ArchivedLogs:Storm Fronts

Storm Fronts
WARNING: graphic violences.
Dramatis Personae Cage, Dusk, Eric, Isak, Kay, Joe, Nicoleta, Rasa, Regan
In Absentia	2014-04-09 (Part of Perfectus TP.)
Location culthouse in harlem
There's a house, one house on the long list Sage provided, narrowed down by Toma to this segment of Harlem. It's not a great neighborhood, here, run-down; the house next to it is abandoned, windows boarded-up, bullet-holes in the door, though /this/ one seems in perfectly good repair. There are lights on, people clearly evidently home. /More/ clearly evidently home given that two of them are currently right outside, engaged in rather intense conversation, low and -- maybe not so much angry as /earnest/, though the softness of their voices doesn't carry far. Mental wavelengths probably carry farther in agitation, though, snippets of thought carrying thoughts of whether or not it's worth it to risk /feeding/ the damn vampire or might he just eat the rest of the stock? The two on the doorstep can be easily made out in the lamplight from a nearby streetlight, one man tall, lanky, stringy hair hanging down to his shoulders, dressed in boots and jeans and a Mets sweatshirt, his companion a shorter athletic woman with a poofy afro. Leather jacket. Tall boots over her jeans. The Brotherhood's arrival on the scene is quiet and rather unobtrusive -- mostly thanks to Regan. A lot can be done under cover of illusion, and while the large cargo van they drove up in is perfectly normal and visible as it parks around the corner, once they get /out/ and make their way up to the cross-street at the end of the block the entire team fades neatly out of sight. Just for now, admittedly -- Regan's illusions work on /all/ of them just as well as they do on their enemies, so it's rather unfeasible to keep in place for the /entirety/ of this operation. But at the moment, the street looks clear enough; Regan's voice can still be heard, quiet, as she lets only Isak fade back into view. Just: "You're up," and nothing more. If Isak said he wasn't nervous, he'd be lying. This is his first real operation. He is, in a lot of ways, a sheltered young man. He's dressed for the occasion - in black slacks and a calf-length tailored black hoodie that zips at the side, all made out of workout material. Yes, it's stealthy, but it's also stylish. A leopard can't change its spots. He purses his lips and watches the two sentries. He casts a glance to Regan when she speaks. He swallows, then exhales. Smoke billows from his mouth and spreads out across the ground. He starts slowly and builds it up bit by bit, so it just seems like a bit of fog or exhaust. Then he steps forward. When he does, the smoke envelops him. He drops low and creeps forward. He's low enough and there's enough smoke by then that he's nearly entirely obscured. "-- don't even know how much longer we're going to have to keep this batch," the woman is saying uncertainly to her companion. "We're going through them faster but --" "... going through us faster, too," he mutters back, looking up at the sky." A faint shiver runs through him, his head turning back downwards to look instead out at the street. And then /frowning/ as he takes his phone out of his pocket to check the time with an irritated huff of breath. "Not going to be back for hours yet," he grumbles. "And I'm out of smokes." If Eric is nervous, it doesn't show on his face. Cracking his neck quietly out from one side or the other, he has - perhaps ironically - chosen to wear a big black 'I <3 NYC' shirt to go with his pants. The sidearm at his side is a comfortable, if a bit worn, looking Glock, in a leather holster. A decidedly non-regulation silencer extends out the bottom of it, newer looking than the rest, and the police officer has several magazines of ammo velcro'ed along his leg. A tazer sits at the other side of his hip, in front of the side-handle baton. It is, to be sure, not a very subtle set of uniform, but it matches the determined look on his face. Off at the end of the block, Regan is simply -- watching. Quiet and perhaps quietly /assessing/ The New Guy in his smokey forward creep. Her expression doesn't tell of anything much, when she reappears from invisibility. She's looking as she has been through most of the day, shorter than usual, tan, short black bob. Black jeans, dark leather jacket, sturdy boots, arms crossed over her chest and her dark eyes, for now, focused more on the smoke-cloud that is Isak than on the house. Well. Here goes nothing. Isak grows the smoke as much as he can. It