Fire to the Bone [IC]

[trollthumper]

"What he said." Cannonade stepped through the open door. "We've got no idea who's in the upper offices. For all we know, this place could have janitors working the night shift. Besides, we don't know what they're using to make these things down there, and if they've got hostages..." He didn't complete the thought; he just trudged down the stairs.

There was a second door at the bottom of the stairs, just as thick as the one at the top. This one, however, was wedged open by the chassis of yet another broken security drone. With some effort, Cannonade managed to hoist the door up enough that the others could go through. Beyond the security door lay a small antechamber, with computers on all sides. Three doors, these ones shut, stood on the walls -- but gouged onto the steel were glyphs in some language Cannonade couldn't make out, burned and broken as if fire had run through them.

"What the hell were they doing down here?"

[Quinn]

Push gave a somewhat wan smile as he followed Cannonade and the rest downstairs, carrying the busted drone along with him on a sudden suspicion. The sight of a second drone seemed to confirm something for him, and he slid both in and rolled into the room underneath the door as Cannonade held it up. The computers held no interest for him, and the glyphs he seemed to look at askance for a moment before shrugging.

"Best guess? Trying to find a new interior decorator. Or having a house party that went a bit awry."

As the others separated to search the place, without further ado he rolled up his coat sleeves and dug into the drones, expertly taking them apart with an ease brought by years of messing with crazy technologies of all stripes. Admittedly, he wasn't any caliber of genius compared to Dragonfly or Ironclad, but he was by no means a dope about this sort of thing. Within a few minutes he had both disassembled on the floor in front of him, and he examined a particularly vicious looking device with a professional's eye.

"Hmm...party or not, these guys weren't kidding around. High-caliber machine guns, laser cutters, blades, we're talking seriously lethal hardware here. These things were meant to take intruders apart, and fast."

He chucked the device behind him, shifting to examine a pair of boxy objects he'd salvaged from one drone. The first object he only had to take a quick look-over before he'd identified it, but the second seemed to bother the kineticist. That one he picked up again, standing to examine it further.

"And...lessee...first item's a targeting computer. Solid piece of programming and machinery too. And the other one looks like some kind of memory bank...give me a sec."

He reached into his bag, taking out a small handheld PDA, and hooked it up to the memory bank. A few seconds of browsing, and Push actually smiled as he input a command.

"Hah, I love it when I'm right. Security codes and passwords, probably for the computers and the rest of the complex."

Setting the data to copy over, he picked up the targeting computer and dropped it into his messenger bag, making a note to call up Dragonfly and Jessica later for a look at it (and maybe repurpose it for Lazarus...). With that done, he turned to the others and shrugged.

"It'll take a bit to copy the codes over to my PDA. You guys got anything?"

[Azuth65]

Wisp leaned against the entrance the group used, her arms crossed over her chest in a stance that to the untrained eye conveyed a lack of interest or concern but upon a second look, one could tell her eyes scanned every direction trouble could be coming from while Push, Atlas, and Cannonade looked around at the various pieces of equipment around the room.

"Way out of my depth here," she sighed to herself as she looked around.

[trollthumper]

Push managed to copy the codes from the broken drone over to the database. It seemed that most of the people working on the project had had the good sense to differ their passcodes for the robots from their passcodes for the computers -- save for one. A database opened up, revealing controls for the three doors and a file on "Project Vigridr."

"Got nothing on my end," Cannonade said as he ran his fingers over one of the doors. "This door feels weak. Like whatever sorta defenses they had on it fried the inside." He drove his fist into the door, letting out a great banging noise. He drove it in again, pushing the steel down but not breaking it. He drove it in again, and while the steel bulged obscenely, it still held. He drew his fist back, shaking it. "Stronger than I thought. God, what do they make this stuff out of?"

[Azuth65]

Wisp watched Cannonade take several swings at the door out of the corner of her eye. After the third try, she was standing next to him with a slight nimbus of her sanguine and ivory smoke around her body. "Say, want a hand with that?" she asked, cracking her knuckles. Before Cannonade could make any further statement on the matter, the young woman stepped forward and rammed her fist into the door. It landed with horrible sound, not that of bones breaking but close enough let anyone listening that the blow had hurt. A lot.

