ArchivedLogs:Experimental

Experimental
Dramatis Personae Ion, Isra, Scramble
In Absentia	2017-01-07 "Please stand down and wait for law enforcement to arrive." (Set shortly after finding out they're shorthanded.)
Location <PIT> Oscorp R&D Facility
This thriving complex puts the lie to anyone who claims that heavy industry is dead in Pittsburgh, but the sprawling tech park looks a far cry from the factories and mills that built old Steel City. From the street, the sleek but bland modern architecture vaguely resemble some kind of convention center, or maybe a high-end office building, with glass-walled lobbies bright and open. But behind the offices and conference rooms, the heart of the facility is a rectangular box of a building. Inside, this building is a makerspace on a grand scale. A cavernous sub-level hosts an immense and serpentine assembly line, entirely automated from fabrication to finish. Its ceiling is made of thick but low-distortion glass only occasionally interrupted by steel support beams so that the people crossing the floor of the split-level central lobby above can view the production of Sentinels in real-time. Above ground, the building is mostly various offices and rooms filled with rapid prototyping equipment, but the real treasure trove is a heavily secured lab at one end of the basement production facility, filled with experimental Sentinels in various stages of creation. The facility is mostly shut down for the night, the impressive assembly line still and silent, though still brightly illuminated. There's little movement around the complex at large, but the central R&D building is patrolled by Sentinels (and other, more prosaic drones) marked with the Oscorp logo. Few living beings are evident--pairs of guards monitoring camera feeds from security rooms, and two researchers in the secured lab on the Sentinel production floor. If Isra experienced much discomfort arriving in a blaze of electrical discharge on the grassy lawn outside the R&D building, she shows little sign of it and recover rapidly. She is a dark, matte gray all over, from horns to tail-tip; something about the shade of the coloration makes it hard to pick out specific details on her person, such that without a close examination its impossible to see the bodysuit she wears in an uncannily identical hue. A sleek lumbar pack is tucked beneath the immense sweep of her wings, which she now spreads wide. The wings beat down hard once, twice, thrice and she's up and away, searching the grounds for nearby patrols. Ion is dressed not overly differently than his usual. Heavy tall boots, heavy black jeans. His black leather jacket is plain, though; the hoodie underneath has its hood pulled up, the scarf he wears has been wrapped half around his face. Somewhere beneath Isra, he's pressing a hand up against the side of the building, brows knitting as his senses reach out in scan of the electronics that lie beyond. The unannounced visitors do not go unnoticed. Per its programming, a quadrotor drone veers from its pre-set patrol path to investigate, its camera scanning the ground. The building itself is chocked full of electronics, wired for everything from smart climate control and motion sensors to the somewhat less commonplace technology to suppress mutant powers. Scramble is still reeling from the shock of their journey. /Journeys./ Steadies herself against Ion, shakes her head to clear it. She's dressed in a no-nonsense black softshell jacket, cargo pants, gloves, and combat boots, her face obscured with a balaclava. Slowly gathering herself while Ion communes with the building. Isra intercepts the drone, grabbing it by its camera assembly and hurling it against the side of the building nearest to her, growling low. She banks hard and swings into a tight circle above her brother and sister, ready to drop down to the their level. There's a stillness to Ion not often seen. With Isra overhead he pays the drone no mind -- not in its adjusted path to approach them and not in its aborted one when it is dashed against the building. His eyes close, muscles tense where they're propped up against Scramble's side. Slowly feeling out the extensive networks of wiring and sensors humming away within the walls -- before long, some of the building's systems are starting to lose functionality, though it's somewhat erratic, kind of random where the sudden power loss hits. More precisely targeted is the abrupt surge that floods through the circuitry of the suppression technology a moment later when Ion vanishes (and soon after reappears, a few feet from where he'd been, brighter eyed, bouncier), leaving a somewhat charred and fried mess in the walls in a lot of his wake. The quadrotor drone expires in an anticlimactic shower of plastic and metal components. No obvious alarms sound, no doors slam shut--not that many were /open/ to begin with. Shortly after Ion reappears, however, the building's security system kicks into high alert mode. There are /still/ no blaring klaxons or metal shutters, but the Sentinels all turn from their staid, slow circuits of the facility, diverted to investigate various random sectors where damage to the suppression system had been registered. Two of the humanoid robots issue from the nearest door, their optics scanning the lawn and fixing at once on Ion and Scramble. "You are trespassing on private property," one of