Who wants to get ripped in duelz ^^ (this weekend?)
Baddy/Baddi/Raddi/Raddy I think are my chars across TR1/TR2
I have some amazingly gay teams I want to try out too including mandickloving comps such as:
protp/combat
protp/destro
protp/destro/disc
disc/combat/dru (nerdy combat poisonz build)
feral/disc/destro
protp/disc/feral
HOPEFULLY I WONT GET ANY ACCOUNTS PERMA'D FOR OFFENSIVE TEAM NAMES ON TR THIS TIME (17 YR LO DESTROYED DP INTERNAL)
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Chapter IX (Part I)
The smell of gym and leather felt oddly nostalgic despite never having really spent much time around either. I had decided a workout would keep my mind distracted from the day's events and needed something to do while the boys slept. Jet had joked that Mania wouldn't come out till night and suggested that we all relax till then. I enjoyed surprising him by demanding he let me use one of his gyms. Jess, never to be shown up athletically by me, was happy to keep me company for a workout.
The smell of leather was the old heavy bag in front of me, my hands stinging the bag with weak thuds, more effective at straining my wrists than moving the 70kg bag noticeably. I didn't care. I continued striking the bag dully, Jess watching with an amused smirk as if I had totally lost my mind. Catching the reflection of my reddened face in the mirror, I had to agree. After my hands transitioned from simply throbbing to utterly numb, I stopped, again catching my reflection, this time of the possessed scowl I wore, and couldn't help but laugh with her.
"Okay Jess, your turn."
What she lacked in scowling and crazy, she made up for in athleticism and skill, her punches driving the bag visibly with each impact. I need less athletic people in my life. Still, despite her skill, and my total lack of it, I think the bagwork gave us both the same cathartic release.
I had watched Jet train down here many times before mustering the courage to ask him to show me how to use the heavy bags. Jet explained that they taught you how to strike with follow through, that they demonstrated the feeling of striking a real opponent. He preferred a heavier bag than this one, but the bag he liked scratched up my bare hands too much. I liked this smooth, scarred leather one.
Jet showed me how to make a fist by folding first at the fingers, how to halfway lock one's wrists, how to keep my eyes forward, and how to strike the middle of the bag, always just below shoulder height. I laughed at this last instruction, "But don't you sometimes want to strike at other heights?"
He had laughed, "Not if it has this much resistance, you're strongest at that height. And you won't get injured."
Not that I was terribly interested in striking real live targets. Being able to defend myself would be nice, but no amount of training was ever going to save me from the Mania's and Crow's of the world. Or probably any of those other names from today...
Donovan Cross. Of Cross Industry. Alex's father had worked for that boy's father. Donovan had also lost his father. That night in October, while Mania slaughtered a houseful of police officers, terrorists had attacked the Cross headquarters across town. Part of me assumed Mania was involved in that, but --
Jess, huffing and out of breath, "You're back up."
I began again with renewed focus, only pausing to blow a stray lock of hair from my eyes, continuing until totally exhausted.
Why not ask Donovan what he knows?
Because he's creepy. Because even Mania seems afraid of him. Because he is one of the mentioned names.
My eyes flashed to the doorway catching a hint of movement. Jet framed the entrance in dark jeans and layers of gauze thin knits, his physique hidden but subtly still present beneath the layered folds. His hands absently fingered a large pair of headphones. He spoke, solemn in tone, but his grinning eyes betrayed him, and revealed his excitement, "Gonna head out soon."
"Jet"
"Hmn?"
"What do you think about maybe contacting that Donovan guy?"
Jet shrugged, "Whatever. The brother, right?"
Jess chimed in, "You trust that guy?"
"Not really, but he was mentioned too." That wasn't really all that I meant. "I don't know. I get the feeling he'd know something."
Jet, now struggling to untangle a cord he had fished from his pocket, distractedly replied, "Maybe we should split up. Alex can talk to this Cross guy."
"I thought Alex was going with you."
"Nah, Mania hates Lex."
So? "Yeah, doesn't she hate you too?"
Jet grinned. "Probably, but, she might listen to me. At least for a little while."
Mania had rammed a knife through Jet's hands last they met. Jet replied by sticking that knife between her ribs. I couldn't really picture the two having much of a conversation.
My tone accusatory, "You are going to try talking to her about today, right? Not just fight?"
Jet's sheepish grin and hand in his hair gave him up instantly.
"Jet!"
"Fine!" he sulked.
Jess rolled her eyes thoroughly unimpressed by my idiot boyfriend's, well, idiocy. She turned to ask me something but I was fixated on watching Jet use the long cord to tie knot after knot, securing the gigantic earphones to his head. His voice, now inapproriately loud drowned out Jess, "Allie, come with, make sure I don't fight."
