16461/It Came from Beneath the Sea

It Came from Beneath the Sea
Date of Scene:	01 December 2023
Location:	SHIELD Outpost
Synopsis:	Savage Seas SHIELD 'spedition, part 2! The vessel is attacked by Tubanti fish men, Darcy is hauled away as a captive, and Lara gets herself into the same mess trying to rescue her.
Cast of Characters:	Darcy Lewis, Lara Croft

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Darcy Lewis has posed:
It was now hour sixteen of their three hour tour, aboard the SHIELD research vessel sailing the gentle waves of the 'Sea of Gorahn,' a large body of water at the center of the Savage Land.

Previously, they'd completed a number of sonar, metal-detector, and other scans, located a large underwater ruin, and briefly surveyed it via a combination of SCUBA and submarine recon. A tower, a dome, and a long passageway, all of them caked and hidden with sediment and oceanic life. Lara had managed the briefest look inside... but found further entrance blocked by ancient doors.

Since returning, they'd had time to remove their gear and have a small galley meal. Afterwards, Darcy then retired to one of the lab rooms to review some of the data. Lara was free to do whatever Lara does when she's not nabbing treasure or fighting velociraptors!

Crewing a ship is always a 24-hour affair, with multiple watches, and this one is no exception. Still, night watches do tend to be thinner. A young SHIELD crewman goes to relieve the helm, and a couple others walk regular rounds on the deck. There are lights enough on the ship, but they cannot do much to penetrate the inky water that surrounds the vessel, lapping quietly at its every side.

No one thinks much of what might lurk below.

Lara Croft has posed:
One might think that after surviving a terrible ship wreck in the middle of a horrible storm, after nearly drowning inside of your bunk room as the ship sank beneath the waters, that you might avoid all boats hither-to-forever. Lara Croft, however, was not your average woman. She'd joined the others for the meal, spoke some on what she'd seen first-hand to several of the crew dining with them, and even verbally sparred with a few of the more mouthy crew who'd seen some of the footage so far, who just /had/ to comment on her wetsuit. All in all, it'd been a fun outting, informative and exciting.

Lara wasn't in her bunkroom just yet tonight though. She'd taken some tea out on the deck with a couple of the crewmen, and been sending text messages off between idle chit-chat. She was dressed in a light duty SHIELD jacket, a simple sleeveless shirt of dark blue, and a pair of track pants that softly swished as she moved along one of the side routes from fore, to aft of the ship.

Casting goodnights over a shoulder to the others she'd been with, Lara was only now on her way to her crew cabin. One last look was sent out at the sea to the starboard side, before the Englishwoman's eyes fell down to her phone once more, a thumb tapping across the keypad to shoot another text off, while her other hand raised her thermos of warm tea up for another sip.

She takes a turn to port, stepping through an open hatch in to the ship's interior corridors, her room not far away at this point. She smiles toward an approaching crew member, who offers her a pleasant comment, and a question of if she's retiring for the night. She confirms the question, shooting a return 'Goodnight' back to them, her eyes drifting toward her cabin door just up ahead.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
When the creatures come, they come in silence and darkness.

It is perhaps a certain twist of fate, that Lara doesn't see it, turning away at that last moment, from the sea, to her phone, and then finally inside. The oil-black surface breaks just a second later, as the first vague shape rises from the deep.

While the crew are well-trained, as all SHIELD operatives are, there are limits to that training. For starters, this is a survey vessel, meant for mapping and oceanic research. All SHIELD train in some basics of security, and there are a smattering of better field-qualified personnel aboard, because, well... this is STILL the Savage Land, after all. Yet a certain comfort has definitely come to prevail in recent times, the longer SHIELD has operated. With the Brood seemingly eradicated, Sauron disappeared to find a new mountain to infest, and seemingly surrounded by allies like the Fall People, Lemuria and the Aerians, SHIELD's operations have basically gone unchallenged.

Well, occasionally a dinosaur comes along and makes a fuss. But dinosaurs, when you get down to it, are just big animals. Without something driving or commanding them, in the face of modern deterrents? They will mostly run.

