Summary:Morbius and Eve put together a rescue. A very violent rescue. Log Info:Storyteller: None |
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Video games.
The answer is always video games. After work, Eve always settles down at her desk wit ha lovely game. She's perpetually young and fast, so what's not to love? She's quite good. Not topping the killboard good, but good enough.
… She still loses.
"Fuuuuck," she groans.
Dr. Michelle Morbius landed on the roof of the next building. She was running along the rooftops, trying to keep the SUV in sight.
One hour ago, she had been "holding court" when Alysha and Corinna had disappeared from the club. She had excused herself to follow them to the rear exit, as a man had been guiding them out somewhat forcefully.
Then he had shoved them into the rough arms of a passenger in the Escalade SUV, which then sped off. And the chase had been joined.
She slowed down as she saw the truck pull into what looked like a small apartment building. Except most apartments didn't have security armed with shotguns and Chinese rifles.
She looked down, aware that her vampiric senses were sharpening. She turned away, then pulled out her phone, selected EVE from the list of contacts…and dialed.
Her phone rings, of course.
She answers it with a quick flick of her finger and calls out, "Hey, Michelle. What's up?" The phone number is recognizable, after all, and she's smiling into her phone… not that anyone can see it.
The sounds of her media enceter, and the assorted screams and deaths, are audible. She is clearly in a war zone… again.
Ah, video games.
More explosions. Michelle eyed the phone, then says, in a voice loud enough to cut through the vidogame noise, "SLAVERS KIDNAPPED TWO WOMEN."
"WHAT," replies Eve. The video gaming sounds stop.
"What are you talking about?" she says back, quickjly, eyes wide. Not that Michelle can see it.
Michelle took a deep breath. Even vampire queens need to do that. "Alysha and Corinna. Two women from my…coterie. They were intoxicated, and a strange man hustled them out of the rear of Club Embrace. They were put in a SUV and taken to a building. There are men with guns. a LOT of them. And there are more women there, as well."
"Wait, what?" repeats Eve.
"Where are you?" She asks, immediately. Rescuing people isn't something she does all THAT often but she isn't going to let that put a stop to her. "Be there as soon as I can." She is already grabbing her keys while she waits for the answer.
"I'm in Brooklyn. Near the beach. There's a red brick building. I'm up there. I'm…near the docks. A block west of that. Dammit, how the Hell do you work this GPS thing…?"
"Open a text message after I hang up," replies Eve, " then you can select an option to share your location with me. On my way towards.you." And she is. Bolting for her car.
Michelle examines her phone after the call ends. Message Icon. Share. What do you know, that's the one. Learn something new every day.
She pressed SHARE LOCATION, then the SEND button. Therewas a muted beep, and then nothing. She hoped it went through.
She looked back at the building. Observe. Analyze. Hypothesize based on the empirical evidence. If something doesn't fit the hypothesis, break down the theory, rebuild it again.
Meanwhile, Eve simply looks at the map, takes note of the location and finds her way there. It takes time to get anywhere in New York City. Frustratingly long in this case. Minutes pass and she does eventually find her way there, parking around the block from Michelle.
"Nearby," she texts.
Michelle looked down at her phone. "All right. Observations. 20 men, 4 women. All have guns. Balkan accents. Armenian, Ukranian. Googled tattoos. One is identified with an Eastern European gang. Human trafficking. SLAVERY is easier."
"Twenty," is the text back, "was expecting the other way around. Twenty??" That sounds weird to her all the same. "Where exactly are you? Want to get to you and we can figure out what we want to do." Getting the women out is priority one.
"I'm on the roof of the next building over. If I worked at it, I could jump to the roof of the slaver's building. I'm on the roof of the red brick building north of the one where the women are held." She risks a glance. "There are four guards on the roof." A thought occurred to her. "How strong are you?"
There's a little time before Eve slinks up the buulding side. Easy enough to do when can make vines grow and attach themselves to things opposite you.
