Scene #6670: Clinical Trials

Owner	Pose
Maricel Thorne	The arena Maricel's dialed in would look positively gladiatorial to almost anyone but a Mortasheen native. She likely feels completely at home in it herself: it's a circular pit fifty feet across with patchwork sheet-metal floor and walls, and an electrified mesh dome above separating the combatants from a simulated roaring audience. Old blood, acid-scorchmarks, and stranger scars mottle almost every surface. The crowd's programmed well enough to roar Arthur's name as he enters; a heavy forcefield-reinforced portcullis falls down behind him when he does. Maricel herself stands just off-center, in a spraypainted starting box. She's not visibly armed apart from a blade that looks like the bastard child of a utility knife and a scalpel; her other hand's stuffed into her labcoat pocket. "Sooo glad you could join me, Arthur. I've been a big fish in a small pond for a long time. I can't go around advertising my products if I don't know how they stack up, can I?" There's no overt invitation to violence in her words, but her demeanor's visibly ready.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's stylish entry is side-saddle on his broom, relaxed and at ease in the situation. The simulated crowd is peppered with actual, real-life cheering, screaming iguanas, who have just kind of shown up even despite the lack of invitation and other suchlike. The old signs of battle are fine; at least there's no corpses! That would give /unfair advantage/ to Maricel, after all. In many ways. He gets off the broom and takes a dramatic pose, flipping it about in his hands as he does. "PATIENT SYMPTOMS: HIGH-OCTANE BATTLE!" Shouts an excited, bitcrushed voice. Above both him and Maricel, a suspended pair of HEALTH VIALS is shown, as well as a countdown and various GAUGES -- though for Maricel, presumably, there's less an ASPECT GAUGE and more something silly and strange like a VITAE INDEX, and it's undoubtedly just a collection of estimates. Not so for Arthur; his are all true to precision. Arthur laughs. "HELL YEAH, homie, glad to get those FEET WET on the BATTLEFIELD SHIT. You gonna bring the BIG GUNS, or you keepin' some TRADE SECRETS in the POCKET?" He points the battle-broom at Maricel, revving its bristles dramatically. "I wanna see you bring some HEAT, dawg! 'Cause I ain't HOLDIN' BACK!" The UI of his weight fighting-game interface seems to finally finish up assembling. "GET READY!!" His body flares with dramatic green, white, and black glows. Spellcircles emerge from him like bubbles, boiling out of his robes and into the air. "STRIFE!!!" Calls out that bitcrushed voice, and with a brilliant flash of light, Arthur's off on a rocket-blasted rush right towards Maricel, shouting "YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!!!" And going for a simple rush-down melee assault with the roaring blender at the end of his broom, swinging in wide horizontal and overhead swipes with enhanced gravity enchantments to add heavy weight to the impacts. It's a strong opening!
Maricel Thorne	Maricel's got a half-dozen bars above her- none of them are anything as simple as 'Health'. There's one for 'INTEGRITY', one for 'BLOOD', one for 'WILL', and a half-dozen rotisserie-turning bars like bullets in a spinning revolver in different colors labeled 'DRUGS'. "My medicine's like soda," she replies with an easy smile as Arthur's Intro Animation finishes. "The recipe's a secret; the flavor isn't." Arthur comes in for his barrage of broom attacks; Maricel finally takes her other hand out of her pocket- and pushes her glasses up her nose, flashing with the light of the stadium's spotlights. Her other hand comes up with the knife, meeting the broom's haft with the blade and pushing it just slightly off-course from her silhouette on each swing. She seems at ease, but that's a demeanor born less out of safety and more out of acclimation to danger: the narrow, uneven margins on each parry are evidence that she's more lucky than good. Finally, Arthur comes in with a swing she can't deflect. She jams her knife into the broom's whirling blades, gumming up the rotors for a split second. Her other hand pulls a second scalpel from her pocket and throws it behind the godkid, accompanied by the faint yet distinct sound of Psychic Audio Warbling. The thrown blade passes behind him, halts in the air at twenty feet away, pivots to face directly at Arthur's back like a heat-seeking missile, and then plunges towards him with a telekinetic pull. It's aimed right for a crucial tendon in his shoulder! "Let me show you the mistakes of anatomical orthodoxy, Mr. Lowell."