rises up and up and starts to diffuse through the air, lowering visibility to a few feet. Then he steels himself, takes a breath and lets go of the fog. That means the wind can push it away instead of being held in place by his will. He creeps around by the woman, and exhales sharply into her face. Carcinogenic smoke billows out and heads straight for her mouth and nose. A few lungfuls of that is decidedly unpleasant. A steady stream of it is particularly debilitating. The conversation of the pair on the doorstep cuts off as that cloud of smoke -- perhaps ironically approaches as the man complains of his lack of cigarettes. The woman coughs, once, twice, then doubles over, a small flickering of flame starting to dance around her in her sudden panic but guttering out as she starts to black out. The man's alarm is briefer -- there's a /tension/ to him that suggests they've been perhaps /expecting/ trouble/ as might perhaps happen when your compatriots get their heads hacked off. His hand reaches out -- it's hard to /see/ what happens, really, for those down the block, but Isak can /feel/ it well enough as the arteries alongside his neck neatly /crumple/ closed in a very /fine-tuned/ application of pressure. It only takes a few short seconds to knock someone out -- it'd probably only take a few /more/ to kill but the man isn't sticking /around/, fleeing into the house. /Presumably/ to sound some sort of alarm, because more lights inside are lighting. That's the problem with being a shiny new terrorist. Isak hasn't exactly had a lot of practice using his abilities in a situation like this. It's perhaps no surprise that it doesn't go off quite the way he was hoping. He really is /much/ better in enclosed spaces - or at least that will be his excuse if he survives this mess. As soon as the pressure is applied to his neck, the smoke stops forming and starts to be pushed away by the wind. Then he crumples and blacks out, disappearing beneath a layer of his own smoke that has yet to fully dissipate. Luke accompanied the group wearing the black t-shirt and jeans he had on earlier, with just the addition of a balaclava, currently rolled up like a knit cap on his head. He hangs back, waiting for Isak to do his thing. When it looks like the party has indeed started, Luke breaks into a heavy run, jogging through the street toward the front door. He picks up speed as he gets closer, lowers his shoulder, and crashes his way through the door. Subtlety Lost. As soon as he's inside he's looking around for any indication of how to get downstairs. Kay's strolled along near the back, guarding drogue like a slinking coyote, with an equally coyote spirit in his grim grin and lively amber eyes, lacking only the lolling predator's tongue and reflective pupils. He wears his old batterd MC kutte over a sturdy denim jacket, fully patched Mutant Mongrel insignia on the back, a number at the breast pockets where Road Captain is by far one of the oldest and most... singed. Though also in skinny jeans, he's ditched the wallet chain, opted to /keep/ the flashy watch and knee-high boots. A knife sheath hangs on his belt, presumably beneath his jacket is a gun, making it swing just slightly /heavy/ to that side. The air around him is dry-heat warm as a desert thermal, rippling faintly through the clothes and hair of those standing nearest him. When the man vanishes inside, he's abruptly sprinting right along with Cage, cheeks puffed out to hold his BREATH through the smoke. His long legs leap /over/ Isak (hi Isak! bye Isak! don't die Isak!) to rush inside as well. Letting out a choked 'phah!' kind of ... laugh! If Luke's attention turns left, Kay's will turn right to make a clean sweep. Eric raises his hand as Cage darts forward, opening his mouth to object. But he sighs as the other man darts forward, drawing his tazer out of its holster and heading up to Isak. He scoops the smaller man up and tosses him over a shoulder, movement jostling Isak rather uncomfortably. "Easy there," Eric murmurs, as he heads back towards the van at a quickly lumbering pace, stepping backwards and keeping an eye on the building. Eric is, at least, curtious enough to put down the tazer and cradle Isak's head as he places him down on the floor of the back of the van - though, not quite enough to make the landing feather light. "There you go," Eric says, turning and closing the door quickly. "Now stay there, ya'ear?" With that, the police officer heads into the building a great deal more cautiously, pressing himself up against the wall, peering through, and