PLOT: WISE SNAKE'S EMERGENCE

[theearth]

Who: OPEN.
When: March 9th, Sunday, daylight hours.
Where: The business district of Locke City.
What: An enormous snake monster is pissed.
Warnings: Violence.

[The alien explodes silently - but it explodes.

First in a small cloud of hot (rose-scented) gas - those there to watch its final moments will want to step back.

A ripple in the air pulses - heavily - from where it once was, with absolutely no sound and color, but penetrating force. Anyone standing within two miles of the point of origin will feel a push, with those closest guaranteed to be knocked off their feet and temporarily dazed. Cars swerve and crash. Staff in the nearest office buildings launch into disarray. There’s no shielding from the blast - it can be felt through walls, through structures, in the air, and underground.

And it is felt underground.

The entire business district starts to shake, abruptly, jarred to a stir by some movement. It rises over the span of a long half-a-minute to the magnitude of December’s earthquake.

Tuning Towers experiences the worst of it - windows are smashing and objects are shaking loose and falling from the upper floors.

It finally ends - with screaming - as the head of an enormous pink snake breaks the lobby floor.

It flows its way quickly out of the hole it’s made, breaks itself another hole ever so politely through the main entrance doors, which were not meant to accommodate a twenty-foot-tall-and-wide exitor, and as it draws the last of its tail out after it, the quaking dies down.

It’s now roaring its way through the streets of Locke City’s business district - all several hundred meters of Wise Snake, emerged in the flesh (or stone?).

No regard for the walls of buildings, streetlamps, civilians, stopped and blindly pulled-over vehicles, anything else on its course - in a frantically-awakened, unrestricted rampage.]



[ OOC: This is part two of the Season 1's finale. The first - the assault on the farmhouse - is here; pertinent plot posts one and two. ]

Comments

[espigeonage]

[Julien clasps Thorir's hands, feathers shutting out the view to either side, and starts pulling. He's modestly stronger than a human and weighs around eighty pounds.]

Okay, back up - okay -

[With some scrabbling and rearranging of his legs Julien is able to get them placed right, the weight on what used to be the balls of his feet, and with his toes splayed he stands.

There are really two ways he can stand, he found on the way here. One is like a cartoon of someone sneaking, or a dinosaur. The other is like a ballerina. He prefers the second way, though it's less stable and makes him... really tall. No, really tall. Very nearly seven feet tall, two heads taller than he was.

He looks down at Thorir, and for a moment everything else is displaced.]

Uh.

[disdainfully]

[...that really is tall.

Wow.

Thorir has to tip his back to look at Julien's face, and then blinks against a pulse's vertigo. Like he hasn't had enough of those yet today.]

Will you be all right?

[espigeonage]

[Most of Julien's new height is thanks to his legs. Some is because of his neck. His lips twitch.]

...So that's what that's going to look like.

[yeah, he isn't planning to stick around after this long enough to see Thorir and the others turn into Dwarves. Focus. He blinks horizontally, with only his inner eyelids.]

Uh. Just a moment.

[Julien frees his fingers, bracing them lightly on Thorir's shoulders. They're lower than his own. Guh.

With that to help with his balance, he puts most of his weight on one leg and manages to use the clawed, scaly toes of the other to grab the cup of athelas tea off the floor. It takes a couple of tries and some spillage before he manages to grip it between thumblike "big toe" and the longer "first toe" - his toes are almost like clawed, armored hands now - and raise it high enough that he can free his opposite arm, take the cup in his fingers and navigate it to his mouth, and drain its contents. Again, there's some spillage. This takes coordination.

He does feel better, though. Not normal, not at all, but it's easier to breathe and think. Julien pushes the empty cup back towards Thorir, and stands on his own with just a hint of wobble.]

...yeah. I think so, sir - for now, I mean.

[disdainfully]

[He'll take the cup and look at Julien, a bit sceptically, but Julien is old enough to judge such things himself.]

Good luck with getting used to moving like this quickly.

[espigeonage]

[Undaunted by a look like that, Julien glances down at the distant floor, and the claws on his feet curving into it, and winces.]

Yeah. Thanks.

[disdainfully]

Call if you need something.

[And with that he will be gone.]

[espigeonage]

Sure thing.

[For a while Julien is there in the background, trying to walk on his own with various degrees of increasingly feigned clumsiness. When he crouches up somewhat - goes from ballerina to dinosaur mode - he's not so extravagantly tall and gets a little less highly visible.

At some point, when no one is paying attention, he escapes out into the streets. In the hours that follow he guides or directs some people here, but doesn't come back in himself.]