them informs the visitors, the intonation of its computer-generated voice /almost/ mimicking natural language but falling just short of it into a disturbing auditory uncanny valley. "Please stand down and wait for law enforcement to arrive." Both robots raise their left arms to unveil their dart guns. Scramble has fortunately found her feet again by the time Ion disappears. She keeps an eye on their surroundings, drawing a pistol but keeping it pointed steadily at the ground. Until the Sentinels arrive, at least. The muzzle of the Beretta lifts, points at the nearer of the Sentinels. Flashes, its report sharp and clear in the quiet. Isra waits until her sister has fired before swooping down, a shadowy blur of wings, to lift the trailing Sentinel by its head. She cannot carry it far, and does not try to. Straining under the extra weight, she merely bears it through the air for a few strokes of her wings before letting go again. Gravity and momentum take care of the rest. Scramble's shot skips off of the gleaming armor of the leading Sentinel's torso, denting its futuristic curve and damaging the white finish, but the robot continues on its way. Isra's attack is somewhat harder to avoid, and the Sentinel does not seem to understand what is happening to it, not even when it crashes back down, the impact fouling its leg actuators and leaving it sprawled supine. It continues attempting to rise in an unsettling jerk and clatter of mechanical limbs. The Sentinel in the front is met with a dancing jolt of energy, coursing out from Ion to the bot nearly before the announcement has finished. "You all feel like stand-down? {Waiting for the pigs?} Let's go." He waits only long enough for his sisters to join him before vanishing again. This time the shocking ride ends somewhere in the bowels of the facility. Ion's latest jump gets them onto the production floor. It's a section near the end of the assembly line, where the Sentinels-in-progress look mostly complete, though still inert and nonfunctional. Well, except for the two marching along blithely unaware of the intruders behind them heading to investigate damage to the power suppression system. Scramble reappears grimacing and twitching, but not nearly as out of sorts as from the last trip. She doesn't even give the operational Sentinels a second glance, but starts picking her way through the shut-down assembly line, unslinging her backpack periodically as she goes and attaching small parcels of plastic explosive to structural supports. Isra again shakes off her electrical trip with ease. Her vivid green eyes--the only color other than gray or black on her person at the moment--snap to the two /moving/ Sentinels. She charges at the back of one, leaping the last few steps with her wings slightly spread and landing on the robot's shoulders. Her taloned hand seize the Sentinel's head and wrench hard, aiming to at least destroy the vital connecting cables in its neck. In here too now, there's a faint electrical hum, a tingle of energy in the air after Ion lands. There is power once more draining from -- many things within reach, with something of an /erratic/ hunger. Save for any security cameras in the vicinity -- those are visited with sharp zaps. Fierce and sizzling. "{Somewhere other end of here, maybe? You got a visit to pay.}" His head tips to Isra. The Sentinel that Isra pounces on raises its arms in a somewhat ineffectual attempt to dislodge her. It continues doing so even after she has wrenched its head loose (though it does not come off altogether). Its balance begins to fail, as much, perhaps, from the weight of the gargoyle on its shoulders as from the breaking of its neck. The other Sentinel turns around, raises its arm, and fires at her. The tranquilizer round catches Isra in the thigh. She growls low and rips the head from the Sentinel she has just disabled before pushing off of it, wings snapping wide. Descending again toward the one that just shot her, she flips the head of the first Sentinel around and swings it by its severed cables, smashing the skull end into the in-tact Sentinel's head. Scramble plants another charge and straightens up, nodding. "{Over there, if I remember the blueprints right.}" She points. "{Dusk said they might be locked inside if the building goes into emergency mode.}" The second Sentinel crumples into a heap on the floor with somewhat less dramatic flair than the first, which, though headily, is still flailing about. The secure lab might be in lockdown, but a pair of security guards have bravely emerged from their station to investigate the ruckus. They are accompanied by two Sentinels that much like existint models from a distance, but as they get closer, minor cosmetic differences become evident. Like the lettering on their chestplate declaring 'TESTBED PROTOTYPE.' "{Is this emergency mode? Is that's what's happening?