tushanshu_logs | 'Cause We Could be Immortals

Pepper didn't usually spend much time in Tony's lab here in Keeliai, since it doesn't double as their base of superhero operations. But she's more than a little unhappy about this salt, and especially concerned about what Yunxu wants with it, and Tony is the best. He's got a good extraction technique down, and now they're trying to find out what else this stuff can do.

She turns at the sound of the door opening; Cain is already here, and now another visitor? Busy day.

"Oh, hey Valdis," she says with a smile. Given how hesitant the woman had been about seeing Tony at the house, there must be a very important reason for her being here. "What's up?"

Cain's visit to Tony's lab today was one of personal interest. It was a long time in coming, really, but he wasn't exactly on any kind of timer for getting any of this done. He'd managed well enough before and only really came now that he needed his mind off other things. He wouldn't exactly be approaching it with a fount of honesty, but that was between him and... no one, actually. Just him.

When the door opened, Cain automatically turned to see who else was entering. He froze for all of a breath before forcing himself back into his usual rhythm. The days apart had helped calm down his emotions, however some of the memories that stirred were much too close to the surface to ignore them entirely. At least he was much more coherent this time. Keeping a conscious lid on the fear, exasperation, anger, disappointment and all the rest, Cain merely nodded to Valdis and turned back to Tony.

"Maybe now isn't the best time," he said easily. He remembered what Valdis had meant to ask Tony and that was admittedly more important than his little chore. "I think Valdis has something more important to ask."

Jacob had only arrived a minute ago, and Tony had just been about to wrap up the small talk and ask him what he needs, so Tony's quite surprised to now see Valdis here, too. Did somebody send out invitations for a party in his lab and not tell him? He doesn't think he's ever had this many non-College people in his lab at one time before.

(Surprised, and not terribly pleased: he's still trying to avoid Valdis.)

"Oh. Valdis. Hey." The greeting is a little more stilted than Pepper's. He wonders if there's a polite way to say, 'Jacob was here first; wait your turn.'

Oh, never mind, Jacob has just given him an opening. "No, it's okay, go ahead. You got here first. I'm not in a hurry or anything." There will be plenty of time for him to get to Valdis, too. (Unfortunately.)

She had been so worried about Cain that she had neglected to notice that Pepper's scent had also been there and she relaxed almost immediately. The young girl's presence seemed to have that affect on her for some strange reason. Valdis smiles at the redhead, her ease increasing when Cain doesn't immediately freak out, though Tony's attitude definitely left something to be desired.

"Hi, Pepper."

She closed the door behind her, walking closer, but making sure to give Jacob plenty of space. Their last encounter had ended on a sour note and the last thing she wanted was to make things worse between them.

"That's fine," she said to Cain, "I can wait."

Pepper can practically hear the cries of the awkward hawks when Valdis walks in the room. The conflict with Tony she's aware of, but there's an undercurrent of something between Valdis and Cain. Her curiosity is immediately piqued, but now is not the time to ask probing questions.

She's not here on any specific errand, so she just hangs back, hopping up onto one of the tables and swinging her legs back and forth.

"We should rename your lab to Grand Central Station, Tony," she jokes, leaving Cain and Valdis to sort out who asks what first.

Cain was placed at a far enough angle from the door that he didn't feel particularly threatened. Closer to Pepper than to Tony or Valdis, and he was fine with that. He could be civil where it warranted, finish up his business, and leave when he was done. No need to hang around, no need to make this worse than it was. He was nearly twenty-eight hundred, he was not going to make a scene because someone he didn't like showed up. Dipping his head in acknowledgment to the deference (it would get him out of there faster, that was for sure), Cain looked to Tony.

"It isn't anything big. You've got a lot of tech here, so I was wondering if you could do me a favor and whip up some kind of sedative—for me," he clarified quickly. The machine analyzing samples of the salt off to the side of the room gurgled, and he paid it only peripheral attention. "I've got an unfortunate amount of tolerance to the stuff you can find elsewhere around here, and I've been needing some help getting to sleep lately."

