The only submission that was received was Crank's. Sebastian said that he will forfeit the tournament and thus shall no longer be participating. Thus the only submission required is Twitch's.
Hollywood:
Spoiler (Click to Show)
Most of my body has been bleeding for the past hour, and as much as I wanted to just sprint home to my brother, I figured I needed something to defend myself incase I ran into another prisoner or anything else along the way. Planning ahead, I had set up a spare set of gear in a friend’s apartment complex, but apparently my priorities are about as straight as Neil Patrick Harris, and I don’t mean the characters he plays.
Instead of having a full set of clothes and gear, I just had the weapons. Which left me with absolutely nothing fucking useful. No phone. No id. No clothes. No money. Weapons? Ding ding ding! Fuck you, me! Worst part was the friend whose apartment I set it up in, Jack, was not only not home for my emergency ‘Shit, I messed up’ purpose, but also lived in the worst neighborhood of all my options. And that was entirely intentional at the time, because I would’ve rather people thought I was out buying drugs than Hollywood getting weapons.
Here’s the thing if you don’t already see it though, that’s a frickin’ impossible situation to explain, especially after a fire breaks out on the first floor. I didn’t know why, I didn’t care, and I just ran. Not wanting to charge through flames, I chose to take the literal high road, navigating through the chaos of the residents who were stampeding throughout the staircase. I felt like Luke Skywalker flying through the trenches, weaving by the occasion punch or ducking a haymaker as my feet sped on without fail. The door to the roof was within reach, and my heart was beating to the tempo of my adrenaline, rapidly crescendoing as the snares drove their solo home towards an epic finale.
My shoulder pounded that damn thing open and whirling into an instant one-eighty, I slammed it shut behind me locking it on the spot. Relieved laughter entered the drumline’s melody like a triumphant trumpet, but the cymbals crashed on it all too soon.
“Sabine, we need to finish this later.”
Sabine? I scavenged my mind for a distant memory and found the image of one of the beautiful women I had met at the ball, but there had been something special about that one. Maybe a chunk of it was that unlike Haku, she wasn’t two and a half millennia older than me, but I distinctly remembered the way her hair and headwrap framed her her freckled face, and the elegant dress she wore, flowing from white to orange to brown like water. Even the way her piercings and piercing deep brown eyes shimmered in the light was stunning, and she had some pretty badass tats on top of all that. I was going to ask her to dance, but somehow never got around to it. Hell, I was even considering trying to meet her as myself to see if there was anything there. Running into her would’ve been great at literally any other time, except for today.
The speaker’s voice registered as familiar too, from the same place even. Sebastion? Yeah that wa- Wait no. Sebastian. There we go! Completely forgot what the hell he looked like though.
“Well you certainly picked an ‘interesting’ place to run to.” Pissed as she sounded, my brain refused to let the sweet melody that I remembered in her voice go. Hopefully she didn’t remember me as well.
Not being one to take the odds however, I lowered mine by a few notes. “Look, I’d sound like a liar if I even tried to explain what I was doing here,” Reaching my hands up I slowly began turning around, “But if you give me a chance, I can call someone who can clear my name.”
I had a gut feeling the two were exchanging a glance, but when I was fully turned around, my gaze locked on Sabine alone, seemingly emphasized by the smoke pillaring from the windows behind them. Ever crush on someone to the point that thoughts of them would flutter into your mind with ever distraction, but you try to block it out on account of how impossible the situation would be? To the point that you can’t even lie to yourself and say you don’t really have a thing for them? Well, all that, uh, all that fucking died when I saw her without skin. Or human skin? Hell, I don’t even know, but it looked like flesh was peeled revealing patches of deep grayish almost black scales. Like an Inception sub-plot though, crimson spikes lied underneath those and she even had a pair of horns sprouting out of her head. It isn’t even the worst part though. Her red parts, well I, uh, I found that to be pretty... for lack of a better word: Sexy. Apparently I’m into some shit.
