multiversallogs | plot } the creatures descend.

plot } the creatures descend.

Who: Everyone!
What: Creatures descend!
Where: All across the city, although attacks will be most fervent at its heart.
When: Friday/Veerdi evening and into the week.
Notes: Slow and back-tagging is, as always, permitted. If you are confused, look at these two posts for more information.
Warnings: Violence, creepiness, swearing knowing these characters.

On Veerdi, the presence of the creatures reaches a fever pitch. Something has provoked them into launching an all-out assault, though it is one that begins slowly. The pipe-crawlers, generally harmless though they may be, are seen across homes in Baedal, sneaking up through the pipes and into bathtub drains or sinks. They come by the dozens, and their keening makes most homeowners nauseated--but it's their appearance that leads to a number of distressed Network calls.

This is just the distraction for the rest.

The call of the crawlers draws in the armored, sickly creatures with the tiny primates carried inside of it. They are inelegantly lumbering, but much faster than one might expect, and certainly hostile. They trudge across the city, barreling over anyone who gets in their path and leaving them half-crushed in the street. They're certainly unsettling in their obvious unhealthiness, and the disease-ridden animals they carry are downright vicious, especially once they escape (messily, bloodily) from their fleshy cage.

It's the birds that are the worst, though; the cleverest, and the cruelest.

These strange black birds are resistant to typical attacks and flying in large groups. They descend on pedestrians, picking at their eyes and faces, ready to rapidly tear flesh from bone until there's nothing left but skeletal remains. They fly out of range when they can, only to divebomb anyone who might think they've escaped.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In the distance, through the flapping wings and the bird calls, there's a clip-clop sound of hooves rapidly approaching. The cadence is all wrong for a horse, however, two legged rather than four. The hoof noises are finally accompanied by a massive shape of red and tan, wielding a golden sword.

"BOOM!" Hellboy shouts as he barrels into the midst of the crows. He lashes out with both the sword, and the massive stone artifact that is his right hand. After a few seconds of slashing and crushing, the cloud of birds disperses, taking off for easier pickings.

As they fly away, he calls after them, "Yeah, you better run!" He takes a moment to look down at himself -- this coat survived with much less damage than its predecessor -- then walks over and knocks on the door of the bookstore. "Hello? I'm collecting for the March of Dimes?"

"I think those bastards picked my pockets, I'm clean out." Mabel's pretty damn cheery considering the gashes on her arms and face. There are a few of those odd pebble remains of the birds - she'd be damned if she picked them up - but they got their far share. She had twisted strips of her jacket around her hands to keep her grip on the bat. Another piece of clothing down the drain.

There's a muffled banging noise from the back. "Stay in there!" she shouts, and it stops. She checks herself over quickly - quite a few wounds were superficial, about three of them would need stitches as far as she could tell - and dismisses any hint of self-concern with a grin. "Next time around, I'm going for the sword. Thanks, big guy."

"No problem," Hellboy says, then clicks his tongue with a little tsk sound when he sees the state of her injuries. He's got a few cuts of his own, but Mabel can probably see that they're slowly closing by themselves.

"Come on. Let's get those folks somewhere safer, then get you patched up. I don't think the birds'll try again while I'm around, but if you've got any offensive magic, that's your best bet against them."

"I've had worse." She just had to throw that protest out there, she knew there wasn't going to be any arguing over it. Now, if Hellboy were closer to her size and therefore easier to threaten, she'd have some grounds to work off of.

"I'm a defense, basic-warder kinda girl, unfortunately." The civilians, scared shitless, get let out after she struggles with their door a bit. She should have warded it, now that she thinks about it, but she just didn't have the time. Future reference.

"You know what I really need? A shotgun."

Hellboy was going to have a hell of a time convincing her to settle down.

The look Hellboy gives Mabel says that no, there will be no argument, she will get patched up before going back out. He sheathes his sword and fumbles a bit with his CiD (it can hardly be considered proper use when he's only got one fully functioning hand for the purpose), nodding with a noncommittal grunt at her assessment of her magic skills.

