ic Strange Aeons

[Raveled]

February 14th, 2013

Hunter Museum of Natural History, Freedom City

Noon

 

Tona Baudin wandered through the halls of the Hunter Museum, looking up at the bones of long-dead animals or posed scenes out of prehistory. Fossilized ferns were lined up next to stone arrowheads and a slim piece of wood with the plaque "One-Note Flute" in front of it. Tona was more used to nature than most, heck she was a lot more comfortable in the natural world than in the artificial one most people inhabited, but this wasn't her natural world. She was used to living animals and green, growing things; not dust and rocks and approximations. But here she was, trying to find something to write about, because the Curator had abducted her before exams and Claremont wasn't about to let a test taken by a robotic duplicate go on someone's permanent record. Apparently.

 

The young woman sighed and hitched at the straps of her bag, where her bow and costume rested. Even here she was ever ready, though goodness knows what kind of villain would attack a museum in the middle of the day. She walked out of the prehistory exhibit and began wandering towards agriculture. Ever since her visit to Sanctuary she'd been growing more interested in how many people a piece of land could support, so maybe she could write about the history of farming, or something.

 

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she wasn't looking where she was going and bumped into another girl! Tona fell on her ass, blushing at her own clumsiness. "Merde. I'm sorry, I just wasn't watching where I was -- Katherine Shade? Is that you?"

Edited April 16, 2013 by Raveled

[Curious Key]

Kat had been sure her science class would be a breeze; she'd been so sure that it hadn't seemed a big deal to let a few assignments pass by, and then the teacher had asked to see her after with concern, saying things like 'repair,' 'extra credit' and 'repeat the class.' Now, she was chewing at her lip, trying to piece together a good project to put her broken grades back together again before the damage got irrepairable. Kat was walking, doing her best to scribble a note onto a scrap sheet as she moved, determined not to waste a moment of time and wondering if she could get extra credit if she went to an actual dig, when she walked sideways into someone else, tangled her leg with theirs and surrendered to the fall.

She hit the tile on her side and made a sharp pained sound. Kat shook her head, looked up and saw . . . Her face blanched hard, as she saw the face of the archer who had shot and killed half a dozen people right before her eyes. "Uh . . ."

Just the face, she had to remind herself. Just the face; the girl attached to it was innocent. Kat breathed. "Yeah," she said, her voice shaky. Kat forgot Tona's apologies as she tried to stumble over her own. "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention to where I was going and I . . ."

[Raveled]

Tona blushed as she heard the pause in Katherine's voice, saw her face go pale. Of course this wasn't just a chance meeting between students, just a month ago someone wearing Tona's face had tried to kill Katherine and several other T-Babies -- and they'd been more successful than Tona was comfortable with. "N'est pas," she said. "I was... stuck in my own head." She pushed herself to her feet. "Are we... Do you... I didn't expect to see you here, Katherine."

[Curious Key]

Kat had no idea what N'est pas actually meant, but from the look on Tona's face she guessed it was a more-panicked 'no problem.' The stark shock and worry in her features was enough to comfort Kat, a little bit. Just knowing she wasn't alone in it was enough to alleviate some of it. Some. "I guess . . . that makes it both our faults, huh?" Kat did her best impression of a smile, and it almost worked. "I'm falling behind in history, so they asked me to do a project on ancient history to help catch up." Kat said as she pushed herself to her knees, stood, eager to fill her own ears with sound before silence could.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Raveled]

"Yes, I... didn't actually take my history exam before Winter Break, because..." Because she was light years away on the Curator's ringworld and a murderous robotic duplicate was standing in for her. Tona coughed. "I'm getting until the end of the month to turn in a paper, though. On anything prehistorical. I was, uh, about to look at the agricultural exhibit," she added lamely. Just what did you talk about with someone who had fought your duplicate to the death?

[Curious Key]

"Y-yeah," Kat said, remembering how long the robot imposters had lived among them without anyone noticing what had happened. "I know." The smaller girl put her hands behind her back and rubbed nervously at an elbow.

