Silver Carrot

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

@Kumbaris

Julia joined Xiang at the bar, looking stoic until she heard the door close behind Remo and his friends. The moment she heard the click, her head collapsed into her hands and she let out a shaky, haggard sigh, before starting to breathe deeply and deliberately. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. She hadn't had a panic attack in over twelve years. The prison therapist had helped her put a stop to them, and the trauma of getting blown up and losing two limbs was healed as far as Julia knew. But seeing that bastard face to face was almost bringing something back up.

Xiang pat her on the back and tried to cheer her up. Julia raised her head and glared at her for a few seconds, before her expression softened a tiny bit.

"I appreciate you looking out for me, but don't pity me," she sighed, shaking her head, as she took the cocktail and gave it a sip. "Mm! Thanks for the drink, though. That's nicer than I remember."

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

Any hope that Julia could get through this night whithout that Black Maria bastard spotting her were shattered when, upon checking back after he'd entered, their eyes met, and Julia's head snapped back to the front. Well, he'd seen her. She didn't doubt he recognised her. They crossed paths enough times. He'd grown a beard, she had a lot more scars and they'd both started going grey, but you don't forget the face of one of your nemeses.

She tried to calm down when he appeared to ignore her and sit at the other end of the club. Maybe the desire to avoid each other was mutual. After all, surely this was a coincidence. Xiang seemed too popwerful to be in Black Maria's pocket. It wasn't that Julia trusted her too much to entertain the thought that Xiang may have ratted her out. She was still a relative stranger. It's that Xiang didn't seem like the type to operate like that. She probably had her own guys. Didn't seem like the blonde lady's style to do something like this.

Their drinks arrived, along with a chilled bottle of red wine. The robot waitress made a point to specify that the 'gentleman in black' had ordered it for this table. Red wine, huh? Julia was starting to calm down now that her fight or flight response was assured she wasn't in danger of catching a bullet, or worse. This was, however, an annoying addition to her evening. Her expression turned from fear to irritation as she clicked her tongue.

"I'm fine, don't worry." Julia reassured her new friend with an unconvincing, fleeting smile. "I'm afraid I have to catch up with an old friend. Excuse me."

Julia hadn't invited Xiang to come with her, but she hadn't told her not to either, as she left the wine in the ice bucket, and downed her cocktail in one gulp. It tasted sour and fruity going down, but left a cloyingly sweet aftertaste in her mouth. She made her way across the club's floor and over to Remo's table, where she sat down at the free seat.

"It's been a while," Julia greeted dryly, with a nervous smile. "Never thought we'd be in a situation like this. So, how can I help you, Don Remo? Congratualiions on the promotion, by the way."

@Kumbaris@Thayr

"What Did They Do To Us?" - A Mysterious Supernatural Escape RP!!

Pia

---

Pia looked around again at the bodies around them, and shook her head at Ada's question. [color]"If these guns couldn't help these soldiers...or guards. Whatever they are...they're going to be even less help to us."[/color]

When the creature tht was watching them spoke back, Pia froze on the spot. Her blood went cold as ice. At least it was talking, and that meant is wasn't a monster that would kill them all on sight. But they were still at it's mercy. Pia could only watch on as it demanded a sacrifice, and then the scene played out in front of her. It tried to take VV. M volunteered in her place, and was scatched up and eaten in front of their eyes. He hadn't known who any of them were. He hadn't even known who he himself was, and he still made that choice. Pia knew she wouldn't have been able to do that.

Soon, the creature's mouth opened again and suddenly all was shadow. She saw a vision of a woman trying to resucitate a child in a high school uniform. They were out in the open, on a road. These place looked familiar. All the signs were in German. She the realised; the woman giving CPR to the student was her. Was that what she looked like? Her head was suddenly splitting in pain. Things clicked, and she suddenly remembered this scene from her own eyes. She couldn't remember enough to make sense of it. Just the desperation, confusion and guilt. She somehow knew that she had caused this student's injuries.

---

The Archive's room returned, and Pia now had knowledge that she had something else insider her. Something that she could invoke but not control. She never could control it properly. She wasn't sure how she knew that. Just a feeling. The creature spoke again. The words didn't make sense. 'Become their predator, not their prey'? Did it want to attck the shadows that were now forming?

