2018-07-07: The Consequences of a Bad Decision
- Log: The Consequences of a Bad Decision
- Cast: Loren Voss, Margaret, Tabitha deVriese
- Where: Pendrago - Port District
- Date: July 7th 2018
- Summary: Loren awakes, hungover and in jail after the events of the previous evening. Unfortunately for him, he's due for an interrogation from Margaret -- but fortunately, he hasn't been left to his own devices, either. A pitched fight between Margaret and Tabitha ensues with Loren's immediate fate hanging in the balance.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It was perhaps not the best decision-making ever made by Loren Voss in his life. Or, to be more accurate, string of decision-making. Deciding to drink with a man of dubious moral character: bad. Drinking with Lily Keil also: worse. Getting in a barfight: worse yet. Taking that fight to the commander of the Guard: even worse than that. Insulting said commander: ...bad.
There's a reason his current place of residence is a jailcell.
It's at some point long long after he's tossed into the cell to sober up that the thin tendrils of dawn start to make their way through the small high barred window in the wall, provoking the young man to stir on the cot.
...It feels like someone packed his head with cotton, then left him out on the street all night. And that's before he tries to get up and the headache really gets going.
He utters, just under his breath, a Solarian oath as he levers himself up and leans (or more accurately slumps) against the wall.
Unfortunately, he can also remember exactly what he did last night.
...Why did I think any of that was a good idea?
Before another thought occurs to him and he closes his eyes tight as if in agony.
Command is going to murder him for this when he gets back. Or maybe he'll just get lucky and die in jail first. If only.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
"WELL WELL WELL," comes a flat voice.
Death may come sooner than expected.
MARGARET, THE BLACK PEARL OF NEO-VANE has appeared, probably from Hell, in front of Loren's jail cell. She was not immediately apparent for several reasons, one of which is that she has the soft and silent walk of the elves and also because the ventilation in here is surprisingly non-garbage so the plume of cherry-ish smoke from her pipe was being drawn away from Loren. Now, though, she's come up to the bars.
"So, Thomas," says Margaret, as she looks inwards - and she is wearing some kind of purple silk THING with a neckline that plunges halfway to Aquvy and literal thread keeping it together, as well as bare shoulders and half-length gloves - "I'm given to understand that you've had a little bit of a TIME of it. To be honest I never expected to hear of you again, but there I was, happily hobnobbing with my co-religionists, and when lo and behold I heard that someone who matched your description was here."
"Surely," Margaret says, "I said to myself, Surely: Surely this is not the SAME Thomas I knew and was able to briefly speak with on the realm of Filgaia, oh so long ago. Surely this is just some grand coincidence. But here we are and I see you, lurching around and probably having your liver and lights scream in protest at you."
Her voice grows gentler. "Can you rise? I'll pass you a carafe of water but I need to make something clear to you first, which is that I hold literally every card in this particular game of Idiot's Poker. If you get cute or smart with a piece of crockery I will eat your most important bits in front of you - but if you act like a gentleman, then I think this will go quite painlessly indeed."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Oh no.
He knows that voice.
No, this isn't really happening. Not right now.
Unfortunately, as much as Loren looks like he's attempting to merge physically with the wall he's leaning against, there are certain aspects of reality that cannot be denied or escaped from once they are underway. A groan escapes his lips, though whether it's from mental or physical pain is arguable.
Only once it becomes impossible to attempt to tune her out -- with the headache he has it sure is impossible -- does he halfway open his eyes to stare over at her with the exact expression someone might make at their executioner.
"Why... are you here," he says more than asks, because he can halfway guess at the 'why' already.
She has water, she says.
His mouth and throat also feel like they've done a trip on the cottonball express train. Briefly, briefly, he contemplates just using ether, but...
He lurches to his feet, one hand to his head as he staggers over to the door to his cell.
...but right now he's not sure he could even manage to wring a thimble-full of water out of the air, let alone the gallon he's sure he could down easily.
"...Just give me the water," he asks her, gripping the bars to the cell, "and then leave me alone. I don't..." He shudders, a little involuntarily. "Ugh... why do you people drink that stuff..." He bows his head.
At this range it's hard to miss her attire of the moment, which prompts him, after a moment, to avert his gaze towards the floor instead.
Why is this happening, he thinks in passing.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Margaret stares at Loren - Thomas - Whatever his name is.
