SPACE STATIONS > The Cancer

Droplets on a Razor's Edge

(1/25) > >>

Daglobster:
Torien's vision whipped about as he felt his back slam the steel and concrete barrier that surrounded the ten foot diameter circle that made up the center ring of Cancer's Stern Club, something of a hangout for pirates and gangers who'd made it big enough to enjoy some of the finest pleasures in life. He didn't know much else about the place other than it was run by goblins, didn't really have time to ask.

His opponent stepped back and slammed him against the wall again, and he could feel the studs digging through his flesh, but none of the hot pain or running warmth of his streaming blood, just faint echoes of it.

"Come on, kill him!" came the brute's manager, and someone from the crowd above threw down an empty beer bottle in protest, which shattered on the arena floor. Torien yelled and slammed his spiked elbow into his opponents back, and when the man reared up he balled up one of his cybernetic hands until he could feel the joints creaked and his knuckle studs stick out. The sound of metal on metal announced the blow and the assailant staggered back into the spotlights.

The man had metallic studs on his head and a massive, cybernetic jaw. He swayed a bit on his enhanced legs but came rocketing back in, swinging the circular saw that used to be his left hand. Torien just barely stepped back in time to feel it skim across his chest, slicing the skin but revealing gleaming metal beneath it.

Cut down to the bone, damn near, and he didn't feel a lick of it, just the cold air against his now exposed flesh. He sprung right in before his opponent could recover, rocketing another punch into his side while he cocked the other back. Mechanisms clicked and reverse-oriented spurs came out of the sides of his forearms and when his opponent came in for a backswing his adrenaline spiked and his accelerated reflexes kicked online.

The crowd watched as he flowed around his opponent's strike and swung an arm to catch him in the face with the spurs. Face bloodied and gouged, the man stumbled to the side, and Torien grabbed him by one of his metal studs and gave him an uppercut. He pulled him back down and when the man grabbed at his arms to try and free himself, Torien rooted himself to the spot and slammed his plated knee into his face.

The man fell back, catching himself on the wide mesh but otherwise barely able to stand.

Everyone cheered, and when Torien looked up to see what his handler's instructions were, he found him absent. Looking back down to the man he was fighting, he took a moment to study the look in his eye before he raised an arm and punched him square in the face, finally knocking him out.

The crowd peaked and a scratchy voice came fromthe speakers above.

"An' DAT'S IT folks! Chrome Warrior takes tha brackets! I 'aven't seen an upset like this since the days'a Skinner Pete!"

There was more, of course, but the promise of being able to leave that small pit took up his full attention. He tuned out the crowd and announcer as the floor lowered and he was delivered to the "backstage" spaces, so to speak.

Stern Club was a brand new venue for him, so he was thankful for the two armed goblins who took him to the arena's chop shop, half engineering bay and triage ward. The place smelled like gas fumes and blood but he couldn't complain about the treatment.

The doctor, a scraggy hobgoblin who definitely didn't have a medical degree, made it a point to confirm his augmentations with him, a process that took a while as there wasn't quite much of him left after he'd been augmented.

Most of his body was either enhanced or replaced (89%, by his last measurement), and while he was proud to show off his chrome beneath the knees and past the elbows (as that where most of his weaponry was anyways) the rest was covered in living tissue that gave the appearance of life, save for his head which sported two lines of exposed chrome that outlined his squat mohawk and framed his synthetic eyes. And then he had to point out the pain regulator in his brainstem, how that system was wired all the way down to the spine and integrated with his adrenal booster and delimiting device.

Upon spotting the delimiter, the "doctor" raised an eyebrow, but when you worked in illegal bloodsports it was more of a curiosity than anything else.

Anyways, he was just grateful for a synthskin regrowth treatment and the free morphine, and even though he looked pretty grievously wounded it was mostly his "outer layer", so he wasn't worried. And with the bandages and grafts done, he just kind of looked like a recently wounded warrior.

What did have him worried was his handler bursting into the room. Madrissa hadn't owned him for that long a time, she was nearing her fourth week with him, but he'd never seen her as skeeved out as she looked at that very moment. A blur of brown hair and candy red clothing approached them and she shooed the doctor away.

"He's done now, we're leaving," she said, and despite Torien's sour look she quickly pulled him out of the room.

"We got to get out of here. You just won me a fat payout but we've gotta survive to collect it," she said as they started down a hallway. Torien knew better than to question, and he could see the honest terror in her eyes.

"Fucking Anklehackers," she continued.

"They tried to buy you but I ditched them. I got the winnings check though and you won't have to fight for just about two weeks."

She led him down a hallway and started slicing into a door that led into one of the club's storage areas. Another door further down the way opened, and the sound of goblinish syllables being barked out spurred Madrissa to work faster. She got the door opened and motioned him through.

"I'll be back, don't go anywhere. I'll be rich, eh? So I'll treat you right, no reason to run off," she said, and patted the regulator control on her waist with a smirk. Torien wanted to say something but she closed the door and he could hear her making a break for it.

Yeah, he was gonna get out of here. And so he turned about and glanced around this room, which seemed to hold display items that weren't being displayed at the moment, either covered in tarps or locked away behind plasteel walls or cabinets.

