Shadow Chow [Party of 3] [Open]

[Kate Minola]

Another night, another failed attempt to just work. And another night of finding jack shit in her mind and heart to draw something. Just... nothing. She did some traces for background and landscape studies and a few pages of inking shit over the lightbox but that was it. No work of her own.

Zilch.

Nada.

Well fuck that. She needed ice-cream. Stat.

So obviously, being so late, she moseyed over to the supermarket. It was becoming a bad habit but she was an artist with art problems and she fought giant monsters for what was becoming dangerously akin to 'fun'.

She had problems.

And some problems can only be solved by ice cream.

So Kate armed herself with her bow and arrows, put on her tough little vest and got out of the house and made her way to the supermarket, grumbling about pages and art and stupid art blocks with their sticky, yellow-fog sensation and shit.

Heck, she was probably going to get a beer tonight, too.

[Akira Nakajima]

To say that Akira was one that did much grocery shopping would be a lie. A terrible lie, really. While he could cook if he needed to, it was often unnecessary. Between his sister and the “uncles”, he was pretty well set on people willing to prepare something good. Plus, he always had his nutritional food “supplements” that one guy could prepare. Ninja food, he called it. And, hey. It worked. Well, regardless, he wasn't there to buy things during the dark hour. It went against his standards to take things without exchanging something for them. And it wasn't like he had a shortage of money. Hell, he was plenty good at building funds from nothing.

”Well. Things are mostly fine here, it seems.” Nothing out of the ordinary, he noted, while looking over one particular aisle. Just the typical food-inspired monsters. Which varied from condiments to actual food. They weren't actually edible, were they? That'd be creepy as all hell. Regardless, he was pretty calm about the whole situation. Then again, he'd had about a month to adjust. It'd be bad if he wasn't getting used to it. ”Abandon all logic, ye who enter here.” He lightly mumbled before steering Hayagriva around a set of freezers. Perhaps it'd be a quiet evening, for the most part?

[Ariane Ivers]

Ending out later than intended seemed like a common occurrence these days.  Anne headed on home dreadfully late this night, her familiar leather jacket over her ugly polo and khaki uniform from work, the even fuglier apron folded up and tucked away in her bag.  It wasn't until she was most of the way back to her loft that she realized she hadn't had anything to eat that night, and all she had in her fridge was food for the animals.  With a groan, she changed direction.  Even if it wasn't 'open', for the obvious reasons, she sure as hell wasn't waiting around until it did.  She'd drop off the money for what she needed with a note on the counter and call it a night.  If they questioned the ghost money and slip beyond that, it wasn't her problem.  Bad karma was the last thing she needed with all the monster fighting she'd been doing, and with how her luck had been on the last couple big fights she needed to avoid any more as much as possible.

As luck would have it, the place was crawling with leftover-reject monsters.  For the most part they were just little creepy-crawlies, not posing much of any sort of threat.  It was easy to slip around them and grab what she needed, or stomp on any little ones that got too close for comfort.  As she looped around to the freezer section, she saw a familiar face and waved tiredly.  "Yo, how're you?  Looks like it's been pretty quiet here so far, so hopefully that holds up."  Hearing the sound of more footsteps she turned and raised an eyebrow.  Another familiar face, in another shadow infested area.  Goosebumps ran up her arms, and she had a crappy feeling that the calm wouldn't last for long.  Sighing, she still waved to the other girl, "Hey Kate.  Looks like this has become a regular little user shopping party, huh?"  

She flexed her knuckles under their leather wraps, looking around the store before setting down her shopping basket and bag.  The goosebumps weren't going anywhere, and she wanted to be ready in case something really was coming.  If not, well she'd just deal with looking silly for a moment and gather her things back up, wouldn't she?

[Alice]

It's a party. I'll bring the dip.


Tomato Twins
Resist: Pierce
Weak: Slash
Skills: Skewer, Agi

Diet Dancers
Resist: Light
Weak: Dark
Skills: Hamaon, Skewer

Ginger Gigas
Null: Fire
Weak: Ice
Skills: Viper Smash, Agi, Counter

Worcestershire Wheel
Resist: Strike
Weak: Lightning
Skill: Viper Smash, Twin Shot

[Kate Minola]

Kate was staring at the ice cream cartons through the frosted glass but sheepishly greeted Ariane. "Oh, er, hi," she said and blushed. "Yeah, heh-heh-heh... It's kind of embarrassing, but I am a starving artist and writer... oh but I do shop here when I have money!"

She put down  her basket when she heard the odd clip-clop of hooves. She was about to assume an attack when she saw it was just that kid with the horse Persona. She couldn't quite remember his name.

"Hello," she greeted him. "It's Akira, right? I'm sorry, I'm just bad with names until I've met the person a few times."

Of course, before further pleasantries could be exchanged, they got attacked.

Of course!