Which she does.
She is then vaulting over into the roof and approaching Michelle.
"Prety strong," she tells her.
Michelle is dressed in her Selene getup. Black leather, latex, and as severe as Death. She looks to Eve, then points to the roof. "If we can subdue those men, we could get inside and bring the trapped women to the roof. Then…I can get back here. Do you think yuou could throw a 150-pound woman from there to here?"
"…well… no," says Eve after a moment, "but I can deal with them and we can go over there at our leisure, okay? I have a plan."
Eve takes a moment, hunkering doiwn. She focuses inwards, focuses on the sense of life she has from the men on the roof. The gap is large enough that longside the building, she's really pushing the limits of how far she can extend her senses.
She produces a packet of seeds from her pockets and tears it open before throwing the seeds into the air, aloowing them to be carried by the wind in the other building's direction, alongside her throw. They scatter across the roof.
She ducks down thereafter, waiting a few seconds before the plants explodew from their seeds into huge, writhing vines that swiftly grab, snatch, and gag the men in question on the roof, all writhing and thorns. They didn't even have a chance before they're thoroughly netted and that looks like it hurts.
The strain has given Eve a nosebleed. She's pushing up against her limits here, very much so. "We won't have much time. I can try to throw you over there, but I might… miss." She grimaces, smearing the blood off her nose.
Michelle looks to her, concerned at the nosebleed. She's pushed past some natural limit, but there is no time to ponder now. The clock is ticking.
"Do not worry about me," she says, backing up a few steps before lunging forward, boot-heels thumping on the roof. Four steps, five…
And then she leaps off the edge of the building, soaring over the wide alley, and then she lands, tumbling forward to end up standing on her feet, looking around.
"I will go in and send the girls up to the roof. I shall…CONVINCE them to do it. If there is a way you can fashion some sort of bridge without giving yourself a pinprick aneurysm, then do it. Otherwise, we will have to corral them here until the police arrive."
"…seriously?!" says Eve as Moribus leaps across the gap.
Just.
Like.
That.
"…god, that…" She texts her thereafter: "I'll just go through the front door while you get the girls out to the roof."
And then she's on her way down. Yes, she's going to play distraction. It's going to hurt.
For a moment, Michelle gapes as Eve heads down. It was not her intention to put Eve in harm's way. But it is done, and she can help Eve by doing her part.
She heads to the door and opens it, clawed hands scraping against the door as she heads down.
Viden was set up at the hallway when the black-haired dybbuk came towards him. He brought the rifle up to aim it at her, wondering if she was simply dressed for the part when she was taken…
He almost made it. Michelle hit him with a punch that dislocated his jaw and rammed his head into the doorframe. He was unconscious before his body hit the ground.
The door banged open, and five girls screamed as one as Michelle gazed at them. Corinna was one of them, and she recognized her Mistress immediately.
"MY QUEEN!" she exclaimed.
She would discuss honorifics later. "Corinna, guide the women to the roof. Do so for the other rooms.'
"But…the guards…" she ventured.
Morbius looked at her with those glowing red eyes, and all doubt ceased. "Yes, Mistress."
Michelle went down the hall, not even glancing at the assault rifle at her feet.
Meanwhile, Eve is getting punched. A lot.
Armed men or no, when she forced the door, people saw a five foot nothing goth with no real physical oomph to her. There was punching. When that didn't work, it was knives. And when that only serves to make a mess of her, well, that's when it came to guns.
That's when there's muffled sounds of semi-silenced gunfire.
Attracting police orsuperheroes would be bad, after all, but when that five foot tall girl has proven rather difficult to stop, fire pose comes into play and then there's silence. For a moment. And then a whooole lot of cursing and screaming.
Michelle can hear the screaming as she walks from room to room. There are girls in most of the rooms, but the occasional gunman or two. They tend to mistake her for one of the girls who somehow got loose. It's when she shows them how wrong they are that bones get broken, teeth kicked or knocked loose. Michelle is doing an admirable job of not killing anyone tonight as she makes her way down. How do the real heroes like Captain America do this sort of thing?
