applesaucedream | Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

Current Music: September 22nd/23rd, 2013

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Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

Welcome to another ordinary day in Manhattan. This barely even qualifies as a dream at all, it's so like waking life. The dreamers will find that they're their own perfectly normal selves going about their perfectly normal business and thwarting perfectly normal crimes in their perfectly normal spandex outfits.

What's that? No, of course it's normal to wear spandex (or leather, for the more chic among you) and go around beating up muggers and thwarting your villainous counterparts, don't be silly. What else would you do with your afternoon, not use your superpowers to better the world? That's grossly irresponsible of you; don't you know that with great power comes great responsibility?

So get out there and make the world a better place -- and be sure not to let that disguise slip if you do make it in to work today. Wouldn't want anyone to learn your secret identity, after all.

[OOC: Characters will find themselves thrust into the role of superhero...or at least, super-powered human. Whether they'd use those powers for good or evil (or use them at all), they'll think they've always been this way (or maybe just since that time they fell in toxic waste and developed ~~cancer~~ telekinesis). Usual dream party rules apply: all players and characters welcome regardless of membership status. Characters will remember or forget the events of the dream at players' discretion.]

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In the rising conflagration of someone who, apparently, would prefer to self-immolate rather than confront the problem directly, Nick recoils from the range of the hungrily licking flames, eying the utter disarray warily.

It is of little consequence.

Nick withdraws a second object, rattling and globular, and drops it into the chaos their mutual enemy has helpfully generated on his own. With a bright hiss, the small orb releases a thick burst of choking gray smoke.

Oh well now this is happening. Iman pulls a fold of her hijab up over her mouth and nose with a sharp jerk, assesses Nhodd's position, closes her eyes, and ducks into the smoke. Not the smartest move ever, but she never rode on smarts alone. Her prosthetic emits another burst of energy and she throws a punch. Lots of variables on this one. Does her normally flame-retardant energy shield work on whatever fresh hell this is? Did she propel herself at the precise correct angle that she can blindly strike Nhodd in the spine? Is Rush going to throw another fuckin trick grenade in while she's still in there? Let's find out.

There is too much smoke -- there should be no smoke at all, for his is a holy fire that burns beyond the ken of mortals. Black spots still interrupt Nhodd's vision, but that is nothing compared to the smoke that bounces back the light of his fire in duller form. No matter -- he resolidifies himself, clapping his wings like thunder to disperse the smoke and --

And that is a robotic fist in the small of his back. A repeat of such a direct attack was unexpected, to say the least; even without knowing that the fire is aetheric energy, most mortals have the sense not to attempt to touch him in this state. There's no shout this time, but a surprised grunt as his legs give out beneath him -- but then he's rolling with the impact as he hits the ground, throwing an arm up to shoot a gout of flame at his attacker.

Useful as he finds the tactic of lobbing a concatenation of expertly-prepared optical and pulmonary irritants into the fray rather than entering into direct conflict himself, Nicholas does not terribly find himself predisposed to linger on the sidelines as their joint opponent sweeps the smoke aside with a wing flap whose strength and sound and velocity approximates a sonic boom.

Asadi has helpfully positioned herself behind him, allowing Nick clear shot as the other man, possibly some sort of partially-avian pyrokinetic, lashes out at her with a gust of flame.

He raises the dark coil of his weapon and fires once, a bright blue bolt of energy arcing at the presumably organic target with a high-pitched, distinctly electrical whine.

He contemplates firing twice. Firing twice would create a positive feedback loop of electromagnetic energy that would build into an overload and superheat one's internal organs to the point of manufactured necrosis, but killing the other man seems drastically counter-intuitive, particularly provided the consequences should he miss, which he will not, because he is fair deadly accurate with his choice in sidearm and has been for some time.

And so. Nick only fires once.

For her part Iman leaps back, dispersing the fire thrown at her with an angry sweep of her arm, though it's a narrowly avoided burst, slow and resistant to dissipation, not at all any earthly flame. The effort unbalances her and she lands in a sprawl, staring up at their enemy who, she's starting to realize, is not like anything they've fought before.

She realizes simultaneously that Nick has fired on him, and whether that will disable him or piss him off more remains to be seen, and she doesn't wait for even the instant it'll take to tell before scrambling up to her feet.

