TWO YEARS AGO, A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION GOING BY THE NAME TEAM IMUM WRECKED CHAOS ACROSS THE LAND, DAMAGING CITIES AND KILLING THOUSANDS OF CITIZENS. While Imum itself has long since been disbanded, however, the region remains broken: entire towns have been laid to waste and the Association struggles to find homes for those who were lucky enough to survive the attempted genocide. Reconstruction trudges on as usual... but with three factions - the Association, the corporations, and the people - each wishing to take the rebuilding of an entire region down opposite paths, how long will it be before Lyeant's last leg gives out permanently?
03.01
first activity check is currently underway. regardless of your green status, please be sure to check it out and make extra sure your characters make it safe and sound after the eighth of march.
01.28
we're officially re-opened! come check out our event, the pokeathlon forever to enjoy some fresh restart activities. let leap know if there are any skin bugs, and they'll be sorted out accordingly!
Care to hear about our lord and savior Operation: Mindcrime? In all seriousness: Hello, hello! I'm Pharaoh Leap – or just Leap – local head admin and rock opera enthusiast. On the rare chance you catch me in a time when I'm not bawling about characters entirely written into song, you may see me actually doing work around the site, like skinning, making too many characters, and encouraging others to also make too many characters. I only know how to write angst, and in no fewer than six trillion words an app or post, so if you like dying while reading like I like dying while writing, I'm the girl for you. ;o
Howdy guys! The names Astro and I am your resident Brit & Red muse (you'll honestly see me more on him than any of my other characters). I'm a moderator and my main job is to make sure everything is running smoothly so the Admins can focus on other things, you'll often see me within the apps and shops, etc when I'm not on Red. What can I say about myself? Apart from being a Red fanboy I like music and games and yaoi huehue, I honestly never now what to put into these sort of things but ohwell, I'm more of a "ask me and I'll tell" sorta guy. Anyway, from my personally I hope that you enjoy the site and what we produce here but also if you're new, please look around and if you like what you see please consider joining for rad plots that everyone gives! :D
Hey there~ Nano over here! I uh.. Wait, I'm doing this right, right? Bleh. So I'm a moderator over here - fun, fun - who kind of just.. Keeps an eye on everyone. You know, the whole app thing and what not. Uh.. Lets see.. When I'm not doing school work (because I may or may not be trying to be a good student) I'm probably storming up new ideas like events and etc. Or plots. Plots are always good, too. As you can see, I uh.. Have the horrible habit of making way too many characters. I swear, I was tempted with plots, ships and angst. It's like, the holy trinity. Uh.. What else is there about me? Oh, right! Please excuse my obnoxiousness. I'm just really loud in general so don't be surprised if I start screaming as loudly as I can caps. So yeah. Nice meeting you!
tbe: take two! is inspired by, but not associated with nintendo's pokemon franchise. the current skin was created by pharaoh leap using font icons primarily from ion icons and fonts from google fonts. banner art by vav of pixiv. characters, with the exception of canons from the manga, belong to the members who write them, and all posts and templates on site are credited to their respective authors and artists. we claim nothing that is not ours.
Nikki doesn't do flashy arson work, so I hope you don't mind me including there being a second dude. Maybe we can play him as an NPC who shows up later. ;o
In a sense, he should have been grateful. Another so-called "criminal" in the city who favored high-ranking Association members with questionable rises to power and flimsy politics at best meant there was someone here in Eirenhyre functioned under a similar mindset to his own. The news alone was something that should have brought a tear to his eye. It was unreasonable to think that one man alone could change an entire region, but the addition of even just one more name to the cause meant for half the individual work - another, a third! And he would have been shedding that joyous tear, had it not been for one simple fact: this arsonist, whoever they were, was going about it entirely wrong. Their methods spoke all too much about their carelessness for who got caught up in their fray, the bombastic nature of their killing a cry of attention too loud to be well-intentioned. Nikki had set his sights on tonight's target long before the other's fire had been set ablaze, and had it not been for them and their schemes - the likes of which had already made civilians into causalities alongside the monsters they made into targets - his kill would have been a simple in and out affair. Instead, the grounds were littered with faces that shouldn't have been there. What should have been an easy assassination and a quick money maker had turned into a headache, and that was before he took into account that the man slated to die had a potential second assassin.[break][break]
Nothing, however, was worse than the feeling of having to dress up in suit and tie. His client had been generous enough to loan him the black ensemble, fit enough to pass but not enough to hide the nerves strung up high beneath them, and slip him into the party as a supposed guest, but even their influence could not spare him from his inability to function well within a crowd. Worse, still, was that these were the "elite of the elite", judgmental and critical to their core. Abhorrent, in a word. All of the wine at this event couldn't have calmed him enough to have a decent conversation with any of the heirs and aspiring officials gathered here, assuming he'd even allow himself to swallow a drop. If it had done him any good, he may have considered.[break][break]
More than an hour in, and his target had yet to show his face. Or, at least, the hitman had yet to lay eyes on him. The best place to be was the thick of things - it afforded the best vantage point, the most likely place to be able to track the man whenever he finally landed in his field of vision - but the thicket of people was something he could only take for so long, and the need to escape the suffocation of the main room lead him to a balcony overlooking the city (and, further still, the destruction) beyond. The periphery of his vision told him he wasn't alone in escaping the crowd, but his presence had either gone undetected or ignored entirely, and it was as though he was the sort to initiate conversation. Views like this mattered very little to him when it all boiled down to it, spectacles and their so-called beauty lost on him more often than not, but the cool breeze was a welcome change from the stuffy heat of tight-lipped strangers attempting to mingle, and had he not bothered to roam to the edge of the railing, he may not have found an unexpected prize. No wonder he hadn't been able to find the soon-to-be corpse. He'd been outside in the courtyard the whole time. In a more forgiving world, perhaps he would have been alone on this balcony, and his target would have been alone in the courtyard, and a sniper rifle would have been able to hide between his suit jacket and button up. Instead, he was trapped her, a potential witness to his crime to the right, another figure in the shadows down below, and the only weapon on his person one that was concealed well, but ill suited for long-ranged firing. From the looks of things, they were having a conversation down there, one buried by distance as the gentle whisper of the wind. His best bet was keeping an eye out from above and waiting for his chance to strike; at least, that was the best one to come to mind. That, unfortunately, left him with company, at least until his target ditched his own.[break][break]
Said company was surprisingly young, Nikki found when he tossed him a sidelong glance, likely no older than himself. Considering most of the faces he'd met here had been well into their thirties, another such youth was surprising to come by. Regrettably, the similarities he could draw from sight alone ended there, and similar age wasn't bringing enough to mind to spark up conversation. If only he could get by with ignoring the brunet the whole time. Things, unfortunately, didn't usually go that way.[break][break]
"Nice, uh... weather we're having," he began oh-so-conversationally. Shame set in immediately. Quietly, mostly to himself (although with no great effort to keep it from the only ears around who could hear), he hissed, "Arceus, I can't believe I just fucking said that."
