[The Grid] Chatper 1: Hardwired

Malcom, Patrick


With help from behind, Malcom heaves himself clear of the car and hits the asphalt. Immediately it yanks his feet out from underneath him, and he tumbles. Not entirely unlike falling practice, he rolls along the road, saved from oncoming traffic only because there isn't any. Concussions are involved. The world spins around him too fast to spot the Maurader come roaring up from behind, narrowly missing him. That's when the passenger gets him with the door.


Like the Challenger, this is old Mopar. They didn't screw around with any of that aluminum crap back then. They made the frame out of steel, and if they needed to increase the power to weight ratio, why then they just threw more power into the engine. That door weighs about as much as Malcom, and coming along at nearly eighty, it hits him like a load of bricks. Patrick can see this all perfectly in his rear view mirror, and there's only one possible outcome.


It is not the door exploding into fragments, and those blasting outwards in all directions. The man who should be a bug splatter tumbles and rolls a few more times. More detritus falls down around him, this time from the vehicle. But he isn't dead. In fact, taking a door to the face hurts him significantly less then the drop to the road did. Not to underplay the pain caused by that, though. Malcom is only vaguely aware of what's going on due to that asphalt impact, but when he finally stops rolling, he sits up in a daze.


The Maurader goes sideways, shrieking across the road under the ungentle auspices of the emergency brake, and comes to a lurching halt. The tires are smoking like sand devils. Inside, looking out the opening on the shotgun seat, the driver and passenger can be clearly seen. They too are androgynous, indistinct figures nearly without emotions, and without a doubt they are staring, utterly baffled, at Malcom, trying desperately to figure out what the ---- just happened.

Maurader's roll to strike yielded

seven successes. Yeah, they hit.
Five skidding to a halt, and various perception rolls and other such stuff.


BA: Stamina + Resistance for hitting the asphalt.


BR: You're in perfect control of the Challenger. Given your roll, there's no glass inside, and the windshield is undamaged.
 
Malcolm had brief cause for a moment to regret his choice of haste. Then the moment was gone, and the world was all bumps and thumps, pain and incessant rolling. One blow of asphalt here, another to the elbow, and things just kept going and hurting. Then, he managed enough focus to sense the flash of a basketball rolling towards him, and he managed to perform the trick of grabbing onto it, and pushing himself up at the same time. Despite the shock of strained muscles, Malcolm focused himself to force the injuries off, forming a sort of right triangle with his body, the ground and the ball.


At that point, his head was high enough for the Marauder door to make contact as Malcolm rose. Oddly, it felt little more powerful than Taylor Smith's fist, the overpaid, under-performing (the latter was solely Malcolm's opinion, everyone else ate him up) lead of Forged Warrior.


Still, the impact drove him off the ball and rolling again, but after some short bumps and the tiniest of lumps, Malcolm was clear. He rolled up onto his butt, yet at the moment the daze was a bit too much for him.


Stamina + Resistance (I wonder why no resistance was bought? :D ) + 2d Stunt + 1 wp for Sux


5d10 → [8,10,3,1,3] = (4 sux, including WP)


http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/2836955/


WP 4/5 (If stunt succeeds, I get the WP back)
 
"Says the idiot who walked into my last ambush. Of course I have a plan!" Erin grins unpleasantly.
 
She lets go of his arm and gives him a push. "Go. Get in the car, then. I'm sick of running away from people -- at least without giving them something to remember me by first." Another smile.


Erin doesn't normally smile much, to hide the fact that her teeth are both large and somewhat crooked. This smile is positively crocodilian.


"If I'm a book, I want to be a book that gives the bad guys nightmares."
 
"Yeah...and here's where we run into a snag. I have to come back with you. Look, there's a reason behind this," said Kase, pulling out the marble and showing it to Erin. "...have you ever wondered if there was a reason behind this? Why one day you're just a normal woman and the next you're being targeted by the Cleaners?


"I know why, and if you let me and my friends explain the story...trust me, if you want to become the book of people's nightmares, the people I'm allied with will make you worse than the ever-living Necronomicon."
 
Erin, Kase


Time runs out. Into the afternoon sunshine walk the two agents, solidifying out of the shadows of the library stacks. The reflection of sunlight off dark glasses appears first, and you can see that shimmer when the rest of them is still obscured. It's the old chestnut of monster eyes glowing in the dark, but these monsters come smoothly into the light without a problem.


Within seconds they will be within arm's reach, and you are standing in a vacant lot, exposed.
 
