The One Eyed Bandit
rotworm
THE LAIR OF THE MIDDLER
Money makes the world go round huh? Yeah he understood that sentiment, money really greased the wheel of action and loosened lips. Still he shuttered as he heard the voice coming closer. Even if this woman was calling the gameshow shady he had to say she wasn’t exactly making a case for why she wasn’t. Then there were her claims that the other girl was a serpent of all things.
“How’d ya know? You in bed with the serpents too-”
He heard the other calling out for him to sing and he couldn’t exactly say that he was wrong. Even if it were just a taste of pain it’d be a good warning for the woman. He started humming lowly listening to the footsteps once they were close he started belting out the first song that came to his head.
“If you hate your enemies, enemies shine
If you're not a friend of me, enter the light~”
Upon hearing the song, Pascal started following the trail it made away from its source. The tingling in his hands and feet were back. As he approached, it became more of a discomfort than a tickle. Getting even closer caused him to wince as parts of his body started to throb with a dull pain.
“Guy really wasn’t kidding…” he muttered. As he continued his approach, he braced for how the pain may intensify next. Would it feel like being stabbed repeatedly all over? Or perhaps it would just be a more constant hurt.
The narrow, blackened halls of the maze had already been made with noise in mind. Bereft of their sight, after all, how else were the contestants supposed to navigate beyond blindly groping about? So, as Jackson’s Potential flared within his lung, his voice tore through the hall like a tidal wave of pure force.
Splinters of wood were shaved from the walls, and the foundation of the maze shook. All things before the blonde trembled, and then, one of them laughed.
“Hah! You don’t fuck around, do you?” The woman scoffed, and then light flooded the hall. A flashbang. Suffocating black was replaced with blinding white, searing his senses in the manner that only magnesium could.
The flashbang also caught the other blond off guard. He blinked and stumbled a bit, crashing into one of the walls as his vision turned completely white. The sudden loud sound also left his ears ringing for a moment. What about the one who dropped the stun grenade though? Was that just a diversion tactic, or a means of escape?
The light that tore through the walls burnt his eyes causing a searing pain. He stumbled back with a shout cutting off his song as he felt the solid wall hit his back. He let himself slide down the wall until he reached a sitting position letting his eyes adjust once more to the return of the darkness.
“FUCK. You piece of shit”
He forced himself back up keeping a hand on the wall. He didn’t really get a great view of the place in the flashbang and he still felt the occasional spots of white fill his peripherals like a cruel reminder that he didn’t know how long he’d suffer its aftermath. Even his hearing was affected as he heard a ringing fill his ears that he tried to put out of his mind. At least the frags itself didn’t mean shit to his HP skin.
“HEY OTHER DUDE. YOU ALIVE STILL?”
“Dude’s a bit mean, isn’t it?” A sneer, masked by black and white. Cold steel pressed against Jackson’s throat. “Now keep that pretty voice to yourself, or I’ll open your throat like a wallet.”
The voice was close now, and hot, heavy breaths lapped against Jackson’s face. He could hear the woman shifting her weight, and then stumbling on her feet. Her blade, for a moment, fell away from his throat, and she swore under her breath.
Even though Jackson had stopped singing, the hall still shook.
A wretched, heavy sound of splintering wood filled the hall, and light spilled in from a fat crack which now ran up the wall. It was faint, but the mystery woman was now visible. A pair of red-brown eyes were cast upward, distracted by the sudden wave of destruction, though her knife was still held towards Jackson’s head.
“What the fuck?” She grimaced. “This ain’t you, is it?”
“NOPE.”
Jackson took the distraction to shove all of his weight into trying to elbow the woman off of him. The knife wasn’t his biggest concern here and a few scratches we’ren’t going to stop him from trying to put distance in. Unfortunately with the shaking of the ground and cracking of the wall it was all leading to one potential outcome, being buried in rubble.
Once the woman was off him he took a look down the hall at all he could see with the light available. He knew there was at least one woman either knocked out or dead here, there was the other dude who was or was not an HP, Makoto in his last room, Flo somewhere in here… How many others would be trapped if this place came down?
“Hey! Save the aggression for later. Right now we need to expect this place is coming down and get the hell out of here. Who knows who else will be caught up in it.”
Boom. As if it had came at Jackson’s beck and call, another shock ran through the bleak maze. From both above and below. Ripped loose by the earth’s violent rumbling, another of the show’s challenge rooms dropped from above, crashing through the ceiling, and turning the surrounding walls to splinters.
