Log:T-Rex has teeth. Will travel.
From C2Wiki
| T-Rex has teeth. Will travel. | |
|---|---|
| Emitter | Mr. 108 |
| Players | Guardian Angel, Barda, Atlas, Reckless, Adamant, Feral |
| NPCs | T-Rex, Muggers |
| Place | Greyhound bus stop in PL. |
| Time (IC) | |
| Time (OOC) | Sunday, Jan 06, 2008 |
+- Bus Stop -----------------------------------------------------------------+
Clear plastic walls encircle one bench on three sides, a panel in the front making it a miniature room almost, and serves to shield from wind and rain. Outside beside the covered bench is a standard bench, a trash bin right next to the curb and the sign that marks this as a bus stop. On the panel between the inside and outside benches can be found a map of the city with with a helpful 'you are here' dot. Just off to one side is a bank of three pay phones, one with the phone book hanging from it's chain. This stop is at the corner of two major thoroughfares, each corner sporting a different shop - a bakery, a butcher, a drug store, and a greasy spoon diner.
So Feral and Atlas, in their own seperate ways, have been trying to track down the metahuman who destroyed the DMV. Admittedly, this isn't a particularly serious crime, except that, to all appearances, the man changes into a Tyrannosaurus Rex when under stress. Asking animals about the man who smells like a big lizard, and checking with the DMV and the Edison museum leads to one missing paleontologist, Paul Denning, (The name may have changed since the emitter can't find his log) who...just purchased a bus ticket out of town with his wife's credit card. Dr. Denning is at the stop, waiting for a bus to take him to parts unknown.
Unfortunately for him, and for the nearby Greyhound station, bus stations -are never in a good part of town-. Which is why, five minutes ago, three armed men surrounded Dr. Denning. One of those men is being held in a position Atlas might find painfully familiar, and another was sent sailing through a sign with a tail slap. The third...has opened fire, shooting wildly. And...so, this is our tableau as the heroes arrive: A dinosaur -eating a mugger-.
Nick was near the station....sometimes he has business in a bad part of town, like now how he's talking to an old woman outside of a run-down building at the entrance to her upstairs apartment. "I'lll see what I can...." Then the shots ring out, and a glance down the way show a man flying through the air. That's....a sign of something rather outside the usual shooting in this part of town. "....excuse me, ma'am, I'll be right back." He takes the "shortcut" through the alley rather than around the corner: this is so he can have a stone from his bracelet in hand and some cover in case he sees something needing a change when he gets a view of the scene. A rampaging dinosaur will do it, though, and he crushes the crystal in hand before Adamant appears in a flash.
Well, Guardian Angel often patrols in a bad part of town, and the sound of gunshots is a simple sign that her intervention might be needed. As she swings into action - literally, she almost loses the grip on her rope as she whips around a corner and spots the prehistoric carnage. Hitting a roof and rolling, htough, she doesn't hesitate, fitting her staff together as she runs along the rooftop. "Okay, I guess handcuffs are out of the question..."
With quick steady hops down the length of bus steps, an unusually tall and lanky blonde teen in a Catholic uniform lands upon the curb with a gym sack slung over her shoulder. This girl or woman, depending upon your preference, will go by the name of Barda because that's who she is. Barda was intending to fill up after a limb shaking performance at a scheduled gymnastic meet, and for all purposes was going to head down a few blocks to drop at a friend's families apartment for free food and said friend. This course of action from having a chow is rudely interrupted by someone else barging in first at the dinner table, sending Barda into a scream of rage. No, not rage, we're sorry. That's just pure scream from spotting a T-Rex standing at a bus stop shaking out a man for more than his spare change. This scream decreases in volume as the teen suddenly vanishes from sight like a magic trick with all the flair of requiring a single blink. Meanwhile, within the confines of her personal dressing room; a carbon atom configuration consisting as part of the concrete, Barda has gotten a grip because she's no longer witness to the horror show and is busily changing her clothes in public, but a very exclusive tiny public so it's okay.
He had a name, and the scent from the night he spent in the zoo sneaking around, asking the other animals about the man who smelled like a lizard. In the city, especially in the bad part of town, following a scent and trying to keep a low profile is not an east task, as Feral keeps to the alleyways and shadows, with the occasional rooftop. Taking the Scent of the Wolf, he uses his enhanced sense of smell to try and keep a trail on Demming. But, since his powers involve a laser-light outline of the wolf around his six-foot-tall bldy in scale, he doesn't precisely blend. It's a circuitous route he takes to get to the bus station, and he's too late to try and stop the mugging and its immediate aftermath.
