Rally Time

"I've got you." Veronica pulled the dart from Cameron's arm and slung him over her shoulder. They'd met briefly, before she went undercover. With the cacophony barely anyone paid the police blues and the boy much mind. Her supernatural awareness made the ever-shifting battle much easier to navigate as gene-amped soldiers clashed with natural mutants. Flame, water, goo, beams of energy, raw muscle fought darts, muscle and collars.

It was a clusterfuck.

She paused to what would seem random to an outsider. Two Vanguard troopers landed in front of her with a wet thud. It seemed like they fell from the sky. Veronica kept moving to avoid the ball of acidic goo that followed shortly after. Fucking Vanguard. Until they showed up, there had been a shot at making it through this whole thing without a riot. She made it to an untouched car, and set him down against the tire opposite of the ruckus.

"Mute," She stated between breaths, "how are we doing?"

She didn't give him a chance to respond before she punched the car door. It dented deep. Veronica didn't look remotely phased.

"Fuckin' god those shit-nosed cowardly ass-lickin' bastards. I wanna shoot every last fuckin' one." Body armor or not, at close range, with the right angle, her bullets could pop through. She punched the car door again.

The succession of resounding clangs jolted Mute from his drowsy stupor. Down the left side he was dead; his leg was heavy, his arm limp. He sucked ragged breaths to stem the creeping numbness and fumbled for his celphone. He managed a cynical half-smile in response to Veronica's beautiful string of expletives.

"So surprised?"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tess Abrahams

"Chris? Help me move him!"

---

It felt a little bit like time travel, seeing Tess stood there, her face pleading from the heart of the swarm. In an instant, I was back in school, skipping lessons and mastering the fine art of spectacular skateboarding dives. I was a clown in fancy dress and alien skin, drowning in a turbulent sea of responsibility, and just as suddenly, my senses rubberbanded, snapping my arse two years back to the future. I gave a nod and rounded the unconcious kid.

"Take his legs. Ready?"

We lifted in unison and started to shuffle against the oncoming current of protestors. Over the violent din I called out, demanding a safe thoroughfare from the manic crowd, but it was useless, like being caught in a school of frightened fish. They battered my arms and shoulders as they pushed past, jostling our fragile load, my face clenched to bite down the indignant temper. Opposite me, Tess had turned Poe's favourite shade of pale.

"Are you okay?"

Trusting the girl as she trusted less then a handful of other people, Spectre ducked in time to avoid the blast of white hot energy that flew above her head connecting with the soldier behind her, throwing him backward. The girl had just saved her ass. Her amazement was short lived however when the popping sound surrounded them Lana staggered to her knees.

The boy with Lana looked pleadingly to Spectre calling for help, but she was already on her way to them, cursing at the situation.

He's going to be pissed at me. Spectre thought grimly.

One last soldier stood between her and Lana, and Spectre was all done playing nicely now. He took aim at her with a dart-loaded gun and she only glared at him, her bright green eyes seemed to bore right into his mind. She concentrated with enough vicious energy to give herself a nosebleed but she brought him to his knees, clutching at his eyes that he was now convinced were burning out of his head. She convinced him of pain upon pain, and the gun dropped from his hands. Picking it up she pistol whipped him with it, crashing it against the side of his head hard enough to cause a burst of blood at his temple. When he crumpled to the ground she stepped over his body and reached Lana's side.

Down on her knees she assessed the damage and felt for a pulse. "Void!", she hollered over her shoulder.

Looking to the young man, Spectre didn't think it wise to leave him behind, and Lana would need a friendly, familiar face. He would have to come too. Wiping the blood from her nose, she addressed the concerned young man. "She'll be alright. but we have to get her to help right now."

"Our friends are right over--"

Alex looked back the way he'd come, or the way he'd thought he'd come - he saw the tree, but he couldn't see Noah or any of the Redencion contingent still hanging around.

He turned himself so he could loop Lana's arm around his shoulders, and he struggled up to his feet with her hanging over him. That was enough for him to realize he couldn't carry her far on his own, whatever visions of heroic chivalry he'd had galloping through his head. She was only an inch shorter than he was, and he... yeah. He really needed to start working out.