Pia saw a wave of dark energy come towards her and her fear welled up. Before she was fully aware of what she was doing, it was as if her strong emoutions were escaping her body and causing a whirlwind. Just, without any wind. guns and bodies were lifted from the floor nearby her and began to swirl around her. One of the corpses took the impact of the dark energy wave and was cleaved in half, showering Pia in his stale blood. Become the predator. She grabbed one of the guns as it floated past her hand, pointed it at the shadow that attacked her, and opened fire.

"What Did They Do To Us?" - A Mysterious Supernatural Escape RP!!

Sorry, I have a job interview tomorrow and it's been making me too wound up to get in the mindset to write. I will post tomorrow after the interview

"What Did They Do To Us?" - A Mysterious Supernatural Escape RP!!

Travelling back home today, and will make a post once I'm back

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

After showering, Julia looked through her wardrobe for what to wear. Her old leather jacket had been irreperably damaged in the explosion that took her left arm and right leg. She'd been able to buy a few more leather jackets from 'retro' shops in Arcadium 15, though hearing them called retro had really pissed her off. They sold trenchcoats in that shop too. She knew of a few dead E street members and MCPD officers who'd be horrified to see that if they were still here.

After wearing a particularly shiny 'dress' one, a silver crop top that she would not have been able to pull off without the jacket over it, and tight leather pants, she then actually brushed her hair and did her makeup for once. The finished effect was that she now looked like a rather attractive, trendy woman in her early 40's as opposed to late 50's, if you ignored the greying hair. She took her handbag and her keys and headed out the door. She didn't need to look far or wonder which car was Xiang's. It was certainly a statement, and no doubt the car of an eccentric heir. She approached it and knocked on the window. After the door was opened for her, she slid into the passenger seat.

"Just me," She replied. "sorry, hope you weren't waiting too long. I had to remember how to dress up."

She was certainly tense when she heard the engine. It wasn't exactly a sound you'd associate with the healthy engine of a safe car. Her grip tightened against the edges of her seat. The sound apparently being deliberate was slightly reassuring but that was cancelled out by the heir apparently having made the car herself. After a while, she got used to the noise, and could see that Xiang was a very good driver. Julia had never owned her own vehicle but when she was ninteen, she had a boyfriend who owned a hoverbike. Riding on the back of that thing was the single scariest thing she had experienced in her life at that point, gunfights included.

Xiang easily got past the bouncer, a task that Julia always remembered being a gargantuan struggle for a posse of scruffy E street kids, several of whom were too young to drink legally. So even by the standards of heirs, Xiang must be a big deal. Not just a corporate higher up, but maybe a CEO herself. She followed Xiang to her usual spot, and smiled when she saw where it was.

"Well, isn't that a coincidence," she chuckled before collapsing into the sofa beside Xiang. "This was my usual spot too." When the robot bartender arrived, Julia had no such restraints as Xiang did. "I'll take a cocktail. Shuffle. Choose random." The robot bartender process the command words before ordering Julia a random cocktail. Not even she knew what she'd ordered.

After her new friend inquired about her story, Julia looked like she was deep in thought for a second. "It's not a case of 'I'd tell you but then I've have to kill you.' There's a lot of details we would genuinely both get targeted for if I spill them, so I'll have to cut a lot out. I'll tell you what I can, though. I was in prison for the last thirty years. Walked right into a trap, got blown up, caused a huge mess that I had to clean up by taking the fall for absolutely everything, in exchange for a lenient sentence."

The doors to the club opened, and a man in a black coat walkied in. For a brief second, Julia swore she recognised the gentleman. She tried imagining him thirty years younger, and the color immediate drained from her face. Her eyes narrowed to pinpricks. Something Xiang could never have pictured until that moment; Julia was terrified. She averted her eyes and preyed that he hadn't noticed her. Why oh why of all days did she have to wear a leather jacket today?!

@Kumbaris@Thayr

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

Julia was across from Xiang, and watched her curl the dumbells, as well as listened to her. The older woman's brow furrowed. "When you say 'robotic', you mean you've installed augments inside your natural arms, right? I don't mean to stick my nose where it doesn't belong but you could say I've developed a distaste for the rush to willingly get rid of natural limbs in their entirety. I never had a choice in the matter. This arm is only a replacement. It doesn't have any mods or gimmicks. No hidden blades or guns. I could have requested them but...that would be admitting I wouldn't rather have my real arm back..."

