ic Horrorshow

[Fox]

"I did not want them to call for help in their panic," Wraith explained, none-too-gently brushing one of the thugs out of her friend's way as she passed through. "They were very easy to deal with once you had them so frightened, but I had already let them run loose long enough while letting them think they could help their friend." She grabbed the two by the backs of their shirts, tossing them into a nearby room and closing the door behind them; a tiny piece of herself reached into the door lock - and from the subsequent angry mechanical noise, one doubted the door was going to open anytime soon. 

 

"And I think you were very effective," she insisted, eyes smiling, as they made their way toward the stairs that led down, to more prey. "It is important to exercise even one's core skills, after all. If I did not know you, I would have been very afraid, myself." She formed one hand into vicious-looking claws, and back again, glancing up at her heroic companion. "I envy your ability to frighten through larger...what is the word. Spectacles? ....no, that is the glasses."

[Gizmo]

"'Spectacles' works there! Like a flashy, visual display, eh?" Ghost Girl supplied while making emphatic jazz hands to illustrate the definition. She shot Wraith a knowing grin as the Kinigosi looked up at her and added, "Not that I believe for a second any of that would have honestly scared you but it's sweet of you to say anyway! C'mon, let's see how they handle a real apex predator! Are you gonna do the vents thing? 'Cause I love the vents thing." The phantom took the direct route through the centre of the stairwell, passing leisurely through solid objects along the way while imitating the deep voice of a monster movie protagonist. "'My god. It's been watching us this whole time. It's. In. The. Veeeeents!'"

[Fox]

GM

Wraith seemed thoughtful as they hit the next floor, craning her head around the corner to see what they had to work with.

 

Like the floor above, this one's walls appeared ringed with office space and meeting rooms - but instead of a series of hallways and old, covered-up lab equipment, the floor was dominated by a small maze of cubicles, row after row of interconnected beige walls to muffle noise and provide some imitation of privacy. There had been a bustling white collar space here, at some point - the room was well-stocked with monitors and computer towers, but they lived neglected under a small film of dust. The worker space had been personalized, but what the employees hadn't taken on their way out had begun to show its age: here a motivational poster hanging from a single, brave tack; there a corner-curled calendar of cats doing yoga.

 

Somewhere on the other side of the room, shifting, glowing light was splashed up against the ceiling as empowered thugs loudly tried to decide if they should go around the worker farm, or through the worker farm.

[Fox]

With a low humming noise Wraith considered her options, but at the end of the day she wasn't one to disappoint. "Humans must have had so many stealthy predators when they were evolving," she quietly mused, body slowly losing definition - she was probably taller, but it was hard to tell with her posture slumped, limbs long and willowy on a torso more fitted to an emaciated corpse than a healthy, living creature. She craned her neck nearly down to her knees to check her feet, three-toed images of stealth and violence, before twisting back up at the waist to look at Ghost Girl with three black eyes over a lipless jaw designed for crushing bone. "It is a wonder they ever went out in the dark."

 

"If any make it to the stairs, could you be kind and stop them?" She moved with alien grace toward the wall, body extending upward and into a vent near the ceiling. "I would not want any to get past us and cause trouble upstairs."

[Gizmo]

Ghost Girl made a thoughtful noise as Wraith mused on evolutionary tracks; it wasn't her area of expertise certainly but she'd rifled through enough fears to agree that gnashing fangs in the dark were a fairly universal feature in nightmares across the board. She doubted this particular group had such complex inner lives as to be exceptions to that rule. "Of course, of course!" she assured her friend from a few steps down from the top of the staircase, making a shooing gesture with both hands. "Go have fun!" The phantom whirled her scythe about and planted its blunt end against the surface of the stairs like a wizard's staff before winking and fading out of sight, invisible to any conventional senses.

[Fox]

It was a noise, at first.

 

"Look, all I'm sayin' is, is that the guys upstairs ain't answerin' when we call 'em, so maybe we go THROUGH this place and see what's up." One of the glowing figures punctuated his thought with a gesture that toppled half a cubicle wall, shards of someone's long-dead potted plant's ceramic home falling to the ground behind it.

