OPERATION: SALT THE EARTH - Log 8
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xp_logsMarie-Ange and Jubilee take the second part of the attack on the FSB facility, securing it.
It was a big metal door. The USSR had been good at those. Lots of heavy bolts, imposing looking locks; an aesthetic that practically screamed 'none shall pass'. Only trouble was that big imposing locks meant big tumblers. Which meant any experienced lock-pick could bypass them quickly. Which they did, pulling open the door and moving silently into the interior of the squat two story concrete building.
The duo paused for a moment just inside the doorway to put away tools - and take out weapons that had been securely stashed for swift movement. Now that they were inside, movement would not be the most important factor in their speed. Marie-Ange gave a silent signal to Jubilee, and then pointed down the entryway, indicating the plan - she would scout first, quiet as a church mouse and Marie-Ange would follow behind once they’d figured out what it was they were up against.
Jubilee moved forward as quietly as had been indicated would be needed. She'd grown used to the constant need for silent movement through spaces dangerous to her continued well-being, whether you counted that as physical or mental.
Beyond that familiarity, she'd also spent the past months working to infiltrate an exceedingly paranoid organisation that really didn’t welcome outsiders beyond ‘sponsorship’ via shell accounts and a variety of drug purchases. The fact she was Chinese American hadn’t helped, no matter how much she’d managed to get rid of the American accent with the help of Doug.
When it came right down to it, she was about at her breaking point for shadowy goings on, but there would be so much more of it to come before she'd be finished.
“Two up ahead,” Jubilee breathed into the throat mike she was wearing, melting back into the shadows of a junction as she watched the men walk toward her. “Feel like playing murder hobo today?”
For a moment Marie-Ange considered replying in French just to irritate Jubilee, and then thought again, because there was petty and then there was petty that would have ripple effects on their mission at hand. "No. I am never the hobo. I wash and do not spend time in dumpsters." Unlike other people. But despite the reply, Marie-Ange flipped a card into her hand and a thing popped into view. The thing - all black oily skin and white veins coiled behind Jubilee as Marie-Ange stayed back.
‘Maybe you should.’
Jubilee thought it but didn’t say it; considering she had no desire whatsoever to get into another pissing contest with Marie-Ange. She’d had more than enough of that back when they had higher ups to stop them from killing each other. Besides, the whole damn thing just made her exhausted these days.
Instead, she waited for the ‘bad guys’ to appear and then proceeded to set off a firework the size of a cherry bomb in the first one’s face before following up with a kick to his balls. She ducked low and used his backpedalling as cover from the gun the second guard brought to bear as the first guard made a sound similar to a strangled duck.
Despite Marie-Ange's assertion that she had no intention of playing murder hobo, her imaged monstrosity crept up on silent stalks and wrapped itself around the chest and throat and face of the second guard. It squeezed, and oozed, and the man struggled wetly for a long few minutes.
Jubilee had taken the time it took Marie-Ange's creation to finish off the second guard, slowly choking the first one with a garrotte wire she'd pulled from her hair. It wasn't nearly as elegant as her companions solution but it was a score and above in terms of disturbing future dreams. At least, Jubilee thought so.
“That wasn’t incredibly disturbing at all,” Jubilee quipped, waiting until the man stopped struggling before moving onward down the hallway. “There should only be two more to take down. Who wants to bet they’re manning the fort while these two went to the bathroom?”
"Neither of those men were skilled or trained beyond basic security duty, or they would have noticed one of us." Marie-Ange answered. "Either they were sent here as bait, and died for it, or the security on this facility is sadly underfunded." She carefully looked over one of the guns she had picked up from the now-dead guards and frowned at it. "This is too nice of a gun for an underfunded facility."
“Always with the good news,” Jubilee muttered, almost to herself as she kept only half an ear on the conversation with Marie-Ange.
They were barely in the front door of the facility and the hard-line that they’d need would be further in toward the centre.
“If they’re bait, then exactly where is the cat?
"The cat was outside with Deadpool, did you forget already?" Marie-Ange quipped. "Maybe the other two are dead already. That would be a nice refreshing change of pace. Suicidal guards." The pair came up to the first set of doors and flattened against the wall before Marie-Ange sent her squidoid monster image to push the door down off its frame and waited.
Empty.
"I feel like I should like, be making a joke about a cat in a box but that's just totally too much effort right now," Jubilee quipped back.
