14494/anarky scene

anarky scene
Date of Scene:	25 March 2023
Location:	Chelsea - Miagani Island
Synopsis:	No description
Cast of Characters:	Lonnie Machin, Sandra Wu-San

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Lonnie Machin has posed:
The Old Blue is one of Gotham's scuzziest and best-loved bars. Like many a toilet bowl, the place has *longevity*. It's been around since the 70s. The crowds are boisterous. The drinks are watered-down. The bathrooms are... for the brave. And... there are cheesesteaks. The bar is famous for its shotgun hibachi made out of half an oil drum on cinderblocks filled with charcoal. Somehow this place has never been shut down by the Gotham Board of Health.

The Old Blue has been a much-loved spot on Gotham's punk scene for years. In fact, there's a band tonight, something that just got ginned up called 'Batman's Boot' - and the noise is... offensive. You could shoot someone in this bar and it'd be hard to hear it over the racket, and the sound of young people jostling and committing just shy of bodily assault on one another. What would someone like Lady Shiva think of a mosh pit? Best she not get caught in it. Best for everyone else that is.

The bar is also playing host to members of one of Gotham's anarchist collectives, who have had the usual meeting where they plan and organize their tactics of resistance. Which protests to attend, where the latest anti-homeless architecture is being installed and what they're going to need to disassemble it, what soup kitchens need volunteers, which GCPD cruisers are going to get rubber cement poured on their windshields.

"I'll provide the angle-grinder for the spikes." Anarky says, leaning over the table, his hands braced on it, fingers spread, "But I want it back, and in working condition. I'm not made of angle grinders."

The meeting breaks up, and the masked figure stands there, for a moment. "...Loaning out power tools. Heh."

Sandra Wu-San has posed:
Someone like Lady Shiva would think that there are other moments for losing themselves in the ecstasy of communal violence. They might furthermore be intrigued - quietly, thoughtfully - by the sense of history staining the walls, infusing trash-made treasure, and wafting aggressively from every angle in a myriad of rude tones. It's even possible that they'd drift around the worst lit edges of a poorly lit shithole, soaking in the atmosphere of a screaming middle finger turned and fixed squarely upon the gloomy status quo of a city practically built for soft-handed predators and calloused prey.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

It's hard to guess at what someone like Lady Shiva might think of The Old Blue, because nobody like Lady Shiva has ever stepped foot on its beer and sweat-soaked floors before tonight.

What is easy - relatively, anyway - to figure out is why, within just seconds of Anarky's comrades filtering away, she's seated right beside the masked man. Her hair's been teased into a voluminous waterfall of jet-black waves broken up somewhat by the myriad of gold chains dangling from its lower depths, each sporting a different assortment of beads and baubles. A leather jacket so deeply, thoroughly red as to approach black sports metal studs down the lapels and around the cuffs, matching tightly fitted leather pants. Simple black slippers - a daring choice indeed for a venue this broken in - round out the outfit, along with the simple white blouse beneath her jacket.

"'Anarky'," she exhales just moments after settling in, eyes set forward and searching for a bartender.

"Yes...?"

Lonnie Machin has posed:
Of course he knows WHO this is. Though he's never met her in person. Anarky has had a couple of hits put out on him in the past, but if someone was willing to hire Lady Shiva to kill him, well - "If you're here to kill me, tell whoever hired you that I'm flattered." He uses a vocal distorter to cover his voice, but he has the accent of a Gotham City native.

The drinks here are... alcoholic, but there isn't really such a thing as top shelf. A waitress eventually makes her way along. "What'll you-" She looks up at Anarky, and then at Lady Shiva, and then says to herself, "...Shit."

"Just get her a drink." Anarky says, "She hasn't attacked anyone yet, and trying to throw her out would be a mistake." He stares straight ahead, and makes no sudden moves. It evokes the behavior of a man who's suddenly come face to face with an angry cobra. His own jacket has rivets and spikes, and numerous patches - bands, symbols. It's also armored, beneath all that leather, and heavy. He wears it like it's nothing.

His eyes narrow behind his mask, as the waitress puts a shot of bourbon in front of Shiva, and then makes herself scarce.

"Are you here for the band?" Anarky asks, his hands still braced on the table. "...They suck. But they suck *enthusiastically*."