"Where can we go?"

With each step towards Spectre and the girl, Void became more tangible until by the time he reached Lana's side, he was completely solid. He didn't waste any time with introductions and, before Alex could object, gathered Lana up in long, lanky arms and began to fade from view.

“Parking lot. Now.”

While Void took care of Lana, Spectre urged the young man along gently but firmly. "This way.."

"I'm Spectre. That was Void, he will take care of her. We are here to help you, but please try to do as we say until we are out of this mess." She led him from the fray in the middle of the, now ruined, rally across the crowded street, sensing where her invisible partner was heading. Inside the garage, she had only to follow the drops of green splashing onto the cement floor to know where to follow.

Minutes later they were on their way out of the parking garage with the man at the gate waving them through with a smile. "Have a nice day!", he called, even though just across the street mayhem was breaking loose.

In the backseat of the jacked SUV, Spectre had Lana's head in her lap, keeping pressure on her wounds.

Stern needed a plan. He needed a way to get everyone to stop. Flaring hadn't worked before, and it was too much work to knock everyone out, even if he was light-jumping.

The whole thing stank. People were out of control, shot, wounded, hopefully none dead. All he knew was that if this situation could be used to make his unit look bad, it would.

"Shield, it looks like Vanguard got what they came for. They didn't need to do it like that, though. Jeez. When Vanguard takes Geryon away, I want crowd control on this area. Keep it enclosed as best you can, so we can get these people uncollared and on their way."

"Hu, Ghost, are you all right?"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Chris Wilde

"Are you okay?"

---

That was a question that didn't come with an easy answer. The shorthand was no. No, because other than the fact that they'd managed to snag a parking spot with relative ease and hadn't forgotten the cooler at home in the rush to leave, nothing had gone okay. Everyone was gone, blown to who the hell knew where, and now even the oranges were just a flattened mess somewhere back in the fray.

But she nodded anyway, trying to catch her breath and stay rational. Scott jerked like a wind-rocked hammock between her hands and Chris's and it was an almost divine surge of relief to finally break through and set the teen down at the edge of the grass, within the reinforced safe zone of a medical team that had set up on-site.

"The kids..." Tess battled back a claustrophobic rise in her windpipe. "I was with a group from the House, they're still - fuck, I don't know where they are, I have to call Anna, shit, shit..."

Chris didn't look like he knew what she was talking about and of course he didn't. They hadn't seen each other in years and the current circumstances didn't provide a background for a genuine reunion.

While the paramedics tended to the limp-limbed Scott, Tess whipped out her cell phone and dialed Aimee and then Alex, the connection clicking over to voicemail on both.

Where r u?

Normally it was an almost physical assault to use text speech but time was of the essence. Tess punched in Anna's number next and pressed the phone to her ear, reaching out to squeeze Chris's hand.

"Thanks, I don't... if you hadn't been there..." she trailed off as the radio holstered on his hip crackled to life. Tess nodded at it and hugged her stomach anxiously as she waited for her call to go through. "Go ahead, go ahead. We're okay."

"Tess?" Anna put her phone to her ear, holding it in place with her shoulder. "What is going on? There are all sorts of -"

She looked across the table at her older brother who was distracting Jamie from the televisions over their heads that someone had helpfully tuned to the breaking news. No sound of course, making it hard to know what was happening. Anna clicked her mouth shut, letting Tess actually talk.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Stern

"Hu, Ghost, are you all right?"

---

It felt wrong to leave Tess alone in that state, but she knew as well as I did that there was work to be done. One last fleeting moment of misguided chivalry, I hesitated, eyes fixed on that friendly face from the past, my conscience weathering a battle of conflicted duties. Steeling myself, I nodded, and disappeared into the crowd.

"Ghost here. I'm good, captain. I've got eyes on a minor altercation to the south. I'm moving in."

"It's a mess, Anna, everything fell apart and there's... there's guys with riot gear and tranq guns attacking the crowd; they took Noah down and hauled him off for no reason - I don't know who they are but they're not LAPD, they seem to be pissing them off, too." Tess's voice was strained and tight and her eyes never stopped sifting through the crowd in the desperate hope that one of the jostling faces would be a recognizable one.