She waited for a few moments more before moving on, her senses trained on any sort of trap that might have been set off. When all she heard was the slight hiss of the air conditioning system doing its job, she moved on down the hallway. It didn't take them long to find the next door, and Jubilee held one hand up to count down from five before she slammed the door open and sent in several paffs.
Nothing. No screams, no gunfire...no strange beasts from Alpha-Centaurus.
Jubilee felt somewhat disappointed, frankly. She'd expected more from a facility such as this beyond a fuck-off huge door and some mall cops.
"Okay, I'm feeling like we've stepped into some weird horror movie and there's gonna be a jump scare any moment. I did not bring my brown pants for that, dude."
Rolling her eyes would have taken them off the corner, and the regular flash of amber safety lights. The quieter this building was, the more she was convinced that the first two guards had been sent out to die easily and make any intruders overconfident. Which made Marie-Ange paranoid and twitchy.
Jubilee held up her hand as they neared the next room as she paused to listen closely. It had been quiet but she was almost positive she’d heard the scrape of a footstep somewhere back behind them.
She didn’t know the odds of there being two ways out of the command room but getting caught in what would basically be a pincer movement was not what she’d come here for.
She made a gesture for Marie-Ange to go onward while she backtracked and came in from the other side.
Well, the Jubilee hand sign for "Fuck me we're being tailed" cinched Marie-Ange's paranoia. It had been too quiet, the other two men had been a setup, and this -was- too easy, and now it was time to fix that problem because they had gotten just a little complacent.
She was not going to die in a concrete warehouse. Not today.
She flashed a sign back at Jubilee, and then crept down the hallway, pausing in the dim grey space between two of the lights. A quick strike with an imaged baseball bat (Topps Baseball Cards, Jose Bautista, 2012, two dollars on E-Bay. Marie-Ange felt very strongly about sourcing from teams loved by her ex-boyfriends) took care of one of the lights, and then inside the locked up security room, one of the pair of remaining guards saw her continue down the hallway, taking out lights methodically.
Jubilee used the darkness that Marie-Ange had provided to move closer to the door, pulling a ball of C4 from one of the slim line pouches she kept on her person at all time. It was the work of seconds to place a small plasmoid among the putty before layering it against the weak points of the security door.
She could have blown in the door easily with just her powers but given the possible fight beyond, she wanted to reserve the true kick of her power for that. C4 explosives backed by a little something extra worked just as well.
Three seconds and Marie-Ange heard the expected firecracker crackle and then bang of the explosives and the door, and the shape of the woman continuing carefully down the hallway disappeared into nothingness.
This guard - he had some training. His reaction was not to stop and stare dumbly - he pressed himself up against the wall, and scanned up and down the now darkened hallway with his flashlight.
***
Smoke, dust and the darkness left after Marie-Ange had killed the lights made the perfect environment for Jubilee to slip past the door and enter the room. Of course, if it hadn’t been for the muzzle flashes in that same miasma, the bullets the hit the wall behind her as she deftly fell forward into a roll would have done much more then send flecks of plaster into her skin.
Her normal position in a fight was up high, throwing both wise cracks and bombs at the bad guys, close in fighting had never been her preferred vehicle, she left that to people like Doug who had the advantage of being able to tell what the bad guy was going to do next.
As it was, she couldn’t stay here, she needed to keep moving. She lunged out from behind her cover and flashed up several paffs to blind her attacker, before dodging back behind another. She could hear the breathing of the guard, slightly pained, and the click of a gun being drawn back. She needed to make him waste his ammo, and hopefully not get shot at the same time.
The baseball bat that the imaged Marie-Ange had been carrying reappeared and came down across the guard's wrist, knocking the flashlight out of his grip and sending it rolling out into the hallway, creating a vertigo-inducing pattern of light and shadow on the walls, combining with the flash of Jubilee's power to completely ruin the guard's ability to see much of anything in the dark.
Jubilee dodged the bullet that punched through the wall beside her, sending a paff to knock the guys eyesight out again. She'd managed to avoid the guy hitting anything important so far but she'd quickly run out of space in the small room. Marie-Ange's earlier trick with the lights had given her the idea, and she'd always been happier working from the shadows. If she'd counted the bullets right, the guard should be down to his last clip.
"Dude, you're like, as bad as a storm trooper with that thing."