Sandra Wu-San has posed:
"Enthusiasm without discipline produces little at all," Shiva remarks without looking over. She does meet the waitress' eyes, when approached, her own ever so slightly narrowed in consideration. Lady Shiva is not a woman who courts or collects fame in most circles, nor does she make any effort to wear her identity on her sleeve. Not quite unknown, not quite prominent, the woman lives in a shadow state: to those who know her, of her, there's a shape that might bear recognition; to anyone else, she could just as easily be a dark spot in an otherwise bright place or a vague thing drifting along lit margins, looking in.

Waiting.

Watching, as she does the waitress until it's just she and Anarky again, with a cold dearth of interest.

After all: she isn't what Shiva came here for--

"I'm here for you," she then states.

After a small sip from the glass and a moment of lidded eyes with a soft, sharp inhale, she casts a sidelong look towards the masked anarchist. The glass is set against the bar, barely captured between her hands. All of her's as loose, as casual as one might expect a person taking up space at a bar to be this late at night, and no less deadly for it.

"Your talents; your appetite for change..."

Her eyes sweep slowly down, then up; her nose wrinkles, briefly.

"Your enthusiasm for the game of masks."

Lonnie Machin has posed:
"She has no idea who you are. It's just that the people here are hip to danger, especially people who look like you and are seen casually talking to me." Anarky says, before he shrugs one shoulder. "Masks are symbols, they become metaphors. You put on a mask and the way people perceive you and react to you changes. Or the way you behave changes. But you know all that." Anarky's masked head dips, once. "You're here for me. But not to kill me. All right, I can work with that."

"...So if you're here for me, what do you want? I could make a lot of guesses and even more assumptions, but that would be stupid." His gloved fingers drum a tattoo on the bar. "...You know, I've heard my methodology called a lot of things - terrorism. Real-world shitposting. Instigation of chaos, that's one of my favorites. But no one's ever put it as an "appetite for change." It'd be like saying you have an "appetite for death."

Sandra Wu-San has posed:
The glass in Lady Shiva's hands may as well have descended into her grasp from the heavens, for all she cares about the waitress. She takes another measured sip rather than speak on what being a dangerous stranger means to her, because the question of whether she was recognized one way or the other never even crossed her mind.

"I have an appetite for life," she corrects, crisp and utterly even. "Death is just an inevitable consequence of life, just as change is an inevitable consequence of chaos-- whether it comes from terrorism, or symbolically rich violence."

As she takes another sip, her eyes flit just a little bit further to better take the masked chaos agent in. One meticulously threaded brow begins to arch as her gaze approaches his golden visage.

"Or 'shitposting'," she flatly allows once her eyes are where she assumes his must be.

"But you know all of that."

Lady Shiva turns in place until she can lean backwards, elbows propping up against the bar while one leg crosses the other. "You surround yourself with others who hunger for change. Your voice, your face, your very identity -- all crafted to set expectations and change perceptions," she observes, lightly echoing his own analysis. "Like lightning in a dying forest, you seek to burn decrepit corruption to ashes so that something better may grow in its place. Your enthusiasm for change shines too bright to be ignored, and -- perhaps -- you even have the discipline to see it through," she rattles off as she idly scans the thrashing mass of humanity surrounding this island of reasoned conversation.

"I also hunger for change -- because what use is a life lived in stasis?" Without missing a beat, she shifts her eyes sideways again and continues:

"And I would see this city of yours changed into something new-- I would see the corruption of weak, petty tyrants burned to ashes so that something better may grow in its place," she says, growing softer -- more intent -- by the moment.

"And I would like to acquire your aid in seeing it through."

Lonnie Machin has posed:
Anarky's eyes narrow behind his mask. "Inspiring choice of language. All right, I'll bite; how do you plan to do that and what part would I play in the scheme?" He gestures, with one hand. "You have me dead to rights, I'm no fan of the elites. The moneyed parasites, the jackbooted enforcers. The problem is, the older I get, the more I see how chopping down a rotten tree could crush someone who can't get out of the way fast enough. Fires help bring about new growth, but not everyone can escape the inferno."

His mask is as always, impassive, only his eyes giving away some hint of his expression. "It's one thing to give your life for a cause, it's another thing to be sacrificed by someone else for the 'Greater Good'. But... you have my attention."