"What about Alex and Jess?"
"WHAT?"
Jess scowled, I inwardly smiled, and nodded. It would be amazing if we survived this night.
The smell of leather was the old heavy bag in front of me, my hands stinging the bag with weak thuds, more effective at straining my wrists than moving the 70kg bag noticeably. I didn't care. I continued striking the bag dully, Jess watching with an amused smirk as if I had totally lost my mind. Catching the reflection of my reddened face in the mirror, I had to agree. After my hands transitioned from simply throbbing to utterly numb, I stopped, again catching my reflection, this time of the possessed scowl I wore, and couldn't help but laugh with her.
"Okay Jess, your turn."
What she lacked in scowling and crazy, she made up for in athleticism and skill, her punches driving the bag visibly with each impact. I need less athletic people in my life. Still, despite her skill, and my total lack of it, I think the bagwork gave us both the same cathartic release.
I had watched Jet train down here many times before mustering the courage to ask him to show me how to use the heavy bags. Jet explained that they taught you how to strike with follow through, that they demonstrated the feeling of striking a real opponent. He preferred a heavier bag than this one, but the bag he liked scratched up my bare hands too much. I liked this smooth, scarred leather one.
Jet showed me how to make a fist by folding first at the fingers, how to halfway lock one's wrists, how to keep my eyes forward, and how to strike the middle of the bag, always just below shoulder height. I laughed at this last instruction, "But don't you sometimes want to strike at other heights?"
He had laughed, "Not if it has this much resistance, you're strongest at that height. And you won't get injured."
Not that I was terribly interested in striking real live targets. Being able to defend myself would be nice, but no amount of training was ever going to save me from the Mania's and Crow's of the world. Or probably any of those other names from today...
Donovan Cross. Of Cross Industry. Alex's father had worked for that boy's father. Donovan had also lost his father. That night in October, while Mania slaughtered a houseful of police officers, terrorists had attacked the Cross headquarters across town. Part of me assumed Mania was involved in that, but --
Jess, huffing and out of breath, "You're back up."
I began again with renewed focus, only pausing to blow a stray lock of hair from my eyes, continuing until totally exhausted.
Why not ask Donovan what he knows?
Because he's creepy. Because even Mania seems afraid of him. Because he is one of the mentioned names.
My eyes flashed to the doorway catching a hint of movement. Jet framed the entrance in dark jeans and layers of gauze thin knits, his physique hidden but subtly still present beneath the layered folds. His hands absently fingered a large pair of headphones. He spoke, solemn in tone, but his grinning eyes betrayed him, and revealed his excitement, "Gonna head out soon."
"Jet"
"Hmn?"
"What do you think about maybe contacting that Donovan guy?"
Jet shrugged, "Whatever. The brother, right?"
Jess chimed in, "You trust that guy?"
"Not really, but he was mentioned too." That wasn't really all that I meant. "I don't know. I get the feeling he'd know something."
Jet, now struggling to untangle a cord he had fished from his pocket, distractedly replied, "Maybe we should split up. Alex can talk to this Cross guy."
"I thought Alex was going with you."
"Nah, Mania hates Lex."
So? "Yeah, doesn't she hate you too?"
Jet grinned. "Probably, but, she might listen to me. At least for a little while."
Mania had rammed a knife through Jet's hands last they met. Jet replied by sticking that knife between her ribs. I couldn't really picture the two having much of a conversation.
My tone accusatory, "You are going to try talking to her about today, right? Not just fight?"
Jet's sheepish grin and hand in his hair gave him up instantly.
"Jet!"
"Fine!" he sulked.
Jess rolled her eyes thoroughly unimpressed by my idiot boyfriend's, well, idiocy. She turned to ask me something but I was fixated on watching Jet use the long cord to tie knot after knot, securing the gigantic earphones to his head. His voice, now inapproriately loud drowned out Jess, "Allie, come with, make sure I don't fight."
"What about Alex and Jess?"
"WHAT?"
Jess scowled, I inwardly smiled, and nodded. It would be amazing if we survived this night.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Chapter VIII (Part II END)
A few minutes after the news, the professor dismissed us, though not long before the whole school had canceled all classes for the day, and the four of us made our way to Jet's in lack of a better option. My mind was a mess of nerves to the point where the thirty foot trek out the classroom may as well have been a trip to another planet.
We had scarcely made out of the door of the classroom before Jess was firing questions at the boys. I was alone in my spaced reaction to the events. Jess and the boys were angry.
"How did you know of the attacks first?" she demanded, her tone accusatory.
Jet shrugged indifference. Alex ignored her.
