ic Out of/In to (IC)

[Ecalsneerg]

Arrowhawk advanced, bullets ricocheting off her armour with a clatter, tilting her head slightly to the side to avoid exposing it. An audible growl came from the back of her throat, as she seized one of the gunmen by the shoulders, lifting him up into the air, feet dangling, without even so much of a grunt of effort.

 

Slowly tilting so the man's body was between her and his recovering compatriots, she looked up into his face, blue eyes blazing with anger. She tightened her grip as she lifted him a good feet further into the air. "I have slain giants. Do you think I fear mere men?" Arrowhawk tugged the man closer in towards her face, teeth bared and white in the darkness. "What fool sent you?"

[Ari]

GM

 

Struggling helplessly in Arrowhawk's grip, the looked wide-eyed into the merciless face of his captor, his night-vision goggles covering one eye at a jaunty angle. It was a moment before he found his voice.

 

"I-it was Scarpia! The big boss, he doesn't want any more heroes, he thought you were gonna team up with the Hammer or somthin' and then he'd-" suddenly remembering himself, the man clammed up but remained as stiff and trembling as before.

 

Out of the corners of her eyes Arrowhawk saw the other gunmen get clumsily to their feet, scrabbling into position as they circled the Asgardian, levelling their carbines...and pausing, none of them wanting to be the first one to shoot.

 

The droning of blades swelled. From above, a stabbing lance of light blazed down to illuminate the scene as a helicopter swept to just a thousand feet above the ground, moving ponderously as its pilot examined the street.

 

"When'd we get a chopper?!" One Scarpia man hollered.

 

"When we jacked that shipment!"

 

"What shipment?"

 

"Don't worry about it! The Air Force won't miss a gunship!"

[Ecalsneerg]

Arrowhawk stared down the man, aware of his allies surrounding her, levelling their weapons. She was outnumbered and they were heavily armed, even more so now the light of the helicopter was above them. She gritted her teeth for a second, needing more information, but very much aware it would only take one or two lucky shots to take her out there.

 

With a snarl, she hurled her captive hard at one of the gunmen, sending the two sprawling into a heap on the cement. Quickly drawing her bow, she leapt backwards, notching an arrow and drawing it back in mid-air, aiming it towards the centre of the group, At around twenty feet up, the apex of her prodigious leap, Arrowhawk loosed the arrow. 

 

Landing in a half-crouch a good thirty or forty feet away, she let herself have a brief smile of satisfaction as the arrow detonated with the sound and light of a thunderstorm, her assailants crying out in pain.

[Ari]

GM

 

The screams and howls and curses were a good deal more incoherent this time, and much more pained. As the men stumbled away, one of them half-tripping over The Human Javelin and TargetMan who had collided and bashed each other into unconsciousness, they swung their carbines in wide, erratic arcs, firing at anything their burning, star-shooting eyes told them was there. In moments the shouts were drowned out by gunfire that whizzed into the sky or cracked into the ground, but the moment they weren't any real danger.

 

The looming gunship's pilot however, had evidently had enough. With a dull roar its underslung Gatling gun came to life, hot metal spiralling out to where the stabbing spotlight pointed, right for Arrowhawk's unmistakable silhouette.

 

However, hitting a target with a cumbersome piece of advanced military hardware is difficult enough, even after years of training.

 

The road and sidewalk around her splintered, Osla felt the red-hot muntion crashing through the air, but as the gun slowed and the helicopter moved to an angle unobstructed by the pillowing dust it had kicked up, the light shone on Arrowhawk still totally unharmed.

[Ecalsneerg]

Arrowhawk wheeled as gunfire shot in all directions, sparks kicking up around her as Midgard engineering spat its ammunition at her. She had not expected this level of resistance, but she'd faced worse before and come out the other end. But this flying machine, its weapons were larger and its armour thicker than anything she'd prepared to fight this evening.

 

Steeling herself, she reached into her quiver and nocked an arrow, drawing it back tight. She took a deep breath, holding her nerve even as gunfire kept erupting around her, incredibly conscious of the fact that her armour would be unlikely to withstand even a brief assault from that gun. So she squinted in the spotlight, her keen eyes moving to the weapon, illuminated as it was by the constant flash of detonations. All it would take was one good shot...

[Ari]

GM

 

Though their eyesight was still obviously out to lunch, the men of Scarpia were not to be denied. At long last they managed to get their aim centered into something about torso-height.

 

If they had been aiming anywhere near where Osla was, they might have posed a marginally credible threat.

 

Instead their sights were directed into the buildngs nearby, whose already dim lights had quickly gone out when the firefight started. The crumbling brick and concrete slabs that made up the apartments in this part of downtown wouldn't put up hardly any resistance to the military-grade firearms present, and the unpredictability of blind gunmen ensured hiding was no better defence than a prayer.