[attr="class","frphoepost3"]
[attr="class","frphoelyric3"]
AS I GAZE AROUND THE ROOM, THEIR EYES ARE LIKE KNIVES - COULD DECAPITATE
There were reasons, of course, that he hated going outdoors. He was a man of justifications, after all, one with an excuse for everything, an asterisk behind each action, each word. Never mind the smell of the filth of the city, the too-bright sun hanging low in the sky, the claustrophobia that came with pushing his way through the streets of one of the three last places to live in a region ripped up and raw, all valid reasons to sneer at the thought of leaving the comfort of his home-slash-base and tossing himself to the wolves of the wild. The reason that really mattered above all others were the eyes. Virtually everyone had them, a probability so high that it was guaranteed that at least one person would see him in passing any time he took his steps out into the light, and while there was nothing to say that people were, truly, looking at him, staring him down, peeling his outer layers down and down until all that was left was his bleeding, barren core, it didn't stop him from feeling that way. One face in the crowd to recognize him as the nameless gunman from before Imum's fall would be all it took to have him incarcerated once more. To have him back in that place again. (He didn't think he could make his escape a second time; all of the fortune he'd missed out on in his life prior had come back to give him his freedom the first time.) It didn't matter that Imum had fallen, that their existence and their influence and the proof of his crimes had made it to the public's knowledge: the law, filthy, rotten, had labelled him a traitor to the region he served, and the whole world who knew of who he was and what he had done thought him better off dead.[break][break]
The fear of them knowing once again was often too much for him to brave the trip. Often, his paranoia was unwarranted and his errands were run without trouble. Occasionally, something else would crop up that had him gritting his teeth, but never had the police been brought into the equation. Today, however, something very different gave him an entirely new reason to fear the city beyond his humble (read: crumbling) abode: namely a massive canine barreling his way and the helpless trainer that it dragged behind. "Look out!" had come the panicked cry of the woman in question, but it was a warning issued too late, and before he'd even had time to curse the heinous Doctor one last time, he was -[break][break]
...
[break]
White walls. White sheets. White mind.[break][break]
An asylum escape - a release from all of this - something he should have known was too good to be true. Nikki only had himself to blame, then, for the anguish that flooded through him upon waking up to his old prison after what must have been another idyllic dream. Good things didn't happen to people like him. For all of his trying and suffering, the mental ward was all he had to show for it.[break][break]
Sure enough, when he opened his eyes, the scenery was more or less the same as it always had been. There were differences, of course - the television screen appeared to have moved, perhaps was even a different model, and the tiny view afforded to him through the window was different. Sometime in his rest, as well, they appeared to have removed the steel bars that had sullied what may have been a picturesque scene, although a window that could inevitably used for a suicide would never slip by the personnels' ever watchful eyes. At the start of his time here, he'd considered that route: tearing the bars from the window, ripping it open, thrusting himself through the whole and letting his body splatter on concrete like goo (a kinder outcome than rotting away in here, certainly; the euthanasia he so craved), but he'd never had the strength in his fragile limbs to do it, and it wasn't even as though he'd ever had the choice, cuffed to the base of his bed. The fact that they had apparently moved him in his slumber, however, did not appear to change the one constant he wished to see the least: the face of a certain Sister Mary staring down at him from his bed side, the concern on her face falsified, the stream of accusations and curses on her tongue poised to strike from just behind her teeth. He saw her there when the blur of his eyes smeared the room and its details to a point he could only just barely make them - and her, by extension - out, but her presence was enough to elicit a pained groan from his lips. Go away, he begged silently, frightened of what the nurses would do to him if the words were spoken aloud. Aren't I suffering enough?[break][break]
She didn't go, of course. She wouldn't until the room was filled with his screams, and shortly after staff all jumping over themselves to quiet their unwanted menace to society. It'd be easier if he could ignore her, just turn on his side, and - oh sweet mother of Arceus, why did laying on his arm hurt so terribly. "Mew, fuck!" the hitman yelped and jumped, further than he should have been able to under ball and chain, more energized than the sedatives they held him under with would have ever allowed. And just like that, his surroundings snapped into focus: a hospital room around him, but not the sort of hospital he was used to, and a woman who looked so much like Mary he could cry sitting at his bedside, likely off put by the panic washing over him just moments after his awakening from slumber. In a sense, this should have been preferable. A medical hospital was not the mental hospital - there were be no sneering, no needles, no bars on windows and no straight coats to hold him down. But there were doctors here, cruel, greedy, the sort who could brainwash and betray and kill, kill, kill. Why was he here? His arm? Or was that just a pretense for wrapping him back up into a world of forced crime that he'd tried so hard to remove himself from?[break][break]
There was terror in his eyes, wild, feral as he looked at this nameless woman in the eyes. She was no nurse, that much was obvious - so why was she here? "Y-you - who are you? And why - why are we h-here?"
