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+--- Thread: 'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things (/showthread.php?tid=4900)
'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things - King Ghidorah - 02-20-2018
Quote:Disclaimer: I swear I did not name this character after anybody, especially not anybody whose name is at the bottom of the web-page. His genesis occurred back in 2010, in a far-off corner of the internet. Any resemblance to Gregs living or dead is purely coincidental.
In spite of the pervasive smell of grinding ennui and lead-infused exhaust, the graffiti'd tenements and postmodern skyscrapers of Tier-5 had a hypnotic quality of human desperation that drew a certain kind of clever cockeyed jackass like moth's to a self-destructive flame.
Although he certainly fit the type, Special Liaison Gregory (formerly of Grand Austroavia's Diplomatic Liaison Corp, and about a million-and-a-half less illustrious places since then), didn't like the lowest rung of Imperial civilization very much. It was no place for a little guy, let alone a human soul shoehorned into the peg-legged body of a stuffed-toy penguin, criminal proclivities notwithstanding. Gregory much preferred the neon-night energy of Tier 4, where nobody cared what shape you were as long as you were offering to sell them something they wanted, and nobody below middle-management could spot a bad deal; Whenever he was riding high on the hog of a promising business venture, that was where he spent most of his time.
Right now SL Greg was not riding high on the hog. Right now SL Greg was riding high on the fist of a tattooed skinhead in courderoy coveralls and bright yellow wellington boots. Holding the prinny by the back of his extra-small t-shirt (which had his own beaky face on it; branding was always important) the punk slammed the Special Liaison into a dingy alley wall beside an overflowing green dumpster and held him there, coating one side of Gregory's plump little body with a patina of moist soot. Everything smelled like garbage, even the rain.
"What the fuck did you do with our guns?!" the man screamed. SL Greg turned his head very slightly, so that his beak was no longer pressed squarely against the cinderblock wall. Out of the corner of his beady black eye he could see the rest of the Corduroy Mob clustered around on the oily pavement, a skinhead-stormcloud of ropy muscles, tattoos and dingy coveralls, all eager to hear SL Greg's response.
"I sold 'em dOOd," he shmoozed, doing his best to give the impression he wasn't freaking out. "You hired me to sell 'em! I don't understand! Why are you so mad?"
"We hired you to sell them to the HUTTS! " his tormentor roared, grinding the little demon's fluffy body into the jagged mortar. "We got the money, but they never got the guns! They are UNDERSTANDABLY UPSET!"
Gregory felt warm spittle spatter against the back of his head amidst the generally cold drizzle. Somewhere nearby, a useless police-siren dopplered past and faded into the distance. The Special Liaison flapped his stubby limbs until his tormentor eased up a little.
"Look, dOOd - it's all fine!" he said, slightly muffled and speaking quickly. "The Hutts are gonna get their weapons in a couple days! What I did, see, I sold 'em at a ninety percent markup to a big salvage-crew in the Deeps, and then I used the profit from that to buy some slightly crappier guns off this super-naive aggressively-hegemonizing robot-colony I know down on Tier-7 for like, one-fourth the original price! The shipment's in-transit! I made like, double-plus the gross on the original deal, dOOd! I'll give you twenty percent!"
The alleyway was silent. An empty fast-food wrapper crinkled past on a ground-level breeze.
"You're sending the Hutts," said the man in the Wellington boots, speaking slowly and pausing for emphasis, "inferior Product?! And they think it's from US?!"
The rest of the Corduroy Mob frowned thunderously. Knives began to appear in their hands.
"... fifty percent?" Gregory offered, uncertainty finally creeping into his nasally voice.
The only response was the unmistakable particle-nightmare whine of a Chambers pistol, bargain-basement plasma-weaponry for the discerning crackhead, as it entered its priming cycle.
If only they hadn't taken his fanny-pack, he could do something clever; as it was, all Gregory could do was flail and kick and scream.
"HELLLLLLLLLP! HELLLLLLLLLLLLLP!"