Light flooded the maze, and then the entire structure keeled over. The twisting corridors became channels for falling rubble, which tumbled down from above in gussets of metal and plywood. Robbed of his footing, Pascal plummeted down from the mirror maze, and crashed into Jackson and the woman, sending them tumbling down the hall.
The woman swore under her breath, and in their collective moment of freefall, made a decision. A hand clasped around both the Dragon and Tiger’s back, and a foot rested on the Serpent’s, and then the lot of them vanished.
~~~
Unconsciousness took Jackson. For a precious set of minutes, he swam in blackness. Not that of the maze, but of his own mind, until he awoke to the scent of blood and sand.
The explosion knocked him out. That much he understood as he was once more experiencing the blinding bright light. He was going to have the world’s worst headache, minimum, when this was all done. He’d definitely need a trip to a check up.
“Took ya long enough.” The woman sneered. Above the two of them a blazing, wrathful sun hung, finally exposing her freckled features. A pair of brown eyes loomed over Jackson, a derelict gas station reflected within them. “Lucky I ain’t cleared to kill any of you today. Would’ve been reeeaalll easy to just let you drop, blondie.”
“SHIT.”
He shoot up at the words into a sitting position scanning the area for the others. He had registered just enough to realize they were likely okay but that couldn’t be said of anyone else still in there. Not that he was really planning to feel bad about that, he’d barely made it out himself.
“What’da mean? What the heck are you doing here? Who are you?”
“That’s…”
A darkened, man-shaped figure emerged from out of the gas station’s gloom. Filling the doorway, he cast eerie shadows against the peeling wallpaper, his jet-black hair, carelessly tousled, his narrow, piercing eyes glinting with a predatory gleam. The curve of his lips held the promise of sweet deceit and treachery, a living embodiment of fear and seduction, an enigma wrapped in beauty and terror.
"Hey, Freckles. Job done? Who's this?" Beau's voice, a smoky baritone, slithered like a serpent through the dusty, barren air. He leaned against the worn threshold, crossing his arms over his chest, his head curiously tilted.
“Mmm? Some straggler. I was in the middle of finding out more, but things’ve really gone to shit out there. The whole place is coming down.” ‘Freckles’ sighed, and gave Beau an exasperated look. “And ‘yer interrupting, by the way. I’m in the middle of the process.”
She turned her attention back to Jackson, and then offered him a hand. “Speakin’ of. Get up. If that wasn’t you or your friends, then I think we’ve got bigger problems for the time being.”
“The fuck, why the hell would it be us? Did you miss where we were inside the place as it came down?”
He gave a sigh as he forced himself up off the ground. He had no idea where they were which meant this unknown woman was currently carrying all the power in this situation. On the off chance knocking her out didn’t free him then he’d be stuck here with an irate woman who probably would be willing to off him.
“Listen, whatever you guys are planning, I want no part in it. Thanks for the save, now can you just send me back? Assuming that wasn’t a completely shitty grab for views then like you said there’s bigger problems and I got people to check on.”
His mind flashed back to the last year when several groups of Dragons were found brutally murdered in central. It wasn’t necessarily similar but it had felt like there was a noose closing in with every suspicious dealing going on.
“Sass doesn’t suit you, blondie. Don’t act like this city isn’t full of the sort of psycho that’d collapse a building and then make a game out of getting out alive.” The woman sighed. She hated when anyone within the gangs pretended like they were a reasonable person. She knew from experience that they were nowhere close.
“And I’d say you’ve got bigger problems than checking up on your friends…” She huffed. “...But I’ve got bigger problems than you now, too.” She gave Jackson a dark look, and her eyes said more than words could’ve. Call it a silver lining, but as far as she was concerned, that earthquake was his saviour. A seismic hero without a cape that’d snatched him from her clutches, and that annoyed her more than she let on.
But she still wasn’t petty enough to interrogate him when there was clearly so much larger a fish afoot.
Around the group, the world suddenly rippled. The rolling sands bent like waves, and the phantasmal gas station melted away like wax. One moment, they were within an arid stretch of nowhere, and the next the sun had vanished from above them, replaced by a tattered array of the studio’s few surviving lights.
“Now scamper off.” The woman shot him a glare. “I already let that other blonde off the hook, though I suppose you never actually got to catch a look at him.”
He let out a tch before doing exactly that. It wasn’t like he wanted to listen but seriously he had no reason to stick around at this point. He took out his phone and immediately began typing up a message to Nona-me.
"Hey Nonnie, how much for a special delivery and a request?"
Her response was almost instant, he glanced it over and wrote back quickly hoping to get some more information before booking it.
"That'll depend! ^w^ What, when, and where?"