 

"And I'm saying, what happens if what we're after is in here?" One of the others pushed the cube wall upright a moment to check, before letting it drop back in disgust, more shards of orange clay hitting the ground with an oddly distinctive clik-clik-clik.

 

"It ain't gonna be in a cube farm, man, my dad worked in one o' these 'til he went gray, I'm tellin' you, they don't keep stuff in here. S'all just dust and weird calendars and would you stop breakin'' stuff, so I can hear myself think?"

 

Clik-clik-clik, said the pottery shards that had long since stopped falling....from the other side of the room. The trio turned around just in time to glimpse the tail end of something moving between two cubicles. By the time the braver two got there, whatever it was had long since gone...and by the time they got back, they found they were the only two left.

[Fox]

"I'm tellin' you, man, there ain't nothing here!" He was holding onto his projection, if only just - both of them, in fact, were flickering so badly they may as well have come with a seizure warning. They stood over the unconscious body of their comrade, who lay, unmoving, in the middle of the half-broken office space. Something had taken a far-too-large bite out of his projector.

 

"Well something did this, man!" The thug gestured in frustrated helplessness, standing on the desk to try to look at everything in the office at once. "They didn't go by ME, 'cos I was right behind you, and they didn't go by YOU, 'cos you were at the other end of the aisle, so, what, they turned into air?"

 

"They could do it! I knew a guy, fought a dude who turned into air. Made tornadoes," one proferred, his voice as weak as his argument.

 

"You see any tornadoes, man? Who knows what mad science #### they keep in here."

 

"Maybe he just...fell down. You don't know. Or one of those Raven types, they're all stealthy."

 

"Something dropped him so hard his head cracked the desk, and that's all we heard. Even without this tech, nobody's fallin' down so hard they crack a desk. I'm tellin' you, man, it's Area 51 ####; ain't nobody here but you, and me, and him, so unless you got experience with capes who fit into the tiny vents this place got...." He'd raised his finger for emphasis, and both of them followed the gesture to look up into a vent that looked back down at them.

 

Clik-clik-clik. Wraith had been holding the vent in place, and cheerfully let it drop with a small metal clang that echoed through a space suddenly devoid of banter. No one remaining limb on her body was thicker than the small air vent that had once supplied cold breezes in warm summer months - she twisted her mask-like face out of the hole, spindly limbs following like some kind of awful alien spider pulling itself out of a hidden warren. They stared at each other, for several awful heartbeats, before the thugs tried to make a break for it: their projections dissolving into static, one scrambled toward the exit that did NOT require going through a monster, the stairs up, while the other made it about two feet before Wraith dropped on him like something out of a horror movie, one meter-and-a-half long limb grabbing him by the chest and casually putting him through the nearest cube wall.

[Gizmo]

In his haste to escape the last remaining intruder nearly ran face first into the robed figure floating in the entranceway to the stairwell. Face concealed in the shadows of a tattered hood, the creature's outline was partially shrouded by a cloud of chilling mist rolling down the stairs, making it impossible to see more than a few feet beyond. What could be seen of the passage was covered in a thick layer of jagged rime, looking more like an abandoned freezer than part of an office building.

 

Worse yet dozens of needle tipped icicles the size of kitchen knives rattled momentarily before snapping free and floating into the air, orienting themselves just behind the phantom with their tips aimed squarely at the fleeing criminal. They hung there menacingly while the robed figure raised a skeletal hand to point sternly back the way he had come.

[Fox]

The would-be escapee decided that perhaps he didn't want to go upstairs today, after all.

 

He didn't seem eager to venture back into the maze of cubicles, but a glance over his shoulder - his feet already backing him away from Kimber's cold welcome - confirmed that whatever had taken out his friends, it wasn't there NOW. Not knowing where it was wasn't great, but knowing where it wasn't...was...something?

 

He never got far. Every time he neared an exit from the sound-dampening beige walls of mediocrity, a glimpse of the creature was there to turn him back - a leg, a tail, a head turning around a corner to look him in the eye before the thing vanished. The violent thug who originally lost his projection and ran had been afraid - the hand-wringing bundle of nerves that now stood in the midst of his new prison was the barest shadow of his criminal past, twitchy and uncertain of going anywhere and nowhere.

