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...

Comments

[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.

[smelltheashes]

"Ah!" calls a familiar voice from the opposite side of the moonlit street. "It is you, sister! I apologize, but no harm done. My bullets are the least of your concerns."

There's a hissing noise, and a sound like a cat's scream is abruptly cut off as Father Grigori's next round takes down one of the poison headcrabs.

"The two of you have stirred up hell! A pair after my own heart," the priest notes as he reloads his gun. Something in the building catches his attention, and he turns away from the window. A careful listener might well hear him intoning, "Although they call me crazy I care not, for thou art my helper, my strength, and my savior," as he vanishes into the depths of the building in a hail of further gunshots.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah stares after him before turning to Gordon, concerned and curious all at once.

"Where from here?"

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon leans out the hole in the roof a ways and looks around. "We need to get to that building there," he says, pointing to one of the taller ones in the distance. "The street leads in the right direction, but it's crawling with zombies, and it ends at some kind of a... looks like a cistern or water tank or something. I don't like the idea of falling into that thing, do you?"

After some thought he adds, "There's a couple of girders running across the street down towards the cistern. If we can cross those we should be able to get into that brick building and make it to the roof from inside. Think you can manage that?"

[raptorcanaria]

Think being the operative word. Dinah likes beating things up at ground level.

"Yeah," she says, nodding firmly. "Yu go ahead I'll follow."

[acts_of_gord]

"All right."

Gordon sets out along the ledge that leads to the girders; they have the look of something that'd been in place long before zombies and crazy priests. Maybe there was a cargo unloading zone involved, or they'd been planning some sort of reconstruction or shelter- he doesn't know. They just seem solider than anything he's willing to attribute to the man with the penchant for pseudo-Scripture. Solid enough, in fact, that when he spots a zombie through one of the windows in the building where Father Grigori had once been shooting, he pauses to point his gravity gun at a pile of bricks on the ground, twenty or thirty feet below.

As the hail of bricks takes out the zombie in Grigori's building he calls out, "Come on over. We should be good."

[raptorcanaria]

"Right," Dinah says. She glances down quickly before following Gordon as fast as she dares.

She's alomst there when her foot slips to the side, and she's suddenly falling towards the street below.

[acts_of_gord]

Crap!

What follows is a remarkably un-super-heroic-looking set of maneuvers. Lacking the kind of training you see in millionaires named Wayne- and not trusting the gravity gun to act anything at all like the Bat-grapple- Gordon moves on instinct instead and sits down, fast. This is so that he can get his legs around the girder and his feet locked around each other at the ankles, a process that's still going on as he leans over to grab for Dinah's hand.

He'll pay for it in the morning, but he'll never not be paying for it if this doesn't work.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah's hand reaches out sharply - alomst as quick as she falls, and her hand closes tight around Gordon's wrist.

Her shoulder jerks suddenly, but she stops falling.

"Nice catch."