🔧🚧🛰️

"...Hmph." She simply and flatly grunts and kneels down to pull the smart disc out of the fugitive's spine. A sickening CRUNCH dribbled with spinal fluid and blood onto the floor, pulling out a device that looked cylinder in shape. The device humming in response to T'achui as the top of it suddenly pops up and reveals it to be a lamp of some kind. Her fingers cradled the edges of the device and allowed for the red light to begin to warm over the blooded smart disc. The blood crusting in response and dropping in flakes making the disc as clean as if it was factory new.

"You are lucky." Her tone in broken, robotic English. "Man. Employed for enslaver." She explains as if that would give context. She kneels down again. "Look away. Squeamish." She automatically assumed the other would not want to see the beheading of this Bounty Hunter. She could not leave the head unattended. Evidence of a hunt complete as if the rest of his body wouldn't be evidence. Pulling out a LARGE hunting knife, the cutting process begins of beheading him. Proceeding to cut above the neck to allow her easily access to cut through bone. The sounds alone were already sickening.

The process of claiming a trophy made Nero wince. But he couldn't look away: On some level it was cathartic seeing someone who wanted to mount his head on the wall like a trophy get exactly that done to them.

"I believe it. This guy was already declaring himself King Cop half the time he chased me. King Creep sounds about right too, with all the surveillance gear he put everywhere and the torture devices he kept on his ship and--"

Nero stopped yammering and started nodded frantically when T'achui said he was lucky. He liked being lucky. Or at the very least he liked acquiring winnings by default. The two sweetest words in the English language and probably many others in variant form.

"Factional dispute. I did my job. Repairing things. Exploration. Diplomacy. Some kingdom or company didn't much like the results, so they wanted revenge. Perhaps to send a message to my superiors."

Despite practically sensing the fact he was in no danger from an honorable yautja, he couldn't help but be a lily-livered cur, fearing reprisal of any form.

"... Uh. Thanks. I uh. I owe you one."

He stood there for a while, looking at the hand offered to him and then at the blinded and downed labsplice. He had half a mind to try to finish it off while it was down but there was also the possibility that this might make it worse. Somehow. He'd never been able to figure these creatures out.

Antares took Nero's hand and let himself be helped out of the pool.

"Thanks..."

One pool down, the rest of the park to go. The next obstacle before them was a play area with a massive sprinkler in the center that rotated in short bursts. It was also spewing some sort of gunk that looked biohazardous. Antares instinctively put a hand over the lower half of his face.

There didn't seem to be any MalAug in sight...for now. But they better get through all that before the lifeguard recovered.

Nero took out his teledex and started using the scanner function to go over the water park. But the path they needed to take would require them to get past the biohazard sprinkler. The pathways around it were partially littered with debris and old structures left crooked from the disrepair that came with no caregivers for the place. Though being a cruise liner, there were good odds the resultant mess would have happened anyway by the end of the ship's journey. Cruises looked nice and fun at the start but they ran out of supplies and enthusiastic energy eventually, only the promise of landing at planetary or orbital ports offering much in the way of relief.

Anyways.

Antares would probably be fine between his mask and regenerative capabilities. Nero on the other hand had to go gut some inner tubes and make a rubbery protective poncho. He took a deep breath before putting a pair of old swim goggles over his eyes to help keep the makeshift hood in place while he frantically tried to get to the other side-- throwing off the improvised PPE and watching it start to disintegrate after taking on too much of the material the sprinkler was spouting off.

Nearby, the Lifeguard MalAug had suffered a similar fate. The rancid suntan lotion had bored its way into the creature's multiple-brains, like a cranial bio-server room. It was dead and the other creatures would probably dine on its flesh once they caught wind of its putrid death-scent. Antares wouldn't have to worry about defenses. Yet.

"Over here. C'mon."

Nero opened a door leading into a side maintenance passage. It was brightly lit with more reinforced walls. They could use this to get across the remainder of the water park section of the stellar cruise liner unharmed.

