Serious: Encounter! Gael Iura meets with an old friend and Yoruyonaka Kaizokudan fights Shichibukai Gael! ((Yorunaka crew members only, please))

"Funka!" Avarill forced back the grass with explosions out of nothing. With no better offense to think of, Avarill settled for his usual spam attack "Destructor Gatling!" He created 15cm diameter blasts of both Funka and Hokai, all aimed at Gael's body. He started moving towards the edge of the plaza. He had a plan.

((Only reason I'm sort of autododging is cause Avarill's attacks can blast him to bits. I think its about time Gael tried to get away... sound okay?))

Gael grimaced as he was forced to retreat back into the tree to dodge Avarill's attack. "Looks like this'll be it." Gael began coating himself in vines, creating a colossal mass of vines. Gael was in the mass, but only he knew where. The mass took the shape of a hunched over human being, and Gael lifted up one of it's 'arms', and brought it down on Avarill, trying once more to crush him. He could feel the fruit wearing down.

Jim had been ready for a lot of things, but watching his foe turn into a giant hulking monster made of vines hadn't been one of them. He leapt away in a hurry; while he was safe inside the Air Door, he didn't want to be caught somewhere that he couldn't see and risk coming out in a dangerous place.

Just as soon as he'd made it out, the stranger witnessed the massive attack aimed at Avarill. There was no telling if he'd be able to crush or explode that much stuff at such a close range. While Jim didn't know the man well, he did like him enough. The guy knew how to keep things interesting.

Using his own improvised version of Soru, Jim sped through his alternate world, throwing open his air door and slamming the ground at Avarill's feet as soon as he was out, opening another trap Earth Door below him. He kicked off to use his speed technique again, but was a bit too late and felt the hand catch his back leg.

Taken off course, a distant building exploded as Jim slammed into it at near-soru speeds. His stormy eyes rolled lazily as he held a hand out infront of himself and reached towards the ground below him with the other, his fingers fumbling with it as if searching for a lost key.

"Welcome to the soft parade," he muttered, smiling to himself and the spinning sky. "All our lives we sweat and save..."

"Building for a shallow grave..." Jim finally mumbled, his hand clenching the ground.

Seeing James handle the attack for him, Avarill ran a bit to the side, and concentrated on his offense. "FLEE!!!" He yelled to James. He was going to go thermonuclear. "Thirty seconds, Shichibukai. Make it last." He started. He created 2 diameter blasts, but nothing happened yet. He was delaying each and every one of them, with expert timing, engineering them all to explode at the same time. He kept at it, only leaving his immediate vicinity untouched. The whole square was engulfed in sucking winds. They were steadily gathering power. It was gonna blow.
And so it did, in thirty seconds, engulfing the whole marketplace in a carnival of explosions, going off at the same time, blowing off whatever was left of the cobblestones. Nothing would be left standing.

The monstrous mass began falling over, having been knocked over slightly by James' interference. Vines shot out of the ground, wrapping around the mass to hold it up. Gael shuddered in his shelter, feeling his proper thought process being restored. And it happened at the best of times. Gael could tell Avarill wasn't screwing around anymore. He pushed his vines deep underground, pushing the earth itself into a nice hollow for him. Just before the explosions went off, Gael was sucked into vines, being passed off before going into his hidey-hole, and the explosions blasted his vine golem to bits.

Though the world was still hazy and spiraling, Jim's Soft Parade had taken most of the damage out of his impact. He'd been waiting for a counterattack from the vine beast, his outstretched hand charging for a big shot, when Avarill had shouted for him to flee.

Given the way that 'Property Damage' Jackson's attacks normally went, it seemed to the stranger that it'd be a good idea to take his advice. Forgetting about the offensive, he tore open an Earth Door with the hand that was already on the ground and kicked himself in, slamming it shut just in time to witness the town-shattering explosions that violently erupted overhead, ridding the scenery of what remaining town had been left after the rest of their fight.

