multiversallogs | The City at Large & Mission Alpha

Entry tags:

The City at Large & Mission Alpha

Who: OPEN to all residents.
What: The ant-situation is changing!
Where: Throughout the city.
When: NOW. This thread will likely cover a few days.
Warnings: To be updated.

Dear Mission Alpha,

It is your undeniable privilege to bring back as many of the so-called 'crow pearls' as possible to the Temple. Any temple. No one important cares how you do it, just get it done. Try to be substantial about it, let's say more than 50, hmm? The actual task here is to deprive our deranged ant-friends of as many pearls as possible, but no one is going to be rewarded for stories like 'oh we absolutely threw two tons of pearls down the whirlpool, we swear on our broodmother's grave', okay? Okay. Peachy. Bring me the pearls, chop chop.

Your totally sweet gods have decided to lend you some ...boons I guess, however that goes, to aid you in your quest. Useful objects. For you, my gifted pilferers and negotiators:

A Skeleton Key - it will open any unwarded lock. It will not open warded locks. That means magical locks. No magical locks will be opened with this key. Unless the magic is broken first. Good luck with that.

Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card - I realize no one has bothered to build proper jail cells in Our City yet so it's more of a Fend-off-The-Local-Authorities-Free Card but that's not as catchy. Think of it as An Official Voucher From the Gods that says you're on Official Twelve Point Business and can't be arrested right now. Keep it for the Sheriffs as it might not have the desired effect the Militia.

Privacy Ward or App For Your CiD - Well you don't want to get caught leaking signals and communication everywhere, do you.

It is a week and some change after the ants first noticeably began their labour and it seems they have finished rebuilding their houses. It's hard to see exactly what is going on from the ground, but the brave few who have ventured into and up the hives or climbed neighbouring buildings get a good enough view. The rooftops are now crowned with organic spires, much like malformed and undernourished termite nests reaching for the heavens. They are not the best constructs, some of them have broken off or imploded, but the majority of the spires stand.

Then one morning, individual ants are seen climbing to the very top of their towers. They then sit still, mandibles locked and antennae arched. It's hours before any change becomes noticeable, and by then it's too late. The ants have sprouted strange fleshy fungal tentacles, all filled to the bursting with spores.

Soon there after, reports come in from all across the city about people acting out of character; some have become catatonic or violent after brief a period of sickness. Individuals have been seen entering the ant-occupied buildings to help defend the ants against intruders, others have attempted to climb high points in the city or thrown themselves in the rivers.

Once again the City is under siege, but this time the enemy is invisible.

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Nazca hadn't been involved in any direct theft of any size in a long, long time. Her father had made sure she had the fundamentals of course, but more useful skills came from the outings in which she'd demanded Locke take her along. Sometimes they went with Jean, but more often without, and despite the danger facing Baedal, a part of her is delighted to find her old skills aren't failing her.

The hardest part is finding the pearls to take. But she's better for having something to do.

And she is fiercely trying to ignore the dream she had and what it meant. That would do her no good, and a mission from the gods was the priority.

Cassandra was looking for something, but she couldn't remember what. Before, it had been a word. Vaguely, some small part of her mind told her that she had found her word and didn't need to look for it anymore. The bigger question, it seemed, was what she was looking for now. She remembered something...something about a dream. But dreams were so complicated and so ephemeral, and she wanted something else, something she could hold in her hand.

There was a word for that, wasn't there?

Yes, there was. It started with a sound. A sort of clicking sound. Like the word Titan or the word terror. She tried out the sound in her mouth a few times. The word was lost to her, but the sound...it felt right somehow. She clicked a few more times, smiling. Her chapped lips broke and bled, but she didn't seem to notice it.

She continued wandering, her white dress sticking to her back with perspiration. There was a lot of noise around her, but she couldn't seem to understand it. Oh well, just as well, she supposed. No one really understood her anyway.

Le Mat had given him a rough location, and Lucius had alerted Hellsing that he would be away from his post. Now he was hunting for her, alert and wand ready, and praying he could get her to safety before becoming infected himself.

Now and then he calls her name, and wishes she was wearing the twin of his wedding ring, which might make her a bit quicker to locate.

Wandering through the city with too much purpose to be considered aimless but lacking any real speed, hands bare of all ornamentation, traceable or otherwise, Narcissa is headed for the fog. Skull ringing with a dull ache, she fancies she can hear someone calling her name...

