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xp_logs2007-10-29 07:06 am
x-forge.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2007-10-29 07:06 am
Thirteen Days: Zombie Cosmonaut
The first missing team members are located when Marie calls in from Japan. Unfortunately, when Forge and Tabitha arrive at the hospital to get their teammates back to the Blackbird, they find out that Marie and Garrison weren't the only survivors left at the crash site.
It was a bit difficult to track down two missing X-Men in a rural Japanese hospital where you hadn't yet managed to find anyone who spoke English. All of the nurses and staff members Tabitha encountered were perfectly polite, and in fact seemed to be trying to be helpful, but they hadn't yet managed to direct her to anyone who could actually give her specific information about Marie and Garrison.
She found the trauma ward entirely by chance - chance, and a lot of agitated shouting and crashing. There was an edge of real panic to some of the screams, and it became perfectly obvious why. Doctors, nurses and patients in a sleepy little Japanese hospital were not equipped to deal with certain things, and one of those things turned out to be the large, rampaging man in a bloodied gray coverall. The coverall was marked with Cyrillic lettering, but that wasn't the alarming thing. It was the fact that he appeared to be missing half his skull and yet was on his feet, throwing equipment - and people around.
Tabitha ducked beneath a flying IV pole as she dodged panicked people in her attempt to get closer to- she was reluctant to use the word, but honestly - the zombie. She threw herself behind an overturned bed to avoid the thrown ventilator. That was one ticked off walking dead.
A woman screamed, high and loud. Tabs looked over the top of the bed to see the zombie with its stinky fingers tangled in the long hair of one of the white-uniformed nurses. "Swell," she muttered. She vaulted the bed and barreled shoulder-first into the dead cosmonaut.
Its ribcage collapsed with a nauseating crunch and all three of them crashed to the floor. Tabitha reached up to yank the nurse's hair from the zombie's grip.
The nurse was weeping, babbling in panic as she scrambled away once Tabitha had freed her. One rather calm-looking doctor was circling the scene, trying to get close with a syringe he had in his hand. He looked rather dubious as to whether that would work, however.
The cosmonaut made a sound that might have been intended to be some form of communication. Its fingers scrabbled clumsily at Tabitha, trying to lock around her throat.
Tabitha grabbed the clutching hand and yanked it out of the way. She scrambled until she was over the prone zombie's head. She grabbed a length of IV tubing and tied its wrists together around an overturned gurney.
"Great. Now what?"
The doctor stared in something approaching fascination at the cosmonaut. "He is dead," he said to Tabitha, in understandable but accented English. "No... brain activity. I do not know what-" He stopped abruptly, as the cosmonaut's body convulsed, and what looked like oddly solid gray-green smoke pulsed out of his nose and mouth.
"No, no, no!" Tabitha pounded the floor. "No fair!" She briefly pondered holding the thing's mouth and nose shut, but didn't really think it'd help. Instead, she followed the smoke.
It seemed to twitch and hesitate - before it shot at a late-arriving security guard's face, vanishing into him in an instant as he stumbled backwards, choking. He reeled against the wall, but then slowly straightened, blank eyes fixing on Tabitha, and said something in Japanese that sounded like a demand.
Beside her, the doctor gasped. "Magneto?" he asked fearfully.
Tabitha sighed, but wasn't terribly surprised. "What else did he say?" she asked, pulling herself to her feet, just in case this one tried to strangle her too
The security guard repeated whatever he'd said, more forcefully - and grabbed an IV stand, advancing on Tabitha and holding it like a spear.
"I think I liked the zombie better." Tabitha formed and tossed a small but airy bomblet at his chest. She tackled the doctor into cover behind yet more overturned equipment before she set it off. More air than boom, it shouldn't hurt the new guy, just knock him over.
It did. The security guard was flung backwards and into some equipment - not gently, but not hard enough to do him serious injury either. He immediately convulsed, however, that suspicious smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth. It wavered hesitantly for a moment, then floated upwards and vanished through the ventilation system.
"It wanted to know... where Magneto was?" the doctor said, sounding fearful.