"The name suits him, doesn't it," Jim half-asked half-stated to himself, viewing the empty world above him through the purple tint of the earth pocket dimension. He looked around, trying to find where the shichibukai had gone. Bits of his golem littered the translucent earth-air boundary, but the man who'd made it was nowhere to be seen.

Remembering then that his foe could hide in plants, Jim began searching amongst the webwork of roots that shot through the amethyst void of the earthspace, finding at last the bulbous hollow where he'd hidden himself. Stepping over to it, favouring his good leg, he opened a door into the dark subterranean chamber.

"Are you in here, Mr. Bukai?" Jim asked, keeping himself half inside the door. He held up a palm, which glittered with a blue light, illuminating the dark space inside the boring non-extra-dimensional earth. "Maybe we should talk a moment, before my friend with the explosions up topside starts...explosioning more."

Gael gasped when Jim just meandered into his tunnel. "What do you want to talk about?" Gael asked with a paranoid tone in his voice. Everyone but Ranyx wanted him dead in that crew... why should this fellow be any different? "At this range, I can knock you out faster than you can say 'Doi'. Don't try anything..." The tough-guy, threatening intent in his voice was more translucent than glass. It should have been obvious to Jim that Gael really didn't want to fight anymore.

"I'll not doubt it; I rather like my head where it is, and I'd have not shoved it into the middle of all of your plants if I'd meant to keep fighting. I'd have stuck something I could sooner be without in, first...maybe a hand or something."

Leaning on the rim of his door, Jim looked the shichibukai up and down.

"Well, Ranyx doesn't seem to like the idea of your turning up dead, and unless you can leave this island underground in a plant, like this, you're probably not going to get any quarter from the rest of them. How, then, do you leave?"

Smiling and hanging through the door even further, the stranger smiled broadly.

"I'm one of these lots, sure, and I did just sort of try to shoot lasers at you, but all that aside..." His lopsided grin dragging his head to the side with it, Jim's visage seemed wholly unreadable in the pale lavender light now shining from the center of his palm.

"You walk through the doors. I wasn't fighting you so much out of malice as, you know, helping out my crewman. For the same reason, I'd help you; Ranyx seems rather attached to the notion of your hide staying attached to the rest of you. I'd wager a lot more people will be a lot more happier if I save you than the grim, meager satisfaction Lord Breaks-Everything and company would from killing you."

"Still, I've given you about as much reason to trust me as the fox has the hare. If you do see a better way, though, do give me a sporting half-second head start to pull my head back inside before you start killing me again."

Gael was shocked. "You talked with Ranyx? You... know? Well... I can handle myself. If you can, can you tell Mr. Looney that you couldn't catch up or something?" He lifted a hand, shooting a vine through the dirt towards the prescribed meeting place for him and his animals. "I appreciate this, Mr... who?" Gael barely stuck around for a name before grabbing the vine and being sucked inside.

"It's Jim," he stated as the Shichibukai fled into his vine. He finished his statement after the man was already gone. "But mostly, I'm just the stranger."

A brief moment later, Jim hopped out of an earth door in the middle of the ruins that Avarill had made of the center of the town with his powers. He dusted himself off, tilting his head slightly as he walked towards his crewmate and putting on a lopsided smile.

"I found it, underground," he said, pointing towards the middle of the clearing. "This big room made by vines. Had something like a million roots going off in every direction...can't be sure which way he went." Deciding to tell as much of the truth as possible, Jim pointed in the direction that he honestly thought Gael might have fled.

"I think he went that way, if I had to guess." Pausing a moment and looking down that way, he turned back to Avarill and continued.

"Still, there's no telling where he'd surface, if I even have got the direction right, and I'm not like about to spook at every shrubbery between here and the end of the island looking for him."

"You're the senior, though," Jim said at last, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his black corduroy pants. "If you say hound, I'll dig up any bone on this island."