@Ome:  Both girls look you up and down.  Somewhere in there you might even think their attitudes are impressed.  Looking for trouble and trash talk is sometimes a sort of reverence among the fighters of the pits.  "One week from now if you still need time to recover." The cat-eyes one says.  "At the closed down zoo at Balta and First, just before you're about to exit the city.  Or if you really think you're a bad girl... you can come tonight.  But we won't hold our breath." She says, not mockingly, simply in understanding that you might be rather strained.  They both chew on their tongues, sizing you up, and nod, turning to leave.<br/><br/>@Chiro:  "Baron?" The professor ripped the rickety trapdoor up.  "BARON!"<br/><br/>Baron's stories would grow darker.  Like the fairy tales of old, tomes of heretical knowledge.  Apocrypha.  Stories that told you most of recorded history and all your happy endings were lies.  It just got worse and worse.  Not so much scary as just silly.  What if you picked up a book written in 1949 that detailed the dictatorship and subsequent battles of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, almost as though an alternate history had occurred?  Or a story that the Roman empire never fell, fiddling a tale of a world where a Caesar had seen a man to one of the moons in recent decades?<br/><br/>Now, just what would Baron have to say about the badlands beyond the wall, being regarded as a place of sanity and order, where magic and technology were, essentially, one?<br/><br/>@KavenBach:  It wasn't even fifteen minutes more before Tim's body gave an internal shudder and worked you gently out, onto a pile of newspaper.  Sam threw over you a sheet immediately.  "Santi." He sighed, not for you but for what you'd been through.  As you rise from the ground, you catch your reflection in the wall mirror.  Your looks, your body, through and through.<br/>"San..." Tim swallowed, looking over the edge of the bed.<br/>"I'm not gonna hold you back.  Just try not to kill him.  His healing isn't nearly as advanced as yours."  Sam tosses two somethings at your feet.  It looks like a gun designed for shooting those little foam balls... no, that's a canister of gelatinous pepper extract inside.  The other is a set of brass knuckles cast from, well, real brass.<br/>"Sam!" Tim yelped.<br/>"Ah, who knows, maybe she can beat some sanity into you." Sam is fixing coffee on a heat crystal plate.  "Oh, Tim, remember, you scream, they might come." That was pretty cold, or perhaps rather understanding to you.  Tim didn't make a move, he just stared at the ass-whooping on the floor before him, in the part of two weapons and the set of hands that would reach for them...