The pain shooting up her arm quickly faded as the door finally came loose and fell inwards. "Totally. Worth it," she hissed through gritted teeth.

[trollthumper]

The door fell in and landed with a terrible clang, revealing a room lit by fluorescent bulbs. The room stretched on for a good two hundred feet, revealing a series of chambers mounted against the walls. Five hung open, their interiors empty but for breathing tubes and a small reservoir of fluid. The others chambers contained humans, all in various states of assembly. The ones nearest to the door seemed almost like they were alive, sleeping and suspended in the fluid. Past these chambers, however, lay constructed bodies that were lacking skin, organs, muscle tissue, all the way down to the barest elements of skeleton. Some of the bodies were seemingly being built, with motes of nerve or flesh emerging onto empty bone.

As Wisp and Cannonade explored the room, an item in the database caught Push's eye. "RITUAL."

[Quinn]

Push hated to admit that computers were his strong point. In fact, more than once he'd had to send a potential L.A.I.R customer to another auto shop specializing in work when the issue wasn't mechanical, but more to do with radios or GPS problems. Still, sometimes he could muddle along if the situation called for it. This was one of those situations.

One of these days, I gotta get Blue to give me a crash course in this stuff...

The word "Ritual" was rather hard to miss, perusing the files that were readily available after inputting the codes. Especially since he dealt with the aftereffects of rituals on a daily basis. Aftereffects which might involve zombies? Radioactive Nazi zombies?

"Oh, crap."

He dived into the file, looking at every scrap of information that was available, fearing the worst.

[Geez3r]

Atlas stood back and let the events unfold. Truth be told, all of the technological stuff was a bit above his pay grade. It looked like the others had it well in hand, so he just left them to it. Some of the sciency types got annoyed if you looked over their shoulder while they were trying to work, and because Atlas had never worked with these heroes before, he didn't want to test anyone's patience.

He did however wince, or whatever passed for wincing in his odd blob form, when they tried to knock down the door. "Next time, I handle the door."

He intended to follow that up with a joke of some kind, but after crossing the threshold, it died in his throat. "Good God. What is this place?" asked Atlas to no one in particular as he took in the horrendous surroundings. Hesitantly, he reached out telepathically to see if any of those things were alive.

[trollthumper]

Atlas picked up nothing from even the most developed bodies in the tubes. No dreams, no cogent thoughts, nothing. He could pick up the faint trace of autonomic reflex -- breathing and so forth -- but the bodies were not primed for active thinking or intelligence. They were meat, prepared for something else.

"That'd probably be best," said Cannonade. "I don't usually try to knock down doors that thick. Call it a stress test." He looked at the grown bodies. "These guys ain't clones... I mean, if they are, they ain't all using the same body. Different hair colors, eye colors, general build -- they're being built for variety as well as performance. Gotta wonder why, though, if they're just gonna pump 'em full of radiation and let 'em go."

Push, meanwhile, had opened the file labeled "RITUAL." There were excerpts from old tomes, writings on blood and flesh and the branches of Yggdrasil. Ritual implements were outlined -- here a knife, here a circle of runes, here a piece of the deceased. And there was a video attached in a sub-folder, which opened up to full-screen when clicked. The video showed a room carved from concrete with runes burned into the walls. An altar the size of a table rose out of the ground and stood at the center of the room; four men in labcoats stood at the corners of the room, and a man with striking blond hair and a white robe stood at the head. On the altar lay a muscular body clad in an SS uniform, one that appeared to be sleeping rather than dead.

The man at the head was spitting something out in a guttural tongue -- it could have been German, Old Norse, or Swedish for all Push knew. As the chanting carried on, the runes on the walls burst into spectral flame, and something began to form over the body. It appeared to be a ghost, sharing similar features to the man on the table. He seemed confused by his surroundings, but surprise danced across his face as he locked eyes with the man in the white robe. The robed man slashed his palm and beckoned down at the corpse, and suddenly, the ghost was drown downwards, flowing like water into the mouth of the prone body. When the ghost vanished, the body on the table sat upright, gasping. After it regained its breath, it swung its legs down to the ground.

"Frederich Marsk?" asked the man in the white robe.

