apocalypsehowcomm | Event

Entry tags:

Event - For Sport

For Sport

➥ Breaking It In

(cw: mentions of apparent mutilation of/violence against animals and animal death)

The conference room on the upper floors of ADI HQ is bright, airy, perhaps unnaturally so for the grim tidings that bring people here today. Those who have recently arrived will be ushered to the meeting by ADI employees or by Bonnie. It's not just the newest arrivals, but some other people who seem to be longer-term employees. The room is rather large and arranged like a lecture hall. Bonnie takes up a seat near the back, looking somewhat uncomfortable, but smiling at anyone who greets her.

At 9 AM sharp, a person steps into the room and heads to the front. They have curly hair and are wearing a gray business suit with a dark blue bow-tie. When they address the group at large, they speak in a calm, measured tone. "Good morning. I appreciate some of you may be here more reluctantly than others, but… there are matters of import to all of us to discuss. Some of you may have seen me already. I am Reyes Amador, assistant to Ms. Lehrer, the head of ADI. Earlier this week I sent out a message regarding some unusual activity at Coffin Beach. Thank you to those who investigated."

Their eyes seem to find the people who did, in fact, go looking, whether they found something or not.

"We have determined the creatures are shape-shifters. Some sort of, em... horse thing. In lieu of a term they might give themselves, we are referring to them as kelpies. Given the locations these were found, as well as other information into disappearances and deaths and mutilations of sea mammals in the area, we believe the kelpies are coming from the Essex Bay area to the north.

"For those willing to assist, we are mounting a reconnaissance mission. This is not intended to engage kelpies, just to find out where they are and how we might best approach an attack. All supplies, transportation, and monetary compensation will be provided. We will meet at ADI HQ in main lobby at 6 PM three days from now. Essex Bay is a remote site and conservation area, accessible only by boat, and not without a scientific permit. As you may guess, we will be traveling under cover of nightfall." Reyes smiles.

"I will be accepting questions about further details. I understand this is the first mission away for many of you, and you may have concerns. I will do my best to allay them. Bonnie also has some experience in these missions, if you would like first-hand accounts. Please also feel free to discuss amongst yourselves if this is a mission you think you are ready for. You will not be required to attend, nor penalized in any way if you do not. There is additional work to be done here, both with continuing examinations of the bodies we have and other efforts unrelated."

➥ Move the Goalposts

(cw: kidnapping, violence, sadism)

It happens away from the safety of ADI HQ one evening or so early in the morning, it's still dark, away from the potential for help, maybe. One moment, you (and possibly someone you're with) are walking, and the next, you will find someone has grabbed you and slammed you into the nearest surface. For those unable to fight back, a cloth will be held to their noses and mouths--chloroform, something to knock them out. For those able to fight or even to escape thanks to not actually being corporeal, they'll find that it is a trio of people who have attacked them. They wear jagged smiles and they're all much too sharp around the edges beneath their clothes. Those who saw the kelpies at Coffin Beach may recognize these people as something like them.

"Run, rabbit, run," one of the group says, voice rolling out like a gurgling tide.

Those who run will be chased and, if caught, chloroformed. Perhaps you're lucky, though. Perhaps you can race them back to safety. Or perhaps you'll find help along the way to protect you. Either way, the kelpies are relentless in their pursuit unless one of their number is injured or their prey can make it to ADI. The kelpies seem reluctant to actually enter ADI HQ or their housing, and will break off pursuit there, slinking back to the shadows.

➥ Curveball

(cw: kidnapping, violence/violence and mutilation against apparent animals, sadism, body horror, transformation, potential for claustrophobia)

For those unlucky enough to be caught, they'll find themselves waking amongst mud and bodies. Living, breathing bodies, thankfully. You have been tied up, but not gagged, and left with a group of other captives. A nearby fire casts light over everything, showing a large group of naked people with long, scraggly hair hauling a seal up out of the water. The animal fights them with a cunning that might seem odd, but the kelpies just laugh at it. They get it up near the fire, one raises a knife, and stabs into the seal, dragging the blade down its belly.

