all_is_truth | Big Red Monkies from Space

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Big Red Monkies from Space

Who: Hellboy, a traffic sign, and anyone else

What: A newby getting the lay of the land from inanimate objects

When: Arrival

There was a trail leading straight to the scene. An impact crater that had cracked the road, a dented vehicle, and debris from the road and said vehicle all in a line showing the course of crash landing the guy in the trenchcoat took when he fell out of the sky and landed in the City.

At the end of the trail there was a dented wall where the crashlander finally came to a stop. And if one were to follow the broken bits of plaster and cinder block a short ways, there was the guy, wearing a trenchcoat. He was big, built, and also very, very Red.

He was also kind of very pissed, at a traffic crosswalk signal. You could tell by all the arguing.

"What do ya mean I gotta get a job?! I have a job and I gotta get back to it."

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"It means it won't recognize your right to food and the like without a job and so far there's no way home," Babs summed up, wheeling forward carefully through the debris trail.

That was going to be fun to clean. "I'd sugar coat it but you don't look like you'd appreciate that."

Red tilted his head in the woman's direction, not quite ready to break off his argument yet. He hadn't even slugged the sign yet.

Still, she seemed to know a thing or two and so finally he turned to face her.

"I'd appreciate knowing what the heck is going on here. This isn't Jersey." It didn't smell bad enough to be Jersey.

"No, this is a city that I'm pretty sure is floating in space," she admitted, putting on the brake, closing the small laptop in her lap, and looking him over. "And the stop sign isn't sentient. The city is and tends to get pissy when things are broken which is probably why it started chattering at you."

As for what was going on, well, "The city took people, probably because it was lonely, and it is crazy. It wants to have a populace again and isn't giving us up."

"Floating in space. And sentient." He nodded, clearly believing her (in that way where he wasn't). "Right."

He looked around, the emptiness of the place feeling kind of eerie. Hellboy was a fan of cities, and always wanted to stroll down the street through one. This was kind of ruining that dream for him.

"Look, someone's gotta be in charge. Point me towards them so I can beat some answers and a bus ticket out of 'em."

"The city is an incredibly advanced and powerful AI that has spent the past several, oh, probably centuries alone and degrading. It's alive, it's insane. Have fun with trying to punch that." Just saying.

"Come at me and I'll clean your clock, but then I've only been 'employed' as the technician in charge of helping to fix the crazy city so there's that. I just don't like threats of punching."

"Always hated computers," he grumbled.

He was offended at the thought she suggested, and he turned to face her fully, straightening up to full, broad height in indignation.

"Hey," he said, pointing a stone finger at her. "I didn't say I was going to punch you, lady. Wheelchair or not I would never slug a girl. Unless of course you were a vampiress or mermaid or something." It happened, sometimes.

"I just don't like this whole 'you're stuck here, now get a job' thing. What am I supposed to do?"

"Nominally in some things people could see me as in charge. You wanted to punch someone in charge, ergo, I'm a little grumpy at the idea." Why not after all? "And don't let the chair fool you." Anyway, yes, moving on.

"For now? You're stuck here. Get a job. Do something you've only dreamed of, open a flower shop, whatever, the city doesn't seem to be picky about what you do as long as you're employed and it can keep track of fake money for you." And yes that irked her too. A great deal.

"On the plus side you can punch that." Something slimy and large was coming around the corner down the street. Awesome huh? "It doesn't always manage 'people' when it reaches out to nab a new citizen."

He listened, not impressed with her logic and so he was going to ignore it. Focusing instead on the idea of a flower shop.

"What if I wanna open a bar that serves pizza and has craps tables in the back?"

He turned his head, eying the slimy thing, then shrugged. "I guess that'll work."

Cracking his neck, he stalked off in the direction of the creature, hauling back to crack it on his approach.

"Then I'd say tell it now before it decides to land you with a job based on the first thing you do," she offered simply. "That and talk to the cop, she'd probably have some good ideas about how to make gambling work in a world where there's so few people." Chrome seemed the type, go figure.

"CURRENTLY HE'S MY ADJUNCT PUNCHING THE THING IS NOT HIS JOB."

"Citizen Hellboy will draw Consultant pay for tasks set by the Technician today.!" The city chirped.

"Thank you."

Apparently the big slimy thing? Was just the foot of a very large (read a story tall) slug coming around the corner. Fun.