Arthur Lowell	Arthur takes the shot direct to a key tendon while he's busy dramatically locking blades with Maricel. There's a noise like a guitar string snapping. "GAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" He screams in a surprising pain; it's not that it's drawn a great deal of blood or knocked a huge chunk out of his HEALTH VIAL. Rather, it's the way his arm is suddenly hanging limp, and the way his broom is suddenly much easier to deal with. He pulls back, and status effect icons are all over his HEALTH VIAL. "Fuckin' hell. PSYCHIC SHIT? Aint' dealt with that since the old TROLLS and their BULLSHIT SHENANIGANS." He mutters, trying to work his arm. "But if you think that's enough to deal with the REAL-ASS HUMANITY side of things, you're... Hhhhhh..." His ASPECT GAUGE suddenly loses a huge chunk. He roars in painas he drops the broom, grabs the scalpel, and tugs, provoking a spray of blood -- then reaches in. "HHHHHAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!" He screams as he does something strange inside, forcing power along his shoulder, treansmuting his entire arm into raw starstuff in the shape of a human instead of a normal limb, then right back. A kind of massive, anatomical hard-reset! It looks like it took a lot out of him. There's only so much he can do with that. "Don't tell me fuckin' up my...ghhhhh... my muscles is ALL YOU GOT. Let's get WEIRD, BITCH!" He decides to keep some distance for a bit; he floats off the ground, and opens fire with his broom. Bolts of starfire emerge, elaborately geometric patterns that blossom out across the arena like an esoteric graph, and most of them arc towards Maricel!
Maricel Thorne	"If it's all I need to do, then it's all I need to do," Maricel replies, backing off a step or two as she watches the starry 'healing' process with naked fascination. Someone more pragmatic might take advantage of that- but pragmatic, Maricel is not. "There's no sense playing the ace from your sleeve until you know the other guy's playing with a full deck." For a brief moment, it looks like she's going to be as mangled as her metaphors: she dashes and dives to the side under the geometrical barrage of spacebolts, but it's not enough to carry her out of their reach. It's not until python-like limbs of raw red meat erupt from her upper back and fling her human body across the arena that she gains the necessary agility, hurtling across the floor like a jumping spider, scaling up the walls with climbing-pitons made of bone, and briefly swinging from the ceiling before the electricity convinces her to let go! One of the space-bolts grazes her side as she plummets down like a falcon from above Arthur, drawing blood and staining her labcoat. She doesn't seem to mind it- her attention is focused on his eyes as they blur past each other, catching his gaze for a split second and bludgeoning his mind with a raw psychic jolt while a sickly-green aura radiates from around her head. "I don't think you're prepared to get as 'weird' as I am, Mr. Lowell. Prove me wrong."
Arthur Lowell	Raw thought sprays out the back of Arthur's skull in a burst of light as Maricel nails him with a psychic headshot. He stumbles, "bleeding" from the mental wound. Figments of imagination drip down the back of his head, and a pool of crunchy defensive reflexes forms at his feet. "GUHHHHH!!" He holds his head tightly in both hands for a moment. But only a moment. A gravity burst lashes out of his body to try to smash Maricel back several feet if she's staying that close. "You better know it, DOC!" He shouts. "I fought plenty PSYCHICS, I wanna see what you got to ACE ON 'EM!" His defensive reflexes might have gotten blasted out of his brain, but his offensive reflexes are preserved. He intends to use them while he has them. He grips his broom tighter, revs it harder, and opens the throttle wide on the thrusters. Gushing white and black flames tear out, making it half flamethrower, half bludgeon. "Lemme show ya some TRICKS I learned in the MECC!" He slams it into the ground, and from the chaotic floor, gushes of starfire burst out, filling the area with hazards! He closes in for several super-rocket-powered strikes that threaten to smash Maricel through the columns of raw fusion with sheer force, even despite the agility! Even just the heat of the arena would be hard to resist; Arthur's only not burning up himself because he's encased himself in exotic spells that protect him from the brutal radiation. The real-life, actual iguanas in the crowd are used to being blasted with solar radiation. They're fine. Don't worry about it.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel gets absolutely gut-punched by Arthur's first swing, tumbling backwards through the air as her whickering tendrils try to find some purchase to catch her on. The second and third, too- but each time she gets knocked through a column of searing starfire, her tendrils shift noticeably. At first, he might shrug it off as a cartoonish or otherworldly reaction to radiation, but on the third smash when her claws find purchase on the ground and another pair of limbs sprouts to Blade Clash with his broom, the mutation is visible: the red meat is blackened alongside her labcoat and hair, but pulsing veins of luminescent green material course along the tentacles and fill the air with the taste of metal. "I'll tell you the difference between me and them," Maricel replies, pulling a yellow syringe from her breast pocket and jabbing herself just above the collarbone. Popping and crunching sounds echo from her neoplasm as she depresses the punger. "'Mens sana in corpore sano'." A pair of sharpened tendrils arc around and try to stab him in the sides, and the air itself glows Cherenkov-blue as they dump all their absorbed radiation back into the godkid's body. "Is that all you've got? I've given chest X-rays worse than that!"
