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+--- Thread: [M] Gun Running [Complete] (/showthread.php?tid=5614)
[M] Gun Running [Complete] - Luci - 01-02-2017
Luci tightens her hoodie as she walks quickly across a freeway overpass on a cold night in Tier 5. She runs her hand along one of the chain-link fences that border the overpass, watching the traffic below. The artificial darkness emboldens her.
Luci takes a deep breath and becomes, to any watchful observer, transparent. She walks through the chain-link fence, and then exhales, and her body assumes its normal opacity. She hurriedly paints a glowing neon chrysanthemum onto the side of the bridge. It seems to pulse with a steady light. She climbs back up, takes a deep breath, and phases through the fence again. She continues on her way, unaware of the figure in the darkness watching her every move.
***
Luci yawns on her way home from a double-shift, looking forward to a good nap. She is riding a golden bicycle with a playing card clacking against the back tire. She turns down an ally and sees a figure lying in the middle of the road. She screeches to a halt and peers over her handlebars, and she sees that it is a mannequin in blue jeans with a burn hole in it's chest. The word 'Jimmy' is written across his face.
"Hands! Lemme see those hands!" a gruff voice yells from behind Luci. She does not move, which seems to anger the yeller. "I'm not fucking around, put those fucking hands up!"
Luci does not put her hands up.
She hears a whirring sound, and a bolt of blue fire zooms over Luci's shoulder and hits the mannequin in the face, leaving a smoking black hole where the word 'Jimmy' was.
Luci puts her hands up.
"Better. Now real slow like, take your money, and tuck it into Jimmy's pocket," the voice snarls.
Luci slowly tucks a small wad of glowing bills into the mannequin's pocket.
"Good. Real good," the voice growls. "Next month, you come back this way, you come see Jimmy again. You ever have a problem, come tuck a note into Jimmy's pocket, we'll take care of it. Now get back on your fucking bike and fuck off."
Luci does not look back as she rides off. On the way home, she notices that her chrysanthemum had been vandalized; someone has rendered it in greyscale.
***
In a crowded nightclub on Tier 4, during another split shift, Luci ducks a thrown beer bottle intended for an orc in a white tracksuit. The bottle thrower is a rowdy Slytherin flanked by several oily friends, all of them in matching black leather jackets. The jackets have been embroidered on the back with a large cobra and the word 'Slytherins' at the top and 'Tier 6' on the bottom. The Slytherins are yelling insults at the orc and and levitating various items and throwing them at him. The orc stares at the Slytherins, unmoving.
Luci signals security, but they do not see her. A second orc, this one in a red tracksuit, walks up next to the first orc. They exchange a few words, and the orc in the red track suit pulls out a very strange looking gun.
Luci has a belief; weapons come in many different shapes and sizes, but people know death when they see it, whether looking down the barrel of a revolver or (as in this case) an odd collection of glowing tubes and spheres crackling with electricity.
Patrons scream and duck out of the way. The orc guns down the Slytherins in a hale of blue fireballs. Each shot that lands sears away flesh down to the bone, and the rate of fire is horrifying. The Slytherins scream in agony as they try to retreat out the back door.
The orc dodges their clumsy hexes and follows the survivors out the back, flanked by his friend. Luci doesn't see whats happens next, but she hears the weapon discharge again a few times outside. She would later learn that in addition to the three Slytherins and six innocent club-goers killed inside the club, the orc would kill two more Slytherins outside the club, and disappear in a yellow Prius.
Luci leaves early so she does not have to make a statement.
***
Luci eyes a strange wriggling fruit in a farmer's market on Tier 5. The alien selling them does not appeared as interested as she is. She overhears a conversation between two young vampires.
"Hey did you see that throw-up on Hover Ave?" one of them asks. Luci's ears perk up.
"Yeah that um, what was it? The flower right? Yeah I didn't see it before Klowdy got to it though. He painted it all black and grey," his friend responds, holding up an amulet to see it glitter in the artificial sunlight.
