RP [Strays] Yamog and Prig Lounge With Lasers

The one-eyed spider kind of just sighed lightly whilst leaning up against the imposing hunk of creature that was Prig. A softer kind of smirk formed on their lips, as she finally got it through her thick skull that she should stop trying to make problems with this chill woofer.

He didn't even balk at her talking about the real ways that things work, and how often did that happen?

"...I'll get Deimos to hijack the food queuing system and deliver us some... Oh, it's burgers again... Third time this week?... Burgers." There was a repeated 'pang'ing sensation, like the severing of guitar strings, as Yamog used their specially hooked nails to begin splitting the drying web, one thread at a time. "...As for the curse, well... The important thing is not wasting 'their' time... I'll sanctify this place, and you in the process, huh?..."

Another gurgling grunt. Her belly had a talent for sounding like real muffled speech.

"...Food first." An adamant gesture, wafting around with an arcane mudra gesture, and then addressing some buttons on a rather sizable yellow-plastic bracelet on their upper left wrist. Apparently Deimos lived in there, because she wasn't getting her communicator back out. "...Oh, and tell 'em to get my guitar, too..."

Back to the game. She looked surprised that the characters were still alive. Or that she hadn't been petulantly nuked by the other player, for a laugh. Though she did have him tied up in real life...

Underground levels of the game just kept getting weirder and weirder. There were 'aliens' that were clearly just the earlier skeleton enemies, retextured in a blue crystal color. They had really damaging laser swords and hopped around annoyingly. The thorny vines on the walls sometimes shot out spines that had to be dodged. The boss was a huge skull, with skulls in it's eye sockets, that fired them out in long screaming arcs. It's name was UNALIVE KING STONGONGULA, despite the fact he was an alien and not a skeleton. The best way to hurt it was waiting for the roll attack, let it bash against a wall, and then rapid fire when it was stunlocked.

"Yeah... Burgers are usually the uh... leftover meat scraps ground up so you can't tell what they come from. You can also just freeze it into blocks for easy storage." He remembered grinding up more than a few thousand pounds of 'mystery meat' at one of his part-time gigs. Talk about a job fit for someone with tumor-ridden olfactory organs. With the string-snapping sounds, Prig felt a bit of the pressure let up around his body; apparently he was being freed from his bondage. She suggested 'sanctification', whatever that meant, and it planted a seed of worry in his mind that would only grow in time.

Something behind him, that wasn't Yamog, gurgled and grumbled. More magic? Gastrointestinal sorcery?

But they were back to gaming in due time, waiting for a food delivery orchestrated by a distressingly cruel Fairy AI. "These guys are just... They're just the last guys. All hoppy." Prig grumbled about the retextured crystal skeletons. He was a little jealous, wishing he, too, could hop around like that and swing a laser sword. Was there a mech that had a laser sword? But then it was Boss-Time. "Watch out for the-... yeah." he halted his warning, as Yamog was already prepping her dodge. "Why's he keep doing that to himself? Not much of a King, running himself into walls."

With the health bar halfway down and the fight seeming to be well in hand, Prig ventured a question.

"So, what's sanctifying me going to entail?" he had to know.

"I'd follow him over one of those Yam wench queens, at least he comes out and busts up intruders 'imself..." Yamog stroked her chin as if this was a real serious proposition, also demonstrating she probably could have played as a third character at the same time. "People and things with the most crazy passion should be the monarchs... I guess that's why I like Shasta..."

Having to think about how to describe the ritual was more difficult. That sort of stuff always sounded dumb when you just said it in casual conversation... Plus, like, wasn't that half the point of keeping your obscure underground sect a secret?

"Don't worry! It's fun!" Yamog projected an intimidating, open-eyed smile, making her head look not too far off a classic video game boss itself. Or perhaps some kind of obscure yokai from an old roleplaying game. "It won't hurt that much, you'll have your fingers in the future sanctity of this place, and I'll sing a song about it!... Your willingness to dedicate yourself is good, because spreading the aura will make forgiveness much easier... Plus your parts look cooler!..."

Well, it was official. Prig had been nice to the occultist, and now she thought he was joining the cult...

Prig didn't agree or disagree with Yamog, outwardly, but the fact that she was a monarchist... Well, hadn't she said something about how she was a Lady? Some kind of nobility, maybe. A blue-blooded spider girl with a heritage, perhaps? Or was that all... the same goofy stuff that seemed to be leaking out of her head non-stop? As he mindlessly played the game, his character double-jumping and pile-driving down in some kind of butt-slam move, Prig kept thinking about this strange little trash-wearer. She was eccentric, sure, but was she dangerous? She'd shrunk back quickly enough once he'd shown her his own fangs, and again, he'd brought that on himself by accidentally stealing her stuff. He thought about challenging her on... any of the things she was saying about powers or sanctities or curses, and he was pretty damned sure none of that existed. Was that bad, that she believed in things that weren't real? Were her weirdo beliefs hurting her? And what was his role, as a fellow Stray, a fellow castaway picked up by the drifting net of Shasta and dropped into a mech?

