. Wet shoes kinda suck.

She gives up on her shoes with a sigh, tying the laces together and swinging them over a shoulder. "Nawh," she says, "I'll just do socks for now. Can I see your arm?"

Collette stands in a full body effort that sends her stumbling and arms flailing, all for the sake of balance. She does find it, planting her feet a little more than shoulder distance apart. Ah-hah! All right, she's got this!

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