"Klowdy? Oh the knife ear. Yeah, he's all moody and shit lately," says the other vampire, deftly grabbing some black eyeliner off the table and stowing it in his pockets. "But what do you expect? The orcs blasted a dozen of his boys over the last month."
***
Luci sits and sips a cup of glowing rainbow coffee in a small Alderon-themed cafe in Teir-5. Across from her sits the infamous Klowdy, young leader of the Westside Knife Ear Warriors. He has a soft face smudged with white war paint, and feathers in his long blond hair. His gang lounges awkwardly behind him, a motley collection of elves in a mix of Native-American garb and modern street fashion, leaning on their long bows and smoking cigarettes. Klowdy speaks earnestly.
"It's not just the Slytherins," Klowdy says, stirring. "The orcs have wiped out Westside Ewok Gang, and some Ewok kids while they were at it. They gunned down Pop-Eye and his girl in broad daylight, and their war with the Hut Mafia is the bloodiest in recent history. And it's not just that," Klowdy sips his coffee, seeming to look for the words.
"Things are just worse now. You can't walk down the street without getting mugged or worse. I've seen children on hard drugs. Civilians are dropping left and right. The Empire is breathing down everyone's neck. And everyone just keeps dying," Klowdy says. He and his gang stare at the floor sadly.
"We know how the orcs are getting their weapons," the elf continues. "They smuggle them in from Teir-2 disguised as electronics, then reassemble
them in Teir-6. This time though, they're never going to reach Tier-6. We're going to intercept them on Tier-4, and you're going to help us do it. I've seen what you can do," Klowdy says squarely. "I've been keeping an eye on you. And we need you."
Luci stares at him. She does not seem to believe that the needs of the Westside Knife Ear Warriors should affect her very much.
"Look, we're not even keeping all the weapons. The best thing for us to do, strategically, is distribute a good bit of the haul to civilians," Klowdy says.
Luci does not seem convinced.
"Really," he insists. "The orcs have ripped through our ranks, we'll end up with more guns than people to hold them. If we hand them out to civilians and shop owners they'll help curb the orc threat, at least here in Tier-5."
Luci does not seem convinced.
"And if you help, we'll cut you in some Om for your trouble," the elf says, grinning a little.
Luci sips her coffee quietly.
After a while, she speaks.
"Yeah, OK."
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-02-2017
In a crowded nightclub on Teir-4, a grizzled Ewok orders a Jack and Pepsi. The Ewok slips Luci a note as he pays. He does not leave a tip.
She does not catch his eye, but she slips the note quietly into her pocket.
***
Luci does not go home after her shift. She glides her bicycle through the darkest streets of Teir-4, riding by the illumination of headlights and neon signs. She rides in the street; the sidewalks are crowded. Bacchic revelers squawk and howl with drunken abandon, drinks spill, dresses slip.
Luci hops off her bike and watches it roll a few feet away and hit a wall. Rather than crashing, however, the bike appears to ride directly through the wall and disappear. Luci walks into the club.
The music is loud but not overpowering, a kind of pop-trance that blends into the background. Red booths illuminated by blue and pink lights surround the stages where young Twi'leks gyrate on poles. Luci walks up to the bartender, a pretty green Twi'lek.
"Arnold Palmer," Luci tells the bartender. The Twi'leks' eyes flicker for a moment. She hands Luci her drink, with a napkin on the bottom. Luci checks the napkin, thanks the bartender, and wanders over to a private booth with a red velvet curtain pulled in front of it. Luci slips inside and joins the other members of her conspiracy.
Klowdy and his top lieutenants, Moss and Lyon, are drinking nervously.
"Hey," Klowdy says. "So it's like this. Last month two orcs got kicked out of this joint, Gnash and Xar. They spent up a lot of money, but got real handsy with the girls and started a serious brawl. So Gnash and Xar, they find out that they got a job, smuggling these," Klowdy says as he slaps down a thin metal tube onto the table "from teir-4 to 6. And being the class acts they are, they make this place the drop point. And Gnash and Xar, they got this weakness for girls. So the plan is, you're going to dance for them, lure them into a private party, and then we're going to sneak up from behind and open up their heads with a claw hammer."