"I have a headache, stop shouting!"

The hypocrisy evidenced by her own volume is overlooked, urged on as she is by the externally planted desire to reach the outskirts of the city.

Her voice is enough, and he's not quite running, but he's moving quickly when he appears from around a corner. "Narcissa." His tone is mingled relief and concern, and he doesn't try to hide either. "I know, I'm sorry."

Her smile, when she sees him, is too wide, too happy. It looks unnatural, for all that it's definitely hers.

"Lucius! Have you come to walk with me? I'm on an errand..."

Narcissa is looking right at Lucius, but her gaze goes right through him, and there is a sickly, waxen pallor to her skin.

Eddie has been plugging away at decrypting the list he and Mike found in one of the ant houses. It's exactly the sort of thing he can really throw himself into. The usefulness of the results really isn't important to him. It's enough that this is a good challenge and he can do this.

However, as events unfold, and he and everyone else sees what's happening in the city - and he hears all about the reports coming in, at the newspaper offices - it sinks in that he was in one of these ant houses and the ants are filling the whole city with fungus and... oh god. No, he won't be having anything to do with that, thank you very much.

He was very eager to get himself hidden away in the nearest temple he could reach, and is not about to leave safety, not to help out some gods, not to help out his cohort, not for anything. He has already had his brush with things growing in his brain that weren't supposed to be there, and that was plenty enough.

It wouldn't do to sit around acting terrified, though. He squishes that right down, and is instead simply a ball of nervous energy, set on planning and constructing defenses that may or may not be superfluous. They'll need to keep the ants as far back as possible. The uninfected will need a safe path, and hey, it's another challenge to tackle, and a very, very welcome distraction from what's actually going on.

At the moment, he is sitting with his back against a corner, going over the writing in one notebook and drafting something else out on a pad of graph paper. The pen scratches along the paper at a manic pace, and he is oblivious to anything going on past the upper edge of the page.

He'd held out some hope, until now, that there was some other explanation for her odd behavior. But this ends it. "I've come to take you someplace comfortable, and to make you something for your head."

"If you insist," she agrees, still looking through him. "I really don't feel at all well - that's why I'm walking, you see. If I keep going, I'll feel better."

Slim fingers pluck listlessly at his sleeve.

"Where are we going? It should be this way--" --and she takes another step on her path out of the city.

He puts a hand on her elbow. His tone in firm. "We are going somewhere where I shall help you to feel better. Come along."

He'd rather coax her along, but he'll use force if he has to.

She pauses then, and stares at his hand.

"No." A serious attempt is made to wrest her arm from his grip. "I need to go this way."

Although she is determined, her will is not her own and it's likely he could overpower her if he truly needed to.

As of right now, Alec had two concerns. One, tracking down pearls, because this? This he was good at, and two, he really hoped he got to keep the cool toys that came with this one. A skeleton key was like a thief's wet dream, and add on to the fact that this came with immunity and a little bit of cloak and dagger? Alec could almost say that he was in Heaven.

Almost.

Pearls were still hard to find, and people still didn't take too well to people breaking into their homes. It's days like this that Alec was grateful that he still had his X5 bonus features. It came in handy when you were forced to jump out a two story window to get away from an angry local with magic skills.

Which, to that point, this would be Alec, landing rather gracefully in front of Nazca, and flashing her a smile, before reaching for her wrist. "Might want to get out from under the window."

He doesn't allow it. He's not violent, but he's firm, and larger than she is. "I am taking you somewhere safe, Narcissa, and believe me when I say I will carry you there if I must."

"No! Don't you see?" Her tone turns wheedling, the fingers on her free hand twisting into his shirt. "Lucius, I have to go this way... please?"

She gives him what would have been a pleading look, had her expression not been eerily vacant.

She reacted before she thought, getting out of the way as he suggested and also yanking her hand away. "I suppose there's nothing worthwhile in there now, then," she observes, annoyed.

There was a blast of magic out of the window, and she jumped despite herself.

"No." He gives no flicker of emotion, no hint of the anguish he feels at seeing her this way. He wraps his free hand around her waist. "We will go the way I say we will go. That is what you must do."

