Streets of Fandom/Arms Hotel, early Saturday evening

[sharp_as_knives]

After a day of research, a lot of watching battle, and a little bit of shooting, Hannibal was ready for a bit of rest in his handwavily acquired hotel room. Tomorrow seemed like it might be a little bit busy.

He secured his rifle, straightened his suit, climbed the wall across from the school, and headed for the Arms hotel, keeping an eye out for danger.



[OOC: expecting one, but open!]

Comments

[myownface]

"Something like that, yeah," Sparkle mumbled, poking at a piece of cheese, eyes down on his plate. "Got stabbed and blown up today. That was kind of stressful, anyhow."

Sparkle had a gift for understatement sometimes.

[sharp_as_knives]

"Not the sort of stressful most people experience more than once," Hannibal noted.

"I had some patients when I was in the ER that died, medically speaking, and survived. Some of them changed because of it. And some of them shrugged and moved on." He sipped his own tea as a prompt. "There is no right or wrong way to handle it, so long as you don't let it defeat you."

[myownface]

"Didn't let it defeat me the last time someone killed me around here, either," Sparkle grumbled, tearing off a chunk of bread and stacking some sausage on it. "More or less lost a friend because of that time, too. Which sucks, but I guess thats what happens when you eat them."

Understandably.

[sharp_as_knives]

In Hannibal's experience, yes. But then, he tried not to eat friends too often; they were too easy to trace back to him.

"Eat them?" he asked. There was casual curiosity there, but nothing else. He took a piece of sausage for himself.

[myownface]

"Some vampire bitch tore my throat out in the streets," Sparkle explained, eyes firmly turned toward his meal. "I came back as one of them, and, in between snacking on Alec, I... killed Sholeh. And I enjoyed it. Laughed in her face as she struggled and bled out."

He was now stacking cheese onto sausage with a sort of violent bent that most people didn't generally reserve for finger food.

"I know it's probably not totally the same thing, I mean, I was under the influence of this demonic thing inside me at the time, but when those masked bandits came after us, laughing and waving their knives around and talking about everything they wanted to do to us, it felt like I knew exactly what the fuck they were feeling."

[sharp_as_knives]

Hannibal watched him for a moment. "We don't know what causes those men to act as they do; perhaps they're also under the influence of something," he pointed out.

"Regardless, being able to identify with them to some extent isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's easier to fight or evade somebody if you understand them."

[myownface]

"Yeah. Made it a hell of a lot easier to shoot those first two I ran into until they stopped moving," Sparkle noted, still staring down at his plate.

That was totally still cheese, there. It was just a very sausagey sort of cheese, on a well-squished piece of bread.

"Well. Alec finished one of them off, I guess."

[sharp_as_knives]

"Was Alec helping you sabotage the propaganda?" Hannibal asked. He saved the relationship questions for after the existential crisis.

[myownface]

"No... this was earlier in the week. He and I bumped into each other at the Kwik Stop, before we knew the psychos were a thing. They attacked us, killed him, and I managed to hold two of them off and kill one by the time he came back to finish off the other."

Which he was both proud of and kind of horrified at.

"Tonight, with the posters, that was me and Kenzi and Cecil. We got swarmed."

[sharp_as_knives]

"And yet, here you are. You survived," Hannibal pointed out. "Each time."

[myownface]

"Well, I got lucky and respawned," Sparkle replied. "That's not so much me surviving as Hyperion making a profit off my death. And the other time, that not being permanent, that was a fluke too. It's not like it was my stellar survival skills that gave me my pulse back."

He was taking a really vengeful sort of bite of the... whatever the hell he had done with his food, there.

[sharp_as_knives]

Hannibal smirked. "Survival by technicality is still alive," he pointed out.

[myownface]

"... Guess so." Sparkle wrinkled his nose a little. "Means I'm a little less likely to make the same damn mistakes again, anyhow."

At least somewhat.

[sharp_as_knives]

"There you are. Death as a learning experience," Hannibal remarked dryly.

[myownface]

"Most fucked-up learning experience I keep having around here," Sparkle grumbled, and then shoved a piece of bread into his mouth. Possibly mostly to spite it.

... Probably mostly to spite it.

[sharp_as_knives]

"Better than it being the last one you have," Hannibal pointed out, not ungently.

[myownface]

"Yeah, but that's the hell of it," Sparkle grumbled. "I died. It should have been. I mean, not like I'm in some hurry to call it quits or anything, but this New-U shit is seriously screwed up."

He wrinkled his nose, and then picked at the cheese again.

"When I go home again, second and third chances like that aren't going to keep happening."

[sharp_as_knives]

"True." Hannibal nodded. "However, I should think you're also unlikely to encounter gangs of psychotic men wearing rubber tires. Please correct me if I'm wrong." He raised an eyebrow.

"And if you do, you'll have a better idea how to fight them or when to run away."

[myownface]

"Toronto has its own fair share of assholes who would love to take me apart, but nothing quite like that," Sparkle allowed with a sigh and a grudging nod of his head. "Just the more run-of-the mill crazy. The desperate kind, not the 'eyelid hammocks' kind."

And Sparkle could understand desperate, too. Desperation drove people to do some pretty horrible things, too. Made it easier for them to justify it.

[sharp_as_knives]

"There will always be desperate people," Hannibal noted. "But you seem to have acquitted yourself quite well so far."

[myownface]

"Yeah, well. I can now say with certainty that I'm not really a huge fan of the alternative."

Yeah, that meat was gone, now. Sparkle had angrily devoured it, and was going to exact his revenge on the cheese, next. Presumably for not being sausage.

[sharp_as_knives]

"Nor I," Hannibal agreed. "I'm rather fond of living."