RE: 'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things - The Future Warrior - 02-20-2018
It was on days like this that he really wished he had done many things differently. Like bothered to get a jacket with a hood. Or an actual raincoat. Or just not gotten out of bed that morning. Or maybe, like...all of the fucking above. He hated rain, he hated being out in the rain, and he hated most of all how the rain somehow not only smelled like week-old half-burned garbage...but somehow managed to make everything else smell even worse. It was bad enough that everything just sort of looked and smelled like it had been put through an incinerator set on low and then painted over by a one-armed Bob Ross going through some tough times and without the energy to spare on making everything a 'happy' little accident.
But boy, this place was definitely an accident, no lying about that.
Trudging down the sidewalk, the tired, downcast expression of Resho Johansen was fixated firmly on the puddle and-strewn path ahead of him, with the occasional glance out into the road when he passed a particularly fascinating pothole. The unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth was now as damp and miserable as everything else about him, and had a disgruntled air about it that suggested it wouldn't light properly even if the bedraggled young man had had a way to light it in the first place.
He shuffled to a stop at the intersection of Fuck It avenue and Who Gives a Damn Boulevard, staring listlessly across the street. His eyes slowly swept from right to left, following the distant, muted glare of flashing red and blue at the next intersection as a police vehicle careened down the waterlogged street. Back home, that probably would've meant something. 'Hero Time!' he might have said, and put on a futile chase to follow the vehicle on foot. Over buildings (sometimes through them, if he was desperate enough) and causing enough property damage to warrant a week's income from the city to fix it all, only to still show up unfashionably late for whatever crime incident was in progress and barely contribute to solving it.
"Sometimes I really miss the good ol' days..." he muttered weakly, as he started to shamble across the street. "...then I get the urge to hit my head against the nearest wall until those thoughts go away." He was halfway through his listless tromp across Fuck It avenue when he heard a sound pierce the patter of the icy drizzle of ass-ejected rainwater. He squinted his eyes through the gloom, peering around. "...fuck was that? Someone calling for help?" After a second or two he shrugged, hunching his shoulders against a breeze that carried the wonderful scent of low tide at Rancid John's seaside manure disposal facility (a strange smell, considering there was no seaside down here), and trudged on across the street. "Nah...definitely not...probably just a truck backfiring."
"HEEEELLLLLP ME, DOOD! THEY'RE SMASHING ME AGAINST A WALL!"
Resho squeezed his eyes shut. "Oh, god damn it...fuck you, hero instincts..."
The tired, disgruntled man turned aside to shuffle quickly down the street toward the source of the agonized kerfuffle. When he finally reached the mouth of the alleyway where it was going down, he was lost for words...for all of about two seconds. There was...a stuffed penguin, being forced against the wall and surrounded by a gang of street punks probably slightly more infuriated with the child's toy gone wrong than they were with their own choice of fashion sense. The former hero's confused stare was enough that it let the unlit smoke dangle freely enough from his halfway open lips to tumble to the wet ground.
"....okay, what the fuck. Clearly I hit my head either way too many times this morning, or way too hard, because I can't believe I'm seeing this..." he finally spoke up. "Look, I get you guys are pissed off because you smell like a more pervasive brand of garbage and shit than the general everything around here, but try taking a shower. No need to take it out on the stuffed arctic bird." The sequence of glares he received was equal parts and numbers confused and livid. "Do not hate me because I speak the truth, man. Also....the knives and guns and everything, wow. Really? It's gotten to the point where a bunch of wannabe gangsters can't even lace up their corduroy pants and go out to gangbeat a defenseless and....poooossibly innocent stuffed creature without needing to be armed. My grammy is rolling over in her grave, lemme tell you."
"Oi, fuck off, kid. This is none of your damn business!"
"Yeah, yeah, Wellington....it isn't any of my business. 'Cept I picked today to decide to be a hero. I'd hand you my business card, but I'm too broke to have any made." He held up a hand, index finger raised pointedly. "Also...I'm fucking twenty-nine. Don't call me a kid, jackwipe."
