Civil Unrest

[Gum]

Dust puffs twisted circles over the stone cold cobbles. Dull bronze horseshoes hushed their rhythmic grind against the grey stone street. The thoroughfare was a game's gauntlet, lined in stinging silence by the anxious houses and shop fronts looking on. Either end stood the players. One group mumbled with bubbling discontent while their adversaries were regimented, proud and chest first. Overhead, the cerulean sky was just a brittle dome, it gave the day its soothing pastel palette and nothing more.

Luap Rideout prowled those lifeless cobblestones of no man's land. Back and forth. The spindly punk's loose swagger brewed with animalistic uncertainty; his nostrils snorted and his popping eyes were shot with blood, there were drops of sweat on his ragged temples. It was a vision of a ragged silver back gorilla trying to find out how much bullshit he could sling before the big man beat him down. He steamed and steamed, he bounced and bounced. He tightened his frenzied frustration into the coil of a spring.

“FUCK YOU!”

Luap sneered the words, shattering the collective murmur. And as he did, he bounded towards the uniformed line with his middle finger waving at them. He was aching for them to swing first.

Armoured to the nines, the police were hot, uncomfortable and struggling to see through their headgear. They stood firm against the intensity. They were the discipline in the chaos. Every shoulder butted the shoulder of the next officer. Mounted police kept at bay the fidgeting whinnies of their stressy eyed horses. No crime had been committed. No crime had been committed. No crime had been committed. Those caging words, just words, chained the peacekeepers in place. It was real, they feared for their lives. Behind the brazen Luap Rideout grew a number much greater than their own. In the writhing throng flashes of weapons revealed themselves.

“I think I saw a machete.”

“Hold steady.”

“Yessir.”

[Gum]

Soothing the tightness of his arthritic finger joints came the simple pleasure of holding a loaf. It was soft, responsive and spattered with tasty seeds. It was still warm. It smelled great. Best of all, it was coloured brown like the rich earth of home. The old shaman had picked out his bread at the bakery.

“It's on the house!”

Gum looked up to see a sweet smile on the flour covered face of the elderly baker. There was a sincere blue to the white man's eyes, and his hair was lighter still than his skin. Gum mirrored the sentiment with a kind smile, but the pupils of his eyes were adrift in mahogany; it was a striking difference in the two men.

The Xangu shaman settled his stance and insisted, “I will pay.”

“No, no—our mutual friend. Ahm, Mr. Dice. He's always been good to me. And. Well. He said you were a friend of his. Clearly you're not from around here. I'm a friend to immigrants. My wife, she's not from here.”

Gum accepted the charity gracefully while secretly concerned that he was increasingly wrapped in the city's complex web of obligation. His appearance to which the baker referred was as much loyalty to the Xangu Nation as it was resistance to bedding in to Radasanth. His face was still decorated with the yellow and black warpaint of his people. Besides the straps of hide and tangled fur draped over his wiry body, the shaman went naked. Gum forewent armour in favour of faith in the spirits of his ancestors. He stuck out when his newfound profession demanded he blend in.

“Thank you. I am in your debt.”

“Not at all, not at all!”

His right hand waved at the baker in thanks as he walked away and into the shop's door frame. The light outside stung his eyes and blurred his vision. As his pupils shrank to restrict the sun's glare the scene presented itself to him.

[Gum]

The honourable always drew their weapons to signal their intent before striking, but the imminent rioters began pulling cloth masks over their rage wrought faces, bandanas across their frothing muzzles and goggles over their bulging eyes. The Imperial police across the way pressed their gloved hands against the hilts of their weapons in response to the menacing scene of anonymous anger. The cops knew, more than anyone else, that people do terrible things when they shed their identity.

“Stay inside,” advised Gum when the baker came to see why his customer was blocking the doorway.

The shouting crowd split for a man with a wheelbarrow full of jagged bricks and mortar from a building site up the way. Revelling with testosterone, people in the crowd came forward for the bounty and plundered a brick or two for themselves and immediately leered at the police line. Bricks spilled out of the barrow and into the street, more and more marauding discontents armed themselves with the makeshift projectiles.