She is silent as he rises up and stumbles and starts to talk about wanting the water, coming almost face to face with her. Actually given the height discrepancy it's more like face to clavicle.
Margaret reaches forwards -
To grasp Loren by the collar and pull him forwards.
"I'm HERE because I LIVE here, you sneering popinjay!" Margaret shouts. "This is my PLANET! Do you know what a PLANET is? Do you know what a JOB is? You do not give the ORDERS on this planet, Thomas! On this planet, I am the LAW and I am the LASH! Do you UNDERSTAND ME?" Shake shake shake. "We drink WATER because otherwise our piss dries up and our kidneys tear apart and we bleed to death! By the Goddess, did you drink yourself simple?"
"Do you know what this room you are in, is? It is a JAIL. You will eventually be taken to ANOTHER jail where you will get to explore your relationship with your fellow prisoners in between bouts of hard labor and attempted smuggling of contraband. Do you know the concept? Do you know what a MINE is? If you don't start jumping to and listening to me, laddo me buck, you're going to gain an EXTREMELY INTIMATE ACQUAINTANCE!"
Margaret crouches a little to get on eye-to-eye perspective with Loren.
"I will assume, out of my INFINITE MERCY AND CHARITY, for which you will THANK ME, that you are being surly because you are in pain caused by the devils of drink. I will pass you the water but FIRST, I will exploit the DIFFERENTIAL OF POWER to make you give me a CLEAR ANSWER to a question that is VERY IMPORTANT FOR THE REMAINDER OF YOUR LIFESPAN."
Margaret stares for two seconds, unblinking.
"Do you have magic," she says. "I don't care what you call it. This is a question with two possible answers, one of which is 'yes miss' and the other of which is 'no miss.' The only WRONG answer is one that is A LIE. Are you CLEAR?"
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
"I do!"
The answer may come rather unexpected, given there is nobody else here to give it, and there was no great sound of someone approaching, and there's nobody here except Margaret, Loren, and some oddly out of place but profoundly luxurious lichen tumbling down from the ceil--
Tabitha deVriese suddenly inverts to normal gravity and tups down between Margaret with two boot-clicks. She is...not so much dressed in as poorly attempting to remain mostly inside of a Guard uniform she must have stolen from its previous owner, to judge from the fact that although it is about right on her at the shoulders, she has had to unbutton it into a decolette that would have had the shirt hanging somewhere around the sternum of a reasonable person and also cannot help but demonstrate once and for all the fundamental supremacy of Solarian beauty science. It isn't even kind of tucked in.
"I was gonna do a whole bit," she says, conversationally, "but when I see some old harpy shouting at my good buddy I just, you know, have to put my nose in it!"
She reaches up and very gently places her hand on Margaret's shoulder, and smiles winningly. "Bye!"
Then Margaret finds out, probably somewhat in defiance of her expectations, that the far wall of the cell line is actually where down is, and her body is rushing thataway at roughly 9.8 m/s^2.
Tabitha grins widely at Loren. "I'm here to help!" she declares. Then she looks over at where Margaret went. "That lady totally had the key, didn't she," she muses.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Margaret's response is to grab him by the collar through the bars.
The bars, comma, which his face slams into, glasses and all.
"I... gathered... that," he manages, gasping for air as she shakes him. He fumbles for her hand, as if he could somehow get her to relinquish her iron-like vise grip on his shirt collar.
In all probability, it doesn't help much.
"And... I know... what a jail is...! Stop--"
It definitely won't help much.
This is the point where she crouches down to make eye contact with him, and makes a few things unmistakablely, infinitely clear.
As bright as day in fact. He stops struggling and looks, right into her eyes.
"..."
He gets a good two-second-long look into Margaret's eyes, in fact, and in those depths sees an unfortunate truth.
Even in his current state -- pain blossoming from new and fresh places he didn't know it was possible to feel pain in -- and a body that would prefer 'death' to its current condition, it reads loud and clear.
There is only one good option and one bad option right now.
And yet, isn't this one of those things that it's better to go to the wall for? That's what he'd always thought, but somehow it had been easier to think about rather than actually confront. His audible silence proceeds: "..."
Before from above, there is a voice.
And what a familiar voice it is.
"--deVriese? What," is perhaps as far as he gets out before Tabitha plants a gentle hand on Margaret's shoulder and...
