Aberrant: 200X - Ticket to Graceland

[Kazuo]

[Aušrinė]

[Aušrinė]

[Kazuo]

5

[Right Now]

A few seconds ago Rotta came charging into this little rundown auto shop expecting to find a surprised nova detective (who isn't all that bad looking, if he's being honest with himself) ripe for capturing and interrogating. Since this is exactly what you're supposed to do with someone if you're a criminal and you discover them tailing you for unknown reasons and you'd like to know what those reasons are, everything seems par for the course up to this point, right? Wrong.

Wrong because instead of surprising a single, totally non-combat-grade nova who is completely unprepared for an ambush by three more-or-less-combat-grade novas, Rotta and his friends are finding themselves face to face with a scared detective (but a scared detective who is – surprisingly - not surprised) and what looks to be a decidedly-combat-grade nova who is pointing one of the biggest guns Rotta has ever seen at them. And – hey, is that guy not wearing any pants?

"DORE, DO-RREH?!?!", shouts the Asian-looking, pant-less, possibly insane and definitely homicidal Elite (and there's no doubt in Rotta's mind that this guy is an Elite) with the huge-ass gun.

Rotta has no idea what "dore" means (or even that that's how it's spelled), nor does he have any time to try and decipher its meaning either, since the Elite (who is, of course, Kazuo "Kurusu" Kanai) immediately follows up his shouted question by attempting to put a bullet between Rotta's eyes. Fortunately, Rotta can turn into a swarm of large rats (which is how he got the name Rotta, as it happens), and so he does this, sacrificing only two or three of his little rat-selves to the Elite's bullet rather than, say, his brain. All in all, he considers this to be a reasonable tradeoff.

The nova detective apparently doesn't care for Rotta's transformation because she screams and cuts loose with a loud - but largely uncontrolled - burst from her assault rifle, which costs Rotta a few more of his lesser selves, but otherwise has no effect. The Elite, on the other hand, seems to have forgotten about Rotta entirely, and instead seems to be focusing his attention on Rotta's companions who, last Rotta checked, were due to burst through the auto shop's side entrance right about… now!

"DORE, DO-RREH?!?!" Again? Jeez, Kazuo, not very original, are we?

Rotta's many rat-selves are pleased, however, to see that Kazuo fails to blow off the heads of either of his companions. Both Elvis and Cobra (or 'Huey', if you prefer) manage to jump back through the doorway, followed by bullets from the FatMac. Kazuo is pleased to see that they are indeed leaving holes the size of Geryon's fist in the cheap plaster walls of the auto shop. Satisfied that he's scared off Rotta's backup, Kazuo turns back to his pile of weaponry (now reduced to another assault rifle and a shotgun) and grabs the auto-shotty, hefting it in one hand. Not that Rotta knows, or would really care if he did, but the shotgun is actually a Daewoo USAS-12 fully automatic CAWS - largely unseen outside of the Eastern half of the planet, these things are nasty on the best of days, and this aint the best of days!

Turning casually back towards the swarm that is Rotta, Kazuo begins firing off round after round from the Daewoo. The rounds, of course, are birdshot. And while this would, under normal circumstances, be a completely inappropriate form of ammunition to bring to a firefight between a bunch of novas, it is perfect for shooting swarms of rats! In fact, it is so perfect, a guy might even get the notion that Kazuo had planned this or something. Regardless, Rotta's many scurrying rat-selves are rather quickly reduced to only a few scurrying rat-selves, and a large number of gory little red spots all over the floor and walls.

Within slightly less than two seconds Kazuo has managed to reduce Rotta's numbers down to only one tiny, left-over rotta-self, which is still rather foolishly rushing directly at Kazuo's sandaled foot. The most un-fun part about using a gun like the USAS-12 is that, unless you've got an oversized drum magazine mounted under the gun, you run out of ammo almost as soon as you pull the trigger. Kazuo's just got the regular old 10-shell clip, so he's already out of ammo by the time what's left of Rotta reaches his big toe and tries to bite it. He doesn't really want to waste a shell from the Mac on a stupid rodent (and, Tee-Bee-Aych, he's not so sure it's a good idea to fire a weapon like that off right next to his bare foot, either), so he just jerks his foot back, winds up, and let's her rip, giving the little furball the kind of kick that would make even Corbin jealous.

In a way, the nova known as Rotta had already been essentially dead and gone before now, since there was no way he was coming back from such a massive amount of trauma, but purely from a technical standpoint, if one were to try and measure the precise instant wherein Rotta's soul left his body and the Heavenly Courts began their long, long debate as to what-in-the-bloody-hell-to-do with a man's soul when the last body it'd inhabited was in fact a rat's body, well then right now would be that instant.

As the rapidly-expanding cloud of fur, gristle, and blood that had once been the last vestiges of an Albanian drug dealer sails through the close (and now rather smokey and gun-powdery-smelling) air, his still-living partner - Elvis - makes the horrendously bad call of trying to rush back through the side entrance again, just in time to be smacked in the face by a dead rat. Even for novas, this kind of thing is no laughing matter. Kazuo hadn't actually meant for this to happen, but he's not about to question it either, so he just smiles and raises the Mac towards Elvis. And immediately goes blind.

Verstand and Kazuo both are completely caught off guard by the impossibly bright and impossibly loud burst that comes screaming out of Elvis right after he gets his rat-to-the-face surprise. They aren't caught off guard because they didn't know Elvis had this power, but rather because there's really no way not to be caught off guard by something that so completely and unbelievably violates the senses the way Elvis's little strobe-attack just has. Worse is that right after Kazuo loses his ability to see entirely, and most of his ability to hear, he gets knocked right off his feet by what feels like a freight train slamming into him at two or three hundred kilometers an hour. That can't be right, though, because Kazuo's pretty sure there weren't any train tracks running through this particular auto shop the last time he checked. Dimly, from somewhere in the back of his mind, Kazuo remembers a nova nicknamed 'Huey', and also recalls that she was hired to protect Rotta, and furthermore that she has a telekinetic attack that is supposed to feel remarkably similar to being hit by a train moving at several hundred kph. Kazuo does not fail to connect all of these facts together as he sails blindly through the air, nor does he fail to slam - face first, and upside down - into the opposite wall of the shop at a speed that's probably just not healthy at all.

The entire time that Kazuo's picking himself up and trying to rub the spots out of his one good eye so that he can maybe defend himself long enough to no die today, he finds himself wondering why he doesn't seem to be having to defend himself. Huey must really suck balls as an Elite if she's not gonna take advantage of a situation like this. For an instant Kazuo is concerned that maybe she decided to try and pick off Verstand while Kazuo was down instead, but then he's up and he can (more or less) see, and there's Verstand standing right there. She looks shaken and rather terrified, but not dead, so that's good.

"Where'd they go?" asks Kazuo, walking over to where his FatMac had fallen.

Verstand just looks all about the shop nervously for a second before answering in a stuttery voice, "I shot at them b-both and must have scared them off. I th-think I wounded Huey..." She sounded sick as she said this. A combat elite she was not.

"Really?", asks Kazuo, looking with raised eyebrows at Verstand and then at the empty doorway Elvis and his hired bodyguard had been standing in a moment ago. "Cool!"

He smiles and gives her an entirely too-hard congratulatory clap on the back and then says, with gusto, "let's go get 'em, huh?"