Semiotic Drift [IC]

[trollthumper]

Friday, Dec 2nd

12:05 PM

Eric LaCroix usually didn't stray towards Freedom City University as part of his work, but when the offer had come up to deliver a few crates of coffee and a box of cupcakes to a faculty function, he'd taken it. He'd managed to time it perfectly with his lunch break, granting him a good hour off the job. Normally, he wouldn't bundle an off-site assignment with his free time, but he needed all the time he could get at the university. His other job had seen to that.

Word had been spreading about strange symbols cropping up across the city, bringing fright to those who looked on them. Needless to say, that seemed right up his alley. Ghosts were known to try and communicate with the living by smearing messages in ectoplasm; when they did so, though, the ectoplasm took on psychic qualities colored by the ghost's condition, causing it to look like blood or carry over some other element of the ghost's temper. Odds were some lost spirit was trying to communicate with the world the only way it knew how, and causing a fuss.

He'd finally managed to track down the symbols to an abandoned apartment building in Lincoln the other night. Marching into the basement, flashlight in hand, Nick came face-to-face with a giant... something etched into the floor. It looked almost like a bent loop run through with five arrows, rendered in something like wet spraypaint. But Nick was quick to notice three things.

First of all, he spent five seconds looking at it before his stomach turned into a washing machine. Unceremoniously, he ended up losing his dinner on the basement stairs of the abandoned building.

Secondly, during those five seconds, the arrows seemed to shift position whenever he blinked, meaning the symbol was not permanent, but something being constantly fed.

Third, it most definitely did not ping his ghost sense, meaning there was something else at work.

He'd finally managed to pull out his phone and snap a picture of the giant symbol - in its form at the time, at least. The good news was that catching it through a grainy filter kept it from playing hell on his gorge, even if it didn't provide the most accurate picture. A search of various anthropological and occult websites had turned up nothing, so he'd decided to go for Plan B. Hopefully, there would be something in the anthropology wing of the FCU library to help him find out where the symbol came from - and even if there wasn't, then maybe he could find someone on office hours who'd be willing to help a "grad student" with a project.

[Supercape]

"Class dismissed!" moaned professor Quentin Quill, as he emptied his stomach into the waste paper bin.

The students, stumbling out of the classroom, were not so lucky. Their regurgitated lunch had hit the floor, the desks, and, unfortunately, each other. It felt like a pre-industrial hospital ward struck down by some nasty gastro-intestinal bug.

The cause?

The blackboard had danced and spun into a shifting stream of symbols that didn't behave decently, changing in precisely the wrong manner. Or perhaps more accurately, precisely the right manner to induce waves of uncontrollable nausea.

Professor Quill made quite sure he wasn't looking at it any further as the last student stumbled out. His eyes were clamped shut.

Fighting back the nausea, he reached out with his mind, alive the flow and ebb of esoteric particles. He stood up, and - with his eyes still resolutely shut - navigated his way to the exit without difficulty. For Quentin Quill was none other than Supercape, able to guide his way through the classroom without vision, but using his amazing extraordinary senses.

With a showering display of sparkles, he transformed into the blue and white costume and cape of his Superhero alternate identity, and, his magnificent cape trailing behind him, took to the skies.

He stopped at some altitude.

I'm sure this is a job for me... he mused to himself.

But what on earth am I going to do to solve it?

[Electra]

Halfway across town, Stesha Madison was also having a rather difficult day. "What's the matter with you?" she asked her wailing daughter in mixed concern and frustration. Amaryllis had a very festive look going, with her green hair and red screaming face, but it was one Stesha found hard to appreciate right now. "You're full, your diaper is clean, you had a lovely nap, so what gives, kid? All I want to do is get some groceries!" Near them, people were walking in and out of the grocery store, many of them staring at the mother-daughter duo who lingered outside. "I just don't know what could be bothering you."

The more Stesha thought about it, the more she realized she herself wasn't feeling quite right either. On a hunch, she ignored Ammy for a moment and closed her eyes, extending her senses through the plants that surrounded them, all through the many gardens, parks and neighborhoods of Freedom City. Many plants were dead or sleeping at this time of year, but there were more than enough for her purposes. As soon as she reached the North End, though, Stesha stopped cold and had to ratchet her senses back into her body. Something bad was happening there, something bad and strange enough to have bile rising in her throat. She swallowed hard a few times, her face now winter white in contrast to Amaryllis' ruddy red.

