3189/Mr. Venom's Wild Ride

Mr. Venom's Wild Ride
Date of Scene:	01 September 2020
Location:	Upper West Side
Synopsis:	Venom and a careening carriage cross Cecily's path. Muggers are eaten.
Cast of Characters:	Eddie Brock, Cecily Winters

---

Eddie Brock has posed:
You know how they have those old-fashioned carriages that go around the nice neighborhoods in New York City? Tourist stuff, really, cheap romance for people nostalgic for a time that was mostly only real in movies. Still, it's a good little racket and a gentle entertainment for people who can't handle anything more exciting.

Until, of course, tonight when someone who, frankly, had pissed Eddie off. Said person had fled, bizzarely, into a carriage only to have it take off. Venom had made a massive leap and landed on top, slobber trailing from his massive maw as the man inside shoots at the horses feet to try and make them go faster.

"WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOUR TESTICLES FOR THIS!" the windblown symbiote shouts as the carriage, drawn by maddened horses in fear of both gun and monster, drag the carriage through late night traffic.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    It really is a nice, normal summer evening. A bit warm, but what can one do? Cecily is finding her way out of the deli, having stuck around and finished a sandwich. As she opens a bottle of iced tea, she pauses, ears picking up some sounds over the traffic. Gunshots. Wild shouting? She squints down the street, and frowns, seeing the... sudden chaos being dragged along at breakneck speed. "...oh hells..." she sighs, taking a long, long drink of her tea, as if wishing it were alcohol, and dropping the half-full bottle into a nearby bin.

    "Always something, something, something, isn't it..." she's ahead of the carriage, to be sure, but she won't outpace it on her own, and starts to run down the sidewalk, and then into the street. Amidst honking horns and screeching brakes, she leaps onto the roof of one car, then the other, setting her own bounding pace in the hopes of getting on the carriage, or the horses, or... anything, really. At the least she's in smart shoes and her skirt is good enough for agile work.

    The professional fox mutters something about New York night life, and this not being exactly what she'd meant, or wanted, when she mentally was pondering some excitement for the evening.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock slashes down at the top of the carriage, talons forming of symbiote stuff and tearing through the old-fashioned wood. Of course, it's just a cheap simulacrum and soon enough there's a hole in the roof through which Eddie peers. His prey has his gun turned now towards the couple in the carriage, shaking them down for wallets and jewelry until he suddenly sees the monstrous maw above him, a pythonic tongue dangling down low enough to flick at his face.

"WE ARE GOING TO DRIVE OUR TONGUE THROUGH YOUR GUTS AND GNAW ON YOUR SPLEEN UNTIL IT BURSTS IN OUR MOUTH LIKE AN OVERRIPE GRAPE!" it snarls, drawing a cacophany of screams from inside as Cecily catches up with the vehicle.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    No, it's always some damn thing. She at least has a full belly, and it was such a good sandwich. One more -thud- of shoes on a car roof, an angry shout, and she's leaping for the runaway carriage. Now the guy inside has to deal with two crazies clinging to it. Venom on the roof and Cecily on the side, feet catching on the step near the door, hands gripping the boarding railing. Her tails wrap around her waist, avoiding the spinning wheels behind her. That weould hurt. A lot.

    "How about we stop this bloody thing and talk about our feelings?" she shouts, though the deadpan expression makes it obvious she's only half joking. After all, there's a nightmare creature shouting vulgar obscenities on the roof, and a man with a gun shaking down the poor guests. The fox isn't even sure who's in the wrong here, though she does sigh, ears flat, and gazes towards the horses. Maybe she can at least disconnect the thing.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Venom turns its head towards the foxy one, lips peeling back from its jagged shards of needle teeth, "WE DO NOT NEED YOUR HELP. UNLESS YOU BROUGHT A NAPKIN. WE TEND TO BE MESSY EATERS," Venom gurgles in his gutteral voice. Powerful hands rip further at the rooftop, tearing more and more plank free as he straddles the roof, massive frame rippling with power and ferocity.

The robber panics and tries to shoot up at Venom, the bullets impacting the liquid-black surface of the symbiote and sending nary a ripple as the panicked couple, an insurance salesman and his very terrified wife, screaming at Cecily, "Help us oh god oh god please we never should have left Iowa!!!"

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Cecily earflats, just staring. She's clinging to the outside of a rampaging carriage, and is fairly surprised it hasn't smashed into a lamppost or something just yet. It's a good thing her ears went flat, as the proximity of that gunfire would be deafening otherwise. "Just give me a moment, hold on you two. You! Up there! Don't eat the civilians." She indicates the terrified couple. The man with the gun? She couldn't care less. She's interested in protecting the innocents.

