I DON'T NEED YOUR HANDOUTS | kyubey

[Karkat Vantas]

Karkat was walking through the city streets. It was pretty rare for him to actually be out of the apartment he'd managed to get by putting a virus into the owner's computer saying that he had paid for the whole year already. He'd just do it next year, too. But enough about his glorious victories over the wretched apartment owner. Karkat was out walking because he was looking for any of the people from his session. Both Dave and John were here, so why couldn't anyone from his session be here? He'd briefly seen the names 'arachidsGrip' and 'caligulasAquarium' on Trollian, but neither of those people were people that Karkat could even barely tolerate talking to. They were pretty much the asshat shitboxes of his session.

As Karkat walked through the street, most of the humans there were giving him weird glances. Fucking humans, not even knowing what trolls are. Thankfully, the streets weren't as crowded as they usually were. Otherwise, Karkat would actually have to walk amongst the wretched humans that lived there. Surprisingly, Karkat was in a much better mood than usual. It wasn't a good mood, since that's pretty much impossible, but it was a... slightly less angry mood. He was starting to stop being all aggravated about the fact that he was on Earth instead of his own planet. Of course, that wasn't going to go away entirely since Earth was a total shithole compared to Alternia.

Karkat pulled out his human phone device and opened up Trollian. There was still nobody. Karkat stared angrily at the device for a moment before putting it back in his pocket. There was literally nothing to do on this planet except talk to people. Most of the time, people weren't even online to talk to. Karkat took a turn into an alley, trying to avoid more contact with the humans.

[Mecha Kyubey]

Oh, well, that was certainly interesting.

Alternians were, by nature, a rather interesting species - so combative and plagued with nightmares of violence that they willingly sedated themselves to sleep. There were many with a great deal of energy to be harvested, but it was difficult to contract with them - finding the right time and the right motivation was often difficult. They were an erratic species, with such an odd fascination for blood colour.

They were also known well for galactic conquest, which did not explain why there was an Alternian wandering around this world, not razing anything and certainly without a fleet nearby. In fact, there had been no sighted ships of the Empire for some time... another thing to consider.

Kyubey considered the troll below, watching him check some antiquated technology before turning into an alley. Excellent. No one would find the troll speaking to the air anything out of the ordinary, and there were no humans showing interest in entering the same alley. It was time to act, then. With a twitch of his tail, he leaped down from the roof and padded into the same alley. He leaped up onto a garbage bin and from there it was just another small leap to land in front of the troll - not blocking his path, but standing close enough to ensure he was seen. He tilted his head and sat down, hoping this encounter wouldn't require making another body. Trolls could be so irrational about conversations, sometimes.

"Hello!" he said, trying to project an aura of harmlessness. "You're a very long way from Alternia, aren't you?"

[Spades Slick]

The restaurant was dark. Musty. Rather skeevy in nature, shadey, filled with inhabitants that didn't like their faces to be remembered, but it worked well enough. It started to become a sort of dead drop point for it's current guest, a sort of place to grab a meal and then get his little operations off the ground. But today was a bad day. Today, it turned out, someone cleared out the joint, and sent Big Dosh's men to try and deal with him. The red, dim lighting of scenic "Tsao's Chinese Eatery" illuminated a scene that was about to unfold. About seven men, equip with guns and knives and other such nonsense to try and deal with one last member of this little band. Their target. A man who was shrouded in black, and as dark as midnight itself. His eyes narrowed in disgust and anger. Just seven humans, but they were packing, and there wasn't alot of cover to take. He'd have to be quick. One of them, the fattest of the bunch spoke up with a smile. Taking a cigar away from his corpulent lips with his swollen digits, he chuckled as he gazed at the smaller, scurrilous looking would-be victim of his. Big Dosh himself came to oversee the deed done.

"Any last words, Spades?"

The man let out a 'tsk'. The most cliche of the cliche. Didn't his assassin give a damn about sounding intimidating? Or maybe he just cared too much. Just enough to fail to get his job done. He sneered with an angry grimace. There was a pause as he evaluated his situation. He'd keep it concise, and just uttered one word.

"Draw."