Klowdy stares at her. Luci does not seem amused. Klowdy and his lieutenants burst out laughing.
"You see?" he says. "Look, she was going to do it, look at her face!"
Luci does not appear to be giving any sign that she 'would have done it'. Klowdy wipes away his tears.
"Hah, OK, so, here's the real plan."
***
Luci walks confidently out the back of the strip club and up to a locked white van with no windows. She takes a breath and holds it, becoming transparent, and hops up and through the wall of the van. Inside she exhales, and becomes solid again. The back of the cargo van is dark, lit only by her own bioluminescence. Luci hurriedly opens one of the cardboard boxes, and finds the little black tubes. She gets out her spray-paint can and shakes it, then draws a glowing blue door on the inside of the van, and kicks it open.
Klowdy is grinning. Moss and Lyon look dumbstruck as they pull up in a black SUV.
"Get to it, boys," he says, and the boys get to it. Moss and Lyon load the tubes into the SUV while Klowdy and Luci unload the decoy boxes into the van. They work silently and quickly, the stress mounting with each box they grab, before finally Klowdy whistles and the four of them hop in the SUV and take off.
***
Minutes later Gnash and Xor would be thrown out of the Twi'lek strip club and stumble into the white van. They would not find it odd that someone had vandalized their van by painting a blue door on it. They would peel off, knock over some garbage cans, and not be told until the next day that they had in fact not delivered the right shipment. The shipment they delivered was filled newspapers articles detailing the recent homicides committed by the orc gang.
***
Luci gazes out the window as she smokes, thinking. She hears a radio crackle.
"What, a g-15?" a voice says through the static. Moss and Lyon sit up in the back seat.
"Yeah," replies another voice. "Black SUV, male elf driving, last seen going northbound on IT-45."
Klowdy curses and turns off the highway, zooming through side streets until coming to a deserted parking lot.
"Fuck," he intones, as Moss and Lyon nod. "So here's what we're going to do," Klowdy says as he turns to Luci. "We're going to go right through them. We're gonna hit that highway running, and they're going to come at us with everything they got. They'll come with their gunships and their cruisers and they'll put up big metal gates at the entrance to Teir-5 with storm-troopers in front with guns. But none of their shots will hit us, because you're going to turn this whole SUV transparent and we're going to drive right through them. After we get through the gates, phase us through the street and we'll land on the highway below. I know a spot we can hide for a few months. It might be tough living for a while."
Luci stares at him.
"We might have to eat rats," Klowdy adds.
Luci stares at him.
"Well what's your plan, then?"
***
Luci waves to a storm-trooper in a toll booth at the entrance to Tier-5. The storm-trooper eyes her and points to a money collection bowl on the side of the booth. Luci shrugs and smiles sweetly. The storm-trooper sighs and presses a button, and the gate is lifted. Luci drives into Tier-5 in a freshly spray-painted pink SUV with no trouble what so ever. It was a leisurely breeze. She looks in the back seat and grins at Klowdy and his lieutenants cramped in the floor underneath boxes of gun barrels.
"Yeah well, that was the easy part," snaps the squished elf. "We'll see how you do tomorrow."
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-02-2017
***
Somewhere on the west side of Teir-5, Luci watches the headlights spill into the basement through the window. Her conspirators are curled up in a pile on the floor. Klowdy is twitching. Luci does not fall asleep easily, but then, she never does.
Luci does not sleep or dream like many people do. When she feels tired, she falls into a deep trance, and an invisible ghost-like painting of herself rises away from her body.
Luci hovers above the basement, above the still forms of herself and the elves. The headlights again flash through the basement window, and catch her attention; someone is dreaming outside.