If there was a flash of vindictiveness in Valdis' direction, he wasn't going to hide that. His trouble with sleep was a general issue but it certainly hadn't been helped by their recent misadventure. Anything that might help sell it more, really. When the machine gurgled, rumbled again, Cain looked toward it with furrowed brow.

"Does it always—"

He knew the sound that came next. A small break, something going wrong, a slight explosion hinting at the threat of more. Sound cascaded and grew into a cacophony, and Cain shifted automatically, instinct taking over to brace his step and scan the room he already knew. There was really only one piece of action he could take before that thing either failed in the most nonthreatening way possible... or exploded. He wasn't going to take any chances, moving to hop along the counter with one foot, take Pepper in his arms, and press off his other to try and get some kind of cover.

"Get down!"

Valdis bit back a sigh, despite Jacob's attempts to hide his feelings, they were there and she could feel them. Her eyes narrowed at the perceptible threat that spiked when he described his affliction. How dare he judge her for something she couldn't control, he had seen her memory, just as she had seen his. He didn't seem to care that they had both been traumatized by the event, perhaps he was more selfish than she thought.

A sharp, acrid scent drew her attention from the conversation and her own thoughts. She knew that smell, or at least she had smelled something similar many times before. She was moving before Jacob even called out his warning. Trusting the other immortal to protect Pepper, Valdis grabbed Tony, spinning him around and pushing him after Cain and Pepper, putting her body between him and the machine.

The machine exploded, metal shrapnel flying in every direction, flames billowing outward and the force shattering glass and knocking over tables.

"Seriously. Do I need to start selling backstage passes?" Tony jokes, going along with Pepper's attempt to lighten the mood to disguise his discomfort. And he's not the only one feeling uncomfortable, it looks like: there's something weird going on between Valdis and Jacob. What's that about?

He doesn't have much time to wonder: Tony picks up on the weird noises coming from the machine right about when Cain does, and he turns to look at it, frowning. "No, it's never—" The machine lets out a deafening rattle and bang, and Cain yells, Get down!

Now, Tony has had proper lab safety drilled into him since he could crawl. He knows that when a big piece of machinery starts going haywire, you get away from it. There are very few dramatic mechanical malfunctions that can be repaired by hand in the span of a few seconds, and attempting it is just a recipe for disaster (the gruesome, missing-limbs-and-third-degree-burns kind of disaster). Lab accidents can get ugly, and there's no piece of lab equipment that's worth life and limb(s). But Tony has gotten used to being much sturdier than usual, both in and out of the armor - and most importantly, there are other people in the lab to worry about. So his first impulse isn't to take cover, but to worry about what the hell is going wrong over there and how to stop it before anyone gets hurt.

Fortunately for him - and unfortunately for Valdis - she knocks him to the floor before he can make a dive for the machine.

And then all hell breaks loose.

Even though he can't see it, with his face mashed into the floor and Valdis shielding him, Tony can feel the explosion. It's a feeling he knows all too well. The wall of unbearable heat, the flying debris, the noise— but most of all, the shockwave. The feeling of being punched in the gut by a battering ram, and being squeezed from all sides at once, and your bones shuddering inside you. He's been blown up plenty of times, but being caught in an explosion unarmored, unprepared— Tony flinches and has to convince himself, for a moment, that he isn't thirty thousand feet up and falling.

For a moment, and just for a moment, it looks like this strange party in Tony's lab could turn out remotely okay. And then, of course, everything goes wrong.

By the time Pepper notices the machine making strange noises, it's already far too late to do anything but shriek as Cain grabs her and the room erupts around them. She's been in plenty of fights, gotten thrown around by aliens and extra-dimensional beings, faced off with supervillains both in and out of the armor, but she's never been blown up before.

Objectively speaking, it's uber mega super awful.

