We Don't Go To Ravenholm- Oh Wait, Looks Like We Do

[acts_of_gord]

The Milliways portal door is a capricious, fickle thing. It had opened for Gordon earlier when he'd tripped over the charred, blackened remains of a lurking zombie while firing a sawblade into its still-mobile companion. Then it'd gone and opened again, back to Ravenholm, just as he was leaning forward to check and see whether the zombie that'd loomed over him before had gone.

The blade had flown true and eradicated the zombie threat, but in the moonlight that trickled through the cracks in the boarded-up window and badly patched roof, Gordon could see he still wasn't alone...

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[acts_of_gord]

They're fighting their way through a zombie infested headcrab shelled town with a current known population of three: them, and a madman with a thing for fire, lumberyard tools, and scuba gear.

Gordon's just gonna nod and go grab a couple of those cylinders with the gravity gun. The fact that they're twenty feet below him doesn't seem to matter much- it's got very good range, although it only grabs onto one cylinder at a time. When he's acquired all three he notes to Dinah, "If anything jumps our way, take my crowbar and send them back down. I don't want them bringing the fire to us."

With that, he rolls two of the canisters off the edge, so they land near each other in the center of the leaping, shrilling room full of headcrabs. The third gets picked up with the gun and hurled into the stack.

Burn, baby, burn.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah takes the crowbar promptly while his hands are still occupied with the gun, and stands ready, moving quickly everytime a flaming creature comes leaping at them. Crowbar and feet alternate in sending them back into the mess.

It stinks.

[acts_of_gord]

Literally? Yes. And it screeches, too; incoherent screams of animal rage, and noises like cats crossed with rattlesnakes. Fortunately, the screeching noises drop off swiftly as the fire claims its victims.


.... all, perhaps, save one, which spends its last breath in an act of literally venomous hatred. One of the black scuttling ones flings itself up at an angle Dinah can't quite reach-

"AUGH!~" shouts Gordon, and flings the thing away with all his might. "Neurotoxin detected," responds the suit.

[raptorcanaria]

"Neurotoxin?"

Dinah pauses - no, she doesn't, she whacks another flying back then she pauses - turning to Gordon

"Gordon?"

Are you okay?

[acts_of_gord]

"Seek medical attention," the suit continues. Not that Gordon notices; he's down to his hands and knees, busy trying to unclench his jaw without the use of the crowbar. Every single nerve in his body is on fire to a degree he hasn't felt since the Nihilanth blasted him with enough lightning to induce convulsions. There's a fresh layer of sweat breaking out on his forehead, too.

"gnnnh."

"Administering antidote," the suit says blandly, and eventually Gordon manages to look up at Dinah. "Don't-" He coughs, clears his throat. "Don't let those bite you. It stings."

[raptorcanaria]

"Oh my god," Is Dinah's response. Then: "Don't get bitten, check.

"What is that you've got?"

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon raps on the suit with one knuckle. "HEV Mark V suit for use in hazardous environments," he says. "Originally just for use in high energy physics labs. It's been upgraded since."

He runs one gloved hand over his face and glances down. "Looks like the fires are out. We'd better keep moving." Before another one of those things turns up in the shadows goes unspoken.

The building's doors open onto an alley, where the shadows cast by a fire in one corner leap and flicker oddly. A complicated pulley mechanism with a lever that might as well say PULL ME sits in the middle of the alley, its cable leading up to...

"... how did he get a car up there?" Gordon wonders aloud.

[raptorcanaria]

"Metahuman strength?" Dinah suggests. "Flight? Telekinesis?...Oh."

Rhetorical question, huh? Pretend she didn't say anything.

"This is one of the traps he was talking about."

She glances around, looking for a zombie to drop the car on to.

[smelltheashes]

A zombie? No.

Four of them, shambling forward in a ragged group that trails its own cloud of flies? Yeah.

Gordon glances at the cluster, then gestures to the switch in a 'be my guest' fashion.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah grins at him, turning to the switch. She's happy to wait until the exact moment that they're under the car, before yanking the lever with both hands.

"Wonder how he managed to set them up without being attacked."

[acts_of_gord]

There is a word for the effect of the car dropping onto the zombies below, and that word is:

WOOMCH.

