12276/The Reavers: What's Yours Is Mine

The Reavers: What's Yours Is Mine
Date of Scene:	03 August 2022
Location:	Ryker Heights - Founders Island
Synopsis:	Bunny tries to deliver a package to what turns out to be a Reaver-linked lab. Karai, Bebop, and Rocksteady show up to destroy the facility and rescue mutant captives. Josh's friends are decimated. His true feelings about mutants come out. Josh gets his due and is left to die when the lab self-destructs.
Cast of Characters:	Joshua Foley, Shredder, Bunny Macleod
Tinyplot:	The Reavers

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Joshua Foley has posed:
The air in Gotham is thick and warm, even under heavy grey clouds that threaten summer rain. Thunder rolls in the distance. Morning rush hour has died down in Ryker Heights and the streets are unusually quiet. In a heat that makes the shirt stick to your back even just standing still, everyone who can be inside in the air conditioning is taking full advantage.

The Jackson Building is an older, 20-storey office high rise wedged between much newer edifices. It is a simple tower of tinted glass and houses a dizzying array of businesses leasing space from 1919 Properties, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a division of Worthington Industries. People go in and out the front doors. Bored, low-paid security guards sit at a desk in the lobby helping people figure out which floor they are heading to.

A matte black van drives slowly down the alley behind the building. It looks suspiciously like vans that have been shown in a few social media posts about suspected abductions of mutants, and attacks on mutants. It weaves a bit between piles of trash and less savoury refuse left behind by Gotham's many downtrodden. Two men with a month's of accumulated grime on their clothes who are having a hushed conversation notice the vehicle, turn away from their hushed conversation, and shuffle off in different directions.

The gate to the parking garage is open during business hours. The van drives into the parking garage and down two levels to find a parking spot.

"For fuck's sake, this place smells like piss," Anthony complains as he climbs out of the passenger seat of the van. He has short brown hair, pinched features and brown eyes. He is maybe 5'10", thin, and about 20 years old. The van rises noticeably when he climbs out of it. He is wearing black cargo pants, a black t-shirt and combat boots. Maybe security. Maybe military. Maybe a wannabe. Anthony shoulders a black duffel bag and closes the van door.

"Yeah, it's gross," Josh agrees. He is about the same age, dressed the same way, but has ear-length blond hair and blue eyes. Classically college attractive, he seems ill at ease in the clothes he wears. Josh locks the van and the two walk towards door to the elevators.

For those in the know, rumour has it that similar black vans and people in similar outfits have been going in and out of the Jackson Building for weeks. People with the access find the plates to the vans are registered to seemingly random people in the state with no discernible pattern or connection to each other. Anyone who has done the work will know people getting out of the vans have been taking the elevators down from P2.

Shredder has posed:
    "So we get to just break stuff?" Bebop asks. It isn't common that it's a job simple enough for the warthog and rhino to pull off without complications.
    "We gotta get missions like this more often," Rocksteady snorts, slapping his friend on the shoulder.

    "Yes, just break things," Karai answers, lacking the cheery disposition of her underlings. The small kunoichi wouldn't be expected to be leading the two monstrosities who are easily ten times her weight. At least, not perhaps by a bystander. One might even expect her to be in significant trouble. Karai's authority is unmistakable to anyone in the ranks of the Foot Clan. To those within the clan, there aren't many who would dare to challenge her, despite her youth and small stature. The two mutants aren't an exception.

    "What about that Batman guy?" Rocksteady asks. "Don't he come in and break up the party on stuff like that?
    "Don't worry about him, he's never seen during the daylight hours. Besides, he's only human, you don't really think he'd pose a threat to you, do you?" she answers. "Now go break things.

