2019-09-04 - Trip the City Fantastic

It's been a weird day at Green Harbor, and after a long day of selling pot and only pot, Greg is blowing off some steam in the small skate park area behind the store while generic cashier Karl watches the shop. At least, he's supposed to be watching it. Anyhow Greg doesn't seem too concerned about it, instead focusing on the movement of his body as he first rockets down one side of the half pipe and then soars up into the air above the other. He spins in a deceptively lazy arc midair before dropping back onto the half pipe at a nearly perfect angle. He forgets all else for a time, the sound of the wheels of his board grinding out all the other noise, physical and mental, of the day.

Greg might not eat shit when that weird feeling runs over him, but it's enough to make him stand up and take notice, so he brings the board deftly to a stall when he gets back to the top of the pipe's arc. He steps nimbly from the board, one hand dipping down absently to snatch it up. From the top of the pipe, he snaps his attention back over towards the door to his establishment at the noise that starts coming out of it.

"Tha fuck..." Greg wonders in an extremely put-out tone, and board in hand he drops from the top of the pipe to hurry over to the door and snatch it open. "YO!" he yells from the threshold, squinting to try to get a better look inside. "Where the fuck is security, Karl?" he demands hoarsely. "Karl?!"

What. The. Fuck. Greg's face contorts in non-understanding, and his head tilts to the side for a moment with confusion. He seems more or less paralyzed for a moment in time as his chemical-laden brain tries to work out the math to reconcile what he's seeing with reality. Those impossibly deep brown eyes flit from face to face as the... creatures... begin to address him, with a pretty vapid look on his face.

That is, until the little dude says his last piece. Greg hesitates just a moment, almost glancing back into the familiar alley, then back at the weird fur-wing nerd. "You're gonna owe me big, bitch," Greg promises... him? Her? It? Whatever pronoun fits the little mutant, it seems the allure of profit has the desired effect on the human of the bunch, because he hefts the skateboard and his courage as he steps through the door.

"Fuck you, you ugly bitch!" he tells one of the boar-persons, being sure to make good eye contact. "I helped myself to your mother last night," he tells the other one with a smirk. When in Rome, bash the fuck out of orc punks with your skateboard, right?

Greg shudders, rolling his shoulders, as this feeling of connection with this... place... comes over him. His mien is not unlike an addict reveling in the sensation of their favorite drug as it rolls over them, and while his right hand with its grip on his board drops, tensing in preparation to strike, his left hand rises up, empty.

"This place... feels good," Greg mutters to himself as he steps forward. "Like a good trip." Those deep brown eyes fall on the boar-dude who likes to talk about little pricks. "That's my line," Greg growls, and his left hand twists as he reaches within himself to touch the power within, gather it, and aim it, to one purpose: smash piggy-face with a dumpster.

Greg takes a moment to be impressed at his success -- he can't help it. He looks down at his hand with an altogether different sort of disbelief, amazement with self. This is not a sensation Greg has felt often, validation of self, and it proves almost as heady as the actual power. When he returns his attention to the fray proper, Quix is on one of the boar's heads, pitching in. "Fucking right he is!" Greg answers that boar-person's claim on Quix's behalf, hefting his skateboard and taking the charge Quix stole from his enemy. He runs up, gripping the board with both hands, and looks to smash the ugly pig in the sternum with the board's extending truck as hard as he can.

Greg's moment in the sun doesn't last long, and for typical reasons, "Fuuuuck..." he moans anxiously, frozen with indecision for a moment. Something about following whatever a Quix is blindly, wherever... "Fuck it," Greg mumbles, and he takes a short run after Quix before throwing the skateboard ahead of himself and leaping onto it. There's no room for fucking up here, and a twist of Greg's hand ensures that the skateboard is where his feet need it be and moving at a good clip when they get there. "Where are we going?" he yells after Quix, or the Quix, whatever it is.

A practiced tripper, at this point Greg is just going to go with this situation and cease to be surprised by shit. Oh look pig dudes, my skin is spiders... it's all one, right? His eye does fall on those skateboards without wheels under them with some jealousy, though. In fact, he almost eats shit, paying more attention to other people's boards than his. He pulls up to a stop when Quix pauses, stomping to bring the end of his board flying into his hand through simple skater physics.

As to the proposed 'deal'... "Listen family... I don't really see what choice I have. Where the fuck am I even?" The question is not really rhetorical, but then, neither does he truly expect an answer. At least not one that makes sense. "What you got good at the house?" Visions of space drugs on floating skateboards dance in Greg's head as he peers at Quix. Really looks. At length he shrugs. "Let's go."

Greg doesn't fall behind or lose sight of Quix, but he does lag from time to time, letting himself take in the strange sights. Why even trip if you're not going to lean into it? For a time he just studies the closest buildings as he rolls past, just taking in their architecture and the strangeness of their exposed surfaces. "Vivariosa," he repeats the strange word a few times, feeling it out. "The Living City. This place is nuts," he tells Quix in an impressed tone, then lapses into observant silence for the rest of the trip.