RE: 'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things - King Ghidorah - 02-21-2018
There was a brief, disbelieving moment where everyone paused to consider Resho's point. Then the skinhead chieftan holding SL Greg said, "Oh, well, I'm glad we cleared that up. You hear that boys? He's a hero, and he's twenty-nine. I guess we'll have to let this sorry sack of bird-shit go and head on up to Tier 1 to turn ourselves in."
He half-turned and pointed with his free hand, still grinding the hapless prinny into the bricks with the other. "WILL SOMEBODY KINDLY SHOOT THIS PRICK ALREADY?!"
Resho took a step forward and started to say something flippant, but he only got as far as "Y'know-" before a Corduroy punk with a fantastic handlebar mustache raised a Chambers pistol, its bent accelerator-coil sparking dangerously in the damp, and shot him in the chest.
The air crackled, and then rang like a bell. Lightning flashed across the space between them, raising a massive cloud of foul-smelling steam from the filthy puddles of toxic rainwater, and left a fading purple-black after-image hanging in the air. Gregory's would-be rescuer flew backwards out of the alley trailing oily smoke from his burning clothing, and rolled several times on the soggy tarmac before landing in a heap in the gutter on the far side of the avenue. The sad spectacle was appropriately lit by the flickering, failing neon of a nearby strip-joint.
The man who had shot the hero fell over as well, flash-fried to a crisp by the radioactive backwash from his own poorly-maintained weapon.
The rest of the Corduroy Mob looked down a their fallen comrade, across the street at his victim, then back at their boss. The burly skinheads were wheezing and squinting from the poisonous fog that now hung in the alley, increasingly damp, and collectively nonplussed.
"Awww, dOOd..." Gregory lamented. With his face still pressed against the bricks, he couldn't see exactly what had happened, but it wasn't hard to figure out.
The man in wellingtons shuffled his boots and leaned against SL Greg hard enough to make the prinny produce an involuntary squeak. "You shut your beaky face!" he hissed. Then he looked back at the mustachioed casualty, grimaced as though trying to hold down a headache, and added softly: "Goddamn it Karl, you dead idiot;I meant shoot him with bullets. You probably just gave us all cancer!"
"AAARRRGH.... FUCK! FUUUUUuuUUUUUuuck! SON of a BITCH that hurt!"
Every human eye turned towards the mouth of the alley where, across the avenue and against all expectations, Resho was standing up. The would-be hero stared at the charred and peeling skin on his hands, barely noticing the ruins of his outfit.
"Who sells jankstains like you a gun like that?!" he ranted, advancing unsteadily back towards the alley and waving his blistered arms, "What kind of a mom's-basement supervillain motherfucker even BUILDS a gun like that?! I was expecting a blaster, not a suicide death-ray!"
SL Greg turned his avian head just enough to make himself heard and called, "They're arms-dealers, dOOd! jankstains like these sell jankstains like these guns like that! As for who builds 'em - MMF!"
The leader of the Corduroys, without looking at Gregory, drew his prisoner back from the wall and then slammed him into the bricks again. "Shut up." He pointed at Resho, a throbbing vein standing out on his rain-slick bald head.
"CORDUROY MOB! KILL THIS BITCH!"
RE: 'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things - The Future Warrior - 02-22-2018
"Wow. You guys are literally called the Corduroy Mob. Accurate name, but just...yikes." Resho shook his head in sheer disbelief and open amusement, momentarily forgetting the fact his arms felt like he'd decided to go bare-hand fishing in one of the Creep's acid pools.
He shook his hands and arms, trying to get the burning feeling of cancerous death ray to fuck off, only succeeding in coating them in a fresh layer of liquid garbage from the disgustingly gray drizzle pelting down from an artificial sky overhead. 'Where does the rain even come from?' he thought, as he frantically barged into one of the incoming textile clad crackhead, bowling the man over and into one of his rambunctious ruffian allies. 'Ain't a thing up there except fake-ass sky-ceiling whatever-the-fuck. Can't be high enough for actual weather patterns to form. Maybe run-off from somewhere higher up...just piped through a bunch of big-ass holes drilled in things to make it seem like rain.'
