18638/Diary of a Madman

Diary of a Madman
Date of Scene:	01 August 2024
Location:	Lake Superior.
Synopsis:	In the middle of Lake Superior, SHIELD and a rogue Logan find the things of nightmares. But more importantly, they found the trail left by the head of the snake.
Cast of Characters:	James Barnes, Logan Howlett, Natasha Romanoff, Sara Pezzini, Stefani Houston, Richard Stadler, Camille Russo

---

James Barnes has posed:
After securing the oil refinery in Texas, SHIELD brought those EPA members that surrendered 'home'. There was no police involvement this time, there was no room for mistakes or escapes. While none of them actually knew much about the inner workings of the organization, one of them did offer one small lead - the location of an unmapped island in the middle of Lake Superior. Any sort of recon would show that the island is small. The only possible means of egress that includes stealth would be under the cover of night and by boat. So, is stealth the plan?

Drones or anything else used to gather information would find heat signatures that could be human, but they're oddly shaped - those heat signatures seem to be on the outskirts of the island, lingering in the tree line near the water's edge. At the center of the island stands a simple concrete structure, over grown with vegetation.

Bucky's vote was the stealth approach, but his weight doesn't carry as much as some of the others.

Logan Howlett has posed:
Besides the obvious problems picking a fight with Cap, for most folks, there's the rippling consequences thereof. The guy's made more than a few dangerous friends over the years, left an impression in idealism, heroism, self-sacrifice. What's one more round?

Admittedly, when Logan first went sniffing around the explosion site, he was hoping for indications that Steve had survived; a trail to follow to the haggard hero in a safehouse, or something. Instead, the fallout led him by his nose to the suppliers, the specific chemist even, responsible for crafting the ordnance.

A little leanin' later, and well... there's this enigmatic island in the middle of Lake Superior. Right under everyone's noses. Tourist towns, recreation areas, summer houses, it's not exactly the picture of rural seclusion on this particular body of water; but this afternoon, that suits Wolverine's purposes. He finds a little lake house with nobody at home, and borrows their fishing gear and a rowboat.

The rest of the evening? It would be pretty great, in any other context; drifting around the island, drinking from a bottle of brown alcohol, fishin' his heart out. But Logan's keen eyes are subtly on that overgrown landmass as he circles it from a close distance, gradually angling ever closer as the night falls, as the wind shifts, as the ol' Canucklehead swigs his liquor, then cants his head and sniffs at that breeze.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
And going through the waters surrounding the island swims Natasha Romanova. She's wearing a chamo-mesh wetsuit that blends her way in with the water, a series of mirrored panels along it to match the depths of the water. The seaweed, the algae, the gunk. She displaces almost no water as she goes through the rather gunky deritus about the inlet.

She's using a rebreather instead of a tank, the filter taking oxygen out of the water and letting her cycle in breathing it with a minimum of bubbles, leaving almost no trail.

Tied over to her back along with her other weapons is a harpoon launcher in case she has to take anything out while she's swimming. She's moving serenely through the waters when the small sonar module..

Pings. IT registers fish, jetties.. And now it shows humanoid things several dozen meters away. Natasha pauses in her approach. Interesting. They seem to be slagging their way through the muck.. Towards schools of fishes. At a slow pace. Perhaps hunting them? or just wandering. Their paths too random to be a set patrol. Natasha waits a few moments, for the things to pass far enough for her to bypass them or have an idea of their route to swim around them.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Quinjet to the mainland, arrange a fishing boat with Stark's funds, then set out onto the lake to make it look like late night fishing. Sara had never been fishing, she still wasn't going fishing.

Stealth was the most logical choice for approaching the island, so when the armor formed around her, it was not constructed of the usually shining and spiked metal. Instead Withcblade used a dark, almost light absorbing metal and completely left the spikes out. Where the armor didn't cover, because there was aways skin exposed when there was no magical threat offered, she had taken black grease paint to herself. Sure, she might have needed a little help in reaching some places, but she no longer stood out in the night.

"Everyone check your comms, make sure they're working," she stated, the obvious really, but it was still wise to say it. "We have no idea what we're heading in to, so stay in contact with each other at regular intervals. You all know my specialty, including overwatch, but I'll be on the ground with you this time."

Stefani Houston has posed:
A fresh water lake, the size of an ocean. Sort of.

