Friendship Through Punching

Alexis leapt forward to snap his jaws at Dalia and immediately was blasted in the mouth with a big ball of webbing followed by a net around his snout. For all his strength he couldn't break his mouth free and.. well he started to panic. It was one thing to be beat up in a fight. He'd experienced that countless times. It was quite another to be restrained.

He could still breathe but having his mouth more or less sealed shut completely overrode his ability to think rationally. His snarls were caught in his throat and he whipped his head back and forth trying to free his face. In his frantic movement he failed to notice Dalia zooming underneath him until he felt the additional webbing sticking him to the floor. He threw himself forward towards the bleachers and ripped free of the webbing.

With no hands to try clearing the webs on his face he resorted to dragging his snout along the floor. It wasn't enough to clear them and he abandoned that to chase after Dalia. Unfortunately each time he slowed down to break through the new webs Dalia had time to throw in a few more and they were adding up quickly.

Alexis was just lurching around since his wings had been webbed enough that they no longer opened and he was not designed to walk well in wyvern form. His eyes showed just the sheer panic and anger of a trapped beast as he struggled but it was looking like he was going to lose very shortly.

Alexis turned one wild eye to glance towards the sound of the whistle but was too tangled in all the webs to fully turn towards her. He didn't even bother trying to follow her movements as she soared into the air.

He couldn't move out of the way in time and he had no real way to defend himself from the Dalia-shaped projectile headed right for him. All he could do was fold down the spines on his back so she wouldn't be horribly impaled. But he found that they were stuck extended by one or more of the ropes of webbing.

With a crash she landed right where she wanted to and Alexis collapsed down onto his belly with a huge but muffled groan of pain. He tried to swing his tail up towards Dalia but most of it had been webbed and it couldn't reach. Alexis wriggled and shook but he was unable to do much. All Dalia had to do was finish webbing him up and he would be completely unable to continue fighting.

Alexis eyes Dalia as she approached his snout but he could do little more than shift around a little bit while restrained in so many webs. He couldn't voice his reluctant agreement that he had lost with all the webbing in his mouth but it was plain for everyone to see that he was unable to continue fighting.

For some reason Alexis had halfway expected Dalia to just leave him there to sit in embarrassment and defeat until the webs broke down on their own. But she didn't and, as embarrassed as he was for needing the help to be freed, he was grateful to her. She wasn't rubbing his face in it or telling him how pitiful it was for a wyvern to lose like that.

As his face was freed he could talk again but he was dumbstruck for the first little while. What did he even say? Finally though he bit the bullet and decided to try not being an asshole if he could. "I don't know how smart it was. Didn't seem to stop you from knowing when I was coming. But... thank you." It sounded like he was pretty unused to saying that phrase. He practically had to force himself to say it but he was tired and very sore and fighting with someone had a way of making him more friendly with them. Even when he lost. "Yeah it's a good weapon. I can paralyze a lot of people with it too. I... was a little worried what it would do if I stabbed you when you had those flames."

When Dalia finished Alexis shifted back to his human form and slowly went to stand up. His whole body was sore and tired, but that was a good feeling. It helped clear his mind usually. As he stretched his arms and legs and rolled his neck he looked over at Dalia. She seemed plenty tired herself. He had no idea what she was trying to say but he did hear her tell him to come over there. Was it a trap? Did it really even matter? She had already won and he wasn't going to argue it- he wasn't that type of person.

He sucked it up and slowly walked over, slumping down to sit by her. He inhaled sharply as the shock of hitting the floor traveled up his spine and twinges of pain extended out from where he had been injured in wyvern form. He didn't actually heal quickly like some dragons did. His body could withstand a great deal of punishment but he had to heal over time like a normal person. "Uh, why did you want me over here?"

Well that... was not what he expected at all. He kind of just sat there for a moment trying to figure out what to say. The joke, though, snapped him out of it and he groaned but there was also a little bit of a smile. "God tier? Really?" Leave it to a joke like that to break the ice. "But no, with you being a flaming flip wizard with spidey senses or some shit you're damn hard to beat in a fight." He wasn't really the type to go around complimenting people a whole lot but he definitely had respect for people he saw as worthy opponents.

Had he been having fun? Yes, absolutely- aside from the bit of panic at being unable to move at the end.

"Course I had fun- it was a fight. And you did warn me about the friends thing. I'm good with that. Bunch of my other friends here came from fighting anyway. I didn't lose to all of them though," he grinned. His win-loss ratio wasn't actually that great but losing didn't mean it wasn't fun as long as he had a decent opponent.

If he had been thrown off by Dalia just wanting to lean on him or relax or whatever she really wanted, the last bit was ten times more confusing. It sure did sound like a date when she put it that way. He blinked, with a vaguely confused look on his face, and then moved to pull out his phone while he processed it. The phone was fairly new actually, since the old one had been chucked into the ocean towards the beginning of summer break. "Uh, sure. Here's my number. And dinner or whatever probably wouldn't be bad. You already know i'm not worried about eating whatever." She had shared some bone chips with him once before and he wasn't bothered at all by the whole thing.

Alexis used a hand to brush some of his damp hair out of his face. "Leave it to a goddess to call her body a temple and get away with it. I don't know about temples and shit but I eat a lot too. I burn a lot of it off," he snickered as he added, "maybe we should do an eating challenge sometime."

Alexis didn't argue or pull away. He just sat there recovering and letting her lean against him. "I don't like- I don't do a lot of hugging." What a freaking understatement that was. He could probably count the number of hugs he had given or received in the last few years on a single hand. "I guess this... is fine though." He rolled his neck in a few slow circles. He wasn't being impatient- he legitimately didn't know what to do. The fight was over but he didn't really feel like leaving yet and she obviously was getting... something out of just sitting here?

Whatever, Galen kept telling him to just talk to people instead of always running off to do something else. Talking about shit couldn't hurt right? "Uh, yeah. I mean I don't know about the whole needing to touch people thing but while I was... during the summer break I kind of wandered back to the community center a few times just to be around people for a bit." He tried to shrug it off but he felt lame just saying it. That's why he preferred to fight and run and stuff. It kept him from thinking about dumb shit like that.