multiversallogs | you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Entry tags:

you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Who: Benji Ryans and You?
What: A transdimensional kidnapping might give anyone restless dreams.
Where: In your head. Or her head. Something like that.
When: Various nights through the week.
Notes: Please see the OOC post. Beneath the cut is a general idea of the setting in which you can tag in, but let me know if you'd like me to threadstart!
Warnings: Possible violence, depictions of ruined New York City.

Of those that know a traditional and contemporary Earth, maybe you can see the eroded shadow of a New York skyline which has had such a hard twenty-first century. The buildings are reduced to the skeletons of giants, ribcages and spines and skulls with gapped teeth. Yellow tape lies like dead snakes and dust covered from where it had once cordoned off areas but now it's all the same corrosive danger, every block this way to Harlem and back. It's war wrecked from the black crater radioactive heart that had cut out the soul of the city some thirty years ago and change, through to the slow decay of street terrorism and citizen warfare.

Night and day casts grey both and presents different dangers. The bright lights of a rebuilt and prospering Staten Island seems like an eternity away, and fences that once defined and regulated spaces have been torn apart, cut open, climbed over. Abandoned attempts at construction are like a graveyard for hope. Unbelievably, some people still live here. Some people even live in the tunnels beneath the pavement of the intact buildings boarded closed. Hazard symbols are spraypainted on the faces of buildings.

They come out at night, the robotic hellhounds that breathes steam out their ribcages, whose eyes turn red when they sense you are near. Needles in their mouths, sharp feet, klaxon howls, seven hundred pounds of steel, and artificial intelligence networked between them that sees herself as a pawn and a herd at the same time but carries out her coded marching orders because she lacks a name.

Tanks in the streets, but these are rarely abandoned. A wind howls through the once crowded city streets. The dream is vivid enough to taste ash in the air.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

At first she thinks it's Gotham, but the destruction is too great even for her home city. It got bad during No Man's Land, but not like this, the buildings were crumbled, destroyed by the earthquake but this is different. The destruction is worse, like something tore through the city. So, no, it's not Gotham and that's troubling. No matter how messed up Gotham is, at least she knows the city like the back of her hand; she doesn't recognize this place.

The second thing she realizes is that she's in civvies, which is also worrying, because having body armor and a utility belt full of crap makes life so much easier. Instead, she's in jeans, combat boots and a dark green military jacket over a black t-shirt. She checks her pockets for her phone - CiD - something but there's nothing to be found.

When she looks up at the sky, she notices that it's starting to darken, and she slips into a side alley with barely a second thought. She'd go up, but she can't judge what conditions these buildings are in (those that are even standing) and doesn't want to risk them crumbling under her feet. Staying quiet and hiding in the shadows will have to do for now, as she walks through the city searching for a sign of life.

It feels like she's trekking through No Man's Land, hands tight on her wheels as she manoeuvres around cracked and crumbling pavement, but somehow this is worse. Even at its worst, Gotham never felt quite so desolate - so hopeless.

She used to welcome the night, but as darkness falls a cold shiver wrack her body. A sense of foreboding as thick as the ash-stained air tightens her chest and quickens her breath.

The distant howls of the hellhounds sound, in their echoes, almost like laughter.

Before, he never slept. He'd spend days running from it, take any pill he could, legal or not, drank pot after pot of coffee -- ran, literally, sometimes, because holding still would make it so much harder to stay awake. It is impossible for the human body to not sleep and it caught up to him eventually, weakened him with microsleeps, fogged his brain until he could no longer function and then dragged him under with the bad dreams. The ones where he always died, and they felt so real, like memories -- he'd wake sweating and screaming and still feeling the knife in his throat, the bullet in his eye, the loss of a leg.

Now sleep is all he does. For hours. Sometimes at least half his day is spent asleep on whatever surface he collapses on first -- if not his bed, then a desk, the kitchen table. The floor. It's annoying but it's not so bad, because sometimes there are no dreams at all and the ones that do come are softer. They're still memories, but they're as often good as they are bad. In most of them, he's still a child, and he remembers parents that aren't truly his anymore, friends he's never actually met. The rest are usually women.

That's why he doesn't realise immediately that this is anything but really real; it doesn't have the same feel to it, that sense of memory, a soft sort of deja vu. And he isn't used to being a man.