 

But there was nothing there - no more signs of the monster, no more glimpses. The floor was achingly, hauntingly quiet, outside of his own breathing and his quiet mutterings. "It ain't HERE. It ain't back THERE. Can't do...can't go back to the stairs. Where'd...."

 

He glanced to his left, where a thin tail-tip was sliding across the floor. He followed it along to a leg, a back, slowly turning in place as his gaze spiraled up into the face of the thing standing directly behind him. "....oh," he said. "Okay."

[Fox]

Wraith was humming to herself, dragging the thug by his heel over to rest by the other two, form melting back into something more reasonably-proportioned...but not before she grabbed each of their projectors is one long-fingered hand and crushed them, one by one, into sparking uselessness.

 

"I have been too busy lately," she noted to Ghost Girl, wistful. "I have missed the hunt for people like...these. It is a good practice of one's skills. Perhaps I was too...what would the word be. Indulgent?" She turned to look at the room, eyes sliding across her face a bit to take it all in. "Your way was equally effective but much faster. This should be everyone on this floor, however, and I think most of them are still downstairs. Perhaps we can clear many of them at once, or defeat their leader."

[Gizmo]

"Oh shush," Kimber tutted, letting the floating icicles clatter to the stairs and slipping back into a friendlier appearance. "You're terrible at taking time for yourself, you know that? We need to figure out some equivalent of a spa day either of us could actually enjoy. Maybe camping again? Ha, or just doing this sort of thing, eh?"

 

Her laughter turned to a thoughtful hum as they headed downward. "Hm. The angry little guy might be smart enough to figure out we're picking them off and screwing with their bravery-armour-things. We might want to have a plan to take him out of the equation first."

[Fox]

GM

"Yes, that would have been clever of you."

 

The voice was...everywhere, echoing and without source, but they knew it none the less: they'd heard it berating the science-empowered thugs over the security system earlier. Their little leader had lost none of his ego or condescension in the intervening minutes, his words laced with the quiet excitement of a man with a plan. "How unfortunate for you that you've done all this for nothing. Nothing," he hissed, "nothing to stop me or even slow down our plans here. But you have cost me a number of my minions - replaceable, yes, but recruitment is time I can ill-afford! I'll be quite busy later, you see, but for now...now you've earned my undivided attention."

 

They'd almost made it to the stairwell when the voice had started, intent on their descent toward victory - and their opposition appeared to want to give them a helping hand. A glowing, helping hand, which burst through the wall near the stairs to reveal the glowing body of an empowered thug against the darkness outside. He grabbed Wraith around her midsection, three alien eyes wide in surprise, and pushed her - thug and all - over the stairwell railing to plummet into the darkness several floors below.

 

Behind Ghost Girl, shifting debris were her cue that the thugs were getting back up again, jerking upright like marionettes and flaring back into their larger, energy-cloaked forms. Two more could be seen coming down the stairs on the other side of the room, light cast upon the back wall of that stairwell, while a cracking sound from the ceiling just above implied that the one she'd trapped in the room had awoken and, perhaps, decided that he'd take a more direct route down.

[Gizmo]

Ghost Girl blinked at the space where Wraith had just been for a moment before placing a hand to one cheek and noting loudly enough to be overheard, "Gosh, that guy is about to regret his life choices. Wraith haaaaates people getting in her personal space without asking."

 

Inwardly she was considerably less calm; so far they hadn't had to deal with one of the invaders with their device as 'full strength' and if the field could prevent her from passing through it she wasn't ruling out its ability to hold onto Indira. She couldn't loose her outward cool, though, not with an audience. Instead she made a show of considering the figures walking haltingly toward her and the pounding overhead. "Already played with these toys. Boring," she sighed theatrically before producing her scythe seemingly from thin air and pulling her hood up over her head. If she wanted to help her friend and keep the civilians in the lab safe she needed to get to the root of the problem without delay. "Guess you've got my undivided attention, too, little man." With that she disappeared through the floor like a pebble plummeting into still water.

[Fox]

GM

Glowing people.