He didn't know. Had no way of knowing.

He figured he'd start with a friendship, and see where things led from there. Maybe her behaviors had made her lonely, had made her as lost as he'd felt when... When he'd... Well, his entire damned life.

Prig was about to ask what the hell she meant by 'parts' looking cooler when they both heard a mechanical rolling sound from down the hallway. Prig, freed of the strands, was able to turn and see an... interesting sight.

It was an android, (or at least a half-droid?) sitting on top of two wheeled tank-like tracks. The upper half , above the tracks was a robotic body in a humanoid configuration that ended at the hips. It looked like it'd been quite brutally scavenged; abdominal plates were missing, its entire left arm was gone, wires had been pulled out, and three-quarters of its skull had been pried away, leaving glowing chips and twitching servos visible to the world. Disturbingly, the robotic head was lolling back as though it was deceased, its mechanical jaw hanging wide. A crumpled-up yellow sticky note was stuffed inside the teeth.

The thing managed to rock and roll its way over the cables to enter the room. Once inside, a jury-rigged panel opened in its chest, and a bit of steam puffed out... Its remaining hand reached inside all herky-jerky, withdrawing a plate holding three 'burgers', along with packets of ketchup, mustard, and... soy sauce. Wordlessly, the robotic thing waited.

"Wow." Prig said, eloquently.

Yamog approached the macabre hunk of machine bodge-work daintily, perhaps even shyly. It took a bit of a reach to pull the post-it out of the thing's mouth, but they seemed not to express anything outwardly, perhaps trying to save the rolling haunted house attraction the distress of being perceived in such a broken-down way... For all they knew, it was a fully sentient android, just doing it's best, like they all were...

Did someone put a mean message in there just to taunt it? Hurm.

It had something looped around their back, which Deimos had also slipped into the pickup rota. Not a guitar, but something more like a keytar-melodica. A gawky red bakelite oblong with keyboard keys- Extending into a guitar neck with little but a sidelong plastic dial- Then looping back around with a transparent hose that ended with a flute's mouthpeice. It literally blended in with the android until now, because much like Yamog, it looked too distant from the things a brain was trained to recognise.

"This is Archibald." The spider explained, explaining nothing. "It makes the trueform of sounds that paves the way for non-compromised enlightenment... My arcanist-sensei gave me a silver ribbon!"

Straddling the sonic torture device didn't stop the spider from also grasping a burger. The jumbo meat-construct was like an oversized steaming behemoth in their hands, however, already beginning to collapse under its own weight.

"Oh-no-oh-no-oh-no!~" Looking back and forth to the towering dogman looming over them, they ran back to their chair so they could cross their legs, apparently in order to catch all of the stray globs of not-ham that escaped from the underside as she took the first bite. It was an increasingly messy affair. She blushed purple with embarrassment, observed being so unladylike, but also enjoying the savory flavor and texture too much to stop. "Arm.... Iyeh tausts leak... tha reaul theung!..."

No thoughts, head empty. They took a break from being a borderline sociopath, to be a thing that only thought about burger.

The post-it note bore only a single word. 'Same.'

Prig was, understandably, disturbed by the robot's appearance. The humanoid half slapped onto the tank half made it look like some a wheeled cadaver, though 'rolling haunted house attraction' would've been an even better comparison. He listened as Yamog introduced her instrument, but as always, he struggled to follow the terms she used. 'Trueform'? 'Arcanist-sensei'? What kind of life had this girl lived?

Prig failed to recognize what exactly 'Archibald' was. It looked to him like a ukulele and an oboe had had really raunchy sex on top of a toxic waste dump, and this was the little being that had been spawned from such an ill-fated coupling. He grinned wolfishly as she scuttled over to sit down, the dignity she sometimes tried to carry herself with evaporating like burger-steam. "So, can you play and eat at the same time, or do you need your mouth to... blow... it?" he asked haltingly.

As Prig waited for her to have a clear mouth to answer, he leaned down and took a burger from the robot. "Thanks bud. Why not stick around for a bit, hang out with us?"

Its mission complete, the robot's tracked wheels began to spin in separation; the left peeled forward, the right back. The maneuver started to turn it around in place, presumably so it could exit the room, declining Prig's invitation, but an odd thing happened. The humanoid-half's single arm reached down and flicked a toggle switch on the tank tracks. The rotation stopped immediately. The robot remained, unmoving, its naked and featureless betraying no expression. "Uhh... cool, man." Prig said, taking a bite of the sloppy mess and heading awkwardly over to the bean-bag chair to plop down near Yamog.