Event - Dogged

[apocalypsehowmods]

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Dogged

The message goes out to everyone on ADI's network. It seems to be something captured live. It's Pam Ruan, head of HR who holds a prosthetic finger up to her lips before whispering, "Everyone's pushing for transparency right now, right? Figuring out where threats are coming from and sharing. I think that should come at all levels. Let's see what Nia's talking about with Mr. Zyrian Steel, hmm?"

The camera flips around as Pam clearly creeps closer to an office door. There are muffled voices, and Pam sets the phone face up before using one hand to shove the thing under the door. The video shows a sliding picture of the office's bland ceiling for a moment before coming to a stop. The voices become much clearer.

"-down in Wolf Trap," a masculine voice is saying. Presumably, Zyrian Steel. "There's just no need for that."

"Zyrian, this ain't a negotiation." Nia Lehrer's voice is familiar to most people working at ADI at this point. They've likely heard her speak in some pre-recorded training videos at the bare minimum. Nia's tone is no nonsense and clearly on the edge of snapping in frustration. "You're not hiring us. I'm sending my people down to Wolf Trap next month. We've got evidence of those signalhead things being on the march, one down that way, your kick off for New Horizons in the park, and evidence out of there about the Lullaby Girl from some of my people."

There is silence.

"You remember her? Ava? Or Amber, it seems like. She's the one you gave us those Lucidio masks to help train our people against. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you don't remember her, Mr. S." Another drawn out pause. "You ain't been straight with me for a long time. You ain't been straight with ADI since Tawnya was Warden. You tell me you need us in Buffalo, payback for helping in Wolf Pen and Cortana and the mobile med units, and not only do half the staff come back with crab claws and whiskers, but I find out you're using us for business politics." There's venom in her tone. "Or were you just going to stay quiet about Etcher's enterprises competing with your own software companies? ADI is not your personal attack dog. You are our client. And I thought my friend. But I'm about 30 seconds away from firing you from both."

Further silence, then a heavy sigh. "And I was going to offer to send you and your staff on such a nice retreat." There's the sound of a chair being pushed back. "Warden, I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship. You are the dogs. I am the master. I hold your leash. Or have you forgotten just how much technology I've donated to ADI over the years, how many of your systems run on things I built? We've had a mutually beneficial relationship up until now- Well… you and I have. Tawnya got to be a problem before the end, too. But I made sure that was taken care of."

"You self-aggrandizing son of a-"

"You're a much more practical woman than she ever was, even with those shiny ideals you hold so dear. You'll compromise for the greater good, to protect what's yours. Such a good Warden, looking out for her charges."

"What are you talking about? And get your hands the hell off my desk."

"Haven't you ever wondered about the title? Warden. Odd name for a leader of any organization, even one like yours. But maybe not so odd when you consider your more eldritch masters." A scoff. "The Hunt always does pick out the most oblivious avatars, doesn't it? What does a Warden do?" A beat. "She controls the monsters, Nia. Sniffs them out and contains them. And she goes after the poachers coming after her prey. Tell me, have you ever noticed how you're always picking up on threats far afield with uncanny precision. It's been getting stronger, hasn't it? Tawnya was the same way. As was her predecessor, I imagine."

"That's not- I wouldn't ever…"

"Wouldn't you, though? Every time you sent your own dogs after a threat, reveled in it, you were being such a good Warden, instilling terror in the hearts of your enemies, ADI's enemies. So many cults know who and what you are and they fear it. Fear the Warden of ADI, famed avatar of the Hunt. Even now, I know you've compromised yourself. Have you considered what that's done to you? You let that Visionary kid stay alive. I rather think that might have been the start of your slide, hmm? Making exceptions, just this once.

"Now," he continues, voice growing louder and footsteps starting toward the phone, "I realize this is a lot to take in, to think about. Why don't you do that self-reflection while I attend to other matters? You are doing good work, puppy. I need a dependable pet to take care of all those nasty pests who keep trying rituals. But no need to worry about the New Horizons launch, really. I'll just-" Zyrian pauses and everyone will have a view of a middle-aged caucasian man with dark, slightly graying hair and a beard. He's wearing khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, and he's looking down at Pam's phone.