He's forced to reach out to grip the bars again as Margaret's grasp rather suddenly leaves his shirt collar.
He stares down the hallway for a moment.
Then looks over at Tabitha.
"...does Command know about this," he asks, steadying himself against the bars.
Which is followed by a wince and: "...probably."
It even answers two questions at the same time!
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
"Do you? DO YOU, THOMAS LASTNAME? DO YOU KNOW HOW DEEP THE MANURE YOU ARE IN, IS?" Margaret shouts. Then:
Margaret abruptly pitches away from Loren and crashes in some furniture.
In the interim he is able to have a conversation with Tabitha! Margaret herself is briefly consternated by this turn of events, trying to rewind her recent memory of events. What in the name of the Goddess? she thinks, but this is not a place where she dramatizes. SOMETHING happened and she needs, very badly, to understand what, in full and complete detail. She doesn't feel that she was kicked with great force. No, that woman landed from where (where? invisibility? no - she was moving. the ceiling? yes, that must be it) she had been hiding, and had touched her.
DeVriese, Margaret things. More like debris. Yes, she thinks, remember that one. Thomas knows this person. He has comrades. Well, that's a surprise, Margaret thinks bitterly.
Meanwhile, her pipe clatters among some dirty straw. The embers smoulder. Hm.
Margaret pushes herself upright slowly, grunting as she does. She feels every one of her years for a moment despite the blessing of elvish blood. She breathes in and out, and then 'Thomas' asks a question about...
Margaret's head snaps up after he says 'Command.'
Her ears twitch once.
"Oh ho ho ho! THE TRUTH REVEALED! You and this harlot are in combination, Thomas! TSK TSK TSK." Her voice grows less playful. Darkness rises around her, interspersed with nebular lightning. "Starlight Express." There is a tension of magic in the air -
From Tabitha's perspective it's like Margaret just kind of teleported across the jail hallway. That is because she is moving approximately sixteen times a healthy jogging speed, and it isn't a very long hallway. She aims a balled-up fist right straight at her lower abdomen, aiming at an oblique angle for maximum tissue contusion.
"Throw me across the room, will you? WELL NOW, THOMAS! Is this your RESCUE PARTY? Your squadronmate in the secret society of HERESY? All becomes clear to me, but SLOWLY," she says as she regains her feet and turns her head to look at Loren.
"Unfortunately for you, your top-heavy compatriot may have expected your every day run of the town wizard, but has instead received the bloody fangs of the Hounds of Hell. Perhaps you'd like to start being forthcoming now? Or do you hope that Miss DeBris will be able to somehow liberate you with her force tricks?"
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha brightens at Loren's question. "I'm a go-getter!" she chimes, brightly.
So, no, then.
Tabitha reaches into her decolette and produces her favorite problem-solving tool, a small silver rod of slightly greater than hand size. "Stand back a bit," she advises him, and then Marrgaret is monologuing. "Uhm," she says, tentatively holding up a finger in complaint. "I would say I'm more of a sl--" WHMPH
Increasing one's own gravitational experience is an interesting physics exercise. It doesn't increase your density; objects have no particularly greater difficulty interacting with your matter than they would otherwise. Bullets strike with their usual power. Fists, too. But those impacts have less ability to force you to move, too, as your body does experience greater weight. Decreasing it, likewise, does not necessarily change the initial moment of impact, but can change how the followthrough applies.
All of which is to say that when Margaret's fist hits Tabitha's gut, she should go stumbling back a few inches, fully within striking range and deeply affected by a good, solid follow-through.
Instead, Margaret slams her and she suddenly impels away from her like wind-blown grass, roaring down the hall way until she whips end-over-end in midair and SLAMS into the far wall with a force that somehow utterly fails to crack the brickwork.
....and there she stays, standing upright and rolling her shoulder a little, setting the jiggle physics engine on a merry chase. "I'm more of a free agent," she says, clarifying something else, and then hops off the wall, taking a few steps forward, pointedly swaying her hips with each step. Her eyes fall on the small silvery rod that has escaped her grasp from the force of that hit, and then tick up to Margaret, smiling coyly. "But, you see, my pointy friend..."
She reaches into her decolette again and produces a positively alarmingly-sized handgun, considering where she was keeping that thing, which she fiddles with for a moment, plucking back the slide and releasing it as if chambering a round, although it's hard to see where on that thing it would even accept bullets.
