ArchivedLogs:Waking Up to Ash and Dust

Waking Up to Ash and Dust
Dramatis Personae B, Dusk, Eric, Ion, Isra, Kay, Regan	Tuesday, November 28, 2017 Part of Future Past TP.
Location <NYC> Bronx
The northernmost of New York's five boroughs, the Bronx... well. You might get shanked. It may be the city that never sleeps but you wouldn't know it from this neighborhood. There's not an /actual/ tumbleweed blowing down the street but there's a crumpled-up page of newspaper bouncing along and its rustle-skitter on the gritty-icy sidewalk produces a similar effect. Its path down the sidewalk bounces by a few shops, shuttered up for the night. A gas station long since closed, some place (with bars over its thick glass) optimistically à "New Horizons Juvenile Center", a check-cashing stop. The long low-slung building that runs opposite them is in good repair as compared to these others. It's the only lighted thing around here, too, though only marginally so. A yellow light from a back window, where a pair of police officers are munching on Chinese take-out while chatting; a cherry-red light near a side door where another young man is taking a smoke break. Somewhere near the back where a few cruisers are parked, another room has a game of sportsball on. The noises back here are intermittent but more raucous than the idle chatter in the front. In the rest of the building it is stone-quiet. The /bulk/ of the occupants are saying absolutely nothing, three long rows of depowered Sentinels in the long empty room at the center of the garage-like building, numbered and marked with NYPD insignia though their only sign of life just at the moment comes from the faint glow of charging lights at their backs. Not far down the street Regan has just killed the engine on a large black SUV. She's dressed warmly enough, lined leather jacket and lined leather gloves, tall black boots with black jeans tucked into them, black cap pulled down over her blonde hair and blue scarf wound around her neck and tucked into the jacket. As pep talks go she doesn't have a whole lot of one to offer her people. She reaches around behind her to grab a duffel bag with only a simple: "Don't get killed." Isra's only reply is a quick flash of fangs in the darkness before she unfolds herself from the back of the vehicle which, despite its bulk, still cramps her long limbs--especially the wings. These last, clad in the same dark gray skin-tight matte fabric that covers the rest of her body from neck to tail to toes, shiver loose from where she had folded them tightly against her back. She carries only a small lumbar pack, and no weapons. The long talons exposed by reinforced openings in her gloves and foot-coverings look more than adequate to that task. She ducks into the shadow of the SUV and tips her head back to scan the sky with bright green eyes for a moment before launching herself diagonally across the alley. This single leap, not fully engaging wings--the space is too narrow for proper flight--sends her well over fifteen feet up, and she rebounds off of the wall to land easily on the second storey rooftop. Moving in a low, stalking crouch, she makes her way toward their target and pauses at the last building adjoining the Sentinel storage compound. Her ears swivel to and fro and her nostrils flare as she looks for the best moment to cross over. Ion's teeth flash bright white in the dim light of the SUV. "{Never the plan, mama.}" His fist touches to his lips, pressing a kiss there with all the solemnity of a salute -- for whatever value he can /ever/ be called solemn. And then he's practically /tumbling/ out of the truck after Isra. "Ay-ay-ay winged-fucked-beasts they wait for no --" His subvocalized words are swallowed as he vanishes, barely a spark left behind and barely one, too, when he reappears on the roof a short distance from Isra. Less easily. Kind of an ungainly collapse. "Fff." He picks himself up, dusts himself off. Grunt. He also carries no weapons. No talons either. Just his /grin/. "No keeping up with you, hermana. Yee-ow." Guy Fawkes mask pulled up over his face, Eric's chuckle is unencumbered, waggling a finger at Regan with a hand holding a steel magazine over one hand. "We'll do our best, ma'am." His rakish grin can be heard, more than seen, through the cheap plastic mask. Picking up the long, heavy rifle from the trunk of the SUV, he hefts it up over his shoulder and checks the pistol hanging off of his waist. Eyes turning skyward, he scans the surrounding buildings as he hikes the sniper rifle over his shoulder. "Jesus, can't ya give a guy a minute to set up?" Eric gripes, as he watches Isra dart off ahead. The police officer steps quickly over to a building across the street. He grumbles quietly under his breath as he tugs a trash can over underneath a fire escape and clambers on top of it unsteadily. "Ugh, Ion, this shit smells