"But-- no, I-- I have to--"

She struggles, briefly, her own instinctive desire to stay with him warring with the implanted urge to reach the fog. Suddenly, her expression clears, and her blue eyes are feverishly bright and aware as they meet his.

"Lucius? I don't feel well..."

And with that, Narcissa faints dead away.

That moment of awareness crushes him between hope and despair, but he scoops her up in his arms like she was Draco's size, and not a tall young woman. He starts for Sebastian's flat; it can be kept better warded, and it's closer than his own. He made a note to be more thorough with his own wards in the future, if he manages to survive this.

He told Hellsing he'd go back, but he's loathe to leave her. For now, though, he concentrates on getting her to safety.

Even unconscious, there's a part of her that recognises the arms around her, the scent that permeates the fog clouding her brain. The realisation isn't enough to drag her up from her faint, but it does provide some small measure of sub-conscious comfort.

Were she at all herself, she'd be embarrassed by the situation; as it is, she simply lolls in Lucius' arms, feet dangling and long blonde hair falling in her face.

Just beyond the edges of the Hellsing wards, Sebastian can be found beside a horse and cart, checking both over to make sure they're up to whatever task comes their way. He knows the harness and tackle are in good condition and while he's generally unfamiliar with horsemanship, the basics shouldn't be too different from thestrals, right?

In any event, after he's sent out his coordinates Deucalion will probably find him checking to make sure the cart itself is sturdy and able to travel well over what might become rough road.

Edited 2011-07-20 15:04 (UTC)

It doesn't take him too long, blessedly, to get to Sebastian's flat and let himself in - he'd set up these wards himself, for which he breathed a small "thank Merlin."

Once he'd settled her on the bed, locked the door and reactivated the wards, he set about seeing what sort of supplies they had. Ideally, he'd lock her up and go back to his work... but he began to doubt that it would happen.

Something to keep her asleep might be good.

One bag of pearls dropped off. Gabriel is on his way out to see if he can gather more when the sound of a pen dragging over paper catches his attention. The sound is coming from a man seated with his back to a corner--it's a good tactical position, no one can sneak up on him, Gabriel has used it himself in the past--

He shakes his head. He's not thinking about that past anymore. He's not that man anymore.

But someone working furiously is a remarkable change from everything else going on in here. Gabriel's idle curiosity makes him drift closer. He stands there a moment until he realizes the other man is so engrossed in what he's doing he doesn't realize Gabriel is standing there.

He clears his throat. "Hi. What are you working on?"

Slumped in the position he places her in, it's the unfamiliar scent and different texture of the sheets that permeate her unconscious state. A quiet whimper makes its way past slightly chapped lips - a condition she'd never normally allow - and Narcissa turns onto her side, curling up slightly.

Slim fingers clench and tug at the coverlet, her usually graceful hands tense, the knuckles white.

Eddie picked the corner without a second thought, for that reason, regardless of necessity. He wanted to focus on the page, not on his surroundings. When Gabriel walks up, he doesn't seem to notice, but keeps on writing, until the other man speaks.

He doesn't startle, but looks up and is quiet for a moment, switching gears. That's when he smiles. "Hi," he says, with a sort of tired but still not forced cheerfulness. "We need to improve the outer perimeter if people are going to be able to get to the temple. Yeah?" He holds up several pages of neat little graph paper diagrams, in pen.

Considering the best materials available to him right now are pen and paper, there is a good amount of wishful thinking in here, as far as feasibility goes, but those ideas are marked by speech bubbles connected to stick-figure cartoon ants saying stuff like "NOT GONNA WORK! DRAT!"

However, there are actually good, useable ideas with available materials, and for some reason, the start of what looks like a word search, or some such thing.

Throughout his years, especially in his earlier ones, Deucalion had learned the basics of horsemanship. Solo riding. While in the Arctic, he became experienced with steering dog sleds, his experience with horse-drawn carts is unfamiliar.

Regardless, he is willing to help in whatever ways he can.

Deucalion wastes no times once he's given the location. Merely moments after the connection is terminated, he appears behind Sebastian.

"Hello."

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The City at Large & Mission Alpha

[Location: Various throughout the city]

[Location: Near the Valhalla Inn]

[For Narcissa]

[For Narcissa]

[For Narcissa]

[For Narcissa]

[Location: A Temple]

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permission to manhandle is completely granted.

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[Location: Sobek Croix]

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