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Athwart History (Closed)

Elias shrugs, looking around at the tunnel with interest. Out of sheer pigheadedness, he puts a boot on one of the electric panels, and twitches momentarily as it lights him up. The lights flicker briefly, and he stumbles back with a laugh, hair standing on end. Whatever would drop or kill a speedster doesn't really hold a candle to his own freakish durability. "Hell of a trap," he says with a nod, then turns an eye on Jenna.

"There are three villains that can brainwash or manipulate memories, off the top of my head," he says, "And then whatever the fuck Marrane does. Knowing that they can get into our heads so easily, having a setup to counter our own powers - a nonlethal one - isn't a bad idea. I know for a fact I couldn't catch Laura or Jenna without doing something dramatic that they aren't likely to survive."

Elias shrugs at Lana, his mouth tilted in a slash of grim smile. "I think that's how Marrane got so many of us. I know he takes hosts. What if he can pilot a metahuman instead of some random body? A friendly face, and him - burrowed, underneath. I don't know. I don't want to know."

He shakes his head and looks around at the trap. "Paranoia seems warranted, these days."
 
Lana doesn’t relax, her frown only deepening. “Plans for everyone?! You don’t plot against your friends. What kind of treasonous sort of...” She taps the trident against the concrete and it chips the concrete. Maybe Elias has a point, but she’s briefly so disgusted, so angry it deflects right off a shield of self righteous fury. Lana Atlantis, daughter and sister of kings, a princess.

“And what if you get mind controlled, someone sees all your hateful little plots-”

“Wouldn’t happen.” Marie said matter of factly, her voice the same growled, leveled flatness. The panels power down, and she pries out a chipboard from the switch. Then she follows the cord to a panel pulls just hard enough to lift it a few inches, trying to see beneath it. She doesn’t seem quite as focused as she probably wanted them to think, however. Even behind that mask Lana can see her jaw tighten.

“Oh, right, I forgot-you have a plan for that.” Derisive. Sam had said something about a capsule or a pill or something-a way out. Sam hadn’t liked it. Thought it an awful thing to plan for, to consider. Mostly, she hadn’t wanted Marie to die and miss a chance for rescue.

And here Protagonist had been, repaying that worry with treachery. “Why Samson? If this was a trap for a mind controlled Laura-why would you think here instead of somewhere that mattered? And Laura disappeared just before you joined the Front. This wasn’t a ‘protect the world’ thing, it was another paranoid you thing.” She’s not going to reply. She’d let Elias make all the excuses he wanted, and Lana would have to go along with it because what else could she do? It’s the same thing. She lets someone convince her there’s more to Protagonist, that Marie is a person under there-and they’re wrong every time, and Marie says nothing and lets them be wrong.

So when Marie DOES respond, still investigating the stupid trap she’d somehow let someone discover, let someone try to use on Jenna of all people-Lana’s only angrier she was breaking script.

“When you and Invincibelle were ineffectively creeping through my city, your exact words were: “If the monster gets much worse, we might have to put her down.””

A brief look of shock crossed Lana's indignant features. She...she hadn’t realized the vigilante had overheard that. “Well, you were...you were crippling people.”
 
Elias scowls, anger warping his face. "I just crippled someone not a minute ago, Lana."

He takes a moment - takes a deep breath.

"Listen to me," he says, eventually. "Lana, you're a princess and a heroine, with super strength and toughness and water control, and you can kick all sorts of ass. Alright? You are tied for the woman most likely to kick my ass."

"Marie is a fucking normal human being."

He blows out a breath, gestures at the panels. "See this? This is what Marie has to do to have even a fucking shot in the dark at competing with superhumans. She has to plan things out. Set traps. Prepare her gambits ahead of time, because on the spot and in the moment, Marie is a regular human being, taking swings and taking hits with the rest of us who've been god-gifted some ridiculous ability to make physics our bitch."

Elias's fists plant on his hips and he turns to glare, honestly glare at Lana, now completely pissed off. "Marie is all the way down on the bottom of the genetic lottery that the rest of us won and her only way of evening the stakes is, yes, to set traps and plan ambushes and shit, because otherwise anytime somebody decided they had a problem with what she's doing, they really can just thrash Marie and do what they want with her. God forbid she be able to defend herself against you, against me, against the rest of us."

The disgust is visible on Elias's face, now. "So fucking what? So fucking what if she had traps in Samson, the only place she's certain the rest of you don't go, because no one ever did, in the only place she's got left? Why does she need to be at our mercy?"

He shakes his head and turns back to the paneling. "It's nothing we can't do, except we don't need to, because we have superpowers. We don't need to scare people or outthink them or lay traps, because we have the power to just walk in and lay waste to everything."
 
"I just crippled someone not a minute ago, Lana."

Lately, Marie doesn’t know quite what to think of Elias. He’s good and he shines as brightly as the rest of them, but he was also a lot more practical, aware than she had previously given him credit for.

Still, to put his action against Rush on the same plane as her hateful, violent binges against the scum-it makes her somehow uncomfortable. As if he was sullying himself with the comparison. Crippling Rush had been a necessity. She had done enough harm and seemingly could not be contained, had escaped time and again. Had targeted one of theirs with nefarious intentions. Her crippling scum had been mostly accident or malice.

Didn’t seem right.

And Lana-Lana didn’t understand just how brutal, how terrifying you needed to be to have any effect in Samson. There were only so many hours in the day to reach and hurt so many pieces of trash. There had to be a reputation, there had to be a deterrent. Actions to be whispered about and warned of in the dark reaches of the cesspit.

Still. It didn’t matter. She was in the business of punishment, and Elias was in the business of bettering the world-and the world was infinitely a better, safer place without a psychopath like Rush darting across continents and laying harm to whatever and whoever she felt like, deserving or not.

"Marie is a fucking normal human being."

And in a sentence, Elias gets it. He fucking gets it. It’s not malice, it’s not hate, it’s not anything against heroes-it had been necessity. It had been compensation. He didn’t think they had any right to tromp around and invade her space, any natural right to rule over her. Hell, they made up their own reasons why they didn’t rule over her, she half had felt like, sometimes.

Demon woman. That might have been useful for the scum to superstitiously think and assume, but it hadn’t done her any favors for her allies to think it. Some part of her, somewhere, finally relaxes. She draws down the mask and there’s no snarl, no grimace or growl, dark eyes returning to Lana.

“I did join the Front to avoid scrutiny.” She admits, that same matter of fact way she spoke about anything. “I stayed because it kept me sane.”

A beat. Then two. She backs up a little with a turn on the wheel, and then, with a shrug- “...ish.”

~*~

Lana’s not used to being argued with or chastised, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened since coming up here-and again, it was about Marie. She was about to interrupt him, to tell him how that was entirely different, he’d crippled a psychopathic speedster, Marie had been crippling baseline humans-when she realized the truth in what he said, and how asinine a statement that would have been.

Marie was baseline.

“-anytime somebody decided they had a problem with what she's doing, they really can just thrash Marie and do what they want with her. God forbid she be able to defend herself against you, against me, against the rest of us. So fucking what? So fucking what if she had traps in Samson, the only place she's certain the rest of you don't go, because no one ever did, in the only place she's got left? Why does she need to be at our mercy?"

Lana swayed a little with her trident, frowning. It had been limited to Samson. What would she do if outsiders showed up in Atlantis making demands? Laurent? Their father?

The mercy comment was for this, but it also flashed her back on the hospital, how pale she had looked, how small. The needles and bandages, the tubes and silence. The argument, how bitterly angry Marie had gotten about her leaving, about the invitation. Crippled, and insisting they had to get back to it, that the evils of the world hadn’t really gone anywhere, that they’d take the opportunity and become stronger than ever.

She’d been so angry, spitting venom-and now, suddenly, Lana realizes she’d been at her mercy. No plans, no omnipotence, no control through fear-broken, desperate, and at her mercy. And she’d left her there.

Yellow eyes shift back to the woman as she lowered her mask and actually talked to her. Somehow, it only chastened her further.

She had told Elias Marie had been an ally to heroes. That was still true.

“...it is a good trap.” Lana echoes what he’d said before, feeling awkward and somehow apologetic. It wasn’t really the time. Maybe...maybe later. She could come see her. It didn’t feel quite so daunting a thing.

