Summer Splash Challenge! Taylor Vs. Adrian: Event 3!

Taylor yawned and crossed one leg over the other while she lounged against the ropes. She didn't bother to keep her eyes on Adrian, though the used-to-be-a-nerd-and-totally-isn't-now-please-take-me-seriously girl looked a little unsure of herself. She watched the clock while the last seconds of round one ticked away, and at the bell, she lifted a hand to give Lukretia what was unmistakably a tall, proud middle finger, despite being hidden by her boxing glove. She stuck out her tongue and winked at the petite German.

"Just get in the ring so I can break your jaw," Taylor mocked Adrian, and punctuated it with a sniffle. She gave her hips a sassy wiggle and rolled out of the ring.

"Alright, let's play some chess!" Taylor clapped her gloves together and went to Macha to wait for her gloves to be untied and pulled off. She couldn't wait to move the little pieces around on the squares some more!

Lukretia scowled at the mocking bird Taylor flipped her under her glove. "How very juvenile." Lukretia muttered. "In your attempts to get me a goat, you have utterly succeeded in boring our audience to tears as vell as to make fools of both of yourselves."

She crossed her arms while the seconds came to pull off the gloves. "I vill have a fight one way or another." She threatened. "Even if I must take matters into meine own hands. Zere had better be some action in ze next round, ladies."

With Adrian waiting patiently in the center of the ring, waiting for Taylor to ready back up and join her so they could actually do something, the 3 minutes seemed to take an hour, the crowd starting to boo both competitors for not actually providing any of the boxing action promised, and now they had to settle for another boring chess bit. At least this whole thing was pissing Lukretia off. Small conselation as the former cosplayer slipped out of the ring to remove her gloves.

She was kicking herself for threatening to take the fight to Taylor and then doing nothing with it, for letting Taylor get in her head enough to make the threats in the first place, and thirdly for not just going for Taylor when her guard was down. She really was being a coward about this whole thing, scowling as Babd took off her gloves.

Taylor clapped her hands when she was free of her gloves and began to sit down, but stopped herself and took a moment to stretch out first. She reached down at her toes like an old woman, and put her hands on her lower back and arched to look up at the lights. A couple trunk rotations, and she eagerly took her seat at the chess board.

"Definitely don't want to come in cold, man. That's how you get injured." She looked over the board, and thought about her next move. It was getting a little trickier to find a good move. Soon she'd have to be thinking about which pieces she was okay with losing, but hopefully she'd be able to... accomplish something when she did. Whatever.

She made her move and slapped the time clock. "Hey, Adrian," she said, leaning forward with her forearms resting on the edge of the table while her knees bounced and jittered below. "What sounds like a jackhammer and tastes like raw eggs and cheese?" She asked, bright eyed, a curly little smile forcing it's way onto her lips.

"Give up? Rebecca's vibrator!" She put on a big "ta-da" smile, and held up her hands, fingers splayed out, to really bring the joke home.

Okay, now that was normal Taylor, just trying to antagonize Adrian and get her to fuck up. It was almost worth breathing a sigh of relief as she went back to trash talking so quickly, the former cosplayer letting the insulting joke sail overhead as she thought out her next few moves. "Castling." She declared, grabbing both her king and one rook, moving the King two spaces to the left and the rook the other side, making it easier for her to get the straight line piece out in the open while her king was still decently protected. She was trying to not sacrifice as many pieces, and keep her pawns protected so it wouldn't be worth anything to take them. All in all, she reckoned this part was going well, but it wouldn't last forever. Soon they'd have to glove up again, and this time maybe actually fight.

Or start another Q&A session in the middle of the ring. How easy was it to hold a microphone with boxing gloves?

Taylor scowled and glanced away from her joyless rival. She looked at the board for a few seconds and tried to come up with a good move, but soon began shaking her head.

"Man, I liked you better when you had a personality," she said, folding her arms across her chest. "You have got to be the least fun person I have ever met in my entire life, and I've met Megumi Mutoh. Would it really kill you to lighten up once in a while?" She shook her head, and stared down at the board again. "Whatever."

She grabbed a pawn and moved it up a space. Maybe she could try to bait Adrian into taking something and take a bunch of her stuff and hope she came out on top afterward. Chess went against everything she stood for! She believed in being perfect in the moment and letting things work themselves out, that being brilliant in the present leads to a brighter future. Chess was about, like, planning out lots of moves and predicting stuff and keeping track of lots of different pieces, and she didn't like it. Too much clutter in her head.

Though maybe if someone was really good at it, they didn't have to plan and think ahead and predict, they could just make the perfect move in each moment and win. That was kind of a cool thought, but it definitely didn't apply to Taylor, who loved her rooks and referred to her queen as "me".

