Logs:Call to Arms
| Call to Arms | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae
Jax, Hive, Hive, Hive, Hive, Hive, Hive, Halim, Joshua, Mirror | |
| In Absentia
Dusk, Shane, Taylor, Tian-shin, Horus, Ion, Kadar, Lucien, DJ |
2025-01-16 << Worst reunion tour ever. Where do we begin? >> |
| Location | |
--- (a short while later) The feel of the massive presence that's rippling through the city is rougher than the team remembers. Abrasive, even at this size, and fluctuating with a worrying instability that picks up and new minds at its fringes without much careful control. It thrusts rough and forceful into their minds. It brings with it a shock of headache and nausea and, lower, sicker, a fury and grief that yanks them in along with it. << Dusk is alive. >> There's no relief, no happiness, together with this news, just an ozone-tinged braindump of agonizing context. Out in Astoria, they don't need a lot of push to tip over into fury, caught in the middle of writing-and-discarding a series of increasingly vitriolic texts to Xavier's staff. Probably these were never getting sent anyway, simply blowing off some anger for the sake of doing something other than spinning his wheels, but just in case they had the bad idea to change their minds the sudden psychic shock is jolting this phone out of their hands to crack its screen thoroughly on the hard balcony floor. They're leaning heavily into the wide mental net, like the shock of this will steady, somewhat, if it's distributed. Does it help? It doesn't seem to help, some clawing-cloying guilt << (can't protect our kid) >> << (couldn't protect our team) >> that runs a severe risk of dragging them all into this spiral as well. In the upper level of Hellhound Bikes, they are stopping mid-sentence and leaning forward to brace the heels of their hands on the table's edge, pressing until the pain makes them real again. Not real enough to know how to feel about the information that's just been poured into them, but their lifelong experience with such altered states is an anchor in its own way. Their eyes track to one of the many (too many) empty chairs and fix on it hard as if that would summon Tian-shin from where she's still quarantined. << (That bitch going down,) >> isn't calm so much as just dull and dissociated and matter-of-fact. Just down the table from where they're thinking murderous thoughts in the direction of Westchester, they are pulling knees up tight against their chest, curling into a small compact ball in the chair. They, too, instinctively lean into the shared mental space, less for grounding and more in hopes it will clarify how they ought to be feeling. It works, in a way: cranky, contrary, a snap decision that the others here are going about this all wrong, illuminating by example how not to react. This comes with shifting recollections of hiding fearful and determined in L'Entente, toiling at proving her innocence before her former comrades kill her over a transgression not-hers; it comes with recollections of long stints on the farm fretting over her Ba's closed bedroom door and wondering if they'd lost one more at Lassiter after all; it comes with the helter-skelter flight home through dimensions and no time to mourn because there was work still to be done. << not like that we can't, >> snaps sharptoothed into their midst, venomous across the boroughs, << he'll need us with some spine. >> In their tiny East Village efficiency, they are sitting seiza at the altar, wreathed in spice-scented smoke. The words of the Daimoku stutter in their heart and on their lips, the chanting silenced by a sharp indrawn breath. They try to hold in the grief and horror and rage as they must do to be of any use to the team. And to Dusk. They let out the breath back out slow, trusting their burden for a moment to their greater self(ves) -- careful by habit even at a safe physical remove. They must and will master it, and they start again at "namu myōhō renge kyō." In Greenwich their panicked futile attempt to resist the psionic intrusion gives way almost instantly to rage. << (Are we trying to kill --) >> That rage, too, dies in an instant with their collective comprehension, and they sag back against their kitchen counter, hand clapping to their mouth, eyes staring through the pasta as it starts to boil over. But then they sink willingly into the million horrors they've spun tight to make space for something almost like calm, even if it's only in the eye of a storm. Even so, they're scrabbling for focus. They straighten, click off the stove, and start cleaning up the mess. << Worst reunion tour ever. Where do we begin? >> In quarantine in Westchester, the shock of this news has had time -- a very short time, but even so -- to dull into a quiet and guilty kind of relief: something to do, somewhere to focus, the urgency of another fight sharpening the listless grey world back into a terrifying and painful-bright color. The question tumbles overlapping images in their mind -- the empty Danger Room, a blank canvas that they won't yet know how to fill for this new and unknown adversary; Ion battered and broken in a guest room bed; photojournalist images of a war halfway across the world; a small waspish robot projecting PROJECT WIDEAWAKE beside a sleek hovercraft into the air. There are other images that flicker brief but aren't given the space to surface -- Dusk effortlessly overturning a Company X truck; the steady level feel of Taylor's mind grounding them in the middle of chaos, a fierce sharp-clawed whirlwind of blue yanking Sentinels from the air. These get tucked away for later; for now: << Take the weekend. Feel what you need to feel. New training schedule starts Monday. >> --- The celebratory air has not quite died down, though now that night has fallen there are fewer people in the streets than there had been earlier. The ones who are still out are none too pleased about the IDF drone that is fast incoming -- it's sent many hastening for cover. Even less pleased when it veers into the makeshift clinic that's been set up in one of the houses, or what's left of one of the houses; it drops in through a shattered window, tearing at the plastic sheeting over it, which (dusty-white and fluttering) makes it now look like something of a ghost come to haunt the medics. A very curt ghost, speaking up now in Halim's brusque voice: "Your team needs you." Joshua would probably be giving a very flat look to the drone if he were looking up. He isn't, hands very full and attention quite focused on the tiny and severely malnourished infant in them. "Little busy." "OK." The drone starts back toward the window, and stops again quickly enough it looks like a brief stutter of movement. "Dusk is alive." A short distance away, Mirror has just gotten down for a quick between-shifts nap. They're stirring on their cot at the commotion, and still rubbing blearily at their eyes when this information comes. Their form is shifting, melting; a moment later, a second Joshua is beside the first, verrry gently taking his tiny patient from his arms. "Could've led with that." Wait, second Joshua? Where? There's only one left there to tend the child -- -- no, nevermind, there's the second, reappearing just long enough to set a hand on the drone and vanish it before he disappears again. ---
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