Which sucks.
“Call who?”
Snapping my head back into reality, I was suddenly reminded that Sebastian was also there. Pulling my eyes from Sabine, who had been glaring in response to my staring, I turned to face him. His dirty blonde hair was a disaster and it was hard to take him seriously as he struggled to get untangled from his parachute. Wasn’t there a plane crash earlier today?
“Does it matter? It’ll barely take a minute.” Reaching my hands up about shoulder level, I slowly made my way towards the duo, both by the ledge of the roof with the guy standing behind the girl. If I could get Leo on the line without having him drop my actual name, I could probably avoid this whole thing and establish the two as allies over acquaintances. Besides, who’s about to punch a guy looking after a ten year old? If I remembered right, Sebastian was working on getting with some Sonia chick, so that wouldn’t go over too well over dinner, and Sabine seemed safe just on account of being a woman. Well, if she still even classified as one considering she seemed to have demon pa- I cringed as my mind took a sudden jump. Assuming I don’t burst into flames upon entry, I definitely have to go to church next week.
Blue eyes met brown as the ActaSanctorum members traded a glance.
“One minute.” Dipping into her pocket, Sabine dragged out her slick piece of metal, sliding her pointer finger across it’s surface as she unlocked the device, “And one try. Understood?”
“That’s all I need.”
Exchanging the device for a whip, I discovered just how badly I had to go to Confession before her technology went airborne. I caught it effortlessly, immediately finding the call option and began to punch in my ten familiar digits.
“Put it on speaker.”
That kinda went without saying in my mind, but when I dialed the last number a sudden chill froze me to my core, skeletally paling me behind my mask when a robotic voice beat out any ringing.
“We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.”
I paid my phone bill last week. Both Sabine and Sebastian crossed their arms tighter, and after an inhale, I tried my roommate’s number.
“We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.”
Okay, he called me yesterday, there was just no way. Aug maybe?
“We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.”
I had texted him an hour ago and it went though, but now everyone in my apartment had suddenly gone dark the day of a prison break. Trying to restrain panicked shaking, my brain frantically spun out like a car as it desperately scoured for a way home, suddenly crashing into the rails as Sabine took a step forward. Her phone shot at her like a bullet and in a mad dash to Sebastian, I stepped on a shoe flinging it at him just as quickly. The girl, distracted by the threat of losing every number she had yet to memorize desperately fumbled with it while the man reflexively drew up his arms to shield his face, and with the few seconds it gave me, my sprint closed the distance.
Adrenaline spreading quick as blood in the water, my shoulder impacted his gut, lifting his light frame with me into the air as we neared the edge of the building, barely two feet away after a six foot drop to the next roof, through a growing cloud of smoke. Desperate men do desperate things, not even thinking my feet shoved off our brick and we flew, wind rushing against our bodies as we spiraled downward before sharing the blow with my left and his right shoulders. Our agonized bellowed clashed like a missed key change, but his foot shoved me rolling more towards the center of the new location.
Managing to end on my knees, I was able to shove myself upright before Sebastian was able to close the distance, recently gashed palm leaving a print where I pushed. With the fate of my brother a sudden mystery, I had to get home. I couldn’t let them stop me, however injured I had been walking into this. Nothing mattered but Leo, not even potential friends, and especially not ones risked bringing him even more danger with their own issues. Besides, my story for the day sounded like the product of snorting enough crack to make Scarface jealous.
I wasn’t taking that chance, and it was about time I put my acting to use.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” Brushing himself off, Sebastian’s heavy frown deepened before signaling to Sabine that he was alright, “I fell out of the sky and it was the tallest building to land on. How’d you wind up in a burning building with…” His eyes narrowed as he indicated my weapons, slipped into my belt loops. “Those.”