worse than your cooking," he complains, reaching up to grab hold of a ladder rung and pull himself - and his gear - up onto the metal gridwork with a grunt. Setting up the rifle doesn't take too long as Eric settles down onto the fire escape floor and lays his equipment out around him - a flick of the bipod into position, a quick bit of murmured math as he looks down his scope and twists knobs this way and that. "Support in position." "Thanks, ma," Kay doesn't actually kiss so much as says 'mwah' a few inches off from Regan's cheek, his long legs making the hop down and subsequent landing crouch outside the vehicle spiderlike, since he isn't bothering to take his hands out of his god damn pockets. While everyone else takes up position, he swings his way around to the shadowed side of the vehicle only for a moment before openly sauntering down the sidewalk along the side of the building. With thick winter-appropriate hoodie -- black, nondescript but rather grubbily in theme with the environs, and hood pulled up over his head and faded jeans, tall shit-kicker boots -- he fits in with the rest of the derelict features. Just one more resident. Nevermind that under the hoodie he has on cobbled mismatched body armor, elbows and knee pads. Bony hips swinging, he wanders along the side of the complex with a token lack of urgency, head down and partially hidden -- possibly against a chill wind tunneling down between the buildings. And combs through the bodyheat signatures within the building. Muttering low, "...only two in the back. One guy outside -- few more by the vehicles. Hang on." There is a proximity /limit/ he has to work in, after all. Counting out the the exact number of warm bodies within the building will take a few minutes for him to actually traverse the length of the property. He fits a cigarette into the corner of his mouth as he goes. Lights it with an actual… lighter. Flk flk. Pfff. The last one out of the van is also the tiniest. B may be a little nervous here though bundled as ze is it's hard to see much of hir face under the grey hoodied and scarf, oddly gunmetal -- gauntlets? Those definitely aren't /gloves/ -- covering hir webbed hands, jeans, boots, cap, a flexible thin headset wrapped around hir head just under the cap. It's only belatedly that ze turns back to Regan, dark eyes opening slightly wider. "Oh! Oh, right. No. I'm not -- going to. Die. I think. Thanks. You too. Don't, I mean." Hir head ducks again as ze slips further away from the van, hands hanging heavily at hir sides until ze puts them in hir pockets. Ze follows Eric's path at first, towards the fire escape and then past it to a side alley to vanish. BYE. Skipping out on this mission entirely CLEARLY. Regan watches all these departures with a very small curl of smile toying at the corners of her mouth -- save for the last. Her brows lift just a tiny bit higher, her head dipping just a tiny bit lower. "I don't plan to, either," she assures B calmly. "We train for this." She slings the bag over one shoulder, disappearing as she shuts the van door. It isn't long afterward that one of the officers in the back begins choking on his orange chicken. Which wouldn't in itself be unusual if his companion wasn't shortly thereafter finding himself being strangled by the noodles of his lo mein, snaking out of his plastic takeout carton and wrapping themselves around his neck. The puck on the television screen in the other room is shooting itself straight off the ice and into the /head/ of the nearest officer. Zing-thwip-ping, caroming around the room with a rather surreal poolball crack that it really shouldn't be making. It's just so /satisfying/ when it ricochets from one skull to another. "You want to get the straggler outside, firebug?" Regan's voice is low in all their ears. "Indeed not." The ominous duality in Isra's speech is especially pronounced when she subvocalizes, the effect in the end not unlike synthetically modified voice of some comic book villain. "Next time I'll remember to scoop you up like a babe." Her ears prick forward and her muscles visibly tense beneath the bodysuit, but she waits until Regan's voice reaches her before moving again. Her eyes snap from one smoker to the other estimating their distance to contact. Then she backs away from the edge of the roof, making eye contact with Ion briefly--a sort of wordless "here's your head start"--before springing into the air and gliding across the alley. She mantles her wings, beating them hard twice to kill her momentum and land softly on the roof of the garage. She drops down into a low crouch at the rear of the building, taking cover only briefly--after all, the inhabitants of the room into which she is about to break and enter are quite busy succumbing to their respective suppers. The door, however, proves locked, and with one glance at the smart card reader beside