20194/The Santo Marco Shuffle: Primera Parte

The Santo Marco Shuffle: Primera Parte
Date of Scene:	06 March 2025
Location:	Republic of Santo Marco, South America
Synopsis:	Rated D for Domino.
Cast of Characters:	Logan Howlett, Neena Thurman

---

Logan Howlett has posed:
Place: Ciudad de Santo Marco
Time: 15:38, UTC -3

Away from the downtown area of Santo Marco City, the buildings gradually become both newer, and shoddier in their construction. Up on the hill, the streets become narrower, and pavement becomes rare. It's more likely to see a bicycle passing than a sports car, but aging jeeps are a fairly common sight, generally with the windshields and roofs taken out entirely. It's in one such vehicle that the international man of mystery known primarily as 'Logan' is currently wishing that he'd sprung for a ride with better seat cushions.

When the pothole in the gravel road is hit, Logan flies up more than half a foot from his seat, and lands jarringly shortly after. He's had worse injuries, true, and he's far too proud to complain about something like a bumpy ride. But the jeep with the nicer seats was only an extra twenty San Marco Pesos...

"You'll be early for your card game, senor. Maybe you'd like to stop and have a few drinks first? La Flama Dulce has Budweiser. The King of Beers, yes?"

The driver is friendly. An older guy. Maybe too friendly. Maybe too old. Whatever the reason, the look that he gets from Logan is one of silent resentment, as the short guy with the hairy knuckles holds on for dear life as another pothole looms on the horizon.

"Do I look like I drink Budweiser, bub?"

There's a hidden rebuke, and the hirsute mutant appears to have been stung by the very suggestion. It makes the driver a bit nervous as he deftly swerves to avoid hitting that particular pothole, only to hit one that's slightly less deep.

"I'm sorry senor. You are American, yes?"

Logan braces himself again, with a hand on the dashboard, right before the jeep skids to a stop in front of a small storefront with no sign in the front.

"How dare you?"

As the Canadian leaves the jeep, the driver is left to wonder if perhaps he would have gotten a few more pesos if he had suggested that the man have a nice cold Molson.

There are a few buildings nearby, with a mixture of handmade signs in Spanish, and factory-produced signs for various brands in English. More than one of the restaurants has signage that suggests that the reader enjoy a Soder-Cola. But the building that Logan seems set for possesses no signage at all, and no indication that it's even open aside from an old man sitting in a rocking chair on the porch. As the stocky mutant walks past, in his light-colored linen shirt, he looks only somewhat tourist like. Clearly an outsider, but one who has purchased his clothing locally. Noticeably, he wears no adornment on his fingers or wrists. Not even a watch. It's too bad, as a few accessories might really make the outfit pop.

With any luck, that would be the only thing that would pop today.

Neena Thurman has posed:
Tucked away within that building, past the old man on the rocking chair, and past the even older staircase that leads up to the second floor where floorboards creak and muted moaning and grunting can be heard, is a second set of stairs that lead down. Down, and then turn, and then down again, to a hazy and smokey basement that smells like a mixture of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and cocaine. There's a din to the space as well -- a dangerous sort of chatter that seems jovial at first blush, but carries a tone that implies a tenuous peace. An entire trove of kinetic energy dammed up, and waiting to burst forth. A powder keg, quivering in anticipation of a spark.

"Ah, ah... no se. Esto huele a trampa."
"Gualo!"

Two men continue to banter back and forth, their voices growing louder and louder not only due to their nearing proximity to Logan as he approaches, but also as their tempers begin to flare. A slurry of Spanish curse words erupt, until they are suddenly cut through by a familiar woman's voice.

"Guys... GUYS!" Domino yells over them, and they both seem to hush up. Presumably, they look at her.

"Listen I've got /no/ idea what the fuck you're saying, but..."

There's the sound of cards being laid on velvet. One at a time. Fwip....

Fwip...

"I do know 'two pair' when I see it. Ah, lo siento -- dos pares?"

...

Silence is interrupted by the sound of something heavy and metal slamming down on a table punctuated with a...

"PUTA!" <-- Though this is tempered somewhat by the sound of throaty belly laughter from the other man, who is presumably far more amused with all of this than the other.

