Starring:
Posting Date: January 23, 2010
Summary:
An attempt to hide out goes terribly wrong.
"What You Did"
A Warehouse
The night spreads on. Moments bleed together for the dreamer in ways that make telling how long he's been in this dream difficult. It could be moments, it could be weeks. Sometimes it feels like forever. Peter's aware it's a dream, but at the same time he's aware he has no control over anything outside himself. An alley turns into a warehouse district, a light peeking through a window. He climbs up to look inside, peeking through panes that have been painted over with black to block out the light. There's small scratches in it, enough to look through.
The inside shows people, sleeping in blankets, some wide awake with eyes on the entrances, waiting for something…
Perhaps they're waiting for this.
Suddenly a searchlight pans around outside. Peter looks behind him, upwards, towards the helicopter that wasn't there a moment ago. It hasn't found him yet. He has to move quickly. Which luckily is something he can do. A wind kicks up outside the warehouse, tossing garbage and dirt into the air as he reaches a door, undoes the latch, and quickly ducks inside.
Jamie is lying under a blanket, near an Hispanic boy just a little older than her, maybe around thirteen. The boy sleeps soundly, but Jamie is lying awake, staring up at the ceiling. Not a look of fear, (perhaps the only one not scared in the room), but the boredom of a child that can't get to sleep. When Peter ducks inside, though, she sits up, looking towards the door that just opened.
Estella was one of those people staring at the door, eyes wide and stiff as a board. When Peter enters, she starts forward and ultimately leaps up, poised to run. She hesitates a second, watching him suspiciously before finally saying, "You're alone." Her hair has been pulled loosely back, bound with an elastic band, and she is clad in all black: tight black pants tapering over dark sneakers fit for running and a long-sleeved turtleneck. Estella looks at some of the others who lay awake then turns back to Peter entirely. "Who are you."
Though awake, Alexandra isn't exactly staring at a door, or looking out for any others. For the most part, she's been keeping to herself, having turned a little corner of the warehouse into what is essentially her own private little sand…er, dirt box. Crouching in a little divot in the dirt, she idly turns over suspended little streams of loose earth, smiling, a million miles away.
Well, that is, until the door latch creaks and the door whines open. When that happens, she turns her head in that direction and the dancing streams fall to the ground in a little cloud. In the dark, she strains to figure out who it is, until a beam of light from that chopper highlights just enough of the man for her to figure it out. "Peter…" she says idly, stading up, but not approaching yet.
"Sorry, I was just trying to hide from the…" Peter starts to explain, before his eyes focus briefly on Alexandra, then Jamie… Familiar faces are as common as unfamiliar ones in this dream, but sometimes they're more familiar then others. "There's a lot of you here. I haven't seen many groups gathered together in the city," he admits, worry creasing his face. They're so young. Some of them are children. "Are you all in hiding here?"
It takes Jamie a moment to recognize Peter, but once Alexandra says the name, she smiles, "Oh, hi!" Then she nods quickly to his questions, "Yeah. For now. Dunno where we'll go tomorrow." She looks up to Estella and says, "It's ok. He's one of us. He took me flying once."
Estella seems to settle back, and settle down, when Jamie reassures her. She continues watching Peter warily, however, and begins to pace from side to side through the warehouse. Finally, she springs toward Jamie and murmurs to her, "How can you be sure he's… alright. He said that he's trying to hide, what if he just led them to us?" She seems full of nervous energy, unable to sit still. She starts tapping her fingers on her forearm idly.
"If he lead them to us…" Alex begins, before she breaks out into a giggle that can only be described as not all there. "…then I guess we'll just have to kill them." As she talks, dirt begins to snake up her legs, coiling around like some serpentine-embodiment of earth. Up her legs, around her waist and chest, then finally about her arms and down to her hands, where it all piles up and compacts into two huge hands like The Thing. "He's ok though…I met him before. He got me involved." In what, she doesn't say.
"I don't think they saw me," Peter explains softly, looking up toward the windows. A beam of light shines across the darkened panes in a few places, but it moves on, rather than stopping. The light inside the warehouse must be dim enough not to be noticed from above. But he looks back at Alexandra, in some shock. "What— you can't just kill them. We need to find a way to fix this, to live together to…"
Don't be idealistic right now. The only way to fix it is to lead them.
The voice whispers in the back of his mind and he twinges a bit, rubbing at his forehead. "We… I can help you…"
But his words may come too late. There's a clicking sound near one of the loading doors, large enough for a truck to back into. Like something's attaching to it. Then it rips away, opening the room to the cold air. Within moments, a spray of bullets rains in.
Jamie shakes her head to Estella, starting to say something, then stopping and looks up to Alexandra, and then back to Peter at the talk of killing. Then the back door is opening, and she immediately turns into water, even before the bullets start flying. But she doesn't just drop to the floor, her water-form stands up, stepping in front of her hispanic friend protectively, even as he wakes with a yell (and explosion of light) at the sound of the gunfire.
