Closed RP Good Business

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Beatrice winced as his jaw cracked, and subconsciously re-evaluated the man's size. To large to be considered merely tall. His eyes were jaundiced...everything about him was...unsettling. And Beatrice wasn't quick to be judgemental about a persons deformities.

Beatrice didn't hesitate when the man asked for her coca-cola. She carefully handed him the bottle without question, even it was only to appease him. She didn't trust metas in general, much less ones this large. Her injured arm ached, as if reminding her to be careful. "Here...keep it."

She pulled her coat around her tighter to keep out the chill, hoping to find a way to make an exit without provoking the man. He was different than the Mustache Man. More wild, and seemingly less in control. Probably homeless or on drugs by the state of him- and his clothes. It was a calculated risk but...

"Do you need anything? Or somewhere to go...I can recommend a place."
 
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The walking horror, now seated comfortably across from Bea on a park bench, did not need to rise to accept her offering of a drink - he merely stretched his arm out languidly, pinching the outstretched bottle between his enormous thumb and forefinger, where he held it like a tiny vial.

"Ahh. Sugar. My only weakness."

He tipped his head back and emptied the remainder of Beatrice's soda into his open jaws - it was a nearly full bottle, but compared to the sheer size of him, it looked like a mere trickle out of a test tube balanced precariously between two claw-tipped talons.

"Thanks."

He regarded the woman in front of him with his two beady orbs - tiny golden spheres which flickered menacingly in the gibbous moonlight. She was afraid, of course, highly apprehensive, but not running away screaming. Impressive.

"This reminds me," he sat back, stretching one leg up over his knee, "...Of New Coke. Do you remember New Coke?"

He didn't so much as pause to let her answer. Instead, his rumbling voice grinded with unnatural enthusiasm - deep and altogether inhuman, the words strung together in grating mimicry of a man's voice.

"After World War Two, the Coca-Cola Company held sixty per cent of the market share for cola products. By the eighties, it'd declined to a mere twenty-four per cent, due to competition from Pepsi. Pepsi had the younger generation. Coke had tradition - its famous formula, unchanged for decades."

Sitting on the bench, the abhuman looked positively out of place - dwarfing the likes of Shaquille O'Neal, with contorted muscles shifting and undulating in an exaggerated fashion as he spoke.

"Roberto Goizueta, a Coke executive who had defected from Cuba after Castro took power, had become the CEO. And he famously declared there would be no sacred cows under his management. He changed the Coca-Cola formula and introduced New Coke. It tested well with consumers (in the North, not the South) and saw initial success. But the backlash was the stuff of legend. It became a farce. Hundreds of well-publicized boycotts, thousands of complaints - international distributors refused to even sell the stuff. Bill Cosby resigned as Coca-Cola's mascot. And Fidel Castro said he liked the old formula better. Rob Goizueta's father agreed with him."

The jaws cracked apart in a massive smile.

"The original formula was reintroduced in a mere three months, resulting in a significant sales boost. Robert Goizueta stood by his new product. He drank New Coke until he died in 1997."

He laced his huge fingers together.

"What do you think of that?"
 
"It's a double edged sword isn't it."

Bea answered in a shaky voice, that grew stronger as she continued. She was familiar with the story from her classes on marketing. "Retracting the New Colas would mean he made a mistake- that he was weak, but if he hadn't it would have destroyed the company...I've always held to the opinion he drank the New Colas after the original went back to shelf out of pride, nothing more. To prove to everyone that he did stand by his product, no matter what the consumers wanted."

Beatrice shivered nervously. She should have stayed quiet instead of opening her mouth. "That's the risk you take with anything new...anything different." Then she met the mans yellow eyes. This was now less about soda and more about what she was planning. "In he end he acted out of the greater good for the company...for everyone. I can at least respect him for that."
 
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When Beatrice answered him, calmly, confidently - as heroically as she could muster under the circumstances, the creature's yellow eyes contracted to mere slits, then closed entirely as he leapt suddenly to his feet. His jaw slackened, then cracked apart in a grotesque display - it practically unhinged like a cottonmouth snake, but his mouth was not stretchy - it was flesh and bone, and it sounded like ten shoulders dislocating. And he howled, air forcefully expelled from ogrish lungs, enough that lights popped on around the neighborhood and a car alarm went off.

He whirled towards her, taking two steps closer, until he practically loomed over her - - with his sudden burst of adrenaline, his height had increased, metabolism over-firing. The hideous stench was overwhelming.

And he screamed:

"NO! THE POINT IS THAT GOIZUETA WAS A MORON!"

Whirling away from her, he bent down and ripped the metal park bench out of the ground with one mighty heave. It looked like a child's lawn chair in his hand, and it might as well have been made of cardboard.

"IT'S OBVIOUS! THERE - IS - NO - SUBTEXT!"

Every word was punctuated by him dashing the bench against the sidewalk, the metal CLANG practically silent compared to his words.

With a gurgling cry, he slung it away in a rage, where it wrapped itself around a nearby tree.

"THE LESSON HERE IS THAT NEW COKE WAS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER! WERE YOU EVEN PAYING ATTENTION? AND IT TASTED LIKE SHIT!"

Spittle - viscious saliva - sprayed everywhere. Veins bulged all over him as he grew even taller - if such a thing were even possible. It was almost indescribable, horrifyingly unnatural. Nothing terrestrial, by any means, should've grown like that - or exhibited such fury.

The yellow orbs in his bulging skull were little more than pinpricks.
 
