"I'm not good at this game." Maribelle said, sorely. At this point, she... sounded pretty annoyed, watching the eight ball slide into the pocket of the pool table. She leveled the tip of her cue stick, leaning down towards the table, before immediately giving it. It wasn't like she could do anything now, right?

Instead, she reached down to her side where she kept her leather satchel. She unlatched it from her belt and plopped it down on the table, digging into it.

"As promised..." She let out an exasperated sigh. After a moment of rooting about, she took a handful of silver coins from her bag. After a moment of counting them out loud, she set fifteen of them down before Marco, avoiding her gaze as she did. "Buy yourself a drink or something. I'm-- I'm going home, I think."

What a loser.

follow-up time, men

Smithson frowned at the measly amount of... Debris that he had collected in his lanky - almost bony, really - hands. Well, there isn't any way I could've won this. He shot the younger woman, who had far more bones and weird little trinkets than he, a sharp look before dropping his collection and brushing his hands. Staying where he was, the middle-aged man instead found more comfort just standing there with his chest puffed out in the saltiest way possible.

It really wasn't that major of a loss, but given that he was so used to competition, the idea of losing some scavenging hunt - despite how irrelevant it was to his career - meant way, way too much for him. Hell, even the idea of convincing her to cover it up and just be all hush-hush about it proved appealing to him. A hand was put up to his chin as he glanced down at his dropped items before giving an animal bone a kick. The kick wasn't enough to break the bone, but it definitely was enough to sour his indignation even more... Just slightly...

Finally, he broke the increasingly awkward silence by stating, "Good game," with a shrug. "You beat me there." Honestly, he should've seen it coming since he was brash enough to challenge someone like her to see how many miscellaneous things they could collect in ten minutes. Didn't he insult her for engaging in such a hobby? He conveniently forgot that with a brush of his hand as he muttered, "That's one thing I'll never embark upon again..."

Only dread remained in his mind as the bitterness left with his words. But... Why dread? Smithson shook his head with a frown, the movement barely being visible but still present anyways. Addressing that oversight would be an issue for a different time. For now... He felt as if he was as lowly as the grime on his hands. The aristocrat looked down at his palms once more before quickly flipping them, far too disgusted with the dirt despite having just spent ten minutes scrounging around in it for anything remotely interesting. Perhaps his standards were too high. He didn't know anymore. But... What lay beyond those standards? An answer to that wasn't something he felt like providing at the moment.

after several months..... a quick-ish follow-up..........

Magical energy drained from 527's limbs as they steadily became encased in ice. This was bad. They'd never wanted this encounter to escalate like this, especially when they'd underestimated their target. They could never win against ice, only survive the cold. They collapsed under their own weight, feeling their surroundings grow distant as the ice continued to envelop them. The magic canister would keep them alive... but they felt like taking such a big nap... So cold... So....

Their eyelids closed as they went into an emergency sleep state. Kassia won this round..

Upon wandering around the place he doesn't reconize, It was rather bright and not as opened as his location. He later found a weird creature, which he also doesn't reconize. The creature seem to be some sort of crab-dragon, it doesn't seem like it's aggressive. He thought to leave the creature, Idea 527 alone. But in the sudden, his stomache growled like it's telling him to not miss this opportunity. That big crab with long tail, it would have packed with meat, right? With that, Alpha engaged in a battle. He sneaked to the back before performing an ambush attack.

After some time of fighting, he lost. Unfortunately due to the light that made him weaker and seemingly empowering Idea 527's power. "You're not bad...hehehe..." The canine laying on the ground, most of the goo splattered and look like he had melted when looking from up above. Light and empty stomache, this might be his worst day of his life. But then again, he already died once...er, twice. Could there be thrice?

"Oh please no." Akio gasps, laying on his back and lifting himself using his arms, trying to crawl away from the creature in front of him. All Akio wanted to do was help, he heard someone calling for assistance and followed the sound to investigate but it just led to this black wolf, grinning at him. Akio ran as much as he could but it felt like the wolf was everywhere, in the trees, in the shadows, just...following him. Akio ended up facing a tall mountain, how he even got there, he couldn't remember, he didn't remember there being a mountain, or maybe he just ran so far, as much as he could, that he ended up at the base of a mountain. How he got there didn't matter, not when there's a black wolf walking forward, mouth agape. 

"Oh god..." Akio exhales, transforming into a wolf and growling at the creature in front of him but the black creature didn't even seem fazed, it seemed...amused almost, and that only made Akio more terrified. 

There were a few small squeaks from the tiny alien as she backed up, confused and scared. She'd meant no harm, but maybe the boy thought she was going to do something mean? No matter the issue he had with her, he'd turned into some weird Earth monster she'd only seen once before and batted her away. This was enough to scare the wits out of her without a full battle.

Germ cowered and turned away, back towards the alley she came from. The spines on her back slicked straight back to make her appear smaller as she darted back to the dumpster she previously took cover in. Her paws left a strange yellow liquid behind--a defense mechanism, perhaps?