Then she raises it at Margaret, flicks the safety with her thumb, and opens fire, blasts of green light racing toward Margaret. It doesn't go off with the CRACK CRACK CRACK of bullets, and these indeed aren't those; instead, seeds of whirling wind race toward Margaret, popping into mini-kamaitachi hurricanes set to slice and disorient if they get close.
"Ah, sorry, I was saying something, wasn't I!" Tabitha adds, after firing. "I got distracted by that tacky dress."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Oh. Good." For once, he sounds anything but sarcastic when he says it, too. It actually might just minimize some of the consequences awaiting him, assuming 'labor camp' isn't in his near future instead.
"What," Loren utters, rather flatly, as Margaret gets to her feet and declares with all appropriate drama that he and Tabitha are in cahoots. The corner of one of his eyes twitches. "Of... course we are?"
This is before magic is had, and before Margaret charges down the hallway with startling speed. Loren barely needs to be told twice -- he releases his hold on the bars to his cell and takes a stumbling two steps backwards before catching himself on the lefthand wall.
"deVriese, I hope you've got this one covered," he voices, wincing as Margaret charges Tabitha.
He needs to... do something here. He shakes his head, more to rattle some of the nausea and weariness gripping him aside than at the scenario unfolding before him. All this gets him though is feeling as if he's just taken a stomach-churning ride down an ill-kept road on a carriage. He leans against the wall and covers his face with both hands. It's too bright. It's too loud.
All-too-clearly he can hear Margaret yelling at him interspersed between the sounds of Tabitha's voice and the apparent counterattack from his colleague.
He makes the pained sort of noise so commonly associated with the very sick or very hung over, both of which might apply right now if this keeps up.
"Heresy? What... are you even... ugh..." He falls silent, taking an uneasy breath. "Please," he groans, sliding down the wall of his cell, hands still pressed to his face. "Just shut up. I think I'm going to be sick."
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Margaret comes to a halt after smashing into Tabitha, tosses her hair back, and gives Loren - Thomas - a flat-eyed glower. "You make EVERYTHING you say sound so miserably condescending! Is it a knack or did you get taught by your mother on how to have inverse charm? If the cards hadn't told me this so clearly I'd say I was wasting my time."
Then he sags downwards. "Shut up? SHUT UP? Oh, would milord enjoy a refreshing DRINK along with that? Perhaps the company of a handmaiden or a vigorous foot massage? By the Godd--"
Oh she's pointing a weapon at her. Margaret breathes out.
She moves with blurring speed again. Margaret undulates out of the way for the first blast, running along the wall of the building as she stares dead ahead, her eyes glittering. Her momentum is such that the second one whips past her without leaving her in great dishabillete either. Her eyes are glaring and her teeth are bared and in this moment she really does not look a lot like a human at all; though, perhaps Tabitha has not seen many people in this sort of heat of velocity and enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm for what?
She leaps off the wall. She swings a leg around with neck-snapping force at Tabitha's head and
that's
when
shot
three
hits
WHOOSH! There is a stone-rumbling SLAM as Margaret hits the ceiling, and, apparently, sticks.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Margaret's speed is amazing - terrifying. Or it should be. But Tabitha has her own training to fall back on. She's not as fast as Margaret, maybe, but if Margaret is expecting her to be practically stationary compared to her, she'll find that the girl blurs back as well, firing the last shot - down.
The shot blasts Margaret up, and Tabitha sucks in a breath. Her hand falls to her bracer, but...
"No," she murmurs. Her eyes swivel up toward Margaret. Then she leaps off the ground after her, flilpping mid-flight topsy-turvy so that up appears to be down; she comes 'down' at Margaret with her own speed. She may be slower, but she's still faster than any untrained mopped, sweeping down with swift, sweeping kicks that leave sweeping blades of wind in their wake, carving the ceiling apart. "I think he comes by it naturally, you know?" she says, offhanded. "Really, he's a terrible chore to deal with, so...!"
She swings back, doing a full vertical backward split, and then sweeps at Margaret in a cyclone of rapid, rotational lashes of her leg, pirouetting around her planted foot. "Be a dear and take your evening NAP won't you!?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He actually cracks open an eye, partially visible through his fingers. "Leave my mother out of this," Loren utters, perhaps a little more loudly than he intended. This provokes a wince nonetheless and he presses his hands harder against his forehead. It doesn't help much, and really only reminds him that he took the hilt of that beastman's blade to the side of the head the previous night.
