Hooligan Hoe Down V The Looting

[Arkash]

Glade 35th, 4623

After wiping out an encampment of Raiders and finding his stolen goods, Arkash and Luna took their time browsing all the goods the bandits had gathered over their years. There was plenty to see and wonder, but without space in the cart to fit it all, it was bound to remain there in the camp.

Izzy and Bants would appreciate a barrel or two of water,he imagined, but the rest of the goods and nick nacks the outlaws had gathered were purely monetary, or at least appeared to be for the sake of selling. Arkash had no use for the money, but did spend quite a bit of time inspecting the chariots the raiders had left behind.

In no time at all, he'd assessed the chariot in the best condition, and was on his way to salvaging the comparably better parts from the other vehicles. It came to him almost intuitively, as though he was able to study and measure each piece with his eyes and determine the quality, along with where it was supposed to be bolted and how securely. Before long, two of the three chariots were in pieces over the tiled floor while the third was gradually restored.

The tent they stored their chariots in also appeared to be some sirtof armory, As a number of pistols abs rifles lines racks made with scrap metal, with boxes of ammunition stacked atop each other beside them. It made sense, Arkash determined while he screwed in another bolt to secure the newly refurbished engine. If the raiders were going to ride out, they wanted to be armed while they did so, it just made sense to be efficient.

He looked up at Luna then as he stood up and moved to collect a piece of the plating from the floor. "You like the bow?" He asked while he eyed the rifle she'd taken from her captor. "Those things have one Bel of a kick," he began with a turn of his claw. "Ever shoot one before?" He quizzed as he positioned the plate upon the chasis, then fetched his oddly-shaped black wrench to fix a nut to the bolt near the top.

"Deadlier than an arrow, I find. The bullet ricochetes on the skeleton, ruins everything it travels through... 'Course, you can make it fly clean through with a little more gunpowder in the charge..." he trailed on in thought.

Image source.

[Sola]

While Arkash inspected the contents of the raider's camp with a praticed eye, Luna felt like she was a puppy just trying to keep up. She wondered if that's how the other girl had gotten to know Arkash - whether she'd been pulled into some crazy adventure and couldn't get enough of the chaos. It was an addicting feeling to say the least. If Luna didn't already have a commitment to an Entente member in Amoren, she might have wanted to go on another grand adventure. As great as raiding the camp was, she felt that the money she had to gain by marrying an Entente was better for her in the long run.

These thoughts filled her head while they searched. She kept quiet most of the time, mulling them over in her head. It wasn't until she was asked about her bow that she said much. "I suppose I can't complain about bows. They've helped me plenty through my travels. When I was little I wanted to be a competition shooter, but life just kept getting in the way. Not much money in shooting at targets anyways." She realized she was droning on so she continued, "haven't ever shot one before. I met a guy on a boat who showed me one. I even tried finding work at a gunsmith's shop but I wasn't good enough to hire. According to them anyways. If I remember correctly, they're awfully expensive."

She paused for a long moment then asked, "what's gunpowder anyways? It sounds like you know a lot about them. You have experience shooting?"

[Arkash]

The repairs to the Chariot were coming along well; the machine looked almost new except for a few beaten and dinged areas. Otherwise, Arkash worked diligently to clean and tune up the various working areas.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Shooting like that, you're not making much money unless you're at the top." Most competitive sports were like that, he imagined. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it, wouldn't they? He couldn't help but chuckle when she asked if he'd fired many guns, but nodded in response while he fastened another plate of the exterior. "Yeah, all types really."

"I've shot pistols and rifles, mage guns and flintlock." He looked up at her for a moment once he'd fastened the bolt as far as it would go. "Gunpowder... Is the stuff that makes the ball bearing fly." With that he got up, dusted off his hands, then looked about the room before he found an inconspicuous barrel and collected it.

With remarkable ease, the Rath carried the barrel toward the woman and set it down. With his claws, he pried it open. The barrel was filled to the brim with a grey-black salt-like powder.

"You pour a charge of this into the barrel of the gun from the nozzle, then stuff the ball bearing in after it. To get it to fire, you..." Arkash paused partway through following the gun mechanism as he found the serpentine of the mechanism. He blinked in confusion, then took the rifle from her to inspect it. "...Oh wow, this is old," he said. "This isn't a flintlock," he said with a sigh and lifted it to the lantern light.

"I think this is a matchlock; I haven't shot one before but I've heard of them," he explained before he handed it back to the woman. "No wonder those guys couldn't land a hit on us, eh?"

Image source.

