Brief Title:
Fight for Freedom
Characters:
Kimura (NPC), Logan, X-23
Scene Runner/Watcher:
IC Date:
04/09/13 23:00
Location:
Chinatown
Summary:
Kimura cuts in on X's kill. Logan shows up and things get electric.
Social or Plot:
TS:
Yes
Log:
Like the loyal dog she is, X-23 is back out and on the prowl. Though she's never had -faith- in the Facility, she's always had loyalty - and that's been shaken. Cracked. Not yet broken, but on the verge of it; all it would take is one hard hit and all of it could be destroyed.
For now, she continues as she always has, settled as she is in her predatory gyre. Her latest mark is here. The information she needs is here. Like a ghost forever doomed to haunt the same spot, she slinks through the shadowy bowels of Chinatown. A narrow alley leads to a door she needs - behind it, she might be able to save some face within the Facility. After the destruction of the base she was operating out of, it was the least she could possibly do; if she was successful, they might loosen the leash a little. Just a little.
A futile hope, or so the nasty little voice at the back of her mind whispered. A futile hope, but one she clung to with feverish intent.
Her gloved fingers settled on the door knob and her other hand pulled the balaclava down to cover her face. Clad in black, she's prepared to sneak in and strike as unseen as possible.
The door opens silently, into what passed for a safehouse amongst the core cadre of people that X-23 had been tracking. Within it's dark, still, no motion to draw the eye save for the faint whisper of window shades being buffeted slightly by the breeze of an open window. Yet it's not the stillness of vacancy in a home, it's the stillness of a tomb.
Across the way, a faint trickle of blood still slowly flowing from it, there is a corpse on the floor. A man, middle-aged, face down with his arms splayed and a darkening of the fabric in his back. At the feet of a splintered chair, he's in a pool of his own blood and unmoving. There are no tracks around him, no marks of another occupant. Though when the first whiff of the night's air reaches her and gives her the scent she can pick up the smells of not just that occupant, but another rotting perhaps in the back room.
It's only when she advances into the room that the murderer makes her presence known. Garbed in a black jumpsuit with the faintest indigo trim, the tall woman is there now, perched upon the windowsill where a moment ago there was no one.
With that wry cocky smirk and that psychotic gleam in her eyes, Kimura smiles across the way towards X-23. "Too late, too slow, Clone." She hops down without a sound, rising to her full height. "Which is good, I didn't feel like waiting for you to deal with this and then finding out why you did what you did. I'm impatient, as you know."
Not good. She doesn't need to see the body to know something is horribly wrong; it's just confirmation of a fact she should have pieced together earlier. She strips the balaclava from her head and jams it into a pocket. Green eyes cut to Kimura's perch, though she doesn't move; not at first. Tension threads through her physique and pulls her hands into fists that set her gloves to protesting.
"I do not know what you are talking about," she hisses low, jaw clenched. "This was my assigned mission, Kimura." And never mind why it took her quite so long to make her move; Kimura would know well of her inadvertent dealings with the gods - and likely the brief meeting with Logan some time ago. But that's all she can say. While her handler rises to her full height, she hunkers down, all but bristling with anticipation. Few can ever get a proper rise out of X - Kimura is one of them.
"Yeeeah, your mission kinda got a bit of a kibosh on it when you slaughtered your support team. What happened there? Trigger scent got loose? You breaking your training again?" Kimura walks along and casually touches the side of the corpse's head with the toe of her boot, giving the older man's body a small kick so that his head bounces like some fleshy soccer ball.
She looks over towards X-23 and maintains that same cheerless smirk, "Not that it matters to me really. Could've been Santa Claus for all I care." She rests her hand on her hip, her service weapon in the holster there as she taps a leatherclad fingertip upon it casually.
The clone's eyes narrow. "That was not my work." She takes a step forward, one fist already drawing back. Primed. "You -know- that was not my work." Her words drop into a throaty growl that dances at the edge of audible annoyance; she fights the urge, fights it hard, and manages to succeed - mostly. The sight of the body being kicked doesn't garner a reaction; if anything, it seems to pull her more acutely into the moment.
