Welcome to the Jungle [Open]

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Tony has honestly been trying to avoid the whole Yeerk trial thing. It was before his time, he doesn't know that much about it, and he generally trusts the command staff and the crew to make the right decision at the end of the day. It's what they do, right? They're good people. He can tell that. Some of them are like people he knew back home. Some of them aren't. But he trusts most of them. Or, at least the ones he knows.

Still, he doesn't want to got up in that bru-ha-ha, so he's decided that it would be good a idea to chill in the Sensoriums for an afternoon. So far, he's conjured up an image of his home neighborhood - he's been a bit home-sck lately, although this doesn't help that much - and he's just been walking empty streets. He could fill it with the people from his memories if he wanted. They'd seem real, but it wouldn't be right. It would feel... off somehow.

Still, this is his home, even if it is run-down. Even if the cops don't like to come through here unless they absolutely have to. That, or they're chasing someone in force; he can't begin to count the number of times he's heard a helicopter fly over his apartment building. And then there was that one time a SWAT team had stormed the aprtment a few doors down. Someone had apparently been dealing crack or some other shit and the Federal government's War on Drugs had come rather uncomfortably close to home. He'd been a kid then, only eleven or twelve. He'd been terrified (although he would never have admitted that to his friends) and he and his family had stayed inside most of that day.

It was a rought neighborhood. There were gangs. People had been shot - hell, he'd been shot at and shot people. He'd gotten into that shit when he was thirteen and it was really only because of his First Change that he'd gotten the Hell out of it (much to the relief of his mother). He still kept close ties with his friends that were in, but... he wasn't going back to that. Aside from the fact that he could eat bullets for lunch now, he really didn't want to go frenzied war-form on a bunch of gangbangers and wake up in a pool of human blood and entrails. Once had been enough.

Besides, he had his own war to fight. The one he was fighting now. Well, would be if it weren't for Stacy. But this was home.

He'd grown tired of walking and eventually had just had Stacy conjure up a car, which he was currently in the process of trying to hotwire - just to keep in practice, of course.

"Come on, come on..." he mutters.

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"It's horrible. We're forced to eat nothin' but tofu," Tony smirks in reply and then starts laughing.

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Roxie smiles subtly as she stretches her legs forward again and lays back against the hood, looking up at the imaginary sky, silent for the moment.

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Tony glances over, leg tapping against the side of the car. The sky is fading into twilight, long shadows stretching out over the ground.

"What's on your mind?"

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"That I'd rather be back home," she admits, crossing her arms over her chest. "There's stuff I'm responsible for there."

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"Yeah. Same."

He sighs softly, "Just gotta make th' best of it, y'know?"

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"Yeah." She almost sighs herself, and a hand slips up to touch that bell on the chain around her neck again. "Still makes me feel like a lazy idiot."

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"I don't feel lazy..." he glances upwards, "I just feel helpless. An' I hate it."

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"That too," Roxie says with a frown. From the sky, her gaze slides over to Plays a little curiously, and a little appraisingly.

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Tony shrugs, "...I have shit I should be doin' back home. A war to fight. Instead I'm here, joyriding in fucking cars made out of fucking light!" He shoves himself off of the car hood for a moment, cursing in Spanish. He turns and kicks at the car for a moment in impotent rage as he lets out all of his frustration and rage on the unfortunate car. When he's done, the hood's dented and he looks like he's grown a bit bigger and a bit hairier.

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Roxie has slid away from the car, watching Tony. That jacket of hers is pulled a little more open, a hand an inch away delving inside it—there's a little glint of metal against the fading light.

She's wary, but not quite afraid in the proper sense—almost like she was halfway expecting something like this to happen.

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Slowly, Tony seems to regain control of himself, glaring down at the hood of the car. And slowly, he reverts to normal, hair shrinking away, mass dropping, until he's a normal teenager again. He bites his lip, shakes his head, and then glances at Roxie, "...lo siento. Shouldn't have lost my temper like that."

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The girl lets her jacket slide back mostly-shut again, the weapon (if it was one and not something else) hidden against her again. "It's okay," she says quietly. "I've been feeling the same way for a while."

FML, I thought I'd tagged this.

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"Yeah. This whole thing is just full of shit... man, I hate it, but I'm livin'. It's OK, mosta th' time. But then I think 'bout everything I should be doin' at home."

He sighs, "And now... ugh. Fuckin' hell."

Re: FML, I thought I'd tagged this.

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Roxie nods quietly, slowly leaning again against the battered car. "I just wish I knew more about all of it. It feels like half the people here are giving me major bad vibes, but I don't want to be a dumbass and assume that they work the same as things do back home."

Re: FML, I thought I'd tagged this.

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"Shit... I don't know half the people on here anyway. It's just crazy. Lots of good people, but that's gotta mean there's some bad people somewhere in here too..."

He settles on his haunches, peering up at her.

Re: FML, I thought I'd tagged this.

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If Tony is in the mood to sense that kind of thing—or if he was, in that moment of lost self-control—a very faint smell of death clings to Roxie, like someone who's encountered the topic repeatedly but washed well each time. There's something weirdly chemical about it, though, and kind of a strange multifaceted unpleasant tinge to her in general, as if she's been raiding the assorted chemicals under the kitchen sink. It's all too faint to pick up on with a human nose, but with what a werewolf can manage...

"I haven't picked up on anything I really recognize, but that might just mean they're hiding well." She adjusts her glasses.

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Tony frowns in concentration for a moment, nose wrinkling. That was weird. Really weird. He cocks his head to one side, peering at her a bit more closely. Who was this kid, exactly?

"Could be."

He rubs a hand across his mouth, "What'd you say you did again?"

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"I didn't." Roxie fiddles with her glasses a bit more. "But I hunt things called cho." She pronounces the word almost as an epithet. "I haven't found any here, but they could just be hiding."

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Tony squints, "What th'fuck are cho?"

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"If you see a white spider with ten legs or hooves, that'd be one." She watches Tony coolly. "They eat people from the inside-out and become them."

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"Well, shit. Sounds like a Wyrm thing crossed with Weaver, if ya ask me. Shiiiit."

He shakes his head, "Never run into one of those, but I've seen nasty shit."

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"A what with a what?" she asks.

"They're all I deal with... usually. Other stuff really isn't my problem."

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"...Wyrm. Basically the incarnation of death, decay, an' corruption. S'gone a bit crazy and it's tryin' to kill th' world now. We fight its minions. Similar thing with th' Weaver, except that's the incarnation of order, organization, shit like that."

And there's some basic, basic stuff on Werewolf cosmology.

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"Oh... see, it doesn't work like that where I'm from," Roxie says, relaxing against the side of the car a little more. "There's the cho, but there are other things too. Fae, the dead, the things that come in from other worlds... but the cho are the only ones that shouldn't exist at all."

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"Oh, it's s'possed to exist. It should just be in balance an' not trying to kill everything."