She rolled as a gun flash lit up the darkness from her left, feeling the breeze as a bullet tore into the sole of her shoe; sending her off balance and into the floor. She managed to not land face first but only through years of practice. As it was, she'd ended up prone and in a dangerous position. It was pitch black but that didn't mean either of them were particularly at a disadvantage, sound being a very good indicator of where both of them were. Her assailant only had to be lucky once, she needed to figure out a way to take the man down without also taking out all the equipment in the room they needed.
She could hear him breathing from her place on the floor, and she rolled quickly to try and get herself into a better position. If this guard was as highly trained as Marie-Ange had surmised, she had to guess that she would need more than just her normal 'come up from behind and use their own weight against them.' Which meant remembering the layout of the room she'd just made impossible to see in.
Lucky for her, Remy and the guild had made it part of her training to memorise key structures in any room she was in in a matter of moments, mostly as an aid when doing recon on a place but it had certainly worked out to her benefit in numerous other ways.
She commando crawled to the nearest wall and then used it as a guide toward the door. She needed to lure the guy out of here in order to take care of him.
"It's almost like you're not even trying." Jubilee noted as she flattened herself to the left only to feel a bullet punch through centimeters from her head. "Still here, dude."
Of course. When in doubt, use Jubilee's mouth as a strategic aid. A tentative footstep warned Marie-Ange that one final guard was attempting to use the chaos of Jubilee's entrance to sneak up on them. There wasn't enough light for a card, but the flickers from Jubilee throwing her sparks around provided just enough for her to distinguish the darker ink of the tattoo surrounding her upper arm. She rose up behind the man like a wraith, one arm snaking out to cover his mouth, and a long, thin dagger appearing in the other hand to drive up under his rib cage and into his chest cavity.
“Cleanup in aisle 2.” Jubilee sat in the now fully empty office that held the hard line they needed, playing with the overhead speak system as she waited for Marie-Ange to turn back up. Her assailant was a smoking pile of melted skin and bone in the hallway beyond. It had taken time to get the man out of the room, and a great deal of subterfuge on her part once he’d worn out his bullets. “Calling Tarot to cleanup in aisle 2.”
"And further destroy this manicure? Non, thank you." Marie-Ange stepped over the...puddle carefully with a wrinkle of her nose at the smell.
It was a big metal door. The USSR had been good at those. Lots of heavy bolts, imposing looking locks; an aesthetic that practically screamed 'none shall pass'. Only trouble was that big imposing locks meant big tumblers. Which meant any experienced lock-pick could bypass them quickly. Which they did, pulling open the door and moving silently into the interior of the squat two story concrete building.
The duo paused for a moment just inside the doorway to put away tools - and take out weapons that had been securely stashed for swift movement. Now that they were inside, movement would not be the most important factor in their speed. Marie-Ange gave a silent signal to Jubilee, and then pointed down the entryway, indicating the plan - she would scout first, quiet as a church mouse and Marie-Ange would follow behind once they’d figured out what it was they were up against.
Jubilee moved forward as quietly as had been indicated would be needed. She'd grown used to the constant need for silent movement through spaces dangerous to her continued well-being, whether you counted that as physical or mental.
Beyond that familiarity, she'd also spent the past months working to infiltrate an exceedingly paranoid organisation that really didn’t welcome outsiders beyond ‘sponsorship’ via shell accounts and a variety of drug purchases. The fact she was Chinese American hadn’t helped, no matter how much she’d managed to get rid of the American accent with the help of Doug.
When it came right down to it, she was about at her breaking point for shadowy goings on, but there would be so much more of it to come before she'd be finished.
“Two up ahead,” Jubilee breathed into the throat mike she was wearing, melting back into the shadows of a junction as she watched the men walk toward her. “Feel like playing murder hobo today?”
For a moment Marie-Ange considered replying in French just to irritate Jubilee, and then thought again, because there was petty and then there was petty that would have ripple effects on their mission at hand. "No. I am never the hobo. I wash and do not spend time in dumpsters." Unlike other people. But despite the reply, Marie-Ange flipped a card into her hand and a thing popped into view. The thing - all black oily skin and white veins coiled behind Jubilee as Marie-Ange stayed back.
‘Maybe you should.’
Jubilee thought it but didn’t say it; considering she had no desire whatsoever to get into another pissing contest with Marie-Ange. She’d had more than enough of that back when they had higher ups to stop them from killing each other. Besides, the whole damn thing just made her exhausted these days.
