Honey?

Tarin cringed for the pretzel guy.

“Who even says things like that?” he said.

All around him Tarin could see the spirits fighting with the people, the people fighting with the people, and the little snot with the card table swinging a morningstar at the jogger who’d just been trying ot keep a fight from breaking out.

Tethered to the spirits, Tarin could feel them taking punches. Not the punches themselves, just that punches were landing. Spirits were dead. They…they couldn’t feel anymore. At least not anything beyond the most base of emotions and the things they’d felt as they were dying. At the moment, Tarin really wished that more people who died blissfully of old age in bed with beautiful younger people chose to stay behind when their bodies wore out. It generally didn’t work that way though. They only stayed if they felt like they needed to stay or if they couldn’t find their way out.

They also didn’t like their link to the living world being threatened.

”You clearly think you’re doing something here…” he said, just angry enough to walk up and swing a hard right at the man’s nose. This was going to be a terrible waste of a good pretzel if the punch landed.

Instead of responding with words like a civilized member of society, the man who could hold rooms inside balls of light produced a morningstar. The fight had taken a medieval turn. Ranger sighed and caught the morningstar with his hand. Just grabbed the spikey ball. While the spikes couldn’t pierce the skin, Ranger knew he was going to have some weird bruises.

Ranger’s muscles grew as he exerted force to bring the morningstar to an abrupt halt before it could reach his head. ”Y’ saw me fight in that office with the purple smellin’ melted pancake. Y’ve t’ know this won’t end well f’r y’.” Ranger said before pulling on the morningstar while simultaneously rotating his hips to bring the fist on his other arm swinging toward the man’s face.

Nothing de-escalated a situation quite like knocking the other person unconscious. Hard to fight when the lights have been turned off in your head.

De-escalation had been the plan. Now that Ranger was within earshot of the pretzel bearing member of Bananadrama, his power was having an effect. The hand that had held the morningstar was now holding a knife. A side folding switchblade that Ranger carried on his hip, even while out running. It was meant to be the ever versatile tool to solve most problems, but was built to double as a fighting knife. It was good at making things bleed.

The ghost man threw a punch at the pretzel man right as Buzzkill aimed one at Zek.

All Zek could see was red. His mace was getting mangled and there was no blood. And the guy was way too strong. He'd have to try something bigger, something sharper. Something like a sword or a--

The fist made contact with the edge of his face.

Zek's world blurred around him as his head twisted 180 degrees with an amazing series of cracks and the remaining force of the blow sent him flying back over the fallen folding table, where he collapsed in a puff of dollar bills. His chest was to the ground but his head was facing the sky. The lights in his eyes winked out.

As for the pretzel man? His jaw wasn't made of glass and neither was his nose, but that still didn't mean he was going to just go down without a fight. He got an arm up just in time to block the blow and with his other hand threw the rest of the pretzel at the ghost man's face. Then he fixed his grin on the ghost man. "It's not me who's gonna be doing something," he said, as he shifted the tenor of his power. His voice was pitched so only those closest to him would really pick up his words - no sense undoing the effect of the desire for blood on the entire crowd when it was just one guy causing him trouble.

"Good-bye now," he said as two brawlers near them stopped what they were doing as the desire to run home as fast as they could took effect.

Tarin

Yep. A complete waste of a perfectly good pretzel, Tarin thought as the thing hit him square in the face and flopped ineffectually to the ground.

The asshole had blocked his right too. That might have been even worse than the pretzel.

“Goodbye now..”

Tarin’s feet were moving away, somewhat of their own volition now and this time he just kind of let it happen. It wasn’t worth fighting the effects when he could just as easily send in spirits to do the work for him.

Someone shut that guy up. I guess don’t kill or maim him though. [/color] He sent down the bond as he shoved his hands in his pants pockets and walked out of the brawl. The Medium felt the moment he walked outside of the the other psychic’s range and stopped walking, turning to see how the spirits were doing.

Two of them were approaching the man and Tarin poured more energy into the bond. Maybe pretzel-man could boss humans around…but the dead only listened to Tarin. Fickle were the dead.