He also has no idea where he is, which is going to be a little embarrassing later, and that is wrong. He always knows exactly where he is because he lived there once.

This can't be real, but it has to be real, it's not one of his dreams so it has to be real, but it can't be because he's in Baedal, unless Baedal ejected him again, but it should have sent him home, this isn't real, it is real, it can't be real, is he dead?, it --

He sees something moving -- something big and mean, what is that, a dog or something? what the fuck is that? -- and he swears under his breath and ducks behind a building. His hands are starting to shake, not from fear of it -- although there's a bit of that, too -- but at the sudden raging doubt about whether or not anything he is witnessing is hallucination. He doesn't, in the way of normal dreams, realise that he is dreaming.

Either this is real or he's mad.

It doesn't seem odd to Tatiana that she's in costume, or that her mask is missing. Even the devastation of New York - of her home, once upon a time - doesn't daze her.

No. She's merely sad as she walks the barren streets, examining the decaying shells of the city's structure. She can almost taste the fear and despair with the ash in her mouth.

It all feels so inevitable, somehow. She almost expects -

"MUTANT TARGET IDENTIFIED."

Well, fuck.

She turns just in time to see the giant robot lumbering toward her. She can smell the blood on it from here.

He's in Baedal. Shrieky doesn't question this, in the way that you just don't question things sometimes. This is just what Baedal is like now, or maybe what it's always been like, there's a sense of dread hanging over everything here, but none of it seems unusual. None seems unexpected to him.

He isn't wearing shoes, and the floor here is all broken glass and crumbling stone. Even the parts that shouldn't hurt him do, and he feels a very thinly repressed layer of anger at having to exist in any way shape or form. It's always terrible. Everything, everywhere, is completely and irredeemably painful and hated, and he is entirely certain of this.

He picks his way through the rubble, of one of the buildings, trying to figure out what neighborhood he's in. It's hard to tell now, but if he can find someone then he can ask for directions at least.

He can hear the distant buzzing of insects, like a swarm of flies just outside of the range of his vision. It sends a prickle of discomfort down the back of his neck, but he pushes the feeling aside.

As the sky grows dimmer, the shadows on the street grow longer, giving Stephanie the cover she needs to get wherever it is might be safe. Signs of life will, at least, be easier to pick out when everything is so dead around you, and so something snags her attention -- painted in unofficial sloppiness in yellow spray, and X marks a spot in the middle of the street she's found herself upon. It looks old, but not so old that whatever it indicates is irrelevant. Further down the street, marking an intersection headed right, there's another cross much like it, printed by the same, hurried hand.

But it isn't just the streets, plotting some unknown direction -- on the wall just beside her, printing over brick and mortar and the boarded over buildings, are words in big yellow, a warning:

-->
EVO HUNTER ROUTE
BE WARE

There's something mournful, about the klaxon howling. Which might make it appropriate, for what she sees next.

As her wheels rattle over debris, observing a street that, once upon a time, was once packed with business people in their suits, their dresses, their Gucci and their Hugo Boss, a sight may or may not have her stop. Hanging from the streetlamps are thick black chords of rope, almost military in issue and make, but what hangs from them is more important. Men and women both, with grey to black skin, missing shoes, faded clothing -- perhaps five? Their ages impossible to tell.

She has an alien urge -- she wants to cut them down. It's entirely incongruous with what she is capable of doing but also very external, a dream-memory implanted like a seed in her heart with sudden mourning. There are words in black paint on the glass and brick behind them, difficult to make out, but they ultimately say:

the road to hell
paved with good
intentions

Edited 2012-03-27 13:48 (UTC)

The dog is not making the same sounds of a dog, even though it casts a nearly canine shadow. There's a sudden hiss that sounds like gas or air or steam expelling through metal, although there are no tin-man creaks or groans with movement. Whatever this is, it's too sleek, too well designed to be clunky. There's a soft green tinge of light ahead of it, casting illumination long enough for Wolfgang to be able to see it where he's ducked and hidden around the corner. All of the fine details-- someone's details-- are there for consumption, the creeping light as the thing goes closer, the rubber-dulled steel feet, all four of them, quiet but unable to disguise exactly how heavy it sounds.

