154/Naughty tentacles in the park...

Naughty tentacles in the park...
Date of Scene:	27 February 2020
Location:	Bryant Park
Synopsis:	Tentacle-blocked, but with questions open.
Cast of Characters:	Melissa Gold, Leon O'Malley

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Melissa Gold has posed:
    It's a normal evening in Bryant Park. The Carousel is running, though only at half duty. The reading room is shutting down and the jobless and jobbed both are shuffling away from it, blinking at the change of light. The lawn has the usual assortment: businesswomen resting their feet, kicking off the uncomfortable shoes they wear in the office; lovers spending time in intimate conversation not quite out of public view; the night shift grabbing a hasty breakfast before starting their tedious night-time work; the collection of dark-robed teens led by an early-twenties woman in a white robe gathered around a crudely-burned pentacle in the grass.
    Wait...what!?
    The chanting of the latter group reaches a crescendo that annoys some of the other denizens, one of whom gets up to walk across and tell them to quiet down. The woman stalks over, murder in her eyes, until suddenly, freezing in place, eyes widened in shock, she releases a scream.
    Purely by coincidence, just before that scream, long tentacles, brown and blood red, erupt from the soil around the group, wrapping around each of the robed people, the leader in white included, and dragging them into the ground.
    They don't quite fit into the holes the tentacles leave behind, so parts of them are still strewn on the grass.
    Five ... four ... three ... Ah, Hell with it. Pandemonium starts NOW!

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Swinging through the city nearby smacks Leon into the side of a building, luckily too slow to cause any real injury to anything but his pride, "...Yeah yeah, I know, whine whine whine. Look, we'll get it, we just gotta keep practicing. Swinging is hard, ok?....Do you hear something?" He asks to...I guess the wall he's lazily sticking to, as he looks around, his gaze eventually settling over the park, "....Sounds like something's happening, and not just a backup at the port-a-pots....No, I'm not gonna crash into anything on the way there, ya smartass!....Probably..." He argues as he kicks off the side of the building, launching another let's for sake of simplicity call it web on which to swing his way to the scene of the eldritch ritual gone...probably exactly as intended.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    Momentarily it seems as if the immediate threat is over, with only bodily parts to clean up near mysterious holes in the lawn. Then the earth trembles again and a half-dozen tentacles sprout up around the lawn, near where people are standing, and start reaching for and grabbing civilians, dragging them, kicking, screaming, begging, toward the holes they come out of, as if preparing to add more human parts to the lawn for decoration.

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon lands nearby in a roll that takes him a good thirty five feet and messes up the lawn, "....Mental note, work on landings...Shut up." He remarks as he kip ups and webs the tentacles, latching on and pulling for all he's worth to keep them from dragging the civvies to their chunky earthen doom.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    The tentacles resist en masse, tugging hard against the various strands of webbing. That's the "-" column. On the "+" column is the fact that three civvies manage to squirm free, starting to sprint away from danger, screaming for help the whole time.
    Of course the math-inclined might point out that means there's still three civvies at risk of being dragged to body-rending doom. (Not to mention what's likely happening to their souls once so rended.)
    The three tentacles newly freed from their task of dragging bodies, choose instead to wind their way to Leon, reaching out for him quicker than expected, throwing him off-balance as they very suddenly move in the direction he's tugging instead of resisting the pull.
    "Hey! You OK down there?" The voice comes from the sky, attached, as it were, to a compact muscular woman with pink-streaked hair and wide pink wings. "Or do you need a hand? I don't wanna step into a turf war, so if you don't need the help, I'll be off, K?"
    Those wings are making a truly unpleasant vibration in the air, way up in the ultrasonic register.