Her mouth pulls into a flat line at the last. Her eyes dart to the service weapon, then back up to Kimura's face - there is no smile, not even of wry amusement. "Even if it was Santa Claus," she finally says, "what would it matter? What do you think you can do that will fix it? The one responsible is still out there - but destroying or detaining him also will not fix it." The rest remains unspoken, but obvious enough.
"Either way, Clone. You failed." Kimura looks at X-23 steadily, noting the tension in her form, the clenched fist. "Go ahead, take your shot. Won't end any differently than before." The taller woman steps towards X-23 and again taps her fingertip lightly upon her service weapon.
"You know they told me to round you up after you were done with this leg. The support team's going to be here in about an hour and a half. Know what that means?" Her smile grows just a bit, "I got you all to myself."
And as she says that last, her movement is a blur, the weapon drawn quickly and coughing fire straight at X-23 though a little low. It's almost silent, like a chuff of sound, but the flash of the weapon would almost be blinding in such a darkened space.
Her upper lip distorts in a snarl. X manages to restrain herself - but only just. The words have all but ceased to have meaning; only the tone properly cuts through to her mind. What is an hour and a half alone with Kimura? A lot of dismemberment and bullet holes, that's what.
And that's if she's lucky.
She doesn't spit out a warning; she doesn't utter any further words. With a feral bellow, the clone surges forward. The sound of boots on the ground is well-matched to the sound of claws popping out - it's an even better match to the barely-there-bark of the gun. It's not the bullet or the fear of getting hit that has her suddenly pitching to a side and preparing to tuck into a roll - bullets hurt, sure, but it's tolerable. The plan, as it usually is - as Kimura certainly would -know- it is - is to get down, then attack from the side.
That's not how it plays out.
She should have known better, in retrospect. She really should have. Dazzled by the muzzle flash and locked into her instinctive mode, she doesn't see Kimura move. She does feel the other woman catching her, though - and, more importantly, pitching her out of the window.
She balls up against the onslaught of shattered glass and broken framework and can only brace herself for the inevitable impact. She hits the roof -hard- and the only thought flashing through her mind is: I hope this roof is solid.
Falling through it? Now -that- would hurt.
The impact of the roof is solid, gravel and small pebbles bounce with the force of the small mutant slamming hard onto the tarpapered roof of the industrial laundry next door. Luckily she missed the jutting upwards aluminum air vents that usually give a place for the steam to escape from the rooms below. She's still a few stories up, though now the night sky is high above her and the moon gleams balefully down upon her.
There's a tick-tick, thump, /thump!/ as Kimura hops out that window, drops a few stories and arrests her fall with one hand in the wall, then drops the rest of the distance. She lands in a crouch at the edge of the roof, some small distance away from X-23 and is definitely the less worse for wear. Standing up slowly she brings her heavy pistol up and aims it almost casually towards X-23 as she starts to walk towards the girl.
"You know I got to thinking about that last time you escaped." As she speaks she reaches to a leather sheath along the back of her belt. A length of metal is drawn free, loose almost like some piece of bendable aluminum. She thumbs a small switch and it stiffens abruptly into a firm three foot blade, like a very long razor. "You wanted to do good didn't you? Rush out into the world doing your little bit for Mary and Joe Citizen. Got me to thinking, you know you could probably do the most good solving world hunger." She stops some ten feet from her, still smirking. "I mean if you heal fast enough as I carve the skin off you, we could package it up, send it off frozen to some third world country. How would that make you feel, Clone? Good idea, huh?"
No sooner than she impacts than X-23 is uncoiling. She springs to her feet with a feral quickness; the very sort of thing that's helped her more than a few times from Kimura's punishments. This is different. Much different. She dials it all in and drops into a crouch of her own, green eyes narrowing keenly at the point where Kimura stands. One of her hands rests lightly on the ground; the other is up, claws out and fist ready. She doesn't bother dusting off the dirt and gravel; she'll be moving enough to knock it all off in short order.