That was where Kat was going! For a moment she considered lying to the older, doubling back and hoping that in twenty minutes Tona would be done. She did a quick count of the numbers in her head and realized that putting that much time could put her dangerously close to having to come in after school on her own. "That's . . . I was headed in that direction too." Kat said, turning toward the exibit and walking with as wide a stride as she could manage.

Edited March 3, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Raveled]

Tona cringed inwardly. This was a recipe for an awkward afternoon. "D'accord. Great." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I suppose we just go there together. Just... over there." The pair wandered over towards the farming displays, where stone tools sat next to steel-tipped plows, going all the way to a picture of a huge, green combine harvester with a John Deere logo on the side. Tona wondered how Stesha and the folks on Sanctuary seeded their fields. Did they use plows and machines, or did they do it by hand? Or did Stesha just cause the ground to open up and they dropped seeds in? How would her father adapt to a life of farming, after hunting and shooting his entire life?

 

"It's, uh. It's pretty amazing," Tona said lamely, not wanting to let any kind of silence grow between her and Katherine. "For so long people just used their own two feet to push plows across fields. They really had to work hard, every single day, just to survive."

[Curious Key]

Silence was a dragon. A dragon that didn't know how to die. Kat had walked through the museum with scarcely a word except some muttered curse at the paradoxes of school papers and museum design, but with Tona beside her Kat felt silence coil around them like a living thing with strength and a quiet malice all its own.

Tona fought it back for a while longer, but Kat knew it would be back unless she took her turn against it. "Um, yeah." She said, staring sideways at the tools, hands in her pockets. "Amazing." The word had a distracted dullness that told all; she did not understand, not the way Tona would. She remembered, vaguely, farms she had visited on trips to meet her father's side of the family, long fields and big tractors and bales that she mainly ignored in favor of dreams of pavement and concrete and home. "It's good we don't have to worry about that," she said, weilding the words like a weapon against the silence.

[Raveled]

Tona frowned. "Some people still have to," she said, her thoughts still on Sanctuary. "Some people still sow and farm by hand. To them this isn't just musty old history, it's how they live their lives." She wandered over to a display showing corn yields, absorbed in her thoughts. "We only think about the world we can see," she said, half under her breath. "We never think about all the things that go on that we can't see that we need to survive."

[Curious Key]

Kat glanced at Tona with half-narrowed eyes, remembering before she turned back toward the painting. It reminded her of something the robot had said, before she had destroyed it. Mostly they seemed to have been reliable replicants of the heroes they replaced, right up to the point where someone pulled the crazy lever. Even after, in some ways. So. "So." Kat jotted down a note about something into the crook of her arm. "I assume you've seen the tapes of it."

"Was what it said about where you came from true?" The Terminus; the dark engine of entropy that sought the end of all worlds and then some. It was hard to imagine someone coming from that place, really. Dorothy's copy had went and claimed that she was a Terminus mutant. They were not, it seemed to her, beyond lies.

[Raveled]

Any train of thought Tona had was derailed, detonated, melted down into scrap iron, and fashioned into tank traps to catch other lines of imagination at the mention of the Terminus. She grew more silent than normal, becoming almost entirely still before simply saying, "... Yes." She didn't make any noise, barely even breathed for an entire minute, until she finally glanced down at her feet. "I was... born there. I spent most of my life there. And now I'm here."

[Curious Key]

Tona's doppleganger had announced precisely that before she declared that all Terminus mutants should die an awful death and putting an arrow in a girl's eye. It was stranger to hear it said here, meekly. Kat crossed her arms, her mouth forming a thin line as her eyes pretended to examine the exibit.

She let the conversation drop and the silence grew fat and bloated on the moments. "I thought maybe it was lying," Kat said. "Dorothy's said that it was something I'm almost sure Dorothy wasn't." It was a little frustrating to talk in vagueries like this. Kat looked to the left and right, tried to find anyone close enough to listen in. Kat bit down on her lip and tried to keep her voice neutral. "It really had a grudge against mutants."

[Raveled]

"I hate the Terminus," Tona said, speaking slowly and carefully. "I don't hate people from the Terminus." She smiled, just slightly. "Otherwise I'd hate myself and my family, and I don't. I'd do anything to save them." She sighed and looked down at her hands, then over at Kat. "I don't know everything that my double did, but it wasn't me. So... let's start over, okay?" She held out her hand to the other girl. "Hi. I'm Tona."