When Quix starts his whole bit on arriving at the house, Greg just smirks. "Yeah yeah sure," he tells Quix. "So uh... what makes you think there's anything worthwhile in there?" He glances down the alley, but doesn't look like he's walking down there willingly. His smirk climbs towards his ear, and he points towards the door. "I think the front door's unlocked, homie," he offers, then fixes Quix with the same look he would give a junkie with another excuse. "Convince me it'll be worthwhile, and I'll go check."

"Drugs?" Greg asks, and that single one-word question just resonates with significance on his lips.

His feet are halfway up the steps before his mind can catch up, and after a quick glance around he crouches down to quickly take a look at the situation. He fails to see anywhere to get a pick in, and looks almost crestfallen as he stands up. But wait, he thinks. What if I...

And sure enough, when he marshals that inner power and extends it into the lock, he can feel the mechanism. "There's the easy part," he mutters. Now he wracks his brain for everything it's ever known about a lock, and leaning on the general sense of his experience, sets about trying to trigger the mechanism from within.

Greg is really starting to like the way that particular sensation feels... like a bump of coke, or like a whole oxy when you rail it to your face. He shudders happily as it moves over him. When it passes, he turns his gaze to a study of his surroundings.

It's not hard to know a nice place, even if you can't quite properly make sense of a lot of it. As Greg walks into the house, he looks around, and it all looks pleasantly expensive. Quix is a cool enough dude and all, but Greg's line of thought as he walks through the place should be no surprise to anyone, considering his profession: he wants to find whatever Quix is after, before he does, to take control of the deal. He dwells on the matter of just what the hell Quix could want to find in here and searches.

Greg may not be sure where he's going or why, just sort of wandering and letting his intuition guide him. And it honestly shows; he just looks like a wandering jackass, accomplishing nothing but the wasting of time. But then Quix chimes in with what the thing actually is, and Greg's meanderings suddenly take a distinctly purposeful turn. "A cylinder in a velvet bag?" he asks Quix, but it's honestly rhetorical; he can feel the cylinder and the bag, and it's just a matter of guiding himself through the house in the way.

That distant cylinder beckons, pulling at him like the way the morning after a bender makes you need a bump. He leaves Quix on the stairs and walks over to a side room -- almost walking into the wall in an attempt to move directly towards the cylinder before realizing he'll need to walk over to the door, like a person. Inside the room, his steps quicken and he calls back to Quix, "Get me those fucking drugs you promised me, Quix! You owe me!"

His sense of the cylinder guides him directly to a desk, and he stares at the locked drawer, ignoring the rest of the office-like room. Once again he delves into the lock's mechanism with his power, and twists -- this lock gives way much more easily, and he snatches the drawer open. With a grin like a cat with a mouse, he moves to snatch his prize, shuddering with pleasure as that increasingly familiar sensation rolls over him.

Greg watches Quix's method of breaking and entering with interest. A hungry sort of interest, it must be said. He manages to pry his attention away from the cabinet of dreams and catch the packet deftly enough, and immediately shoves it into his pocket. "Horcha seeds, eh?" he asks with similarly hungry curiosity.

Those keeping score at home may notice that Greg is still holding the object du jour, the bepouched cylinder. He hefts it suggestively to remind Quix of the same. "Now, my little buddy... How the fuck do I get out of here? Your payment's no good to me if I can't get home." He waggles the cylinder again. "You still got me up one favor here, wings. You want the cylinder, and I want to go home. Can we deal?"

"Shit!"Greg swears, but quietly, and lets himself get distracted by the noise upstairs. It isn't just the sounds... he can feel, from inside himself, that whatever the hell is up there is huge.

"Fuck!" he swears again as Quix snatches his edge, and it seems he's once again reliant on trusting the little weirdo. As Quix darts into a goddamn closet of all things (he obviously never watched Scooby Doo), the desperate dealer looks around wildly for another way. He considers some bold options, but ultimately opts for hiding in the goddamn closet with the little weirdo. What could go wrong?

"Get the fuck over!" he whispers harshly as he tries to jam himself in. "And stay the fuck out of my pockets." Matter of fact, Greg jams his hands down hard into his pockets.

It's pretty fucking disorienting to fall out of a closet, thinking you're about to get murdered by Robocop, tumble through an eternal goddamn void and then stumble over the stoop of your new dispensary, immediately threatened with eating shit on your own board. Despite that disorientation, Greg has the presence of mind to get his hands out in front of him and catch himself from total devastation. Instead he just tumbles into a sort of messy chaotic sprawl together with the board, rolling into a display full of Bob Marley tees and knocking it over.

At this point he's pretty happy to just lay there half-upside down and just... take stock for a minute. It's at about that time that Greg remembers the... Horcha seeds? His hand dives back into his pocket...