[open] May catch-all

[unmakeme]

WHO: Natasha Romanoff
WHAT: Wandering around the food bazaar, patrolling, hanging out on the roof, potentially getting screwed over by fireflies during the first three weeks or so. You know, the usual.
WHEN: May
WHERE: lots of options, take your pick
WARNINGS: none yet, will update as needed

NOTES: I'm only going to be tagging in prose, but I don't care if you want to tag in actionspam if that's what you're most comfortable with. I have no problem with our styles not matching. I will match tense, though, so feel free to pick either past or present.


i. patrolling (with possible flying monsters)
Weird looking avian dinosaurs that clear the perimeter wall no problem and view the average citizen as a tasty meal? Sure. Why not? Natasha's just decided that she's not going to let it change her routine. She still takes as many shifts as she's allowed to, still picks up extra work. If there's trouble, and she's close enough to respond to it, she will. It doesn't matter if she's technically working or not, in uniform or plain clothes, if she's the first one on the scene, she'll handle it. Backup is a thing she rarely calls for, but she's still not so far gone to refuse to ask for help when she knows she needs it. Still doesn't come up that often.

ii. housing (mostly on the roof)
The attacks by random feathered dinosaur throwbacks are probably enough to keep most people indoors at night, but they don't stop Natasha. The weather is nice, and she feels less boxed in when she can see the stars, even if they're the wrong ones. Her supply of marshmallows seems like it's never going to actually run down, and she can't waste them. Part of her wishes she could, because she's starting to get sick of them, but she can't. She's lowed through half a history books, and while she feels better informed, she also feels increasingly depressed. So learning about the world she's stuck in is clearly not the key. She's changed her tactics, picking up books from other worlds, trying to find things that are familiar, trying to find things that excite her and make her feel like she's getting something done here, even if it's just gathering information she won't ever be able to use.

It takes her mind off of things. If it happens to give her yet one more excuse to withdraw from people, to keep herself safely at a distance, all the better. The books and the stars, it's good enough.

iii. homesick food festival
When she finally wanders over, it's out of curiosity more than anything else. She's not expecting to find anything that will resonate with her. She's not even sure what might call up that reaction in her. There are things she likes, sure, but nothing that sends her over the moon. Food as fuel was a part of her life for too long for it to hold much sway over her now. She does find a few things she likes, pelmeni and black and white cookies and those adorable little pinwheel pastries she found in Prague and never learned the name of. It's surprising, but not enough to do more than make her hungry.

She's still interested in the things she doesn't recognize, the things that have come through from other worlds, and more than once she finds herself sucked in by the stories told by those who do recognize the dishes. It's an odd sort of vicarious comfort, living through the memories of others.

! wildcard
If you want to write your own, go for it. If you want to work something out and have me write the starter for you, hit me up and we'll work something out.

fireflies: As with her previous post, the bulk of this month still held the danger of a firefly bites. If you want to pick her colour, feel free to do so. Otherwise, if we don't plan it, I'll just RNG it. Firefly info on the APril TDM.

Comments

Some combo of i and wildcard:

[blaze_it]

Genos was new to this place, but he was not without his skills. He had been appointed to his position in the Police Department with relative speed and had summarily committed to his new purpose. He believed in Justice and Order on a fundamental level; while the Police were not his first choice when it came to such things, this place seemed to lack an equivalent to the Hero Association, so he was left with no other options.

Genos was walking the streets, getting a proper map of Riverview (such a strange name for a city, but alright), when he came upon a scene that was truly extraordinary (at least for this location).

He turned a corner and stumbled across a woman, clad in jeans and a leather jacket, assaulting a portly man carrying a large duffle-bag. He stared, for a moment, as she swung a right hook and then kicked the man in the chest before he moved to action.

"Halt!" he shouted and charged at her, his fists raised, but his incinerators powered down.

(OOC: Hey so I assumed some stuff, I hope some mild godmoddery is okay? If it's not, please let me know, I will change this!)

[unmakeme]

She'd given him a chance to stop and surrender himself to law enforcement. Well, she'd told him to stop without identifying herself. That would be his word against hers, though, and it didn't concern her much. What did concern her was the bag full of cash and electronics, the fact that it wasn't his (well, maybe the bag was, but the contents definitely were not) and that she was the only one around to handle it.

Until the boy band robot turned up. Which, all right, weird, but not something she needed to deal with right now. "Relax," she called back over her shoulder with a dismissive shake of her head. "I've got this." This was one of those rare times when she truly genuinely did not need backup. Also, she didn't really want to socialize. She just wanted to get this guy incapacitated, tag him for pick-up, and go back to her apartment to make some dinner.

The man on the floor, winded but not yet fully accepting his fate, stood up and tried to run. Natasha's attention instantly focused back on him entirely, and she quickly closed the distance, hooking her ankle around his foot to bring him crashing to the floor with her weight at his back to make sure he really felt it, and the knuckle contact points of one of her bites pressed at his spine just because she felt like being an ass. It wasn't at full power, definitely wouldn't leave any lasting damage. Everything was going to taste like pennies for days, though. "Do you really think you're going to get away from me?" she asked him, equal parts annoyed that he'd tried and mildly impressed by his insane levels of optimism.