    Rocksteady hoists up his sledge hammer. "C'mon Juniper, time to go out for a night on the town." Yeah it's daytime. He doesn't bother hiding himself as he gets out of the armored car that the Foot is using to transport them. The significant weight shift is visible as Rocksteady hops out, followed by Bebop who has decided to bring a rather large chainsaw. Anyone wanting a distraction is about to get it as the two begin approaching the front door.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    Bunny preferred working in the city center, the streets of Manhattan were her second home, and she knew their lines and shortcuts by rote at this point in her job -- which is one of the reasons she didn't want to take a gig going out to Gotham City, of all places. The heaviness of the air was weighing down on her white T-shirt with MACLEOD MESSENGER SERVICE in brown on the back seems to also affect the tutu skirt in bright yellow, matching today's skates of sunshine yellow with little gold suns on them. Her sky blue leggings break up the attire, and she takes her helmet off as she skates into the building itself, missing the two weight-releived vehicles in the parking lot as she gives a bright smile.

    "Hello! Bernice Macleod, I'm here to deliver documents to Suite 404." she introduces herself at the security desk, her curly dyed-pink hair all over the place as she gives a bright, cheery grin to the underpaid (probably especially for Gotham) security guard.

Joshua Foley has posed:
Anthony opens the door into the little elevator lobby. There are doors for the stairs, and two elevators. Josh walks through next. He looks behind him reflexively to check for anyone to hold the door open for. Anthony presses the down call button for the elevator and the two wait. Anthony taps away on his phone and snorts.

"404, you sure?" the security guard Bunny speaks to asks. He looks Bunny up and down with a slight narrowing of the eyes. Then he shrugs. Forty-five, tired, and underpaid, he does not care enough to be too inquisitive. His freckled face wrinkles when he checks something out of sight on his desk and nods. "Take the elevators over there. Button for BL4, it's a couple floors below the parkade." The guard gives Bunny a plastic smile, but looks across the lobby towards a woman in her mid-thirties with sandy brown hair cut short. She is sitting on one of the benches by a wall in the busy lobby, her attention mainly on her phone. She wears a non-descript black military uniform with no markings. The guard catches her eye and nods just a bit in Bunny's direction. Then the guard moves on to helping a self-important man in a suit who seems deeply inconvenienced by... Everything. The woman in uniform turns her attention to Bunny and watches her.

It takes a moment for the anomaly in the expected and routine to register with people in the lobby. Two women in business casual with plastic identity cards hanging from green lanyards around their necks walk out of the front doors of the Jackson Building. They stop and both look confused. Then their eyes go wide as they realize that yes, yes, they are in fact seeing what they are seeing. They both quickly rush to the side and try to sidle out of the way of Karai and the two massive mutants walking towards the doors. Inside the lobby a few voices raise in alarm and the flow of humans becomes an eddy as people are uncertain what to do or what is happening, the people further away from the doors see the alarm of those closer but not the reason for it.

The woman in the military uniform turns sharply toward the doors. She looks outside and frowns. Her eyes go blank for a just a second, then she turns and /runs/.

This woman can move. She plows through people in the lobby with enough inertia they go flying and she barely checks her step. And she is fast. Beyond Olympic athlete fast. She sprints towards the door to the stairs, pulls it open and starts down the stairs.

"Oh fuck," Anthony says suddenly. His head tilts as if he can hear something. "Oh fuck. Mutants up top. We gotta get downstairs." Anthony and Josh forget the elevator, turn to the stairs and start down.

Shredder has posed:
     Juniper (the sledgehammer) crashes through one of the glass doors of the building, and Rocksteady hooks it on the metal frame of the door to casually pull it open. It wasn't locked? Well, it was breakable, and that's the most important thing here. "You ever get tired'a people screamin' when they see you, Bop?"

    Bebop laughs, "Only if they scream really high," he answers. And with that, his heavy steps pick up, following the woman's rush toward the stairs. He may not be as fast as she is, but his free hand takes a potted tree, and that is fast enough when he flings it at the door. The woman beats the plant, the pot crashing against the door to slam it shut again. "Drat," he mutters. His hand reaches across to the pull chain on the chainsaw, bringing it to roar to life over the shouts of the people. He drags it along the ground as he makes his way to the security station , the teeth catching in the tile floor and flinging scraps of the material into the air before slinging it down to the security desk so he can begin cutting through it.

