11376/Of Kryptonians and Barbarians

Of Kryptonians and Barbarians
Date of Scene:	28 May 2022
Location:	Greenwich Village
Synopsis:	In which Superboy and Haze take care of the driving hazard that is Big Wheel and find that most ancient and mysterious of things, a telephone booth!
Cast of Characters:	Mary Jane Watson, Conner Kent, Kim Hayes

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Mary Jane Watson has posed:
It's somewhat late in the day in Greenwich Village. People are going back and forth through the city. Tourists shopping, food carts out, art over on display from vendors. It's a lovely day in the artist's haven; even with how much rent has gone up in the last few decades as the area had a migration that gave it much of it's unique flavors. It's a quiet day.. At least, it started out that way.
    Blasting through the area at high speed is a huge sphere moving at speeds normally only a racecar could manage. A very big.. Automated vehicle with heavy guns blasting out of it racing along, the occasional gatling gun from it shooting out!

Conner Kent has posed:
New York is always pretty noisy, and Conner tries not to pay attention, because it can get overwhelming to people with enhanced senses. It is an ongoing thing, the filtering of noises, and learning to discriminate what is important and what isn't. Currently in his apartment in Greenwich Village, ten minutes from the Empire State University campus, Conner is just trying to ignore the ruckus from the street. He needs to finish this paper.

Speeding vehicles, well... usually okay to ignore. But the noise of a gatling gun? Not familiar. With a sigh, he stops typing and then hears. Screams? Gunshots? Homework will have to wait.

It takes him ten seconds to find the black T-shirt with the big red S and his reinforced boots. Then he flies out the apartment through the window. Hopefully too fast for anyone to notice. Although careful not to break the speed of sound.

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
Mary Jane Watson is one of thsoe there that is just caught up in things as people are running back and forth. She's wearing a hoodie and a set of jeans as she just flat out stares over at the huge thing zooming along. A five meter tall giant armored wheel rushing along at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour and has people leaping and scurrying out of the way as it runs over a car, flattening it to a pancake!

As Conner is zooming out of his dorm room, down on the ground there's a.. Phone booth. Old, glass windows intact, a functioning phone that accepts quarters and other change within, and a 'TWENTY FIVE CENTS' mark on it. There's a sign which reads 'TELEPHONE' on top of it in bright red. For anyone around, there may be something almost.. Instinctive about it. A siren's call to them for tradition as for some reason amongst all the chaos no one is remotely looking at it or seems aware it exists.

Conner Kent has posed:
A phone boot? Conner was released into the world in 2017; it is safe to say he has never been inside a phone boot. Why is he feeling deja vu at seeing the bright red cabin? Weird.

Really, the giant armed wheel running through the streets is more interesting. It is vaguely ridiculous, but also pretty cool. Except for the part it is shooting gatling guns in the middle of New York. It is not going to end up well. So, Conner dives to intercept the Wheel of Doom before it runs over someone.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    Kim Hayes has got the evening off from her job at SoHo's Monkey Heaven Records. Normally, she'd have taken the subway straight back home to Hell's Kitchen from work, but she got a text from her roommate October that October's boyfriend is spending the night. That, of course, means that Kim's been in no hurry to get home, so she's been taking the scenic route through Greenwich Village on foot. She's just ordered a hot dog from a cart, the sound of the approaching chaos drowned out by the headphones she's wearing -

    <<Hayes! Look out!>>

    Looking around quickly as pedestrians around her panic and flee, Kim opens her eyes wide before diving behind the hot dog cart, the ketchup and mustard previously covering her purchase now covering her hoodie as bullets whizz overhead.

    "Fuuuu-"

    Kim's expletive is drowned out by the continuing gunfire and sound of vehicles being crushed. The dazed brunette frowns at her crushed hot dog, considers it for a moment, then quickly breaks off a piece and stuffs it in her mouth before turning her grey eyes to assess the situation as she chews.

    There's a phone booth nearby - that's something she could use to call for help, right? Nevermind the fact that she's got a smartphone clipped inside her kangaroo pouch.

    <<Let me out! We can stop this.>>

    "Shut up! I'm gonna call the cops!"

    Courage inspired by the potential of making this someone else's problem, Kim makes a break for the red phone booth - planning to get inside, if she can, in hopes of dialing the police...

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
For Kim, the door of the phone booth glides open. Then it clicks shut behind her, giving her a veil of privacy. Inside, the windows are tinted and faded with age giving the sense of amodicum of privacy and someone outside not being able to call in. The phone when the receiver is picked up gives a 'line open' signal for those who knew what it means. And a light above comes on, indicating it has power. Perhaps for her there is some sort of instinctive, almost siren's call to it the same way for others there's an almost automatic nature. Perhaps. If she wishes to call the police there is of course the full ability to do it. But given how fast the Wheel is they might not be able to catch it in time.
    Superboy goes to stand out in front of the Big Wheel, which rather than veering off goes to move full speed towards him! Going to hit the Boy of Steel and.. Flatten him beneath it's wheeled treads, leaving him imprinted on the pavement as it would zoom along! Doing no more real damage than perhaps to his dignity as the Wheel would rush on ahead.

