14818/The Nightclub Under Your Bed

The Nightclub Under Your Bed
Date of Scene:	01 May 2023
Location:	Under Your Bed Nightclub, Gotham City
Synopsis:	The Under Your Bed dive bar for monstrous folks is unfortunately lost as it suffers multiple holes in its walls and severe fire damage. Whether it is written off for the insurance money by whoever owns it is uncertain, but Iara, Sally and Andi meet for the first time, they all get a taste of Batman at work, and they all have a pretty stereotypical night in Gotham: Interrupted by villains and not finding any peace.
Cast of Characters:	Iara Dos Santos, Sally Pride, Andi Benton, Bruce Wayne

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Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     It's not terribly unusual for Iara to head somewhere alone, she's a perfectly capable young lady and when you can break cinderblocks with your bare hands, people don't get AS worried about you going off on your own... still, she has a burner phone in her pocket, a change of clothes in her licensed JAWS backpack, and her short-cut X-Men uniform on under a plain white T-Shirt and black shorts, the afro-brazillian human looking fairly unremarkable, save her wild, unkempt, frizzy hair. She heads off the bus and checks a note she wrote for herself as she makes her way down Conroy street, then Hamill avenue, and finally she arrives at her destination... a disappointingly run-down looking brick building with a broken movie theater style sign that says "UNDER YOUR BED" across it, the brick stained on one side of the entrance a suspiciously dark color and the sound of broken glass coming from inside over the beat of the music. A gruff looking bouncer stands guard.

     This is where Iara ducks into an alleyway. A good way to get yourself shot in Gotham, but instead she ducks behind a dumpster and opens her backpack, shifting into her mutant form, a 6'7" shark-woman, with scales, amazonian physique, and a mouth full of flesh-tearing, triangular teeth. She takes off the pants and shirt to reveal the x-men uniform beneath, black and yellow with a red X belt buckle, and she puts on a different white shirt over it that's been cut with schissors to end at the rib cage. This shirt, unlike the first one, has a skull on the front with cartoonish X's in the eyes, and text around it that says "DON'T BE AFRAID TO GET ON TOP" across the top curve of the skull, and under it, "IF HE DIES, HE DIES" beneath it. Form fitting unstable molecules hugging her brazillian hips, a short shirt covering her legendary chest, this is the way she's going in. Hiding the backpack in the dumpster, she heads to the front.

     One look at her from the bouncer, and he motions to let her inside.

Sally Pride has posed:
It was nice to get out of Mutant Town, out of New York... but the options of elsewhere to go where still somewhat limited when you're a 5-foot-9 anthropomorphic African predator. Though with it's dark, gritty atmosphere and it's own menagerie of vigilanties, weirdos and mad science rejects Gotham was a natural choice. That is where Sally found herself eventually, and after a bit of wandering legwork caught wind of one of the slum areas that was supposely a bit less leery of the... a... not-human population.

Which eventually brought her to the entrance of the Under Your Bed nightclub. And she already looked the part for an underground dance party with her studded leather jacket, over tore up tanktop and jeans, lopsided mohawk and multiple ear piercings.

Still the bouncer gives her a squinting look, muttering something about cat girl wannabes under his breath... Only to recoil a bit when he gets six sharp and very real claws a few milimeters from his face. Not that she wasn't going to scratch him, its just Sally displaying that she's very much not someone in a cat costume. The bouncer quickly apologizes, insisting it was just a test and that she had the hearing sharp enough to hear him had been enough, and let her inside.

Andi Benton has posed:
The internet has always had its share of darker elements to it, underground things that can be found with a little bit of searching. Or, in some cases, stumbling across one thing or another.

Andi Benton saw a thing that led to a thing that led to another thing, resulting in her milling about near the Under Your Bed club. Gotham City is not a normal haunt for her, but there are parts of it that are kind of her speed. There's just the prospect of running into the Batman or one of his crew. It shouldn't be a problem - ultimately they're on the same side - but he can be..protective of his territory. It's a concept Andi understands, through Mania.

Mania, of course, is who approaches the front of the club, the change having taken place away from prying eyes. "Is there room for us?" comes the question from the faceless visage in almost all black, save for the white spidery insignia along with the overly large and expressive eyes. Spiky-appearing bits of 'hair' stick up as the punk-looking vigilante crosses her arms. After having already dealt with the entrances of Shark-Girl and Sally, he just steps aside and nods to the door. In she goes.

