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| "Sunlight on a Broken Column"; X-Corps only | |
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| Topic Started: Jun 1 2012, 09:49 PM (524 Views) | |
| Lodestone | Jun 1 2012, 09:49 PM Post #1 |
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Unregistered
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May 18th, almost 3 am. Something stirred. He didn't know what or why, but the electromagnetic shifted. The sheets were too comfortable, the bed too warm, the air thankfully too cool with a working air conditioning unit. Hobbes lay next to his head, the tail batting at the side of his cheek in irritation from the sound. It quivered nearby, rumbling on the treated wood of the nightstand just on the other side of the striped ball of fur. He swore, letting it go to the answering machine. It was quiet for a moment. He savored it, face planted into the pillow, the blanket drawn up over his head, the cat's peace disturbed by the movement. Hobbes made a sound, unintelligible by half-conscious mind, but the sound picked up. The rumbling started again, this time on the other side of the bed. X-Corps was calling. Again. He cracked open his eyes, looking at the digital clock. It wasn't even three... What could possibly have happened that they needed him now? He groaned, rolling to the side and stretching out his arm, blindly groping for the phone. Finding it, he tugged it into the shelter of his blanket and blinked away a bit of foggy sleep. Birdman, the small screen read. What was Harvey calling for? Opening the phone, he raised it near his head, eyes wilted to a shut. "Yeah?" It was obvious he wasn't happy with the call, his tired voice grating. "Ed. Jesus. Get up," Harvey said loudly. The blip of a police siren sounded in the background. Under the blanket, Edmund rubbed at an eye. "It's not even three, Harv. What do you need?" "Someone's been killed at the X-Corps building. In the courtyard." Ed was wide away. Suddenly, he wasn't so comfortable. "There's blood everywhere. There's police and everything." "Do they know who it was?" Stillness. He didn't know how long it took him to get to the building. Part of him was left in his bed still dreaming, part of him was driving the car. He knew the route by muscle memory, he could have been dreaming this. He didn't know if he turned the blinker on to change lanes, he didn't know if what was happening was real. He wanted this to be a nightmare, but the rank taste of a freshly lit cigarette in his mouth and the acrid smoke corroding his lungs made him aware that it was real. There was music playing, the radio that he had left on from the last time he drove singing a tune happy and pleasant. To his ears, it was empty. Muted. Muffled by the driven purpose of getting to the building. Another body on the graveyard of X-Corps. The first thing he became aware of were the lights. Flashing red and blue, white and red, maybe some other colors. They were far away, but suddenly they were close. Seconds had become minutes or minutes to second, it didn't matter. A police man directed him by, an NYPD with a mournful face just waving a hand. He'd seen that face before, the same expression at other crime scenes he had been called to. Mutant and human incidents, violence on both sides. The cigarette withered away in orange and time skipped along. He was walking through people now, a throng dense. He heard the sad whimpers of people he worked with, members of X-Corps summoned from their beds to stand along swaying yellow caution tape. He tasted the butt, unaware that he was breathing a plume as he walked around it. Things were blurred. Things were fast and slow, lights dancing like kaleidoscopes. He heard his name once or twice, a gentle touch on his shoulder, but he kept walking through and around them. The heat of the stick in his mouth sizzled under his nose. The yellow tape touched his abdomen as he looked at the courtyard. It was quarantined, blocked off from all public access. Standing cards with numbers of them followed a trail of evidence, red and drying slowly, from the building to the middle of the courtyard. Concrete was cracked, shattered glass was spread out around the base of the building, and it was the Purifiers all over again. There was a hole where the glass had come from, several stories up. He saw figures -- policemen -- standing in the hole, staking pictures, gathering evidence. In the middle of all the wreckage and carnage of the courtyard, he was sure he dreamed what he saw. On the cobble stone walkway, the fractured stone surrounded a figure. Shrouded by the respectful colors of death himself, a black tarp embraced the dignify of the body. It gave no shape or figure away other than the obvious. Female. Sprawled. Broken. A red pool that still reflected the lights of the courtyard and those that were set up still gathered near her. A hand -- just barely visible -- peeked out under the tarp, digits curled. Rigor had yet to set in, but they were still, almost as if they were scratching into the hard rock beneath them in desperation. He thought he saw them moving, curling in toward their palm. His lip suddenly burned. The old habit of plucking the cigarette from his lips returned and he flicked it away from the scene