Mysterious Benefactors are Mysterious

[Narrator]

Stradeverde flexed his arms, trying to break Robin's hold on him. He was...surprisingly strong. Like, 'above human normal' strong, as he looked for a purchase with his hands to throttle something on Robin. To shut her up, if nothing else.


Ryan, however responded. "Oh yeah? Sure, you help now. And when you go trotting back to your university, and I'm left alone defending this place? You think anything about that's easy, Pink? I'm gonna make somethin' of myself, one way or another!"


.

[Robin Stanton]

It's easy enough to grab Robin's elongated neck, but that just makes her grow a head somewhere else. She is being stretched rather thin by Stradeverde's super-human strength though, especially since she's still struggling to retain proper solidity throughout her body.

"And screw everyone else these guys hurt, right? As long as it's not you?" she manages.

[Narrator]

"I have to protect me and mine first, Pink!" Ryan protested.

"You do realize it's rude to have a conversation when someone is fighting you?" Stradeverde grunted, slamming his frame against the wall, attempting to smash Robin between his mass and a hard place.

[Robin Stanton]

"Is not!" Robin exclaims before getting slammed into the wall, making the whole of her go slack and hang on Stradeverde like a wet sack.

"Is that what your dad would say?" she manages to squeak out at the expense of tightening her grip on the mafioso.

[Narrator]

"Yeah," Ryan said, tightening the grip on her baseball bat. "Yeah, it would."

Her eyes hardening, she strode forward to try to help Stradaverde.

[Robin Stanton]

Well crap.

Robin abandons her attempts to solidify and instead simply tries to twist herself like a rope to tighten herself around Stradeverde. No complicated bones and tendons or other stuff to try and maintain that way. Her swarm of office supplies grows increasingly directionless. They still throw themselves around but with Robin's attention elsewhere it's more vague meandering than actively aiming for things.

[Ryan Foley]

Stradeverde was turning an interesting shade of red (ironically) as Robin constricted herself around him.

Shrugging, Ryan swung her bat towards the part of Robin around the man's gut. He'd understand. Probably.

[Robin Stanton]

Robin lets out a sound somewhere between a squeak and an oof! Her grip on Stradeverde slips which results in her rapidly unwinding like a coiled spring and almost accidentally slapping her lower body at Ryan.

[Narrator]

Ryan staggered back from Robin's slap, slamming back into a file cabinet--and then through the file cabinet, via the power of phasing.

Stradeverde took a big, shuddering breath, and dove behind the desk, as the two guards, now with a clean shot, opened fire.

[Robin Stanton]

Robin doesn't so much dodge the bullets as she collapses into a pile. Which is then hit by bullets that punch through the blob. If she hadn't given up on standard biology that might be a problem but as it is it mostly just stings and singes. Which is still painful enough she scrambles out of the way onto the same desk Stradeverde is cowering behind. And then into it, making the desk stagger towards them to ram them against the wall.

[Narrator]

Sending the desk forward has two main effects. Firstly, it slams into the two guards, hard, causing them to drop their guns. Secondly, it exposed Stradeverde's hiding spot. Two points for Robin!

And then the baseball bat came phasing through the wall, aimed in the general direction of the desk. OK, maybe one-and-a-half points for Robin.

[Robin Stanton]

Already strained from tackling the two guards, the bat cracks down on the desk and splits it in half. The sudden shock ejects Robin from it in a stream of pink goop that tumbles along the ground in a semi-solid chunk until Robin manages to pull herself up into a human shape that slides backwards to a halt with one arm on the ground. Even if her limbs are still kind of jiggly.

"Damnit, Ryan! You don't have to do this! I can help you!"

[Ryan Foley]

"Yeah? How you gonna do that? You gonna kick all the Mafiosos out of Italy?" Ryan shouted through the wall, the bat swinging blindly and smacking into a file cabinet. "You gonna clean up the ports and make the bad men not come around anymore?", smacking the bat into the wall. "You gonna by a frickin' Coke and teach the world to sing?", smacking the bat hard into one of the mafiosos who had just been staggering to his feet.

[Robin Stanton]

"I know I can't just wave my hands and fix this, but somebody's gotta look for a solution. And I'm gonna start by kicking the crap out of the Mafiosos right here." she says and true to her word walks over to Stradeverde and aiming a kick at his side in case he was thinking of getting back up. "Your call if that includes you or not."

[Ryan Foley]

"We don't all have our hands clean, Pink. You go look for your bigger solutions; I've gotta do what's best for me and mine," Ryan's voice echoed through the walls.

Though, perhaps to her credit, she didn't come through charging again, and the sound of footsteps headed away could be heard.


Stradeverde grunted in pain as Robin delivered a swift kick to his ample gut.

[Robin Stanton]

"Now listen here, fucko. You're going to leave Ryan and her family alone, you got me?" she says, leaning down and grabbing Stradeverde by the lapel. For a moment she considers using his jacket to strangle him but that feels... over the line. It does give her an idea though.

"Because if you don't I am going to make sure you never trust an appliance ever again. Your oven's gonna slam shut on your hand, your dishwasher's gonna use toilet water. Your car's gonna be blasting the Ketchup song forever, every suit jacket you put on you'll ask yourself if the fit is off and if that means it'll randomly get in your way all day. There will be rocks in your shoes and glitter on your pants. Your shower will be warm long enough to catch you off-guard when it turns ice-cold and your cell-phone will bite at your fingers. And when they kick your sorry ass to the curb because it'll be very obvious there's no conversation they can have with you that remains private you'll wonder if it was really worth it for that tiny bar at the harbor and that you simply could have chosen not to ruin your own life when I so graciously warned you what would happen."

Sure, some of it's a bluff and she certainly doesn't want to dedicate her life to making this one guy's life a hell of living objects, not to mention that there's probably no shortage of other goons to pick up his mantle, but right this moment she's mad at this stupid world and this guy in particular. The fact that Ryan betrayed her has nothing at all to do with that.

"I make myself clear, Mister Big Scary Mafioso? I will haunt your ass."

[Narrator]

Stradeverde is heavy and more or less helpless at this point in time. Though, to his credit, he didn't flinch even as Robin pulled him upright.

"You don't really know what you've gotten yourself into, do you, Miss Stanton? You have made some powerful enemies today.

It would be a shame if anything were to happen to Miss Foley, but this is such a dangerous profession we are all engaged in..."

[Robin Stanton]

"I've been threatened by worse." she blusters. Truthfully, she is more than a little worried that she's making things a lot worse for Ryan in the short term. And explicitly against her will too, which doesn't really sit right with her. What she does not consider is that she actually might have bitten off more than she can chew. She's Robin Stanton, daughter of two X-Men and sort-of-niece to a goddess and this is just some guy. And what Stanton has ever hurled themselves into something they couldn't handle.

Somewhere, an entire universe away someone lets out a deep sigh in her lab and doesn't know why.