Crashing the Party 2.2
Vespertine
The night after Junior died, most of the Undersiders had at least a bit of trouble sleeping. Some had trouble because they were worried about the following evening, some because of the Big Bad Blonde, some because Junior was dead. Alec was worried about none of these things, and slept like a rock. The next day would bring what it brought, and they had certainly succeeded at stupider things. And the only real unknown was what this Torchwork guy brought; if they failed, Alec would probably get two thousand lien and Lisa's pride in one fell swoop. Almost certainly win-win.
Wake up, get breakfast, back to planning (sans Taylor, who went back to the bookstore). Lisa kept her eyes glued to newspapers borrowed from Tukson or found in the trash, trying to find more crumbs of helpful data while she talked with everyone else. A plan was hatched.
The Undersiders would go into the Dust shop one by one, starting about an hour before when Torchwick was supposed to hit the shop. They could browse the merchandise—Lisa checked in person first thing in the morning, and said that From Dust Til Dawn sold not only Dust, but also magazines, a few books, some spare parts, jars, even newspapers. Not all of the Undersiders would actually be in the shop—Taylor and Lisa would be outside, Taylor down the street, Lisa on the roof of a nearby building. In an absolute emergency, they could come and intervene in person, but hopefully that wouldn't be needed. Lisa said that if it got to the point where the other seven couldn't handle it, she was running. Taylor, however, was more capable in hand-to-hand combat and (by Alec's estimation) more likely than any of them to risk her life to do something stupid but heroic.
Brian and Rachel were good enough brawlers to have a decent chance against Junior's boys; Lisa guessed that in a fair fight, Brian would win every time. She quickly followed this up by pointing out that since Junior's boys had weapons, the fight wouldn't be fair. The plan to deal with them was to have Sabah wrap some threads around their machetes' blades, axes' handles, and so on, then hand them to Lily so she could charge the thread with her power and destroy the weapons. The same would be done with Roman's cane-that-is-also-a-gun.
Brian would deal with Torchwick, while Lily and Rachel would attack the boys, with Aisha, Alec, Sabah, and Taylor's bugs supporting as needed. Without his weapon, Torchwick should be easy to deal with, unless he had some unexpected tactic or trick. So he probably won't be. If things got thorny, the Undersiders had their powers. Brian being the only one able to see, with Sabah and Alec having powers that would help them navigate regardless and both Aisha and Rachel being more used to fighting in the dark than Junior's boys, would give them an advantage; if things really turned dark, Lily could provide an emergency trump card. It didn't have to be lethal—she could just cut off Torchwick's arm or something, and have Sabah stop him from bleeding out.
There was also the possibility that things would go belly-up before they got that far in. If the weapons didn't break, the Undersiders would have a much harder time. They had to plan for that.
"Can't we just leave if that happens?" Sabah asked.
Lily shook her head. "They'll notice me tugging on their weapons. If it gets that far, we're at the point of no return. I can't imagine anything they might have anything that could stop it, though."
"True," Alec said. "Not like they'd have spare weapons, either. You know, an axe for axing things, a machete for macheteing things, a gun for shooting—"
"Pretty sure 'macheteing' isn't a word," Lisa interjected. "And like I said, Junior doesn't have a lot of guns. Remnant's got a solid warrior culture, so guns are either frowned upon or also swords or whatever. Anyways, they all use either Dust, which is expensive, or else 'Aura clips,' which are apparently more expensive and only work if you have plenty of Aura on hand, so it's not terribly economical to use lots of guns except in emergencies. He sent one pistol with them, and it's only for intimidation and extreme situations. No axes, either."
"They might still have knives or spare machetes for macheteing or stuff."
"True. If they use deadly force on us, I'd say we can take out all the stops. All our powers, the nastiest bugs Taylor's found...maybe we should take some weapons along."
Alec sighed. "You think?"
"I call the cool knife!" Aisha interjected.
They located some other emergency weapons while they considered other possible problems. Brian felt relatively comfortable with just his fists, but the others did not. Lily wanted to take a broom handle, but couldn't figure out how to conceal it, and hoped that the store would have a convenient broom if needed. Someone in the White Fang glued a couple of iron weights on some sort of short stick; Alec managed to strap it under his cape. Rachel might be able to hide a small weapon in her vest, but eventually decided against it. Sabah agreed to take some extra needles, just in case she needed them—they suited her power better, could allow her to make a small cloth golem, and anyways she was never going to be much for combat. They even found a dagger for Taylor, not completely unlike the combat knife she used in Brockton Bay.
Contingencies were discussed more fully, as were their plans. What was enough to give them cause to draw weapons? To use use Brian's power, or Lily's? For Taylor to bring out the redfang spiders, bullet beetles, or rapier wasps? For Aisha to cut someone's throat? They disagreed, but came to an agreement on the likeliest situations.
Taylor returned, bringing the book she borrowed for the night. She figured out how to hide the dagger in her dress and gathered her more useful bugs, before the Undersiders went over the plans and contingencies again. They ate dinner, and waited for the hour to be upon them. Lisa shared her discoveries.
