Amanda Sefton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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xp_logs2015-05-18 03:20 pm
xp_daytripper) wrote in xp_logs2015-05-18 03:20 pm
Big Trouble in Little Lowtown - To Catch a Thief (backdated to Monday)
Acting on the information gathered, half of X-Force may in wait for their thief, who turns out to be a handful.
The Lowtown Docks were notorious for their control by organized crime, the vast smuggling enterprises that comprised Madripoor's shadow economy and the mind-boggling complexity of ownership, buried beneath a tangle of shell companies and dummy corporations. Thousands of small and large warehouses were clustered around the dockyards, broken only by Madripoor's massive Naval base at the far end of Victoria Bay. Control was as fluid as the crime families were, exchanging hands as one gang fell and another became ascendant. To those who knew the underground well, they served almost as a report on the status of each group. The current building had a sign out front that read Ho Fu Pak Shipping; a company that had existed for over a hundred years and had never done a day's worth of registered business. The 14K owned it outfight, although it was often used by their sub-Triads for their local enterprises.
Today, dozens of 14K stood around their Red Pole as he faced the foreign mercenary. Kwan was unimpressed by the man. He was short and thickly muscled, and seemed incapable of not fidgeting. He had a ridiculous mustache that reminded him of an old actor his mother used to watch - David Niven - and his Cantonese was thickly French accented.
"You are sure this is the final piece."
"Non. This is the final piece on the list that your patron gave me. Anything he missed... he missed." The man stroked his chin. "The rest of my payment, merci?"
The Red Pole held up his phone and punched in a few numbers. There was a buzz as the other man checked his phone and nodded.
"My work here is done, oui? Enjoy your art trash."
McFrosty, Wade thought at Emma, Do we have infrared up yet? I know there's a lot of Triad members running around and you know I don't mind killing them, but my merc friends say Batroc's on the more 'kill everyone for fun' side of cray than the 'sit and watch the pretty birdies' side. They had backup comms in case Emma had to go diamond or something happened to interfere with mutations, but he had to admit, the whole telepathic switchboard thing was pretty nice.
Infrared is running, confirmed Emma. Is it helpful for me to say there's lots of them and you're surrounded?
If you want to drop an image of that into my brain, Wade said, suppressing the urge to snort. That'd be helpful. Specificity, McFrosty. Also, let me know when I'm less likely to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. We need a clear shot at Batroc.
Work, work, work sighed Emma, sending a mental image of what was showing up on the infrared to the team far below her, taking the trouble of highlighting Batroc's team in red and her colleagues in blue. It looks like DSM-5 would diagnose Mr Batroc as displaying distinct signs of paranoia. He's seems to have brought up a second set of henchmen, possibly to keep an eye on his first set of henchmen. I've done a scan but none of them seem to have spotted you yet - there's no sense of alarm, anyway. But you've got the ones in front of you and some behind you. Emma concentrated for a moment, having identified the weakest point in the psyches below her. Oh look, there's one at the back who just had a crisis of conscience and is off to investigate whether becoming a cave-dwelling hermit is the lifestyle for him. One less for you to play with.
North tracked the slow retreat of that particular henchman from his position next to Amanda, holding his breath until his heart thundered in his ears and his vision started to grey around the edges and blur. There was not much to see from where they were positioned in the building opposite of Emma, but as he swayed on his feet, his powers kicked in with a rush of colour and sensations of a crowd closing in. Early warning system is up.
Madripoor was never one of Amanda's favourite cities to blend with, but at least this time it wasn't actively fighting her. The witch was sunk up to her ankles in the pavement, North shielding her from casual view, and when she responded to the psychic roll call, her mental 'voice' was laced with a cacophony of the city's presence. Shock and awe ready to go.
This place was a shithole, and that was putting it mildly. Cammie was on the ground near Wade, simply because this was where she wanted to be. "Does this place ever not smell like death and shit?" she grumbled as she waited for a time to strike.
Artie nodded from the rooftop, his response a non-verbal sense of readiness as he stared down at the street. A moment later he showed them a mental image of a map, the areas he couldn't cover greyed out.
They'd waited as long as Wade was comfortable waiting and, thanks to the various overlays of information in his brain, he could see they weren't likely to get better odds so far as pure numbers were concerned. He didn't look toward Cammie as he stepped in front of Batroc, knowing she'd be where he needed her to be when the time came. A wide grin on his face, his eyebrows slightly raised, Wade said, "What a fantastic coincidence. Batty Batty Batroc, in the flesh!"
"An American. And here I believed that this place had been swept for vermin. Alors, I supposed that we will simply have to kill you." Batroc nodded and the 14K rushed into attack from all sides.