[[OOC: No, that is absolutely perfect, and I love it. Wildcard is an option for a reason. Plain clothes vigilante-style justice for the win. And I'm totally going to build on a misunderstanding to make things more awkward, because of course I am.]]

[blaze_it]

The woman continued assaulting the portly man and Genos was vaguely horrified. She dropped him and punched him in the spine, paralyzing him against the ground. Genos moved as she taunted him, his jets kicking to life and propelling him at a speed humans could rarely hope to reach.

"Cease your attack!" Genos instructed as he charged her, crossing the distance in an instant. He swung a leg out, propelled by his jets, and swept across her own, dropping her to the ground and away from the older man she was attacking.

"I will not harm you if you surrender!" Genos added as he dropped the redhead, sparing the man she was attacking from her full ire. She fell with a pronounced whump and Genos drew himself up, standing as a hero should, above her fallen body. The man on the floor, dually paralyzed, did not reinforce his statement with any comment. He was largely silent.

[unmakeme]

She heard him approach, the kid was not exactly quiet, but she honestly wasn't expecting him to go after her. The end of a very long day, getting more complicated by the moment, and she really just wanted to put her damn feet up and take a break. Which was obviously not happening, as her moment of surprise resulted in a fully successful leg sweep landing her flat on her back. She stayed there for a moment, expecting another hit, ready to take whatever force he'd try to drive down into her prone form and turn it against him. It didn't come, though.

Surrender? He was talking to her. "Are you fucking kidding me?" she asked, brow furrowed in confusion with a not insubstantial helping of annoyance. You know what? No. Not tonight. She wasn't dealing with this tonight. She arched her back and then pitched her upper body forward and off the ground, kicking out at his shin as she came up both for the boost and also just to be an ass. Her boot connected with metal, more solid than she'd been expecting based on the silhouette he cut. Any suit that streamlined had to be incredibly thin. Well, high tech suit or no, she was on her guard now, and another hit wouldn't be so easy to land. He had a weak spot. Everything did. She'd find it.

[blaze_it]

The attack to his shin did little, but clearly she did not predict his composition. She swung herself up, flipping to standing, but she as barely up before he swung his fist out and lashed a punch toward her clavicle. The strike would have put her down, if it had connected, but she ducked back and evaded it by bare millimeters.

"I am not joking; I do not joke," Genos assured her in monotone as he jabbed out again and clipped her shoulder, preventing a strike to his chest that might've shattered her hand. Clearly, she did not expect his metal body and he had no desire to hurt her unduly; she was merely a criminal, not a villain.

"Cease your resistance at once," Genos instructed again and dipped back to evade a kick. Her palm strike landed on his clavicle but did little to unbalance him. Such was the advantage of being made of metal and carbon fiber, this was why he was made into a cyborg.

[unmakeme]

Any other day, she probably would have loved this. He was fast, hard to take down, and she was willing to bet he hit like a hammer. Tonight, though, she was just tired. "And let you hit me? No." His suit was really fucking impressive, but his joints weren't nearly bulky enough to be properly armoured. So that was where she struck out at next, her heel to his knee, at enough of an angle to hopefully jam something. His face similarly unprotected, it seemed the best place to try and land a punch. He was fast, but so was she, and she knew she didn't have to get lucky more than once. Her Bites packed more than enough charge to take someone down with one hit, provided it was a good hit in the right place.

[blaze_it]

Genos had not expected her to throw her full weight against his knee and try to twist it. The joint was more flexible than a human joint, if only to facilitate his increases in speed, and he bent with her blow to protect the machinery. It was probably unnecessary but Genos was trying to be more cautious in his fights--too often he underestimated opponents and lost one or more limbs. This criminal was both fast and efficient and thus far he was uncertain how strong she was. If her strength was not limited to the normal human spectrum, he would be risking his mobility by not reacting to her blow. If it was, well, he simply lowered his head to easy striking range.

And strike out she did.

Without preamble, she threw a fist forward at his face. It was a well aimed punch, designed to break his nose and perhaps cripple an eye, but Genos was faster than she was. Well before she struck him, his hand snapped up and caught her around the wrist. It took more force than he expected to halt her blow dead, but given that she didn't snap his hand off, he had to assume that she was of normal human strength...or some facsimile thereof. His grip around her wrist, unfortunately, was just a tad too tight. When he pulled her hand away from the path to his face, and bent her straining arm, he heard a metallic crunch under his fingers.

[unmakeme]

The casing on her Bites was tough, designed to survive a lot of punishment, but Genos was incredibly strong, and she was currently working on improvements that left them a bit structurally unsound. It was part of the give and take of her design process, especially with her funds and resources limited by this new world with its new rules. The spikes of power, though, the overloaded circuitry, that was going to be a problem for Genos. The cracked casing exposed the much more delicate guts of her weapons, and her instinct, reflexive and desperate and strong, was to protect it.