unconsciously. "That's him. If it's someone who worked here, he'll know." On the other side of the yellow tape, Harvey approached, barely recognizable without his cartoon-ish cowl. The Birdman's expression on his face swallowing all the jovial expressions he usually had. Edmund stared back at him, unaware that it was he who was being talked about. Harvey gestured toward the electromagnetic, the officer at his side following the motion. Edmund met his gaze as the NYPD approached, the man's face noticeably callous. He had been through this all before. The evils of the world were cruel and he could tell by the man's face that he had grown numb to the sight of death. "You work for X-Corps?" he said gently. Edmund barely nodded. "How many people do you know that work here?" "Everyone," Ed answered, terribly calm. What was another body, after all, when he had magnetized twenty to the ceiling during the Purifier attack? "We could use some help identifying the body. Jane Doe had no ID on her. ..." The officer looked at him seriously. "You okay with that?" He had seen the dead before, walked among their bodies. He had even made people dead. Why would it bother him so much? Edmund could hear the whispers of those around him, the grave and the grim, the rumors of who it was underneath that tarp. If it was someone that worked for X-Corps, he would know them. Already they had lost dozens in the attack by the hate-mongers. Edmund nodded. The policeman raised the caution tape and he ducked under, following next to the man. "They were pushed -- thrown out -- of the building. The guy with wings back there said the glass was reinforced. To be thrown out this far, though... Our suspect is going to be superhuman, undoubtedly foul play. Jim," the officer called out, waving down a man on the other side of the courtyard. The coroner looked up and sauntered over, mindful of putting distance between himself and marked spots of blood elsewhere. The officer explained to the coroner and the man frowned, resigned to the decision. "Hope you haven't had anything to eat in a while. We've already had a few upchucks..." There was no humor in the coroner's voice. Coroners, like doctors, were renowned for having a sense of humor in the face of horror and distraught situations. Their respect for the duty was unyielding, Edmund knew that, but even those who were used to seeing death had a limit. Steeling his resolve, he stepped at the edge of the small crater. The concrete had cracked and fractured around the body, the force of the impact sending crooked tendrils of space between the hard surface. The body, Edmund noticed, had sunken an inch or two into the ground. It was that, or the force of impact had spread the body out. He would rather have it the former. Delicately, the coroner touched the tarp and began to lift it. The first thing Edmund noticed was the hair. Spread out, it was matted and caked with still wet blood. It could have been red for all they knew, but a few blond strands betrayed the natural color. Its length was easy to judge. A familiar pang twisted in his stomach and his brow furrowed, eyes squinting a slight to focus. The brow came next, and an ear, a thick fracture line poking against the skin. He could hear the coroner sigh as the tarp revealed the face. Edmund turned pale. The lights throughout the courtyard flickered. He went cold. His fingers were no longer attached to his palms and the hand of a fiendish creature ran up the back of his neck. His heart leaped into his neck, its fast beat filling his ears. Instinct forced him to look away, his hand reaching for his mouth as his stomach lurched. His lungs sucked in air as he stumbled to a nearby garden. He jerked, tempted by the explosion of sensation to purge, but nothing came up. A dry, heaving sound escaped through his nose as he stared down at the flowers. It was a long, long few seconds before he could even breath again. He flinched at the officer's touch on his shoulder when his hand came to a rest there. "Have a seat." The officer did not press for answered as he sat against the flowers. Edmund buckled forward, hands pushing up and over his scalp, his nails digging in. It was her. His friend, his peer, his fellow employee. He saw her nearly every day for the last year. Every day there was a conversation, a casual lunch, a painfully tedious meeting, discussing the future of X-Corps. She had pushed X-Corps to new levels where even Worthington could not have hoped to get it. And now... Her dead eye gazed over cement and a sea of red. "It's Hart." He managed. His voice grated like sand in a bucket, his eyes shut tight as his limbs trembled. "Oh God, it's Hartley." |
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| Venus Dee Milo | Jun 1 2012, 10:50 PM Post #2 |
