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

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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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"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.

Dante shrugged. "You just said to get outta here," he said. "And not to fight these guys because we wouldn't make it out alive. If I can, then what's the point of doing it any other way?"

... we were sorry, Kanan. You probably wouldn't be the last person Dante gave a headache, either.

"Learning how," Kanan pointed out. "Like you're presumably here to do."

He shrugged his shoulders, then, and shook his head.

"But at the end of the day, I'm just here for the pay until I can find my way back off of this island. The only person whose time you're wasting here is your own. And hell, maybe your classmates' too, since I doubt they'll have you there to bail them out every time they're in a situation like this, themselves."

Yeah, but Dante was a direct kind of guy; if there was no one to feed him a plan, he took the path of least resistance.

... which was usually the path of most resistance.

"Whatever," he said. "But if you know so much better, how about you tell us what you would've done."

"Well," Kanan replied, "I might have started by at least taking a look around the room to see if I even had any other options. Tables to duck behind, back rooms to tuck myself away in. Hell, I could have someone else start a fight as a distraction. The place still suffers some damage, but in exchange, Okadiah isn't taking the cost of repairs out of my next pay. Anyway, watching the fights in a place like this is almost as fun as starting them. Especially if you can just sit back with a drink and enjoy the show."

He wasn't going to feed Dante platitudes about how he seemed like a smart kid and coming up with literally any other course of action was well within his reach. He didn't figure that would mean a hell of a lot to him anyway. So, sure, he would be happy to tell him just a few things he would've done, even before thinking too hard about his options.

"You really wanna sit out in a back room waiting for hours for these guys to clear out?" Dante said. "And then you come back the next day and they're there again?"

Frankly, Dante was firmly of the opinion that if something tried to pick a fight with you, you picked one back unless you had no other options.

"Hey, I didn't say there was some hard rule about not following them out and making sure they don't come back after you," Kanan pointed out. "I just said you didn't want to fight in the bar. You'll be held responsible for the damages."

Whatever you did once you left the cantina was up to you, Dante.

"Charko and his friends don't usually come around here looking. Their time is usually better spent waiting on Broken Boulevard for some easy targets. Tonight was probably a slow night."

Dante shrugged. "I didn't know that," he said.

Not that he'd made an effort to find out. "I just saw a couple of big guys who came looking for a fight."

"Yeah," Kanan sighed. "I noticed. Did you think I was setting you up, here, telling you to find a different way out even though there wasn't one?"

He wouldn't, but let's be real, after this class he'd be pretty tempted to set Dante up to fail hard if he didn't follow instructions. Which was maybe not behavior terribly befitting of a teacher or somebody who had trained as a Jedi, but Kanan hadn't lived this long by playing fair, either.

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

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