 

Glowing people were everywhere.

 

The floor below Kimber turned out to, in fact, be two floors: more offices and meeting rooms ran a ring around the outside of the otherwise-open space, large wood and metal barriers separating visitors from falling through the air and straight down into the lobby below. It probably would have been a pretty great design, a decade or two ago - high-powered investors could have stood up here, leaning on the railing and watching employees mill about on the tiles below, watching the ebbing and flowing tide of business and science as the day went by. Now it was dust and neglect, some of the guard rails leaning out in a way that would make an OSHA inspector break out in hives.

 

Oh, and it was positively swarming with glowing figures, with glowing eyes, that all simultaneously snapped up to look at their spectral guest. They moved with singular purpose, slogging out of the offices, leaving their posts by the glass doors to the dark outside, crowding in to try to grab her - though from where she floated near the ceiling they couldn't quite reach....

[Gizmo]

"Eugh," Ghost Girl groused aloud, casually floating away from the offices and into the empty space, well out of reach of the glowing figures. "Wraith and I are putting on a master class and you show up with a shambling horde like it's open mic night? This is embarrassing for both of us." The disgusted expression turned into a more thoughtful frown as she considered the mass of reaching arms. "Actually... this is an outrageous number of little helpers for such an amateur." The beryl freckles dusted over the bridge of her nose crinkled as the whole situation began to feel off somehow. Looking about she abruptly realized why the inky blackness outside the windows was bothering her: there hadn't been enough time for the sun to set since she and Indira had entered the building and even if it had she could see in the dark.

 

Rolling her eyes pointed she maneuvered to the centre of the room. "Like the holographic skeptic said, 'It's a faaaaake!'" she announced to the silent crowd in her best impression of a Tronik accent. Producing her scythe she held it overhead with both hands and began spinning the blade around like a twirler's baton until it was crackling with bursts of preternatural static. In moments she'd become a sphere of dark, whirling metal and flashes of light, letting it build before releasing the disruptive energy in a roaring wave. "Showtime's over!"

[Fox]

GM

Ghost Girl said "no", and the world replied, "WOOOHMP".

 

She could be pretty sure that the world was not supposed to go WOOOHMP.

 

For a moment - a brief span of time as her wave went out - she could see two things at once, superimposed and fighting for her attention. The lobby was still there, with its glowing, monstrous thugs and suspiciously dark outside, all things exactly where they should be, aside from everything that wasn't. But she could also see the stairwell, the steps leading down from their fight in the cubicles, as if the world had frozen just before one of the thugs had made off with Wraith. It was a vision so complete, in fact, that Wraith was still there, at her side, frozen in place with black eyes wide in surprise or anger at something unseen and unfelt.

 

And then the world snapped back into place, and she was only in the lobby, though it was...thinner, somehow. Less detailed, perhaps, and less populated, definitely: as the smell of acrid, burning electronics hit her nose some of the legion of offending glow-thugs fuzzed out, becoming indistinct and then vanishing entirely, leaving a still-threatening but far less impressive horde behind.

 

"Fine," said the little man's voice, about half as patronizing but twice as irate; he'd appeared, at some point, in the center of the lobby, standing with both hands on the head of his cane, covered entirely in a field of red force. "First the metal one tried to shake me loose, and just as I got that under control, you? I don't know how you did that, outsider, but I - I will not be so easily taken!"

[Gizmo]

Ghost Girl suppressed an irritated noise as the simulation reasserted itself. Knowing that it was some sort of technological illusion, a shared delusion didn't do her a lot of good if she couldn't actually shut it down. Maybe the source of the effect had been too far away for her electronic scrambling discharge to do more than disrupt it. There was nothing worse than trying to outthink an egomaniac who actually was a step ahead, she thought with an irritable sniff.

 

The she sniffed the air again. Fear. The force fields the thugs had been using might have psionically shielded them from her ghostly senses but now that she focused on the obnoxious little toad she saw below her there was a distinct thread of paranoia wafting through the air. It was enough to tell her that he wasn't actually where it looked like he was - which made sense so long as she didn't think too hard about not being where she looked like she was either - but more importantly she caught the big, stinky terror as he said 'the metal one' and 'outsider'. She paused for a moment and focused on the bouquet. Aliens. He's afraid of aliens? It was almost quaint.