It's not organic, although it creeps as if the programmes and coding that drove it forward act like it might be.

The street doesn't bear much in the way of refuge. The abandoned buildings are just that: abandoned. Some boarded shut, some left in peace, plastic covering broken windows because almost all of them are. There's a shell of a car that sits, looted and gutted, on an angle on the curb.

When the thing moves forward enough to be sighted, it's head first coming around the corner -- a silver skull, almost maniacally creative with a sordid sense of humour, with green light glowing through its steel sockets, a lower jaw missing in favour of a long, charged needle that extends beneath fangs. The green light suddenly switches it red.

Edited 2012-03-27 13:42 (UTC)

What--

What is that?

It's an intrusive shard of memory that disturbs the fabric of this reality, and in some ways bearing some familiarity enough that the spell of unconscious dreaming is not yet broken. Suddenly, there's the blast of shotgun fire knifing through the sound of the street -- it doesn't aim at anything, but serves to get attention. A slender figure is half-shadowed at the mouth of an alleyway, holding awkwardly the shotgun she just fired. Benji is in her element in that she would rather not be, dark hair pulled back off her face, clothed in pragmatic cuts of clothing.

Too scared to shout out, voice lost, she gestures for Tatiana to hurry. To follow.

Somewhere along the way she picks up an abandoned tire iron, the weight reassuring in her hand - and she'd think it was ironic, maybe, if she could think about Jason Todd and the first time he met Batman. But she doesn't think of that, her mind too focused on the city around her, and the itching at the back of her mind like something is following her. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of orange, sometimes it's black, sometimes it's white gloves curled around the corner of a building. No matter what's there, it disappears when she turns to look.

She follows the X marks, of course she does, but the warning makes her pause. It's something to consider, whether continuing on this route is more dangerous than wandering, lost.

Something flutters by her, then, fabric caught in the wind and she reaches out to catch it despite already knowing what it is. Black, two white circles where eyes go. It's her Spoiler mask, except it's covered in blood. She lets it go, blood from the mask staining her hands in a way that blood shouldn't, but does now.

She follows the arrow.

Wolfgang stills when he sees that head coming around the corner, fear tightening his stomach into a hard ball. It doesn't make him question his surroundings at all, the impossibility of this -- very much the opposite, it's the sight of that machine-thing that convinces him this is real. It suddenly makes sense to him.

Because that thing, right there? It has Technocracy written all over it.

Identifying it is slightly less pressing than getting the hell away from it, though, and he immediately takes a few slow, cautious steps back, staying out of its green headlights. Can he outrun it? He's fast, but he has no idea if it's faster. Four legs, but made of metal, it looks like. If it's Technocracy, it might be Primium, which means magic might be useless. He won't know unless he tries it, but if he tries it, the backlash could --

Well. It won't be pleasant.

He glances behind him. Can it climb? (Can it fly?) If he can get up somewhere high where it can't follow, he has a better chance than trying to outrun or attack it. There, a few meters behind him, he can make out the skeletal remains of a fire escape, like the exposed spine of a building. It looks like it's barely hanging on and is definitely not safe but it's his best chance for getting somewhere defensible, so he starts slowly backing up in that direction, not wanting to run yet because doing so will almost certainly attract that thing's attention.

Something crunches, a metallic twang as rebar snaps beneath immense weight.

Behind him, far enough at the minimum possible distance such a thing could ever hope to sneak up on a person, is a shape. Shrieky won't have a name for it, but because this is a dream that is not entirely his own, the word sentry springs to mind. It's tall, an equine shape of a creature with a long neck, horse-skull head hovering some ten feet above the floor with glowing green out its steel sockets. Where a lower jaw would be, there is instead a tangle of tentacle-like sensors, glowing gently blue and bobbing in the air. At the end of its long neck is a body of silver, made of hot metal and sharp edges, and out its ribcage-like sides, plumes of steam eject.

It stands on four legs, one of which is raised, frozen in position, ending in a knife-like taper. It has come to a halt, those two expressionless green lights staring at Shrieky.

It doesn't register the humming of insectile buzz in the background. Arguably, Benji does. If the other shadow is Benji, anyway. A flash of light snags at Shrieky's periphery, a flashlight that is then throttled, wavering in a panic, switched off. It came from the direction of the yellow abandoned construction machinery away from the robot, as a slender, dark-shadowed shape darts behind one.

