Say Amen by Panic! At the Disco: watch?v=sy8wclUmYWA/p
From time to time, if a chapter is inspired from a certain song I'll be sure to share it with y'all, my loyal readers.
Fun Fact: Atlas only erases quirks from people that were in its range the moment it was used, if someone wasn't in the radius of 1,524 meters, or about 0.9 miles, they won't be affected. That's the size of a medium sized nightclub!
The reference on the T-shirt was from Nickelodeon's Cow and Chicken.
Once a myriad of searing plumes combusted into erratic hues of aquamarine, ultramarine, and canvas white, the calm before the storm had been brutally murdered. Any inhabitants nearby, hired men or mere civilians alike, halted in awe while the reflections of flames swung over the globe of their eyeballs, taking the initiative to dart in a mesmerizingly deadly fashion; slithering up the now seared black columns of the clinic maliciously, swerving around the entirety of the establishment until all of the flaming columns connected to make what Hephaestus would lovingly declare a cradle of forged fire. Smog perforated the formerly virgin white walls of the building, taking great lengths to circulate even faster and clog squishy pink lungs that gave no resistance to its presence, invading airways as if it were a robber darting their figure through various hallways and rooms to take and take, giving nothing in return to his victims but grief.
You yourself could begin to feel the settling of smoke particles giving way into your pattern of breathing, silencing to the best of your ability a few coughs that threatened to roll out and alert any possible enemies.
After Dabi had entranced with his sweltering hot entrance, the two of you made way to stride deeper into the depths of the room, the male shrugging his form in his usual lethargic stroll while you skipped casually with the passionate merriment of a child, dissimilar attitudes able to simultaneously set someone on edge and make them unnerved. Some goons such as one with a hair quirk, made obvious by the almighty volume of hair sitting on the top of her head, were already licked amorously by the male's fire, attempting to somehow slap the burning heat out of her tresses unsuccessfully.
Others, however, were steering clear from them and delving further on into the somewhat large floorplan, bowing to their knees quickly to show their respect towards their superiors and jetting off far, far away from them. A duo stood guard in front of the emblazoned EMPLOYEES ONLY door that seemed to be trembling in fear from either party, thanks to the bozos who had hurriedly dashed in from before.
The psychedelically dressed male looked to be obsessed with neon colors, clashing extremes that overall would make any normal upstanding citizen's retinas bleed, just a little bit. Dragging your eyes to his tie-dye tee that had some obscure pre-quirk era cartoon depicting an anthropomorphic cow and and chicken, the behind of a devil with the shape of a fat lima bean mooning its behind, you decided you had seen just about enough to get the gist of it.
Beside him was a classily dressed woman fitted in a crimson jumpsuit, dressed to the nines in her chin-length haircut with glistening jewels hanging from both of her ears, even standing in 3-inch high heels that matched the clinic's walls before your pal had livened up the place. Heaving his body forward in star-crossed anticipation, neon boy over here let his eyes dance at a spectacularly high speed over the punk male next to you, the inferno boxing all of them inside of the joint, and your figure.
"Huuuuh? You freaks are the ones that lit this place up?" tilting his head to the side as if to cast another wild cursory stare towards you two, a smile started to spread wider on his face.
"Sachihiro, don't get me started," the one who had outed her partner threw an exhausted stare right into the back of his head, practically causing the man to become impossibly happier, mirroring the happy-go-lucky front you had shown just moments before.
"Mao, join in, and just..." Sachihiro suddenly leaped unnaturally high into the air, his feet bulldozing back down to powerfully create small craters on the ground. "Have..." he eerily bounced back as much an insanely hyperactive child or man whose system is not clean from drugs, causing you to loosen your body and get into fighting stance while the blue-eyed man merely rushed to throw a blue-hot punch. "SOME FUN!" a catastrophic series of events followed: as soon as the crazed man had even uttered the start of his sentence, a shockwave consisting of volatile colors fluctuated around everyone in the room, strangely enough not changing the actual surroundings, causing you to yelp in surprise when you kissed the ground due to your ankles being disorientated, Dabi's trajectory being comically veered away from the opposing pair as if he were in a gag skit.