All of which is to say that the other crew out on watch don't see anything. The helmsman's attention is ahead. The few floodlights? Well, they surface in the spots between their coverage, and when the exterior patrols have just passed. Once they surface, they move quickly. Fast swimmers, not surprising for their fishlike qualities. Good climbers... which IS surprising for a fish, but less so for a clawed fish man. Who knows how many come aboard, but they come quickly. The first two targets are the crewmen out patroling. They go down quietly, quickly, are cast overboard, and then taken below. They secure the exterior areas first.

Inside, Darcy is at her computer. Tap-tap-tap. There's a dull metallic CLONK somewhere, and she looks up and sideways, but doesn't immediately think much. Boat noises. Yet a moment later, she sees a shadow go past a porthole. Is it enough to throw up her alarms?

Lara might be faster to take to the signs of what is happening, to recognize a bad situation in the brief seconds before it becomes a truly disasterous situation.

A few will make their way inside. A few more, climbing up to the elevated bridge.

Lara Croft has posed:
Once inside of her crew cabin, Lara dropped her phone on her desk pushed up against the exterior wall. Her own cabin's port hole is viewed for the briefest of moments before she looks down to her laptop, and brings it out of sleep mode with a tap to its spacebar. While it comes back online, Agent Croft shakes her shoulders, pulling her jacket off, and draping it over the back of the chair pushed in to her desk. She turns away from the viewport just as one of those shadowy figures scales the side of the boat, another unfortunate turn of fate just missing her attention.

Lara steps over to her bunk, adjusting some of the items upon it, moving her travel bag aside to the bench attached to the foot of the bunk itself. She's rooting around inside of it when she hears something outside of her cabin doorway. She doesn't pay much heed to it, at first, assuming it is just your standard crewman passing by.

Her hands pull a pair of ear-buds from her travel bag, and she flips them over to check the small digital readout indicating their battery level. With a sigh, she pulls the USB cable out of the bottom of the earbud cradle, and steps back over to her laptop. After plugging the cable in, and letting her earbuds charge, Lara notices that beside her laptop is Darcy's waterproof camera. She picks the device up, and turns it over in her hands. Internally she debates if she should return this tonight, or wait till morning. Ultimately she knows if she waits, she may completely forget, and she knows Darcy likely wants to review the images on it as soon as possible. this camera had been the camera she'd taken in to the under water temple, afterall... she got to see all of that with her own two eyes, Darcy likely wants to see it through the lense's perspective.

Lara shifts her weight, turns from her desk and steps back toward her cabin door. She pulls it ajar, and steps quietly out in to the main corridor once more, looking aft first, she sees nothing out of the normal, but when her eyes sweep forward, Lara catches sight of the tail end of one of those intruders, at first her mind makes nothing of it. Surely it was just a patrolling SHIELD employee, or a bridge attendee headed back up to duty, but as Lara is prone to do, her perception kicks in, and she notes a trail of water streaked across the corridor floor. This causes pause in the Briton, her eyes looking at the streak of droplets glistening upon the deck, all the way up to the bridge access.

Something tickles the back of Lara's mind...

Her cabin door is thrust open once more, the camera dropped on her travel bag as she steps over to the locker mounted to the fore bulkhead. The locker door is pulled open, and Lara reaches for her holstered handgun...

the mirror mounted to the inside of her locker door garners her attention, and once more in Lara's life, she stares at herself in her cabin locker reflection, inside a completely different ship this time, but with the same sense of uncertainty building inside her spirit that she's felt before in a similar situation... She shuts the locker door, grips her pistol in its nylon and leather holster, and turns back toward the exit of her room, now headed out, and turning fore to march toward the bridge access, eyes tracing the trails of water, as her footsteps are taken with a growing level of caution ...

Darcy Lewis has posed:
The ship is no behemoth, though not exactly small either, comparable with some Coast Guard cutters in general layout. Long decks fore and aft, and a middle section with two decks of cabins and rooms of various functions, with the bridge at the front part of the uppermost deck. There's two ways up to it: either internally, up through a staircase, the way that Lara is going now as she marches through the ship's corridoors, or from smaller hatches that open on either side directly to the exterior, onto a smaller walkway that rings the upper deck, accessible by some ladders and exterior stairways.

The fish-men have largely taken the other route, climbing up the exteriors, via the ladders or their own claws, to surround the windowed bridge.

The fish-men inside don't know the efficient routes, and Lara can quickly make it to the bottom of those stairs before they do. She encounters one on the way... that is surprised by a quickly moving human and can be dealt with appropriately!