Man, what a cliche thing. But it worked with the arena, supposed the soon to be swiss-like carapacian. Oh well. None of them would be alive to remember it. Quickly, he drew three playing cards and through them at the crowd. In a flash, they turned to knives and promptly stabbed though the throats of three aggressors. That left four about to open fire with tommy guns. He could handle that. Plopping down his Warchest to make cover, he pushed hard down it to knock two gunmen off their feet with it's weight, before charging at a surprised riflemen to the left. He took out his hitcher, his trust trusty Hitcher, and bashed his brains out. Then, picking up the fallen mook's gun, shot up the other two men with a quick rata tat tat. That left a shocked Dosh who suddenly wasn't looking so big. He continued to look like a deer in headlights, up and past the part where Spades tackled him through a window, into a dank dark alleyway and smashed in his smug fatty face, over and over and over and over. Fortunately, the fat bastard took all the glass to the back-- a clean exit, so to speak. At least, for Spades. Is Dosh had survived very much longer into the beating, he might have disagreed.

But at the end of his overt, overly violent and over the top escapade, he began to look at his surroundings. An alleyway as any other alright. But it was a bit different. It was different because there was a figure in it that he recognized, presumably about to start talking to a bloated sewer rat of some kind, much like the one the black man current was atop. That greasy hair. That turtleneck. Those nubby horns.

It was a goddamn troll.

But more than a troll.

It was his troll.

Dosh coughed up some blood. Spades guessed he was still alive enough to object. A sudden, thick and wet smack solved that though. He went silent. And an awkward silence purveyed the alleyway for a brief second as Spades narrowed his eyes at the troll before speaking up.

"Well...I'll be damned..."

[Karkat Vantas]

Avoiding contact with humans apparently came at a shitty price. The minute Karkat started down the alley some weird... thing jumped off of a can of some sort and landed in front of Karkat. The troll stopped for a moment to stare at it, taking in it's weird appearance. It was probably some awful, shitty human animal thing that he couldn't be bothered with. But, once he started walking again, it started talking to him. More surprisingly, it started talking to him about Alternia. So now shitty Earth things actually knew about Alternia... or there was something equally shitty, or more shitty, that knew about Alternia. Now realizing that he couldn't ignore it, Karkat looked down at the animal.

It wasn't really like any human animals he'd seen. It was like some weird combination... thing. With weird ears. Karkat already hated those ears. They were so big and... stick out-y. He couldn't stand their existence, but he would probably have to deal. The thing talked with a regular voice, at least. It was a bit more girly than he thought it would be, which also bothered him. It just seemed so fucking harmless, which made it hard to be suspicious of for knowing about Alternia. Stupid harmless human... things.

Before he could speak to the animal, another figure entered the alleyway. This one, Karkat actually recognized. His weird carapace and height were enough for Karkat to realize that it was Jack Noir. Not the shitty dog Jack Noir from the humans' session - the Jack Noir from his session. Except he was wearing an eyepatch, a hat and he had a robotic arm. That was pretty fucking strange. "GIVE ME A FUCKING SECOND, WEIRD ANIMAL SHIT." Karkat said... or, more accurately, shouted as he began to approach Spades. "HOLY SHIT, JACK NOIR? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN... DOING HERE?" It wasn't that Karkat wasn't happy to see his session's Jack Noir. Karkat was just nigh incapable of actually expressing happiness like a normal person.

[Mecha Kyubey]

Another living presence, with considerable potential as well - and also a few dead individuals. Violence could be so messy, but of course, sometimes it was necessary.

Turning to look up at the carapaced being, he tilted his head, not bothering to try to fake any sort of fearful or anxious behaviour. There really was no need for that, especially when with this amount of potential, both of them could very easily contribute a great deal to the effort to stall entropy. Of course, he could wait if he had to, but Kyubey preferred to contract as soon as possible.

"What a rude way to refer to me," he said now, ears flattening. "But I see you two know each other! How lucky it must be, to appear in this dimensional anomaly and find someone you've met before." He had been asked to wait, and indeed, it seemed like he would be less of an intrusion if he waited for them to finish their greetings and preliminary courtesies. So, aware that sitting still would make him appear rather unnerving, he stretched out and then fluffed out his tail in a sinuous, hypnotic motion.

He had heard of Alternians before, had memories of contracting them many times. They were not a new species to him. The carapaced one, however, was a mystery, a blind spot in his knowledge, and that was exceedingly rare.

He would have a lot to talk about with these two, it seemed.