 

"I'd explain if I thought your under-evolved brain was capable of comprehension," she called to the irate scientist, floating down toward the floor of the virtual lobby while staying a good half dozen feet out of his reach. As she approached she shifted her form, coming up with something on the fly that looked a bit like Daphne's Grue form rendered in blues but with three glossy black eyes like Indira and long, lean proportions just far enough from human to be disconcerting. "Silly little ape meat thinks it's so clever, doesn't it?" she laughed with a singsong whimsy. She gestured with too-sharp fingers to the space around them. "Oh, don't feel bad. This is vaguely intriguing. And Wraith said we wouldn't find any meat worth... examining." She laced the last word with preternatural dread, reflecting her prey's darkest nightmares back toward him with a wicked grin that widened and widened until her face was nothing but a maw of serrated teeth coming closer and closer.

[Fox]

GM

"I knew it."

 

"I KNEW IT!"

 

The little man was shaken, but seemed to be holding himself together - less could be said for the world, which bent and twisted against some unseen force emanating from the villain and his bubble. More and more of the glowing thugs faded away, dissolving into nothing as he held his hands over his head in which was probably supposed to be intimidating. "You hide and you lie, and you are loved but I knew," he hissed, his voice growling and echoing through a lobby that was...dissolving? Bits of the walls were flaking away, fragmenting into a swirling void. "We knew," he corrected. "We always knew, and you will not-"

[Fox]

What few glowing thugs remained had been trying to advance on Kimber's position, but as one they turned to look toward one of the shattering walls, and even the short egomaniac had to pause as one of their brethren came crashing through.

 

Backwards.

 

Something silver and deadly stood on top of its fallen, glowing form, all predatory angles and wicked blades, tail lashing in the air behind it as it made a rattling noise at its new surroundings. "Come then, you--oh!" Wraith stood a little taller, or as tall as she could on all fours, anyway - she looked like the kind of large cat-wolf H.R. Giger might design for an 80s neon metal album. Her flank was dented in a way that was probably mildly painful, but Kimber had seen worse. "You've been doing better than I have, I think. Has he started monologuing to you, yet?"

 

She turned to look at him, her metal skin pulling back to form a maw of teeth too long and sharp to be practical for anything pleasant. "Can I eat him?"

[Gizmo]

"Not so much monologuing as whining," Ghost Girl sighed theatrically, the very picture of disinterest. "I have plans for its brain meat but I don't suppose there's any harm in taking a few nibbles, dear. I know how much you like tongue." She'd affected a sort of singsong purr that might have suggested a certain sadism to the would-be mastermind of the break-in but which Indira immediately recognized as a passable imitation of Tarva's mannerisms. The lean, too-long proportions Kimber had given herself turned the airborne sashay into a sort of unsettling gyration as she continued calmly closer to their adversary. "It would be easier to transport without so many limbs."

[Fox]

GM

"You'll have to TAKE THEM!"

 

The little man positively reeked of fear, but it seemed to only drive him to new heights - the walls, already deteriorating, crumbled away in great chunks to reveal a swirling void. He raised his hands as if to grasp something in the air above him, and the void answered in kind. They stood (or floated), now, on a ruined lobby-themed platform suspended in the grip of a giant, fingers like trees cracking the tile floor, the man's furious, panicked face glaring at them from within his bubble and from over the platform's horizon, eyes like fire staring down at them even as they stared down at the smaller man below. It was, one could imagine, his ego made manifest - massive, undeniably powerful, with the entirety of the world in the palm of his hand.

 

"You failed last time." He spoke with two voices, the small man's below and the booming thunder above, one hand reaching back behind him; the giant drew back its hand as well, as if to swipe everything off the surface like so much dust. "But you are in my world, and this time you'll find I'm far more--"

[Fox]

Wraith bit his hand off. He'd pushed it too far, swept it outside the bubble in the course of his self-aggrandizing dramatics; with his attention laser-focused on Ghost Girl's very best sadist impression, he'd failed to see the silver predator stalk up on him until it was too late and he'd given her all the opportunity he needed.