"It's an emitter! Don't count on your ey-" grateful for your instincts screaming for you to clench your teeth, spit flew out of tiny gaps in your teeth, your body rocking back due to the force of the punch. The worst part was that you couldn't even tell which of the pair had clobbered you particularly hard on the jaw, nearly driving it out of its rightful place if you hadn't gritted your choppers.
"Gee, I wonder why?" the only other downed person sarcastically drawled, Endeavor's hardcore abuse finally coming handy with how easily he was able to get on his own two feet again.
You grumbled an incomprehensible jab and closed your eyes, looking as crazy as someone who had "rightfully" claimed to be the resurrection of Jesus H. Christ and prophesied that the world would end due to prehistoric Mayan tablets proclaiming such nonsense, discarding any nausea that had risen through the back of your head. The sightseeing going on in your mind's eye wasn't as pretty either, with it being jumbled geometric lines running along in the space and flashing colors denoting moving shapes, if they could even be span style="font-style: oblique;"called/span shapes, swerving to and fro with some simply cycling through normally.
Maybe to your partner-in-crime, you lost the last of your marbles jiggling in your hollow head, but you were trying to figure out the personification of rainbow-colored barf's power, attempting to piece together what information you could gather at a moment's notice with your life-or-death gamble. After all, you wouldn't go all in on black if you had a chance to rig the roulette.
Unobserved by your eyes was the samba dance that had her heels clapping systematically onto the floor, Mao rhythmically making her way with long bouts of shuffled feet making sounds parrot back to everyone in the room, hands clapping together while she jumped, aiming to slam her body weight onto the shirtless male.
"It takes two to tango, and I have a feeling you're going to break a leg," she smiled venomously, striking her pointed heels onto his bare flesh to tastefully create gruesome holes on his back, a pained grunt ringing out in the air. Tactically gripping her ankles in a vice, taxing her upper-body enough to cause it to slump lower from his grasp, he was throwing her a reasonable distance away from him while also leaving the heels inside his back.
Dabi unabashedly ran the back of his hand against some wayward blood, wiping any traces of it against his body and only serving it to be smeared on a greater area of his torso, a primitive show of war paint glazing his strife visually. "It's sad, really," loafers the color of the night sky dragged themselves sluggishly on the tiled floor, embers starting to erupt at his sides were maddened and ballistic, rage acting as the fuel to their fire.
"That wasn't even the tango, lady."
Guttural shrieks erupted from her drooping lips slimily plopping onto her burnt flesh, calcium deposits etched into the very bone and nerve endings connected to her perfectly white teeth were scorched to oblivion, gruesomely eradicating any traces of her oral cavity and porcelain throat. It looked as if though her companion had shied away from completing his counterattack to the gothic man's brutal blow, pupils dilating as his brain undoubtedly struggled to retain any remnants of composure.
Steam flied from the very seams keeping his mulberry, burnt flesh whole, cyan orbs shining a dangerous neon parallel to the tantalizing strobe lights that had run through the end of the room as if they were daring for more fight inside of his dwindling faith, something to challenge him for the time being before he would scatter him across the ground as if he were broken glass to be shattered.
In his traumatized state, you had managed to regain your bearings without having to tear out clumps of hair on your head in frustration to see through his quirk-induced haze; you hauled your ass without the use of your nonplussed sense of direction over to them, tracing the flashing geometric shapes in your mind to their bodies.
Fingers clamped around the bob of an adam's apple that seemed ripe for the picking, strangled noises breathily made from the crushing of his wind pipes, your legs wrapped around Sachihiro's midsection to anchor your grip on his neck while his hands scratched at you.
It was as if you startled a drowsy bull by gripping him by his ivory horns, consequently making him struggle tirelessly against your restricting hands, pulling out all the stops in kicking you off its rightful flesh and bone.
"My idea of fun is not having to deal with your bullshit on a Saturday night!" you intonated in clear frustration in part from your blaring headache and the ever looming sirens in the back of your already irritated mind screaming "the police are coming".
Intermittent fits were bucked through like a true horserider, with your black-haired friend seeming content with watching the frantic movements the pesky man had been making for about ten seconds before he slumped into your hold, sending your back to painfully slam against the hard white tiles of the clinic but not hindering your grasp on his carotid arteries in the slightest.
The only other breathing person in the room parted his pierced bottom lip as if to speak, but you only interrupted him with a single raised finger in response, stating that it may take at least another minute or so to be in the clear.