Marie gives a nod. “Old. Need to check the nature of the breach.”

“I could take Rush in, go check on Jenna.”
 
Elias nods. His jaw is set and square, not quite clenched. "Do that. Make sure Jenna's alright. She was out of sight for a lot of that engagement and we don't know if Rush slipped her anything, some kind of poison or wound out of sight, and that's the kind of thing she wouldn't mention immediately. Then drop off Rush at ADX on the west wing; I have a standing agreement with the warden about special inmates."

ADX has no interaction with the outside world whatsoever, or even with other inmates; it's twenty-three hours of solitary, seven days a week. Even that single hour is outside in a mobile isolation block. The lack of contact and social interaction is deliberately intended to break down problem inmates into more agreeable prisoners. As of right now, its stringent protocols and lack of human guards also makes it excellent for securing villains, since there's no such thing as a superjail after the Peche Asylum closed its doors.

Shaking off the idle thoughts - he'd studied ADX as an extension of his last fallback - Elias turns to where Marie is still sitting.

He doesn't have much to say. Said it all, really. And it's already more feelings than Marie is comfortable dealing with.

He wonders, briefly, what the trap for him looks like.

Instead, what's tickling at his brain is: "If Rush is here, then where's her boy-toy?"
 
When Elias glances back to Marie, he’d find her watching him. She’s wearing the usual impassive mask, but there’s a tense sort of expectation to her body language, her dark eyes watchful. He’d settled Lana, which was good- she would have only made it worse, she wasn’t any good with people and she was still angry with the Atlantean for leaving-but at least she had come back. It was the coming back that mattered, now.

He doesn’t say anything more about the trap, or what she’d just said about why she had originally joined. Anything on the nature of her contingency plans, despite them being 'plots' against his family. Lana was no longer here to soothe, so...so he really had understood. He got it.

Marie both felt settled and uncomfortable, out of sorts-there was something to say here, maybe, but she's not sure what it would be or if he was even looking for her to say anything. Thankfully he returns to business, and she starts up on things she knows and things she’s comfortable with-facts and hating on scum.

“Rush retired to her Italian villa when she ‘reformed’ back before...everything. Mindmelt didn’t go with her. He's more predictable than she is, more useful to the Ring.” Unfortunately. She’d still been walking then, she would have paid a visit. Sam wouldn’t have had to know, after all.

“She looked him back up once a new Velocity started making waves, far as I can tell. They’re both sociopaths, but when one promises the other a good time, they’re suddenly ‘lovers’ again. Probably busted her out of prison in apology for not shattering Paige. I assume it was his doing, anyway-when she escapes on her own, a lot more people die.”

Marie’s returning to her much more comfortable place of hate and venom, the iron determination to strike back. “Could interrogate her, but he’s probably already moved on if he was waiting someplace for her to return with Jenna.” That’s why she had come. They had tried to use her trap and her city to snare the kid, and then God only knows what would have happened after that.

Marie doesn’t like it. Question was, was this more of Rush being Rush, or was the villainess a targeted missile fired by someone else? “Someone had to give her these schematics. Whether she sought them out as a favor from someone in the Ring or if someone in the Ring contracted her to go after Jenna-not that she’d need much incentive-I don’t know. I don’t know how long they had them, either. This was an old, very old plan. Only place they could have gotten it was a crappy laptop in my old apartment. Need to investigate.”

She doesn’t really want to go there, but this had clearly been an oversight on her part. The laptop had seen very little use once she had joined the Front. It'd been collecting dust even when she was still active on the streets.
 
Marie's Mew, Samson

It occurred to her that without Marie down there, no one could let her in. She frowned, studying the keypad. For the hell of it, she typed in her old Front keycode-and was mildly surprised when it worked.

Marie had had access to her lair keyed for her keycode all this time. It makes her feel a little more guilty for being so angry with her before. Neptune-how much she didn’t know, hadn’t considered about the woman. The elevator began to descend, the ride smooth but long. She thinks about just how far underground it was-and how dim and dark.

When she steps off, she’s relieved to see Jenna petting Jasper.

Jenna blurred to her feet from where she’d been sitting against the console, brightening to see her. “Lana! Everybody okay? Was there anybody else?”

“Not that we saw-you look a little roughed up-how many fist fights, how many times were you two exchanging blows during that chase?”

“I uh, I don’t know. Five, maybe six. She kept running away, kept making messes I had to try and prevent or fix. She got me a few times, but I got her some, too. Went way better than the two times before. Good thing I’ve been training with you, right?”

Lana took the broken silver goggles from Jenna’s hands and caught her chin, tipping her head back to check her pupils. Her lip had been cut and there was a nasty bruise on her cheekbone, probably more under her costume-but her pupils were even and overall, she seemed okay, if a little hollow cheeked.

“That’s it? She didn’t cut you with anything?”

“She tried, but I’m faster than she is, just a bit.”

“That’d make you faster than Laura.” Lana said with a faint smile before she remembered the electrified panels. “She was leading you into a trap.”

“I thought she might be.”

Lana cut her a look. “You suspected it was a trap and yet you kept racing after her?”

“Well, I had to,” Jenna said with a worried frown, anxiously responding to her disbelieving tone.. “She would have hurt a lot more people if she wasn’t busy trying to lead me into it. And if I wasn’t following her, you guys wouldn’t have been able to track her through me. She couldn’t stay wild out there. We had to bring her in.”

“That was very risky.”

“Well, heroes take risks.”

“They also work together. You ran hard and got into a dozen fist fights with someone a lot bigger than you are. When Protagonist said to turn around-”

“I wasn’t going to leave her there with that crazy lady! Even if...I mean, she had it handled pretty good, but…” Jenna rocked a little. “Mindmelt or...or Paul, I don’t know. Somebody worse. She’s...I mean, she’s in a wheelchair. That was kind of crazy that she came out there.”

“Protagonist is crazy. She hates criminals, used to be a nightmare in the field. There’s a reason we all thought she was something supernatural, for a while. Even after Sam tried to dispel the rumors, I still-”

”And maybe we never saw anything past that, but that is not her fault, no more than a rehab patient is to blame for their own efforts to numb the pain. She's just - addicted to anger; it keeps her moving.”

”Marie has fucking nothing. Her bunker is her last refuge-”

Lana refocused on Jenna’s gaunt looking face, frowning a little. “Well, that doesn’t matter now. This is her city. Wheelchair or not, she probably felt she had to do something...it’s all she has left. That, and...well, I think she was concerned about you. Under it all.”

“Yeah...she did tell me to turn around. I don’t think she woulda came out if I had. I’ll...well. I’m glad everyone came out alright, and Rush’ll have to answer for things, work on herself some behind bars.”

“C’mon. You need to eat, and then we ought to go catch up with Sarah.” Lana had a lot to think about, and Daybreak wasn’t the least of it. It was a bit silly, but she wanted Jenna where she could see her. The attempt to capture her, Rush’s fixation, how much energy Jenna had probably expended-none of it settled well.

“She’s not going to like this.”

“Well...we can leave out a detail or two.”
 
Elias nods, a little grim, as he considers the matter of Mindmelt. The fucking psychopath that he is, cowardice is also his mark. His powers operate only on touch and grant him no strength or speed, which makes him an ambush predator of the highest order, and the quickest to flee when open combat is joined.

He'll kill that fuck, sooner or later, but it's been a long time since Mindmelt would even willingly be in the same state. In the meantime, he'd meant to check out Marie's flat anyways, as a possible place to put some of the other kids they'd be taking in eventually. It was Samson, and thus a shitty place to put anyone, but at least it was an option, right?

"We'll check it out," Elias says firmly. "Limit one ambush a day. I'm coming with you, and if somebody pokes their fucking head out I'm throwing it off the planet."

~*~

It wasn't. The flat proper was on the cross of Brown and 26th, a part of town that didn't even have electricity flowing regularly through the area, on account of maybe a third of the locals paying their bills. The usual assortment of streetlights had long since gone dim and unreplaced, the roads are full of potholes and are narrow, un-laned affairs, and no cars are in sight whatsoever. The buildings are all tall and stacked together. None of the windows are open, shut tight and blinds drawn down. Dogs bark in the distance.