[Curious Key]

If she was being technical, then what Tona was saying didn't necessarily preclude her from hating Terminus mutants for the twisted little coil of power inside them. But before she could hedge a thought in edgewise she caught herself; semantics were worthless. She knew what Tona had meant when she said it; the only thing left over was to decide whether or not to believe it. Kat stared at the hand, her eyes flickering up to meet Tona's once, twice . . . she breathed in deep and took Tona's hand, trying to make her handshake a firm one. "Hi," she mirrored. "I'm Kat."

[Raveled]

Tona squeezed Kat's hand in response and began to breathe a little easier. "I guess we can work on this together," she said. "I don't think they would notice if we turn in the same paper. Do you?"

 

Tona's eyes slid off her fellow Claremont student as something caught her attention in the background. A number of uniformed security officers were walking past, at a gait designed not to look like they were hurrying. The young archer was an experienced hunter and tracker, though, and noticed all of them converging on the same place. She touched Kat's arm and nodded past the other girl's shoulder. "Trouble," she said, and began walking towards the line of security officers.

[Curious Key]

"They might notice," Kat said, tilting her head to the side and grinning a wicked grin. "We just gotta make sure it's different in enough ways to keep them off the trail."

Kat's eyes followed Tona's example and found the security guards; they were trying to hide it well enough, but she could tell from the way their eyes darted, from the shape of their mouths as they talked and the way they walked on the balls of their feet; they were afraid of something. She turned and raised an eyebrow at Tona. "You think we'll get extra credit for this?" She asked, not expecting an answer. She followed right behind Tona, pretending interest in the artwork while keeping an eye toward the front.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Raveled]

Tona kept one eye on the artwork while still moving too fast to take any of it in as more than a blur; Sam had given her a few lessons in moving through a crowd, but the young hunter was simply too fixated on lines of sight and camouflage to blend into a crowd. It was obvious something was happening up ahead of them, but there was no way to know what it was -- until the wall a few feet in front of the girls exploded and a man in a red and white bodysuit came tumbling through it. He crashed into a planetary diorama and lay there for a moment, before gathering himself up and marching up to the hole in the wall. "Give it up, you crumbling bag of dust and bile," he shouted at an unseen adversary. "There's no way you can beat the Golden Glove!" He glanced at the girls and motioned them back. "Stay out of the way, ladies, this could get dangerous."

 

Indeed it seemed like it could be, as a mummy -- a bandage-wrapped corpse straight out of a Hammer horror film -- lurched out of the hole, knocking aside drywall and support beams like they were, well, so much dry wrapping. "You seek a challenge you cannot overcome," the mummy intoned. "Stand aside, or you shall be destroyed."

Edited March 10, 2013 by Raveled

[Curious Key]

Kat rolled her eyes. "Dangerous." She put a hand on Tona's shoulder and made her voice low. "I'll be right back." She turned away and dove into the crowd, but people were all just gawking at the mummy, getting in her way as she ducked and dived through them like a obstacle course. Kat ducked under an arm and escaped into the open hall, veering down a hall at a wide angle and dove behind a thick pillar. She closed her hand into a fist and a crawling darkness spilled out between her fingers, crawled over her skin and ate her civvies, leaving her attire as Warp in its place.

She grinned, flexed her fingers inside their glove and turned her head back toward the mummy.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Raveled]

Tona moved back with Kat, but where the other girl when right the archer went left. She wasn't able to change as easily as a teleporter, but she noticed a janitor's closet with the door open. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her, then dropped her backpack on the ground. Inside was her Claremont jacket (which she slipped on and zipped up to the neck) a domino mask (which she stuck on her face) her bow (which she unfolded) and a couple dozen arrows. A quick shake got them into place and she reslung the quiver, opening the door and double-checking that no one had noticed her darting inside.

[Raveled]

GM

As the girls scampered off to change, the fight between Golden Golves and the mummy kept on shambling forwards. "I think someone wrapped your head too tight," the Glove taunted as he danced forward. "Or maybe your brain is just rotted away after all that time!"