Edited 2012-03-28 00:55 (UTC)

It comes rolling out into view, its movements some mix of feline and arachnid - jerky stops and starts. A strong neck, a heavy looking body that likely contains a whole number of mechanical innovations, guarded by gapped sheets of metal that almost resemble an exposed ribcage. Wisps of steam escape through the slats, and steam rises off the metal itself as the moisture of the evening comes into contact with the steel that must be superheated to inspire such a reaction.

It's no taller than one meter off the ground, but it's body might nearly be six feet, with exception to a long tail that seems put on place by the same person who thought it a good idea to model its skull with fangs.

It's entirely within view by the time it even thinks to look down the street that Wolfgang ducked into, but it isn't slow about it - it's head turns, and as soon as it registers the man's presence, the green headlights flick to warning red. Which incidentally, does not mean stop. Abruptly, a yellow gas suddenly comes flooding from where the steam had been ejected, although it's meaningless to Wolfgang, ineffectual in this setting, but does sting at the eyes, the corners of his mouth.

In the same moment, the robot is quick to chase with a whrrr of machinery, driving Wolfgang towards the fire escape, head cocking up, needle glinting.

The little intrusions of her own subconscious twinge at the fabric of this reality, like a leaf caught in a spiderweb, disturbing it with minute vibrations. But the shape holds, the narrative continues to play, and she follows the X's laid down on the road by someone who had some sort of well-informed intention in doing so without making it necessarily very clear to outsiders. Like Stephanie.

Behind her, someone picks up the mask. But should she look behind her, the street is empty.

Ahead, a shape forms at the end of the road. The first one is more striking than the first by taking up ten feet of space upwards, mostly due to the length of its neck. An equine-like silhouette, four legged, long necked, all silver and machinery with glowing red emitting from its silver eye sockets, and entirely motionless, standing as still as a statue. Even the sensors, tentacle-like, slightly blue-glowing, and spilling out where a lower jaw would be, are in a suspended sort of animation of a machine shut off.

The second shape is a person, lying face down, unmoving, at its feet.

If someone were to call Steph reckless, they'd have a very good basis for their argument in how she barely even pauses before going to the motionless figure on the ground. Her approach is at least slightly careful, her eyes trained on the machine and the tire iron tight in her grip, ready to be used as a makeshift weapon should the machine attack. She doesn't think about how easy it would be for that thing to tear her in two; it's not the worst she's faced down, she can do this.

It's probably a trap, she thinks, but it's a good one because there's no way she could resist coming to help someone. Once she's at the figure, she crouches down, free hand going to their neck in search for a pulse. Her eyes don't leave the machine, watching for any sign of movement as she prays that she'll find a sign of life in the figure on the ground.

The urban ruin with its devastated skyline and blood-red skies is no stranger to Hellboy's mind. Sometimes it's New York, sometimes London or Singapore or any of a hundred other cities all around the world that he's traveled through over the years. Half the time, the reverie in which he sees these visions of What Might Come To Pass happens when he's at least ostensibly awake, albeit usually induced by circumstances that remind him of the destiny he's fought to deny. The one thing unusual about the dream this time, though, is that rather than Anung Un Rama, Great Beast of the Apocalypse, horned and crowned astride the seven-headed dragon Ogdru Jahad, Hellboy is merely himself, looking around cautiously as he wanders the streets.

When the first hellhound appears, green-eyed and on the prowl, it's almost a relief. "Okay, here we go," Hellboy says, mostly to himself. He doesn't know how he ended up in whichever city this is, but it was inevitable that something would come out to start some trouble. The hound's eyes turn red, and Hellboy sets himself and shouts, "Come on!" He doesn't have Excalibur, but his massive stone right hand serves well enough to catch the hound's charge short and send it flying back in a twisted heap of metal.

"BOOM!" He shouts, punctuating the force of his punch with satisfaction for how easily the robotic dog went down. Then three more pad out of the alley, with hints of metal glinting in the shadows suggesting that there are far more.

