Turn Five: Things Get SeriousThere is a being in a long black cloak and a strange white mask like a bird's skull.Seven Months Until ArrivalAnya looked out at the city, leaning on the railing of the penthouse's balcony. She had long blond hair which drifted slightly around her neck in the wind, and a long blue dress that looked very expensive, and a feeling that precludes anything big going down: sparkling excitement, and the slightest hint of terror. Behind her, the elite of the city were drinking, snorting, and loudly bragging about their latest accomplishments. The city was far from her home, which was a good thing since her home was a shithole. Of course, so was this place. She may have been far off the streets, high up enough to reach the clouds, but she could smell the blood from up here.
The mafia's bride wanted to leave. But then again, who wanted to stay? The only thing that kept people here was circumstance and a lack of options. Nowadays, though, things were heating up. The Cartel was moving into the city at a frightening pace, but they weren't even the worst thing out there. Certain names were flying about like lightening: Red, Coupe, Absolon. Lots of names, but not many certainties as to what they were. Lot of bullshit, not a lot of facts. Anya preferred facts.
Her husband (Though such a word did not suit him) dragged himself over to greet her with his swollen and horrendous slab he called a body. The two were more mismatched then a tennis player in a soccer match. The only thing that kept them together was that he had money and she only had a nice body, so as long as she closed her eyes during their more intimate moment, she was happy with the arrangement and so was he.
It was moments like this, though, that really pissed her off. In a year, they would only talk 8 or 9 times, usually in public places. Their penthouse was big enough that she could safely ignore him and he would get on with his work. When he was particularly drunk the problems would start. For one, he'd think she was his actual wife. Even she had the smarts to recognize that she wasn't anything of the sort.
"My baby." he said, slurring and shaking slightly in the cold wind. "You know I love you?" The last word had a curiously upturned quality to it, like he was asking a question. He sounded American when he was drunk. Even if he didn't know her, she knew him.
"Yeah, sweetie." said Anya. "I do."
"You don't." he said, leaning on the rail. "No-one does. They all go... hey, there's Petrov. He's just a fucking... fucker. They don't give me no respect."
"You're the most respected man in the city, Faddei." said Anya, feeling hollow. "Don't say stuff like that, it's just the drink making you think all wrong." The fact the drink made him think at all, Anya thought, is practically a miracle in and of itself.
"You're my best girl. I love you. I really do." said the mafiya kingpin. "All of this. For you. I did all this for you. I wanted someone to love, no-one would love me without respect. No-one would love me without money. So I broke men, bones, stole. All this. For you."
Anya sighed and stopped fooling him. "You fucking idiot. You didn't do any of this for me. So don't pin all this on me like you're some sort of a heroic family man. You don't love me. You just wanna fuck me. That's all you'll ever feel."
He narrowed his eyes and stood up fully. Now that he was taller, Anya felt the excitement bubble over to utter fear. She wanted to stop, to apologize, but the plan was so close to completion. "Don't talk to me that way, baby, I can get real angr--"
"That's my point. Real men who marry women they love don't spend their entire time either fucking them or beating them. Your kind only manages the lowest feelings. All you are capable of is fucking and beating people."
He reared up and got right up in her face. "Honey, I'm going to count to three. And if you don't apologize, I'm going to do something very nasty."
So that's when Anya headbutted him. He drew back, screeching in pain and holding his bleeding forehead. Just what she wanted. She kicked him in the stomach sideways. He wobbled over the railing he leaned on previously, then in a second he was gone. Faddei didn't have time to scream before he hit the ground.
Shooting him would have been simpler. But it wouldn't have looked as clean. She wiped her hands and silently began practicing what she was going to say to the people inside. Anya had the ability to cry on demand: it came in handy on several occasions. She began to walk over to the door and opened it.
That's when she found that inside, there was a lot of corpses, most of them very high ranking. A lot of them looked like they were heart attack cases, but for the leader of the Irish mob who was over for this party... Well, she assumed it was the leader of the Irish mob. It was hard to tell, since what remained of him was mostly chunky in consistency.
