ic Burning at Both Ends (IC)

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Peri dropped gracefully to the floor doing a little flip to be the right way up.

 

"Well I'm glad someone has heard of me in such ivory towers!" she strolled confidently over to the group and looked at the screens

 

As she checked over the code flashing on the screen at last it seems having all the information about what was going on here.

 

"I think I can open the blast door long enough for you all to get out of here, then we'll see about sorting out your Francis!"

 

The first responsibility was getting people to safety first, everyone here might not think it but people were much more important than money or power.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Right, let's focus on that and see where we go from there." said the man who seemed surely in control, as they went to work. Before long, the security doors were grinding open, and through the cameras, the Emerald Spider could see the people inside slowly filing out, realizing this was not usual. Especially when the apparently leader man activated the intercom.

 

"All employees need to evacuate now. This is not a drill." and so it was. The employees- including Jessica- quickly worked to file out.

 

But then the monitors hissed, and the camera went blank, replaced by the same image from the underground.

 

"You can't help but get in my way, can you Joseph?" Francis snarled.

 

"You were engaging in corporate espionage."

 

"THEY STOLE FROM ME, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!" Francis yelled in anger. "I'M TAKING THE THINGS I MADE BACK!" There was a rumbling and the vents started blowing cold air now, rapidly freezing and chilling the area in the entire tower. The Cameras slowly clicked back on to the sever room, where the support beams to the servers were freezing over, under massive stress from the sharp heat followed by the cold.

 

"..Oh. I get it." Joseph said at the same time Peri did. "He increased the heat, which made the air expand, and stressed the metal...now by suddenly cooling it, he's going to compress the air, suffocating anyone in the building and cracking the metal...He's not just going to steal the data on the servers, he's going to steal the entire server room!" he explained, though the Emerald Spider could also make this connection herself at this point. "...Then he's got to be ready to transport it somewhere, below the Server room."

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Architecture wasn't her strongest subject but she understood enough to be able to figure out all the implications of what could have if Francis succeeded.

 

"As a nice bonus, there's a good chance that the damage will destroy the building as well!" she mused "Luckily the room should be designed to be cooled, should buy me a little time to get everything into effect."

 

"Guess it's time I went I had a work with Mr Francis! But first, you can tell me the quickest way to the server room, then you can get out of the building just in case!"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"...Fastest way is going to be dropping directly down. Head back to the elevator, drop down one floor to the glass panel, break it and you can fall down directly to the servers in the center of the room. If you can survive a fall like that, anyway, it'd be about 10 stories straight down. If you can't do that, you could go down the elevator or stairs to the 10th floor, then head to the center of the building to get to the hallways leading to the hanging servers...man I knew that was a stupid idea when they suggested it, but the higher ups wouldn't let the idea go." Joseph sighed.

 

"We'll get out of here too, but be careful." he said. "Everyone else! Pack up whatever we have, get any files transferred you can in case those servers go down, and let's get out of here." he demanded as the others started to file out.

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

"Trust me this isn't all just for show!" Peri gave the guy a bit of a side eye as she gestured to her costume "But thank you for all your help, now get out here!" she waved them all out and watched until she was sure that all of the people were safely out of the building.

 

Then she stepped into the corridor, lined herself up and ran towards the elevator shaft (after making sure the doors were stuck open). Making a perfect dive she tumbled down rolling into a ball to go through the glass panel. She then free-falled down for around nine stories or so before making the complex series of finger motions to slow her fall with quantum foam, landing gracefully on her feet. She stood and clicked her neck before walking out to find this server room, musing how all this would have looked cool in a movie or comic book. But then again who'd read a comic about a spider-themed hero?

 

"Well let's do this!"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

There was a roar from below.

 

The building rocked back and forth, then the floor split open. White and blue flames licked up the side of the crevasse like it was the opening to a pit of fire as a suit of slick armor rose out of it, then flew straight up towards the server room and the Spider.

 

It was split directly down the center; half white and red, smeared and curled like flames. The other half was sharp crystals, blue and white, like ice shards. The suit moved fast, soaring up through the floors and leaving melted panels of glass behind it as it go to the center with the server room. The mono-eye in the center of the helmet regarded the spider, holding a frozen orb in one hand a burning orb in the other.

 

"This doesn't concern you, hero! Leave! Now!" Francis yelled. "Everything on that server is my work, stolen by my mental inferiors! I won't let it be used by these ridiculous imbeciles for their own gain, that money deserves to be mine! Those inventions are mine!" he pointed his hands towards the Spider. "This is the only warning you're getting! Let me make that clear!"

