Operation: Jungbrunnen - Infiltration & Information Relay (backdated)

[x-deadpool.livejournal.com]

While Wanda, Doug, and Wade infiltrate the facility and locate David...


The rough brick of the building bit into Wanda's back and shoulders even through her clothes but she breathed gently through her nose and the urge to shift slowly dissolved. The waiting was always the worst part of any operation but it ate at her more now. She could feel the hot slide of chaos against her mind and in her younger days, the anger and concern for David would have meant she would have welcomed it with open eyes.

Now, though, she knew what was at stake. And so she sat with her back against the wall, breathing in and out and watching the darkness with half-lidded eyes as she stoked the power inside of her. It would be time to unleash it soon enough.

Normally Wade would have been fidgeting. He'd have been cleaning his guns or flicking his knives in and out of their sheathes at his wrists. He'd have been toying with the comm unit at his ear or bantering with someone. He'd have been forcefully relaxed, unworried. But normally, Wade didn't have anything personally on the line. And technically, it wasn't him on the line, but it was his friend, theoretically, and if this didn't lead them to North then it would be on to another thing until they found him.

So Wade mirrored Wanda's pose, completely still. Only the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest and the slight flicker of his eyes beneath his closed eyelids gave away that he was alive.

Doug's eyes were hard and flat - all of his fidgeting tended to be in the confines of his own head. Recriminations, wondering if he could have spotted something that might have prevented North's abduction, chasing himself around in circles imagining what was being done to his teammate...at least all that energy was expended in perfect silence. He was staring off at nothing in particular, his eyes hardly even seeing Wade or Wanda as he waited.

Something changed between the inhaling of her breath and the exhaling. The ear piece twitched to life with a single sound that to anyone else would have simply been background noise. But all three of them had heard it and knew what it meant. They had to move and they had to move quickly. Wanda rolled to her feet and bolted around the corner, keeping low and close to the wall as the group headed towards the nearest door. The red around her hands indicated to the men that she was in the process of taking care of their entry.

Adrenalin hitting hard, Wade rolled his shoulders even as he palmed his handguns and flicked the safety off of them both. He followed Wanda, mimicking her hunched posture, as they made for the door.

They had a well-established rhythm between the three of them. Wanda would breach, Wade would follow immediately behind, and Doug covered the rear. They moved without needing to talk - they were all of them on a razor's edge as it was, talking would just dull that edge. Wanda was already moving to the door, trusting her teammates to take care of the guards. All the recriminations were gone from Doug's mind, filed away while the part of him that saw tactical patterns and angles came to the fore. Wade had the guards closest to the door already in his field of fire, so Doug concerned himself scanning for an overwatch. Finding one standing on a second-story balcony, Doug's gun was up and double-tapping before the man could even get his hand to his radio.

There was no finessing the door open. No coaxing the hinges to rust, no turning the wood to rot. Instead, Wanda channeled the internal rage through her power and it manifested in a swirling mass before her. She kept it close to her body as she ran towards the door, the energy vibrating and churning madly between her hands. It wasn't released until they were so close to the door she could make out the fine details.

And then she let it go, curling her arms around her head as she followed it through what remained of the door. It was smoldering and melting, pieces of it sticking in the wall across the room as Wanda hit the ground in a baseball slide, getting clear of more than the door now.

Following Wanda immediately through the door, Wade pointedly avoided the smoldering bits of potential entropy as he raised his handguns. He walked forward, his pace steady as he fired two shots to take out the guards near the door at the end of the hall. Throat shots. Not necessarily the fastest way to die, but with silencers on both guns, it was as quiet as he was going to get.

Wade walked by Wanda, trusting Doug to help her if she needed it, he continued past the bodies on the floor and paused at the locked door. "Wanda? A little help?" He asked.

She was already on her feet when he asked for her and Wanda headed towards the door, frowning in concentration. This required a far gentler touch than her previous entrance. Laying a palm over the lock, she gazed down at it with half closed eyes and sent a slow tendril of chaos energy into the lock. It crumbled inside the door with barely a sound but Wanda stayed where she was for a moment.

Nodding, she took a few steps back and held up her hand, showing three fingers. There were at least three different people she could feel the tendrils attached to. They knew, though, that there could be more, farther away from her influence.

Wade looked over his shoulder to check on Doug, then nodded to acknowledge Wanda's raised fingers before nudged the door open. The screaming hit them, almost a palpable wall of sound and, though not unaccustomed to the types of violence that typically garnered that type of response, he froze for a moment.

Under the wordless cries, several voices could be heard conversing rapidly in German. "They did something to him," Doug translated, trusting the screams to drown his quick whisper out for anyone farther away than Wade and Wanda. "And they have no idea why... his body is... fluctuating?" David North's pained voice hit a new decibel level, and Doug chopped a hand down sharply, signaling to Wade that the time for stealth was over. They needed to be in that room now.

Shouldering through the door, face expressionless, Wade took in the scene before him - a total of five scientists, two of them standing near North too far away for Wanda to have sensed, one with a clipboard looking vaguely authoritative, and three guards along the opposite wall. He hit the guards first with throat shots, then the scientists near North each got one to the head. Coming back, he hit the one who looked like he was in charge with one shot to his knee so he couldn't run.