From up the stairs, as she gets there, she'll hear a shout. "Holy- what are? Ah!" A second later, there's a POP of a weapon firing. There is an alarm up there, but it doesn't start up. She can still hear sounds of fighting. It might be an obvious destination, to rush up and secure the command deck, and alert the rest of the ship!

Except...

Somewhere at the same time as all of this, Darcy, having heard some weird noises, gets up and goes to the door of the lab she's still occupying, peering out. There's no immediate rush to a weapon locker for her. There might not even be a weapon locker in the SCIENCE LAB. But as she peeks out into the hall-

Lara hears the very recognizable, higher-pitched squeal of surprise and fear, from that direction!

Lara Croft has posed:
With a determined expression upon her face, Lara is about to begin to ascend those steps to the bridge deck when she's suddenly face to face with one of the men from down below. There comes that split second of both she and he staring at one another before he reacts first. His right arm smacks hard against her left wrist, sending her holstered gun thudding and rolling in to the corridor wall, before the two are suddenly together in a clash of bodies! Lara is slammed up against the corridor wall, a gasping breath escaping between her lips, before she reacts by grasping hold of the wet and slippery skinned wrist of the creature pressing itself up against her. She performs a manuever with the trained precision that her SHIELD close combat coach would definitely be proud of, allowing Lara to bend the creature's wrist and slam it face first in to the corridor bulkhead! Positioned behind the creature now, the SHIELD Agent, and world explorer, breathes heavily before she yanks on the creature's arm, and twirls it around, both of them falling down on to the ground, Lara ontop of the sea-man's body from behind! It lets out a strained noise of its own, as it wrenches its wet slippery wrist from the woman's grasp, and moves to spin itself over, and attempt to roll on top of her in-turn!

Lara doesn't bite for it, however, and tumbles across the hallway away from the creature, and toward her dropped weapon. She dashes to slam her back against the opposite wall, and pulls the trigger on her sidearm, aimed right for the creature's throat!

Lara stares at the aquatic being, as it gurgles on its own blood, and slumps against the opposite wall... She watches the life drain out of its eyes, moments before the shouts from above, and then from what could only be Agent Lewis back in the aft section of the ship...

"Shit..." Lara utters, her form bouncing back to her feet, as she makes a hard decision. The bridge deck had guards, Darcy probably didn't...

Lara turns to the aft, and begins moving at a fast clip down the corridor, her gun aimed down, with her elbows locked and both hands gripping its base. She raises the pistol up, and aims down its sights, as she rushes toward where she'd heard the feminine shout.

"Darcy?" Lara calls out as she makes the turn to the corridor with the laboratory entrance, her gun up and ready!

Darcy Lewis has posed:
The ship certainly has other people to defend it. Even if the bridge hasn't been able to trigger the general alarm, the gunshot is sure to be heard by many. More than that, there are clearly attacks happening in multiple places, across many decks. Almost as if an echo, or even a spoken reply to her own weapon, moments later she will hear matching reports of other weapons being fired, the sounds echoing strangely through the narrow metal halls and tight hatches.

Clearly, the fight is happening... everywhere!

And as it turns out, everywhere definitely includes Darcy's lab.

It takes a few moments to traverse the ship, as well as certain special acrobatics to expediate things in the narrow quarters. Fortunately, Lara is a very graceful person, a masterful athlete, and this is not her first rodeo. Or... boat show? Whatever! She ducks through the narrow hatches or under pipes presumably connected to important ship things, takes tight turns and other obstacles. Passing the galley, she can see a larger fight playing out inside, several SHIELD agents behind a table for cover, fighting off advancing aquatic monsters.

Through the chaos she goes, eventually arriving near the lab! There's good news and bad news.

Good news! In the hallway there, just outside the room, she will first see a single fallen tubanti. There's a couple tell-tale little prongs sticking out of his chest. While Darcy might not have had a weapons locker near by, apparently she carries that taser EVERYWHERE (if it worked on Thor, why stop...)

Bad news? No Darcy in the lab. It's a mess in there, a laptop knocked onto the floor, some machinery damaged, and at least one shelf that had been stocked with a variety of recovered objects of interest totally ransacked.