"Food, my house, hopefully check up on ma. 'Cause when I get back I sure as hell ain't gonna wanna cook. The earthquake reaching east or is everything good over there?"
He didn’t waste any time moving forwards trying to get a glance at the damages and throw himself further into the fray looking for anyone still trapped. The ground still shook and who knew when it planned to let up. His phone made its chime once more and he quickly drafted up a response.
"It's only sorta wobbly down there, but I'd say it's reached us! Doesn't seem too bad though ^w^ Is it bad over there?"
"awful just had to speedrun not getting squashed like a pancake gtg though keys in the fifth plant like usual extra cash in the kitchen ask ma take whatever."
He heard the distant sounds of chaos from the building he was just in and weighted how much leaving them and making his way home would bother him in the end. Pocketing his phone he already knew what he was going to do, he only hoped he wouldn’t wind up with a damn concussion from it.
“Fucking shit… seriously. Ughh I hate giving a shit…”
With that he started to rush past the crew racing back inside to help.
Beau watched as Jackson raced back towards the chaos, a smirk playing on his lips. He enjoyed the unpredictability of the world around him, and as it crumbled, he felt an odd sense of excitement. He turned to Yulia, who was still visibly annoyed by the unexpected turn of events.
"Hey, Freckles, lighten up," he said, nonchalantly waving a smartphone in her face. The caller I.D. read 'Techno.' "Z's calling us in. We've got work to do."
Beau glanced back at the destruction. He couldn't help but be intrigued by the strange man who had just run back into the wreckage. What drove someone to do such a thing? Was it loyalty, bravery, or just plain stupidity?
“Don’t we always? If knew the Queen Bitch of the ‘winning side’ was such a damn workhorse, I would’ve told you to eat shit.” Yulia grumbled, recalling the night that’d sent her down the convoluted path to being on the ‘right’ side of the law. “At least Weiss was too busy geling up his hair to give a shit about what anyone else was doing.”
It’d been like this ever since she’d taken her partner up on his offer. Maybe if she’d been a bit less drunk, and a lot less fed up with everything, she’d be in the position of one of the contestants. On a list, and stalked from the shadows, but she wasn’t. She was the watcher. A pair of eyes for some great, unknowable beast, and one that paid well at that.
“Shit. What does she want, then? Another wild goose chase? Or does it have something to do with all…” She took a moment to gesture to the wreckage surrounding them. “...this?”
Beau’s smile spread, his voice saccharine sweet. “Guess. ~”
“How’d ya know? You in bed with the serpents too-”
He heard the other calling out for him to sing and he couldn’t exactly say that he was wrong. Even if it were just a taste of pain it’d be a good warning for the woman. He started humming lowly listening to the footsteps once they were close he started belting out the first song that came to his head.
“If you hate your enemies, enemies shine
If you're not a friend of me, enter the light~”
Upon hearing the song, Pascal started following the trail it made away from its source. The tingling in his hands and feet were back. As he approached, it became more of a discomfort than a tickle. Getting even closer caused him to wince as parts of his body started to throb with a dull pain.
“Guy really wasn’t kidding…” he muttered. As he continued his approach, he braced for how the pain may intensify next. Would it feel like being stabbed repeatedly all over? Or perhaps it would just be a more constant hurt.
The narrow, blackened halls of the maze had already been made with noise in mind. Bereft of their sight, after all, how else were the contestants supposed to navigate beyond blindly groping about? So, as Jackson’s Potential flared within his lung, his voice tore through the hall like a tidal wave of pure force.
Splinters of wood were shaved from the walls, and the foundation of the maze shook. All things before the blonde trembled, and then, one of them laughed.
“Hah! You don’t fuck around, do you?” The woman scoffed, and then light flooded the hall. A flashbang. Suffocating black was replaced with blinding white, searing his senses in the manner that only magnesium could.
The flashbang also caught the other blond off guard. He blinked and stumbled a bit, crashing into one of the walls as his vision turned completely white. The sudden loud sound also left his ears ringing for a moment. What about the one who dropped the stun grenade though? Was that just a diversion tactic, or a means of escape?
The light that tore through the walls burnt his eyes causing a searing pain. He stumbled back with a shout cutting off his song as he felt the solid wall hit his back. He let himself slide down the wall until he reached a sitting position letting his eyes adjust once more to the return of the darkness.
“FUCK. You piece of shit”
He forced himself back up keeping a hand on the wall. He didn’t really get a great view of the place in the flashbang and he still felt the occasional spots of white fill his peripherals like a cruel reminder that he didn’t know how long he’d suffer its aftermath. Even his hearing was affected as he heard a ringing fill his ears that he tried to put out of his mind. At least the frags itself didn’t mean shit to his HP skin.
