ataraxionlogs | EVENT: DUPRR ▒ THE SECONDARY SHUTTLE BAY

Some of the bullets dig into the hard outer shell on the creature's pitch black body, but some of them dig through it, piercing just enough to get it angry. It lets out a follow-up yowl, descending towards Rey now that she's made herself a threat. It lunges for her, giving her the opening she needs to ram the spear straight through its narrow abdomen.

Another horrible shriek follows and its spindly arms claw for her, raking claws across her skin as it struggles against the weapon. Death comes to it slowly, and it tries with its final grip on life to reach out for the shuttle.

Through the open door, the awed and disturbed expressions of two men are visible as they lean against the opposite wall of the craft's interior.

After the spear sinks through, Rey is clutching onto it like her life depends on it. But mostly it's for William's sake, and also to ensure that the creature doesn't try and shake her off in its attempt to get into shuttle.

She twists the blade deeper, impaling through the other side of its body, and rotates the spear to make its death quicker.

It'll suffer, but not for long as she uses the remainder of her untapped vigor to yank the creature away from the men in its final throes.

The liquid that spills forth from it cannot truly be called blood. It's green and unevenly drippy or runny when it springs forth, spraying over Rey as she yanks the beast back towards her, in turn shaking it loose on the shaft of her spear. When the fluid touches her skin, it begins to bubble. Harmless but warm at first, then sharp and agonizing: acid.

But for her efforts, the black, misshapen monstrosity curls in on itself, fibrous hole of a mouth stretching wide as it releases a shrieking death rattle that dwindled as it slumps over, limp and lifeless.

For a moment, the two men crouched in the shuttle don't budge, distrusting that it might truly be dead.

Rey is hardly a stranger to pain, and has felt various kinds from simple scratches to fatal injuries that actually killed her. It's almost worse that this doesn't. The searing shock of the blood spurting from the open wound of the creature doesn't register at first. Not until she finds it bubbly pockmarks in her arms, and burning holes in her tanktop to sear into her abdomen.

Instinctively, she withdraws. Her boot over the creature's corpse and the other foot grounded, she composes her nerves just enough to kick both herself off and release the spear from the gaping flesh. It slips from her fingertips and clatters across the floor.

She staggers away from the shuttle, panting as the pain deepens and she starts clawing at the fluid stinging her skin.

Fire she can handle. Acid, apparently, is another matter.

"Will--" Rey gasps, unable to finish the second syllable within the same sharp inhale.

And like that, the pike undoes itself. Splits apart like splintering, into great black jagged shards of metal that then flex as if they are as supple as silk, the shape of him shaking out in a blur, falling out of her hand, shrinking, shrinking, hitting the floor with a tak.

For a long, oddly anticlimactic moment, William is a glass marble: teeny tiny cat's-eye.

He rolls a short distance, spins, leaving the thinnest streak of acid on the floor behind him. The worst of it sloughed off behind.

The next instant, he rattles out big ('big') and human again. Almost mid-change, he's reaching for his backpack, dropping his shoulder. Just like his sweater and trousers and boots, his supplies were undisturbed by the medley of transformations. There's an ugly spot on his collar, dangerously close to his neck, where there seems like the residual acid might be eating through-- but he doesn't pay it any mind just yet. Time's precious, and she's got less of it than he does.

He's assessing her burn as he moves. Ticking fast as he can through burn types in his head, his face very motionless, lips moving slightly as he names them off under his breath. The likelihood it's something that'll react wrong with water seems low, so in a moment, he has a water bottle out, a second by his feet. Uncapping the little plastic container, he's emptying it over her skin without asking or even telling her to stand still-- she knows how it is. He holds it high up her arm so it runs down, covers as much of her burning skin with the flow as he can. There isn't enough water to irrigate for as long as they should, and he only has so many hands. speaking of.

"Oi!" William snaps at the two losers hiding in the shorn-open compartment. For a moment-- for a moment, he's completely distracted [from murder] by the task at hand. "DUPRR cunts, get the fuck out of there and help! Have you got any water?" He twists his head to look just for a moment, before looking back to his companion.

A snap look of annoyance comes out of the older of the two. He looks to be fifty, maybe sixty, but he wears the critical eye of someone a great deal older. Pushing to his feet with ease, covered in black grease, he claps the shoulder of his younger companion and points out towards William and Rey. The younger team member grabs his canteen as he scampers forward, heading straight for them and crouching beside William.

He hands the canteen over and cautiously questions, "Are you sure it's dead?" Traitorous eyes flicker anxiously back to the tangled mess of sinewy black limbs as his superior comes out from behind him, a pack slung over his back.

"'Course they aren't." He growls, "They don't know any better than we do: you've read the reports."