"Ja."

"Willkommen zuruck nach Midgard."

[Quinn]

Push's response was abrupt and succinct. And not really fit for public hearing. Surprisingly enough, he'd seen worse, but this was fairly high-up on the "burn first ask questions later" list. Which he was now strongly in favor of.

He recognized a few words, pieced together from other rituals and magic spells he'd heard in the past. Folkvangr. Freya. Einherjar. Vigridir. Valkyrie. Valhalla. Midgard. Einherjar. Valkyrie. Valhalla. Midgard. Ghosts being drawn into corpses. A hair on that knife, didn't Wyrd once tell him something about sympathetic magic? Using a part of a person to represent a whole? And a ghost being formed by a ritual...wait a sec, these guys weren't just making cheap zombie labor. They were calling up einherjar from Valhalla! The mightiest warriors of the dead, serving them...and these were warriors who had millenia to train and fight.

"Oh crap."

But what didn't make sense was how they went from factory-floor model Asgardian warriors to barely able to moan radioactive zombies...or what their plan was. He copied the RITUAL file to his PDA, then started searching through the database for security videos, anything recorded what happened in the recent past. Besides that, he kept his eyes peeled for anything labeled Operation such-and-such, or at least anything that might indicate plans. An insignia of the organization beyond a swastika would have been nice too, but he wasn't holding his breath on that one.

[Azuth65]

Wisp moved quietly through the room, looking at the tanks and feeling both her stomach trying to revolt and like she was in a bad horror movie, 'Attack of the Radioactive Nazi Zombies' was both an apt description of the night and sounding like a 50s b-movie. Each tank she passed, she had the unnerving feeling the form inside was watching her and her companions, even from the flesh-sacks that didn't have eyes.

"Okay gang, this takes my personal tolerance for creepy and dials it up to eleven," she said, turning a slow circle. Then she heard Push's rather vehement curse, "Make that a twelve. I don't like when the guy with the big hammer starts making sounds like that. What did you find?"

[Geez3r]

"They're alive." reported Atlas after doing some mental investigating. "But there's no higher brain function to speak of. They're just meat at this point." he continued, seemingly not too terrible bothered by this turn of events now that he was over the initial shock of finding this place. He should have been expecting this by now. Practically every mission he had gone on with the Midnighters had them eventually winding up with them walking down some dark and deserted corridor before winding up in a room for some sort of occult ritual. Maybe he was taken aback because he got here through an office building? "What did you find?" asked Atlas to Push. "Besides them making zombies?"

[Quinn]

Push's hands fairly flew over the keyboard, although he still had very little idea of what he was looking for. He'd managed to retain a fairly blase expression over the scarf, but his movements were getting faster and more desperate as he scrambled to remember what little computer skills he actually had; which is to say jack squat.

"Zombies, no. Walking undead super-soldiers, most emphatically yes."

He nearly put a fist through the monitor in frustration, resolving to have Blueshift give him a crash course in computer use as soon as possible; no way he was getting caught with his pants down like this in the future.

"The geniuses running this joint were stealing souls, einherjar, from Valhalla and shoving them into those...things they've got in the tanks; homebrew super soldier. Think Frankenstein, but bigger, meaner, way more intelligent, and battle experience out the wazoo. Seen similar ops in basements elsewhere, except there it's more inverted pentagrams, lots of chanting, and 'smite ye mighty smiter'. No prizes guessing what usually happens next..."

Push took a rather ragged breath, flattening those particular memories before they could arise to the top of his head. Come on, come on, give me something. How in the blue hell did those zombies lose it?

[trollthumper]

"So they're making goddamn zombie super-soldiers," Cannonade said as he locked eyes with one of the more complete template bodies. At least this one had eyes to look at. "Great. Leave it to Nazis to see how many ways they can pervert nature and stick 'em in one pile. Then again, you said 'way more intelligent.' So how the hell did we end up with glowing groaning zombies?"

