ArchivedLogs:Some Kind of Serendipity

Some Kind of Serendipity
Dramatis Personae Blink, Flicker
In Absentia	2016-02-27 Two superheroes cross paths evacuating a burning building.
Location <NYC> Brooklyn
The most populous of the boroughs, Brooklyn has nothing if not character. With a thriving music and arts scene, and a distinctive New York slant to its stereotypical gritty accents, Brooklyn ranges from the high-cultured to the very much working class. From botanical gardens to beachfronts, Manhattanites might like to think their borough is the only one that matters, but Brooklyn has a lot to offer of its own. The fire that has started in a housing complex in Vinegar Hill has triggered a wealth of 911 calls, lighting up emergency switchboards for a little while now. The blaze is strong enough to cast a ruddy glow onto the murky nighttime river, the East River's chilly water splashing dirty and cold up against the bank. Many of the tenants have already evacuated, fled to loiter -- in various stages of (un)dress, pajamas with coats thrown over, underwear and sleeping robes, work clothes not yet shed -- on the sidewalks of neighboring blocks. Inside, though, there are still some frightened voices, wheezes, gasps, hallways impassably clogged with smoked and flames. Into one of these bedrooms, right now, a shape has just /appeared/. Kind of ghostlike for its quick-shimmering movement, too fast to properly track save by the phantom afterimages he leaves behind until he stops, Flicker resolves finally into a young man. Pretty unremarkable in jeans and dark X-crossed leather jacket, gloves, dark hair, face unremarkable save for the thick heavy scarring twisting waxlike across most of one side. There's an elderly woman in the bedroom here, already -- asleep, still, in the bed. A glowing purple disk appears a few steps away and expands into a swirling vortex from which steps a young woman. Her eyes are an unnatural shade of green, there are purple markings on her face, and she wears a dark green hooded cloak with silver trim. Blink comes up short, looks between Flicker and the old woman. "Can you carry her?" She speaks English with a very strong Chinese accent and much lighter Bahamian accent. "I get you both out fast." Her hands are already beginning to glow with the same purple light that have brought her into the room. Flicker has paused -- for a moment, at least, green eyes sweeping the murky room. His eyes widen when Blink appears. Brows lifting, posture straightening. He shivers into displacement again, flit-flit-flitting over to the woman's bedside -- almost reflexively, really, because it's only after he lands beside her that he actually answers. "/I'm/ fine. We're fine. I can carry her." There's a distinct note of /startle/ -- in his voice, in his /expression/, but the smoke curling in under the door means he doesn't -- really waste time in /voicing/ it. "I heard voices across the hall. Can you check there? I'll be back." He's scooping the woman up -- starting to talk her through what he's doing ("-- I'm Flicker, there's a fire, I'm here to get you out --") regardless of how much she may or may not be in a place to be listening. His words fade away as he does, vanishing shortly into nothingness (though somewhere outside, he is reappearing -- to the surprise of the tenants -- turning his charge over to the care of the clustered people on the sidewalk.) Blink's eyes also go wide, so much that some white shows around their huge green pupils. But to the question she just nods, and turning flicks the purple light from her hands. The light focuses, then expands into another purple vortex into which she disappears and emerges from an identical portal in the unit across the hall. The family of three there has just awakened and found that they cannot leave through their front door. Come, I get you out same way I come in," Blink says urgently. "Get ready." She throws a portal and stands near it, keeping her hand raised up and glowing purple to hold it open while the family escapes. She follows them and emerges onto the sidewalk, squinting up into the blaze and tipping her head. Gives Flicker a quick nod before she vanishes into another portal. She stops inside, once, twice, each time briefly, then emerges along with a puff of smoke onto a fourth floor fire escape on the other side of the building, so rusted through it doesn't reach the ground and can barely support the weight of the two children trying to climb down. "I'm here to help!" Blink says when the kids back away from her in fear. "Don't be afraid." She coughs a couple of times and drops down onto one knee. Maybe this convinces the older child she isn't a threat, because now he drags the younger girl over to her. "{Mom says not to speak English with strangers,}" the boy chides her in Spanish, but takes her hand easily enough and lets her pick up the little girl as they step through a portal and out onto the sidewalk. "{Thanks for reminding me,}" she tells him in much more broken Spanish, putting his sister down beside him. Flicker just tips his chin up to Blink. One quick nod before he vanishes back into the building. He's briefly visible while she's inside, just a ghosting shadow passing through the apartment into the one above. He reappears back on the sidewalk outside, skinny teenage boy and his mother propped against his sides; they're left in the company of Blink's newly rescued family before he flits back in. Somewhere not too distant is the sound of sirens, faintly audible but growing moreso over the sound of crackling flames and cracking wood. Blink draws a deep breath of (mostly) fresh air and leaps into a new portal, coming out on the top floor this time, which is so thick with rising smoke it's hard for anyone to see. She goes through apartment by apartment, blinking back in between each to breath. It's only in the last unit on on the floor that she finds anyone, drawn by frantic barks to a small yellow mutt and its human hiding in a bathroom. Even with wet towels stuffed under the door, enough smoke has gotten in that Blink cannot draw enough breath to