Siege Perilous - Prologue - The Briefing
Dec. 18th, 2020 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsA series of mysterious deaths in New York is the subject of X-Force’s latest briefing.
"And under the cover of a fitting for several new bespoke suits, we know that the possible Brotherhood rumour was referring to Basque nationalists, and not mutants. Thanks for throwing yourself on that grenade, Gabe." Kevin said dryly, pushing the action item up on the tablet. He missed his paper files. There was something about intel that needed paperclips and dog eared pages.
"Next item... ah right, life stealing serial killer. Our friends at XFI turned us on to this one. Amanda, you took point. What are we looking at?"
Amanda glanced up from her own tablet and took a second to gather her thoughts. "All right, we got this one passed onto us from X-Factor. It looked like a possible serial killer, but when they realised the cause of death couldn't be identified, we got it as a 'weird shite' thing." She scrolled through her tablet until she reached the item she wanted, projecting onto the boardroom's screen three driver's licences. One belonged to a middle-aged black man in a suit; another a taxi driver from Queens; and the third a female student from Koreatown. "These are the official victims, but there's also been a couple more deaths of homeless people - one a woman in her sixties, another a long-term drug addict." She flicked her screen and brought up another batch of photos. "X-Factor 'acquired' these from the Coroner's Office. Apologies if you've just eaten." All of the photos were from autopsies, showing the head and shoulders of each deceased person. They all looked the same, regardless of their ages when they'd been living: shrunken and withered with what strands of hair left a dirty grey or white, cheeks hollow and skin spotted with age. "This is what they all looked like when they were found. As if all the life and vitality had been sucked out of them."
"Perhaps all the life and vitality was sucked out of them." Marie-Ange said, from behind a mug. She set it down and continued. "It would not be our first energy vampire, I hate calling them that. There was the one the X-Men dealt with.. were there any reports of odd lizard men in the area? Or the other one...." She picked the mug back up, and looked at Amanda from over the rim. "I forget her name. That moon bitch."
“Queen Serenity?” Jubilee quipped as she entered the room in her normal mode, if a little more gingerly given the neck brace. Magical healing had sped up her healing but it didn’t mean she didn’t have to still go through the process. “Or are we talking non-anime inspired villains?”
Felicia, who had been making an increasingly distressed face as to how this was her life now, staring at the Halloween apple autopsy images, snapped her attention to Jubilee in betrayal. "Girl, you did not." The focus shifted to her and silence deafening she shrugged, nose lifting slightly. "I have nothing helpful to add, just no filter and the observation that Jubilee is obviously insane and we may need to put her down. Back to the spooky fun time corner."
Wanda laughed under her breath. "Jubilee's far too sturdy for that," she said, shooting her younger colleague a tight smile. Her own injuries were less devastating than Jubilee's had been and, again, but they ached still nonetheless. "But she is obviously insane, I'll give you that." She looked again towards the pictures and drummed her fingers against her leg while she thought. "Alright, we have the same end result and a potential serial killer in theory. But those killers generally leave other calling cards - are there any pieces missing from the victims besides the glaringly obvious? Any letters or taunts sent to the police or investigators that we could find out? Often times the police won't publish that."
She cocked an eyebrow at Doug. "Anything useful being hidden away where you could find it?"
Doug completely missed the prompt from Wanda until she dug an elbow in his ribs. "Hm? Sorry, I was trying to figure out a way to make a 'that's rough buddy' joke about the whole moon thing." He took a glance at the screen. "Can you pull back and plot the...yeah, okay," he tailed off as Amanda was already showing a map of the killings' locations. "Ta," he muttered distractedly to the Brit, clearly in sync with her.
"So either we have the most random serial killer in the world, or there's something else going on," Amanda added. "There doesn't seem to be anything special about the locations, either."
"Do me a favor, Amanda?" Doug asked, still looking at the map. "Find the file named 'physics don't work like that' and overlay it?" A few moments after Amanda found the file, a second set of points appeared. Not a perfect match, but all of the killing locations seemed to map near to one or more of the locations from Doug's file. "So this other one is a list of reports of...for lack of a better way to put it, physics going sideways. Momentary fluctuations in gravity, highly localized weather phenomena...and in ways that are not suggestive of mutant powers."
"There has been some interesting youtube videos that have been posted lately. Some people in the comments are screaming that they are fake, but they were trending." Clea who was on her phone finally piped up. Turning her phone around to show a clip of one of the videos she was mentioned. This one had a weird snow storm over a person's house but no one else's. "That was posted yesterday. There are others, but that one really takes the cake."