Arthur Lowell	"Don't like men's saunas, homie! Gross." The ongoing war against ever looking like an intelligent person rages on. Arthur eats a healthy radiation breakfast. Where Maricel could evade most of the damage, Arthur has to eat it raw head-on. He isn't able to effectively dodge around the tendrils going for the side, and they lance into him. A heavy shock of radiation blasts through him, and it's enough to light up his eyes bright green, and to show his bones in an exotic glow beneath the skin. The burst is so much that a small explosion goes off between them, knocking Arthur back in a bursting gamma lightshow that sends him tumbling and rolling. As he struggles to his feet, the announcer's voice returns. "ROUND TWO!" He announces! Looks like Maricel took the first. Arthur's broom was tossed near him, slamming hilt-first into the sheet metal and somehow sticking there. "Alright, homie. You want ALL I GOT? You earned a taste of the BIG HAMMER. It's time for... THE TWIIIIISTEEEEEERRRRR!" A unique spellcircle has formed around the fist he raises to the crowd. The Iguanas are already chanting. "TWISTER! TWISTER! TWISTER!" He paces around, shouting as he does. "YEAH! YEAAAAHHH!! WHO'S NUMBER ONE! IT'S ARTHUR goddamn LOWELL!" "READY!?!" "STRIFE!!!" Round two kicks off. And Arthur twists the spellcircle in his hand like he's turning a massive piece of machinery. Specifically, he twists and intensifies gravity. The crowd will need to be simulating seatbelts, because suddenly it's like they're fighting on upside-down Jupiter. Arthur's trying to slam Maricel into the dome above! But he doesn't stop there, he twists again, sideways, worried she'll attach to the ceiling, trying to make her swing hard and slam back into the ground. And another twist to smash her into the patchwork floor! And each one seems to multiply the force of gravity more and more, trying to just eat into her endurance and energy and make it harder and harder to move and stand after that exhausting assault.
Maricel Thorne	"You've got quite a penchant for the dramatic," Dr. Thorne observes in a Very Doctorly Tone, casually cauterizing her open wounds with one hand during the sacred Round Transition. "The admiration of the crowd- how does that make you feel, Mr. Lowell? Does it invigorate you? Or do you feel anxious to live up to their expectations?" Maricel's thrown around like she's on the world's worst amusement-park ride once the magical assault starts, but even as the world around her turns and twists, her human body itself remains gyroscopically oriented right-side-up. Her tendrils tense and slack, fasten and unfasten, grab and hold in a dizzying display of coordination, and even her hair comes loose from its messy bun and whips around her head- but she narrows her eyes, presses one hand to the side of her head in Traditional Psychic Stance, and neuro-amputates the concept of nausea from her own mind (accompanied, of course, by a green-sick-face status indicator falling off). The simulated crowd isn't so lucky. Many of the artificial Mortasheeners careen off into the open sky. The survivors don't seem to mind at all. "You have, as promised, 'gotten weird'. Please, allow me to return the favor." Maricel slaps a glowing defibrillator-like pad over her chest and activates it with an audible beep-thunk, immediately catalyzing her neoplasmic tentacles to roil. They erupt a second later in dozens of oversized eyes, separated by whorls like the surface of a brain. Her head emits a fuzzy green 'pulse' with a noise like an overworked hard-drive, and the eyeballs focus its energy into piercing neuro-rays that try to hijack his nervous system on a basal level, wracking him with pins and needles and sapping the strength in his limbs!