***
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-03-2017
(01-02-2017, 09:40 PM)Luci Wrote: ***
Luci floats through a grey-scale dreamscape echo of Tier-5, her spray-paint can at the ready. The Astral Realm distorts sounds and shadows, warping them strangely, giving a surreal weirdness to every movement. Luci is not afraid. She passes by Moss, Klowdy's first lieutenant.
The area around Moss is flashing with brightly colored lights, contrasting with the grey of the Astral Realm around him. He is getting a lap-dance from a Twi'lek stripper. Luci floats on.
Luci sees Lyon, Klowdy's second lieutenant. He is sobbing, and holding the body of a young elven woman with a burn hole in her chest. She flinches, and floats on.
Klowdy's astral presence is strong. Whereas his friends light up a small ten-foot area with their dreams, Klowdy lights up a whole city block with color. He dreams of merchants and performers and families with laughing children and a hundred other people living happy, peaceful lives.
Luci follows behind him curiously, easing her way through the crowd. Klowdy is laughing with a group of young elves. Luci realizes with a shock that it is his gang, but with faces filled with joy and cleaned of war paint. Klowdy catches her eye and wanders over.
"Hey," he says nonchalantly. A hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth seems to not experience gravity and keeps trying to float away.
"Hey," Luci responds, her neck craning around. "This is beautiful. How long have you been Dreaming?" she asks, meaning how long has he become lucid in the Astral Plane.
"Oh for years now," the elf explains, peeling a tangerine. "It's the only place I can relax, let my guard down a little."
A young dwarf boy pulls a wagon of laughing elf children over the cobblestone road.
"I can understand that," says Luci, her eyes unfocusing, her mind going somewhere else for a moment.
"But you," Klowdy says "You're something else. You're a Native. You're a fish in water."
Luci shifts. "It reminds me of home."
Luci pauses. A young Ewok presses something into her hand. It's a glowing chrysanthemum.
"So," she says "You can dream of anything, and this is what you choose?"
Klowdy nods solemnly. Luci nods back, and looks at the flower in her hand.
"It's a good dream, Klowdy," she tells him. "It could be better."
"You're talkative all of a sudden," he says, bemused. "I don't recall asking for a critique, but since you're so chatty, why don't you tell me what would you do to make this dream better?"
Luci pulls him close.
***
***
Luci and the elves rise with determination in their eyes. Nobody exchanges any meaningful glances indicating anything other than a restful night's sleep occurred for any of them. The four set off in a new vehicle of Luci's design, a black sedan with tinted windows. They do not speak, but sit in silence and smoke cigarettes and ayahuasca, thinking. There is no joking today, and everyone knows the plan word for word.
***
Luci watches from a bus station on Teir-3 as everything goes wrong.
"Fuck," says Klowdy, as he is want to do. The four of them, Luci and the elves, are watching five identical white vans hit the sky highway IT-35 below them. Five vans. Not one. Five. "Fuck," Klowdy repeats. A pretty orc girl sprints up to them.
"Klowdy!" she says in a deep but feminine voice, taking panting breaths. "Klowdy, they brought decoys!" She tells him hurriedly. Klowdy points to the five vans.
"Yeah, we noticed. See if you can find out where Ognok is, call me as soon as you know," the elf tells her. The orc girl nods, gives Luci a strange look, and runs off.
Luci stares at Klowdy.
"What?" the elf asks.
Luci stares at Klowdy.
"What? Look, she's just sympathetic to the cause," he says casually.
Luci stares at Klowdy.
"She's just a freind," he adds sheepishly.
Luci stares at Klowdy.
"Enough of that shit! Get your head in the game!" Klowdy snaps. "Here's the plan-" he says.
Luci rolls her eyes and jumps off the bus-stop into open air.
***
Luci extends her arms like she's diving. She looks ahead vaguely to make sure she's still on target, and sure enough the fat white van is below her, in front of its four friends. She takes a deep breath and turns transparent as she dives smoothly though the hood. She immediately exhales all her breath, becoming solid and landing in the back of cargo van in a roll.