 

Up above, the chopper pilot seemed to think better of making another sweep and ducked up and back. The mounted Gatling gun spun, but didn't shoot. Yet. The floodlight tightened, sweeping back and forth with the sway of the aircraft, slowly fixing on Arrowhawk's precise location. The floodlight was blinding and the rotor blades deafening, but the smell of hot steel overpowered any other. 

 

All around her lay the shattered, torn-up road and sidewalk that bullets long as her head was tall had impacted. Even her armor wouldn't be proof against that.

 

But the people most in danger here didn't have any armor at all...

[Ecalsneerg]

Osla closed her eyes and took in a deep breath for a moment. There was no way she could stop the helicopter and the gunmen simultaneously. There simply wasn't enough time to do it. She had to take down the helicopter. Her eyes shot open and then narrowed, drawing her arc of fire until it was going to hit the helicopter's gun right in the barrel.

 

She let go of the string, propelling her shot through the night air, unerringly landing to stick in one of the barrels of the weapon. The arrow trailed a pale blue mist behind it, that mist congealing and expanding upon impact, rapidly solidifying into layer after layer of thick, heavy ice. Arrowhawk let out a sigh of relief. The helicopter was neutered for now.

 

She quickly dropped into a low running stance, charging forward at an angle to stop behind a car, drawing her cloak around her as she felt herself vanish from sight, just as invisible in the night as she would be in the day.

[Ari]

GM

 

From behind her five shots cracked out. Then there was a distant, piercing scream that stopped like it had been switched off.

 

But the five gunmen had seemingly shaken off the effect of the flare arrow and the howls and their own screams were replaced with snarled curses as they set out to find where their enemy had gotten to.

 

"Why'd the boss gotta send us?" One bellyached miserably, wipng his streaming face with the hand holding his gun "Wese ain't his crack guys, don't he want this **** dead?" 

 

There was a chorus of commiseration snd shared sense of being wronged, but the rest were less inclined to talk while stalking their first metahuman quarry. 

 

So focused were they on finding Arrowhawk that they walked right by her, straggled out in a long, disorganized line.

 

Also disorganized was the flight pattern of the helicopter above, which was dipping and wobbling in the air like a badly-held note at an amateur opera. Its floodlight swung back and forth, casting the streets into a strange, almost cartoony mix of white and black.

 

There were still no sirens.

[Ecalsneerg]

Arrowhawk slowly walked out from behind the car, footsteps silent on the pavement. She reached behind her, pulling out her axe from beneath her cape, sliding her hand up until her grip was just below the axe head. Not breathing, she slipped among the group as they hunted for her. For a moment, she closed her eyes, feeling the cold night air on her face.

 

Then she spun and slammed the handle of her axe hard into a man's jaw, sending him crumpling to the ground.  "I reiterate what I said. Mere men." She turned quickly, delivering a sharp side kick to one of the men even as she scythed another's legs from beneath him. Cloak fluttering behind her, she pivoted fast, bringing her raised foot down on the fallen thug's knee even as she drove her palm upwards into the nose of a third opponent. Even as she gripped and lifted him up, Arrowhawk contemptuously flung her axe at the man she'd just kicked, the head of the axe colliding with his stomach and hurling him down. With a final yell of effort, she swung the man down one-handed onto a fourth mercenary, leaving them entwined in a heap.

 

"You've been spared. Repay the favour with information," threatened Arrowhawk, calmly stepping over the four men she'd dispatched and walking towards the fifth and final assailant.

[Ari]

GM

 

The whirlwind attack, having left all of his comrades out of commission, very quickly gave the terrified-looking man something to say.

 

"It was Hammer! He wanted to scare you off! Threatened the Boss! Please don't kill me, my band Slüshy's playing at Jack's wedding tomorrow!"

 

The wobbling helicopter was getting really, worryingly unstable in the air, the pilot's voice faintly garbling curses over the deafening rotor blades and drowning out the desperate sobs of the man lying on the chewed-up road. 

 

This much was obviously unlike what her father had described crimefighting as like in Freedom City, what little he'd mentioned that is. There if you got a Driogano soldier on the floor, they'd stall as hard as they could and say as little as they thought their boss wouldn't dump them in the sewer for. 

 

Which left very real questions about just what kind of fear the Hammer of Justice had been nailing into the brains of Bedlam's organized criminals.

 

Also unlike fighting crime in Freedom City was the helicopter beginning to go into an increasingly tight spiral sending it closer and closer towards the ground, the pilot bailing and by shocking luck managing to avoid the scything tail rotor. That was the extent of his luck, however, as he was flung bodily into a roof and from the anguished howls was not likely to leave it any time soon.