Bruce Wayne has posed:
Bruce Wayne observes from above. A skylight, antiquated and tarnished, in a long forgotten corner thirty feet above the catwalk. Some of the wallcrawlers might make their way up there, but not much reason to bother. Why would anyone be on the roof, much less trying to look in at this eclectic gathering of fellow travelers? A journalist? A cop?

No. Something much, much worse than that.

The Batman crouches low, his cape hunched over his shoulders, the faint patter of beginning raindrops starting to bead on the impenetrable material, slicking down to skitter in streams down the curvature of the thing. He's been there for approximately thirty two minutes. The lenses in his mask enhance his vision, giving him HD quality visuals in multiple spectrums. He can flicker from channel to channel with a specialized eye-flutter he'd developed, a signal language he'd spent years developing along with his core computer team, Tim and Barbara. He could operate an impressive heads-up display and online computer with nothing more than movements of eye and lid. Easy to learn as a martial kata. Muscle memory. He was good at that.

But he was good at everything. That was always the problem. For everyone else at least. Put simply, Batman was unfair advantage incarnate.

And at the moment, his attention was centered on this group of individuals. He had no issue with mutantkind - genetic diversity would inevitably result in these sorts of alterations, although the recent acceleration probably bore research. But they were people, like anyone else. Most people were good people. But when the gifted went bad, the trouble got bigger. Batman didn't like trouble. Not in Gotham.

He finally manages to tune out enough of the music so that he can hone in on individual conversations. The club itself will mask his scent. And he can sit still in this position for at least fifteen hours. Far more than he'll need to get the lay of the land. And see if his attention can move on - or must remain.

Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     As the other two step inside, Iara's portugese-brazillian accent is already chattering away at another patron of the bar, another aquatic-looking woman, a black and white... literal whale of a woman that appears to be a killer whale/human hybrid. "Oh come on amigao, this is great! We're both big ocean predator ladies!" The Shark-Girl excitedly says, where The Orca rolls her eyes under those giant white patches. Mania isn't the only scary lady in shiny black and white tonight. "Fuck OFF, kid." the larger woman says, "I ain't here to make friends." With that, the sitting killer whale woman brings a glass of vodka to her mouth and knocks it back in one go, like a bucket of fish at Sea World.

     The Shark-Girl seems quietly furious at this, a snarl forming at the edge of her mouth, before the glossy black doll-eyed X-Man blinks as she turns to see a cat-lady and a goo-lady walk in. Even if they didn't step in together, the gray-scaled shark walks over to them with wide arms in welcome, saying "Ey!" with a gigantic, triangular-toothed smile, before she leans in more at their height, saying "I'm the Shark-Girl, who're you two?"

     A giant man that looks like a pile of mud in the shape of a man sits at the bar behind her, there appears to be literally Frankenstein's monster in a secluded corner, and some sort of... really sickly looking pigeon-man that Sally might recognize out of all people is operating the DJ Booth.

     "Alright, that was Darude Sandstorm, braawk, next up is Boris Pickett with the Monster Mash!" the pigeon-man says over a very low quality headset microphone.

     There's a collective groan throughout the bar as two vampire-looking gentlemen seem to approach the pigeon-man to haul him out of the DJ booth.

Sally Pride has posed:
Sally Pride has to lean back a little to look up at the approaching shark woman, but she's use to doing so as it's the only way she can look Ray in the eyes. At least she's not put off by the face of a fierce oceanic predator. Looks are only skin deep or something like that. Instead she gives a curious tilt of her head to one side. Maybe trying to size up which kind of 'mutant' this woman is. "Name's Sally. Sally Pr--"

She stops, pierced ear flicking at a familiar voice out of the DJ booth. She turns to look, but by that point the pidgeon man is already being dragged back outside for his taboo choice of song. He likely didn't realize some people here would take that as offensive, he was a bit too naive in his sense of humor.

We don't question how he got here seemingly of his own. You just accept the eccentricity and move on.

