ArchivedLogs:Private Property

Private Property
Dramatis Personae Ion, Scramble, NPC-Pietro, NPC-Wanda
In Absentia	2017-06-17 "{My brother is angry.}" (More with the twins.)
Location <NJ> Essex Genomics - Hoboken
It's a smallish office building, unremarkable, not unlike the rest of the block. The name of the company that owns the building is nowhere evident from the outside, but a plaque in the lobby reads Essex Genomics, Inc. It's very minimally staffed, but despite its plain exterior has an exceptually sophisticated electronic security system. A blue-white electrical flash leaves four humanoid silhouettes on the roof, behind a bank of towering HVAC equipment. One of them is moving before the flare of the discharge has even faded, and looks for a moment as though he's vanished just after appearing. There's a blur of motion next to one dome-covered security camera, then another, each in turn being covered in black paint. The blur returns to the other three people and resolves into a slender young man in a tight grey and blue bodysuit. He touches the elbow of a young woman who has been standing there, looking dazed. "It doesn't look like much, but is a fortress by civilian standards," he says, his voice casual, carrying a thick eastern European accent. "You can get us inside, no?" Ion is nondescript tonight: jeans, a lightweight grey long-sleeved t-shirt, a thin balaclava currently folded up caplike onto the top of his head. He's dropped to a knee, palm pressed down to the rooftop though his eyes flick rapidly after the shifting blur. His smile flashes bright, head tipping to one side. "Me, shit, I can get get any-fucking-where." His brows crease just slightly. "Hell of a lot of buzzing in here, that ain't wrong." Scramble blinks and rolls her shoulders. She's wearing a sleeveless black tactical vest, catching cargo pants, and a balaclava that miraculously compresses her hair down to a fraction of its usual volume. Hefting her backpack, she looks around. "Guess Doctor Whatshisface really made a killing off of us, to be able to afford all this." There's a sneer in her voice. "Bet he knows there's folks itching to get at him, too. So let's get at him." "I doubt he'll be here in person," says Pietro. "But a lot of his research is. This isn't his only lab, but he has computers here to crunch the big numbers for his genetic research. Loosing them would set him back a lot. Sister," this to the red-haired young woman, "can you steer us to the most advantageous spot?" Wanda turns huge, dark eyes up her brother. Seems to stare past him for a moment. Then nods once, slowly. "He is here," she adds quietly, smoothing her hands down the sides of the lightweight red dress she's wearing. "I could take you to him." Her gaze shifts unblinking to Ion as she says this. "Yo you psychic too? Shit what /can't/ you do?" Ion's eyes have dropped from the twins down to the rooftop. "Could fry that whole expensive-ass system, you give a sec." His own gaze is just a little distant, focusing inward on the complex labyrinth of the building's security system, but he still looks up towards Wanda at this last. Then over to Scramble, before refocusing on his task. "Shit I'm charming as fuck but don't think this boy gonna be talked into make a donation to the cause or nothing." "I'm not psychic," Wanda says simply, after a significant pause, as though she had to think hard about her reply. "You can do that from /here/?" Pietro's snowy white eyebrows lift up, not so much incredulous as impressed. "I'm sure Father would have loved working with you. /Will/ love working with you." "I dunno." Scramble shrugs, pulling on a pair of light synthetic gloves. "I probably /could/ talk him into it, but it wouldn't stick for long. I could also give him enough nightmare fuel to last for years. Maybe worth it, but destroying his work is a higher priority, so you fry away, Hermano." She gives Wanda an appraising look, the skepticism heavy in her voice. ""How you know he's here, then?" "From here? Not /exactly/." A moment later Ion has vanished in another pop of blue-white light, crackling his way into the walls of the building along the paths he has been scouting. Unseen, his path through the building is -- improbably quick, from an external point of view; far less so from his current vantage point, tracing a careful path and selectively draining or overloading circuits as he goes. It isn't long at all before he reappears on the roof, just where he left. "I guess sort of I /could/ but easier doing hands-on. Shit fried though we maybe best go before they get to wondering. How /do/ you know he here, huh?" "Still very impressive!" Pietro says brightly. "And I do not impress so easily. Come, comrades." He scoops up his sister and vanishes in a blink, to reappear next to the door leading into the building. Wanda cranes her neck to look back at Ion over her brother's shoulder in when they're still for a moment. "I know him." And then the twins are headed down the stairs. Scramble trots after the twins, frowns at Wanda. "Girl, you sure are cryptic." But