"Well… fuck." He stomps a heeled shoe on it and the transmission ends abruptly.

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Comments

[worthallthis]

I. Plans Gone Awry - Closed to CR

Winter doesn't usually reply to things on the network unless it's important, from someone he knows, or he has a particular interest in whatever is being said. Which is not often. He does, however, keep up with everything posted there and follow up on responses that aren't made private.

So he saw that video. And he is pissed. He seeks out his people, because he doesn't know what to do, but he does know they need to do something.

"What do we do," he asks each member his team. "We can't work for an Avatar." But can they take her town? Should they take her down? He doesn't know. And he doesn't know what to without an organization to work for, either.


II. Smashing Things - OTA

When in doubt, kill something. For now, Winter is still showing up for his security shifts, and he is making it his personal mission to seek out everything strange and out of place to smash it, shoot it, stomp on it, or otherwise make a mess out of it. He prowls the halls of ADI like an avenging angel decked out in guns, staves for poking things from a distance, and the occasional grenade.

Mirrors all get punched with a metal fist, all the plates closed tight and hard until they finally crack. Anyone looking over his shoulder for that could see a parade of deaths, clearly at Winter's hands, or more rarely a handful of smiling young women with dark hair.

He also eyes anyone he passes warily unless he's very familiar with them, in which case he might make an unhappy face and ask, "Did you see it?"

He leaves "it" unclear, though he means the video.


III. Gunning - OTA

About halfway through the morning on the second day of artifact hunting, one might find Winter hastily stripping things off in the hallway of ADI and throwing them as far away from himself as possible: weapons, body armor, even his boots. Only when he's down to a tank top, pants, and his two layers of socks does he stop.

That makes it obvious that his right arm is looking kind of metal, too, and his fingers are a little longer than they should be. He stares at the mess of equipment he's made, glares at it, searching for the culprit.


IV. Handyman - OTA

Winter is a former assassin. He knows how to pick locks. He gets back to the ADI apartments and can be found cursing at the lock on the front door as he coaxes it open again with the pins in his little kit. When he gets inside he'll see about sticking a brick in the door to keep it open for anyone else not home yet.

And once he figures out that the power's out, which shouldn't take long, he sets about picking the lock on the maintenance closet, too, to figure out what's wrong.

He can't fix everything, but the water is easy, and he can twist wires together until they get power. Wifi he's not going to figure out on his own, though.


V. Blowing Something Up - for Yelena, Steve, and Cortana

There's only one signal tower left. Winter is sure they can take down one signal tower, if they put their heads together. So he makes the rounds to his usual crew to hatch a plan.

"I want to blow it up," he says simply. "Grenades. If we can get some C4, that will be even better. We just have to get close enough to strap the explosives to it. Maybe take turns distracting it."

III

[punched_hitler]

ADI has become something of a minefield of strange effects, and even if smashing mirrors or throwing artifacts doesn't work, it still feels better than doing nothing. Steve has been warily patrolling, Mjolnir in one hand because this seems like the time to start carrying it around, when he hears scuffling in the next hall over and breaks into a run, only to find -

"Winter?" He stands there, blinking, for a second, before his brain gets into gear and he sprints forward, hand reaching out as if to help tear off some offending piece of gear. "What's wrong?" Is there something in his clothes? Is he hurt?

But coming closer, he can't help but notice that Winter's right arm is - "What did you touch?" he demands, looking around at the gear strewn everywhere, and anything else that might be in the hallway, besides.

[worthallthis]

"Don't touch any of it!" Winter snaps at him, holding out both hands in a panic. The last thing he wants is for Steve to have this happen to him, too.

The movement is oddly stiff, and he jerks back again to yank off the tac vest, too, and then starts emptying his pockets. There's the ever-present pyramid, and his usual collection of lock picks and bandages and snacks. He doesn't think it's any of that, because the change stopped already, but he has to be sure.

[punched_hitler]

Steve stops where he is, though his eyes follow that damn pyramid once it's produced, his fingers tightening on the hammer's handle. But he already tried that. It won't work, and besides, Winter's had it a while, why would it suddenly start doing something now?

