Welcome to Gaia! ::

The number of alarmed reactions his appearance elicited in the local population had been an excellent way for Bacchus to lift his spirits in the days following his arrival on Earth. Sure it had resulted in the appearance of what seemed to be what passed for a night watch on Earth the other night, but they made themselves embarrassingly easy to evade, what with their constant shouting. Over the past several days Tempesti had been trying to persuade him of the merits of disguising his true form, but as far as he was concerned, the xenophobia of Earth’s humans was their problem to solve, not his.

Still, for the sake of his overly cautious new roommate (honestly how does someone who died like that become so fixated on safety anyway?) he’d agreed to limit his excursions to nighttime roaming. He’d abided by that. Mostly. It was easier to shoplift at night, when the people who should be paying attention are too drained by whatever monotonous horrors the day had sent them. He still drew stares, but many were just as eager to avert their eyes as though if they couldn’t see him he wouldn’t level his gaze on them.

And so he sat on the rough concrete of a low wall that edged a desolate park. He had yet to find any frogs here (he finally knew what those little jumping things were called), but it was a good place to be alone with the bottle of spicy liquor he’d pilfered during his most recent raid. The flavor couldn’t compete with his own spiced mead and the sweet waves of dizziness couldn’t hope to match the embrace of the Grey Lady, but limitations on this planet being what they were, he wasn’t going to complain. Much.

Bacchus’ lip curled into a reflexive sneer as Chaos began to prickle across the back of his neck. He couldn’t claim to enjoy the sensation, but it was a decided upgrade from the ******** he’d left behind. Even if its source wanted to poison this world. People loved to tell him all the ways in which his decisions were bad, or stupid, or impulsive but he’d never infected his own world with the cosmic equivalent of the Wasting. He wished he could rub this development in Nuada’s stupid face. After all, this person was living proof that he wasn’t the most ill-advised person in the galaxy.

Taking a long swig from his bottle he leaned backward, long black hair dusting the ground behind him as he took in an upside down view of the newcomer. Centuries of harassment by Chaos and its more inconvenient side effects made the presence of some hack with a knife and an attitude problem an annoyance at most.

“You know, you remind me of an abscess I had once, it was a mess. There were no healers around so after a while it had me puking blood for days. Sorry to tell you, but it was better company.”

He offered the stranger a crooked grin as he spoke.

“I’d decline your offer, but you don’t seem the sort to acc-,” the not entirely unexpected avalanche of pain roared through the senshi’s head before. A soft hiss was the only sound he allowed to escape him as the blood flowed freely down his inverted face and into his right eye, entirely unwilling to allow the p***k whatever satisfaction a scream might have given him.


“See?" He choked a bit on the blood making an inconvenient path down the back of his throat, "This is exactly the sort of stupid s**t I was talking about. You’re just proving my point.”


With as much strength as he could manage, Bacchus’ hands snapped around the other man’s forearm and yanked down hard in an attempt to overbalance him while simultaneously trying slide the sleeve of that stupid little jackboot uniform upward. Maybe he could expose just enough skin to let him get a solid bite on the ********. Whatever else happened, it was only fair to give the stranger something to remember him by.

Whatever Bacchus intended to say when he opened his mouth dissolved into a sharp wheeze that morphed into a blood-spattered laugh. He wished that the little s**t was wearing white. Something he would have to scrub once the night was over and he wandered off to whichever fetid hole someone like that spent their evenings. Struggling to return the air to his lungs, the deep space senshi did his best to maintain a stubborn, one-handed grip on the spore-born shitweasel’s arm.

Not exactly the best position for combat, but right now his goal was to at least make this guy’s night at least a little bit unpleasant. "Better a ‘terrorist’ than a parasite. Whatever shat you out…” He took another wheezing breath, choked a bit as he turned his head, “Should have used wormwort. Would have saved the rest of us a lot of trouble.”

With the quickest motion he could manage Bacchus snatched up his forgotten bottle, its spicy contents sloshing about inside, before swinging it back as hard as he could in the direction of that tumor’s face. He had no idea if he was going in the right direction, he just hoped that it hurt.