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Post by aegis on Jun 3, 2016 14:39:52 GMT
 The sun is high and bright in a cloudless sky. The road shimmers with heat. Even the cars seem sluggish, somehow, inching their way across the MLK to and from Arkham with great reluctance; they don't care where they're going either way, they just don't want to be going, and neither do the drivers and passengers inside, sweating as they curse their pitiful AC systems or roll down the windows in desperate hope of attracting a weak breeze.
No one has noticed Aegis yet. He's walking along the pedestrian footpath on the bridge, the bottom half of his face wrapped in a black mask, chicn tucked into his leather jacket despite the weather. His bangs are damp with sweat but aside from that, he gives no indication that he notices the heat, although he's swathed in full tactical gear below the jacket.
The cars crawl by, one by one, gleaming chrome beneath the sun. Aegis hops the concrete barrier between the road and the sidewalk. A little girl peers out the window and points excitedly at him, while her father, without taking his eyes off the road, gestures for her to hush. He walks past the car's front windshield and the man blinks, rubs at his eyes as if he thinks he's caught sight of a mirage.
His target on this mission is a sleek red BMW, currently jammed in between two mini-vans in the ceaseless traffic gridlock. The woman in the back seat hammers away at a tablet. He halts a dozen yards away and climbs onto the top of an SUV. The occupants pound on the roof, the driver leaning out his window to unleash a truly impressive stream of obscenities. Aegis ignores them and pulls the grenade launcher out from beneath his jacket.
The man shuts up remarkably quickly, tracking the arc of the grenade as it rolls under the BMW and blows it to kingdom come.
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jun 4, 2016 1:53:19 GMT
| I should really change it to “petty dabbler”, I hate to put on airs
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Morricone is enjoying an irish coffee and a donut on the other side of the street when he sees the car blow up with a mighty whoosh, and he gets up from his chair, looking through the facade of the café. “Mheaeha,” he mumbles as he tries and fails to quickly take out his Initiative Badge and start his beeper to signal a request for backup, and he adds another one of those sounds when he almost strangles himself with the strap of his stylish manpurse. Morricone finally manages to look slightly presentable, and runs outside to see the damage.
It’s a mess. The red car exploded out like a tin can with a stick of dynamite stuck in it - and the debris are still showering the area - that’s when Morricone sees a masqued man on the top of a truck. He’s holding a grenade launcher, and considering he’s just used it right now, Morricone doesn’t even doubt he’s ready to do it again.
“I am SO not ready for this,” he mumbles, and starts a somewhat pathetic sprint towards Ground Zero. His first objective - take care of the wounded. He slams a finger gun on his temple and starts talking to himself, his eyes closed. “I am speaking to the entity that is inside,” he murmurs as a green, sickly aura appears around him, “The great lover, the gentle medicae, the soft breeze. I call you forth and bind you to my will, The Cure!”
It’s a small, jewel-embedded, white bunny that spawns forth from behind Morricone, and skips and hops quickly from one wounded to another, sitting on their laps and offering them moral and physical support - as he licks their wounds away, as if they were stickers peeling off their skins.
“INITIATIVE!!!! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, PUNK!?”, Morricone bellows, showing his badge to the shooter. He’s trembling, but he hopes that’s not visible from the distance.
aegis ✎pie |
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Post by aegis on Jun 5, 2016 6:41:06 GMT
His target, the woman, lies in a pool of her own blood, gasping for air that won't save her. There's a hole the size of a fist in her stomach. Aegis watches, stone-faced. Visual confirmation of death is necessary for mission report.
A rabbit hops to her side and licks the bloody wound. It disappears like it never was. Aegis is almost surprised enough to miss the man shouting at him, and to let it show on his face. Almost, but he does neither.
Instead he jumps off the SUV, landing heavy on his feet, and pulls out his SIG-Sauer to put a bullet in her brain. He doesn't think rabbits can lick that away.
The Devil's Advocate |
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jun 5, 2016 13:15:21 GMT
| I should really change it to “petty dabbler”, I hate to put on airs
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Oh.
Oh fuck no.
Morricone gets the bigger picture now. This isn’t just civil unrest. This is a HIT. Professional, cold, distant and bloody. Something boils inside of The Devil’s Advocate when he sees the longcoat-wearing hitman jump down the truck and pull out a pistol, work the action, and aim it straight at the woman’s - the hit herself, poor girl - head.