A knife swept at him and he raised an arm to catch it, blade sinking into the skin and flesh like a laser through cardboard. "....fucking jankstains," he grumbled, as the knife struck bone in his arm. The impact reverberated comically back through the corduroy crackhead's hand and arm, like a genius striking a streetlight with a metal bat in miniature. He recoiled instinctively from the shock, loosing his grip on the knife in the process. In that moment of dumbstruck idiocy, the opposite arm of the lackadaisical hero swung around, with all the grace of a recently-fired drunken construction worker. Half a heartbeat later, knuckles of a closed fist met teeth of a gaping mouth like a sledgehammer meeting the side of a defenseless cement mixer. Shortly after, skull met puddle as the mustache-challenged no-knife-haver touched down with a noise like a strangled cat falling out of a tree into a pool.
"Look, I gotta say, guys...you're not impressin' me here," Resho grumped. "It's just...like--" He was cut short as bullets introduced themselves to the party, with a lazy staccato of noise and the delightful smell of poorly maintained gunsmoke. Five quick, thunderous CRACK-[/b]BANG[/b]s followed by only three resounding, meaty thwaps. Two shots went wide, hitting walls across the street half a beat later with whining crunch of tiny metal hitting large brickwork.
The sailor-mouthed 'hero' stumbled back from the impact of bullet-to-torso trauma, wheezing and looking down at his fresh new wounds. Among the tattered, scorched remnants of his coat and shirt it was hard to see much of anything, save for a little fresh blood trickling from three puncture wounds roughly clustered in his upper chest. He brought a shaky hand up, clutching at the wounds and staining his hand with fresh blood. It was quickly washed away by the deluge of liquid ass falling from the Sky™, but the red stains lasted long enough for him to put on a wide-eyed stare of, presumably, panic. "Dude..."
His eyes lifted to stare at the two offenders, sporting a matching beard attempt to denote their 'teamwork' among their woven thread-based criminal gang. "...not cool. That almost hurt." The reaction was priceless, both of them raising eyebrows so high they almost disappeared into a thinning hairline. They shuffled and readied to fire again, but Resho held up a hand, pointing toward them. "NO. NO MORE OF THAT!" he barked. "IF YOU SHOOT AGAIN, I SWEAR TO PALPATINE HIMSELF..." He swung his arm to point at the deep-fried crackhead, Karl. "...I WILL BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH CAPTAIN CANCER."
RE: 'Special Liaison' Can Mean All Kinds of Things - King Ghidorah - 03-02-2018
The leader of the Corduroy Mob (whose name actually was Wellington) watched the action unfold with a growing sense of irritated disappointment as Resho screamed nonsensical threats at his men.
The arms dealer had always suspected that maybe his gang wasn't as tough as he liked to think they were, but this was just embarrassing; If the no-account would-be 'hero' had dispatched them all in an effortless display of power and athleticism that would have been one thing, but the Corduroy's were beating the tar out of Resho and he was giving the same right back garnished with halfway-clever taunts. The only real difference seemed to be that the interfering bastard could handle his medicine and Wellington's boys couldn't.
"You know dOOd, you might want to put me down. Or at least, like, stop grinding my face into these cinderblocks?" SL Greg suggested. "I think you're going to want both hands to fight that guy."
A gunshot went off, the muzzle-flash blooming like a fast-forward sunset in the toxic mist, followed by an enraged cry of "OH THAT IS IT! I warned you mother fuckers!"
One of the two Beardos - a name they had chosen for themselves - ran past Wellington, his feet splashing on the wet pavement, yelling "OH EMPEROR FUCK ME, HE'S ACTUALLY DOING IT!"
He was right; Further down the alley, Resho had scooped up one of Karl's radiation-blackened ankles in each hand and was swinging the corpse around by the legs like the world's least practical flail. He only actually managed to score two hits on the deceased skinhead's brethren - one on the upswing, clocking the remaining Beardo under the chin with Karl's skull, and one on the downswing, flattening a machete-wielding Corduroy under the dead man's blistered trunk - before Karl's knees gave up the ghost and his lower legs, their connective tissues wasted and burned by the man's own crappy plasma-pistol, came off in Resho's hands. Still, the psychological effect was profound: The remaining gang members scattered, losing themselves further up the alleyway or fleeing out into the rain-sodden street.