He arrives just in time to see the man flying past, and the masked man sucks in air through his teeth, also hearing the gunshots. Oh, this is bad. "Had to go it alone, didn't ya," he says to himself before going out a full run into the bus station, in costume. "Someone's already broken their resolution," he says, feeling himself go a little pale under the mask at the sight of the T-Rex going Sweeney Todd on the mugger.
You know, it's *easy* to think you're going to be psychologically prepared to fight a big mutha of a reptile who once upon a time had you in its jaws. Especially when you're a superhero. But this hobby/occupation also lends itself to a certain amount of overconfidence, and... long story short, Atlas appears to be running away from a half-digested early dinner on the sidewalk and *towards* the t-rex; that must have been a really horrifying early dinner. "OhgodI'mgonnadie," she whines under her breath, but dammit she came here to bag a t-rex and that is what she is going to do.
Look! Up in the sky! It's neither bird nor plane, but it's made of metal and accompanied by the noise of jet engines, so it's probably closer to the plane thing. Reckless is out joyrid-, uh, conducting an aerial patrol over the city. With "All Along The Watchtower" (Hendrix's version) blaring over his speaker systems for technical aerial patrol reasons. Yes. It is just a coincidence that "There's too much confusion here" is playing just as Reckless spots a dinosaur in the middle of town. "Brother, you ain't kidding," he mutters, as he dives in for a closer look.
"What's this? We've no place for giant things like you coming out and making this sort of fuss! Who are you swallowing now?" Adamant bursts from the alleyway, sparkling in motion as the lights catch his faceted form. He springs up, skipping off and badly denting a bike rack that no sane person would leave something chained to unattended anyway as he hurtles for the beast's face. "I would say they are not in season, but these days I have to wonder. No more!" Those translucent violet hands pry their way between teeth as the dinosaur starts to snap at him, and only continue to pry the dinosaur's jaws open. He soon wedges himself properly in there, hands and one knee as he straightens slowly to wedge the angry T-rex's jaws wide...at least for the moment. How strong can he really be?
The thug keeps shooting, but the bullets seem to have no effect like on T. Rex's hide. Finally, he throws the gun down and starts to run. Meanwhile, The T-rex is trying to shake Adamant loose, head shaking back and sending feathers flying everywhere. At the last moment, the gem-hard hero pops out of his jaw like a Watermelon seed, barely avoiding the jaws clashing down on his torso.
Turning a horror show into a freak show, our dressed up Barda explodes upon the scene. It's a mostly vertical explosion blooming out in the exact shape of a lanky sixteen year old teenage gymnast, hitting a height of somewhere in the ballpark of sixty feet. This naturally only increases the panic in the general area, as we've now a T-Rex and Ultragirl ready to go at it. Wrinkling her nose and giving the T-Rex a squint, she spares a moment to do an inspection around her feet and below, being sure she isn't standing on anything important; like a car, or someone important. Not having the rich life experience that tells her how to handle your normal T-Rex, Barda goes with what she knows. The sixty foot tall giantess suddenly reaches downwards making a gentle sound suggesting what she's about to do may not be a good idea, which is, ripping up a whole concrete and steel city telephone pole support and then holds it with one hand like a rod or perhaps a rolled up newspaper. "No! No!" She shouts in a loud domineering voice, pointing at the ground with her other hand while waving the rod at the T-Rex. "Bad! No! Put it down! Put it down! Let it go. Let it go" she repeats a second time in case it doesn't have the best grasp of the English language. That giant concrete and steel newspaper makes a menacing bonk at the T-Rex's snout, to show she means business. Broken wires hiss and boo and spark and make a lot of fuss upon the ground, disapproving of her method and T-Rex whispering abilities. Yet the T-Rex spat out whatever was in its mouth? Was it due to Barda? No, but she'd like to think so anyway.
