the sky is falling.

[baedalites]

Who: Everyone.
What: Part two begins.
When: Evening, a few hours before the end of the 24-hour siege period.
Notes: Feel free to thread in comments here or make your own posts! NPC your own monsters, team up in locations anywhere you like, and feel free to plot things at the plotting post, which has the relevant details. Remember that this is city-wide, so you are free to do what you like with locations.

Just after dark, the air of Baedal seems to change. While it was tense before, with the stand-off in Mafaton, a new kind of electrical energy begins to spread through the city, leaking from the sky itself. The horizon is clear tonight, even starry where the city lights don't obscure the view, but soon enough it begins to blur with color, and at an alarmingly rapid pace. Bright streaks of pink and green begin to spiral across the sky, in an approximation of the auroras, though it is much nearer and brighter than any common demonstration of an aurora should be. The geomagnetic storm swirls and dances, initially beautiful, but its intensity is ominous.

It's also growing. Most geomagnetic storms stay to one corner, but this spreads across the entire sky, green-purple-pink-red illuminated and inching further into the dark, leaving the city of Baedal tinted with a dim, eerie glow. This continues for about a half an hour, until that tension reaches its breaking point.

The magical boundaries holding Mafaton crack and then completely shatter. It is audible, and the backlash sends flying many of the Candlelighters trying frantically to preserve the borders of their siege. A few of them are killed by the backlash of their spell's combustion, but more are simply shaken; having one's magic work so thoroughly broken is not a pleasant experience. The sound covers another tearing, this time a metaphysical one that rips the heavens open in places the common eye can't see. Those whose vision allows them to observe different layers of reality will notice, but others will only see the incoming flood of creatures from other universes.

One siege has ended, but another has just begun, and this time, it's not just Mafaton at risk.

Comments

[23rd]

With a shrieking, burning mutant dragon thing flailing off her as it tries desperately to put itself out with its wings -- pointlessly, those burns go beyond third degree -- X-23 still doesn't stop, rising in one fluid motion. It wouldn't matter if he burned her down to her skeleton, she'd still be moving, but that he doesn't is awfully convenient. Even her healing factor takes time.

Her foot slams down on the dragon's neck, severing its head from its spine with one of her foot claws, ruthlessly efficient. She plans on being doubly sure everything that is killed stays dead.

Laura turns to look at him then, briefly assessing him with a sweeping glance. She doesn't know his level of training. He's Magneto's and he's obviously not inept, but those things are huge, faster than they look, and equipped to respond to specific mutant powers. The New X-Men spent a lot of their time in the Danger Room running simulations against them, and it was a long time before they consistently won.

In the end, she decides to ask, pointing in the distance at the Sentinel, which is just visible as it stands at least ten feet higher than the building it's behind. "Can you fight those?" Can he, not will he. If his answer is no, then she's going in alone.

[fuckrobertfrost]

The look he gives her is only a little incredulous. There are a lot of things to kill here, but she wants to go after that? Then again, it's not that surprising from someone who just beheaded a fucking dragon with their foot.

"Okay," he says, which is not what Laura asked. He doesn't look like much, and he hasn't had that kind of training. But he is calm, and he doesn't even smell afraid, mostly due to a lack of experience with fighting anything more unsettling than a particularly large or aggressive mutant. He doesn't know how bad this could get.

Somewhere in the back of his head, he's wondering about the claws, but it's just not important right now. He'll follow Laura's lead, and blast creatures out of their way.

[23rd]

Well, that will have to be good enough. She takes off in that direction and she's fast even if she's being mindful to not put too much distance between them. He can almost certainly take care of the other threats around here without her, but she needs backup. She's a super soldier, but she's not invincible and she's already anticipating their countermeasures. She would like someone more experienced -- Gambit or Wanda would be fantastic right now but they almost certainly are up to their ears in shit themselves, and there isn't time to wait for anyone else.

She pauses just outside its field of vision. "Aim for the head." Solid advice, generally speaking. Then she's moving again.

He has more range than she does and her plan is to focus its attention on her, which means getting up close and personal. If it mauls her, she can survive it; other people can't. She hurls herself at it like a small missile, climbing up its back where it can't reach to pull her off. She's too precise to be called berserker at the moment, but she has a feral rage that's an obvious throwback to her origins.