Instead, she waited for the ‘bad guys’ to appear and then proceeded to set off a firework the size of a cherry bomb in the first one’s face before following up with a kick to his balls. She ducked low and used his backpedalling as cover from the gun the second guard brought to bear as the first guard made a sound similar to a strangled duck.
Despite Marie-Ange's assertion that she had no intention of playing murder hobo, her imaged monstrosity crept up on silent stalks and wrapped itself around the chest and throat and face of the second guard. It squeezed, and oozed, and the man struggled wetly for a long few minutes.
Jubilee had taken the time it took Marie-Ange's creation to finish off the second guard, slowly choking the first one with a garrotte wire she'd pulled from her hair. It wasn't nearly as elegant as her companions solution but it was a score and above in terms of disturbing future dreams. At least, Jubilee thought so.
“That wasn’t incredibly disturbing at all,” Jubilee quipped, waiting until the man stopped struggling before moving onward down the hallway. “There should only be two more to take down. Who wants to bet they’re manning the fort while these two went to the bathroom?”
"Neither of those men were skilled or trained beyond basic security duty, or they would have noticed one of us." Marie-Ange answered. "Either they were sent here as bait, and died for it, or the security on this facility is sadly underfunded." She carefully looked over one of the guns she had picked up from the now-dead guards and frowned at it. "This is too nice of a gun for an underfunded facility."
“Always with the good news,” Jubilee muttered, almost to herself as she kept only half an ear on the conversation with Marie-Ange.
They were barely in the front door of the facility and the hard-line that they’d need would be further in toward the centre.
“If they’re bait, then exactly where is the cat?
"The cat was outside with Deadpool, did you forget already?" Marie-Ange quipped. "Maybe the other two are dead already. That would be a nice refreshing change of pace. Suicidal guards." The pair came up to the first set of doors and flattened against the wall before Marie-Ange sent her squidoid monster image to push the door down off its frame and waited.
Empty.
"I feel like I should like, be making a joke about a cat in a box but that's just totally too much effort right now," Jubilee quipped back.
She waited for a few moments more before moving on, her senses trained on any sort of trap that might have been set off. When all she heard was the slight hiss of the air conditioning system doing its job, she moved on down the hallway. It didn't take them long to find the next door, and Jubilee held one hand up to count down from five before she slammed the door open and sent in several paffs.
Nothing. No screams, no gunfire...no strange beasts from Alpha-Centaurus.
Jubilee felt somewhat disappointed, frankly. She'd expected more from a facility such as this beyond a fuck-off huge door and some mall cops.
"Okay, I'm feeling like we've stepped into some weird horror movie and there's gonna be a jump scare any moment. I did not bring my brown pants for that, dude."
Rolling her eyes would have taken them off the corner, and the regular flash of amber safety lights. The quieter this building was, the more she was convinced that the first two guards had been sent out to die easily and make any intruders overconfident. Which made Marie-Ange paranoid and twitchy.
Jubilee held up her hand as they neared the next room as she paused to listen closely. It had been quiet but she was almost positive she’d heard the scrape of a footstep somewhere back behind them.
She didn’t know the odds of there being two ways out of the command room but getting caught in what would basically be a pincer movement was not what she’d come here for.
She made a gesture for Marie-Ange to go onward while she backtracked and came in from the other side.
Well, the Jubilee hand sign for "Fuck me we're being tailed" cinched Marie-Ange's paranoia. It had been too quiet, the other two men had been a setup, and this -was- too easy, and now it was time to fix that problem because they had gotten just a little complacent.
She was not going to die in a concrete warehouse. Not today.
She flashed a sign back at Jubilee, and then crept down the hallway, pausing in the dim grey space between two of the lights. A quick strike with an imaged baseball bat (Topps Baseball Cards, Jose Bautista, 2012, two dollars on E-Bay. Marie-Ange felt very strongly about sourcing from teams loved by her ex-boyfriends) took care of one of the lights, and then inside the locked up security room, one of the pair of remaining guards saw her continue down the hallway, taking out lights methodically.
Jubilee used the darkness that Marie-Ange had provided to move closer to the door, pulling a ball of C4 from one of the slim line pouches she kept on her person at all time. It was the work of seconds to place a small plasmoid among the putty before layering it against the weak points of the security door.