it she sweeps a small bow and steps aside for Ion. "No offence querida but you don't, you don't look like such a comfortable --" Fzztpop! Ion doesn't quite manage to make his grin hang in the air a moment after him. But he is grinning when he vanishes and grinning when he reappears, /this/ time a split instant before Isra on the garage roof, "-- ride, huh. /Probably/ more comfortable than a heart attack though. Hmm, hmm." He's not bothering with cover, /subtle/ as a heart attack when he thwaps a hand down against the card reader. Spark-SPARK-sizzle. He shoulders it open when really turning the handle on its own probably would have done. "Ey we lose the leetleshark already?" He taptaptaps at his ear before remembering /oh/yeah he doesn't /get/ one of those -- it takes him a moment to /find/ the tiny hovering /bug/ that serves as his comm. "Leeeeeetleshark?" He pokes a finger at the flybot. "This work still? Huh? I go in. We go in." One of Eric's arms slides underneath the rifle, cradling it and steadying it carefully as he leans slightly in to peer down the scope that has the world painted in bright greens and oranges, sweeping his enhanced gaze over the yard and building. "I count three rows, looks like, of Sentinels. There's at least thirty of them, but I don't have clear visibility to see if there's more." Eric's voice is even and calm, a quiet murmur in everyone's ear. "So far, no alarms on the police bands. Let's keep it that way." "Thought you'd never ask," Kay's irreverent scratchy-coyote voice in everyone's ears manages to be, perhaps appropriately, rather warm and impossibly /fond/, opening a phone for just a moment, unlocking the screen and looking down at it. Nearing the young man outside, the small motes of light from their respective cigarettes link them to the screen's glow like a miniature constellation -- Kay closes it soon after and looks to the YOUTH with a huff of air, "Hey, man. You know where I can find the 7-Eleven?" Holding only the phone in his visible hands, he ambles towards the young man, mouth compressed at a diagonal line and eyebrows up. And when he reaches him, the phone is smashed INTO the the other man's face without break in his casual stride - a brief ripple of intense heat trails up the side of the building, and Kay extracts his fingers from the black and sizzling mess where the phone remains melted into the charred surface of the young man's skull. His other arm is already hooking under one of the crumpling figure's armpits to keep them standing, busily rummaging through his pockets for whatever key or card might get him through the door on this side. He has to maneuver his cigarette to the corner of his lips and squinch up the eye against the smoke on that side as he does. Hopefully, he can get the door open. For to drag the body inside and off the street through. "{Hearin' your ass loud and clear down here, sparkplug.} Don't front. {You'd love to be carried off by a winged lady.}" "We hear you." Dusk isn't actually here, but his voice is, even and warm and clear as though he /were/ here. "Don't worry. Disturb all the shit you want. /I'm/ watching your airwaves. I'll keep it that way." "I'm here." Small and /terse/, this is all that comes from B at first. Still out of sight. "I'm not getting any signals, I can't -- count --" You can almost /hear/ the frown in hir voice. "But there's power enough for more than thirty. Guys, stand back for a sec. Regan, Kay, you might want to hit them first." "Mmm." Regan reappears behind Kay, duffel still slung over her shoulder as she wanders in. She slips along the side of the building, first to claim a security card of her own from one of the (unconscious? Dead? Perhaps it'll all be the same soon) inert guards in the breakroom, slipping back out to poke her head into the Sentinel's docking bay. Her eyes widen juuust slightly at the garage. "Double that," she murmurs, very soft, after a moment, on the count of the Sentinels. "Kay, I'll take the south side." She doesn't bother with invisibility as she heads down towards it; it's not like it would fool robots, anyway. She makes sure to test her card on a back exit /before/ she sets down her duffel bag, starting to set her charges from it. "Please don't torch them until I'm out." As an after thought. Amused. Isra folds her wings in tight and follows Ion inside. "I haven't gotten any complaints." This is as close to petulance as she gets, picking her way between two unconscious cops and their scattered Chinese food. A white plastic bag flutters in the breeze from outside like a flag of surrender--if such flags were considerate enough to also present a smiley face and exhort all to Have A Nice Day. She pauses by the inside door and goes utterly still, listening. "Very good," this with perfect calm, "we will stand by." "{True enough, Dusk he got nothing but --}" This is undoubtedly leading nowhere but crass but it's cut off by Ion actually paying attention for once, turning to swat his tiny-robo-bug up into a palm and cup it as though he /needs/ to speak close to be heard. Which he doesn't. "How /back/ we talkin', {me and the gargoyle, we gonna get splatted here? 