    Meanwhile, Karai, slips in quietly, moving with the crowd, flowing from one direction to the next, and like many other people, begins to maker her way for the stairs that Bebop threw the potted plant against.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    Bunny gives an equally plastic smile to the guard -- she's not in any part thrilled to be in Gotham herself -- and she turns to push off and get out of the Super Serious Businessman's way, heading towards the elevators when -- she turns, and hears the commotion around her, turning to drift backwards a bit on floor, holding her messenger bag tightly as she spots the oncoming form of Bebop and Rocksteady, her eyes going wide as her heart drops to her stomach.

    She doesn't even get a word in before the windows smash in with Juniper's help, and she turns and skates for the doorway to the stairs as well, ducking down and baseball-sliding one-foot-first low through the door that the woman was going to, hearing the screams above as the chainsaw rips through the security desk.

    Her breath was coming hard and short as she tried to determine a good place to Hide and not get drawn up in this -- and giving a l ook to the woman in the military uniform and decides that 'down' would be a good place to start, holds onto the railing and begins to bumpily skate down the stairway after her!

Joshua Foley has posed:
The screams break out in earnest and people in the lobby surge away from the doors when the glass shatters. People run for the halls, to push along the walls at the edges of the big lobby to slip past the giant menaces and escape outside. People trip, fall, are stepped on. They scramble out of the way of Bebop, showered in bits of floor tile. An older man in an expensive suit looks deflated and sits down on one of the benches, resigned to the chaos. A woman in her mid-20's in a pantsuit pulls out her phone and starts filming, seemingly oblivious to the actual mortal peril. Super important business just stands and quakes. A middle-aged man in a city works uniform hammers on the elevator button over and over.

The two security guards stare open-mouthed at Bebop as he approaches. The chainsaw cleaves the desk in two and that seems to break the spell. They both turn to try and run away.

The potted plant smashes into the door just after Bunny gets through. The tempered glass breaks and chunks of glass fall on Bunny. Dirt and bad earthenware spray liberally across the floor and near the stairwell door and the elevators.

Below her, Bunny can see the woman in uniform landing heavily on the outside of the railing one floor down. She turns and jumps again, and lands the next floor down right in front of a young man with brown hair in similar looking black clothes looks up the stairwell.

"What are they sayi... oof!" Josh is cut off. Still looking up the stairwell, Anthony grabs Josh by the front of his shirt, picks him up off his feet mid-stride and pushes him back against the wall.

"Shut up. Fifteen seconds the others will pass us on the way up. Julie and I form up with them. You go down to the lab and secure it in case anyone comes down the elevator," Anthony says. His eyes are fairly dancing.

"Secure it? Tony, what do you expect me to do?" Josh protests. Anthony reaches into the waistband of his pants and forces a black handgun and the duffel bag into Josh's hands. "Expect you to be a fucking Reaver, what do you think? Jesus, you're fucking useless."

Four floors down from the lobby level, the door bursts open. Three men and a woman in the same black uniforms. They are all armed with assault rifles. One has two extras. They start sprinting up the stairs towards P2.

Shredder has posed:
    Bebop laughs as the security guards abandon their posts. "Wussies," he calls out after them, but he doesn't attempt to pursue. There's stuff to break here!"

    Rocksteady takes note of the woman filming them, and he poses briefly. "Hey!" he calls out at her, as if perhaps to menace a threat, but his words say otherwise. "Make sure to send that to all the newspapers so they can get it on TV," he says. "I wanna be on tiktok." That's a newspaper, right? He holds the hammer over his head and does a terrible rendition of a dance he saw, then smashes a bench.