Sorry to say, Lydian, but Nikki has, like, two backup pistols and a knife on his person alone, not to mention the snipers he's got back home. Breaking one gun ain't gonna stop him for any more than an hour. c':
The faces those on death row made were no mystery to him. After so long in his bloody business, it would have been more of a surprise for him not to know them better than he knew the tracks littering his own arms. Shock almost always came first, courtesy of a lifetime fixated on the mindset that money equaled power and power equaled some untouchable god-like status, one such mindset that shattered just moments before their skull did the same. Some never had the chance to move past it, that initial fear-stained incredulity. Those who did took their pick from disgust (as if they had any right to be disgusted by their killer when they were the worst filth of all) or pleading (truly, the worse option; what an insult it was to have a man offer to pay him more money than his mind could wrap itself around if only to spare a traitor to society his life). There were deviants, of course, whether they be new takes on the old tale or the rare soul who decided to try to fight for his life – each attempt unsuccessful, of course – but the song and rhyme was almost always the same. The beginning and the end were, anyway. There had only been one man in his memory who had ever stared down his wrath with anything but. He could still see it in his mind's eye: that man, postured and poised behind the desk his own hands slammed into, eyes twinkling with mischief (deceit), a smile on his lips even as his most promising member forsake everything they had worked toward. And oh, how he had laughed, melodic, beautiful, but it was different than it had been before, like all of the warmth of the human soul had been sucked from it dry. Had something changed, he still wondered? Or had it always sounded just like that – empty, twisted – and he'd only just then recognized it, it's maker, for what they really were?[break][break]
She smiled at him in that moment, too, almost as though oblivious to the gun pointed in her general direction. There are most certainly differences. The Doctor, all those years ago, had been unshaken, immortal; he knew that Nikki would not kill him, and that nothing in the world could harm a hair on his head; that status that all the rich had worked so hard for, that he, and he alone flaunted so effortlessly. The revolutionist who sat, arm broken, Lucario at the ready, seemed almost resigned to her fate. Go out with a bang, she may have been thinking; go down, but not without a fight. The similarities were enough to make him sick, and had he any doubts of her position as another member of Mindcrime before it and Imum's fall, they would have been gone now – but the contrasts were very much real, and enough to set him off-footed, unprepared. Somehow, he thought to himself, her squealing like a Tepig and begging for her life would have been better to the mirthless smile she flashed him in that wet alleyway.[break][break]
“Yeah, like you're any better. If anything, you're worse than me, Mr. Poster Boy,” she said, and as soon as the words sunk in, a sound not unlike the hissing of a snake or a balloon letting loose all its air in a slow, painful stream snuck out through his teeth. “Always the special little snowflake. Like you've never extinguished a human life. You're just as guilty as I am.”[break][break]
“Don't talk like you an' me are the same!” the hitman spat, leveling her with a look caught somewhere between a dangerous man and a child pitching a fit over having his toy taken away. In truth, he did not know her. His understanding of her entirely, in fact, was limited only to that she had been a co-worker at one time in the past, and his conclusion was that she was as rotten as the lot of them. Nikki was not a smart man, after all, and he knew that, he accepted it. Someone else had to have known that X's movement was corrupt. Someone else must have known that it was hypocrisy defined! Why was he the only one who ever tried to leave? Why was he the only one to say 'no more'? The rest, then, had to be killers. They had to. Self interested, devoid of empathy; he'd kill them all, alongside the rest of the scum infecting their region. “And don't you dare talk like you get the weight of an Arceus damned 'human life'! I'm not a murderer, no matter how you try an' spin it. At least I left when X turned his back on us. If you fuckers had gotten it your way, all of Lyeant would be dead by now!” Almost as if knowing, however, what it was that he was thinking in that moment, the words she spoke to him in the moments that followed painted a very different picture: “I was done with all you shitbags before the operation was shut down. Now you think you're oh-so-special enough for the great and powerful Doctor to send someone to kill you personally? How egotistically big headed of you. You're not the only one on the hit list.”[break][break]
That was – ah, but that meant – was she implying that she, too, had fled the organization before Imum's ultimate fall? It wasn't... impossible. He'd been the first, certainly, to flip the Doctor the metaphorical (and quite literaly, while he'd been at it) bird, but that wasn't to say that he'd been the last. He'd never heard of talk of another former member of Imum, much less their particular sect breaking free and spilling their secrets – but then, he'd been cooped up in white walls, white sheets, white brain, blank, blank, blank for nearly three whole yars of his life, and it wasn't as though the first thing he'd done upon regaining his freedom was sift through years' worth of old news stories. … But that was too convenient (that meant that he'd attacked an innocent person), and he couldn't afford to trust a former member of Mindcrime (he couldn't find it in himself to trust after what his faith in people had earned him before). And then, there was was she said -[break][break]
“Go on. Pull the trigger, I dare you. I just makes you as bad as X.”[break][break]
As bad as X.[break][break]
The words exploded from his lips as liquid fury, an inferno of rage, hate so raw it'd tear him apart if Nikki didn't spit it out of him and into their battleground:“Say that again! Do it, say it, I'll fucking -” … He'd what? Shoot her? Already, his index finger had tensed in its place on the trigger, tighter than before, poised to end but stopped just a second too soon – because she was right. If he shot now, he really wouldn't be any better than him. So quick had he always been to violence, so reliant had he been on the bullet, and all it had done was leave him a place where he couldn't even defend his very basic human decency. I'm not like him, I'm not, I'm not. But if he wasn't, why was he holding a woman he knew absolutely nothing about at gunpoint in a place where no one would be around to give him justice? Why was he moments from snuffing out a life that could have been just as, if not more innocent than his own? (In a flash of horror, he saw not the Doctor on the ground before him, but Mary, and just like that, the worst of the fight went out of hi like air.)[break][break]
“... I want proof,” he said, instead, and the pistol he'd pointed at her forehead found its target shifted to the ground. Terror still rattled in his bones at what his rage had almost let him do, but there was still no guarantee that she was who she said she was, and even if he was willing to spare her life now, that did not mean his trust was so easily earned. Not anymore, anyway. “You're tryin' to tell me you left the Operation, too? Give me one good reason to believe that, and I'll let you live.”