Then a trio of gunmen appear at the end of the hall. They need to get their guns up to shoot at the woman in black, but they need 2.1 seconds to do it.
Unfortunately, she gets to them in 1.5 seconds, and that's when Eve hears Michelle casuse some screaming of her own…
Eve is left a handful of men bound up in vines and thorns, honestly. It works quite well, when you come down to it, especially useful to gag someone.
Of course, she's a wreck by the time she's done, as she so often is. A bloody, bloody wreck. She limps along, forcing her body to mend and spending precious biomass on backing her systems up to keep herself from kneeling over, patching wounds rather than fixing them.
By the time she reaches Michelle, she's awash in mostly her own blood.
Michelle spots her and looks wounded herself. The women are being herded up by Alysha and Corinna, doubtlessly voicing platitudes about their "queen" saving them. "Good Gods above and below, are you…no. Stupid question, fo COURSE you're not all right. Is there anything I can do?"
"Believe it or not, I am perfectly okay," says Eve, voice tagged with pain that definitely make it seem like she's not. Then again, Michelle has seen her cells.
"Just get them out of here, get somewhere safe." She nods back over her shoulder the way she came.
"I called the police. Nobody I met is going to be able to do anything to them, and Alysha and Corinna are first-person witnesses." Michelle looked around. "We should…probably go. Anyone left on your end that could cause trouble in the next five minutes?"
"Okay," says Eve. It's all the words she has the strength to muster right now.
"I need to get out of here and get somewhere quiet so I can fix these things. Make sure they understand we were never here and the girls were luckily saved by like…. intragang warfare or something." She pinches the bridge of her noes. "My plants will wither away once I am far enough away."
Michelle nods. "Come on. We can go this way. There's a small park we passed two blocks away." And with that, she picks up Eve and begins running. She's no Flash (or even Flash Thompson) but she is definitely keeping it above 30 MPH, even in high heels.
One minute later, she slows down and enters the small park, now thankfully empty.
"Ack!" Eve would protest but she doesn't really get a chance. She's on the move quite forcefully in Michelle's strong grasp and she's eventually just going with it.
When they arrive at the park, she sort of flails. "Okay, Okay! Put me dooooown."
Michelle puts Eve down quickly. "Sorry…sorry." She looked back down the road towrds the building they just left, and relaxes when she sees the flashing red-and-blue lights.
"It's okay," replies Eve. "I had no idea you could run like that." She flops down into the grass, color draining from her face.
"I won't be dead but it might look like it."
And the She goes still. her heartbeat stops altogether.
For a moment, Michelle is the way she used to be, amazed and almost uncomprehending. The cells had recovered. Her protocols had wroked, better than she had hoped…it was unbelievable.
Now, here she was again, faced with the unbelieevable. She looked at Eve for a long moment, then forced herself to look back at the building down the street. She would give Eve a few minutes.
She saw Alysha and Corinna guiding the women out into the crowd of police, and she smiled, more than a little relieved. As long as her "coven" didn't get thirty new people, she was a happy vampire queen.
Before Morbius' eyes, even the blood on Eve's skin seems to crawl back into her, absorbed back into her skin. There are ripples under her flesh as bone and muscle knot back tother properly versus the jury-rigging nonsense that was going on before.
Bones crack, shift back into place.
Then her eyes slowly open and she draws on what seems like a completely unnecessary breath.
"Ow," she says, perhaps unnecessarily.
Michelle relaxed, but only slightly, as she looked at Eve. "Let's get out of here before the cops doing the canvass spot us." She points to the subway entrance. "Then we can take stock of what happened."
"… l… yeah, sure," breathes Eve, getting herself to her feet somewhat unsteadily.
She is only able to follow after Michelle woozily at first but she seems to gather strength quickly. Very quickly.