Something inside her begged for some reaction to this, something human. She had a feeling that anything human inside her was long gone at best. One of the mafiya's top hitman stumbled backward and yelled "What the hell are we going to do!?"
Anya gave a meager smile. "Glad you asked." she said. "Let's get to business."
*
The spy bug project was a success. The number of people monitored by the bugs was only second to the amount of people monitored by cameras in London. Matthew wasn't sure what to think of this. On one hand, he and Merlin were literally Wizard Big Brother. On the other hand, that was also sort of cool.
Only one problem: one of the bugs was killed, and seemingly intentionally. The bug was flying into an abandoned building, then seemed to have been switched off by something, like an EMP would do for a less literal spy bug When Merlin reviewed the last of it's footage, all that was seen was some shadowy figures approaching. Matthew had volunteered to see what was up. Merlin was hesitant, but Matthew was pretty sure he could handle himself. Who knew what it was: Merlin was a great wizard but new situations could have made things different. Perhaps the bug had passed near a speaker playing dubstep and was vibrated to death for some reason. Magic was handy, and it generally played well with technology, but when science and magic collided it was like trying to play chess with monopoly pieces. Merlin may have thought it dangerous, but knowing exactly what causes breakdowns would be extremely handy.
The place where the bug died was a tenement near their shack. The Bogomolov Projects. It was on the edge of the Rust Streets, but it was highly unlikely that someone would be living here. The place gave the impression that it was a video of a place collapsing in on itself played in slow motion. Beside the tenement, an abandoned playground slowly played itself in the wind, with swings spinning and gates opening and closing with a rusty sound. Matthew wasn't scared. The only people that could be living there were homeless, and homeless were generally harmless if you didn't bother them. Or if they weren't on meth. Whichever. In either case, he had his staff and his magic, and he felt prepared to do whatever he needed to do, if it even came to that.
He pushed open the two double doors, which collapsed in on themselves. Classy. He concentrated, then tried to focus on the very weak signal sent out by the dead bug. He could see the hazy silhouette of it down underground. Matthew turned on the flashlight he brought along for the expedition then began to move into the tenement. The corridors of the projects were lit by thin slits from the boarded up windows, and crows feasted on the dead rats lying everywhere. Floorboards creaked below him worryingly as he entered a truly dark section of corridor. Once or twice he swore he could hear the sound of someone jabbering down in the basement. As he went deeper and deeper into the tenement, he thought he could hear two pairs of footsteps. He stopped, and so did the second pair. He was so ready to dismiss it as an echo he recognized the fear in that readiness.
Matt thought he could hear it coming from the corridor in front of him. He went against the wall and looked around the corner, shining the flashlight as fast as he could to get the follower red-handed. Nothing appeared. He heard the sound of tapping directly behind him, like the sound of someone walking on their toes toward him. He turned around, but once again the flashlight revealed nothing.
He checked in front of him, he checked behind him. Where else could the noise be coming from?
He realized too late when he looked up. With an unnatural strength and agility, something dropped from the ceiling and screamed unintelligable curses. The flashlight fell to the ground as he did, and smashed on landing. However, in that splitsecond between meager light and total darkness, he saw something dark on top of him.
Matt screamed out an apology and tried to crawl away, but the figure grabbed his throat and held, held so tightly that Matt felt his breath become more and more strained. He's trying to kill me. he thought. He's trying to kill a kid for walking into a building. Matthew had never dealt with a psycho. He had dealt with criminals, weirdoes, and annoyances, but he had never dealt with someone who was so beyond reason and sanity that they would kill someone due to proximity.
Trying to keep the panic down but finding it keep bursting through from the lack of breath, he pressed his hand up against the figure and tried to think, and think fast. The staff was on his back and too far to reach. He would have to use his hands. He thought of interlocking parts, and his first lesson. Remove the circle that keeps things whole. In a flash he saw the psycho's heart. He removed something from it. For a precious few seconds, the psycho kept his deathgrip, which was a moment that Matthew's subconscious would always make him remember in dreams. Then, the psycho cried out in pain and fell over. The cry was feminine. As the body toppled off him and he breathed in stinky, nasty air that soothed his burning lungs, he realized he had just killed a woman. Quickly, he stood up and ran from the scene, thinking nothing but to get out of the basement. Whatever was going on here could not possibly be worth the strain.