"You'll have to talk to Sir Integra about that," he says about the shotgun idea, then shows her the map on his CiD, pointing to a spot on it. "Okay, the nearest place I saw that'd make a good shelter is here. We'll put the civilians between us. I'll take point, you bring up the rear. Your bat should be good for the other stuff out there, but shout if you get birds and I'll shoo them off. All right?"

He may never feel right with being a king, but leading small teams in the field is something he's long experienced with.

"Damn," she mutters. She wants a shotgun right now. Well, it's not like Hellboy was going to be producing one from his coat. Shouldering the bat, she gathers the three hapless civilians (none of this was their fault, poor things, she ought to be a little more understanding about their uselessness. She's not.)

"Better than anything I've got. Let's kick some ass."

Yes, sorry, Hellboy does not carry shotguns on him for handing out. He does, however, say, "All right," and take a moment to light up a cigar (striking the wooden match on the rough stone of his Right Hand) before drawing his sword and leading the way out.

High in the air, just outside the store, the surviving crows gather in a cloud. They start a dive-bombing run as the group leaves the sanctuary of the bookstore, but pull up short when Hellboy points up at them and shouts, "HEY!" Instead, they content themselves with hovering out of reach overhead, some of them cawing out, "Beast! Beast! Beast!" and one scalawag adding in, "The devil will never sit on the Throne of England!"

The group darts through streets and alleys, combat ringing out in the distance on all sides. After three quarters of a mile, they get about halfway across a large thoroughfare when a sewer grate near them pops off and a large swarm of many-handed lizards boil up out of the hole, unleashing their nauseating screech as they charge.

That was more up her alley, and they had all the the advantages of an open street (when the majority of your work is done in tight, confined spaces like houses or thick woods, this is a blessing).

Mabel tries to fill in the gaps of protection between the creatures and the civilians. She's pretty apt at her bat, bashing a number of them good, but it was wearing her down. "Getting a gun for sure," she huffs, her eyes flickering up for a quick check on the birds. They reminded out of reach, but they seemed to be enjoying the show. Feathered bastards.

After their buddies get killed, the remaining crawlers quickly regroup, and then simultaneously unleash their infrasonic scream. The civilians immediately double over and lose their lunches. Hellboy staggers but keeps it together, teeth gritted as he steps up and starts dealing out quick stabby death to the lizards.

The first one falls off his blade when he pulls it off, but the ones after that stick, quickly presenting the appearance of someone preparing a pipe-crawler shish kebab.

Mabel had enough of her share of blows to the gut and bouts of alcohol poisoning to know better than to cover her mouth, lurching as she tries to keep her balance and puke at the same time. When the scream is finally over, she chokes down the impulse to retch some more and wipes unceremoniously at her mouth, pulling herself upright with a mixture of willpower and adrenaline.

One of the crows, deciding to be a smartass, swoops in just close enough to shriek at her. "Return, little dead girl! Return to your purpose!"

She swipes at it with the bat as it flies off, switching her focus to turning the crawlers into goo. Her head was starting to swim and her stomach was still rolling. "We gotta move, big guy!"

"In a second!" he growls out through clenched teeth. His sword is all clogged up now, but rather than deal with that right off, he instead scoops up the sewer grate, drops it on the few remaining crawlers, and stomps down on it with one hoof and a lot of his weight. The resulting simultaneous kill is messy, but the resulting silence is sweet.

Hellboy sweeps two fingers of his Right Hand down the length of Excalibur's blade shoving off all of the lizards, then gives it a quick wipe on the sleeve of his coat and sheathes it. "Okay, everybody move, let's go." The civilians are still trying to recover from the attack, but Hellboy scoops up the two who are doing worst off and unceremoniously puts them one over each shoulder. Mabel will presumably have to help the third person, though perhaps not using Hellboy's method. "Not much further. Come on."

Mabel grabbed the third person, supporting most of his weight with her shoulder, half dragging him down the street. She's keeps darting back and forth from the skyline and the ground; the next attack could come from anywhere, if one was coming at all.

"This is starting to piss me off," she huffs. Something's moving in the shadows to her left, but when she turns to look at it, it's gone. She can't tell if it was a creature, or something else. It's not worth investigating unless it's going to attack them.