The answer came as a file popped up before Push - the most recent security logs. He clicked it open; the ritual and its attendants were much the same as the first time, only five corpses were lined up, with one of the main altar and four others at the various cardinal points. The ritualist began to intone, and the room seemed to grow darker...but the rite was cut off by a steadily rising clicking noise. The corpses began to rise, but in a fashion more mechanical than organic. The attending Nazis began to panic as green light began to shine out in patches from the skin. A mish-mash of German emerged from their lips, but Push could make out one word - "nanotech." The rest was carnage, as the zombies turned on the Nazis and the ritualist disappeared between frames.

[trollthumper]

The sound of clanging metal broke Push from the video feed. Behind him, the bolts on one of the doors were popping open. As he reached for his hammer, a thick white mist began pouring out of the door, settling on the ground. The sound of boots running on steel rang up from behind the opening door as the mist began to coalesce in the middle of the floor. As the door receded into the ceiling, three soldiers emerged, clad in the uniform of the SS. They carried no rifles, assuming a fighter's stance instead. Before they could strike, however, the mist rose up from the floor, gathering together and solidifying. When it cleared, the ritualist from the video stood in the middle of the floor.

"You," he said, staring daggers at Push. "You're the saboteur, aren't you?" He gathered shadows in his hands. "It doesn't matter. I will get answers if I have to tear them from your flesh."

[trollthumper]

The sound of the marching soldiers drew Cannonade away from the cloning tanks. "Oh, good," he said. "We get to find out who's lead geek at the freakshow." He charged into the main room as the ritualist rose out of the mists, taking corporeal form. He aimed his fist for the spellcaster's face, but the man's body still retained some quality of mist; he dodged around it like a whipping wind.

"I recognize that helm," said the ritualist as he looked eyes with Cannonade. "It can't be... I knew in time some fool would take up one of the old mantles. I faced off against your predecessor, boy. You should know he was brash and short-sighted as well... and ultimately weak."

One of the soldiers took advantage of the distraction and launched towards Cannonade, but the undead warrior's fist went wild, missing Cannonade by a wide distance. "Whereas your guys are so big and strong," he said. "Guess they don't let genocidal scumbags take the field too often in Valhalla."

[Quinn]

Before Cannonade charged in, Push simply raised an eyebrow at the figure in the mist, tilting his head to the side. The einherjar were a mite creepy, and the dude gathering shadows in his fists was a mite disconcerting; but overall he was just a bit too jaded to start gibbering in terror.

"Y'know, I've fought a lot of ugly things in hidden basement lairs. You...you, I'd say would rank in the top twenty-five. Maybe around seventeen-ish or so. The flesh comment helps a bit tho', I've probably heard that one only around five, six times?"

Once Cannonade blew in and distracted them, Push shoved a nice-sized kinetic charge into his fist, leaping forward with a powerful blow that just barely nicked the einherjar that had gone for the helmeted hero.

"I'm the Hammer-Bearer, scumbags! You think I'm scared of some heavy metal rejects who couldn't stay in the game in Valhalla?!"

[Azuth65]

Wisp's revulsion grew by leaps and bounds as she watched the video. She nearly jumped out of her skin as the door opened spilling out the ritualist and his cohorts. "Normally, I'd try for a witty jab here but I'm too sickened to think of a joke," she started. Steeling her resolve she brought up her will and in the blink of an eye, the villains were surrounded by several puff of white and crimson smoke, the sounds of punches and kicks came from behind the quickly dispersing smoke. "So, let's just skip to the punchline," she finished, returning to her starting point. Inwardly, she groaned and made a mental note to pay more attention in the witty banter portion of combat training.

[Geez3r]

Well this was entirely a creepy evening. Ghosts were more of Dead Head's thing, and summoning rituals were Phatoms. Hopefully there was some way to break the enchantments or something. I should really be better at this magic stuff by now. mused Atlas for what seemed like the 12th time tonight. A sudden influx of the apparent big bad and some of his cronies snapped Atlas out of his funk however. This he knew how to handle.

He suddenly stretched out like taffy, with his limbs becoming incredibly long, and having unneccessary waves and curves in them, as he practically stooped beneath the ceiling under his new height. From his new vantage point he sent a fist towards one of the goons, who unfortunately managed to dodge, but he didn't count on the fact that Atlas could change the direction of his attacks as his attacking fist made a U-Turn and struck the zombie in the back. The fist splattered against the back of the zombie, the strange ooze that now made up Atlas' body began to engulf the zombie and squeezed the unlife out of him.