"Okay, pumpkin," Stesha said faintly. "We're gonna go pay a quick visit to Grammy's house, won't that be nice? The nasty stuff won't bother you there." In the wink of an eye, the pair was in the Chicago suburbs, at Stesha's parents' comfy house. Her mom was only too happy to look after the baby for a couple of hours, though as always Stesha had to promise to be very careful. Within minutes of sensing the disturbance, Fleur de Joie was in uniform and teleporting her way towards the center of the strange sensation.

[trollthumper]

Eric was in the library when the screaming began. He was pouring through various anthropological texts and finding nothing on the symbols from the basement. He was about to turn and head for the anthropology department when he heard the upset coming from the quad. He ran to the window to see... something crawling over the lawn. It was the size of a school bus and cloaked in shadow, but every so often the light would change to reveal some new quality -- an eye with a blood red pupil, a tentacle that ended in gnashing teeth instead of the usual suckers, the glint of fangs. Just looking on it was hard for Eric -- he felt something reaching into his lizard brain, pushing past every instinct he'd picked up in his crimefighting career and telling him to run away.

But since when had he ever listened to that voice? Instead, he ducked into the stacks and opened the gateway to the familiar part of Hades' manse where he kept his costume hidden. In a matter of seconds, he was back in the world of the living as Nick Cimitiere. He ran out on to the quad to meet with the monster.

Stesha, meanwhile, arrived on the quad just as the beast emerged from the soil - not parting it so much as rising up, like an apparition. And Quentin had a perfect view of the monster as he flew over the campus. It let out a blood-curdling screech, daring someone to challenge it...

[trollthumper]

Nick stepped onto the quad, slowing where the grass met the sidewalk. "Wow," he said to the thing parked on the grass, "you look like someone ran the ugly tree through a woodchipper. So, what are you supposed to be? Boogeyman? Another nasty Grue secret? Whatever you are, it'd probably be best if --"

The shadows pulsed around the thing, strobing and tugging. Nick thought he caught a glimpse of the thing in the middle of it - gigantic, predatory, and utterly bestial. But worst was what he saw in the darkness. Visions swept over him - Freedom City burning, the sky turning red, a dreadful cry that swept over a dead planet. The apocalypse in miniature played out behind his eyes, and he felt those instincts flare up again. He steeled himself, but keeping himself steady was not easy.

"Gonna have to try... harder than that..."

[Supercape]

Quentin had a perfect view of the monster as he flew over the campus. It let out a blood-curdling screech, daring someone to challenge it...

Good gracious, what is that!

He didn't really enjoy looking at it. At all. The creature's horrible form even permeated into his own uncanny supersenses. It's roar was equally unpleasant.

Disgusting as it was, it was also dangerous, quite clearly. He reached into its core with his mind and started dissolving the atomic bonds of the creature, although it was a slippery task at best. The creature was just a mercurial and strange in its molecular structure as it's material form.

Supercape decided he would be far happier if the thing dissolved back to primordial goo.

[trollthumper]

The thing's form pulsed and strafed as the atomic bombardment took its outer corpus apart, and let off a sound that was quite familiar to Supercape. Radio static was pulsing off of the monster as the shadowy form sundered. The thing was a shell made out of various components of the EM spectrum; the only thing that seemed solid was at the core. As strange as it seemed, something was "singing" this monster into being.

The monster, bound and wounded, let out a terrible roar. Shadows in the shapes of spears lashed out from its form, striking blindly around him. Fortunately, the quad was empty save for Nick and the others, and the blows came so blindly that they were easy to maneuver around.

"Well, looks like your bark's pretty good," Nick said, "but your bite really sucks."

[Electra]

Fleur wasted a few moments staring at the monster, trying to decide what it even was. It was wrong in so many ways, that even a mind that had been opened by many new experiences found it impossible to comprehend. Nothing was where it seemed to belong, nothing moved as it should. It was only when the others began moving to contain it that she was able to shake herself free of the thrall.