"I'm definitely getting an us vibe. He's been doing relatively small-time jobs for a while, before taking a step up as far as scale goes in the past few months. Not as big a step as Grue or Bitch did when the Undersiders were founded, but it's definitely noticeable. Roman Torchwick went from a serial thief to someone everyone knew and feared. He's always done higher-profile crimes,, but the ones he did over the last month or two seem to have been focusing on that more than profitability. He's been going for Dust as of late, though; not sure what that's about, but he's not alone. Between Torchwick and the White Fang stepping up their Dust raids, not to mention a smaller increase across in Dust theft the world, crime's being cited as a big factor in the recent spike in Dust prices."
Taylor, Aisha, and to an extent Lisa could go to their places more or less immediately, T-minus a bit more than an hour. A bit after the T-minus-forty-five-minutes mark, Alec and Rachel went into the store, Alec playing the part of an annoying younger sibling that Rachel had to keep an eye on. He grabbed a random magazine and started paging through it, while Rachel glanced around the store before leaning on a wall not far from him. When Alec got bored, he looked at another. Lily and Sabah followed, twenty minutes before Torchwick was supposed to arrive, looking at the books by the window. Finally, Brian came in five or ten minutes before Torchwick, looking at the prices of Dust in various forms and types, asking the shopkeeper about it. The shopkeeper looked like a stereotypical old man, and Alec would have sworn he was blind if he hadn't caught Alec before he could try to swipe one of the little bags of Dust. All the while, bugs slipped in through the door whenever it opened, also gathering outside in nearby alleys and crevices if Taylor was following the plan. The bugs that came in hid in the shelves, the corners, anywhere dark and concealed. Alec knew they were coming, and still didn't see much of them.
The Undersiders weren't alone in the store. Customers came and went some, particularly towards the beginning, mostly upper-class people looking for fuel for their vehicles and the like; a Huntress wanting to get more ammunition before she left town tomorrow showing up about fifteen minutes before Torchwick, and a few students around Aisha's age came, got some books, and exchanged a few words with Lily and Sabah. About halfway between Alec and Lily arriving, a girl wearing a red cape came into the store. Alec greeted her; she responded by turning up the music on her headphones a little, which Alec had already been able to hear. She turned it up again once Sabah and Lily started chatting. Red was the only actual customer still around when Torchwick arrived.
And arrive he did, walking down the middle of the road, drawing the attention of passers-by. Roman Torchwick was a household name and face, more of a supervillain than a petty thief. He wore a clean white coat, red on the inside, along with black dress pants and matching bowler hat and gloves. His red hair covered one of his eyeliner-lined eyes, a little gray scarf was wrapped around his neck, and he carried a red-and-gray walking stick that was somehow also a gun. Oh, and he was smoking a cigar—way old-fashioned. That's not what I expected. Overall, he looked more like some Clockwork Orange wannabe than a Kaiser or Lung or even a Coil…but then again, you wouldn't think Heartbreaker was a supervillain just by looking, either. Or Jack Slash, if everyone on either Earth couldn't recognize him on sight. Roman was flanked by two black-suited goons on each side, with red sunglasses, red ties, and black fedoras.
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a Dust shop open this late?" Torchwick spoke in a calm, though slightly irritated, tone that might have been soothing, if his statement wasn't followed by one of the goons pointing a gun at the store owner. Alec had never seen a Remnant gun, and so wasn't expecting it to look so…cheesy sci-fi. It looked like a laser pistol from the "blocky boxy weapons" school of fiction, with a bit of inspiration taken from the era when rocket ships looked like torpedoes with bubbles on the side. It didn't quite fit the seriousness of a robbery; Alec found himself suppressing a giggle at the weapon anyways. Or maybe because of that.
"P-please! Just take my lien and leave!" Alec wondered why people always said "lien". Was this a world where the language was exactly like American English, except that no one invented a general term for money? He also noticed Brian creeping along the left wall, towards the front of the store.
"Shh, shh, shh, shh, calm down; we're not here for your money." As Roman turned towards one of the goons, Alec stole a glance towards the corner of the store where Sabah was silently feeding thread along the ground towards the five criminals and their weapons. "Grab the Dust." Predictable; why else would he specifically want to rob a Dust shop at this time of night?
The crooks started to spread through the store, which Alec thought would make it trickier for Sabah to catch their weapons. Sabah apparently agreed, because the threads suddenly lurched upwards, grabbing three machetes, a pistol, and a cane, before Sabah shoved their other ends into Lily's hands. The sudden movement caught the eye of everyone in the store (except Red, who remained zoned-out and reading her magazine).
Lily held the string for half a second, then pulled hard and fast. The individual threads came back at her, but the weapons looked completely untouched. Torchwick looked amused and annoyed. "I'm not sure what you were trying to do there, or how, but you have—"
Alec didn't get to find out what Lily and Sabah had, because Brian lunged at that moment, elbowing one of Junior's boys into the display counter before tackling Torchwick to the ground. Meanwhile, flies and other innocuous bugs flew out of the corners, settling on everyone's limbs and heads.
Time to see who's best at the old ultraviolence, droog.