"...Crap." As tempting as it is to take on all comers, he knows that even he can be overwhelmed with sufficient numbers, and that sometimes it really is better to run. (He can thank Baba Yaga in particular for that hard-won lesson, and for just a moment he thinks he can hear her cackling in the distance.) He's not a terribly fast runner, but he's better than a guy his size might be expected to be, and he occasionally tosses a backfist with his right that sends the hound in the lead sprawling into the ones just behind it, opening up just a little bit more of a lead than he lost in taking the shot.

The chase takes them out into progressively larger streets with each turn, until Hellboy finally finds himself in blasted, wrecked Times Square, and what he sees pulls him up short and makes him think he might've had better luck with the robo-dogs. The square is host to a congregation of large, humanoid frog creatures. A small number in the middle are standing on a mound of human corpses, and holding up offal, skulls, and various other parts torn from the bodies at their feet as sacrifices. Many more surround them on the street, their hands outstretched, and extend long, tentacular tongues into the air. The tongues seem to glow a soft blue as they radiate out a cacophanous drone, while the frogs in the middle begin chanting prayers from a time long forgotten.

"Son of a..."

He has enough time to say "oh, fuck!" before his feet catch up to his brain and then he's just running. He's fast. It's probably faster.

But it's all metal, not organic -- he should be able to stop it. Not while he's running, he can't focus on it long enough, but if he can get up out of its reach, he can break it down. It is easy to make anything man-made malfunction; improbable over impossible, that's what he does.

Assuming it's not made of Primium. Assuming there's no countermagic woven into it. Assuming it can't climb. There are a lot of assumptions he has to make here and he doesn't like any of them.

No other choice. It'll catch up to him if he tries to run much farther, and he's really not keen on figuring out what that needle is for. He hits the sidewalk from the street and uses the momentum and the wall to leap for the lowest rung of the ladder. He catches it, thank God, and the whole thing creaks dangerously as he pulls himself upwards. He suspects that it can't support his weight for very long but he's got long legs and long arms and if he can make it all the way to the top he can probably reach the roof.

Please don't be able to fly, he's thinking fervently.

While he's climbing, he makes one offensive move -- attempting to disable it or slow it down. It's giving off steam, which means heat; it's easy enough to flip one force for another. Cold, he's thinking and it's concentrated straight at that thing, his willpower focused on this one act. He knows he can channel his will to alter reality; that's not a dream thing, that's a real life thing. It's as instinctive to him as breathing.

Shrieky twists on his heels, his attention torn between that thing (That sentry, a voice in the back of his mind whispers) and the brief flash of yellow torchlight off to the side.

He wants to run, away from the sentry and towards the light, but his feet feel hot with pain, and he knows that if it pursues him he stands no chance of outstripping it. For the moment it seems to be holding still, he doesn't know if it has any reason to try and hurt him, and he certainly doesn't want to give it one.

Swallowing hard, the idea crosses his mind that he can befriend it. It's just like a horse, only metal and swelteringly hot and sharp and terrifying, but he likes horses, so perhaps if he can communicate to it that he doesn't mean it any harm, and hasn't done anything wrong, perhaps it'll just pass him by?

He lifts both hands, in a gesture of peace and surrender, then opens his mouth to speak. At first, nothing comes out at all. It's like the words stick in his throat, and he can't exhale hard enough to make them come. Then he pushes, and what comes out is a creaking, clicking noise that can't be deciphered.

Shrieky stops, briefly, then tries again. He focuses on forming the words, but what comes out is the same, a strangled, broken string of shrieking noises. Realization dawns, and he claps a hand over his mouth, suddenly aghast. He can't speak. He's forgotten how. The words are still there, the sentences he wants to make fresh in his mind, but somehow they won't come. Fear of the sentry is secondary now, even if it doesn't kill him, the thought of losing his connection to the rest of the world petrifies him.

Of all the Gothamites to be caught in this subconscious tide, the projection of a man walking along a burnt rib of a skyscraper is the one to harken no mental association with his home; instead, Bruce Wayne, dressed in an improbable mixture of textiles, runs a quiet but efficient elimination game in his head in an effort to determine where he is. Combat boots make barely a whisper over steel, long wool coat catching the night air but doing nothing to unbalance him, ash and the smell of ionized particles touching his bare face.