She looks down at her arm as it curls a heavy dumbbell with no issues at all. The hydraulics in the elbow were making easy work of the movement. She sighed with a melancholy longing and returned her attention to Xiang. Once they both finished their reps, Julia put her bells back on the rack, where an attendant dressed in white shorts and a collared shirt took them away for sterelising. This was after all a Spire gym. She listened to Xiang talk about her past and rested her metal hand on her hip, impressed.

"Wow! I would not have guessed you only started fighting that late in life, though if you're involved in that sort of thing, it makes sense. As for me, there...was nothing to get used to. I had my first firefight and took my first life when I was thirteen years old. I was E Street, you see," she explained. A scarred, unkempt lady with a rough accent and the air of a killer suddenly moving to the Spire made a lot more sense now. However, it didn't seem like she was going to divulge anything more detailed than that. E street stay in the good books of their Heir benefactors (and by extention, Law Enforcement) by keeping their mouths shut and following orders.

"And sure! I'm down for hitting Vivian's! As long as I can stop by my apartment to change first. I am not going to Vivian's in gym gear with no makeup," Julia agreed as they both walked in the direction of the showers side by side. "Vivian's used to be the Black Cat, right?"

Vivian's was renamed from the Black Cat before Xiang was even old enough to get in.

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

When Julia got to the gym, she decided to start with her old daily prison workout routine as a warm up. Fifty pushups, fifty situs, fifty crunches, fifty bicycle crunches, twenty minutes on the treadmill as a subsitute for ten laps of the field, followed by fifty squats. With that done, she waited for one of the posturing bronzed pretty boys to be done with the nearest bench. He took one look at the middle age woman covered in scars and wlked away in a mix of fear and slight revulsion. She clearly wasn't an heir with her messy grey hair and makeup-barren face. Julia sighed. She used to be the most attractive girl in the E street nightclubs. Bigger pond, different fish, thirty years later. Not the same story.

Now a little pissed off, she hit the benches. Pressing this much would have been easy. Still technically was easy in terms of the reps. But what she was trying to train with this were both her back and shoulder muscles, and her coordination. A robotic arm was a little too easy to move quickly and easily compared to a human one, and she wanted both of her arms to move in sync. In a way, having gotten used to being one-armed and having forgotten how to use her left arm was a blessing, as it made these coordination exercises easier. She didn't need to unlearn anything the same way people only augmenting one side needed to.

Her shoulders were always undertrained. She used to work out so that she could fight, and run. But she wanted to achieve this without adding too much bulk to her feminine frame. But that ship has now sailed. So what if she gets broad shoulders? A robot arm is strong but a punch from it is only as strong as the power you can pack into your shoulder.

She lost track of time as she zoned out, disassociated from her body and started thinking about other things while her arms kept on moving by themselves now they'd gotten the rhythm down. Only when her right arm and left shoulder finally started to feel physically exhausted did she come back to reality and place the bar back on its rack. She wiped the sweat from her face and arm with her gym towel, before one of their heirs approached and addressed her.

Julia caught herself thinking 'why is she holding out her left hand? I don't have a left hand' before remembering the arm. She shook Xiang's hand with her prosthetic and nodded in greeting.

"Yeah, I'm new here. Only moved into the Spire a little under two weeks ago," Julia answered. She wasn't intimidated by Xiang, but she was impressed. Julia had been checking in on Xiang out of the corner of her eye every minute or two. She'd seen women who were like this in prison; strong, heavily augmented, fighters. Killers, even. But not so much in the Spire. And she clearly knew how to fight fight, not just throw punches. Julia liked this stranger.

"I'm Julia Kray. And I just got done on the bench but I was going to hit the bells next if you want to talk there. Gotta say, don't see very many heirs who can fight like that."

@Kumbaris

Geonet 2.0 - Battle for the Megacity

'08:04' was the display on the bedside clock. Julia's eyes went wide with panic as she tried to scramble out of the covers. Shit! She was four minutes late for cell inspection!

She stopped. There was no cell inspection. She was free.