A wave of pressure hits and she tumbles to the floor, her hands over her ears - a flimsy attempt to shield herself from the noise, and she wonders vaguely if her eardrums have burst. Even with Cain putting himself between her and the flames, she can still feel a blanket of hellish heat that makes it hard to breathe, and there's shrapnel and bits of table and wall and who knows what else flying through the air and it's impossible to tell whether she's on fire or if everything is, the seconds ticking by agonizingly slowly. Pepper squeezes her eyes shut, trying not to scream, fear rattling her core even more than the shockwave rattled her bones. She is powerless and terrified and confused and -

Where are Tony and Valdis?

Ow.

No matter how many times or how many different ways Cain managed to get himself hurt, that never stopped the pain from actually sinking in. He could probably take more than any human being could or will, but that didn't mean he was inhuman. He felt it, the pieces of shrapnel and glass both glancing off and embedding into his back. Not that the scorching and heat and sheer power of the explosion hadn't already covered everything, this was just the icing.

His eyes were stinging with tears, a natural reaction, but he was still conscious. Barely. Likely wouldn't pass out if he hadn't already, his body already trying to expel the largest debris lodged in his back where the smaller complaints could wait. His breathing sounded awful, now that his hearing had started to filter back in. Rattling and labored, a familiar song and dance of struggle.

Before he could just give in and let himself heal, try to recover before anything else happened in the wake of that explosion, Cain forced himself to focus. "Pepper." Yeah, that sounded just as bad. Just say it, get it out, then rest. He could do that. "Okay?"

The first thing Valdis noticed, apart from the intense heat swirling around them, was the pain. She could feel Tony's fear, Pepper's fear, but the two teens seemed uninjured, unlike Jacob, his emotional state was one associated with pain. Was it his pain that she was feeling? She tried to push herself up, off of Tony, the scent of blood overwhelming the smell of the chemical fire.

She could feel the pieces of Shrapnel embedded in her back as she shifted, sending new pain shooting through her core and her cheek stung from a small gash, but those injuries were the least of her problems. Tears leaped to her eyes, and she bit back a whimper. The pain in her lower back was sharp and pulsing, it was an injury she had experienced before and she knew without a doubt that her spine was broken.

"Tony?" she gasped as loudly as she could, her voice thick with pain.

Tony coughs smoke out of his lungs and tries to blink away the white halo that the flash of the explosion had imprinted on his retinas even through his eyelids.

"Fine," he gasps in reply, and coughs again. He thinks he's fine. It's always a little hard to tell through the adrenaline, but he's obviously not dead, and he doesn't feel any injuries that seem likely to be fatal.

He doesn't ask how Valdis is, because he knows she has insta-healing powers and now is not the time for wasting breath on unnecessary words. "Didn't have to do that." ~~Unless those words are frivolous bravado, apparently.~~ "Gotta get out of here. Smoke," he continues, somewhat more constructively. "Could be toxic." Also, it could totally still suffocate them without being toxic. Toxic smoke just makes their escape slightly more urgent.

"Pepper?" She probably couldn't hear that over the crackling of the flames. He tries again. "Pepper?"

Pepper's ears are ringing almost painfully, and the right side of her face feels like it's covered in thick cotton. The rest of her is still covered in Cain. She can barely hear him, but the fact that he hasn't gotten up doesn't bode well.

"I- I think so," she answers shakily, coughing as the room begins to fill with smoke. At least she doesn't seem to be in agonizing pain - everything is a dull ache right now. "You don't look so good," she manages, eyes watering. Carefully, Pepper shifts so she can prop herself up on an elbow, gasping when she sees that Cain has basically been ripped to shreds and coughing at the sudden lungful of smoke. "Oh my god."

Don't panic. They don't have time for panicking, panicking can happen later; right now she needs to find Tony and Valdis and make sure they're okay and get Cain out of here. Don't throw up. The pealing of bells inside her skull isn't helping, but she hears Tony calling for her.

"Tony!" She starts to struggle out from under Cain. "Cain's hurt," she yells. "Where's Valdis?"

He was steadying the longer they waited, but Tony had too much of a point. The smoke couldn't be good for anyone inhaling it and there was an unfortunate amount of the stuff to spare. He shifted when Pepper did, wincing at the movement and hissing despite himself. Reactions were hard to get over, and it wasn't like he went hurting himself on purpose so he could learn how not to react to pain. That would just be stupid.