"Sally Pride," she finishes. Her tail gives a flick, the movement much too fluid and natural to be any sort of costume. Unlike some other cat women a certain vigilante is familiar with.

Andi Benton has posed:
Really, it shouldn't be a surprise that Batman is there tonight, observing secretly through the skylight. With the music and lighting and distractions within, nobody's really looking up there anyway. Even if somebody was, he might not be easy to spot.

For their part, Mania/Andi have to devote extra focus to tuning out things that would be too much of a distraction from what's going on nearby. Given certain unique abilities the symbiote provides, the 'creature' can literally sense everything immediately around, front and back. It's enough to catch the exchange between the shark and orca, both of them humanoid. An internal conversation follows.

<<Mania>> There are many interesting ones here, Andi.
<<Andi>> You're telling me. That must be saying something.
<<Mania>> Yes. We just said it.
<<Andi>> It's a figure of speech. Are you all right so far?
<<Mania>> There are many things here to distract us. Like the kitty.
<<Andi>> The what...oh.

Yes, Sally has been spotted, and there's Shark-Girl approaching. Mania's arms cross, the better to keep from reaching out and doing something that might need apologizing for. Impulsiveness is /still/ a thing in spite of a couple years or so of that bond.

"We..are Mania," comes the reply, the all-white eyes shifting between Shark-Girl and Sally, then back again. The voice is a blend of two, feminine and alien. "This place is very different."

Bruce Wayne has posed:
Batman works methodically through the crowd, taking in faces. Those he deemed suspicious, for whatever reason, he took pictures, storing them for later analysis. He would see if any were wanted or matched suspects at large. See if they had a record. See if they had bad associations. It was never personal. Just what he did. He strived, always, to be fair.

Except he was always unfair. Even when he didn't mean to be. Batman likes to get his way, most of the time. He doesn't think he's perfect. But he knows he's better than most. Not everyone. But most.

And what he wanted was to have Gotham be safe. Which meant keeping track of potential troublemakers. And making sure they knew this city was protected.

But he sympatthized with the outsiders. He knew that most would be gathered here in peace, just looking for friendship, somewhere to belong. He'd raised teenagers. Being a teenager was hard. How much harder, then, to be both a teenager and someone so different? How would that change you? What kind of stresses would that create? And how might those stresses...turn violent?

He centers in on these newish friedns, this gathering of Shark and Lion and creature from beyond the black. Were they suspicous? A threat to Gotham? Or just...girls out on the town?

Was that even still a thing? He hadn't even gotten through Sex and the City yet.

Quiet. Still. Attend.

He settles in to listen, to find out who they are...

Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     Iara gives a look with that big smile to Sally, finger-gunning at her as she says "Pride, 'cause you're a lioness? Love it." before she looks to Mania, peering at her a little closer as she squints at her, saying "We? There more than one of you in there? That's... really cool, you're not like... gonna goo everyone up and infect people with your touch, right? 'Cause we've been fighting these aliens called the Brood, and they're like, real nasty..."

     A new DJ is put into place, a fellow covered in polka dots that begins playing a remix of Daft Punk's Voyager with a stony, serious expression across his face as he does so, unblinkingly looking at the crowd as he pushes buttons to remix the track in real time.

     Back at the bar, a chalk white gentlemen seems to be demanding a drink, but the bartender in sunglasses and chomping a cigar doesn't seem to want to serve him. "Look, pal." the man says, "We can serve ya whatever ya want, but first we need some ID to verify date of birth."

     "SOLOMON GRUNDY..." the man bellows, suddenly standing up before bringing two fists down on the bar, causing it to explode into splinters as he finishes his sentence with "BORN ON A MONDAY!!!" With that, there's a toss of a barstool and a crash behind the counter of bottles falling over as the zombie older than dirt starts wrecking behind the bar... and a pale-skinned man with sharp teeth takes the opportunity to punch his opponent in a card game, a fight quickly breaking out in the club!

Sally Pride has posed:
Sally Pride smirks a bit. "Yeah, that's it. And trained in aerospace ops." So a lion pilot, named after a famous astronaut, because she also flies things. Though these days it's more driving very fast and loud things on wheels, but it's the original joke that counts. "But nothing wrong with using a name that's right to the point, either." Which applies for both Shark-Girl, and by the way she's talking like she's more than one, mayhaps Manic as well.

