Energy: 4
Current Training: None
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
The Docks, Brockton Bay
"I'll baby sit the Trump." You agree immediately. You don't want to let your Master down, or risk your team suffering the effects of Animos' scream, so you resolve yourself to subdue the man without using any excess power. You can do it, you think. Taylor, not being privy to your inner thoughts, tightens her frown and turns away from you.
"Fine. Aspirant, if I jump you into an abandoned floor can you start sweeping the rooms to clean up all the guys up there?" Taylor asks, to which the pearlescent white cape nods, his carapace darkening into a harder to see but still reflective black.
"I can take Oliver with me. The roof is a low-risk area, and I can protect him if he stays close." Aspirant adds, glancing to Oliver who is looking around nervously.
"Is that wise? He's not exactly... bulletproof." Parian questions, not so subtly referencing the fact that Oliver is the only member of your team sans Miss Militia who lacks aura.
"I can protect him." Aspirant says mulishly. You eye him curiously, but his lack of facial features in his combat form makes it somewhat hard to determine what emotions he might be feeling.
"...Fine. I'll come with you." Parian grunts.
"Hey, I thought you were all 'I don't fight cus capitalism' or whatever." Trainwreck says. His tone is brusque and joking, but there is a certain level of genuine concern in his voice. Parian glances at him for a second, before turning back to Oliver.
"I can handle myself at least. I'll be sure to stay out of your way. I'll just be there for if something goes wrong." She says, almost daring anyone else to countermand her. You squint at her in consideration. You know Parian is a caring girl. You know that, left to her own devices, she'd rather not fight or even really be a cape at all. But you also know other things. You know that she worries about her friends. You know that she doesn't consider Oliver ready yet. And most of all;
You know that her power wants to give her reasons to fight.
The group remains silent for a second as something passes between them, then Taylor nods and turns towards Miss Militia.
"Militia, you can make sure no one escapes and siege the ground floor right?" Taylor asks.
"Yes. I've already called the Protectorate, they have officers standing by to bring everyone in." She acknowledges with cool professionalism.
"Wreck, once the fighting starts can you handle holding their attention down here until Aspirant can pincer them? We want to try and bait their capes into the open so we can handle them." Taylor asks, to which the large tinker just shrugs and nods.
The plan settled, you vanish from sight, moving out.
The first thing you do is locate an empty room for your Master to deposit Aspirant, Parian and Oliver in. With that task complete, you fall through the floor until you arrive near Animos, who is pacing back and forth in a small room and snarling randomly at the air around him. To the side a few other members of the teeth are putting together neat little powdered lines on what was once an office table, all of them loaded down with more firearms than you expect they could reasonably use.
'I'm ready.' You send to your Master, which is at about the point that you realize, you don't know what her part of the plan is going to be.
'Aspirant and his team have started. Good luck.' Taylor sends to you, and you catch a burst of concern and warmth before you turn your attention towards your assigned task.
Carefully, quietly, you step towards Animos, waiting until he is just out of the line of sight from the other people in the room. Once he is, you lift Long Memory, extending it outward, and pointing it squarely at the man's temple. Then, just as he is about to turn back in his pacing, you appear, thrusting forward with as much force as your Aura clad form can muster. There is a notable cracking sound, and he goes down in a heap. Before you can determine if maybe you hit him too hard, gunfire begins to rip past you, two shots of a normal pistol and a burst of much faster fire from what is obviously a much larger weapon, that slams into your shoulder.
[Vanish.] Ozma orders you, shorting out your immediate emulated response of trying to charge your attackers and causing you to pause long enough for a shot to hit you, before using your ability to vanish from sight, becoming immediately intangible.
"Thanks." You mouth, although no noise travels from you as you are no longer tangible.
[Think nothing of it. I'm an educator at heart.] Ozma replies easily.
Smiling through the pain you're in - you'd estimate your Aura to be in the upper seventy percent right now - you make use of your intangibility to dart to the side of your attackers, reappearing in time to crack your weapon across one of their temples, then disappearing again, leaping and rolling to the opposite side of the group as your victims two fellows turn to your previous location. This, it seems, is more than enough of an advantage to allow you to take the last two of them out.