then following through with a sweep of his tazer in a precisely practiced movement. Clearing a building. Just like his day job. Almost. The house, inside, is shabby as the neighborhood is. Large and only sparsely furnished, a big front room, mostly empty except for a lot of boxes, a dining room beside with a table and a lot of rickety chairs, a kitchen in the back with a back door and a closed door there. Another room to the left full of beaten old couches, stairs leading up. Though sparsely populated of furniture it isn't sparsely populated of /people/; the young man from outside is here already. Lifting a hand towards Kay and Cage and though his telekinesis isn't the brute-force crushing kind it doesn't /need/ to be; sometimes a delicate touch is all you really /need/. It takes, for example, barely any pressure at all to squeeze closed a trachea, or blood vessels, and it's these things that the man is focusing on as Kay and Cage enter the house, focusing largely on their necks. Beside him there's a shorter woman, pudgy and freckle-faced, very busily /shoving/ a thick powerful blast of ice at very high speed towards the entryway. Behind the others, Regan -- doesn't try to fight the blast of ice, there's not really much she has to combat /that/. She waits it out, out of range of the doorway, but soon afterwards the /floor/ beneath the young telekinetic is opening up into a small swirling chasm that -- by all evidence is melting very quickly into a very /hot/ pit of bubbling lava, oozing-thick and set to melt flesh from bones. /Possibly/ it may be jarring to concentration. Or, in the very nearer term, life. Cage stumbles when his windpipe is suddenly blocked. It's funny, it really doesn't matter how big you are, if you still need to breathe. Luke Cage conquered by the equivalent of a plastic bag over his head. Slowed down by the choking, he's in exactly the right place for the freezing blast to hit him instead of Kay, by Cage trying to shove Kay to the side a bit, and out of the way of the ice. Falling to his knees, straining for breath, Luke reaches for anything he can get his hands on, picks up the cheap wooden table by the entry way, and hurls it in the direction of the telekinetic attacker as hard as he can. The initial blast that ruptures off Kay is reflexive, making a choked 'ngh!' and crumpling as it pours out from him in deceptively transparent ripples. An oily-gas heat like liquid glass that whips gently through cloth and hair and disintegrates it. Probably taking Cage's poor shirt with it. Hitting the wall of ice, the spectral heatshimmers lose their serenity - a sudden snarling clap like thunder and /steam/ fires out in a shockwave both cold and hot at intervals. "Shiii--" Eric is, thankfully for the sake of his Southern metabolism, still close enough to the door to duck mostly behind it as the wave of ice hits him. It knocks him to the floor, half in and half out of the doorway, and he lets out a long groan. Tazer, not so much. As Kay melts the ice, Eric shoves his tazer into his holster and withdraws his pistol. Even with the silencer, the report of the pistol echos through the house like a loud crack-crack, Eric braced against the floor as he aims two shots towards center mass of the humans on the stairs. The telekinetic is sinking, rapid and /screaming/, into the sudden /lava/ pit where there was no lava pit before, Cage's thrown chair thudding against the wall to crash and break down onto his head. There's a sizzling, a rich roasting smell of crisping burning flesh, and the hold he'd had on Cage and Kay is vanishing, leaving behind only a /lot/ of very /sore/ unhappy throatfeel. The woman, meanwhile, is half-retreating back down the stairs -- though her blast of ice is not exactly. The /initial/ blast is melting, puddling down into the floor, but there's another blast firing /back/ against Kay's, creating a -- small /stormfront/ in the middle of the dining room where their two elemental-blasts meet; it shields her retreat in a mini-tempest as she flees down into the basement. Behind her a thick solid wall of ice has built up, blocking off the way into the kitchen; another is blocking off the /door/ that leads down into the basement. The bullets slam against the icewall that has shielded her retreat. "Cage, Kay --" That's all Regan says as she steps into the house, /glaring/ at the icewalls. The lava pit is vanishing as neatly as it came, leaving behind a man lying on the floor who -- /looks/ very much unharmed, save for the littered pieces of /table/ around him, and /is/ very much dead. She