'cuz if we need to jump} I jump us like woah." Just in case he has a hand rested on Isra's arm. A heel tapped almost casually back against an outlet. No doubt, though, he's a /way/ less pleasant ride than Isra. But faster than a door in case of impending explosions. "Standing by," Eric says, watching the oddly colored blob that is Regan through the targeting scope on his rifle. A sound above him causes him to look up sharply, blinking, hand going to the pistol at his waist. He glares at the pigeon looking down at him from the fire escape level above. "You shit on me, I swear ta god, I've got a 50 cal round with ya name on it, bird." Still glaring, he turns back to the lens in front of him. Ion's distorted-loud voice in his ear makes the sniper wince, getting back into the correct position. "You don't need to swallow the damn thing, man." "Chk-ah!" Kay fires off a finger pistol in Regan's direction - whether or not she's able to see it at the expanding distance between them doesn't really matter, it's not like she isn't familiar with his preferred form of expressing 'understood'. "There's thinking with your cop parts," he praises absently over the frequency, starting briefly with a jumping of shoulders at the initial sight of… ALL those silent, unmoving sentinel figures, "Nothing you can't solve with a trigger finger… man. These guys are creepy." Even if he sounds a little /giddy/. While Regan sets up her charges, he takes the extra time to do some poking around, patting his hand against a beam here, opening cabinets and checking storage rooms with his borrowed key to get a general idea of what architectural support might get in the way, what might /explode/ inconveniently, what he might want to loot for himself or his brothers. Maybe he even pokes his head in briefly on Isra and Ion in their own back room, inventories them - ONE, TWO - maybe swipes a bite of Chinese food. By the time he's made his rounds, he'll be back on his own end. "Alright, boys n' girls," he fake-spits on either palm. His footsteps are loud in the resounding silence. As is the clap of hands together to warm up some friction. Kneeling down, he raises his fist over the head, preparing to strike the ground. And grins. "I'm lightin' it up in ten. Nine. Eight…" Outside, the cold barren night moans softly with the winter wind. A few soggy leaves limp a few feet over the pavement and then lie still. Then a bright orange light slams into every window pane, stabbing huge geometric shards of brilliance over the outside pavement, followed a millisecond later with an outward eruption of each windowpane. Thick rounded mushroom of flames roll up the outside walls to shred apart into black smoke against the night sky. "{Seven. Six. Five.}" B's voice can barely be heard, a tiny muted murmur in Vietnamese continuing the countdown. Then silence. Then -- not silence. The ensuing explosion drowns out B's sudden gasp, Kay's fire mirrored on the other side by the rat-tat-BOOM-tat-BOOM of Regan's charges detonating. Shattering glass, cracking stone. Sending metal bodies crumpling to the ground, flying into each other. It largely drowns out, too, the words that are following. Dusk's voice again. "-- signal, now," starts to come back in over the noise, "At least six." Pause. "Ten." Pause. "Twelve." Pause. "... two dozen. Or more. Think you woke 'em up, hermanos." "Then send them back to sleep." Regan's voice. Likely, presumably, somewhere out of blast range by now. "I'm reading fourteen." There's a droning now, rising over the smoke. A motorcycle -- of sorts, sleek sporty, blue-and-silver, heavy-modded chopper sporting a /toothy/ chomping-shark paintjob on its front and riding not on ground but veering overhead out of the alley to skirt up above the smoke. From within, there's the sound of metallic footsteps, tromping. Those Sentinels /not/ in pieces in the initial blow have, in fact, been alerted to the presence of the Brotherhood. Perhaps they're not happy about it. Two lines of somewhat /sooty/ metal bodies are emerging from opposite sides of the rubble. Long inured to such pyrotechnics, Isra braces rather dispassionately for the detonations. One wings comes up, perhaps reflexively, to shield her eyes, and the other wraps loosely around Ion. She keeps her face averted until the heat of the explosion subsides, and even so her pupils have contracted quite a bit when her eyes open again. If the million embers that rain down around them in the aftermath bothers her at all, she gives no token. Releasing Ion, she takes to the air in one mighty leap and a downward snap of powerful wings. Into