“Is it likely to be magic?” Emma asked, from her seat next to Kevin. “It could be mutants, of course, but unless it’s a large gang of psychotically murderous energy-sucking minor mutants who make physics go sidewards, magic would seem more likely to have that large a range of effects. Amanda? We are still keeping tabs on Santana, aren’t we? Or, as Marie-Ange so neatly categorised her, ‘that moon bitch’.”
"We are, but it's like tracking a ghost. I think we need boots on the street at this stage, someone to go sound out the magical community. As well as just generally poke around, see if we can find anything the cops might have missed." Amanda flipped from the autopsy photos to a map of the relevant areas. "The city itself isn't giving me too much, but it is unsettled, at least in those areas. I think we can go in with teams of two, see what we each can find..." As she continued to talk, Amanda was also remarking to Emma psionically: ~There's one commonality that we haven't mentioned. The Frankenberry Cat. These are all spots where there's been dimensional weirdness, or where there were big changes when Xorn did his thing.~
~Ah,~ said Emma and then reached out to those from the Frankenberry Cat world, apprised them of the situation quietly. “I can try doing a psi sweep or two,” she said out loud even as she whispered inside people’s head. “Though if that’s as nebulous as everything else about this case, I might borrow a bit of psychic oomph to go with me.”
In a meeting like this, with varied levels of ASL proficiency and attention spans, neither of Artie's preferred communication styles - sign or projected text - worked, so he used a speech synthesiser to say "There's chatter on the street but no leads. No one thinks it's directed at or by the local mutants. Of course, talk is cheap and the people who know what's what won't be saying anything useful." Silently, he added ~Do you think we're the only ones who came through? The locations are too specific to be coincidence.~
He flicked points of light to Doug's map, highlighting several other ‘physics don't work right’ places. "I think we need to focus on these areas before someone decides that A plus B equals a mutant serial killer."
"Agreed. Though I wouldn't rule that out just yet." Gabriel leaned forward from his chair, scrutinizing the map. There was no pattern he could see either, but of all the people in this room, he would have been the least likely to notice one anyway. "I mean, sometimes, the most obvious explanation is the best one." There was a beat of silence in the room. "Okay, okay, fine, that has never been true for us. But I still think we should look for all the standard serial-killer stuff. We can't just ... blindly trust the detectives."
He then shifted his focus from the map to Emma, whose gaze he had avoided after she'd broadcast her message about their old world into his mind. Gabriel had made a concerted effort to leave the world behind, and part of that process was refusing to indulge the idea that their past reality could cross over. "And maybe we can borrow Jean?"
"She does provide oomph," Emma conceded. "Between her hammer and my scalpel, we might be able to find something solid under all the smoke and mirrors." Emma's thoughts were on the finest of bands, only to those who'd survived the end of their last world. ~And if something or someone else came through the cracks, then Jean is the best person to help me find how big the cracks are.~ "Possibly even the man behind the curtain," Emma added, dryly.
"I mean, an 'Oz the great and powerful' type of situation certainly wouldn't shock me, Auntie Em," Doug declared, pitching his voice higher for his best Judy Garland impression. He took a long second, staring off distractedly, then shook his head. "I was trying to find a way to mash La Vie Boheme and Defying Gravity into that joke somehow, sorry."
"Reminds me more of a Stephen King novel with the deaths and weirdness happening than anything else," Natasha said as she studied the maps and overlay points. There wasn't much of a pattern. If she imagined lines overlaid connecting the locations, it looked like someone had ripped apart the map and then stitched it back together haphazardly. Whatever this organization or group had planned likely relied on occult reasoning and ambitions and she wasn't the only one left without the appropriate intel on what was going on. Surprising given the vast amount of knowledge and resources assembled in the room but that was life.
"Of course we end up in the book with all the weird deaths," Topaz muttered, balling up a piece of paper from her notebook and throwing it at Doug's head. "Can't be one of the fun ones like the haunted hotel or zombie animals." It was possible she needed to rethink her idea of fun.
"So it looks like we put in a call to Doc Grey for some assistance and look at a broad sweep. Hopefully we find out what it is, but just as importantly, we cross off what it isn't. We'll break into pairs and start running down the possibilities. Anyone picks up a lead, spread it around immediately. Draining someone's life sounds a lot like something we don't want to face without backup. Or at least dinner and drinks first." Kevin said. "Let's get to work."