So he started down his own way and moved down deeper into the room, hoping to find a vent or some other way out.

DragonSong:
Darkness. That was alright, she was used to darkness. Honestly, she found she preferred it--her only real, sustained experiences with light tended to involve pain, confusion, or terror. Sometimes all three, on an off day.

That hadn't seemed to change much since she'd been dumped from one dark tank into another. Of course, her new "home" was at least a bit more interesting, at first; she saw new people, new places. The group of street performers who had purchased her off the black market had mostly kept her in a sort of side-show attraction, a dilapidated building with a broken neon sign, if she remembered correctly.

It was getting harder to remember.

The carnival had been her first new tank. From there...well, she honestly wasn't sure. No one ever seemed to really care to tell her where she was, or where she was going when she was inevitably sold off again--she only knew she was being sold because she'd learned to listen in when people would stand beside her tank and speak with those wide, expressive hand gestures. She'd tried doing that herself once or twice, but the only people who really paid attention were the little ones that sometimes came close to gawk at her.

So this darkness was pretty much par for the course, really. She hadn't even bothered to look around her new surroundings once her tank had been dumped into this storage room. At least she assumed it was a storage room--even if she'd wanted to take a look around her view was mostly blocked by stacks of crates or oddly lumpy protrusions covered in some kind of thick fabric.

But then light. Brief and flickering, lasting only a moment or two as it accompanied the sound a door opening and closing. The emergency lighting in the room had flickered on, sickly green, but it was dim enough that she didn't have to squint against it as her eyes adjusted.

Was that...were those footsteps?

Her eyes widened and she instinctively darted to the furthest corner of her tank from the noise, coiling her tail in close to her body and wrapping her arms around herself in an effort to make herself as small and unnoticeable as possible in the greenish, murky water.

...Of course, this effort wasn't helped by the gentle sloshing of liquid against glass caused by her movement. Or by the fact that the emergency lighting wasn't quite enough to obscure the subtle blueish glow of the markings that covered her body.

Daglobster:
This place was pretty packed with all kinds of empty containers and things covered in tarp. He reckoned this must be a storeroom for stolen things with no real black market value, it figured that the little green monsters would keep it all in one big mess. Torien even pocketed a few things, including a heavy wrench from an open toolkit lying next to a half dismantled machine. As he picked it up he heard what sounded like... sloshing?

He turned about and looked behind him, and his gaze fell upon a tall, cylindrical object covered in the same grey tarp as everything else about halfway down, and the bottom half was mostly darkened, but...

There were some lights on the bottom? He stooped down to get a closer look. Something about the tank must have detected proximity (it seemed like a pretty advanced unit.) and the interior of it lit up just enough to reveal the shape of something curled up on the bottom and away from him. Whatever it was, it was big, as big as him at least and... wait...

were those hands?

DragonSong:
The creature in the tank pressed back further against the smooth glass behind her, chest starting to rise and fall rapidly as her breathing picked up. It--he?--was getting closer, closer...she was trapped.

She looked around desperately, wincing and gritting her teeth as the markings along her body flared brighter in her distress.

In a sudden burst of movement she uncurled herself from her tiny, protective ball and rocketed toward the top of her tank, slamming against the lid with a dull, metallic thunk. Her tail churned the water below her anxiously, most of her body except for the very end of her tail fins now hidden by the tarp.

She spun wildly, the panic of a trapped prey animal overriding conscious thought. She slammed her hands into the side of the tank, earning another, louder thunk and causing the tarp to shudder delicately as her desperation shook the cylindrical structure.

Daglobster:
The creature surged and his adrenaline spiked, and what was a lightning fast slam upwards for her, Torien perceived as a slow-motion glide upwards. She was... a lot to take in, or at least Torien thought it looked like a "she", there were a few details that hinted him towards that. But he also knew what terror looked like on someone's face and it was the horrified look in her eyes that caught him off guard and sent him stumbling a step back, chromed limbs clinking against the metal floor panels.

But the moment passed and as the edge wore off he saw the container continue to slam. Suddenly remembering the guards from before, he advanced back up to the glass and laid a hand on it, cool metal resting against the glass.

"Hey, hey," he said, wincing through the pain of talking. Ever since he'd been put back together his voice was one thing that never really came back. He'd been rebuilt to fight, either to the death or until someone pitied him enough to free him.

"It's alright, please..." he said, pleading quietly, as raising his voice too high caused stabs of pain. He did his best to try not to look threatening, trying his best to find her face with his sharp green eyes. And now that he'd come closer, she'd be able to see that he was just a young man, barely an adult but with extensive cybernetic reconstruction on the right side of his face. The brow, temple, and lower jaw had the most obvious chrome, but his right eye was also framed with a studded outline that helped shield that eye.

His eyes held the same fear as hers.

Because he'd heard of how the Anklehackers operated, a nasty cartel run by the nastiest little creatures in this arm of the galaxy. If they caught him, he'd die fighting for sure. At least his newest owner made promises, whether she'd keep or not was yet to be seen.

He laid another hand on the bottom of the cylinder, trying to steady it so it didn't slam about as loudly.

"You don't... Need to be scared."

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page