Tabitha slapped her comm to life. "Forge, heads up. We got a bad guy on the loose. Likes to get all smoky and nasty before he takes control of civilians. He's looking for Magneto."
"Roger that," Forge said into his mouthpiece, pausing as he turned away from the ambulance. "Wait, what? I've got the ambulance ready to get back to the 'Bird, they had another Brotherhood member with them? Crap on toast. Is he a threat? Taking control of civilians, shit, of course he's a threat. Okay, um..." His mind raced, then he reached into the ambulance and grabbed an EMT kit. "Gimme his last known location and what you know about him, no matter how trivial it seems."
"I'm in the trauma ward. There was a dead guy. Then there was smoke coming out of his mouth, then another guy started trying to kill me. I blew him up and he got away." Tabitha thanked the doctor before she sprinted through the hall. "Details, damn, Chicken Lips, you don't ask for much." She thought back through the encounter. "Started off in a dead Russian body. Hopped bodies after I immobilized it. Spoke Japanese in the Japanese body. Pretty violent, but didn't kill anybody that I saw. Mostly threw them around and scared the crap out of them. Smoke was green, almost opaque. Tell me to stop any time now, boy wonder."
"Gaseous form, reanimated otherwise dead tissue, uses host body's speech patterns... Russian body?" Forge kept repeating the information as he started rummaging through the EMT kit, tucking items into the myriad loops and pockets on his flight suit. "Holy crap, that must be one of the cosmonauts. That's how Magneto and the Brotherhood got control of the satellites. This guy... gas... thing is possessing folks. Okay. Okay. Let me think..."
Forge closed his eyes for a moment, leaning against the side of the ambulance. This guy's possibly part of the Brotherhood. This is the real shit here. You should get Marie. She's senior X-Man on site, you're just a trainee. She knows what to do. She... He stopped and opened his eyes. Marie and Garrison were somewhere in the hospital, probably injured. I know what to do.
"Okay, Tabs. The ambulance is at the south entrance. Find Dominion and Rogue and bring them down there. I'll take care of this. If I'm not out in ten minutes... well, figure something out."
Buckling a respirator mask over his mouth and nose, Forge nodded once and walked into the hospital.
What he was presented with, at first, was a totally innocuous-looking setting. Nothing at all seemed to be wrong, in sharp contrast to the scene upstairs in the trauma ward that Tabitha had witnessed. But as Forge watched, a curiously blank-eyed nurse walked to the main desk and shoved another staff member off the chair. The woman yelped as she hit the floor, but the nurse sat down in front of the computer, calling up patient records.
"Hey!" Forge said, moving toward the nurse's station as his hand went to a pocket. "Back away from the computer, asshole!" He pulled out a pre-filled autoinjector marked with kanji he couldn't read, but luckily an English label below it - Lorazepam, an incredibly powerful sedative.
Uncapping the syringe as he walked, he flipped it into the air, catching it point-first between two metal fingers and firing it like a dart at the possessed nurse.
The throw was a good one, and the nurse grasped at the syringe, then toppled off the chair. His body started to convulse, the same green smoke reemerging and streaming at the face of the woman still scuttling away.
Forge blinked as the green smoke flowed into the other woman's mouth and nose. "Oh, no fair," he moaned, watching the new host stand up. "What in the hell are you?"
"Magneto," the possessed woman said, in very heavily accented English. "Magneto. Where. Magneto." A strangely alien sort of rage contorted her features. "Magneto," she said, and rushed Forge.
Forge hooked a wheelchair with one foot, dragging it towards him and then kicking it at the nurse's shins. "You want Magneto, huh?" he taunted, "Bet I get to him first."
He flexed his left leg, feeling the prosthetic shift and convert into the running formation, then turned and bolted down the hallway.
"Magneto!" the nurse shrieked after him, but instead of following, headed for the frazzled-looking security guard who had only just now arrived on the scene. She grabbed his face, laying what looked to be a passionate kiss upon him. The man jerked and flailed at her, trying to push her away - but then straightened, the same blank look in his eyes as the woman had had. She crumpled soundlessly in front of him, and he stepped over her body and ran after Forge.
"Magneto! Magneto!"
