Take Down Zompano

[malnosso]

Who: Zompano, Saori, others?
What: Zompano is making a mess of things
When: August 10th
Where: The Plaza of "Old Luceti"
Summary: Count Zompano must be stopped to end this madness. Which means taking him down in a tense showdown.
Rating: V for Vendetta.


Lord Mayor Zompano was furious. Everything was collapsing around him. His beautiful piece of art, his perfect army... he cursed as he saw the chaos going on all around. This was all the scientist's fault. He should have sacrificed him just like he had the other. He'd gotten no useful information out of him and now he was about the lose the entire village.

The Commandant is likely waiting outside for us when we try to escape. That hideous cow.

He didn't go looking for a fight. He waited in the plaza, in front of the fountain, watching as his army fought the confused villagers. Of course, he knew they had already lost. Even if they killed every last one of these ignorant mice, there would be no escaping the village afterward. But if that was to be the case, so be it. See how the Malnosso liked it when he broke their toys for a change.

Note: Zompano will be killed in a battle with Saori. However, you are free to challenge Zompano anyway, but your character won't be able to defeat him. If you wish to play that route, be sure to note ahead of time if you want your character killed or injured.

Comments

[windandrain]

Saori Sugasawa's mood mirrored the Lord Mayor's, liquid fury welling up inside as she stalked through the anarchy that'd become Luceti. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with this. Not just the battle or the newfound power that'd taken hold in her friends and family, but the whole of it. Barnaby had been the first clue, his blond hair and light eyes contrasting sharply with the rest of the Hyuugas, but there had been others. Hinata and Neji's eyes, the strange exclamations that seemed so natural to Saori and her wife but baffled everyone else, and how smoothly they'd all taken to battle all pointed to some sort of cruel deception.

Everything was a lie, and that was a very good way to make Saori very very angry.

Stepping into the plaza of Old Luceti, the young estate manager found herself face to face with the illustrious Lord Mayor. He'd been the epicenter of so many problems over the last few days that she knew he had to have been involved in some way. Electricity crackled along her hand as she glared straight at him and spoke in an icy tone.

"What did you do, Zompano?"

[zompano]

Zompano had barely even noticed her arrive. When he did, he turned to her with a look of weary disdain. Though he noticed the crackling electricity and her fury, he was utterly unimpressed by it. Instead he seemed to roll his eyes as he shrugged dramatically.

"What did I do? You wretched little mouse. I gave you everything. A lovely little place to call home, a family that loved you, and a place to go beddy bye when you were tired~! But look at what you've done now. Only a little bit of chaos and you all turn into killers."

[windandrain]

"After what you took from us, you brought this on yourself" she fired back, heat entering her voice. Dismissal never sat well with her. "I know you did something, changed us, twisted our lives inside out, but why? Why would you do all of this?"

[zompano]

"Your people left me for eternal damnation and stole everything from me." He took a step towards her, staring down his nose at her. He may have been as rag-wearing cultist now, but he never lost his sense of superiority. "I'd say we're even."

[windandrain]

"I have no memory of this," she replied sharply, her feet setting themselves reflexively. Her eyes flashed with anger as she stared up at him, meeting his gaze without trepidation. "But you've done more than enough. Undo it, whatever it is, or you won't leave the plaza alive."

[zompano]

"You are hardly in a position to make demands, little mouse~" He stepped back, clapped his hands, and within an instant, everything began to shift. The fountain ripped from the ground, the benches and lamps flew into the air. Stones from the plaza whizzed up in the air and they all remained precisely stationary where he wanted them to be. In the distance, the snarling of two Shift Hunters could be heard.

"But if I must kill you, I'll try and make it excruciatingly painful for you~. I'd hate for you to come back to life and not know how you died."

[windandrain]

That made her step back a pace, a flicker of surprise crossing her face. He could move things with his mind?! Gritting her teeth, she did her best to shut out the fear and called out to the sky. Thunder rumbled as the clouds darkened, the air coming alive with the buzzing, snapping sound of electricity.

"I'll try and reply in kind then, because I wouldn't want you forgetting that you were beaten to death by a mouse."

A spear of lightning leaped from the sky, a jagged bolt aimed squarely at him...

[yourfononsarewhack]

Jade Curtiss had been looking increasingly, uncharacteristically haggard over the course of all the time he's spent locked in battle since this whole debacle began. His uniform was frayed on the sides, and his face was seemed to be locked in a perpetual scowl. Devoid of his glasses and with the shift lifted, his eyes blared red. Even in this form, Jade was a tactical master of some level. But it was harder than ever for him to see clearly. On one hand, he was letting his anger cloud his intellect - his anger at his family and the world around them. And on another was this sudden power that he was wielding, terrible and impossible in a way that was almost overwhelming but certainly exhilarating. And he had not even stumbled into the more advanced of his artes yet.