the roiling smoke she banks, unsteady still for the chaotic currents that still stir the air around the erstwhile building. She circles around to the flank of the still-ragged formation of Sentinels, swooping low to grab a single unit lagging behind the others. It is not separated from its fellows for long; Isra swings it around and hurls it into the opposite flank, using the momentum to fling herself free again. "Aieeee." Ion does few things dispassionately, and he braces for the explosion with fervor. Tensed muscles, tensed grin, a wired-taut energy that courses through the both of them and has them on the /outside/ of the building in a lightning-snap jolt too quick to really notice (except for the sudden jarring buzz that thrums through Isra's body in the transition.) His face glows, his smile glows, with the flickering bits of ember and ash that flutter down around them. "{Salamander, boy, I don't /never/ get tired of that.}" He ducks low to avoid a large shard of -- well, it /used/ to be a Sentinel, maybe -- skittering through the air, and turns his hands up, fingers beckoning the line of robots. COME AT ME BR -- no, that's not what he's doing, actually, instead he's siphoning power out of one of the units, hair standing a little on end as the air around him charges. What power he sucks out he is quick to push /back/, bright and dancing in a sizzling skittering arc towards the bot closest to him. Wincing as the shockwave blows over him, Eric blinks several times to clear the smoke and dust out of his eyes. "Woke 'em up? I think you pissed 'em off. Engagin'." Eric's drawl comes over the radio, and the smile on his face is audible even over the poor wireless connection. A few seconds later, the first loud crack comes from his direction, hot gasses blowing out of the shark-style muzzle brake at the end of the rifle. One of the sentinels at the front of the line suddenly jumps backwards, a smoking fist-size hole in its center, sparking and dripping bits of molten metal and plastic from where the bullet exploded on impact. To the northern end of the building, where rubble clatters down amongst lashing flames, Kay rises from his kneel at the epicenter of a black starburst of soot and ash radiating from all sides and SHAKES out his head to rid it of a shower of dust and debris. Scrubbing at his hair with one hand, the other resting on his hip, he ignores the approaching Sentinels just long enough to grin at B's arrival through the massive HOLE in the floor and ceiling, "We got /landshark/ incoming, guys! Yow!" This last comes with him having to abruptly duck down under the bulky robot body Eric had sent flying. Heated sparks sizzle on his skin, and then begin to quickly fade with the /rest/ of the red sun-burned looking skin down his face and hands from being at… y'know, the center of an explosion. Around which time the first of the mobile Sentinels (some maybe limping or missing a limb, some NOT) have reached him. And he reaches them right BACK, hands landing flat against a metallic abdomen, his elbows fold like he's doing some sort of bizarre pushup against it, nearly pressing chest to chest, ferociously grinning face to pitiless metal face, /speaking/ into its face, "If they can get pissed--" when he shoves his hands forward it's with an explosion of rippling dry heat, chaotically rip-whipping mechanical bodies and flaming debris and some poor singed table indiscriminately, "Let's see if they can feel /fear/." He pushes further into the building, flames parting before him like a terrible sea. "How we looking?" "/Skyshark/, now," B corrects, /fiercer/ on this when hir voice comes through the comms. Hir bike skims down lower, bursting through the smoke on Kay's side to drop down, a few feet above the column of Sentinels. A twist of gauntleted hands against handlebars has the eyes of the grinning sharkface glowing bright. Similar beams to the ones that /propel/ the bike shoot out from its front -- the 'pew pew' noises don't actually come standard with the bike. That's just B, mouthing into hir headset. In the movies, this would probably be flawless. The columns would stay columns, the opponents would continue to progress one-by-one, continue to be picked off one-by-one. Someone, somewhere, though, programmed these things a little bit better than that. Ion ducks, /they/ duck -- at least the one in the front does; the others are already parting to avoid the thrown Sentinel. Not just parting but /forming/ up, splitting to flank outwards so that when they look upwards, /shoot/ upwards -- and they do -- its a veritable hail of hard black rounds that come from quite a /few/ directions, aimed largely for Isra's wings. One robot depowers. Zzzz. Sleep, now. That much can't really be helped. The nearer one, though, Ion's initial blast makes it stutter but not /stop/, instead splatting out a heavy large ball of