fandomhigh | Off The Grid: Laying Low for Beginners, Tuesday, Period Two

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laying low

Off The Grid: Laying Low for Beginners, Tuesday, Period Two

"Alright," Kanan clapped his hands together, looking out over his class. If there was an amused look on his face, well, he'd discovered the Danger Shop. And if it was programmed to look like a certain cantina he was well familiar with, full of sweaty, hungry clientele that was just as much alien as human, well... Maybe he was just sharing the love today. "Welcome to The Asteroid Belt. Not much to look at and too much to smell, this is where the miners and freighter pilots coming over from Cynda head to help them wind down after a long, hard day working the moon."

And Kanan, who was stepping behind the bar and casually reaching for a rag to lazily wipe at a glass, apparently tended the bar here.

"You've been told by the bartender, who incidentally happens to be your boss, that if you have one more brawl inside and break one more bottle of his favorite vintage, you'll be flying the broken down hoverbus out back for the foreseeable future." He quirked a little smile. "Trust me, that really is a fate worse than death."

Kanan didn't like the hoverbus. Kanan was pretty sure it was a miracle that the hoverbus hadn't exploded and killed everybody on it, yet.

"Unfortunately, there's this guy." A male Chagrian with a broken-off horn made his way into the bar, the simulation pausing him in place with an angry sneer on his face. "And these guys." A half-dozen other people, a healthy mix of human and non-human, followed behind. They didn't look nice, exactly. "And they don't like you. See, they're a little gang that likes to call themselves the Sarlaccs. If you don't know what a Sarlacc is, trust me, the name fits. These guys'll grab anybody walking through the industrial area at the wrong time, and then thoughtfully relieve them of their credits."

He grinned at the class.

"Last time Charko, that would be the big ugly blue guy, ran into you, you broke one of those horns off of his head. Maybe you meant to, maybe it was dumb luck, but you can imagine he's not too thrilled about it. He knows you're here, he'd like to settle the score by breaking something off of you, and he's got more blasters than you do. Assuming that today you've decided that you like breathing and you hate the hoverbus, you're not going to fight these guys. You're going to hide, or you're going to leave."

He clapped his hands again, and gave a grin to the class that was a little too bright.

"Have fun with that. Oh, and Ada? Congratulations, you'll be my TA for the rest of this term."

And then he turned his attention to the drinks as the Danger Shop sim came to life.

[OOC: Open!]

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The Asteroid Belt has only two exits- There's a front door, and a side door that leads out into the alleyway. A pair of the Sarlaccs are standing by the front door, blocking that exit. Another pair is ever so casually making their way around the cantina's booths and tables to block that side door. There's a short hallway that leads into the storage space and the broom closet, but no actual way out from there.

The cantina is busy tonight, though, packed with miners and pilots wanting to have a good drink after a long day's work, and even a couple of those weird heavily-cloaked blood cultists that sacrifice stray animals by the light of the full moon. People mostly just give those guys their space. Because weird blood cultists.

Hide or find a way to slip out unnoticed. Or, hey, work together and come up with a diversion so the rest of you can slip out. Kanan doesn't care how you get out of trouble, here, just so long as you make it good.

"I could take them," Dante said, a little louder.

What? He had a long history of fighting his way out of shit.

"Kind of missing the point, there," Kanan noted. Casually. From over the bar. If there was a little smirk on his lips, though...

Hey, somebody had broken that Chagrian's horn off, after all.

Dante shrugged. "I'm not sneaky," he said, "But in this one, I don't need to be."

It regularly took SWAT like twenty, thirty people or more to take him down for just a little bit.

"Your boss might disagree," Kanan mused, still not seeming concerned either way. "He owns this place, lets you drink as much as you like from the bar, and keeps your sorry ass employed so that you can keep a roof over your head. We like Okadiah. Trashing his cantina when you don't have to means you'd have to find somewhere else to drink."

Priorities.

"There's another cantina a few blocks away, but it's been closed for renovations for a couple of months now."

"You think 'our boss' is gonna like it when you don't show up to work tomorrow because you let a bunch of dipshit assholes beat the crap out of you?" Dante asked incredulously.

No, he'd never been employed. And there were always other bars, anyway.

"I think you're in a class about avoiding notice," Kanan replied, shrugging and pouring a drink for an Ithorian who was piggybacking an Uggnaut around on his shoulders. They were both completely blasted. This seemed pretty much the usual, around here. "And I think they won't beat the crap out of you if they don't catch you. So don't get caught."

It should be noted that Kanan wasn't saying that Dante couldn't break off Charko's other horn and leave his men whimpering on the floor. He was simply pointing out reasons why he might not want to.

There were plenty of different ways to not get caught, after all.

There was a really good reason why Dante was in this class. Not that he was likely to walk away having learned all that much ~~Mr. Let's Pick Up Two Women At A Demon-Infested Club When The Entire City Is Looking For You I'm Sure This Will Go Well~~, but still.

He shrugged. "So I knock their lights out and I don't get caught," he said. "They started it, right?"

Edited 2016-05-17 12:39 (UTC)

"Oh, they definitely started it," Kanan agreed. "They tried to mug you in the street in the first place."

A beat.

"Several times. It didn't work out for them all that well then, either."

"So there you go," Dante said.

