Operation: We'll Always Have Paris - Log 8
Jan. 5th, 2025 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsDarcy and Sarah are forced to head to the basement to physically lift the lockdown and Darcy runs into more than her power might handle.
Sue's urgent explanation about the security switch forced them to leave Sue and Hope to hold the security room and start to make their way into the basement. It wasn't surprising that the club had elaborate lockdown processes, but having things be easy would have been a nice change. Especially since their circuitous route to the security room to avoid the guards wasn't workable to reach the basement unnoticed.
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong," Sarah muttered as they rushed toward the door to the basement. She had abandoned her pressed white uniform coat back in the security room, it would only get in the way for what they needed to do. In her right hand was a bone pulled from her shoulder, blunt and bloody. "Maybe next time we should do the hard way first, just to save time."
Darcy let out a soft snort of agreement, finally managing to get one of the weapons hidden in her dress free. The blade was a small, unassuming thing, not long enough to kill on its own... but it didn't need to, not with the thin channel of poison that ran down the middle, only able to be released with the slide of a discreet section on the hilt. "I liked this gown," she murmured quietly, giving the tatters hanging from knee to hem - ripped to enable quicker movement - a mournful look. She wasn't the only one who had liked the gown either. "Next time maybe I'll play staff so my pretty stuff doesn't get taken or ruined."
She slowed as they got closer to the known grouping of guards. "How do you want to tackle this? Up close isn't my best thing, but I can follow your lead. I'm not without tricks to make them regret touching us, at least."
"I can go in hot. If we can get them to underestimate you, we can use that to our advantage." She wished the guards were on the inside of this door-- it would have attracted less attention-- but that didn't matter now. If they didn't get to that switch, everyone was fucked. "Take out the guards, find the key, save our asses."
Sarah rushed forward then, hoping to take as much attention off Darcy as possible. She swung at the head of one guard, who dodged back and into another guard behind them. Darcy slipped to the side as Sarah went in swinging, grappling with a third guard. They got an arm around her neck, but a few grunts and twists later she'd pulled them forward with her, left leg behind them and knife sliding through pants into soft skin. Her thumb slid up the hilt of the knife enough to deliver a few drops of the poison before sliding back and out, right hand still keeping a firm grip on the arm around her neck.
She dropped the knife behind her and swung upward with her now free hand, channeling a taser's worth of voltage - split between her hands - into the groin and forearm of the guard, keeping both hands pressed tightly against flesh and clothing until they slumped to the ground, muscles twitching erratically. Her knife got stowed carefully back into the sheath sewn into her dress before she started rifling through the guard's pockets and taking anything that looked remotely useful before stepping clear to join Sarah. "No key on this one."
"Damn," Sarah grunted, ramming with a bony shoulder into a guard's midsection. Another guard lay slumped against the wall and bleeding from the temple. Not dead, but Sarah suspected that concussion was going to make it difficult for him to follow if he came to. She heard the guard above her pull something from a holster she hadn't noticed before, and jammed the bone hard against his kneecap. The knee hyperextended under the force of the blow, and the shot flew wide. "Heads up!" she called, and rolled out of the way.
Darcy swore loudly when a painful, searing heat sparked from her left hip as the wide shot grazed lace and flesh, melting one into the other and causing her stomach to twist with nausea. The swearing was both verbal and mental, echoing across the light telepathic link still joining all of the Xavier's crew as her shields wavered under the pain but held. She locked down everything except the need to complete the mission - thwart Fitzroy, make her report for Snow Valley, report to her king - with a ruthless viciousness, the walls of her mental shielding sending a neon flash over her eyes as they formed, turning the light psychic link to everyone into the merest hint of a whisper at the back of her mind that was more easily ignored than the steady pain pulsing with each step she took.
"C'était une erreur." Her voice was soft and calm as her eyes flicked to the security badge on the man. "Monsieur F. Scott." She flicked the safety off on the gun she'd liberated from the still-twitching guard, and the barrel didn't waver as she pointed it at the man who'd accidentally shot her. "Vous serez utile, n'est-ce pas? Il ne servirait à rien de répéter votre erreur." She knelt at his side, elbow putting pressure on his hyperextended knee as the barrel came to rest against the seam of his pants. "Which one of you has the key that will let us into this room, and how many guards are on the other side of the door?"
****
"Stay down!" Sarah growled in frustration and kicked the last guard in the abdomen with more force than was strictly necessary. She felt something give beneath the man's skin, and she wondered vaguely how gnarly that X-ray would look. When he howled in pain and curled up against the wall, Sarah finished him off with a blow to the head. She gestured at the door. "I'll keep an eye on the hallway."
Darcy nodded grimly. "It may take a lot of power for me to fry the system," she said carefully as she stepped into the now open doorway. "If you hear a body falling or smell burning flesh..." She trailed off, straightening her shoulders and looking into the room with resolute eyes. "Get Sydney. He holds my medical proxy and will know how to safely get me where I need to go. Don't try anything yourself, because I don't want to send voltage through you."
She disappeared into the room with a soft click of heels, finding the switch and the computer holding access to it unattended. One hand stroked up the side of the tower with a light caress as she murmured softly to it, tendrils of her power wrapping around the hard drive and network cables. "Oh," she breathed out as the club's secrets started to unfold behind her eyes. "You beautiful, beautiful baby. I'm so sorry." Her tone was regretful as she opened the link in her own mind wider, scraping the French club's secrets into her own servers. She dug deeper and deeper as she slithered around and under and through the myriad bytes of security as she hollowed everything out, leaving behind pristinely intact security walling off absolutely nothing.
At the same time, her left hand was directing lightning - electricity - into the physical switch keeping the lockout in place. This was apologized to as well, but as a simple physical device it didn't have quite the same... awareness to her senses that a computer did.
Directing her energy like this was a gamble, but a necessary one. Delicate, careful. Exceedingly dangerous. But she didn't plan on leaving empty handed.
Sarah looked up uneasily as the lights in the hallway flickered and popped, leaving her staring into the sickly glow of emergency lighting. Her visibility shot, she called softly back into the room, "How are we doing in there? The lights don't look like they're going to hold out much longer, and I'm pretty useless in the dark."
The query touched her mind and was shunted to the side as Darcy increased the voltage into the physical switch. Her eyes were shut, but she could feel the fuzzing at the edges of her mindscape as she raced towards her limits. She had.. most.. wait!
A hidden partition revealed itself in the drive, and she started to delicately dismantle those securities too, barely noticing when the physical lock finally gave up, shuttered windows and frozen doors finally offering the huddled partygoers upstairs a hint of relief and escape. The electricity sparking from her hands trickled to a stop, livid lichtenberg figures tracing starkly up her left forearm and fading the farther up her arm and neck they went before disappearing into her hairline. She was scraping the last of the data out when her fatigue caught up to her, exhaustion overpowering her delicate control and flinging the link between mind and data and her own private server wide open. Darcy scrabbled furiously for just another few seconds of control, but her efforts were futile as the feedback overwhelmed her. Lights flared into a supernova before dimming into almost darkness, finally settling on a dimmer-than-usual brightness.
The echo of her pain sizzled across the psychic link connecting the team to one another, twined with a bitten-off moan of agony that sounded in the physical world as she crumpled to the floor with a thud and the clatter of things being pulled from the desk in the wake of her drop.
Sarah winced as the sensation ripped across the telepathic link. She took one last look down the hallway and ducked into the room with Darcy. "Darcy's down," she said across the link. "What are the odds that I end up in the medlab overnight if I pick her up?"
"Get her. I trust in your healing factor." Kevin said through the link. "I'm about to run into Fitzroy. If you don't hear back from me, get yourself and her out, as soon as you can." His grim determination echoed over the telepathic bridge. "Good work, both of you."
Sue's urgent explanation about the security switch forced them to leave Sue and Hope to hold the security room and start to make their way into the basement. It wasn't surprising that the club had elaborate lockdown processes, but having things be easy would have been a nice change. Especially since their circuitous route to the security room to avoid the guards wasn't workable to reach the basement unnoticed.
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong," Sarah muttered as they rushed toward the door to the basement. She had abandoned her pressed white uniform coat back in the security room, it would only get in the way for what they needed to do. In her right hand was a bone pulled from her shoulder, blunt and bloody. "Maybe next time we should do the hard way first, just to save time."
Darcy let out a soft snort of agreement, finally managing to get one of the weapons hidden in her dress free. The blade was a small, unassuming thing, not long enough to kill on its own... but it didn't need to, not with the thin channel of poison that ran down the middle, only able to be released with the slide of a discreet section on the hilt. "I liked this gown," she murmured quietly, giving the tatters hanging from knee to hem - ripped to enable quicker movement - a mournful look. She wasn't the only one who had liked the gown either. "Next time maybe I'll play staff so my pretty stuff doesn't get taken or ruined."
She slowed as they got closer to the known grouping of guards. "How do you want to tackle this? Up close isn't my best thing, but I can follow your lead. I'm not without tricks to make them regret touching us, at least."
"I can go in hot. If we can get them to underestimate you, we can use that to our advantage." She wished the guards were on the inside of this door-- it would have attracted less attention-- but that didn't matter now. If they didn't get to that switch, everyone was fucked. "Take out the guards, find the key, save our asses."
Sarah rushed forward then, hoping to take as much attention off Darcy as possible. She swung at the head of one guard, who dodged back and into another guard behind them. Darcy slipped to the side as Sarah went in swinging, grappling with a third guard. They got an arm around her neck, but a few grunts and twists later she'd pulled them forward with her, left leg behind them and knife sliding through pants into soft skin. Her thumb slid up the hilt of the knife enough to deliver a few drops of the poison before sliding back and out, right hand still keeping a firm grip on the arm around her neck.
She dropped the knife behind her and swung upward with her now free hand, channeling a taser's worth of voltage - split between her hands - into the groin and forearm of the guard, keeping both hands pressed tightly against flesh and clothing until they slumped to the ground, muscles twitching erratically. Her knife got stowed carefully back into the sheath sewn into her dress before she started rifling through the guard's pockets and taking anything that looked remotely useful before stepping clear to join Sarah. "No key on this one."
"Damn," Sarah grunted, ramming with a bony shoulder into a guard's midsection. Another guard lay slumped against the wall and bleeding from the temple. Not dead, but Sarah suspected that concussion was going to make it difficult for him to follow if he came to. She heard the guard above her pull something from a holster she hadn't noticed before, and jammed the bone hard against his kneecap. The knee hyperextended under the force of the blow, and the shot flew wide. "Heads up!" she called, and rolled out of the way.
Darcy swore loudly when a painful, searing heat sparked from her left hip as the wide shot grazed lace and flesh, melting one into the other and causing her stomach to twist with nausea. The swearing was both verbal and mental, echoing across the light telepathic link still joining all of the Xavier's crew as her shields wavered under the pain but held. She locked down everything except the need to complete the mission - thwart Fitzroy, make her report for Snow Valley, report to her king - with a ruthless viciousness, the walls of her mental shielding sending a neon flash over her eyes as they formed, turning the light psychic link to everyone into the merest hint of a whisper at the back of her mind that was more easily ignored than the steady pain pulsing with each step she took.
"C'était une erreur." Her voice was soft and calm as her eyes flicked to the security badge on the man. "Monsieur F. Scott." She flicked the safety off on the gun she'd liberated from the still-twitching guard, and the barrel didn't waver as she pointed it at the man who'd accidentally shot her. "Vous serez utile, n'est-ce pas? Il ne servirait à rien de répéter votre erreur." She knelt at his side, elbow putting pressure on his hyperextended knee as the barrel came to rest against the seam of his pants. "Which one of you has the key that will let us into this room, and how many guards are on the other side of the door?"
****
"Stay down!" Sarah growled in frustration and kicked the last guard in the abdomen with more force than was strictly necessary. She felt something give beneath the man's skin, and she wondered vaguely how gnarly that X-ray would look. When he howled in pain and curled up against the wall, Sarah finished him off with a blow to the head. She gestured at the door. "I'll keep an eye on the hallway."
Darcy nodded grimly. "It may take a lot of power for me to fry the system," she said carefully as she stepped into the now open doorway. "If you hear a body falling or smell burning flesh..." She trailed off, straightening her shoulders and looking into the room with resolute eyes. "Get Sydney. He holds my medical proxy and will know how to safely get me where I need to go. Don't try anything yourself, because I don't want to send voltage through you."
She disappeared into the room with a soft click of heels, finding the switch and the computer holding access to it unattended. One hand stroked up the side of the tower with a light caress as she murmured softly to it, tendrils of her power wrapping around the hard drive and network cables. "Oh," she breathed out as the club's secrets started to unfold behind her eyes. "You beautiful, beautiful baby. I'm so sorry." Her tone was regretful as she opened the link in her own mind wider, scraping the French club's secrets into her own servers. She dug deeper and deeper as she slithered around and under and through the myriad bytes of security as she hollowed everything out, leaving behind pristinely intact security walling off absolutely nothing.
At the same time, her left hand was directing lightning - electricity - into the physical switch keeping the lockout in place. This was apologized to as well, but as a simple physical device it didn't have quite the same... awareness to her senses that a computer did.
Directing her energy like this was a gamble, but a necessary one. Delicate, careful. Exceedingly dangerous. But she didn't plan on leaving empty handed.
Sarah looked up uneasily as the lights in the hallway flickered and popped, leaving her staring into the sickly glow of emergency lighting. Her visibility shot, she called softly back into the room, "How are we doing in there? The lights don't look like they're going to hold out much longer, and I'm pretty useless in the dark."
The query touched her mind and was shunted to the side as Darcy increased the voltage into the physical switch. Her eyes were shut, but she could feel the fuzzing at the edges of her mindscape as she raced towards her limits. She had.. most.. wait!
A hidden partition revealed itself in the drive, and she started to delicately dismantle those securities too, barely noticing when the physical lock finally gave up, shuttered windows and frozen doors finally offering the huddled partygoers upstairs a hint of relief and escape. The electricity sparking from her hands trickled to a stop, livid lichtenberg figures tracing starkly up her left forearm and fading the farther up her arm and neck they went before disappearing into her hairline. She was scraping the last of the data out when her fatigue caught up to her, exhaustion overpowering her delicate control and flinging the link between mind and data and her own private server wide open. Darcy scrabbled furiously for just another few seconds of control, but her efforts were futile as the feedback overwhelmed her. Lights flared into a supernova before dimming into almost darkness, finally settling on a dimmer-than-usual brightness.
The echo of her pain sizzled across the psychic link connecting the team to one another, twined with a bitten-off moan of agony that sounded in the physical world as she crumpled to the floor with a thud and the clatter of things being pulled from the desk in the wake of her drop.
Sarah winced as the sensation ripped across the telepathic link. She took one last look down the hallway and ducked into the room with Darcy. "Darcy's down," she said across the link. "What are the odds that I end up in the medlab overnight if I pick her up?"
"Get her. I trust in your healing factor." Kevin said through the link. "I'm about to run into Fitzroy. If you don't hear back from me, get yourself and her out, as soon as you can." His grim determination echoed over the telepathic bridge. "Good work, both of you."