'I've got Animos.' You state, turning to face the unconscious cape, and then cursing silently as a hail of gunfire from outside the room begins to rain on you through the door. You are only somewhat grazed by the first few shots before you realize what is happening, at which point Ozma reminds you to become intangible again.
[Why don't you make use of this more often? It seems to be the only ability you maintain between forms.] Ozma asks curiously.
"Oscar can't do it so why would I think of it?" You ask, sweeping your gaze through the room and allowing your Master to use your vision in order to create Gaps beneath your victims, depositing someone where they are presumably safe from friendly fire. Beneath you, you can feel the telltale rumble of Trainwreck in motion as part of the building explodes inward to allow him inside.
[Because you aren't Oscar.] Ozma notes blandly. You suppress the urge to retort to that. You are Oscar right now. That's your entire point.
'Check on the guys upstairs. They should have made it to you by now.' Taylor orders, and you can tell via your knowledge of her presence that she has joined Trainwreck downstairs in wreaking havoc on the gangsters.
'What about-' You begin to ask but are succinctly cut off.
'I'm fine.' She orders again.
Pursing your lips, you turn to run up the stairs, bouncing upward and through a wall in time to step into a massive wall of gunfire that you instinctively duck away from despite your intangibility. Glancing around once you get out of the immediate line of fire, you finally fully take in the situation. For one, Parian is standing in one corner of the room, her expansive dress in tatters as the threads and fabric from it are torn away to supplement a cloth shield she is holding aloft in front of her. Behind her, Oliver is seated on the floor, clutching fruitlessly at his stomach. As you watch, bullets ping off of Parian's patchwork shield, which glows a slight green. You can't immediately spot the shooter, as many of the bullets are coming through the weak dilapidated walls of the building, but you you quickly dash towards her regardless, just in time for the gun fire to begin to turn spastic, as though the any bullets entering this particular room are merely a side effect of aiming at whatever your attacker is actually trying to aim at.
"You okay Oli?" You ask quickly, appearing crouching over the boy. Then you freeze, as two barely visible strands of thread stop an inch from both of your eyes.
"Sorry. Reflex." Parian says, her voice hoarse as she reaches into her dress and withdraws a paper tag that she quickly rips open above Oliver. A burst of golden light emanates from it, washing over all present.
"I'm good." Oliver grates out, not sounding nearly as confident as his words would imply. Carefully and slowly, he pokes at his sternum, before standing up, making sure to stay crouched so that his head isn't peaking over the top of Parian's shield.
"What happened?" You ask, glancing between the two.
"Spree was up here having fun with... well Spree was up here." Oliver says with a shudder.
"We mistook him for a normal thug, and then when Aspirant made to strike him he evaded and exploded into an army. Oliver got hit in the crossfire, Aspirant is still dealing with the clones." Parian reports.
'Did you catch all of that?' You ask your Master, having felt her examining the situation through your eyes the entire time.
'Yeah. I'm going to pull them out. Keep going.' She says, her voice slightly strained from the effort on concentrating on fighting, talking, and seeing through your eyes at the same time.
"Nexus is going to pull you back to Miss Militia. Is that okay?" You tell the pair. Oliver nods quickly, but Parian glances towards her shield and then clenches her fists before nodding once. As if watching in reverse, the thread making up the shield begins to disentangle itself, reweaving into the longer dress Parian typically wears and quickly covering up her stocking clad legs. You barely take the time to acknowledge the Gap that appears beneath them as you turn rushing onward, and becoming intangible again.
What you find on the other end of your run is... not really... what you were expecting.
What you were expecting was to find Aspirant - who is largely bullet proof - dodging between people as he disables the clones and makes his way towards their creator. What you got, was somewhat more horrifying.
For one, most of these clones aren't moving. From what Trainwreck told you while this was being planned, that's fairly common for Spree's clones. They're basically braindead after a handful of seconds, and dissolve after fifteen minutes or so.
For another, something... you're pretty sure it was Aspirant, is tearing through the room and most of the clones like a pinball made of teeth and claws. It's form is indistinct. It's moves whipcrack fast. And most importantly, it is liberally chewing through the mostly unmoving clones - quite literally - like a chainsaw through butter. To describe the sight as 'gory' would be an understatement.