Ranger’s fist made contact. The blow wasn’t square but it was solid enough to send the man’s head spinning—way too far. It was also enough to send the man backwards over a table that had been set up in the area.Someone was taking bets. New York CIty at its finest, yall.

The punch didn’t feel as satisfying to Ranger as it should have. There was no blood. THere needed to be blood. Ranger flexed his fingers around the hefty switchblade in his hand before switching it to his dominant hand. Ranger stepped forward looking at the man’s body.

Eyes to the sky but chest on the grass. Not something people walked away from. Even if they lived to tell the story. Ranger felt compelled to ensure it was enough. He leaned forward and stabbed with the knife toward the man’s back.

Then a new compulsion. Ranger felt a tickle at the edge of his hearing, Time to go. Just leave. He was already running, he should go ahead and run off.

The knife stabbed toward Zek's back and bit deeply into the fabric of the trenchcoat. Almost immediately there was a burst of red as the blade sank into flesh and if the knife were to be pulled out, it would be dripping with blood.

The pretzel-less man allowed himself a smirk as the ghost man left the immediate area. Excellent. Now there wasn't anyone who could stop him. He looked over to where his other bandmates were and started to head in their direction and help them up when he saw the two ghosts coming at him, clearly unaffected by his words.

"Never know when to just give up, do you?" he said to the ghosts as he pulled a handgun out from the back of his pants and started firing at one of the ghosts.




And then Zek gasped and his eyes began glowing again.

"What the..?" he cried and then horror dawned on him as, thanks to the extra bones in his neck, he looked down as his sky-facing back and saw the knife ruining his beautiful trenchcoat and....

....spearing the rare steak sandwich he'd had underneath his trenchcoat on his back! Zek had been eating it before he'd instigated the fight and had slid it into a little backpack he was wearing, to keep it out of the way of harm and theft.

But now bloody steak juices were soaking his coat and the new knife that he was claiming as his own. "Nooooo!" Zek wailed in anguish as he realized his steak sandwich would never be the same again.

And….someone brought a gun to the knife…fist…whatever fight.

Luckily…luckily the spirit standing in front of the pretzel man…scratch that…pretzel psychopath was corporeal enough that the bullets didn’t just pass through and into the crowd.

Now Tarin wanted to run. The fist fight hadn’t done it, the man’s power of suggestion hadn’t done it, but the emergence of that weapon and the telltale pops it produced as it discharged made the Medium want to turn tail and run back to his shop. He didn’t even care about his coat. This had been a stupid idea. This kind of fight drew attention, and attention was the last thing that he wanted.

Still…he couldn’t just walk away at this point, could he? He’d helped instigate this and things had just escalated and escalated. He wasn’t going back into the fight, not by a long shot, but Tarin sayed where he was on the little rise a safe distance away.

For its part, the spirit looked down at where it had been shot and looked back up at the pretzel psychopath.

“Now that was just rude.” it said, reaching out to grab the firearm, “Have you no respect for the dead?”

It was odd. Ranger just up and leaving while a fight was happening. It was a painful cognitive dissonance, but ‘not my chair not my problem’ was winning. He had drawn blood from someone and it was time to go. Leave the ghosts and the brawling to the next jogger who wanted to intervene.

Ranger made it twenty feet away before he turned to head for the path he had been jogging on before. Only when he turned to return to the path someone had turned their fist directly into the path of his face.

Psychic attacks were something Ranger wasn’t good at managing. In general the only things he was used to and had developed skills to handle was memory manipulation. Being married to and having spent time as someone who lifted and deleted memories had been training for that. Other forms of attack, like suggestion and command focused attacks… Those Were not something Ranger was equipped to manage.

However, nothing helps you wake up like a punch to the nose.

Recoiling from the punch, Ranger covered his nose with his hands before unleashing a teep kick on the man who had punched him. There was no hole and Ranger held back the urge to yell, ‘this is Sparta!’. The man went to the ground and rolled onto his side holding his chest. Ranger turned back to the brawl.

Someone was due for an ass whooping and Ranger had a spare can to open.