Edited 2015-04-16 22:12 (UTC)

It doesn't take long, or even much effort, for Rey to compartmentalize the pain as William starts neutralizing the acid burn with water. Her enhanced epidermis seems to provide a little more protection than a normal human's, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt like a bitch.

She bites down, shooting the younger man a narrowed look whilst ignoring the snide comment of his elder. "Of course it's dead," she says through gritted teeth. She's still holding her arms out for William to tend to. "And if it isn't, will just kill it some more."

The way she talks, it's like she's ordering from a menu. No big deal.

When the next bottle is spent, part on the woman's arm and then a little on her side, William casts it aside. The emptied container goes thunk! thunk thunk along, rolls away. Hands empty, William moves instead to grasp her hand again, his fingers dry and warm on the slippery chill of her hand.

She feels the rush instantly. His power urging the blood to scab, the minute cells of her skin to knit, the layers to mount over layers. There's not so very much he can do in as little time as they have-- before the damn monsters might come again. But enough that he can stop the damage, take away the worst of the pain. It's a protracted minute or two before he lets go, looking slightly wearier for it.

It's taken some of the mania out of his eyes when he twists his head back, looks at the two interlopers. Some of it.

The younger team member, wiry and wide-eyed, hovers near William, watching him work with a small degree of awe, trying to figure out how he'd created the effect of healing. As soon as Rey looks in fighting shape again, though, the old, greasy engineer jumps in brusquely.

"Well? Let's get the hell out of here," he demands. "How far to where your people are based on board?"

Whatever sort of crazed flash caught in William's look there was, Rey feels it as well. All this time she's felt it, but hasn't allowed it to register until just now when it's screaming in her head. She swallows, biting the inside of her cheek and sensing William's energy flow from him to her.

It's a dangerous sudden strength, she's decided.

About three days, she starts to answer the older man. But the words don't make it past her lips.

"Not too far," is what she says instead. Rey casts a brief, careful glance at William, before turning to retrieve her fallen rifle. It's on the way out, anyway. "It's just a bit of a trek with the infestation. Will take you there."

"Right-- sorry. Someone should have explained," William says.

His heart is going like mad inside of him. Clackety clack clack clacking inside the xylophone curvature of his ribs, exhilarating, out-of-control. Frightening, but even that is high and bright. He doesn't feel bad, which is exhilarating too. Different. Strange.

"This place has got a way of changing on you."

The younger DUPRR operative is so very close, with his soft eyes and his ~~unforgivable Bridget Jones reference, what the fuck Tifa,~~ generic whiteness, and the seemingly human palpitations of his squashy little pulse inside his neck when he talks and when he moves his head to get a closer look, how fragile the bird's egg cup of his scalp must be under the lamby woolly curls.

"I mean--"

Not that William has super-sight. Or X-ray vision. Or any kind of superpowers that allow him to see to this kind of minute detail. It's just that he's been a medical practitioner for a long while now, and he knows something of how body parts fit together, by now.

"By now, you've met all the fucking monsters."

He's let go of Rey, who has turned to get her rifle. He reaches for the young DUPRR agent now, hooks a hand around his wrist and an arm around his neck. William changes as he moves, his legs fusing and the texture of his shirt turning shiny, flowing into the flesh of his throat and up the roof of his head, his torso contracting at the same time as it shimmers, corkscrewing in on itself. It only takes a second or two, which is enough time maybe for someone to shoot him or cut him but it's too late by then already: he's turned into a metal wire, fine and sharp, and very small.

Too small to fit the neck of an ordinary man.

The youth's head topples backward, connected only by the column of his spine. Blood shoots out of his severed arteries in a wide, splattering William's abandoned backpack, lakes the floor, unfurling bright tendrils of color in the preexisting puddles of water and the acid.

Edited (I didn't kill Mark Darcy!!!!!!!!) 2015-04-20 05:21 (UTC)

Two steps. She takes two steps forward. Then she stops. Time freezing, almost. She's staring at the air in the split second frame of the moment passing around her, when she hears William's words and the fleshy sounds and tearing and blood gushing, splattering at her feet.

It's her soldier's reflexes that spin her around. When she does, the scene before her is already a mess of carnage, the head of the young man severed not so cleanly from his neck. The very beast that's been raging within its cerebral cage, that she's stifled since coming here, is all too soon released.

Just not by her this time.

Something changes. The monster in her own mind twists behind closed bars. Rey looks down at the remains of the young man, and then to the older one. Not with a murderous intent, but something else.

"William, no!" Rey barks, because she knows what he's so inclined to do next. And whether or not she can stop him -- that's another matter entirely. Instead, she places herself between the remaining DUPRR and the wire that just killed the younger man. "Stop this right now!"

Not often does one hear Rey raise her voice in such a manner. But right then, she is dangerous with authority. She is not making a request. This is an order.

She has a mission of her own, and it needs this other man alive.

