ic Night Shift

[Huckleberry]

Like a nightmare, La Puma Negra pounces out of the shadow. An instinct deep within her target's primitive mind paralyzes him with fear at the sight of her yellow, luminous eyes. Like a close up in a king fu action thriller, her kick connects artistically with the gunman's face, and he is unconscious before he hits the ground.

 

Shadows wrap around the assault rifle of the other guard as Rot exercises her disintegration powers at range. The weapon reduces to a useless lump - no barrel, no trigger, no gun.

 

The last conscious guard drops the useless thing and falls to his knees, begging La Puma Negra for his life. "Please, don't hurt me! They're all in there, everyone."

 

He gestures towards the door he came through, then lies down on his belly, face down, and continues to whimper. 

Edited February 25 by Huckleberry

[MoonSimply]

La Puma Negra

 

"I ain't buyin' it," says Puma as she grabs the man by the collar, bearing the fangs her mouth and looking more like some sort of feral monster in the minimal light. With her impressive strength, she was actually holding the man up, growling at him as the other hand bared claws, "Start talking bub or else I'm gonna make you take a few sick days."

 

As they werecat would threaten the man with more harm like his compatriot, she'd motion Rot to go check the room that this apparent guard was gesturing towards. Puma still wasn't sure what this whole situation was about, but she was starting to get a sick feeling in her stomach about it, and it wasn't from being close to Rot, "Preferably now, or I let my friend here talk with you."

[Huckleberry]

Nodding to Carmen, Consuelo floats towards the door. 

 

"Jeez, okay, okay."  The man La Puma Negra is holding up is clearly terrified. "It's this thing. I don't know if it's technically illegal . . . But it ain't right. Some machine. It's supposed to get into people's heads. Alien technology. They're building it in the next room. The aliens."

 

Reaching the door, Consuelo cracks it open and peeks inside. She stays there for a little while, then quietly shuts the door and hovers back to Carmen.

 

"Holy freaking cow, yo. Um, there's like, uh, all these guys in lab coats with, uh . . . squid faces. And they're working on this huge machine. And there's like, one guy - one, uh, human guy - in a suit. He's like angry and talking on the phone. And, this is weird, but, on this side of the door, we can't hear anything, but when I stick my head through the doorway it's, like, really noisy."

[MoonSimply]

La Puma Negra 

 

Puma would growl at the man one more time before throwing him aside with a threatening glare, "Go!" she'd speak with gritted teeth. The look of an animal, a mean and nasty one that knew it had prey right in the palm of her hands before throwing the guy away from her. Fighting both her and Rot would be a fouls errand for a guy like this, especially unarmed, Puma glaring at him until he'd leave.

 

"Aliens huh..." Puma spoke as she'd turn to Rot, calming down before slowly creeping her way towards the entrance, keeping out of sight to see what Rot saw and getting a rather strange surprise when Rot closed the door, "Squid faces?"

[Huckleberry]

La Puma Negra's prey is tossed aside. "Oof!" The man crashes painfully into a stack of pallets, but quickly gets up and scrambles out the same door that the three teens left by, leaving the two young supers alone in the room.

 

"Uh, yeah, uh . . . squid faces." Rot opens the door up again just a crack and Carmen can peer in to the chaos beyond.

 

The doorway opens into a more modern looking space, perhaps 200'×120' with 40' ceilings. It's clearly a new building with sealed concrete floors precisely painted with layout markings and glossy white walls, with wide open sight-lines and sizzlingly bright overhead LED illumination. Not ideal for stealth.

 

The room is dominated by . . . something. A huge alien-looking machine glows and swirls with strange energies, emitting noises like whalesong combined with random clarion bell strikes. Taking up maybe a quarter of the floorspace and reaching nearly to the ceiling, the thing is being worked on by a dozen three-foot-tall creatures with squid-like faces wearing long white jackets. Some of the squidmen appear engaged in mechanical tasks at ground level. Others are working from levitating platforms, either zapping the machine with electrical prods or adding or removing glowing orbs from the upper part of the machine. A few others look like they're maybe engaged in some kind of programming work, waving their tentacle style arms around in a cloud of multicolored energy like they are some sort of bizarre orchestra conductors.

 

More recognizable is an adult human male in an expensive looking suit. His hair looks even more meticulously manicured than Michael's. Like Consuelo said, he's talking angrily on the phone as he stalks into a back office room and closes the door behind him.

 

Squidman body language is not a specialty of either Carmen or Consuelo, but they get the feeling that those that saw the man storm off might be engaging in nervous speculation. 

 

After she's had a chance to check out the scene, Rot turns to La Puma Negra. "So, uh, what's next?"

[MoonSimply]

La Puma Negra

 

Puma's eyes go wide as she looks at the large contraption, beyond what she could think of as a device for there to be. The same could be said for the language itself as trying to discern what they were saying was wracking her brain something fierce. It was beyond intelligible, as if someone was speaking Chinese to her and Rot. The young feline woman was unsure of how to deal with this, unsure of what to exactly do. With the Patriot, she had fought a few aliens, werewolf aliens from the moon, but nothing else beyond that. In fact, she'd much rather being dealing with the moon wolves right now.

 

"Uhuh.... squid aliens...." she says before moving away from the door and sitting down, "What you think cause I'm stumped just as you?"