What’s worse is, the hitman doesn’t even react to his words.
The Cure hisses, hindlegs ready to bounce, jewel eyes angrily staring at the cold man, but Morricone calls him back - it leaves the unconscious, but stable, woman to her demise as it turns to mist. He’d rather pull out the heavyweights for this problem: something he knows will be able to fight back. It’s with a dead sprint to the car that Morricone mutters a few words, a finger jammed at his forehead, shaped like a gun.
When he pulls back, it’s not a fake anymore.
The gun itself is flashy pink revolver, of small hammerless make. The cylinder is a pretty yellow - and the whole ensemble hums with power. If the assassin had been concentrating, he would have seen six little humanoid figures flying around the gun, all of them shouting obscenities in high pitched voices. They look like anthropomorphized bullets. Morricone loads them in the gun, takes the first shot - and misses.
Well, not really. It’s all going according to plan - if you can call it a plan. But he plays along with the act, and yells a “shit!”, before readjusting his gun and firing again.
The first bullet fired was floating in the air near Aegis, like a little bullet fairy. It’s shouting in its little voice, and the hitman can hear him, even if its voice is low: “yeaaa, come here, we’ll show him, we’ll show him!” And yes, when the second bullet is coming along right at the little fairy - with a second one rodeo-ing on top of the projectile. Their paths meet, and the two little twerps KICK the bullet in a whole new path - headed right towards Aegis’s handgun.
“Good job, Sex Pistols! I swear to god almighty, I’ll make you leave that woman alone - or die trying! That’s a promise I’m making as The Devil’s Advocate! You better learn that name, because I’m not stopping until you’ve seen justice!”
aegis ✎pie |
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Post by aegis on Jun 6, 2016 3:28:04 GMT
Civilians move like they have all the time in the world. The man is still sprinting towards the car when Aegis fires at the woman.
When the man starts to shoot at him in turn, Aegis drops low to the ground, away from the talking bullet that mutters to itself as it hangs in the air, and takes cover behind the SUV he was previously perched on. Actually--he rips the door off the driver's side with his metal hand and pulls the man out, snapping the seat belt in two, and presses his gun to his head.
"Stand down," he says flatly.
The Devil's Advocate ZjWMGl0m |
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jun 6, 2016 4:52:03 GMT
 The man pulls the trigger before the first shot even gets to him. Something in Morricone snaps. Not his patience or his sanity - he realises the idea that this would work like a comic book was so flimsy that it couldn’t even handle one casualty. This is a FIGHT. You have to strike first, or work an angle.
He does just that immediately - after giving a shit eating grin, Morricone falls backwards into his shadow, pulled by invisible arms. Ripples remain, and then the shadow disappears in the sunlight..
The little flying bullets are still hanging around Aegis’s head, flying around him like mosquitoes and shouting obscenities to the hitman: “Oh, you’re SO dead mister, you’re so fucking dead! Papa’s gonna wreck your dirty little face! You just wait!” Annoying fucks is what they are.
Suddenly, coming from the car’s shadow, a single arm leaps out with something akin to water splashing - shadow dribbles down Aegis’s pants leg when the arm - clearly Morricone’s - grabs and pulls it in the watery darkness. It feels like mud, or more accurately, swampy earth.
Morricone swims out of a shadow, behind a car, putting some cover between him, the hitman and the hostage. He catches his breath and mentally recalls the two Sex Pistols sent out. He had to think of a plan. At least, he’d disappeared, and had somewhat handicapped the shooter - this was going to help him, if only slightly. But now, he needs a plan - something tangible, a way to try and stop him from doing too much damage.
aegis
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Post by aegis on Jun 6, 2016 20:30:03 GMT
The man disappears, but Aegis isn't stupid enough to think he's gone. The bullets (?) continue to buzz around his head, yelling obscenities. They would be more effective than they are now--which is to say not at all--if they were shaped like his handlers and speaking in German. He keeps the gun pressed against the man's head, uncaring of the way he shivers in Aegis' grip with fear. He scans the area, debates getting back up onto a car for vantage, and abruptly has his left leg pulled out from underneath him by an arm that reaches out of a shadow before vanishing again.
