Fragile Things IC, Who hunts the Hunter? Options

[Ophis]

Wing steadies herself after her quick shift of position. She calmly ignores the new target shooting past it to demolish the remaining cultist. Darkhorse remains in cover and snaps a pair of shots, into the spirit, which it just ignores as it bounds into Wing. It lunges forward biting her arm as she brings it off her gun to fend the creature off. Whe a grunt she pulls clear before the jaws close, almost.

The jaws close down hard. Teeth skate off armour plates and armoured skin heavy lips slap the arm but leave only bruises. The spirit hardly seems to care as it shifts to press it's attack then something slams into it. It's warty skin bursts a strange green blood seeps from it's wounds. It stumbles backwards, still a threat, bloodied but unbowed.

[Ophis]

A solid kick from Wing forces the spirit back on it's haunches. A power bolt slams into it's head and slides off doing it no damage.

Downstairs the outdoor team move into the building.

[Ophis]

Darkhorse ploughs into the spirit, forcing it aside but doing it no damage. It lunges at Wing but she keeps it at bay with a warding off kick. Before it can recover balance Flat is up the stairs and neatly slices it's head in two with his katana. As the spirit fades existence the building falls quiet.

[pragma]

JW had a bad feeling as he moved back under cover ducking by the stairs. With the amount of fire that had been poured into the building, everything should have quieted down. The fight still raged upstairs.

He snatched Jun out of the spirits LOS and kept his shotgun trained on the door as he instantly sent a message to Flat

<<JW@Flat: I'll secure first floor. You clear the fight.>>

He hadn't even finished turning to Jun when he heard the characteristic ring of Flat's enchanted katana being used.

"Sorry 'bout yanking you 'round ma'am, just tryin' to keep you out the line of fi'ah. Keep an eye on the back door for me."

He composed another message:

<<JW@Team: I've got the first floor and I'm going to scan for traffic shortly. But we've cleared all the cultists by my count. I'll secure the stairs and Jun, and you four can clear the second floor. Our hostages ought to be there.>>

[adamu]

No sooner had Flat finished off the demon than he was bounding back down the stairs. Without even a few free seconds to do a proper psychometric read on Jun, he still had no clear idea what was going on with her, but the thought of leaving her alone with his friend JW had made his skin crawl.

He got back to the first-floor landing just as the ork hacker's message came through on his comm. Nodding at his teammate, he looked at the mysterious woman - "We've got three people up ahead. JW'll stay down here, and I'll watch your back," he said calmly, pointing up the stairs with his katana.

[Vegas]

Jun looked between the two men and their conflicting directions. She didn't relish the thought of going upstairs regardless and opened her mouth to protest, but the tip of Flat's katana was a quiet but efficient negotiator.

With a silent nod she started up the steps, the socks on her feet stepping over and unfortunately enough through puddles of various liquids and toad goo as she went. Each and every step made her cringe but she kept walking, feeling Flat's presence behind her.

[adamu]

Flat hated playing the hardass - she seemed like a nice girl, a real wrong-place-wrong-timer - but being hard kept him in emotional neutral, a place he was good at staying in... and he couldn't ignore the danger signs he saw all around her - everything was wrong, wrong enough he wasn't letting her out of his sight again.

He just wanted to get this damned building swept and get a few moments to take a good long deep painsfuckingtakingly detailed read of her astral self.

[Metatron]

<<"On it">>

[Ophis]

Wing and Darkhorse quickly search the top floor. Two of the cultists appear to alive, if severely mauled, and a too new looking com system sits in a corner of one of the rooms. Darkhorse pulls restraints out and secures the two survivors.

[adamu]

Not finding their targets was annoying, but with all the crap he'd seen and been through today, that was an easy emotion to repress.

Following the gunsels through the second floor, keeping Jun in sight all the time, Flat wiped his katana on a towel, sheathed it, then typed a couple of messages in the air.

@JW<<Got some tech up here for you to look at.>>

@Toobit<<I'm finally going to give our mystery woman a real thorough scan, and I'd rather not be alone when I do it...>>

Then he entered one of the rooms, pulled a chair into the middle of the floor and, pointing to it, said to Jun, "Please. It's time to find out who you are."

[Vegas]

A cold shiver went through her as she looked nervously between Flat's face and the chair he obviously intended her to be seated in. She stepped cautiously towards it before she sat precariously on the edge.