Once she was packed aboard the acquired boat, Agent Houston spent a bit of time leaning over the edge, to stare down in to the water, her reflection staring back up at her, as the mostly calm waters gently lapped at the side of the boat. Her right hand had dipped down in to the water, feeling it run through her fingers, as she schooped some of it up, watching it roll across her palm, and back down in to the sea with cascading rivulets across her skin. "Mmh." She quietly said to herself.

When she leaned back in to the boat, her gear was already packed and ready at her feet. Dressed in black, airy clothing, a form fit bodysuit designed in a way to yield maximum breathing to her skin beneath, the youthful looking Agent slipped her web harness on over her shoulders, before giving a thumbs up to the signal of being ready.

Her comm was checked, a quiet little 'woo wheee...' whistle sent across the team network, before Stefani reached for a black ballcap beside her on the bench she occupied. She lifted it up to the top of her head, and with a graceful slip of her dark brown ponytail through the space in the back of the hat, she settled the cap down atop her head, giving its brim a little tug to tighten it down across her forehead.

When they set out, the Agent in the black bodysuit, began to check her gear. Each weapon, each instrument, and each piece of equipment strapped to, holstered to, or secured around parts of her body was given another check, before she slipped in to a comfortable position, and waited to deploy...

Richard Stadler has posed:
     Richard had learned, through a long life full of black operations for the government, a very important rule: don't try to expense personal trips. They really looked into those, and that was the start of corruption. It's why he, despite the wince-worthy coast, paid for the first flight from New York to Traverse City himself; that was a personal leg of the journey. Sure, he could have just flown straight to the initial point for the operation, but what was he supposed to say to his mother on the next phone call? 'Yes, mom, I had business in the UP, but I simply couldn't be bothered to visit'? It /certainly/ wouldn't fly.

So there was one flight, and a quick lunch filled with vague, gossip generating evasion on what he was doing, before it was another flight to Houghton County, and then a short drive to Copper Harbor, on the shores of Lake Superior.

It was important, sometimes, to take a bit of refugee in the banal. It kept one grounded, closer to reality, which was sorely needed when it was approaching the absolute dead of night on a rented fishing boat, nothing but calm, glass-like water to the horizon, save the target point, and you happened to pulling the M50 mask over your face for what felt like far too often these days.

"Comm check." He says, over the net at Sara's reminder. Simple, but the idiot checks were important. He pulled the charging handle of the Mk 17 back slightly, making sure a round was chambered into the battle rifle, before letting it clack forward, and the rifle hung in front of him.

A quick view of the beach through light amplifying binoculars. "Not the biggest island, really... have to wonder what they build something out here for. Waystation for the Navy, way back when?" He mused, setting them down. "Suppose we'll find out. I'll take the small boat in from here, set up a position on the beach."

James Barnes has posed:
The approach isn't an easy one, the island is obscured by a dense fog that makes navigating to its shores a bit like going in blind if one isn't equipped with light amplifying binoculars - even with them, seeing what lays beyond the fog - on the shore - is a muddied, dulled experience. The silence is eerie in its own right, the sounds of the boat's engine muffled by the fog - seems the stuff works to both an disadvantage and an advantage.

He's dressed the part, he's always dressed the part. For him black is the new orange. Bucky's silent the entire trip. While that isn't anything atypical, even that seems eerie when coupled with the lack of noise surrounding him. The first sound he makes is a softly grunted, "Check."

It isn't until the boat is close enough to shore that the team could feasibly jump out and wade the rest of the way toward dry land, that the first sound breaks the silence - and it does nothing to lessen the creepy feeling of the entire place. It's the howl of a wolf, but not quite. It's the sound of a human mimicking the cry of a wolf, but not quite. It's something in between.

Camille Russo has posed:
The nice thing about knowing where you're going is having time to prepare. For Camille, that time to prep means time to stretch her magic out while she figures out what sort of sigils might be best as a more permanent option, and how to prep her ammo for the evening. Everyone gets a square of fabric, is told to tuck it somewhere safe. Her standard set of symbols make it a touch harder for them to be hit, a little more likely for damage to be somewhere that isn't going to kill or seriously injure them. Options for stealth are added, to dampen scent and pull the shadows a little closer, almost like a hug. Just an extra second or two to stay hidden.

Camille Russo has posed:
Camille Russo says, "Heard," she says, pulling on the gloves that complete her own suit. She shakes her head at Rick's comment. "Doesn't look like a lighthou?The fuck?" Her fingers twitch, wary. "...Everybody heard that, right?""

