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A new skin has been added in honor of the season! Also, Brackenridge Manor has opened it's doors! The butler has some words of warning for you.

Cordially, Icarus
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Returning home finally...; (Open)
Topic Started: Jun 8 2008, 09:55 PM (410 Views)
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Another Bright day, and it was another tick mark on the calendar. His days of exile from his own home were drawing out the days longer than he could bear. He’d let go of every tear he could bear to shed and still came up with nothing in the way of finding Raine. No matter where he looked, or how hard he tried to force the twitching eye, he saw nothing of Raine.

He had thought it would be impossible to be where he was now, standing at his doorstep again, staring at the stone door that sealed his home from the outside world. He’d locked away that world swearing that he’d never open it again till he found her, but time had a way of wearing down convictions of the moment. He’d sworn he’d wait for her, he’d wait for eternity if he had to, people don’t just disappear.

Each week as he grew more lost, he grew closer to home, training just outside his doorstep was as far as he’d come yet. Now he was prepared to take the final step back towards his broken home. A home that would feel cold without Raine, as his hand touched over the stone door he remembered how it looked when she had been there.

They were just moving in together, she had brought over some of her things in boxes and yet nothing had been quite moved in yet. As the door cracked open and the lights came on inside he wished, that Raine was in there sifting though one of her boxes.

Yet as the door opened completely, there was nothing but the empty halls and the still full boxes. Brian wanted to smile, tell himself welcome home, yet he turned away and walked back outside leaving the open home behind him as he stood in the daylight. Cursing his weakness.
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As Brian did his imitation of a teenaged Anakin Skywalker outside his doorstep, faint sounds began to drift down from farther up the mountain. Starting off faintly, they gradually grew in clarity, even without Brian's enhanced senses. It was a mesh of organic sounds, impacts, minor explosions, and the clanging of metal on metal. The sounds, in other words, of a battle. Hardly a foreign sound to the residents of AHS and its surrounding area, but still more unusual in this area of Dragoon Mountain than in other areas of the school and its grounds.

The first sound truly distinguishable was a running string of shouts and profanities, in a male voice. This was punctuated by the occaisional sound of impact, and mechanical, electronic sounding screeches.

"WHY. WON'T. YOU. DIE?!"

There was another series of clangs and electric screeching.

"Bring it on, you stupid-"

There was the sound of sharp, loud electric cracking, like a lightning strike.

"GAHOLYCRAPTHAT'SNOTFAIR!"

There was a series of brief explosions punctuated by panicked profanities, and at least one shattering rock of some kind.

"That's how you wanna do it? THAT'S HOW YOU WANNA DO IT? FINE! SUCK IT, DOLPHIN!"

A blast of blue light exploded from somewhere unseen, further up the mountainside, followed by another mechanical scream.

"Yeah, like tha- Oh SONOVA-"

There was a sudden silence, a sound like the combination of an upset stomach and a complex piece of farm equipment breaking down. Another brief silence, and then a wet, organic explosion.

"Craaaaaaaaaaaaa-"

A wet, slime-covered ball of human being arced out over the mountainside, hit a glancing blow somewhere over Brian's door, and bounced slightly before sliding to a stop in the general area of Brian's front walk. This was accompanied by a brief shower of mechanical and horribly biological parts. The figure that had just made it's entrance groaned, stretching out on his back... and received what looked like a giant, cybernetic insect head at high velocity to the general area of the stomach. He let out a sharp gasp of pain, rolling over onto his side and into the fetal position, a large BPRD logo showing on the back of his jacket through a coating of yellow slime.

"Damn damn damn damn damn godDAMN R'n'D freaks and their FREAKING CYLON REJECTS."

Lupis sat up, grabbing the robo-bug's head in one hand, groaning as he dragged himself upright, holding the remnants of his opponent by the antennae. He wiped a hand across his face, smearing the goop into a slightly less concentrated distribution.

"Oh... hi Brian."
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From his sitting position juggling base matter, Drisk had seen the weird guy do battle with.... something. He had considered offering help, but thought better when he realized that he still probably wouldn't be that much help, and it was actually sort of funny hearing him shout. When the explosion occured, Drisk ran in the same direction that whoever had been fighting had been blown towards, and stopped when he saw who the guy landed by. Wait..... isn't he that guy who helped me the other day?

what, you mean the one who bases life expectancy around the weather?
Will you please shut up about that.
Never.