"Hey, c'mon now, big guy... you're not going to be a sore loser, yeah? It's not my fault I'm lucky~."

Logan Howlett has posed:
The bartender gives a nervous look in the direction of the door as this reputable establishment gets its newest, and currently shortest, customer. Sorry Salvador, you've been bumped up. The look of nervousness doesn't appear to be caused by the arrival of Logan himself though, but rather at the prospect of any new arrivals. Still, the bartender plays it relatively cool, as he wipes down a spot at the bar for the cranky-looking tourist.

The floorboards creak a bit more loudly than they should as Logan walks across them. But with all the other noises going on, it's unlikely anyone would pay much attention. Some of the noises are far more interesting than footsteps, certainly.

As he pulls up to the newly wiped down spot, Logan rests a hairy forearm on the bartop, and looks around the bar in a way that would give him plausible deniability if anyone accused him of looking at them directly. The peripheral vision does a lot of work, as he pretends to admire the dimly-lit bar and its shabby decorations.

"Would you like a Budweiser, senor?"

The bartender's eyes keep darting toward the door. He's expecting someone else. Or worried that someone else might stumble upon the place. But his smile is believable enough, and he's already reaching for a bottle of somewhat chilled beer. The King of Beers in fact.

"Yeah sure."

There's no hesitation in Logan's voice as he lays a few pesos out on the bar top and takes the bottle. Although they're wrong about his nationality, they're generally all correct about his preferences. Strictly bottom shelf for this guy. It's the one he can reach the easiest...

"You're a long way from downtown, gringo. Here to meet some girls?"

Half of the beer is already gone before Logan lets out a loud 'BRAAAAP!' Wiping his mouth on the back of his forearm, he looks slyly at the bartender, as if his secret has been revealed.

"Oh... you could say that. Any girls here worth meeting?"

Neena Thurman has posed:
It turns out the sound of mocking belly laughter, when blended with the acoustics of poker chips being scraped across a card table, does not for a de-escalating cocktail make. And neither does little Domino, wiggling on her chair and smiling gleefully as she collects her winnings. Each of these things, in isolation, may have earned themselves a growl or an eyeroll -- but the combination of all three, catalyzed by the sting of humiliation and defeat... well.

What was that about a spark, and a powderkeg?

"No!" shouts the man. Another slam, this time as his elbow plonks down on the table and sends hundreds of dollars worth of poker chips bouncing up and into the air. Domino's big blue eyes widen on her lily white face, and though she tries to pull her arms back to do an 'I surrender' pose, it would seem that Sore Loser has other ideas.

"Vas a ser mi perra, preciosa..."
"What did he say?"
"Ah, es... es not good, hermana. He is very sore loser, no?"

For Logan, of course, much of this conversation is lost. It just blends into the background of whatever is going on upstairs (we know what it is) and the din of the bar. The bartender moves to grab a bottle of Budweiser that expired in 2022 from the ice cooler beneath the bar. Despite it being a twist off, he tucks the cap behind his molar and uses it as leverage to pry it off. The cap is spat unceremoniously onto the floor and the bottle of beer set out in front of Logan.

"Every one is worth meeting, muchacho," he says, with a little brush of his finger over his moustache. His big brown eyes turn up towards the ceiling, where bits of dust are getting fucked from the floorboards that drift lazily down to create hazy little sunbeams in that afternoon light.

"...Though they are busy now, I think. Should not be long. We can bring them down for yo--"

    **POP**

"HEY... what the FUCK!" comes Domino's shout from the basement. There's another scream of pain and then the hustle of heavy boots on the staircase. A heavy-set man in his fifties rounds the corner, his cheeks flushed a little pink and stained red with blood. He doesn't look like he should be moving as fast as he is, but fear has that effect on a person.

"Lelelelelele... rapidooo," he says, attempting to stumble towards the door. The bartender furrows his brow before thumbing his nose with a heavy sigh.

"...Ah. Lime for your cerveza?"

"Me disparaste!"

"/You/ shot you! I didn't shoot you! H-hey wait wait wait!"