Vengefulness wars with sanity in Erin's mind; sanity wins out. "All right, then," she says, skidding to a stop. "Which way is--"

Miashara said:
Time runs out. Into the afternoon sunshine walk the two agents, solidifying out of the shadows of the library stacks. The reflection of sunlight off dark glasses appears first, and you can see that shimmer when the rest of them is still obscured. It's the old chestnut of monster eyes glowing in the dark, but these monsters come smoothly into the light without a problem.
Within seconds they will be within arm's reach, and you are standing in a vacant lot, exposed.
Click to expand...
Erin's eyes go wide with fear, then narrow and harden. She yanks the wooden sword out of her bag, letting the bag fall to the ground.


"RUN!" she snarls. "Get your car! I'll keep them busy as long as I can, just hurry!"
 
Kase ran. Taking off in one direction, he immediately started working his way back to the library, hoping to outrun one of them if they broke off from going after his friend. This was no longer a retrieval: this was a mission to survive, and two lives relied on the outcome...


The music began to crescendo in his mind as the ink flowed from the quill. Music and stories were meant to be interwoven, it was like bees carrying pollen. He just needed to make both perfect...


He almost stumbled, wondering where that had come from. Then he put it aside. There was only one thing to do.


Run, Kase, Run!
 
Malcom

Sorry this took so long. The first time I saw the post I read 'Taylor Swift' for 'Taylor Smith.' The mental picture was delightful.


Ah, that wasn't the reason my reply took a couple days though. No, I blame the weasels.


Anyway, there's a -2 internal penalty for not having the relevant ability for a roll. This doesn't apply to Exalts, which is why it doesn't come up much. For now don't worry about it, but be aware of it for the future.


Anyway, mark off two levels of bashing damage after soak.


It takes a few seconds for the birds to stop circling Malcom's head, and the stars to set. The sense of bewilderment fades a bit slower. You've taken a couple good shots to the head on set and understand that it takes a couple moments to get your senses right again afterwards. Surely, any second now you'll fully wake up and figure out how you face-checked that car door into a million pieces.


Any second now.


While waiting for that you glance around. The Maurader is sitting in ominous stillness roughly a hundred yards away. It rotated around to face you, and you can faintly see figures through the windshield. It's hard, though. The sun is hitting the glass just right to turn it into a mirror. The car sits in perilous stillness. It is all black, polished to a mirror shine, glossy in its dark perfection. Heat ripples in the air pour up through the vehicle's grill, and the chrome seems to flow like wax. Or mercury, like from a broken thermometer. You know they used to call mercury quicksilver? You learned that on the set of Forged Warrior. The bad guy dies in a tub of liquid silver, the hot kind, in the picture and they modeled it with a smaller tub of mercury. They had like forty gallons of the stuff and dropped a clay miniature in while they filmed, using the footage later with a green screen.


It's oddly mesmerizing to watch, quicksilver. It flows across the hand. The moonsilver grill of the Maurader is running like goo up to the black steel, and faces of the dead rise out while Gottendammerung rides it into war. Gods, that guy was a son of a bitch. Fetich Soul of Jormungund, wielding Rom, the hammer built before defeat had been created. It pissed the Ophidians off to no end, but they were all somewhat on the same side against you. He had an arm on him too. An indeterminant number in fact. Jormungund had refused to pin his soul to reality enough to stabilize even how many limbs he had. You must have delivered a thousand killing blows, each one only to fail when whichever part of him you struck faded out of existence because the big bastard decided he didn't want it any more. He kept changing the rules when you fought. That's how he won. Well, that and the hammer that hit you in the-


Reality snaps back as the daydream breaks. For a brief instant in your mildly concussed state, you look around and see the world through the eyes of a dead memory. The Maurader isn't mercury and steel. It's dead, flat, uninspired. It looks like moonsilver but isn't. Nothing in the whole world has any color to it at all.


Except the even more ominous god-beast that sits in the distance. That thing has power in it. You can see the flow of light off the road pull in like the photons want to caress its almost perfection. Almost, only because it suffered mere cosmetic harm. Someone broke a window. Oh yeah. That was your butt.


Then you finally do snap fully back to earth. You still have no idea how you cracked that door and lived. But damned if those cars didn't look odd while you were hallucinating.




Consider yourself fully functional. Whatever wound penalty you get covers the head wound, but no crippling effect like Kase. Your body was much more bruised than his, but it was an all over thing, while he just took a good cranium shot.
 
Sword in hand, Erin plunges into the dense woods. Among tall evergreens like these she once carried a different wooden sword, pretending to be a knight. Among other trees, taller still, she once carried a sword of wood hardened to the strength of steel, wielding it against things of shadow and deathly cold that make these MiBs look almost comical by comparison.