It was like a scene in a movie: the camera, too close, hyper fixated on his head space, wrapped up in his world, until suddenly it wasn't, moved, instead, to bring light to the presence of a person who was absolutely not meant to be there, panning so slowly, too slowly, the visual heralding of a tragedy slated to happen in just a matter of moments. But he'd seen that very movie once too many times. It'd been mediocre the first time – laughable, perhaps, in its attempts to impress – and after he'd seen it time and time again, it'd lost even its charm in mediocrity. If misfortune was so hellbent on stalking him at every turn, he'd simply have to give it a reason to fear him, rather than the other way around. Too long had he sat and played victim for it. Not today. He wouldn't be backed into a corner by it. He would not be a pawn of revenge for her. Nikki knew a revolutionist when he saw one – the ones who had stood by his side and made his mistakes. He also knew what they'd do to him if he didn't do much worse first.[break][break]
They locked eyes from a distance in one minute, and the next, the streets were filled with the sound of screaming, nearly buried beneath a sudden torrent of water.[break][break]
He doesn't know her name, but he knows her face, hazy, a pixelated image corrupted by trauma and needle. Still, the fact that her visage begs a memory at all is proof that she needs to be dealt with immediately, lest his location and identity be compromised. An ideal world would have had them crossing paths in an empty street, but he didn't need Mary's corpse to tell him that the world they lived in was anything but that; instead, he'd simply had to take the metaphorical Tauros by its horns and separate her from the crowd in the only way he could possibly think to on the fly: blast her into an alleyway with a typhoon strong enough to push, but not enough to kill. It wasn't a crime, after all, to misfire a Pokemon attack in a public area (not that he would place any money on anyone look his way long enough to see the very blatantly non-misfire he enacted). “Oh no,” he called flatly, words pushed through grit teeth, the words themselves concerned but the tone of his voice seething with barely-contained rage (never mind the way his mind was running in a panicked frenzy; kill or be killed, murder or be murdered, that was the only way with a person who once bore the cross named Mindcrime). “Someone just got blasted by a Hydro Pump. Wonder where that came from. Doesn't matter. I'll go check on her myself.”[break][break]
The initial shock of the attack was enough to ward away the others long enough for him to cross the distance between his original position and the no doubt soaking space between rotting buildings that his victim must have been recovering in. By the time he stood at its mouth, the crowds may have been recovering. He didn't know, nor did he care, standing in the newly cast shadow that Big blanketed him, a new guard for their just-starting party, a bouncer who would let no peeping Toms by until the corpse had been hidden. This was a private affair, after all, and he wouldn't stand to have anyone getting in his way.[break][break]
“You oughtta be rotting in some Arceus forsaken prison cell right about now, but look at you. Runnin' free as a Pidgey. An' people try to tell me Lyeant isn't totally fucked.”[break][break]
The moment his hand wrapped around the hilt of his gun, the hitman felt undoubtedly more calm, soothed somehow more by the illegal weapon than the Chesnaught standing watching just behind him. In a sense, though, they were both just tools, carved into different shapes, fit for different functions. His Pokemon was loyal, but it would never be the sleek killing weapon that he needed to preform his duty. “So spill it,” Nikki spat, pointing the barrel square at her forehead. “Did X send you to kill me?”
Ishini Mazuka – a foreign name, or at least one that was foreign sounding, something he would inevitably end up butchering a dozen times from a mixture of his own typical stupidity and the brain cells he'd most certainly fried after years of close friendship with the needle and its illegal highs. Assuming, of course, that he ever had need to use it. Truly an unlikely happenstance. Vaguely, he wondered if that was even her name, seeing as people of their ilk and the frequenters of the underbelly seemed so fond of hiding their identities to avoid repercussion, if not general detection. It was a safe guard he didn't indulge any more than refusing to accept his old family name, though. He gave any who asked (shy of the law, of course) what he went by, and while the chances of others doing the same were small, he didn't put enough value in a name to worry too much about them not doing the same in turn. Again: Not as though he was expecting to get much use out of it.[break][break]
“Arceus knows I wish it were that simple,” she said in response to question of why this all came to pass. If he were a happier man, Nikki may have snorted in some mixture of amusement and contempt, mind fixated on the idea that owed funds to criminals were usually anything but a simple matter. Certainly, he'd sooner stoop to theft for making funds than take out a loan with faces like these; why anything would do otherwise usually involved some long, complicated story he didn't care to hear. In comparison to that, then this was - “It's the same old story. Bunch of punks getting pissed at a Gijinka cause she wouldn't let them have some tail.” - different, certainly. She pointed to something just above the top of her head, shadows in the dark of the alley that he'd assumed to be tricks of the light or those silly cat-eared headphones that seemed to be all the rage with the socially stunted youth of the modern era, but now that his attention was on them and them alone, the idea that they were such an accessory was laughable. For one thing, they wouldn't have matched the rest of her attire, much less their grimy surroundings at all. For another, those ears in question were moving. “Fuck, those are real?” he asked, knowing fully well the answer as soon as he posed the question, but taking a half step back in shock. Gijinka weren't unheard of, but this was his first time meeting one face to face. Well, that he knew of, anyway. Now that the obvious had been pointed out to him, he was almost ashamed that he hadn't noticed any sooner.[break][break]
No more ashamed, of course, than he was of the bodies littered across the ground. Having never interacted with a gijinka, he paid very little mind to their struggles or their movements toward rights. To assault one on that basis alone, however, to try to defile or even kill, was proof of how infected their region had become over centuries and centuries. His face paled from shock to disgust. Men like this had ruined Mary's life; he saw her face and grit his teeth as the heel of his boot dug into the hand of the nearest unfortunate victim. (A small penance. If he didn't stick so strongly to his morals, he may have considered doing more.)[break][break]
More than anything, however, the hitman was reminded of why he was here in the first place, and why he very much did not care to be here at all. Ishini's attackers had all been effectively downed, and the immediate threat that he'd begrudgingly forced his way into was no more. If there was an ideal time to bow out, it would be now, and he opened his mouth to say his parting peace: “Your, uh – shoulder.” Curse him and curse his fucking bleeding heart. This woman could turn on him at any moment she wanted to – had no reason to, but a man he had been closer with and trust more had hurt him more for less – and he had the perfect opportunity to flee with his dignity, identity, and, most importantly, life, but now that his eyes had latched onto the blood on her person and his mouth had made note of it, he was as good as trapped. And the worst part was that part of him didn't even mind. (Any who would leave a person to die are worthy of that death themselves, correct? He wouldn't be like them. He wouldn't, he wouldn't.) “It's bleeding pretty bad.”