isn't really paying him any attention. Gasping for breath when he's released, Luke slowly climbs back to his feet and leans against the wall while he waits for his trachea starts working again. A couple of shallow breaths and Luke croaks out to Kay, "Loosen it up for me." But he doesn't wait for Kay's reply. He just squares his shoulders and charges the ice wall, apparently expecting Kay to send the heat along /with/ the charging bull of a man. Kay ratchets out a dry-croaking sound, a cough, a laugh, a guttural anger - it just sounds like 'rast!', and still flushed with an angry vein pulsing in his temple from suffocation, he shoves himself back to his feet. Regan need not say more - he throws out a left hands towards the ice wall, "Fucking posers." His fires are not gentle; they do not 'loosen' to much as detonate. Ice shatters in the blast as much as melts, seared away in clean-gauzy evaporating steam and a river of crystal water pouring across the floor and down the stairs. It's hard to appreciate the beauty; pinwheeling chunks of wood and tumbling plaster bits rain down as well, pattering ahead of Luke and pelting his back as the explosion also rips out a chunk of WALL. And then Kay is following through the hole Cage's body had thrown through the wreckage. After the shots embed themselves in the ice, Eric stands up, pushing himself off of the floor with a smooth movement and a wince. He shakes out one shoulder, then gives the telekenetic a wary look as he approaches. He eyes the other man's face for a moment, then shakes his hnad and turns his attention back towards Kay and Luke - no cuffs for him. He looks back just in time to get a blast of plaster into his eyes as the steam and water explode down and up the other stairwell. Blinking and wincing, the police officer rubs his eyes and coughs. "Fucking hell," Eric groans in complaint, as he heads quickly for the stairwell. "As if the neighbors weren't going to notice the gunshots," he mutters exasperatedly, as he heads, gun first, after Cage and Kay. The basement is a large place. Cementy. There are quite a lot of boxes strewn about -- all over the place. Quite a lot of /ice/ slick underfoot. A trio of doors along the back wall, heavy, all closed. To the prisoners in the far room, there's just been a /whole/ lot of commotion. Yelling. Things shuffling about. The room is a lot colder now than it had been a few minutes before. Outside there's a back door that stands open. A burly man, mid-thirties perhaps, is heading towards the locked doors. Presumably to open them. The cryokinetic is steadily building up a wall of ice in front of the stairs. /Was/ steadily building up a wall of ice in front of the stairs -- now she shoots out a blast towards Eric. MAYBE just for the heck of it. One of the back doors is also opening, disgorging a third person, a stringy-lean woman with spiky blonde hair whose only contribution at the moment is an almost /annoyed/, "Fuck." Joe scrambles to his feet from where he was resting at the sound of all the commotion, eyes wide, barely allowing himself to hope that this is some kind of rescue. He's in tattered black pants, scuffed dress shoes which were probably shiny and black at some point, and a tuxedo shirt which has certainly seen better days. His movements are stiff and painful looking as he tries to back as far from the door as possible. Over in the back room, Dusk is /looking/ a little better than he had been, in that with Nicoleta around he's actually got blood to drink. This hasn't done a lot for his morale, really. There's colour in his cheeks but he's slumped against the wall, eyes still sunken-closed and his shoulders curled slightly inwards, one knee curled up towards his chest and the broken-badly-healed one stretched outward. He flinches at the noises from outside; the commotion doesn't draw him to his feet. He just curls his fingers harder against his shin, tensing. "-- Someone's having a bad night." /Maybe/ him. Nicoleta is scrambling from where she is sitting on her bed as well, moving towards Dusk. "Shit, you think rescue?". She's had no real qualms with giving Dusk blood while she was here, it should come back, after all. She's dressed in a gray bra, a pair of dusty jeans, and is barefoot, as she listens to the noises. "Or do you think, they're killing someone out there?". Rasa has not bothered to get up since they dragged hir in hours and hours ago, huddled tightly under a blanket in a very misshapen ball. There are some bandages on hir face now, but to what extent the rest of hir is bandaged is hard