    Karai rolls her eyes. "Idiots! They are in the basement level," she tells them, and passes through the stairwell which currently seems to have a much higher population than she would have liked. She narrows her eyes, then pulls a smoke bomb from her person, dropping it down the stairwell so that it explodes with a plume of black smoke. The more chaos, the better for her. She steps back out of the stair well, and hits the elevator button. Bebop stops his assault on the desk, and pops one ear up. "Oh, the basement?" he asks. For good measure, he takes half the desk, and he flings it at the entrance to create a haphazard barricade to anyone who might try to enter the building by the front, and follows Karai to the elevator.

    "Shouldn't we take the stairs?" Rocksteady asks, going toward the stair well. He squeezes himself through the door's entrance and looks at the madness ensuing. "Oh yeah, definitely the stairs." Disrespecting anyone else who might get in his way, he starts on his way down toward the sub level. Be careful not to be in his way.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    Bunny's helmet goes back on as glass, dirt, and ceramic pot cascades around her as she slides down the stairs, nearly wiping out into the wall as her legs nervously twist about, and then the stairwell fills with smoke. She coughs, and as the smoke fills the area her skin takes on a brief rainbow tone, shining through the smoke, and then she brings her arms up over her head and stumbled her way down the next round of stairs, crying out "HELP! I can't see! I can't see!"

    She's a terrified young teen at the moment, with a bubble of a shield in prismatic, gasoline-puddle colors around her as she makes her way slowly through the smoke.

Joshua Foley has posed:
The woman filming laughs and Rocksteady sees she really is revelling in the chaos. She even turns, flips to the front camera on her phone and anime girl poses with the big mutant in the background halfway across the lobby. She giggles when he smashes the bench. She turns back to filming with the back camera on her phone. "Do the walls!" she calls out to Rocksteady and points at Juniper. "Wooo!"

The team coming up the stairs reaches P2. They pass Anthony and Julie rifles. Then the smoke goes off.

"When did muties learn tactics?" Anthony sneers. "Where'd that even come from?" The eyes of the entire group except Josh turn a glowing electric blue. They raise their rifles and start advancing up the stairs, covering each other. The stairwell fills with the staccato sound of gunfire when Bebop emerges. Julie leads the group. She sees the glowing teen coming down the stairs and fires off a round in her direction, then decides Rocksteady is the bigger threat. The team keeps moving up the stairs, ignoring Bunny who to them was either shot and downed or is cowering, but either way, not a threat. Anthony sneers at Bunny as he moves fast, then squeezes off a couple of rounds up the stairs. Compared to the others he is much less polished and comfortable with the weapon. But where they are efficient and cool, he is relishing the violence.

"Shit, shit, shit," Josh says to himself as the team moves past him and up the stairs. He is about to run when he sees Bunny. "Shit."

Without thinking, Josh runs up a couple of stairs behind the cyborgs until he gets to the glowing teen. He holds out his hand to her, and looks barely less frightened than she is. "Come on!" he shouts. He can barely hear his own voice, his ears are ringing from the gunfire. There is a surge of warmth, his hearing clears. More shots go off and his ears ring. It keeps repeating. Barely waiting to see if Bunny takes his hand or comes with him or not, he turns and starts running down the stairs to sub-basement 4.

In the lobby, the man who was hammering at the elevator button backs away when Karai and Bebop come over. He presses himself against the far wall, turns his head and closes his eyes. The elevator opens. Over the muffled cracks of gunfire from the stairwell, music comes out of the elevator car.

"Fly me to the moon, let me play up there..."