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She didn’t sleep anymore, not naturally anyway. Ever since the explosion Dee no longer needed the things that everyone else did. She no longer had a body or physical mind to take care of. That came with its advantages and disadvantages. Because she could not sleep, Dee was always up roaming whether it be just New York or teleporting to different places around the world in an instant. Tonight or rather this very early morning she had been back in Louisiana visiting the old family home. It was not the same. All of their possessions had been sold off and the home bought up by some young couple. While the people slept she had stood in the backyard reminiscing about the good times had on the tire swing when she was a child. She missed those times. She missed them a lot. She had spent quite an amount of time visiting locations that held fond memories of her past life. When it was all over she teleported back to New York, to X-Corp to check on the place. But when she got there it was a horrible scene waiting on her. Police had the building cutoff from the public, numerous lights flashed, and there was a black coroner’s van on the premises. Dee fell into a panic as she pushed her way to the front of the crowd. Edmund was already on the scene. Next to him was the coroner showing him who was beneath the black tarp. Dee got through the crowd, but was stopped by an officer. “Let me through, I work here.” Before the tarp was lowered again, she got sight of the victim. She stopped protesting the officer that was just doing his job. He was forgotten. The person on the ground was much more important. “Oh God… no. This-this isn’t happening.” Dee was in complete shock. If the woman lying lifeless had been just a citizen she might now have been hit so hard, but she was not. She was the woman that had given a job, given her the opportunity to do some good for the community. Dee did not want to believe it was her, but it was. Seeing her body… it brought back the horrible images of her family. Even though this was not her fault, she still felt incredibly guilty. Her body felt like it was hurting, but she had no body to speak of. Her mind was so wrapped in pain and guilt that it was playing tricks on her. “I-I don’t sleep,” she finally said after moments of silence. “I could have been here, I should have been here.” Dee felt that had she not been traveling she could have stopped this from happening to Hartley. Her containment suit began to lose its human shape. She was in too much turmoil to keep up a stable form anymore. The suit was shed leaving behind the raw energy and sounds of heavy sobbing. One moment she was there and the next she was in a nearby alley. In private she cried and cried, but not a single tear was shed. |
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| Doctor Nemesis | Jun 1 2012, 11:07 PM Post #3 |
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Like some of the more famous mutants with healing factors, sleep wasn't as much a necessity for James as it was for others; nor was sobering up for that matter. He'd still been at the office just a few hours earlier, tinkering around in his lab until a bit of a walkaround had brought him to that single office with dim lights peeking out from under the door frame. The one person who was taking this thing harder than anyone else save himself, would be the one person still there with him. It was Hartley of course, and why wouldn't it be? X-Corp had become hers almost before she'd taken over, and she'd taken it to new heights and plateaus. He found her nursing some Brandy, and he'd had his own feel good potion to drown his sorrows. They'd talked, connected; he'd opened himself up to her on a level he didn't do with most. Why? He wouldn't say it much but as much as he looked down on others for their lesser intelligence, he still respected and liked people, some obviously more than others. Hartley was one of those people he respected and liked; but of course if anyone tried to tell anyone he'd call them a liar and shoot them full of laughing gas. But the reason he'd let her in, spoken with her as an adviser and friend was that she needed him to. She needed someone who'd been in the same position, experienced the same troubles to identify with her and take even the smallest amount of pressure off her shoulders. And he was a doctor, his job was to help people in any way he could. He'd been in one of the smaller labs dotting his estate when he got the call and the message that someone was dead. His soldering tool was dropped and he was out of the door and in his car faster than he'd have thought possible. He tore through the night and broke the speed limit to the point that if he'd been pulled over he probably would have gone to jail. He slowed as he drove up to the crime scene and stepped out, making sure his clothes were as presentable and proper as ever. He ducked under the caution line and simply held up his ID badge when one of the officers came up to stop him. He calmly strode past Edmund, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder for a ghost of an instant before continuing on to the coroner and officer still by the body. On the way he saw Dee's containment suit, but the energy being wasn't being contained within...so she was taking it hard too. He knew who it was without even looking; knew by Ed's reaction. "The victim's name is Hartley Lindwall. 