The mummy groaned and swung awkwardly, then responded in a surprisingly cultured tone. "The first step in mummification is removal of internal organs, you imbecile!"

"Oh, name-calling, are we?" The Glove paused to give the mummy a raspberry. "Well how about I just call you round-heeled?" He popped the mummy in the nose, and while it was rebounding from that gave it a haymaker with his left, his namesake impacting the undead's head with enough force to floor it and send it skidding several feet.

[Curious Key]

Kat's best guess told her the girl who ran off, only for another to appear down the same hall in the same direction, didn't really have a good case so far as keeping secret identities secret went. Not when there was another option, anyway.

Warp ran back down the hall and peeked over corner; she picked a spot she could see above the fight and ripped through to there with a thought. Darkness coalesced in the air into a girl-shape that landed with a lithe grace. The entropy blackness dissipated to reveal Warp, looking down on the mummy with one eyebrow raised. She kept the entropy under her skin running deliberately hot, letting her eyes glow red. "I thought you might need some help with King Tut here." Kat put a hand on her waist an raised an eyebrow at him. "Guess I was wrong?"

[Raveled]

Blue Jay nodded at Warp as the pair of Claremont heroes rounded the corner, as she considered the wisdom of an archer getting up close and personal with a couple of brawlers. Instead she opted to step up a stair until she was overlooking the entire scene. Golden Glove, for his part, gave Warp a bright, toothy smile. "Indeed! No dusty bag of bones can stand against the flashing flurry of the Golden Glove!" He sauntered over and placed a foot on the mummy's chest. "Watch closely, girl, and I might just teach a few, heh, techniques afterwards."

As the Glove started stomping on the mummy's chest, an older, harried man wearing a cardigan vest stumbled out of the hole. "No! You can't let him kill the prince! He's a priceless historical artifact!"

[Curious Key]

In Warp's approximation, the danger of the mummy had passed. Whatever it was that had possessed the thing to start stomping through walls and throw itself onto Goldilocks, he wasn't gonna try it again for a while. Long enough to put whatever'd gone wrong with him right, maybe. Either way, there was nothing to be gained by letting the letcher beat on a corpse. "Careful golden boy," she called over her shoulder. "I'm pretty sure that whenever someone dusts one of those things in the wrong way, they get cursed. I saw it happen once," she lied. "Guy went chicken-leg thin, and withered like a dead man. You know . . ." she confided, a conspiratorial tone in her voice. "All his boneless bits fell off. Ears and nose and . . ." She smirked. ". . . Other things."

 

She turned back to the museum staffer and shrugged. "I dunno what to say, sir. He's caused a lot of trouble, and it's not like he won't just get up again now that he's down. How'd you keep him from getting up and breaking down walls before?"

[Raveled]

The Golden Glove gulped and retreated a few steps, looking distinctly more worried about the mummy now. "I... The Golden Glove is eternal! I don't have to worry about things like that. Obviously. But I suppose I could let you put this one on your record, hm?"

Sweater-vest stepped between the mummy and the heroes. "Merneptah's not a danger to anyone! He's a prince from the 19th Dynasty, an absolute treasure trove of information on ancient Egypt. And aside from the incident with Dr. Ford last year, there's never been any trouble. Until the Auric Ass here burst through the wall and started punching Merneptah! It's all his fault!"

The Glove scoffed at the accusation. "Come on, who are you going to believe here? The handsome man with the powers? Or the wrapped up dead guy?"

[Curious Key]

The egghead was clearly agitated, but it seemed to be legitimate to her. If there was a lie lurking behind it all, he hid it well. Warp bit her lip and peered at the other hero . . . caught a pause in his words and a shifting of his eyes . . . the instant he said his own name. It took a lot of practice to lie convincingly about who you really were. It was an art that required careful practice and perseverance. Practice, it seemed, that this 'Golden Glove' did not have.

She dissolved and reappeared between the fake and his undead punching bag. "I dunno," Warp said, crossing her arms, narrowing her eyes. "Why don't we find the real Golden Glove and ask him what he thinks?"