to say. Ze stirs a little, more at the conversation than the commotion, eyes squinting open. Ze gives a little whimper and pulls the blanket over hir head. "--killing the prisoners first," Kay rasps, "/Consistent/ anyway." He's not just running down the stairs but /leaping/ it, throwing down his hands to cushion his landing with a small explosion against the ground, ice melting rapidly in the faint shimmering inferno tornadow-whirring around him. The flames bathe past his face, leaving faint red like a sunburn that fades almost as soon as it appears, and he looks around. For a target. Any target. His eyes lock on the cryokinetic -- and he throws low his hand like hurling a bowling ball. Fire races along the ground towards her, carrying a less visible shockwave atop it. Then he throws a second. Because overkill is underrated. "DUSK!" His ratty tenor rarely yells - it gets shrill when it does, ignoring the closed doors to charge the ice-slinger, "Whoever the fuck is down here, FIGHT LIKE HELL if you wanna live!" Luke tromps down the stairs as well, in Kay's wake this time. His heavy footsteps make a lot of noise as he goes. Slipping past the Duel of Ice and Fire, Cage moves to the first door he can find and /shoves/ it open, hoping to find the people in question. As the shouting is heard, Nicoleta's turning to Dusk. "Mind puncturing a vein? Seems like a win-win on getting the fuck out of here.". Nicoleta's tossing an arm out incase he accepts, afterwhich she proceeds to look back towards the door, no matter what happens. "I'm going to fuck these bastards up." Behind Kay is a Regan, staying -- out of the way of the flames and heat that the pyrokinetic carries with him. She slips in against the wall, eyes fixing on the man who is unlocking the door. There are suddenl streaks of lightining that are growing, in the room, slicing through the air to arc towards him in white-blue prongs that zap taser-strong up towards him where he stands. "Fight?" Rasa croaks quietly. Fingers tug, tug, tug and pull down the blanket once more. "Kay?" Ze is not very loud at all. The two people who are standing near the trio of doors may impede Cage's shoving. /Are/ in fact impeding Cage's shoving -- at least, the spiky-haired woman is turning as Cage approaches the doors, hands whipping around to gather stray broken shards of the ice that is limning everything of off the walls, the ceiling, to -- vanish it, neatly. Cage might be the only one who notices where it /goes/, sharply broken shards of it /teleporting/ to embed itself into the muscles of his arms and legs. Kay's sudden blast melts the /rest/ of the woman's ice, unslicks the floor beneath them. Yet again the crisping smell of flesh fills the air, the woman's legs crumpling beneath her as a sudden /fierce/ sharp blast of ice whips out towards Kay as her body goes down. From the man by the door there's -- an odd black /vortex/. It whirls and spins in odd vaccuum-sucking, neatly /eating/ up the energy of Regan's lightning before it ever touches him. Stray ripples of Kay's heat are sucked in as well, before it stops. Stepping carefully down the stairs, careful to keep his weapok in front of him as he pivots slowly into view of the room, Eric is a good deal more cautious than either Luke or Kay. Somewhat ironically, considering his particular mutation. As he comes into view of the doors, Eric stands not far from Regan. He levels his weapon at the second of the two door guards and fires several rounds at the man with the black vortex, an even spread up the man's chest and to his head. "Eat this." Shredded muscle fiber in all four of his limbs is in fact sufficient to bring down Luke Cage. The man howls in agony as the freezing shards tear his muscles apart from the inside, and he collapses in a twitching pile of five-hundred pound man on the floor. Concussion explosions are not fine-tune weapons; they do not take commands so much as suggestions. In this way, when Kay throws up warding hands to reflexively protect his face, he's also URGING out another spiraling conflagration to meet the blast head on, showering hot water back into the burned woman's face. He does not stop. Fires another, continues to approach her, reaching for her face. His expression even, grim, ignoring Cage's screams and the black vortex, seeking to seize onto her body. To consume it with fire. "Kay?" Dusk's head lifts; his shoulders twitch reflexively, before sinking again. "Holy shit /Kay/." This is -- louder, but rather /hoarse/, a little woozy, a little drugged. "Oh shit." He leans forward, teeth sinking