[Sola]

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Luna listened to Arkash's explanation about the clockwork of guns. It was good information to know, but his answer only sparked more questions. Why did the gunpowder make the ball bearing fly? How was it created? What even was a ball bearing? She felt stupid. She watched as Arkash confidently tried to demonstrate how to use the weapon. She giggled when he realized it was different from the kinds that he'd shot before. So there was something that Arkash hadn't done before.

She accepted the weapon back and said, "it's alright. Even if this blasted thing is inaccurate I could still crack it open and study how it works." She yawned and slung the weapon on her shoulder with her bow then continued, "is there even any point in me taking one of these chariots? I don't suppose they work outside of the badlands, do they?"

After allowing Arkash to speak she'd go find some of the raiders' water supply and wash off as best she could. She'd do what she could to make herself smell less shitty despite their lack of self care products that she was accustomed to finding in the city. She realized at that point that she'd definitely overstepped to some degree. Perhaps when she'd vomited earlier it'd been due to that and not just because she'd seen a half decapitated man.

After some time she'd wander back around to Arkash and ask, "if you know necromancy, can't you just raise one of the leaders and have them show us where all the valuable stuff is? Digging through all this stuff is kind of... mundane. I'd do it myself but I'm still learning."

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[Arkash]

He rose a brow at her giggle. Something inquisitive, as if to ask 'what's so funny' without those words passing his lips. Of course, it was obvious. He'd been boasting about how he'd fired every gun up until he encountered the matchlock mechanism. It was funny in that context, he supposed.

"They work everywhere," Arkash clarified. "But they need Wurmblood to work or they just stop moving. Wurms are a creature exclusive to the Badlands, these giant... Armored... Nasty buggers that could swallow half an army in one pass. They burrow under the sand and erupt at random. Hell, one of them could swallow us up right now." He looked up for a moment, then shrugged. "So it would work outside the badlands, but you'd be S.O.L once your tank emptied. I can fix one up if you want it though?"

He offered as he climbed atop the one he'd been servicing, then twisted the key in the ignition. The machine kicked a few times before the engine roared with a potent VROOM. The whole machine jittered and bobbed while he sat on it, ready to take off with so much as a press of the pedal. Once Luna had left him, Arkash released the hand break and began to roll forward. His eyes widened and his feet shot out to the sides to try and slow the machine down, to no avail. It kept going forward.

His eyes widened further and he moved his clawed foot to the brake pedal but found the acceleration instead. At once, Arkash zoomed forward and threw his head back. Lightning-fast reflexes yanked the hand break and stopped so fast and with such force that he was thrown over the vehicle's handlebars. He flew at the ground at high speed, and with naught but his arms to guard him, he bounced off the tile, flipped, and landed flat on his back with his tail between his legs in a haze.

Arkash managed to prop his upper body on his arm as the world spun around him, then collapsed on the tile with his limbs splayed as he drifted off to sleep.

The sound of luna returning to the tent stirred him to consciousness, to which he shot up quickly, blinked, then looked upon her with confusion. "Huh?" he asked, puzzled. "Oh, raiders, right." he helped himself up off the floor, then approached the chariot quite carefully before he turned it off. "Yikes..."

"Raiders, undead... Uhh..." He thought for a moment, clutching the dormant machine. He appeared to battle some sort of brain fog. "Yeah, I've only really raised the dead with the cardinal resonator, at which point they're just puppets," he explained. "No wait, I'm lying," he remembered. "I once took the mind of a mouse and put it in the body of this thing I created... I called it 'The Thing'."

"I guess I could raise this guy and see if he can tell us anything." With that, Arkash gently pat the Chariot, then waddled his way out of the tent without so much as mentioning the horrific experience he'd just endured.

Toward the sick bay, he walked through the tent and arrived at the corpse of the purple-skinned Moroi at the surgical table. There were no wounds to speak of, but Arkash had deliberately botched the surgery in such a way that he created a blood clot and killed their leader with cardiac arrest.

His Necromancer's kit was still there at the foot of the table, so he collected his instinct capturer and looked over his shoulder. How far was Luna?

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[Sola]

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Luna nodded and figured as much. She'd never seen a chariot outside the badlands but it was nice to know that they could theoretically work outside of it. She wondered how one even got the fuel source from such a dangerous creature. Then again, she didn't really care at this point. She said, "eh, don't worry about fixing one up for me then. I doubt I could make much use of it after we get back to a city." She didn't want to inconvenience Arkash if she was just going to turn around and sell the damned thing as soon as she could. Plus she didn't know how to drive one, something she figured would take more than an afternoon to learn.

Luna looked at the strange creature presented to her. It looked weird and opened her eyes to the possibility that strange things could be "created" with necromancy. One did not have to raise a skeleton to make an undead.

"A cardinal resonator? And you... what? You took a mind of a creature and put it into another creature? Geeze I didn't even know that was possible. My teacher has only taught me stuff about how to heal people. Never mentioned much about doing... creative things."