Kimura can do all the talking. She has to think. She has to prepare. The threat of getting shot is nothing; being skinned alive, on the other hand- that's enough to get her lips to peel back from her teeth in a fierce grimace. The razor. The gun. Kimura. All of these things are fitted together - and the end result is the one she both despises and knows is necessary.
"You will have to catch me first."
She launches herself to a side and tucks into a roll, doing so with enough force that she should be able to get some good distance before she can spring to her feet and break into a full run for the edge of the roof. From there, it should be an easy matter to hurl herself at a wall and climb up - and if she's lucky, she'll only have to endure a few bullets to the back to get there.
The Facility consider Kimura as the counterpoint to X-23, as the hard check against the clone's lethal talents. They were not unfounded in their considerations.
Even as X-23 is gathering herself, Kimura can see in her eyes which way the mutant girl is going to jump, can almost feel the way this rabbit will run. She laughs to herself, and as soon as X-23 is moving, Kimura is in pursuit. She'll see Kimura's shadow behind her, like an all ecompassing mass of darkness overtaking her and blotting out the gleam of the moon. A few rounds PTANG off the wall as she starts to make her climb, but then there's a silvery flicker and that long blade slices in aimed straight between the third and fourth ribs of her target and seeking to /impale/ the young woman right there upon the wall.
It's a brutal maneuvar, a vicious thing as if trying to pin the girl like some bug in the insect collection. But it is not the worst, for if she's able to close the distance, to seize the leg of the fleeing X-23... then Kimura will not hesitate to rip the girl down and tear her insides even as she tries to throw her back down upon the rooftop beside her.
Neither will ever be able to kill the other.
For good or ill, they are opposite sides of the same coin.
X-23 manages to get the wall. She hooks her claws in, doing her best to ignore the ominous shadow of her handler behind her. She can't look back. Won't. Doesn't need to. Something bad is going to happen and she can almost taste it.
And then she does. It tastes like blood. White-hot pain lances through her and her body is jarred, pressed against the wall while wet heat spills down her back and from her lips. Blood. Coppery. The scent-taste is overwhelming for just a moment and all she can do is hold on. She waits.
But there is no slackening of Kimura's grip - and where she hesitates at the thought of disembowling herself, in an attempt to surge upward, the other woman seems to have no such hesitation. Instead of pushing herself up and splitting her lower torso in half, Kimura's grip on her leg ensures that the razor will cut straight up. Leather is sheared with the same wet, tearing sound as the meat of her body; bones are cut through and she feels everything split in half at a sickening angle. The sound. The feel. The horror is almost too much for her; she hits the roof again and, this time, the impact is punctuated with a horrific, wet sound and a blood-drowned scream. The world swims amid a sea of darkness - and not all of it is the night sky.
With a yank, Kimura pulls the blade from the wall and snaps it around in a small swirl that sends a thin spatter of X-23's blood across the rooftop and over her gore-slickened features. Now standing there, her dire features illuminated by the heavy moon overhead, she looks almost ethereal as she stands before the young mutant.
"You didn't let me finish my thought," She starts to walk forward, her other hand reaching into one of her vest pockets and producing... a paring knife of all things. "See, if you can heal without having to eat or somehow take in energy. Then you're a veritable perpetual motion engine of sorts. Clonecakes for everyone."
She clucks her tongue a bit as X-23 bleeds copiously, as if admonishing her for making this more difficult than it has to be.
And that's when a rough and gravelly voice lifts, coming from the other side of the roof where a man kneels there, his forearms resting on his knee and his gaze locked on Kimura. "I got two pieces of news for ya, darlin'. If yer waitin' on that recovery team, yer gonna be waitin' a long time." The short stocky X-Man slowly gains his feet. "And yer time with the girl there. It's about ta be cut short."
