19321/Ambush in the Village

Ambush in the Village
Date of Scene:	19 October 2024
Location:	Greenwich Village
Synopsis:	Ghost-Spider and The Darkness meet, deal with some of Francetti's goons, and .. Jackie learns about cluster's of spiders.
Cast of Characters:	Jackie Estacado, Gwen Stacy

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Jackie Estacado has posed:
Evening find Jackie in his brand new Lucid Air making his way across town, and as is usual for this time of the evening the traffic is enough to keep him moving at just a bit more than walking speed from one light to the next as he traverses the Village.

It's here, of course, that the latest squad of Francetti hit-men have planned a ... demonstration of the Family's displeasure with Jackie's turning state's evidence against the Family in general. Two trucks pull up on either side of him at the next stop light, and a freakin' garbage truck comes from the cross street where it'd been parked on the curb to block any avenue of forward motion for the low slung and expensive electric vehicle.

CRASH!

And then the junker of a Ford F150 behind Jackie accelerates into his car's rear end instead of slowing down - completing pinning the car in place and .. trapping Jackie in the car to boot.

"What the _absolute_ fuck! " Jackie growls, straightening back up from having face planted in the airbag that went off due to the collision - just now starting to look around and see just what's going on.

"Boss.. looks like it's another hit!" Some voice calls from below the level of the seats.

"No shit."

Then men start to pile outta the cars, all wearing dark suits, balaclava's, and carrying assault rifles.

Gwen Stacy has posed:
It's not instantaneous, and they can't possibly be everywhere at once, but it's surprising how fast the city's Spiders can get around, sometimes.

There are still people murmuring and pointing. The sound of collision is still ringing in their ears when a black-and-white-costumed and hooded figure appears on the rooftop of one of the nearby building.

With pink and teal accents inside the hood and teal Chuck Taylors on her feet, Ghost-Spider surveys the damage from her lofty vantage point, letting the HUD inside her eyelets settle as it pick up the pedestrians starting to scream and scatter, drawing little boxes around the men with guns.

That siren in the distance? It seems to be getting fainter.. apparently NYPD dispatch hadn't even figured out what was going on, yet.

"Oh, come on, guys... in my back yard? Really?" she murmurs, shaking her head as she leaps into the air, arms out stretched and body lengthened. Her hood flaps in the wind as she shoots out a web-line and pulls herself over to the top of the garbage truck.

*Thwip*
*Thwip*
*Thwip*
*Thwip*

Four more more globs of webbing, all smacking into the balaclava-covered faces of the armed men.

"Hey! If you can hear me in there, keep your head down! I'll get you out once I've finished taking out the trash!"

Because.. garbage truck? Get it? These are the jokes, people...

Jackie Estacado has posed:
"Boss, Nob says there's about twenty of'm out there. Gonna turn the car to swiss cheese!"

"Can we go get'm? It's all dark ou.."

"No." Jackie interrupts, even as his clothes begin to change color, rapidly shifting into darker colors..then hardening..as the Darkness prepares to make his way onto the scene and respond to this ...

"Dammit, I just _bought_ this car."

He leans the seat back, folds himself in half so he can get his feet up to kick the glass roof of the car with one good firm two footed motion, sending it flying twenty feet up into the air and back towards the truck behind him.

Continuing the motion he rolls backward and ends up standing in the back seat of his now _more_ totaled vehicle - just in time to get shot by no less than five goons with assault rifles loaded with..

"Damn.. someone pulled out all the stops..those are cop killers..." Armor peircing rounds, in _assault_ rifles.

He looks up at the girl in white on the truck, "I hope that suit's AP bullet proof...Mebbe _you_ should be puttin your head down? " A pause... "Looks _damned_ good on you though."

Gwen Stacy has posed:
The good thing about New York City is that even when it's night, it's never really night. Between all of the headlights and street lamps and building lights and the atmospheric glow from the rest of the city, it never really gets darker than twilight.. at least in the super populated areas. It's just that at night, the shadows are longer and the space between things -- cars, buildings -- feels more ominous, like there might be danger lurking in that abyss.

You never know what monsters might be hiding in the shadows. And as it turns out, in Jackie's car, that might actually be the case. Ghost-Spider was already starting to deal with the goons... even though she still had a _long_ way to go... when that glass roof explodes outwards and a man...

...is that a man?!

...stands up. "No! Get dow -- "

The ear piercing gunfire erupts and for a moment, Gwen's eyelets are huge, obviously thinking she just witnesses someone get gunned down in the middle of Greenwich Village.

But that isn't the case. He just sort of... stands there. And complains.

"Uh, I'd love to, but I can't have your friends here playing with their toys on the middle of the street. What did you do to their Cheerios to make them this angry?!"

More gunfire, this time some of it directed at her, but the girl is in motion before it even happens -- it's like she could sense it. And if one were to pay to watch a choreographed dance of this fight on Broadway, they still wouldn't get the level of grace and coordination that seems as easy to Ghost-Spider as breathing.

Between her sticky-grip, her natural agility, and those precognitive abilities, she's back-flipping, webbing, sticking to the side of the truck, nabbing one of those rifles to jerk it out of the guy's hand, flipping again, shooting a stream of webbing at another that his his shoulder... until she yanks, wrapping it around his arms and sending im to the ground.

Then the girl's in the air again, flipping off of the garbage truck to land on top of one of the F-150s to get another angle on the goons.