        *POP!* *POP!* *POP!*

Logan Howlett has posed:
Gunshots in a backwater bar that Logan happened to be drinking in. Must be Jueves...

As small caliber weapons go *POP!* *POP!* *POP!* nearby, much of the bartender's dialogue gets interrupted. And though Logan has a bit of practice reading lips, that only works when he's not watching a heavy-set man in his fifties running for his life. But as he personally isn't in any imminent danger, he leans forward over the bar, to be better heard by the employee who appears to be working the least right now, judging from the sounds from upstairs.

"Maybe later bub. Let me see that lime though."

The bartender pulls a small tray of lime wedges from off to the side, and looks as if he's about to pluck one from the tray. But they have been sitting out a bit, and have a brownish color to both the peel and the fruit within. Logan doesn't exactly turn his nose up, but he does shake his head in a decidedly negative fashion.

"Nah... I get enough Vitamin C."

The bartender just shrugs, and pushes the little dish of lime wedges back where they came from. Someone will want a Cuba Libre later, and he won't be caught lacking.

As the heavy-set man exits the establishment, Logan finishes off the rest of his beer. He gives the bartender a nod for another, but as the bartender picks up the bottle it explodes in his hand! He starts pretty violently, dropping the now shattered neck onto the floor in front of him. Logan is not paying for that one.

Outside, a vehicle pulls up. Unlike the various surplus jeeps that can be found in this part of Santo Marco City, this vehicle looks fairly new, with a still immaculate paint job. Mercedes isn't a completely uncommon sight in South America, but a G-Class is an attention getting sight virtually anywhere in the world except for Dubai. Men in linen suits get out of the vehicle, as another one pulls up behind them. It's a small group, but based on the cut of their lightweight suits, the jewelry they sport, and the hardware that they carry, these are the sorts of people that probably aren't here to celebrate happy hour at an unnamed bar. At least not the way that most people celebrate it.

The bartender can see the vehicles through the window from his vantage point, and he looks very nervous all of a sudden. The group of men watch as the blood-covered man runs toward his own vehicle, and it looks like they're about to hop back in their vehicles before the oldest among them orders them to instead check the bar.

Pistols are pulled out.

Oh look, a Rohrbaugh.

From inside the bar, Logan doesn't turn to look. He simply sniffs the air, as chaos unfolds around him. And that's when he picks up the scent. Feminine sweat is easy to detect in a place like this. But this aroma is unique. Vanilla, patchouli, and a third thing he can never quite place. And that's just the sweat. Add the smell of leather, gun oil, and industrial grade mascara, and the list shrinks to exactly one.

"You know what? Give me your cheapest bottle of tequila... I'm about to need it."

Neena Thurman has posed:
            *POP!* *POP!* *POP!*

Three shots, and three shots total, ring out from the basement. The eruption of violence causes a vibe shift so profound in the tiny little space, that even the girls upstairs can feel the men on top of them. There's a shriek from one of the rooms, and then two more. Groans of disappointment and protest mixed with high-pitched, muted Spanish panic.

In the basement itself, two of the three bullets bounce off of the concrete floor and spin harmlessly in some corner somewhere. The third, however, takes a much different trajectory. It hits first off of the floor, and then off of a metal cabinet containing an irresponsible amount of cocaine in the corner, and then once more off of some gun safe on the far wall, before it finds its way back through the right nostril of the man who shot it and up into his skull, where it sort of ricochets back and forth for a few more seconds, turning grey matter into soft-scrambled eggs.

And then it does as the other two, and just sort of spins harmlessly on its axis, as he falls face first into the poker chips, body beginning the haunting and horrific display of a death rattle.

"Jesus," Domino says, her hands still pointed up in the air in surrender, as the man's teeth start to gnash -- the last traces of bioelectrical energy causing neurons to fire confusedly. Not all of him realizes he's dead yet, after all. She rises to her feet and delicately lifts the pistol from his hand. A Glock 17, which she quickly slips the magazine from within to inspect the number of bullets remaining...

"Five... six... seven..." Domino murmurs as she begins to walk upstairs. The magazine is slid back into place, and she pulls back on the slide to chamber a round. Hard metal clicks and locks in satisfying lethality -- that trigger humming beneath her finger. It wants to kill.