Lupra falls onto the ground with a large thud, whatever this dog-like alien creature in front of her was, it managed to catch her on one of her bad days, and she now is on the ground in shock, lifting her head and holding it in pain, she's shocked how something so small could manage to beat her like this.
"W....Wha?"
She was dumbfounded, she is not used to being defeated like this at all, her eyes actually fully widened, she looks at the creature in front of her "Who...What...Are you?? How?? Tell me how!!" She pants, her body still sluggishly on the ground, she drops her head back onto the ground again, showing she is exhausted and has given up.

"Wh-what the..." As she came to, Artemis lifted her head off the ground and found her vision swimming. It felt like she'd been hit by a truck, and then another truck but much larger. She groaned, blinking inky blackness and sparkling white dots out of her vision, and managed to look up at the person who had defeated her.

Or... Maybe "person" was being too generous. The thing above her was undoubtedly a monster, based on the body alone. It dripped with mucus, and gave off a foul odor that had Artemis wanting to gag.

"Halley," Artemis groaned, turning her head painfully to the side to look for her partner in crime. "Halley, the... the bombs..." If nothing else, Halley would be able to blow that beast sky high! Right? Right..? Hey, where was Halley...?

Tenebris kneeled in a bad state. Before his victor was a humanoid cat. How can a mere mortal defeat an ancient lord as grandesque and all consuming as the Crystalion himself? Maybe he let his guard down, believing his grips on dark magic and years of practice would overwhelm anyone who dared stood in his way. Yet, this was a once in a while... an unfortunate incident that if it gets wind of those who knew him, it would tarnish his reputation. 

He raises back on his feet, purple blood oozing from where Artemis' attacks had butchered him with his glaring purple eyes piercing into his foe, with a hungering bout for a second run but, as true to his self, he could always come back stronger.

"Luck and fortue may have spared you from a fateful end but I will return, considered my strategies and my supreme control over crystals, by likes you never seen before, will consume your prideful soul. You best watch the shadows...les one will come out to reach you." He said, in a cold bitter tone and faded into the lingering darkness.

With a huff, Brown eyed the lord before hissing, "You know, it's not exactly a fair fight when one is immortal in words and the other is... Actually immortal.." Her breathing was ragged as she looked down at her arm, which twitched beyond her control; it was likely a residue of the dark magic cast during their skirmish, and even when she told him to go easy on her, she still had that feeling that the pins-and-needles sensation in her arm (as well as that general spinning, nauseous feeling she had in her head) was going to last for... A while. Maybe permanently! She could joke about it, but she wasn't sure if she had that much bravado left in her for such a feat. Not that he seemed like the fellow to have much humor anyhow.

"Hand-to-hand combat would've worked better," the woman insisted dryly, "mostly just because it's fairer that way. No stupid magic and the like, and at least it is easy to tell if someone's just bullshitting their way to an easy win." The last part of her sentence was filled with particular bitterness as she shook her head and just... Sighed. This could've turned out better, she supposed, but it also could've turned out worse? That's just how it was sometimes. Nevertheless, Brown still felt as if the defeat was beyond her control, and if there was one thing the woman always wanted in her grasp at all times... It was control.

He had wrenched that from her, and it made her feel a primal, visceral sense of vulnerability that she hadn't felt since she was a young woman tied to her husband  financially, politically, and socially. She knew that he was gone, now, but now, she could see reflections of him in the other man. Goodness, it felt disgusting.

She spat on the ground and kicked at it, dust flinging up as she continued to grab at her arm and try to regain control of it; when that somewhat failed, Brown cursed under her breath and just... Stood there. Her eyes had drifted down onto the dirt and sinking dust, and there was that feeling that she might as well just stop groveling and accept what she had received. Her friend had told her about it once, when he wandered through the subject of philosophy and didn't seem to care about her own antipathy towards the subject.

"Fatalism," he recounted to her while gently tracing his finger along the chaise's arm, "It's when you realize that everything is subject to fate, and that there's nothing you can do to change it. You're born to succeed, but you're also born to fail. Every action you do just proves it, but there's never a way to disprove it..."

Those words resonated with Brown now as she coughed and grunted, "I guess - in that regard - there is a reason why they see you as a lord, and not just an aristocrat... And I suppose those powers of yours are not satisfactory enough for such a treatise..." Even then, there was a bite in her words while she rolled her eyes. "... Given that this is what you can do when you only use a fraction of your power," she continued while holding out her damaged arm, "I hope to know what you will be like when you use all of it." From there, Brown started to grin at him, because that was the only way she knew how to be ominous and mysterious. "I would likely respect that, at the very least. You may be a fraud, but you are indeed a powerful one... And that? That I can consider acceptable. Maybe even worthy of the praise normally directed towards a lord, if I must be honest." (It was likely sarcasm, given her tendency to be a sore loser, but... Maybe not?)

oh heck..... time for a follow-up...........