A Rose, Unnaturally

[four_is_death]

The lockpicks slide against each other with a gentle metal-on-metal sheeee, then click solidly into place.

Sophia smiles beneath her mask. "Got it."

Comments

[four_is_death]

Ow ow ow ow what the hell get it off!

[four_is_death]

This is actually hurting less than before.
... Okay, where did this sudden prettiness come from?

[four_is_death]

Okay, this hurts, sure, but it's also interesting. The creature looks down distractedly at the flower implanted in its chest.

[four_is_death]

Eyes throws a nearby bottle labelled 'aetheric quintessence' at the rapidly-growing portal. This does the exact opposite of helping.

[greatestgift]

The portal rumbles and groans and spits out a shrieking flailing girl who lands almost on top of the black rose with the white stem. It aggressively entwines her. Her shrieking increases in pitch and volume.

[four_is_death]

Slab manages to grab a limb of the shrieking, flailing girl and drag her behind his solidly-built counter. He has a surprising amount of muscle for someone so wiry.

[four_is_death]

Rose discovers that she can move, so she does. In fact, she manages a perfect somersault over a pile of flaming wreckage.

Her body feels almost carelessly light. Is she going into shock? She's going into shock, isn't she.

[four_is_death]

Sophia tries to grab ahold of the flower in her shoulder and wrench it free.

[four_is_death]

The experiment practicedly reevaluates its body.

It seems to have gained a significant amount of physical coordination, for some reason.

... Oh. Things are still exploding. Something should probably be done about that.

[four_is_death]

Eyes gives up trying to fix the disaster, and joins Slab behind his increasingly-crowded counter.

[unmarred]

The portal spits out a large fireball, a scattering of mismatched playing cards, a cracked glass marble, a green garden snake with one hundred and one dainty little legs, a potted plant, and a pair of identical twins. The first one through appears to be in considerable pain from no obvious source, and tumbles through the air to land on the red rose with the black stem, whereupon it begins to entangle him.

[last_one_out]

The second one is flung straight at the far wall and followed by a barrage of assorted shrapnel. Wooden splinters and iron spikes pin him against the blue stain; a sullenly glowing red shard of crystal embeds itself in his skull; assorted liquids splatter his body, turning the iron bright blue and the crystal bright silver and the wood black and charred.

[unmarred]

The first one makes an inhuman hissing noise, scoops a couple of extra roses off the floor, and takes a flying leap to stab his brother(?) with them. They set to work, freezing and burning with their insubstantial stems but reversing all of the other damage in short order.

[four_is_death]

The creature steps forwards and begins to operate the controls of the malfunctioning machine, ignoring a glancing blow from an inkjet printer. Gradually, the tear in space begins to shrink.

[four_is_death]

Sophia manages to pull the rose free of her shoulder, gasping as she tears the roots from her body.

[four_is_death]

Rose darts instinctively towards the obviously-wounded man, but by the time she gets there his injuries are already healing.

[greatestgift]

The shrieking girl stopped flailing a while back, and now the shrieking is over with too. She uncurls and attempts to extricate herself from Slab, grimacing every time she moves.

[last_one_out]

The person pinned to the wall comes loose. His red-stemmed orange flower and blue-stemmed white flower have twined together to form a unified petalsuit under what remains of his original clothes. Fragments of various things fall away from him as he drops to the floor; he clutches his head and moans unhappily.

[pythbox]

Sophia's rose retracts all of its stems back down to its original shape and sits tidy and dormant with a single long sharp stem.

[four_is_death]

What.

Okay, that is convenient but it is also not how flowers work.

[four_is_death]

Slab lets the woman up when she seems to be mostly operating on her own again.

[four_is_death]

Rose doggedly tries to figure out why the strange man is in pain, half-remembered first-aid and herbal remedies all tangling together in her brain.

[four_is_death]

Eyes seems to be rather distracted by the fact that Sophia's remaining clothing is full of holes.

[last_one_out]

Well, he's full of thorny rosevines, that can't be helping with the pain situation. Besides that...

A new sense unfolds, bit by bit, exploring the many many things that are wrong with this man. He has numerous old scars from some combination of surgery and torture. His skull contains entirely too many foreign substances - tiny crystal shards, some kind of alchemical concoction. The crystal has also gotten into his blood somehow. He's full of thorny rosevines, but they are actually helping, exerting a steady magical pressure that refuses to allow any of the rest of this bullshit to kill him. Glittering silver tears stream from his glowing silver eyes - that's the crystal at work. The healing-sense advises Rose to leave well enough alone; there's nothing she can do for him right now that his flowery companions aren't already doing.

[greatestgift]

Meanwhile, the girl is now hovering three feet off the ground. She looks really confused about it.