“What exactly do you mean ‘find out who I am’? How exactly do you propose you’re going to do that? I can’t tell you anything I don’t know.�

She moved slightly, shifting more of her weight to the balls of her feet which only caused the socks that she was wearing to share an audible squishing sound with the otherwise silent room and it’s occupants. She grimaced at both the noise and the feeling against her skin.

[amra28]

Toobit leans against the wall as the weariness of his recent actions drags at him. The dwarf tries to regain some energy as he waits for the others to complete the sweep of the top floor.

The blinking of an incoming message on his sunglasses grabs Toobit's focus. After quickly reviewing the message he sends the following response to Flat:

"Ok sounds fine to me, be right there. Hopefully she will not explode on us."

The dwarf then moves just inside the doorway of the room with Flat and Jun. He gives Flat a quick nod and then gives Jun a neutral stare. After a few moments Toobit shifts his perception the the astral plane.

[pragma]

Flat's message came through and JW roused himself from his makeshift foxhole.

<<@Team: Looks like stairs are secure. I'm heading to you guys to check on the tech. If someone else wants to stand watch (]b\Dark Horse[/b]?) it can't hurt.>>

JW double checked his agent's output. It showed no new nodes in the area and the tracking results were similarly empty. Looked safe. He ran a brief scan of his own to make sure that his agent hadn't been fooled. It worked well, but only the dumbest of hackers trusted their agents completely.

Arriving in the room, JW sized up the communications. Flat looked like he was preparing to work his magic.

"'Scuse me miss." As he slid past Jun and headed to comm. equipment. It was a welcome distraction from the other things going on tonight. The paranoia that he lived with in the physical world, especially when the astral intruded on it, always melted away when he got to a terminal. It was his turf and he was itching to work on it.

[adamu]

With Toobit on astral overwatch, Flat perched himself on the edge of a chair opposite the woman they were calling Jun. Rather than answer her question directly, he smiled warmly and just said, "Trust me. All I'm going to do is have a look at you. It's all good."

Your heart is your own and naught shall touch it. Your heart is your own and naught shall touch it. He repeated his mantra several times in preparation for whatever he might see. When he'd read the room they'd rescued this woman from, it had almost floored him, and a being he assumed was their quarry, Orion, had addressed him directly.

And then there was the other crap that had gone down in his head since then.

He'd read some nasty scenes before, but nothing like the last 15 minutes had ever happened.

Soon his shades started to strobe at irregular intervals with a kaleidoscope of hues - he had slipped into the astral himself. He had already seen Jun's own aura, now he was going to see what sort of impressions were piggy-backed onto it.

He reached out and gently laid his fingertips on the back of her hand....

[Ophis]

Flat

[ Spoiler ]

You sense pain and fear, then a feeling of elation maybe an escape from that. Then a growing sense of dread. Then nothing. Then confusion and panic. Strangely there are no images attached to any on this. You here a voice dry and harsh, "Many thanks this astral link you've created will serve me nicely."

Jun

[ Spoiler ]

Flat touches your hand at first you feel a slight tickle. Then a sense of an all to familiar touch creeps into the sensation. Your throat tightens as panic sets in.

For a moment Jun's head is wreathed by a golden halo. A huge unseen hand seems to pick Flat up and slams him into the wall. Even upstairs everyone can hear the crash.

Flat

[ Spoiler ]

"Bitch!" screams the voice, but you cease to care as you impacted the paster board.

Jun

[ Spoiler ]

That was odd, but the feeling is gone.

JW

[ Spoiler ]

You've just logged on when you think you hear something in the physical.

[amra28]

"Oh frag!", Toobit says as he watches Flat get tossed across the room. Then the dwarf broadcasts the following message to the other team members over his commlink, "Our new lady friend just tossed Flat like a rag doll. Some of you may want to get in here."

Toobit then moves over to check the status of his teammate but all the while he keeps his eyes locked on Jun.

[adamu]

Still in the astral, Flat also kept his eyes on Jun as he accepted a hand up from his dwarven teammate.

He winced as he stood - it felt like he'd maybe broken a rib. He tried to stay calm about it, but the fact was that while things had been weird before, now they were getting frightening, and for Flat, being scared hurt worse than a lousy cracked rib.

As his companions converged on the room, however, he kept his voice in its trademark monotone as he said quietly, "Don't hurt her."