She whistles as she ascends the staircase. The tune? Some Miles Davis off the album Bitch's Brew, though she can't even remember where it's from.

"Take it!" The bartender says. A bottle of Fortazela Reposado is clunked down in front of logan. The man scrambles now, sprinting towards the kitchen as other patrons hide beneath tables. The girls upstairs continue to scream at their clients, who scream in turn -- insisting that they won't be paying for three quarters of a nut. Domino's eyes turn towards the bar. She's thirsty, all of a sudden, and that's where they land directly on Logan.

"...!" Domino gasps! "You son of a bitch!" she exclaims in the tune of 'it's so good to see you!' There is a pause again. A loading wheel, scrolling proverbially over the top of Domino's head.

"Though if you're here, and I'm here, that means that--"

        *CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK*

Small arms pop. Large arms... make whatever that sound is. They also blow through bar windows and shatter 140 dollars of Reposado tequila.

"WAUGH!" Domino screams back, and then blind fires through that window once.

"AYYY!! DIOS MIO!" comes an answer, as one of the men storming into the place falls over and clutches his center of mass, where a bullet has entered, and then exited somehwere just above his left kidney.

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Grrrrrrr..."

As the only immediate comfort available to him disappears in a shower of glass and liquor, Logan leaps over the bartop to get some cover between himself and the small arms fire that's starting to perforate the bar. It was so close to getting a name, and now the odds are that it never will.

Though he didn't come carrying a piece, Logan isn't ever really disarmed. It's moments like this that really illustrate the limits of his effectiveness. For the adage isn't 'Always bring six knives to a gun fight.' The number of knives doesn't seem to factor into that adage in any way whatsoever.

"No fuckin' way!"

He didn't really need the visual confirmation, having already gotten a good whiff of her, but he looks somewhat incredulous nonetheless. Taking advantage of a brief lull in the fire while someone is reloading, Logan remains low, and moves quickly out from behind the bar, heading toward the door and posting up just to the side of it to avoid getting unnecessarily tagged by the hail of bullets that will mostly likely shred right through the doorway as soon as it opens.

"YOU'RE La Perra Pastosa!? On second thought I probably should have seen that comin'!"

        *CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK*

"Let me guess, you don't have the drugs yet, but you told the boys in Langley that you did?" Though he's having to shout to be heard above the bullets, Logan doesn't seem so much angry as irritated, which is a fair reaction to an irritating turn of events.

A bullet rips through the wall and tags Logan right in the organs. Fortunately, it passes through cleanly, but from the tone in which he shouts "SONOVA...!" it clearly stung quite a bit on its way through. The healing back usually stings worse than the wound itself, so at least he has that to look forward to.

"Fuck this... you can explain later..."

There's an audible metallic 'SNIKT!' of claws exiting their housings in Logan's forearms, and the man quickly gets up from his crouched position with a growl and kicks the door hard enough to not only open it, but to send it flying out into the street leaving its hinges behind, only partially attacked to the door frame still. The sailing door draws some weapons fire from the men outside, which cuts down a bit on the bullets heading directly toward the snarling mutant who is doing his best impersonation of a man on bath salts running with scissors.

It must cause a freezing feeling to sink into the guts of those who hear his feral growl as Logan sprints out of the building with the speed of a man with much longer legs, and much less metal weighing down his skeleton.

"GRAAAAAAR!"

Neena Thurman has posed:
/YOU'RE La Perra Pastosa?!/

"Well, I mean... /technically/ speaking, I'm--"

        *CRACK CRACK CRACK*
        *PWONG... PWING... BWOOOVT~*

Bullets sail by and fill the bar with the sound of shattering glass and splintering wood. Logan dives behind the bar and Domino follows suit. An unluckier woman may have caught a stray bullet in the shoulder or kidney, but the hail of hot metal seems to want to collide with everything /except/ her body. It is truly an... impossible thing to witness. The sheer improbability of it all, happening over, and over, and over again.