His stomach twists even as he tries to keep his voice light as he says, "Much though I'm enjoying the show, we should take this into an office."

He feels exposed, out here in the hallway, the hair standing up on the back of his neck. Winter, probably even more so.

And also V 8D;

[punched_hitler]

"I like the way you think." Because finally. Finally. Something he can do. Or, at least, help with. "We can raid the security supplies." Are they supposed to? Steve doesn't care. Security's job is to keep things secure. Destroying the tower will do that. Good enough for him.

"What kind of distraction are you thinking?"

[worthallthis]

"I raid the security supplies a lot," Winter admits. "But definitely grenades and bullets for a distraction."

He eyes Steve a beat, then adds warily, "Maybe lightning. If you wear protective clothing."

[punched_hitler]

Skeptical Steve is skeptical "Define protective clothing."

I

[failedpromise]

Oh, Winter. She looks at him, observing his rage and confusion.

"I..." I don't know what to do she doesn't want to admit. So instead she goes with what she does know. "I'm not sure we--those of us from other universes--can survive without ADI, at least not yet."

And what she suspects. "And I'm starting to think that any attempts to fight the entities run the risk of getting twisted to serve them." It sounds so hopeless, when she words it like that.

She clenches her fist. She's not ready to give up just yet.

[worthallthis]

"Maybe," Winter says, as the guy who spent six months being a creepy Stranger-puppet until he figured himself out, and the guy with the Web's pyramid in his pocket right now. "There's risk. But there's risk in everything. There's risk in giving up, too. Right?"

[failedpromise]

"Even if there weren't, I'd rather go down fighting." Give up and be left alone by the entities while they go consume someone else? No. No one should have to be an entrèe to some alien nightmare.

"We might need to change our tactics, is all."

1

[musicdied]

"If she practices even a little of what she preaches, we will not be working for an Avatar for long," Yelena says, though the look of faintly disgusted skepticism on her face makes it abundantly clear just how likely she thinks Nia will be to stick to her principles. Sentencing other people to death for the cause is easy.

She's seen nothing at all that suggests the Warden would be willing to lay down her own life.

"But the rot won't begin and end with her."

[worthallthis]

"A lot of us have rot." Winter has rot. He's got at least two entities with claws in him, now. "That doesn't mean we can't fight it."

He's still waffling over whether they should just track her down and shoot her, or give her a chance. Winter is... normally of the mind to just shoot avatars, but-- "She didn't know," he says after a pause. "Like I didn't know."

[musicdied]

Yelena shakes her head, motion quick and sharp. "There is a difference between having one of the Entities get its hooks in you, and actively serving one," she says. "This is an entire organization of monster hunters. They've served her for years. There's no way none of them realized there was a problem, or heard concerns from someone lower down the food chain who thought something was off. At best, they ignored them because they were getting what they wanted. At worst, they actively helped cover things up."

After all, hadn't some of them realized something was off, even coming from another world entirely, without much in the way of access to ADI's upper echelons.

"She says she didn't know. If I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt, I will say it's more likely that she made herself willfully blind."

III

[pinionedheart]

Of all the strange things Nina's seen over the past couple of weeks - burning ants and horrors made of congealed blood and haunted mirrors and what she's fairly certain was a rogue set of teeth - it's the man stripping in the middle of an open hallway that's somehow the most incongruous. It shouldn't be. It's not like the view is unpleasant - far from it, with the breadth of shoulder and well-muscled back visible as she comes around a corner - it's just...

Everyone who's accustomed to it seems to be putting armour on, not taking it off.

"Not that I'm complaining," she says, voice bright, like she's not half-wondering if he's hallucinating or compelled. "But this seems like a bit of a strange place to be stripping down."

[worthallthis]

There's also a strangely-shaped red star on a metal shoulder, on his left side. Winter half-turns towards her, expression flat. "I picked up an artifact," he says, voice equally flat, but also somehow tense. "I don't know what it is. Don't touch anything," he adds, a warning. He doesn't want anyone else's hands turning into metal, either.

[pinionedheart]

She's seen prosthetics before, nearly as intricate, and while the lines of the star seem strange, she has no way of knowing if that's just how the symbol is supposed to look, if it has some meaning to a man from a world she's probably never heard of.