“You know exactly what I’m doing with them,” Damnation obvious in my harsh tone, I stepped forward, dropping it just low enough that it sounded like a whisper yet loud enough for Sabine to still hear, “I’m following Sonia’s direct order to make the wRHG clans ‘disappear’, starting at the bottom of the alphabet to give yours time to run,” Moving within inches of him, I finished in a growl, “But ActaSanctorum doesn’t even know, do they?”
I’ve never been punched so suddenly, fist smashing into my eye like a hammer as I stumbled back, awkwardly ripping my blowguns from my pants and keeping him at bay with a blind swing. His mouth opened to shout, but a thud resounded as Sabine joined us, whip in one hand and knife in the other as she completed some kind of a triangle.
“What’s he talking about?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m dead serious,” Matching his frustrated tone the woman stepped between us, “You were about to interrogate me over planning for a holiday, and then some criminal suddenly knows you by name?” Her hands found her hips as she faced him and I shamelessly checked her out as soon as she had her back to me. I really should’ve just started saying my Hail Marys there.
“You had fresh injuries and gunpowder when a building started to burn!” Snap, really? Damn, I could’ve used that. “I needed to make sure that it wasn’t you!”
“It wasn’t! Now how exactly do you two know each other?”
“We don’t! I’ve never even seen him before, and I don’t take kindly to the accusation!”
“Like you thought I would?” Their voices were steadily rising as Sabine slowly turned to face me, “How about you? How do you know Sebastian?”
Taking a calming inhale, I gazed deep into her eyes as my brain drew from every little thing that I had gathered about the man. If he ever got with Sonia was a mystery, but at the ball they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, but she seemed to be the more dominant of the two. Alright Leo, this is for you.
“I met him two years ago,” My words came out with genuine fluctuation in my tone, eyes steady with relaxed body language as they glided from one to the next, “When Sonia recruited us both to help her make the darkness of the world disappear. Your entire organization is Midnight black, so I have no regrets how I got these.” Slowly I lifted both of my blowguns, and the girl’s eyes widened with the realization.
“You killed Hollywood.”
A nod confirmed her fears. Suck it Tom Cruise, I can do this too, “Carolyn is hunting Observer Protocol and Sydney and her squad were waiting to sack ActaSanctorum. They’re who I was trying to call, but she paves her own path so it’s not surprising she dropped off the grid.”
She was visibly shaking with rage by the time I was done and her fists clenched in a furious pop when I ended with a grim grin. A slew of emotions rushed over Sebastian behind her however, conflicted between trying to sift through my garbage to track any truth, or defend what he knew wasn’t. He obviously knew Sonia and himself weren’t involved with any of what I mentioned, but he couldn’t detect whether or not the threats were just as fabricated or a wretched reality.
Shaking his head desperately as he decided to speak, loathing for me burned aggression in his tone, even if I wasn’t who he was talking to. “He’s lying Sabine! S-”
She whirled too suddenly for him to stand still and even though the knife she whipped his direction was intentionally off, it all looks the same after you’ve moved. On one hand, this looked great from my position, but on the other, I think this made me an official bad guy. Either way, this was how it needed to be until I found an opening to escape into some shadow. Dashing as I thrust my weapon forward, the woman heard my foot strike the ground, snapping her whip back with a vicious crack, slicing my skin, its tip carving a foot long line. Orange turned crimson beyond the diagonal gash and as stinging anguish tore into my brain my voice blew out on me, cutting to a rasp as I tried catching my breath. Her whip rose once more as my body slid across the ground, but my hollow pole flung out at the woman, smashing her skin and costing her balance. Stumbling back the rush of her leader caught her attention, but his palm seized her wrist before she could defend herself.
Similarly, he couldn’t defend himself before I ran my mouth.
“Thanks, I owe ya one Gladstone!”
All the air in his body burst out as her knee met his midsection as I turned to bolt, and as he collapsed to a knee, Sabine sprinted after me. Anything to keep them from talking, and I