[pragma]

The new device was beckoning:

<<System Online: RR Kernel 9.2.5.10
Checkiing for local disks, flash storage located
Mounting wirelss protocol
'Starting hardware abstraction layer - HAL
Searching for wireless file system

This was his opportunity, if he could have his comm. act as a primary wireless file system it could feed arbitratry files to the processor when it looked for configuration and binary data. Fooling required a nanosecond spoof so that it couldn't reach it's normal file system.

Wireless filesystem found at 77.32.A6.F8.3A
Wireless filesystem identified as JW

CRASH!

The jarring noise from the physical world was enough to convince JW to drop his delicate manipulations and swith to AR.

Flat was lying on the ground, bleeding. The shotgun was in JW's hands before he thought about pulling it; enhanced synapses launching him into action.

Flat instructed the room not to hurt her, but JW kept his gun trained unwaveringly. Just pointing it at her wouldn't hurt her, and was good insurance to boot.

In a tone that mixed menace and curiosity he asked "What did you just do to my pa'atna, miss?"

[Metatron]

Wing barrels down the stairs.

"Hey hey! what the frag is going on here?", she roars. "Shouldn't we think about getting away from here before we round on each other? We don't know if the star is likely to turn up, and somebody should call Mary, and maybe then, we can figure everything out"

Wing walks over to Flat to have a look at him.

"You fine?" she asks Flat, "Or are you just a little bruised?"

[Vegas]

Her hands that had been on her knees as she sat down, the very ones that Flat had touched now gripped the edges of the chair with an intensity that made her knuckles white.

She blinked once as Flat was no longer seated before her.

She blinked twice and caught sight of Flat standing across the room with two people concerned beside him.

She turned at the sound of JW's voice and stared down the barrel of his shotgun. She swallowed hard and looked between Flat and JW before she spoke, her voice meek and fearful, whether she was afraid of what she felt or the shotgun remained to be seen.

"What did I do to him? I... I don't know. I'm sorry I don't know.. I just felt him again."

[adamu]

Flat had been about to answer Wing when Jun's words distracted him from his pain - "You never mentioned a him before," he said calmly. "If you remember something now, tell us quick while the memory's fresh."

[Vegas]

"I... he..."

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to concentrate, tried to focus on the feeling and the memory it evoked however fleeting. She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the sides of the chair hard again.

She let out the breath she was holding a few moments later in frustration.

"I can't remember. There's nothing, it's all a void."

[adamu]

Flat winced as he replied to Wing. "More than a bruise, I'm afraid, but it'll keep until we get out of here - which is a fucking outstanding suggestion. We'll talk more once we're mobile. We should see if JW can find anything worthwhile on their comm gear and than get out of Dodge. And we all need to keep an eye on this one," he said, indicating the Hispanic elf in men's casual wear.

All that he said out loud. For the private benefit of his teammates, however, he wrote the following. <<My insights into our guest were simultaneously much less and slightly more informative than I expected. I haven't yet got all the answers, but for now it is enough that I believe she really is a good person. And for that reason, I intend to do everything I can to help her. Unfortunately, she may also be incredibly dangerous to us. In particular, I believe our quarry can at least track us through her, and hear what we say. So everyone's warned, and if you choose to keep your distance from us, I won't blame you. Although as dangerous as she is, she might be our only link to our quarry.>>

[pragma]

Flat and Wing were right. They needed to bail soon, but security was first. Keeping the gun pointed at Jun he said. "Keep yer eyes on the floor lady." Even JW's limited experience told him that few thing's counted for more than LOS with mages.

He overlayed his comm's log over his normal vision, the bright red reticle of his smartlink fading into the background.

... Init meta-version 0.1.23 loaded from JW
Mounting primary filesystem ... wfs-expoit-1.1
Executing boot loader ... ./hack2.0 ... sucess
admin account r00t granted.

r00t@unidentified_comm:___ (id-data loading) ...

He was itching for a chance to pore over the data, but they needed to get gone. He stood up, tapped Jun in the back with the gun and said, "Let's start walking."

[adamu]

Flat also stayed behind Jun as they headed out of the building. He was still perceiving astrally - he wasn't actively assensing her, but he had an eye out just the same for any surge of mana activity or other presences.

Once they were outside, he gave his car a once over, trying to determine the extent of the damage.