Doug had come in on Wade's heels. Seeing that his friend had covered the immediate threat of guards, he took care of the scientists standing next to North, dropping them with shots to the head before they could inject their teammate with anything else. He almost put one into the lead researcher as Wade kneecapped the man, but he realized that they needed someone to interrogate, so he pulled his gun up and away at the last second. "Clear," he announced.

Wade exhaled slowly. It didn't matter how clear they were, David was still screaming and shooting the scientists hadn't stopped him from... doing whatever he was doing, Christ. Turning around, he opened his mouth to ask Wanda a question only to find that she was frozen near the door. Not simply paused, not simply shocked into stillness - she was like a statue, almost brittle. "Wanda?" He asked, cautious. This wasn't pretty, but he didn't know what kind of memories it might be dredging up for her.

Her eyes flickered over to him and it became obvious that she was crying. Tears were streaming down her face and she made no move to wipe them away. "I... give me a moment," she said, voice tight. "My powers. I am trying to lock them down."

When they had first entered the room, the sound of David screaming had urged her to action. Wanda had thrown open those mental doors, fully prepared to bring as much chaotic energy down upon the heads of the men and women in the room as she could muster. And at the first look at the landscape that her powers painted for her in her mind had stopped her cold.

Whatever they inflected on David, his body was an ever evolving mass to her. The lines shifted and blinked in ways that she had never seen. And in that one moment, she realized if she shifted even one part out of place, she would kill him.

She took a ragged breath and then stepped forward, hands clenched at her side. "He is dying," she said, through her tears. "And my powers... I could not chance it."

This was bad. Even as Wade muscled the last surviving scientist to his feet, Doug was reaching for his earbud. "Surveillance team, get over here now."


Marie-Ange, Gabriel, and Artie set about ensuring they have copies of all Kravinoff's information and that they'll be able to keep track him later.


An antsy Gabriel was bouncing on his toes. Sweat dotted his forehead, which was scrunched up while he looked around them. The pit in his stomach wouldn't go away. "Okay," he said quietly, looking up at Marie-Ange and Artie, "so?"

Artie's reply was simple, emotionless through the synthesiser. "We have information. Email incoming with the details, okay?" His face was utterly blank as he snapped photos of projections that summarized what they knew and attached them to email to Doug. He had one eye on Kraven as he worked.

Marie-Ange pulled a card from a sleeve, and a lumbering man-wolf-ape thing pulled itself from the ground, and then it picked up the unconscious Kraven. "I am not sure I trust the information from his papers. No one with this much of a career keeps things uncoded or this simple." She huffed out a breath. "I hate this, but we are going to have to let him go."

"Excuse me?" Gabriel crossed his arms. "Come again? I thought you just said we went through all this shit and we're gonna let him run, but maybe you hit me with a dart, and I'm hearing crazy things."

"There is too much here. No one this connected is this foolish, and he is going to run back to whoever paid him and complain. There is no way this is this small scale," Marie-Ange said. "So Artie is going to do me a favor and help me put some tracking devices in, well, not his buttocks, that is cliche. I think - his phone... and goodness he has terrible taste, this belt buckle, and oh, ew, alligator shoes. Yes, a tracker in those too, men who buy nine hundred dollar shoes do not get rid of them lightly."

Artie nodded. He opened the case and pulled out the tracking applicator. It looked a little like a syringe, while the man-ape-wolf-thing dropped Kraven. He wasn't gentle as he stripped the man's pants, jabbing the tracker into the back of his knee and then another one, for good measure, at the back of his neck. Artie gestured to Gabriel - 'dress him again', while he pulled the right shoe off and got to work.

The speedster opened his mouth to object, glancing from Kraven's body to Marie-Ange and back to Artie. Instead, he sighed. "Okay. Whatever. Not my mission." He began to dress Kraven again, struggling a bit to get his pants back on. "So, what, you're gonna - I'm sorry, this all just seems crazy to me - just follow his every move?"

"No, not every move. Just ones that ping whatever magic programming..." Another vague gesture. "Miracle Cypher wrote, it will pick up anything out of his usual patterns." Marie-Ange wasn't sure how it worked, but 'we're watching this guy and he did something strange' showed up in Monday round-up meetings on various people they were watching. "So no, not following him to the toilets, yes, following him when he checks in with whoever paid him, or pulls paper money from a stash, or goes into hiding because someone is mad he was followed."

"Right." Gabriel tried his best not to sound as skeptical or skeeved out as he felt. "Great."

Artie gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder. "its okay. we all think this is fukd." He followed up with an image of the two of them dragging Kraven out to the car and dumping him in the trunk.

"Yeah," Gabriel huffed. "Fine. Seems like we should be able to get him," he gestured to the man-ape-wolf, which he was trying not to think too much about, "to help, though." With Kraven dressed, Gabriel grabbed the leg-end of the man's body and gestured both Artie and the tarot-card-illusion-thingie to the rest of it. Together, they managed to lift him and haul him to the trunk

"Not sentient, but yes, it can help." Marie-Ange gestured - unnecessarily - and the lumbering wolf-ape-man got it's hairy, altogether too long arms under Kraven's armpits and hauled up. "Facade, you could have put the tracker in his elbow, we did not need to pants the man. None of us needed to see his briefs."

"Surveillance team, get over here now." Doug's voice was clipped over their comms as he gave the sitrep. He was sure Marie-Ange would be able to tell just how bad it was from listening to him, and he tried his best to keep professional. "We've got Maverick, he's... they've done something to him, we're not sure what."

"We are on the way with some ugly baggage," Marie-Ange replied.