The seal bellows and then goes limp, seeming to collapse in on itself. It isn't long before a woman is drawn from the skin, shaking, fighting, wild-eyed with terror as her captors shove her around the fire in their own game. A few others turn their attention to the captives who are just beginning to wake and move about. They approach, one grabbing the skin the woman had come out of, others grabbing more skins from a nearby pile.

"Hush, hush... you'll have your freedom soon... while you can swim." The words come just before the kelpie slices your bonds and throws the skin over you.

The skin grapples your body, twisting tight around you, encasing and restraining. Your body is different now, thick and round, ungainly in the mud. Your legs have fused together and your arms have shrunk to thin flippers. This is not your body, you can feel how foreign it is, how you're crammed into the too-small confines of it... but you have instincts to go with it. Water is freedom! Or it's an attempt at freedom. It's either swim for your lives as some mockery of a selkie or stay and see how it feels to be cut open. Luckily for you, you'll find yourself psychically linked to the other selkies around you. Maybe you can do something together? Best think fast because the kelpies are setting their sights on new prey to chase once they've finished with their latest victim.

➥ Below the Belt

(cw: violence/violence and mutilation against apparent animals, body horror, gore)

The journey to Essex Bay isn't a long one, but it's somewhat treacherous as a small group of powerboats make their way into the refuge. The mission is simple: find where the kelpies are and see if there are any strategic points of-

Was that a seal? There are, in fact, many seals that pop up once boats enter the bay. The animals might seem to have an unusual cunning about them. Will they lead you somewhere useful? Perhaps try to flop themselves into your boats? The point is, there are seals accosting you in the middle of the night, and that's weird. Perhaps they have something they want to communicate.

Or was that a horse? A crocodile? There's something that seems to have noticed you, and it's smart enough that it's going to try to tip you and anyone else in your boat into the water rather than trying to engage otherwise. Sit down, you'll rock the boat.

➥ Sticky Wicket

(cw: potential for severe burns/injury, pain)

ADI is engaged in far more than one mission at a time, and for those not dealing with Essex Bay, or even before that, there are pick-ups to handle. Artifacts, you've been told as you're paired with someone else, whether you like it or not. The mission is simple: go to the Docks, collect a package from a locker there, and return with it to ADI. You've been provided an exact location and a code for the combination lock. The section of the Docks you've entered seems to be one with a lot of empty warehouses covered in graffiti, but the locker is there, something heavily reinforced and designed to be virtually impossible to get into. There's evidence that people have tried to gain entry without success.

Your code works, though, and you have your prize! You've been given strict instructions not to open the box the artifact is in… but there's nothing technically stopping you now, and there is a strange pull toward it.

Those who can't help themselves will find they have just picked up… some piece of sports gear! It looks wholly innocuous. Touch even a finger to it, though, and a horrific, searing pain will consume your entire body as 3rd-degree burns bloom across the skin where you've touched your artifact.

Or maybe you have a will of iron and sense enough not to touch strange, supernatural objects. What should be an easy mission is quickly derailed by some young punk darting out of an alleyway to try to steal your package. Or, at the very least, knock it from your hands. The youth is not alone, either. You've found yourself on someone's 'turf,' and they want what you've got. Are you cruel enough to let them have it?