"Marie, this place is a shithole," Elias says, helplessly, looking up at the bleak, brick affair. It looked like a DMV crossed with a shitty retirement home - that was how much personality it lacked. There wasn't even a sign out front, and the lobby was definitely already closed, not that Elias paid any attention to that as he pulled the doors wide. "I'm not putting anyone here. This is some Cambodia warzone shit."

It's one thing to say Samson's a shithole, and another to come to a place like this, where not only God but city government and everyone living here is trying to block it out. The place stinks of mutual spite and rot. He can smell mold even with the air conditioning on, rattling somewhere upstairs. Elias glances back at Marie, and stops short at the expression on her face - mainly, because she does have one, instead of the stony indifference that's typical. It's nothing happy.

Elias lets the door swing shut and comes to her side, and rather than say anything just kneels beside the chair, silent and comforting.
 
It didn’t look like too many people really lived here, anymore. She recognizes a rusted cargo van and a silver Taurus parked in the overgrown lot, the tags still just as outdated on the one as they’d been nine years ago. Her rent was still being automatically paid every month, something she had just left to itself. She’d gone straight to her lair after checking herself out of the hospital. Hadn’t thought to come here. Or maybe just hadn’t wanted to think about coming here. There had been a lot of things she hadn’t let herself think about. Besides. Protagonist hadn’t needed, nor did she deserve what little comforts she’d previously allowed herself.

“I wouldn’t put anyone here, either. Was offering up the Front’s flat, in Albany. Heroes don’t belong in Samson.” Marie kept her eyes on the cracked bricks, the place exactly as dingy as she remembered it. Maybe worse, which she might’ve previously argued impossible. She doesn’t take offense to his statements. They were honestly kinder than what she would have said.

She doesn’t move to go in, and part of her is angry at her hesitation, that she wants to tell him to go on ahead, that she’d stay out on the sidewalk. Maybe lie, claim the elevator never worked. Hell, for all she knew, it didn’t-she’d always been taking the stairs or climbing in from the fire escape.

...she doesn’t want to go in there. She’s still uncertain, uncomfortable being herself again that heavy, ill fitting jacket. Up there, it was exactly how she’d left it, that morning when she’d been awoken by the all points bulletin. When Sam had still been alive. When her team still bickered with one another between and sometimes on missions, Anhinga usually the instigator, that cynical biting wit. The image of Invincibelle and Anhinga’s colorful costumes obscured by steam flits across her brain. That brief delay of the inevitable.

Elias cuts her a glance and lets the door close, comes back. Marie doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to handle him, how to handle this, how to handle anything that wasn’t The War. Something churns somewhere,

“It was better than sleeping in the back of my patrol car.” She finally says, slowly. She hadn’t wanted to live in the dead couple’s apartment. She’d packed up a few things, walked back over the blood stained carpet at the door-and left it all behind. Left to make the scum, make the city pay.

“Haven’t been back since...everything. Left hospital, straight to my pit. Stayed there.” A long, long time. Her gaze finally leaves the face of the building, dark eyes shifting to him. She’s briefly more than a little unguarded, conflict clear. “...haven’t wanted to come back.” She finally admits.

She faces forward again, draws in a breath-and then her hands tightened on her wheels, toned arms flexing as she pushed on ahead.

~*~

She had slowed up once they reached the proper floor, gestured to the top of the door frame where a single key was taped down. Elias said something about wanting to clear the place first.

Marie nodded mutely.

It was a very small apartment, sparsely furnished and meticulously kept up-save for the thick build up of dust everywhere. Still, compared to the cracked walls and filthy hallway carpet, the yellowish tinge to the paint out there, Marie’s old apartment was very, very clean, if minimalist. There were no knick knacks or trinkets anywhere, nothing hanging on the walls, not even a bread box on the counter in the small little kitchenette. The kitchen was to their immediate left when they opened the door, everything about it visible immediately, it was so small. There was a cheap coffee pot, at least. A sign that someone had lived here. The carafe was clean and upside down within it, a neatly folded hand towel resting beside the appliance. The dish rack next to the sink held exactly one plain white coffee cup, one fork, and one mismatched saucer with little green leaves painted around the edge. The refrigerator lacked magnets or any other decorations. There was a heavy black mag-lite flashlight resting on top of it, along with an opened box of Honey Nut Cheerios.

It looked like a recent divorcee’s place...or a widow’s. Lived in but not really...lived in.

If he glanced to the back of the door, he’d see it had several deadbolts installed on the other side, a row of them and an arm bar on the opposite side of the door frame. Nothing would have gotten through that door quietly.

To the right was a small bathroom, also pristine save for the dust and a coppery, rusty residue where the sink faucet had been dripping for nearly a decade. Just past that and around the corner was the bedroom area in the studio apartment, suddenly the mildew scent made more sense-the window had been shattered outward, years of rain, snow having soaked and rotted part of the wall beneath the window, the carpet. A nasty trail of dried...something led to the half open closet. There was a scent of death but not wet, not rotting. More a dry, vague something of unpleasantness.

The bedroom was mostly as neat and as minimalist as the rest of the place. A single twin bed was neatly made, plain, off white sheets and a thin, scratchy looking blanket. It was on a steel bedframe, bare bones and practical, no headboard. It didn’t look like it had seen much use-looked new, like a store display.

What didn’t look new was the over stuffed, much too large for Marie ratty recliner in the near center of the room, a dark green heavy knitted blanket tossed over one plush arm and a pillow tossed on top of that, as if someone had sprung up in a hurry. A single empty beer bottle sat next to the chair on a collapsible tv tray. The only other things on that were a CB radio and a police scanner, the cords trailing off across the room and plugged into the wall. A short distance away from the chair was an ancient looking television resting on a short shelf. It would have been old even a decade ago, an old tube type, heavy and with an antenna on top. Five or six dvds were stacked beneath it, all Westerns of all things, including a weathered looking box set of the Lone Ranger. It looked more like a middle aged white man had lived here rather than a Hispanic woman in her early twenties, if you judged the place on the chair and television alone.

In the bottom of the closet next to a vacuum cleaner and a neat row of exactly two pairs of shoes-police issue and then tennis shoes, both size six and a half-there was some kind of broken open husk, easily six feet in length and three feet wide. It was lying on the bottom of her closet, had apparently hatched and then escaped. Judging by the molded shape, it’d been something horrific looking. She had been found out, and Paul had left a nasty surprise waiting for her, at some point.

Just in case Protagonist had survived Immolation, it seemed. If Marie had come home after whatever point Paul had planted something foul in the closet, no doubt she'd be very, very dead. The vigilante would hardly be expecting an attack of that magnitude.
 
Elias glances around the room, but his eyes don't hang anyplace but on the open closet, where - something - of Marrane's had been left. His predation of heroes had been encyclopedic. Elias's face contorts in rage at the sight of it as the room is briefly washed out in white, like a train's headlights flickering through the window. His skin goes fluorescent and hot, and the stint of death is washed out by a sharp, actinic odor, like a lit lightbulb. Only a controlled breath brings the light down to human ranges, where he merely glows steadily. The light is warm wherever it touches straight through the skin.

"Very thorough," Elias says, and the mildness of his voice is in complete contrast to the glow of his skin. He drops to one knee and reaches out to clasp Marie's hand in complete ignorance of their usual observed distance, then moves forward to bedroom and glances around - finds nothing. He returns to the closet and the egg, which he tears in half. Then he tromps off to the kitchen, secures a garbage bag, and stores the thing for later analysis. His tread is freakishly heavy:

du-dum

du-dum

du-dum

The bootheel connecting first, and then rolling forward and dropping his weight onto the toe; a distinct staccato. He comes back to the living room and looks at Marie again, then aside at the egg, and his jaw squares and shoulders tense like he might just fucking detonate on the spot.

Instead, he sets the garbage bag aside, and picks up the Lone Ranger box set, which he hands to Marie. "I'll find something to carry the rest of them with," he says, voice firm. "Anything else we can take with us? I will absolutely carry that chair and not blink about it."

The plans were why they came up here, but he doesn't give a fuck about them now. Marrane had been here, and only Marie's caution had saved her from a horrible fucking death at the appendages of whatever surprise he'd left. It was already compromised, clearly. But at least here he can reclaim something of what Marie's left behind, even if it's just physical effects.
 
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Marie had wheeled in just as far as the door after a blank moment staring at it from the side-cautious in a way that had nothing to do with the possibility of attack and everything to do with just...being here again. Her eyes linger on the coffee pot a moment. She wasn’t sure she even remembered what the stuff tasted like, but it’d once been a staple. Straight black.