"Gluck." It's the only semi-articulate utterance X-23 can manage. Already, her body is starting to heal itself; where damaged flesh meets its other half, it begins to knit together. She attempts to spit a gobbet of blood and gore at Kimura, but can't get her body to cooperate; the stuff dribbles out messily instead, streaking her cheek and getting lost in the tattered fan of her hair. She gurgles again and tries to push up to her good elbow, while the other remains uncooperative - being connected to the detached half of her body does not make the process easy.
It's the familiar smell of Logan that gives her only a moment's pause. Then he speaks. She swallows hard around a throat full of blood in an attempt to force it down; but when she opens her mouth, there are no words. She's barely able to move as it is and, with the unexpected distraction of Weapon X, she tries to drag herself a little further, leaving yet more of her blood behind and tracking her progess with a broad smear of her life's essence.
Kimura looks over at Logan and for a moment there's a small hint of hesitation, but then the arrogance surges back to the fore with that smug half-smile lighting up her features. She lightly taps that long blade against her thigh even as she shifts her grip long knife in her other hand, "Weapon X. Don't tell me." She looks around slowly, knowing that she's on borrowed time right now. X-23's healing, the other mutant is most likely going to attack, "You brought your X-friends to help you."
Logan starts forward, cracking his neck to the side with a metallic ringing sound. He's in his civvies, much as X-23 saw him before, jeans, flannel shirt, brown leather jacket, boots. But he wears a grimness of feature that is severe as he addresses Kimura in turn. "Nope. Just me."
Kimura laughs a bit, "Didn't your little genetic offshoot tell you about me?"
"A lil." Logan pauses and rests his hands at his sides, the six blades slide forth with a whisper of metal over metal, snikting into place and gleaming there in the night.
"Then you made a mistake, X." Kimura starts to grow more sure of the situation.
"Mebbe, figure we can settle this here. N'now. You able ta pull this off, yer masters'll be pleased ta have somethin' more viable ta run their tests on than what I left behind years ago. But if ya can't... well," He opens one hand to the side, the blades shining in the moonlight as he gestures as if what will happen was self-evident.
Good. Kimura's fully distracted. X continues to slink back toward the edge of the roof again, though only to find some edge to lean up against. The better for her to fit her pieces back together; the better for her to keep the blood inside of her, rather than gushing out all over the grit and gravel. The innermost pieces are already well on their way to being repaired; the rest is slower, takes a little longer. She reaches across with her 'good' arm and tries to hurry the process along by making sure everything is butted up properly. This time, when she spits, the stream of mixed blood and saliva makes it to the ground.
"Did not." Another wad of clotted blood is brought up, then spat out. "Bring anyone," she finishes. Does Kimura even hear her? Doesn't matter now. Not at all. Bit by bit, she's coming together - and when she's whole, there will be Hell to pay.
Assuming anything's left of Kimura by then.
There's a flash of that smile as Kimura's turns almost positively feral. She's already moving forward, rushing headlong straight at Logan as the X-Man's lips part into a wild growl to meet her charge.
The two figures come together in the middle of that rooftop, Logan's fist drawing back and slashing forward as he seeks to drive the claws straight into Kimura's throat. There's all the wild abandon there in his eyes as he lets his berserker side go, the madness seeming to take him...
Only for the slash to be stopped by Kimura's raised forearm. She almost laughs in that instant as Logan's eyes widen slightly and then she's moving. She twists, smoothly turning to the side as she loops her arm around Logan's and stabs the knife into his pectoral muscle. It gives her enough purchase to slam him /down/ onto the rooftop.
Her sword comes up and slashes downwards even as she laughs, "She didn't tell you enough, did she Weapon X?" The Canadian mutant twists to the side at the last moment, the blade skittering across the gravel and tearing the tarpaper asunder. "You can't beat me. You can't kill me. And I can play with you all I want."
Logan twists up and to the side, rolling to his feet and planting a splay-fingered hand upon the ground to help him balance. The wound in his chest already closing, he doesn't answer her back instead growling and /leaping/ again to the attack.