● has too ideal a vision of love[break] ● refuses to romance as an apology[break] ● probably wants, like, thirty kids
[attr="class","daytmiiprofile"]
nikki's profile
okay, first of all, let it be started for the record that nikki's face claim of akira is very misleading because he's not supposed to be nearly that pretty. akira is a very pretty man. a long story short is that nikki is not available for canon romance. i am, however, one million percent down for au romances, like. please. please do au romances with him, they're so much fun.[break][break]
the girl of nikki's dreams is undoubtedly mary - she was his very first real friend friend, probably his only real friend in general as of right now, she was beautiful, more importantly she was kind, and he fell for her hard. unfortunately, this resulted in her "death" (although, unknown to him, she's still alive, and even went on to mother his his child as a single parent in the time he spent locked up), and as a form of self-punishment for second-handedly killing her, as well as the fact that she still holds his heart in her hands, he hasn't really been able to find love since. traditional love, anyway.[break][break]
while nikki and mary are already plotted to meet back up again and rekindle the relationship they were never allowed to have in the past, currently, nikki's in a purely physical sort-of-relationship with his former boss, DOCTOR X, who he hates, but is also still a little romantically attracted (and very physically attracted) to. as it says at the top: it's very complicated.[break][break]
like most things in life, nikki's idea of romance and the pursuit of happiness through it is very idealized - almost frivolic. when it comes to stuff like marriage and kids and all the mooshy gooshy stuff of a relationship, he's very much the girl, plotting out everything and dreaming of some happily ever after (preferably one where he's also cleaned out the government and "saved the region" or whatever he goes off about). unfortunately, he's one of my many angsty punching bags, so good luck ever getting that, niknak.
Ooooh, I actually like your idea better, having them meet during one of Nikki's hits and kick starting things like that. 8O It would definitely be a more interesting dynamic. My only fear is that I'd more or less like to keep Nikki a mystery from the wide eye of the law, at least for the time being, so that he can get up to his shenanigans without the police knowing his identity/having to stay out of plain sight at all times. If Luke were to catch him in the act and we started things that way, would there be anything that would keep him tight lipped about Nikki's appearance/identity, then, would be my question? I figure most people's immediate reaction would be to report it, haha, but maybe something that was said/done that would make Luke want to take this case personally? I know you mentioned taking it upon himself to try to convert Nikki or bring him in as a form of self atonement - always a cool motivation, might I add - but that also sounded like a thing he'd do after he knew a little more of Nikki's own personal motivations. *strokes chin*[break][break]
Generally, though, yeah, I think this works better in most cases. |D Oddly enough, I think they'd have a better chance at making friends, or at least having some mutual understanding of each other. Nikki's at his best when he's making passionate speeches about the freedom of the good and the weak, not when he's irritable and snappy because someone bapped him on accident on the street, and another person showing even remote empathy for his cause is pretty much all he needs to think they're pretty okay. Unfortunately, he's so set in his ways that Luke'll almost certainly have to settle for the latter between conversion and capture. Admitting he's wrong at this point is the equivalent of admitting that he's as good off dead as all the people he's killed, and that's certainly not something he'll allow himself to do.[break][break]
Cheddar's rushing me to bed, uuuuh, shoot but yeah, I like this idea! We can iron stuff out more here or in DMs. Whichever works for you. <333
So I offered to hit up your plotter with "Ma Boi", because I'm an absolute sucker for face claim plots, I have no sense of self-respect, but I remembered not five minutes later that I'm absolutely trash at coming up with plots. So. I'm sorry about this. *wipes brow nervously*[break][break]
His occupation says he's part of the International Police, but his app says that he was taking a leave of absence in order to visit family in Lyeant. Is it safe to assume that he's since resumed work, but is being stationed out of Lyeant now, or is he still technically on leave? If he has resumed work, I think it would be fun to have a cop-and-robber dynamic. Nikki used to work for a specific sect of Imum that systematically targeted high ranking (and often "corrupt") Association members - although, he didn't realize it was part of Imum or Imum's greater scheme at the time; he was just under the impression that they were killing "bad guys in charge" to "help out the good guys who can't help themselves". He bailed before Imum's ultimate collapse when he realized what was up, but landed in the hands of the law, and later a mental institution almost immediately after where no one believed him when he ranted and raved about an organization bent on murdering the whole region. He's since broken out, but he continues his own personal goal of killing "evil" Association members, partly because he hasn't given up on his goal, partly for some kind of weird self-atonement. It's complicated. |D Either way, it's possible that the IP have started to connect his personal string of murders with those he committed for Imum (so connecting what he's doing now with what they believe to be the WHOLE of Imum) - and since an Imum resurgence is kind of a huge problem, it'd make sense for them to step in to investigate as opposed to leaving it to local police. Well, that, and they haven't caught the guy yet after quite a few serial murders, so. Who knows. Lots of factors. For bonus layers of mayhem, maybe these two actually manage to make friends (somehow) without realizing that the other is in the force and chasing him/actually a vigilante and the one being chased. That is, of course, assuming they actually manage to get along. *sweats*[break][break]
If Luke ISN'T currently working with the International Police... heck, I actually have nothing. Again, assuming they have any capacity for friendship with one another, we can still go the whole friends-without-knowing-they're-on-opposite-sides-of-the-law, just sans that active cop-verus-robber thing going on on top of things. Heck, if they make close enough friends, once the truth comes out, maybe they can try to appeal to the other and "convert" them rather than, ya' know, immediate heart-breaking betrayal. ... Although the heartbreaking betrayal can still come later. Look, I just really like angst.[break][break]
If neither of these ideas works, or if you have something better in mind, I'm definitely all ears! Like I said, I'm not so good at this whole plotting thing - never have been - so these are probably pretty lackluster ideas, anyway. But... What say you~?
