The Unquiet Past

[angrydurf]

Ace frowned into the phone and hung up in response. Nice thing about cell phones was they were just as traceable active or not, Rachel probably even had GPS if he was lucky.

He immediatly had one of the officers put a trace on the cell then turned back to Rachel "I gotta go after her kiddo, the docs'll get you taken care of and you'll be better before you know it." Ace then began turning away and paused to ask "You have that thing lo-jacked?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Rachel had not, in fact, had her car lo-jacked, much to her obvious chagrin. She had put a GPS inside the car and the phone, though, and by the time Ace had reached his own vehicle they'd set up a tracker for Rachel's car as it sped west down Route 4 down into Southside. Given Ace's long career and reputation, the police deferred to him on this issue. There were patrol cars in the area, but as Ace himself had said, Marionette's powers could easily turn standard assets deployed against her into assets of her own.

[angrydurf]

Ace slid behind the wheel of his porshe and sped out of the garage and onto the streets of freedom. The low slung sports car hummed as he pushed the speed weaving in and out of traffic to intercept Marrionettes likely location.

While in transit he contacted the central computer at Danger Manor and had it look up retirement comunities near her last known location trying to get ahead of the crazed psychic.

[Avenger Assembled]

Ace's skillful navigation put him well ahead of the game, letting him weave his sports car in and out of traffic, shooting across the bridge like a bad-ass driver out of a James Bond movie. By the time he'd made it onto the streets of the South Side, his computer had dug up something very interesting for him. The Shady Acres Retirement Home in Bayview had a partnership agreement with the Psychiatric Nurses' Union of New Jersey, allowing for low-cost care for aged union members in return for inexpensive labor there from nursing students associated with the Union. Remembering Marionette's comments about the hospital where she'd died, it wasn't hard to guess some of her intentions.

[angrydurf]

Ace smiled at the revelation, while he certainly wasn't happy about Marrionettes prospective rampage he realized that his mispent years had been missing something, despite himself he enjoyed this edge of your teeth kinda heroism.

He called in the likely target and requested a perimeter be set up wth as many Anti-Esper equiped officers and agents as they could get. He didn't want her slipping through his fingers again and gunned the porshe towards Shaddy Acres.

[Avenger Assembled]

Shady Acres proved to be something of a low-rent retirement home, the sort of place that had claimed a depressing number of Ace's contemporaries in the last few years. The lawn was brown and the building itself old, its institutional style dating back several years. But the place looked clean, anyway, and it was in a decent enough neighborhood. Poverty didn't always mean neglect. As the police mobilized in the neighborhood, Ace pulled into the parking lot to see a red Corvette in the lot, one parked with careless ease in the handicapped spots. The lobby doors were closed, as one might expect in the hot weather, and the hum of air conditioners came from most of the rooms. He couldn't see inside the windows from the outside.

[angrydurf]

Ace took in the building for a moment before vaulting out of his car. She knew he was coming, had made sure he would in fact. No point in wasting time some poor retired nurse might not have.

Ace strode directly up to the front of the building and opened the doors stepping in out of the glare and looking around for any sign of Marionettes plan.

[Avenger Assembled]

All seemed quiet when Ace walked into the nursing home's lobby; the air conditioners and the gentle sound of 40s Muzak the only sounds he heard at first. There were a few residents sleeping in wheelchairs by the door, and a secretary hard at work at her desk. He was just walking up there when she picked up her phone and said, "Shady Acres, how may I help you?" She hung up the phone, smiling perkily, and went back to typing at her computer. A few moments later, she picked up her phone again and spoke in the same inflection. "Shady Acres, how many I help you?"

[angrydurf]

He knew that woudl have been too easy. Marionette wasn't even trying to keep a low profile any longer. He quickly stepped around the desk and looked for a registration log or something she might have used to find her targets room number. he could only hope she had left behind some clue. finding nothing he started down the hallway listening intently for sounds of trouble.