Luci moans in main while the hover-van is rocked, swerving wildly. She looks up and sees the van is empty except for the two orcs in front, one of whom is driving while the other aims a gun at her. Luci jumps up though the top of the van again just as a bolt of blue fire burns a hole where she was standing. She hurriedly paints a big red 'X' on the top of the van, and then jumps off the back, phasing through the windshield of the still-moving van behind it.
Luci zips past the two confused orcs in the cab and though a second empty van. By the time the passenger readies his weapon Luci is already gone, leaving behind nothing but another red 'X' on the top of the second van.
Luci sees that the orc riding shotgun in van three looks very angry, very armed, and very aware of her existence. She hops over his cab and lands on his roof as a bolt of blue fire rips the windshield off from the inside. Luci phases through the hood and into a cargo hold filled with boxes. Luci promptly knocks a box over, and a glittering orb of electricity crashes to the floor. She phases through the bottom of the van as the orc riding shotgun fires another blast, nearly taking her head off. She catches hold of the tailpipe with her left hand, and using her right hand spray-paints a big green check mark on the side of the van.
Immediately the van is rocked with arrows. The other vans fire shots wildly up into Teir-3. Civilians scream and fall, but Klowdy and his gang cannot be found. Another volley hits the van, which starts to swerve. The back door of the van Luci is grabbing is kicked open. The growling orc level his gun square in Luci's face, and Luci lets go.
The orc fires after her, but misses, and eventually turns his fire on Klowdy.
Luci falls.
She is a hundred feet up with nothing to grab. She is not looking forward to this.
Luci takes as deep a breath as she can right before she hits the gound. She phases through it, diving deep into the earth. It was dark.
Her momentum was slowed, but not by much, less than it would be through water, but it was slowed. Luci held her breath as she slowly stopped falling, and then kicked desperately to push herself to the surface. Luci was very fast. She was faster than the fastest car in Coruscant. But she is not sure she is fast enough to swim to the surface before she ran out of air. If she is not, if she exhales before reaching the surface, she would become solid while underground. So she kicks.
This is why Luci hates the dark; when she is underground there is no sunlight peeking through the top, nothing reassuring her that she can make it. There is only darkness. Her lungs are burning, screaming at her, but still she kicks, swimming up towards the surface. There is a pounding in her head. She feels dizzy, faint.
Luci breaches the top soil with a gasp.
***
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-04-2017
A flying black sedan roars down towards Luci, and she falls inside and collapses, taking deep gasping breaths. Lyon is driving and Klowdy is riding shotgun. Luci looks around hurriedly for Moss.
"He's OK," says Klowdy, following her gaze. "He's following the van. The one with the green check mark, right?" he asks, as Luci nods. He hands her a canteen of cold water which she gulps hurriedly. The radio crackles.
"Northbound on IT-34," comes Moss's static-laced voice. Lyon swerves into oncoming traffic and off the sky-highway, landing with a thump on the sky-highway below. He roars through the entrance to Teir-4, catching sight of Moss riding a commandeered hover-bike. Moss points at the vans, swerving through traffic, but the green check mark is distinct. Luci hears a very loud whooshing sound and the car is bathed in light. She hears a voice.
"Pull over!" screams a voice through the megaphone of a hovering gunship. Luci can see sirens wailing through the traffic, and similar spotlights tracking the white vans. Neither the vans, nor Lyon, seem to have any intention of complying. Lyon floors it while Klowdy leans out the window and fires a shot with his longbow, piercing the tire of a van and causing it to skid off the highway and crash into a bus stop. The gunship opens fire.
Apparently there is a joke in Coruscant; how many storm-troopers does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1001. One to put in the new light bulb, a thousand to shoot out the old one. Luci understood it to mean that storm-troopers and servants of the empire had poor aim, or never seemed to hit their targets. Luci no longer believes this is true.
Luci phases through the car and out into the open air as a line of fifty-caliber bullets tear through the sedan. She exhales and is caught quickly by Moss on his hover-bike. Klowdy manages to open the door and dive out at the last moment, cracking the windshield of the car behind him.