"And under the cover of a fitting for several new bespoke suits, we know that the possible Brotherhood rumour was referring to Basque nationalists, and not mutants. Thanks for throwing yourself on that grenade, Gabe." Kevin said dryly, pushing the action item up on the tablet. He missed his paper files. There was something about intel that needed paperclips and dog eared pages.
"Next item... ah right, life stealing serial killer. Our friends at XFI turned us on to this one. Amanda, you took point. What are we looking at?"
Amanda glanced up from her own tablet and took a second to gather her thoughts. "All right, we got this one passed onto us from X-Factor. It looked like a possible serial killer, but when they realised the cause of death couldn't be identified, we got it as a 'weird shite' thing." She scrolled through her tablet until she reached the item she wanted, projecting onto the boardroom's screen three driver's licences. One belonged to a middle-aged black man in a suit; another a taxi driver from Queens; and the third a female student from Koreatown. "These are the official victims, but there's also been a couple more deaths of homeless people - one a woman in her sixties, another a long-term drug addict." She flicked her screen and brought up another batch of photos. "X-Factor 'acquired' these from the Coroner's Office. Apologies if you've just eaten." All of the photos were from autopsies, showing the head and shoulders of each deceased person. They all looked the same, regardless of their ages when they'd been living: shrunken and withered with what strands of hair left a dirty grey or white, cheeks hollow and skin spotted with age. "This is what they all looked like when they were found. As if all the life and vitality had been sucked out of them."
"Perhaps all the life and vitality was sucked out of them." Marie-Ange said, from behind a mug. She set it down and continued. "It would not be our first energy vampire, I hate calling them that. There was the one the X-Men dealt with.. were there any reports of odd lizard men in the area? Or the other one...." She picked the mug back up, and looked at Amanda from over the rim. "I forget her name. That moon bitch."
“Queen Serenity?” Jubilee quipped as she entered the room in her normal mode, if a little more gingerly given the neck brace. Magical healing had sped up her healing but it didn’t mean she didn’t have to still go through the process. “Or are we talking non-anime inspired villains?”
Felicia, who had been making an increasingly distressed face as to how this was her life now, staring at the Halloween apple autopsy images, snapped her attention to Jubilee in betrayal. "Girl, you did not." The focus shifted to her and silence deafening she shrugged, nose lifting slightly. "I have nothing helpful to add, just no filter and the observation that Jubilee is obviously insane and we may need to put her down. Back to the spooky fun time corner."
Wanda laughed under her breath. "Jubilee's far too sturdy for that," she said, shooting her younger colleague a tight smile. Her own injuries were less devastating than Jubilee's had been and, again, but they ached still nonetheless. "But she is obviously insane, I'll give you that." She looked again towards the pictures and drummed her fingers against her leg while she thought. "Alright, we have the same end result and a potential serial killer in theory. But those killers generally leave other calling cards - are there any pieces missing from the victims besides the glaringly obvious? Any letters or taunts sent to the police or investigators that we could find out? Often times the police won't publish that."
She cocked an eyebrow at Doug. "Anything useful being hidden away where you could find it?"
Doug completely missed the prompt from Wanda until she dug an elbow in his ribs. "Hm? Sorry, I was trying to figure out a way to make a 'that's rough buddy' joke about the whole moon thing." He took a glance at the screen. "Can you pull back and plot the...yeah, okay," he tailed off as Amanda was already showing a map of the killings' locations. "Ta," he muttered distractedly to the Brit, clearly in sync with her.
"So either we have the most random serial killer in the world, or there's something else going on," Amanda added. "There doesn't seem to be anything special about the locations, either."
"Do me a favor, Amanda?" Doug asked, still looking at the map. "Find the file named 'physics don't work like that' and overlay it?" A few moments after Amanda found the file, a second set of points appeared. Not a perfect match, but all of the killing locations seemed to map near to one or more of the locations from Doug's file. "So this other one is a list of reports of...for lack of a better way to put it, physics going sideways. Momentary fluctuations in gravity, highly localized weather phenomena...and in ways that are not suggestive of mutant powers."
"There has been some interesting youtube videos that have been posted lately. Some people in the comments are screaming that they are fake, but they were trending." Clea who was on her phone finally piped up. Turning her phone around to show a clip of one of the videos she was mentioned. This one had a weird snow storm over a person's house but no one else's. "That was posted yesterday. There are others, but that one really takes the cake."
