Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Just a vignette that got stuck in my head;
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The line outside of the ‘Boom Boom Room,’ Metropolis’ current ‘it’ place to be seen, wraps around the cube-like structure, and at least two hundred sentients, some having completely given up on making it into the building itself, are having an impromptu dance party on the sidewalks. Vi heads straight for the front of the queue, soaring over the gyrating throng, Ayla only a few yards behind her, waving at those in line who have noticed the Legionnaires passing overhead and struck up a cheer.
The club itself is a vast cube, decorated to resemble a NewGen Mother Box, more than thirty meters on a side, and scenes of the dancing going on inside are projected on the four walls, so that all outside waiting in line can feel more like they are part of the experience.
Alighting in front of the four armed obsidian-skinned bouncer, selected for his intimidating appearance and gravelly voice, Vi just shows him the back of her hand, Flight Ring in prominent display, and he steps aside, rumbling, “Business or pleasure, little Legionnaire?”
She pats him on a bicep larger than her torso as she enters the club, “Does it matter, Alphonse?”
He gives her a grin that reveals ivory tusks the size of machetes, and nods to Ayla as she enters behind her lady-love.
“Do you know the bouncers everywhere?” Ayla says as they enter the club.
“No.” Violet grins, “But they all answer to Alphonse, so it looks that way.”
Inside the club, the NewGen theme continues, with baroque patterns on all surfaces, which are covered with dancing sentients, thanks to the grav generators that allow every bit of flat surface, floor, wall or ceiling, to be used as open dance area. Shadowy nooks in the eight corners of the cube contain dozens of secluded booths for conversation, and high ‘above’ the six dance ‘floors’ in the geometric center of the structure floats a spherical pool of water, lit from within by strands of bioluminescent blue-green bacteria, in which still other club-goers swim.
Two bars are in service, and as they enter, an attendant stamps the backs of their hands with a temporary comm-patch which immediately connects to the nearest bar, requesting their orders. Violet orders her usual without hesitation, a Double Rainbow in a bulb, and Ayla makes a pretense at looking at the daily specials before going back and selecting the first drink she saw, a Cometary Ice. As they move into the press of dancers, faint whispers of dozens of different musical styles coming from the musical zones surrounding individual dancers, Violet dials up some drum-heavy music and raises her arms above her head and whoops as she begins to dance. In the mostly quiet club her exclamation catches Ayla off guard, but most of the other patrons, engaged in their own direct feed musical zones, are only dimly aware of sounds outside of their own music. Rather than pick a different style, Ayla just synchs her own music feed to Vi’s and lets her set the rhythm for the evening, swaying along with the tribal beat and providing a counterpoint to Vi’s more energetic moves. Their drinks float down on levitating ‘floasters,’ locking onto their wrist-stamps and hovering at hand. Violet wastes no time snatching up the flexible bulb containing her drink, and pauses only a second to admire the fourteen different fruit and nut flavored liquors, so precisely layered, before irreverently shaking the drink, causing all of that work to be undone as the liquors all mix and swirl around. She then chugs the drink in three long gulps, before dropping the flaccid bulb back onto the floaster and sending it back to the bar with a flick of her fingers.
“Show off,” Ayla mutters, sipping at her icy blue drink and admiring the burn, before setting it back on the ‘floating coaster,’ and setting it to hover over her head to keep it out of her dance-space. “If I tried to shoot this, I’d freeze my brain…”
Noting that the other dancers in their area seem to be synchronizing for slow-dancing, she gently nudges Violet towards an area of the dance surface where the locals are engaged in a more energetic style, on the eastern wall. The sloped wall makes the transition between floor and wall seamless, and she smiles at the warning signs, to discourage fools from attempting to hang out in the area of fluxing gravity fields, which can cause a strange sort of high as it messes with blood flow to the brain, but also lead to unconsciousness and brain damage…
Ayla loses herself in the rhythm, and she feels the bleed as electricity leak from her body, connecting her to Violet by harmless streams of low-amp current, linking them together with threads of dancing lightning. Even through the music pounding through her body, she can hear a muttering from nearby club-goers, and a few move away, while still others move closer. Soon the dancing lines of energy are leaping from her body and Violet’s to connect with other dancers, who pass close enough to attract jagged streaks of energy from her body. Within a matter of minutes, as Ayla allows the voltage to increase, while keeping the flow of current so low as to be almost imperceptible, dozens of nearby dancers are also lit up, as arcs of electricity link them all in an everchanging web of electrical forces, like a circuit whose components are in constant motion. Dancers on the edge of the static bridge brush against those who move forward, spreading the arcing current to them like strands of sticky thread, ever expanding the shifting pattern of light and force.
The beat changes, growing more intense, and Ayla begins to pulse the electricity leaking from her body in tune with her heartbeat, so that the entire network fades and reappears, as if she herself is the heart of an enormous circulatory system binding dozens of dancers together, and causing the entire area to strobe between brilliance and darkness, so that those nearby see only momentary flashes of dancers lit up by arcs of electricity, frozen in exaggerated poses before the light dims, to reveal them seconds later, in completely different poses.
A few minutes of this surreal photo-flash display pass before the music that Ayla and Vi had chosen begins to wind down. Somewhere, the club manager has clearly had enough of this unscheduled pyrotechnic display, and Ayla lets the display amp down, the arcs of electricity fading slowly and recoiling from the most distant dancers first, as if being called back to her body like a receding tide. A quiet voice speaks over the music-feed directly to Ayla, inaudible even to Violet, who dances beside her. “They’ll be talking about that for weeks, Legionnaire, and while I’d love to let it continue, the club would be liable if someone’s life-support equipment shorted out or something…”
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
That club sounds awesome! One of the advantages of prose versus comics I think is being able to immerse yourself more in background details...
-------------------- Read the alternate adventures of the Legion after Legion of Three Worlds! postlo3w
Registered: Nov 2009
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by razsolo: That club sounds awesome! One of the advantages of prose versus comics I think is being able to immerse yourself more in background details...
Thanks!
It's a little frustrating, really. It takes so many words to describe something like a floating coaster, or hovering bars, or a spherical swimming pool floating in the middle of the box-shaped room, that would just appear on-panel without any sort of explanation. I wish I could draw, and yet, I also wish I could do so without go through all the trouble of learning and practicing! I'm so lazy.
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
I think it can have more atmosphere when a reader is forced to visualise it for themselves though....little things like mentioning the gravity flux walking between planes make it more of a fully realised environment.
A minor detail like that would be too awkward to explain on a comic book page I think, but it really goes toward fleshing it out as a real place (as much as a New Gods inspired gravity-distortion nightclub in the 31st century can be a 'real place' I guess, lol)
-------------------- Read the alternate adventures of the Legion after Legion of Three Worlds! postlo3w
Registered: Nov 2009
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by razsolo: I think it can have more atmosphere when a reader is forced to visualise it for themselves though....little things like mentioning the gravity flux walking between planes make it more of a fully realised environment.
Good point. I considered that standing between two gravity zones would have funky effects on blood flow to the brain, so kind of threw in something about that, and it wouldn't have really been do-able in a picture.
The quietness of the place, where people could just talk normally, while a bunch of folk ar dancing around them listening to music piped directly to them and them alone (and different people could be dancing to completely different music, perhaps even from the person standing right next to them) is another thing that a picture probably wouldn't have easily conveyed.
Registered: Aug 2006
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