"We're practically home free!"

"FREE?"

Nero looked like his lungs had been torn out of place and dropped through to his stomach acid. Behind them, an uncomfortably closeby service android: Unlike the Wishbone's, which were smoother, more obviously metallic endoskeletal robotic-units despite also resembling crash dummies, these ones were coated in a latex composite designed to emulate human skin, with semi-molded facial features that gave them an incomplete, uncanny valley look.

"EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE HERE! ALLOW ME TO BE YOUR PERSONAL CASHIER."

"Back up, jack."

Nero kept walking, waving Antares along-- perturbed by the profiteering subroutines on this unit. But the android seemed to stand in place and watch the two of them go. It'd probably watch them sleep if it could. Waiting to calculate a bill for the air they breathed and how many square inches they took up, with multipliers if they tossed or turned overnight.

"I like the way you think," Selina praised, giving her quite a few ideas to work with, "As fun as ex sex sounds, I don't want us to be the talk of the night. Then, all eyes are going to be on us and what fun is that? Let's keep it simple. You're head over heels for me, but, you don't know how to win over someone like me. I'm just too far out of your league, right? Or, so you think."

She enunciated her final point with a boop to his nose, flashing a cheshire-like grin from ear to ear to Nero. Most of their entanglements required coming up with escape plans, testing out new gadgets, and making Nero a mere spectator to the shows she liked to put on. It wasn't often they were conspiring under the public eye. What a joy it was to Selina Kyle, to deceive these elites right under their noses. They thought they had it all until they lost it, and what a sight it was to see them mourn.

"I'll take a tour of the banquet's upper floors now, if you don't mind," Selina offered, thumbing through her hair until pulling out an encrusted bobby pin. She split its ends between her fingers, letting it snap back together to keep her lockpick in tact.

♫

Nero gave a little bow while he watched Selina go to do her thing. Glad to have played some little-to-none part in her plan. Not that he wanted more responsibility: he trusted that in bearing the bulk of the risk on these jobs, Selina could take care of herself far better than if she had some underachieving reprobate bungling her gymnastic grace and practiced mastery over the fine tools of burglary.

Oh crap. How would he find a way to win her over?

Not even just for the sake of a ruse. Nero was mostly just amazed he was still talking to her at this point. Selina could have anyone she fancied and yet she'd come back to him a couple of times now. Now certainly, Nero was willing to participate and he was not above sharing home amenities and provisions for her-- she often needed a place to crash between her handiwork and the Technician had some sort of bare minimum adherence to the more universally benevolent components of INTERPLAN's mission statement.

He'd have to think of something while he marched over to kick up a storm with security.

"Hey, you meatheads heard? One of the guests is bragging about a 400lb squat and how no one here can possibly lift more than that without being augmented."

The security guards looked at each other, offended on each other's behalf (behalves?) and started jogging along to go start a loud argument. Nero waved 'goodbye,' and started walking on the other side of the great room so that Selina could see him work his own magic with misdirection, petty squabbling, and other con artistry.

☄️👾🥊

Independent Fandomless Sci-Fi / Superhero OC RP Blog

Set in a genre crossover kitchen sink comic book setting!

Wielding longform continuity/retcons for (narrative) good!

"Hosted" by a disgraced cosmic-powered alien superhero!

☄️👾🥊

Independent Fandomless Sci-Fi / Superhero OC RP Blog

Set in a genre crossover kitchen sink comic book setting!

Wielding longform continuity/retcons for (narrative) good!

"Hosted" by a disgraced cosmic-powered alien superhero!

A Drag Path... Etched In The Surface As Evidence I Left There On Purpose A Sad Sap, Laying On The Surface....

Loved by Mika

Zapcrap

Moltenfracking

Fragged (Quake/Unreal Tournament DNA)

Gort (invoking the robot from the 1951 classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still")

“You. Exist.”

“You have eyes.”

“You’re certainly a person that I know.”