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur eats raw psychic shenanigans yet again. Every time these blast into him, it sprays out something new. This time, the neuro-beams lance through his body, and the spray of thought that blasts out of him is full of... muscle memory, of course. He struggles to stay upright and continue floating with the feeling, but "struggle" is a constant thing for Arthur. The Twister, of course, remains in his hands, but it's starting to fizzle. Panting heavily, he slams it with the opposite hand to get it working better. "Makes me know what I ALREADY KNOW, dawg!" He shouts, forcing a wide, eager grin. "That I'm COOL! I'm the one making THEM feel, ain't the OTHER WAY AROUND! 'Course that's INVIGORATING! And I don't got that ANXIETY, livin' up to some EXPECTATIONS is EASY!" That's a lie, of course, and one doesn't need to be a potent psychic reading the surface thoughts off a freshly brain-blasted godkid to know that. He takes some enthusiasm and motivation from it, but not too much. He's sweating, and not all of the sweat is exertion-sweat, there's a couple beads of nervousness-sweat in there too. A glance at the HEALTH VIALS above breeds a few more beads. The grin gets grim and a kind of subconsciously accepting of where this is about to go. "Alright. You make it harder to HIT YA? I'll just HIT HARDER!" He says. "HARDER, HARDER, and HAAAAAAAAARDEEEEEERRR!! Come on! Let's FINISH THIS SHIT!" He slams both palms together, pressing the TWISTER between them, and pouring light suddenly leaks from the gaps. From his body, an eight-pronged whorl of light emerges, and splits into dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of very tiny suns. Gravity gets extra weird, encircling Arthur as he spawns an extremely small galaxy in the middle of the dome, and sets it spinning. The swirling lights lash out like turrets with their own bolts at Maricel! The huge storm of already damaging micro-suns features its own smaller barrages. He's eating up the last of his ASPECT GAUGE, in what looks like an effort to take Maricel out -- or at least make this less of a one-sided loss, and save some face! The pressure of a partially real crowd, and all.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel has gotten maneuvered into a dangerous psychological space here, however inadvertent Arthur's manipulation might be. Her bright yellow eyes visibly dilate behind her glasses while he gives his Coolkid Monologue. "I know what you're saying," she replies, her tone indicating one meaning and her intent another. "I used to do this all the time when I was younger. The challenge, the thrill, the adulation- the euphoria and euthymia of reinforcing one's purpose." Right now, she's not his opponent. She's his therapist. As his barrage ramps up, her tentacle-limbs lift her off the ground again and tense, leaping backwards onto the wall like an arachnid and embedding their tips in the metal. She starts to race along the curved perimeter, doubling back to avoid denser bullet-patterns, leaping from segment to segment and circling for an opening. "I get it. This is who you are, 'homie'. You're the light and they're the mirrors. So show them how bright you can glow." Subject: Arthur Lowell. Scan for: Desires. Impose: Emotions: Confidence, happiness. Thoughts: "Watch behind you." Finally, her tentacles wilting from the radiating heat and her labcoat pockmarked with burns, she seems to find what she's looking for. She cocks her arm back with a knife glinting in her palm and hurls it. Just like the first time, it sails past him- then dances in the air, zips back and forth, and darts towards his back. "Now!"