It happens too fast for Russe to process what's happening. The kid was his responsibility. Green, eager, naive. Russe knew all these things of him, and was precisely experience-weathered enough to supplement the problem. It's all about balance.

But watching William shift is like nothing he's ever seen before—truly monstrous. The demons they'd encountered on this ship were nothing more than animals, but this grotesque display. As horrified as he is, as distinctly as he feels that compulsion to surge forward and lash out at William, he knows he can't do anything with it—William is nothing more than a fine wire. Whatever supernatural abilities he possesses are well beyond the realm of anything Russe might have imagined, and wide-eyed, he can only accept one course of action as truly productive.

With a yell, he turns and sprints through the darkness towards the exit of the bay, choosing the unknown of the monsters in the shuttle bay over the certainty of these homicidal passengers.

The wire shudders once, violently, a blur of a shadow so narrow and so small that it's nearly not discernibly a shadow at all. Except that it flicks some blood off of it very visibly, more specks spotting the floor, shaken off by the high-freqeuncy vibration.

The next instant, the miniscule throb of movement gives way to William again. William recognizable, William as William, having hands starfished in the sticky puddles on the floor, and a mess of black hair, and a slightly disheveled look about his shirt. When his elbow pops back into the proper size and shape, it knocks into his backpack, pushing it over. He winds up on his knees, crawly, a little wild-eyed, looking around at the cross-section of that one DUPRR agent's severed neck and.

and the one who's running away. Finally, last of all, at Rey. William doesn't know if he feels better, but he feels different. "He's--" he clears his throat stickily. There's a bit of secondhand blood leaking down his forehead. Just a little. William exhales, pushing himself up into an ungainly kneel. "He's fuckin' getting away."

Edited (typo) 2015-04-22 02:11 (UTC)

...Shit.

Rey doesn't think twice. She blinks at William, and then turns her head. She whirls around to pursue the DUPRR survivor. Scoops up the empty assault rifle along the way by the strap, swinging it over her shoulder. Even in its current state, it could still be useful.

"Stop!" Rey snaps, if not a rather fruitless endeavor. The strength poured from William's healing pays off, though. She's fast. Adrenaline pumping. A deft three-hundred-pound tank hurdling towards the running man who's not going to make it very far out of the shuttle bay before she lunges to tackle him.

First thing is to make sure this guy doesn't get himself killed. William she'll deal with next.

He doesn't stop, but he's also slow-moving. Faster than any man his age has a right to be, admittedly, but Rey's in top form and better trained in the area. Smaller. Faster moving all around.

She gains on him, and he's winded by the time she does, breath coming out in raspy wheezes as he tries to keep his muscles moving. He's not a soldier, dammit, he's just—

She takes him down, and they spill across the floor, but he doesn't stop fighting her. Doesn't hesitate to swing at a girl.

Before, every fiber infiltrating her brain wanted to kill this man, and she had been fighting it. Something's different now. She can't tell whether it's still the adrenal rush or that shift in directive snaking around inside her head -- but she's shaking.

What she knows now is that she'll say and do whatever it takes to get this man to stop struggling against her. She'll take whatever hit he has to throw at her. But it doesn't take much for her to maneuver and overtake him into a chokehold around solid arms. It's obvious to her that the man is no skilled fighter.

"Just stop!" Rey says again, more exasperated. "What happened to your friend wasn't supposed to happen. Don't want to hurt you!"

Partially a lie. Partially the truth.

Below her, Russe doesn't stop struggling, but she does get him into a chokehold eventually. His hands curl around her thick arm, but it's not doing him any good except to get air in. He uses that air to shout at her, "You're crazy! You're all fucking crazy!" He thrashes, trying to shift them both if he can't tear away from her on his own, like maybe he can get her to drop and knock her to the floor to loosen the grip between his weight and the steel of the ship.

Russe's accusations are probably not inaccurate. William's appearance certainly doesn't lend credibility to any arguments to that matter, when he finally comes stumbling into view. Even though he picked himself up out of the spreading lakes of arterial loss, it's still drenched down the knees of his pants and clotted on his elbows, some on his chin and his forehead. Underneath it, he looks kind of

worried. Big soft eyes and a slightly confused quality to his expression overall, his mouth half open, slightly out of breath. Hard to say whether it's from sprinting over or from murder. "I'm," he starts, then stops, glancing at Rey a little shrewdly. He already stopped in his tracks, but he starts to back up slightly within his own little space, his shoulders going up. He isn't sure if Rey wants him to say anything.

What could he possibly explain, anyway? What could that possibly change?

It doesn't take much to figure out why this guy's so hysteric. Rey has been in his shoes on more than one occasion. The only difference is that she was predisposed to cope with it faster. Nothing was ever permanent, especially human life.

Still, she admires his efforts. She's a lot heavier than she looks, and quite effortlessly keeps him pinned down under her weight.