Nhodd doesn't bother to watch the woman, taking for granted that his fire will at a minimum distract her while he contends with her companion, and, preferably, will put an end to her efforts altogether. He does not see her dismissal of his aetheric fire as he turns to face Nick's attack, not knowing what trickery the mortal will try this time until the arc of blue light hits him.

At once electricity is coursing through him, and for a moment his joints lock as his muscles spasm in response to the painful false signals. He stumbles and his legs threaten to give out under him as his wings snap open painfully wide, feathers brushing the dirty concrete. Unexpected as the energy attack is, though, he knows what to do with it -- it is the wrong kind of energy, but he can make it the right kind, convert it to aether and feed it to his fire, and he does so, burning brighter than ever with fire that for a moment he cannot direct except outward.

Nick is pleased to see the weapon's discharge impact its target in a shattering dispersal of vibrant energy.

He is less pleased to note that firing openly upon the thing has done very little aside from, apparently, contribute an element transducible from one form of energy to another.

He shades his eyes against the self-immolating inconvenience, the brightness searing his vision like the heat off a sodium flare.

It occurs to him that in some point of time elapsed between firing upon their mutual foe and now, Nicholas has fallen away to escape the blaze and has landed on his back, levered up on one elbow, squinting against the interminable glare.

Without any further hesitation, he snaps his weapon upright and fires thrice before shifting his weight in a controlled jerk that rolls him to his feet.

Oh good, he's shooting again, because it worked SO fucking well the first time!!

Or no, not even. He's shooting three times. Three times is overkill, literally. Two is for kill, three is for fucking disintegrate. Granted in this case it might actually be warranted. Cursing rapidly and bilingually under her breath she darts away, giving Nhodd an extremely wide berth as she launches herself back toward the fire escape, scaling it up. "Nick!" she snaps, trying to get his attention over the din. If this gambit hasn't worked they need to get the fight off the street or people are going to start getting hurt. This fucker can fly, so the roof isn't exactly an optimal battleground, but there's 100% fewer bystanders up there and she'll take that.

Once he has begun to transfer the energy outward it is fortunately easy to continue to do so -- fortunate because with the quick succession of further bolts, it is more than likely that his too-physical body would fry from the inside out before he could create an outlet to be rid of it. Unfortunately, even the most skillful transduction still allows the energy to pass through him on its way to becoming something else and being released back into the world. He is burning up, an overheated conductor unable to bear its load, and he screams as his body is obscured by a whirling pillar of fire reaching into the sky. He cannot see, hardly knows where he is or what is around him anymore, but he cannot remain where he is and allow Nick to continue making these demands of his body. He leaps, flapping burning wings whose feathers are tongues of fire, rising unsteadily upward, clawing his way into the sky as he radiates blistering heat and blinding light.

Is it ending? He burns for what feels like an eternity, but in reality he burns bright, hot, and fast, the forced transduction leeching out his own aetheric energy with it, leaving a scorched but extinguished Nhodd to make a rough landing a little further down the street, gaze flicking about as he tries to locate his enemies. There -- Nick. The one that can injure him from a distance. He is farther away than he should be to attempt it, but attempt it he must -- Nhodd reaches out a hand, fingers curled into claws as he tries to forcefully draw energy from the human. Nick will not fight him if he does not have irrational feelings dictating that he must do so; that is the way of things.

He redirects like an electric current slicing its way through the path of least resistance, scaling the fire escape behind Asadi, rapid breath made searing in his lungs, his eyes slits against the erupting columnar inferno as it shoots skyward.

It would be terribly fucking consistent for him to have encountered the first enemy that simply refuses to combust or overload and simply be done with it. He flinches against the inhuman sounds spiraling from the thing as it immolates with a blazing intensity unhelpfully amplified to the nth degree, the raw howls through torn vocal cords.

He turns and squints to look at the thing he does not want to look at, the image of Icarus fixed rigidly in his mind as the thing bears itself upward, propelled by a clap of flaming wings, trailing gray ash and black streaking smoke.

Something lodged in his chest wrenches as the silhouette of a hand stretching toward him carves itself into his retinas.