There's other heroes, Feral sees, which makes him very thankful. This is not as easy as he originally imagined it, but he is not going to shy away from it either. He keeps his ears open, just in case the mysterious T-Rex is actually saying anything, since he can hear and talk the language of beasts. But it's his other power that he reaches for as the other man takes on the man-creature hand-to-hand. The red-light outline of the wolf fades from around Feral as he concentrates. Whatever he can access, he tries to gain the strength and toughness of the Tyranosaurus Rex, since it's, well, right there. He feels his insides change, as the red laser-light image around him coalesces into that of the fabled dinosaur...again scaled to his height. He growls, shifting into the language of the thing. <<Let him down.>> Pause. <<You're right. They shouldn't have upset you, but you need to calm down.>>
Holding her staff as she ponders it all, Guardian Angel knows her kung fu just won't service alone against the Lizard King, and so she comes to a halt. Pushing down that primordial fear, she blinks, and then... notices a small flag hanging just off the edge of the building, and then snags it with the edge of her staff. With a lever action, she yanks it back, and then whips it forward, making a rather rough approximation of a flying creature. A 'dactyl, maybe? Here's hoping the T-Rex's eyesight is as bad as fabled, but... then, with the other monster appearing, her eyes widen as fear finally starts tapping on her mental door. "Uh.... two? C'mon, follow the flying thingy!"
"Hey! Smelly!" Atlas calls. Here's hoping no one notices that faint twinge of ohmigodI'mtooyoungtodie in her voice. She barrels down the sidewalk at it, leaping into the air and dropkicking it somewhere in the midsection just like she did on the first encounter. Only this time, she gets even less luck. And she's standing right in front of a t-rex smelling faintly of the meat-lover's pizza she tossed on the sidewalk just a moment ago. Oh, lovely.
This is normally where 'No need to get so excited' would come up, but Reckless is still on the page of 'There's too much confusion here.' "Give me a sensor diagnostic, am I really seeing what I-" +++Sensor systems operating within normal parameters+++ "Damn, I was afraid of that." Reckless mutters as he brings his left arm to bear. His forearm begins to glow, and a series of silver bolts of energy are launched toward the dinosaur. They all strike home, and seem to buffet the creature, leaving him stunned for the moment.
Adamant is tossed aside like a toy when the T-rex's teeth fail to get purchase on his faceted form. A crash echoes as he smashes a hole into a cinderblock wall...not that he seems too disturbed as he stands up from that to look over the mounting scene of chaos. "Quite a busy time this is, but I'm happy enough not to be caught alone here. Now....down with you!" Only a glance up to a giant woman before the gemstone man steps back into the fray, a leap and a sudden blow of a stony fist up at the joint of one knee. Not that it seems to do more than minor injuries. "They...did make them tough, back in those days."
The giant costumed superheroine takes a quick step back holding up her rolled up concrete paper close to her chest, eyes wide with surprise. "Oh. Hello there?" Barda says to the giant red ghostly T-Rex that suddenly appeared on the scene, finding -now- the moment to introduce herself. "Hi there so… are you like his ghost Jedi T-rex father or something?" she inquires with a hesitant curl of her lip, glancing warily between the two. "Because… oh!" Barda's eyes snap to their extremes as they track a rare flying flag-bird past her field of vision. Her head snaps down at the sound of Atlas below, causing her to splutter a quick laugh down. "Uh... Nice try there Bruce Lee but..." The sixty foot tall woman takes a step-hop forward and swings her concrete and metal telephone support pole over her head in a wide arc, bringing it down with a terrifying crash of debris and dust as it connects while she blasts it with more English to T-Rex translations, "SIT!" The T-Rex sways drunkenly, with a tongue slightly hanging between his jaws. His eyes are entertaining visions of terradactyl. The big girl finishes her sentence, "...you have to try it with something larger."
Seeing that the giant T-rex isn't listening, Feral lifts his shoulders, a frown spreading on his face. His thoughts are pulled away as Barda speaks to him. "Nope. Just a...hell, no idea why it happens." He really doesn't; the little lightshow of his is some bizarre side effect he hasn't figured out yet. "Just for the record, I /did/ try to talk to him," he adds, as he pumps his legs to go forward, bringing his hands together in an uppercut to the T-Rex's midsection. The strength of the creature Feral now possesses staggers the rampaging dino a bit, adding more to the fire, but he's not down yet. "Have it your way."
"A dinosaur. We are fighting an actual factual goddamned dinosaur," Reckless seems to barely believe the evidence of his eyes...or of his armor's sensors. "And if any of you tell anyone I used the words 'actual factual' in sequence, I will deny it." Another spray of silver bolts hits the actual factual T-Rex, to much the same effect as before.