Lyon takes three fifty-caliber bullets to the back and swerves off the highway.
***
Luci understands why Moss chooses to go tearing off after his friend. She understands, even he dips his hover-bike towards the edge of the highway, why he is doing it. She believes she can honor Lyon's memory another way.
Luci hops off the hover-bike and onto the hood of a moving car, then immediately jumps onto the roof of another car, then takes a deep breath and phases through the roof of a white van with a big green check-mark on it, coming face to face with the weapon she has come to hate so much. It is of simple design; two of the tubes they stole last night hooked to the glowing blue orbs they are stealing today, but the damage they have caused is incredible.
This time the orc is ready, and simply cracks off a shot of his glowing blue fire as soon as Luci appears. Luci, however, is very fast, very quick. She rolls as she hits the ground, and the fire only singes her hair. The orc fires another blast, this time causing one of the boxes to fall and the glittering electrical orb to smash and burn another hole at the bottom of the van. Luci smiles, and grabs and hurls one of the orbs at the orc.
Blue fire momentarily engulfs the gun wielding orc, causing him to crash into the driver, and causing the driver to swerve and clip the bumper of the car in front of them. The burning orc with the gun is thrown through the open windshield, and the driver smashes his face into the steering wheel and lies motionless. Luci, for her part, cannot phase in time to avoid smashing into the back seat.
Luci shakily makes her way to her feet. A line of rainbow blood drips down her head. Groaning, she shoves the orc out of the drivers seat, ignoring the sirens and lights. She buckles up as Moss and Klowdy float down gently beside her on the hover bike. They jump in, Klowdy needing some help. He's cut up and breathing raggedly. Moss has a glassy quality to his eyes. Luci starts up the protesting van and starts driving doggedly towards the entrance of Tier-5.
As she dips through the traffic she hears the voice from the gunship again. "Pull the ever-loving fuck over or we will open fire!" it screams, sounding incredulous. Luci screeches to a halt in the middle of the highway; in front of them the entrance to Teir-5 is barricaded with big metal gates and armed police out front. Behind them is a fully armed, trigger-happy gunship.
Klowdy breathes heavily as he asks "So, got a plan?"
***
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-05-2017
***
Luci has a plan, but she does not speak it. She looks at Klowdy sadly.
The elf catches her gaze from the floor and sighs. He pulls a blood-stained cigarette from his ear and lights it shakily. He wipes his war paint off his face with the back of his hand.
"OK, here's the plan," Klowdy says through a hacking cough. Luci puts finger on his lips. "OK," he concedes "I'm just going to go outside and talk with them for just a second, I'm sure I can smooth all this out."
Luci sheds a red tear. Klowdy takes a drag on his cigarette and eyes her through a cloud of smoke.
"Right underneath us," he says "in a garage in Teir-5, is an Ewok mechanic named Chirpa Paploo. You get those orbs to him, as many as you can, and he'll keep you safe. Moss can take you," he says with a grimace, trying to stand. Luci finally sees the gunshot wound she knew was in his ribs. Klowdy grins at her. "Don't worry about me doll, I'm a gangster, this is what I do."
The elf kicks open the back door of the van and hops out with his hands up and a swagger.
"Don't shoot!" he screams as he closes the door behind him. "My dad is Judge Dredd!"
Moss catches Luci's eye.
"You," he says in his oddly deep voice "whatever it is he thinks you can do, you better do it, because he's out there buying us time."
Luci hears Klowdy shouting "Who's being aggressive? You're aggressive!"
Luci breathes. She thinks. Her eyes flicker to the floor of van, and her mind, as it often does, thinks about what's on the other side of it. In this case, it's the street beneath the sky-highway. Luci scrambles to the floor and looks out into one of the burn holes the orc left.