As the gears and entrapments in the device whose switch Dinah just pulled start slowly creaking the car back up to its former height- the zombies being not much more than a couple of reddish piles of ew now- Gordon shakes his head. "Maybe he had help once," he murmurs. "Or a guard animal, or-"

He goes quiet; he can hear more of the zombies shuffling their way, but he's more interested in what he's just spotted ahead and above. There's a second falling-car trap, and the car looks to be at exactly the right height to make it to yet another second-storey wooden walkway.

"This man is starting to worry me."

[raptorcanaria]

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Dinah asks, peering up at the walkway.

She looks around, then runs to the second lever, waiting for the zombies to line themselves up. "Get ready to jump."

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon's been bitten enough today, thank you. He gives a small, faintly feral smile and crouches for the leap.

Today is a good day for someone else to die, and do it properly.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah's grin is reassuring but slightly nervous, but she focuses on the job at hand - as soon as the zombies are under the car, she pulls and runs immediately, landing with a klank on the hood of the car.

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon's surprisingly nimble for a man his size in a suit of what amounts to armor. His own leap hits the hood of the car and he scrambles over the top to the other side, hanging on to the central cable in an effort to keep the load balanced. He does not want to fall off right now, thank you very much.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah tries to stand steadily on the hood, but as it winches up she stumbles and grabs quickly at the cable to stop herself from falling. As the car rises she glances down, trying to keep her weight steady.

"Not my favourite mode of travel."

[acts_of_gord]

"Reminds me of Black Mesa," Gordon murmurs. "The only way across one room was to jump from cargo crate to cargo crate. The conveyor they were hanging from'd stalled with them seventy feet off the ground."

He still has nightmares of missing the last jump. Repeatedly.

Fortunately the car doesn't have that far to travel, and the walkway's wide enough to get onto without much difficulty. And as they do...

[smelltheashes]

"Better and better!" announces a voice from the far end of the alley. And sure enough, there's you-know-who in the second floor window. With a bow the man announces, "I am Father Grigori. I see you have already met my-" He glances down at a pair of zombies making their way along the street below. "-congregation. Stay to the high ground where you can; mostly they have lost the strength to rise above their state..."

He glances over his shoulder, then calls, "Press on! I will meet you when I can," before darting back into the building.

[raptorcanaria]

"He's helpful," Dinah remarks, though she's unable to fully conceal her concern for the guy's state of mind.

"So we stick to the rooftops, I guess?"

[acts_of_gord]

"For as long as we can," Gordon agrees. "I'm used to that kind of thing. Will you be all right?"

[raptorcanaria]

"Yeah."

She's not sure, but she wipes her hands on her pants and nods firmly.

She's going to have to get used to it, after all.

"I'm good."

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon would say something, were he someone else, but he's aware of exactly how dangerous the wrong word at the right moment can be. He just nods. "This way," he says.

It looks as if Father Grigori is right. As they scramble from rooftop to rooftop- sometimes by means of a mere plank stretched across this street or that- Dinah will no doubt note that there are at least two or three zombies wandering blindly through each of the streets below. There's a moment when they have to stop; the zombies can't climb any more, but the headcrabs that haven't found a host are another story.

Let's just say that Dinah has a hell of a kick, shall we?

At least the moon's full and the clouds are few. A rooftop run like this would be a nightmare on a darker evening. Especially when the only way off one particular roof is to duck into a cramped, chemical-smelling attic. "I think this should come out on the next street," Gordon notes, "but we should be ready for anything around here."

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah does have a hell of a kick, and she's quite proud of it. She's also beginning to get flushed with the effort and the exhileration of action: she's enjoying herself, under the concentration and worry.

She climbs into the attic behind Gordon and wrinkles her nose at the smell, but aside from saying anything else, she nods.

[acts_of_gord]

Buildings in old towns like this are often so cheek-by-jowl that it doesn't really make that much of a difference which house you're in. The crawl space in the attic leads through a broken wall (painted with an orange lambda, which provokes a small smile from Gordon) into another building entirely. Up ahead, a man-sized gap in the slanting roof lets the moonlight in.

... enough to light up the zombie that's just lunged to its feet.

[raptorcanaria]

There's not a lot of room to move where they are, but Dinah's going to give it a damn good try. She lunges forward into the attic proper, landing ready to fight this thing however she needs to.

It turns out she doesn't need to, as a gunshot rings out and the creature falls.