}" Ion is asking this oddly casually -- in tone, anyway, there's a manic near-glee in his /eyes/, in his wide eager smile, as he peers towards the approaching guards. Briefly. He doesn't really wait /around/ long enough for the guards to give answer -- he's (just as casually) explaining, "Yeah lo siento we evacuating, for your own safety right? I'm helping --" As he -- vanishes. Reappears a small distance behind the approaching guards-and-sentinels. Vanishes again, meat-guards disappeared but the robotic ones very much still left behind. Whups. Isra takes off again, banks sharply above the Sentinel assembly line to cut behind the two newly activated robots, slamming into one in a bid to knock it into the other. Scramble has been largely hidden from the view of the guards and their charges by the machinery. Now she leans out from behind the cover of a large conveyor belt, a pistol held in both hands and braced on top of a terminal. She fires at the farther of the two Sentinels from Isra. The Sentinel is slightly more agile than expected, whirling on Isra at the last moment in an attempt to fend her off. Its speed and strength are no match for the gargoyle's momentum, however, and it topples over, clipping its comrade though not solidly enough to bring it down, as well. It turns toward Scramble and opens fire with a dart gun that folds out with almost disturbing rapidity, firing at the admittedly small portion of her visible to it. There's a slight delay this time -- from his comrades' perspectives, anyway -- before Ion turns back up. He turns back up several /other/ places in the facility first. On the roof, in a few deserted offices, in a storage closet, in an empty women's bathroom -- before finally finding his way back down to where he's meant to be. A little bit flushed, stray sparks dancing across his skin. "{... shit where we at?}" To Ion's electrical senses, there's something /off/ about the Sentinels. Something different about them compared to when he departed, though it's difficult to isolate. They feel /blurry/, as if he'd need to squint at them if the relevant sense were vision. The one that is still upright turns its gun arm to him and fires. Isra slams the fallen Sentinel's head into the ground before attempting to twist it off, though even in this evidently uncontrolled savagery she is careful to pin down its arms with her legs. "{Would you mind taking care of that other one? I think it's bullet-proof.}" Scramble ducks back into cover the moment the Sentinel's arm comes up, so though its shot flies unerringly through the gap in her cover, she is no longer there to be hit. "{I'll go get the door to that lab open, then,}" she calls out when Ion returns, and resumes picking her way through the assembly line, using the machinery as cover. At the other end of the factory floor, she finds the door to the lab unmarked but where Dusk indicated it would be. The panel beside it is lit up red with the words 'EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN' on it. She ignores the panel entirely and starts applying det cord to the doorframe with a casual nonchalance. "{I think it's gone weird. Or my brain gone? Fuck.}" Ion doesn't seem overly /concerned/, honestly. A little puzzled, a little curious, the lightning coursing brighter around him in the moment before he vanishes -- almost concurrent with that gunfire -- reappearing just a little behind and beside the Sentinel that fired at him. A bright crackling surge sears outward from him to the bot. This Sentinel's neck is not actually any more resilient than that of the previous one; if anything, it seems to come apart /more/ easily in Isra's hands. Of note, its armor overall feels warm to the touch and is indeed quite hot in the torso region. Ion vanishes from his Sentinel's line of fire, but when he materializes behind it, the process /feels/ wrong, as if he is working against more resistance than altogether reasonable. He can barely feel either of the Sentinels at all, on an electrical level. The discharge that surges forth from him forks, unfocused, arcing out in several directions to hit /both/ Sentinels--/and/ Isra--though not with enough potency to take any of them down for good. Isra tears the Sentinel's head loose and frowns down at it critically. "{I don't know what they're testing on these bots, but they're not very tough.}" Then, as an afterthought. "{Perhaps we should bring one back, if you can take that one down in ta--}" Her words cut off in a sharp intake of breath as Ion's lightning arcs through her. The jerking and spasming of her wings looks dramatic, and when it has passed she collapses atop her beheaded Sentinel, propping herself up weakly on the long carpal spar of one wing. Scramble takes cover around the corner from the door and detonates the (modest! directed!) explosive. The muffled boom happens in tandem with the bright flare of Ion's lightning, and she looks in that direction. "{Whoa now! What --}" She looks as though she's about to run to her comrades, but hangs back, drawing her pistol again. "{Hey Isra, are you going to be able to...}" Perhaps she has answered the question for herself now, but she does not venture into the lab, only keeps the door in her gun's sights, darting uneasy glances between it and the ongoing fight. Ion's eyes widen. His muscles have tensed, the charge around him sputtering brighter, more intense. There's a sharp rapid twitch to his fingers in the moment before Isra collapses. "{Fuck.}" A little raspy, a little hoarse. "{Sister, I should get you --}" Though he sounds uneasy about this. "{... out from here.