Forge glanced over his shoulder at his new pursuer. "Oh shit, that's so cheating!" he called, sliding across the tile floor around a corner. Looking down the hall, he saw exactly what he was looking for. While he couldn't read Japanese, the yellow-and-black circle-and-triangles symbol was universal.
"Hey!" he yelled at the security guard rounding the corner towards him, "You want Magneto? Come and get him!" Seeing the guard put on another burst of speed, Forge sprinted forward, praying that this plan would work.
He ran directly for the door at the end of the hall, but leaped into the air before crossing the threshold. His fingers gripped the top of the doorjamb and he kicked his legs up as if he was on the gymnastics bars, letting the security guard run past him and into the room. Forge's toes touched the ceiling tile and he kicked off backwards, landing back in the hallway and slamming the door behind him, sealing the possessed security guard in the small room with only a lead-lined window looking in.
"Holy shit," Forge breathed as he scrabbled for the intercom, "I don't believe that worked." He leaned on the button, glancing through the window at his trapped pursuer. "Gosh, that must be the wrong room," he taunted.
The man threw himself against the door, snarling. "Magneto!" he roared, and the threat in his wild-eyed look was only too obvious. "Magneto!"
Forge shook his head. "No Magneto here, dude. Just you and me and Officer..." He peered through the window, but couldn't read the guard's nametag. "Just us three. I'll make you a deal. You get your ugly green living-fart self out of his body, and you get to live."
The possessed man gave him an ugly look, then a smile that bared all his teeth. Then, before Forge could continue the negotiations, he slammed his head hard into the door. And again. The laughter was somehow mocking, and his intention was obvious. Let me out of here or I kill him.
Forge scowled and turned a dial on the console by the door, then pressed the large red button. A warning klaxon sounded, and the lights in the room dimmed slightly. He took his thumb off the button and returned to the window. "That," he explained, "was around seven point five milligrays of ionized radiation. You're standing in a radiotherapy chamber that they use to treat cancer patients. Now that guard there, he looks like he weighs about... a hundred, hundred and ten kilograms? Big guy. But you... you're just a nasty green gas. Ionizing radiation will pass right through his cells and fry you like an autoclave. Sure, he might wake up with a headache and a sunburn, might even be sterile. But I crank this thing up..." Forge hit the button again for a brief second. "...and you're nothing but a memory. You've lost. Get out."
The man looked up at him, his face blood-covered and his eyes baleful. He said something in Japanese, and then his eyes narrowed, as if with strain. "Kill... me. If I do."
"Maybe," Forge said, eyes hard as he stared through the glass. "But rest assured if you don't, I will definitely kill you. Cooperate, and you have a chance. There's an airlock there on the wall. I'm going to fit a canister of agar gel with a one-way valve and slide it through. You go out of this man's body, into the canister, and then the courts decide what happens to you. Refuse, and I will nuke your wannabe terrorist ass into oblivion. Make a move."
It took a long moment for the mutant in the man's body to absorb Forge's words. He gave that bared-teeth smile once more. "Do," he snarled - and then slammed the man's head into the door once more. It was purely and simply spiteful, had to be, because the mutant vacated his body instantly, hovering waiting in the air as his victim laid unconscious and bleeding on the floor.
Forge resisted the urge to just hammer down on the button. One quick dose of radiation wouldn't be harmful to the security guard, but it could burn the gaseous mutant into inert particles. His hand hovered for a moment, then he stepped into a nearby supply closet, returning with a liter canister. Some quick work with his multitool and he'd rigged up a valve. The gas could go in, but not out until it was released.
Placing the canister into the airlock, he sealed it and pushed it through. "In," he ordered through the intercom.
The cloud of gas pulsed, as if defiantly, but then poured into the canister through the valve. Inside the chamber, the security guard stirred, groaning.
As soon as the canister was full, Forge reached into the airlock and retrieved it, sliding it into a padded carrying case. He unlocked the chamber and knelt down by the guard. Pulse was strong, and he didn't appear to be hurt beyond the cuts and contusions that his possessor had forced upon him. Stepping back into the hallway, Forge shouted "Nurse!" loudly - the meaning would hopefully be clear to the hospital staff, if not the exact words.
Pivoting on his heel he turned to go, looking once at an autoclave and pausing, before walking for the doors.
It was a bit difficult to track down two missing X-Men in a rural Japanese hospital where you hadn't yet managed to find anyone who spoke English. All of the nurses and staff members Tabitha encountered were perfectly polite, and in fact seemed to be trying to be helpful, but they hadn't yet managed to direct her to anyone who could actually give her specific information about Marie and Garrison.
She found the trauma ward entirely by chance - chance, and a lot of agitated shouting and crashing. There was an edge of real panic to some of the screams, and it became perfectly obvious why. Doctors, nurses and patients in a sleepy little Japanese hospital were not equipped to deal with certain things, and one of those things turned out to be the large, rampaging man in a bloodied gray coverall. The coverall was marked with Cyrillic lettering, but that wasn't the alarming thing. It was the fact that he appeared to be missing half his skull and yet was on his feet, throwing equipment - and people around.
Tabitha ducked beneath a flying IV pole as she dodged panicked people in her attempt to get closer to- she was reluctant to use the word, but honestly - the zombie. She threw herself behind an overturned bed to avoid the thrown ventilator. That was one ticked off walking dead.
A woman screamed, high and loud. Tabs looked over the top of the bed to see the zombie with its stinky fingers tangled in the long hair of one of the white-uniformed nurses. "Swell," she muttered. She vaulted the bed and barreled shoulder-first into the dead cosmonaut.
Its ribcage collapsed with a nauseating crunch and all three of them crashed to the floor. Tabitha reached up to yank the nurse's hair from the zombie's grip.
The nurse was weeping, babbling in panic as she scrambled away once Tabitha had freed her. One rather calm-looking doctor was circling the scene, trying to get close with a syringe he had in his hand. He looked rather dubious as to whether that would work, however.
The cosmonaut made a sound that might have been intended to be some form of communication. Its fingers scrabbled clumsily at Tabitha, trying to lock around her throat.
Tabitha grabbed the clutching hand and yanked it out of the way. She scrambled until she was over the prone zombie's head. She grabbed a length of IV tubing and tied its wrists together around an overturned gurney.
"Great. Now what?"
The doctor stared in something approaching fascination at the cosmonaut. "He is dead," he said to Tabitha, in understandable but accented English. "No... brain activity. I do not know what-" He stopped abruptly, as the cosmonaut's body convulsed, and what looked like oddly solid gray-green smoke pulsed out of his nose and mouth.
"No, no, no!" Tabitha pounded the floor. "No fair!" She briefly pondered holding the thing's mouth and nose shut, but didn't really think it'd help. Instead, she followed the smoke.
It seemed to twitch and hesitate - before it shot at a late-arriving security guard's face, vanishing into him in an instant as he stumbled backwards, choking. He reeled against the wall, but then slowly straightened, blank eyes fixing on Tabitha, and said something in Japanese that sounded like a demand.
Beside her, the doctor gasped. "Magneto?" he asked fearfully.
Tabitha sighed, but wasn't terribly surprised. "What else did he say?" she asked, pulling herself to her feet, just in case this one tried to strangle her too
The security guard repeated whatever he'd said, more forcefully - and grabbed an IV stand, advancing on Tabitha and holding it like a spear.
"I think I liked the zombie better." Tabitha formed and tossed a small but airy bomblet at his chest. She tackled the doctor into cover behind yet more overturned equipment before she set it off. More air than boom, it shouldn't hurt the new guy, just knock him over.
It did. The security guard was flung backwards and into some equipment - not gently, but not hard enough to do him serious injury either. He immediately convulsed, however, that suspicious smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth. It wavered hesitantly for a moment, then floated upwards and vanished through the ventilation system.
"It wanted to know... where Magneto was?" the doctor said, sounding fearful.
Tabitha slapped her comm to life. "Forge, heads up. We got a bad guy on the loose. Likes to get all smoky and nasty before he takes control of civilians. He's looking for Magneto."
"Roger that," Forge said into his mouthpiece, pausing as he turned away from the ambulance. "Wait, what? I've got the ambulance ready to get back to the 'Bird, they had another Brotherhood member with them? Crap on toast. Is he a threat? Taking control of civilians, shit, of course he's a threat. Okay, um..." His mind raced, then he reached into the ambulance and grabbed an EMT kit. "Gimme his last known location and what you know about him, no matter how trivial it seems."
"I'm in the trauma ward. There was a dead guy. Then there was smoke coming out of his mouth, then another guy started trying to kill me. I blew him up and he got away." Tabitha thanked the doctor before she sprinted through the hall. "Details, damn, Chicken Lips, you don't ask for much." She thought back through the encounter. "Started off in a dead Russian body. Hopped bodies after I immobilized it. Spoke Japanese in the Japanese body. Pretty violent, but didn't kill anybody that I saw. Mostly threw them around and scared the crap out of them. Smoke was green, almost opaque. Tell me to stop any time now, boy wonder."
"Gaseous form, reanimated otherwise dead tissue, uses host body's speech patterns... Russian body?" Forge kept repeating the information as he started rummaging through the EMT kit, tucking items into the myriad loops and pockets on his flight suit. "Holy crap, that must be one of the cosmonauts. That's how Magneto and the Brotherhood got control of the satellites. This guy... gas... thing is possessing folks. Okay. Okay. Let me think..."
Forge closed his eyes for a moment, leaning against the side of the ambulance. This guy's possibly part of the Brotherhood. This is the real shit here. You should get Marie. She's senior X-Man on site, you're just a trainee. She knows what to do. She... He stopped and opened his eyes. Marie and Garrison were somewhere in the hospital, probably injured. I know what to do.
"Okay, Tabs. The ambulance is at the south entrance. Find Dominion and Rogue and bring them down there. I'll take care of this. If I'm not out in ten minutes... well, figure something out."
Buckling a respirator mask over his mouth and nose, Forge nodded once and walked into the hospital.
What he was presented with, at first, was a totally innocuous-looking setting. Nothing at all seemed to be wrong, in sharp contrast to the scene upstairs in the trauma ward that Tabitha had witnessed. But as Forge watched, a curiously blank-eyed nurse walked to the main desk and shoved another staff member off the chair. The woman yelped as she hit the floor, but the nurse sat down in front of the computer, calling up patient records.
"Hey!" Forge said, moving toward the nurse's station as his hand went to a pocket. "Back away from the computer, asshole!" He pulled out a pre-filled autoinjector marked with kanji he couldn't read, but luckily an English label below it - Lorazepam, an incredibly powerful sedative.
Uncapping the syringe as he walked, he flipped it into the air, catching it point-first between two metal fingers and firing it like a dart at the possessed nurse.
The throw was a good one, and the nurse grasped at the syringe, then toppled off the chair. His body started to convulse, the same green smoke reemerging and streaming at the face of the woman still scuttling away.
Forge blinked as the green smoke flowed into the other woman's mouth and nose. "Oh, no fair," he moaned, watching the new host stand up. "What in the hell are you?"
"Magneto," the possessed woman said, in very heavily accented English. "Magneto. Where. Magneto." A strangely alien sort of rage contorted her features. "Magneto," she said, and rushed Forge.
Forge hooked a wheelchair with one foot, dragging it towards him and then kicking it at the nurse's shins. "You want Magneto, huh?" he taunted, "Bet I get to him first."
He flexed his left leg, feeling the prosthetic shift and convert into the running formation, then turned and bolted down the hallway.
"Magneto!" the nurse shrieked after him, but instead of following, headed for the frazzled-looking security guard who had only just now arrived on the scene. She grabbed his face, laying what looked to be a passionate kiss upon him. The man jerked and flailed at her, trying to push her away - but then straightened, the same blank look in his eyes as the woman had had. She crumpled soundlessly in front of him, and he stepped over her body and ran after Forge.
"Magneto! Magneto!"
Forge glanced over his shoulder at his new pursuer. "Oh shit, that's so cheating!" he called, sliding across the tile floor around a corner. Looking down the hall, he saw exactly what he was looking for. While he couldn't read Japanese, the yellow-and-black circle-and-triangles symbol was universal.