"Bollocks." Amanda pulled up as much energy as she could from Madripoor and let rip with a blast of midday market chaos, down to the smells. It herded a number of the 14K goons towards a blocked-off alley way that Artie's map showed her and she focussed on keeping them boxed up there. ~Anyone want some sitting ducks?~ she 'called' across the switchboard.
Artie bit his lip, aimed and shot, carefully not missing. They were targets. They were just targets.
"Now that," Wade said, fending off the first few men to come at him. "That's just not nice." He funneled the men toward Cammie, trusting her to keep them from getting up.
The responding cloud of green haze and the sound of gagging and vomiting showed she was more than up for the task.
McSparkles, Wade thought, moving to engage Batroc directly. He's got more hardware than I was expecting.
I know, sent back Emma, her mental tone somewhat strained as she kept the switchboard operating, kept an eye on all of the people below her to intercept any particularly menacing henchmen and attempted to break into the mind of Batroc. I think some it's wired into his brain. It's all - it's like trying to read something that's all glitch and no signal. She took another look below her and sent a quick thought out through the switchboard to everyone. Keep working on the henchmen, she sent broadly and updated the mental map to show a red mark on the area directly below area. Stay away from there if you can. Except for you, Wade. Can you get Batroc to that spot?
Sure. Can we get some of that shock and awe heading in this direction, maybe? Wade sent. Then, still smiling, he partially disengaged from the switchboard, letting everyone else deal with their parts as he waggled his eyebrows at his fellow mercenary. "You picked the wrong job, Batty. Let's just all agree on that and you can tell us about it so we don't actually have to throttle you."
"And you, connard, talk too much. We shall fix that, non?" Batroc moved so fast that his limbs blurred. The first kick landed before Wade was aware he'd moved, doubling the mercenary up. The follow up knee slammed into his chin, part of his tongue severed and dropped away as his jaw was driven together. Batroc feinted back and then spun, his heavy heel connecting with the side of Wade's face, shattering the teeth on that side completely, turning his mouth into a broken ruin.
"Ah, much better!" He said brightly.
Ears ringing from impact, Wade let muscle memory take over, following the Frenchman's movement even as he swished his broken teeth through the blood in his mouth. Batroc's augmentations had obviously given him more boosts than Wade had initially been led to believe. Still, even as the side of his face started swelling, the mercenary kept himself moving in an effort to get the other man into the red zone Emma had highlighted for him.
Amanda ducked back behind North, panting a little from her effort - Madripoor wasn't cooperating. "I need more juice - watch my back?" she asked North as she sank further in, her expression becoming distant as she let more of her consciousness blend with the city.
The German nodded, picking off any unfortunate 14K members who approached.
Emma had been waiting impatiently, juggling the switchboard with sending as much pain relief as she could towards Wade as he had continued to work on manoeuvring Batroc to the position she’d requested. When the fight finally drove Batroc into sight beneath her, the sense of relief she felt ran through the whole switchboard. Amanda, she sent. I’ll need your juice as soon as Batroc is down. Wade, duck. Everyone else, I’m going dark. When you hear the splat, if you can, come running. Bombs away!
And with that, Emma let diamond ripple over her skin and dove elegantly off the beam high above Batroc. She took a few moments to orient herself on the figure below, long enough to see Wade dance out of the fight and her way and then did a gracious half-somersault and curled herself into a diamond ball.
In the end, she didn’t manage to hit Batroc on the top of his skull as she’d hoped – perhaps he’d looked up at the last minute or there’d been a warning shout, she’d never know – but the thunk as her body drove into her shoulder and arm and the shuddering impact as their combined weight crashed to the ground was very, very satisfying indeed.
Batroc crumpled to the ground under the impact, cursing the whole time. His shoulder and arm looked like a giant hand had reached down and squeezed, broken bones pushing against his outfit. He rolled to one side and back to his feet in one movement, still moving fast despite the injury. As his eyes cleared and Emma came into focus, he sprung at her immediately, determined to kill the source of his pain.
A barrage of gunfire from North's direction dissuaded him from that course and as he turned to respond, the gunfire was followed up by an arc of electricity striking the thief-for-hire and flowing through his enhancements. The source was Amanda, who had been hidden by North's greater size, one hand outstretched towards Batroc and the other jammed into a circuit board belonging to one of the buildings.
"Zut! Alors!" Batroc said, dummying up as the bolt hit it. It did no good, hitting him square on. The backlash blew the Frenchman clear through the back of the warehouse and out over the water, arcing down like a burning comet into the darkness of Victoria Bay.
Amanda yanked her hand out of the circuit board. "Oops?"
“Well, that’s one way of solving the problem,” said Emma, turning back to flesh as she rose to her feet. She sent her mind questing outwards and was pleased to note that, presumably, the combination of her blunt force trauma and Amanda’s electricity seemed to have shorted enough of Batroc’s enhancements to allow her access to his mind and, with a little bit more work on her part, all of the information in it. “Does someone want to go fish him out of the water before he wakes up and swims away and I can work out who got us into this fine mess in the first place.”