}" The surviving Sentinel, though not down for the count, is certainly experiencing Some Difficulty. It turns as if to take aim at Ion or Isra but can't seem to quite manage either. The heat radiating from it is palpable now, and in a moment it freezes up altogether, wisps of blue-gray smoke diffusing from beneath its armor. Ion's sense and control of electricity returns to him as abruptly as it left him. The partially destroyed door of the laboratory falls open and crashes to the ground, flung by a robot that might not be immediately identifiable as a Sentinel. Without its armor, it looks creepily skeletal, its inner components exposed. This one does not seem to even have a gun installed yet, but whether due to its lighter weight or some actual improvement in design, it moves with far more grace and agility than its predecessors. And it bears down on Scramble, hands outstretched to grasp and restrain. Isra shakes her head, at first in a slow negative, and then more rapidly as if to clear it. Her upraised hand was probably intended as an appeasing gesture, but ends up looking like a supplication even when she has rallied enough to rise--shakily and unsteadily. "{I'm quite alright. The mission--}" She glances over her shoulder as the naked Sentinel barges out of the lab and attacks Scramble. The growl that rises in her chest is abrupt and angry, but her attempt to rush to her sister's aid only succeeds in spilling her onto the floor again. "Shit!" Scramble lifts her gun and fires at the charging Sentinel, putting as many rounds in the important-looking components of its torso as she can manage while also backing hastily away. "{I think those motherfuckers are hiding in there, sending their experiments out to fend us off.}" "{The goddamn mission is get my family home the fuck /alive/.}" Ion's rumble of a voice sounds like it comes through clenched teeth, even as his actual muscles relax some of their seizing, the crackling around him beginning to subside. Subside, then hum again -- not quite so flashily, this time sucking power directly from the robot rushing Scramble. "{Crazypants, can you feel anyone in there?}" Whether from bullets or power drain, the skeletal Sentinel drops like an abandoned marionette, a step short of its mark. There are no minds within the range of Scramble's powers at the moment, but the unarmored frame of yet another partially assembled (or disassembled) Sentinel is lumbering out of the lab now. The tromping of numerous pairs of heavy feet can be heard from the nearest stairwell--reinforcements are on their way. Scramble shakes her head vehemently. "{Nope, not close enough.}" Her voice is very loud, though perhaps surprisingly calm, all things considered. She turns the gun on the next Sentinel and fire on it, too, while backing toward her comrades. "If you think you can get us inside there, I'll -- I can do it." Though the muzzle of her gun is wavering just a touch even as she insists. "But we better get somewhere that ain't here, fast." Isra struggles to her feet again, wings mantled shakily for balance. "{No. That was my task, and I am in no condition to perform it.}" She reaches for Ion as if to steady herself. "{Ion, if you think you can take those scientists out with us, that's the next best thing. Otherwise, just get us out.}" "{Shit, you weren't...}" Ion's eyes fix on Scramble hard -- though not too /long/. The continued closer heavy TROMP snaps him out of this without much further arguing. A sharp hiss, quick and unhappy; a hand clamped hard against Isra's wrist, another on Scramble's shoulder. The jump back into the world upstairs, however quick, is no less painful than the last; a short and heart-stopping breath later, the women are deposited out in the crisp night air. There's not really even time to catch their breath before Ion is gone again -- though subsequently there is plenty of time. His return is not immediate. Not even all that swift. Occasionally there's a flicker -- flash -- visible brief from one window or another of the facility. Then a shudder. Crack? Boom? Muffled in a series -- these come more or less concurrently with Ion's reappearance. Kind of out of breath. Kind of sparking. Jacket torn up in several places -- his posture a little hunched, though the thick ragged leather makes it hard to take /good/ stock of what might be underneath. He comes with BOUNTY; a new person hanging on each arm, though admittedly his companions do not look well pleased to be there. To one side of him there is a tall brown-skinned woman with hair pulled back in low ponytail and rectangular glasses somewhat askew on her round nose, a bit of singeing (and some smeared blood, though this looks to be from Ion's hand as /she/ looks fairly unscathed, save for her fear) on her crisp slacks and button-down. To his other, a shorter stockier man with a peppering of brown stubble, twin to his research partner in the fear in his eyes though entirely unlike in the pallor of his skin and close-crop of chestnut hair, shabbiness of his un-ironed khakis and rumpled blue polo. "Hccck," Ion says -- or hacks, really, a rasping coughing sound as he releases the pair of scientists to the night. Isra had not collapsed again after her trip, though the strain in her posture is evident to anyone who knows her. She leans against Scramble and watches anxiously for Ion's return. Her wings unfurl from her back now and then, restless, ready for flight, little though the rest of her might agree. When he returns again her wings stretch out for him, enfolding the electrokinetic and his stunned passengers. "{Good work, Brother.}" She pulls Scramble into the shelter of her wings, too. "{Let's go home.}"