Vanguard Roll Call!

Vanguard Roll Call!

Monday, December 29, 2008

Issue 30: A House Afire!


Big City, the Bronx. Investigation Day One. 11:06pm

As the thug hung upside down, Sentinel drew him closer toward him until he could hear his voice and see he was dealing with what appeared to be a man controlling the tendrils.

In a voice deeper and more menacing than his own, Kirk said, “You know what I want to hear. You’d best start talking quickly … and I better like what you have to say!”

“Okay, okay! Don’t kill me!!” the weasel-faced thug cried.
“It was Dexter Sinister! Dexter Sinister ordered the hit! That’s all I know!
Please, Octopus! I’m beggin’ you! Don’t kill me!”

KRAKOW! Sentinel heard a strike of lightning. White light backlit the storefront building.
Then, from behind the building, he also heard the unmistakable sound of Tommyguns. BUDDA!BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA!

Suddenly, Sentinel saw Slingshot appear from nowhere, falling from the sky! The malleable man of might transformed into a ball and crashed through the storefront doors in hot pursuit of the Tommygun killers. KRASH!
Slingshot slammed hard into the men, WHUMP!! Knocking them back like bowling pins, their weapons scattering. Slingshot counted six of them as they bounced off the walls and floors.

The storefront was the front half of what looked like an empty, abandoned building. Might have been a drugstore once. Scraps of paper and garbage littered the dirty wooden floors. Windows were boarded, slicing up the moonlight that came through.
Also, there was the smell of fire. Orange light and smoke came from the back of the building.

Voices shouted in the darkness, through the chaos.
“It’s a damned extranormal!” one of the men yelled, rubbing his jaw as he found his feet.
“That’s what them tentacles musta been,” another shouted.
“I’m getting outta here!’
“Get back here!”
Three of the killers ran into the back, as the other three found their Tommyguns.
“Fill him fulla lead!” growled the first man, leveling his barrel at Slingshot.

(OOC: Actions?)

Meanwhile, Kairos and Lightning Strike were behind the storefront:
“Let ’em have it!” barked a deep voice from within the burning building and the guns opened fire, spraying out a hard rain of hot lead upon our heroes!

Like winged Hermes, Kairos ran toward his bound captive. He slammed his shoulder into the man’s gut, taking his wind away. Then Kairos raised up while still moving, shifting effortlessly into a fireman carry.

BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA!

Kairos heard the guns but sensed no bullets coming anywhere near him. Still racing like a gazelle, he risked a look back. He saw a sight he wouldn’t soon forget.

The man called Lightning Strike stood with hands outraised toward a lightpole. White electricity circled it, creating some kind of field. The field was attracting the bullets! They flew from the roaring muzzles of the Tommyguns right into the light post! Kairos and his captive were safe. Funny how things always worked out for Kairos.

Kairos slammed his man down behind a dumpster. He was unconscious and Kairos reeled in the cable. With the bullets out of commission for now, he sprinted to the burning building, threw his grappling hook to the roofline and scaled the building with Tommyguns firing over his head!

Meanwhile, the lightpost was being chopped apart from the bullets! Strike cancelled the electrical field and transformed himself into living lightning again! He entered into overhead wires that ran into the burning building.

SHAKOW! Lightning Strike burned out of a socket, melting the electrical works in the wall. He was human again and standing in the same room with the four surprised Tommygunners. They wore clothes chosen to identify themselves as mobsters. The room looked like a makeshift bunkhouse. Mattresses covered the floor. Newspapers, half eaten meals, beer cans, ashtrays filled to overflowing.

Beyond the room, the building was on fire. Smoke, fire, heat, orange light. Men shouting from outside the room. Sounds of a big scuffle downstairs. Heavy footsteps on a staircase.

Unsure that their guns even worked anymore, the four cursing thugs threw their guns down in disgust, pulled out knives and clubs and closed with Lightning Strike as Kairos slipped in the window behind them!

(OOC: Actions?)

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Slingshot:
"Tentacles? Extranormals? So our intel was right, the mob didn't have any supers," thought Scott. Looking around to the bodies strewn about, they sure didn't need any supers to get the job done. The tentacles weren't coming here, yet. I'll have to get one of them, then I'll see.

