Disclaimer: Cryptic Studios owns the rights to City of Heroes, a massive multiplayer online game. Julie's a common NPC name for citizens, and the rest of things here are City of Heroes IP. True Dat.
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Scene: If Atlas Park is the gem of Paragon City- and by most accounts, it is- the back alleys would be the unsightly blemish kept out of public view whenever possible. Julie Neven knew quite intimately the numerous reasons for that, and thus, tended to stick to the better protected streets ran the length of Atlas instead. Most of the time, there just wasn't any reason to get off the streets. Julie often wondered at length why so many people seemed to wonder back there.
She inadvertently picked up her pace, eager to get home from another long and monotonous day of work. There'd been such a huge demand on her law firm lately, and not much increase in money to go with it. Atlas Park, safest zone in the city or no, offered it's share of distractions to your well being, though. One tended to learn to ignore the distant clicking and the faint smell of rotted flesh. That is, one tended to ignore it until the smell got to strong, or the sounds too close.
Like most of the people in the city, Julie had experienced her share of close calls. Times she'd gotten a bit too close to the action. More appropriately, times the action had hunted her down. She figured one day there wouldn't be any cops to save her, and that'd be that. A nice, quick, hopefully clean ending to a life that was well lived, if a tad lonely.
She could almost see the clouds behind the warwalls, or she thought she could. Mistaken impression or legitimate, it gave the impression of a storm rushing in, even though she knew that likely wasn't the case. Storms rarely got past the towering war walls of Paragon City. Julie Neven pushed all lingering thoughts of the effects of the war worlds in the environment to the back of her mind and tried to focus on determining why Crey Industries was seemingly after so many small companies lately. It seemed like everyone was out to steal Crey's intellectual properties. Why that seemed so escaped her. That confusion wore her out more than the conviction she was defending the guilty. That wore a person's soul into nothingness, she knew, but there were few alternatives to supporting one's self in the city, anymore.
Julie looked up, noticing with blind panic she's stumbled dangerously close to a pair of Clockwork. Julie felt the taste of bile- fear- at the back of her mouth even as she mentally cursed at herself for wondering so close to the menaces without even realizing it. To an outsider of Paragon City, they might appear harmless. Almost cute. At hardly four and a half feet tall, they were a full head and three quarters shorter than Julie, and looked something akin to metal toys. Right down to the familiar, slightly oversized winder on their back. Fitting to the Clockwork name. Julie had always wondered how they stayed so shiny, so clean.
A low set of trademark buzzes and clicks set her senses afire. She'd heard the familiar noises right before the mechanical wonders lashed out violently at whatever they perceived to be a threat around them. She knew this sensation well- like acid biting at the back of her eyes, the length of her tongue, and inside of her skull.
A sensation of terror.
Such sensations had long become familiar to Julie, however, so she was easily able to suppress the instinct to run, and by doing so, attract the much unwanted attention of the two metal beings in front of her. Clockwork, as a rule, would only attack if they thought you were a threat, or if you had something they wanted, which is why Julie never allowed herself to carry metal unless it was absolutely nessicerily.
They seemed like they were looking at her, anyway. The problem with Clockwork were, no matter how precisely you knew their methods of operation, they still had a nasty habit of randomly acting erratically and unpredictably. Julie wondered between new rushes of acidic terror if she'd forgotten some random metal object in her small briefcase that might be drawing their attention.
A colleague of hers had once left a metal pen in her briefcase for her to discover one evening when she got home, as a twisted joke. She'd refused to speak to him for months after, and nearly had him fired over the incident. A testament to it's serious nature in a world where the Clockwork walked.
She took a nervous step backwards. One of the Clockwork almost- almost- seemed to shrug, and the two went back to work. A second nervous step, then a third, took Julie backwards. She'd have to hurry to make up for lost time, and altering her path would take her at least a full city block out of her way. But she was of no mind to make sudden moves while still in the Clockwork's sensor ranges.
If nothing would have gone wrong, she wouldn't have had to duck into the nearby alley. Some well meaning hero must not have known, or cared, because in the very middle of her third step, a large spine impaled the Clockwork closest to the street, nailing it against the wall.