The thought was very surreal.

Her eyes cut back to Elias as soon as he flares up, some of her impassive mask returning-but she’s caught between emotions-the familiar burning anger, and the unfamiliar twist of regret and...she doesn’t know what else.

He drops and takes her hand, the glow of his skin warm and grounding, nonviolent physical touch. He would have been bothered if she’d fallen here. Between the defense of her traps and her methods and his coming here with her, she’s beginning to think he was her friend. Which wasn’t any good, because she had no idea how to be a friend, anymore. She maybe never had. Protagonist certainly didn’t.

“Thing was either for me, or for someone who might come here looking for me or those files.” She says as he straightens, her warmed fingers lowering to that wheel, just resting there a moment, lightly tracing the metal handrail rather than her usual tightening and loosening grip on the wheel itself. “They figured out who I was. Maybe they always knew.” No one in Samson, for certain. She would have been attacked long before Rahab had they known.

So how, and who? She hadn’t wanted her former identity known. Anthony deserved more than a wife who’d gone mad, to be a footnote in the myth. She shook the thoughts away, mutely following his movements, the heavy foot fall of his boots. “Art is still synthesizing an agent to kill that blasted mold.” The AI had had a body, once. He’d formed a personality in it’s use, had been as human as anyone.

And then he’d gone to the islands to help in the makeshift hospital, and all that he had become was lost in an instant. Now he was nothing more than a sophisticated program in a government facility somewhere. Software.

And then his anger and temper take a turn for the bizarre when he scoops up the box set from the tv stand, turns and hands it to her. “I don’t…” She holds it loosely and kind of lost, as if it were some relic of a bygone era. He says something about the chair, about taking things back to-where, her lair? What was she going to do with these things, show them to his cat?

“It was...it was five dollars at a garage sale.” Marie says with mild confusion before her face firms, that same look of irritation she gets when she says something ‘stupid’-as if someone else had uttered the words for her. Noise. This was noise. He was noise. Nonsense like movies and chairs and she doesn’t know what else. And for some reason it fails to piss her off, and that was just downright strange.

She gives a shake of her head, but doesn’t growl at him, at least. “This isn’t what we came here for.” Business, facts, the War. “The laptop was in the closet. Upper left ceiling tile and above the shelf. I need to know if they physically took the thing, or if they got into it remotely. If it’s the latter, maybe I can-” Marie stops short, a frown as she glances to the bedroom wall, then the ceiling.

“...it’s quiet.” Is what she says, suspicion entering her voice. The walls were paper thin-you could hear quiet conversations in the apartments surrounding yours-but mostly noisy, arguing neighbors, rambunctious dogs and children, television sets. Her staff is still with her, point in the far side of her seat with the rod leaning against her shoulder. She shifts it forward, eyes flicking to the door.
 
Elias shakes his head. "I don't think they knew identities," he says, after a moment. "I wouldn't doubt if they had someone at the - uh - the roundup after everything. You know. The official inquiry."

He's not clear on the sequence of events himself, as he had been dead at the time. Sometime in the six months immediately following Immolation, the heroes had been interviewed and set aside; their health insurance categorically denied due to taking part in "catastrophic, unforeseen activities", and most everyone had been bogged down with legal threats and paperwork shoved onto them in stupendous amounts as Congress attempted to make sense of the entire affair. Part of Cid's bargain had been bypassing that for everyone part of the Tower faction - and the rest of the independents, with their leadership sundered, had struggled on as best they could.

But, like he said, that's just hearsay. He hadn't been there for any of that. In fact, the government had never involved itself with him at all, and ignored Adamant as best it could. He didn't know how to interpret that.

"Laptop's gone," he says with a shrug, changing the subject, "Along with the entire shelf. Got busted loose whenever what that thing was came out. Dunno if it was still there when it happened, but there's no mechanical bits spread out anywhere, so I'd guess not."

When Marie mentions silence, he tries to listen, but to be honest the radio buzz of his own radiation is the only thing Elias can hear - that doesn't matter though. "I trust your instincts," he says with a nod. "Let's get the fuck out."

He steps back over to where the Western collections are, and that's when the kitchen wall is bashed in by a beefy arm punching straight through the drywall, the sort of heavyset limb you see on overweight construction workers and past-prime truckers. The knuckles are bleeding raw and red from the force, and the arm draws back out.

"The fuck?" Elias says, dumbfounded, and then a heavy, cheap revolver replaces the arm at the hole, and he immediately dives at Marie and scoops her out of the way as it opens fire, pumping rounds into her old flat. One of the rounds hits his shoulder and bounces off in a flare off light, pancaked by the opposing forces. He barely blinks.

"Ambush," he notes wearily.
 
"I wasn't there. Listed with the missing, presumed dead. The coma...my legs...I left the hospital, Lana had checked me in as Myst-but I was very weak for a long time."

She had followed the proceedings, made a sizable donation of Don Courtelli's money. But she hadn't gone. "Wasn't going to risk being arrested and sent back to Samson, outed. Doubt I would have survived the trip back." If not a metahuman rival, one of the Four Families.

So how? Some members of the Front probably had due to Sam's initial mental attack, back in the day. Adamant, Daybreak and Whisper, Marie had assumed-they were the top of top in the League, of heroes. Sam probably shared. It hadn't mattered so long as it wasn't recorded. That much Marie had made crystal clear.

She thinks about how much different things might have been had Elias been there, or if Daybreak hadn't been pulled down to Cid's impotent level. No one wanting to be reelected would have spoken against either of the two heroes. She was still bitter and venomously angry with everyone who had given up and gone home, surrendered the torch to Cid and gave up the watch.

Angriest of all with Daybreak and Adamant. Assumed he'd been hiding after he resurfaced, watched it all unfold and STILL did nothing . Had remained furious with his half retirement in Gary.

She hadn't known. And from what she had seen of Sarah and her denial, she's not sure the woman deserved her ire either. Marie's body had been broken, but Sarah's spirit seemed to have come home crippled, and Cid had no doubt endeavored to keep it that way.

Marie suddenly feels tired. This place, those thoughts, what was and shouldn't have been-distractions. She needs to focus on the War and hating the scum. There, at least, she had some kind of power, some sort of harmful ability-even if she was stuck in this useless chair and dependent on others to do the legwork.

He tells her the laptop is gone, and Marie nods, expression returning to it's impassive mask, eyes dark and thoughts hidden, determination back in full force. The anger finally returns, bubbling in her chest and flooding everything else out as her attention fixates on the silence.

Yes, time to go. Marie got half a wheel turn when a fist punched through the kitchen wall. Her first instinctive thought was an asshole hopped up on PCP-and then the gun pops through.

Elias -moves-, scoops her up wheelchair and all, bullets blasting through plaster and thunking into the undecorated space-and one bouncing off of the man himself.

What the fuck indeed-Marie jerks her mask back up over her face, eyes narrowed instead of surprised, the staff already in an underhanded hold in her opposite hand. It wasn't the first time she's been shot at. Hell, she had a scar where a bullet had grazed her ribcage, but it's been a long while since she's even heard a gun go off.

It's exactly as loud as she remembers. Elias sounds tired, but Marie is instantly wired, eyes flashing anger.

"Fine. That was six." Is what she growls about the gunfire-and it was fine, just fucking fine if some dumb assholes wanted to try and tangle with Adamant. And fuck-she's crippled, not dead. This is -her- cesspit.

Hers.

Noise in the hall and the door blows open, crunching glass on the fire escape at the opposite side of of the apartment. Human footfalls, not taps of insectoid legs. Good.

Marie flips the staff so that the flat end was at the ready-firing a strike for a thin man's sternum, knocking him back into the hall-the back of his shoulder catching a larger man, front-but he steps up anyway. She draws back in a blur and slams the door closed, a hand flying to give the wheel sharp shove to propel her back in a pivot-when the door opens again she's ready to strike-this time dispensing an electrified shock as soon as the staff hits the underside of the man's jaw, snaps his head back. The first guy was already back up, had a fucking hatchet in hand at his side. He ducks under her staff before she can retract it, swings-one of the escrima sticks comes up in defense, a painful flex of what remained of her right thigh where muscle memory demanded a kick she can't perform anymore, a twitch of the abductor muscle in that hip.