Leon O'Malley has posed:
As the tentacles try to get smark, Leon's feet writhe about before several tendrils of his own stab down into the ground, effectively rooting him there and giving him a chance to launch more webbing out to tether the tentacles together and restrict them. And then Lady Luck appears to kick him square and firm in the balls, the sonic vibrations of Melissa's wings causing the black suit to stand on end like someone scratched a chalkboard in front of a microphone. He immediately loses his grip on the web, his hand darting to the sides of his head as he screams bloody murder, toppling over as his tendrils uproot from the ground, leaving him totally defenceless from the eldritch horror across the lawn.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "Holy shit!" The woman in blue, seeing Leon practically dissolve, seemingly, and then the tendrils rushing across to make good their opportunity, swoops into action. She drops and hits the deck in a perfect landing that Leon, were he not, you know, in huge amounts of pain, might envy.
    "So you wanna party?" she asks the oncoming tentacles. A feral grin hits her face. "It's party time!"
    That pain from her wings? He'll be remembering that as the soft caress of a gentle lover after this. Opening her mouth she SCREAMS. And while it's directed at the base of the closest tentacle (irrelevant aside, it melts the flesh of it away like a fire truck's blast tearing through tissue, leaving a tentacle flopping around loosely on the grass), even the spill to the sides is more than enough to make the wings sound like distant crinkling paper by comparison.
    "You OK?" she asks, without looking behind her as she gauges the oncoming remainders. "Are they poisoning you?"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
At the power chord, Leon's screams reach glass cracking levels, the suit starting to melt out around him. In a ditch effort to not die from shock, he shoots a web towards a nearby tree branch, and pulls with all he's got to launch himself away from good ol' Screaming Mimi, landing with a soft smack into the lawn a good sixty or so feet away, breathing like he just sprinted a marathon in a minute.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "What the f...!?" That gets cut off as Mel looks around, hearing Leon's scream of pain and desperate bid to escape. "But the tentacles didn't touch y..."
    OK, she's not the brightest muffin in the bag, but she's not stupid either. She can add two and two and even occasionally get four. "Oh, shit."
    Then, to her credit, she turns off her sound generators.
    "Guess I gotta do this manuallyeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
    The tentacles, sensing an opening as she processes what's going on and turns off her most effective weapon, leap in, all five, to grab her before she can do anything more to them. Two are dodged, the ones she sees coming, which leaves three to get her: one wrapping around her thighs and knees, one grabbing her left arm, and the third grabbing her across the torso. They commence trying to use her like a wishbone.
    "DAMMIT!" she fumes, "I wasn't ready for you! Ref!"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Give it credit, Symbiotes may die fast under intense sonic pressure, but they bounce back fast when given room to breath. As Melissa gets grabbed by the ghoulies, Leon kip ups....again, and web-yanks back to the fray, coming down over the tendrils as they try to rip Mel apart, his hands morphing into a gleaming edged axe on the way down...

Melissa Gold has posed:
    The tendrils are tough. For humans. They're grossly outmatched by a Symbiote (and even not a particularly good match against an altered human, which is what Mel is when she's not screaming). She's getting the breath squeezed out of her, but they're having difficulty with that dismemberment thing as her muscles strain and pull back, for the moment at least appearing to be a fairly even match.
    Seeing Leon swooping in, axe at the ready, she twists and yanks such that the tentacle causing her the most grief is stretched out in a clean line for him to sever. Which he does with ease, ichor blasting out from the cut and spattering both with disgusting blackish-purple goop.
    "Thanks. Thought you was a goner." That's about all she has time to say before the two free tentacles switch targets to reach for Leon. "WATCH YOUR BACK!"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon straightens up from the axe smashing, his hands morphing back into...well, hands. As Melissa calls out, he's already spinning on heel meet the tentacles, webbing them together and holding to catch them like a sumo wrestler, "You, civvies, go!" He calls over his shoulder to Melissa as his feet sprout tendrils to drill into the ground again, "...And no shrieking, everything is still spinning from the last time."