Then there's a bellow at the bar, the sound of massive fists smashing, and Sally takes an almost too casual step back as spintered bits of wood from the bartop clatter past her feet. Lets out a soft sigh. "Oh come on, Pex isn't even here, the 'can't have a quiet night getting food or drinks' shouldn't apply."

She takes another step to the side when a fight breaks out over the cards. Who was cheating? Probably all of them. "Girl just can't relax some nights..."

Andi Benton has posed:
"No. It does not work like--" Mania begins to say. Doesn't work like that? Does it? Andi will have to ask Mania about that later on.

The opportunity to do so, or give much of a response to Sally's talk about her name origins, is stolen by the commotion over at the bar, the 'SOLOMON GRUNDY' bit causing an alert to ping through the bond. "It was foolish to think this would stay peaceful. We did not even have time to dance or eat."

With that, she acts. A line of webbing shoots out from one hand, up to cling to some of the rigging above as she rises above the crowd, another line sent out toward the bartender with the hope of tugging him away from the rampaging monster. "You might want to not be in his way," she says, seeing about sizing up Grundy while another fight starts up.

Bruce Wayne has posed:
Bruce Wayne hadn't planned on doing anything but surveillance tonight. But dive bars in Gotham were dive bars in Gotham, human, mutant or monster. Drunk loners end up getting in fights. End up hurting each other. End up killing each other.

Not on Batman's watch.

It's something cinematic as he does crash through that skylight and descend rapidly, his cape flicking out and catching air to cast the silhouette of a bat under the hot lights and across the uplifted faced of the creatures of this particular night.

Smoke drop, nothing toxic, just enough to make you cough, just enough to drive you away. He lands, crouched and then rising. Let them take him in. No mystery who he is. He has saved this city a thousand times. He has ridden to the stars with the Justice League. You have gathered in the shadow of his city. And you have brought violence.

His voice is amplified, hacking the sound system through a rigging in his helmet and he thunders and reverbratss.

"THIS IS BATMAN. GET. OUT. NOW."

He lifts a hand and fires a taser line to strike a Grundy. A true Grundy? One of his countless shadow selves? Or just an imitator? Did it matter? He'd beaten them all.

"IF YOU WOULD-BE HEROES WANT TO HELP, HELP EVACUATING THE CIVILIANS. I'LL DEAL WITH THE PERPETRATORS."

Slashing batarang into the side of a fanged man's neck, the sheer force of it enough to dislodge a vertebrae.

He turns off the amplification, speaking now directly to the brawlers.

"Stand down or I take you down. Your choice."

Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     Shark-Girl had just grabbed Orca's arm to try to pull her to help with Grundy, but Orca grabs Shark-Girl's wrist, making her grimace as the larger woman squeezes it. "Okay!" she calls out, pulling her arm back, which Orca thankfully releases without breaking her wrist. Orca walks out without a word as Batman speaks over the intercom, and then Shark-Girl blinks, saying "Okay! Uh, you heard the-" "IT'S DA BAT!" the bartender yells, and then swiftly runs out the back. Polka-Dot Man gathers several different-colored vinyl records carefully before walking out without a word as well, where Warren White and a man in a red and black spandex costume with a metal tube for a left hand, the KGBeast, exchange blows over the card game.

     Iara moves to grab the pale faced man with sharp teeth, pulling him apart from the fight and towards the door, saying "Alright buddy, come on, not worth your life-Hey! Are you a mutant too? You've got gills!"

     Someone gives a throaty laugh from the crowd as Warren shouts "No I DON'T!" as he moves with surprising dexterity and chops Shark-Girl in HER gills, making her snarl, and her mood to immediately change as she picks him up instead, shouting "OH." with a throaty, raspy voice, "NOW you've done it. OUT!" She lifts the man over her head to literally throw him out the front door, and then walks forward to get other people to, y'know, leave that are too drunk or depressed to care. This *is* Gotham.

     Solomon Grundy rampages through the bar, shouting "SOLOMON GRUNDY!" as he pulls down a hanging light, causing sparks to fly and broken bottles of high proof alcohol to light, continuing with "BORN ON A MONDAAAAAAYYY!!!" as the zombie is lit on fire as well, soon becoming a screaming, rampaging hulk through the back of the club.