Logan Howlett has posed:
As night shrouds the island, as another, more complete team rolls up on the obscure locale, Logan guides his little rowboat in towards the shores with only the most minimal of adjustments. Oars barely disrupt the water as he patiently, smoothly, gingerly draws them to limit the sploosh, the splash, the rushing whoosh. He comes in on the leeward side of the island, downwind from the strange wrong critters that remain active into the darkness on this strange wrong island.

His rowboat drifts into the mucky, reed-laden bank, graceful and easy despite the fact that the Wolverine's eyes appear to be closed. He listens to the water, he susses out the depth, he scents the foliage as it brushes past the boat, the sodden musk of the moss-strewn bank. Fuck this fog.

A glance later, the blink of an eye, and the boat is empty of its helmsman as Logan slips silent into the shadowed surrounds. One more semi-feral, partly human menace stalking through the dark.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
As Natasha goes past the things in the water, she goes to ever so carefully take out a small infrared camera to take a scan of them. Something.. Bulky. Too big to be a normally enhanced human. ALmost a simian subspecies.. But too upright. Something too bulky.. At the very least it seemed to be breathing and moving solidly rather than shambling. So it was some sort of Mutate rather than something like a feral zombie prowling the waters. That was an improvement.

She goes to slide her way along further, and now gets onto the full scale of abominations. A bear with human limbs and hear, and a massive muzzle full of shark like teeth. An anaconda a solid ten meters long with a human face on the end of it. Something sharkish going the opposite way with enough plastic on it's mouth to count as a 90's prefab girl band.

Richard Stadler has posed:
     Rick's boots crunch aganist the sand as the smaller boat lands, rifle held at a tactical ready, as he scans what he can see of the fog-drenched interior... before there's the sound of a human mimicking the lupine, before he turns over to Camille. "You know." He says, casually. "I have a few friends in the Air Force. Met a communication officer in Maryland, working for the Raven Rock support activity. He moved over to Minnesota, transferred to the Air Guard out there, 148th, in Diluth," He says, pointing a gloved figure in a direction after some reckoning. "Right on the shore over there. They do a lot of air policing in this area with F-16s, and all I'm saying is if a few of them course deviated with a load of Mark 77s and made this island one very bright, very temporary light house, no one would say a /thing/."

A short pause, before he sighs, and brings the rifle up to his shoulder, peering through the scope into the jungle as they advance. "No one likes taking the easy way, I swear. Russo, take rear security, if you please. Ms. Quiet," It was debatable if that was simply a nickname or the actual code name at this point, but he gestured to Stefani. "Point, if you'd prefer."

Sara Pezzini has posed:
As the boat reaches the shore, Sara hovers over to dry land just as the human-wolf cries out. <"I know that sound."> she reports, and immediately looks toward Bucky. <"We'll be dealing with former humans turned into partial animals, Barnes and I have seen this before.">

There was the connection, the reason for everything that had happened... a mad man with a complex, playing god and thus far getting away with it. Although there was no use of magic, this sort of dismissive and callous use of humans as test subject caused Witchblade's anger to flare up. In response Sara took exactly five seconds to remind him about the mission.

<"If these beings have been out here this long, there is likely no saving them and returning them to their normal state. Keep your eyes open, in the trees, the sky, and even from underground. All types of animals have been used as a base for these perverted conversions, so no telling what we might face.">

She pauses there, turning now to look over at Richard. <"Stadler, I said I was going to stay on the ground, but that just became improbable. You have ground command, I'm going overwatch.">

Stefani Houston has posed:
The slip of cloth from Camille was a surprising offer to Agent Houston, who had looked toward it, than toward the woman. She'd accepted it with a tentative reach of her hand, before a bright smile touched her lips, a kind expression that conveyed the sincere 'thanks' for offering it to her, even if she might not understand the implications of it. The cloth strip found a home upon her suit, tucked away safely, and likely treasured forever.

Along the trip, Stefani took note of Staddler getting ready to her right. She regarded him for a moment too, before she reached over and pat his shoulder two soft times, as though she were telling him. 'You will be fine, do not worry.' She regarded his MK17 primary weapon, her green eyes looking it over, before she followed the stare with a thumbs-up hand gesture too.

When they arrived, as the others went to leave the boat, Agent Houston simply faded in to the foggy night. Where once she was there, now there was just the fog...

Camille Russo has posed:
'Cool as hell trick,' Cam thinks to herself as Houston disappears into the fog, and she nods at Rick, affirming his orders. Human experimentation. Her mouth tightens as she listens to Sara's explanation. Disgusting. Unfortunate they're probably unable to be saved at this point, too. Her hand rests on her piece, but she doesn't draw it. Just waits, alert and ready, eyes scanning the darkness in front of them. Any animal? She hates the sound of that.