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Obviously, poor Francis was unhinged, not unusual in her field of business, so it was time to consider a more compassionate track first.

 

"You know I'm inclined to agree with you, you were probably screwed over by Kessel Corp. And if you did a cool heist and stole the disk drive, or hacked into the data and stole back your data I'd be supporting you one thousand percent!" enough buttering him up time to lay out the truth

 

"But this elaborate scheme has put people at risk, innocent people who didn't do any of this to you!" a pause to let this sink in "Stop this and we can make sure no one gets hurt, do this and I will try and help you get help, that people learn just what was done to you here!"

 

It might be a long shot, but she had to try and offer a peaceful solution to all this.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"...You're right! I was ruined! I was ruined by Kessel Corp, by these...these people who can't understand me." he swung his arm wide and sent a gouge of flame burning across the glass panels, melting and twisting them like a heated lance had just passed over them. "But it wouldn't have mattered! It doesn't matter! If I didn't do it this way it'd never have worked! If I stole back my data, if I tried to bring them to court, I would have been buried under a wave of lawyers! How many lawyers can you hire, Superhero? How good can they be? How many would willingly work against one of the richest companies in the city, in the nation?" Francis shook his head, the mono-eye leaving a trail of red as he did so.

 

"I had to do this. I had to prove I was strong. Stronger than them. Strong enough that they couldn't come after me, because otherwise they'd have sent the lawyers. You know that guy who got forced into corporate slavery by a video game company? They're going to garnish his wages for the rest of his life! He didn't even do anything wrong! he's a modern day debt slave! They were going to do the same to me if I tried to take back what was mine, I know it! I'd rather go to jail than be forced to scrape and suffer like that, I want to succeed, but if I have to pick between a glorious failure and a life under the thumb of Kessel, I'll take the failure, at least I'd die on my feet!"

 

With that, he launched a burning blast of fire, red tinged with white, directly at the Emerald Spider!

Edited September 23 by Poncho

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Peri had lined up a series of suitable responses to his arguments, she really wanted to end this without bloodshed (especially her own). But apparently, Francis has his own ideas, and she only barely dodged the full force of his fire blast, even with all the quantum fields and cooling she felt her flesh scorch. No crop tops for a couple of days she bemoaned to herself if things went wrong obviously.

 

"It still isn't too late, you have a chance to do the right thing here!"

 

Probably a moment too late she began to move around, trying to provide a less obvious target. And definitely not to ignore her danger sense to try and talk someone down next time!

 

Her first instinct, still, was to try and restrain the man instead of just taking him down. Though she still hadn't got used to her wound and in all this motion her quantum thread failed to anchor him to the ground.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Give it up, Spider!" Francis yelled, zipping around to avoid her threads and webbing, sending out a wave of flame and heat as he did so. The suit must be scorching hot iniside for the amount of heat it was outputting, and the freezing tempratures in the building were probably not helping it either; this entire situation was going to be testing the limits not just of the Spider, but the building itself. 

 

Another brilliant lash of white and red fire melted and twisted one of the floors of the building as it chased after the Emerald Spider, boiling glass and metal. Francis' breath sounded loud and labored even through the suit as he continued to scream. 

"BURN!"

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

"I was always more of an outdoor spider, so the hot and cold never bother me!"

 

It was almost like second nature now to bounce and tumble around any area she was fighting, even the burn didn't bother her too much now the adrenaline had really kicked in! After all this it would be a different thing altogether, sometimes she envied those heroes with invulnerable skin!

 

"And you should be kinder to us spider we take all the troublesome bugs!"

 

She emphasised this with two shots of quantum bundles that made a solid hit on her foe.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Gah! No, stop!" He yelled, as he was blasted with the webbing. "You! Argh! You're so annoying!" he screamed. His thrusters gurgled and he dropped a few floors before there was a visible switch in power as his frozen side of his suit activated, summoning a pillar of ice for him to stand on stretching across the floor as he ripped the webbing out of the delicate systems of his armor, especially the mono eye on the suit helmet. The white and silver side of ice had control, and he brought an orb of frozen ice up above his head before it exploded into a thousand sharp spikes that jerked and jittered around the building, impaling parts of the skyscraper to make nothing so much as a giant floating maze of pillars to try and restrain the Spider.

 

"Stay still!"