When Logan starts to read her her rights, Domino gives a guilty glance over her shoulder. "C'mon, man... you know how I get to yapping when I've been drinking. Especially Tequila. It's my Kryptonit--" Domino starts to say, reaching for a bottle of something brown with a worm floating in it, just when another 5.56mm round smashes through both sides of the bottle and tears it clean out of her hand. There's a squeak of surprise, followed by a whine of dismay, and then Domino is peering that black-painted eye up over the top of the bar. A silence settles, cut only by the faint cut of bootfalls from the approaching assailants. It's in that moment that Logan hops the bar, extends those little Wolverine claws, marches up towards the door and kicks it several feet past. There's a sound of groaning and pain as two of the incoming attackers come face to face with the cold reality of uncaring physics. Force is equal to mass (a door is not light) times acceleration (Logan kicked that thing pretty damn hard). One catches the top of the door to the bridge of the nose. The last thing he hears before the ringing in his ears is the crunch of bone, and the other poor bastard?

Well, he catches a brass fitting to the crotch and doubles over in agony, holding his... ahh... jewels... while rolling back and forth.

Domino pops up as Logan starts to draw fires, squeezing the trigger of her pistol with the her barrel pointed out the window!

    *POP POP POP -CLICK-*

"Shit! I'm empty!" she shouts, and starts to crawl on her hands and knees behind the bar, rifling through the various cabinets and cupboards beneath it in search of a weapon.

"C'monnnn... they always keep a gun under here in the movies..."

Logan Howlett has posed:
From the safety of the bar's interior, it might be a bit unclear exactly what Logan is doing to the bodies that he encounters outside. But between his feral growls, and the agonized screams, there are a bunch of sloshing noises as soft human bodies fall to the ground in much smaller chunks. As organs plop against the dusty dirt road, the rate of gunfire increases rapidly, despite the gradually diminishing number of gunmen. These are exactly the sorts of goons who would give Logan no problem whatsoever, and La Perra Pastosa should probably simply find a safe place to wait out the inevitable slaughter, followed by the equally inevitable complaining when our blood-soaked hero returns from making chorizo out of the locals.

That's the most likely scenario.

The sound of something very hard connecting with a metal-fused skeleton can be heard, dispelling any notion that the most likely scenario is the one that will play out.

One pasty bombshell's good fortune is a hairy Canadian's high-powered gut punch.

The noise that Logan makes as he flies back into the bar through the (closed) window doesn't have a direct translation to human speech. Surprise, bordering on fear, which immediately skips past the parts of his brain that allow him to reasonably assign blame. Whatever it was that sent him flying backward managed to send a three hundred pound man about forty feet through a window and left him struggling to recover the air that was knocked out of his lungs. There are also pieces of plate glass window sticking in his neck and forehead, but that's a problem for Future Logan. All that he manages to get out as footsteps get closer to the bar is a raspy "Your... fault..."

They don't bother stacking up on the door outside, and they don't appear to be the most highly trained of mobs. But as they begin pouring in through the open doorway and the busted out windows, the gunmen display an above average capacity for violence, and an above average aptitude with their chosen firearms.

Oh snap, is that a UMP?

* CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK! *

Yes, it is.

Neena Thurman has posed:
From the safety of the bar's interior, it /is/ a bit unclear the /exact/ specifics on what Logan is doing to the bodies he encounters outside. Though you know... Domino has known Logan for quite some time. And she's a pretty perceptive girl. As she crawls around on her hands and knees, she doesn't need to listen too closely to the sound of sloshing, screaming, tearing, and plopping to make the proper sorts of inferences. "C'mon c'mon c'mon... ayyyy!"

Domino tears a collection of empty glasses out from the front of a small cabinet beneath the bar and retrieves a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and a box of ammunition.

"Hola preciosa," she purrs, and pops up over the bar to slap that box down to her left and pry open the lever-arm of the shotgun to check it for shells. And... as luck would have it... it's already loaded.

    *-SNAP-*

Domino whips that shotgun back into place just as Logan flies back into the bar through the closed window. "JESUS" Domino yells, recoiling to cover her face with her arm, as if some of the blow-back glass from that window might have caught her on its way towards the back of the bar. It doesn't, of course... but that doesn't stop her from covering the money maker anyway.