James Barnes has posed:
Bucky climbs from the boat. It's never short of amazing how quiet a man carrying around that arm can actually move. Sara's assessment garners another low grunt of a sound, but this time it extends to a growl. Lone wolf that he is, he skips past the lead and rear business and jogs off to the left. It's not long before he's gone into the darkness. <<Going for the building.>> Of course he is, why wouldn't he be? Straight to the heart of it, that's always the Bucky Way.

Could be he might even run into a friend along the way this time.

The surrealness of the island becomes more and more the forefront of everything. Soft calls of animals that aren't entirely, the slithering of things through the underbrush, things rustling overhead in the trees. The silence was preferrable. There's nothing quite as unsettling as the feeling that one is being watched from a hundred different directions.

None of it is helped by the sight of a large carcass on the shore - an elk maybe, or at least maybe it once was. Now it's just a hollowed out husk with vacant, cloudy eyes - eyes that are disturbingly human along with its elongated snout. What lives on this island needs to feed, apparently they are not above hunting each other.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
She would pull herself up to the shore, still moving silently and then switching over to the large harpoon launcher. The camo-mirrors would fade to match that of the terrain as she would go forwards. Natasha would creep along, intent on rendezousing with the others closing in on the bunker. She goes to update her position on the HUD.

<<A number of mutates are in the waters. They seem free roaming. I'd tentatively label them as having the awareness of animals. Their creation seems rather haphazard.>>

Report given, she heads towards to whatever awaits them at the other end. For it will be /someone's/ end

Logan Howlett has posed:
Stalking a Pumaman? Man-Puma? Donald Pleasance would go with Pewmaymen... anyway. It wasn't on Logan's agenda tonight, but it's also not a surprise. All evening it's been strange scents off this fucked up place. Big cats, primates, freshwater-adapted crocodiles. It's going to be a hell of a clean up effort, one way or another, and the Wolverine does his part.

When it comes to hunting, he's better than most; draws the pounce, jinks it, and the fight ends in a single, soft snikt, the beast pinned to the earth by a trio of adamantium razors severing its spine at the brainstem. No kiai, no murmur, no flourish. Logan decapitates the creature and stalks on to the next, most of whom prove less equipped than the feral runt for night-stalking ambush predation.

It's a grim journey, not one to take any pride in; utilitarian culling is a thing only a psychopath savors. A monitor lizardman falls as Wolverine picks a nearly soundless path towards the dark structure looming in the wooded isle's interior, angling to intersect the encroaching team like he already knows they're there. Which-- Logan almost certainly does. Best there is, and all that.

Stefani Houston has posed:
When intangible, Agent Houston was utilizing her cellular modification to allow herself to move like the fog itself. She had left the boat, and swept herself to the front of the team slipping on to the island. Quietly, she criss-crossed over the water, before ending up on the mucky shoreline. One who looked close enough might see the whisp of mist that represented Stefani's location, but they would not have to stare long, because as she wafted across the island's shorline, she soon began to re-corporealize back in to her full bodied form. From her boots, back to the cap upon her head, Stefani reappeared, this time holding one of her intimidating rifles (decorated in colorful butterfly stickers) off to one side. She glanced back at her team, before she ventured ahead, her eyes darting right to left, as she listened to the sounds of the strange creatures that seemed to live here.

A grin showed on her visage, her pink lips expressing the strange enjoyment she got out of knowing that she'd just joined a team that was inserting upon a literal 'monster island'. She almost seemed to be enjoying the very idea at its own cellular level.

With quiet grace, she advanced onward, listening closely to the comm messages, as she passed around foliage, letting it glide across her form, not really pushing it aside, so much as gently pushing through it, ever onward, point and beyond.

James Barnes has posed:
Perhaps Natasha wasn't far off in her assumption? Maybe the fact that the sounds of 'wrong' animals calling back and forth to one another seem to be coming from all around, but with an almost sinister purpose. Getting closer, calling from one side to the other - coordinating. Even among the different species, they seem to be communicating.

A blurred shape passes by the trio that decided that teamwork is the best work from about twenty feet into the darkness. It's quick, too quick - a panther maybe? Unless caught in a light's beam just right, impossible to tell. The one certainty is that whatever it was, it was more than it seemed to be.