That's when the floorboards below him snapped, sending him plunging into darkness, in more ways then one. He barely felt the thud to the ground.
When he awoke, he could see that he was in some sort of a basement. In the distance, he could hear chanting, and he had one hell of a feeling that he was in a big jam.
*
Thomas Azur was not having a very good day. Seven months away was his reelection, and usually that's when he'd break out the bribe money section of his wealth. However, he now realized that it may not be enough. Usually his press conferences were quiet affairs with boring questions and boring answers. However, this was one had a sharper edge to it. The reporters had a distinctly hungry look about them. Thomas stood at the podium finishing up some dull speech and hoping that the questioning period would not last long.
"And so, we should monopolize our ventures and attempt to create a safer city." he said, finishing up at last. "We are now taking questions."
Most of the reporters held up their hands. He sighed quietly and thought about the Phoenix. As far as the police detectives said, he wasn't doing anything but hanging around his apartment and buying newspapers. He apparently sent a package once, and Azur got a similar one in the mail a few days ago. That was annoying, having to get the bomb squad in. They said all that was inside was a red-colored glass shard, but Thomas had them burn it anyway. For all the odd things that had been happening, he simply couldn't take any chances. He kept Red on high priority, with instructions that if any "strange events" occurred, it was most likely his fault. Azur suspected him to be behind the mafiya massacres, the regulators, and maybe even have a connection to Heart's Desire. Coupe was way too show-offy to be anything but mid-level management for somebody.
He pointed to a random reporter, a preppy young kid who looked vaguely hippish. This was not going to be good. "Hello, Michael Parma, of the Liberal Guardian." Oh Christ, that student rag was allowed in? This was going to be terrible. "Despite your claims that you are attempting to get drugs off the street and stop gang violence, statistics indicate that crime rates have actually grown by 22%, when the average was already 13% higher then Detroit, the highest rated city on the list at the time of the statistic. What is your opinion on this?"
Azur drew the microphone closer, then thought. "Crime statistics can simplify problems and draw attention to the wrong elements. The majority of crimes are most likely not affecting the average citizen."
"So as long as it doesn't affect the voter, it's okay?" said Michael. "What about the minorities, the poor?"
"As long as the citizen is not involved in organized crime, they will find that their city is a very peaceful one indeed. Next question." Azur said, pointing to the next reporter, a more experienced looking woman in a suit and tie, probably from the Daily Times, the newspaper he bribed the most. He felt safe.
"Concetta Sarka, Daily Times." she said, confirming his suspicions. Azur was good at reading people. "Is it true that you are planning to cut funding for inner city schools and increasing it for suburban ones?"
Ooh, awkward question. He obviously was not paying them enough. However, just as he was about to launch into another game of "Get The Press Off Your Ass", he noticed something red flash across the street, through a window.
Laser sight.
[15] There was a loud sound, like a huge stick snapping in half, and the window cracked. Thomas Azur stared straight ahead, feeling a cold feeling spread on his chest. He stepped off the podium, straightened his tie, and fell to the ground. The last thing he saw was the blood pooling, red as a sunset. Then all was dark.
Three hours later, they had caught the shooter. He had used a hunting rifle and claimed that a red shard of glass that had been given to him by a hobo told him to kill Azur. In any other circumstance, this would have been regarded as simple craziness and ignored.
In six hours, the police department was writing up the plan to assault Yeoman's Street 67.
*
Joan was analyzing the readouts from the elerium scanners. She had managed to get a gateway node going, allowing her to remain in the comfort of her room while still connecting to that magnificent machine in the old subway. Lucky her parents had the cash to get some decent internet or she would have had to make more trips to Robert's place then would be preferable. The drones had managed to make a 3D map of the city from their scans, allowing Joan the closest thing to a god's eye view.