Domino leeeeans to get a look out the bar at whatever made that awful clanging sound and sent poor Logan flying, but before she can, there are average gunmen with an above-average capacity for violence beginning to pouring through the open doors and windows.

    *CHOOM! CHOOM!*

Buckshot caves the skull in of the first and shatters the sternum of a second, causing both bodies to collapse into a heap that are immediately replaced with two more. Three. Four.

"MY FAULT?! This is /your fault/!" Domino says, popping open the sawed-off, prying out the still-hot shells, and quickly stuffing another two in their place.

"Somehow..."

    *-SNAP-*
    *CHOOM! CHOOM!*

Logan Howlett has posed:
Lying harmlessly on the ground is usually a good way to avoid getting too much attention from gunmen in linen shirts. As they make their way into the bar, Logan is still getting his breath back, having had the wind knocked completely out of him like a mathlete tackled by a defensive lineman. There's an active shooter, holding a shotgun, who has already killed two of their bros. It stands to reason that Domino is by far the bigger target than the man who is just kind of helplessly flailing and bleeding onto the wooden floor.

Regardless, the guy with the UMP shoots Logan nineteen times, and then puts in another clip so that he can shoot him twenty five more.

Maybe he doesn't care that much about as his bros. Maybe he legitimately thinks that Logan is the bigger threat. Or maybe one busty troublemaker's luck is a grumpy badger's severe misfortune. Logan will have plenty of time to philosophize about that later when his organs finish growing back.

The gunmen really should be retreating by now. It makes no sense that they'd continue when they've already lost so many of their own. As with most things involving Domino, there must be more to the story. Logan will have plenty of time to wonder what when his lungs aren't full of blood, and chunks of .45 ACP.

Firing their weapons in a semi-organized fashion, the gunmen seem to think that they've got this on lock now that the guy who ran around slicing them all willy-nilly is smeared all over the floor. Sure, they've lost quite a few of their bros, but that generally means that their share is going to be larger. Unless they're getting paid an hourly rate, in which case they should really renegotiate the terms of their goonish employment. Or at least demand hazard pay.

But there is one member of the group who doesn't seem to have come strapped. Or at least he isn't carrying a gun. Not even a 9mm. He is, however, wearing a cream-colored suit made out of that material that only rich guys know how to pronounce, with the collar to his shirt thrown open from the top three buttons being left unfastened so that he might blast not only his chest hair, but also his very impressive golden chain.

His hand is covered in blood, obscuring the gemstone that would otherwise be flashing from his pinky ring. It's not easy to tell blood types from such a distance away, but given that Logan is the one missing the most blood, there are better than average odds that it used to belong to him.

Stepping over the window's ledge, he makes his way across the wooden floor in an unbothered fashion in his sockless loafers that expose quite a bit of ankle.

He's probably here for something nice.

"Bring her to me!"

Turns out that was a terrible guess.

Neena Thurman has posed:
The nice thing about a sawed-off-shotgun in a narrow space is you don't really have to aim it. You just sort of... point and click, really. And that's what Domino does. She points. She clicks. She points. She clicks. But it's rapidly becoming apparent that this whole two-shells and then reload thing is not the most efficient way to dispatch what seems to be an endless supply of cabrones.

"Fuck fuck fuck..." she stammers, snapping open the shotgun and fumbling to try and grab another couple of shells from the box. It's in the midst of that fumbling that she sees that UMP get leveled towards Logan on the ground. Her pupils dilate. Her blood vessels open. Adrenaline saturates every neuron. She moves faster than she ever should move, and with more precision than she ever should have.

But it's not enough.

Nineteen bullets are dumped into Logan in the time it takes her to stuff one of those shells into the shotgun. And by the time she gets the second, and snaps it back into place? Another 20. She doesn't speak. She doesn't scream.

Domino points, and clicks, and the damage is done.

"Logan! Logan?!" she finally blurts out, having spent both shells on a single asshole in an abundance of caution. But in doing so means that, when White Suit Pinky Ring steps through the window, Domino is out of ammunition. She reaches for the box and ducks behind the bar. When she reaches into the box, she pulls out two extra shells that feel a little heavier than the last. And, upon inspection, these are slugs, rather than buck-shot. Loaded for bear. She slides them into place and snaps the sawed-off barrel back into place as her mind begins to race.