Which was of course when he chose to look over to the big guy with the missing horn, flashing a grin at him.

And at that, Kanan just sighed and poured himself a drink. He had a feeling he was going to regret that this room wouldn't serve up actual alcohol before the summer was through.

Charko, on the other hand, was turning his attention solely to Dante.

"You! You show your face here, after the last time?"

It should be noted that Charko was mean, and huge, but not terribly bright.

"Somebody had to make up for your ugly mug around here," Dante called back, failing to remove the grin from his face.

He did get up, though. Slowly. Lazily, in fact.

... At least he was going to make a great distraction?

Oh yeah, he'd be a fantastic distraction. Kanan was wondering if he also should have mentioned that Dante would've theoretically been stuck with the bill for repairs.

Even if he doubted the kid would stick around long enough to pay it. He was a bit after his own heart, that way.

"Clever," Charko spat - literally spat, onto the floor - before lifting his hands and cracking his knuckles. The two goons that were flanking him were reaching for their blasters. "So somebody thinks he has a sense of humor, does he?"

It was probably a good thing for Dante to learn how to deal with collateral damage bills early. It was going to be a Thing later in life, for some reason.

"Pretty much," Dante agreed, ignoring the hell out of the goons flanking him. What were they going to do, shoot him? Please. "Though the funniest joke is standing right in front of me."

A master of banter, he was not.

Charko said a few choice words in Chagri, and then, perhaps predictably, he threw himself at Dante, fist-first.

Kanan knocked back a rather disappointing drink and poured himself another. This was going well.

Dante's reflexes were insane; Charko's fist went soaring half an inch past Dante's head. He snagged the Chagri by the wrist and hit him hard with his elbow.

Dante's strength was also kind of insane, and he had a habit of one-punching squishy humans. It was going to be interesting to find out if it worked on squishy humanoids, too?

Unfortunately, Charko was a little better at taking a solid hit than most squishy humans were. He stumbled backwards, eyes narrowed, and flicked out a black, forked tongue at Dante in annoyance. It did take him a few more moments to straighten himself up completely, but in the time it took for him to do that, the pair of goons at his side were already coming in to dive at Dante, too.

They could go dive at each other. Dante was outta there in a flash, rolling out from the incoming bodies. He straightened up without checking back to see what had happened to the goons and just went for it again, hitting Charko harder.

If anyone else wanted to sneak out unseen, now was probably the time.

Kanan, meanwhile, was just raising his eyebrows a little bit from behind the bar.

Well. It had been a while since he'd seen somebody move like that.

The Sarlaccs who had been headed for the side door were turning their attention toward Dante next, noticing that their boss and two of their buddies were on the floor. They weren't even going to bother trying to cross the room. They were going straight for the blasters.

See, the one shitty thing about these classes was that Dante couldn't actually attend them and bring Ebony and Ivory.

So he had to hope for the best, sprinting towards them at high speed. Maybe if he got enough motion going, jumped and kicked, he'd get them before they shot him.

... What? It still hurt.

And there was some desperate blaster fire on the go, now, that would be difficult to ignore even with the Danger Shop's safety protocols turned on. It wasn't going to stop the inertia behind Dante's kick, though. The two with the blasters were going down, hard, while Charko and his pair worked on untangling themselves and picking themselves up again.

Kanan was impressed. So far there wasn't much in the way of damage.

A few blaster burns on the walls, maybe.

Looked to him like he was going to have to hike up the difficulty on these things for Dante if he was going to run another sim. Good to know.

There were a lot of life experiences Dante had missed out on. Fighting his way out of any number of establishments wasn't one of them.

He brushed at his shirt where one of the blaster bolts had hit, though at least there wasn't a hole in it. He was pretty sure the people at Demon Marcus were going to start raising eyebrows if he showed up for new shirts every week.

"See?" he said. "Don't need to be sneaky to take out a bunch of horny fucks."

"Apparently so," Kanan said, an eyebrow raised, a drink in hand, and fired off a little salute with it in Dante's direction. "Though I maintain that it misses the point. Hell, it wasn't even necessary. Why are you in this class if you aren't willing to try to work within the guidelines of the exercise?"

For what it was worth, Caleb had been the kind of kid who had given his teachers headaches, too.

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Re: Get Outta There

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Ahsoka had gotten far too much practice in recently with avoiding or deflecting notice, though she wasn't inclined to try out the easiest method on a sim (or with an audience for that matter).

Instead she scanned the crowd. Once she'd found what she was looking for, she angled her body to hide the motion of her hand and gave one of the Sarlacc's knees a subtle Force push so he'd stumble into a grumpy looking Wookie, or more importantly the grumpy looking Wookie's drink. While people turned towards the source of the commotion she 'borrowed' a cloak from a cultist who'd had a little too much.

Could Merrill just -- ?

No, she didn't have enough spells that would be useful in an environment like this. Who knew that would be a problem for someone whose magic was primarily nature-based? Besides, the last thing an apostate mage ought to do to escape notice was start flinging spells around. (This logic would apparently not apply in Kirkwall someday, but that was Kirkwall.)

. . . No, she'd just take advantage of Dante's "little" distraction to make a break for the door. It was crowded and uncomfortable in here anyway, and admittedly she did get turned around and disoriented three times on her way to the exit, but she at least made it.

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