Drisk went back down to a sitting position, listening to what Brian and the slime-covered guy were saying. Some would call it eavesdropping, but Drisk liked to think that when you hear a murderous voice in your head 24/7, listening to people is a lesser crime than most.
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Self wallowing only went so far, and when a string of curses from not far up on the mountainside rang down to earshot of his home Brian was roused from the pit of disperse. Tracing up the mountainside was not difficult as this site was all too familiar to him even under circumstances that could change the face of the mountain daily.

Following the second string of curses Brian spotted what seemed to be a familiar shape with a distantly not familiar one. Lupis was fighting some sort of insect beast and by all account it was a serious fight. Unfortunately by the time Brian had put together that Lupis was too far away to get to in time to make any serious contribution to the fight before they got to him, the world went silent.

The resulting explosion should have come as a surprise but somehow didn’t as the machinery that made up this bug monster broke down from Lupis’ onslaught and exploded him and it’s body parts all over the mountain. Brian watched in stunned silence, as Lupis crashed down in front of him and patched of good and machinery fell all around him.

Brian wiped off his face from a particularly rancid bit of biomorphic gel that reminded him vaguely of another students powers before he saw Lupis triumphantly pick up the head of the beast.

“Yea... um hey Lupis…”

A sort of silence as Brian wiped off some more of Lupis’ most recent victory off of him.

“I don’t really want to know why this happened… instead we’ll start with hello again, and then you can tell me… besides... Hunting… what you have been up to... Yes...”

Brian frowned as another large chunk of goo and metal landed behind him. It would take weeks to clean all this crap up. His home didn’t look so traumatic as he was first making it out to be when he thought about what a nice warm shower would do to this gunk.

Gunk aside, Drisk seemed to have shown up for a second training session. Maybe he could do something about all this goo, after all his power seemed capable enough to break down rock into goo then reshape it. Brian decided though not yet to call him out, after all Lupis might have some sort of resolution… or more bug monsters.
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Lupis stood, silently dripping the viscous yellow goo for a few seconds, waiting for something to happen to make this be not-awkward. Nothing appeared, and Lupis remained standing in what passed for Brian's front yard, now covered in slime and bug-bot-bits, all thanks to him. Not the best way to say "hi" to a friend you hadn't seen in what, months now? Come to think of it, Lupis didn't think he'd managed to talk to Brian at all since the incident in Scotland. Well, aside from that thing in the Courtyard, and he wasn't sure that counted as 'talking' by any reasonable definition.

"Um.... there should be a cleanup crew out here in under an hour or so," he said, deciding not to mention that said crews got sent out to make sure nothing toxic or radioactive had been scattered by whatever the BPRD's Monster Of The Week happened to be. It happened less often than you would expect, but the radiation in question apparently tended towards the B-movie, grow-tentacles-and-get-weird-powers-variety, so it was perhaps more imperative that the Bureau be as paranoid as possible about it than regarding the more mundane kinds of radiation. Mostly.

"So.... ah... I've mostly been... doing stuff," he said, hoping vainly that it sounded a lot less lame out loud than it did in his head. Moments like this were definitely not his forte. "How about you?"
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Drisk's nose almost shot inward at the smell of the mess, it was the most horrific stench he'd ever wiffed. It was so bad that Drisk almost fell out of his hiding spot, though he sort of guessed they might know he was there. Breathing through his mouth was a little better, although he could almost taste the pungent odor of yellow slime and various robotic remains. After a few minutes of remaining in his prone position, Drisk finally couldn't bear it any longer. He stood up and yelled "this is the worst smell I've had the displeasure of having slide up my nostrils. How can you two stand this stuff? How can you guys wait an hour for this junk to be picked up?" Thinking for a few seconds, Drisk asked "how much of this [bleep] is mineral based, and how much of it is organic?"


Oh, so what now? You're this freak's personal janitor?
Hey, he helped me out with my base sculpting, so it would be the right thing to help out with a problem such as... this horrible-smelling mess. Also if nothing's done about it, there's a very real possibility that I'll lose my lunch all over the place.
OH MY GOD, WHY DID YOU SEND ME A MENTAL PICTURE OF THAT?
Because I hate you.
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Brian watched Lupis waiting for his answer as Lupis’ eyes seemed to dart around him. It was true he hadn’t seen Lupis in quite some time, and the drip of another chunk of ooze dripped off of him. Brian looked at his blue coat and casually shrugged it off his shoulders as Lupis finally gave a half hearted explanation that a clean up crew would be here in less than an hour.

It seemed reasonable, but as Brian’s coat hit the ground he realized that this meant a large group of people he knew nothing about would be here at his home. Apart of some group that Lupis had tangled himself up in. This was not how he had wanted to come home… Brian continued to labor over the logistics of sealing up his own home as the gunk began to bake in the open sunlight. If not for the wrench and rancid face Drisk made Brian wouldn’t have known how lucky he had been to of removed his coat when he did.