It's the length of his fingers that catch her eye, and the gleam of metal on his other hand, which does not look like it was deliberately replaced by a Fabrikator, or whatever equivalent exists where he's from. Her stomach flips, and she stiffens her spine against a sudden chill, remembering cloying dark.

"All the more reason not to do this where anyone might wander by," she says, eyeing his scattered possessions for a moment before tugging off her jacket, the slightly-frayed cuffs marking it easily as secondhand. "This all started two days ago, right? That narrows down the likely suspects. If we collect anything you might've picked up or swapped out in that time in this, then we can cart them off somewhere you can inspect them in peace. Maybe behind a nice set of blast doors."

V

[failedpromise]

Cortana grins. She does love to blow things up. "We should have done this a long time ago." Also, she really hates those towers.

"I'll see about cooking something up for you. How big a boom do you need?" Grenades and C4 are all well and good, but there are a lot more options.

[worthallthis]

Guess who also loves to blow things up? This guy. He smiles a bit, back. "Well, we don't want to take out a whole city block. You've seen the size of them. We need something big but targeted."

[failedpromise]

So some kind of shaped charge, designed to be placed in key areas to do maximum damage, maybe? Hmmmmm...

(She grins to herself as she ponders the possibilities, of which there are many.)

V

[musicdied]

"I think for this we can get the C4," Yelena says, then sniffs. For now, the nosebleed that had come along with that first, horrid wave of sound has stopped, but the dried blood still itches unpleasantly inside her nostrils.

It's worlds away from the headache that throbs in a tight band around her skull.

"I'll ask Neil."

And if he says no, she'll just break into the armory herself. The time to play nice, to cooperate, is well and truly flown.

Re: V

[worthallthis]

"Cortana is looking into something good to help out, too," Winter says. "And if Neil says no-- well. Who knows if we even work for him anymore."

Which is to say, Winter is right there next to her to steal stuff.

Stop the Signal - Cortana, Steve, Winter, Yelena

[musicdied]

The plan, in the end, is a simple enough: split up, half of them drawing the signalhead's attention and inflicting as much damage as possible from the ground, the other half taking advantage of the distraction to scale the monstrosity of metal and hide to plant charges at the weak points they'd identified from what recon they'd been able to manage.

With three demolitions experts, they have, at least, plenty to work with on that front, and between the explosives authorized by ADI and the more specialized ones Cortana had developed, they should be able to do some damage. Hopefully it will be enough.

Simple is, after all, far from easy.

Given her particular skillset, it's little surprise that Yelena is part of team scale-the-monster. She waits at her mark, running one last check of her climbing gear as she watches for a signal. This close to the signalhead, she can feel a throbbing in her bones, head buzzing despite the earplugs and heavy-duty headphones she wears. Even if she were stupid enough to remove the safety gear, she doubts she'd hear an audible signal.

Which is, of course, why flares were invented.

Re: Stop the Signal - Cortana, Steve, Winter, Yelena

[worthallthis]

Winter is another one on the climb-the-tower team, crouched on the corner nearest the signal tower, weighed down with explosives and guns, both. Not that a gun will be of much use with a hunk of metal and magic, but they make him feel better, anyway. He even has his mask on today, just for the sense of focus for a mission that it helps give him.

He has eyes on Steve and Cortana, the former with Mjolnir-- and rubber gloves, and galoshes-- and the latter with more grenades and a signal jammer, waiting for them to do their thing. It's going to be fun, he thinks.

II (shows up late with Starbucks)

[edalyn]

"Did I see... what?" Eda asks, perhaps a little startled out of her own artifact related thoughts.

Her first guess isn't actually the video—because earlier she experienced one of the mirrors, and it was an upsetting experience to say the least. She wonders if Winter might have had a similar one.

Either way, she can't help noticing that he seems in a terrible mood, but she supposes that's not surprising right about now.

[worthallthis]

"The thing." Eda is on the... maybe possibly okay list. She'd been fun at the bus stop. And her form is intriguing rather than frightening, to him. "The video. About who we've been serving all this time."