“Is it likely to be magic?” Emma asked, from her seat next to Kevin. “It could be mutants, of course, but unless it’s a large gang of psychotically murderous energy-sucking minor mutants who make physics go sidewards, magic would seem more likely to have that large a range of effects. Amanda? We are still keeping tabs on Santana, aren’t we? Or, as Marie-Ange so neatly categorised her, ‘that moon bitch’.”
"We are, but it's like tracking a ghost. I think we need boots on the street at this stage, someone to go sound out the magical community. As well as just generally poke around, see if we can find anything the cops might have missed." Amanda flipped from the autopsy photos to a map of the relevant areas. "The city itself isn't giving me too much, but it is unsettled, at least in those areas. I think we can go in with teams of two, see what we each can find..." As she continued to talk, Amanda was also remarking to Emma psionically: ~There's one commonality that we haven't mentioned. The Frankenberry Cat. These are all spots where there's been dimensional weirdness, or where there were big changes when Xorn did his thing.~
~Ah,~ said Emma and then reached out to those from the Frankenberry Cat world, apprised them of the situation quietly. “I can try doing a psi sweep or two,” she said out loud even as she whispered inside people’s head. “Though if that’s as nebulous as everything else about this case, I might borrow a bit of psychic oomph to go with me.”
In a meeting like this, with varied levels of ASL proficiency and attention spans, neither of Artie's preferred communication styles - sign or projected text - worked, so he used a speech synthesiser to say "There's chatter on the street but no leads. No one thinks it's directed at or by the local mutants. Of course, talk is cheap and the people who know what's what won't be saying anything useful." Silently, he added ~Do you think we're the only ones who came through? The locations are too specific to be coincidence.~
He flicked points of light to Doug's map, highlighting several other ‘physics don't work right’ places. "I think we need to focus on these areas before someone decides that A plus B equals a mutant serial killer."
"Agreed. Though I wouldn't rule that out just yet." Gabriel leaned forward from his chair, scrutinizing the map. There was no pattern he could see either, but of all the people in this room, he would have been the least likely to notice one anyway. "I mean, sometimes, the most obvious explanation is the best one." There was a beat of silence in the room. "Okay, okay, fine, that has never been true for us. But I still think we should look for all the standard serial-killer stuff. We can't just ... blindly trust the detectives."
He then shifted his focus from the map to Emma, whose gaze he had avoided after she'd broadcast her message about their old world into his mind. Gabriel had made a concerted effort to leave the world behind, and part of that process was refusing to indulge the idea that their past reality could cross over. "And maybe we can borrow Jean?"
"She does provide oomph," Emma conceded. "Between her hammer and my scalpel, we might be able to find something solid under all the smoke and mirrors." Emma's thoughts were on the finest of bands, only to those who'd survived the end of their last world. ~And if something or someone else came through the cracks, then Jean is the best person to help me find how big the cracks are.~ "Possibly even the man behind the curtain," Emma added, dryly.
"I mean, an 'Oz the great and powerful' type of situation certainly wouldn't shock me, Auntie Em," Doug declared, pitching his voice higher for his best Judy Garland impression. He took a long second, staring off distractedly, then shook his head. "I was trying to find a way to mash La Vie Boheme and Defying Gravity into that joke somehow, sorry."
"Reminds me more of a Stephen King novel with the deaths and weirdness happening than anything else," Natasha said as she studied the maps and overlay points. There wasn't much of a pattern. If she imagined lines overlaid connecting the locations, it looked like someone had ripped apart the map and then stitched it back together haphazardly. Whatever this organization or group had planned likely relied on occult reasoning and ambitions and she wasn't the only one left without the appropriate intel on what was going on. Surprising given the vast amount of knowledge and resources assembled in the room but that was life.
"Of course we end up in the book with all the weird deaths," Topaz muttered, balling up a piece of paper from her notebook and throwing it at Doug's head. "Can't be one of the fun ones like the haunted hotel or zombie animals." It was possible she needed to rethink her idea of fun.
"So it looks like we put in a call to Doc Grey for some assistance and look at a broad sweep. Hopefully we find out what it is, but just as importantly, we cross off what it isn't. We'll break into pairs and start running down the possibilities. Anyone picks up a lead, spread it around immediately. Draining someone's life sounds a lot like something we don't want to face without backup. Or at least dinner and drinks first." Kevin said. "Let's get to work."
