Event | Satellite | Spectres!

[ironwood]

Characters: Any and all!
Date: May 23 - 26, 2013
Location: Keeliai, turtleside, ARSHEPHELIOS cluster remains
Situation: Repairs and salvage operations operating innocently have triggered an invasion of spectres that possess and wreak havoc upon all they see.
Warnings/Rating: Please put CW in your subject lines

Satellite Crash Event

Crash Landing | Salvage Party | Shocking Spectres


Questions | Keeliai | ARSHEPHELIOS


Salvage is sweet, but not all is well on board the ARSHEPHELIOS cluster. The seamless cylinders salvaged from debris and the cluster, now being frequently traded, turn out to be pods the first time one is penetrated or cracked open. Each breached pod releases a flood of energy-based apparitions hellbent on world domination -- or, more accurately, person domination (and it's not the fun kind).

These apparitions -- spectres, if you will -- are driven by a need to protect the technology of the satellite cluster that their pods are associated with. They will stop at nothing to see this through. Each is immune to physical attacks, but seem to be injured or dissipated entirely by things like electrical shock or other energy-based projections. If people touch them, there is also a brief window of vulnerability, but it acts also like a door that swings both way. Through contact, these spectres can and will invade one's psyche, take over their body and cause them to attack friend or foe alike! Should the possessed body be subjected to sufficient electrical shock, the possession should fade. Strong natural will can also drive the spectres out, but it is no walk in the park to do so. Possession is not the only tool in the arsenal, for these spectres use electricity as their main offensive weapon. They'll leave deep-tissue burns on anyone they fight, and show no degree of fatigue after constant use of it.

Ten thousand of these creatures will be freed from pods, resulting in a veritable flood of Keeliai, the turtleside, and the satellite cluster. With such a driven enemy, it comes down to killing or being killed.

Meanwhile, those taking shelter indoors may notice that the spectres will get into the biomechanical functions of Keeliai. Consoles will be malfunctioning during this time, with lines of mysterious code and strange, ghostly images. One might hear people screaming for help or hours of patchy radio static.

Comments

[usavatar]

The spectre drives Dorian back against the nearest intact wall, hands not tightening around his throat. Little flexions betray the fact that it's trying, in spite of the blank expression it's stamped on Steve's face.

He can feel his arms like they're falling asleep, with little exclamation points of pain jolting through them whenever his fingertips move against his will.

Run. Get out of here.

It's a sound deep in his throat that doesn't make it to the air as words, only faint noise.

[depicted]

Pain drives through his skull and spine, obscuring sight, but he is breathing. He can guess why. His hands scramble to get some purchase against the wall; something slices his right palm open.

"Sorry," he manages, and grips the twisted steel brace slippery with his blood. He swings it hard towards Steve's gut.

[usavatar]

Steve feels impact without pain, the blanket against his side that means he's bleeding, and then the heartbeat ache that sends flushes of shock from torso to skull.

Steve feels it. His ride-along clearly does too. It yanks back from Dorian, and a guttural noise finds its way out of Steve's own throat. It rams forward again, plunging fingertips into the other man's ribs in the same place the steel went through Steve's side. Fingers in warm tissue, spread between thick bones, and Steve finds himself almost on top of Dorian on the ground as he forces his other hand away from the immortal's throat.

[depicted]

This time, Dorian screams. It's the sense of invasion, of something tearing at him from the inside that shatters any world-weary apathy and lets the human horror in. His skin goes white with his vision. His struggle stops. Shocked and shaking, he yanks the steel out on reflex only, but he can't get enough control to use it.

And that hand still isn't going for his throat. Why not? Just kill him. Just make it stop.

Steve.

Dorian has to save him.

It's the one thought that brings him back from animal terror. Pain's just a sensation, he can endure that by any measure, but he has to save what's left of Steve Rogers. He has to protect his soul.

This time, he aims for Steve's throat.

[usavatar]

Steve feels the little gout of blood that comes when Dorian wrenches his weapon free, but Dorian's scream locks Steve in place. The metal hits under his chin and gashes up across his left cheek and ear.