she descends the stairs all the same, stopping at the fifth storey landing and listening carefully at the door. The stairwell is well-lit, clean and wholesome and sterile. Pietro waits for the others on the fifth storey landing. "Servers must be in this floor, yes? Close to all that air conditioning stuff on the roof." Beyond the door, down the hallway, the only other human life sign on the fifth floor has gotten up and moved across the room. The ones on the floors below are milling, too, in a confused and restless manner. "Shit." Ion's smile fades at Wanda's words. "Lo siento, if he as kind to you as the rest of us." He follows after the others, fingers trailing against the wall lightly as he heads down the stairs. "Yeah, up here. Most of the power heading up here, anyway, just down the hall." He frowns, lips pressing together, before adding uncertainly, "Someone up here too." "Just one? Can't be security. Maybe someone burning the midnight oil?" Scramble speculates, shrugging. "I'll take care of 'em, if they're brave or stupid enough to come out and confront us. Let's go." She throws open the door and ducks out just long enough to survey the hallway before darting out into it. "Essex has had his fingers in more cakes than just Prometheus," Pietro says grimly. "Now, he has his own research here. I don't know what he research, but is safe to say we probably won't like it." He zips out into the hallway and sets Wanda down beside Scramble. Just when he's opened his mouth to speak again, the door at the end of the hallway opens to disgorge a tall man with very dark brown hair and very pale skin in a perfectly tailored but old-fashioned grey suit. "Are you supposed to be here, ladies and gentlemen?" The man crosses his arms and raises one dark eyebrow expectantly. Ion trots down the stairs just behind the others, coming up alongside his brethren in the hallway. "What, us?" His smile is bright; there are sparks dancing, now, between his fingertips where they trail just an inch away from the wall. "Yeah shit we right where we supposed to be, yo. What about you?" Pietro glares at the man in grey. "Wait, is that /him/? Essex?" he growls low, though he does not tear his eyes away. Wanda says nothing, staring blankly at the man. "Perhaps you are," says the man in grey, smiling a tight smile at Ion that does not reach his eyes. "After all, you have delivered my favorite patient back to me." His gaze flicks to Wanda. "Come, my dear. I pray you have not done too poorly away from my care." This is all the confirmation Pietro needs. He charges Essex in a blur of movement, knocking him to the ground and punching him savagely while keeping him pinned with a knee. "She /said/ he was here, boy, weren't you listening?" Scramble grumbles sidelong at Pietro before he vanishes into motion again. "Well, I /was/ gonna take care of him, but I guess you got that down." She tries the door to the server room. "Sister, you don't look so good. You want to stay and watch or you rather go, huh?" Either way, Ion is heading forward with Scramble, clapping a hand on her shoulder and the other on the door. A quick zap-jolt, a brief shock of darkness, and they're across the locked door, into the steady hum of the server room. Ion takes a deep hungry breath once inside, a skitter of sparks jumping up along his limbs. The server room is cool and, at this hour, only lit by admittedly numerous LED indicators, many of them flashing at their own particular intervals like high-tech fireflies. Out in the hallway, Wanda watches impassively while her brother pounds Essex's face into a bloody pulp with lightning-quick jabs. Scramble blinks, letting her eyes adjust to the server room as her body shakes off the shock of Ion's transport. She lets out a long whistle. "{This a lotta expensive shit. You kill the fire suppression system first while I set the charges, aright?} "{About to be less expensive, ey?}" Ion glances only briefly back toward the door and the thudding from beyond. His fingers skim against the wall again. "{On it.}" Though maybe not immediately; the shifting focus of his expression suggests some measure of concentration, first, before he disappears into the wall again. "Pietro." Wanda's voice is quiet, but her brother stops, his hands gory and the rest of him splattered with blood. He isn't even breathing hard. "He'll never hurt anyone again," he says dully. "I'll get rid of body." And he is gone in a blur motion and a gust of charnel odor. To Ion's senses, two humanoid electrical signatures depart from the building the way the group had come in, moving almost too fast to register even to his electrical senses, leaving Wanda by the door where she has been standing since Pietro set her down earlier. The three people he'd sensed a couple of floors down earlier, however, are running up the staircase. "{Damn right!