The jostling they receive causes Hellboy's cargo to retch just a little bit more than they already had, adding a wash to the repair work that his coat was already going to need later. The birds continue to circle overhead, but the occasional glare skyward seems to be enough to keep them from making another play, at least for the moment. Down one alley, something like a huge armadillo can be seen trundling along the street on the other side of the block.

A few blocks after that, Hellboy leads them down an alley, narrow enough that the upper levels of the buildings on either side offer some cover from above but barely wide enough to allow his bulk room to maneuver.

"Over here," he says as he sets the two he was carrying down next to a door set into one of the buildings. He hadn't had time to check before, but a quick jiggle of the door handle reveals that it's actually locked. "Crap. Hang on." The easy solution would've been to bust the door open, but they need it intact, so instead he fishes a couple bits of long thin metal out of his belt and picks the lock. "Okay, everyone. Inside, quickly."

There's a brief moment of confusion (not helped by lingering effects of nausea) - were they going to stay here? Wasn't there some sort of centralized secure place to get to? - but Mabel quickly realizes there's not a whole hell of a lot of choice in the matter, and Hellboy knows what he's doing. She drags her groaning charge inside, deposits him as gently as she can (which isn't very gently, right now), and braces her hands against her knees.

A quick scan of the building showed that it seemed relatively secure,with windows that were small covered in bars, other doors that were tightly locked, and lacking in a great deal of plumbing that would cause problems. The civilians were in rough shape, but Mabel was chalking their survival up as a solid win at the moment.

She's starting to catch her breath again. "Don't know what we'd do without you, Hellboy."

As far as Hellboy knows, there isn't currently a central shelter. Maybe he'll find out about one later and he'll get them shuffled over there then, but for now this is it. It's pretty bare inside, but the shelving on the walls, the secure doors, and some of the scrapes on the stone floor suggest that this might've been some sort of storage room at some point. That the place is so bare, however, does present one sort of problem, and he scratches at the little goatee on his chin as he acknowledges it.

"Well, you might have to manage for a little while." Reaching into his coat, he pulls a slightly battered old-fashioned metal canteen from its spot on the back of his belt, shakes it to confirm that it has a decent amount of water in it, and hands it to Mabel. "Here. I'm going to go get some supplies. Lock the door behind me and hold down the fort until I get back."

Mabel opens her mouth to protest and snaps it shut again. Now was not the greatest time and it didn't take a genius to tell she wasn't in the best shape to go back out again.

"Alright; we'll make sure this place is secure." Which means she'll do it; the civilians didn't seem like they'd be able to stand.

Hellboy nods, then slips out of the door as quickly as he can. He's gone for about an hour, although he checks in with Mabel every so often via text. (The spelling isn't the greatest, because he's in a hurry and the keyboard isn't so great for one handed typing, but he manages.)

When he returns, he picks the lock again to get back in -- it's a skill that he doesn't get nearly enough changes to have fun with -- then drags in a fairly hefty sack with a few portable cooler packs hanging off of it by their straps, like Santa Claus on a beach holiday.

"Okay. I had to hit up a couple places to get everything, but I think this should be enough to last this place a while." There's food and water, a gas-powered portable stove, a couple of flashlights and lanterns -- apparently thinking ahead, not sure whether the room still had electricity -- and an assortment of first aid supplies.

Mabel is well on her way to clawing down the walls when he returns; her wounds have long stopped bleeding, her muscles rested enough. She digs through the first aid supplies in a hurry, slapping a bandage on the worst of them (no antiseptic - her wounds never got infected).

"You left out the kitchen sink," she says, her tone admiring. "I think they'll be alright with this; I'm ready to bounce."

"I went looking, but the sinks all had pipe-crawlers in 'em." He's probably not really serious, but the way he says it sounds like it was truly a tragedy.

He gives the quickness of Mabel's patch work a brief side-eye as he lays out the remaining contents, then puts his canteen back on his belt. "You folks going to be okay here now?" The civilians nod and mumble through their thanks, and he nods in return, satisfied. "Okay. Give a call if there's a problem. Let's go, Mabel."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

plot } the creatures descend.

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