Sooraya Qadir (dust_) wrote in athinblackline, @ 2009-03-23 23:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | anole |
Who: Dust OT Gambit, Anole
When: March 23
Where: The Sand Arena
What: Dust fights a Blue Block mutant who apparently has dreams of glory and fame and feels very bad for having to stand in his way.
The floor of the arena was sand, and she couldn't help but think that was fitting. Very fitting, really. If she closed her eyes, she could almost think she was a child on pilgrimage with her family they way her feet sank slightly into its soft cradle. They said that the deserts of Africa were the cradle of life, and Dust thought that was quite apropos. She'd been to the desert once, for the Hajj. Her father had taken her when she was twelve, right after the communist regime had fallen to the Taliban. She and her father and mother had boarded a plane and flown to Riyadh, then traveled to Mecca and Medina for the great pilgrimage, one in a sea of humanity. It was an experience she'd never forget, never wanted to, and now, every step she took in this soft sand reminded her that she was one with her maker, one of His people. And nothing these devils in men's clothing did to her could or would ever change that.
But she wasn't of the desert, for all that the people who came to watch the mutants fight and die probably thought it. Her land, her home wasn't really all that sandy. Desert, yes, but the high desert of the mountains, not the blasted and sun baked sand of the Sahel. It was right that she be called Dust, because in her home, Dust was everywhere. It was inescapable. It was deadly. It got into your food and your water and your home and it could suffocate you while you slept. It could desiccate you as you stood. But it also nourished the plants, provided them a place to put down roots, rich with minerals and all that they needed for life to go on.
The question tonight was, which would she be?
Her fight had been scheduled for a week night when the crowd would be less. She wasn't a large draw, for all that her powers looked impressive. That was her will, because she didn't like to use them to their fullest. She would change, she would protect herself, play a defensive game, but she refrained from going on the offensive. She held back from killing.
Her Block Owner and trainers had been trying unsuccessfully for the last four years to change that, to get her to work harder in the pits and be a bigger draw. They knew she would be a big money maker if only she'd do what they wanted.
Perhaps, though, that was why she never did.
But tonight she was tired. She was sore still from her last fight, and not all that pleased to be tossed back to the pits so soon after it. As she saw it, she didn't have anything to prove, and yet it seemed that they wanted her to prove something anyway. And so she stood now, waiting.
She was dressed as she always was to fight in a long flowing black linen robe. She didn't bother with a niqib, had never liked it. The veiling practices of her homeland were not those of the Koran, but those of men who wished to control their women, not honor them as equals as Mohammad (my Allah's Peace and Blessings be upon him) had done. As far as she was concerned, the Taliban had been as much the oppressors of women as the humans here were of mutants. And both groups would be better off without their overlords.
The wind blew, picking up the moisture from the ocean, and her hair whipped about under the lights as she waited.
Finally, her opponent joined her on the sand.
She didn't know this one, and didn't know if that was good, or bad.
As she always did at the beginning of a fight that could end in her death or her killing someone, she knelt in prayer, pressing her face in the sand and asking God for forgiveness for what she was forced to do, drawing on His strength to see her through or to deliver her to Him, as was His Will.
Still prone, she hadn't even stood yet when she felt something hit her hard, knocking her to the side, so that she fell, winded.
Frowning in surprise, she looked at her attacker. His collar was blue. He was new to the island. Perhaps that explained his... enthusiasm. Or perhaps he had yet to understnad that he was helping no one, not even himself, if he were listening to the promises the humans made.
But it didn't seem to matter, between one heartbeat and the next the man was on her again, no longer a man, now blurr of fur and claws and teeth. One paw hit her temple, dazing her for a crucal moment, and the beast-man lept onto her, pinning her for the kill with a roar of victory.
The roar was his mistake. If he'd been more used to the arena, he would have killed her first, then roared. That second was all the chance she had, and she knew it. Changing in the blink of an eye to a body of sand, his paws which had been pinning her chest sank into her body, only to be cut and bloodied by the particles of grit she had become. Flattening herself into a sphere of sand, she enveloped him completely, resonating faster and faster as she slowly collapsed herself in on the poor beast. The pain was driving her this time, and she thought she might pass out, and if she did, she knew she'd be dead. She didn't want to kill him, she didn't, she never did. But this time, it was her or him, and she would take him. As the sphere collapsed, her sand rubbed faster and faster against him, first peeling back fur, then flesh, then polishing bone. She felt sick as every atom of her being turned this fellow mutant into dust like her, but not like her. Because when she was through, she reformed, standing long enough for the dust of his bones and the blood of his veins to drip to the sand beneath where they had been.
The crowd... went wild.
And she gagged once more, then, in a parody of the prayer she had offered before the fight, collapsed to her knees and wondered, once more, if life was worth it as she waited for someone to come and lead her away.