She followed him and asked, "This the guy you were supposed to save? Doesn't look like you did too good of a job." She assumed as much because he didn't look like he was slaughtered in any way the others had been. She would try to stand a few arm's lengths away. She wanted to give him space but also wanted to see him in action.

"I hope he talks... if he can even talk," she added. She didn't know how Arkash didn't know whether it would work or not. If she raised an undead the first thing on her list of things to do would be to ask it some questions. Perhaps by the time Arkash ressurected someone he didn't really have need for what was in their brains.

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[Arkash]

"Yeah, a cardinal resonator is something you use to control the undead with your mind. You surgically implant it like... right here." he turned around and pressed his index and middle finger to the indentation between the base of his skull and his spinal column. "Easier to get someone else to do it for you, though," he smiled as he turned back around to face the woman.

As it happened, she hadn't attempted to reanimate the dead before. She was limited to briomancy in her teachings. To that, Arkash shrugged. "You'll get there in time, don't worry."

At the surgical table, Arkash rolled his eyes. "I meant to kill him," arkash explained. "I fought him once before and took his arm; he was dying of infection in that wound, so I clotted his brachial artery and gave him a heart attack. He didn't feel a thing."

"We'll see," was all Arkash said as he set the instinct capturer down beside the corpse. He exhaled deeply. "...So I need to access his brain," Arkash began. "Don't freak out..."

The Rath held up the claws of his right arm, and the scales paled a few shades to a sickly white and the claws elongated to the size of daggers. Black flames engulfed the claws, but no heat came from them. If anything, the air became frigid near those black flames. Arkash extended a single claw and cut through the cranium of the Moroi like paper. He was gentle in his application as he sawed through the bone exclusively, and cut a circle around the circumference of his head.

When his scalp came away, Arkash's claws returned to normal. His scales returned to their normal pigment, and the freezing flames vanished. "That's a trait from one of the lizards in the straights of devastation," he explained, hoping she'd never ventured far into the corrupted wastes.

Without further pause for questioning, Arkash activated the instinct capturer with the funnel aimed and the Moroi's gray matter, and the suction motion pulled the brain from his skull and swallowed it into the glass jar beneath it. "Okay, perfect..." Arkash nodded. "Now to just..." He collected his grafting needle, then sewed a series of Sinew threads between the spinal column and the jarred brain before he removed it from the jar and manually pushed it into the man's skull.

The Moroi jolted and twitched as muscular spasms became prominent from the introduction of new signals. And as his black eyes began to roll and split side to side, Arkash collected his enlightenment dial and sloppily attached a transistor to the dead man's neck.

He sat up, brain jiggling in his skull. Stiff as a rock, he turned his neck to peer at Arkash and Luna. "...YoU..!" He croaked, voice hoarse and shrill.

Immediately, the Rath activated the enlightenment dial and administered a shock. The Moroi jolted and frazzled under the influence of the dial. "Where's your treasure?!" Arkash barked. "Tell us!" He pressed the enlightenment dial again, which forced the Moroi to shake and convulse once more, brains jiggling atop his head.

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[Sola]

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Luna smiled at his early responses. She was glad he could take a joke. It sounded like Arkash had a history with these bandits that extended beyond a simple theft. She wondered how they even bested him last time given he was so strong. Perhaps he had a weakness that was not so apparent to the young woman.

"I'm ready," she said when he said not to freak out. And once again, she was not ready. She took a step back when his claws took on the flames and sliced through the skull. She was more taken aback by Arkash's continued transformation as opposed to being able to see the brain. Thankfully Arkash offered an explanation that she bought at face value. "Oh, that explains it," she said.

Luna did not ask any more necromancy questions and simply took mental notes. She watched as he sucked the brain into a jar and pushed it back into the head. She could have sworn she saw a transistor, something she'd actually used before. Though, when she used it it was to give shock therapy to a mentally disabled person.

As amusing as it was to see the man get tortured, the raider leader had no intention of spilling the beans. He cursed the two of them every time he was given repireve to talk. That was, until Luna put on her most intimidating look.

"Listen, we literally raised you from the dead. This will go on for...ever until you tell us where the treasure is. And if you tell us, we could let you rest in peace. Or if you prefer, maybe we could let you walk the earth again. But if you continue to resist us..." Luna pulled out an arrow and shoved its tip into his leg, "this is going to get a whole lot worse for you." Luna's words would be laced with an icy posion that was completely opposite to her normal persona. She did not particularly like intimidating people. At her core, she was a persuasive person and liked to resolve things without violence. But she had enough experience in the area to know when people needed an extra push.

"Alright I'll tell you!" shouted the man, "there's a trap door. It's underneath this tent, burried underneath."