Nikki was a man who struggled with a great many things – physical ailments, bred from insomnia and a digestive tract as Distortion World-bent on rebellion as its owner, social impairment, bred from too many sources to be able to begin to points fingers, but more than anything, psychological dilemmas. His moral high ground, the one he boasted so strongly about, was as fanatical as they came, something that seemed bombastic and justice until an onlooker examined any part of it with a thoughtful eye for any longer than a whole five seconds. Murder for freedom on principal was thin ice alone. Never mind every other questionable act he'd ever committed or thought he had fanned the flames of in his twenty-three years of miserable life. To a degree, in fact, he, himself, understood that his “righteous mission” wasn't likely as pure as he would have liked to believe, even if he could not tell a person how, but to judge his own morality and actions with scrutiny would doubtless lead him spiraling back down into oblivion – and that was pit hard fought out of. Surely, he wouldn't have the strength in him to do it again. So he didn't; and he never questioned; and so went the cycle. While his refusal for self judgment anymore than he already had kept him from questioning his own motives and results, however, a lonely life and past filled with events that could have been taken straight out of a tragedy, an opera, all the dramatics without any of the squealing falsettos left him plenty of time to question the motives and results of the people around him. The Association members he laid to waste didn't deserve a second thought, and hardly deserved the first he had to give them long enough to assure himself that he was shooting a bullet through a very notably tainted head, but there was always Mary, the woman who haunted his dreams, and the revolutionists that he knew to varying degrees of familiarity. What had they sought to gain from joining a “revolution” turned out to be money-making scheme? Had some, or perhaps even all of them known? Had he been the odd man out solely because he best played the part of the fool, because he was the only person in this Arceus forsaken world who cared not for the strength that lay in Poke, but the weight of an innocent human being's life? Worse was when he thought, hazily, of the future in which his beloved had not died on that rainy night in her church, blood running scarlet over crimson carpet, alter splattered with her ichor. What would life have been like then? (Anything would have been an improvement. Anything but that horrible hospital with its canvas-blank walls reflected in his own canvas-blank stare.)[break][break]
But that begged another question in itself: What had ultimately put him there in the first place? The death of the sweet Sister Mary? Or the betrayal of the man he had once revered as a god?[break][break]
Nikki hadn't thought much of it – of him – since the breakout that had very well saved his life, but he found the question, and much, much worse flooding back to him in a single moment. Memories, hopes, hallucination, the feeling of a throat beneath his crushing, crushing hands. He could almost feel the flesh beneath his fingers, the offending digits twitching at the sensation. But for once, the morbid fantasy doesn't seem so far away. The victim just so. Doctor X, handsome as ever, a man taller than life and bigger than the world and wealthier than any man has any right to be – walking in opposition, an unstoppable force closing in on you, an immovable object. He's just as beautiful as he remembered him. In that moment, just as in every moment that came before, he wished he was dead.[break][break]
(The hitman had hoped for, dreamed of this very instance, of finding this man in a world outside the ward, of being close enough to touch and taste and break, break, break – but the sight before him was too real, too tangible. In his head, he had ran, jumped, pulled out a gun, a knife, a bomb, ripped flesh apart with his own bare hands, no witnesses, a thousand witnesses, screaming his voice raw, “Liar, liar, liar! I would have done anything for you!” but not that, and that was all that had been asked of him. Corruption could only be defeated entirely by killing the corrupt. It didn't matter what X had meant to him three years ago. It didn't matter if his heart was tearing itself into pieces faster than the image of the man before him was ripped asunder just the same at the thought of it. Nikki murdered evil; X was as evil as they came.[break][break]
(But it's so, so easy to dream. To act – to act is another thing entirely.)[break][break]
“So you're still alive,” came the words – his voice, but not his brain, pushed past his lips like venom ejected from a wound. The distance had been crossed, now, his footfalls falling too a stop. Part of him wondered vaguely if his idol would keep going, pretend he'd never even seen him. The imagine in his mind was too crisp, too real (X, slipping right past him, uncaring as he must have been from the very beginning, for what man of wealth would care for junkie he'd picked up off the street only to throw away to a gutter even worse?), and, ignorant of whether or not the other had stopped or not, his arm shot out to grab a fistfull of collar, to restrain him just long enough to finish in hushed intensity: “Let's fix that.”
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ALL THINGS COME AROUND AGAIN, & THIS TIME I'LL BE READY & WAITING
Post by NICKLAUS STRAUSS on Feb 9, 2018 19:42:04 GMT -6
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[attr="class","hotnotmate"] DECAPITATE
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You say you'd rather decapitate 'im because he's kinda violent? What a fucking hypocrite. Decapitate for you - at least I don't go around preachin' what I don't do.