Elerium scans were coming up zilch on all fronts. Interference was showing from the people the drones was ordered to study, and she wasn't sure why that was. She decided that elerium was the primary facet. She read up his docs on the effects it had on the human body based on what it had done to a random gang member unlucky enough to wander in. It was not pretty.
She was turning up the fine tuning, and thus was coming up with more ghosts. Mostly in the Rust Streets and near the casinos. A document was written up by her denoting the locations where ghosts occurred the most, but the ghosts were secondary to the main fact. Rogue elerium was somewhere, and she had to find it. She turned up the fine tuning so high that basically anything that could produce energy could have tripped it.
She got a faint signal near the Rust Streets. She switched to it. It was a large building, possibly a tenement. None of the drones had gone too near it, so the outline of the building on the map screen was fuzzy and inconsistent, and several walls being simply gone. There was a faint blinking elerium signature somewhere within the building. It matched the elerium signature given off by drones. This was not a ghost, electrical or otherwise. What confused her was the fact that it was not immediately detected. It should have been self-destructed by now, and she knew that it would have been detected in some shape or form by that method. It was steady, indicating the elerium was still contained.
Something was bugging her about the signature. She turned down the finetuning to the original level. Instantly, the signature disappeared. Turning it up slowly did not do any tricks. It only faded into existence when the fine tuning was up to maximum efficiency level. It was almost like the building had swallowed up the signal. There was something up about that building. It was close to the Rust Streets, so it should have had some of that ghost energy near it. She turned the fine tuning down to the ghost point. That's when the unusualness of the building went into downright bizarreness.
The building was totally clean of ghost energy. Since most of the Rust Streets was drenched in the goddamn stuff and even most of the city had at least traces, this bothered her. She looked up what she thought was the address of the house and realized that this was the Bogomolov Projects. Bad part of town. You heard something terrible going down in it every other month. Sometimes it's the latest serial killer's hideout, other times it's the latest location of a drug lab, and still other times it's the latest hangout for a bunch of methed up homeless who inevitably murder someone stupid enough to wander in and string their corpses up outside.
Now it was eerily clean of ghost energy for no readily apparent reason.
Joan knew that this was not something to celebrate. One of the many groups of scum that hung out in the Projects had their hands on the most dangerous material known to man. The fact they had absolutely no idea what it was did not hold any comfort to her.
*
Keke opened the blinds in a tight fashion, trying to see out without anyone outside seeing in. The street was empty, but they were probably not going to be empty for long. When the door opened, she reached out and grabbed her knife (A piece of glass with cloth forming a grip) then held it towards whoever was coming in. As it turns out, it was Karol. Keke sighed and put the knife on the lip of the window.
"Nervous, much?" said Karol, lighting a cigarette. Keke thought Karol had a uniquely cool way of doing this, but experienced observers would note that Karol seemed almost slightly afraid of the lighter's flame. She was still 11.
"I've got a right to be." said Keke. "We have got to get that weird kid out of here."
"She's staying here." said Karol definitely. "She's not causing any problems, and she seemed hurt."
"Oh yeah? She's trouble." said Keke, moving toward Karol. "The damn place is being watched."
"Watched, huh?" said Karol, moving past Keke and opening the blinds too widely for Keke's tastes. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. "Nah, looks like you're still being a paranoid idiot from where I'm standing."
"Close the damn blinds!" yelled Keke, pushing past Karol and shutting the blinds. Before Karol could react, she span around and huffed. "I don't even get why we had to rescue her, now we have to deal with this kind of shit."
"We rescued her because she was one of us." said Karol definitely.
Keke laughed bitterly. "Oh, one of us, as if that's an actual thing." she said. "We're all on our own here. We just have each other, and that's it. When we start letting others in, stuff like this happens."
"What stuff?" said Karol. "You haven't got a lick of proof. Just staring out windows, like you always do."
"I won't take this patronizing crap." said Keke, walking to the door. "Go have your stupid 'we're all in this together' bull, but when they come for you, you should know it's all your fault!"
The door slammed.
Outside, the agent with a round face and blond hair across the way in an abandoned building blinked, sending out the transmission. With his type, it's not a question if you are being watched. It's when are you being watched.