“HEY OTHER DUDE. YOU ALIVE STILL?”
“Dude’s a bit mean, isn’t it?” A sneer, masked by black and white. Cold steel pressed against Jackson’s throat. “Now keep that pretty voice to yourself, or I’ll open your throat like a wallet.”
The voice was close now, and hot, heavy breaths lapped against Jackson’s face. He could hear the woman shifting her weight, and then stumbling on her feet. Her blade, for a moment, fell away from his throat, and she swore under her breath.
Even though Jackson had stopped singing, the hall still shook.
A wretched, heavy sound of splintering wood filled the hall, and light spilled in from a fat crack which now ran up the wall. It was faint, but the mystery woman was now visible. A pair of red-brown eyes were cast upward, distracted by the sudden wave of destruction, though her knife was still held towards Jackson’s head.
“What the fuck?” She grimaced. “This ain’t you, is it?”
“NOPE.”
Jackson took the distraction to shove all of his weight into trying to elbow the woman off of him. The knife wasn’t his biggest concern here and a few scratches we’ren’t going to stop him from trying to put distance in. Unfortunately with the shaking of the ground and cracking of the wall it was all leading to one potential outcome, being buried in rubble.
Once the woman was off him he took a look down the hall at all he could see with the light available. He knew there was at least one woman either knocked out or dead here, there was the other dude who was or was not an HP, Makoto in his last room, Flo somewhere in here… How many others would be trapped if this place came down?
“Hey! Save the aggression for later. Right now we need to expect this place is coming down and get the hell out of here. Who knows who else will be caught up in it.”
Boom. As if it had came at Jackson’s beck and call, another shock ran through the bleak maze. From both above and below. Ripped loose by the earth’s violent rumbling, another of the show’s challenge rooms dropped from above, crashing through the ceiling, and turning the surrounding walls to splinters.
Light flooded the maze, and then the entire structure keeled over. The twisting corridors became channels for falling rubble, which tumbled down from above in gussets of metal and plywood. Robbed of his footing, Pascal plummeted down from the mirror maze, and crashed into Jackson and the woman, sending them tumbling down the hall.
The woman swore under her breath, and in their collective moment of freefall, made a decision. A hand clasped around both the Dragon and Tiger’s back, and a foot rested on the Serpent’s, and then the lot of them vanished.
~~~
Unconsciousness took Jackson. For a precious set of minutes, he swam in blackness. Not that of the maze, but of his own mind, until he awoke to the scent of blood and sand.
The explosion knocked him out. That much he understood as he was once more experiencing the blinding bright light. He was going to have the world’s worst headache, minimum, when this was all done. He’d definitely need a trip to a check up.
“Took ya long enough.” The woman sneered. Above the two of them a blazing, wrathful sun hung, finally exposing her freckled features. A pair of brown eyes loomed over Jackson, a derelict gas station reflected within them. “Lucky I ain’t cleared to kill any of you today. Would’ve been reeeaalll easy to just let you drop, blondie.”
“SHIT.”
He shoot up at the words into a sitting position scanning the area for the others. He had registered just enough to realize they were likely okay but that couldn’t be said of anyone else still in there. Not that he was really planning to feel bad about that, he’d barely made it out himself.
“What’da mean? What the heck are you doing here? Who are you?”
“That’s…”
A darkened, man-shaped figure emerged from out of the gas station’s gloom. Filling the doorway, he cast eerie shadows against the peeling wallpaper, his jet-black hair, carelessly tousled, his narrow, piercing eyes glinting with a predatory gleam. The curve of his lips held the promise of sweet deceit and treachery, a living embodiment of fear and seduction, an enigma wrapped in beauty and terror.
"Hey, Freckles. Job done? Who's this?" Beau's voice, a smoky baritone, slithered like a serpent through the dusty, barren air. He leaned against the worn threshold, crossing his arms over his chest, his head curiously tilted.
“Mmm? Some straggler. I was in the middle of finding out more, but things’ve really gone to shit out there. The whole place is coming down.” ‘Freckles’ sighed, and gave Beau an exasperated look. “And ‘yer interrupting, by the way. I’m in the middle of the process.”
She turned her attention back to Jackson, and then offered him a hand. “Speakin’ of. Get up. If that wasn’t you or your friends, then I think we’ve got bigger problems for the time being.”
“The fuck, why the hell would it be us? Did you miss where we were inside the place as it came down?”