➥ Mod Notes

BREAKING IT IN (21 July): Both Reyes and Bonnie will be available to answer questions that characters might have or listen to their complaints. Please put "NPC Requested" somewhere in your top-level response if you would like a mod response. For characters who can access their supernatural abilities and have some measure of supernatural spidey sense, both Bonnie and Reyes will register as off, but in different ways. Characters are welcome to attempt to use whatever powers they believe will work on the NPCs. There are potential IC consequences for this.
MOVE THE GOALPOSTS (23-24 July): Characters are welcome to capture or kill the kelpies. The only information they will be capable of providing to those who capture them and attempt to compel them for information is that they consider the entirety of the Massachusetts coast as their 'hunting grounds.' Whether that's true or not, it's what they believe.
CURVEBALL (23-24 July): Kidnapped characters will become seals! Sort of. Psychic seals who are extremely ill-fitted to the skins they're in. The only way to escape their current state is to be cut open and pulled out. As soon as they start to flee, the kelpies will chase them. Those who are captured will be cut out, toyed with, and shoved back into a skin again and again to continue the chase until they simply can't go on anymore.
BELOW THE BELT (24 July - night): Characters may encounter their selkie-fied comrades! Unfortunately, while the selkies can communicate with each other psychically, they are incapable of human speech. They are also being actively hunted by the kelpies. Characters may kill any kelpies they come across. Capture will not be possible in this case while they're in their horse forms. If PCs do not eradicate the kelpie threat that night, NPCs who have joined the mission will do so. Unfortunately, reconnaissance has become engagement, whether they like it or not.
STICKY WICKET (21 July - 5 August): You may select any piece of sporting gear you'd like for your character to pick up as long as it can fit in a reasonably-sized box. The pain associated with the burning will last only as long as a character is touching the object. Holding onto it for more than a minute will likely result in coming very close to death. Characters with inorganic appendages will find that the artifact will start to melt that appendage, whatever it is made of and it will still, somehow, hurt while it does it.
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The snark gets a twinkle of amusement from him. "I tend to think it's best to gauge someone's welfare against their own benchmarks whenever possible."

Except when it comes to, say, Malcolm Bright, then he's always worrying about where Malcolm sits compared to the imaginary universal standard.

"As a fifty-nine year old man with the beginnings of arthritis and a knee replacement on the horizon, I'm feeling pretty damn wrung out myself."

"I told you I have joint problems. What I mean is that I have a chronic condition where my body doesn't really know how to make collagen. Which means my joints don't have the connective tissue they need to stay together. I dislocate and subluxate and bruise like a pear and...it's a bad time all around."

She removes the splint from one of her thumbs to show off exactly what that means in practice, at a different joint than the injured ones.

"So, I have a sense of being an enemy of my body at the best of times. I sneeze and a shoulder goes out. I try to run, I'm likely to roll an ankle. As Warren Zevon put it, 'my shit's fucked up'. But right now, it feels different, somehow. Not like I'm fighting my body, but like..." As she wraps her thumb again, there's a thoughtful hum. "...my radio is tuned between stations. The signal's not dialed in. Something's off, but it's not the usual type of off for me."

His first thought is a relieved It's not just me. He'd thought maybe it was shock, a physical reaction to trauma. There's probably some of that in there, too, but the way she describes it is too familiar for it to be coincidence. He felt the same way when they forced him into the skins, physically disconnected from the body he was supposed to pilot.

Gil wraps his hands around his mug, determinedly enjoying the sensation of having fingers, even if they feel strange.

"Me too," he says quietly. "That... out of tune feeling."

He's not going to apologize for her condition, make sympathetic noises about it. She's lived with it this long and it doesn't change anything about this conversation, not really. "I'll confess, I'm wildly out of my depth with all of this. Magic, apocalypses, eldritch powers. I handle tangible crimes and criminals back home. The most surreal thing I ever did was arrest a serial killer."

"I'm the personal assistant to a tech CEO--not even a cop. I mean. I've been kidnapped, back where I come from, because of who my boss is, but that should not have been experience relevant to working for ADI. Like...there are actual superheroes and villains, back home. I don't understand why I'd be the one brought over here."

She huffs, busying herself with her coffee for a moment. "There are people here who do know what they're doing. They have information, experience. It's best to try to learn from them, I suppose."

That at least partially answers the question of where her baseline for weird is compared to his own. This different worlds business is going to be something he spends some time wrapping his head around. "I don't understand why so many kids have been dragged into this either."