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's in the middle of a battle. Ironically, this is perhaps the very best time to perform an act of therapy. In most other situations, he'd be stuck with all kinds of hang-ups presumably busy trying to get in the way of what Maricel is doing. And, if we're being honest, Maricel can fight a lot, but there's nobody in the whole world who can fight Arthur's weird hangups one-on-one very effectively. He's drained of ASPECT GAUGE, but he's still summoning up his light, goaded on by Maricel. "HELL YES, you know it! I got that HEAT! I bring that LIGHT! I'M THE GODDAMN STARS!!" He's digging into his HEALTH VIAL to cast more, but as Maricel launches, he dodges to one side. Then, just as predicted, the bits of Maricel's imposition slides into place where once his ability to dodge and his battle-instincts to block were. The convenient part about imposing that is that it slots in where a missing part is. And so Arthur's eye glints as he realizes what's happening. Hands up, he snatches and stylishly catches the blade in both hands, bloodying them with deep gashes in a sudden block. The crowd's few Iguanas that managed to hold onto their seating go wild, screaming and making weird reptilian tongue noises of celebration. Arthur's HEALTH VIAL goes so low that it literally requires enhanced vision to see the tiny few fractions of a renderable pixel that represent his continued presence in this battle. Immediately, off goes the magic, and he can't fuel the galaxy anymore. It'll keep dispersing and firing, but no longer will it grow or sustain. "HOLY SHIT!" He shouts, in genuine surprise that what just happen did truly manage to happen. Woah! He wasn't expecting to make it through that one -- at least, not consciously. "FUCK YES! YES!! LOOK AT THAT!" He shouts, raising one bloody fist! "YEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!!" He's practically hoarse with the enthusiastic screaming. ROUND TWO is starting to end, though, with the timer going down. He throws the scalpel to the ground, where it sticks, point first. "THAT'S the shit I'm talking about! FUCK, if this were the BIG TOURNAMENT, that shit would be PLUS THREE MILLION VIEWS for sure!" He laughs a genuine and positive laugh. "Alright! Let's push this shit up to makin' it FOUR!" He slams one fist into the opposite palm -- heedless of the pain of the cut -- and charges up for a moment, rising white fire coming off his body as he gets just a little more ASPECT GAUGE. There's not much gas left in this rocket either way. The most he can do is grab up that broom, and try to close in on a melee barrage. His body is clearly wracked with exhaustion, his movements rather sore, his approach just generally a kind of drained to the point where he can't substantially eat through Maricel's remaining stores of HEALTH, but damned if this doesn't feel like the great mood he needs to try it anyway!
Maricel Thorne	"Marvellously done!" Maricel falls off the wall and back down to the floor as her seared tentacles pull back into the rift on her back, landing hard in a crouch before slowly standing up. She's grinning, too, half from the nostalgic roar of a crowd gone wild and half from Arthur's changing demeanor. There aren't any knives left on her, and the one Arthur's thrown aside is outside the reach of her dangerously-overtaxed psychic abilities. "You're digging deep, Mr. Lowell. Let me respect you by doing the same." As he approaches with his broom held at the ready, she bends her left hand at an unnatural angle to expose a long cut on her inner arm, reaches into the wound with her right hand, and digs out a crude piece of jagged titanium- close enough to a knife for government work. She's obviously crashing from whatever stimulants she took earlier, but even slowed and grandstanding, her surgical fighting style has a delicate elegance to it. The first few swings from Arthur's broom are batted aside with well-timed strikes to the haft; the next forces her to block with her opened left arm, drawing a wince of pain, the one after that cracks her over the head, sending her staggering back. The Mortasheen crowd howls with excitement as electricity visibly arcs around her skull from the concussion. Then her eyes narrow, one blown pupil constricting as she forces herself to focus. The next broom attack, she knocks aside with a spray of sparks. Her left hand grasps for Arthur's wrist, finding his pulse. She hesitates for just a split second- then swings the blunt end of the 'knife' for the center of his chest, just a little low and to the left, striking in the space between heartbeats. Just this once, in the hype of the moment, she allows herself the mad scientist luxury of Calling Her Attacks. "Finishing Technique: Commotio Cordis!"
Arthur Lowell	Crash! Arthur's parried! His broom slams hard into the ground, and both arms are out, locked straight in the melee swing. Perfect to snatch! Maricel's treated to a brief minigame, a rhythm game of sorts, a far more complex matter than it would usually be to find a pulse in someone's wrist after she halts the broom. "Wh--!!" Arthur starts, surprised, but in a way... intrigued? As she locks on to the hidden heartbeat, he grits his teeth, eyes wide, and... With a small jab of the blunt end of the knife, he staggers back, feeling a clench in his chest, confused. His heart tries to beat again... And there goes the last of his HP. "K.O.!!!" A long moment after the little bump, Arthur's suddenly launched back by the force of his own convulsing muscles, letting out a pained "OOOOF!" as the echoing bitcrushed announcer calls the end of it. He lands limply, hard on his back. Presumably the Shrine will shortly be restarting his heart. You know, since Maricel will urgently want to be the one to actually do that herself, which means she's gotta get that done quickly before warping reality gets to it. First thing's first, though. It's her turn to do a victory animation and say a quote, right after the bitcrushed announcer calls out, "PLAYER TWO WINS."