“Let's take these idiots down a peg, then.”[break][break]
For the better that he hadn't thrown himself into a fight on the side of someone who refused to accept aid. Even after admitting that he wasn't necessarily suited for this type of work – although, even if he hadn't intended for it to, maybe shooting a man straight through the hand helped his case a little bit – she seemed pretty fine with him sticking around and offering a hand (ha) now that he was here. Part of him couldn't help but wonder if she even really needed it, though. It was one thing to see an alley full of semi-conscious bodies and another to see the force that had put them down in the first place in action. She moved like a whirlwind, hit like a Tauros using Strength, downed one in almost an instant. It did, however, force her to lower her guard just enough and for long enough that the second remaining thug took his chance to charge. Like the Distortion World. Nikki took his own at firing again, another bullet whizzing through air and flesh and bone, and in the moment that his nameless partner turned to realize her could-have-been mistake, this fight was all wrapped up in a metaphorical pretty pink bow. If the alleyway had been full of growning, still bodies, one could exaggerate and call it overflowing now. The only two left standing were himself and the major culprit, and while one part of the back of his mind still warned him to be careful should she decide to spontaneously turn on him and put him out of commission like the rest, she seemed to be making no move to do so.[break][break]
“Thanks for helping out,” she said instead of moving in to strike another blow on the only witness left conscious. Paranoia, he tried and tried to tell himself, was rarely worth the anxiety it brought it. As he slipped the gun back into place, one of only a handful he had stashed away in the many inner coats that decorated his trench coat, and mourned the loss of two perfectly fine bullets that could have been sent through the brain of a particularly viscous man of power, she went on to ask: “If you don't mind me asking, what's your name?”[break][break]
In truth, he did mind. Nothing against her in particular, of course, but the threat of getting captured again and forced back into that horrible, horrible ward only became more real the more people knew his name, the more information about himself slipped out into the world. At the same time, though, failing to introduce himself wasn't going to earn him any brownie points with someone who could probably snap his neck if given a good reason. For another reason, one he wouldn't really allow himself to admit, there was something almost charming about his newfound, albeit temporary company. She was violent, or had the potential to be, but she didn't seem unreasonable now that the dust had settled. Unless she pulled a one eighty (as part of him couldn't stop fearing she would, but that was a fear he held when it came to everyone else in the world), he probably wouldn't mind having to stick around. “Nikki. You?” A question asked out of habit. If he had his own concerns sharing his name, it was safe to assume someone who spent any amount of time in the Underbelly had their own. Not, he mused as he bent down, examining one of her fallen enemies and being grateful to at least find a pulse, that he'd probably remember it come morning. What he was really interested about in the moment wasn't her name at all, no. Groups of this size didn't just attack a person for money. (He hadn't even noticed the ears poking out the top of her head rather than the sides.)[break][break]
“So, uh -,” Nikki began awkwardly as he rubbed at the sore spot they'd left on the back of his neck, “you owe these shitheads some money or somethin'? They must've really wanted you gone if this many of 'em attacked you.” Not that numbers mattered much in the end, anyway. Had he had it in him, the hitman may have laughed.
For a few horrific moments, all Nikki could see was black. An all-too-loud ringing had consumed the sounds that should have been flooding in through his ears, and even though he felt his body fall, he couldn't feel what it was that it landed on in his descent. It could have just as easily been broken glass as it could have a a conveniently placed pillow set aside specifically to catch his fall, though knowing their location, he'd sooner place his bets on the former than the latter. In that time, anxiety far worse than the base level that plagued him in every day life struck: Had the woman ran to safety in the safe window he'd afforded her? Not that it ended up being as long as he'd hoped it would be. If she had, though, it made the inevitable pummeling worth it. Assuming he made it out of this alive at all, he'd probably be boasting scars more numerous (but at least not worse) than those that already tangled up his forearms. His only saving grace in this situation was that he'd probably only be semi lucid for the start of their little revenge play, sparing him from at least some of the agony he foresaw in his immediate future.[break][break]
But the semi-unconscious spell lasted a far shorter time than he'd been prepared for it to last, effectively ripping that predicted “saving grace” right out of his hand. Something to curse the universe for, certainly... had it not turned out that he didn't need it at all. In the brief time that he'd been rendered out of commission, the stranger he'd rushed to the aid of appeared to have knocked his personal assailant out cold – there was no getting up for him anytime soon this time – and while two were still left standing, one looked as though all of the wind had been knocked out of him with a single, harsh blow. “Rushed to the aid of” his ass; in hindsight, it should have been obvious from the groaning bodies he'd taken noticed of when he'd first slipped into this alleyway that the female was a far more capable fighter than he was, and his little surprise stunt had probably just gotten in her way. Stupid, stupid. X had always told him to avoid up close confrontations. At least with politicians, they never knew how to fight. If he'd wanted it, and if he'd had his distance, and if he'd had his sniper, these men could have all been dead in an instant – but he didn't want it, and he had neither, and dwelling on the possibilities was a waste of time when their attackers were still poised and ready.[break][break]
“You're tougher than you look, huh?,” the hitman asked his, at least temporary ally, picking himself up from ground that was thankfully not covered in broken glass and rubbing at the sore spot that he'd been hit at before. He almost considered, for a moment, letting her have her glory in full. It wasn't like he'd come here to claim a debt or anything, anyway, and that thought of only getting in the way lingered dangerously in his mind. However, it was a thought short-lived when he saw the wound, fresh, running up the length of her arm. There was still a chance she could take them on by herself, but Arceus be doomed, he wasn't going to risk it and run away now. One of the thugs reached for – something, a weapon if he had to guess, but Nikki's trigger finger was faster, and his target howled in pain at the bullet that whizzed through his hand. “I'm no good in a close-up fight,” he said through grit teeth, fully aware that his vision was back, but his body wasn't back to one hundred percent, “but I'm a damn near perfect shot. If you wanna take 'em head on, I'll cover you.”
