ArchivedLogs:Unwelcoming Party

Unwelcoming Party
Dramatis Personae Anole, Marrow, Nick	2017-05-10 "If I shoot them then you'll break your teeth on the lead shot while you're eating 'em, so I'll just have to kill them with my bare hands."
Location <MOR> Below New York
Buried beneath the bustle and noise of New York's busy streets, the world underneath the city is a quieter place. Quieter, but far from deserted. Occasional ladders, often rusting, ascend to the city above and are evidence that at /one/ point these tunnels had been in use, or had been planned for it; perhaps by way of maintenance, or access to subways or sewers. These stretches have been abandoned by civic infrastructure for some time now, though, but occasional scraps of evidence -- discarded food wrappers, piles of tatty blankets or moldering old mattresses, sometimes voices carrying echoes through the dank concrete -- give evidence that /someone/ still uses these tunnels. The rumbling of subway trains sounds frequently through the walls, many of the train routes accessible through various doors and openings. "-- were just over here." Anole's voice is very quiet in the dimness of the tunnels -- far below the subway access tunnels though still a ways off from the central Morlocks' home proper, it's still deep enough in to have an unpleasant dampness at the walls and a clamminess to the air. No /actual/ sewage running at the floor, though plenty of trash, rats scurrying about, unidentifiable slime. The lizard is dressed in tatty old jeans, many times patched, and ane oversized RENT t-shirt. He scuttles along the side of a wall at about shoulder-height, a dim and brown-grey shadow where he blends in to the filthy stones. Not too far off around a corner, voices can be heard, footsteps tromping with distinctly un-Morlockian carelessness. A little way behind comes Marrow, slinking through the darkness with her way lit by the glow of a joint. But just a little one, she's being sneaky after all. Her outfit is very Mad Max with lots of black biker leather, crusted on dirt and a sawn-off double barrel shotgun tucked into a loop at her belt. With a low snarl she asks "Remind me again why we don't just leave them to blunder into the traps?" The most imposing member of the party by far, Nick follows a step behind Marrow in dark gray cargo pants and one of his many Green Lantern t-shirts. There are two hunting knives strapped to his belt in leather sheaths, one long and one short. His fur looks a bit rumpled and, despite his near-obsessive grooming, here and there small wisps of loose hair protrude from the usually sleek brown coat. His ears twitch and swivel toward the sound of footsteps and voices and he lifts his muzzle to sniff. "Because then you'd have to re-set or clean out the traps?" he suggests quietly. "There are four of them, by the way." It isn't long after this declaration that the bobbing light of a headlamp rounds the corner ahead, followed by a smallish white man with a sling backpack dressed entirely in military surplus gear. "...last time I came down here, I found like this fucking /altar/, right? With like those Santeria candles and some hand-made statue of I don't even know what." He gives no indication of having spotted the mutants in the darkness far ahead of him, and behind him trudge his companions, also outfitted in Exploring Clothes, each with their own headlamp and gear. "That'd be messy! And they were just looking -- I mean, not looking /for/ us, just -- I didn't think --" Anole fumbles, falling into quiet when the human exploring party rounds the corner. He skitters a little bit higher up the wall, further into shadow and texturing himself further into the stone. "That's what rookies like you two are for," Marrow points out with a sly grin. "Or the rats. Rats gotta eat too." She may not have been the most imposing a moment ago, but as soon as the voices get close jagged bloody bones begin poking through her face. Turning her into something out of a horror movie. She draws the shotgun and blows a cloud of smoke into the air. "Only four? Barely worth getting out of bed." She stomps a few times, getting to the edge of the torch light "Hey shitheads. You paid your zombie protection tax yet?" Nick wrinkles his nose. "I guess they'd at least /fresher/ corpses than the usual kind that need cleaning up." He doesn't sound very much consoled by this. His nostrils flare when Marrow puts on her game face. The human party is steadily moving toward them. The beam of the first human's headlamp swings up toward the sound of Marrow's voice, bright white light is unpleasant to dark-adapted eyes. Nick grows and flattens his ears back, his rapidly contracting pupils glowing bright reflective green. The human takes a big step back, stumbling into his nearest compatriot. "Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch!" he blurts. The rest of his party crowds around him, peering at the mutants. "We can protect ourselves from zombies," a larger white man with a bleach-blond mohawk says at length, tapping the machete strapped to his waist. "Don't need your help, and we certainly ain't paying you." "It's funny. Most people say that until they're missing a foot," Marrow points out with a bloody grin. "Which is what happens to people who poke around down here." She stomps on a wooden board and a rusty bear trap snaps shut with a clang. The board splitting into two halves. "You see this is private fuckin' property. And you. Are not. Welcome." With each pause the bones in her left hand crack and grow, extending into vicious hooked claws. The humans jump as one when the trap snaps the board