Speaking from an apparent face where his stomach might be Atlas asked "Was I supposed to shout a one-liner before I did that or is now good?"

[trollthumper]

The man in the robes brought his hands together; in them, darkness coalesced into something fearful and angry. He uttered a word in a dead language, and the black bolt flew out from his hands, tearing right through Cannonade. "The first of you," he said as the hero writhed in pain, "was a small man who saw himself as a colossus. A blunt instrument of a mongrel empire. In the face of true power, he broke easily. You should have chosen a stronger mantle."

Cannonade shrugged off the pain and drove his fist into the ritualist's chest, sending the man staggering back. "You're right," he said. "Guess that's why guys like him ended up breaking your little nightmare, leaving you to have to scrape together freakshow factories like this one. You sure did come out on top."

[Quinn]

"Heads up!"

A voice came from behind Cannonade, and a blur of motion erupted from around his side; coat and scarf whipping behind him, Push spun on his heel and slammed his hammer directly into the gut of the ritualist, energy coursing through his arms into the haft, up the weapon, and into the head. He wasn't sure how, but for a moment he pumped just a little too much juice into it; the techo-magic runes and capacitors in the weapon overloading and causing, for a split second, a nexus of energy and a light as bright as the sun to erupt in the small room. Sheer kinetic energy lashed into the Nazi villain, cannoning him backwards with incredible force into the steel wall. Once the other heroes had blinked their vision clear, they were rewarded with a rather interesting sight; the ritualist sprawled on the ground, dazed and reeling, a dent in the metal above him nearly half a foot deep. The kineticist smirked as he looked at his handiwork, taking a moment to elbow his compatriot and pat his hammer fondly.

"What was that he was sayin' about blunt instruments?"

[Azuth65]

Wisp capitalized on Push's hammer blow, as soon as the ritualist landed she vanished in a poof of her characteristic smoke, landing knees first on his stomach and landing a couple punches to his face. His unfocused eyes rolled up in his head which laid still as the nazi lay on the ground, she followed up by attempting strikes on the zombie-types, some of which were more effective than others.

Appearing back where she started she wiped her knuckles on her uniform's legs while muttering to herself, "Oh my God this is disgusting."

[Geez3r]

Atlas's strangely fluid form still waved wildly around the room as he wrestled with the soldier that was effectively inside of him. "This is not disgusting." said Atlas as he hefted the reanimated soldier high into the air. "This is normal. If you want to be a hero, invest in soap." As a second soldier closed the gap towards Atlas and lashed out at him, Atlas had to flatted himself to the ground to avoid being hit. That same maneuver also gave him all the time he needed to crush the living bejeezus out of the unfortunate soldier he had in his grasp.

[trollthumper]

"He's got a point." Cannonade lunged forward, grabbing one of the Nazis in a chokehold. "You've gotta deal with these bastards a lot. And with some of 'em, you really gotta wash your hands to get the slime off."

The soldier pushed hard against Cannonade's grip, breaking out with one solid blow. He turned to face Cannonade, throwing a strong punch that missed him by inches while cursing in German.

"Yeah, same to you, pal," he said back. But at the same time, he was concerned; this guy had been walking wounded a few seconds ago, and now he was fighting like he'd just stepped into the ring. "Hey, guys? Looks like these Nazis might have some potent mojo backing 'em up..."

[Quinn]

"Well, that won't do..." Push muttered, hopping back out of reach. The kineticist stared intently at the einherjar for a moment, watching the currents of energy surrounding them, and tightening his focus right down to the molecular level. Focus...focus...focus...THERE!

A headache began to build behind his eyes, but for a split second he could see. The small motes of kinetic energy around their cells, augmented by...something...causing their bones to knit, their skin to heal, their wounds to bind faster than normal. In that split second, he reached out with his powers and tapped into it, a smile creasing his face as the kinetic energy from those cells leaped from them into his inner resevoir, the magic that caused the advanced regeneration suddenly finding itself having nothing to work with. Push let out a laugh and made a polite motion to the others, extending one hand towards the Nazi creations.

"Hah! No mojo for you! They aren't healing themselves up anytime soon, guys; flatten 'em!"