This may be a gang war, but people are dying. I need one of these to get more intel. He looked at the first man who took the lead. He will do nicely. With that, he threw a hand at the man. It expanded to the size of a full man.

[ooc] So wrap top dog for later interrogation. Then deal with the rest of the rabble.

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Kairos:
Kairos will, quite simply, approach the four from behind, unlimbering his staff as he charges into the fray. He'll keep an eye on the "electrical guy" as he wants to try and avoid being shocked but he'll enter into the fight, anyway.

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Lightning Strike:
Lightning Strike scans the room quickly. "Damn shoddy wiring in these old places. I can't get out the way I came in," he thinks to himself. Seeing the men charge him, he positions himself so he is facing them and the door so that whoever is coming up those stairs does not come up behind him. He then raises a static electric field around himself (same as the one raised in issue 1 or 2 atop the empire state building) which may provide some damage to the thugs but is there more for a deterrent to attack. He notices Kairos entering through the window but says nothing.

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Sentinel:
“Octopus? Octopus?!” Kirk thought to himself, that’s the moniker this thug comes up with? In the seconds of devising his guise, names had come to his mind, names that inspired fear, ‘Dark Cataclysm’, ‘Cloaked Nightmare’, ‘Black Plague’, ‘Shrouded Nemesis’ … but now he thought “you'd best talk, thug, if you think I'm bad, you don't want to meet my pals, ‘Squid and Goldfish!’”

Although the irony amused Kirk, he had no time to think about such trivials.

“You're not worth the effort of killing,” Kirk said in a deep voice as a tendril battered the thug unconscious. In a combination of flight and energy maneuvering (in case he was being observed) Kirk quickly scaled the building of the alleyway and disappeared from view from the ground to the roof above. On the roof he secured the thug in case he should wake up before Kirk was back to retrieve him (Kirk found some sort of metal or something on the roof to mold around the thug to restrain him). He also used his energy to jam the roof door so he wouldn't accidentally be discovered and made sure to restrain the thug as low to the roof floor as possible to avoid his being an easy target from another roof.

Tapping his communicator to active he said, “Drake, I've secured the survivor of the gunfight on the roof adjacent our objective building. (gives descriptive location) He's unconscious and ready for pickup for interrogation. I've had visual on Slingshot's arrival and he's already entered the building. I've had no visual but believe Strike may have arrived on the opposite side of the building. I'm dropping my disguise since it's apparent that Vanguard is now on the scene.”

“I did manage to get a name to go with the initials we discovered earlier. Tell Ajay (head of the computer crew he was working with, unless you prefer another name) to focus the search on references to “Dexter Sinister.” (Does this name mean anything to Kirk? Has he heard it before?)

Kirk, was about to say “Out,” but first thought about it and added, “and Drake, sorry about the statement ending my last transmission, it was,” Kirk grasped for the right word, “unprofessional. Out.”

The darkness enveloping Kirk morphed into his familiar bright colors and the chaotic tendrils retracted into his structured shielding as a smile and a look of relief crossed Kirk's face. With a last look at the unconscious thug he recalled Michael Keaton’s line from the first Batman movie and paraphrased “I'm not Batman”.

Kirk exited the roof of the building on the opposite end he had come up and flew around their objective building to get a better visual on all of the activity and if he was correct that the electricity flash he had seen did signal Strike's presence. From the commotion he knew that Slingshot had engaged the men inside, but having seen him in action in the last mission, he had no question about his ability to handle the situation.

Kirk wanted as much intel as possible so that no more lives were lost if he could prevent it. As he circled the building, now closer to it, he reached out with his energy senses again to try to get a mental layout of what he could regarding the inside and its inhabitants. After the obvious set up below, he wanted to make sure there weren't other players about to take out the building entirely… any energy sources that would indicate a bomb of some sort building? Can Kirk get a feel on the number of inhabitants and their locations (are they all concentrated on the bottom floor of the abandoned building or are there other hubs of activity?) Is he still sensing just normals in the buildings or is there any extranormal energy perceptions?

Likely these actions would use up all of Kirk’s time for this turn even though he had no real “attack”.

Once Kirk has a feel that he has the best pulse on the building activity he can get without overextending too much time, unless he discovers something that needs his immediate attention, he will likely choose to enter the building to assist Slingshot from another angle, but depending on what his visual and energy sweep tells him, that might change.