Holding Out For A Hero

Posted on May 05, 2016 @ 11:05am by Selyara Chen
Edited on on May 05, 2016 @ 11:06am

Mission: Fortress: Earth

"Holding out for a Hero"
(cont. "The Mission")

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Location: EARTH
Stardate: 2.160504.2108
Scene: Declan's Apartment

Time slowed for Raxl as the door to the apartment exploded inwards. Selyara, who had been prowling close to it was caught in the blast, her body lifting up from the floor, and slamming back into the wall with a painful sounding thud. She slumped on the floor, temporarily stunned, a fact which Raxl would realize, in retrospect, probably saved her life.

As the smoke cleared, a dark figure stepped through the door, whistling a jaunty tune that somehow added to his air of menace. He glanced briefly at Selyara, who was curled up against the wall, blinking and dazed, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her nose and rid her ears of the ringing, then quickly locked his gaze on Raxl, marking him as the true threat. With a casual flick of his wrist a thin, wickedly sharp blade sprung into life, glinting in the light from the window. Raxl knew, instinctively what would happen next, and he dropped into a crouch, grabbing a chair and flinging it up in front of him to intercept the blade.

The blade punched through the seat of the chair, and Raxl shoved the chair backwards with all his might, twisting it as he did so. The dark-skinned man lost his grip on the blade, and lost ground in the face of Raxl’s brute-force attack. Raxl caught a glimpse of Selyara as he barrelled forward into their attacker, driving his shoulder into the man’s midriff. She was sitting up and struggling out of her cloak and shirt to reveal a skimpy camisole top as she scooted towards the weedy, terrified Delcan who was staring dumbly at the scene in front of him as though turned to stone. She grabbed his hand roughly and the boy shook his head as though experiencing an electric shock, and suddenly burst into life, throwing himself out the open window and onto the fire escape.

Underneath Raxl, the man suddenly twisted out and away from underneath him, leaving Raxl to over extend himself and run headlong into the nearby wall. Raxl recovered quickly, spinning around, but the man was already on top of him, another blade in his hand. Raxl put his hands up, ready to deflect a blow to his viscera, when Selyara suddenly loomed up behind his attacker, grabbing at his hand to stay his blow.

A look of confusion and irritation crossed her face as she grabbed the hand. Her other hand came up and started pulling urgently at the cuff of the man’s suit. Raxl realized that she was desperately trying to pull off the man’s gloves and concluded she must still be out of it from the blast. He started forward to punch the man, but as he began to wind up he felt and hear the telltale noise of a blade narrowly swishing past his nose. Selyara let go of the man’s hand, and reeled away, shrieking in pain, a third, narrow knife embedded deep in her forearm. Green blood gushed from the wound, and she stared at it, clearly fighting the impulse to remove it. Instead she backed away, holding her arm gingerly against herself, one hand fumbling behind her for the communication device. The man took in her appearance and the blood dripping from her arm and laughed, a harsh, cold bark of laughter, and advanced, saying something to her that Raxl couldn’t quite hear.

Selyara’s eyes widened fractionally and backed further towards the window, hunching protectively over the communication device as she tinkered with it frenetically with her good hand, shaking her head emphatically at the man, who waved his knife menacingly at her again to reiterate his point.

Raxl cursed inwardly, the two were far too close to each other for him to use his disruptor without running the risk of accidentally nailing Selyara with the blast. He cast his eyes around the room, looking for something to even the fight out. His eyes fell on a small coffee table. Good enough. He snatched it up in both hands and slammed it across the back of their attacker. The flimsy, cheap material crumpled, leaving Raxl holding one leg of the table.Their attacker darted forward, and Raxl swung the leg like a baseball bat at the man’s chest. The man avoided it, his body fluid and supple like a snake, and feinted first to one side than the next, his blade whistling in its deadly gleaming arc.

“Raxl!” Selyara’s voice distracted him momentarily, and the blade whispered past his chest so close he could feel the breeze as it sliced through his shirt.

“I’m a little busy!” Raxl gritted out, swinging at the man with one hand as he reached for his disruptor, hidden in the small of his back.

“It’s **really** important!” Selyara said urgently, holding her hands up to her ears meaningfully, repeating the gesture with an urgent bobbing of her head for emphasis.

Mama Dreyton hadn’t raised a total idiot, so Raxl flung himself away into a barrel roll, clamping his hands over his ears, following her lead. She flung the communicator in their attacker’s direction, and it erupted in a deafening squeal of feedback that hurt Raxl’s covered ears. Their attacker screamed as the noise ruptured his eardrums.

Selyara was already halfway out the window, onto the fire escape, and Raxl was only too glad to follow suite. She was moving quickly, leaving a green trail of blood drops in her wake. They had just reached the bottom when the shrill noise abruptly terminated, leaving behind it a thundering silence.

“Dammit,” Selyara picked up the pace, clutching her arm to her chest. “I thought that would buy us a little more time. Run like your life depends on it, Mister Dreyton, it likely does. Do try to be inconspicuous, if you please.”

“Says the woman running half naked down the street,” Raxl retorted. “Because you’re real inconspicuous right now. What was with that striptease anyway? Were you trying to distract him? Because if you were I hate to tell you, you really misread him.”

She glanced over at him, the look on her face unfathomable, and then she snorted.

