BoH: Girl Power

[x-wolfcub.livejournal.com]

Backdated to last Tuesday

The muscle of the Reavers finds himself in a bigger fight than he expects.



Laurie had listened with pride to Charles Xavier's speech, sitting in the middle of the audience as she watched the families and friends around her celebrate the graduation of this years class. She'd been shocked when he fell, and angry started taunting them before he released his soldiers. Now she just felt the cold comfort of professionalism stealing over her, leaving the fear and worry trapped deep inside.

She stood, glancing about her at the screaming and panicking crowd, and closed her eyes, letting a well of calm surround her, moving outward as her pheromones permeated the area directly around her. She would keep them calm, and get them out.

Several of the onlookers suddenly felt the sudden fear they had felt only moments earlier, suddenly fade away. As the relief rushed over them, they quickly looked up at the girl standing in front of them, hoping that their sudden placidity would not ware away just as quickly as it had come.

"It's going to be okay," Laurie said, gesturing toward the exits behind them as she kept a wary eye on the battle currently going on closer to the stage. It wouldn't stay so contained for long, and she needed to get as many innocents out of here as she could. "Please, you all need to move quickly and quietly through the exits, and then as far from here as you can get. We'll take care of the rest."

"Not just muties, but pretty muties." The accented voice rang harsh with hate. "You're all fucking filth." Skullcrusher shoved his way through the fleeing visitors, looking at Laurie. The mask on his face showed nothing, the metal was immobile, and the eyes behind the mask were just as impassive. "Go on, filth, save the humans. They're the only ones worth saving."
He had time, and even if the humans were mutie-lovers, they weren't genetically disgusting. He could afford to let them flee.

Laurie looked at the assailant now standing between them and freedom, her mouth setting itself in a grim line. She couldn't afford to let go of her calming influence at that moment or the people around her were going to quickly descend into a panic.

"Everybody, if you could all please move behind me now, I'll take care of our little friend here and then we can be on our way," she said, and at any other time she might have laughed at how steady her voice was, while inside her heart was doing the rumba. "You really should watch your mouth, you know. It's not nice to call other people names."

They weren't really sure why, but the group slowly let themselves stumble forward listening the the woman's voice. It was calm, serene, and they were there to follow.

There was the sound of a thud as a figure dropped from above, hitting the ground not far from Laurie and landing in a crouching position. Not quite between Laurie and Skullcrusher, more in a position to the side of the two opponents, a young woman looking to be in her late teens stood up. Silver skin shone in the artificial light of the gym, the gaze of her unnatural-looking gold eyes moving between the blonde woman and the man with the metal face. Shoulder-length hair of midnight-blue spilled to the side as the girl's head tilted questioningly. "This man bothering you?" she asked with a British accent, directing the rhetorical question at the blonde but not removing her attention from the cyborg.

Skullcrusher barked a laugh. "You look fun." He said, before dropping a shoulder to charge at the new arrival. Maybe the new freak was made of metal, maybe not; he wasn't going to bring out any of his knives until he was sure they wouldn't dull on her skin. But if it was just colouring, he was going to enjoy finding out if her blood was as freakishly colored as the rest of her.

Silver hands leapt into the air, palms facing the Reaver. Her head motioned at Laurie and the gathered group of still unusually calm people gathered behind her. "Go, get them out of here." She watched as metal and flesh slammed into something solid but unseen. "I have this." For the moment, at least. Her hand twisted and invisible forces pushed into the metallic mutant-hater as the dark-haired girl smiled at him. "Have a nice fall."

Even despite his reinforced skeleton and muscles, the invisible force that slammed into Skullcrusher pushed him over. Before he hit the ground, taking the fall on his back and ass, the temperature alarms built into the 'tech in his head were going off, screaming in his inner ear about the heat. The air around him was hot enough to shimmer. But rather than retreat, he pulled out a pistol with an odd metallic sheen from the holster on his side and braced it between his knees, firing several times. His scowl only grew deeper as he realized the bullets weren't reaching his targets.

The alarms were too insistent to ignore, all that metal meant he was unusually vulnerable to overheating. He could feel the cooling rods in his bones swell as they tried to compensate, and he knew if he could feel that, he had to get away from the metal mutie bitch before the whole system just shut him down.

Time to try hostages. They wouldn't kill one of their people, and mutie-loving humans were almost as filthy as muties. He dove out of the heat, making a beeline for the crowd.

Laurie had less then a second to react when Skullcrusher headed away from the silver skinned mutant and toward another small crowd of people on the other side of the aisle. She dropped her protective calm immediately and switched to anger. "Push them away," she called out to the stranger who'd been helping her thus far. She hoped whoever it was knew what they were doing, but she had very little time to spare for pleasantries. Either they were going to be a help, or she'd end up having to drag them out too. "You! Muscle-head! How about you pick on someone who can actually fight?"

Suddenly, the crowd began to stir. Their emotions beginning to shift wildly. Their entire patterns began to shift as they looked around and saw the theatre they had built being destroyed. They didn't know how to explain it, but their hysteria had shifted to calm, and was now on white rage as they saw the fight around them.