He'd hated the Underbelly from the first time he'd stepped foot there. It reminded him too much of his childhood, for one thing, back in the days when the only thing he was concerned about was how he was going to go about getting his next needle through the arm and how far he wanted to stay away from the home he'd left behind. Eirenhyre had nothing that quite lived up to the standards (or stooped to them, he supposed) of this vile place, of course, but it had its fair share of back alleys and crooks, sleezy men who slipped bills to under-dressed girls, knife-wielding thieves who'd gouge your eyes out for enough Poke to buy a meal. There'd been a time when he'd buried himself in such an atmosphere. Killing, or heck, even just threatening another with a weapon was beyond his personal realm of morals back then, but he'd assorted with the worst and hadn't put his life to use for one Arceus doomed thing. Funny; he looked back on his younger self with such disdain, all bloodless hands and heroin highs. Most would think of moving up to murder as a downgrade. In his eyes, his younger incarnation was just as good at the people he scowled at now – not as bad as the Association members, no, or the priests, but definitely a stain on the world he thought worth saving. If there was incriminating evidence to collect from the Underbelly, he'd have done his best to steer clear of here, both to keep his skin keeping contact with the meaty bits underneath and to keep him from seeing the worst of what the common folk had to offer.[break][break]
(But if there were no rich men, and there were no poor men, would places like this even exist? Surely, tearing down the current order to erase the need for theft and dog fights. Surely, no one would have to take their pleasure from another's pain.)[break][break]
In a perfect world, Nikki may have had the fortune of walking in, getting what he'd come into this awful place for, and walked right back out without so much as a hitch. Even if he shuddered at the thought of participating in anything that was offered here, he certainly looked like a man who could, even without the illegal firearms, something even denizens of this unholy place tended to stay away from. People only picked on those they saw as an easy target. As if he hadn't had a reason to hate the place already, though, it decided to give him another: a scuffle out of the corner of his eye, fists colliding with flesh and cries of pain ringing out loud and clear for all to hear. Just keep walking, just keep walking, he told himself, trying to force his eyes to keep away from the scene. Things like this happened all the time; there was simply no helping it. Getting involved would only earn him enemies that he most certainly didn't need. … And yet walking away seemed to be impossible. Curse his curiosity; just that Skitty in that stupid saying, it'd be the death of him. Worse, still, some part of him nearly sobbed in relief when he did turn, for the sight it afforded him showed something the rest of him hadn't been expecting to see: not a fight between two people, or two gangs at all, but multiple men going after a girl even shorter than the smallest of them. He shouldn't have gotten involved, he shouldn't have. Seeing one person up against many, though? Yeah. Like the Distortion World he'd forgive himself for walking away from that. Miraculously, a few of the attackers were already down by the time the hitman made his decision, slipping into the alleyway under the coat of darkness the shadows afforded him and keeping just out of sight from the attackers who very much weren't down. Three on one with the latter backed into a corner. It was about time he changed that, wasn't it?[break][break]
A swing, full force and with the aid of a blunt object he'd picked up off the ground. His arm was soaring through the air only for a matter of seconds before a thunk heralded the fall of one of the three remaining men, and before the others could so much as react, the barrel of his gun was being aimed at the others. As expected, neither one dared to move much at all at in the face of that. A single step and he'd blow their brains out (or, at least, so he'd like them to think; what sort of psychotic gave a person the death sentence for picking a fight in any alleyway? Not him, that was for certain). “What are you waiting for?” Nikki barked when woman to his left didn't immediately make a move to bolt. So impatient. “Run, lady.”[break][break]
Perfect. With any luck, the darkness of their surroundings would make his visage hard to make out if anyone here decided to keep a grudge, and it had only taken a matter of moments and a bit of effort to secure the “victim” a way out of this mess. Or, at least, it should have been perfect. As it turned out, at least one of the strangers he'd shrugged off as unconscious was not nearly so out of it, and in his own moment of triumphant oblivion, that very stranger moved to make his own attack. A flash of movement in the periphery of his vision – “Fuck!” – and the world around him shut down in an instant.
Lydiaaaaaaaaaan, I cannot promise the first thing he does to you this time around isn't to point the barrel of a gun at your head again, RIP. Probably in a more secluded place this time, though. No one around to wipe memories and all that, and guns are extra illegal here. :'D[break][break]
While we don't get to have the mutual misunderstanding of "Oh, shoot, you're a Mindcrime person come to attack me because I deserted!" going on here, it's definitely at least one-sided, considering Lydian was still a member of Imum when Nikki bailed to mack on his hot nun girlfriend. He could just as easily recognize her as an old team member - like he did back on RC2 - or, if you'd rather he didn't immediately jump into "I gotta attack first before she attacks me" mode, it's equally plausible that he just... forgot her, and they can start from the ground up. Less angst, but definitely the safer approach. |D Can't be expected to remember every teammate, even if your face would be hard to forget as the face of the group and the traitor of Imum.[break][break]
Lydian's pretty against killing... at least, when it comes to her behing behind the blade or barrel. I feel like the direction of where their relationship would go - friends or enemies - would rely pretty heavily on whether or not she'd approve of Nikki continuing the cause on his own. He's taken a lot of steps to make sure he doesn't kill anyone who "doesn't deserve to die, anyway", and he definitely doesn't take orders from anyone else, but... I mean, most people would still look at that as murder and shake their heads disappointingly, RIP. X'D He'd probably tell her that he's still up to his old ways right off the bat while very vocally denouncing his affiliation to the Doctor, so she'd have to make up her mind on whether or not he's a chill person to hang around pretty quick. Except Quoz and I may be doing a hate ship between he and DX later, so maybe it's a bit too early to take his word on complete denouncing. Whoopsies. ;3[break][break]
Anywho, I'm down for starting a thread with these guys in a similar vein to how they met on RC2. What's your call?