She could have blown in the door easily with just her powers but given the possible fight beyond, she wanted to reserve the true kick of her power for that. C4 explosives backed by a little something extra worked just as well.
Three seconds and Marie-Ange heard the expected firecracker crackle and then bang of the explosives and the door, and the shape of the woman continuing carefully down the hallway disappeared into nothingness.
This guard - he had some training. His reaction was not to stop and stare dumbly - he pressed himself up against the wall, and scanned up and down the now darkened hallway with his flashlight.
***
Smoke, dust and the darkness left after Marie-Ange had killed the lights made the perfect environment for Jubilee to slip past the door and enter the room. Of course, if it hadn’t been for the muzzle flashes in that same miasma, the bullets the hit the wall behind her as she deftly fell forward into a roll would have done much more then send flecks of plaster into her skin.
Her normal position in a fight was up high, throwing both wise cracks and bombs at the bad guys, close in fighting had never been her preferred vehicle, she left that to people like Doug who had the advantage of being able to tell what the bad guy was going to do next.
As it was, she couldn’t stay here, she needed to keep moving. She lunged out from behind her cover and flashed up several paffs to blind her attacker, before dodging back behind another. She could hear the breathing of the guard, slightly pained, and the click of a gun being drawn back. She needed to make him waste his ammo, and hopefully not get shot at the same time.
The baseball bat that the imaged Marie-Ange had been carrying reappeared and came down across the guard's wrist, knocking the flashlight out of his grip and sending it rolling out into the hallway, creating a vertigo-inducing pattern of light and shadow on the walls, combining with the flash of Jubilee's power to completely ruin the guard's ability to see much of anything in the dark.
Jubilee dodged the bullet that punched through the wall beside her, sending a paff to knock the guys eyesight out again. She'd managed to avoid the guy hitting anything important so far but she'd quickly run out of space in the small room. Marie-Ange's earlier trick with the lights had given her the idea, and she'd always been happier working from the shadows. If she'd counted the bullets right, the guard should be down to his last clip.
"Dude, you're like, as bad as a storm trooper with that thing."
She rolled as a gun flash lit up the darkness from her left, feeling the breeze as a bullet tore into the sole of her shoe; sending her off balance and into the floor. She managed to not land face first but only through years of practice. As it was, she'd ended up prone and in a dangerous position. It was pitch black but that didn't mean either of them were particularly at a disadvantage, sound being a very good indicator of where both of them were. Her assailant only had to be lucky once, she needed to figure out a way to take the man down without also taking out all the equipment in the room they needed.
She could hear him breathing from her place on the floor, and she rolled quickly to try and get herself into a better position. If this guard was as highly trained as Marie-Ange had surmised, she had to guess that she would need more than just her normal 'come up from behind and use their own weight against them.' Which meant remembering the layout of the room she'd just made impossible to see in.
Lucky for her, Remy and the guild had made it part of her training to memorise key structures in any room she was in in a matter of moments, mostly as an aid when doing recon on a place but it had certainly worked out to her benefit in numerous other ways.
She commando crawled to the nearest wall and then used it as a guide toward the door. She needed to lure the guy out of here in order to take care of him.
"It's almost like you're not even trying." Jubilee noted as she flattened herself to the left only to feel a bullet punch through centimeters from her head. "Still here, dude."
Of course. When in doubt, use Jubilee's mouth as a strategic aid. A tentative footstep warned Marie-Ange that one final guard was attempting to use the chaos of Jubilee's entrance to sneak up on them. There wasn't enough light for a card, but the flickers from Jubilee throwing her sparks around provided just enough for her to distinguish the darker ink of the tattoo surrounding her upper arm. She rose up behind the man like a wraith, one arm snaking out to cover his mouth, and a long, thin dagger appearing in the other hand to drive up under his rib cage and into his chest cavity.
“Cleanup in aisle 2.” Jubilee sat in the now fully empty office that held the hard line they needed, playing with the overhead speak system as she waited for Marie-Ange to turn back up. Her assailant was a smoking pile of melted skin and bone in the hallway beyond. It had taken time to get the man out of the room, and a great deal of subterfuge on her part once he’d worn out his bullets. “Calling Tarot to cleanup in aisle 2.”
"And further destroy this manicure? Non, thank you." Marie-Ange stepped over the...puddle carefully with a wrinkle of her nose at the smell.
