Felixentric

Scene 12: I Get into a Fist Fight with an Octopus

She was the most terrifying thing Quinn had seen in all his life.

She was like a Frankenstein, but it looked like she was made by a scientist who hadn't yet planned what he wanted the result to look like. She was as though someone - probably a toddler - had stitched and screwed together random body parts, then called it a living thing.

But she didn't seem to mind that she was a monster. Instead, she smiled right as Quinn emerged from the apartment onto the street's pavement and flinched her massive, extra appendages at civilians to scare them away. When she noticed Quinn, in his polyester bodysuit, she stopped and smiled. When when he flicked out a handful of flame, she smiled wider.

"The fuck are you?" He spoke under his breath. When she started walking toward him, he yelled it.

It wasn't a gesture toward a friendship, but she replied in a mixed voice, "My creator calls me 'Poli.'"

Quinn snorted, his red arms going orange. "You can call me unamused." But he was amused, very.

Both of the woman's hands were colored, one of them a red like a whore's lipstick and the other blue like a whore's eyeshadow. The red glowed like a candle, but the blue was dormant. Then, there were the thirteen squid or octopus - Quinn couldn't tell - tentacles sprouting from her back, and the outfit she wore... She was wearing a lot of red, white, and blue and they were mostly in stripes. Her hair was curling and white under a top hat, and she easily resembled America's Uncle Sam - except for being a fucking land Kraken.

He ran there distance between them to shove his hand into the upper lip of of her 1800s-style vest and hold her so high in the air that her toes were off the ground. "What are you trying to do here, Sammy?"

She put both hands around his arm. Quinn almost expected them to electrocute him. "There are two, extremist sides to human morale. I'm here to pit them against one another. Show you how much power Hen has over you now that the team is coming together."

He put the shirt on fire, but two of the octopus arms shot out and threw him away. The fire went out quickly.

"I'm not joining!" Quinn picked himself back up.

She smiled. "He told me you'd say that. He also told me we don;t need your service anymore. You've been replaced." She raised both hands and let both of them glow above their heads. People, who had previously run from her on the streets, were then walking towards them. They came out of alleys and doorways and even out of low-story windows. None of them spoke, and all of them had a color in their irises - red or blue.

It couldn't have been the entire city's population, but there were lots of them. Probably fifty or so, in a split number of both colors. "People will keep getting hurt and it's all because you ran away. You could have kept this from getting nasty, but it's too late now. Guilty yet?"

He threw a ball of fire at her, hitting one of the protruding appendages. She screamed as the tentacle withered. Finally, someone he had to fight wasn't fireproof. But the numbers were closing in on him, and he was sure these were out to kill him.

But his hunches were all wrong, because in a matter of Poli flicking her wrists, he winced. But the people didn't attack him. They attacked each other.

"What is this?" He didn't mean to ask it out loud, because it gave Poli another smirk.

Screams of anger and pain entwined from all around. It was a complete mess of stereotypes. Women against the men. Christians against the Wiccans, which was obvious to see because they were bearing crosses and other sigils at each other. Europeans against Africans and Asians and natives. But, then again, the stereotypes weren't all true. People of the same demographics were tearing each other apart. A man Quinn knew was gay was jabbing at a blue eye with a long stick and a white, Christian man was leading a group of blue eyes in a mass assault. He even saw two children, probably no older than ten, jabbing each other viciously with sticks.