    In fact, she shows Venom that she trusts him enough NOT to eat the pair that she hauls herself forward to the driver's seat, trying to grasp at the reins, seeing if she has to cut the horses loose, or she can get them under control. With the terrorbeast with those teeth and claws so close behind them, though, the latter isn't likely. She's going to at least try. "Sometimes I wonder why I quit my day job..." she muses to herself, expression flat.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock cocks its head, "BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH MORE FUN!" Venom shouts. Surprisingly enough, it does as she asks, out of both a sense of curiosity regarding what she plans and because some lingering part of their memory recalls the woman at the coffee shop not so long ago, a chance encounter that was nonetheless mostly pleasant. At least for them.

"WE WILL NOT EAT THE IOWA PEOPLE. THEY SMELL LIKE POTATOES. WE ONLY WANT THE JUICY GUNMAN AND HIS TASTY ENTRAILS TO SPLATTER ALONG THE ROAD BEHIND US."

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Just because most New Yorkers are traumatized or jaded by now doesn't mean they want entrails scattered across their streets. Cecily sighs, ears still flat, and turns her head. She seems about to say something, but pauses, thinks about it, and then says it. "...if you scatter his tasty entrails then you don't get to eat them. They'll become road pizza." Yes, she said it. She feels her facial muscles twinge, a little bit of a slightly sick feeling rising up in her throat. But she said it. And then turns back to the horses.

    "I mean some people can't eat potatoes.. so.." she latches on to something more sane, and resolves to try and take control of the horses. Her grasp on the reins is held in one hand, and she pulls, tugging hard, trying to veer the carriage towards a less populous street. Her other hand? It lights on fire. Hot, ghostly blue-white flame, and she projects it forward, in the opposite direction she's trying to get the horses to go. Nothing like a burning incentive. Maybe she can get the horses down a dead-end alley or something!

Eddie Brock has posed:
The horses do obey, although quite erratically, the fire making sure they leave a trail of their own on the road behind them as they careen around the bend and out of the main thoroughfare of traffic. Venom manages to hold their place on the roof, gripping tightly. "WE TIRE OF THIS GAME,' the monster says and a tendril of inky black lashes out from it and slashes through the harness, freeing the horses even as the carriage starts to slow and lose control, bouncing a bit off the more narrow walls of the alley into which they've turned.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    The woman at the reins holds on tight as the carriage careens around a corner, glad for narrowly avoiding a lamppost and then the horses are cut free, left to run off into the night. She'll have to put in a call to animal control later. "Better than smashing head-on into a truck!" Cecily snaps up at Venom, growling quite impressively. Must be the fox in her. As they begin to slow, though, she hauls herself back over to the door, to yank it open and at least let the terrified couple out--and hopefully avoid traumatizing them further when Venom decides it's finally time to feast.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock watches the couple leave, the pair scurrying rapidly down the road with their luggage in hand. The punk jumps out, too, trying to squirt past Cecily to scram along with them. "It ain't my fault, that thing's crazy, don't let it eat me, lady, seriously," he cries. He's obviously wet himself as Venom balances easily in a squat on the edge of the roof, peering down.

"WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE A BITE? YOU HAVE SOMETHING OF THE PREDATOR IN YOU, TOO, WE THINK."

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Cecily pinches the bridge of her nose, ears laying flat once more. "...I mean you didn't shoot at -me-..." she says quietly, then looks between the two. The monster and the terrified man. "...what happened? You hijacked a park carriage. Drove it recklessly through traffic. Risked collatoral damage and injuring others by firing at the road. You could have hit a kid with a ricochet. To top it off, you mugged a couple of tourists..." she lists off the man's sins, at least the ones she'd observed in the last ten minutes.

    "I already ate, thank you," she responds to Venom. "...that said, what'd he do to you, specifically?" she asks, her own grey morality waffling one way or another. Of course, as she speaks, she draws her own handgun, pointing it at the punk, in case he does try to run. "You made me ditch half a bottle of tea."

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock leaps down, going over the top of the pair and landing on the other side, still crouched a bit in something of a gorilla style pose. "HE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO ME SPECIFICALLY. HE WAS JUST SCUM. FAIR GAME. FREE RANGE," Venom says with that massive, toothy grin. "WE WOULD DO THE WORLD A FAVOR TO SWALLOW HIS MEAT."

Yes, he's aware of how that sounds, no, they don't care.

The guy squirms and tries to get Cecily between him and Venom, "Please, lady, I didn't do nothin', I swears, okay, the gun is just for self-defense, y'know?"

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Still pinching. Still that nosebridge. Her face twitches. She's also well aware that she's being used as a human shield now. Those teeth make her cringe just slightly, but not nearly as much as the man's excuses.

    "Yes, self defense involves stealing a carriage and attempting to mug two innocent people at gunpoint. Look, tall dark and inky... I'll tell the cops you ate him and ran off before I could intervene... or whatever... Tomorrow is Taco Tuesday, and I have a feeling that if I don't let you eat him, you'll eat ME instead. And I've got shit to do..."