Back in the hall, she can see the wet footprints, continuing out toward a hatch to the exterior. It's not much of a stretch to follow them!

And then, finally, when she makes it out onto the deck, she'll catch sight of the Physicist, struggling bodily between a pair of the fish-folk, being hauled toward the back of the ship. Why don't they just throw her over immediately? Who knows! Lara no doubt gives chase, but a third fish-man comes from the left just as she makes it out!

Lara Croft has posed:
In times such as this, Lara learned that her main priority in keeping others safe from peril, always came to her going for her closest friends that were experiencing the threatening danger. thusly, she went right on past that galley area, and toward the lab. She quickly makes A hastey search of the disheveled area, her gun sights tracking right along with her eyes as she took in its concerning condition.

No Darcy...

Darting back out of the lab, Lara gingerly hopped over the tazered sea-man, and made for the exterior hatchway. She passed through it with a graceful ease, out on to the side deck, with her eyes jumping fore, then aft. There. She saw her being fishman-handled toward the back of the boat!

Lara's gun jumped up again, her posture went rigid as she began to move with a steady step in her stride, centering her aim upon the glistening back of one of the creatures...

She was about to pull the trigger when the attack from the side came. She saw it coming, but not with enough leeway in time to react well enough. Taken from the side, Lara is thrust down in to the railing of the ship, her ribs taking a fair amount of kinetic damage from the force of being slammed in to. Very nearly, did Lara almost lose her gun over the side of the railing, but she managed to retain it in the fingertips of her right hand as she tried to roll backward away from the attacker clamping down on her. "Get off of me!" Lara reflexively shouted as her left elbow went up to connect hard against the aquatic-creature's right cheekbone! With it grasping her shoulders, it seemed to be trying to push her overboard, but Lara wasn't having it. She fought back, with her right hand snapping back up and another gunshot ringing out, connecting directly with the soft sinew of the creature's left shoulder.

This gave Lara enough time to slip backward out of its grasp, and an advantage enough to lunge forward, sending her shoulder directly in to the creature's chest! She topples HIM over the guard rail, sending him flailing toward the sea below, with his wounded shoulder gushing the ichor of his blood pouring from the bullet's entry point.

Lara takes a step forward again, headed toward where the two had Darcy, suddenly feeling a fiery burst of pain in the side of her right knee where the creature had slammed her in to the guard railing. With a wince striking across her face, Lara raises her handgun up again, this time finding the right moment, the right chance, and she fires twice in to the spine of one of the two creatures manipulating the astrophysicist's form toward the aft of the SHIELD vessel.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Lara's aim is true! Even injured, she's far above the baseline for SHIELD, and SHIELD baseline is pretty badass! And fortunately it seems that for the most part, despite some fairly ferocious anatomy, the Tubanti aren't especially more durable than a human. They do have some nasty looking teeth, but aiming at a vital point like that?

Thus, one of the two escorting Darcy collapses almost without making a sound, the severed vertebrae and nerves dropping it like a sack. While this gives Darcy some room to fight with an arm free, the other one, unfortunately, is pretty strong. It yanks her along, and for a moment, they both pass out of Lara's sight, with part of the main ship tower blocking the view of the rear deck. Lara has to traverse the length of it before she can get a sight line again. It's a straight shot, with no fish men immediately in the way, although as she runs along it, she will see others climbing up the side below. They seem to just keep coming, and that itself may be a frightening thing to realize: that this vast sea isn't empty, and that they're alone and vastly outnumbered in territory they had no idea was hostile.

In any case, once she clears the tower, Lara can find Darcy again. And here it becomes obvious why they didn't just throw her over: at the rear of the ship, where they have the small U-shaped 'port' for the submarine, the fish-folk have brought in some kind of vessel of their own. It looks a little like a shell of some kind, with crab-like appendages (whether they're mechanical or living is hard to tell). But it's clearly something they use for travel, as some kind of valve has opened on top, and they are rather rudely manhandling her to force her inside.

For whatever reason, they want her alive!

Aside from the impending kidnapping, the other problem is that there seem to be a whole lot of them gathered on the aft deck here. And as Lara comes past the tower into view, quite a few square up to hold her back, some with claws, other brandishing spears, nets and tridents.