Conner Kent has posed:
Conner stands in front of the wheel, trying to calculate the best way to stop it. It is a very... original device. But probably just a few tons of steel, right?

CRUNCH

Apparently not. He grabs the wheel, and the wheel pulls it down, and runs over him! It is much heavier and tougher than it looks! "Ow..." The young man pulls himself out of a Superboy-shaped hole in the pavement. "This is going to be a little trickier than I thought," he mutters.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    Quickly pulling the bud out of her right ear, Kim holds the receiver up to it. Her left hand reaches toward the grid of buttons, hovering for a moment.

    <<Hayes. Who are you hoping to summon? More meatbags with feeble weaponry? You'll only get them crushed.>>

    "What are you, like, my conscience now, man?"

    zz 'Please hang up and dial again.' zz

    <<If you wish. We are your conscience, and we are /bored./>>

    "Ugh!"

    Kim slams the receiver back onto its holder. She huffs, about to pull off her hoodie, but stops, closing her eyes.

    <<Alright. Let's go.>>

    Rapidly, the hoodie starts to melt and flow, taking on murky shades of purple and green as it quickly engulfs Kim's skin inside the phone booth. Long, green tendrils grow and hang where her hair was, curtains concealing the sanity-check-worthy visage beneath as the confined space of the phone booth fills with a cloud of green hallucinogenic gas that's exuded by the Symbiote, hands turning to talons that reach for the door to emerge once more...

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
The Symbiote goes to fly over Kim Hayes, and the transformation is no doubt complete. Ther eis perhaps a sense of a life goal being achieved, perhaps. Or nothing at all of any sort of meaning. And now it's time to go out and save the day.
    The Big Wheel is zooming along, going to blast forwards, hit the top of a car and flatten it, and then use the momentum of it to be springboarded forwards and launch it's way through the air like it was taking a ramp Duke Boys style!
    Mary Jane is running along until she comes over to Superboy, "Are you all right?" She goes to quickly offer her hand down to try and help him up and over. "This is.." What's the way to put it?
    "Weird." That's the way!

Conner Kent has posed:
Conner blinks surprise when the redheaded woman helps him stand. "Hey... oh, I am fine. Just surprised. Thanks." Beat, "uh, you should find some place to hide. I will handle this wheel of... yeah, weird."

A few years ago he would have asked for the redhead phone number before going after the wheel. But he is a little more responsible now. He gives chase, flying and... "wait, does it fly too?" He mutters some curses. "This gotta be Toyman. But no, he never leaves Metro. Hey you!" He yells to the Wheel pilot/driver.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    Billowing and oozing out of the phone booth comes... Super-Kim?

    No, it doesn't look much like a superhero at all - and fortunately for her sake, it doesn't look much like Kim, either. It's hard to make out what it looks like at all with the toxic fog that surrounds it - the shape of something evil lurking in a perpetual...

    Haze.

    "Aaahhh... thisss isss much more... fuuunnn..."

    The voice emerging from the monstrosity is high-pitched, feminine and multitonal, like something heard through water.

    "Souuulllsss..."

    The willowy, hidden visage turns up toward the Big Wheel as a male pedestrian cowering nearby who's overheard Haze's declaration lets out a scream and runs away up the road.

    "Yesss. Soulllsss... the Bonewheel..."

    The creature seems to slither forward along the street, clinging onto a streetlight and stretching out as it rises along the length of the pole.

    "<Come hhheeeere, ssssppinnnyy duuuuude!>" A tendril creeps along the street probingly to wrap around the opposite lightpost.

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
Mary Jane Watson is left behind while staring over at the Big Wheel, "I really have to ask about these sorts of things.." Oh, the enxt time she meets Peter she is going to be completely curious on these matters.. Even as Superboy goes to rush along after Big Wheel!

In the cockpit, it spins about, the module the driver sat in spinning seamlessly around even as the wheel kept on revving! It must havea really high end gyroscopic stabilizer in it if it could keep moving that quickly and seamlessly.

"Hey what?" the two large gatling guns would go to try and spray over at Superboy with machine gun fire! Another couple of rockets would fly through the air over at the Amazing Goo Girl!

Conner Kent has posed:
"Hey you... ack," bullets, but just lead. No big deal, they only sting a little. "Hey you, watch me melt your controls," he sates, his eyes going red as he attempts to melt the control panel in front of the Wheel driver. Also, heating up the controls to make it painfully hot.

"Just stop!" He yells to the driver, glancing at the rockets. Oh no! He flies after them, trying to catch them before they hit someone, or some building. He had no idea it had missiles! Next time he is just going to punch the wheel into scrap.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    As the rockets hurtle toward the Amazing Goo Girl, the Goo Girl in question quickly collapses down, releasing its grip on both streetlights at once moments before the rockets might hit if Conner ken't stop them. The nightmarish morass oozes as it starts to flow down the street once more, carrying the humanoid body along.

    "New plannn..."

    Tendrils shoot out from both of Haze's arms as it stretches them out toward the rolling ball, whipping as they attempt to find some purchase to latch onto amongst the weaponry and any other protrusions of the Big wheel.

    "Let usss give youuu a handdd!!" the Symbiote demands as it tries to grab on so that it can drag itself along with the Wheel like the world's most disgusting shoe gum.

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
The gatling blasts and the rockets go over Superboy to no doubt no real damage inflicted over on him and he's able to deflect any that might hit anyone else and limit collateral damage. So for now, no one is at risk.
    Haze goes over in the air and manages to latch onto Big Wheel! And thus stuck over on the giant 'wheel' it goes to continuously run voer her again and again while she's stuck and gunking it up as it goes along at highs peed, her perhaps coming out if she's not able to gum up the works of it like some sort of giant, stretched out pancake as it would keep up!
    The heat vision from Superboy goes to blast over the controls, and the wheel is however starting to fritz. "Hey! I paid the Tinkerer good money for this!" The possibly infamous gadgeteer who purportedly supplied supervillains with tech, if he did actually exist. The wheel was now humming, thrumming and bucking wildly.. Still perhaps with one extremely flattedna dn stretched out Haze on it!

Conner Kent has posed:
Conner manages to intercept the rockets, but unsurprisingly he ends up flying and crashing against a parked van, narrowly missing the phone boot. It would have been a shame to flatten it!

"That is enough, I think," he has been careful so far, but rockets is a bit too much, that crazy wheel needs to stop. He grabs the remains of the van and tosses it at near supersonic speed against the top of the wheel. Then flies behind, to grab it by the cabin if the machine falls.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    The Haze Symbiote stretches and flows with each forward spin as it's flattened out like so much silly putty. Even for something with such questionable organic composition, it's fairly painful. However, it's also helping with what constitutes the plan produced from a mind that, it must be said, has itself been subjected to far too many hallucinogens. The mass of greenish-purple biomass rapidly engulfs the Big Wheel in an attempt to envelop it completely - and while it may not be enough to exert much physical force on the Wheel, any manned vehicle likely has air intake ventilation somewhere on board in order to keep the pilot from suffocating. And if this one does, it's about to be pumped full of all of the hallucinogenic gas that the Symbiote can manufacture.

    Either way, the windscreen would be soon covered by the purple-ish goo, seemingly blotting out the view - before two swirling eyes and rows of teeth would appear in front of the pilot.

    "<Liiiceeennsssseee and regissstration, pleassseee...>"

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
Haze may be, if this were another sort of genre, walking like a slinky and making accordion noises from being so stretched out. But it is fortunately not that sort of thing. So the Wheel goes to slowly and thenfaster and faster keel over and flip as the gyroscopic stabilizer is destroyed, and it's flipped over onto it's side as Haze goes to burst over in to the cockpit!
    The driver of it starts to drool over from the gas, "Far.. Out man.." Having a concussion as the wheel is on it's side, and thus helpless.

Conner Kent has posed:
Conner grunts, trying to slow down the machine with his telekinesis, making sure the driver is not crushed. But he seems to be... tripping. "Uh, I guess you are... you," he pokes at the ooze that is Haze. "I mean, you okay?" Once the wheel has stopped, he starts tearing pieces, tying to pull the driver out. "What was the point of this? Was he trying to steal anything or kill someone?" A bit of a rhetoric question, but perhaps the stretchy person knows.

Kim Hayes has posed:
    "Ahhh... finally underssstand the ssstrange joy she getsss when she opensss a jar of 'nacho cheeeesse...'" the looming visage says as it slurps a huge tongue along the row of teeth, wicked eyes gazing at the hapless driver. The eyes seem to sadden. "She won't let usss eat you, though..."

    The gunk steadily peels and shrinks away from the disabled wheel, the face disappearing once more as it makes room for Conner to get to the inside. From somewhere in the murky mass, a voice addresses Conner.

    "She saysss... 'niiiccce one, duuude.'"

    With the day seemingly saved, for now, Haze doesn't want to stick around, but it's not equipped to take off into the skies...

    So instead, it'll slither toward a nearby storm drain, intending to creep inside and make its way to somewhere quieter.

Mary Jane Watson has posed:
There is a nearby storm drain that Haze can go ahead and get over into without much of a problem. The dazed man that was driving the Big Wheel would look disoriented as Superboy would pick him up and out and then slump down, unconscious even as the sound of police vehicles could be heard catching up and over with them just as stereotypically as the fight was over!

Conner Kent has posed:
Conner peers at the slithering creature. "Sure? Er... who is she?" But Haze is sliding into a storm drain already. Eh, sewers. No fun. "Well, thanks anyway. Yeah, not eating people."

And here are the cops. Some would say they are too late. But really, this wheel was like a tank. What could they have done? New York needs a special forces unit, like Metro.

Conner is not police-shy. He will wait for the boys in blue and give a statement about his 'citizen arrest' and all the due procedure.