}" Scramble unslings one of the backpack's straps and opens it far enough to take out a small rectangular plastic parcel, affixing it to the center of the nearest server rack before moving on to the next, and the next, humming 'Timber' and singing the chorus aloud intermittently. More of the building's systems are failing as Ion short-circuits them. Fire suppression -- the elevators, too, and a few of the lights scattered around the building (it's not always the /most/ precise art.) He reappears in the server room with a crackle, eyes bright and posture jittery. "{Oh shit --}" is all he /actually/ says -- though it's a casual sort of non-exclamation a half-second before he vanishes again. Reappears out in the hallway. "{Sister, you okay? Going to have company in just a sec.}" Kind of strolling past Wanda to the stairwell door. "{My brother is angry,}" Wanda says, her Spanish awkward and heavily accented. After a moment's hesitation, she falls into step behind Ion, almost timidly. "He took the doctor." The stairwell door flies open, kicked by a security guard brandishing his pistol. "Freeze!" he hollers when he sees Ion and Wanda. "You're trespassing on private property." Behind him another guard can be seen aiming his sidearm around the doorframe, while a third remains out of sight for the moment. "{Shit what now?}" But Scramble's question comes too late. Ion has already gone again. She shrugs and finishes planting her explosives. Zips up the largely empty backpack. Goes to the door, unlocks the deadbolt from the inside, and peers out into the hallway. "Don't doubt he got reason." Ion's brows furrow; by the door, he's bracing even as it flies open and nearly hits him, thudding instead against the hard-capped toe of his boot. "Yo shit lo siento," his hands are lifting up by his head, "you say this private property fuck here we was just looking for a place to get our drink on. Next time I asking Google Maps man." This protestation might be a touch more convincing without the balaclava -- or the skittering tongues of energy arcing from Ion's hands out to the guards in front of him. Ion himself is following a heartbeat later -- not around the door but straight through it, leaving a shower of bright sparks in his wake as he rematerializes right in front of the officers, shoulder-checking the first one /toward/ the second. "Shit, it's a mutant!" cries the guard huddled behind the doorframe, a bare fraction of a second before his coworker--the one who had spoken first--crashes into him. The third guard, who had been hidden thus far, has a clear shot at Ion and, lifting his handgun, pulls the trigger. Wanda lifts her hand and turns it. Something shifts in the air like a ripple of heat haze. The bullet hits the wall behind Ion in a spray of plaster dust. Immediately after, a gust of wind speeds in, the grayish-bluish blur that is Pietro, and knocks the shooter down before coming up short at Wanda's side. "That's /mutants/, Officer Rent-a-cop." Scramble has darted out into the hall and descends upon guard #1, who Ion had tackled. "/Plural./" She kicks him in the face even while she reaches down into his mind and prevents him from forming any memories of his recent experiences. "Ffffff--- gracias." Ion's eyes have gone just a little wider at the zing! that flies by his head. He's knocking the guns away from the hands of the guards that he has tackled, knee braced on one of their chests and low but decidedly unpleasant muscle-seizing current of energy rippling through both of them. Looking up at Scramble: "You zonk these pigs?" A brief wait, before he and both his charges are vanishing from sight. The first guard's head snaps back beneath Scramble's boot, but he is unconscious before he has a chance to hit the floor properly. The second guard, meanwhile, is spasming under Ion's electrical discharge. Pietro makes another round through the group and gathers the firearms, carefully avoiding electrified bodies. Scramble nods, shifting her attention to the second guard, wiping his memory as well and knocking him out properly. "Done," she announces, grinning with a sudden startling energy. Waves with waggling fingers as they vanish. "We best move," to the twins, now, "he'll be back for us, but the rent-a-cops probably called the actual cops, and the farther we are by the time they show up the better." So saying she's trotting back up the stairs toward their LZ on the roof. Ion is back, soon enough -- not for them but for the third of the guards, whisking off with that one as well before making a last tour of the building. Only once checked through for remaining people does he meet the others up on the roof, bouncing restlessly on the toes of his boots. He holds his hands (still a little crackly with sparks) out toward the others. "We go watch the fireworks now, huh?" Wanda's dark, dark brown eyes light up with excitement, and a smile blooms on her dusky-pale face for the first time that night. "Oh, how wonderful!" She takes Ion's hand delicately despite her eagerness and pulls her brother along with her other hand. "{Yes, we go, please.}" "My Independence Day come early this year." Scramble grips Ion's hand firmly and kisses his knuckles, sparks be damned. "{Let's go, Brothers and Sister.} Then we light this place /up/."