It's Bucky that Logan will intersect with first - so long as the Wolverine doesn't dissect him by mistake first. The Winter Soldier is sporting his own fashionable 'blood and guts' attire - proof that he's been putting his share of these creatures out of their misery as well. "Logan!" it's a shout without ever being one, it's a hissed whisper just loud enough to be heard by the Wolverine's exceptional hearing. The 'Th'fuck are you doing here?' is implied in that one hiss of a name.

Never mind, he'll ask the question later. For now Bucky just slinks off into the dark again, motioning for Logan to follow. There are certain to be many a fallen abomination in their wake.

From her vantage point in the air, Sara gets to see just how teaming with the wrongness of life this place actually is - even the trees don't all seem as if they belong. The canopy is too close, the species all wrong and some of them not even natural.

As everyone comes together in the central meeting point - the sounds from the darkness get louder, more urgent and the squat building beckons with its broken windows and busted doors.

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Same as the rest of ya trompin' around, I reckon." Logan observes gruffly, as he holds an even more diminutive, claw-and-tooth ravening hybrid at an adamantium-reinforced distance... then with a mournful look, executes the half-a-least-weasel.

A simple grey windbreaker and matching, black-striped pants compliment the soft-soled boots the feral mutant wears; all now substantially bloodstained. "The clowns that hit Cap link back to here." It's not spoken like it's news; Wolverine's guess, again, is that the same business has them in this fucked up place.

"Whole island is wrong; yer jackboots might wanna purge it with fire." Don't they always? It's only vaguely combative and insulting, at least in tone. A snorted breath, and Wolverine darts off into the shadows on one flank, pursuing a predator that pursues Barnes.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
And as Camille, Richard, and Stefani go to rendezous over, Natasha is there at the rally point wiht them. She goes to switch out the harpoon she had brought in for a heay looking rifle, bulky and insulated to have made it's way through the waters without incident.

She would remain in a defensive psoture, going to start sweeping her weapon arounc in arcs to check for any immediate threats or hostiles. "We'll need a way after this to neutralize the creatures."

Camille Russo has posed:
The thing moves too fast for Camille to throw or shoot after it, and it makes her tighten her lips even more. "You have no idea how tempting it is to walk with my back to yours right now so I can watch the water easier." It transmits across the comm link quietly, and though she doesn't actually turn and start walking backwards, she does become a lot more wary about watching the shoreline... and the trees.

"I hate everything about this place, it's foul and wrong. We're coming back and giving all this shit a proper later, and then we're cleansing it with fire." Her voice is grim. "I have freeze and stun ammo, a couple of my grenades. That... might help."

Stefani Houston has posed:
The island was bubbling with life, odd life. Stefani had so many questions, but for a woman who was not one to share them, she was certain to text some to someone later. In the mean time, she navigated the darkness, pushing aside some of the foliage, moments before one of the blurs of motions in the distance got to a level of closeness that Stefani deemed to be uncomfortable.

From her hip, she produced a combat knife, and with a quick flick of her wrist, the knife whirled through the air, its black blade slice through the dark misty jungle atmosphere, before it produced a wet squielching noise, and a stream of red blood that shot across the leaves, and underbrush.

Pinned against a tree, her knife stuck from the neck of a creature with long scales, green and sharp, yellow eyes wide open, and a nasty set of teeth poking out of its elongated maw.

Natasha was there too.

Stefani showed Nat a smile, as she walked past her, soon to retrieve her knife from the lizard-like thing's throat. A couple up and down motions of her wrist, and her knife popped out from the beast's neck. She watched its body crumple to the ground, then looked toward the others.

There was a building in the distance, and as such, Agent Houston was soon taking up a pposition to peer through her weapon scope.

She visibly turned to black mist once more, as she floated up in to the canopy of the trees above, reappearing in the sky, to once more, peer through her rifle scope toward the building. The scope giving her a nightvision view of the complex and its various windows, and points of entry.

Richard Stadler has posed:
     Rick looks to the patted shoulder, then to the markswoman through a bespecled, masked visor. No word on his end, but a nod. He really had to respect her committment to OpSec... though the way she could simply dissolve into a mist and float out to a target certainly helped. He felt like he was getting better at just accepting some of these people simply... existed. At least he didn't get lost in thought running through the possible mechanics, fascinating though it may be.

Not that he's be able to turn the sense of curiosity off enough where it counted... specifically walking by the carcass of something that looked far too intelligent to be an buck you might grab when it was in season. Disturbingly intelligent...and the question would have been if it had been elevated to sapience, or brought down from it?