Shredder has posed:
    The encouragement from the girl with the camera does cause Rocksteady to hesitate. "Yeah, baby! You hang around," he says, "I gots some work to do." In agreement, Juniper is slung against a few of the walls before he disappears completely down the steps. In the stair well, he looks down. "Oh cool, robots," he says with a toothy rhino grin. He leaps over the railing, the steel bending slightly from his weight as he pushes off, and he flies down to land feet first on the first cyborg. The rounds firing at him? Well, they land. They break skin, much as one might expect an airsoft rifle to do to a normal human. Small sprays of blood pop from his arms and legs, but undeterred he swings Juniper with one hand at the next cyborg with glee. "C'mon chumps! You gotta do better than that! What kinda robot wusses around with gun, don'tcha gots like super strength or somethin'?"

    Bebop casually looks down at the man in the elevator, while Karai ignores him all together. "Kinda crappy weather today, huh?" Bebop says, as if to make casual conversation in the midst of his chaos. He looks back at the door as it heads down to the basement, the idle smell of gas from his chain saw filling the compartment.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    Bunny is crouched, but she hears someone yelling for her above the gunfire. The woman's fun aims, the bullet should have hit -- but it stops, six inches from her body and then falls, its point pushed in and the head wrinkled as though it hit something very solid.

    When Josh grabs her, she grabs his hand, and lets him pull her to safety, breathing out unsteadily as she's pulled down the stairs to Sub-basement 4, holding tightly to Josh's hand.

    "Don't let me go!" she whispers, eyes watering from the smoke.

Joshua Foley has posed:
Rocksteady lands on Julie. She is surprisingly solid, but has nothing like the mass he brings to bear. With nowhere to go, Julie takes the full brunt of the landing and is crushed into the stairs. Her gun goes flying and one of her arms is turned at a horrible angle. She swears as if it was inconvenience. She tries in vain to get enough leverage to force her body up off the ground under Rocksteady's feet. Juniper connects with Anthony. The bloodlust is replaced by shock and fear. He is lifted off his feet, hit the railing across the gap on the stairs and falls. The cyborg behind him kneels and keeps firing. The fourth fires over his kneeling teammate. The three behind them all jump off the railing, one after the other. One, a man with a crew cut, twists in the air, his feet hit the far wall hard enough to crack concrete, and he pushes off before he falls. He is going for a flying tackle at Rocksteady's neck. The other two land on the stairs, one a floor up, the other a floor down, and take shots at the mutant.

"Run!" Josh shouts. The world moves in slow motion for him. Gun shots. Deafening. Warmth. Sound. The girl behind him holding his hand as he runs. A glimpse of Rocksteady. Anthony's face frozen in fear as he plummets past to the floor in sub-basement 6. The door with a big red '4'. And beyond. White floors. Modernist couches and side tables. 'New Hope Genetics' on the wall. A spilled coffee on the floor. Empty meeting rooms off the main room behind glass walls. The hall to the labs.

The elevator pings and the door slides open, revealing Karai and Bebop. They can see Josh's heart sinking, it's written all over his face. He tries to pull Bunny behind him and starts backing down the hall. The gun shakes in his hand when he points it at Karai.

"Back off! There's another squad down here, they're gonna waste you if you don't get out of here!" Josh shouts. His voice cracks at the end. The resounding silence down here beyond their footsteps mocks his bluff.

Shredder has posed:
    Rocksteady roars as he is tackled by the multiples of robots. Is he angry? Is he...is he having fun? Definitely the latter. His large white t-shirt sprays red as they littery him with the peppered shots from the assault rifle. He can take a lot, but it's probably a bit more than he would really prefer. Fortunately for him, a cyborg with a crew cut suddenly is grappling his neck. His very thick Rhino neck. He twists his head to bring the cyborg in front of him as a shield, his eyes locked on the man. "Askin' me to dance?" he grunts with a smug grin. "Let's DANCE!" Julie no longer has to worry about getting up from under Rocksteady, he lets her up as he lunges forward down the stairs, horn first with a Cyborg attached as a battering ram at the two cyborgs still firing on him, rushing for the wall at the landing of the steps.

    "Hi." Bebop says behind the tusked smile, looking down at Josh without any fear of the gun. "We bust this up then, right?" he asks Karai behind him.

    "Yes, we bust this up," she says with a deadpan, staring straight at Josh. There's a roar as he flexes the chainsaw. Incoming, one giant warthog mutant.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    That's when Bunny decides to stop being a scared little bunny, hiding behind Josh, her fingers gripping at her bright pink gloves. She'd given her real name at the sedcurity desk. They already saw her sparkly prismatic self once, but this guy with the handgun against an eight foot tall mutant warthog punk man with a chainsaw is not going to cut the mustard when it comes to her.

    She decides on action as Bebop's incoming, and she sweeps in front of him on her skates, her back to Joshua as she raises her hands up, her fingers splayed as a 'STOP', and she closes her eyes.

     That chainsaw bares down, and she tries to catch it against her shield.

    "I can't hold him for long!" she snaps backwards at Joshua, for the first time Bunny was knowingly using her mutant powers to save someone else, her skin taking on that gasoline-puddle swirling quality again, the stops of both skates digging into the floor as she tries to hold Bebop off!

Joshua Foley has posed:
Julie rolls over onto her back after Rocksteady moves off of her. Her torso is... bent... in the middle. She does not seem to notice. Her eyes go blank again. The cyborg on the stairs one floor below slings his rifle and leaps up and across to where she is. He lands behind Rocksteady, bends down and helps Julie to her feet. Without a word they start up the stairs. The cyborg on P1 stops shooting at Rocksteady and covers their retreat. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small smooth cylinder. He looks at it and a red light starts slowly pulsating around its circumference. He lobs it into the void in the centre of the stairwell. It falls five storeys and lands beside Anthony's immobile form.

Rocksteady barrels down the stairs. Bullets plink off his new cyborg shield. He feels the slight impact when he hits the two cyborgs on the stairs, then the much more satisfying crunch of exploding concrete. Rocksteady bursts through the wall at the next landing, ramming all three cyborgs straight into P3 and a blue Camry on the other side of the wall. The Camry flips over backwards and lands on its roof. The hood scraps the cyborg around Rocksteady's neck off and launches him 10 feet backward into the ceiling when the car flips. The other two cyborgs go skidding across painted concrete of the garage. Fist-sized lumps of concrete slam into parked cars, setting off a chorus of car alarms and blinking orange lights. The cyborg that hit the ceiling falls to the ground. There is an audible electrical sizzle, his body jerks and then goes limp. The other two slide to a stop against parked vehicles. One pulls out one of those red-lit cylinders and lobs it in Rocksteady's direction. His teammate managed to hold on to his rifle. He pushes himself to one knee and starts shooting towards Rocksteady again, his face grim. He cannot even stand. His left leg is mangled. Smooth silvery metal muscles are exposed under torn flesh and the leg is leaking something that is not blood.

Josh's vision constricts to Bebop when he charges. He is not even aware of squeezing the trigger, but the gun goes off three times towards the Bebop and the elevator. He blinks unbelieving when Bunny steps in front of him with her glowing shield and roller skates. Josh drops the duffel bag and stumbles backwards, eyes wild.

In the stairs at P1, Julie's eyes go blank.

Down in the lab, the white light changes to deep burgundy, and suddenly Bunny, Karai, Bebop and Josh are bathed in an almost club-like atmosphere.

"Oh shit...." Josh breathes. He runs forward, slides on his side on the smooth floor past Bebop and Bunny and scrambles to the wall with the company sign. He elbows a spot on the wall. It pops open, revealing a panel. Hands shaking and ignoring everything else, Josh punches in a four digit code. A 6' by 6' section of the reception area floor hisses and slides open. It reveals a set of stairs into some kind of tunnel.

"We have to get out of here!" Josh shouts at Bunny. He looks at Karai and blanches. "We're all going to die, we have to go," he pleads.

Shredder has posed:
    Rocksteady shakes the rubble off his body with a huff. "That was fun." He's looking down when the red cyllinder bumps against his boot. "Oh, golf," he says with a smug smirk, and swings Juniper at the cylinder to send it back in the direction of the sender.

    The shield's blocking of the chainsaw makes Bebop pause more than the bullets do, and he reaches out to tap it curiously. "Hey, that's pretty...uh, pretty," he comments on the colors that are visible. Karai is less impressed, moving forward with a fluid grace to her, sliding beneath the shield and delivering a kick at Bunny's ankle in an attempt to knock her off that rollerskate.

    She slides back up to her feet, pulling a ninja-to from its sheath and pointing it at Josh. "Goon, why are we going to die? Where are you holding your mutant captives?" she asks, heeding the threat, and glancing at the opening of the reception area. But she has work to do.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    "Oh... um... thank you?" Bunny replies to Bebop as he taps the colors, and as he's no longer baring down with the chainsaw she goes to let up the shield -- until Karai slides beneath it. Bunny gives a most awkward and ungraceful WARK! of a sound as she wipes out, her ankle folding with a snap as she cries out, pushing herself to the side.

    And her eyes open wide. She turns to Joshua, and asks:

    "/Mutant Captives/?"

Joshua Foley has posed:
Josh raises his hands in surrender, the gun seemingly forgotten in the one hand.

"Captives?! We don't have captives! Your kind are the ones killing and taking normal people! This is just a lab! We analyze samples so we can protect people from things like you! That's all!" Josh protests angrily and spits at Karai's feet. He gestures at the duffel bag beside Karai when he mentions samples. Josh reaches slowly to the panel with his free hand and hits another button. A bigger panel in the wall slides open and reveals a large screen.

"See?! It's just labs!" There appear to be no staff on site. The labs are modern, well-equipped medical labs with a range of high-tech equipment.

"You were gonna kill a teenaged girl to get some equipment? You're monsters!" Josh snarls and and gestures to Bunny. He turns to the screen. "See? There's.... Oh god."

Josh's body posture crumbles from righteous to something else entirely. The third lab has no staff, but it does have two people in it. A middle-aged woman with green scales instead of skin is unconscious on a hospital bed with an IV and some monitoring devices hooked up to her. A man about Josh's age is strapped to a second bed. He has an impressive set of antlers rising out his forehead and is struggling against the restraints.

Josh looks stricken when he turns back to Karai.

"I don't... We just take samples and let them go," Josh says weakly. "That's, that's what... I don't understand..."

The lights pulse. Josh looks around then back to Karai. Josh looks like he might be sick or cry. His face burns red.

"It's the burn protocol, someone set it off," Josh explains. "We've got maybe three minutes, then the whole labs is going to burn. It'll kill all of us. Anyone on this floor."

On P3, Rocksteady parries the orb back at the cyborgs. They react with impressive speed. Both turn and try to scramble out of the way, but it is too late. There is an explosion. The ceiling and parkade floor crack, cars within 6 feet are shoved backwards. The cyborgs are flung, clothes burning, deep into the parkade. A wave of pressure and heat washes across Rocksteady.

Shredder has posed:
    Karai narrows her eyes. She is no mutant, but she feels no need to correct Josh on the matter. Her blade pushes forward, forcing Josh to retreat if he doesn't want to be impaled through the throat as she moves into the lab. "Bebop, free them, take the woman," she says coldly, still looking up at Josh. "I'm going to leave you here," she says. "You can spend your last three minutes contemplating your failure to choose your friends wisely."

    Bebop walks in behind Karai, taking the straps and yanking on them to snap them free of the two mutants, and begins collecting the scaly woman over his shoulder. "What about her?" he nods with his snout in the direction of Bunny.

    Rocksteady's satisfaction turns to wide-eyed surprise as the wave from the explosion is significantly larger than he expected. He is lifted into the air and flies with the wave of head and energy, flinging him all the way to the wall of the parking garage, slamming into the underground wall. He'll feel that one when he wakes up.

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    Tears of fear
    Bunny pushes herself up, trying her ankle -- sprained, if not broken, possibly. She winces, and had been trying to make her way towards the mutants who were bound up before Bebop makes quick work of it. People like you, he had said when he pointed to Karai.

    People like her is what he meant. It was the first time she encountered that racism from someone she'd risked her own well-being for. She winces, pressing her foot lightly against the floor and looking at the stairs -- there's no way she'll make it up in time. If she tries to bubble she'll still be squished. Instead, she takes the delivery -- meant for this very lab -- and she slings the brown paper wrapped package at Joshua.

    "Delivery managed." she states, and in spite of not being able to get up the stairs, she hobble-rolls her way towards them, looking to Karai and Bebop as she passes. The captives were out. That had to count for something, she determines.

Joshua Foley has posed:
Josh swallows hard and backs up into the lab at sword point. "You can't just leave me here," he whines. "Are you insane?!"

The antlered mutant nods his thanks to Bebop and gets up from the bed. He rubs his left wrist as he walks unsteadily toward the door. His arm is bruised there from so many needles.

"I hope it hurts," he says quietly to Josh when he passes the young man. "I hope it hurts like hell."

Josh looks to Bunny and watches the package slide across to him. "I saved you! You can't let her leave me!"

The lab door closes after Karai leaves. Josh stands at the window. He looks pleadingly at Karai and when it becomes painfully obvious she really will leave him his face contorts. Whatever he is yelling at Karai and Bunny is blocked by the glass. He punctuates it by slamming his hand on the glass.

The lights begin to pulse urgently. In the lobby, the sliding door in the floor is open. The metal stairs lead down ten feet into a cement tunnel with pipes and conduits running along the ceiling and walls. This area of Gotham is littered with old tunnels, maintenance tunnels, sub-sub basements of buildings that were built on top of, and who knows what else. The tunnel itself appears to be dimly lit and to stretch for hundreds of feet. The elevator is still there. The emergency stairs that Bunny and Josh came down smells of burning. Glancing over the railing will show a burnt metal skeleton and what looks like the remains of an explosion. The stair cases below the next floor down has been blown off and fallen on top of the cyborg.

Shredder has posed:
    Karai nods to Bunny, ignoring the desperate plea from Josh. Yep, she really meant it, and she doesn't even bother to give him another look as a condemned man. "She's a mutant, take her," she says indifferently toward Bunny. It isn't the sense of mercy or compassion. Bebop shrugs, shutting off the chain saw and hooking it onto his belt. "Okay kid," he says, offering an arm for her to hold, or even probably ride given his size. Karai looks up the stairs. "Let's get out of here.

    "Rats," Bebop mutters. "I hardly got to bust up anythin'."

Bunny Macleod has posed:
    "Saved me? You're the reason I can never tell my family what I am!" Bunny protests, without pointing out that she outed herself for his safety. She grasps onto Bebop's arm, and she swings herself up to make it easy on him, trying not to let it bother her that she's leaving the boy behind. She grasps against Bebop, and awkwardly pats him on the shoulder.

    "S'okay, big guy, you'll get to smash other stuff. Tomorrow's another day."

Joshua Foley has posed:
The door to the stairwell closes behind Karai, Bunny, Bebop, the antlered man and their unconscious rescuee. Inside the lab lobby. The group stops at P3 and gathers Rocksteady, who is just coming to from the explosion. Very soon they back at the armoured car, even before emergency services start to arrive.

In the lab, Josh turns and slides down to the floor with his back against the glass wall. He hugs his knees close and hangs his head.

In the lab lobby, the floor hatch hisses shut. The lights go dark. A new hiss betrays the arrival of the gas. The air grows thick and acrid, and suddenly, very, very, very hot.