The Lowtown Docks were notorious for their control by organized crime, the vast smuggling enterprises that comprised Madripoor's shadow economy and the mind-boggling complexity of ownership, buried beneath a tangle of shell companies and dummy corporations. Thousands of small and large warehouses were clustered around the dockyards, broken only by Madripoor's massive Naval base at the far end of Victoria Bay. Control was as fluid as the crime families were, exchanging hands as one gang fell and another became ascendant. To those who knew the underground well, they served almost as a report on the status of each group. The current building had a sign out front that read Ho Fu Pak Shipping; a company that had existed for over a hundred years and had never done a day's worth of registered business. The 14K owned it outfight, although it was often used by their sub-Triads for their local enterprises.
Today, dozens of 14K stood around their Red Pole as he faced the foreign mercenary. Kwan was unimpressed by the man. He was short and thickly muscled, and seemed incapable of not fidgeting. He had a ridiculous mustache that reminded him of an old actor his mother used to watch - David Niven - and his Cantonese was thickly French accented.
"You are sure this is the final piece."
"Non. This is the final piece on the list that your patron gave me. Anything he missed... he missed." The man stroked his chin. "The rest of my payment, merci?"
The Red Pole held up his phone and punched in a few numbers. There was a buzz as the other man checked his phone and nodded.
"My work here is done, oui? Enjoy your art trash."
McFrosty, Wade thought at Emma, Do we have infrared up yet? I know there's a lot of Triad members running around and you know I don't mind killing them, but my merc friends say Batroc's on the more 'kill everyone for fun' side of cray than the 'sit and watch the pretty birdies' side. They had backup comms in case Emma had to go diamond or something happened to interfere with mutations, but he had to admit, the whole telepathic switchboard thing was pretty nice.
Infrared is running, confirmed Emma. Is it helpful for me to say there's lots of them and you're surrounded?
If you want to drop an image of that into my brain, Wade said, suppressing the urge to snort. That'd be helpful. Specificity, McFrosty. Also, let me know when I'm less likely to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. We need a clear shot at Batroc.
Work, work, work sighed Emma, sending a mental image of what was showing up on the infrared to the team far below her, taking the trouble of highlighting Batroc's team in red and her colleagues in blue. It looks like DSM-5 would diagnose Mr Batroc as displaying distinct signs of paranoia. He's seems to have brought up a second set of henchmen, possibly to keep an eye on his first set of henchmen. I've done a scan but none of them seem to have spotted you yet - there's no sense of alarm, anyway. But you've got the ones in front of you and some behind you. Emma concentrated for a moment, having identified the weakest point in the psyches below her. Oh look, there's one at the back who just had a crisis of conscience and is off to investigate whether becoming a cave-dwelling hermit is the lifestyle for him. One less for you to play with.
North tracked the slow retreat of that particular henchman from his position next to Amanda, holding his breath until his heart thundered in his ears and his vision started to grey around the edges and blur. There was not much to see from where they were positioned in the building opposite of Emma, but as he swayed on his feet, his powers kicked in with a rush of colour and sensations of a crowd closing in. Early warning system is up.
Madripoor was never one of Amanda's favourite cities to blend with, but at least this time it wasn't actively fighting her. The witch was sunk up to her ankles in the pavement, North shielding her from casual view, and when she responded to the psychic roll call, her mental 'voice' was laced with a cacophony of the city's presence. Shock and awe ready to go.
This place was a shithole, and that was putting it mildly. Cammie was on the ground near Wade, simply because this was where she wanted to be. "Does this place ever not smell like death and shit?" she grumbled as she waited for a time to strike.
Artie nodded from the rooftop, his response a non-verbal sense of readiness as he stared down at the street. A moment later he showed them a mental image of a map, the areas he couldn't cover greyed out.
They'd waited as long as Wade was comfortable waiting and, thanks to the various overlays of information in his brain, he could see they weren't likely to get better odds so far as pure numbers were concerned. He didn't look toward Cammie as he stepped in front of Batroc, knowing she'd be where he needed her to be when the time came. A wide grin on his face, his eyebrows slightly raised, Wade said, "What a fantastic coincidence. Batty Batty Batroc, in the flesh!"
"An American. And here I believed that this place had been swept for vermin. Alors, I supposed that we will simply have to kill you." Batroc nodded and the 14K rushed into attack from all sides.
"Bollocks." Amanda pulled up as much energy as she could from Madripoor and let rip with a blast of midday market chaos, down to the smells. It herded a number of the 14K goons towards a blocked-off alley way that Artie's map showed her and she focussed on keeping them boxed up there. ~Anyone want some sitting ducks?~ she 'called' across the switchboard.