Darting behind a bank of advertising signs, she waited a second longer for a clear moment with no one else too close to the creature. Small flowers began to spring from the dead earth, cheerful yellow things shaped like trumpet bells and with long stamens. As they opened, they released soft clouds of pollen into the air, surrounding the monster in a yellow miasma that quickly overcame its biological resources.

"What is it?" Fleur asked as it fell. "Where did it come from?"

[trollthumper]

The storm of pollen struck the monster at all angles, infiltrating its systems. Its roar began to choke off, as the shadows recessed and the glimpses of the abomination under them became rarer and rarer. Finally, with a shriek like radio static, the beast vanished entirely --

-- leaving a very dazed looking man in a hard hat, blue coveralls, and work boots. He struggled to stay on his feet, and as he did, Supercape could perceive electromagnetic energy trying to coalesce around him. In time, though, Fleur's pollen won out, and he collapsed face first onto the quad.

Once the pollen had cleared, Nick covered the distance, stooping down to check on the passed out man. He had a steady pulse, was breathing normally, and was actually starting to snore.

Huh. Usually the monsters I deal with don't turn into maintenance workers...

[Supercape]

"So, anyone enlightened enough to tell me what that is...or was?" said Supercape as he swept down and landed.

"Because I don't recognise it from my wildlife programme's that's for sure. Plus, the thing was riddled with energy. Very interesting. Emitting all sorts of funny wavelengths. Well, funny in that they don't belong coming out of the marrow of any known earth creature..."

He turned to the maintenance worker. "Something about that energy, transformed this man. As if he was infected with it..." he scratched his head. "Anybodies guess, I suppose, but I think we should isolate this man until we know for sure!"

[Electra]

"He's just sleeping," Fleur assured Nick, "it's a plant-based sedative, he'll wake up in just a little bit with no harm done. At least not by us..." She knelt down next to the fallen man and looked him over. "I've seen villains use illusions before, but this seemed different. I know it was different, whatever that energy was had Amaryllis crying from halfway across town." Settling back on her heels, she closed her eyes and extended her senses once more, trying to feel the strange and sickening energy that had radiated through the plants.

[trollthumper]

It was hard to pinpoint what the energy was. The strain of the plants was something passive, tearing at them on the cellular level. The closest thing she could compare it to was plant cancer, something that slowly wormed its way through the body until it twisted the entire thing to the point that it was broken and useless. Once she was able to push her way through the unsettling effects, though, she was able to dig up where the energy was coming from - somewhere below the university, somewhere between fifty and a hundred feet down.

Supercape, likewise, could pick up the disturbances on the EM spectrum from beneath the earth, a good hundred feet down, give or take a few yards. Unlike Fleur, however, he could pick up the same signals resounding in the unconscious crew man's head, like a radio tower picking up on a broadcast signal.

Nick, on the other hand, was entirely blind to all of this. "Yeah, that was a bit more tangible than your usual illusion," he said. "And it wasn't just that thing, or the energy. I've been running into these symbols that, well, do some really not fun stuff to your metabolism." He pulled out his cell phone, which had a recorded shot of one of the symbols; after chancing a glance at it to make sure its nauseating powers hadn't come back, he showed it around. "I've found nothing on them, and I'm usually pretty good at weird symbols. You got any ideas?"

[Supercape]

"Possibly" replied Supercape, peering at the symbols with a good deal of caution. They needed, he had decided, to be treated with respect.

"I can't say I have seen them before" he said "at least not like this. I think I would remember, as I am sure you can appreciate. But it does look slightly like the symbols they were working on to indicate radioactive material dumping. It might be a warning. That might make some kind of perverted sense, the way these horros look, nobody would want to go near them."

He looked straight down at the earth.

"And I did pick up something deep down there. Some complex energy signature. It had a beta over sigma cubed inverse entropy effect which when plotted against the nth dimensional velocity of..."

He paused, and looked around.

"Yes, well, maybe another time. It was complex. And I picked up a similar reading in this man's head. I think quarantine really is a good idea..."

[Electra]

"There's something below the university," Fleur agreed, rubbing her hands up and down her own arms as though to dispel a chill. "We have to do something about it, quickly. It's... it's hard to describe, it feels as though it's somehow inimical to life, that just by being here it's disrupting and destroying all the plants here. I don't even want to know what it might do to us, or to unprotected humans. We should try and find out if there are access tunnels or basements lower than fifty feet underground, and if this man was working in any of them. He might have run into whatever it is underground."