"You wouldn't be lying to us would you," asked Luna.

"Lady, I would do just about anything to be rid of you two. If this gets you to leave then take my treasure and go!"

Luna looked at Arakash and said, "Alright, I'll get digging I guess."

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[Arkash]

Arkash's yellow eyes flashed with glee at every electrocution he administered. His wicked lips curled with glee as his subject cursed and howled, serrated teeth on edge through the whole ordeal.

Even so, they made little to no progress until Luna took charge of the interrogation and stabbed him in the leg. His eyes widened a little while he listened to the delivery of her threat, then nodded in approval behind her. Arkash was impressed.

Beneath a trap door? Buried? "Sounds like a lotta work," Arkash commented as he crossed his arms. When Luna declared that she would dig, Arkash pursed his lips hard, then shook his head. "No, no need." With that, his smile returned, and he cranked up the enlightenment dial and aimed it at the undead. "You dig!" He ordered. "Dig or else!"

"Okay! Okay!" The undead called, holding up both hands. "Sheesh... My day was bad enough without those damn shocks every three seconds." He muttered under his breath as he pushed himself from the table and landed on his feet.

"That's right," Arkash said as he collected a shovel from the tool rack against the tent wall, then handed it to the Strigoi. "Now don't complain about being tired, we both know your muscle don't fatigue."

The undead Moroi shook his head a little as he accepted the shovel, then bent forward to dig. Just like that, his brain slid out of his skull and dropped into the sand. Arkash gasped, dropped the enlightenment dial in a panic and scrambled for the brain. He picked it up with his claws, brushed it off a little, then used his grafting needle to sew it back into place in the frozen Moroi's skull.

"Hold on a sec," Arkash commanded as he fetched the horned scalp of his foe, then put it back over the brain before he stitched the wound closed haphazardly. "Okay, now go." He commanded.

The Moroi scoffed, then resumed digging. Arkash recollected his Enlightenment dial, then smiled at the woman. "Here," he said. "If he acts up at all, just zap him. Send him to come get me when you're done with him, alright?" He offered as he passed it to her. "You take orders from her too, got it?" he delivered one final order, then made his way out of the tent.

Scales bare in the bright evening sun, Arkash drew a deep breath into his lungs, then exhaled before he hesitantly returned to his work on the chariot.

Image source.

[Sola]

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Luna couldn't help but giggle when Arkash told the raider to dig. She thought it was mean, especially since the guy hadn't done anything to wrong her personally, though she knew that Arkash probably felt differently. Either way, she was happy not to do the work.

Luna's jaw dropped when the brain fell out. That couldn't be good. The raider had issues even after Arkash sewed it back to attach it. Luna chalked it up to the brain being a little damaged. Luna said, "I'll let you know what he digs up," to Arkash as he left.

The Moroi behaved when Luna held the enlightenment dial. She had used one before so she was aware of the settings and how the man could do nothing so long as she stunned him. She didn't really need to give him the stink eye but she gave it to him anyways to keep him scared. He dug into the ground and paused at odd moments, sometimes falling over himself or simply forgetting what he was even supposed to be doing. Now Luna was sure that his brain had gotten messed up when it'd fallen out.

"Just dig up your treasure and you can rest," Luna said with a sigh.

"Oh right, I'm fucking dead aren't I," he said with a grim look on his face.

It took him a while to realize that he was not even digging in the right spot and had to start all over again. Eventually though, after what seemed like an eternity, he uncovered the trap door and opened it.

"Now pull it out," Luna said, "and no funny business or I'll drop your brain on the floor again."

"I don't think I could pull a trigger even if I wanted to," he said with a growl. He heaved and pulled out a large wooden box. It wasn't so full that one man couldn't pull it but it was fairly heavy.

"Now can I fucking die again?" he asked.

Luna shook her head, "no, your presence is wanted elsewhere. Go see Arkash, he should be by the chariots." She peeked out the tent and saw Arkash doing his stuff. "Make sure to walk straight there. I can see you on the way and wont' hesitate to zap ya." she gave him a high intensity zap to show she meant business.

He grumbled and stumbled off, leaving his shovel on the floor. Luna then turned her attention to the chest. She opened it and saw that it had quite a vareity of things inside. There was a flintlock musket that had been partially disassembled to fit in the chest. There was also plenty of ammunition to go with it. There were coins, not all that many though. They were mixed in with some gemstones.

There was a surprising amount of books and paperwork that filled about half of the container. Perhaps they were contracts or important information that was taken from their victims. She didn't have the time or patience to read through it all, but she noticed that some were even property rights to some slaves.

After spending some time taking a mental inventory of the chest she went over to go tell Arkash what the haul was.

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