The smell that rose from Lupis was something that Brian wished his body would hurry up and adapt a way to block his need for smell. Brian took his shirt over his nose. Sun baked goo was not going to make anything better, so Brian moved upwind of Lupis and prayed that the smell wouldn’t overpower the gentle breeze going at the moment.

“Drisk move upwind over here, it’s not as bad. Lupis was just about to explain who he’s working with.”

Brian gave Lupis a look that demanded he gave no nonsense from here, Brian did not want a group like DRAGON anywhere near his home if he could help it. He’d had enough scars from a seemingly noble group of guardians from the school who turned out to be nothing more than a rag tag bunch of hooligans looking for a fight. However Brian intended to look serious, it was difficult to get the right feel across with only his swirl crosshair patterned eyes.

“So Lupis, who exactly are you working for?”

He’d never intended it, but his voice carried an edge like the sword he carried. His distain for groups of self righteous students taking up arms against what they felt was evil. Without knowing it his fur felt like it was standing up, his palm drifted over the hilt of his sword, though Lupis was a friend, if he was here like the groups of students who had troubled him so in the past… He wouldn’t surrender his life till he saw Raine again.
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Lupis was not, as he would be the first to admit, the best person at picking up subtle emotional clues and vocal tones. That said, the edge in Brian's voice seemed about as subtle as an armored truck bearing down on him in a closed-off tunnel with no visible exits. He had heard something similar in Brian's voice once before, when he had believed someone to be dead, dying, or otherwise incapacitated. Okay, so apparently organizations were an official Bad Thing on the Brian Scale. Or maybe just ones that managed to locate the Batcave Of Solitude. Pity the Jehova's Witnesses that wanted to give the resident chimera some pamphlets. Regardless, Lupis filed that little piece of information away, and fought the urge to take a step back as he answered.

"BPRD," Lupis got out, the acronym spilling out of his mouth almost automatically. "Er, Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Sort of a combination of the X-Files and CSI, founded back in World War II, handles a bunch of stuff that doesn't fall under normal law enforcement by reason of most people not believing it exists. Also the title of a comic book series by Mike Mignola, but I'm not sure how much of that is coincidence..."

Lupis trailed off for a moment, relaxing a little as it seemed that Brian wasn't about to take his head off for letting his work drift this close to his secluded mountain-home. Not that he thought Brian was likely to do something like that anyway, but Lupis HAD just covered his doorstep in cybernetic cockroach-guts. And in Lupis' book, you did not antagonize people who were about nine-thousand steps ahead of you on the power scale, friend or not. Unless, you know, they'd earned it. Some people were just jerks.

"Anyway, this thing was something some crazed necromantic-Borg-Narbon-Frankenstein wannabe had been messing with," Lupis continued, holding up the now deceased bug-head. "The lab guys decided the best option for figuring out what it actually was was the 'let's press buttons randomly and see what happens' approach."
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Following Brian's suggestion, Drisk moved upwind, and the effect was immediate. Although there still existed the stench of the bug, it was noticably lessened and he no longer felt the imminent sensation of throwing up. Taking in several deep breaths through his mouth, Drisk turned to the other guy there, the one who had been fighting the goo-filled metal monstrosity. Swallowing a little more air, Drisk said "hey, the random button presses is a proven method. Sometimes the only way I'm able to install stuff on my computer is through random button presses." What Drisk failed to mention was that he'd gone through a loooot of computers, just another one this week when he'd accidentally spelled "freeware" as "trojan spy-ware" with the random button pressing method.

"So, are there more of these things anywhere, or was this puke-inducer one of a kind? By the way, I'm Drisk, currently trying to aquire the nickname "resident base sculptor". It hasn't caught on as quickly as I'd hoped, and the only one who's started using it so far won't shut up about it."

Ha hah ha hah, resident base sculptor, that has to be the dumbest nickname I've ever heard. You're a [bleep]ing idiotic [bleep], you know that?

"So.... you're basically the men in black?"
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Brian listened like he would to someone he was interrogating, to Lupis’ quick and hasty explanation of the BPRD. The references that Lupis made were as usual, completely lost on Brian. For all that Lupis has rattled off about another 3-4 groups that Brian wondered were connected to this whole event now. The tricky part however was Lupis’ line of dealing with things that people don’t believe exist; in this age where Meta humanity existed Brian had come to expect the unexpected. This obviously meant that the BPRD were some form of Meta law enforcement. It seemed in spite of the circumstances; Brian could put aside his distrust of student run groups in favor of guessing that something that was founded during the world war would be much larger than a lynch mob.