"Pardon my language, ma'am, but can your move yer ass to the side so I don't accidentally blow yer head off?"
Julie, already in shock, hadn't registered anyone behind her until that moment, although she had been sure there wasn't anyone around. She turned to see one of the costumed vigilantes that regularly ran the city. He was small, almost as small as the Clockwork. But from the way his hands were glowing, Julie had no doubt the red and dark green clad mini hero - really, who comes up with some of those outfits?- was packing super human power. Judging from the way he nervously danced about, Julie decided to no longer be between him and the Clockwork, so she dodged to the side, leaping gracelessly off a nearby box and over a four foot mini fence, into the nearby alley.
She knew that she knew better. She also recognized her lack of options. She landed on her feet, barely, stumbling forward, forcing herself to an even footing. Cutting through an alleyway might not have been the smartest of moves - but the sound of electricity cutting through the air convinced her staying was not an option now. Damned heroes, why couldn't they have just let her get to safety before blindly attacking?
It took precious seconds to regain her momentum after the near tumble, but she did. Her momentum carried her forward, down the deserted alleyway. Over humps of trash and - she didn't want to think about what else she might be tumbling over. It was slimly. Slick like fresh blood. She forced the thought out of her mind as she rounded the end of the alley. It spread before her into two more alleys, crossed like a T, she supposed. This city had, of course, been built long before the people building it had any reason so suspect what a nightmare an abundance of alleyways would someday be to the citizens. They'd clearly clustered them together back here, to provide enough space behind the buildings to handle the nearby business's daily waste, and whatever else went down in alleyways, without making it easily seen to the business's regular customers with great ease.
Since it would be more likely to get her where she wanted quicker, she dove down the ally to her left without thinking, and took several steps down it before noticing her mistake. Before noticing the horrible scene that lay before her.
Julie: Oh, great.. Zombie convention.
Julie had never seen one of the Vahzilok creatures before. Now she was getting ample opportunity to see three. One of them waved a crossbow casually. Another seemed almost inhumanly large. The third was closer in size to the first, if a tad larger. It just kind of lumbered back and forth on unsure legs. All three of them looked to be hand chosen from the nightmares of the most psychotic citizens of Paragon City.
Julie expected them to fall over any second from the way they stumbled around, almost in a drunken, drug enhanced haze. They didn't. Worse yet, it took hardly a fraction of a second for them to spot Julie. Her eyes winced tight as the one in the distanced mumbled something about "fresh bodies," and raised a crossbow at her.
Everything had come down to this, and she was too frozen by panic to even try to dive out of the way. Not that it would have done her any good, she realized, but why wasn't she trying, at least? She couldn't understand the stiffness that seemed to paralyze her body. She even tried jerking her eyes open, but found she couldn't.
She could, just not fast enough. To her mind, time had seemed to slow to a standstill. Unfortunately, her body had slowed down with it. The wait seemed eternal. Having expected to see flashes of her life run before her eyes in the moments before death, she was disappointed to see nothing but blackness. Weirder still, she heard sniplets of random commercials playing in her head. Spirits, they weren't even commercials she had a particular fondness for.
Her eyes were just parting now, finally giving way to her mind's urgent need to see what was before her. To see the end. The crossbow arrow took form in her vision, steadily growing in clarity, at that inhumanly slow pace. Her mind was outside of her body for a second.
All done. It's a shame her death would cast such a gruesome shadow over her aunt's wedding next week. She didn't have time to wonder how painful it would be. Mainly because she felt an iron like grip on her shoulders. Weird that the Vahz would hold her in place for something that would be over so soon, anyway.
She realized with a mix of relief and confusion no Vahzian creature could have gotten that close to her in such an infinitely small amount of time. No matter how eternally long that space of time had seemed to her at the moment.
No. It was a human hand. A feminine, human hand. She was sure of that. Before she could put two and two together, time slammed back into it's proper place. Everything was a whirl before her eyes, once again. More importantly, she was thrown to the side, out of the arrow's path. Despite the wind being knocked out of her as she slammed back against the alley wall, Julie immediately realized her life had just been spared. Hopefully this hero experience would be slightly more pleasant than the one she'd had moments earlier..