[trollthumper]

"Good idea," Nick said. "This guy doesn't look like he went down for a casual stroll. Odds are he was on a work crew. That'll likely help us find out the location - see if we can talk to city hall, find out what kind of projects they're working on downstairs. On the other hand, that means that he probably wasn't the only one who found this thing. Which means we'll be encountering heavy resistance -- "

The workman's eyes snapped open, and he sat up on the table, spitting out radio static. Nick was quick to act; those same phantom hands from before erupted out of the ground, wrapping around the workman's body like bands of rope, dragging him back down onto the table. The static still poured from his lips, but every so often, a syllable resounded in an alien language.

"Any chance we can drive this out of him?" he asked. "Most of my possession experiences involve the undead, not... the radio station of the damned."

[Supercape]

"Damned or not" said Supercape, furrowing his brow in concentration "if its radiowaves, I can pick them up. And follow them right back to their source. Even trace their, errr, shadow..." he mumbled as a way of handwaving what was, to him, complicated quantum entanglement theories.

He could already sense the pattern and track it.

"As for what to do with our friend here, I would suggest either a sweet slumber or bringing him with us. Preferably, I might add, the former. The poor man has probably had quite enough excitement for one day..."

[Electra]

Fleur took a seed out of her belt pouch and allowed it to bloom in her hand, forming a green sprout and then a yellow buttercup-shaped flower that grew until she had to lift her other hand to support it. When it was the size of a beach ball, she upended it unceremoniously over the workman's head, sending a shower of pollen down onto his face and hair. He inhaled once and fell back to sleep, his body relaxing. "That first dose should've kept him under longer than it did," she told the others with a frown. "He's fighting it somehow. We'd better take him with us as well."

[trollthumper]

The worker struggled to resist the effects of the pollen, but the sheer concentration of the dose won out over whatever was hijacking his nervous system. He collapsed into slumber once more. "We might want to keep some of that pollen on hand," Nick said. "In case he tries that again."

It was fairly easy for Supercape to track the source of the signal. With the maintenance worker serving as a receiver -- mind you, one that was currently turned off -- he could pin down the location of the broadcast. As he'd earlier suspected, the signal was several hundred feet down, in the service tunnels of Freedom City. A quick look at a map of the city's infrastructure indicated that the problem wasn't rooted in the subways or any of their maintenance areas, as that would be too high for the source. Which left one option...

"Why does chthonic evil always prefer the sewers?" asked Nick as he worked his way down the service ladder. The unconscious worker went with him, strapped to his back by ectoplasmic limbs that rose from his jacket like the world's most twisted backpack. "You'd think one long-lost plague to mankind would choose a picturesque grotto, or a good old-fashioned cave, but no. They've always gotta be where the stink is."

He touched down on the ground; the worker hung suspended in air, the arms lengthening to keep him where he was, until they retracted slowly, taking care not to bump the man against either the floor or the narrow confines of the tunnel above. Nick took a look around his surroundings; the sewer looked as clean and polished as it could be, given the circumstances. Off in the distance, though, he saw a rough-hewn tunnel gouged into the wall, and the glow of service lights spilling out into the main chamber.

"Looks like that's our destination," Nick said.

[Supercape]

"Looks like that's our destination," Nick said.

"I share your dislike of Sewer's" agreed Supercape. Dark, disease ridden, and filthy, in his estimation.

"I suppose however, that there is a certain logic. Nobody likes them. Hence, a fine place to remain obscured from human eye. Only the rats for company down here. "

He wrinkled his nose.

"I can only see one way from here, comrades. Once more onto the breach. Personally, however, I am going in with my eyes closed. Any more of those symbols, combined with the smell down here, and I will be overcome..."

[Electra]

"Honestly, I'm glad they avoid the grottos," Fleur opined, picking her way very carefully after her fellow heroes. After a moment's thought, she took off her cloak and tucked it into a convenient flower, lest it snag on something or drag in any unpleasant puddles. "At least the sewers are already nasty, so they're unlikely to make things much worse. I like my grottos to stay picturesque." She stepped up to join the others, the faint floral smell that was her trademark all but buried under the much less pleasant floral scents.