Something is leached from him. Something he cannot cling to. Something fluttering and feeble and vital and he seizes at it with wild ferocity and it strikes him that a second noise echoes in counterpoint to the first and it soon becomes clear that it is the agonized sound stretching from his own throat as he reaches and becomes weightless and ceases to be a fixed point, his body an object set on a predetermined downward course.

He lands heavily on one arm, cracking against concrete in an aborted roll that skids him over blackened sidewalk and the charred outline of powerful wingbeats. He can see the sky. He can smell the ash. He cannot breathe.

The pillar of fire is not a particularly good sign, but it only makes her climb faster, as do the horrendous sounds and the peripheral view of fiery wings; what freezes her right up is the low clatter and tension release of Rush falling.

"Nick!" she screams, her head snapping down to stare, oh god, oh god, is he even alive, it wasn't that long a drop but-

No, he's moving. Moving, alive, but visibly not in a good way.

"Fuck!" She slides back down, landing heavily and dropping to her knees beside him, reaching out to press her hand to his unfucked shoulder. The air is thick and awful down here. Is he even breathing? "Nick, can you hear me?" She hovers her mechanical hand over his broken arm, she can't heal it but she could reset it and dress it if she had to. She isn't tracking their enemy right now, which is stupid, a stupid fucking mistake, but she isn't going to just leave Nick here on the ground, not ever and especially not like this.

He should not be burned by his own fire, yet he is -- the intensity of it is so, was so --

Nhodd staggers to a landing, not sure for a moment where he has come down. His skin is tight, sore, wrong, his very cells raw with the effort of serving as conduits for such intense heat. His fire flickers out as he hits the ground, all the heat burned out in that one great conflagration, leaving him scorched and dim. He shakes wings that shed hot ash on the pavement, and it's not until he's blinked the ash out of his eyes that he remembers that he should be feeling another kind of energy flowing through him. Where are Nick's emotions? There's a trace of it, but it's like the source was cut off midstream. Is the mortal dead? He did not intend that.

He draws a ragged breath and turns to search out -- yes, there. Not dead, relocated. Fallen. The other one over him now, neither looking at him. He might escape detection were he to simply turn and go, leave to go about his business elsewhere without their interference. Or he might turn to go only to be interrupted again.

Decision made, he strides toward them, hand outstretched. He will finish what he started with the one on the ground, take away the drive from both of them so that they stop, so that they will let him carry out his mission of peace.

It becomes unclear to him what events have occurred and whether he may be contextually linked to the allegedly intervening parties when it comes to the pressurized, progressive knifing of pain down the length of his spine, and said pain's unnerving sequelae.

He makes a noise; rough, ravaged, unformed, the pronounced scrape driving itself into the back of his throat with blazing, terebrant persistence.

His shoulders spasm in a cough, and he realigns his objective and tries again.

"Move," he rasps, and rolls over and slams Asadi's arm out of the way and fires the weapon in his hand.

The weapon does not discharge with a streak of blue, and it is not of the same snakelike design.

It fires a grapple, hooked and curved, its sharpened tip aiming for the thing's outspread wings.

If Iman could stop the motion of events to think about what was happening, she would understand that Nick is firing with intent to spear and snare, and he's an expert marksman but his arm is broken and he's aiming from the ground, there's a chance the hook won't hit its mark, and even if it does, a harsh flap of those wings could adversely affect her comrade, dragging him in, hurting him worse, and she would conclude that what they need is a stabilizing force, something to brace their enemy against, make sure the shot hits and disarms, rather than only angers.

But there is no time to think about any of this. There is raw instinct and the rhythm she and Nick have developed, and these alone are enough for her to jerk to the side as directed, pivot on her organic arm, raise the mechanical one, and fire a reflexive burst of etheric energy, designed to envelop and tug the creature forward sharply, driving him to meet Nick's grapple with force and momentum.

He is prepared this time as Nick aims at him, already drawing in one kind of energy, ready to take and discharge the streak of blue lightning he anticipates when he realizes the human is attacking again. It will hurt, but he will manage it and they will not have long to attempt their rebellion against his message of peace before he --

His arm doesn't drop, but he stumbles and his wings flap like an enormous, awkward golden pigeon as his body is yanked forward. It's while he's off balance that it registers too late, far too late, that it's not blue energy rushing at him but something very physical. The correct response was not to anticipate energy but to lose his tangibility, but he is devastatingly solid and physical himself in the moment when the wicked hook punches through his wing, hollow bones shattering under the impact.