"Scott's hurt, we're at the EMT tent on the south end of the park right now," her grip on the cell tightened instinctively. "Anna: I can't find the rest of the kids."

Her heart thudded at Tess' words, and she looked over at Paolo who was watching her face carefully as he paid the bill. Jamie was putting their hardly eaten meals into to go boxes. "Everyone has cell phones, you text them and let them know where you are and tell them to meet at the van. That was the plan anyway. I'll head there with Jamie and Paolo will come meet you and Scott. It will be okay."

Even as she said it, Anna wasn't sure it would be okay, but it was important that she keep Tess calm. And herself. The baby kicked at her side, a faint pressure that quickly faded. "Just stay with Scott. He's covered under our insurance, make sure they know that if they decide he needs to be transported."

"Okay. Okay, yeah." Tess didn't sound sure, but they ended the phone call and Anna nodded to her brother.

"Did you get that?"

"Si," he said, signing the bill with a flourish and getting to his feet. "Where am I going?"

"EMT tent at the south end of the park. Tess is there with Scott - you've seen their pictures I think, Jamie was showing you on the phone earlier - I have to go to where we parked the van and see if anyone showed up there."

They left the noisy restaurant behind them and Paolo made sure she took a long route back to the parking lot - one where there wasn't a chance of her getting mixed up with any of the chaos from the rally. Ronnie was at the van, hopping from one foot to the other, a text from Aimee came in shortly after that, informing her she'd been spirited away by her friend Ginny and was on her way home.

Anna texted Tess to let her know about Ronnie and Aimee. It was going to be a long ride home if they couldn't find Alex or Lana, but leaving without them seemed impossible.

In the end Scott was deemed fit to go home, and Paolo convinced her to take the kids they had back to Los Santos. He would stay and look for Alex at the park, talk to the LAPD officers there and see what he could find out.

The ride home was quiet.

"No." Veronica stated coldly, and huffed. She felt so hamstrung, unable to retaliate with her full skillset against these... she was too angry to find a word. This rally actually had a chance, and those pieces of filth ruined it. The 3-11 and anti-mutant groups, they could have handled. But fucking Vanguard had only one agenda and didn't give a shit about anything but arresting a big bad mutie. Stern came through on the radio, making sure his people in the field were in one piece. Credit to the LAPD for a change, they actually served and protected today.

"I'm fine." She replied, and took another look at her quiet comrade. "You should arrest every Vanguard soldier present for inciting a riot and endangering the public." Veronica let her hand off the radio. Hot tears filled her eyes.

While his body waged war upon the sedative in his veins, he studied Veronica, surprised by her tears. Something stirred within him, a vicarious rush of anger which helped cleared his mind and turned his resolve to stone.

"Let's do it."

He struggled to his feet with the help of the car behind him, and secured a hand on Veronica's arm:

"Vanguard has a new weapon. They used it on Geryon. It was like something from a horror movie. We should check it out."

He gave a slight nod, gesturing at one of Vanguard's stragglers across the street, who was busy snapping a baton against the legs of fleeing mutants. On his hip there hung an oversized tranquilizer gun. A thin smile stretched across Mute's face:

"I see brutality. Do you?"

She wasn't scared, just... angry. Veronica made it a point to be detached. But this... this was a disgrace. A big, thick spit in the face of every American. The anger washed over and faded, burned out like the first match dropped into lighter fluid.

"I can't. Not now." She pointed at the badge. Mute looked a bit shocked.

"Today is a write-off. I'm going to get these bastards, but it's gonna be on my terms."

Mute relinquished his grip on Officer Hu and stood, finally, under his own power. Swaying slightly, he watched the lone Vanguard goon regroup with the horde of soldiers piling into a riot van, it was an opportunity missed. He understood, however, the last thing they wanted to do was blow their respective covers before hundreds of eye witnesses and news cameras. In his ears, Veronica's voice sang like cold steel, he liked this woman.

"Our terms. I'll be in touch, V."

He gave her a parting glance that was at once playful and deathly black, and limped away.