 

Taking advantage of the break in combat, Osla saw several shadowy figures race out of the nearby buildings and into the streets, clutching boxes, bags and other luggage, a few even jumping into sputtering cars that were significantly less effective for escape. 

 

Then a single pair of sirens rang in the distance. They soon faded away. Meanwhile the helicopter's spin tightened and accelerated, destined to hit something with terrible force.

 

Osla could have sworn she heard a faint, familiar snickering.

[Ecalsneerg]

Arrowhawk took a few quick steps forward, lips curling into a snarl. "The Hammer sent you? Why would he send you after me? What would he gain?" Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. The Hammer of Justice was working closely enough with the mobs to be able to call in enforcers in an attempt to kill off people like her. So Bedlam's greatest hero was...

 

Osla's reverie was interrupted by the more and more urgent sounds of the helicopter overhead, and she looked up, seeing how out of control it was. Seeing the pilot bail. "<Odin's Blood!>" she snarled, dropping her axe to the floor as she hefted her bow once more. "Do not move an inch!" commanded Osla, pulling a strange gold and silver-embossed arrow from her quiver, aiming it at a point slightly to the front of the falling machine. Drawing back the bow, she felt the painful tug on the edges of her consciousness as she willed the arrow to work, before letting it fly.

 

It abruptly stopped at a point in mid-air, cracks seemingly appearing out of nowhere, a rainbow light sparking from the holes forming as a jagged rift in space opened up, the other side of it showing a craggy, volcanic landscape, running with lava and random spurts of flame. 

[Ari]

GM

 

The man was all too willing to obey as the gulf between Earth and the world of apocalypse was torn away, and Surtur's rage boiled the sky.

 

Half of a volcanic cliffside loomed through the portal, and to Osla's eyes it seemed almost to twist in space to catch the helicopter, a hissing cascade of magma crashing into it with all the fury an avalanche of molten rock could muster. Some of the lava spilled out onto the Bedlam street, crushing the much-abused pickup truck under lashings of red-hot igneous rock, the thing melting and groaning as it crumbled, the tires bursting spectacularly.

 

There was a faint sigh behind Arrowhawk, a familiar voice saying 

"Oh well, close enough."  

 

Loki, as usual towering a few feet over Osla and dressed in silver-green jötunn finery, his thick black hair and beard seeming to catch the firelight like a net of gems, lounged under a streetlamp and surveyed the scene with a sardonic smile.

 

Glancing at Arrowhawk he added lightly "He's been here for a while, you know. Just over there." He waved generally across the street, where the shadows seemed to cling tighter in the blazing light and heat of Musphelheim.

 

"If you don't destroy his hiding place, he will, because why leave it standing if you don't have something on him? Really, it's for the best, and you already have the materials for it..." His eyes drew up to the cataclysmic landscape raging above them.

 

 

[Ecalsneerg]

 

Arrowhawk lowered her bow slowly, watching the magma and flame spill from the portal as the helicopter plunged into it, a feeling of relief washing over her despite the collateral damage to the street. She allowed herself a brief moment of triumph, exhaling a long, slow breath. But the familiar voice behind her ruined her small victory. 

 

Osla turned slowly, reluctantly, eyes sliding up to fix Loki with a hard, even stare. She had no idea if he spoke truth or lies. For all she knew, the Hammer was indeed here, but she couldn't sense him, hadn't seen him. Even if he was, it didn't matter. Stowing Orheidr, she pulled back her hood, revealing much of her face but that hidden beneath the domino mask. And she gave Loki a wide, sweet, utterly insincere smile. ""Destroy everything in it. How hardly matters to me"," Osla recited in a snide tone, before raising one hand, fingers spread wide, and closing it sharply into a fist. The portal snapped shut, once more sealing off the realm of the Fire Giants from the realm of Man. "If I've instigated him into doing it himself... I believe I upheld my end of the request, Liesmith."

[Ari]

GM

 

For a moment fire leapt into Loki's eyes, and the burning embers of the fight Osla had only just won roared to life around her, searing metal and splitting dry old concrete in pops of bursting rock. The shadows swept about the giant like a cloak and battlements of living wroth and in its depths gleamed a sword of bitter black steel. 

 

It died almost as soon as it began. The world was once again a small street in Bedlam with a reek of sulphur and the far-off wail of sirens. 

 

"Yes, I suppose this does fit the bare minimum of my request. Have it your way, Aryan Arrow."

 

"Your debt to me is lessened. I will be sure to give you a challenge equal to your skills next time. Good night, Osla."

 

The air shivered and where the giant had stood there was nothing. Not even a streetlamp. But that would go unnoticed for a long time.