He has a friend's viscera under his nails.

Fingertips around bone, slick as barbecue, and Steve only realizes what's happening when the resounding crack makes him heave reflexively. Dorian's rib comes away in his hand, one end rounded, the other ragged with bone spurs. His hand raises the bone, broken edge down, and Steve freezes again.

Dorian is immortal. He knows Dorian is immortal. He'd be all right if Steve let the blow fall.

But he won't.

[depicted]

Stabbed by my own rib, Dorian thinks. That will be new.

But it doesn't come down. He is staring up at the bone with sight so blurry he can't make out if it's jagged, and it doesn't come down on him. Something warm and wet falls on his cheek. Steve's blood. He hates killing this way.

He's so tired.

His lungs aren't repaired enough that he can breathe right, and even an immortal body will try to shut down. But Dorian stabs that twisted steel again, and again, needing to end this, needing to get it over with. He just wants to stop.

[usavatar]

The second time the steel hits Steve feels his hand close around Dorian's wrist and squeeze until it gives like a dried-up twig. He holds himself in trembling suspension over the immortal, blood patterning irregularly from three separate injuries as he doesn't-doesn't-doesn't land the killing blow. The briefly killing blow.

Something gives. Maybe it's that the spirit feels its target's weakening body, that it's tired of the fight and in search of something easier, but Steve feels control enough to drop his hideous weapon and roll off of Dorian, to lay in the dirt next to him with his back to the smaller man.

He has a spur of metal in his stomach.

That's going to be a hard one to make excuses for.

Slowly, something else gets Steve onto his feet. He staggers a little, makes it to the console. Is this thing, whatever it is, trying to get away?

[depicted]

Why is it over?

Dorian's body won't play along, not even for the price of his soul. He collapses, steel falling out of his fingers, vision going black and then white and then black again as his mind screams to shut down, but his will hangs on to that stubborn idea: he has to save Steve.

His heart stops pumping blood. It starts up again. Dorian puts his weight on a hand to try to push himself up and shouts as the just-healing wrist cracks again under pressure.

He tries to push himself up again, his heart almost steady enough to support him. He begins to see through burning eyes, to see a staggering figure moving towards the console. What is it doing? But when Dorian tries to speak, he chokes on the blood in his lungs and can't stop coughing, each shudder sending new twists of pain through wrecked body.

[usavatar]

Steve's almost sure of it. This thing is looking for an escape. For a way to get out and do this to someone else.

He's not about to let that happen, either.

He doesn't fight as it puppeteers him to the console, waits until he's almost reached the keys - and then plunges one bloody fist through the remains of the screen. The shock ripples through him in much the same way it did when the spirit arrived. Cold numbness, a spasm, and he's thrown back hard away from the source of the charge. When he hits the ground he hits his head, and darkness scissors up around him.

[depicted]

"Steve!" At once, this immortal corpse obeys him. Dorian yanks himself off the ground, vaults over to Steve in a stumbling run. He collapses there, doesn't feel the pain of his knees on sharp rock, but reaches out to test for a pulse.

He's alive.

Should Dorian kill him?

He tears off his coat sleeve instead, pressing it against the gash at Steve's side. More of his coat is ripped away so he can staunch the blood flow at Steve's cheek and neck. His hand shakes but he keeps it in place. His wrist is healed. It just remembers.

"Please."

[usavatar]

The pressure on his side, the sting of contact at his throat - the little anchors draw him back out of the black and the sound of the wind. Exhaustion keeps him still through the surge of panic that always comes with waking. He does try to get up, but only makes it a few inches upright before he can't get farther. He stays that way, propped on his elbows, disorientation settling into the back seat of memory. Little tremors from blood loss and exertion make every part of him ache.

"Dorian-" A croak. Steve's throat feels absolutely raw. "Are you okay?"

[depicted]

Dorian releases a ragged laugh that twists again at his vanishing injuries, but he doesn't release Steve for a second. "I'm immortal, you idiot. Now, shut up." Dorian's head bows against Steve's chest, and a shuddering sob strains through his fresh-healed ribs.