    So with that, she turns towards the exit to the alley and starts walking, those tails waving behind her. "I can hear the sirens already, that was a hell of a spectacle," she grunts. "...you might be able to get a shot off on -one- of us before your head gets snapped off. But I have the feeling both of us are some degree of bulletproof..."

    She's not. But she's also not the one making threats.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Venom cocks their head in surprise at Cecily. Honestly, the heroic types usually play a little more 'everyone lives' with him, so to see one hand over the meat is something of a refreshing excercise. "THIS WON'T TAKE LONG," Venom calls out after her.

The man backs off, "Nononononononono," and Cecily will hear a gunshot just as she turns the corner, followed by a horrible, rending snap and horrifying sounds of flesh ripping and tearing, bones snapping as the body of the mugger is being stuffed down into the gibbering maw of the symbiote.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Less scum on the street. Less chance of a shifty lawyer getting another down payment on a Lexus. If Cecily were on her own, alone, she'd have taken him and handed him over to the police. But she's also quite sure she doesn't want to make an enemy of a creature like that. She isn't sure who or what Venom is, but she's not about to test if she can come back from being dismembered and devoured. It's not worth the risk. Besides. One less criminal to deal with.

    Her ears, again, go flat, and she waits around the corner. There's a wince, those are some grotesque sounds, but she didn't feel a bullet in her back. Good. No getting tacos delivered tomorrow. It's Central Park for her. Thinking about food as a man is being devoured just yards away, it sends a shiver up her spine. She really is jaded. She lets out a shuddering sigh, shaking her head. "...scary things stalk New York... a wonder this one was up on the surface..."

Eddie Brock has posed:
A couple of blocks away, a man emerges from the shadows. Handsome, dressed in a tight-fit black t-shirt and jeans, his body obviously muscular and his face a bit scruffy. It might take Cecily a moment to remember the man she met at the coffee shop a couple of weeks ago, although he certainly made an impression.

Then he looks up and his eyes are momentarily black as night, "THANK YOU FOR YOUR KINDNESS. WE APPRECIATE THE...UNDERSTANDING," he says in the same voice as the monster she'd just seen, before the darkness recedes back into him again.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Cecily does start walking. She didn't leave any real evidence, aside from fingerprints. If she gets a call, she'll keep her promise, of course. She seems surprised as the scruffy man emerges in front of her, and she slows down. Then the spark of recognition comes across her features. "Eddie?" she asks, having to jog her memory for a moment.

    Then her head tilts slowly, as the voice comes, the blackness. She remembers some hints of that from the coffee shop, and the things she'd said. "..we've all got something.." she repeats from back then, and she shakes her head.

    "...he was a jackass, probably worse than a mugger even. Some days you just stop caring in situations like that... I was just glad enough to get the rampaging coach off of the streets before someone else got hurt.." she explains softly. "...and you looked hungry.." she gives a sideways smile.

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock manages a more natural, human looking smile, "We were," he says. "We understand that our way isn't...always easy for people to digest. Pun intended. But we have appetites and there are much worse ways we could be fulfilling them."

Of course, Eddie always deals with those urges. That aching need to destroy, to devour, to hate. Hate feels so damn good, after all.

<BUT I DON'T HATE THIS ONE, EDDIE.>
-Good. We can't eat everybody.-
<SOMETIMES IT IS FUN TO TRY.>

"It does leave me feeling a little more...human."

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Cecily nods, "With enough time you might end up cleaning the streets of bad apples completely... just take care not to devour everything, or you'll have to start eating good people... and then we'll have problems..." she says, her gentle smile turning a little apologetic.

    Then she frowns at the last statement, reaching out to rest a hand on Eddie's shoulder. "...people like us are more than human... it took me a while to get used to it, but I embrace what makes me ... different. Special. It might be hard for others to understand or even accept, but strive to be the best you that you can be. Don't strive to be human..." she sighs, looking down at her tails.

    "We're beyond that, and we'll never be able to go back."

Eddie Brock has posed:
Eddie Brock nods, "We were always very...unhappy as a human. Torn, lost...angry. We still are, sometimes, but becoming what we have become...it has changed things for the better," he says.

"As long as the good people leave us alone in return. We have no problems devouring angry mobs wielding pitchforks," he says, moving to walk alongside his new...friend? He doesn't have many of those.

Cecily Winters has posed:
    Cecily does start to walk, a steady pace but not in any sort of attempt to get away from Eddie. She could dash off if she really wanted. "Yeah, well... we both provide civili services in our own way. I guess it's easier to accept a gun-toting fox woman though. But you seem like you may have better luck getting to the root of some things, places most people avoid or ignore.." she tsks softly.

    The fox shakes her head, reaching into an inner vest pocket to pull out one of her business cards. Black. With a stylized outline of a fox. And nothing more than a phone number. That's it.

    "Coffee shop? I wasn't joking when I said I had to toss half a bottle of tea."