Guardian Angel flaps the flag back and forth. She brings the American flag around in a whipping motion, and then holds it forth towards the creature. "Welcome the the modern world, ugly. C'mon, everybody, let him have it!" It's not just a corny line or two, though, as luck starts to realign for her fellow heroes, fortune favoring their efforts. Lowering the flag slightly, she mumbles, "Sorry, guy, but... you don't want to /start/ your existence here as a man-eater."
"We are here with the Champion of the Deep Earth, with a woman as tall as the treetops, with mortals brave enough to come out and fight what should have been dead when their kind were hiding in burrows, and you question that a dinosaur is here? Come on, Reckless, are you that new to this?" With a ringing laugh, Adamant leaps to flip up from one of the T-rex's feathered forelimbs, curling as he does to unleash with a sharp kick to the jaw. Even with his unnatural strength, it doesn't drop the creature, but given the punishment it's taken so far this should be little surprise. Just the same, the inhuman blow to just the right spot sends the beast reeling as Adamant himself drops with a crack to his feet, sidewalk leaving footprints like it had been soft earth.
So the T-Rex STOMPS the ground hard, cracking the pavement hard enough to actually send a ripple through it, but our heroes our sturdy enough to resist...or happen to be flying with rockets, whichever. It roars...which Feral can translate as "Just leave me alone!" And turns tail to run.
"Oh." Slips out from between Barda's 'o' shaped lips, eyes wandering to the side for a moment before she snaps back and takes a defense step behind her as the general sense of danger returns. She holds up the blasted end top of the ruined crumbling concrete and metal pole, and then turns it around to transform her newspaper into a club, a club tipped with a heavy square cement support base that she happened to pull out along with the rest of it. Eyes darting between everyone pummeling upon the T-Rex, Barda grimaces and holds her makeshift mace nearby with two hands warily. "Uh, yeah. It looks a little... Think we hurt it enough? We should really call maybe pet control or the zoo and have them bring like a truck of tranquilizers or something, guys." She glances at her mace, contemplating hitting it again. "...I'm sure this is an endangered species. I don't want to kill it." She shifts her weight back and forth, straddling either side of the street with her long legs. "Soooo..." This line of logic is quickly dropped as she herself almost drops, the world around her rumbling and causing her to react rashly and suddenly. The booming sounds of her footsteps echo against the concrete valley as she charges with her rude stone and metal mace held below and behind her waist, leaning forward and looking like some Nordic myth as she follows in pursuit with her long blonde hair flying behind her head, feet overturning a car as they glance over it, another crushed completely in her wake before she reaches her T-Rex. Barda leaps into the air and spins halfway and brings it with a wide arc that skims off the face of a building that had the stubborn intent in staying put and in the way, showering the T-Rex with debris and glass and dust and the violence that a hundred tons of girly muscle bring behind it, smashing it upon it's back and sending it rumbling over and down into the street with one last exploding cloud of dust as her mace vaporizes.
"...when you put it that way, it all kinda falls into...holy..." Reckless stares. (Not that it's really possible to *tell* that he's staring, but he is staring). "Wow," is all he says." Adamant recovers well enough after the fact, scattering back when Barda moves to clobber the dinosaur and looking on in some amazement as it falls. "And that is the end now? Such a pleasure, working with giantesses, I should think,"
Barda leaps back after a having a dazed moment, mouthing a quiet, but-not-so-quiet-when-you're-so-big, "Oh shit!" as she drops the ruins of the twisted metal sad little telephone support pole, hands and arms raised outwards over the T-Rex as she continues in her quiet swearing, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." She seems awfully concerned about the Godzilla she just clobbered in the spine.
If nothing else, it appears that T. Rex is starting to adapt to his condition. This time, the behemoth is shrinking, dwindling, and slowly reverting to a human form. Well, at least they probably won't stick him in the zoo.
Guardian Angel cheers as it crashes down, and then puts her hand in front of her mouth with a guilty look. Well, that's that, and hopefully there's /somebody/ that can look after this sort of thing. She looks up to Barda, waving her flag in greeting, and calls out, "You did what needed to be-" She then turns towards the shrinking form with a simple, "Oh.", before calling out, "Everybody okay down there?"