"On second thought, nah. I think I'd rather be an astronaut," he mused, looking up, and up at the... slug?

"Damn."

He's always hated slugs, boogery little things.

"Hey lady, I'm gonna need a reeaally big salt shaker. Or that crap they dump on the road for ice."

And a dry cleaner, he was definitely going to need a dry cleaner after this because his first punch, done by a run and a high leap, came away with gobs of ick.

"YECHH!"

"Oddly enough I don't think this place gets enough actual weather to need road salt," she admitted, pulling open her laptop again. "Buuuut I can probably adjust the saline content of the fire hose nearby." It just took some hard cracking because the city didn't like changing settings.

At all.

"At least the cleaners work. In that 'leaving stuff at an abandoned building and coming back later to pick it up and it's clean' way. There. Hose, South wall there."

While she worked Red his thing, slugging it out with the giant bug. The only problem was, the slug didn't seem to be phased much by all of the punching.

He was jabbing the thing in the eye stock with a street lamp when the woman gave instructions.

Turning his head, Red spotted the hose. Swinging the lamp post around and bringing it down hard, he knocked the whole hose assembly off of the wall, smashing open the spigot and releasing a torrent of water at the slug.

The result was... not pretty.

"So what's a gig like this pay, anyways?" he asked, sloughing slug goo off of his shoulders as he walked back over to her.

"Toady, a consulting fee as I've convinced the city you're working under my order for today," she shrugged. "What that is no one knows, the city is disinclined to give me details on minimum wage, much less what wages we currently 'earn'." she snorted softly, watching the slug slime wash off the street under the continual pouring of water.

"Enough to feed and cloth and clean you and the like. Housing the city will be happy to negotiate, often, and loudly, as you go walking along the streets," and it was annoying, yes.

"The police force doubles as monster hunter these days, but I"m sure we could swing other jobs into that area as well. Animal Control for instance."

"Yeah, well I eat a lot so this place better be ready to start me off in a higher pay grade." He nodded.

He tilted his head at her the rest of her words catching up to him. "Housing? I get a house? Or, y'know, apartment whatever. I get my own place?"

That... was a novelty.

"Pass on those two options. What other jobs you got?"

"Yeah, well, so far no one has starved here that I'm aware of?" she snorted easily. "And yes, unless you were intending to camp." Because maybe that was his preference? Who knew? "Look around, this city is empty. Pick a job, any job, and you can likely have it. I'm not a career counselor Red, I'm just the first girl on scene today."

"Good." He nodded, satisfied to hear that.

"I wasn't intending anything but to march back and slug the sea lizard I was fighting with in the kisser for knocking me through the air, but then I ended up here," he replied. She sounded annoyed, or maybe that was him, but either way he decided going through her was a bother for them both.

"Forget it, I'll figure it out myself." With that he turned and had a look around. And... yeah, he had nothing.

Setting hands on his hips he waited for inspiration to strike, or maybe some other critter to come along to distract himself with; pointedly keeping his back to her.

"Suit yourself," she noted, wheeling forward and past him to eye the water hose fixture he'd smashed. A bit of tweaking and a good long conversation with the wall and the water trickled to a stop then the hole sealed over. One more thing handled. And back to why she'd been headed in this direction in the first place, the City was whining about a blocked sensor array, tracking down the glitch was...fun. And it had probably been caused by the slug.

He gave her a nod, showing that this did suit him and he walked off making quite the show of examining his new surroundings and ignoring her.

Funny how the path that 'suited him' was a meandering course that coincidentally followed hers.

It just so happened that there were store windows to look into, and paper machines to talk to and such along this way, that's all.

She'd been followed by far better than him, honestly, and had a lot more experience in simply ignoring people who weren't being useful or at least engaging. What was he, a teenager? If so, well, at least he was sugar high or something. Ha, sensor array was behind a slimed wall. That was more like it.

When she stopped Red turned a corner, leaving her to her work.

It wasn't long after, though, before he was back and standing right behind her chair, chewing on a Baby Ruth he'd pulled from his pocket and watching her.

"So what's a Technician do, anyway? Cable repair?"

"You are in the way," she noted simply. "Step to the left and four paces back please." Granted, she was saying this half in a wall, so what he could be in the way of wasn't exactly clear. Proooobably distance sensor range testing. "Everything. I'm the most qualified tech person you'll ever meet."