Edited September 25 by Poncho

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Time seemed to slow down as Peri twisted and turned through the rain of ice shards, her natural instincts enhanced by the quantum-affecting suit picking out each and every path the molecules would take and her path through them all! Sometimes she had to remind herself just how weird it was that she could process such things without much real thought.

 

Her real thoughts brought her to twist and make the finger moments to fire off another stream of SPDR Blasts, hoping to catch him off guard by attacking when he should probably expect her to still be dodging the ice shards. A ploy it seems was much more effective than she had expected. 

 

She finished the whole thing with a dive and rolled over the ground, coming up to again try and snare her foe in the quantum filaments.

 

"You know I don't think I will!"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"No, no, no!" he yelled as he was knocked across the slippery ice, sliding across it onto the actual floor of the level they were on and crashing into the wall. "I won't...I won't let you..." He lurched to the right, avoiding the snare. "I won't let you...stop me." he said, stumbling up. He was being powered by pure frustration and anger, at the limit of what him and his suit could do, but he wasn't going down. He held his head in both hands, the mono eye glowing faintly as it swept around, finally settling on Emerald Spider.

 

"Now...I got you..." He said. "Try to keep moving when you can't breathe!" He yelled. There was a momentarily spark of blazing heat around Peri's head, then freezing cold; it sounded like a clap of thunder as all the air was pushed out from around her head, then the area around her head was chilled to prevent it from moving back in. With precise movement of heat and cold, Francis had created an artificial vacuum directly around Peri's head!

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Maybe it was a moment of overconfidence, she really should have started moving straight away, but she still had the presence of mind to take and hold a deep breath before the oxygen should could be suck away from her. It would be easy to just bounce away again, but she wanted to try and catch him out and end this once and for all.

 

So she dropped to the floor, all curled up as if it had taken her right out of the fight. Playing possum, or more importantly certain types of Spiders, she surratically took a breath as she counted quietly to herself in Korean, "넷, 셋, 둘, 하나, 0".

 

On zero she again lept to her feet, in a backflip, as she fired her quantum blasts again at Francis.

 

"I knew you took the Oxygen from the room, but I didn't think you'd try and do it literally!"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"How!? Why!?" He struggled, not damaged but not holding on well. "Why are you fighting me so hard! You admitted I was right, but you're still fighting against me the whole time! You're still just...You're just.." The suit started glowing with flame again. It beeped a warning; sending off overheating warnings it seemed, flashing yellow with danger, but Francis was ignoring it. "I'm going to burn it all down! I'm going to burn everything down to ashes, including you!"

 

Peri might not even have to defeat him herself if this kept up, it seemed like he was losing his composure so much even his own suit was having difficulty keeping up with him, but that meant nothing when he was throwing white hot fireballs at her with all the force he could muster. The poor building was taking it the worst, burned, frozen, burned, frozen, you could almost hear the structural supports of the building themselves weeping under the strain.

 

What would collapse first; Francis, His Armor, The Building, or the Emerald Spider? 

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Peri was tempted to make one final appeal to the man's common sense and decency, but it was toss up if she could talk him down before his suit both fried and froze him at the same time.

 

"Well mostly to protect the people outside who might get hurt if the building collapses or burns down. But also to stop you from causing yourself much more harm, basically, I'm here to protect everyone."

 

It pained her right now that the only way to quickly help the poor man was to take him down before she could worry about stopping the harm he caused to himself and the building. With that she was in motion again as she made the proper finger motions for a stream of harm-causing quantum filaments.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"They don't deserve help! They're all just as guilty!" Francis screamed, but his cries of vengence- which were probably getting pretty old- were cut short by the quantum webbing finally silencing him. He stumbled, rocked on his feet, then tipped over and fell, falling towards the ground rapidly and unconcious, with no ability to protect himself.

 

The Emerald Spider had just defeated the bad guy, and now they'd turned into a civilian in danger!

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

As soon as he began to fall Peri was ready with a blanketing stream of quantum foam, holding him safely a short distance from the ground. She then dropped to the ground and rapidly made her way to Francis. The building was the next problem, but one thing at a time!

 

First aid wasn't her strongest point, aside from the basic course the company made her attend, so she had to rely on the suit to tell her just what was going on.

 

"If you up and die right now I'm going to be extra annoyed with you!"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

A few things happened as Peri went to work to help Francis. 

 

There was a deep thrum from the bottom of the building as the air conditioner cut off completely, finally ending the game of hot and cold that francis had been playing with it, meaning that control of the building had been re-established.

 

Secondly, the emergency shutters all began to open, sending streams of mid-afternoon sunlight into the damaged- but not destroyed- building, opening it up to the insides. And from that came the third thing.