Well. One t-rex down, no thanks to Atlas. She reaches into her pocket, pulling out her cellphone and dialing the zoo and telling them to come pick up their t-rex. "At a bus stop," she specifies. "Near the Greyhound station." The precise cross-streets are related, and... "Shit, he's changing back, I think, hold on, I better just call the cops." And so the cops are called, and the same information shared. And then she turns and heads off for the nearest pizza joint, seeing as the last one didn't stay down.
<<We're trying to->> WHAM! Feral stops in his tracks, drinking in the silence after the T-Rex falls. "Ow," he whispers, starting to walk forward. "They tried the zoo last time," he says. "One night he suddenly turned back human and went walkabout, is what the lions told me. He wants to be left alone, but..." The masked man shakes his head. "There's no place we can take him to help him. I have a name, but I haven't done a lot of research into why he can suddenly go Jurrasic like this." He crouches down next to the now-human. "C'mon, Mr. Denning," he says. "We're going to figure out a way to help." Sometimes, fighting the 'bad guys' isn't all cheery. This guy? Probably a good man in a bad situation.
Barda glances wide-eyed from the T-Rex, to Angel waving the flag and begins to say something but then quickly stops as her attention is brought back to the shrinking T-Rex which causes her body language to ease up considerably. "Oh" she says, stupidly. "Huh. Weird."
"And then once it is down, it changes to another? I suppose that explains why it is not left as nothing but petrified bone." Adamant watches tensely as the beast shrinks. "And a good man or not, he seems to be a dangerous one."
Reckless seems to have the same idea as Atlas, though he's using a slightly higher-tech means of doing so. Which doesn't mean he is particularly successful. "No, this is *not* a crank call, we just put down a dinosaur that turned into a...yes, I know 9-1-1 is for emergencies only, that's why I called your main number...no, I don't want to-" A pause. "The cops put me on hold. Are they allowed to put me on hold?"
The sixty foot tall teenager looks about with a sheepish expression after a survey of all the damage done and decides to quickly shrink down to a height of five feet, surely, no one will suspect a teeny five foot skinny girl stepped on their parked Ford truck. She takes a few steps backwards away from the scene, slow, measured, steps. She's backing out of a cartoon apparently.
As Reckless rockets off into the sky, he can be heard to say, "No, I do *not* want to be transferred to Animal Control."
Guardian Angel hooks a grappling hook on the edge of the building, picking up her duffel and slippind down to the ground, finally. "Ouch.", she says with a simple wince, and then looks over to Barba as she slips away, and then pops her staff apart with some quick, metallic rings. "Well, if you guys have this in hand.", she adds, looking at the man concernedly.
"He is a danger," Feral admits. Because, well, he /eats/ people. There's no two ways about it. "But I don't think it's conscious, but like how a sick man might not be in control." He's so going to the board about this. Trav might know. "But, there will be cops, and I...really don't want to deal." The T-rex image fades around him, to be replaced by a Hawk, and he takes to the skies.
Barda pauses to stare at Guardian Angel and the other strange gaggle gathered, biting her lip and giving Guardian Angel a hilarious shrug with a lift of her brows like she just passed gas in company and what can she do about it?
Adamant keeps his stance, straightening. "Whether he eats humans or they eat him, he does not belong here. So let us hope that this time he will be contained."
Barda continues to stare at Adamant, the downed man, and Guardian Angel for a long while before she begins to look jittery. After a deep breath she suddenly blurs downwards to the ground and all but vanishes to the size of an ant, which leaps through the air in bounds of feet at a time making enough headway to keep up with any normal fit adult, the little heroine carrying her bag over her shoulder as she bounds through the air like a tiny early Superman; clearing mail boxes as opposed to buildings.
Guardian Angel looks at Barda with a weak grin. Hard to be /too/ cheerful when there's a half-eaten guy, anyway, and looks to Adamant. "Here's hoping." She grabs the rope, and tugs it tight before jogging up the side of the wall. She'll stick around long enough to watch and possibly shadow, at least. But she doesn't have much of an excuse to work with once the cops arrive, and so has to at least make her mask scarce for the moment.
Eventually, the cops show up, and take witness statements and which, as they're loading him in the back of the paddy wagon, leads one officer to ask another, "So how do you bring someone up on charges for defending themselves as a giant effing lizard?"