Once the mental counter had reached the minute that desirably knocked him out for the time being without any brain damage taking hold, you kicked his dormant form off of your chest, wiping any rubble that had roughed up your take-out bag styled graphic shirt.
A silent nod to each other led to your wondrous duo to depart from the cauterized corpse of the now retired dancing villainess and the other who had a quirk that made your vision act as if you were looking into a kaleidoscope, certainly matching how choppy his entire demeanor and mood was overall. "Coming through," the eldest Todoroki brother said to add insult to injury to the downed man, kicking his head out of his way.
Once you had reached the door, it was visibly apparent that any evidence of the clerk or doctor being stationed there was destroyed or teleported away with some sort of dark, murky goo coating various towering filing cabinets, desks, and whatnot.
What was left behind would scar any well-meaning, curious child for the rest of their lives, cylindrical tubing running across entangled wires that were unplugged without care, the contents being something even the most hardened would never want to see on a weekend. Viscous radioactive looking fluids raced across the confines of the tubes, engorged wrinkly brains being exposed to the horror of anyone with sight, bulging eyeballs inhumanly staring off into the distant wall of the backroom, perhaps even more terrifying was the fact that one haphazardly shoved in the corner was still gurgling in a gruesome imitation of a newborn child.
Gags made themselves clear on the stance of the situation in the back of your throat, pushing them down towards from whence they came in an attempt to keep yourself calm and collected at the travesty in front of the two of you. The blue-eyed male simply gaped without a single word to be uttered from his vocal chords, gaze travelling from the assortment of slime infested hatches containing what looked like hellspawn.
No sentences were needed to illustrate the thoughts running through two heads, as the unintelligible squawks of what could crudely resemble a deformed and extremely hideous duckling made it clear, higher order thinking wasn't needed at the moment.
Nope, not when an atrocity was being held behind closed doors, the supposed "prostitution ring" being more accurate to the name of human trafficking to make whatever abomination the creature was supposed to be. Your eyes met his and it allowed you to regain some semblance of camaraderie and normalcy within your frozen soul, daring to force your legs to move purposefully to meet the thing. As you further reached the monster, it maintained eye contact, although only with one eye, as the other was far too interested in whatever the grainy, white wall had to offer for it.
"This..." you anxiously stuttered out, uncharacteristically staging a stony countenance on your face, letting your palms rest against the glossy glass of the container. You turned your head towards your fellow criminal, "We need to leave. Immediately. Whoever did this," you flexed the fingers laying on top of the test tube, earning some demonic-sounding chirps from the being. The sounds of flashing sirens rudely barged into the horrifying moment, crashing any sort of leniency you had for taking your sweet time observing the creature.
"Come on," the goth nodded his head towards the backdoor exit of the clinic, breaking whatever trance-like state had wreaked havoc upon the room. Scampering through the roughed up, metal door, it was made clear that a striking patrol car's rear end was waiting for them on the other end of the pathway, birthing fresh alarm bells to clank like they were collared on a patterned cow.
Much to your chagrin, your presences had not gone unnoticed by the law enforcement sent into the area, a booming shout of hey roaring to life and announcing your whereabouts, leading Dabi to clamber onto a neighboring rooftop with you mimicking his actions. Flaring lights of the red and blue variety stormed the streets as the single police cruiser had turned into multiple, leading some ground units to follow suit.
Sweat trickled down your brow and evaporation flew out of his damaged skin in the aftereffects of his quirk, sprinting across rooftop to rooftop in search for a way to escape their pursuit. Realization dawned onto his face whilst he flung his battered torso across another gap, drug-riddled mind catching up to any reasonable thoughts that had stirred long enough in his cranial cauldron.
"Why the hell are you following me?"
Wind lashed out ruthlessly against your weary eyes, your body being tired to the bone after all of the action and the fright that had accompanied what was supposed to be an "open and shut case". "Dumbass, if we split up who's gonna plug those holes in your back? Your daddy, Endeavor?"
Shocked at the exact choice of words you had wrought upon his already tarnished being, it soon turned into the motion of his furrowed brows in the absentminded choice to respond genuinely, all thanks to the copious amounts of cocaine still in his system and the night's events.