She sees the ground-level street beneath the sky-highway, and she sees traffic flowing through the tunnel at the entrance to Tier-5. She withdraws her head and jumps to her feet. She grabs her spray-can and hastily paints a door on the bottom of the van. She opens it, and sunlight comes streaming into the van. She grins at Moss, who looks nervous. She starts stuffing her backpack with the orbs while Moss loads a duffle bag. She sits on the edge of the door at the bottom of the van with Moss, and the two look back at the unclaimed firearms.
"Leave them," Moss says firmly. Luci nods. Klowdy screams.
"I'll see you in hell!" his scratchy voice calls. Luci hears a roar of gunfire, and she and Moss fall.
The elf grabs her waist tightly as Luci sprays a long thing line of gold paint from her can. The gold line latches onto the bottom of the van, and the two swing fifteen feet below it. They rock a little from side to side, and Luci whips the rope onto a billboard. The pair again fall, but this time they are close enough to the ground that at the end of their swing Luci hops off and the two roll into the grass by the side of the road. Moss stands up quickly and puts a hand out, signalling her to stay down.
"They don't see us yet," he says, indicating the gunship above them. "But they will. They're going to be looking for elves, so they can come find ME."
Luci is crying again. Her tears are beautiful.
"I'll meet you at Chirpa's garage in two days. Take IT-45 to Hover St., cut north through the riverbed, turn right at the alley with red bear print and go to the garage numbered 734. Drop off the stuff, lie low, and come back in two days. Can you do that?" Moss asks.
Luci nods quickly, and Moss crouches down and hands her the duffle bag.
"Good," says Moss as he pulls out an arrowhead. "Now gimmie your hand."
Luci holds out her hand. Moss closes his eyes and cuts the arrowhead deep into her palm. Multicolored blood pools in her hand like a gasoline rainbow. Moss dips his thumb in the blood and smears four glowing lines on her face, two under each eye. He nods, satisfied, and starts running backwards through traffic towards the heart of Teir-4. A light from the gunship turns to follow him.
Luci looks at the traffic ahead of her, and thinks about her route.
***
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-05-2017
***
Luci breathes calmly and tightens the strap on her bag. Her eyes focus, finding the gaps in the traffic surging on the ground level entrance to Tier-5, and she digs her worn sneakers into the grass, and she starts to run.
Coruscant fades into a blur and Luci spins and dips through traffic with ease, first matching and then exceeding the speed of the traffic. Luci comes to a traffic jam and starts to run on the wall next to the cars, ignoring the sirens she hears behind her. As Luci sprints into Tier-5 at a hundred miles per hour she thinks idly that this is what she is meant to do.
Luci thinks she glimpses a siren ahead of of her, and paints a long golden rope from her spray-can to a streetlight, then swings up to the third story of an apartment building and phases through the wall. She immediately collides with a beer pong table, upsetting a party comprised largely of gnomes and Hutts. Luci sprints through the kitchen, is poked by a pin from a drunken Twi'lek playing "pin the tail on the Rancor", and phases into the next apartment.
A pair of naked male Klingons scream girlishly from beneath an endorian-chicken-feather comforter as Luci lands on their bed, blushes, and jumps through their wall and into an empty apartment.
Luci stops to take several ragged breathes and looks out the window; an imperial squad car is flicking it's lights towards the apartment complex. She hears the Klingons scream again, and the light flashes into the window of the apartment she's stopped in.
Luci stays low and slides out the back window onto a fire escape above an alley. She looks down into the alleyway and sees a mannequin in jeans, with the word 'Jimmy' written across his face. Luci realizes where she is, and looks over her shoulder.
A very surprised orc is crouched a few feet away from her on the fire escape, holding one of the crackling blue guns. He catches Luci's gaze, takes in her glowing elven warpaint, and his eyes narrow. The orc lifts his gun.
Luci flinches as a strom-trooper from the squad car fires off a shot into the back of the orc's head, blowing his scalp off. Luci crouches for a moment, shaking, then jumps off the fire escape, her long golden rope catching the adjoining fire-escape and allowing her to swing down and onto ground level. She hits the ground running and phases into the adjacent apartment complex, not looking behind her to see if the storm-troopers are following.