His grip tightens reflexively on the man's shoulder, strong enough to shatter his collarbone. The man screams and Aegis shoves him back into the driver's seat. He'll give his opponent a choice.
Aegis tosses two grenades into the car after the man, one for the front seat and one for the back. They're five second fuse variations, and the people in the car stare at them like they're poisonous snakes, like staring is going to save them. Aegis drops a smoke bomb and turns to leave.
The Devil's Advocate |
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jun 9, 2016 3:08:17 GMT
Morricone takes a moment to think of potential angles of approach - but suddenly, he sees that he doesn’t HAVE that kind of time. The hitman forces his hand - he throws the man in the dilapidated car, followed by a grenade. Two of them, exactly - and the people in there freak out, I mean obviously. The panic freezes everybody.
To make matters worse, the hitman does his best to imitate a ninja exit with smoke bomb and all. Great.
Morricone thinks faster than he can speak, so he doesn’t even bother screaming the name of the manitou he’s calling. It appears: small, feminine forms of neon blues and greens, her face flat and missing anything resembling a nose, a mouth, or hair, instead appearing almost metallic or robotic, with sunglasses on her eyes and headphones on her ears - her head bobs to something that sounds like a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff.
She is Stone Free, the joyous spider. She is a toolbox within a toolbox, and one hell of a fighter.
Morricone swipes his hands towards the car as he runs - and it’s not his, but Stone Free’s. The summoner looks like he’s wearing her arms as gloves, her head just over his shoulder, and string comes out at the end of the fingers, her arms unraveling. The two impromptu spider silken ropes fly through the wreck of a car and wrap themselves around the explosives. Then, with another flick of the wrist, Morricone orders his manitou to throw them sky high - and as hard as she can.
The plan works, and the grenades explode in the air, to which Morricone pumps his fist, then fist bumps his manitou in happiness. One slight little problem, though: One stray duck gets caught on the edge of the blast, quacks, and falls to the earth. Morricone stops happy with himself at that point, and winces at the sound of the duck's demise. But in the end, it all works out when the duck’s knocked out body falls right on Aegis’s head.
“...Oh that’s kind of convenient.”
aegis
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Post by aegis on Jun 10, 2016 8:14:47 GMT
The people in the car survive; they are not his mission, and as usual, he doesn't feel about this. Even when the duck falls on his head, he only flings it aside with his metal hand, uncaring.
It collides with a passenger door and explodes into a cacophony of blood and feathers. It isn't a pleasant sight. He keeps moving forward, smoothly jumping over the divider between the pedestrian walkway and the bridge proper. There's a helicopter and his handler waiting for him at a rendezvous point; he only has to get to it.
The Devil's Advocate |
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jun 27, 2016 1:45:56 GMT
That motherfucker just straight up ignored him. Now that was just rude.
Morricone felt himself turn from annoyed to fuming in one second. The mindless destruction of human lives was probably the thing that made his blood boil the most. So he walked slowly and surely towards his enemy, and summoned a pure psychic weapon.
“I am calling forth the enemy within - the ferrous horror - the mindless agent. I’m calling you forth into this world: Metallica!”
Suddenly, pain sprouted from inside of Aegis’ leg. Weakness crept up his limb as his knee buckled, followed by sharp, bloody pain. And then… Thousands of small razorblades, made from his blood’s own iron, screamed and pierced his leg and pants. Reflected on the bloody metal were small screaming faces of pure hate. Morricone adjusted his tie and walked closer to Aegis with a cold look of pure hatred in his eyes. “End of the line, asshole!”
aegis
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Jun 28, 2016 11:50:00 GMT
Post by aegis on Jun 28, 2016 11:50:00 GMT
Despite what they've done to him, despite what Spectre thinks, despite what he thinks, Aegis is still human. He's flesh and blood. They buried the man beneath the frost and the years and kept only his skills, built a weapon around his bones, but he's still there, god, he's still there and breathing, even if none of them believe it, Ezra Mazur is alive.
He's a voice that never sings, but he still has a voice, and he screams when his blood turns to knives, razor-sharp metal bursting through his skin, shredding muscle and tendon and lodging itself into bone. The sound shatters the air for a moment, and then cuts off as abruptly as it started. His throat is raw. His programming for un-salvageable situations overrides the pain and shock with ruthless efficiency.