Red looked down at the spot he was standing in, then shuffled back as instructed.

Leaning over so he could keep watching her he asked, "Does that mean you can transfer CDs to 8-track?"

"It's a waste of space but yes, so could you if you bothered," she noted. What? She was nothing if not honest.

"And assuming you actually were packing any in your pockets when you got shuffled here."

Hmmm, the sensors were now reading Hellboy's body temp as -4 Celsius. Time to fix that.

"Hey, space is worth it for the quality of music," he informed her.

He didn't have any on him, though, so there went that idea.

"Forget that idea. What would it take to build a hovercraft?"

"Actually Martian sound systems are better than either format you listed," she noted absently, tweaking a few things before leaning back in her chair and looking up, "RUN DIAGNOSTIC!"

"Pending!"

"And extreme amount of boredom on my part when there's so many more interesting things to do."

"Why is it the people with the no how never do anything smart with it?" he sighed, turning and resting his back up against the wall, arms folded across his broad chest.

Smart probably wasn't the word he meant, but he used it anyways.

"So a hovercraft science project to wander around an abandoned city is 'smarter' than trying to drag the giant AI that's in control of our lives from this point forward back to sanity? May want to rethink that monkey." Just saying.

"Century Square temperature controls are functioning within proper limits. New Arrival Hellboy still reads as higher than standard temperatures, this may be biological on his part, you read as nominal"

"Good, the giant slug can go to organic reprocessing."

"I am reading no citizen Slug."

"That's because it's a dead monster, not alive now." She reached up to massage her temple, bemused. "New order, remove the mess from the street."

"...that is a large mess. Pending."

Chrome showed up in time, sent by the city. The tiny girl stared around at the destruction, and then at Hellboy. Well. More of a glare at Hellboy, "Did you do all this?" she asked in a tone of deep disgust.

It was a great way to hide deep uneasiness at trying to possibly potentially arrest...Hellboy.

"I didn't-- " he barked, turning around and stopping to search for the source of the accusation, finding it by looking down.

Seeing that it was a tiny girl he reined back some of the hostility. "I didn't do nothin'. Not on purpose." He refused to take blame for crash landings.

"Double negative." she pointed out, "I didn't do nothing is I did not do nothing is I did something.. What happened here?" then, after a pause, "I am the police."

Red eyed the girl up and down, then shook his head.

"You're not a cop."

"City, please inform this person what my paid job is." she said with a small sigh.

"Officer Kuromu is employed as a police officer. Currently she is the only officer on staff."

"Professionally I'm an assassin." Chrome offered with a sweet, innocent smile, "That's not considered employment by the city, however."

Skeptical Red was skeptical, even with the City vouching for the kid.

"Right. Well that it was like that as I got here, so not my fault."

"The city is insane." Chrome told that dubious expression, "I killed a T-rex," pause to see if he knew what one was or if he looked blank, "and it dropped a badge on me. While I'm not entirely certain I believe you, I am choosing to take you at your word because trying to arrest you would be difficult." she was pretty sure she could do it, but equally certain she'd end up with Khemrys disapproving at her.

"T-rex the dinosaur?" he asked, his skepticism showing again.

"Yeah, don't do that," Try to arrest him, that was. "Just gimma clue about what's going on here."

"Giant red men with cut-off horns and long tails should not cast aspersions regarding reports on the other creatures in a high-tech city with an insane artificial intelligence." said the tiny assassin, "I took some of it's teeth home with me. With proper carving they make excellent weapon holders."

Then she shrugged, "I don't know. This is the second time I've been yanked away from a world. I don't know why we're here, what we're here for, or most importantly how to get home." The word home was said with the kind of longing that POWs used when talking about it. She needed so much therapy. So much therapy, "Be careful what you do 'cause the city will give you a job based on what you do." she then mumbled something to the effect of should have set up a loom first with a sigh. Not that she minded killing things, not at all, just that she was regularly run ragged trying to keep up.

Red stared at her a moment, trying to put that sentence together in his head. "Whut?"

He shook his head, because really he didn't care. The important part was, "I can't get home?"

"You exist, why wouldn't a T-rex?" she translated for him.

"You might be able to. I don't know how to." that was...mildly miserable. She then shook herself back to her usual calm cheer, pissed at herself for letting the emotion show.

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Big Red Monkies from Space

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