[fuckrobertfrost]

He has to work to keep up with her, which is a little embarrassing but not unexpected. She's gone before he can acknowledge her advice, and the way she leaves bears an unsettling similarity to the maneuver he once saw Peter and Logan pull off, to say nothing of the sheer bloody-mindedness involved in hurling yourself at a giant robot. John lifts his hand, and the column of fire that cannons toward the sentinel's head is smaller, car-sized, but more intense. It doesn't have the kinetic force that Scott's weirdo eye beams would, but it gets the sentinel's attention. The metal there has been melted, but not enough; it is still able to turn its head and get John in its sights, which is kind of mind-blowing to him, if he had time to examine it.

He does have time to think "fuck" and scatter when it lifts its giant palm and shoots some kind of light at him. The stone street erupts behind him as he covers his head. Despite Laura's advice, the next thing he aims at is the hand, trying to destroy whatever it's using to shoot at him.

[23rd]

X-23 is close to the head when it turns to target John, close enough to get in one swipe at its neck before it starts blasting at him and her priority shifts. She uses her claw hooked into its back to swing her around to its front and drive her claws into one of its eyes, destroying its left-hand optic sensor and ruining its depth perception. Still dangerous, but its aim is less precise.

Its free hand flies to its face and swats at her. It's too close for her to dodge; her claws tear long gauges into its half-melted face as it pulls her off and hurls her into a building with enough force to break her spine. X falls and twitches.

In thirty seconds, she's hauling herself up. She should be a smear on the cobblestone street, but instead she's scaling the side of the building by her claws, looking irritated and trying to get high enough that she can drop directly on its head. If it's still firing at him, she may have to try cutting off its arms.

[fuckrobertfrost]

Having long since dropped the habit of screaming FUCK! whenever something terrible happens to someone, John only gapes for a second before he's moving again. There are a lot of mutants more physically powerful than him, and even if he's figured Laura has to be one of them, seeing someone flung into a building is simply not something he's used to. It's only thirty seconds of thinking he's on his own, but that is a long thirty seconds for him.

To his credit, he continues the fight. The entire Sentinel's head is wreathed in flame, a giant walking beacon. That doesn't stop it from knocking into buildings or firing indiscriminately, but John is on the move, and is able to defend himself from monsters on the ground simultaneously.

[23rd]

Fire won't melt her claws no matter how hot it gets, but it will sear her flesh and take forever to heal. She skips the head and drops onto its shoulder, her foot claws sinking into it to keep her holding on as she uses both hands to start sawing at the arm socket, severing it at the base; the arm drops and hits the ground, leaving a dent. That's one, but it's still got the other.

And it's caught on to her; after a moment it starts emitting a high-pitched whining, nearly too high for human ears to hear, but she hears it plain as day. Her hands clap over her ears as it keeps screeching (horribly distorted by virtue of the fact that its face is mostly melted off), the sound reverberating in her head. It's not high or loud enough to burst her eardrums and render her deaf, that would defeat the point, but just enough to disorient her.

She lets go and drops the ground, breaking both ankles on impact, but they heal almost immediately and she's running, putting distance between them until the noise stops. She's thinking they could really use a third backup. She finds him -- oh, good, he's not dead -- but spins immediately to look at the Sentinel. It's blinded and flailing, one-armed, its head burning and interfering with its ability to sense the world around it. They have a few minutes -- maybe a few seconds -- before it figures out which direction they're in. She needs to cut that damn head off, but getting closer is going to be a problem now that it's figured out a good strategy to disable her.

By the way, hi, John, she's still not dead, somehow.

[fuckrobertfrost]

Though Laura hasn't been rendered completely unrecognizable by blood, there's still a second when she's heading toward him that his instincts jump and yammer to blast fire at her too. It's the sort of twitchiness that's saved him a few times already, but he manages not to set his best chance of staying alive on fire.

He's still trying to melt the head, but he's never actually encountered anything that has resisted this long, and he's starting to get that weird sort of hollow, burnt feeling inside already. It doesn't hurt him or affect his abilities, and as far as he knows it's not even an indicator he should stop or there'll be consequences. It's just weird.

If John were thinking better, or less afraid of Laura, he might ask her why she stopped attacking it, as he can barely hear the high pitch himself. But he's not and he is, so he just looks at her for direction.