Estella hits the floor when the bullets come; she hits the floor and stays there, ducking under and around anything she can until she manages to tuck herself amidst any shield — even if it's another person. She shouts an explicative. Whatever her power is, it's not going to save her from bullets.
This getting shot at is getting very old. But it's pretty much the reason Alex so carefully groomed this little dirt box inside. Of course, it doesn't make much of a difference seeing as how the warehouse sits on the ground. The door is only truck width…pretty easy to remake with earth. With a terrific yell and and oddly happy face, standing in the dirt, Alex throws her hands in the air. The concrete floor of the warehouse starts to crack around the doorway, as a nice, thick wall of earth rises up to plug the hole…and suck up bullets. "I probably can't keep every door plugged up!" she howls out at the others.
The initial bullet rain stops after a moment, perhaps because of the sudden walls of earth that plug the main hole. A sound of impacts can be heard for an instant, peppering the newly built wall, but then even that dies out. Estella, bent down as she is, suddenly finds an arm on her shoulder as Peter stands next to her, looking up at the door and watching for whatever is going to come at them next.
What does come, comes from above. A shimmer of the solid ceiling, and someone drops through, grabbing onto a rail to catch his fall, before dropping to the ground. Dressed all in black, it would appear he's one of them, until he suddenly aims a dart gun at the Hispanic boy, and shoots him. Dart guns are only used when tagging is going to be pulled out. And others of their kind only work with them…
When they submitted to tagging.
Tagging, whatever, Jamie isn't thinking about that kind of thing. The guy aimed a dart gun at her friend? Water-Elemental-Jamie spins around towards the new arrival, as soon as he's shot at the Hispanic boy by her, and she raises a liquid arm. The arm seems to turn into a water cannon, blasting the new figure with high-pressure water like a firehose.
Estella is the only person, it seems, who doesn't /know/ Peter already. Despite the assurances that Peter is on their side, Estella's reaction to his hand on her back is to leap up, bullets be damned, and grab his wrist in a firm, small, cold hand. She stares at him angrily, eyes a flashing green and blue. She looks breakable, but the grip on his wrist is surprisingly strong. "This is your fault. You led them here," she snarls at him, whipping around so that Peter is between herself and the bullets. Back against his back as the bullets begin to die out, she relaxes somewhat. Peter can certainly feel that tension slowing. "What's next," she says. "They're surrounding us, aren't they?"
Holding the wall securely, Alex turns to look over a shoulder at the others. She's moving through the warehouse though, barefoot, and then she stops. Closing her eyes, and breathing deep, she uses the ground itself to feel where those guards are. "They're…coming from other there!" she yells, pointing at the same door that Peter came through. Of course, poinpointing those on the roof is a lot harder, and in the choppers is impossible.
The sudden appearance, the unknown display of ability that pinpoints locations. The building itself resonates. They haven't surrounded completely, but— as indicated, they're approaching from the door. Not including the ninja that dropped through the ceiling. The whirling of the helicopter seems closer, almost right on top of them.
"I'm sorry, I didn't…" Peter tries to say, apologizing. It's not just her that blames him for this, but that voice.
If you'd lead them, this wouldn't happen. They need a leader.
The water blast slams into the man in black, into and through him. He gets knocked back, falling onto the concrete with a grunt, and then disappearing through it. A puddle of water gets left behind, not going with him.
"We need to get out of here. Is there another exit?" Peter says, looking around, as the windows he'd looked through explode inward.
Jamie sinks to the floor long enough to pick up her clothes, then rises again with her clothes held up by water pressure, before she turns back into a human girl again. "There's the drain, but that won't help most people." She crouches by her now tranquilized friend, "Come on, Timo, wake up."
Estella tries to brace herself against Peter again. He's useful as a shield, at least! Whipping around loosens her ponytail; strands of hair fall into her face as she tries to keep on top of all the stuff that's going on. When the windows explode, she instinctively ducks and covers her head, kneeling next to Peter's legs. Once glass stops falling, Estella rises and points to the windows. Exits, of sorts. "Apparently this place wasn't built according to any sort of fire code," she shouts over the helicopter.
Helicopters….always with the helicopters, and the flying. Definitely not something she likes. She'll stick to traveling on the ground, thankyewverymuch. In the dirt, she begins to pick up a lot of rocks, ones that are baseball-sized or so. "Back in a jiff!" Alex says cheerily! In a fluid motion, she sort of…wraps herself in dirt, and simultaneously creates a pillar of the stuff that reaches up and up and up, eventually smashing through the aluminum roof of the warehouse. Being wrapped in the earth at the head of the pillar shields her. From inside, there's a thump and an oof! as she rolls out of it and onto the roof. The pillar falls back down into the warehouse, except for a bit of earth that rains down on the roof of the place. What she's doing up there is anyone's guess, but she's got ammo at least!
Where did all that earth come from? Peter doesn't have time to ask, before he pulls a loose piece of glass out of his shoulder and leaves Estella's side to pick up the young boy that got darted. "We need to go." He says, waving a hand in the opposite direction that she indicated people, and another window shatters, this time outwards. "Hurry," he says, taking the kid and making his way out.