Sally Pride has posed:
Honestly Mania has the right of it. She really should of expected as much, considering the kind of people that would be attracted to this kind of place. In this city. But a girl could hope. Until the hope is shattered.

"Damn, it IS Batman." That entrance was an experience in itself, but the Dark Knight also just sort of adds to the chaos that's already popped off because of Grundy's rampage over age verification. Don't let it get distracting.

Sally looks one way as Mania is yoinking people out of Grundy's path. Looks the other way as Sharky literally hauls one man off through the door. Looks around a bit more, spots one of the emergency exits. Which she runs over to... only to find it's been partially blocked off by some arcade cabinent because of course, why would a seedy dive bar in the slums be worried about safety protocols. "Of all the... Seriously?" A shoulder shove knocks the game out of the way, followed by Sally giving the heavy exit door a solid kick the bust it partway open. Good thing she wore heavy biker boots.

But now there's a means other than the front doors to escape, avoiding a potential bottleneck of patrons who want no part of this fiasco now that Batman's gotten involved.

Andi Benton has posed:
There are a couple things in particular that act as irritants to symbiotes, to say the least. The first? Excessively loud sounds. Batman's crash through the skylight, along with him tying into the club's soundsystem, sees Mania land with a flinch as some of that scaffolding comes down, the efforts to get others out of the path of danger taking a hit as hands fly to spiky head.

<<Mania>> Too loud, Andi!
<<Andi>> It's him! Batman! I told you!
<<Mania>> Told us what? We said it is too loud! We cannot hear ourselves think!
<<Andi>> Just keep it together. Trust me.

Any awe at seeing Batman actually there, any fear or surprise, it's a little hard to focus on just him with the chaos erupting all around. Someone tries to deck her, so she returns the favor - after her fist grows to three or four times its usual size. Talk about packing a punch!

The second thing that symbiotes really don't like? Fire. Heat from fire in particular. For a moment, whatever makes up Mania's appearance begins to fluctuate and ripple, signs of pale skin beneath for a moment before it's all held back together and solidified again. "This way!" she waves. To aid in directing those trying to get out, her arms reshape into curved 'scoops' that allow her to draw them around a few people at a time and herd them along. If that's what Batman wants, that's what they'll do.

And then the zombie guy is alight, heading toward another part of the club. There might be a new exit momentarily.

Bruce Wayne has posed:
Bruce Wayne reaches down to his belt and draws a device, flicking in a few truncated codes rapidly, before slapping the controller back in place. here come the scrubs. They always want to try their luck. He'd seen some of these faces (or carapaces or beaks or what have you) around town before. Henching's an equal opportunity employer. They'll take anybody who wants to hurt people for money. Of course, those sorts of people, in this town, always end up under the heel of The Batman.

Thrust kick to the chest. Windpipe, ribs, groin. Toss. Block, block, duck, headbutt, headbutt, swallow the blood. It squelches between his teeth. He's learned to like the taste. It usually means he's winning.

Spinning elbow. Speared by a mantiger, driven through a table. On his back, looking up, getting choked. Only he's not, the armor doing what it's meant to do, even those strong hands can only get so far. Fighting a tiger is a terrifying thing, even more so when that tiger is also a man, a bestial chimera roaring in your face. Now some deluded psychotic's minion, no doubt. How could such a creature know that, in preparation for this, Batman had trained around the world. And in that training, he had once speant a sweaty and bloody six months deep in Bangladesh, a gladiator in the bits, barely nineteen, lean and grimy and living off a reward of meat if he won or pig slop if he lost. Knowing that he earned a reputation there, because over and over again, he chose tiger. Tiger. Not deer, not ferret, not snake, not even man. Tiger. Over and over again.

And he always won.

Batman reverses the tiger with a snap of his hips rolling over and striking a ridged chop at a nerve cluster behidn the tigerman's ear, knocking him cleanly unconscious. Batman rises as the Batmobile, responding to his earlier command, crashes through the wall, shattering a massive hole and then backing out again, creating another exit to break the bottleneck, so long as you didn't mind a little rubble.

"THE AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED. THE FIRE DEPARTMENT IS ON ITS WAY. I AM SORRY BUT THIS IS NOT YOUR SANCTUARY. GO HOME."