She drew her warhammer to further test herself with a new weapon. Just in time too, as the weird, floating thing that looked like two people connected by an antenna skewered through their heads loomed over her. They wriggled creepily and cast a burst of fire on her. Kate shrugged and tanked it, aware that fire wasn't as nasty for her as it would be. She responded by summoning Antiope to knock them backwards with a powerful slash. It seemed to be very effective on them because it launched them back and flat on their asses, giving Kate the opportunity to rush in and, amusingly, finish them off with one powerful swing.

She nearly lost her footing from the momentum but she caught the bigass giant creature thundering at her at full tilt from the corner of her eye. She just managed to turn as it launched a heavy-handed swing of its fist. Kate raised her hammer in front of her to shield her head and to her amused surprise, the blow bounced right back at the creature. She grinned and swung her hammer at him. To her dismay, it did nothing and he just slammed her with another hit that sent her skidding backwards on her back. She grunted and got back up.

Right, okay, no fire.

She put it away on the holster on her back and drew her bow back with an arrow, striking it in the chest. It responded by blasting fire at her, which she handled. When she fired another arrow at it, it bounced right back at her and Kate just managed to dodge and avoid getting an arrow in her goddamn eye. Summoning Antiope again, she sent the amazon to attack with a vertical slash that pushed the giant back. It rushed in to body-slam her again but Kate dodged it and turning, she fired another arrow in its face, killing it.

"The things I do for ice cream," she muttered, lowering her bow.

[Akira Nakajima]

Not one person, but two, and both girls at that, happened to be there at the supermarket. Not only that, but one was Anne. The other was the woman at the meeting and battle- some Kate Minola, or something like that. He lightly waved at them both, nodding at the question of his name, while closing in on them. No need to raise his voice unnecessarily, after all, right? Except that proved to be a needless caution, given that the problems came despite that attempt. Honestly, he had come around for the sake of a check-up and sweep, so it wasn't like a fight was unexpected. Still, it was annoying to meet people, only to have to break up and fight things again. Well, that was life.

”Back to work, I guess.” He lightly sighed before leveling his halberd. Part of the good thing about being able to ride his Persona- and that said Persona was, in fact, a horse, and therefore fast- was that he had pretty good mobility. Enough to cut off a target's progression or escape attempts. The things in the market weren't exactly dangerous, but he liked neatly cutting off things from a bunch, when it was an issue. Focusing on the wheel, the boy charged in and swung his halberd, slashing across the lion-like face- or was it mask?- with little difficulty. No resistance was to be found. Certainly a nice blessing, compared to some of the things he had had to fight in the tower recently.

The wheel twirled and tried to skewer him, but it met with limited success. After all, Akira resisted Pierce-based attacks. With a second swing, he cleaved that front panel in two, effectively offing the Shadow. When it worked, that halberd blade was pretty nice. Definitely a nice thing to try improving further when side-funds allowed for it. In any case, it seemed Kate was dealing with two of them. That meant Anne had the last one of the bunch to deal with. He doubted any of them would have really needed it, but he'd heal as necessary.

[Ariane Ivers]

Anne gave a sympathetic smile at Kate's plight and nodded, "I could only imagine.  I'm only lucky in that the greenhouse is helpless without me by this point, I couldn't do with the bad juju of not leaving money behind for my stuff.  I know, I know, it's dumb superstition, but..."  She shrugged awkwardly, a little embarrassed by her own irrationality of just taking the food during the dark hour.  They were, after all, killing giant monsters no one else could see or defend themselves against.  Didn't they deserve a little free food now and again?

Come to think of it, though... She frowned at the freezers, furrowing her brow as she posed a question to the other two, "Since technology doesn't work in this hour, how is it no one's food goes bad during this hour?  I mean, in coolers and stuff I guess it'd be fine enough for an hour...  But imagine if someone was in the middle of scooping themselves ice cream when the dark hour hits.  Wouldn't it melt, leaving them very confused when the hour was up?"

Before she could get an answer to her sleep-deprived question, the apparent cause for her goosebumps turned the corner and she sighed.  While it wasn't really surprising by this point, it was pretty annoying.  Cracking her neck she turned to the only unoccupied baddie.  Baddies?  The freak show seemed to be one head sharing the same body and danced around in circles.  Well, she'd seen plenty stranger things by this point.  

As she charged it, it's single head began to spin as a beam of light shot towards her.  It hurt, sure, but just barely.  Shrugging off the attack, she continued in and delivered a few hard straight punches; left, right, left.  With as practiced as she had become by this point it obviously left quite a dent, the creature almost struggling to stand by this point.  As she saw fire dancing out of the corner of her eye, Anne thanked her luck in how the divvying of enemies wound up just as the pointed blade her own shadow was carrying aimed directly for her.  She started to flinch, up until it literally just slid off of her.  Well, that was a welcome surprise.  Anne hadn't even had a chance to notice until now that pierce attacks were even more useless against here than they were before.  With one more hard punch the dancers disintegrated, leaving her just tired and annoyed by the interruption to her grocery trip and sleepy musings.