“We're out numbered,” admitted a cracking voice deep inside the police force line.

Reinforcements arrived, but not for law enforcement. Drunken patrons caroused into the street, pouring their bodies and their drinks into the horde.

Luap Rideout, still chicken strutting in the middle, turned and sauntered to pick up a brick.

A bowl cut kid broke from the rioters and rushed his scrawny limbs at the city's keepers of the peace and skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust before getting too close. Or so he'd thought. He did get too close.

An officer broke rank, span and slammed the butt of his weapon into the kid's forehead.

“Yerrrggggghhhh!” screamed Luap Rideout.

It was barely a word, but it was the horn to signal the battle. Rideout his brick, it arched into the glare of the sun and fell into at the ranks of his enemy.

[Gum]

Despite possessing the smaller force, the Imperials had organisation to their advantage. Parity in conflict forged the most brutal outcomes. Shattered bottles slashed Imperial flesh and lead pipes beat Imperial bodies. On the other side, citizens felt the cold cut of taxpayer's steel and the jarring shake of a solid shield bash. Blood dripped and drained into the divots between the street's stone pavement.

“Lock the door behind me. Barricade the door.”

Gum pulled the primitive axe from his hip and waded into the wash of violence. He moved through the shower of broken bricks. Fase blessed him with luck and so he was not among the dented helmets and broken bones of the city's elite guard.

“Go back to where you came from, foreign pig!”

A xenophobic protester thrust out of the milieu and jabbed a shiv at the shaman's gut. Gum slid aside, twisting his body back at the attacker as he did. He buried the jagged obsidian chunks of his weapon into the belly of the bigot. To ensure a kill, Gum sawed the blades of his weapon back and forth through his enemy's abdomen. A stone scowl of sullen stoicism accompanied Gum's gruesome act, the garish sight of guts spilling did not phase him; his was the duty of death, not malice. To a Xangu shaman, to encounter expiration was to see just a speck of dust floating in the light of a spirit's eternal experience. The protesters backed away from Gum, frightened by the vision of his foreign garb soaked in the blood of extreme barbarity.

“You will meet Oxxad in the Underworld. I will tend to your soul, it will not be lost,” he kicked the slumped body to the ground.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked a captain in the city guard who moved back to back with Gum.

“We can end this by taking on the one with the loud voice,” replied the shaman, ignoring the guard's question entirely.

“You three!” the captain pulled three shield bearing subordinates to his and Gum's flank, “With us! This concerned citizen," he elbowed Gum in the flank, “is going to help us take out the fucking ring leader!”

Gum nodded.

"I need two more," the captain pulled the next two members of his squad into their improvised crew.

Together, the group pushed towards the core of the opposition.

[Gum]

Their crew's tortoise shelled shields battered back the mob outside, a claret mist steamed between the tangled buzz of blood drunk fighters. Under the protection of their crew, Gum and the captain were able to advance. The progress was deliberate, steady, but hardly leaden. Their position was a spot of blue in a swathe of red.

"Keep me updated, men!" the captain demanded his team stay vocal. At the core of the formation, Gum and the captain were unable to see what was going on outside the barricade.

"Five more yards, sir!" the answer came with a rasp of duress. Under usual circumstances, five yards was a simple space to cross, but under the throttling grip of a revolution's explosive discontent, every inch was hard fought.

"Keep it up, lads," the captain said before rocking back from a hammered blow delivered out of the rear, "Oof!"

A wooden plank, pinged with rusty iron nails, scratched through a breach between the shields. The blunt end of the improvised weapon thumped the captain in the back, he was lucky to avoid the cutting tetanus of the board's contaminated enhancement.

Another lout, armed with twin knuckledusters worn over the faded ink of crude prison tattoos, crawled under their shields in the confusion. Gum felt a tooth crack loose into his mouth, he'd been clocked with a one-two across the cheeks; he hit the cobbled deck on his hands and knees. With his tongue, he rolled the molar to the breadth of his bloody frown and spat it out.