He should... probably try to do something about that, too, when he stops feeling like he's going to retch.
But then Tabitha chimes in.
She suggests his 'inverse charm' is just his nature.
Loren is silent for a moment. Then: "...Thank you so much... for the support, deVriese," he mutters, leaning against the wall as if it alone could hold him up. "I really... appreciate it. ...ugh."
Then he sinks to the floor, and no, there's no reprieve from the sound of the fight unfolding right outside his cell. "...Just leave me alone." Silence follows, before he hunches over and claps a hand over his mouth. "The room's... spinning. I think... I'm gonna..."
The room shudders with a low rumbling boom from somewhere close by and he...
Well, he doubles over, to say the least. The only good news is that he hasn't eaten anything in at least eight hours.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
"I can tell," Margaret answers Tabitha sourly as she descends - but then Tabitha's marching upwards, throwing herself into a sweeping rising bicycle kick! Margaret herself, who was gripping onto a rafter and bracing her feet against another, has little chance to dodge.
So she has to interrupt. And with nary a random weapon in sight!
Loren might get a good sight of the straw in the corner smouldering if he can tear his gaze away from either his own interior agony or from the fact that Margaret's throwing herself down to lace her legs around Tabitha's own, sweeping herself round in that nebular accelerating to try to -
What is it? It's not clear. Time for more conversation, either way.
"I don't need to sleep," she tells Tabitha. "Not as badly as you. So why don't you--"
At this point Tabitha has probably figured out that Margaret isn't just an elf, with their known anomalous (if predictable) Ether response ratings, but she's one of the damn robust builds which have probably been indifferently sprayed-for on Filgaia in the past. Why may be clear when with a "hup!" she starts to twist Tabitha around. Her PLAN is to smash her into a wall.
This may not work. She has yet to figure out just what the hell Tabitha does. She may not have the necessary background to do so successfully.
"- DOZE THE HELLS OFF!"
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
It's tough to suss Tabitha out - she freely uses some strange magic while at other times focusing on some more mundane skills, gunplay, magic bullets, martial arts of uncertain provenance. But she does seem to know what Margaret's doing, spinning her around, forcing the blood into her brain and disorienting before delivering a final, horrible shot...!
Is a great idea, except she suddenly finds Tabitha weighs something like quadruple what she used to. The attempt to spin the woman around midair fails; Tabitha suddenly drops out of her grip like a stone that refuses to be budged, slamming into the ground with such force that the cobblestone cracks. Tabitha sucks in a few breaths and doesn't, somehow, notice anything burning. Instead she looks up at Marge and kicks the ground, sending the stick she grabbed earlier spinning into the air. She grabs it out of the air, whips it around and slips it between the bars. "Loren! No time to get it all out! I'll get you a nice bucket later, OK?"
Then she flips a switch and the thing extends out a good few feet. She rears back and KICKS the extending steel pole with tremendous force, and like it were hit by a falling boulder, the thing BENDS the bars it's wedged between.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
In the end, the upside of his current predicament is that the spell of sickness doesn't last him too long.
"Easy... for you to say..." comes his response to Tabitha's shout that he should 'try to keep it together'. Yet, he still half-rises, swaying unsteadily as he does so. For the drink to be leaving that much of an effect on him, he must have consumed a great deal of it, right...?
(no, he's just that unfortunate insofar as the genetic lottery is concerned. alcohol tolerance never was a selected-for trait in his bloodline)
He doesn't see the smoldering straw so much as he smells it. All of his senses are on horrific high alert at the moment -- hearing and sight foremost among them -- but smell isn't that much further behind. It's noxious, whatever it is, runs the thought. Like someone was burning...
He lifts his head.
...the straw's burning.
Tabitha wedges that pole of hers against the bars.
The straw's burning. It's probably not far from going up like a tinderbox at this point, if the scent in the air is to be any judge. Great, he's going to be trapped in here with a horrific headache while the whole place goes up in flames and he can't--
He takes a breath, touching his hand to his forehead. Focus, focus, focus--
The bars bend.
He reaches out with his mind alone, pushing through the nausea and dizziness and pain, spreading his will into the air itself. Draws the ambient moisture into a singular point. Exhales.