27 on the 1st of next month. She was the boss of X-Corp." He sighed and looked up, his eyes easily zooming up to the shattered glass of her office. "She fell from 10 stories up, from her office; couple that with whoever was strong enough to get her through that glass...the human body can't handle that much force exerted on it." He shook his head with a hint of sadness. "Excuse me sir, but who are you?" The officer asked him as he stood up and looked him over. James pulled out his ID badge yet again and handed it to him. "James Bradley, head physician and lead of the medical branch." The officer nodded and handed him his badge back, then scratched his head. "You just got here, Doctor Bradley. How'd you know so much about this?" James pointed up to the shattered window. "Simple. I've advised CSI's and coroners before, I've seen cases like this before...and I was here earlier. I was with Hartley just a few hours ago. I knew it had to be her when I got the call...she was the only one still here; she was always the last one here. If you don't mind?" He asked before pulling the tarp further off of her. His ever present white gloves were removed and replaced with rubber ones so he wouldn't disturb anything while he looked her over. "Hmmm." It was obvious that while getting hurled through glass that thick hurt, it was the impact with the ground that killed her. Most people thought it was the fall...it was never the fall. His eyes took on an eerie glow as he looked his friend and now, post-mortem patient over for probably the last time. It didn't show, but the words he spoke in such a calm, focused manner hurt him to his core. "The impact with the window fractured several bones and caused severe lacerations; that's one of the causes of the sheer amount of blood. He picked up one of the pieces of glass that had survived the fall; several inches thick and razor sharp still, it was a genuine surprise that Hartley hadn't been shredded to ribbons before she hit the ground. "The force exerted when she smashed through pushed most of the glass outward though; it's the only reason she's still in one piece more or less." The men looked at him and even they who saw this every day wondered how a man who'd obviously worked closely with her could be so cold and show such lack of emotion. He had to; it was as simple as that. "The glass didn't slow her velocity at all. She hit going so fast." Her insides looked like a battle zone, and if he hadn't been trained and been doing this for so many decades, he'd probably have lost his dinner. "Bones shattered on impact. Organs liquefied on impact. Cranium split under the skin on impact." He looked over every detail of her broken and battered body. "Bruising on the throat and on the trachea itself suggest she was hit hard and had trouble breathing before she died. Similar bruising to the skull and other parts of her body also suggests...that she was beaten, severely before she died." He finally stood up and turned to them. "Whoever did this beat her unmercifully to the point where she couldn't struggle. Then...out the window. His eyes faded back to their normal icy blue and he took a deep breath. "Time of death; about 2:05am." The two men exchanged looks, wondering how he could determine all of that without even opening her up or removing her clothes. "How...how did you?" Bradley turned to him and held up his badge one more time. "I'm a mutant...I'm a doctor. It's in the job description." |
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| Dead Girl | Jun 2 2012, 07:32 PM Post #4 |
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Unregistered
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The corpse moved and moved fast, there was something different about this call. She could feel it. As she moved she remained impassive but urgently. As she reached the complex, and then the courtyard, her step was as if she was floating. The Sergeant chimed in, ”..Oh…Oh Moonbeam.” His words, how few there were, was chilling. She stopped dead in her tracks, “Sergeant?” He paused. ”I am so sorry, Moonbeam.” She held her breath, not that she needed to breathe but she stopped none the less. “Who is it?” No answer, “Who is it!?” The Dead Girl moved again, faster, and becoming intangible. She saw the blood, some co-workers, and the Doctor with the body. In a low guttural but echoic voice she spoke to those in her way, “Move.” It chilled the men who were standing near her. They did so yet she still managed to shove them out of the way. She approached the mangled body. Looking down on it confused, like a child who didn’t understand a puzzle meant for adults. She shook her head. “No…” She refused to believe this. The voices of the dead grew quiet, in respect for the lost friend of their Shepherd. “This can’t be-…” She couldn’t say the name. Her dead red eyes looked at the Doctor, hoping he would confirm her thoughts. “Please tell me it’s not-“ She couldn’t muster saying the name. But the look in his eyes, Edmund’s reaction, the others. She shook her head and looked intently at the body. She stepped away and shook her head. Her hands grew to thick lengthened claws. She leapt up and latched her claws into the side of the building. He claws dug in as she climbed, her body shifted and morphed as she climbed. The creature she transformed as was a creature she had recently seen in a movie that was originally a video game, but the blue hue of her skin. The creature peered around the window that was broken, shattered to pieces. The creature looked at object to object, it just seemed untrue. Something of fiction that others would watch in theaters. It couldn’t be. It was. Hartley. The creature groaned a