Luci rolls underneath the legs of a startled ogre in a doctors mask and hops over the head of a Rodian on a couch mixing two smoking bottles of liquid, phasing through the wall into their bathroom and then out into a courtyard. Luci sees the lights of the squad car and hurries out the back of the complex.
Luci comes to a sidewalk and tries to loose the cops in the passing crowd. She pulls her hoodie up over her glowing hair and keeps her eyes on the ground, attempting to blend in with a group of giggling anime girls in revealing school outfits. It works for about a block, at which point Luci thinks she hears the crackle of radio static and tears off down a dimly side street, turning north and coming to a dead end.
Luci takes a deep breath and dives headfirst through the wall, crashing into an Ewok mother serving dinner for her husband and two children. Luci stumbles out the back and phases through a wall into a large garage with a disassembled space ship in the middle. She sprints through the garage door and looses her footing, falling into a steeply slanted drainage ditch.
Luci scrambles to get up and get her bearings. She spots a grey-scale chrysanthemum painted on the side of a bridge; Hover St. She looks up and the garage door she just phased through, and sees the numbers 734 painted in tidy black writing in the top right corner.
Luci runs back, phasing through the garage door, immediately being zapped in the neck by Chirpa the Ewok. The rush of electricity snaps Luci out of her transparent form and knocks her out cold.
***
RE: [M] Gun Running - Luci - 01-05-2017
(01-05-2017, 10:28 PM)Luci Wrote: ***
Luci catches a fleeting glimpse of an enraged Ewok wielding a cattle prod before she is knocked unconscious and into the Astral Realm. She watches, a disembodied paint-ghost, as the Ewok pokes her cautiously. He unzips her backpack and duffle bag, finding the glittering blue orbs, and his eyes go back to Luci. She watches as the Ewok presses a button beneath the spaceship, and a secret basement is revealed. He grabs Luci's body, and then the orbs, and drags them down into the basement, then presses the button, concealing them again. Luci is not worried; Klowdy trusted this man. Luci hears a song coming from outside the garage; someone is dreaming.
She floats out of the garage and into the steeply slanted drainage ditch. As usual, the Astral Realm is mostly rendered in shades of grey. Luci looks over at the Hoover St. bridge where Klowdy had once painted her chrysanthemum black and white. The whole bridge is alive with light and color and laughter and music, and the neon chrysanthemum is pulsing brightly with a hundred colors. Luci floats over.
The crowd welcomes her warmly as she floats in and takes a seat beside Klowdy. His face is red from laughter, a beer is in his hand, and a pretty elf girl on his lap. His eyes are alight with mirth and his face is wiped of his war paint, and Luci thinks that he has never looked so beautiful.
"Hey Klowdy," Luci says with a smirk.
He realizes she is next to him and laughs, pulling her in with one arm and giving her a sloppy kiss.
"You!" he cries drunkenly. "You did it! You made it, oh man, I am SO happy!" the elf says, and he truly looks it. "Chirpa and the Westside Ewoks can defend their homes. Their Warriors can defend their streets. The business owners can protect their livelihood. You DID it, girl!"
Luci stares at her feet guiltily.
"I didn't do everything," she says. "I didn't save Lyon. I didn't save you," she chokes as a multicolored tear runs down her face. Klowdy sighs.
"I'm a gangster, Luci, I knew what I signed up for, and so did you," Klowdy says with a stern voice. His eyes show compassion, but there is a strength there too. Luci will not find in his eyes a place to let her guard down and collapse. In Klowdy's eyes there is only fire, and determination. She sniffs, and wipes a tear. Klowdy smiles.
"That's the fucking spirit," whispers Klowdy. "Now come on, are you going to party with me? It's my last night alive, and you've had a big day, you aren't waking up for a while!"
Luci laughs and stands up, letting her body sway to the music, as Klowdy and the elf girl come join her.
***