Perhaps Laurie's would-be helper had been unusually calm, had made a pun when it wasn't quite called for? She hadn't even considered this, but suddenly her cool, collected demeanor changed. Pure rage engulfed her. Why hadn't the other girl taken the crowd away when she'd asked? Now she wanted someone else to do it, and when the crowd obviously wasn't calm anymore? The hell with that! Not that it really seemed to matter about getting them away at the moment; the Reaver was heading away from them.

Angry eyes blazed at Laurie. "I know how to fight!" she shot back. In a streak of silver, she shot up over the heads of the crowd and headed straight for the metal man. Even in the chaos, a fleeing man with a titanium skull mask was pretty hard to miss.

Once again she dropped down, this time lunging at her foe, grabbing him and pulling him down with more force than expected. Her uncontrollable and unexpected rage began to dissipate, but her actions had already been set in motion. "Can't take the heat?" she hissed at him, once again heating the air around him, concentrating especially on the area around his face where he was obviously covered with metal.

The heat warnings began screaming as soon as Skullcrusher engaged the woman. He ignored them. The indicators for air toxicity that flashed across his retinas warned of unknown chemicals in the air that could compromise his systems. He ignored those too. With a bellow that had it been articulate would have been unprintable, he pulled both of his knives from their holsters and lunged at the woman, slashing viciously and wildly, not caring where he hit, only that he did.

Laurie watched the civilians currently milling about her with her peripheral vision as she kept the majority of her focus on the fight going on between the assailant and the stranger mutant who had popped up to her them. Every so often she would reach out a hand and touch one of the crowd on an exposed arm, or hand, or something just simply brush her fingers against whatever exposed skin she could reach.

While she could release more then one set of hormones at a time, opposites like adrenalin and endorphins were tricky, just throwing them out together would simply nullify any benefit of either hormone. By limiting one to a part of her body, namely her hands, and letting the other have complete reign over the rest of her skin she could control the spread of both.
It was in this way that she kept the crowd of civilians from joining the fight, although she could only thank the size of the building and that her powers spread slowly when separated from her body for the fact they didn’t have a riot on their hands.

She needed to move closer, the two combatants were moving outside her sphere of influence and she didn’t know enough about the stranger to know whether she could handle this guy alone. Suiting actions to thought, Laurie darted closer, managing to catch a few more civilians along the way who looked ready to join in the battle. Once she reached what appeared to be a good distance, she increased the push of the adrenalin she was releasing.

If she could short this guy out, then she could deal with any ill effects the increase might cause the stranger afterward.

The golden-eyed girl had been taken by surprise by Skullcrusher's attack with his knives and one of the blades found its mark. She gasped and hissed in pain as the sharp metal sliced into her skin. After that, she was on her guard, trying to ignore the pain as she evaded another lunge. She made two brisk motions with her hand and in quick succession each knife flew out of the cyborg's grasp. It was impossible to know what other weapons he might have in his arsenal, and it would appear that he actually was a weapon. Why hadn't the extreme heat stopped him? That was what had been expected, but clearly his instinct to fight and survive was strong.


Suddenly, the increase of Laurie's abilities hit the battling mutant and mutant-hater. Any lesser plan that might have been going through the girl's mind vanished as she was overwhelmed by unbidden and unexpected rage once more. It consumed her thoughts, and as she glared with hatred at the evil creature in front of her, a shimmering hand was flung up into the air. Following that movement was Skullcrusher as he found himself flying up for an intimate meeting with the ceiling.


The cyborg's reinforced bones and muscles were the only thing that kept him from being pulped. His skin was not nearly as lucky. His heads-up-display was screaming warnings about dangerous weather conditions as he crashed through the roof. The temperature, the pressure, the movement - his sensors had determined that he was in fact in the middle of a F5 tornado, and responded accordingly, automatically closing the eyeholes in his mask and placing his systems in automatic-retreat mode.

The man inside the machinery was unconscious by the time he hit the ground, but the machines still worked, hosting the body up jerkily and fleeing at high speed.

Laurie rushed to the doors where several of the graduation’s guests were leaving quietly as per her earlier instructions. Glancing out she saw the man who’d attacked them sprinting away, and sighed with relief as she turned back. She didn’t have time to pursue him, not with a battle still going on inside and possible injuries to attend to. If he came back they’d deal with him then, if not, he really wasn’t worth thinking about.

“Keep going,” she said to a semi-dazed looking man, reaching out to brush a hand against his neck, her smile gentle. “You’ll be safe outside.”

The silver girl looked up at the hole in the roof, soon feeling her excessiver rage fade away. She hadn't quite been herself when she acted, but even with the way she had felt she hadn't really meant to actually throw the Reaver through the roof. With the fade of Laurie's pheremones came the painful reminder that she had been injured during the fight, and the wound wasn't just a superficial scratch. Getting out of there as fast as possible was a very good idea.

At this point, the scene in the gym was no longer nearly as chaotic as it had been when she had first jumped into the middle of things. Battles had been fought, the mutant haters seemed to have lost, and the gym was no longer full of innocent people needing to be saved. Quickly, the girl headed for an exit; she might have tried to stop Skullcrusher if she had seen him, but by now he was out of sight, and searching for him in her condition would not be a good idea. Soon, she too was out of sight of the Salem Center gym.