[Avenger Assembled]

Heading down the corridor was an eerie experience for Ace, the already-depressing confines of the nursing home made all the more disturbing by the mental chaos left behind in Marionette's wake. There were nurses in wheelchairs and patients stretched out on the ground, all of them in the same mental fugue into which she'd locked the receptionist. Following the trail of chaos led Ace down the hall to the psychiatric ward, an even eerier place full of the mentally-deranged elderly. Staff and patients both watched him here as he approached the single open door, through which he could just hear Marionette's voice.

[angrydurf]

As he head Marionettes voice he clouded th minds around him and slipped out of sight he wanted to see what the situation was before he engaged the vile telepath. He hoped her enhanced senses would be confounded long enough for him to position himself at least.

He slipped into the room to guage the layout taking care to keep his distance from Marionette and quickly scaned the room before acting.

[Avenger Assembled]

"This is disgusting, May, just disgusting," Marionette was saying, flipping through the medical charts in her hand with a look of slowly dawning rage. She was paying hardly any attention to the very elderly woman in the bed, whose wide eyes and slow movements showed she was somewhere far away. "Late-stage Alzheimer's, huh? Late-stage Alzheimer's?" She was pacing back and forth, her boots ringing on the tile floor beneath her feet. "You're not even suffering anymore, are you? You can't even tell I'm here! I could put a pillow on YOUR FACE, and it would be a blessing!" She screamed and pointed her finger at the old woman, whose face didn't change a bit as Marionette's psychic powers lashed out.

[angrydurf]

Ace shook off the projected emotions of the crazed mentalist with little effort after all he wasn't the intended target. He lightly stepped around marionette and leaned over the old woman, shimmering into sight and whispered to her, "Sleep." with his will backing the command.

He then turned to Marionette an almost sympathetic look in his eyes, "Stop this, that time is gone, what was done may have been wrong but this solves nothing." He spoke plainly and at least on the surface from the heart.

[Avenger Assembled]

"You're right," Marionette admitted. Looking down at the old woman in the bed, she folded her red-gloved hands open and shut, open and shut, the leather squeaking slightly. "Killing her would have made me feel a lot better, but it's pointless now. She's already dead. Her family would probably buy me a gold medal for saving them the trouble." She sighed, shaking her head, before focusing on Ace as the air around her seemed to crackle. "You're still alive, aren't you?" she asked Ace suddenly, her eyes glowing white. "Still alive, and still young, when everyone else is OLD AND DEAD!"

[Avenger Assembled]

When Ace's mind resisted her untoward advances yet again, Marionette dropped to the ground with a deeply depressed look on her face. "It's not fair. This was supposed to end with somebody dead." She thought about that for a moment...then suddenly her eyes rolled up in her head. As blood came out her nose, she fell all the way back and hit the floor, a relaxed look on her unconscious face. All around Ace, suddenly he heard the cries and startled exclamations as the residents and staff Marionette had been mentally dominating began to wake up.

[angrydurf]

Ace let out a curse quite out of keeping with his normally genteel exterior and dropped to the floor to trya nd see what she had done to herself. He knew it could well just be another trap and she certainly was one of the more vile villians he had faced in recent time but if she could be saved he woudl see to it that she would be.

Crouching over her he quickly began checking what he could of her injuries and treating her with what supplies the room had on hand. He was tempted to call in the cops and paramedics but needed to be sure this wasn't another trick.

[Avenger Assembled]

Marionette's unconsciousness was very real, Ace's ministrations coming just in time to stabilize her from slipping into something even worse. By now STAR Squad had moved in to help restore order, tending to frightened patients and traumatized staff, bringing some order to the nursing home that Marionette had thrown into such chaos. Marionette was still out when the cops put the inhibitor on her (for real this time, verifying it with an officer standing outside with a camera), and didn't stir as they cuffed her to the gurney and carried her away.

[angrydurf]

Ace shook his head saddly as they took her away. She had been a dangerous terroist before certainly, but this maddness was something Ace couldn't help but feel for her about. He knew why what had been done was done to her before. She was a menace and the sentiment at that time was not friendly to even the heroic metahumans. But it had broken her in the end, Ace knew a bit about various ways of coming back and had serious worries that this would not be the last he saw of Marrionette.

Pushing aside his rather maudlin self reflection he thanked the officers for their speedy response and jumped back into his car gunning it for midtown and his late lunch.