Either was almost too disturbing to contemplate

At least Sara was flying overwatch, Rick giving a quick, "Wilco' to the transference of ground command... as best as it would do with the amount of lone wolves in this group pretending they were too good for a pack. They moved toward the building as a group, then, Nat joining up, and Rick going through a mental inventory. "A have a few stingers." He motioned to a grenade or two at his belt, and then to the shotgun hanging from the rifles underbarrel. "A couple of baton round which aren't exactly harmless with the direct fire we'd be using. Given the... way they're operating, however, I find our chances of neutralizing a concerted attack less than optimal."

James Barnes has posed:
It's a to-and-fro between hunter and assassin, back and forth, blood and gore - all with the snikt of claws and the slice of a blade.

For all the build-up, the building itself isn't much to write home about, at least on the surface. It's only one story, windows long fallen from their hinges and windows long lost to time and the foliage encroaching on the structure. But the potential intrusion on the 'sacred' place by those that do not belong, has the island erupting with sound - snarls, growls, the calls of primates, the howls of wolves and they're all getting closer.

Inside the structure, things take a turn toward the hellish. Cages ripped open, lab tables long tipped from being thrown about, file cabinets with contents spilled on the floor. But there's more, there's always more and more almost always means 'worse'. Skeletal remains are littered among the mess and debris - definitely human. Some of them are scattered about, others still mostly put together. The latter are covered in the remnants of the white cloth of standard 'lab coats'. The stench of rot and decay is heavy in the air, mingling with the aroma of animal urine and musk.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Taking to the air, Sara does one flight around the island with her eyes wide open. Every movement, every sound, every shift in the fog has her attention. The calls from the woods below makes the flight a little more eery than it should be, but it's the movement in the trees that has her the most worried.

<"For every one you put down, there's likely five more,"> she reports, moving in lower to the trees. <"They know you're here, they know where you are, and you only have a short time before they are likely to converge on you.">

Selecting a spot in the trees above the building, she swoops in and comes to land by Bucky. <"Whatever we're going to do, we need to do it fast... we're looking at all out war if we stick around too long.">

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Find a hatch, somethin'-- whoever was operatin' here wasn't staying up top." Who's the CO here? Does he care? It's good advice, Bucky. That much Wolverine is pretty sure of at a cursory glance of the hellscape within the small cabin. No mad scientist worth their salt goes that route, right? At the least, there's gotta be something left behind.

"I'll buy ya some time." All-out war? Another howl sounds into the night, far closer to an actual wolf than anything ringing so far, a resounding note that echoes across the tainted landscape as Logan sprints back into the woods, claws extended and glinting dully in the stifled moonlight.

Instants later, the gathering growls and howls and cries gain a new cadence, a swiftly shifting point of lethal conflict a clarion call of menace through the darkness. Another challenging howl answers the cacophany, a cry of triumph amongst the horde.

Stefani Houston has posed:
From her vantage point, Stefani is spying through the scope toward the building that they had apparently come to salvage something from. She gets a good look at one side, even the ability to scope inside one of the windows well enough to get an idea of the condition of the place. Withint a instance, she is back in to her black vapor form, drifting back in to the night, moving a little closer, but still keeping a monitoring perimeter on the place in-question.

When she re-materializes on another steady and sturdy tree branch, she is re-scoping, acquiring her zero on the site once more, when something moves out of the corner of her eye.

From down below, the tree that Agent Houston had occupied rustles, the branches begin to sway, and the natural bird life within the tree begins to fly...

Only those are not birds. Large bats take to the sky, zipping out of the tree, and flying past the broken windows of the compound of desolation.

The rustling in the tree dies down after about a full minute, for a few seconds anyway, before the sound of branches breaking can be heard, and a huge dark object emerges from the canopy.

A giant dead creature flops on the floor of the overgrown jungle landscape, the forested area beneath the heavy body crumpled by giant leathery wings, and a huge head, gnarly and dripping blood from several gushing knife wounds to the head...

A bat head. A bat body, along with a bipedal form of a man.

Agent Houston just killed the Batman.

Sort of.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
This does unfortunately bring back memories. Too many memories. The mere fact that there are -multiple- incidences of this sort of thing is a testament to the way the world is. Natasha goes to brace herself and moves to start laying down suppressive fire. Quick three round bursts of heavy shells that are aimed at the central mass of anything big in the general area.