"Did you catch him?" You ask, appearing in the room. Which... might have been a mistake, in retrospect. It isn't like you didn't have enough of a clue that Aspirant was behaving abnormally. Of course, this all occurs to you after Aspirant's murder ball form pivots towards you, two overlong tendrils of flesh and teeth whipping out to pulp the nearest Spree clones to it. It doesn't even have eyes really. Just... teeth. Everywhere.
Then, it leaps at you.
Thankfully, you have learned the dubious lesson of becoming intangible when things are attacking you, which helps greatly and allows you to handily evade Aspirant.
"Hey-"
"-I need-"
"-you to calm down-"
"-Or I'll have to call Taylor."
You say between attacks and bouts of temporary visibility.
At your Master's name, the thing stops, freezing in place before twitching slightly, and then slowly - ever so slowly - retracting into itself, until Aspirant is standing before you, mostly human, save for the fragments of his mask fused to the upper half of his face.
Then he vomits.
"You okay?" You asks, rushing forward towards the man. Under normal circumstances, you think most people might be hesitant to do that. Either because of the horror of what you just saw - and make no mistake, it was nightmare inducing - or because of the fear of imminent death. You, however, are as close to a species from the works of H.P Lovecraft as is biologically feasible, and can't really die in the conventional sense, and so your primary concern becomes the well being of your Master's teammates.
"I- yeah. Just. Urg." Aspirant grunts, vomiting again as you approach. The rest of the building has gone mostly quiet, and so you assume the raid has finished for the most part.
"So... what was that... exactly?" You ask hesitantly, rubbing Aspirant's back.
"Oliver got shot. I don't, I felt stupid. I shouldn't have brought him. But he was so good in the lessons I thought- but he got shot. And I just - the brakes just came off. My fault, my problem, my solution." Aspirant explains, temporarily forgoing his 'wise old master' voice for the panicky tones of a teenager who has just realized he might be a monster. You purse your lips at that, but don't otherwise say anything. Your reasonably certain this is another example of what your kind do. Aspirant... hasn't really been using his powers. He has, but not in the way your kind intended. You can see how his shard might have nudged him towards this. With all that data it must have been gathering from his 'enlightenment' it must have been like a kid on christmas getting him into an actual combat situation.
'How is everything downstairs? I'm pretty sure Spree got away, unless Miss Militia caught him.' You ask your Master, delaying for time.
'Got Vex and most of the normal thugs. Haven't seen Hemorrhagia - dumb name - or Spree. I think they're supposed to have another guy - Reaver? But I haven't seen him.' Taylor tells you distractedly.
"Fights over, if you want me to have Taylor take us back." You offer Aspirant, who is still dry heaving slightly. He shakes his head no, breathing heavily and deeply.
"Can you... not tell the others about this?" He asks you, desperately.
You consider the question.
[ ] If he see's regular combat your pretty sure this won't happen again.
[ ] You'd like to but... honestly it's probably a bad idea to do so. He needs help.
Aspirant takes your response in for a second, then smiles at you, a small brittle thing.
And then your Master whisks you away.
"Well, we didn't get all the capes, but with most of the mundane gang members tied up the Teeth are effectively done." Miss Militia says warmly as you watch the last of the PRT vans drive away. You know it's technically true, but for some reason, you can't help but feel a deep sense of wrongness at the statement. Like you just know the Teeth will be back somehow, whether you like it or not.
"Just gotta keep those loony fucks in prison for once." Trainwreck jokes, earning withering glare from Miss Militia, who might still remember his less than chivalrous remarks when first meeting her.
"I'm sure it will work out." Aspirant says, although his tone is less agreeing and more... grim. He has refrained from making eye contact with Trainwreck or anyone else since the end of the fight, and has been mostly staring blankly at the building the fight took place in. Occasionally, he glances upward, to the part of the building he was fighting Spree in, and then away, as if ashamed.
"I think Oliver would be best served with a more bulletproof suit of armor." He says after a second, sidling towards your Master and whispering. Her eyebrows raise slightly at this, but eventually she shrugs.
"I'll try and get something ready soon." She agrees, before turning to check on everyone else.
"Anyone hurt?" She asks, getting a chorus of no's and an uncomfortable look from Oliver as he fingers the holes in his costume where he was shot.
"Alright. Let's go home." She declares confidently, sparing a glance at the Aspirant, who has been behaving oddly since the fight ended.
Then she opens a gate to the Heap, and you are forced to shelve your thoughts for another day.