He does not like it one goddamn bit. He takes a pull of his coffee, studying her carefully for a moment.

"You weren't helpless out there, you know. You weren't worthless. You kept yourself alive. That's worth a lot."

Her gaze drops, unable to make eye contact after he says that. Her shoulders curl slightly, defensively, as if she's waiting for the "But,..."

And when it doesn't come, there's a hint of a bitter laugh. "Yes, well. I didn't see any option but to survive. I'm used to treading water, Lieutenant."

That last word, his title rather than a name, it's also a self-defense mechanism. Formal language and titles and honorifics as a form of distancing technique. She's clearly not used to people being kind, to being offered grace at all.

He's used to prickly and defensive. He hasn't met a single person--not a young one, anyway--who hasn't been that way for a reason.

Gil nods once, acknowledging her words without agreeing. "I've met a lot of people over the course of my career who've been through a lot of different kinds of hell. It always seemed to me like surviving was the braver choice to make."

"I don't do it because I'm brave. If anything, it's out of spite, because drowning under everything is letting the world win."

There's a pause, she glances up as if waiting to see if she's said too much.

"You know, here, I don't have student loan debt. Or medical bills. Or a famous...infamous...boss who treats me like office furniture."

That gets another flicker of amusement. "Spite can be a hell of a motivator too. God knows I've relied on it more than once."

His expression as she continues stays calm, attentive, nonjudgmental. "You're actually not the first person who's told me something like that. They said being here was a relief. Even with all this going on, it felt like an escape. Give it a week, a month. Maybe you'll feel differently. Maybe you'll be more sure. Nothing says you can't choose to stay here if that's what you end up wanting."

"I think in the end, it'll be the same level of difficulty, just in different areas. And I think I'll survive regardless of if that's true or not. But, uh, enough about me, Lieutenant. What are your thoughts on all this?"

Deflection, of course. But it's polite. A softly shut door rather than slamming it in his face, so to speak.

He's smart enough not to push. A person doesn't open up after one major trauma and a follow-up chat. If anything, it makes some people more tight-lipped.

"Gil," he says, with a tiny smile, one that fades quickly. After a while, he sighs. "I wish this had gone a different way. I didn't think I'd..."

He almost says rack up a body count, but it's a little too blunt, his feelings on that front still a little too personal. "I didn't think I'd ever go through something like this. Never even crossed my mind, probably not even in a dream. Those things did need to be stopped. I still don't know if I agree that they needed to be slaughtered."

"Alright, one step back: do you think there is a clear-cut line somewhere, between 'that which needs to be killed' and 'that which can be allowed to live'?"

She's curious how he's coming at it, if he thinks the inhuman things what were kidnapping and torturing people might have been worth leaving alive.

"No." The question itself is simple enough to answer. The moral tangle behind it, less so. "There are plenty of humans I think the world would be better off without too. There's a difference between thinking the world would be better off without a person and acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Why not apprehend them? Why not at least consider it?"

He rubs one eye with a fingertip, wincing as he bumps the bruise on his face. "I'm not a soldier. I'm a cop. I made a promise to uphold the law. I need to be more subject to it than most people, not less. Murder is murder, even if you're killing a killer."

Gil flashes her a tired little smile. "That serial killer I mentioned--well, he was the first of two, but that's not the point--when he was convicted, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. He had a big room to himself there, a Persian rug, a desk, personal books, privileges. He was alive and, by all accounts, thriving. I saw the toll it took on his family. His murders, his trial, the media circus, the trauma of it all. I spend half the time I think about him wishing he was dead. But it's not my right to take that step without the presence of an imminent threat."

He takes a long drink of coffee, practically savoring how bad it is and wishing for his office to go with it. "I killed some of those things," he says bluntly. "The other option was watching innocents die. That's still taking a life, even if it's an evil one."

"You'd make a piss-poor superhero with that attitude. There's at least one villain in my world who became a villain just to make that point." The one she's working for.