[usavatar]

He has to lay back down to free up an arm, which he drapes around Dorian's shoulders in the closest approximation of a hug he can manage at the moment. "Not what I meant."

Steve closes his eyes again, vaguely aware that he's bleeding on Dorian - but having a hole ripped in his side has probably already ruined the immortal's clothes.

[depicted]

When Dorian can breathe again, he pulls back, not quite releasing Steve. He is a mess of blood and phantom pain, but he is fine.

Steve isn't.

"What do you need me to do?"

[usavatar]

Steve draws his arm to his side, then reaches out to touch the spot where he sank his fingers through Dorian's skin, a brief assurance that Dorian is back in one piece.

Do. What does he need Dorian to do.

Think.

"Peggy," he says. "Closest. She can help, find someone else who can."

He puts a hand against his side and tries to sit up again, fighting the press of gravity. Exertion sends fresh stains spreading around his injuries.

[depicted]

Dorian doesn't stop Steve, knowing it's nearly useless. He supports him instead, keeping one hand clamped tight to the stomach wound. "At least let me wrap this one first. I don't want to get killed another time tonight because I brought you home with this many open wounds." Not waiting for Steve's permission, Dorian makes a massacre of the rest of his coat, working quickly and deftly. Steve will recover, Dorian knows that. He just has to make sure Steve stays together long enough to heal.

[usavatar]

Steve stays put and lets him do it. The ease, speed, and tidiness of the job strikes Steve as practiced. Dorian had said he was in London for the Blitz, but what about before that? What about after?

"How many wars have you seen?"

[depicted]

"I tried to avoid the frontlines for obvious reasons," he answers. "Most of the conflict I've seen has been gloriously personal, not national."

The immediate work helps to calm Dorian, as the chemicals still racketing around his body begin to normalize again. He's fine but he isn't, and it's the worst part of taking injuries as he is: everything looks fine, but his mind knows that it's all wrong.

[usavatar]

He lets his head fall against Dorian's shoulder, an attempt at comfort that lets him go limp enough to mentally regroup.

As soon as Dorian is finished with the injury, Steve rolls over, onto his knees, and stands determinedly free of assistance. For a moment - fingertips pressing hard against one of the unbound injuries, in the middle of rubble with the sounds of the city going mad at a distance - he could be in New York. He could be in the mud-slagged fields of Europe, or the remains of one of Schmidt's work camps.

Steve blinks the temporal dizziness away and goes to retrieve his shield. "If these things can get-" a pause as he bends to pick it up "-into the consoles..."

He needs to warn Peggy. He needs to warn others, too, but she's the closest and she can get the word out better than he can right now.

[depicted]

"None of that," Dorian says. He moves over to Steve's side. "Let me at least support you."

He doesn't need to think hard to guess where Steve might want to go.

[usavatar]

"I'm fine." He almost rolls his eyes at himself, over how untrue that statement is. "I'll make it all right."

He isn't used to accepting assistance, not in this kind of situation. It's a matter of pride, a matter of stubbornness - moreover, it's a fact of who he is. He can't let people see Captain America limping through the streets of Keeliai in a crisis. "It's not far."

[depicted]

Dorian will do the eyerolling for him. "Yeah, and my shirt is salvageable. I wasn't making a request, Steve."

[usavatar]

"No." He slides the shield onto his arm, and there's a clear easing of tension as it settles where it belongs. It's funny how much a part of him it's become. "I'll make it."

He might collapse after that, but as long as he can get that far, it's fine.

[depicted]

"Why do I doubt that?" Dorian muses to himself. "Oh, now I know," he says, before aiming a punch at Steve's gut wound. And should he stumble on impact, he will catch him and help him.

It still isn't a request.

[usavatar]

Well, that was unexpected. Steve makes a soft noise of surprise, squaring off so he keeps his feet in spite of the way his vision grays. He locks on Dorian's position, so when his vision clears he's looking the older man in the face.

"Don't test me, right now, Dorian," he says, his voice quiet. He does allow himself to brush a bit of dirt from Dorian's shoulder, for all the good it does. It's a conciliatory gesture. "This is who I have to be right now."