But eventually he manages to stagger to the square where the mayor is waiting. It's possible that Jade was able to figure out where he would be stationed through some means, but it's also very likely that chance played a hand in his attempts to find the mayor. And there he was - the man at the center of all this chaos. Something about him just didn't seem right, or fitting. And it was odd, because Jade recalled him as someone he trusted - looked up to, in a way, even. He was a classic model of the elite, even if Jade sometimes frowned upon his sympathy towards the lower classes. But now here he was, commanding the forces that almost arrested him and were tearing his family apart.

Jade stops, some yards away. His powers require distance, after all. He stares the man down, and he grunts out with contempt, "Lord Mayor."

[zompano]

"Mister Curtiss." Zompano rose from where he was sitting. He did not make any move to approach. He merely crossed his arms and looked him over.

"You look awful."

[yourfononsarewhack]

He looked him over carefully - or as carefully as he could while he felt so on edge. Even so, it was clear how out of place Zompano looked. He looked almost casual while the entire area was erupting into chaos. This wasn't the same mayor whom Jade was thinking had too much of a bleeding heart regarding the tax hike issue.

Still, he tried to quip back, "On the contrary. I think this look suits me." And oddly, it was true in a sense. On the battlefield, he was feeling oddly at home - despite the fact that he could never remember having actually set foot on a live battlefield. He glared at the count while raising his hand. He wasn't entirely sure how his new powers worked, but he knew it was wisest to have himself at the ready.

"But that's beside the point. I demand to know what's going on here. What is all of this - this madness?"

[zompano]

Zompano surveyed the madness around him before returning his sight to Jade. He shrugged.

"The mice have been let out of their cages. It's a terrible mess. So we're killing them all. We'll start over somewhere else~"

[yourfononsarewhack]

He's speaking nonsense - just like Shayera was. His teeth were grit and he was flaring with anger. The key phrase of 'kill them all' struck Jade and produced an almost instant reaction. "You truly have lost it!" Without being completely sure what he was doing, guided by his intuition and 'charging' as he spoke, he formed the fonic arte Energy Blast. This focused a sphere around Zompano within which an explosion would occur - but one that was not especially powerful, considering it was only a basic fonic arte.

[zompano]

Zompano had, quite frankly, not expected an attack yet. Just banter and anger and some rant about how horrible he was. When he found himself caught inside an explosion, he was surprised. And he found the experience rather painful. He coughed as the smoke cleared and he wobbled a bit on his feet. He raised a finger to object to that, but just as he was about to do so, two policemen suddenly lunged at Jade. Both wielded police batons and had seemed to lost all remnants of society. Both officers had bloody and ripped clothes, with hateful expressions and a barbaric malice to them.

[yourfononsarewhack]

It had seemed like a simple enough idea in his head; these new powers were making his problems disappear, wiping them out so quickly. And with how quickly the mayor was proving himself to be mad, knocking out this head would be the ideal way to take over and establish order. Jade was surprised to see the mayor still standing - presumably there were no survivors among those caught in his attacks - and his surprise was only displaced by the officers now attacking him.

Jade had not acquired his own weapon, not even thinking that he had one. He stumbled back at first and quickly raised an arm in a feeble attempt to block the assault. At least one of the batons could make contact and bloody his arm. But he strikes back at one of the officers quickly. Some more instincts were kicking in - helping him to handle the hand-to-hand motions quickly and moving to try to disarm him. And these moves that were kicking in were the moves of a colonel who was able to restrain an enraged Asch the Bloody.

[fantheflame]

This was insanity. This entire place and everything in it was insanity, and the longer Sasuke kept his eyes open - really, truly kept his eyes open, his red eyes active constantly even though he could feel that using them was tiring - the more he was certain all of this was wrong. He wasn't sure what to call it (the word genjutsu kept flitting through his head but he didn't know what that meant), but he knew what he was seeing was broken.

And something gut-deep and instinctual told him that it was the string-pulling leadership of this village that was causing everyone's problems.

People were getting hurt all around him - Itachi was sick and his friends were going hungry and at the core of him he knew it was wrong and he had to fix it, and that was even before the chaos spiraled into the physical. Suddenly friends and neighbors were able to do things he should have thought impossible but that - intense strength and shifting shadows and lighting from fingertips - was the only thing that felt real.

To find the mayor standing here with his leather-red skin in a place where everybody should be a normal human and wasn't just cemented everything, didn't it.

"Did you do this?" He didn't even bother to call the other man by name. He sure as hell wasn't going to call him Lord Mayor.


((ooc: Mental and physical injuries up to and including grievous and incapacitating ones are just fine, but no dismemberment or death, please!))

[zompano]

He didn't even bother to rise from the bench he sat on. Instead, he rolled his eyes and offered a slight shrug.

"I should think that obvious. I am, after all, the star."

[fantheflame]

"Tch." Arrogant asshole.

"Then undo it. I'm not interested in living your stupid lies."

Even if he'd felt so much more comfortable around some of his friends (around his brother) before he'd started to question this crap, if it was all bullshit he still didn't want it. His friends could like him for something real or not like him at all.