She steamed, "You can't go off being all mysterious about this anymore. This is affecting everyone now." We continued down the hall, her continuing to rant, Jet flickering between bored, confused, and aggravated, Alex cold and distracted. I stuck initially to being simply shaken, but curiosity took hold of me as well. She was certainly right that whatever the boys were caught up in was spreading into the wide world at a quickening pace.
I had told Jess almost everything, but not everything I knew. To be fair, most of what I knew of Jet and Alex's history was fairly recent knowledge from a single conversation with Alex.
Alex had explained to me that Jet, Mania, and he had all known each other as children. More than knew either, they were friends, close friends. Alex's father, was a researcher at Cross. Not just any research scientist, he was generally credited with discovering Stutter, and was accorded, initially, a lot of power and responsibility in hopes that Stutter could be put into application.
Of course, Stutter ended up being a catastrophic failure; a drug that had fantastic, almost supernatural effects on the body and mind, but when metabolized, broke down into toxins quickly killing any and every test subject. This I knew without Alex's aid.
Despite nearly two decades of failed efforts to transform Stutter into something applicable, Cross forged onwards with research, until Alex's father suddenly not only refused to continue the research but destroyed all of the accumulated data on Stutter. Apparently, he alone knew the trick to combining the precursors of Stutter, and his refusal to cooperate along with his destruction of most of the data on the project were potentially a multi-decade setback.
It was a week after his father's refusal that a wide-eyed ten year old Alex found himself frozen in the doorway of his parent's bedroom. Before him, and above his recently decapitated mother and father, crouched his friend, an eleven year old Mania, kitchen knife in hand, smeared in blood, fingers to toes.
Alex screamed and fled with Mania in pursuit, gaining distance as she slipped with blood-slick bare feet on the downstairs kitchen tiles, running till he could feel his heart ready to explode in his chest, eventually making it to Jet's. Mania was seconds, not minutes, behind and before he could explain much of anything to Jet, she arrived, panting and furious.
Alex didn't give me much to work with concerning what happened next. I'll do my best to recall it as he did to me.
Jet and Mania trained together religiously, both fascinated by combat. Jet's excuse was being the prodigy in a long line of competitive fighters and martial artists. For Mania, it was apparently different. She was naturally gifted without much training. Strong. Quick. For her, it was more about expressing that which lay otherwise dormant and unused. As children, compared to Jet, she was always stronger, faster, but she lacked his stamina and technique, and was typically the loser whenever the two sparred.
Not on that day.
The two fought with Jet becoming horrifically cut and slashed almost immediately. Alex had managed to break off and alert the police with his phone only to return as one of his best friends was in the motion of slitting the throat of his other. He screamed her name, her real name, Charisma, and she spun to look at the boy with whom she used to laugh and play, and now wanted to kill.
Her once cute face now bore a sick grin, porcelain white teeth in full display between thin ruby lips drawn languidly back. She claimed that she was not Charisma and that her name was Bia. She didn't respond when asked why she was hurting them, why she killed his parents, but she did let Jet out from trapped underneath her. She sat frozen, covered in fresh blood, some hers, most of it Jet's, for only a few moments before three police officers tore through the front door, shouts flooding Jet's demolished living room.
Their threats and shouts to disarm unfortunately did the officers little good. Mania, Bia, stood facing the men, slick with red, knife gripped firm in hand. Tires screeched outside in the driveway. The first shot tore through Mania's left shoulder sending the young girl to the floor screaming. The officers inched closer, encircling the wounded girl. A mistake.
She was up in a flicker, the knife claiming the weapon arm of the officer who fired, before finding the throats of the other two. Three bodies hit the carpet floor with a soft thud, two coughing garbled wheezes, one screeching in agony.
Despite his injuries, Jet was quick to spring into action as well, prying the gun from the amputated arm and spinning to fire at young Mania as she turned away from the three men. Four shots rang out, all four missing their mark. Behind Mania, framed in the doorway, and now silently slumping towards the same carpeted floor were Jet's panic-stricken mother and father.
Mania kicked the weapon away from the horrified Jet, and bent down to restrain him from rushing to the side of his wounded, dying parents. Sirens blazed in the distance, each second drawing nearer. She spoke tranquilly, her fury gone, transformed back into the girl they knew, "I'll be leaving for a long time. I'll miss you."
"And what exactly is the point of that," Jess harped. I had absolutely no idea what they were arguing about. I could have sworn Jet mentioned something about a nap.
Jet yawned as he spoke, "Need rest if we're going looking for Mania."
"Why? Even if she didn't do it, why would she help? This sort of thing sounds like something she'd probably enjoy."
Jet grinned at Jess, "Because she's being called out."
We had scarcely made out of the door of the classroom before Jess was firing questions at the boys. I was alone in my spaced reaction to the events. Jess and the boys were angry.
"How did you know of the attacks first?" she demanded, her tone accusatory.
