"Hey, Kazahana, what's u--oh god OW OW OW"

[snowburned]

Characters: Open to all
Date/Time: 12:01 AM February 26 to evening February 28
Location: Anywhere. Probably not your bathroom.
Rating: Say R to be safe, but no death
Summary: Evil twins are back in town.
Note: Anyone who's indicated an interest (or has an interest now) in having their character run into evil twin Kazahana can tag in here to log or

Comments

[wtk_is_wedge]

[Early. Somewhere on the 26th, probably midafternoon at the latest. Somewhere public, but without a lot of other people.]

A brain walker picked its way across the ground, six golden metal legs moving clumsily, unsteadily. There was fluid and a brain in the jar set into the underside of the walker, a brain that would have looked human if not for the paired braintails curled around it. The mechanism in the brain, connected by wires to the rest of the droid, had lights set into it. Nearly all of them glowed scarlet.

Rogue's body was tied up, drugged, and squeezed into a tiny box, and he was piloting this - this thing from there. He knew that this wasn't true. But he told it to himself anyway. Anything would be better. Anything.

He could see only through a small fisheye lens, hear only distantly through a poorly-tuned receptor, and feel almost nothing. But when he told himself that this wasn't him, that he was fine and somewhere else and not this, he could almost feel his body. It ached. Phantom pain, probably.

Someone ahead. Hopefully he'd be able to get around them on these splayed, uncoordinated legs.

[snowburned]

She was here for a reason. What that reason was, she couldn't articulate, but that was fine; she didn't need to. All she had to do was move forward like a chill wind, weapon in hand. It would rip apart the bonds that connected people--that horrible feeling of being tied to something else.

It was in the air, in the ground, everywhere. The energy that living beings generated, its strength and shape determined by whoever it belonged to. She was out there somewhere, this one's other self, and they would meet. But that could wait.

The creature drawing near to her didn't even look like a person, but she didn't see with eyes alone, and she knew someone was inside it. A mind, a heart, with constricting ties to others.

Lifting the scythe, she turned to face it; she would sever those bonds.

[wtk_is_wedge]

Weapon. Even with the lens distorting it, he saw and recognized it as some kind of blade. He stopped, took one unsteady step backwards.

But he'd been looking for something like this anyway, hadn't he? There was no point in self-preservation if his self was this. Why try to avoid it?

The decision took about a quarter of a second, and then some of the red lights changed to a deep rose as the walker's legs straightened, tilting the body in such a way that the brain jar was presented to her, like a bared throat.

[snowburned]

A normal human being would have stopped, or at least paused, and wondered why this creature had prostrated itself so. It wasn't a difference of body-language. Her scythe was a threat to any creature with the capacity for intelligence, and this one surely did.

But she wasn't a normal human, or really even very human at all. So she didn't pause for an instant, instead swinging back with her weapon and cutting through the creature's brain, her blade phasing smoothly through and taking all the bonds and emotions and memories it had ever acquired.

Then she left, not looking back for a moment. There was much to be done.

[wtk_is_wedge]

For several minutes after that the brain walker stood motionless, nearly all of its lights a yellow-amber color, with only a few pink and one rose colored. They were the only outward sign of deep confusion and a sense that something was wrong.

And then most of the yellows shifted to blues and greens. The fisheye lens tilted, swiveled, and the walker turned in a slow, uncertain circle, then started to walk in no particular direction.