[zompano]

Zompano stood and stepped towards him, a small arrogant smile on his face. "Do you really think your real life is so much better? Have you ever stopped to think perhaps that this life is better than what awaits you? Ignorant mouse. I've given you paradise~!"

[fantheflame]

Sasuke's guard went up as soon as Zompano stood, chokutou sword up in front of him. He didn't know how he knew to stand, but he was just gonna let the instincts do whatever they'd do.

"I don't care what you think is better. I've never been interested in doing things the easy way." That instinct was one of the few things that hadn't wavered in the last few days.

"Your paradise sucks anyway. Tax hikes to make half your population starve? Whose brilliant fucking idea was that?"

[zompano]

He paid no mind to the swords. He looked up in the sky with a look of distant satisfaction.

"Nobody loves a perfect paradise, dear boy. The organization tried it many times in many places. But they always made it a little too perfect. Nobody will ever be convinced by a perfect world. A little strife, a little chaos. It was all that was needed for you pitiful mice to be convinced. If you hadn't turned feral, I was going to come and save you all. The wonderful Lord Mayor! Uniting the rich and the poor, solving the crisis, and lollipops and flowers for everyone!"

But then his expression soured. "But that wretched scientist ruined it all. So I'm afraid you're just going to have to die~"

[twinlionfists]

Hinata and Yuuna had followed Saori to the plaza with the "mayor" of Luceti, righteous anger burning through the teen as she went to meet with the man everyone believed to be responsible for twisting their lives into the lie that they now suffered with.

Hinata herself was suffering with the fact that she'd had a family vastly different from the one that was slowly making itself known to her, that she had had been forced to behave in ways and say things that she wasn't sure she understood completely yet. No, she was...furious and she wanted to make sure that her ire was known.

Her...sister-in-law (faux s-i-l her mind screamed) and she had only shared a look before they decided to follow Saori after all, but as soon as the fight between the newly awakened goddess and the man in rags began, two large dog-like creatures jumped out at them, stopping them from helping the other woman.

"Yuuna-san... I...I believe that we will have to fight these creatures to continue," she yelled over the wind that was starting to pick up around them.

[sun_showers]

Teeth grit and Yuuna knows they're in for something. Creatures like she'd never seen before, demons at that stood before them, the saliva dripping from their fangs and ready to defend their master. She has a clear view of Saori and Zompano beginning their rounds at each other, and she knew that Hinata and herself had to take care of the wretched man's pets, lest they decide that Saori become their next lunch. The answer was simple, keep these dogs here, if they couldn't help exterminate the obvious source of the infection, then they could at least deal with the other problems that stemmed from it.

It made her nervous, but at the same time she told herself this wasn't the time to be afraid. This was a time that the two of them had to be brave, for themselves, for their wife and sister alike, even if it was all a lie- and for everyone else in Luceti.

Her sword is drawn out, the blade flashing from the glint of the sun. She'd murdered the men who sought to lock them up before, their blood still dirty upon her hands. And now, the lives of the two canines that dared block their path would mean nothing, absolutely nothing for her to take.

"Those nasty things look like they mean business. It's ok. Why don't we put them down for their own good? I mean, who'd want Zompano as their owner anyway?" Her eyes harden, noticing the dogs are beginning to approach, sword at the ready.

[twinlionfists]

The sound of Yuuna's blade is oddly comforting, something that Hinata isn't sure about why that would be the case. No one she was intimately acquainted with back in Konoha used a sword, but she knew many kenjutsu proficients, since all the ANBU and former-ANBU jounin in the village had their own tanto.

But that is besides the point. Before them are two murderous, dangerous demon dogs. Animals that were nothing like the big white dogs of the Inuzuka clan, nothing like the ninken she is starting to remember Kakashi-sensei using from time to time.

"I agree that it appears that we shall have to be serious," she says softly, harshly, before pulling her hands before her, letting the strangely-familiar-but-not jyuuken cover her hands. "I would prefer nothing better."

[sun_showers]

There isn't time for much talk. The growling dogs leap at them, taking Yuuna by surprise as one of them takes shot at sinking its teeth into her leg. She barely gets out of the way in time, stabbing her sword into its side, the blood spurting out from the wound. But it only seems to make it more angry at her. Like the blow was nothing. In fact, it begins to heal itself at an alarming rate, and it's ready to attack again. Her face is nothing but shock at the spectacle, mind racing on what she can possibly do to an enemy like that.

"Hinata...did you see that..." She looks over, hoping the other dog hadn't managed to hurt her sister-in-law. What kind of monsters are these things...

[twinlionfists]

She does see the unnatural healing rate and her mind begins racing to figure out how to defend herself and Yuuna-san as well in that case. She focuses on her hands, letting them take on the eerie strange, blue glow that she realized she could do yesterday.

With a deep breath, she lets her body take over and pushes one hand forward. The demonic dog that had been aiming for her throat with his sharp teeth is thrown back into a tree. Nearly half a meter before it ever reached her. Her wide eyes register the shock before she pushes her other hand forward and the other animal is thrown as well.