And, well, makes it rain.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Margaret's big problem with regard to Tabitha - well, big problem #3 from a certain point of view - is that she is not exactly clear on what this 'Gravity' thing is, and yet even so. Even so!
Tabitha hits the ground hard and Margaret disengages, rolling away so far she reaches the entranceway door. She crouches in front of it, dress torn, hair falling into her face. She bares her teeth again. "Oh, do you think you can get past me, Ms. DeBris?" Margaret says with scorn.
Then she works the pole with great force - and surges forwards. As she does, she ripples - bifuricate, quadri-furicate. She's going to try to slam dead-on into Tabitha, hidden in her shrouds of illusions. Tabitha may have seen similar ideas as Gear tactics if she went to the right training.
You do not have time to bend a pole, Tabitha deVriese!
>>> PRESS A! <<<
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha's attempt to break Loren out is foiled yet again by some manner of FEISTY ELF. What is this woman, she thinks, her own face turning more toward a frustrated scowl. Her hand half-consciously goes to the unpaired bracer on her arm, but she forceably pulls it away, even as Margaret multiforms at her. Seeing it, Tabitha knows the way to go. She thrusts her arm down, barks a call, and a seed of wind ripples into being at her feet and EXPLODES, sending Tabitha soaring forcefully upward.
She doesn't get to the roof. The air around her seems to bend and twist as Tabitha curls up, whirling around herself like a comet tumbling through space, orbiting around some invisible point and collecting momentum from it in an eye-watering collection of gravitational energy.
Then, as Margaret gets to the ground, she releases.
Tabitha ROCKETS to the ground, slamming into it with enough force that her bones should shatter. They don't. The ground does - a blast wave of concussive force distributing itself outward, ripping up cobble, sheering foundations, sending boxes tumbling.
"Hate doing that," Tabitha grunts. "You're gonna make me sag!"
Then Loren's rainstorm soaks her entirely through and her pretty lips flatten into an annoyed line. "Granas preserve me, Voss, you are useless when you're drunk."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Margaret at this juncture splits into apparently multiples, as Loren scents smoke and prepares to take corrective action.
And now it's gotten so bad that I'm hallucinating, Loren thinks to himself, before shoving all worldly distraction aside.
The fire probably doesn't stand a chance -- Loren might be hungover and focus might be a difficult state to attain given current conditions -- but once he breaks through those boundaries by the sheer threat that smoldering pile of straw poses (and his desire to not become ovenbaked) there is indeed a bit of a torrential downpour, centered specifically within the jailhouse. It's definitely not a leaky roof.
This is about the point where, after Tabitha rises up and gathers her own strange ether to herself, the woman comes crashing back down. In an enclosed space like this, there's no escape from the blowback, particularly when you're an unanchored hungover man in jailcell. He's sent flying into the back wall, and narrowly misses getting hit dead-on by the cot and other assorted accoutrements of the cell.
Fortunately for him, he's had worse. He might twitch a little on the floor, but he pulls himself together at length.
"...I'm not drunk," Loren corrects, staggering to his feet at last, though he has to brace himself against the wall to do so. "I'm hungover."
Perhaps it's karma at work that Tabitha isn't the only one getting soaked by Loren's merry little rainstorm (is this what they mean by a cold shower). He's definitely inviting a cold upon himself from this one as he makes his way over as fast as possible for the bars to his cell.
"Just... just get me out of here so I can die in peace," he asks of Tabitha, reaching out a hand.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha rises up from releasing the awesome power of a technique that doesn't entirely make physical sense, stretching out her long back and flicking her hair over her shoulder as she surveys the surroundings of shattered furniture and broken doors with a disinterested look. "Guess that's average for that amount of wind-up room."
Having banished Margaret to the shadow realm or at least the unconsciousness zone, she finds herself free to shove aside one of the bars damaged by her attack, loop Loren's arm around her neck, and make her way out, supporting him. "Now, now," she chides him, kindly, "you're not allowed to die so easily after I went to all this trouble busting up rabbits. I'm sure we'll find something to take your mind off things!"
Surely that sudden sense of incredible danger is just the hangover talking.
Regardless, once they're back out into the open, which is curiously devoid of guards on account of Tabitha totalling everyone on the way in, Tabitha sucks in a long breath and then, next to Loren's head, her bracer beeps once.
And then he feels like he weighs about half a pound as Tabitha takes to the air and brings Loren with her.