The captain recovered from the jab and gorged his bulging white eyes on the scarred convict's putrid arrogance. "Ya little fuck," he said dragging the man away from Gum's fallen body. "Not today," he billowed, hacking his blade in a malicious slash across the man's thigh. It was an attack made with intent to agonise and disable, not to kill.

Gum began to right himself, coming to a proud but weakened stance. "Bloody eye," the shaman said, the words were part of an old Xangu battle rite. Holding his axe, still dripping from his first kill, Gum let the blood from the blades drip into the man's eye. As the attacker blinked and bent his head away from the shaman, Gum brought the sharp obsidian down on his victim's neck. The head was almost severed, death was instant and the execution complete.

[Gum]

"We're opening up the wall," the soldiers warned ahead of parting their shields.

An angry kid screamed and kicked into the opening, booting the captain repeatedly in his shin. Without restraint, the captain responded by bashing the kid's skull open with the hilt of his weapon. "Whoa, captain," the request for him to relax had arrived a jolt too late. Less than twelve, the boy's lifeblood washed abroad the dirty street.

Gum's apathy towards violent death was shaken; the desensitisation that occurred in his training cracked for the grim vision of fear frozen on the dead boy's face. An itch grew under his skin, a painful discomfort to his bones; he was raring to give in to the jaguar spirit writhing inside. Savage retribution could satiate his distress. Yet, with severe gravel to his command, Gum insisted, "We must make our move on him now."

"Right," agreed the captain. He set out, his armour rattled towards the increasingly threatened Luap Rideout.

Together, the group had entered Luap Rideout's range. It was a place where the burning hiss of his audible bile could be felt at its loudest. In spite of the determined approach of the city's guard, a few nuts were hanging tough in Luap's entourage.

A sniper shot took down a thug stood to Luap's right.

Rideout squealed through the scarlet splash on his gaunt face.

[Gum]

* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *




* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *




* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *
* Rata tat tat *






Support volleys ripped waves in the fresh air, some kids on the slope of a terracotta roof rattled percussion over the conflict's wall of sound; the city's fresh faced squad of newly graduated magic users took orders from above to help the city guard contain the violence. They were geomancers, and their stinging stone bullets split flesh to the bone. Pinholes bled blood on the grooves, cracking skulls were the fuzzy bass. It was a sick crescendo for a mediocre track. Somewhere in the halls, there was a big stroke; to turn the guns on the crowd put a neck on the line and phat signature on a document.

The crowd started dispersing when the bullets came down. Luap Rideout's protection cockroached it to the alleys and avenues that branched away from the main street.

Without the need for support, Gum lurched at Luap, beating back against his need to transform. The arthritic joints of Gum's fingers closed, toughly, around the agitator's torn shirt collar. Gum jerked the man's head towards his head. For a moment, the raging beast took control of the tempered shaman. Gum's face froze in the middle of mutation—half human, half jaguar—and with those gnarly canines, he bit a crack in Luap's skull.

"Holy shit, what the fuck," the captain reeled.

Luap fell dead.

The fragmented transformation reverted, Gum was just human again.

"You also have an obligation to meet in the Underworld," the shaman explained.

"What?" said the smirking captain.

"Yes. Your spirit is corrupted."

"What kind of mumbo jumbo is that?"

Gum acted quickly and quietly to slip his weapon across the captain's throat.

"Oxxad awaits."

The captain fell dead.

Before the shaman could turn to fend off the expected assault of the captain's men, a grip handled Gum's blood drenched arm and a whisper flexed the membrane of his eardrum. "What the fuck are you doing?" the voice asked. The captain's men were gone, the street was almost empty. "Why the fuck are you making a spectacle of yourself? Mr. Fordstein has an interest in this. If you don't hear from us, you don't fucking move, okay? You provincial fuck, when are you gonna realise that?!"

Later, Gum would discover that rioters had succeeded in breaking into the baker's shop.

[Philomel]

Judgement Thread: Civil Unrest (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?31636)

Rewards:
Gum receives: (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?18636-Gum)
670 EXP
77 GP

Ice-cream given in the following flavours:
- praeline and cream
- mississippi mud
- chocolate eruption
- apple
- grape
- super duper chocolate eruption

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

All rewards added!