Maricel Thorne	The 'camera', as displayed on the gladiatorial arena's mandatory Big Screen, zooms in on Maricel as she stitches up the long cut on her own left arm, her singed labcoat sleeve rolled up to her shoulder. The needle snicker-snacks back and forth in her right hand too fast for the eye to track. Finally, she pulls the sutures tight with one end of the string in her teeth and the other in her right hand, jerking her head to the side to face the camera and grinning charmingly. One of her meat-tentacles emerges from her back to push the glasses up her nose. "You reap what you sew, Arthur." That obligation concluded, she slams a couple of electro-patches onto Arthur's chest and personally applies a bio-electric zap to them. "Give my creation- aha, rather, welcome back to us, Mr. Lowell. I think you've given those reptiloids the show of their lives. Quite possibly the show of mine, too." She even offers him her hand in good sportsmanship, knowing the potential consequences full well.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur zaps back to life. Somehow, despite briefly dancing with an absence of heartbeat for just a few seconds, he manages to groggily harass her hand with the series of daps, pounds, bumps, and other unnecessary-to-list motions often used in coolkid handshakes precisely nowhere in the world besides specifically where Arthur is at any given time. He's still kind of returning to proper, full awareness after that weird experience, and Maricel can tell through psychic intuition if she's curious that he's doing it entirely /without conscious thought/ at this point. But the end of the motion is to take the hand. "Hhhhhhurgh. Fuck yeah, you know I put on only the biggest and the best shows, dawg." He says, holding onto the hand for a bit while he pulls up, staggering to his feet. "That shit was wild, god damn. What even /was/ that last bit? You got tricks for days, homie." He shakes his head, trying to clear it of psychic impact, rubbing his eyes a little. "Haven't gotten my brain beat around like that since goddamn Ivulst." He says the name like someone might mention a tragic disaster. "Well, shit, looks like you got what you were after. Ain't too small a pond for you to grow in at the start, looks like. Gonna be expanding, then?"
Maricel Thorne	For once, somebody goes a step deeper into the handshake nonsense than Arthur- not only does Maricel gamely follow along with the zombie maneuvers for as far as Lowell goes, she brings him in for the one-armed hug/back-pat after it's all concluded. "Commotio cordis," she repeats, in the blissfully cheerful tone of a microbial biologist who's just been asked their personal opinions on slime molds. "A known defect in the unaugmented mammalian heart! If you... hm. Think of it as hitting a 'perfect' beat to shut the whole rhythm game down, 'homie'." The arena starts to fade away, along with the scorches on her labcoat and the sutures on her arm. She offers him a neon yellow pill without saying what it does; it tastes exactly like medicine is supposed to taste and kicks like a Big Gulp full of espresso. "I'm always looking to expand, Mr. Lowell," she says, moseying towards the exit at the kind of pace that invites him to walk alongside. "Might be a big fish in a small pond, but there's never enough food to sate the goldfish. And the Multiverse has some marvelously bizarre afflictions for me to chew on." She gives him a Coolkid-Approximate wink at the door. "Don't be too careful out there, champ. Doctor's orders."
Arthur Lowell	The explanation fits so perfectly into Arthur's worldview you can practically hear it click as it locks into place. As for the pill, there's a /twinge/ of subconscious uncertainty but overall Arthur seems like he's basically in a good enough mood that he doesn't feel the caution about it. There's a bit of a thrum and his ASPECT GAUGE boosts back up to full. "Well, turns out being big in the small pond don't mean ya can't be big in the big one too, apparently. Jesus. Yeah, plenty of weird sicknesses. But, let's be honest, really fuckin' irrationally high amount of it's goddamn zombie diseases." He works his shoulders a bit, trying to ease the soreness out of them. "Hey," He says, nodding to Maricel. "What else is all this extra blood for? Don't worry, I'm not gonna get that caution any time soon."