That was alright-her other hand snaps out and grabs hold of his wrist-fingers tightening in the pressure point as she twists it-sliding the hatchet off the stick and driving the flat of her palm into his chest when he half falls forward.

The entirety of that he had had a blank face and hadn't so much as grunted in pain. She shoves and wheels back in two short pulls on her wheels, hurtling the electrified stick into a woman stepping through.

"The fuck is this? Mind control, body snatched?" Marie growl is laced with venom and rage, not a trace of fear. She's got her staff in hand again, brings it violently crashing down on the join between the skinny man's shoulder and neck. It flattens him out on the floor and blocks the door wide open. "Reversible?!"
 
Adamant is very fucking tired of people trying to ambush his family. Catch them down, catch them weak. Kill them. Violate them. He remembers that torn collar of Jenna's - Maestro's skull, in a worm-throat. It fucking exhausts him. And it makes him angry. No one is taking a single soul more of what's his.

Since the chair isn't important to Marie, he picks it up and chucks it wholesale through the wall the revolver and come from. There's a whomph of air and then a horrendous crash as it sails right through the thin drywall and smacks a middle-aged man over, his pallor greenish and sickly. The crackle of breaking bones is audible even over the thudding crash as the chair continues onwards to embed in the next wall, not quite making it through that.

The man immediately starts to get back up, clumsily fiddling with the revolver - he can't quite seem to figure it out - and then Elias strides forward a single step into the kitchen, takes hold of the flashlight, and sidearms it through the man's head, crushing it like an overripe fruit. It doesn't bleed; diseased flesh sags from the gaping wound, and in place of veins squirming, pincerlike legs have wound through the cranial cavity. There's a puff of sickly dust, and then something screeches at them from the darkness of the man's head.

Elias takes another long step and kicks the living corpse in the elbow raising the revolver at him. The blow saws through the limb entirely, blasts the host's ribcage into powder, almost tears it in half and launches it towards the window of the kitchen where it impacts the wall and nearly comes through that too. The sagging mesh of insect and flesh hangs there, limp, as the revolver drops to the floor - undisturbed because of the sheer violence its owner had been ejected with.

Spotting a speedloader laying on the floor besides the revolver, he scoops them both up and strides back to the living room and Marie, dumping them in her lap. "Hosts," he says, shortly. "Marrane's work. These aren't humans anymore. Just bugs."

The man she'd knocked down starts to rise. He squashes its skull with a boot. Green splatters across the floor.
 
He drops the revolver in her lap, six shots in the speed loader. She’d stop using guns nearly a decade ago, too risky. She hasn’t even fired one in all that time, and this was no glock.

"Hosts. Marrane's work. These aren't humans anymore. Just bugs."

“Dead bugs.” Protagonist growls hellishly, all she needed to hear. Her eyes cut back to the window where more were spilling through, a twist to her staff-the barest hint of a seam in the middle. “Hallway’d probably kill me.” She had already been turned perpendicularly to the door, it’s an easy thing to turn and dart back into the apartment at large. She can’t roll over bodies, but she sure as shit could fend for herself, at least against these things. The vigilante still had the toned arms and shoulders, a strengthened core and back-Marie had kept in fighting shape despite her ravaged, useless lower half.

So long as it was limited to the husks of the former tenants, she could remain in the fight. She didn’t plan on being in the way, anyway-or worse. Her tongue touches at her back right molar almost absently as all her hate and anger tunnel vision her on the monsters before her.

Marie swings the gunmetal staff into the side of a sandy blond woman, dispensing a lethal amount of electricity into her lithe form-the scent of burned flesh and charred chitin as her body superheats instantly on the air.

The staff slides through her fingers and the flat end rockets into the chest of a man climbing through the jagged glass of the window, knocking him back and into the railing. Her blood was hot and singing, something tight and compressed finally unfurling as finally, fucking finally she was hurting the scum, even unfeeling, monstrous scum out of a horror movie. Doing something. Something real, something viscerally effective. The rod rests against the splintered sill as her other hand yanks something out of the bag hanging from the back of the chair, the small of her back-and hurls it into the chest of a man that had tripped on his way in, had been picking himself up. Just as he straightens, Marie hurls a black spider trap at his chest, the legs curled inwards-and then snapping out around his arms and digging into his back, the telescoping legs the same gunmetal color most of her gadgets had always been. He goes down-and then the wall thuds in the bedroom closet, a panel of drywall.

She fires another shot at the man on the fire escape smack in the forehead-he topples backwards over the twisted railing. There are more climbing down, but the panel of drywall thuds again-Marie readies another nasty trick, a heavy ball bearing looking thing, about two inches at it’s thickest point, thumb hovering over a small depression where the trigger was. She’s got to keep her eyes on the window and the closet at the same time. A man‘s shoulder tears through the thin wall separating her closet from the apartment next doors, punching a hole in the whole mess. She pressed in the button as soon as he’s breached the wall, and as he barrels in she throws it. Tiny holds open up and a gel oozes through-the thing sticking smack to his forehead before dispensing a nasty shock. Right behind him another man just barrels right on in, stomping over the twitching form at breakneck pace-and she wheels back and pivots so that he rammed into the opposite wall.

The hell.

The staff was in her hands and she thrust the point forward, expecting the thick muscle of the wall of his chest and a lung-and instead stabbing right on through and into the drywall, his body barely a body at all-but a true husk, chest ripping open from the puncture in his chest like paper, an untold number of some sort of ant spider hybrids darting down the length of her weapon. They were instantly swarming over her hands and arms-biting her, the legs little pinpricks.

It all stung like a bitch, but it only makes her angrier-an inhuman growl tearing from behind the mask as the husk launched forward down the length of the staff still tight in her hands-she swiped the revolver up, and shot him point blank through the underside of his jaw.

Rotted grey matter and slime splattered against the back wall, more fucking spiders things but he goes limp.

She abandons the staff to rocket back on her wheels, another gunshot for a window climber’s kneecap, knocking him down-she fires again, this time in his head. The shitty revolver had more kick than she was used to but she makes the shot dead center into his skull. More bugs. These were somehow not as advanced, were carriers? She doesn’t fucking know. She passes over the knocked out panel of the closet, sweeping up what she’d really come through the bedroom for-her shotgun.

This one she really hadn’t used in over a decade.

She’s in the next apartment now, cocks the thing before pivoting with a push on one

tire-discharging it one handed into a squealing man with no tongue-some kind of centiepede in his mouth, down his throat. The butt of it slammed into the strip of the halfback of her chair as the buckshot tore his chest into pieces, twisted him away from her on a mostly exposed spine.

The third time she’s seen what one of those slugs could do to a man up close and personal.

The kickback had left that wrist and forearm numb, still dealing with fucking insects biting the shit out of her-she’s glad for the face mask, keep the damned things out of her mouth. The racerback sport tank was a shitty downgrade from her protective, kevlar mesh costume.

She brought the gun up to catch it against the throat and shoulders of another man, driven back and slammed into the wall-the wheels hit first and the front smaller ones lifted up as her back hit too. Again the twitch to kick him, redhot pain searing as his body half fell into hers, keeping his head and chest separate with the stock of the gun despite his clawing at her, tearing the mask down, ripping her hair mostly out of it’s bun. There was something nasty in his mouth too, his jaw falling open as if disjointed-it literally fell into her lap as the internal monster bulged in his throat, popping muscle and sinew like stitches before tearing through what was left of the lower half of the man’s face. Christ, it was like a fucking snake.

Well it wasn’t getting in HER mouth!

“Que te jodan-” Enraged, Marie slammed the crown of her head into the fuck once, twice, three times-bashing what was left of his face in and cutting the thing off on his teeth-where it ALSO fell into her lap-but a second man collapses into the first and her arms strain to hold them off, popping the left forward in an attempt to knock the first to the side.
 
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Elias trusts Marie to handle her own, as the horde comes through the doorway in sufficient numbers to completely command his attention. Half a dozen sprint through - their features wizened, skin twisted tight and boiled red, as they scream and gibber. They leap onto Elias bodily and try to bear him down as more clash at the doorway in a writhing knot, and he extends his arms to either side, steps forward, and scissors them across the front of the apartment and through the door entire. Sheer strength scythes through midsections, wood, and drywall with equal ease. Even split in half they still grab and crawl and shriek, biting at his limbs, clawing. One tries to jam its fingers into his ear, screaming into his face from less than an inch away.