into Nicoleta's vein. Taking a rather deep /drink/ before he pulls back to let the blood flow. Regan, at least, is not ignoring Kay's screams. Even if she can't touch that man she may well be able to touch the /woman/. Not, perhaps, with electricity in the face of the spinning vortex; instead a trio of knives, long and sharp, appear in the air, spinning around to fly straight towards her. Two towards her eyes and one right towards her chest, fast and truer than real /throwing/ would really manage. The vortex spins out from the man again, wider and wider and -- well, uselessly. The bullets pass through it harmlessly. For the bullets. Not for the man's /face/, which the slam right into. Blood and brains and bits of bone splatter against the door; there's a /thud/ that the captives inside can hear. The black vortex vanishes as the man crumples to the ground. The last woman reaches out mentally, seeking to grasp with telekinetic senses for -- well, it doesn't quite work that way with illusion, does it? There are, kind of abruptly, knives sprouting from her eyesockets; tears of red drip thick and crimson in streaks down her face. She slumps back against the wall, sinking down heavily. As the blood begins to flow from Nicoleta's vein, it's beginning to prop out, creating spikes along her arm, growing as more blood comes to where she can manipulate it. The rest of the blood is being converted into three small spheres that begin to float around her. "Let's get even.". She's waiting for a way out, not thinking she can get through the door, but keeps her spheres at the ready and her arm up. Dusk is struggling to his feet, now. Slow, teeth gritted, with Nicoleta's blood pumping now through him. His fingers flex, lean muscles tensing hard. A soft growl sounds in his throat; it's soon after followed by the strange only barely-audible clicking that orients him towards the door. His run is stumbling, leg healed only badly and his knee not /quite/ working -- but the inhuman-strong muscles on him are still, well, inhuman-strong. His shoulder crash-shatters against the door with a splinter of wood that makes his growl now one of /pain/ as much as fight, healing muscles protesting the motion but leaving a splintery wreckage where Door once was. It's not a graceful entrance into the scene. Pale, shaking, only long jagged-mutilated scars along his shoulderblades where wings once where, he stumble-/collapses/ out the door onto his knees, broken-rehealed knee giving out beneath him as he lands on his palms. "-- Fuck." Rasa reaches up to take Joe's hand, but every movement is agony. As ze pushes away from the mattress, the blanket falls away to reveal even more bandages across hir torso. When ze reaches the full height of hir hands and knees, ze wraps both hands around Joe's arm, tugging down furiously as ze tries miserably to get up on one leg. It's... all ze has. "Oh fuck, hon, what did they /do/?" Joe chokes back a sob mixed with horror and relief and guilt at /feeling/ relief. He ducks down and wedges his skinny shoulder under Rasa to be her crutch, but he's really not strong enough to just pick her up and carry her. "C'mon let's get the fuck out..." When the thickest of flame-heat fades, Kay rises up from the black husk that had once been a human - there is a row of alarmingly white teeth grinning from the middle of it! - and shakes out his hands once. Already turning away. "S'me, buddy," he even sounds normal, somehow. Against the background sound of crackling fire and screaming, and the smell of blood and brainmatter. Casual, confident. He lightly raps his knuckles against the side of Dusk's shoulder when he moves past him, "Gimme just a minute more. We'll get the fuck outta here." And he goes to check and see if there's anyone else behind any remaining doors that might want to visit a WARMER CLIMATE. Nicoleta strolls out after Dusk, ready to toss her spheres at the first kidnappers she sees..until she doesn't see any. "Shit, you didn't leave any for us? Reaaally?". Nicoleta's blood spikes are retracting into a /blood bandage/, holding blood in with..hardened blood, but the spheres remain intact just incase, as she bends down with a hand to Dusk. "Need a hand, vampire? I need a cigarette after we get out of here, /fuck/." "Think you might need to help me with this one," Regan is musing to Eric softly, looking down at Cage. Her eyes fix on Dusk for a very long moment in slow quiet, breath drawn in slowly. And then she looks away, over to Nicoleta, with a very small nod. "After all this? I'll give you a whole pack."