Even quicker than the last punch, because this one involved no calculation or contingency plan to protect herself, she pulled herself in close to Genos and then lashed out with her free hand, knuckle contact points aimed to connect along his cervical spine, charge at full. She still didn't want to kill him, but she needed him incapacitated now. Any possible short term damage to his motor functions, memory, speech, that was a risk she was now more than willing to take. Connecting would close the circuit, making Genos a part of it, forcing all that electricity to surge through him. Through Natasha, as well, and it would hurt, but her boots had rubber soles, the lining and wiring insulates her from part of the shock, and she was not an actual robot. Running electricity through a human being and running electricity through a complex and delicate piece of machinery was going to produce two very different results.

[[OOC: If you're not cool with any of this, we can run it back two tags and he can either grab not quite hard enough to crack the casing, or a little higher up on her arm? Her Bites have been dangerously overloaded for a while now, and exposing himself to that is probably about on par with just grabbing a live wire. Could be fun, but if you'd rather not I am also fine with that.]]

[blaze_it]

[OOC: Lol, nope, this is perfect! I hope this tag works, let me know if I take it a step farther than you'd like.]

Genos seized as her hand connected with his neck. He hadn't thought to check for electrical weapons, had assumed her bracelets were decorative rather than weaponized, and he paid for his error dearly. Her fist struck out across his spine, one of the weakest points on his body, and the contact was enough to draw the electricity straight through his actual, human nervous system.

The voltage wasn't enough to do more than superficial damage to his mechanical parts (though something in his chest was smoking and stank of burnt wire), but it was certainly enough to damage his human parts. Fortunately, while his body was predominantly a weapon, it had been designed with quite a number of fail-safes to protect his remaining organic pieces. In normal combat, Genos would have overridden these fail-safes without hesitation but, given the abrupt nature of this shock, he had no time to do so.

Without his consent Genos's body rapidly shut down and cut power flowing through his limbs. His body went completely limp save for the parts of him directly involved in the electrical circuit. His arm remained fixed and locked in position and his neck remained rigid as he dropped to the ground and took the redhead with him. His collision with the concrete sounded like a sack of sledgehammers being dropped from a second story window. It would take him a moment to reboot safely and, until he did, the black of his eyes displayed a series of rapid-fire startup sequence codes.

[unmakeme]

Well fuck. Natasha tugged sharply against the grip on her wrist, the slow tip, but she couldn't stop it. The most she could do was turn him and make sure that she was on top when they fell. Which was a very small consolation. It was still incredibly jarring. "Let go," she demanded, before she got a good look at his eyes. Was that-- Were they? Oh for crying out loud.

Natasha attempted to pry his fingers off, but there was no loosening his grip. She'd fried some part of his suit, which was fine. She would just-- she'd disconnect it, slide his arm out, they'd get it off together. Or she'd get it off herself and then give it back to him. Whatever. The important part was to find where she could detach something. The wrist was a no-go, clearly not where anything came together in an obvious way that she could see. She began inspecting the elbow.

When he regained consciousness, she'd have to see what damage she'd done. He was still breathing, so there would be no oxygen deprivation, at least. Motor functions might be down - perhaps that was the reason he couldn't let go. She'd test his word association to make sure the language center of his brain hadn't been affected.

After she figured out how to get his damn arm-piece off. Those bolts at the shoulder looked promising. She stretched and twisted herself around to be able to reach them with her left hand, the multi-tool from her pocket out, open, and working on the first bolt with neat efficiency.

[blaze_it]

Genos booted back up with all the grace and ease of a piece of military hardware that was unaccustomed to being shut off. The whole of him jerked slightly as he came back online and Genos blinked his eyes as his connection to the world was re-established. It would take longer for his limbs to reactivate and re-calibrate, the process could require up to an hour from a cold start, but he wasn't concer--wait. He'd been fighting someone hadn't he?

Genos craned his neck (the largest motion he was capable of) and felt the actual, physical pain involved in the action. He'd been knocked offline by that criminal--the criminal who was currently detaching his arm!

What Genos intended to do upon realizing what she was up to was jerk his arm away and shout something to the effect of "remove your tools from me". What actually happened was somewhat less dramatic and sensible.

"Apple grey bluejeans nabe!" Genos said in a tone that was more mechanical than human and his limbs remained locked in their startup rictus.

[unmakeme]

Bad form to knock him unconscious again, right? Natasha just sighed as she worked at the bolts on his shoulder.

"You've had a shock. Literally. The Broca's area of your brain has been effected. It won't last long, but your ability to process language has been-- Look, I know you think you're speaking to me, but you're not. Not really. It's just garbled nonsense. You should be back to normal soon enough. Just relax." One bolt down, and she began work on the second, avoiding his turning head and pretty much done with the conversation. Especially since it couldn't possibly go anywhere.