Each large bullet has a barbette on the end with some heavy neurotoxins within it. Upon contact with a target the barbette would break off the round..

And then it would fire off the rather powerful Widow's Bite within to hopefully give the recipient a rather nasty shock to drop them.

<<Finish quickly with retrieving anything useful so we can have this area sterilized.>>

Most of them could probably guess what 'sterilized' meant

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Logan was a new face, not someone Sara knew, but he was covered in blood and off to deal with the impending army of creatures, so clearly he was on their side. Taking a quick look around, letting Witchblade take a moment to gather information on locations of beings closing in, she nods once to Richard.

<"Obtain as much information as possible from the site, Stadler. I'll clear a path back to the boats and make sure it stays cleared.">

Words to action, tendrils of metal unwrap from the Gauntlet and form a sword in her right hand. A few more tendrils extends from the armor of her right hand to form another sword, and without another word she heads toward the path back to the shore and the boats that likely needs clearly.

Witchblade is always thrilled to draw blood, even if not exactly for the purpose of his existence. These creatures needed to shuffle off their mortal coil, to allow the energy or soul as some believed, to return to the universe. As Sara disappeared into the trees and waded into the throng, there was a flash of red from the gem on the back of the gauntlet that for one moment caused the fog to look like blood, and then darkness returned.

Richard Stadler has posed:
     This cacophony of animals certainly had no place outside San Diego, and it was... deeply concerning.So many of them, from so many different taxonomies, united in purpose that they, simply didn't belong here. Rick's hackles were firmly and securely up. And that was before the discovery of the laboratory.

He ran the rifle's barrel across the ground, looking over the signs of things having escaped, ripping apart the staff in a way that spoke to both anger and predation; he could see a human femur off to the side, split in two to reach the marrow inside of them. Richard had to hope the person was dead before that happened.

"Okay..." He says, looking across the floor of files spilling from cabinets. "Okay. Fire options are bit limited on my side anyway." He says, reaching into a gear pouch and taking a trash back from a roll there, unfurling it, and reaching down to scoop up documents. "Grab whatever you can. You see a computer, we don't have the mass for the whole thing; rip out the hard drive..." He muses, looking over the age and rot of the place. "If they're still there."

He's mainly speaking to Camille at this point. The rest of them were floating about and slice, shooting, and otherwise keeping this abhorrent synthetic jungle from claiming all of them.

Sterlized was right.

James Barnes has posed:
With Logan off 'buying time', Bucky sets to looking for anything remotely resembling a way 'down'. But he finds nothing. For an evil genius, whoever was behind all of this seems to have been a pretty simple man?

The one computer in the room looks as if it might have been outdated at least fifteen years ago - it's from a time when laptops weren't actually small enough for comfortable lap use - but it's just that, a laptop.

The sounds outside grow to a chaotic crescendo as the Wolverine and Witchblade bid for their attention.

One file, one single file that's fallen from the hand of what once was a man and now no more than skeleton to be forgotten in the 'purge' of this place - one file: Auditory DNA Sequencing - Dr. Wilfred Cockerham. It's putting a name to a name and drawing a direct line between madness and insanity. What better way to save the world from the humans that are destroying it than to turn the humans into the animals? This is the work of Dr. Helix. This is the madness that was set loose in the Appalachian Mountains. This is full circle. This is the identity of the Head of the Snake.

Wilfred Cockerham is the man responsible for the death of Steve Rogers.

And he's already a dead man walking.

Camille Russo has posed:
Camille leaves her gun in the holster, but there's a vial in each hand. The first one is tossed into the path of a group trying to advance on Logan, leaving them snarling and pissed, but frozen in place. The second one is aimed at what looks like a thick branch of a tree, but when it explodes on contact there's a series of thumps as mutated squirrels drop to the ground, stunned. "If I didn't already hate the fuckers doin this shit," she mutters, turning to Rick and nodding. There's not much, but she finds a few flash drives in the lab coats, and a single file that's managed to stay free of the gore. "I foun?" she trails off while reading the file, then gives the corpse at her feet a vicious, angry kick. "Si Bondye vle you get every torment you delivered in life returned to you five-fold in the afterlife," she snarls. The file and drives are held out to Rick, and it's only her training that keeps her from crumpling the file.

Logan Howlett has posed:
'Buying time'. Yep. It's a safe bet that the responding werebeasts are finding their numbers thinned considerably between the covering fire and the top-tier commandos going hog wild in their midst. Out here is the wilderness, but Logan brings civilization; a multitude are taken to Claw City in a maelstrom of blood and viscera and splintered bone.