“I don’t dress like this for my health, Mister Dreyton, nor for your or anyone else’s benefit,” Selyara snapped. She grabbed his elbow and pulled him onto a main street, pushing one handed through the throng of people. The crowd seemed to part in front of her, allowing them easy access forward, and then filled in behind them, suddenly standing still, forming an immovable barricade between them and their pursuer. Seeing one of the small transport pods on the side of the street, Raxl stopped Selyara with a hand to the shoulder and pulled her down next to it as he shimmied the door open. He pushed her into the passenger’s seat and started to work on bypassing the ignition sequence. Next to him, Selyara twisted around in her seat, looking anxiously behind them. “Hurry, he’s getting through the crowd-” The antigrav engine roared to life, and she breathed a sigh of relief as they hurtled upwards into the air, narrowly missing several other hover pods. Raxl rocketed the ship in the opposite direction of the safe house, before programming in a circuitous route back. He felt the tension in his neck relax, and he glanced over again at Selyara, who was trying to staunch the trickle of blood from her arm.

“That looks nasty,” Raxl said, his naturally chivalrous disposition towards the fairer sex finally winning out over his less charitable feelings toward Selyara.

“Looks worse than it is. The blade was small enough and sharp enough that it didn’t do too much damage. I just don’t want to take it out until I have a first aid kit.” She took a shaky breath and then thumped the dash in frustration. “Dammit, now they *know* I’m down here, and we don’t have comms anymore. I hope Michael knows me as well as he thinks he does, otherwise finding any assistance he provides us with is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Raxl noticed the way her face softened when she said the man’s name, but refrained from saying anything, knowing than the satisfaction of letting her know he’d found the chink in her armor would not be worth the pushback he’d receive, so he settled for being a gentleman and took his jacket off, dropping it around her shoulders. She looked at him with a flicker of surprise crossing her face, and then nodded her head appreciatively, even managing a grateful smile which actually looked something close to genuine. She turned her head to look behind them, apparently lost in thought.

“Do you want to know why I dress the way I do?” she said suddenly, her face was still turned towards the window, but he could see that she was looking at him askance, her now-brown eyes ruminative.

“To distract people? It screws with people’s, uh, heads when they have to deal with very attractive very, uh, available women. Distracts, them, makes them say and do stupid things they might not do otherwise?” Raxl hazarded a guess.

“That’s part of it, yes. But there’s another reason. Think back to Limbo, every time I convinced you to do something that you were on the fence about, every time I overrode your first instincts, what did they have in common?”

Raxl racked his brain, and then suddenly it clicked in his head. “You were touching me.”

“Indeed.” She turned to look back through the window. “Unfortunately, I am not as terrifyingly all-powerful as rumors or your experiences on LIMBO might lead you to believe. My abilities have limits, the most important of which is that I need to be in direct, sustained contact with the person I intend to use them on, or else I am on equal footing with anyone else. Which is why less is more for me. I want to entice people to touch me, or at the very least, have enough of my skin bare to increase the chance that I’ll be able to use my talents in a dangerous situation. If I had been able to touch him, I could have short circuited his nervous system, which was what I was trying to do, or I could have done worse.”

“But that man-”

“Mister Johnson.”

“Mister Johnson, he was wearing gloves and a tight cuffed shirt, and you weren’t able to touch him, which is why you were ultimately stabbed. Why are you telling me this? I hadn’t pegged you as someone who would willingly reveal a weakness.” Raxl stared at her suspiciously, wondering if this was some further manipulation to get him to let down his guard around her. She turned and met his eyes, a look of mild amusement on her face.

“Paranoia is a way of life for you, isn’t it, Mister Dreyton?” She prodded gingerly at the flesh around the protruding stilletto. “I’m telling you this because we’re in a precarious position, especially now that our cover is-”

“Your cover. They don’t give a toss about me, except that I”m hanging around with you.”

“**Our** cover, Mister Dreyton. As far as they’re concerned, you’re in bed with me, and subject to the same mistreatment as me, likely worse, since they want me alive.”

“Lady, you’re more trouble with fewer benefits than ANY of the women I’ve actually been in bed with.” Raxl muttered under his breath, glaring at her.

“Feel better?” She looked amused. “If you would let me finish: We’re in a precarious situation right now, and the only way we are going to get through it is if we have at least a basic level of trust between us. Furthermore, as demonstrated by that near miss we just had in there, you need to be aware of my limitation: I cannot use my ‘mind mojo’ as you put it if I am unable to touch them directly, and even if I do touch them, there are certain things I cannot and will not do, like impelling them to do something they do not want to do.”

“That’s remarkably moral for you,” Raxl said as he dropped the pod down to a pond a mile or two from the safe house. Selyara didn’t respond. He landed and they stepped out of the vehicle, and Selyara helped him push it into the water. “That should keep it hidden for a while. What’s the next move?”

“I’m afraid we need to balance the need to wait for Michael’s assistance, with the danger that they might discover where we’ve holed up. We will wait ten hours for assistance, and then we will have to find a new place, and hope that we are able to find and meet up with whomever is sent. So for now, we’ll go back to the house, I’ll ferret out rumors and information that might be helpful, and you can maybe see what you can do about this.” She waved her hand towards the blade still in her arm, and winced.
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NRPG: Short bc I'm busy, but hopefully from this weekend on I should have more free time to write epic posts (maybe I'll explore a very angry Mister Johnson hunting).

In the meantime, laying ground for the arrival of the Hulk. I mean Barton.

Alix Fowler
As
Selyara Chen
Shadow Shish-kebab