The other man crumples like something broken, the kickback of the blast sending a jarring tremor down the shattered bones of Nick's arm, curling tightly around his skull and his spine.

Possibly he screams. Possibly.

In a largely pointless expenditure of energy he cannot afford to be expending, Nicholas rolls to his feet apropos of little to no forward momentum to speak of, his voice tearing with the effort of rising, his bones grinding over one another in agonized chorus.

His arm is a limp and mangled thing by his side, and so it can be disregarded.

He moves forward with swift efficiency and pins the thing's fluttering, damaged wing beneath one heel and leans heavily forward, mercilessly yoking all of his weight over the wing he and Asadi willfully shattered via blunt application of physics.

"I suggest," he says, his voice trembling with poorly-concealed strain, "that you don't move."

Edited 2015-07-25 05:52 (UTC)

Iman grimaces at the horrifying crunch as Nick's weapon pierces the wing, but she steels herself and follows him up and over to their downed enemy. Nick's arm needs attention now, and she would know, but tearing him away from this will be a struggle of its own.

Nhodd is railing wildly in a mixture of agony and savage rage, the pitch and fervor increasing sharply as Nick steps down on the wound he made. She keeps her stare cold. This is more brutal, more gruesome than either of them are generally accustomed to - this really escalated in a direction she did not anticipate. But they're here now and they can't afford to give any ground. So, she threatens.

"Restore them," she barks, indicating his blank-faced victims who are still lingering nearby. "Or we'll break the other one."

Nhodd screams as the searing pain in his wing becomes impossibly sharper, agony lancing up into his shoulder. It is impossible to obey the order to remain still, though perhaps he obeys it in spirit considering he manages only to writhe on the ground. The wreckage of his wing consumes his comprehension -- how dare they, how could they -- so that for a few seconds he doesn't comprehend Asadi's demand, only the threat that accompanies it. His unbroken wing wrenches itself in tight, folding as close to his body as it can though it trembles with sympathetic pain for the other.

"Stop!" he howls, halfway between a demand and a plea. His shaking hands wrap themselves around Rush's foot, trying to lift it or at least to stop it pressing down any harder. "Get off me!"

Mouth twisting with distaste, Nicholas leans across his own leg as it continues to grind viciously into the injured wing, draping his undamaged arm over his knee in a display of callous, deliberate unconcern.

"I'd do as she says," he murmurs, his voice low and dangerous. "Or I may - " he stresses the threat with an abrupt increase of foot pressure, " - be forced - " and he brings his face nearer to the thrashing man beneath him, teeth bared in a snarl, " - to be more creative."

"You reeeally don't want that," adds Iman, crouching down to get closer to him. "Look, you're obviously some kind of angel-wannabe, you're all about light, right?" Sure. Close enough. Enough to make her point. "Let me tell you something about light: it always, without fail, takes the path of least resistance." She smiles. "It's a good path to take."

Nhodd lets out a high-pitched noise as he feels the shattered bones grind against one another under the weight of Nick's boot. "Please!" he hears himself shriek. "Please, I cannot, it hurts too much!"

He is not a wannabe, he is an angel and they are impeding his holy mission and yet all he can think about is how much it hurts, how he'd do whatever he must to make the pain stop.

"Then turn them back." Nick's face contorts, his tone vicious. Abruptly, he drops his weight to kneel across the wing, undamaged hand seizing the thing's uninjured wing, fingers digging mercilessly into the golden pinions.

"Turn them back." He can feel the ridge of hollow bone beneath his thumb and he presses slowly, deliberately down upon it. "Now."

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Saving Lives a Mile High [open to all]

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frantically improvises

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tw: bone breakage and physical trauma

tw some more vague bone breakage stuff, eeugh

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well this is totally brutal gosh sorry rashad

cw: broken bones, limb trauma

tw: brutality and physical trauma, mild bone/joint-related body horror

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