The tall pines are not the cedars and fir trees she knew in childhood, or the mighty jungles where she fought alongside a host of scaled and feathered men, but they're close enough.
 
Kase


The two agents watch you leave. They both pause, staring at you with hard expressions behind their shades. They look inhuman, cyclopean. You get around a corner and find find Lace waiting in the car. She glides forward to meet you and leans across the passenger seat to shove the door open as you approach. Normally it would be comical because she has to almost climb across the car. It isn't that big, but then neither is she. Now you hardly notice.


"You're alone. What happened?" she asks as soon as you slide in. You can see her notice the bruises and the lack of the sword, but she says nothing, waiting for your explanation.

Sorry, I got wrapped around the axle and did not reply in a timely manner.
 
"Chased. Two people in suits. Don't get me started about how I got hurt or lost the sword," Kase said breathlessly. "...ow. Head hurts."


He shook his head. "She's not far from here. We can make it if we hurry."
 
[Patrick]


Patrick does, indeed, watch the scene behind him in his rear-view mirror - and winces at the Door-Shattering Blow the Maruauder takes.


And even as his mind takes that in, he remembers the comments made by the Dynamic Duo back at the shop...


...the whole 'the world is older than you know, blah blah' speech.


In a moment of realisation, he yanks on the hand-brake and cranks the wheel over, sending the Challenger into a bootlegger's turn, skidding to a halt in the middle of the street pointed back the way he just came.


And, for the moment, sits there, staring, both at the Man Who Lived, and the agents' Marauder. The Hemi idling quietly now, wisps of acrid smoke still coming off the rear tires, the car aimed perfectly at the Mercury's rear bumper...


Waiting.


Your move.
 
Malcolm rubbed his head as he got up, both to alleviate the pain in his head and to make sense of what he had just seen. That crystallized it, the odd sights, the lack of people paying attention to what had to be going on, everything. There was something wrong with this world... except he hadn't the foggiest idea what it truly was. No more than shattering a heavy metal car door to pieces with his face. No more than the memory?


It played again in his mind, something out of a fantasy novel, yet it was now seated in firmly as if he had fought the battle himself. No secrets hide from the heroes of the dawn... Something whispered that into the back of his mind, then was gone.


Malcolm turned as he heard the rumble of a car, and then saw the man in the previously-shining other oldie car. Patrick and Malcolm's eyes locked, and though Malcolm saw something there, something that suggested the other man had some understanding of what was going on. Better than his at any rate.


Then Malcolm took a few steps towards the side of the Marauder, the door-less side, and slightly grinned at the two figures in the car. "Do you mind explaining why I had to be bashed in with a car door, and be clear as you can?"


He'd seen the girl and the young guy split and make it away from the suits, so he felt comfortable at the moment with risks. "Why don't you get out of there and tell me yourselves?"
 
Kase


"Suits, you say? Black suits, I'd guess."


Lace nods and settles herself back into the seat. She buckles up, and then grabs the steering wheel, readjusting her grip a few times. The engine purrs, then grunts, before beginning to grumble softly to itself as the note slides down a scale into the bass registers. At first you think the car is shaking before you notice that you're settling. Your seat is slowly receding down, and around you the upholstery of the door is flowing like wax. The handle interior panels erode off the the frame, vanishing like dust before a high wind. The central console slowly shrinks and disappears while the carpeting on the flow retracts into the foot well like inverted growth.


Meanwhile, the hood begins to change as well. The center of it bulges, distending upwards and swelling outwards. Parts of the metal fall away into air intakes where lattices of mesh grow across. This coincides with the change in engine tones, and the note makes several sudden drops in octave as underneath the exhaust system splits and picks new paths out of the car. The sound of the machine is now ominously prepared with a hint of subdued hostility and excitement.


Lace turns back to you and says very distinctly, "Buckle your seat belt." She's still a small, cute girl, but her eyes are very intense now. She gives an impression of barely enduring restraint, a lion on a leash. As tint flows up the windows and the interior gets darker, her hair seems to have more black then you remember. Like the vehicle, she's gone from being relaxingly pretty to dangerously attractive. "There are aspirin and guns in the glove compartment. I suggest you get both."
 
Erin


Not being far from the woods when you part ways with the stranger, it takes you only a moment after than to hit the edge of the trees. The two men stared after Kase for several seconds, scrutinizing him with visible malice as he went. By the time he gets away you're also in the treeline. You hear them talking arrogantly, too disdainful to lower their voices.


"No."


"Only human."


The woods are dense with concealment, but there is little true underbrush. Mostly you just have thin reeds and short bushes. The trees are widely spaced but thick bored, old and strong. This forest is probably culled from time to time, and the weak or stunted are removed.