"I might be able to get a look ahead of us," she offered, opening her hand to cast a few seeds into the muck. Thin green vines sprang up, running along the tunnel wall almost invisibly in the muck and dimness. "It could be a trap." She closed her eyes as the vines reached the corner and turned towards the light, sending her own senses to see what lay ahead of them.

[trollthumper]

The vines wound through the dimly-lit cavern, creeping over gouged bricks and rough scaffolding. As they raced along the uneven carnage of the first pass at an expansion project, the ground and the walls began to smooth out, like a natural cavern emerging from a wall of stone. The natural tunnel opened into a sizable chamber, and Fleur found the other workers. There we six of them, evenly placed around the chamber, standing still as statues. Their mouths were open, and something like the static of a radio flipping between weak signals filled the air. In the center of their arrangement was a small mound made of what appeared to be impervium. It was raised and angular, looking much like a pie plate turned upside down, and grooves ran around it in circles.

"So what're we in for?" asked Nick.

[Electra]

"I... I'm not totally sure," Fleur admitted, her eyes opening but remaining unfocused as she continued to watch through the plants. "Six maintenance workers, looking like they've been mind-controlled or hypnotized, but at least they're alive. They're spread evenly around the chamber, and in the middle, on the floor, is a sort of low platform that might be impervium. It's got..." She blinked, tried to verbalize it. "It's grooved almost like an old record, and the air is full of static. I don't think we should go in there if we can help it. Whatever is controlling those workers might grab hold of us as well."

She blinked again and seemed to return her attention to the hall where they were, looking at each of the others in turn. "I can send vines in to try and get the men out, but my ability to see and grab at the same time is pretty dodgy. I don't have any idea what to do about the platform."

[Supercape]

"Do we have any choice?" replied Supercape "I'm not sure we have any real idea what is going on...only where it is. And we need to investigate it. Disturbing those men may be dangerous. For them, perhaps, but they may also be serving some benign function, as unlikely as it sounds. "

He cracked his knuckles.

"We need to know what's happening. The only danger I can see is being overcome by the same force that has overtaken those men. And I don't know, yet, how we can counter that threat..."

He pondered the matter for a moment.

"I could try this however...radio static!"

He hadn't tried this before, but the principle was easy enough. It was just hard work. He frowned with concentrated effort. It just needed a self-perpetuating degrading of some key atoms, locked in a entropic loop...

His mouth moved and he mumbled to himself, not keeping his thoughts confined to his head.

The equations were not easy, but by shifting a few states, he achieved it, flooding the area with the radio wave frequency of white noise.

"Bingo!" he said, smiling, wiping a bead of sweat of his forehead.

[trollthumper]

Through Fleur's plants, the chamber remained as quiet as possible, but there was certainly a change in the air. The workmen definitely sensed it; they pivoted as one, turning towards the entrance to the chamber. They began to speak, and fragments of speech in a hundred different languages poured out. Supercape could make out some brief pieces in German and French before the babble solidified into English.

"Protocol Axakt-253-Galon is in effect," said the workmen as one. Fleur didn't just hear it through the plants; the voices were echoing down the chamber, to where Nick and Supercape could hear them. "You are in danger of violating a Class-Velar defensive sanction. Leave the area, and allow it to remain undisturbed."

"See, I think we're going to have a problem with that," Nick called back. "I'm not quite sure what half of what you said means, but you've got a few of our people under your thrall. If you'd let them go, maybe we could sit down to negotiations."

"These ones are necessary. They are needed for the protocol memes to spread and duplicate. Exo-Threat 31572 must be contained. There must be no risk of breaching the seal. This place shall be made clean to neutralize all risk."

[Electra]

"Who are you?" Fleur called out, even as she dug in her pouch for another handful of seeds. "What's the threat you're talking about? We're charged with protecting this world from all different kinds of threats. We might be able to help you, but we can't allow you to keep using innocent civilians. Let them go and I'm sure we can find a way to help you contain... the Exo-Threat," she finished, slightly tentative on the unfamiliar phrase. To the others, she whispered, "I might be able to get the workers out, but it would be one at a time, and I don't know what it would do to them if they're under some sort of magical possession. It's very risky!"