Elias's left heel plants, and then his entire body sways back and then forward, moving in a sinuous line that terminates in a jerking stop, hands crossing in half-circles; some kind of graceful martial arts move, multiplied by a thousandfold. The floor splits and is forced up by his foot as it slides forward, and his hands propel crawling biters off him at terrifying speeds, plastering them all across the front of the apartment.

Then he swaps from some oriental style and pops forward in a lunging series of jabs that detonate skulls with careless ease, little flicking blows with explosive power that pile up the bodies in the now-ruined doorway. Easily thirty of them fall in quick succession as he picks them off trying to cross the shattered front wall, and by that time their slumped and motionless bodies have formed an improvised barricade of their own where previously holes and damage had reigned.

Pausing only to squash a crawler's head beneath his boot, Elias strides for the bedroom as a shotgun barks out, and then lowers his shoulder and simply barges through the intervening walls entirely as he makes for where Marie is fighting like hellfire, two walking corpses bearing them down under their sheer weight.

Adamant grabs the first one's head, the one closest to Marie, steps past them for leverage, and with a snarl, he lights up blinding-bright and shoves with everything he's got.

The two bodies don't so much fly away as are pulverized into goop by the acceleration involved. They blast through the wall and most of the floor of the apartment they'd been fighting in, splatter across the concrete and sublimate into foul gases in the air beyond, liquefied by air resistance, leaving a smattering of old and rotted bone behind - and a rattling collection of teeth. What's left is a gaping hole in the side of the apartment complex, angling down and out, and the rising shrieks and snarls of a nest of horrors awakening all around them. No police lights, no sirens, no alarms. God and Man have left this building behind long ago.

He starts to turn around to address Marie, and catches a face full of some kind of chemical spray from a husk with an elongated neck and bulging stomach: some green, hideous liquid. Adamant's knees buckle and his hands come up to clamp over his face - his mouth opens to gasp in pain - and then the thing projectile vomits yet more of that foul acid straight into his open mouth.
 
The jabbing agony in her legs subsides, back to the usual pain. Front tires land again and she’s no longer tilted against the wall, can breathe properly again and not through her grit teeth. A swipe across her upper chest and neck to brush the damnable insects still crawling and biting into her and leaving itchy faint scratches across her olive skin. Blood trickles down her forehead-scalp wounds, no matter how superficial, always bleed alot-from where she had bashed the man’s face in. And then a thing steps through the hole in the wall from the closet-

!

Marie goes from single minded raging to absolutely fucking nuclear, lips drawing back in a vicious snarl as her face darkens to a homicidal expression of intense hate and malice, the air sucked out of the room as she reorients the shotgun in her hands, the metal still hot against her palms, searing towards the muzzle. Lifting it up and over her head, she brought the heavy butt of the tactical shotgun down hard on the thing’s head as it dropped to maybe hurl on Elias a third time, slamming its mouth shut. Acid sputtered and oozed out the sides. She’s hardly brought the club down before her fingers wrap around the last escrima stick, free arm using Elias' shoulder (bad idea she sure as fuck shouldn’t touch the stuff) to forearm to the broad shoulder shove herself forward, enough to slam the electrified weapon into the thing, knocking it backwards-and then the revolver lifted in her burning hand, discharging into the thing’s distended stomach as it fell backwards, emptying the acid out in a foul smelling flush.

She rips a hanging towel out of the closet and whips it into Elias, because fuck, it was burning the shit out of her arm, seemed caustic as fuck, and it was all over him. He’d possibly ingested it, even.

He might be apparently capable of coming back from anything, but that didn’t mean it fucking felt good-or that something might not kill him in the meantime.

“Fucking throw it up-” Marie doesn’t just hit the next thing-she practically beats it to death with the weighted escrima stick, then hurls it into the next thing, right in the throat-the shock is there but the skull still explodes outward, some screaming frothing thing with mandibles easily the size of a man’s head.

She fires the last three shots into it, a short t formation across the ‘face’ of the thing. It drops. She can’t move back through there the closet with the bodies in the way, the pieces of rubble are stacked too high where Elias had come through, and the floor was mostly gone where he’d thrown her two attackers. In addition to the limited movement options, she’s running low on gadgets and weapons. She has one last tasering spider restraint, a second sticky tase ball, and the shotgun currently being utilized as a club. The self assessment is poor-but she pulls and hurls the spider restraint anyway, this one thrown hard through the hole Elias had made. She’s not an idiot-proper strategy involved recognizing your limitations. She twists to see him again, check his status-they might have to level the whole building. She has no idea how many more might be left, but she also can’t have the things spilling out into the street and infecting the fuck street denizens.
 
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The acid bubbles and hisses, melting away skin and flesh with equal ease, and Elias throws himself away from Marie, some mad thought to get the shit as far away from her as possible, because he can't remember having been in so much pain ever - he's been burnt with acid, set on fire, crushed and slashed and abused more than any living thing existent and this hurts more than all of them, it's digging into his nerves

it's digging into his nerves

With the clarity that comes at the absolute screaming end, Elias reaches up, takes hold of his face and jaw in both hands, and tears them away in a shower of gore that ignites into burning light. Among the evaporating red are thickly coagulating tendrils of green, knotting together from the burning liquid into parasitic roots that even now still reach for his flesh. He can feel the droplets of it burning through his skin like mistletoe, trying to sink deep, trying to take over.

For a moment, there is a complete and alien sense of contempt for it, and for all the weak and frail works of flesh that Marrane has arrayed against him, in all his days.

The light coruscates and a bell rings, high and clear and pure, and the green liquid scorches into a boil instantaneously as the burning energy that seethes within Adamant's form surges back down the tendrils and immolates them utterly. He rises to his feet, and turns to look at Marie, reaching out to brush aside one flailing husk as it comes out of the next room. It rockets aside into a wall and shatters itself and the drywall in a cloud of detritus and grimy filth.

"No more,” he says, flesh reforming in blooms of light even as his lips shape the words, and takes hold of Marie's wheelchair in one hand, then lifts her and the chair both to hop down the wreckage of the open wound in the side of the building, straight out to the concrete below which shatters beneath his weight. The rooms that have been torn open are visions of horror: bodies laid decomposing and discarded, empty eggs and webs, a laboratory of horror more complete for its abandonment, that such a thing Marrane would so easily create, then discard and ignore. That this is nothing to him, just a passing thought and a day's work.

The contempt surges again, and Elias sets down Marie then turns back to the abandoned tenement. His body is no longer merely illuminated, the skin has gone dark like night sky, lights twinkling and burning in the distance, a cosmos writ in human form. If he was ever wounded it is not visible now among the stars that compose him.

"Destroy it?" he asks, low and resonant.
 
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It took a lot to shock or surprise Marie. She was intimately familiar with violence and all the shapes and forms it came in, had seen the end result of more than her fair share of horrendous acts perpetrated by the worst and most sadistic of the scum.

But Elias ripping his own face off in a shower of gore and acid-even her all consuming rage can't fully insulate her from the shock of it.

Jesus Christ-either it was hurting him that bad or he'd taken complete leave of his senses. In a split second her strategic mind slams into overdrive, powering through her animalistic vicious rage to plot her next steps. The teleporter buttons as well as the teardrop shaped device itself in her bag, what ordinance she had immediate access to in her lair, what the access points to the building's sublevel were, her own level of exertion-but without the benefit of legs, she could hardly evacuate Elias, arm up and come back to break into the basement for an -actual- act of 'terrorism'. And she's not sending Velocity into another tight, unexplored space with anything of Paul's in it.

She can't surrender to this shit and she can't eliminate it alone, which keeps her blood boiling and her logical mind reflecting on grim end results as she shoots the centipede thing and throws the spider restraint with all the hatred she can muster.

A high bell sound and blazing light, and Adamant was back in the fray and -done with this shit.-

He scoops her up entirely and jumps-her sudden lack of control sends spikes of twitchy warning through her spine, hands gripping the arms of her chair and her core tightening, body tensing for impact. That makes her angry too, just without any target.