Some part of Domino has to hear the man's order. But like a cornered animal, there is no reason left in the grey matter between her ears. There are no witty quips, or coherent thought. Just the sound of her heart beating in her chest, and the smell of blood in the air.

Savage instinct.

When the sound of footfalls heads her way, Domino pops up. A loud, skull-splitting boom shakes the walls of the cantina as she looses the first slug. Heavy metal punches through one body and into another, and then she fires off the second shot. And there's a sad bit of tragedy to the fact that she doesn't look at the four men she's just killed -- but rather the man in the white suit with the pinky ring. Four more men replace them, the first of which receives the full weight of the shotgun being hurled at his face from across the bar. The next three leap over the bar, and the ensuing melee results in two broken bottles of Pacifico as well as a single broken jaw. In the end, however, it's Domino's face that is on the receiving end of a cash register. The only lucky thing about that is that she somehow doesn't manage to break her nose.

Blood splats over the keys and she gives a low groan of pain, before she's dragged by her hair up over the bar and thrown to the feet of Pinky Ring.

Domino shrinks inwards in pain, and then stretches outwards, beginning to fade in and out of consciousness as her pale blue eyes turn up towards Logan on the floor.

"Your..." Domino wheezes.

"Fault..."

The world turns black when the toe of sockless loafers closes the gap between it and her forehead, the force of the kick causing her to flump unceremoniously onto her back, unconscious.

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Search the building. Find the drugs. Kill everyone."

The man in the cream-colored suit frowns behind his goatee as he realizes that his very expensive loafers now have a bit of Domino blood on them. It'll be very difficult to replace those shoes in Santo Marco, but he doesn't have the attitude of someone who is planning to stay in the country for very much longer. As he pulls back the sleeve of his lightweight suit jacket to look at his watch, he notes that it's still five minutes before 4 PM, though the watch face has one of those dials that's more for the display of gems than the display of easily-readable digits.

From behind him, a couple of men look at each other with very concerned expressions. With only three of them left, it will be a bit difficult to really carry out their boss's instructions with the sort of speed and efficiency that he's probably grown to expect from a squad of over twenty. But they move in a motivated fashion nonetheless, propelled onward by a fear so intense that fighting two notorious psychopaths seemed like the less dangerous option.

Notorious psychopaths is a bit strong. Relatively well-known causers of bodily harm.

There isn't much stirring over from Logan's corner of the bar, as he's blissfully unaware of what would no doubt be an especially excruciating period of healing. The goons leave him alone for now, as they begin to do just as their boss ordered. There are yet more screams, and yet more gunshots, as anyone who hadn't managed to get away from the bar with no name is removed from the list of potential witnesses. The Santo Marco police will have their work cut out for them figuring out this bloodbath, and why nothing at all seems to have been stolen from the building. They'll probably come to the conclusion that it's gang-related activity. And they'll be right.

"Such a shame you couldn't make the wedding, Beatrice. But making off with the gifts? Tsk tsk... that's simply tacky."

Wiping off his hand with a somewhat clean bar towel, the man with the dark hair and the prominent eyebrows keeps an eye on the two mutants through the lens of the monocle that may or may not be a mere affectation. There are no more screams, but there are plenty of sounds of rummaging as his goons quickly trash the place. Until...

"We found it, Boss!"

The goons return, carrying an attache case that doesn't look like it was purchased anywhere near this part of town. Opening it on the bar top for their boss's inspection, the men look nervous as the thought occurs that this might not be what they were looking for.

But judging by the expression on the man's face as the greenish reflection from inside the case hits his monocle, they've hit pay dirt.

"Excellent work. Now secure these two ruffians and let's be off. The jet is due to leave at 4:30."

The goons look like they'd rather be doing just about anything else. But they comply to the best of their abilities.

"Sure thing, Boss."

Striding toward the open (missing) door, the mysterious man pauses and looks back over his shoulder. His face is stern, and aged, but there is still a hint of humor behind his eyes as he takes on a chiding tone.

"Now now... is that any way to speak to a Count?"