Beatrice knew something was wrong the moment he loomed over her and screamed a piercing howl that rattled her bone marrow. She shrunk under his hulking form, inching away from him until she fell to the cold wet ground.

Bea had answered wrong.

Of course she had been honest with her thoughts and beliefs, but to him she had answered incorrectly, warranting the tantrum.

He began to rip up benches, yelling his tirade like a toddler told “no” but infinitely more violent and destructive.

This thing was going to kill her.

Beatrice had dealt with her fair share of assholes, and had already nearly died because of it. The fear was familiar and horrible all the same. But much like with Redblood, Bea was determined to not be at the mercy of this creature and let him terrorize her.

She tapped into her abilities- a rare occurrence- the second he looked away from her, and willed the creature to become blind. He couldn’t chase what he couldn’t see. For him it would be like the flicking of a lightswitch to endless black.

Beatrice scrambled to feet and ran for cover, her heart pounding in her head.
 
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The monster lurched menacingly overtop of Bea, misshapen muscles rearranging themselves as his sudden enthusiasm propelled him forward. But as he loomed over her, a startling change came over his internal perceptions - brought on by nothing less than the instantly-effective use of Beatrice's hidden power to utterly influence the sensory perceptions of others. For all of his durability, the creature boasted no immunity whatsoever to her hidden metahuman aspect - and as quickly as he'd advanced, and grown to a great height, he recoiled in disbelief.

Blinded! And for who knew how long. He howled as his vision was torn away from him, and painlessly, too - the unnatural imposition of stark blackness where there'd once been light in his eyes further incensed him.

He brought his hand down on the bench she'd been sitting on and squeezed it - metal twisted like clay in his fist, the seat torn from its foundations and discarded. As his mind struggled to keep up with the deprivation of his most critical sense, he wondered what precisely had happened - there was something more at play here, but he knew not what. Had his optic nerves somehow misfired? After forty years of transformation - no, he was a physical pinnacle of health. But there was no follow up to his blinding, and no sign of any source. There had merely been her.

Had some metahuman vigilante interceded on her behalf? Such a thing was said to be common in Pittsburgh. Only - none made themselves known. He had only his other senses to go by, the scrabbling of what he took to be Beatrice's feet along the walkway. And in the moment, startled, unsettled - he was not thinking straight at all.

Stumbling towards the sound of where she'd gone hiding for cover, he felt his hand squeeze around the trunk of a tree. With a quick squeeze, it shattered into wooden splinters, and the canopy fell away to the side, as if struck by a woodsman's axe - but felled instead by horrifying Cyclopean strength.

"Where are you? I can't see you..."

Deep breaths came and went, his chest rising and falling...jaw grit, he swiveled his head around, yellow eyes still wide open in their cavernous black sockets, but relaying no visual information whatsoever. They were a mask of murderous fury.

"Was that you? Do you have a little...secret, like me?" he growled, un-arching his back as he stalked forward, blindly.
 
Beatrice turned back, hearing the bench splinter in the creatures fist behind her. He stumbled drunkenly after her. She kept moving away, doing her best to avoid the alley. It might help her but she couldn't bring herself to end up in another dumpster. This time she might actually end up dead. Bea ducked behind a tree, flattening herself against it. She heard him suddenly on the other side, moving just in time to not be snapped in half like a twing in his meaty grip.

Beatrice knew her power only lasted up to five minutes- which in the grand scheme of things wasn't that long, and even now she was having trouble keeping a hold over the monsters eyes, concealing her from him. She steeled herself to run when he spoke again, rooting her in place.

She did have a secret. And now another psychopath knew that. The list of people who knew what she was...it was longer than she ever intended it to be. Beatrice took a breath, and tried to push that deep-seated worry far away from the forefront of her mind. She needed to go. Now.

Beatrice turned and faced the creature as he lumbered closer, attempting to rush past him before he could turn around and follow her.
 
Each step was deliberately taken as the creature seemed to unfurl; adrenaline rushed through his sinewy form, which expanded even as he spoke, gaining in height. The handful of kindling that had been a tree just seconds before fell away, discarded as the yellow alligator-eyes scanned blindly for the girl.

Furiously, his other hand came up to his face. He hadn’t felt any pain when his vision had gone, but something had fucked with his eyes (no response from the girl). He couldn’t go through life blind, not when there were so many sights to see. There was a trick he’d pulled before – a hard reboot of sorts. Turn it off and on again. Maybe that would help. Best to test with one eye before both.

His enormous fingers raked at the socket that held his quivering golden orb, a sharp pain eliciting a grinding growl from his throat as he scratched and tore at his right eye. Blood, thick and unnatural, poured out from the skull-like crevasse that held his eye, now a stringy mess, ripped and discarded.

It’d regrow. It’d come back working, or it’d come back blind, but at least he’d know what he was dealing with. He left the other one alone, and flicked the viscera from his fingertips.

It burned, oh how it burned, but it was a small price to pay for sight. Eventually.

Then he heard the footfalls of the girl running past him – straight past him! – and he whirled around, fingertips barely licking the back of her shirt, but coming up with only empty air. He howled in anger, and prepared to give chase –

"Little whore - "

- then gunfire licked his back, a staccato pop pop that drew little blood. There were police sirens, and shouting, and he turned to follow them –

- to close in on the new source of his pain. A welcome distraction.

If Beatrice turned to look, she’d see the brave (foolish) officer hoisted into the air, and then she’d see him ripped in two, spilled everywhere, shadows cast in red and blue with the whining of sirens. And if she did not look, she’d still hear it. The squelching, sickening cracking, and the laughter.
 
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