speak. Fortuantely, the man is also not questioning his extraordinary rescue, and doesn't need much encouragement to leap through the purple portal and outside, clutching his terrified dog to his chest. Blink leans against a lightpost, gasping for air, but her hands are already glowing again and her eyes glazed with concentration as she feels around inside the building for other survivors. Flicker has been working his way up from the bottom floor -- he passes by Blink somewhere in the middle, a fluffy soot-covered orange cat tucked into one arm. He doesn't see her again until he's back outside, searching the crowd until he deposits the cat into the arms of a kind-of-frantic young man. /He's/ wheezing, breathing strained and high on each exhale -- the sirens are wailing louder, a bright flash of lights approaching. He's at Blink's side in a heartbeat, shaking his head as he taps at her shoulder. "It's clear. We're -- clear." His words are strained, too. "You -- we --" There's a question in his eyes that doesn't really make it to being voiced. Brows just raised as the first fire trucks and police cars start to draw near -- /he's/ flitting away, now, leaving a ghostlike trail behind him in his wake as he shimmers off. Back across the river, away from Brooklyn and towards the Lower East Side. Blink nods but doesn't speak, although her breathing doesn't sound nearly as bad as his. The light fades from her hands and she tugs the hood down, hiding her face in its shadow as the police pull up. She looks up, though, to track Flicker's progress across the water. Then she flings a portal out ahead of her and disappears only to step out of an identical portal on the opposite bank of the river, a few seconds ahead of the other teleporter. She turns to look back at the burning building, then at Flicker. "You alright?" Across the opposite riverbank there's a -- park? Perhaps? Where Flicker's blurring path has aimed, at least, there are large trees leading down to the rocky riverbank, a wide sweep of grassy expanse stretching away behind the treeline, dormant flowerbeds lining swirling pathways through the grass. A large gazebo with a barbecue pit, a huge space-station themed playground off in the distance, a rock-lined koi pond; houses line the large open yard on three sides. Flicker is sinking down onto a rock by the water, nodding briefly to Blink. He rummages a bright red inhaler out of the inside of his jacket, shaking it quickly and then putting it to his mouth. One puff, then another. Slowly his breathing gets -- a little less wheezy. The heavy scarring on his face is thrown into starker relief when he smiles up at Blink -- warm and bright. "That," his hand describes the elliptical shape of a disc in midair, "is /something/." Blink sits down cross-legged, a little farther up the bank on a boulder, and scans the park while Flicker catches his breath. She turns to him when he speaks again and looks kind of startled. "This?" She throws her right hand out (it begins glowing half way through the movement) and portals appear in front of her and Flicker simultaneously. Through the swirling purple mist in front of his Flicker can see Blink waving. "Yeah, it's pretty awesome." Her voice sounds a little odd coming from two directions. The portal closes a second later. "That. What you do. Is something, too." Flicker's laugh is still a little breathless, but less so than he had been a minute before. "Oh -- oh /man/." His eyes have widened. He runs a (slightly sooty) hand through (slightly sooty) hair, rubs his palm against his cheek. Dark smudges against pale scars. He shimmers out of place, reappears sitting on a smaller rock just beside and slightly below Blink. "Yeah, but if I could do it in /color/? It'd be twice as something." His grin is cheerful. He's peeling off his gloves -- one of his hands underneath is decidedly Not Flesh, mechanical, not even /trying/ to resemble flesh in marbled green and white. He offers a hand -- his left one, the actually flesh-and-bone -- out to Blink. "I'm Flicker. You hungry?" "You /can/ do it in color, with some reflectors," Blink says, nodding seriously. "Or LED strips. EL wire is nice but really eats batteries." Her eyes linger on his green-and-white hand, but shakes the one he offers her all the same. "Flicker?" There's kind of amused note in her voice, and a shy smile on her soot-stained face. "I'm Blink." She pushes the hood back from her head, exposing long, pointed ears. "And I'm starving, but not actually super sure what places are open around here right now." Flicker's green eyes open wider at this introduction; the widening of his smile puts crinkles into their corners. "/Seriously/? That's some kind of serendipity." He gets to his feet, slow, looking back across the water at the faint distant glow of fire across the river. Then behind them to the yard -- and a large houselike building in its center. "Well, I know a couple good places open late but. Actually. I live here. Sort of. There's crazy good cupcakes in our common house." He waves a hand towards the large house central to all the others. A little more sheepishly: "... probably some real food, too. There was enough yakisoba at dinner to feed an army." "Seriously!" Blink stretches and hops to her feet, also. She turns and looks at the houses again. "You live...here? It looks /nice./ I definitely won't say no to free food." She is tugging her hood back up now. "But anyway," she says with a smile, "cupcakes is real food." "My housemate's an architect. And property got really cheap after zombies. It was sort of -- crawling with dead when we bought it. " Flicker's smile skews juuust a little lopsided. It evens out soon after, though. "These cupcakes," he promises, "are the /realest/ of real." And then -- /blink/ -- he's ghosting off towards the big house across the courtyard, its lights switching on a few seconds later after he vanishes inside. Blink nods, kind of solemnly at the mention of the dead. But she follows Flicker, stepping from of a portal just outside the building to look up at it wonderingly. Then opens another one to join her host.