Wellington opened the lid of the nearby dumpster and stuffed Gregory inside, eliciting a cry of shocked distress as the man slammed it shut. Then he drew a vibro-knife from a sheath on the small of his back and turned to face the interfering busybody who'd humbled his men.
Behind him, a muffled voice exclaimed, "AHG! dOOd! It's full of broken glass!"
Resho stared at the pair of shins in his hands for a moment, taking note of the cheap sneakers protruding below his grip, then reversed his hold so that the shoes were on the business end and raised them threateningly. He leveled his gaze on the sole remaining gunrunner. "Run away, hairclub-for-psychos. Run away really fast, or I'm going to kick you to death with your idiot minion's feet." He waggled the charbroiled appendages for emphasis.
Wellington grinned savagely, backed up against the dumpster, already making a plan; it didn't matter how tough this wannabe hero was - he presumably still needed his kidneys. "Just you try it you worthless cu-"
The lid of the dumpster popped open. "Shenk! Broken bottle," said SL Greg, his voice full of practical good cheer. It was followed shortly by a sound as though someone had upended a bucket of chocolate-syrup.
A look of confusion flickered across Wellington's face. He suddenly felt very cold - and then he didn't feel anything at all. The former leader of the Corduroy Mob collapsed into an already-massive and rapidly-expanding puddle of his own blood. The neck of a broken bottle was sticking out of his back, just to the left of his spine, pulsing an outflow of deep red liquid in a steadily-weakening stream. Above him, SL Greg's beady black eyes peered innocently out of his blue penguinoid face. The prinny was peeking over the lip of the dumpster with his flippers hooked over the side. Ignoring the rain, and the smell, and the corpses, it was almost adorable.
Resho looked down at the fresh body then up and SL Greg and let his arms drop to his sides. He was still holding Karl's legs, but he'd forgotten them for a moment while he processed what had just happened.
"Thanks for saving me dOOd!" Said Gregory, levering himself out of the dumpster and dropping to the ground. He tottered for a moment on his two cedarwood peg-legs before finding his balance. The Special Liaison drew himself up to his full two-and-a-half foot height, broadcasting oblivious good cheer at a hundred megawatts for all to see. "I've been in some fuckstupid bad trouble before, but those dOOds were really gonna kill me!"
Resho continued to stare. Now that he was getting a really good look at the person he'd saved, he was even less sure that 'person' was the right word. SL Greg looked like a child's stuffed toy that someone had tried to adapt for the mall-goth generation, a navy-blue, velveteen pot-bellied penguin with two peg legs and a pair of bat-wings peeking out from the neck of his stained t-shirt.
"You're welcome...? Also, why were they grinding you into a wall? Also, what the fuck are you exactly?""
"I'm a prinny, dOOd!" said Gregory, deliberately ignoring Resho's first question. He did a little pirouette on one leg and pointed a triumphant flipper towards the disgusting sky. The filthy drizzle was beginning to cleanse the soot from his self-promoting shirt. "But that's not important. What's important is that earlier you said you were broke, and you just saved my life! We're in this together now, dOOd! I owe you big-time!"
The hero frowned, instantly suspicious. "What do those two things have to do with each other? This is going to involve some kind of bullshit curse or something, isn't it - some leprechaun thing where you grant me wishes and they all end with me getting punched in the junk. Or I'm going to end up on some kind of underworld hit-list."
He went to put his hand on his face and nearly poked himself in the nose with a sneaker. Irritated and belatedly grossed out, he tossed Karl's limbs aside. "Fucking instincts," he muttered. "I knew this was a bad idea."
"Naw dOOd. None of that stuff! And I'm WAY better than a leprechaun." SL Greg returned to his resting position, standing at ease in a pool of Wellington's blood with his flippers against his sides and gazing attentively into the depths of Resho's soul with his empty marble eyes. His beak didn't move when he spoke. "How would you like to make some real-people money?"