It's not Baedal, and it's not anywhere he's been before - not in this state, anyway. He puzzles out an approximate year and location easily, but the reality, which slim card in a loaded deck faced every which way - that's harder. His PINpoint, which he usually carries even when it's supposedly on the fritz, has vanished from his person, as have most of the other things he usually has on him. But he's calm, watchful, walking from one end of a ruined highrise to the other, fingertips brushing against the corner beam when he gets there.

So far, he's alone.

It's sort of a curse of her own power that Benji is limited in the department of true surreality. A stitched combination of dreams can make a patchwork quilt of incongruous images that border towards the strange, but true creativity of things she's only imagined never fully resolve into her mind's eye solid enough to manifest in dreams.

Meanwhile: chanting frog people.

She panics, a temporarily invisible presence in her own dreaming, centred in no one place but instead infused throughout the fibres of her own dreaming, although the frog creatures and Hellboy's own fearsome presence are alien and exotic to her, toxins in blood. She cannot simply rend them apart, she is not her mother, she is certainly not her mother's mentor, Hokuto.

Slowly, her own subconscious inks into the gruesome display. Corpses can be identified as objects, dead meat that's quickly spoiling, to be buried or burned or offered in ritual. To Benji, they take on faces. The pastor, the ex-FRONTLINE officer who had been her friend, her aunt, all long pale limbs and scraggled dark hair, and countless others who had passed unfairly and too soon, always-- just piled like a podium, homogeneous flesh, as if dug up from the Ferrymen graveyard simply to serve these creatures--

The protesting sentiment is not spoken with words, but Hellboy can probably feel it, a mournful disgust that tremors through the fabric of the dream, before the dreamer finds feet on which to move, almost mindless. Either brave against danger or simply ignorant, Benji suddenly darts forward, appearing from the shadows out the corner of Hellboy's eye - a skinny figure, dark haired and dark clothed, apparently unarmed.

In the same way that negation gas does nothing to mute Wolfgang's ability, there is no magic woven into the make of the hunterbot, which does not mean that magic cannot affect it. There is too much certainty and belief in the way his own magic functions against machinery for the dream world to offer up any counter, and as coldness grips intangible fingers around the mechanics of the robot, steam suddenly floods with an unwilling hiss, almost drowning out the noxious yellow it had began emitting. Momentum of state of the art technology has the hunterbot surging forward, leaping-- it cannot fly, but it can jump, and other things one might not expect of human technology-- before something disables.

The needle misses its target, sense of heat-based vision obscures, internal compass shorting out, and the thing is in for a clumsy landing, but not before one powerful shoulder clashes with the rickety fire escape. It does not drag the structure down as it may have been calculating, but steel screeches and groans, shaking beneath Wolfgang's hands and feet and close to knocking him free. Judging by the thrash of metal tail below, the creature is not utterly down for the count.

Below is a storm of metal, steam, and yellow vapour. Above, two hands spring from the shadows and grip the fabric at Wolfgang's shoulder, another on his arm. The rest of Benji resolves rather quickly, all fear-paleness and greasy black curls, and she hauls Wolfgang that last foot towards the edge of the rooftop where they may spill their way over the edge and out of harm's way. Or so goes the theory.

But not quite.

The sound is minute, but up here, anything that isn't the wind rushing by or the general giant groans of these wrecked structures is probably noticeable by those keen enough to listen for it. It's sort of like a camera's shutter whir of machinery, but the actual impact of its feet are completely silenced, dulled with rubber and whatever suction function that makes it able to crawl up the side of a nearby piece of exposed iron. Insectile and less than a foot long in length, it remains at a distance from Bruce around the corner, some piece of its 'body' slickly turning until a red eye focuses on the shape he's made at the corner of the skeletal highrise.

One gets the sense, if one believes in that kind of thing, that one is being watched.

But just as immediate as this little robotic creation has come into view, there's the sudden crack of a handgun going off from within the eviscerated building, down a level. There's a twang as the bullet hits metal, but not the insectile robot it was probably aiming for. Unless it was aimed for Bruce, but then the gunman would be even more inept, although as it stands, it's a tricky angle to score.

The robot doesn't really react, in the way that machines. Don't.

The faces that come into focus don't spark any recognition in Hellboy, but he's met and forgotten so many faces in his life that it doesn't surprise him either, doesn't jar him from being in the dream.