Jet shrugged indifference. Alex ignored her.
She steamed, "You can't go off being all mysterious about this anymore. This is affecting everyone now." We continued down the hall, her continuing to rant, Jet flickering between bored, confused, and aggravated, Alex cold and distracted. I stuck initially to being simply shaken, but curiosity took hold of me as well. She was certainly right that whatever the boys were caught up in was spreading into the wide world at a quickening pace.
I had told Jess almost everything, but not everything I knew. To be fair, most of what I knew of Jet and Alex's history was fairly recent knowledge from a single conversation with Alex.
Alex had explained to me that Jet, Mania, and he had all known each other as children. More than knew either, they were friends, close friends. Alex's father, was a researcher at Cross. Not just any research scientist, he was generally credited with discovering Stutter, and was accorded, initially, a lot of power and responsibility in hopes that Stutter could be put into application.
Of course, Stutter ended up being a catastrophic failure; a drug that had fantastic, almost supernatural effects on the body and mind, but when metabolized, broke down into toxins quickly killing any and every test subject. This I knew without Alex's aid.
Despite nearly two decades of failed efforts to transform Stutter into something applicable, Cross forged onwards with research, until Alex's father suddenly not only refused to continue the research but destroyed all of the accumulated data on Stutter. Apparently, he alone knew the trick to combining the precursors of Stutter, and his refusal to cooperate along with his destruction of most of the data on the project were potentially a multi-decade setback.
It was a week after his father's refusal that a wide-eyed ten year old Alex found himself frozen in the doorway of his parent's bedroom. Before him, and above his recently decapitated mother and father, crouched his friend, an eleven year old Mania, kitchen knife in hand, smeared in blood, fingers to toes.
Alex screamed and fled with Mania in pursuit, gaining distance as she slipped with blood-slick bare feet on the downstairs kitchen tiles, running till he could feel his heart ready to explode in his chest, eventually making it to Jet's. Mania was seconds, not minutes, behind and before he could explain much of anything to Jet, she arrived, panting and furious.
Alex didn't give me much to work with concerning what happened next. I'll do my best to recall it as he did to me.
Jet and Mania trained together religiously, both fascinated by combat. Jet's excuse was being the prodigy in a long line of competitive fighters and martial artists. For Mania, it was apparently different. She was naturally gifted without much training. Strong. Quick. For her, it was more about expressing that which lay otherwise dormant and unused. As children, compared to Jet, she was always stronger, faster, but she lacked his stamina and technique, and was typically the loser whenever the two sparred.
Not on that day.
The two fought with Jet becoming horrifically cut and slashed almost immediately. Alex had managed to break off and alert the police with his phone only to return as one of his best friends was in the motion of slitting the throat of his other. He screamed her name, her real name, Charisma, and she spun to look at the boy with whom she used to laugh and play, and now wanted to kill.
Her once cute face now bore a sick grin, porcelain white teeth in full display between thin ruby lips drawn languidly back. She claimed that she was not Charisma and that her name was Bia. She didn't respond when asked why she was hurting them, why she killed his parents, but she did let Jet out from trapped underneath her. She sat frozen, covered in fresh blood, some hers, most of it Jet's, for only a few moments before three police officers tore through the front door, shouts flooding Jet's demolished living room.
Their threats and shouts to disarm unfortunately did the officers little good. Mania, Bia, stood facing the men, slick with red, knife gripped firm in hand. Tires screeched outside in the driveway. The first shot tore through Mania's left shoulder sending the young girl to the floor screaming. The officers inched closer, encircling the wounded girl. A mistake.
She was up in a flicker, the knife claiming the weapon arm of the officer who fired, before finding the throats of the other two. Three bodies hit the carpet floor with a soft thud, two coughing garbled wheezes, one screeching in agony.
Despite his injuries, Jet was quick to spring into action as well, prying the gun from the amputated arm and spinning to fire at young Mania as she turned away from the three men. Four shots rang out, all four missing their mark. Behind Mania, framed in the doorway, and now silently slumping towards the same carpeted floor were Jet's panic-stricken mother and father.
Mania kicked the weapon away from the horrified Jet, and bent down to restrain him from rushing to the side of his wounded, dying parents. Sirens blazed in the distance, each second drawing nearer. She spoke tranquilly, her fury gone, transformed back into the girl they knew, "I'll be leaving for a long time. I'll miss you."
"And what exactly is the point of that," Jess harped. I had absolutely no idea what they were arguing about. I could have sworn Jet mentioned something about a nap.
Jet yawned as he spoke, "Need rest if we're going looking for Mania."
"Why? Even if she didn't do it, why would she help? This sort of thing sounds like something she'd probably enjoy."
Jet grinned at Jess, "Because she's being called out."
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