You're going to get all of them killed if you keep running.
"Shut up," he actually says outloud, though the rest of the people inhabiditing the dream hear nothing. A dark figure appears out of the concrete, pulling himself upwards, and grabbing for Estella. The mask he'd had a moment ago is no longer there.
Jamie's eyes widen a little as Alexandra disappears through the ceiling, "Wow." Then she turns to run after Peter as he carries her friend. Her attention on moving forward, she totally misses the figure coming up behind Estella.
Estella is caught entirely off guard. She was listening to Peter talk to himself! Grabbed by the ankle by this dark figure, she tumbles backwards and lands with a heavy 'oomph' on her back. Grimacing, she begins to kick wildly, sneakers connecting with the man's face only once. She pulls herself toward him and tries to dig her fingernails into his eyes, tries to smack him in the face with her foot again. Then, suddenly, the second she can get a grip on the guy's face, she braces herself and leans forward, covering his face with the back of her head and the strands of hair that have long since escaped their elastic confine. What she is doing is hidden, but the man starts wriggling and pulls away from Estella with all his might. When she releases him, his skin has yellowed and begun to decay off of his face. His body begins to disintegrate and, before their eyes, he turns to dust. Estella bolts up, shoving herself from the ground and running after Peter and the others.
Meanwhile, up on the roof, Alex knows that that chopper has to be taken care of if the others are to have any chance of escaping the warehouse. Her entrance isn't exactly subtle, but then, what part of her power is? Just moments after she gets up there, they have their spotlights trained on her, and a moment after that, machine guns too. Doesn't look like they're going to try and bother tagging her. "Aiiyeeeee!" she screams, wrapping herself up in whatever dirt there was that landed on the roof with her from that earthen pillar elevator.
She's on the offensive though, as the chopper hovers and swings around to get a better shot. Those baseball-sized rocks, courtesy of the nice hole dug in the floor of the warehouse make great projectiles themselves! With ease, she's hurling them through the air with enough velocity to make sure they punch through the skin of the chopper. One or two make it through the open door on the side of the chopper and bang on the helmets and armor of the black-clad soldiers, knocking them down, if not out. Her goal, however, is to puncture something…hydraulics, electronics, fluid lines…and so she aims at the tail and blades, until she runs out of rocks. Then she gives up her only protection by letting the loose dirt go…hoping it gets blown around and sucked into the intakes, as she bolts for the hole in the roof to get the heck out of there!
Sometimes, a little dust is all it takes. The helicopter loses control and starts to lose the delicate balance that holds it in the air. The warehouses that surround them suddenly become the only possible cushion that it has. A metal roof buckles, pieces of metal go flying every which way, and the explosion can be heard down where the rest of the people are.
Between what's going on up there, trying to evacuate the children, and the man who just turned to ash, Peter's got a lot to look at. All of it comes at him. Somehow it's as if he's seeing things from different points of view. He's outside of his body, looking at himself… as a bullet flies out of nowhere and impacts him in the back.
You're never going to save them. They're everywhere.
The sky which once had only one helicopter, suddenly seems to have dozens. Heavy machine gun fire pierces the rooftop, now trying to kill, rather than herd or capture like before. The exit that was broken for them gets rained down on as well, threatening to take them all out.
Outside, looking down at himself, he sees the light before anyone else does. Not the light caused by the hispanic boy, but a red furious light.
"No!" he yells, a voice that resonates from everywhere, before the very air starts to burn, and the explosion expands out, detsroying everything in it's path.
Guns. It's a miracle, in a way, that Jamie doesn't panic entirely. She keeps close to Peter, running after him even as the helicopters bear down, and the explosion up above, and everything else. With all the noise and light, she doesn't see the incoming fireball until it's almost too late. She turns to water instinctively as the heat hits her, and she's practically instantly turned to steam, her molecules scattered, perhaps beyond recovery, by the shockwave that follows the heat.
Despite making her way from the attacker, it seems too late for Estella. As she runs for the exit, she sees the bright light and her eyes go wildly large. She starts to scream, but it is cut too soon by the sound of the explosion — and by her death. She falls backwards, burnt.
In the middle of dropping back into the warehouse, intent on turning that little sandbox to quicksand and cushion her fall, the bomb hits. The prone falling body is vaporized in the heat and force of the weapon. What is left is much like the dirt that brought down that chopper except this time it's what's left of a human being floating in the air on the convective currents.
As his consciousness seems to expand outward, Peter sees the heat and fire obliterate the helicopters that threatened them, but also the buildings that others may have sought refuge in, those he wanted to help. The mushroom cloud expands into the sky, visible against the blackness, as the lights all go out in the city. The cloud is burnt into memory, an afterimage that seems to get left behind as he shudders back into a physical body, far from the warehouses he'd once been in. He stumbles down to his knees, sitting on the small island which sports Lady Liberty… which he had been looking at the day he met one of the women he just vaporized.
Look what you did.
Even as the city rebuilds itself, as the city lights back up, as the fragmented people reform… the afterimage remains for him. A reminder of what he's capable of.