webglue towards his hands. Thwwwp. Maybe the Sentinels are afraid of Kay. Maybe? Maybe not. Their flat blank faces don't register much, and this one in particular doesn't have much time to plead in the moments before its body crumples into char and twisted metal. But much as the ones on the other side, the /others/ are already shifting, flanking, getting themselves out of the path of the threat; ones that had been in the back of the column are coming around from somewhere at the sides. Darts are coming from somewhere aimed at Kay's neck. B's repulsor beams have maybe been deemed a higher-priority threat; the policebots have not unpacked their less-than-lethal weapons for this. They're just shooting, albeit currently aimed for the glowing eyes and glowing propulsion of hir bike. Perhaps if they get the smallshark sitting atop it's just a bonus. Isra takes evasive maneuvers, but the the sheer volume of rounds incoming overwhelms her. The hit--or hits, it's hard to say how many--tears a snarl from her lower vocal chords, and she falters in her chaotic flight path, shedding ten feet abruptly and beginning to tumble. Mid-stall, she tucks one wing and turns sharply toward the Sentinels to present a smaller profile--still falling, but falling with aim. If bowling with one of their own didn't work, she was going to try it herself, tackling the first target that presents itself and bearing it to the rubble-littered ground. Her claws scrabble for purchase on its metallic skin as she seeks to turn it into a giant bludgeon. "{Oh -- fuck /off/,}" Ion's hands have glued themselves together with the incoming SPLAT, and from the contorted look on his face the sizzling lighting strike didn't immediately /end/ with this capture. "Joke on you, tincan, I don't need 'em." He's rock-hopping back a few steps, chest heaving as another dose of power is sucked in from the Sentinel that just webbed him, muscles tensing up as he drains it dry. Eric's shots don't come evenly, one shot here, a quick one-two there, as he aims carefully around the team on the ground, but his fire is concentrated at the group of robots attacking B. One shot hits one of the robots center-mass, blowing it over onto the ground to sizzle merrily. Another tears the entire gun arm off another drone, sending it skitter-scattering across the floor. "Move back, B," Eric warns, another shot booming out across the ground and tossing up a sheet of dust and dirt around him. Down in the thick of it, Kay isn't spending a lot of time with picking out specific targets; his own clothes and hair /also/ smoldering, his hands raise up over his head to smack down against the ground. It throws up an outwardly erupting concussive burst that some darts may or may not manage to still penetrate - but their momentum is considerably canceled, their shape likely warped and blackened by the heat. It's possible this was even on purpose! Equally possible it was just a perk, as his primary goal seems primarily Maximum Blast Damage. Breathing harder, sweat tracing streaks through soot-smeared features, he follows up the first blast with a second one, pitched like a bowling ball along the ground after another cluster of Sentinels. The Sentinels are surprisingly quick to move out of the way of Isra's range -- that is, except the ones Ion is depowering, frozen still and quiet and /quite/ ready to be smashed into uselessness by the bludgeon-bot the gargoyle woman has commandeered. The one she is grappling with is grappling /back/, though, strong arms clenching tight around hers as it tries to wrest itself away. Those bots that have retreated from Isra are closing in around Ion. The zing of rubber bullets is probably not much kinder to flesh and bone than to wingsails. From B there's another volley of 'pew pew', another Sentinel reduced to shrapnel. But then one /actual/ bullet -- or maybe two? takes out one of the repulsors on B's bike. The hoverbike veers unsteadily, falling lower on its path -- clearly much harder to /steer/, now, B might not have such an easy time staying out of the way of /Eric's/ range. In other situations possibly the sharkpup would take the time to stabilize the bike but here there's more bullets incoming and, lower to the ground now ze just dives off it, tumble-rolling and /tackling/ a sentinel with the palms of hir gauntlets glowing as they slam hard into a metal body. Lower to the ground now it's clearer, too, the blood dripping from the side of hir leg, spattering down against the char-darkened metal. "-- I /still/ have nearly two dozen signals," /Dusk's/ voice, still so far removed from the fray, is oddly calm in the midst of the chaos. "But they're erratic as fuck. I don't think they stop registering even when they're mostly disabled, give me a --" He's stealing Ion's flybot. Zooming it away. It's not like Ion's /using/ it. A moment later: There's only three left