Aegis still has his gun drawn, and he fires twice at the man as he advances, thumbing for his communicator with his free hand. The whites of his eyes are showing. He's a cornered animal. He's down on one knee. The damage--not pain anymore, but damage--is extensive. Even if he were still not engaged with his current obstacle, he's not sure he could make it to the helicopter. They're going to have to come to him.
Or they won't, and he'll execute the protocol for when extraction becomes impossible.
The Devil's Advocate |
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Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jul 1, 2016 4:22:37 GMT
Morricone takes a leisure walk towards his target. He’s pissed, and it’s clouding his judgement. Finally, a vocal retort from the agent. For most of the fight, the Devil’s Advocate had been up against a wall, but now he sees that he’s just a man. Clearly focused, clearly engineered into a machine of war - he’s pretty sure that who this man is, he was in the list of dangerous folks to take in and apprehend. Aegis, right, right.
For a moment he forgets the gun.
There are two sharp pains blooming in his body as the first bullet hits him in the left leg, and the second shot goes right through his left shoulder. He doesn’t fall backwards like people in movies do, no: his nerves explodes and scream, and then his weight crushes under itself, faltering to the ground, forwards and almost down for the count. He screams all the way, and almost sobs - god fucking damnit, getting shot was not his favorite way of being hurt! It hadn’t happened often but he’d always hated it. On the ground, holding his shoulder to stop the bloodflow, Morricone rolls over to his back, and up into the sky.
He must’ve blacked out for a while - maybe even fell asleep, because when he reopens his eyes, there’s a buzzing sound in the sky that wasn’t there the instant before, and that’s when he sees the helicopter.
“No no no no No No NO!!! FUCK!”
aegis
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Post by aegis on Jul 1, 2016 7:41:06 GMT
The cold, clean satisfaction of putting the obstacle down is nothing in the face of the pain. Damage. Pain.
He crawls to the side of the bridge. His right leg is useless. It is beyond useless. It is an active hindrance, a malfunction on a level he cannot comprehend.
(Aegis doesn't remember losing his arm, how they cut away everything, even though it was only irreparably damaged below the elbow, to make him a better weapon, but that's the only thing that could remotely compare.)
Time passes without hold on him. His handlers roar over the communicator like the ocean and he gives terse answers back. His hair is slick with sweat, damp against his temples. The roar of the communicator fades out like static and gives way to a much closer noise. The helicopter hovers overhead like a grotesque, fat bug. A ladder unfurls down.
He only has one leg to stand on, but he grips the wall of the bridge with his metal hand and pulls himself upright on that left leg. When he takes his hand away, concrete crumbles from his fingers, his grip imprinted in the divider.
The ladder pulls him up and away, the bridge shrinking, the obstacle shrinking, everything but the reality of damage and his completed mission falling away.
The Devil's Advocate |
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Jul 31, 2016 13:05:12 GMT
Post by The Devil's Advocate on Jul 31, 2016 13:05:12 GMT
The cleanup crew comes too late, as usual. Morricone isn’t even surprised at this point of time - he’s just happy to be lifted from the street floor and bandaged and treated by a few paramedics of occult learning - the lay on hands they’re doing pushes the bullets out of the wounds and treats the flesh slightly.
“There,” one of them says with a pant and a sweaty brow, “Just keep your arm in the bandage and let it relax for two days or so, and you should be fine. As for your leg... Ever used crutches?’
Morricone groans and grabs them out of the paramedic’s hands, before walking away. He’s had enough. He gave all he could, and that wasn’t what was needed. Crisis like that wasn’t Morricone’s forte, and it annoyed him. He had to get better if he wanted to survive longer than just…
Morricone sighed, and turned around.
“Make a call for all the World War 2 era heroes,” The Devil’s Advocate finally says. “Aegis made the hit on the woman in that car. I… Tried to keep her alive with a spell, but she took a bullet to the head. Can’t keep someone alive after that. He fled on a helicopter - don’t know where. I’d blacked out by then. I also Fucked up his leg bad.
-If you don’t mind, sir, how bad?
-Potential Amputation levels of bad. Had to stop him moving. Seemed the easiest way.”
And, after grabbing a new smoke and lighting it with a match, he slowly walked away from the mess in the direction of the nearest bar.
(aaaand scene.) |
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