Kimura fends off the flurry of claw-slashes, sword flickering as she mixes in her own blocks with clangs of their blades. She slams a knee upwards, smashing it into Logan's jaw and sending him rocking backwards even as she spins and slashes the sword across his belly.
Stagginer back a step, two, Logan for a time tries to keep his guts inside his belly, one arm holding them in close. No matter where he strikes she's able to repel, no matter what opening it seems she has, his claws cannot penetrate.
She laughs and shakes her head as she flicks the sword again to the side, this time cleaning it of Logan's blood. "You know if you had a brain I'd be tempted to just reach in and pop it out of your skull. But I'd just get a handful of what? Beer? Maple Syrup?"
She steps in, the sword blurring as she moves. His claw comes up to make the block as he steps in to her. She's knocked back, his shoulder slamming hard into her, rocking her back a step but not enough. She's able to bring the sword down /hard/ onto the musculature between his neck and shoulder. His lips part, fangs flashing as he howsl with the pain.
Another step as Logan staggers back towards that old utility stairwell in the rooftop. She lifts a hand to the comm unit in her left ear and keys it, "Support. Key evac team, two subjects to transport." And as she says the last word she _stabs_ the blade forward and almost mirroring her strike on X-23 impales him against the wall of that stairwell.
The timing could have been better- but it could have been much worse. X-23 forces herself into a three point crouch while Weapon X and Kimura tango; she watches, she waits - but, mostly, she's working out the kinks in her newly mended biology. She should have warned him - but hindsight is what it is. So, he's forced to endure the same hard lessons she's had to; perhaps it'll be enough to give him a better appreciation for why she does what she does.
Perhaps.
But all of that is slipping. The single hard blow needed to destroy her loyalty has been dealt. She heaves herself to her feet and, just as Kimura is drawing back to impale Logan, she surges forward with renewed purpose. Her shoulder tucks down and all of her weight is thrown into the singular act of attempting to tackle her handler with the bonus aim of grappling her into temporary incapacitation.
As she charges in it almost seems as if she has a clean shot, the other woman's back is to her. She's gloating even as she's holding Logan's body against the wall with the metal blade deep next to his spine and locking him in place. She might even for a moment think that she has her. It's only in that moment when her arms spread, when she gets ready to slam into her...
There's a burst of pain, a /WHAM!/ of impact accompanied with a burning sensation of heat as Kimura's backfist slams powerfully into X-23's jaw. It's strong, augmented by the Facility's scientific acument specifically to sear the flesh from its target.
She glances over at her, Kimura's smile positively exultant as she has the two mutants almost at her mercy. She tells X-23 with a sing-song voice, "You forget, Clone. I _know_ you, know how fast you heal, know what you're capable of. You can't surprise me."
And as Kimura says this, Logan's rough and ragged voice lifts, blood burbling in his throat as he tells her. "Mebbe I can."
And as the Canadian mutant says this his claw flashes, stabbing powerfully not into his opponent... but into the heavy junction box in the utility stairwell causing a HISS-TZZZT to sound as a few sparks leap to life and suddenly both Kimura and Logan's bodys go taut as electricity courses through their bodies.
It's enough to kill most people, enough to kill most heroes. The electricity burns through them, sizzling hair and causing bones to snap with tension from the overly taut muscles... and then the breaker kicks in and they both slump to the ground.
*Crack* goes X-23's jaw. *Sizzle* goes her skin. She hits the ground, but is far quicker to rebound from the backhand than the earlier mauling. But where her primary goal failed, her secondary succeeded. "Do you really know me?" It's rhetorical. She's already seen the junction box. Like as not, her thoughts skew in the same direction as Logan's own.
When the blow comes, she's already prepared; namely by shielding her face from any ensuing sparks or flashes of light. She waits until the breaker kicks in before she dares to look again. She knows Weapon X will be fine. Kimura- she's not so sure. With both of them on the ground, she moves quickly; first to try and kick Kimura off the roof and, second, to check on Logan to make sure he still has a pulse. And, if he does? Then he's getting hauled up, one way or the other - and she's getting out of there.