Lara Croft has posed:
In situations like this there was always that sense of hope that things would return to normal, if one just pushed a little further ahead, and made enough right decisions along the way. But at the same time, when things progressively got worse and worse, more of that hope was inevitably going to get siphoned away. It was right when Lara made it around that obstacle of the ship's tower, that much of her hope started to bleed off. There were so many of the creatures coming over the edge of the SHIELD ship, with the sounds of combat all around her in ways she'd gotten all too familiar with in the past 4 and a half years of her life...

"Darcy!" Lara called out, as she stepped over the body of the Tubanti she'd dropped with two rounds to the spine. Her gun kept up, her eyes down sights, she couldn't take another shot without risking Darcy's own well-being, and she didn't think the scientist was the type to want Lara to 'shoot the hostage.' But she could see their own vessel now, and its strange design was even more forboding to the overall situation they were facing here tonight.

With her injured leg causing her to have a little limp, Lara rounded a guard railing in the middle of the deck, and was about to line up for another shot at Darcy's captor, when that line of enemies began to encircle her. A net was thrown her way, causing Lara to duck and dash away from it before it could ensnare her. She spun around, raised her gun and put a bullet in to the forward-thrust thigh of the creature that had thrown the net! When she finished her spin, she caught the end of a trident's shaft, right across the left side of her chin, dropping her to the deck of the ship, and causing her sidearm to clatter away upon the floor.

Two of the creatures came down upon her, one instantly finding out what the teeth of a Human can do to its flesh, before the second finds a heel of the woman's right foot sent right in to the middle of its crotch, testing the pain threshold of the creature taking one right to its taint!

Another net came down across Lara, however, followed by tridents slamming down on to the deck to keep the edges of the net in-place as the woman beneath it was now thrashing, with attackers coming down atop her to pin her down upon the ship's floor, while she cried out in frustration.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
"Get yer slimy fins off of me you damn dirty fish- oof!" Darcy is giving it her valiant all, but the numbers are against her, and her trusty taser was a one-shot. With an elbow from one that takes a bit of the wind (and fight) out of her, they manage to lift up, leaving her only to flail a little awkwardly, kicking in the air.

While this is happening, Lara engages in valiant battle against the fish-folk. She's better armed, in that whole 'gun to a trident fight' sense of it, but woefully outnumbered. And those odds are only getting worse by the second. Still, what is there to do but try?

Still deadly accurate, another one of Darcy's handlers goes down. although this causes her to fall flat. Not onto the deck, or into the water, but onto the shell thing, as they were holding her above it. She lands with an 'oof,' but gets up onto her hands and knees as if to crawl off, in whatever way she can.

She makes it a short way before a hand reaches out of the open valve, nabbing her foot, and drags her back in.

Back with Lara, she's quickly encircled, both by those on the aft deck and the reinforcements coming up over the sides, although she doesn't go down without a fight. The Fish-Men are apparently enough of the latter category that her 'special attack' has effect, causing one to double over in pain! Or at least, that one is. Like some of the other beast-tribes of the Savage Land, as she fights more of them, she may begin to recognize a certain variability among their features. Some more beast, some more humanoid, and each bearing traits that might be associated with a fair variety of different sea creatures. It's something that might have been fascinating to study...

(Although not for Darcy. She hates that biology stuff. Gross.)

Eventually it's the net that spells disaster. Here, there's proof to the utility of some of these ancient weapons, as useful in war as they are in hunting their fellow (smaller!) fish. Mobility means a lot, and to lose it can easily mean an end to the fight. One raises his trident, tips gleaming, as if to deliver a coup de grace...

...only for a second one to catch his hand, hiss-gulping some kind of command. The one with the trudent blorps back, reverses the weapon and then uses the haft-end to whack Lara in the head instead. Nighty night...

Lara may have brief visions, in and out, as they bundle up the net, drag her back over the deck. The ship alarm, gunfire. The feeling of being lifted, and then dropping into darkness. She lands hard, but then feels something soft next to her. Darcy groans.

Another something drops in with them. There's wet noises, and a click. A feeling of suction, their little vehicle closing around them. And then gravity, the churn of their stomachs as they drop, before the water catches them, and they start to sink below. For now, it's unknown what will become of the ship, out there alone, in the vast expanse of dark sea.

Chances of rescue feel slim, however. For it... or for them!