in half, their headlamps converging on the cloud of splinters and sawdust rising from the spectacle. "These are the /sewers,/" says Mohawk, the least impressed of the bunch. "The /city/ owns them. You setting traps, that's some kinda...reckless endangerment." The others murmur their agreement. Nick's hackles rise, making him look even bigger and more feral. "You see the Mayor down here?" he snarls, "You see the NYPD? /No./ It's just you and the monsters, and not all of them are the shambling kind." "If you really want to get into it, you coming down here in the first place is trespassing and -- pretty reckless, to boot." Anole's voice is coming from the ceiling, though the lizardy youth himself is kind of hard to see where he perches up overhead. "I mean, you /could/ try to call the cops but I dooon't think you're going to find much signal down here." After a moment of consideration: "... or much sympathy from them either, for that matter." Marrow laughs, although there is no warmth to it. "Reckless? You mean deliberate. Saves me having to maim everyone personally," she grins and rests the shotgun against her shoulder. Nice and obvious. "Now. You hand over all your maps, cameras, phones and money. Then maybe I let you leave with your pants and your dignity. The alternative is we beat the shit out of you, then I drag you to a guy I know in Chinatown who sells organs on the black market." She takes a step closer and to one side, giving Nick a little more fighting room. "He usually takes a kidney, but I hear Human eyes are going up in price." The humans shuffle uncomfortably as the two boys speak, but Marrow's ultimatum (and, perhaps, her shotgun) seem to speak to them somewhat more directly. The two in the back take a few hasty steps backward. "Maybe we'd better just clear out, huh?" says one of the explorers, the youngest of the group, who looks like he's about to break and run. The other, who had not yet spoken, has whipped out his phone and is frantically trying and failing to make a call. "Fuck that," says Mohawk. "They're bluffing, and there's more of us. They ain't gonna /shoot/ anyone." "I dunno, John," says the small man who had been in the lead. "And there's more of 'em than we can see, too. Look..." He raises his voice now. "We didn't know there were people living here, and we don't mean any harm alright? We'll just...go back the way we came, no harm, no foul." Nick growls, baring a mouthful of very canine teeth. He settles his weight lower as if ready to spring and flexes his hands, heavy black talons gleaming in the light. Marrow glances at Nick. "He's got me. If I shoot them then you'll break your teeth on the lead shot while you're eating 'em, so I'll just have to kill them with my bare hands." Her bloody claws grow again, until her hand makes Freddy Krueger look like a Disney character. "Outnumber us. Ah that's cute. The rats outnumber us, but that doesn't mean they can hurt the kid. Let alone me. What makes you think you knuckle dragging throwbacks are any better?" Whether it's Nick's fangs, Marrow's claws, or her speech, the humans finally lose their nerve and as one flee back toward the junction behind them. The one who had been trying to call 911 drops his phone in the process, and the youngest one is actually crying as he runs away. Nick's jaws snap audibly and his ears strain toward the sound of the fleeing humans. As the last of them rounds the corner, slipping and half-falling in the muck, the wolf boy surges forward snarling. The human scrambles to his feet, shrieking with horror, and vanishes into the junction. Nick stops, panting, and glances back at Marrow. "We're not /actually/ going to chase them down, are we?" There's a quiet THWP, something long and pink darting out in the darkness. Smacking into the phone, snatching it back up to the ceiling. "Well. We got a new phone out of it. Pretty nice one, too, I can sell this." Marrow shakes her hand as the bones retract. Splatters of blood and gore going everywhere, although she tries to keep it from hitting Nick or Anole. Not very hard but you can't have everything. "Chase them? No point," she remarks, sucking in a deep lungfull of smoke. "Who brings enough cash to deserve a mugging into a sewer? Besides there are a few feral dogs living in that direction. One wrong turn and we'll be the least of their worries." She shakes her head, then tucks the shotgun away and offers the joint around. Nick looks /almost/ disappointed at this. "Right, right. I guess they won't be coming back here, even if they get back upside without getting bitten." He settles for taking a long drag off of Marrow's joint before passing it up to Anole. "Head back for some snacks?" Anole scuttles a bit down the wall, grey-brown skin shifting back to green as he reaches for the joint. "We've still got mad post-Easter junk left. I think," he says with bright eagerness, "there's still a whole cache of Peeps Oreos around somewhere!" The /finest/ of dumpstered meal. "Peeps Oreos? Shit I don't think I've ever been high enough to think that would work," Marrow mutters, tapping on one of the pipes and then twisting a valve until fluid begins dripping onto the floor. "That should get rid of any evidence if the pigs bother coming this far. And put them off searching for the missing phone." "Those the pink ones that smell like a chemistry lab? Yeah, we still got /tons/ of that. Think I'll stick with the jelly beans and /actual/ Peeps, though." Nick crinkles his nose--at the gushing pipe or the Peeps Oreos or both. More quietly, looking down the tunnel whence the intruders fled, "I got a lot to learn about all this, still."