"Drones sequenced theta and delta, launch and target Threat Subject: Solomon Grundy. Extinguisher mode. Prevent excess damage but do not douse. Let him burn."

He would only come back. He always did. That was his curse.

Hiptoss. Palm thrust, Cable launch, hook, drag, pummel. Another taser.

"RUN."

Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     There's something about this that unnerves Shark-Girl. With the X-Men, the people to save and the people to bite are usually clearly defined. The Friends of Humanity. The Purifiers. Hydra. The tribes of the savage lands. The cyborg ninjas. The Foot clan. Friends and Foe were always clearly marked. Friends wear black and yellow, or were people she otherwise knew. Bite the folks that look angry and weren't friends. When instincts took over, she didn't have to worry so long as she had that split second before the teeth come down. Here, the situation is getting more and more tense. Batman is fighting people directly. She's been hit in the gill. She can feel the frenzy creeping at the back of her mind. The frenzy that makes it harder to distinguish friend from foe, but through training she's learned to look for those key traits.

     If she frenzies here, she doesn't trust that she'll be able to avoid hurting someone innocent. So she fights it. She grits her teeth, she wills herself to ignore her instincts and keep a clear head, even as her sense of pain dulls and her adrenaline goes into overdrive.

     That's when someone shouts "Hands off the boss, fishface!" and swipes at her with a broken bottle.

     A gash is cut across her arm, and the shark is fast to respond, an arm reaching for the arm that held the bottle with surprising speed and... her body tenses up, holding herself back as her lips curl into a snarl and her jaws part, as if fighting the urge to eat this man's face. She finally gets a grip on herself as she drags him towards the exit and pushes him towards the door, shaking her head, slapping her cheeks. The cut on her arm stops bleeding almost immediately, shouting "EVERYONE. OUT!" before walking towards the door herself, trying to get fresh air and to clear her head, trying to hold on and not lose control...

Sally Pride has posed:
Crash goes a wall. That's not going to help that the place is starting to go up in flames. Though that's a pretty badass looking car. Sally is a gearhead, she can appreciate it even in middle of all the chaos. Just not let herself get distracted by it.

Despite whatever some of these patrons may of done that deserves a good beatdown by Gotham's protector, they don't deserve being left lying out cold why the place burns and crumbles. Sally grabs the subdued tigerman, not bothering to worry about if he's a tiger turned anthro or the other way around, just hoisting him over her shoulder before hauling out one of the now very plentiful exits.

Andi Benton has posed:
Plans go awry, but with Batman on the job, maybe things aren't so bad. That doesn't mean they're good. And an evening of relaxing entertainment ended up being something other than that.

Mania is still watching Batman work, because in large part there's learning to be taken away in how he fights and deals with a group. It's so calculated, precise, and on target. Looking around, she tries to keep tabs on Iara and Sally, since they were the two she actually started talking to, but there may have to be a moment to rendezvous back outside.

About that time, the Batmobile itself crashes into and through one of the walls, providing one more 'holy shit' moment. All the same, getting out of here is the way to go, urged by Batman himself, and Mania's eyes take on a slightly more slanted look, hinting at something mischievously punk.

<<Andi>> No, we're about to get out of here just fine.
<<Mania>> We trusted you. Now you can trust us. We do not want to be around this any more. Too much noise. Too much fire.

Hands reshape to normal, then change again. This time, into large spiked wrecking balls after a fashion, and while there's no real need for it - most of the clubgoers have already taken off or been taken down - Mania makes one more hole in the wall leading back outside, wood and plaster and whatever else crumbling around the black and white form in passing.

"Okay, that felt kind of good," the more Andi side of the Mania bond admits, webbing back across the way to get atop a building and deal with any aftermath.

Iara Dos Santos has posed:
     With the fire spreading, multiple criminals being herded into paddywagons, and the fire department spraying the building with fire, Mania, Shark-Girl and Sally meet up outside in the alleyway where Iara is calming herself down and chewing on her backpack. Exchanging contact information, the trio part ways, Shark-Girl diving into the Gotham river and swimming away, Mania webslinging away, and Sally dipping into the crowded streets to make her way back to New York.