paradisalost | [thread;] shooting robots on the roof

Who: Aya Brea

aya_evolved and Schuldig

dirtyrottenliar
What: See subject. :D
When: Last night
Where: The war room
Rating: Maybe PG13 for language? I dunno.

The single window in the room was more than ideal for shooting; it actually made it too easy. It was just wide enough for the barrel of a large gun. Schuldig happened to have a small gun, but the window was still perfect. Nothing could get to him. It was funny, actually, watching people gripe and groan in the journal, when he was safe and sound and quite comfortable.

He had pulled an armchair up to the window, and next to that a chess table, which he was using both to play a half-hearted game against himself and to hold his mug of coffee. When he got tired of asking himself which would be better, to let black or white lose, he leveled his gun on the windowsill and shot a few robots. He repeated this for a while, intermittently checking the journal and getting new coffee (he wasn't really drinking it, so it kept getting cold).

When Aya said she'd be up, he debated for a minute whether to set the furniture back and look like he was actually doing something, or leave it the way it was and not make any pretenses.

Having weighed the options, the armchair won. He abandoned the chess game and kept a vigilant eye on the elevator, shooting anything that came near it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Aya hadn't really wanted to help out with the whole robot thing at first. Well, she'd wanted to, but some part of her told her that it was a Very Bad Idea, and people were bound to get hurt. After the incident in New York....

But this was different, right?

They were pathetic (if a bit quick and dodgey) robots, and all she would really have to do would be to shoot them. No powers, no mitochondria--none of that. If she got hurt she could just tough it out like any other person. And besides, there were people out there that could actually use the help.

And no matter how badly she feared something happening, she was still a cop. Protect and serve.

Right.

It took her a while to reach the roof but eventually she peeked warily out, gun at the ready. Schuldig had been right--there wasn't nearly as much activity up here. Still, she kept her gun leveled and advanced slowly. Better safe than sorry.

When he saw her step onto the roof, Schuldig immediately withdrew his gun. It was partly because he figured she could probably watch out for herself, but more than that it was because she was a cop, and he didn't know how she'd react if she saw a gun pointing in her direction from a small fortress.

He cracked open the door and leaned out, glancing in either direction before he spoke: "Hey, you made it." With his gun held in his left hand, he stepped outside and opened the door in invitation. "This place is a fucking fortress. I don't know what it's doing here or whose it is, but it's perfect for this."

The blonde whirled at the sound of a voice, gun whipping around to point briefly at Schuldig before her mind caught up with her reflexes a split-second later. As recognition quickly dawned in her blue eyes she lowered the pistol (though still keeping both hands on it and at the ready, of course), smiling over at the man just a little. "Glad to see you've been safe and sound," she said with a bit of a teasing edge to her voice.

Aya looked around once last time, making sure their position was secured, and then trotted over toward Schuldig and this so-called "fortress."

Just what was a little room doing up here, anyway?

"Thanks," she said as she slipped through the doorway.

Schuldig shut the door behind them and immediately grabbed his mug for a refill on the coffee--whoever outfitted the little room with a coffeemaker was a genius; it just wasn't worth waiting for the ghosts to come all the way from the kitchen.

"Safety is my primary concern," he said smoothly, "and since I'm not the blonde girl in a horror movie, I figured it'd be safe to go up." His right hand hovered indecisively above the assortment of coffee on the counter (it consisted of a can and a bag: one said nothing; the other read "decaf").

"And here I am, at the top of the tower," he finished. "Coffee?"

Not the blonde girl in a horror movie, huh? Aya couldn't help but smirk a little at that. She was the blonde girl, but at least this blonde knew how to take care of herself. Must be all those bleach blondes. Peroxide eats their brains or something.

"Sure, thanks," she replied, taking a moment to look around the little room. It did look awfully comfortable. "Sounds more like a fairy tale anyway," she added, looking back at Schuldig. "The highest room in the tallest tower. Only you aren't much of a damsel, and if this is distress...."

Aya took a seat in a nearby armchair and engaged the safety on her heavily modified handgun. "If this is distress, count me in."

Schuldig made the coffee in contemplative silence, thinking that "if this is distress, count me in" could be the motto of Paradisa in general, despite the strange things that went on.

While it was brewing, he moved over to another armchair and dragged it up to hers, on the other side of the chess table (on which a game was still being played, but only on one half of the board; his journal took up most of the other half).

He took one look at her gun and again had to resist the urge to pry without letting her know. He nodded at the weapon. "That doesn't look standard issue."

Standard issue? Definitely not. It was the handgun that Aya had been carrying during the New York Incident, when she'd fought the Ultimate Being and...well, the rest was kind of fuzzy. She'd modded the gun out the ass and she'd been thanking her lucky stars ever since her arrival that the castle had at least let her keep this one weapon.

"I've put a lot of work into this sucker," she said, holding the firearm up slightly. "It'll do pretty much everything except the dishes."

But for now things looked pretty comfortable in the little room. Robots didn't seem to be an issue at the moment, so Aya sat the handgun carefully down on a nearby table.

Schuldig's gun was also on the table--safety off, despite what he'd said earlier--and he glanced at it, then back to hers. He hadn't done a thing to his; as far as he was concerned, a gun was a gun; if he could shoot with it, it was perfect. Guns were tradeable and disposable, like the umbrellas in the front hall of his apartment back home. One of them was certainly his, but any of his teammates were free to take it, and if for some reason it was lost, or had to be left somewhere, no big deal--he'd get a new one.

"Nice," he decided. "So if you don't have the standard issue gun, can I assume that you didn't do standard issue detective work, or is the gun just a byproduct of working in New York?"

Aya remained quiet for a moment, thinking about how to respond. The whole incident was still sort of muddled in her mind, no matter how hard she tried to recall any of the details. Nothing quite fit together like she knew it should.

"I...used to do normal detective work," she began haltingly. "There was some trouble though, right before I came here. Monsters, I guess you could say." She shrugged. "It used to sound a lot sillier, before coming here I guess. This place really puts things like that into perspective, doesn't it?"

Without waiting for an answer, Aya reached out and prodded her own gun a little with a fingertip. "So I guess it's a little of column A and a little of column B. Just had to adapt the weapons to suit the bad guys."

Though there had been some of that in Tokyo, too, it had only been that one time, and Schuldig had never heard of it happening before that.

He got back up and poured two mugs off coffee, swirling some cream and quite a bit of sugar into his.

"That's interesting," he said. "My world has New York, too, like I said, but I've never heard of monsters there. So I guess we come from the same planet, but not the same planet, if you know what I mean. Cream or sugar?"

"Both please."

Aya nodded thoughtfully, gnawing delicately on the tip of her index finger--a nervous habit. "Sounds like it," she said after a minute, extracting said finger before speaking. "I mean, not that I'd ever heard of monsters in New York either, before the Incident, but I guess unless you're from a time before me...."

Now there was a thought.

"What year are you from, anyway?" the blonde asked, repositioning a bit in her chair to get a better look at him over by the coffeemaker. "That might make a difference."

"Mm, good point," Schuldig nodded and brought the mugs back over, shoving the white king and queen aside to set Aya's mug in front of her.

He took some time to answer--not because he didn't know the year, but to consider her. She didn't particularly look like she was from the future (or whatever, his brain added, hesitant to start accepting answers that sounded like they came out of a science fiction novel), although her gun was impressive.

"I'm from 2000," he said finally. "You?"

[thread;] shooting robots on the roof

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject