xp_logs | Day Zero: Team Charlie

Fighting their way through the sewers, Team Charlie reaches their objective - but is it too late?

"They're right behind us!" Amanda gasped as the group fled blindly down yet another tunnel. 'Fled' was probably an ambitious term - after a full night of running and fighting, most of them were exhausted. The witch was barely on her feet, leaning on Forge to stay upright and keep moving. "We'd better be close, or we're fucked."

Forge was struggling to catch his breath, following Callisto and Sarah's lead as they took turn after turn, diving through old storm drains and sliding down long-unused access tunnels seemingly at random. They'd long since left behind any maps he was privy to, and were completely in the hands of the Morlock duo now.

A glance over his shoulder saw the tunnel behind them illuminated with another one of Jan's electric blasts. In the blue electric flash, he could see their pursuers shambling on - bodies swollen and twisted in odd places, muscles literally bursting through the skin and what looked like nodules of brain matter covered by a slimy membrane enveloping most of their heads. If these creatures had been human -whatever had changed them had torn that humanity away and replaced it with some freakish abomination.

Julio's chest was starting to burn with each breath, but he pushed himself onwards. He wasn't much help to the Morlocks, he couldn't make sense of the maze of tunnels around them, only knew that there were tunnels leading to more tunnels. His fingers tightened around the lead pipe he'd picked up along the way. Using his powers offensively meant flying blind while they readjusted, so he'd had to improvise.

"Do you think--" breath, "--some of us should stay behind--" breath, "--buy some more time?" he panted.

Death hadn't scared him in a long, long time.

Sarah rolled her eyes and shook her head. "We're staying together." Her tone implied that anyone who decided to argue would be dragged along whether they wanted to or not. "I'm not leaving anybody behind. There's no reason for it." Arms outstretched , she stopped suddenly and pointed down another branch of the tunnels. "Hurry, this way."

Callisto's only contribution to the conversation was to turn and glance behind herself for long enough to almost casually throw a knife at one of the pursuing monstrosities' 'heads'. The knife disappeared with a sickening squelching sound that sounded far more loudly than any of them would've preferred in the echoing chamber, and the Morlock swore loudly before quickly following said knife with a handy lump of concrete debris, not even stopping to see what happened before disappearing around the corner. The head was half-destroyed by an explosion of gore and brain matter. The thing shambled on.

"What does it take to kill you guys?!" Jan complained at the disgusting should-be-dead meatspore things, continuing to send blasts at them as she spoke. "I mean, really; this is kind of ridiculous, don't you think?" While the others had been running forward, Jan had been flying backwards, never ceasing her constant barrage of bio-electricity to at least slow down the progress of their ugly pursuers, even if she was unable to stop them. "Just die already, OK?!"

"They're already dead," Amanda replied over her shoulder. "They're just meat puppets. They won't stop." She clutched at Forge's shoulder as another bolt of stabbing pain shot through her temples. "I swear, when I catch up with the pillock who's messing with my city..." Strangely, though, she was far more lucid than she had been earlier, despite the pain - something was helping her focus again. "Sarah... next left and we're there, yeah?"

"I hope, yeah. That hasn't been going that well so far." She pushed further into the darkness, listening for any movement up ahead of them. All they needed was to have to fight them off from both sides. "Okay....should be just up here."

Forge turned to see the large metal door ahead of them. Something behind it called out to him. "Yeah, yeah. This is the place. We just go in and..."

The sound of falling bodies came from behind them in the tunnel. Looking back through the dimly lit concrete expanse, they could see more of the deformed "meatspores" rising from where they were crawling blindly through tunnels and falling to the ground - some able to stand and lurch towards the group, others crawling on broken limbs.

"Shit shit shit..." Forge groaned. "Anyone got any ideas?"

The door was an ancient metal door, clotted with rust. A large wheel, like a submarine door, was in the center, mottled with age. That door hadn't opened in the better part of a century. It was going to take time to get through that door. Time the sincerely did not have, not with the shuffling things coming towards them. Julio was glad his sense of smell had given up on him sometime in the last night.

Impulsively, he reached out and shoved Amanda and Forge towards the door. "Do you thing," he said quickly. He made eye contact with the rest of the group. "We'll do what we can," his fingers tightened on the metal bar in his hands.

Sarah nodded, pulling a bone sticking halfway out from her thigh. At this point, she didn't look much more human than the things they were fighting. She was vaguely thankful that it was dark. Lashing out at a meatspore creature, she swung the bone upward, smacking it wetly under what she supposed had to be its chin. The creature stumbled backwards, but it wasn't finished yet. Great.

Then, however, its chest exploded outwards, drenching Sarah in a fresh shower of gore as a fist appeared in place of a large portion of the monster's mid-section. The arm retracted a moment later and as it folded backwards, its torso no longer able to support its head and shoulders, Callisto was revealed as the perpetrator. She shot Sarah a mirthless smile before lifting one boot and stamping the thing's head to a pulp before spinning around to face the two further creatures already advancing on her.

Jan held up one of Sarah's discarded bones and slammed it into a meatspore. Her tiny fingers gripping the much-larger-than-her bone, Jan used the bone as if it were a bat and smacked the meatspore again. The bone was now even ickier and nastier than it had been when she had found it, so Jan decided to get rid of it. Now holding the bone in the middle instead of close to an end, the bone (and Jan) lifted up into the air, although it would seem to appear that the bone was flying by itself and heading very quickly towards two close-together meatspores. "Take that!" Jan shouted as the bone smashed into the meatspores. Letting go of the bone, the tiny girl wiped her hands on her uniform, made a face, and went to find another bone.

Julio swung his weapon at the larger of the creatures, and it connected with a wet, cracking noise. Another swing and it's cranium burst like a rotten melon. He fought the urge to gag and slammed the pipe home one more time. Behind him, another meat-spore reached with swollen fingers, but without missing a beat he dislodged his pipe from the mess in front of him and swung it around, taking that creature's head completely off.

Later, he would feel bad about these people later. Now, now he had to survive first. Then he would feel bad.

His senses pinged at him again, and he swung to the left. Another meatspore was charging for Callisto, and moving fast, and she was already heavily occupied with two of them. He swore and without thinking threw a ripple of power at the creature, slamming it into the wall.

And blinding himself with the resulting static.

"Fuck!" he yelled, and groped for the wall, trying to concentrate and get a grip back on his powers.

-----

Forge slammed the heavy metal door shut and spun the wheel to lock it in place as he tried to ignore the sounds of his friends engaging the meatspores outside. Fumbling around, he found a bank of switches and snapped them on, hearing the comforting hum and click of incandescent lights turning on after who knew how many years of neglect.

The machinery around them in the room was old, painted uniformly with a light green rust-protective coating, and caked with dust. But the entire area thrummed with power. So much it almost blinded him, like standing in the center of Tesla's tower a year prior. This much mechanical energy in one place was almost like looking into the sun.

"Okay. Okay," he repeated out loud. "This is the heart of New York. And whatever's controlling it out there, we've got to push out from in here. And that's beyond my level of metaphysics. You're the city witch, how do we do this?"

Amanda had all but fallen inside the room and was on her hands and knees, panting. But at Forge's words, she looked up, pushing back a curtain of hair with a grimy hand. "New York's fighting back, but she's no London. Not enough history to call on." Using the wall to haul herself upright, she tried to focus. Beyond the interference with her powers by whoever had hold of the city, this close to the energy centre, it was hard to think; her powers kept trying to grab onto that energy and it was like pouring salt into an open wound. "Someone's stealing my gig - they're latched onto the city's energy and using it to fuck around with things. We need to give them a kick in the brain to make them let go."

"Kick in the brain, right..." Forge took the glove off his right hand and pressed both palms against a bank of dusty switches. Images of circuits and wiring, conduits and relays, the electrical circulation of Manhattan flashed through his brain. "It's like a puzzle that someone's put together all wrong, they're... twisting the city. Oh god, it's like Masque, only instead of shaping a human body he's doing it with the city."

Pulling his hands away, Forge paced. "Think think think!" he chided himself. "To undo Masque's changes we needed Marius to steal his power and find the base state in the victims' DNA, but the city doesn't have DNA! You said the city doesn't have the history of London, but it's got an identity, right? I mean, it's the Big Apple! The city that never sleeps. All we need is to shake it until it throws off whatever's riding it and let it be what it's supposed to. But how? How do you reset a city's heart?"

"No DNA, no, but it's got a body, a nervous system, all the works a human body does. And New York's strong - she's holding on even with them tying it in knots. I wouldn't be standing here talking to you if there wasn't a core they don't have control over." Wiping a shaking hand across her sweaty forehead (and leaving streaks of dirt behind), Amanda took a deep breath, trying to think past the conflict in her powers. Then she smiled. "I think I've got it. How do you reset any kind of heart?"

Forge arched an eyebrow. "Defibrillation. Shock it into stillness, then back into life. It's like cycling the power supply on a computer when it's locked up, you just..." His eyes grew wide and he shook his head. "You're talking about shutting down an entire city and turning it back on again! Yes, it'll work, but you said yourself - you're tied to this city. What's that going to do to you?"

"I have no bloody idea," Amanda admitted. "But we've gotta do something and we don't have time to mess about." A thump against the metallic door behind them punctuated her words. "We shut it down, count to ten, turn it back on again. It should give the wanna-be me enough of a jolt to knock their hold loose." She gave a shaky laugh. "Me too, probably, but I trust New York to keep me safe. We're mates, by now."

"You've got more faith than I do," Forge admitted as he turned towards the bank of electronic switches and dials and began making adjustments. "And for the record, I have resurrected the electronic ghost of the world's greatest inventor, flown a kit-bashed transparent glider into space, and vanished for two and a half years into an alternate dimension - and this officially marks the craziest thing I've ever done."

He was silent for a few moments as he perused the panel, then moved like a blur, reconnecting wires and cables before moving over to one large bank of breakers. "There we go. In defiance of about ten million civic and municipal regulations, every electrical circuit in Manhattan is connected to this breaker box." He put his hand on the switches and looked over his shoulder to Amanda.

"Ready to kill a city?"

"I got swallowed up and spat back out by London. I think I'm justified in the faith." Amanda took a seat on the floor, leaning her back against the wall - no sense bashing her head on something if (or potentially when) she keeled over. "You know CPR, right?" she joked, although there was more than a hint of fear in her face.

Forge paused with a quizzical look on his face. "Sort of," he admitted as he threw the switch. With a loud bang, everything went dark.

'Ange is going to kill me if this goes wrong...' was her last thought as Forge threw the switch. The darkness was more than just the room; it was if a switch had been thrown in her as well and the energy coursing through her, the city's energy, went out. With a small sigh, she slumped over sideways to the floor.

---

Post came to with a sputtered breath - his mouth was filled with grit and dirt from the rooftop and he spat it out as he leveraged himself up to his knees. A few of Apocalypse's men milled around behind him but he ignored them as he watched the city around himself slowly begin to knit itself back together.

Blood ran down his chin as he reached out for his master's city. It reacted but it was sluggish and as soon as he turned his attention away, it started to ooze through his influence.

"What fucking little cunts are messing WITH MY CITY?!" he screamed, slamming his hands down on the ground. Behind him, tendrils of liquid building surged forward and ripped a man's head off his shoulders before tossing his lifeless body over the side of the roof.

Post surged to his feet as he wiped the blood off his chin with his sleeve. "I'm going to feed them piece by piece to the city and when it chokes on them, we'll just start the process over again..."

The surviving mutants scattered, terrified, before Post's wraith.

He reached the edge of the building and stomped a foot, grinding it harshly beneath him. The city grudgingly obeyed him as he forced it beneath him and Post rode through the city skyline as if he were on a surfboard, his hands harshly directing it to go where he wished.

"They may have crippled me," he hissed against the wind, "but they have not blinded me. Now where are you, opposers of Apocalypse? Where ... ah. There." Post smiled and urged himself faster. "Come to Post, he'll show you a grand old time in the city tonight."

---

The pitch-black room was silent, with only the occasional sounds of cries and violence coming from the other side of the door. Forge listened, but couldn't hear anything from around him.

"Amanda?" he whispered loudly, the word echoing off concrete walls. "Amanda? ... Amand-- oh, fuck it. One thousand... two thousand... three thousand..."

He placed his hands back against the breaker box, but couldn't feel anything - like an entire limb gone numb. Or dead.

"Six thousand... seven thousand... eight thousand..."

A loud cry from beyond the door could have been one of his comrades falling in battle, or victorious over their opponents. He had no way of knowing, and if this didn't work - it didn't matter anyway.

"Ten thousand. And here goes nothing."

With one quick motion, Forge pushed all the switches up, darting to the side to crank every dial to maximum and open every relay and junction box in the city at once. The effect should, he wagered, be like a direct shot of adrenalin to the heart of Manhattan.

A long, silent second passed, then sparks erupted from the console with an explosion, illuminating the room in a shower of electric blue.

They also illuminated the still form of the witch, half-lying, half-propped against the wall, her skin chalk-white.

"Amanda!" Forge shouted, bolting over to the blonde girl, hesitant to reach out for her. The entire room smelled of ozone, sparks arcing from wall to wall, Amanda's hair lifting with static. Then her hand spasmed slightly and she bolted upright with a loud gasp. Her eyes, when she opened them, were glowing gold.

"Fuck me!" she exclaimed hoarsely, blinking until she was able to focus on Forge's face. "Let's not do that again, yeah? That hurt like being kicked in the face by God himself."

"I think God himself would be scared of us right now," Forge retorted, looking around at the equipment that, although sparking and smoking, was operating at full capacity, routing electricity through the conduits and cables that powered Manhattan. He turned back to Amanda and grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Did it work?" he asked.

Sparks flew from her clothes where he touched her and she gritted her teeth at the sensation. Every nerve was firing at once, it seemed, but she still had a job to do. "Give me a sec," she replied, closing her eyes and reaching out with her mutant power to the city itself. For a moment she felt herself slipping, like she had in London, and she clamped down hard with her hands on the metal grille of the floor. The pain helped her focus and after a minute she opened her eyes again. The glow had become a blazing fire, echoed in the rather feral grin that appeared on her face. "It worked all right," she said with fierce satisfaction. "He's on his way to Times Square. We need to meet him there."

Pulling his goggles down, Forge called up the maps of the city, intersecting holograms of green and gold flashing before his eyes. He looked up to a rusty ladder descending from the ceiling. "Then we climb," he announced.

A thud from outside caught their attention, and the door slowly swung open.

Jan stood in the doorway, at full size for the first time during their trip down in the tunnels. Behind her could be seen Julio, Sarah, and Callisto, and all around on the ground were finally-dead meatspores. And of course there were bits of meatspores here, and a bit of meatspores there, and she was sure there were nasty bits of meatspores that would never come out of her new never-before-worn-on-a-mission black leathers, and now she'd have to get another uniform already. "Is this a party for two, or can anybody join?" she asked Amanda and Forge.

"Party's not over until the fat lady sings," Amanda replied with a manic grin, already moving to the ladder. "And we've got a prat to stomp on." Without waiting for anyone else, she started climbing the ladder, the city's need driving her on, filling her with an almost reckless energy.

Forge gave a quick look up after Amanda, then clipped a flashlight onto his shoulder and jumped for the ladder. "Next stop, Times Square. God, I hate sewers..."

"Mind your tongue," Callisto quipped, pulling her hand from where it rifled inside part of a meatspore for her knife, before setting her shoulders and reaching for the ladder.

Julio made a face and flicked some more gore off of his arm. "No, I fucking hate sewers too," he added wearily.

Rounding up the back, Sarah made sure the others were safely on their way up the ladder before grabbing on herself. Sometimes the rungs could get slick, and she wanted to have both hands free in case someone slipped. Taking a quick look behind her, Sarah grabbed onto the ladder and started to make her way up. She didn't see anything, but she could hear movement getting closer in the tunnel. "Everybody okay up there?"

Sounds came down in the affirmative, but they weren't loud enough to drown out the meatspores as they rounded the corner. "Shit. Guys? I don't mean to make you panic, but a little faster please." They scrambled up ahead of her, but would it be fast enough? She was only half-way up the ladder, and the meatspores were grabbing blindly at her ankles. She kicked, hard, once, twice, knocking one from the ladder and into the creatures below. There was another one just underneath it to take its place. Sarah grabbed another rung and pulled herself up before the hands started grabbing at her again, not entirely accurate, but deadly strong. It had missed throwing her off the ladder twice, when she grabbed at the final rung of the ladder. Third time, however, was a charm, and the slimy hand-thing yanked powerfully at her legs. She struggled to kick again, but the movement only managed to throw off her grip. Within moments, she was falling back into the darkness, taking the meatspore with her.

"Sarah!"

The cry was high pitched, panicked, and a complete surprise to Callisto as it escaped her own throat. She lunged immediately for the manhole only to feel multiple hands grabbing her arms and shoulders, pulling her back. Perhaps she could have shaken them off, but it was only a split second before she realised how pointless the exercise would be, and she slumped back.

The rumbling was almost unnoticeable as the five mutants tried to figure out with their comrade had disappeared to. To native New Yorkers, or those that had lived there long enough or visited often, it was easily dismissed as a passing garbage truck - until one thought about the fact that since Apocalypse had descended upon New York, not many vehicles, let alone garbage trucks, had been driven. Before realization could set in, the ground surged, almost as if it were throwing up.

"What in the hell is that?" someone said quietly.

Debris scattered as tongues of cement tripped and chased, forcing them away from the ladder they had climbed.

Which closed up with a rumbling groan.

"Now," a voice intoned, "we have some unfinished business."