"I'll heal," he said, automatic to Pepper's concern. It took a moment for him to catch up with himself and add: "Very soon. It's a power, whatever you want to call it. Check on each other."

That he even had the breath to say that now was speaking wonders. His back was still a bloody, burned mess but adrenaline was kicking in and wounds were closing left and right. He cast his attention about while mentally-convincing himself he was ready to stand. He could do it. Maybe... just a few more moments before he tried, though.

"I'm a bit sturdier than you," she replied when Tony berated her for protecting him, but her relief at hearing his voice was only temporary. She heard Pepper calling back at Tony, but she couldn't see the other two through the smoke.

"You go," she wheezed, trying to keep the panic from her voice. She should have been healing by now, the pain should be fading, the metal shards being pushed out, the bone knitting itself back together. She could still feel her legs, but moving wasn't an option. The toxic smoke was getting to her, so it had to be getting to Tony as well as Pepper and Jacob.

She reached down to grasp a large piece of shrapnel that protruded from her side. It was possible that the shard was why her wounds weren't healing, this was a piece of the machine that had exploded, the machine that Tony had been testing the salt in. Taking a deep breath, she pulled it out, sobbing in pain and then horror overtook every other sense. Instead of closing, the gaping wound began to gush blood. The shard had severed an artery or pierced an organ and she had just removed the only thing stemming the blood flow.

Well, okay, true. But he can look out for himself, Valdis, gosh.

Tony's heart leaps in relief when he hears Pepper's voice. "We're here!" he calls back. "Get Cain and get out!" Getting out is the priority right now - they can't waste time trying to regroup in all of this.

"Be easier if you got off me," Tony grumbles in a lower voice when Valdis tells him to go. But he's not going to wait for around for her to heal enough to be mobile again. He squirms out from under her and looks around, trying to see Pepper, or an exit, through the smoke.

Then he hears a sob of agony behind him, and looks back. "Valdis?" She... doesn't look so good. There's a gaping wound in her side that's pouring blood, and Tony doesn't see any signs of it closing up.

"Hey," he croaks, feeling a stirring of concern, "shouldn't you be healing faster?"

It only takes a few more seconds for Pepper to wriggle free. Cain's assurances are a relief, but it doesn't prevent the mesmerized horror with which she watches his back start to repair before her eyes. She would have been dead many times over if he hadn't moved in front of her.

"We should get out of here," she says, echoing Tony's call. Pepper starts to stand, ignoring the burning in her lungs, when the world tips over. Her head is spinning and she sits down rather suddenly. "Uh. I'm not sure I can stand up. Super dizzy."

Vertigo or not, she should be able to see Tony and Valdis by now. Right?

"Something's not right," she mutters.

Flesh mending, wounds healing, more of a reversal than true rejuvenation. Cain coughed a few times, rolled onto his side, then pulled himself to his feet. Nerves screamed all long his body for attention but as long as he could still move and wasn't about to pass out for doing so, he was going to do whatever he wanted while making sure the others got out safely.

Cain watched Pepper topple back down and knelt beside her. His own gaze was coming back into focus after all the excitement, but he was close enough to see her clearly. With one hand, he took her face gently to turn it this way and that; his other arm raised so he could take as deep a breath he could through the filter of his sleeve.

"I'm fine! Immortal," he called for Tony and Valdis' sake. That Tony was the one speaking up and not Valdis didn't give him much confidence for her being conscious after the blast. Great. He coughed, expelled what smoke he was taking in, and kept going. "Pepper may have hit her head. Can you make it to the door, Tony?"

"No shi..." She couldn't finish the sentence. Her breath rattled as she tried to focus enough to call the Void to start healing her injuries, but no matter how deep she looked, she couldn't find the dark creature anywhere and she was dying.

"Go." She coughed, her vision was going fuzzy. Her fingers gripped her side, as if that would stem the flow of blood. "I can't."

She couldn't die now, she had to hold on until she knew that Tony and Pepper were safe, but she didn't have the strength. She took a shuddering breath and everything went dark.