There are several places to lay in wait. On the flats, the tall reeds provide a number of spots to lurk. They offer maximum maneuverability and good concealment, but little true cover. Further away you smell flowing water. From your experience, there is probably flood drainage in the form of a small creek. It's likely five to ten feet deep, and lined on both sides by real scrub pines and bushes. The embankments of either side can severely hamper movement. Finally, you could hide in a tree. There are a couple with large limbs and thick foliage that would hide you well. You've have to scamper up right quick in a hurry though, so that the two suits wouldn't see you.
 
Wedging her sword in her belt, Erin begins shinnying up the biggest tree. She finds it almost hard to climb, as memories of battles fought hundreds of feet above the ground, where the combatants clashed for days without ever touching earth, continually assault her.


When she gets high enough, she crouches in the crook between a broad branch and the tree's trunk, balancing with one hand out to steady herself and one gripping the hilt of her sword. Concealed behind a dense screen of evergreen boughs, she watches the ground below through a small gap in the foliage, and waits, not making a sound.
 
Malcom

You're watching this too, of course. You can see everything without the need for a roll but can't hear the exact dialogue. Malcom's got high Performance and an acting specialty though, so he's got a pretty expressive face. He's also mildly loopy, so he's probably not hiding his expression quite as much as he normally would. The vehicle occupants might as well be carved out of wood. Assume you can read his body language well, but get nothing off them.


The two occupants are stare impassively up at Malcom when he approaches. Their expressions are ever so slightly hostile, but that looks to be a perpetual expression. They probably are no fun at all at parties.


After says his piece, the two figures look at each other. In unison they reach up and cup their right ears, before dropping the hand.


"He says to get out and explain," the passenger repeats to the driver.


"You should do that," the driver agrees.


"We wouldn't want mysteries," the other asserts. They sound almost like they're reading, badly, from a script. Your casting director would punch you in the mouth if you emoted this badly. (Actually, she's a small white woman with a real thick Minnesota accent who would yell something about unformed clay. Good lady; kind of odd.)


"That would be bad," the driver agrees again.


Sinuously the passenger flows out of the car. Neither of them were wearing seatbelts, you notice. The man stands up and faces you. In spite of have a good eighty pounds of weight on you, he moves easily. He's also carrying a vast hand cannon in an underarm sheath on the left side, but he makes no moves towards it. The only splash of color on his black suit is a burgundy tie clasp. It sticks out like a sore thumb on his white shirt.


"Remove your shirt and expose your back," he says in the same, droning tone. "Resistance is authorized but pointless."
 
Ok, seriously, bravado, Malcolm knew, was all well and good, except when it looked like it was a fight he couldn't handle. If the guys were anything like those suits on the other side of the road. So he fell back on the plan that would most suit him: gaining an advantage through hammy acting.


"I don't know about that," Malcolm started with quick, cliche moving hand gestures. "See, if I'm authorized to resist, then I have the backing of authority in resisting. Ergo, if I resist and you try to stop me, that's repressing my right to resist and violating the orders of whoever you guys work for. You don't want to piss them off by even threatening me, do you?"


[spoile=r]


Join Debate: [8,2,1,5]


1 sux.


Manipulation+Performance+ Acting Specialty + 2d stunt - 1 wound penalty: [10,5,9,4,9,3,4,8,8]


6 sux.


WP: 5


Appearance: 3


MDV's: Dodge 3, Performance Parry 2.
 
Taking Lace's advice seriously, he quickly fastened his seat belt, reaching for the glove compartment when lo, the car began to shift. This was starting to become quite a new experience for him.


He picked up where he left off, popping the glove compartment and grabbing an aspirin bottle. After quickly downing two, he exchanged it for one of the guns.
 
Erin

Unfortunately, you didn't meet the threshold to deny them a chance to spot you.


Their perception checks were four and four. Since given the underbrush they had a -1 external penalty, the rolls wound up being tied. In this case you're defending, so they don't spot you.


The two suits enter the woods, walking slowly and casually. They're looking around but not with the intense vigilance of a good hunter. One, it's hard to tell them apart, is nominally leading the way, staring at the ground as s/he goes. All of features seem to blur into nothing, and even your artist's eye can't make out even the sex of either one. From above it's easy to follow their path. They move along your route, turning where you did, and stopping in the same place you chose your ambush sight.


Glancing around, you're sure the lead spots you, since he stares almost directly at your tree. But then then start walking directly towards you, and he goes back to idly scanning the woods. They'll be underneath your lurking spot in moments.
 
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