Sharp eyes take in the utter destruction and Eldritch horrors. This trap had never been orchestrated for a mortal, supposedly dead vigilante, maybe not even for someone looking into her affairs-it just was. He had planted a disease here and left it to fester, not a targeted attack but an absent act of malicious negligence.

He hadn't cared. It hadn't mattered to care. The damage so easily wrought blows even her away.

"Des-"

"Yes." Marie speaks alongside the resonating voice rather than over it-she's not sure she -could- speak over it. He's all twilight and galaxy. Stars twinkle from some place deep within, as if he were not flesh but celestial other, alien and all encompassing. Even his body language was radically different, something Marie notes but can't focus on in the face of it all.

Marie has seen and fought magic, planned and orchestrated attacks- but this was nothing short of otherworldly.

Yes, destroy it. The building had to be collasped, the husks crushed into paste and buried beneath rubble that would no doubt remain for the next several decades. Horrific potential scenarios played out in her mind, thoughts of the ghetto infested and more of that acidic mold leeching into the populace, thoughts of fleshy masks spread taut over planted squirming beasts. She sees monsters consuming and infecting the strays and the homeless and the rest of these forgotten souls, overwhelming a forsaken place where the police dare not go and the city's corrupt, fattened politicians steadfastly ignore. That inevitable chorus of petty denials and blind uncaring gazes, unaware the diseased limb was infecting the rest of this cesspit, drawing tight around the bread and circus of the elite like a noose.

And her city would slip not into the deeper reaches of criminal muck and human cruelty, but instead obliterated in the hellish violation of something damned.

Yes, better to destroy this hive before the situation spiraled out of control and required a tactical fucking nuke dropped on it. By a government that had written them all off ages ago, no less.
 
Adamant slams a fist into his own chest in a salute that blows dirt away for twelve paces from the airburst. "Get as much distance as you can," he says. "I'm dropping the hammer."

He turns and takes several bounding leaps away, gaining about eighty feet of distance, waits for Marie to catch up, then reverses and comes back twice as fast, bounding higher and farther until on the last bounce he rockets skyward. For a moment, he's just a bare figment of light among the night sky - the only star visible among all the light pollution of the city. When he comes back down, it's straight through the center of the apartment complex in a blur of speed.

There are no conventional comparisons. The building is flattened downwards like an aluminum can under an anvil, smashed flat in a heartbeat, a blinding flash, and a horrendous crunch of noise - the impact so abrupt and complete that no debris is flung away. It's all driven into the ground and the foundations, but the result is a tangible quake that rumbles the earth for a two block radius and ruptures the concrete paving for half that, tearing through piping and electric lines of all kinds. Water fountains up as a main ruptures, the street split open all the way to the sewers. Everything from the roof to the earth below is simply crushed into so much powder. Dust shivers into the air, a mixture of toxic asbestos, drywall talc, and whatever Paul's foul creations are composed of.

Perhaps twenty seconds later the light pierces through the hanging clouds, and Elias strides out, glances at Marie, and comes to her side. The powder clings to his jacket and clothes, but doesn't so much as touch his illuminated skin, repelled from it by thudding heartbeats of light.

"Fuck Paul," he says, and the anger and disgust in those words summarize a lifetime's worth of disdain. His voice still resonates, but the thumbs hooked into his pockets lend it an incongruous, casual nature.
 
He doesn’t have to state it twice-she’s had her share of shrapnel wounds and didn’t desire more. The angled wheels of the chair allow for a much faster ride, propelled as fast as her arms had the strength to carry her and irritating the palms of her hands further, rolling over the cracked and shitty sidewalk at a decent enough pace.

And then she turns to wheel partially behind a car as he bounds away-but doesn’t duck down just yet, wanting to watch-dark eyes sharp and focused. She’s never seen him level a building or go full Adamant on anything other than a monitor-and nothing really came close to this.

She ducks but nothing strikes the car-just a quake of power through the earth, a violent tremor beneath her wheels. Jesus-when she looks again, the building had been obliterated. No more husks, no more nests of evil insectoid shit, no apartment frozen in a time before Rahab, just a place to shelve Protagonist until she had use again the following night. A time where heroes still thrived and Sam wasn’t dead.

Marie frowns at the fifteen second count, wheeling back onto the sidewalk, slowly becoming aware of things as the adrenaline begins to ebb away-and then there he was again, illuminating and undamaged.

Good.

She glances to the surrounding buildings and windows. Even in a place where no one sees anything, she’s sure this would get around, the brilliantly lit Adamant in Samson. Not in the news, however. No one would believe these people even if they did talk more than whispers in the seedy underbelly of Samson.

The demolition could hardly be written off as another fucking methlab, but it wouldn’t surprise her if it was-the damage to the street and water main, the way it went dark with ruptures of power cables and pipes-depending on how far it spread, anyway.

"Fuck Paul,"

Marie finally exhales, gives him a curt, agreeing nod before adding on to his meaning. “We will.”

She lifts the tear drop shaped teleporter, wheels a turn closer. Eyes the glow and the dust that doesn’t touch him, despite clinging to his clothing. His face bore no sign of the gory mess it’d been when he’d ripped it away, and he looks otherwise unharmed.

Also good, but it raised more questions about his person, his abilities, his nature.

Hn.

And with a few twists on the three dials-x, y, and sea level-the pair disappeared from the far reaches of her cesspit and instantly reappeared on that deserted concrete plain in the harbor district, feet from the heavy, reinforced door.

Marie’s mind works as she wheels towards the nondescript, familiar looking office building attached to the warehouse, the elevator just past the three by two arrangement of desks. It’s a quiet ride, the woman silent and calculating, pressing a swathe of bandage to the cut just above her hair line, weighing the various things heavy on her mind. A glance to Elias again, mind blank as she reaches for something to say.

“Good work.” She finally decides, a nod.

What felt like hundreds of bites and scratches sting and swell under her skin, her left forearm burns and the palms of her hands are pink and tender-there's something of a headache coming on and the ever present simmering agony that was her lower half-but she was alive. She had neither gotten in the way or further maimed, had downed her share of husks in one way or another, the usual self control to avoid killing the shit out of people thrown to the wind. For the best-that was a near laughable luxury in a wheelchair and set upon in an ambush.

But she had still had impact, despite the chair. Use. The limitations were there and as crushing as ever, but she had still managed to be effective. It’s not relief she’s feeling exactly, but...it was something.

The vigilante and former cop looked like hell-the bug bites and scratches, the nasty who knew what that had stained her clothes and skin, the human claw marks where the man had torn at the side of her face and hair in an attempt to draw her closer. Her left forearm had a nasty looking chemical contact burn, on the side and about midway between her elbow and wrist. With the addition of the uneven, chopped to hell curls half framing her face, she looked like a crazy, wild jungle woman than anything else.

And yet she's sated in a way she hasn't been in a long, long time. It reveals itself, however minutely, in the way her face wasn't quite so tight a mask, the churning, barely contained tempest of rage returning to the cage at the core of her. His presence doesn’t even make her feel twitchy, oppressed-as it had, as people just...did, and definitely did nowadays-though she’s been in the presence of exactly five of them, a cat, and then whatever category the husks could be placed in. Rush, but she was less people than the husks.

The doors slide back open and Jasper is already waiting for them-coming to her feet from where she’d been sitting prettily, sleek black tail curling into a question mark.
 
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It takes several minutes for Elias to work off the head of steam he's built up. He's always thought of his power as relating to momentum, or inertia in some way: the longer he tries to do something, the tougher and stronger and more single-minded he becomes in pursuit of it. Once the bell peals, everything is clear, everything is simple and easy and he hates it on principle when he calms down from the throttling high of transcendent levels of power. There can't not be a price for that kind of thinking. Things should be hard. They should have value inherent to the struggle.

By the time they've made it back to Marie's lair, he's vented off most of the light, back down to a faint shimmer that dances along his skin wherever it presses against something, tingly with warmth, like hot air on skin fresh from the touch of snow. He immediately makes for the first aid kit he'd stashed awhile ago and opens it. "Get to the shower," he directs over his shoulder. "I don't know what the fuck that liquid was, but if it even slightly touched you, you need to power rinse that shit off. That was very low pH, to say nothing of - the rest of it."

God, that feeling. It'd been trying to integrate with his nervous system, coagulating into dendrite threads to jerk him around like a fucking puppet. It wouldn't work again, not on him, but any baseline human would be a mannequin under an absent master.