"But...on some level, thinking about the moral stuff in this case, my mind gets quibbly over the question of 'were those things people?' Like, there's a scale here. I have absolutely zero qualms about the idea of taking antibiotics to kill bacteria that are harming me. Right? I don't have an issue with the idea of cutting back poison ivy off a path that people walk. If there was some sort of animal attacking people, something that had gone bad, either because of rabies or something else, I'd be okay with it being killed. People..."

Her coffee's cooled enough that she can gulp it while forming the next thought, instead of sipping. "Both 'redemption' and 'repentance' are really loaded words, but our capacity to understand harm done and do better, that's part of what sets us apart, really. Do you think there was anything within the kelpies that was not invested in torturing us and feeding on our fear?"

"I don't know," he says. He used to be so afraid of those words when he was young. How it would make him look to say them, whether or not he would lose the respect of the person asking the question. He's long past the need to pretend he has knowledge of everything. Half of life, he's found, is figuring things out and then coming across something that forces you to try and figure things out again.

"That I don't is going to bother me. It's something I'm going to have to live with not knowing. What I do know is when I pulled that trigger--" when he stabbed that kelpie in the throat, when he crushed another one's windpipe with animal teeth "--I did it to protect and to survive. That's what I've got."

He tilts his head a little, curious and ironic. "You don't sound like much of a superhero fan."

"I don't think you can live in Hightower without losing any naive ideas about superheroes always being good people who only have the well-being of innocents in mind. Between needing hero's insurance on your car, home and self, seeing them leverage their fame for sponsorship deals, fights disturbing traffic and public transportation, and some heroes being more interested in fucking up villains than rescuing bystanders?"

She rolls her eyes. "I'm not involved in it all, not...really. But sometimes, it feels like it's their world, heroes and villains alike, and all the rest of us are just there to be their audience."

"Hightower--that a city, state, country?" He shakes his head, clearly bothered by the fact that he has to ask.

He can't help the sympathy he feels when she describes her world. He understands, to a degree. Navigating through the morass of manners and red tape that Major Crimes usually gets mired in, he's felt the frustration of facing down people with more wealth and influence than moral fiber. Still, it can't be anything compared to the constant and very real physical threat that Meredith lives with.

"How would you change it? If you could. No barriers, no conditions."

Edited 2021-08-01 17:56 (UTC)

"Hightower--city in Delaware, fourth largest city in the United States. From what I can tell, it doesn't exist in most people's worlds." She's slowly getting used to the idea that Hightower itself is a point of divergence.

"How would I change it? People with powers would be neutralized unless they were registered with the government and using those powers to actually help people. Captured villains would be neutralized, too. None of this vigilantism and lax sentencing for powered criminals, allowing them to escape from low-security prisons."

"Doesn't exist that I know of, yeah." That hasn't stopped being weird.

He stays quiet while she talks, expression neutral. "Neutralized how?"

"Well. Again, remember you've posited a world with no barriers, no conditions, so I'm positing a way to remove powers from the non-compliant. I'm not talking about killing people in this theoretical, Gil."

She sighs, glancing at him with the awareness that that's probably where his mind went. She had, in fact, considered it, but it wasn't a useful answer to this problem that wasn't actually hers to solve.

"The problem is that in reality there's no single solution to that problem, because people end up empowered in different ways. Magic, alien heritage, mutation, radiation, having enough money and resources to create a supersuit that flies and enhances one's strength...those can't all be resolved with a simple handwave and a 'you don't deserve these powers, so I'm taking them away'. You know?"

He holds up his hands in surrender, smiling a little. "You're right, I did. Deal with enough homicides and you start to assume things."

Gil picks up his coffee, not sure what else to say about a problem that's so beyond his capacity to weigh in on.

So:

"I'll bet insurance premiums are a bitch."

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Event - For Sport

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Caution: link is to image of Weird Body Shit (mundane)

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