While Adrian was able to project the effect of stocism, not reacting obviously to any of Taylor's taunts, she was still fuming underneath. Shut up you asshole she mentally cursed as she plotted out her next few moves, turning the board into a puzzle to be solved. If I do this, this, then this... the former cosplayer pondered, looking at Taylor's most vulnerable spots. That pawn looked pretty covered so going after it with anything but another pawn would be a waste of a turn. So instead she looked to see if there was anything better she could get off this turn or two. Maybe just move her Knight around to threaten the higher ranked pieces on the board.

"Hmmm..." She let out, moving her knight around again, trying to keep in the safe spots on the board as it moved. She had somewhat of a plan, but it was kind of a risky move, and potentially disasterous if Taylor didn't take the bait.

Taylor sat in silence for several seconds while time ticked away, until she breathed a heavy sigh. "Okay, you're focused. That's fine. I'll do the talking."

She looked down at the chess board, and tucked her hands under her thighs while her knees continued to bounce restlessly. "Oh, so I saw the Avengers movie a while ago. We put a home theater thing in the basement, so we've been watching lots of movies and stuff. I didn't like the chick, because she seemed like a pansy. I liked the bad guy, though, and the two blonde guys were on the cute side. It was okay, I guess.

"And thennn, let's see..." She peered up while she thought, still without having made a move. "Oh, so like, here's a question. I've never been, like, in the wilderness or anything, but where we live now is kinda less urban, and I've seen a couple huge moths. Do moths bite? Like, not the little ones you see here and there, but like, the big ones..." She made a circle with her finger and thumb the size of a half dollar and peered through it at Adrian with one eye closed.

She looked back at the board, and with a shrug she made a pretty aggressive move without really thinking it through. It was time to start attacking, and if she lost at chess she lost at chess. "I don't think I've ever heard of a moth bite. I've never seen a sheep, either, isn't that kinda fucked up? Deer and cows and goats and pigs and stuff... I should go to a petting zoo or something."

She glanced at the clock while the last seconds wore down.

Once Taylor started talking about moths and sheep, Adrian was struggling to conceal a grin and say something like there were moths that fused into a bigger moth that eat people and that sheep were a fabric of modern media and don't really exist. A lot of dumb things went through her head before she noticed that Taylor had pretty much stopped giving a fuck about the chess part by the looks of things. Putting one of her pieces straight in the line of two of hers. The former cosplayer moving her bishop to take the wayward piece out of the way. But at the same time derailing her old plan of strategic board control to force Taylor to do what she wanted.

Not that it mattered, by the time Adrian had slapped her clock down it was time to move on, back to round two of the boxing, with Adrian trying to think of what to actually do if Taylor was going to repeat her performance and not do anything while Adrian turtled up. What if I just rush her? she thought over, would Taylor see it coming as a result of taunts getting to the brunette or would it take her off guard that the former cosplayer would deviate from her gameplan and attempt to seize the initiative. She'd hoped that she'd thrown Taylor off by remaining calm and quiet in the chess sections but it probably wasn't going to be enough to make the punk think she wasn't bothered by what she had said, when just 3 minutes ago it was pretty obvious she was angry at her.

On the other hand, post-fight analysis was one of her things. If she got in a scrap with Taylor on camera, with only a week or two left to go before Summer Splash, she'd probably have a better handle on what Taylor could do. She was mainly a striker, so boxing would probably give more of her game away than it would Adrian's, who... never really settled on a definition other than 'not a powerhouse'. And that was if she lost the boxing part. And I'm not gonna lose, because I am totally awesome! she told herself, scowling enough to make Babd flinch as she did up her gloves. It was time to initiate the plan she should have started with in the first place: A retreat of Operation "screw you, your big mouth and your stupid face." Step one: Punch Taylor in the face. Step two: ???? Step three: profit. She was the awesome one here, and she was gonna show it.

Somewhere along the line, Adrian had gone full-clam, and it bummed Taylor out a little. She felt like she was being shunned. But really, that was Adrian in a nutshell: one big downer.

She hopped up out of her chair and went back to Macha to be re-gloved.

"Whoo!" She grinned. "Man, after all that chess, I sure can use this break. Catch my breath and stuff. Do we need to bother with the gloves? We could just sit and braid each other's hair or something, like I had it at the obstacle course. Did you like it like that? I've been trying some new stuff with it."

Once she was securely laced into her gloves, she climbed back into the ring and gracefully turned a slow, one-handed cartwheel on the knuckles of her glove. "Actually, I'm kind of getting used to this you-not-talking thing. It's kind of nice. No one calls me an asshole or anything."

One the plus side, Adrian's mind was probably racing right now, and she was probably all wound-up and tense. She looked pretty tense. If your mind was racing during a fight, it meant that you hadn't thought things through well enough before hand. On the day of the fight, the work was already done. Not that there was much of a fight to be had, apparently.

She bounced back and forth on the balls of her feet while she waited for the bell. After it rang she moved up from her corner toward the middle of the ring, and remained there.