Brian relaxed his features eased up and his hand was no longer on the blade’s handle. Lupis went on to explain that the bug was some experiment gone wrong by somebody. It was all very clean cut and dry on explanation, in action however it was a wet sticky mess that at the chance of a shifted wind they’d all be puking at least that was Drisk’s apparent assessment, who after moving upwind threw in his ten cents on the subject. This turned out to be a major concern, if there was in fact more of these creatures on the mountain the smell would never leave. After Drisk’s strange introduction, he made another group reference; Brian decided he’d had enough of the coy pop culture references.

“Lupis, I have no idea who any of those groups are… just what does the BPRD do exactly, dealing with strange things is kinda vague and hell AHS does that on a daily basis with monsters twice as ugly as that one.”

Just in case, Brian turned his sights away from their immediate area and focused off into the distance of the mountain and surrounding woods. There was some cause for concern as he spotted figures moving towards them from the mountain, they were either Lupis’ cleaning crew, or relatives of the bug monster. They were still very far off for his enhanced sight not to be able to pick them up but it was a worry now.

Brian accidently started a deep sigh though his nose and started gagging on the spot. Though the coughing and hacking, and now watery eyes he tried to squeak out that someone was coming. It was lost in the coughing as Brian grabbed at his throat and tried to mentally force the putrid air out of him.
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"Eh...."

And his analogies fell flat on the audience of the Grand Chimera Theater, it seemed. On the upside, Brian seemed less likely to rip his head off now, in either sense. Not that he really thought Brian would hurt him, but he didn't want to be on the receiving end of Brian's anger. Brian seemed to be the type capable of carrying a good, long grudge, and Lupis didn't feel like becoming estranged from someone he considered among his close friends over something like THIS. I mean, becoming a supervillain was one thing, but getting into a blood-feud over bug-guts seemed a little... Jerry Springer, he supposed.

"We... deal with stuff that can't be attributed to normal or meta-related activity, I guess. If it could reasonably described as paranormal, that's the BPRD's jurisdiction. And you'd probably be surprised how much people don't believe in. Or just attribute to metahumans."

The last bit came out just a bit more bitter than Lupis may have intended, but it was still true. Of course, there was a pretty thin line between "metahuman" and "weird paranormal shit", so it was a bit more understandable than, say, blaming metahumans for the economy, the war in Iraq, and the sinking of the Titanic. But not by too much.

"So.... you're basically the men in black?"

"I- what?"

Lupis glanced over at Drisk, really seeing him for the first time.

"They- ... Yes. Yes they are. Exactly. Lupis Greenwood," he said, not commenting at all on the futility of trying to get a nickname on your own.
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Drisk noticed that Brian was coughing and hacking, and said to him "umm... are you okay? Is the stench finally getting to you?" he asked, not quite sure if Brian could even hear him during this coughing fit. It would not have surprised him if Brian couldn't, that was some really strong hacking he was doing. He quickly turned to Lupis and said "umm... you know Brian well, right? Is he known to have any sort of coughing fits, or is this just from the smell?" Drisk began wondering if the odor affected Brian more because Brian was... well, he didn't know what BRian was, just that he didn't quite look human.

Sighing, Drisk wiped a hand from his forehead to his chin. Exploding robotic bugs, Men in Black, that ghastly smell, it had been one hell of a trip to the mountain.

((Yeah, I know it's kinda short, but I didn't know what else to mention, plus it's one in the morning))
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He started to see little light dots in front of him before the spasm of coughing stopped. Drisk wasn’t wrong about the pungent odor that was wafting around the slime covered mountain. It was a long series of short shallow breaths that finally got him back to standing though dazed from the lack of oxygen. He held his hand over his mouth and stepped back from the pair a little bit. The pair on the mountain however was closer, they looked normal enough, certainly not like the bug mecha monster.

Still watery eyed he trusted Lupis enough that his men would do well to forget where his home was after they were done cleaning up. Still as he finally stood up solidly and looked at the worried look on Drisk and Lupis he put his hand up, signaling he just needed a little room. As he kept his breathing shallow sure not to inhale another deep pallet full of the sludge smell.

Out of breath but quickly running out of time he shakes his hand at the pair wrapped up in their debate about men in black to point up at the approaching figures on the mountainside. The pair coming down the mountain has technological gear apparent but Brian still unsure if they are with Lupis or some other group coming to collect the mecha garbage heap.

“Lupis are they with you?”

Brian stood up and wiped the tears from his eyes as he rubbed his chest where the majority of the gunk had settled now that his breathing had returned to some semblance of normal.
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