When Benji runs out, Hellboy is momentarily concerned that there's now a third threat, but no, there's no recognition there either; just some skinny kid. (He hasn't really gotten a good enough look yet to judge truly, but at his age he's inclined to consider a lot of folks kids.) Turning to face her, he looks quickly at the frogs to his left and the robot hounds to his right.

"Get down, kid!" he shouts at Benji as he runs in her direction. As he runs, he reaches down and draws his gun from its holster. His old gun -- a cannon of a revolver given to him by WWII superhero soldier the Torch of Liberty -- lost in the ocean years ago. Morgan Le Fay once commented on how much more natural he felt with a sword instead of a gun, but this gun is as much a reminder of an old, dead friend as it is a weapon.

The gun doesn't hold nearly enough bullets to take down a significant number of either group facing them, and he's always been a terrible shot anyway, but he fires what he's got into the central cluster of frog monsters anyway, figuring that he'll still hit something they don't want holes put in. Three shots in, and he reaches Benji, ready to interpose his bulk as a shield, herd her somewhere away from the fight, or do whatever else comes up as a better option.

Maybe they'll take each other out, he thinks to himself in a moment of rarely-rewarded optimism.

Edited 2012-03-28 05:32 (UTC)

The command from Hellboy cuts through the irrational need to get to the bodies like a knife, a sudden dose of common sense that is about as ingrained as anything when it comes to living in a place like this. It manifests as Benji suddenly folding, hands smacking against the concrete as she does indeed get down, ducking as gunfire thunders, a spray of bullets tearing through the flesh of the alien creatures, knocking them off their perch to spill and join the bodies they were standing upon.

By the time Hellboy is reaching for her, she's agreeably on her feet again - no combatant, she is at least well-versed in the art of retreat and ducking for cover, and with only a briefly startled, wordless sound, she moves in tandem as Hellboy insinuates himself between herself and danger. Also moving with him on the retreat, even as his own self-- whatever he is, something powerful enough to backhand the hunterbots like they're made of tin, possibly it's a power, yes, probably-- is almost as alarming as the frog creatures.

The sight of something else halts her momentum, however, almost jumping back against Hellboy. Of the same make as the hunterbots, but a wildly different design - ten foot tall, the sentry robot is more equine, long necked, eyes already red as steam wisps around from the slats in its machinery and off its superheated metal flanks. It stands still and imposing (for some) down the way of the blasted 47th Street, suggesting that it is not designed for close combat.

Implying in turn that it is built for range, as the shapes of machine gun turrets settling into position are clearly visible even beneath a red sky. This may be good or bad, depending on how fast they can move.

Benji, meanwhile, has decided that Hellboy cannot be so bad, because she cries a rough sounding, "Run!" just in case he isn't capable of withstanding machine gun fire, and darts off at a different angle, wherever the shadows look safest.

The robot doesn't move, yet. Movement in reaction to her presence is a slightly too organic thing to expect of a machine. Its head doesn't even tilt. Meanwhile, Stephanie's fingers do find that flutter of a pulse thrumming beneath cool skin, but the person is out cold - a girl with closely cropped hair, living it rough out here, a few bumps and bruises and burn marks where her coat sleeve has sealed against burned skin in a slash of some sort of attack. Her face is-- it is difficult, actually, for Stephanie to get a sense of what she looks like, even if she stares down at her, the image just slips out of her mind as soon as she glances away.

But one thing Stephanie can detect is that she was not injured into unconsciousness. Which is not a bad thing. Blunt force trauma, the danger of comas and brain damage. No, she seems to almost be drugged, especially when a low moan eases out of her lungs, eyes moving beneath her lids.

Then, quite suddenly, the night is filled with noise.

It's a klaxon siren that suddenly emits from the tall robot they've huddled in front of, a noise that seems to both function to signal its presence in the massive wreckage of a city as well as do harm to those near enough to endure the sound. It's so loud it's painful, and drowns out all other noise - and so as one knife-like leg suddenly lifts, it does so in seeming silence beneath the klaxon.

It comes down again with the intention to step on the mostly unconscious woman. Or Stephanie. Whichever one gets in the way first.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 5

you can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject