10/25 - Jean, Creed, Logan
10/25/2008
Logfile from Emma.
=NYC= Chelsea - Manhattan
Situated between the raw snarl of Hell's Kitchen and the artsy uniqueness of The Village, Chelsea's general nature is that of its gentler neighbor. But Chelsea is more, say, vocally, pointedly modern than /gentle/. The space between apartments and brownstones and restaurants has been colonized by art galleries and, at night, the streets and nightclubs are packed. The area is particularly friendly to the gay community and you can expect an occasional parade -- and a certain slant to that nightlife.
A note, sent through unconventional means, to arrive at a rather more conventional time, written in graceful script and containing a message that isn't so graceful, has wrought this. Days of living "on the run" really should have more of an affect on Emma's maintenance. It really isn't fair. She at least isn't in heels, favoring boots instead in addition to leather pants and the trademark piece of Crazy Emma ensemble, the corset top. It is covered over with a trench-coat style duster that keeps some of the grime of the streets off. She waits in the alleyway-doorway of a building that has been abandoned to crime and neglect, not even bothering to restrain her powers. Trap and suffocate them. They reach out to pilfer through thoughts and manipulate emotions of those few who have yet to flee the uncertain terror that has been building in the area.
Several days' fruitless, frustrated, seething searching, only to have a note arrive? Jean Grey's appearance may be graceful and poised, hair a flash of rich auburn above warm wool and leather in shaded charcoal, but her mind hisses and crackles with banked flames. She too favours boots, useful for picking her way safely through the addict-detritus of the alley, and head and mind lift in turn as her thoughts contact the outer fringes of Emma's. << For a woman inclined to send notes, you've been difficult to find. >> she notes, shields reinforcing themselves behind the words like city gates closing in the wake of a parley messanger. << The hard-to-get routine works best on susceptible -men-. >>
<< So sorry, darling. I've been rather... wanted the past few days. I do hope you weren't inconveniaced. >> The words and nuances are totally Emma's, but overlaying them are a seconday cadence that is older and darker. A weight of telepathy shifts toward the contact, like a flooded tide held in abeyance by a seawall.
<< I'd be sympathetic, >> sparks the Phoenix's mind, as she trails one gloved hand along the rough brick of the alley wall, << If I didn't think it was all your own doing. >> High and forbidding are the walls guarding the inner keep of her mind, leaving the lone little messanger to flicker their flag towards that dangerous sea. "You're playing a dangerous game, Emma," says Jean aloud for the first time, refuge sought in the distance of the spoken word.
Moments pass between thought and sound, and by the time Emma steps into the alleyway, it is with almost insolent lethary. She turns on the ball of her foot to face the other woman, a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth that looks fixed in place by crazy glue. Her hair is separated into two tails that hang over her shoulder, giving her smooth faced mask an even younger cast. She holds her hands out at her side, emphasizing her defenselessness. "It's the only kind to play." Shadows churn and send sprays of sea foam over the wall.
"Some games shouldn't be played at all," sayeth the red-haired Cassandra, a mental crack in her gates opening to send out a few scouts, sweeping careful spyglasses across the darkened mental terrain of the White Queen. "You, of all people, should know what he can do. This isn't Shaw we're talking about."
Emma's pretty, smiling lips curl up into a momentary snarl. "No. I'm not. /He/ was a narrow man. I much prefer this. So much more... 'scope for the imagination'." The expression dissolves back into pleasant blankness, and Emma blinks, her eyes shifting as if seeing the scouts moving from cover to cover. Darkness seeps out of the ground around those tendrils of power lige fog, obscuring them from view.
Jean stills at this conversational strangeness, frozen like a solitary lion that's just heard the yippings of a hyena pack. Physical sign of inwards unease, her hand lifts from the wall to wrap about herself instead. "So what is it that you're imagining then," she says, less question than a response made out of a desire to say -something-. "And why send me a message with my students to do it."
Emma's is the first move. The shadows rush through a gate thrown open and sweep past the first defenses to fill Jean's thoughts with memories both familiar and not. Anger, despair, bitterness, lonliness--the emotions eat the memories from the inside and sour the stomach. << You took something precious from me. I'm returning the favor. >>
<< I took nothing you hadn't already stolen first. >> Quick and swift, although not as swift as the incursion, reinforcements scramble, and the thick dark smoke and orange flame of oil fires blossoms all along mental parapets, ready to repel the dark rush with the light of years past. But Jean is not the pure and unsullied beacon she was then: her own darkness swirls, plucked by echoed emotions.
The smoke curling up from those parapets joins with the shadows creeping across the ground and thickening the sky, drawn in by a hand more experienced and finessed that either of them. << Oh, ho. No, little bird. I do not steal that which is rightfully mine. >>
<< There is nothing right about you. >> Darkness and light, smoke and fire, all whirl up and aroung, an additional protective mantle around walls that seem much more thin than they did a moment before. But, physical and metaphysical, Jean sets her heels and does not move. << You are nothing more than a parasite. A ghost who refuses to move on. >> Strength builds as Jean falls back on the familiar bolster of righteous ire, hands clenching inside their leather gloves. << So, now that you have a host foolish enough to take you on, what do you -want-. >>
Emma slinks forward, the empty smile tugging at her lips. << Life, of course. Power, freedom. You are so foolish, blinded by the outdated morality that does not adapt to superior rights to life. You and your crippled mentor, with your crippled views. >>
The wall is at Jean's back, somatic feeding into telepathic to reinforce the wall around her mind as Emma, or that which rides her, makes her approach. << A sewer rat is a champion survivor. I wouldn't call it superior. >> she swats back, a weak volley as she attempts to edge away back towards the alley mouth.
<< When it is the only thing left, it doesn't really matter who failed to call it what. >> Emma continues her forward momentum, each step deliberate and precise. Much like the form that strides from the telepathic shadows, all coiling, boiling smoke and darkness, coalesced into a man-shaped form that drags shimmering power at his fingertips, which hover inches above the ground.
And Jean continues her cautious scootching in reverse, not turning her back on Emma and her shadow even in retreat. It is decidedly a retreat -- there is confidence, there is hubris, and then there is what would be required to single-handedly face Emma Frost with the backing of Amahl Farouk's hand upon her mind when one is not Charles Xavier. << If that comforts you in your decay, who am I to take that from you? >> is the next salvo fired off, Jean's mind drawing in about itself protectively. "If you don't actually have anything worth my time, Emma, I'll leave you to your new... business partner."
<< You still haven't figured it out, have you, little bird? >> the shadow voice mocks in a rumbling, bass voice that vibrates the shielding of her mind. << I am not the emaciated remains you left for dead before. >> The soundwaves of his voice seek fissures in those walls, nails tipping telepathic fingers. They sink in and suddenly reverse course, not tugging her shielding away, but rather shaking the totality of her mind. The landscape blurs.
The landscape blurs, and Jean's fingers blood themselves against the rough brick of the wall, her cautious retreat grinding to a halt. The rending screech of twisting metal echoes through the mind's ear at the assault upon her shields, flares of unguarded inner flame glimpsed through the breaches that tear open and seal themselves in desperate haste, the reinforcements serving only to breach new areas in turn. << So you've stolen someone else's power! >> is flung at him, no longer an orderly volley of shot against an encroaching force, but a quick and scattered peppering of shot that seeks only to distract. << We'll still bring you down again. >> Her hands at once are hers and those of some strange puppet's, feeling too large, too small, too alien all at once as she tries to force the one into her pocket, seeking the comforting shape of a panic button. Disoriented, caught between the physical and the astral, the going is slow.
<< We? There is no we here any longer. There is me, and there is you, >> Shadow King boasts, expanding and thinning to capture her projections. They push him back, but are quickly gripped in a shadowed-hold that begins to retrace the trajectory, inching back to Jean like snakes along a grappling rope.
Dizzy as a drunk, without any of the fun of alcohol, Jean's hand inches blindly for her pocket, finds it, and begins to root around, the pain of bloody fingertips pressing against shaped plastic colouring her mind with a fine red haze, dimly present on the fringes of a consciousness focused almost entirely on the shadowy figure as it slips and wavers between the planes, resisting the attempts to draw her into his domain not unlike a wild-caught hawk bating at an untrusted falconer. << Bullshit. >> she snarls, and seeks to rake at him with a hooked talon of thought, swiped at eyes and other sensitivities. << Do you think I'd come to you without letting it be known? >> Closer, closer... her fingers have found the right corner of the plastic mass. The button can't be far.
The swipe scores, rushing through the insubstantial form and leaving fiery-rakes across his chest. Emma gasps and stumbles, her hand clapping out against the alley-wall. Underneath the darkness, a bright, white spark flares, then is buried under an avalanche of darkness that races to catch Jean again and finish the attempt to pull her into /his/ reality.
Jean is not the only one with back up, however, though the loyalty of hers is not strained to the point of breaking. Elsewhere, a pair of field glasses are dropped, and a petite woman looks to her companion. Luke's white-knuckled hands grip the railing and he lets a slow hissing breath out before nodding his head once. Kara is gone almost before his head lifts again to peer anxiously at the scene unfolding across the street.
Click. Unwittingly timed to allow a potential fine confusion between opposing groups of rescuers, Jean's fingertip finds the button, presses it, and then falls away, nerveless, as the bright-fledged presence that shares her mind abruptly seizes the decision-making as the echo of the strike bleeds back to her. No longer -drawn- to the Astral Plane, the Phoenix leaps towards it, joyful with the scent of blood and battle in her mind. (A spark not entirely disimilar to the bright white has a moment's this-is-a-really-terrible-idea appearance before it, too, is subsumed.) Again she strikes, searing light and flame, as her eyes glint and a flame-haired figure appears on the Astral Plane as its ignored body slides down to rest against the alley wall.
It takes Kara longer to scramble her phone out of her pocket and turn it on. But not /much/ longer. Her call is routed almost immediately to the nerve center of the Inner Circle, and into the Rook's hands. But while her signal speeds along, the battle moves to arenas where neither pawn nor X-Man is equipped to follow. Emma's body follows suit, and on that insubstantial plane where power and substance is measured by the strength of will and thought, her astral form appears, draped in black, and covered with the faintest sheen. The shadows weave through her skin, as if /it/ were the shadow and he were the form. The landscape is dark and bleak, frightening, nightmare shapes around them gray on black on blacker still.
This close to the heart of the Shadow King's domain, Jean is bereft of her usual lit-from-all-angles white space to situate herself in. Twenty six years' training and the Phoenix step into this first challenge on the field, and she soon blazes with a self-contained light, ordering her own self and mind first in a mantra learned at a wheelchair-bound knee. She lifts her head only after this, taking in Emma and her shadow-suit. (Or is it the Shadow in an Emma-suit.) "So we come to this plane. Will you tell me what you want?"
While Jean mantras, the shadows grow, encasing Emma's avatar like a sinuous second skin. "I want," Shadow King answers her, "to strip your mind from your body, and leave it here. Broken, bleeding, and eviscerated. As you did me." Emma approaches, her bare feet finding ground easily beneath each step.
"You presume that I would be inclined to -stay- here," is Jean's answer, paired with an alarmingly fey smile as Emma approaches. Thorns and blades blossom from the ground at a twitch of a thought, hedged about her in a defensive ring that offers no injury unless the seeker should press on. "Why do you fear your own death?"
"Ah, yet how would you escape except through another?" Emma stills her advance, and Amahl Farouk examines the hedgerow defense. "And yet you deny me the same. You are hypocritical, Grey. I approve."
Each step is just as desperate as the step before it. Boot heels scuff against concrete and asphalt as any pretense of stealth or anonymity are abandoned. Logan rounds into the ally in a mortal hurry, taking deep breaths, but moving too fast to make any sense of it. When his eyes land on the downed Jean, he stalls, worry, horror, and most importantly confusion in his eyes. "Jean!?" he calls out.
"If you were to kill me, I would opt to pass on," Jean answers, false serenity in her smile and the stillness of a face framed by the bright flame of her hair. "To linger, as you have, requires an act of will. Do you honestly believe you could force me to live this half-life? Do you fancy yourself God of this place?" The hedge thickens, bristling with added points and the dull gleam of a knife edge, over and over. It begins to grow, seeking the not!sky above them.
Sabretooth hates Logan's voice. While the smaller man is busy being so confused and emotive over his collapsed love, Victor does something about that. Lurching out of a shadow, where he has been waiting and watching, he lashes out with a powerful arm in a clothesline, designed to catch Logan under the chin and shut him up. Sabretooth is dressed oddly, with his blonde hair tied back neatly and in a tight black top instead of the rotting carcass of a leather coat he usually wears.
Jean is breathing, slow and even, her pulse likewise slowed to match. Aside from the fact that her boneless slide down to the ground has left her with her fine wool coat well splattered with what we're really hoping is just mud, and aside from small wellings of blood on the tips of one hands' fingers, she seems quite unaware of the men near her, but quite unharmed as well. Hopefully she stays this way.
"No, not God. Master," Farouk says calmly, lifting Emma's hand and with it, her power to form an equally shiny blade. This one slips in between the tangling knots and thorns of the bush and slices upwards. The intrusion of the lesser minds is a flicker of distraction. Physically, Emma is still upright, eyes staring blankly ahead.
Logan's sense catch sight of Creed just an instant before the strike. Unlucky for him... that isn't quite fist enough to prevent a well prepared strike from Creed, even for the Wolverine. The arm connects, winding Logan instantly and sending him hard into the brick to his side, metal beneath skin clanging as the brick cracks where his head impacts. The semblance of a defense begins to gather in his form... but it isn't ready yet.
The thump of flesh against flesh against metal is satisfying. Sabretooth does not relent. As Logan thumps into the bricks, the much taller man rushes after him. A combat boot comes up with the terrorist's weight behind it, in an unrepentant attempt at catching Wolverine's adamantium-laced skull between a boot and a hard place. Creed's attack is more focused. There's no snarling, no slavering for blood. This is a far more focused Sabretooth.
Far away, another sort of focus is blooming in a flurry of calls and orders. Equipment is being handed out capable of taking on just about anything they may find at the scene.
"WRAHH!!" Logan's head twists just before impact, so that the thicker adamantium is aligned to lessen the damage. From the expression on his face and the blood trickling down his nose, though, it still hurt like hell. The brick cracks some more, some of them even beginning to give a little inwards. As some blood begins to film over the outside of one of his eyes, they harden against Creed, and that defense he was trying to gather finally forms together, a pair of SNIKTS and two slash from Logan flail towards Creeds inner thy, and hopefully freedom.
It's more of a distraction to Jean, her concentration wavering as a "Logan..." escapes from unreal lips. The hedge falters, and parts beneath the oncoming blade as lesser metal bows to adamantium's edge. She refocuses, cerebral pain spiking at her as the blade makes it through, and a sudden burst of thought fires off a wall of flying metal right at the invader... but it's not as tight as it could be.
Smoked quartzed shielding flashes against the attack, but in the process, the hold Shadow King has on the arena in which the fight wavers.
Creed stumbles backwards, sprays of blood rising up as Logan's claws find his leg. His jaw tightens and his fists open, his own claws being prepared for use. With his right leg wounded, but already beginning to try to knit itself shut to staunch the flow of blood, he waits until Logan is starting to rise before lunging at him again. It's a flurry of motion, the huge mutant's knee being thrust into the smaller man's stomach in a leap, before both fists come down on his back, in an attempt to spike him back down to the cement.
Jean regroups in that small waver, once more gathering herself to herself. The blades vanish entirely in a flare of the flames surrounding her, before Jean herself winks out, teleported to a vantage point above and behind him as she hefts nothing so high-tech as a large rock, flung from a height in a meticulous calculation of physics equations that swirl around her mind, forced into reality here by will alone. Jean, meanwhile, seeks an escape while the rock is in motion.
While Logan's own healing factor is working overtime right now, Creed has the clear advantage: Logan gathers himself up, but sways with openings showing clearly in his guard. Openings that Creeds knee finds easily and air leaves his lungs hard when the fists connect to. On his way to the ground however, his hand reaches for Creed's other foot, a hard pull aiming to pull the dressed up feral with him. Logan's thoughts ring out wanting to comfort Jean after hearing his name, but circumstances wont let him speak it just yet. Vocal cords require breath, and he's having a hard time getting that right now.
Funny how for all of the advantage in the world, being dumped on your ass tends to even up a fight. Sabretooth's injured leg, still not nearly completely healed is the only one left for him to stand on, and that buckles. He lands in a heap and immediately begins kicking at Logan. Three thrusting slams of his heel meant for Logan's face, followed by lifting that boot high and slashing it downard like a sledgehammer at the back of his head. It's the brawler's way of saying 'please let go of my other leg.'
Amahl Farouk has more than Jean's twenty-odd years of experience. This has been his prison cell for more years than the two woman's lives put together. The darkness that shrouds the landscape comes alive at Jean's escape, coalescing under his command to first find, then pinpoint her. The shadows roar, streaking through the rock and obliterating it, sending searing memory through it, pitching Jean backwards in time into space and in the middle of another rock's devastating consequences.
"No!" The cry is one of pure despair, torn from a throat that would be left raw and hoarse, were there anything tangible to it. Ignored in the alleyway, Jean's body convulses: once, twice, thrice, as memories warped and shattered, tainted by all the recriminations of all the midnight hours since that nightlike day on the Pegasus II, go pouring through her mind to wrack her body. "No!" she cries again, and abruptly spends what twenty years' experience -can- grant her: escape. She hurls herself out of Farouk's realm, to lie gasping and disoriented on the ground, eyes for the skies beneath a blurring of tears.
"NO!" Jean's cry is echoed in the bitter-scoured tones of the psychic-form Shadow King, and Emma's power, controled and directed by the master parasite, chase that bright flight. Hot on her mind's heels, the dark and terrible power nips and burns with cold fury. << I WILL NOT BE DENIED! >>
Logan takes the three kicks to his face, as he begins to try and twist the grip on Creed's leg into a more advantages position, but he has to abandon that in order to roll away from the sledgehammer. With his head just beginning to heal enough to get rid of the seeing 8 creeds, it wouldn't do to end up in the same position again! He rolls away, but doesn't stay away long, pushing himself up and lunging recklessly towards Creed (never quite making it to anything resembling a stand, or even a crouch.) Claws begin slashing and stabbing wildly as he does, no protection afforded for himself what-so-ever to prevent retaliation from Creed. This is... likely to get messy.
For the first time in the combat, Sabretooth lets out a roar. He is tackled backwards, with Logan's claws making a bloody mess of that nice black shirt of his. He rolls with the smaller man, his own claws lashing wildly as they stain the cement rather dramatically. Mess!
Mess! Of a more metaphorical sort, as Jean lies disoriented and with soul scrubbed raw and oozing, still sensing the howling chase of the Shadow King after her. Telepathy flickers, flutters, and is then pushed aside as useless, weak for all of her finesse. But the Phoenix is not out of options yet...
<< LOGAN. >> comes a command, as the weaker power still proves enough for other uses, even as telekinesis seeks and finds the shoring supports holding up the abandoned brick factory that forms the alley wall. << RUN. >>
The Shadow King sinks back into the limitations of the physical world, and Emma's mind. Pouring incoherent rage and fear into her thoughts and pulling her to her feet. She shuffles closer under his whip, and murder is telegraphed in her motions.
<< NO! >> Logan denies the order, mind suddenly filled with two very serpented rage filtered panics with hunks of himself and Creed decorating the landscape, but despite his minds best fight against it, Jean's command overwrites his own will, and he abandons his attack on Creed and begins to flee with an automaton's response, as best as his remaing tissue can manage, at least.
Jean waits for several torturous seconds, giving herself time to be listened to and Emma time to shuffle closer and closer still, before, without even wasting the concentration to confirm the all-clear, she reaches out to those earlier marked supports and struts, and blasts them apart with pure telekinetic force. Her eyes open just in time to watch the collapse start, and look to find Emma's as the bricks start to rain down. << History repeats itself... >> is a last off-kilter thought, before her eyes squeeze shut again.
Without a leash to pull him or send him away, Sabretooth stays on task. When Logan flees, the bloodied monster rises. His clothes are shredded, his blonde hair matted with blood and mussed out of it's neat ponytail. He gives chase, to make sure the runt is not going to interfere. The fact that he absolutely despises the other man is also something of a factor.
The first trembles are enough to pull Luke, watching a street over, upright. The next second, he's turning to speed down the roof-access stairs, leaving a bewildered Kara behind. He will be too late.
Emma's eyes widen as she and her mental companion look first at Jean, then upright. The scream that rips from her throat is purely hers as Shadow King's focuses his useless attention upright, as if he could turn psychic shields into physical ones by sheer force of will. Emma throws her hands over her head and drops to her knees under the crushing fall of bricks and metal and cement.
Well. Duh. Man... I keep losing characters.