pained moan and climbed to the roof of the building. Once the creature was on the roof it paced, wildly like a savage animal. Accompanied with low guttural groans and growls. The creature leapt towards the edge facing the courtyard and howled. The howl was sad, and full of pain. The creature could not cry, nor the girl the creature shifted from. The low moans of the beast on the ledge were chilling, and so very heartbreaking. The creature howled again, but was choked up by its own voice. The creature leapt from the ledge onto the opposing building, slowly crawling down. Looking less and less menacing but still looking beastly. The beast circled the body, not caring who was scared, the beasts head was low, saddened. Once the beast circled the body, she looked at the pool of blood. A low groan escaped the creature’s breath, she walked away from the scene. Lowly, she headed up by way of the stairs and moved towards Hartley’s office. She nudged the door open and walked towards Hartley’s desk. Crawling underneath of the desk, the beast, with its oversized limbs, curled up in a ball and laid under the desk of the late Hartley Lindwall. |
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| Mitchell | Jun 4 2012, 03:08 AM Post #5 |
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When his phone rang in the scant hours of the morning, Mitch really wanted to ignore it. If it had been any other dial-tone, he probably would have. But this was the special ring Hart had set up for X-Guard business, and the thing about X-Guard business was that it tended to be the sort of thing that couldn't wait 'till morning... that couldn't even wait ten minutes for him to finish what he was doing. It was far more likely to be 'be at the helipad in ten minutes' business, and Mitch took it seriously; he'd been on too many missions where a few minutes one way or the other meant the difference between life and death on a pretty large scale, and he never wanted to have to look in the face the families of the folks they could have saved if he hadn't been responsible for delaying takeoff. So he didn't really have a choice here. "Oh, man, I'm really sorry," he said, "but I have to take this." The call had been urgent, but the details were unclear. Something had happened at X-Corp HQ... and given the threats X-Corps was facing these days, both from another wave of attacks by the shadowy paramilitary mutant-hating forces who'd made their lives Hell last fall, and from some force closer to home that had disclosed their secrets to the general public, that could mean anything. The shadow of those twin threats was still keeping most of Mutant Town's population in Magneto's fucking pineapple under the sea, and Mitch had a feeling they'd only seen the beginning of a rising tide. So he'd made his apologies, called a cab, ignored the complaints, gotten hurriedly dressed as he ran down to street level. Had he been home, he'd have changed into his X-Guard uniform and bounced to HQ; it would have been faster. As it was, he had to rely on the speed of a New York cabbie. Fortunately the streets were pretty empty, and an extra pair of twenties had encouraged the woman to run pretty much all the red lights between them and his destination. The building was still standing; he could see that from a few blocks away. That was something, at least. Then he saw the flashing lights, the cops, the police tape, the other X-Guard members gathered on the sidewalk. He got out of the cab in time to hear Dead Girl's howl, though he didn't know it was her until much later. He threw money at the cabbie, not bothering to count it, and left his clothes behind on the sidewalk as he poured himself towards the scene of whatever had happened. That was when the smell hit him. Mitch had smelled a lot of death, both in his time with the Marines and his time with X-Corp. He'd never really gotten used to it; he was pretty sure it wasn't the sort of thing you could get used to and remain human, but it no longer took him by surprise the way it had when he was a raw recruit. It didn't make his stomach clench up anymore, the way it had the first few times. Not even recognizing the scent did that, though it came a lot closer; this wasn't the first dead friend or dead coworker he'd had to bury. Hell, a third of the people he'd known at X-Corp had died when the Purifiers blew the place up; he'd spent weeks doing nothing, it seemed, but going to funerals. It seemed as though that should make it easier, somehow. It didn't. "Oh, hell, Boss..." he muttered, almost inaudible, as he flowed into a semi-human form next to her broken body. He didn't cry; he couldn't, in this form, and while he wasn't ordinarily body-shy it seemed disrespectful to transition to flesh and blood under the circumstances. He shook his head, feeling like he should say something more, knowing that there was nothing more to say. There would be a funeral, of course, and time to talk about her life, and how much it meant, and how much she would be missed. Right now was the time for something else. He turned to Dr.Nemesis, who seemed to know more about what was going on than anyone else. "Who did this, doc?" he asked, his voice deceptively mild. "And where are they now?" |
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2:17 PM Jul 11