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "You heard the black guy!" Mel snarls at people trying to get pics of the conflict. "Get the fuck outta the park before I throw the damned tentacles at you!"
    She might be a tad peeved at being unable to unleash her best weapon.
    "OK, here's the plan, I drag 'em to you, you slice them into fish bait, sound good?"
    She illustrates by yanking the one off of her left arm viciously, heedless of the bloody marks its suckers are leaving behind on her skin and stretching it out for Leon to slash. "Like this!"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon's suit prevents expressions, but if it didn't, he would be grinning ear to ear, "Best first date ever." He says as he arms morph into swords, his feet uprooting, and he charges towards the tendril, baseball sliding under his with both hands up, the blades extending to make sure they go all the way through.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "WoohoooooooooooooooooooooOOO!!!!"
    A very slight miscalculation on Mel's part has her sliding through the grass as the last tentacle grappling her now has no counterbalancing force. It wastes no time in taking advantage of it, as the tendrils apparently seem to understand at some level that half of them have gone down in under a minute. Mel's sonics fire up briefly before they suddenly squelch with a loud "shit, can't!". Instead she just claws harder and harder at the ground with her free arms, legs helplessly bound, until she very tenuously holds a grip that barely keeps her from moving.
    "Finish off your two, then get out of the square!" she shouts. "'Cause I'm gonna get loud soon!"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon is floored for a moment as Mimi Screamy, quickly rolling back up as it shuts back off, slitting an opportunistic tendril across the tip for it's trouble, then rolling under it for a quick offing, "Alright, if you think you can handle it. I wont be far!" He calls out before fwipping a web and zipping off to sonic safety, leaving Melissa to shriek to her banshee heart's content.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    As soon as Leon makes tracks, covered in even more gore from severed tentacles, Mel turns, starting to slide again as she lets go and gets drawn toward her tentacle's egress point. Sonics flare and a ... pink? What? Pair of pinchers forms, grabbing the tentacle at the ground and preventing its continued motion.
    Then that voice again. That loud scream focused with precision where the pinchers are, practically explodes the tentacle, leaving it flopping around on the grass, taking Mel with it, as she gets faceplanted a few times like Loki and the Hulk.
    That's gotta hurt.
    The sonics turn off again, as a courtesy, with Mel dragging herself to her feet in the aftermath, the holes the tentacles came through vanishing without a trace, leaving only the cut-off and bloody remains, plus the remains of half a dozen people, on the lawn as any kind of evidence anything had happened.
    "Shit. It tore my suit's arm. God DAMN it! These things aren't cheap!"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon perches on the corner of a building just across from the park, his suit rapidly returning to it's glossy black and white sheen, "....Is she-theeeeere it is....Mmn, digs right down into the soul, doesn't?.....She stopped...Think she's dead?....Well I dont know, most people cant scream loud enough to set off car alarms either, how should I know how much of a beating she can handle?"

Melissa Gold has posed:
    Far below Mel limps away from the scene. "Hey, tall, black, and glossy!" she calls out. "You out there?" Beat. "You OK?"
    Some braver civilians show up now that the noise and tentacles and dying and screaming has abated and are taking pics and video of the scene and of Mel. "We needta talk, I think. Like, apologies kinda talk."

Leon O'Malley has posed:
A moment after Melissa calls out for him, Leon appears!....By swinging by, snatching Melissa up, and keeping it going all the way up to a rooftop, a tendril covering her mouth to keep her from screaming and possibly dropping them to their deaths, "...Sorry about this, but cant really talk at street level." He says as he straightens her up on the rooftop, the tendril retracting back into the suit's mass, "Turns out we happen to uh....Resemble two wanted criminals....Because that's just the kind of luck I have....So, what'cha need?"

Melissa Gold has posed:
    That gets grabby quick, and counter-grabby for a moment as Mel reflexively uses wrestling moves trying to break free. She stops quickly, however, because a) she recognizes the grabber, and b) the ground is far away. When they arrive at the rooftop she adopts a pretty pugnacious stance, crossing her arms and eyeing Leon.
    "Look, I'm a guess you got hurt by my sonics. Just wanna check if you OK, alright?" Not exactly a great orator. "And wanna say sorry if I was a problem. I figured I'd help out, not really, you know, make it worse."

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon shrugs at Melissa's gruff apology, "Eh, we'll rub some dirt on in. Least you were TRYING to help, more than I can say for most." He straightens up and turns around, sitting down down on the ledge, "So, any idea what in the hell that was? We were getting used to being the living hentai monster, now we just feel normal. And normal sucks."

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "You got me," Mel says, pacing a bit, tugging at the torn fringes. "Weird crap happens all time. I just saw japanimation crap happening and you in the thick of it, so I figured I'd help out." She shrugs wryly. "Didn't know even flyin' up to you would hurt. Didn't register. I figured you'd gotten stung or something."
    She looks down at the park where emergency authorities are descending like flies on rotting meat. And those tentacles seem to be rotting unnaturally quickly. "I'm not much on the thinkin' side," she says with brutal honesty. "But this don't look right. Did you see how it started?"

Leon O'Malley has posed:
Leon shakes his head, "No. Sorry, we cant see that far. We only started moving on it after I heard the screams...Not yours, the normal, not soul piercing sounds of terror, pain, and panic." He stands up, "Well, sorry beautiful, but we gotta run. Swinging wont practice itself. If ya need us, I'm sure a set'a pipes like yours wont have trouble getting our attention...For better or worse." And with that he walks off the edge, zipping away on a web line off into the city.

Melissa Gold has posed:
    "Shit," Mel says as Leon swings off. "I suck at investigating." She makes a wry face and waits politely for Leon to be a long way away before firing up her wings and taking flight. "I know someone who don't, though," she says to herself as she flies away. "Time to get some help."