*
Officer Boon looked at the half-disembled robot within the cell, through the glass window. It wasn't doing anything in particular, just watching and waiting. Just staring at him. He looked at Officer Doubek, who sighed and rubbed his eyes.
"Why is it gutted?" said Boon.
"When we bought it," said Doubek with a snide and nasally voice. "We tried to see how it worked. The auctioneer said we shouldn't do that, but we assumed it would not go psycho and try to murder us."
Boon tapped the glass. Immediately the robot sprung into action, dragging it on it's ripped out gut with wires spreading across the floor. It reached up and banged hard against the glass, having no effect but certainly putting in the effort. Boon stepped back, then shook his head. "Goddammit, a year ago this stuff didn't happen. Now we're up to our butts in assassinations and robots. What the hell happened?"
"Red Kirmiz did. Before bossman got his brains blown out by that sniper, he wrote down Red Kirmiz as the suspect for all these cases. Heart's Desire, the regs, you name it." said Doubek. "On the topic of who the guy even is, that's up for debate. Heard he's connected to that new homeless charity as well."
"Red Kirmiz. Don't ring a bell." said Boon. "Sounds kinda fake to me. Don't know nobody named Red in my lifetime. It's a color."
"Yeah, dipshit, what'd you think it was, a cocktail?" said Doubek. "Now, we gotta figure out what to do with this. I don't envy the other guy who bought it."
"Who was that?"
"Some guy in a white suit, hell if I know. Whoever he is, let's hope he doesn't break the rules... Wouldn't like yet another homicide to cap this shit cake off."
*
The brother opened the window silently, stepping in as quietly. The sister followed him like darkness. Their shoes made no sound upon the stained wood of the apartment, and their breath was not heard by a soul. Perhaps it was not present. The brother took a fuel can from his back, and began to spread the petrol upon the ground, staining the wood. The sister took out a match. But there was a sound. A door opening. They stood silently, awaiting their fate.
Tom rubbed his eyes and walked out of his bedroom. First he needed a pee, now he needed a drink. Thanks, brain. He walked past Nate's door, then into the kitchen. He took a glass down from a cupboard, which seemed to be the last clean glass in the house (They would have to buy a new pack of glasses: the sink was too terrifying to even consider using), then began to pour some OJ into the sink.
Outside the living room window, a SWAT team member accidentally stepped on a glass. His teammates looked at him incredously. Meanwhile, Tom looked up, then sipped the drink. He wondered what the noise was. Considering his city, probably a thief. He took the only weapon to hand (The glass), then went into the living room to check on what was going on.
This would be the [2] last mistake Tom would ever make in general. A baseball bat crudely smashed into the back of his head, and the last thing Tom saw through the bloody filter was a cloaked figure standing above him, wearing a white bird's mask made of bone. As he hit the ground, he could hear himself screaming in the distance, before he passed out and felt himself drift into static.
Outside, the SWAT members looked up. Inside, Red and Nate opened their eyes.
The red glass sent to Azur was incinerated, but luckily a sniper possessed by a glass assassinated Thomas. Unluckily, a SWAT team is on the scene at Red's apartment.
One of the spy bugs went missing in a bad part of town. Matt went to investigate, feeling confident, but hasn't reported back in days.
The Russian mafiya and some of the Irish mob have been taken out, but it looks like a certain lady benefited from the change in leadership and may have her own ambitions.
There is tension in the group of orphans who picked up Illuminia, and it seems like someone is watching cautiously.
Joan has found that the missing drone is in the Bogmolev Estates. The interesting thing is that it seems to totally lack magical energy.
Two intruders are inside Nate's apartment. Tom has been killed or at least severely brain damaged. A SWAT team is right outside.
The note was delivered to Magnus, whose response can be given by Digital Hellhound. Adam accepted the job, and the demonstration/bidding resulted in one of the cops getting a bolter and a Russian mobster getting a bolter. Reapers are now in production.
Author
Topic: The Age Of Fire: Game Thread (Read 26643 times)