Julia sighed and scratched at her messy bed-hair. She looked around her bedroom, still unable to believe that this was her home now. Her bedroom alone was over four times larger than her cell. A king-size bed in the middle of the room. Very soft foam mattress. An empty walk-in wardrobe because her clothes were all folded up inside the chest of drawers. She had yet to buy nice clothes despite having the money for it. She tried to go clothes shopping in the Spire once, and her courage ran out. Nobody wants to see her old, scarred one-armed body in a cocktail dress, least of all herself. The clerks were practically begging her to the contrary, desperate to make the sale. She wanted to shoot them both then and there.

After a quick shower, Julia got dressed in baggy cargo pants and a navy blue vest. She always liked to dress comfortably on gym days. She entered the main living are of her open plan Spire apartment. It was swish. Intimidatingly nice. She'd earned this, but still felt wierd enjoying it. It felt like living in a hotel you needed to be careful not to trash because one day the real owner's going to tell you that your time's up. But this was hers. She was the real owner. Her benefactor had paid in cash for the apartment. They'd even asked Julia if she was sure she wanted somewhere so small and basic. Julia assured them that any Spire house nicer than this and Julia wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

She cooked herself a simple breakfast of bacon and eggs then crashed on the couch and watched junk TV on her home cinema while she ate, more for the background noise than anything else. It reminded her of the buzz of the prison cafeteria. Eating in silence made Julia self-conscious now. She didn't want to hear herself chew.

All of this, had been done with only one arm. only now, at 9:30am, did Julia finally walk to her arm stand and attach her arm. The robot leg, she couldn't live without. The robot arm, she was re-learning how to live with. That's why her frequent visits to the gym every morning were so important. Yes, she'd gotten soft after thirty jears incarcerated, but the main purpose of her gym sessions were to get her brain used to being able to use her left arm again. She'd spent longer without a left arm than with one at this point in her life. Even so, it was shocking how quickly it was coming back to her.

She fished her gym clothes from her unironed clean laundry pile, tossed them in a duffel bag, pocketed her keys and threw on a leather jacket as she left her apartment. The door autolocked behind her, and she was off to the Spire's gym.

Parahumans: Earth Drega

---

Bridgewater Bank
June 19th, 2021
@Blizz@Aku the Samurai@Duoya

Faith could see that there was a fight happening in front of her, but she couldn't process association. It felt like she was watching TV. Even after Richter flicked her head and Shattercrash shouted at her, it took a moment for her to come back to the here and now. There wasn't time to be scared. She turned and headed to the row of teller counters. She very briefly considered picking up the assault rifle, but guns made her very uncomfortable. She didn't think she'd be able to pull the trigger even if she knew bullets wouldn't be able to hurt her target. So she made her way past the gun, leaving Richter and Shattercrash to fight Ironsides.

Shattercrash had gotten the same idea that Decree herself had thought up in the van; using the teller's PA system with her power. All of their group were wearing their earpieces which meant that Decree's commands should only affect Ironsides. It did make her feel less special that somebody else figured that out. Likely, everybody else had figured that out. Most of them had some history in violent, high-stress situations. She was one of the only members who had not. She was not smarter than them, and their experience trumped hers. She wasn't special. As much as she hated using her powers, they were all she had going for her in this team. She needed to get very comfortable using them very fast.

The doors intol the staff area were, naturally for a bank, locked and very secure. Luckily, one or two of the counters had broken glass from the mercanary groups' initial invasion. Decree carefully crawled in through the broken glass, and looked around at this room. The PCs and tills were useless to Decree right now. What wasn't useless was the PA system's microphone, and a CCTV screen showing multiple camera angles of the lobby including a few where she could see Ironsides, Shattercrash and Richter. Just then, Keystone's voice came through her earpiece, and therefore probably everybody's.

"Lot more metal here than I expected - I'm thinking something is boosting Ironside up more than usual. Maybe a trump, tinker tech enhancements or something. Hard to narrow it down with my power being distracted and pointing out every puddle to me. Just be careful if you guys see him, and watch where you step. If Tandem is free, covering the metal in containment foam would be smart."

The other two in the foyer would have heard that too. Didn't change that the fight was going to be a lot more dangerous than the group initially anticipated. They'd need Decree's help. She knew that her power had much less effect on people who didn't trust her, so telling him not to attack or to stand down wouldn't work. But commands he'd want to follow anyway, even if, no, especially if he wasted precious time and brainpower to resist them, would make all the difference. She waited to see what Ironsides would do now he was faced with two powerful opponents. From what Richter did to that coin, Decree knew that he couldn't be underestimated here.