"Hey!" he yelled at the security guard rounding the corner towards him, "You want Magneto? Come and get him!" Seeing the guard put on another burst of speed, Forge sprinted forward, praying that this plan would work.
He ran directly for the door at the end of the hall, but leaped into the air before crossing the threshold. His fingers gripped the top of the doorjamb and he kicked his legs up as if he was on the gymnastics bars, letting the security guard run past him and into the room. Forge's toes touched the ceiling tile and he kicked off backwards, landing back in the hallway and slamming the door behind him, sealing the possessed security guard in the small room with only a lead-lined window looking in.
"Holy shit," Forge breathed as he scrabbled for the intercom, "I don't believe that worked." He leaned on the button, glancing through the window at his trapped pursuer. "Gosh, that must be the wrong room," he taunted.
The man threw himself against the door, snarling. "Magneto!" he roared, and the threat in his wild-eyed look was only too obvious. "Magneto!"
Forge shook his head. "No Magneto here, dude. Just you and me and Officer..." He peered through the window, but couldn't read the guard's nametag. "Just us three. I'll make you a deal. You get your ugly green living-fart self out of his body, and you get to live."
The possessed man gave him an ugly look, then a smile that bared all his teeth. Then, before Forge could continue the negotiations, he slammed his head hard into the door. And again. The laughter was somehow mocking, and his intention was obvious. Let me out of here or I kill him.
Forge scowled and turned a dial on the console by the door, then pressed the large red button. A warning klaxon sounded, and the lights in the room dimmed slightly. He took his thumb off the button and returned to the window. "That," he explained, "was around seven point five milligrays of ionized radiation. You're standing in a radiotherapy chamber that they use to treat cancer patients. Now that guard there, he looks like he weighs about... a hundred, hundred and ten kilograms? Big guy. But you... you're just a nasty green gas. Ionizing radiation will pass right through his cells and fry you like an autoclave. Sure, he might wake up with a headache and a sunburn, might even be sterile. But I crank this thing up..." Forge hit the button again for a brief second. "...and you're nothing but a memory. You've lost. Get out."
The man looked up at him, his face blood-covered and his eyes baleful. He said something in Japanese, and then his eyes narrowed, as if with strain. "Kill... me. If I do."
"Maybe," Forge said, eyes hard as he stared through the glass. "But rest assured if you don't, I will definitely kill you. Cooperate, and you have a chance. There's an airlock there on the wall. I'm going to fit a canister of agar gel with a one-way valve and slide it through. You go out of this man's body, into the canister, and then the courts decide what happens to you. Refuse, and I will nuke your wannabe terrorist ass into oblivion. Make a move."
It took a long moment for the mutant in the man's body to absorb Forge's words. He gave that bared-teeth smile once more. "Do," he snarled - and then slammed the man's head into the door once more. It was purely and simply spiteful, had to be, because the mutant vacated his body instantly, hovering waiting in the air as his victim laid unconscious and bleeding on the floor.
Forge resisted the urge to just hammer down on the button. One quick dose of radiation wouldn't be harmful to the security guard, but it could burn the gaseous mutant into inert particles. His hand hovered for a moment, then he stepped into a nearby supply closet, returning with a liter canister. Some quick work with his multitool and he'd rigged up a valve. The gas could go in, but not out until it was released.
Placing the canister into the airlock, he sealed it and pushed it through. "In," he ordered through the intercom.
The cloud of gas pulsed, as if defiantly, but then poured into the canister through the valve. Inside the chamber, the security guard stirred, groaning.
As soon as the canister was full, Forge reached into the airlock and retrieved it, sliding it into a padded carrying case. He unlocked the chamber and knelt down by the guard. Pulse was strong, and he didn't appear to be hurt beyond the cuts and contusions that his possessor had forced upon him. Stepping back into the hallway, Forge shouted "Nurse!" loudly - the meaning would hopefully be clear to the hospital staff, if not the exact words.
Pivoting on his heel he turned to go, looking once at an autoclave and pausing, before walking for the doors.