Some measure of those first two do prove to be Wolverine's own, but he had a good meal before heading out here, and he's remarkably resilient-- it's almost uncanny. There's a targeted cunning to the violence-- keeping the path as clear as possible back to the team's extraction point. If some guy's rowboat and nice rod gets lost, oh fucking well... the stakes are what they are.

Despite his reputation as a berserker, the prototype who was Weapon X is a masterful combatant and operative; no motion wasted, no error in footing, stance, or riposte. He carves the most efficient, nearly surgical line through his misbegotten quarry, fighting tirelessly no matter how many new bloody shreds appear in his clothing, the meat beneath rent in far more transitory fashion.

Stefani Houston has posed:
At some point, Stefani had left the bat tree, a whisp of dark smoke, flittering through the sky.

She'd nested herself inside a new sniper nest, a new vantage point to view the building from. But as such, on this island of nightmare terrors, she found herself in a new nightmare of horror because of it.

Not that she wasn't prepared for it, the woman had been surviving nightmare situations for 40 years...

The latest tree she found herself inside the branches of, once more began to shake, but instead of a giant Man Bat falling from its leafy embrace, a rain of slithering snakes poured free, splatting down in to the tall grass below, before wiggling their way in to safer, and darker places to retreat to.

Lastly, a massive snake, a true python of absurd proportions topples out of the tree, swaying like a 20+ foot long rope the thickness of a sedan.

From its body up in the trees, Stefani rides the snake down to its lifeless head, using her knife to slice a cut from its middle down to the side of its jaw, all the way to the forest floor where she nimbly lands upon booted feet, her rifle slung over her shoulder. The snake's guts follow after her, but she evades the rain of entrails, with a hop, skip, and a little bounce in her step, the raining inerds splashing down upon the ground she had just been.

With a glance over her shoulder, she releases a sighing huff, before she looks back toward the building of desolation, shaking her head slowly back and forth, while wiping her knife down on a old lab coat strewn across a toppled tree not far from the building's perimeter.

Richard Stadler has posed:
     Laptop, excellent. That made it easy for Rick to grab and shove into the bag. Everything went into the bag... except the flash drives. Those he took from Camille and placed in a pouch. "Abhorrent. No less abhorrent them a biowarfare lab, just... a lot less obfuscation between the research and the horrors than usual. At Camille's curse, however, he moves to take the file she kept in good condition, despite it's contents, skimming over the text. He doesn't get angry. Not visably; the file is placed with the others.

"I really... don't understand people, sometimes. To think that humanity is enough of a pox that it should be destroyed, or... worse. reduced to this state of nature like it's an unalloyed good. As if a world is served returning all of it's occupants to dim fucking awareness of the majesty around them. As if a wolf pauses to appreciate God's handiwork before ripping a gazelle to pieces."

He's on the radio again, the local band. "All right, folks. Intells collected. We're done here. Exfil to the boats, and do it quick because this place is going to get dangerous real fast."

He's let the rifle hang in front of him, one hand drawing his pistol, while the other collects a weapon more powerful than any of them carried here... a satellite phone. Attenna flicked up, and a call made."

"Marcus. Richard. Yeah... yeah. No, we're going with that contingency I've talked about- yes. Excellent. Just glad Diluth can handle a C-17 occasionally. Op should be handed off by Lieutenant Colonel Baker, Air Force- Yep, that's the one. Log the hours, keep it above board... no."

He looked around the building, listening to the keening of animals. "Island's uninhabited. Nothing but wildlife. As to the why... well. Trust me."

The team would fly off, move toward the boats, and sail away. Not so far away that they couldn't hear the distant roar of F-16s, from that self same Air National Guard unit in Diluth, Minnesota, right at their international airport. Air policing, mostly. Except for today.

Today, the flight of four had been told they were getting recertified for bomb release. An odd location, but the paperwork checked out, the chain of command satisfied, all the boxes checked properly. FLIR cameras panned over the island once more, seeing nothing but ruin, and nothing but animals. The spread of Mark 77s was as even as you could reasonably expect, weapons hitting the small island in a holocaust of thickened kerosene, the first ripping and consuming hot through trees, animals, and what was left of that research. It would have been a bright, visible pyre from the boats. The howling, inhuman screams were... most likely imagined.

It would be in notifications from the Coast Guard's 9th District; routine air force activity, a pretty light show. Along with the unrelated notice to watch for the odd sea life. in the area.