by B and Kay. Ion, Isra, seven on you, but. Maybe if Ion lines 'em up you can knock 'em the fuck down." Not much kinder, no, and where some thud (battering but not /breaking/) against body armor underneath old brown hoodie, some register with a much less pleasant crack against arm, against /cheek/. Ion /sparks/. /That's/ going to bruise. But in the meantime there's a crackle growing around him, a rather /dangerous/ hum of energy charging the air. Metal in his vicinity thrums. /He/ thrums. All up and down the street, streetlights and houselights and signs go dark, the everpresent faint background hum of powerlines quiets. /Targeting/, maybe not so much; Ion's just sucking dry every shred of power he can reach. The small force of Sentinels in front of them included. His eyes have rolled back up into his skull, and it's hard to really tell amid all the flicker-glow of white-blue light around him whether the glint of teeth is grin or pain. The casing of glue around his hands chars brittle-black and breaks apart. The Sentinel in Isra's grasp, dented but undaunted, digs its metal fingers into her arms. She smashes it into the ground and then hooks the heavy thumbclaw of one wing around its manipulator, wrenching its grip loose. When she finally dislodges it--perhaps a function of Ion draining the power from every machine in the general vicinity--she throws it at the nearest cluster of its fellows, stumbling back as she does so. Her wings flare out, ungainly from recent injury, in an attempt to stabilize her, but she seems less concerned about falling than the rattling policebots and Ion at the center of his own electrical storm. A bullet thumps through one of the Sentinels trying to box in B, but that is the last of Eric's shots as the lights flicker and a blinding white-blue light wipes out everything else in his scope's vision. "Shit," he mutters, undoing his careful cradling of the sniper rifle to reach up and flick at the controls of his scope. Day time? Sure, it's totally day time, promise. "Shit, shit, shit," Eric mutters, pulling the magazine out of the gun and switching it for another one before he settles back against the metal grate and aims back down the scope. From Kay's corner - it's just a inferno. Lashing explosive whirlwinds of heat and flame, to look in his direction it's all so many bright buzzsaws and roostertails of fire punching up at the smoke-choked sky and then lashing away into smoke and winter winds. His sleeves have burnt away, his brow greasy, mouth open. It's harder to /not/ fry small AirSharks, but he's trying his damnest to keep B's proximity in mind with rushed glances, putting his back to the pup and just trusting that ze'll watch it for him. His grin has taken on a manic… /sheen/, when the bright clean-white light of electricity spears through the warm baleful glow of his own fires. He hasn't much choice but to ignore the pounding of a metal fist to the side of his cheekbone, seizing his hands to either side of (a Sentinel? a metalrobothard SKULL head, neck, it's all kind of a spiral) his enemies head and rupturing an explosion into it from either side. "...if those gloves are electric…" He is presumably panting for B's benefit. Taking a few steps back, towards B, away from powersink of electricity to the other side of the building. One Sentinel crashes into another and into another, a thunking domino of robots. Depowered, now, they may as well be heavy paperweights, crunching under the weight of Isra's throw to clank-topple one into the next and fall to the ground. The gloves, in fact, /are/ electric, unfortunately enough, given that the first slam of B's fist was accentuated by a beam of heat helping to weaken the metal. But even after shorting out and dying (the sharkpup gives a smallpained /yip/ as they fizzle around hir hands) they still have the benefit of being /sturdy/ pieces of armored metal to add some heft to B's already appreciable strength. The Sentinel is trying to rise, lifting a hand to crunch around hir neck and push hir back; ze thuds a gauntlet down into its face, lifting its head up to slam it back hard once more against the ground. Ze's twisting out of its failing grip -- /watching/ Kay's back, but the rather copious bloodloss in hir leg is giving hir a noticeable limp. It makes it hard to keep up with the last of the oncoming Sentinels, one final persistent machine lifting its arm to take aim at the firebug. Until, *blam*. Crumple, drop. A hole opens up straight through the machine's head. << Zombies or bots, seem to drop the same way. >> Regan's voice this time murmurs in each of their heads. On a fire escape across the street, she's lowering her weapon; not exactly a gun but some odd concoction of B's. It's probably starting to die the same death as everything else. She is making her way down to the street. << Ion. Need the car back. We're going home. >>