The dramatics are unnecessary, Valdis. "...Valdis?" The hellhound takes one shuddering breath, exhales... and then doesn't take another. She goes limp and her hand slips off of the gash in her side, which is no longer pumping blood.

"Valdis?" Tony nudges her. Oh, shit. Is this normal? Doesn't her healing magic usually kick in before she dies?

Through the smoke, Jacob helpfully informs Tony that he's immortal. That's convenient, because Tony is not, and he's quickly running out of time to figure out what is wrong with Valdis. Breathing in all this smoke is not good.

"I'm good," he replies, "But there's something wrong with Valdis. She— she didn't heal like she's supposed to." And now she's kind of dead. But only temporarily, right? She'll perk right back up any second now.

Cain's cursory inspection would be able spot the small about of blood coming from Pepper's right ear - her eardrum ruptured in the explosion. It hasn't turned into a splitting headache yet, fortunately.

And apparently Cain is immortal. Uh. Well, that would explain the insta-heal.

"I'm okay," she says, as much for Cain's benefit as her own. The very vague description of Valdis' plight causes a sinking sensation in her stomach. Very not good. "Help Valdis," she says as firmly as she can. "I'll get out with Tony."

Pepper can't be the rescuer here, and while that rankles, she's smarter than trying to pretend otherwise.

It was something Cain would likely have to talk about more later. His immortality wasn't exactly a secret and there wasn't a whole lot to hide... but sometimes it didn't catch everything. Like someone else's injuries. He remembered the bauble he had been practicing with, before all this fog and interference, and now he found himself almost glad he didn't have to make the decision between someone's life or death in a place where the meaning was so obscured.

Seeing the injury for what it was, Cain automatically swiped some of the blood away before shifting to stand. "Your ear looks busted," he informed her. He'd already intended to go to Valdis while the relatively-unharmed ones got to safety, but her urging didn't hurt. "Balance is going to be the big thing, so wait for Tony and get out of here."

He turned his head and waved Tony over. There was plenty of debris in the way, but it looked like Tony was whole enough to make it if he could spot them through the smoke and dust. "Over here! We're swapping places. Get yourselves to safety, okay?" That said, he started to move, back already close to perfect with nary a drop of blood in sight, toward where Tony's voice had been originating. His own lungs could only last so long before temporarily giving out, yet he was willing to wager his endurance under such conditions would last much longer than theirs.

It goes against all of Tony's instincts to leave Valdis behind - but his lungs are burning and the smoke is starting to make him light-headed. He's strong enough to carry her out, but if he passes out before they're in the clear, Jacob will just have to rescue both of them.

With one last, uncertain look at Valdis' unmoving form, Tony staggers to his feet and starts picking his way through the rubble.

The first few moments after the blast had been extremely disorienting, but now Tony has gotten his bearings back, and he makes his way for where the door should be.

He crosses paths with Cain (who looks as fresh as a spring daisy, the lucky bastard) a few moments later, and points to where he'd left Valdis. "Behind that table," he says, between coughs. "She— you'll have to carry her."

With Valdis taken care of, Tony turns his focus to Pepper. He sees her sitting on the floor, and she looks beat up but not too seriously injured. "Pepper!" He stumbles to her side, and heaves her up off the ground. "Come on, let's get out of here."

Like Tony, Pepper is loathe to leave, but she can't exactly help Valdis if she can hardly stand up straight. That, and her lungs are informing her that she's about to lose the battle with staying conscious if she sits here any longer. Although the stinging smoke is making her eyes stream with tears, Pepper can still see that Cain's back is no longer the charred mess she had seen.

"Wha -!" Pepper catches what Tony says, and she's about to demand an explanation when he yanks her off the floor. The vertigo immediately gets worse, but having Tony next to her keeps her from falling again.

Pepper glances over her shoulder as they duck out of the flaming room, hoping against hope that Valdis and Cain are following behind them.

'Cause We Could be Immortals

lasergrenades

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CW: Blood

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what's wrong with Valdis is that she's DEAD, TONY

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