 

The giant, ever in sync, dissolved immediately: its hand, first, and its body unraveling from there. The little man fell to his knees, clutching his stump - and whatever he was made of here in "his world", it wasn't flesh and blood. The stump vented purple energy, not blood, as he stared at it in shock and pain. And then there was a scream that they felt more than heard.

 

---

 

Wraith and Ghost Girl stood at the top of the stairs, exactly where they had been just before everything went almost literally upside-down. The world felt more real than before, somehow - like waking up from a dream that seemed right, all the details and dream-logic only seeming strange on returning to consciousness.

 

Wraith's body shuddered as soon as they could move again, form seizing outward as it tried to catch up with the shape she'd thought she had only a minute ago, but she got herself back under control before quite falling over. A half-formed beast-mouth turning down in discomfort and disgust before it smoothed out into nothingness. "He had no scent," she hummed, running a hand down her torso as if to help push out a wrinkle. "None of my senses worked right, but I could at least smell...I thought it was his shield, but when his hand was outside of it, it did not smell like anything. Do humans not think of their own smells?" She turned her eyes up in curiosity, as if the thought hadn't really occurred to her before. It seemed odd, and she knew they sought out fake scents, but ignoring one's natural odor would explain a lot. "Since it was not a real hand, I thought perhaps he would not miss it. Perhaps we should go downstairs and see if he would like to lose any more limbs today."

[Gizmo]

Ghost Girl's entire form remained strangely out of focus for two or three full seconds, as though Wraith was viewing her in her peripheral vision. Eventually she snapped back into focus with a full body shake and a supremely irritated expression. "Guh. If you want his real hand you can have it, little creep," she grumbled, straightening her cinched coat by hand even though sh could have fixed it with a thought. "We try not to think about it, honestly but then you're talking to a gal who hasn't had to worry about deodorant in a while." The poltergeist sighed, still feeling something akin to headache from the strange double-vision of the illusory world. "Alright, let's go see if he's knocked himself out or not. You got the part where he's terrified of aliens for whatever reason, eh?"

[Fox]

"Yes," Wraith confirmed, eyes narrowed in a Kinigosi scowl. She made her way down the stairs carefully, eyes watching the hallways with unsettled distrust. "I was in a...basement, I think, with many of the glowing henchmen. The small man was not there, but his voice was, and he had many things to say about the 'alien menace'."

 

Wraith certainly seemed to be in the mood for menacing. "I do not know what his...'deal' is, but he seems very insistent that most or all super-powered people are aliens in disguise, or get their powers from aliens or...I believe I lost him at that point. He is, I think you would say, 'off his rocker'?" She glanced at Ghost Girl, rippling her body in some kind of alien shrug. "Still, we should perhaps be careful. It smells like he had some kind of machine assistance, but he was still a psychic, and we do not know what he has left in him. You left the greater impression, I think, hands aside. I will follow your lead."

[Fox]

GM

If nothing else, the small man's vision of the building had given both Ghost Girl and Wraith a general understanding of the lobby, and they were more than able to sneak across to the lip of the upper floor's ledge to take a look.

 

There weren't legions awaiting him - that, thankfully, seemed to have been his own fabrication - but there were enough, a half-dozen glowing forms of varying levels of instability holding ranks around a small, well-dressed man trying to clutch both his cane and hand at once, with limited success. The cane was smoking, part of its head split open to reveal what looked like circuitry - it periodically spat out a spark that arced several feet to a smoldering hat on the ground nearby. A metallic band hidden inside the hat was smoking, too, and they could smell the tell-tale acrid odor of burning electronics even from halfway across the room.

 

The man's hand was fine, but you'd never have known it for how he held it to his chest, glancing fearfully around the room. He was a cornered animal, caught between flight and fight - and when an ill-fated mouse dared poke its nose out of a pile of broken chairs, he met it with an unseen wave of kinetic energy that tore the pile apart.

 

His guards didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about their current job, but none the less tried to ignore the little man's strangled noises of fear, casting unseen eyes around the room.