He gave a sigh as he forced himself up off the ground. He had no idea where they were which meant this unknown woman was currently carrying all the power in this situation. On the off chance knocking her out didn’t free him then he’d be stuck here with an irate woman who probably would be willing to off him.
“Listen, whatever you guys are planning, I want no part in it. Thanks for the save, now can you just send me back? Assuming that wasn’t a completely shitty grab for views then like you said there’s bigger problems and I got people to check on.”
His mind flashed back to the last year when several groups of Dragons were found brutally murdered in central. It wasn’t necessarily similar but it had felt like there was a noose closing in with every suspicious dealing going on.
“Sass doesn’t suit you, blondie. Don’t act like this city isn’t full of the sort of psycho that’d collapse a building and then make a game out of getting out alive.” The woman sighed. She hated when anyone within the gangs pretended like they were a reasonable person. She knew from experience that they were nowhere close.
“And I’d say you’ve got bigger problems than checking up on your friends…” She huffed. “...But I’ve got bigger problems than you now, too.” She gave Jackson a dark look, and her eyes said more than words could’ve. Call it a silver lining, but as far as she was concerned, that earthquake was his saviour. A seismic hero without a cape that’d snatched him from her clutches, and that annoyed her more than she let on.
But she still wasn’t petty enough to interrogate him when there was clearly so much larger a fish afoot.
Around the group, the world suddenly rippled. The rolling sands bent like waves, and the phantasmal gas station melted away like wax. One moment, they were within an arid stretch of nowhere, and the next the sun had vanished from above them, replaced by a tattered array of the studio’s few surviving lights.
“Now scamper off.” The woman shot him a glare. “I already let that other blonde off the hook, though I suppose you never actually got to catch a look at him.”
He let out a tch before doing exactly that. It wasn’t like he wanted to listen but seriously he had no reason to stick around at this point. He took out his phone and immediately began typing up a message to Nona-me.
"Hey Nonnie, how much for a special delivery and a request?"
Her response was almost instant, he glanced it over and wrote back quickly hoping to get some more information before booking it.
"That'll depend! ^w^ What, when, and where?"
"Food, my house, hopefully check up on ma. 'Cause when I get back I sure as hell ain't gonna wanna cook. The earthquake reaching east or is everything good over there?"
He didn’t waste any time moving forwards trying to get a glance at the damages and throw himself further into the fray looking for anyone still trapped. The ground still shook and who knew when it planned to let up. His phone made its chime once more and he quickly drafted up a response.
"It's only sorta wobbly down there, but I'd say it's reached us! Doesn't seem too bad though ^w^ Is it bad over there?"
"awful just had to speedrun not getting squashed like a pancake gtg though keys in the fifth plant like usual extra cash in the kitchen ask ma take whatever."
He heard the distant sounds of chaos from the building he was just in and weighted how much leaving them and making his way home would bother him in the end. Pocketing his phone he already knew what he was going to do, he only hoped he wouldn’t wind up with a damn concussion from it.
“Fucking shit… seriously. Ughh I hate giving a shit…”
With that he started to rush past the crew racing back inside to help.
Beau watched as Jackson raced back towards the chaos, a smirk playing on his lips. He enjoyed the unpredictability of the world around him, and as it crumbled, he felt an odd sense of excitement. He turned to Yulia, who was still visibly annoyed by the unexpected turn of events.
"Hey, Freckles, lighten up," he said, nonchalantly waving a smartphone in her face. The caller I.D. read 'Techno.' "Z's calling us in. We've got work to do."
Beau glanced back at the destruction. He couldn't help but be intrigued by the strange man who had just run back into the wreckage. What drove someone to do such a thing? Was it loyalty, bravery, or just plain stupidity?
“Don’t we always? If knew the Queen Bitch of the ‘winning side’ was such a damn workhorse, I would’ve told you to eat shit.” Yulia grumbled, recalling the night that’d sent her down the convoluted path to being on the ‘right’ side of the law. “At least Weiss was too busy geling up his hair to give a shit about what anyone else was doing.”
It’d been like this ever since she’d taken her partner up on his offer. Maybe if she’d been a bit less drunk, and a lot less fed up with everything, she’d be in the position of one of the contestants. On a list, and stalked from the shadows, but she wasn’t. She was the watcher. A pair of eyes for some great, unknowable beast, and one that paid well at that.
“Shit. What does she want, then? Another wild goose chase? Or does it have something to do with all…” She took a moment to gesture to the wreckage surrounding them. “...this?”
Beau’s smile spread, his voice saccharine sweet. “Guess. ~”