 

A swath of reporters crashed the doors, cameras flashing excitedly as the Emerald Spider attempted to help Francis. At the head of them was not a reporter, Joseph had claned up since his frazzled look in the control room, added a blazer and fixed his hair. He looked much more in charge.

 

"And as we can see, our friendly local Spider Heroine has solved this crisis for Kesseler Industrial." he peered at Francis as Peri worked on him, seeming genuinely curious and maybe even concerned. "Is he going to be okay?"

 

Thankfully, it did seem so; no life-threatening injuries but maybe a little heat exhaustion from over relying on the heat functions of the suit instead of the cold functions. 

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Peri was so intent on making sure he was okay that it took a second or two to realise what had just happened. Still, she'd been doing this for a few years and quickly recovered her senses.

 

"Physically he's okay..." she spoke softy and quietly to Francis "... though everything that happened with the company before has had an effect on her mental state." 

 

She didn't regret being a hero and helping people, even though she never made any money, but she wasn't going to play the corporate media game. Even if it was them just taking an opportunity of a bad situation.

 

"I'm sure that as a sharing caring company Kessel will happily cover his medical bills to help him recover!" he seemed genuine so it was more a friendly suggestion than a threat to ruin this PR moment.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Joseph smiled at the Emerald Spider confidently. He was definitely playing this somehow. He adjusted his blazee and turned back to the assembled press.

 

"The good Spider has said that this formerly released employee is suffering mental strain. Now, I will be honest. We fired Francis here on claims from our competitors that he was stealing from them. But I think we can look at his abilities- if not his actions- today and see that it is actually clear that Francis Celius is clearly a master scientist and engineer. Whioe I did sign off on his firing, I had no idea just how competent he was." His smile never broke.

 

"So not only will we not be pressing charges, and handling all therapy costs, but we will also be hiring Francis back, at higher pay, and sending sternly worded letters to all our competitors that claimed he stole resesrch feom them; if they were lying, they are equally responsible for Francis' mental health, and Kessler Industrial Technologies will always look out for our employees." He paused and looked at Emerald Spider, confident and assured. 

 

"And for all of her help today, we must also thank the Emerald Spider." He extended his hand.

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Even with everything she couldn't help but feel that she'd still been played, she wondered if the Freedom League ever felt the same way? Still, Francis would get the help he needed and she could always check back to see if the company was doing super criminal (compared to normal criminal) things. Hopefully, Jen would give them a good review and they would keep the contract, which was another thing she needed to square off quickly. But first...

 

"I'm happy that things ended with minimal harm, and that Francis will get the help he needs..." she took Joseph's hand, and smiled (with her eyes at least, her face being covered)

 

"Now I'm sure you all have lots of questions, and I'm needed elsewhere in the city, but I think I have time to answer a few!"

 

A quick bit of superhero PR, then grab her clothes and make an appearance with on cameras so people wouldn't get too suspicious of Peri's disappearance.

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

A corporate suit was one thing, but a superhero was another entirely. So the Emerald Spider quickly had the focus as Joseph continued to smile next to her. Now he was getting pictures for the morning and evening reports next to the Spider. This really had turned out for him.

 

"Miss Spider, how were you on the scene so fast?"

 

"Was this villain a challenge? How did you handle the fight? Can you spare the time to describe your actions first hand?"

 

"Is this a new era of Super Activity in Emerald City, do you think?"

 

"Are you allied or affiliated with Kessler Corp?" 

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

"Every villain is a challenge, it's egotistically for me to think that I'm better than any of them! As for a blow-by-blow, I'm sure KessleCorp has the footage and I'll with their permission I'm sure we can release the footage for a reasonable amount donated to an agreed list of local charities!" she'd be pretty careful up to the server room, but there was almost no doubt that they had some in the room

 

"And though, like them, I have the interest of Emerald City at heart, I'm not affiliated with Kessler Corp in any manner." right enough walking the corporate line, time for a little self-promotion

 

"I've been doing this for almost eight years, and in that time I've met many, both super-hero and otherwise, trying to do right by this city. So it maybe not be a new era, but another chapter in this city's superhero community. As for everything else, well a girl got to keep a few secrets..."

 

With a keen eye, she put her arm up and made a series of hand movements to send a tendril of quantum filament shooting up into the sky, she then zipped up into the sky, giving a cheery wave as she went. At the top of the building, she did a flip and roll to go out of sight on top of the building.