Artie bit his lip, aimed and shot, carefully not missing. They were targets. They were just targets.
"Now that," Wade said, fending off the first few men to come at him. "That's just not nice." He funneled the men toward Cammie, trusting her to keep them from getting up.
The responding cloud of green haze and the sound of gagging and vomiting showed she was more than up for the task.
McSparkles, Wade thought, moving to engage Batroc directly. He's got more hardware than I was expecting.
I know, sent back Emma, her mental tone somewhat strained as she kept the switchboard operating, kept an eye on all of the people below her to intercept any particularly menacing henchmen and attempted to break into the mind of Batroc. I think some it's wired into his brain. It's all - it's like trying to read something that's all glitch and no signal. She took another look below her and sent a quick thought out through the switchboard to everyone. Keep working on the henchmen, she sent broadly and updated the mental map to show a red mark on the area directly below area. Stay away from there if you can. Except for you, Wade. Can you get Batroc to that spot?
Sure. Can we get some of that shock and awe heading in this direction, maybe? Wade sent. Then, still smiling, he partially disengaged from the switchboard, letting everyone else deal with their parts as he waggled his eyebrows at his fellow mercenary. "You picked the wrong job, Batty. Let's just all agree on that and you can tell us about it so we don't actually have to throttle you."
"And you, connard, talk too much. We shall fix that, non?" Batroc moved so fast that his limbs blurred. The first kick landed before Wade was aware he'd moved, doubling the mercenary up. The follow up knee slammed into his chin, part of his tongue severed and dropped away as his jaw was driven together. Batroc feinted back and then spun, his heavy heel connecting with the side of Wade's face, shattering the teeth on that side completely, turning his mouth into a broken ruin.
"Ah, much better!" He said brightly.
Ears ringing from impact, Wade let muscle memory take over, following the Frenchman's movement even as he swished his broken teeth through the blood in his mouth. Batroc's augmentations had obviously given him more boosts than Wade had initially been led to believe. Still, even as the side of his face started swelling, the mercenary kept himself moving in an effort to get the other man into the red zone Emma had highlighted for him.
Amanda ducked back behind North, panting a little from her effort - Madripoor wasn't cooperating. "I need more juice - watch my back?" she asked North as she sank further in, her expression becoming distant as she let more of her consciousness blend with the city.
The German nodded, picking off any unfortunate 14K members who approached.
Emma had been waiting impatiently, juggling the switchboard with sending as much pain relief as she could towards Wade as he had continued to work on manoeuvring Batroc to the position she’d requested. When the fight finally drove Batroc into sight beneath her, the sense of relief she felt ran through the whole switchboard. Amanda, she sent. I’ll need your juice as soon as Batroc is down. Wade, duck. Everyone else, I’m going dark. When you hear the splat, if you can, come running. Bombs away!
And with that, Emma let diamond ripple over her skin and dove elegantly off the beam high above Batroc. She took a few moments to orient herself on the figure below, long enough to see Wade dance out of the fight and her way and then did a gracious half-somersault and curled herself into a diamond ball.
In the end, she didn’t manage to hit Batroc on the top of his skull as she’d hoped – perhaps he’d looked up at the last minute or there’d been a warning shout, she’d never know – but the thunk as her body drove into her shoulder and arm and the shuddering impact as their combined weight crashed to the ground was very, very satisfying indeed.
Batroc crumpled to the ground under the impact, cursing the whole time. His shoulder and arm looked like a giant hand had reached down and squeezed, broken bones pushing against his outfit. He rolled to one side and back to his feet in one movement, still moving fast despite the injury. As his eyes cleared and Emma came into focus, he sprung at her immediately, determined to kill the source of his pain.
A barrage of gunfire from North's direction dissuaded him from that course and as he turned to respond, the gunfire was followed up by an arc of electricity striking the thief-for-hire and flowing through his enhancements. The source was Amanda, who had been hidden by North's greater size, one hand outstretched towards Batroc and the other jammed into a circuit board belonging to one of the buildings.
"Zut! Alors!" Batroc said, dummying up as the bolt hit it. It did no good, hitting him square on. The backlash blew the Frenchman clear through the back of the warehouse and out over the water, arcing down like a burning comet into the darkness of Victoria Bay.
Amanda yanked her hand out of the circuit board. "Oops?"
“Well, that’s one way of solving the problem,” said Emma, turning back to flesh as she rose to her feet. She sent her mind questing outwards and was pleased to note that, presumably, the combination of her blunt force trauma and Amanda’s electricity seemed to have shorted enough of Batroc’s enhancements to allow her access to his mind and, with a little bit more work on her part, all of the information in it. “Does someone want to go fish him out of the water before he wakes up and swims away and I can work out who got us into this fine mess in the first place.”