acts_of_gord | Assault on City 17: Team Ninja

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Assault on City 17: Team Ninja

In better times City 17 had many, many ways of crossing town. For the most part, the citizens of today travel on the surface, and mostly on foot. This is partly because they're easier to track down, and partly because the alternatives haven't been maintained lately. On the other hand, the Combine don't use the underpassages any more either. Clearing one of the tunnels that crosses half the City is a priority for the Resistance; it'll give them a much better crack at getting behind enemy lines. Thus the infiltration team finds themselves in a small courtyard at the back of what was once a highway maintenance building, facing a poorly lit flight of stairs leading down.

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Dinah's used to the wig no, so much so that it seems to never obstruct her view. She gives the courtyard a once over, assuring herself quickly that there's nothing around, then peers down.

"This looks like it."

"Hey!" calls a human voice from not far away. "Who are you guys? What's going on?"

The speaker is a dark-skinned man in his late thirties or early forties, dressed in scavenged body armor and dark blue winter clothing. He's got an orange circled lambda on a band around his upper left arm and a shotgun at the ready.

"Sure hope you guys're here for the cleanup mission. We can't spare anyone from the house-to-house fighting."

"Yeah, I think that's what we're here to do. Clean out--zombies and all that. We're with Freeman."

John pauses, looking back at Dinah. "You ready?"

"Yeah," Dinah says to John, giving a nod to the new arrival. "Coming with?"

That's all she says, starting down the stairs immediately.

The man casts a glance at Dinah's getup, but only in passing. In times like these, you wear what you've got. (Besides, the suppression field means that the human urge to reproduce, or at least simulate reproductive activity, has been dead for sixteen years. Certain social constructs, such as the concept of 'streetwalker', just aren't anywhere near the front of the psyche any more.)

"He made it out, then? He's alive?" asks the man, moving to get between Dinah and John. "There've been all kinds of rumors- did anyone else hear something scuttling just now?"

"Yeah, he's plenty alive--ahh!" John hears the headcrab before he sees it, and turns, throwing a ball of space-bending psychic energy at it. The thing flies back upon contact, killed or knocked out by the force.

"Whoa!" The man's jumped back a few paces. "What the- how'd you do that, buddy?"

"Uh..."

Think fast--

"Flux capacitor? I've... uh, been working on it. I'm a scientist."

That rates a whistle. "I've heard some stories about the stuff they've made at Black Mesa East, but nothing that fancy," he says as they push onward into the reeking dark. "Think you can do that again? There's bound to be manhacks down here."

"Yeah, definitely. It's got some... other uses too." He smiles a bit. "You know where we're supposed to go?"

Dinah had watched the telekinetic defense with some interest, but without comment. It's useful to know what she has on her team.

Unfortunately, she notes as they press on, she can't use her weapon down here. Not unless she wants to bring the tunnel crashing down on them.

Apart from that, she's just listening to the conversation, keeping alert for more headcrabs. No way is she letting herself be bitten again.

"Sure do. Through the tunnel, wipe out whatever manhacks show up, and then out to where 280 used to run aboveground. We got some reports that the Combine'd ceded the central section of the highway to the headcrabs, so we wanna make sure and wipe the whole thing as clean of zombies as we can."

As they make their way into the darkness, in the distance, something hums. An alert eye might well catch sight of first one, then two, then several glimmering red lights.

Dinah scowls the scowl of a young but passionate technophobe.

"Those manhacks?"

She doesn't wait for an answer. Instead she throws herself forward, rolling her spine along the floor for the only purpose of picking up a spare pipe that just happened to be landing there. Landing on her feet, it's just a case of knocking the saw things against the wall, swinging the pipe like a mace.

Thank you, Uncle Carter.

The whirring noise of the rotating blades mingles with beeping as the manhacks advance- and then with the sound of metal smashing against metal, and a sudden shift to an almost agonized higher-pitched noise as Dinah lays waste to the first wave. The luckier machines are the ones that shatter on impact. Others don't receive quite as much force; their lights switch from red to orange as their internal systems rearrange to compensate for now-useless circuit paths. It won't help, of course. Any manhack that comes anywhere near Dinah is in for a very bad, very short day.

Of course, the fact that they keep coming is an issue. The Combine likes to flood tunnels and abandoned pipes with these things just in case refugees try to escape City 17, after all.

John's helping, too; his solution is likewise utilitarian. He raises his right hand, and it glows blue as he picks up a manhack. The yellow and blue lights shine and pop around it as he whirls it around, using its blades and its speed to wreak havoc on the other manhacks. When his is finished, it's just a manner of picking up another.

There's scores of the things, so shattered bits of metal and wire end up everywhere. The walls are rapidly speckled with chips and dents as pieces of flying manhack saw gouge chunks out of the paint and concrete.

Between Dinah's mace work, John's psychic wrecking crew talent, and the rebel's guns, the things do stop coming. Apparently there's only so many the Combine care to stuff into one area without a watcher. There certainly aren't any CPs or soldiers coming to check on the things. "That," the rebel says, "was incredible. Where did you two learn to do that?"

The stupidest part of the costume? No convenient belts for pipe stashing. Dinah lowers it to her side. and takes the opportunity to toss blonde strands away from her face.

"My uncle taught me to swing a club."

Casual as anything. It's not like she was using metapowers or anything.

He shakes his head ruefully. "Man. You must have some uncle. Well-" He squares his shoulders and gestures towards the flickering light of something that might be burning or might just be dying electricity up ahead. "Shall we continue? There's more of 280 to clear."

John turns and looks the man square in the eye. "I can scout ahead, if you need me to. I've got a stealth function built into the capacitor."

"I sure wouldn't say no," he answers. "Thanks, buddy."

The way ahead is clogged by fallen concrete and smashed vehicles. Possibly gas pipelines, too, if the occasional fits of fire are anything to go by. Clambering over concrete eventually leads to a narrow passage through which one must crawl. On the other side, the ceiling is long since gone, and the former freeway has become a high-walled trench into which every foul-smelling and toxic substance known has long since spilled.

There's no way those things crawling in the shadows are cockroaches....

John nods, and runs up behind a piece of rumble so that his party can no longer see him. "I'm still here," he calls, once he's behind, "so don't worry about me!"

With that, he runs up the alley silently and invisible to any manner of creature with a brain, occasionally becoming visible for a second to take out a batch of headcrabs with blue shockwaves. They don't even have the chance to stalk him before they're thrown backwards with that blood-curdling cry.

Dinah smirks to herself, wondering what exactly this stealth function involves. For her part, she stays by the man who, despite his obvious competence, she's already mentally designated as a civilian to protect, the same way she would if a cop invited himself along on her business at home.

Occasionally a headcrab might slip past John, but it's easy enough to smash them against the walls of the trench.

They do smash well, don't they? The headcrabs die faster from impact than from piercing, going down with one good WHACK or shattering from within under John's waves of force.

The formerly human things that begin to haul themselves out of the liquid foulness, bloody claws that were once hands scrabbling for purchase, may be another story altogether.

THere are quite a few of them.

There're a few of them, but at least they're human shaped,and Dinah's good with things that are human shaped.

She leaves the lone headcrabs to John and focuses on the zombies. And now she remembers the advantage of the heeled boots - a smaller surface area means more pressure on each parasite she kicks at, and the blows are even more effective.

And if she can't get a kick to the head in, she just needs to judo throw the whole thing back in the mess.

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