He bustles back over to Marie - pauses - then smirks at her. Smirks, not smiles or grins. Just a bare upturn of his mouth. "You kicked a lot of ass in there too, hon."
 
Marie, meanwhile, moves for the slightly curved console, Jasper following along and leaping onto it, sniffing at the air. She presses a drawer in and it slides smoothly out, an array of pill bottles, syringes and vials nestled in insulating foam, and then a deep depression of medical supplies to the right of that.

"Voison was always eager to introduce me to more toxins than I found prudent." She says, almost conversationally touching on a villainess that had made the very serious mistake of entering her city a second time. Her voice is still matter of fact and flat, but it lacked the punch her words usually had, the growl. "Built up what immunities I could, but who knows what diseases those insects carried.”

Whatever was in the vial shimmered, a milky substance. This too was a product of Miss Miracle, and while she didn’t like injecting or ingesting anything at all linked with magic or mystery formulas she doesn’t understand-the devil you knew was better than the one you didn’t.

She glances at her arm. The trace amount that had touched her, the transfer-it’d done damage, but she suspects, given the consistency she’d wiped off with the towel vs what had clung to Elias’s face, that she had gotten a brush with the more watery carrier of it, fluid not full intermingled-she doesn’t fucking know. The shower was a good idea-the scratches half made her feel like bugs were still on her skin.

She leaves the draw open, dark eyes flicking to him. His physiology was a flat mystery to her. He looked fine, but- “Most everything’s labeled.” Marie says as she wheels backwards from it. The chair itself would need to be decontaminated. She has no easy way of doing so, and wiping the thing down didn’t seem through enough-she’d trash it. There’s a spare like this, and then a racing three wheeled one she doesn’t like. It had a sling rather than a seat, had the user’s weight bearing down on folded legs.

She wasn't a masochist.

"You kicked a lot of ass in there too, hon."

"Hn. Still good for something." She dismisses-but the woman was pleased. She rolled away towards the metal sliding door and the alcove behind it, lights turning on in her wake to reveal the cavernous space beyond the console.

She slid the door closed behind her.

~*~

Seated in the shower chair in the small stall, one of her raw hands still absently holding onto the black strap she'd used to lift herself in here, Marie lets freezing cold water beat down on her head and down her back while she thinks, her forearm already blasted painfully.

She's thinking about the fight, each movement and weapon use, the slightly sore spot between her shoulder blades. Lifting the shotgun and bringing it down like that had revealed a minor weakness-she'd iron that out in future training sessions. She's thinking about how fucked all of that was, how Paul had ruined those people on a careless whim.

And she's thinking about Elias, and the acid belched onto his body. He felt pain. That was very clear, and Christ, enough he'd torn his face off rather than suffer more of it.

...there had been a note. A high pitched bell. It hadn’t really registered at the time, in that moment. She was busy fending off monsters and ensuring the thing didn't get off another shot at him, and then the shock of his violent self disfigurement.

She replays the gruesome scene, mind laying out the enemies and the hero, the layout of the room they were in. He had torn his face off, she briefly thought him out of his mind-and then burst into light after and then alongside that sound. A warning of Catalysis, so Miss Miracle had once instructed them all on. But there he stood in the other room showing no ill effects, and after the sound he had fought on as light had reformed him, regenerated flesh faster than anyone Marie had personal knowledge of-and THEN he'd been able to level the place in a single bounding leap.

And out of everything about that, it was his thumbs hooked in his pockets, afterward that somehow sticks in her brain, gnaws at her. Again, it'd been a shift in his body language, but that one seeming more consciously aware, somehow. As had the winding down in the after. Marie’s lips purse, her eyes narrowing a fraction as she watches water spiral down the drain, represses a shiver as the cold finally gets to her, sinks bone deep and makes her legs ache deep in the center. He was a puzzle she lacks pieces for, pieces she wants, because she liked to know things, period.

There was no real purpose other than knowledge. She has a plan should Adamant go off the rails, and it circumvented any retaliation the God like man could muster.

She thinks about Lana's sense of betrayal, and she thinks about how right she was in the wrongness of it, the treachery in even considering how best to take down your allies. But someone had to consider it, had to -know-.

How very ugly it was. She leaned her head back and let the water run over the scratches and bug bites beneath her collarbone again, the skin already scrubbed raw. She didn't hope often, certainly never prayed.

But may such grim realities never come to pass.

-*-

Marie reemerged fresh, her damp, clean curls back in the bun at the nape of her neck, another copy of the sport tank and shorts. She isn't...self conscious about the ugliness that were the scars and chunks of missing muscle, once strong legs reduced by distrophy and injury-but she still...

They were a punishment for her to see and know them. A reminder. She had worn the scrubs because Elias didn't need to see them, and...she doesn't know. Not really. They had pockets.

She's giving half turns on one wheel, mildly distracted by her half bandaged forearm. She gets most of the way and then pauses to start wrapping it the rest of the way.

"Two layers of skin," She states matter of factly. "Not as potent as you received." Her mind flashed on the gory scene of his face torn away, and she glances to him, frowns.

"Do you feel everything, before regenerating?"
 
Elias shakes his head as Marie comes back out of the shower. Her legs still look bad, but they always look bad, and to be honest after all the shit he himself goes through, looking at scars or injuries or any kind of bodily - anything - just doesn't bother him. It's hard to be queasy after you've watched your own entrails get ripped out a couple times. "The acid wasn't the bad part," he says honestly. "It was - I don't know. Rooting in? I could feel that shit digging through skin and getting into nerves, musculature. Some kind of hyperactive, spreading fungus that fed off the product of the acid catalyzation and just -"

He shudders at even the memory of that much pain. It had only been moments, but he can't think of anything that compares. "It felt like phantom pain. Like all of it on the surface was raw, exposed nerve. Just screaming. It hooked into my nervous system somehow, I'd bet, and was trying to integrate and take over. That's why I - you know. Had to get rid of it before it got too deep."

He's never comfortable discussing the depth of self-mutilation he goes through in a fight, the sheer physical trauma he endures every time. Lana has enhanced durability too, but it stays that way, all the time, and he has to work back up from base every time. Sometimes he gets the time he needs to throw some punches, take some weak blows and build momentum.

Sometimes.

Marie's question leaves him a little at sea, and he honestly doesn't want to answer it. She's treated him with complete honesty, though, in even the worst of things - and here, in her last redoubt, legs bare and wounded from fighting alongside him, the instinctive cringe towards misdirection or a quick joke doesn't take. It's not right. Elias wants to say it isn't fair, but he and Marie have never pretended that fairness means anything. Instead it's -

that someone wants to hear, he guesses. And that it's someone that wouldn't turn away from it, the ugliness inherent. Why he's so comfortable with flouting the law, with the two-sided nature of being a hero, signing autographs and acknowledging the fame with one hand and killing with the other. Unlike the others, all the others, Marie knows suffering. Has had it intertwined with her life, the hero life, all this time. Maybe for others it's a comforting dream, a home and a family, and it is that for him too, but -

He doesn't pretend it's all goodness. Elias fights so hard for the Coulee and for this new League, because it's everything: all his triumph and his pain, his suffering and the most precious lodestones of his heart.

So as he comes out with some antiseptic and hyrdocortisone, and bustles over to Marie to start applying it to all the bites on her arms, he answers.

"Yeah," Elias says, after a moment. " . . . Energy isn't as bad. Fire, electricity, most blasts that get thrown around are pretty dull. The nervous system isn't designed to interact with them, or it gets too damaged to carry the signal. Just hurts for a bit and then when it grows back it's more the light sensation."

He wets his lips. His eyes don't rise from where he's carefully treating each individual bite with a daub of the lotion before disinfecting it, careful and precise. He has to kneel to get at her arm properly, which puts them at head level with each other.

"The . . . if I can start small, physical stuff doesn't hurt nearly as much. I get tougher, hurt less once I build up. Take less damage. But if something gets ahead of me - the, uh, the physical trauma hurts a lot. It's what pain's meant to communicate: this is broken, this is cut, you need to fix it. You need to know about it. That's natural. A natural body response."

Elias shrugs, uncomfortable. "Catastrophic trauma is - bad. I can still feel blood loss, get faint, all that shit. Feels like dying. I come back, come back stronger, but - it's not fun."
 
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