"Not all of us," she tells him. Calmer, though her arm has a secure grip around his neck. He can thrash and claw and punch her with all he has. She is used to pain. "This ship wants you dead, and it'll do whatever it can to make that happen. Even if it means forcing some of us to..."

She trails off. Hears William speak. She eases her hold of the man, giving him room to breathe.

"Sorry."

The sound of William's voice does little (nothing, actually) to ease him. When Rey lets up, Russe grabs out for the floor, trying to pull himself away. But her grip is only looser, not released, so he doesn't get anywhere. The man who just murdered his friend is standing over him, and there's nowhere for him to run. Rather than trembling, frightened, he shouts.

"You're out of your mind!" He barks, "It's a fucking ship; it doesn't want anything. You've lost it. All of you, you've lost it." Said in the mournful but paranoid voice of a man who's decided they made a mistake, following the Tranquility, boarding it. Their mission was not only a total loss; it was a mistake. "We should have left you out here."

"Ain't disagreeing with you there," says William, who then-- sudden as a heart-attack-- wonders if the Hellhounds could drown him back into the soupy mess of his soul as quickly as they'd hauled it out of him. He scrubs his arm absently. William knows that he won't like it when he can feel guilt again. There will be so very much to feel.

The anticipatory prickle distracts him for a moment. Sucks him into a brief, strange pause, during which he stares at Russe's face and seems to stare right through his head without really seeing him.

A moment later, he blinks hard enough to crease his eyelids, and then reopens his eyes to stare at Russe dead in the face. He inhales unsteadily, glancing at Rey. "It's a fucking ship's got monsters," he answers. "Robots and armored Goddamn aliens with acid blood. Van Rijn's been 'round for fuck knows how long, and they had Strela brainwashed into complacency or whatever the fuck happened. You don't reckon it's within your generation's tech to fuck up someone's brain?"

William looks fucked up in the brain a bit now, his words coming out too fast, tio blunt, and something very uneven about his pace as he takes a few steps closer to Rey and the other man. At some point he picked up his medkit bag again. Maybe he wants to play doctor-- but he clutches the canvas with both smeared hands for now, and Rey here to chaperon.

What the man says comes as a surprise to Rey. It was very telling just how little these people knew about what they were getting themselves into when they decided to dock the ship. That this crew got dealt the same shitty card as anyone else stuck here was.

Only her eyes move when she hears William, shifting up to meet his for that brief moment.

"That's right," she agrees. "Your people have seen Strela, the Cyllene. And you think a ship messing with people's heads is crazy?"

Well, it sure as hell wasn't sane, she had to admit that. But it wasn't her fault. It wasn't any of their fault.

It wasn't our fault.

She blinks when William starts making a move towards them. Her free (two-fingered) hand whips out, gesturing for him to stop, her head shaking. Whatever the hell inspired William to kill the younger man, she doesn't want to take any more risks of the same thing repeating itself, or how this guy will react. There are too many unknowns to contend with right now.

Rey looks back down at the DUPRR guy. "Going to let you go. If you try to run out there on your own, you'll die -- and it's too dangerous to stay here." She pauses. "Again, am really sorry about your friend. We've lost a lot of people, too."

Unlike the soulless William, Rey has these stupid things called feelings to feel right now. Guilt is definitely one of them, for not acting fast enough, for turning her back on William despite having a really good idea what he was thinking. That one is on her.

He doesn't address their accusations; at this point, he doesn't believe it will do him any good. They've made up their minds, if they're willing to kill the other members of his team for it, and he values what little life he's got left in him. Slowly, he raises his hands, gesturing his surrender and acceptance of Rey's terms.

Instead of silently accepting that he's essentially under her guard now, though, he pipes up to question her in a rough voice, "What do you want?" She could have killed him, but she didn't. If that were still their goal, he'd already be dead: instead, they're both talking. That's progress. (Then again, they could have let the monsters devour them, as well.) With any luck, they need him for something, and he can use it to get back to the rest of his people—or whoever's left.

To go home is the honest answer that William is in no position to give. He's been overly forward already, he's given to understand. He presses his mouth into an awkward... smile? and shoulders his backpack up again. There are dark, blotchy handprints all over it now, incomplete finger marks and partial palm-prints. It could still come in handy, though. If the ship tries to stop them from taking Russe back to the-- wherever.

If he tries to stop them. But he isn't bothered so much now by that chaotic edge, the loss of control, that veering shiny-eyed mania that had taken him minutes ago. Later on, William will realize that that had been as much giddiness as mind-control, but that's a disgusting thing to think about-- later. For now, he takes a step backward, eyes moving between Russe and Rey. While the DUPRR agent is evidently an important person, what Rey does matters much more.

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SORRY FOR SO MAny moves, if im godmoding just poke me in pp

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cw gore things and powerpose as fuq

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give permission for rey to knock him out rn if she wants