[Spades Slick]

The Carapace continued to glare and stare at the shorter, angrier being his opposite. As the Troll approached him, he felt a sort of happiness well up inside of him. Happiness that could only be properly expressed with a tender, fatherly stab. Unfortunately, the dead guy by his feet was sort of in the way, and they seemed to be in the presence of a creepy weasel fucker with crazy psychic blah blah blah blah. Stupid weasel. Preventing him from stabbing his acquaintances. There oughta' be a law...

"...Just about. The name's Spades now though. And don't bother asking why or how I got here. I'm about as clueless as you are."

Spades leveled his glare at Karkat Vantas before adjusting the brim of his hat. He kicked the bulbous dead guy to the side and walked to meet him fact to face. His white eye met Karkat's yellow, and he just gave an angered sort of nod. An angered nod of acknowledgment and acceptance. Weird. But what was weirder was the talking little animal weasel fucker with no manners that was standing in the way of stabbing Karkat which he didn't even want to do any more but did when he first saw him. It'd been a hell of a time after all, but they still had an agreement. No one else could rightly know about the damn troll's perfectly normal blood color unless they were already aware. Tch. What a pansy.

Oh right. What was he angry about? The weasel. Right.

He had a good point though. It probably did all involve weird space shit.

Casually throwing a knife at the weasel without even really sparing him a glance, he continued to stare at Karkat. Damn. The kid had grown a bit. Even more than the last time he saw him in the past-future. Or whenever that was. How long had it been? Well. He guessed that was relative. Fucking time. Speaking of time, time was sort of like space, which was kind of related to what the fuck Karkat was doing here.

"...But like the little weasel fuck said. Dimensional anomaly or...something. I don't know. The works. Also who is that presumably now deceased cat...thing? More importantly, what the hell are you doing here, Kid?"

[Karkat Vantas]

Honestly, Karkat just wasn't paying any attention to Kyubey. All he really heard as "dimensional anomaly" or something, but he was pretty used to that kind of stuff. Where he came from, basically everything was some kind of dimensional anomaly. Karkat was much more focused on Jack Noir - or apparently "Spades", as he was calling himself now. What a dumbass name that was. Karkat had no idea why he changed it, but that was his business. "'SPADES'?" Karkat asked, raising an eyebrow. It was going to be really weird calling him "Spades", but he'd get used to it. "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CALLING YOURSELF SPADES?" Karkat apparently assumed that it must not have been that personal.

A moment later, Spades threw a dagger at the animal thing. Karkat didn't really care that much, but he was a little bit surprised. Not that Spades was being violent, of course, but that he seemed to actually give a shit about what it was saying after. More of that dimensional anomaly bullshit he'd been hearing for the past whatever amount of time. Karkat shrugged at his question. "I DON'T KNOW, HE DIDN'T REALLY... INTRODUCE HIMSELF OR ANYTHING." Karkat said, glancing down at the possibly dead Kyubey. "PROBABLY JUST SOME WEIRD FUCKING... THING THAT SHOWED UP. IT KNEW WHAT ALTERNIA IS, THOUGH."

Then the next question. That was a question that Karkat himself really couldn't answer. What the hell was he doing on Earth? Pretty much nothing besides hanging around and occasionally talking to one of the few people he saw on Trollian. "YOU KNOW WHAT?" Karkat asked. "I DON'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW WHAT I'M DOING HERE. SOME FUCKING DIMENSIONAL RIFT OR SOME SHIT TOOK ME HERE."

[Mecha Kyubey]

Oh, it seemed his body was in danger of being stabbed. He leaped away from the knife, easily calculating its velocity and trajectory and thus knowing exactly which way to jump, and how far, to be "safe". It was only a faint attempt to act as if he was mortal, however - while others would have flinched or automatically moved, he had to put effort into doing so. Standing there while his body was stabbed was the natural reaction - it wasn't as if these bodies mattered. They were just individual vessels for the consciousness, nothing more.

"My name is Kyubey," he said, now perched on a significantly higher vantage point. Doubtless he was still in range for having a knife thrown at him, but it really wasn't anything to worry about.

"I'm here to make you both an offer. But you can finish catching up first, of course!" They were both individuals with strong emotional potential - of course they had that individual tendency to form attachments. It wasn't something he understood, of course, but he knew how important they considered those relationships - it would be more efficient to allow them to cultivate it now, rather than interrupt and risk lowering his chances of making a contract.