Jackie Estacado has posed:
The shadows seem to gather around the Darkness as he stands there in the ruins of his car, made worse as bullets zip past him, hit him, and generally make a mess of .. well alot. He jumps then, just enough to carry him to the top of the garbage truck that Gwen just left, spinning in an agile - if clumsy by Gwen standards - pirouette to face back towards his car and the mafia hit men that surround it with a bunch left standing despite Gwen's efforts.

He raises both of his hands, then, a pair of very large handguns held out in each direction as he starts to take sights on the nearest targets...

"Seems their boss doesn't something I said, or maybe .. that I'm going to say. This is fuckin' insane though, there's civvies about..."

BOOM-BOOM. BOOM-BOOM. BOOM-BOOM. BOOM-BOOM.

The triggers of each of his weapons are pulled - double tapping four targets in less than two seconds, starting with those closest to him.

Maybe it's cause he knows what the 'Spider' is likely to think, or maybe he's trying to turn a new leaf ... but despite it being perfectly clear he could've just as easily shot to kill - he's not. Each of his targets is hit very purposefully in each shoulder.

They're going to need some _serious_ rehab and may still not ever be the same, but they'll live - with the right medical care.

Gwen Stacy has posed:
Big, conventional firefights aren't exactly the 'norm' in the Spider-lifestyle, but they're certainly not unheard of. More often than not, it's either something more mundane or some super-powered villain with an overly elaborate device they've just finished constructing in a lab.

Or one of the regulars. Rhino, Vulture, Electro..

Those big boss fights tended to be just as dangerous as these swarms of armed goons, especially to bystanders, but this meant a lot more bullets flying in _both_ directions. It's hard to complain, of course, when Jackie's ultimately putting down the threat (just like she is), but it does take a few of those non-lethal shots for Gwen to completely give up on the idea that Jackie might need to be webbed up and strung up, too.

"You know, when I went to school, if you talked about someone behind their back you ended up with gum in your hair. This feels like an overreaction..."

*thwip*
*thwip*

Two more goons lashed up. Gwen leaps up, shoots a web-line up to a light pole, and pulls herself up to a higher vantage point... when both her Spider-Sense and her HUD alert her to the danger at the same time.

Another car pinned in by the gunfight has had enough and thrown it into reverse, slamming the pedal. The car is starting to race backwards towards a woman cowering behind a sidewalk trash can... which is a horrible place to hide from assault rifles, but people panic.

Gwen leaps off of her light pole, sprints down the sidewalk -- two, maybe three times faster than it seem possible -- snags the woman with a web-line on the go, and is clear of the crash just as the car's bumper passes inches from her legs.

She doesn't even have to say anything to the woman when she sets her down. Immediately, she takes off down the sidewalk, leaving Ghost-Spider to race back to the fight.

Jackie Estacado has posed:
And that .. lack of having to fight with two groups, the 'Gwen' group being the more potentially irritating one... is exactly why Jackie is showing at least _some_ restraint.

It's that restraint that contributes to what happens next. From the back of _another_ damned Ford pickup half a block 'behind' his car, a man stands up in the bed and quickly lays the bipod of a ..

"Oh hell."

50-caliber Barret sniper rifle on the roof of the truck with the clear intent on 'sniping' at the Darkness. That much gun here in the street, fired at an angle to hit him.. if it misses him it's gonna do something terrible to someone behind him, maybe multiples.

There's an explosion of shadows and .. writhing _things_ around Jackie and when it's gone, there's no one on top of the garbage truck any longer.

URK! THUNK!

"The escalation's gone a bit too fuckin' far. 50 cals? What the hell is Frankie thinking!" Jackie growls, his armor covered hand on the back of the goons head in that truck a block away - where he appears to have teleported to - and has promptly, and quite literally, smashed the man's head into something less than round and whole into the top of the truck's roof.

He looks over at Gwen.. a block or so away, "What's left down there?"

No, he's apparently not thinking of the 'targets' as people at this point.

Gwen Stacy has posed:
It just so happens that with another quick *thwip* of a web-line, Ghost-Spider was lighting back onto the top of the garbage truck at the exact same moment Jackie was vanishing in a swirl of shadows and... were those... tendrils?!

Oooooh-kay. An armored, teleporting shadow-octopus. That's new. And, if she's being honest with herself, doesn't _really_ give of a very strong 'good guy' vibe, but... well... at least she wasn't standing next to him when he bashed that poor guys head in. At best, she caught a glimpse of what happened a block away when she looked over her shoulder and saw the two shapes 'wrestling' (well.. one shape smashing and one shape losing in dramatic fashion).

What's left down there?

His words echo down the street, barely audible over the tinnitus.

"Uhhh..." Ghost-Spider looks back over her guys. "One.. two..."

There's another explosion of gunfire, and Gwen's moving again, jumping up onto and flipping over a street lamp.

"Stand still so I can count you!" she gripes at the bad guys.

Circling around another car, she hooks into the corner of a building and launches herself into the air over them with a final web-line...

"OneTwoThreeFourFive," she rattles off quickly, and even as she's counting them off, she's firing web-lines in rapid succession, yanking all of them together into a pile of webbing. There's a clatter of assault rifles as their weapons fall to the ground and they're pulled away from them.

Oh! And there are sirens, now... lots and lots and lots of sirens...

"They just need a bow!" Ghost-Spider finally calls back. "You?!"

Jackie Estacado has posed:
"It seems this bugfucker was the last of them here, the only one in the truck anyway."

Flash of darkness and then the Darkness is standing back in the car that was his new ride, drops the _two_ halves of that sniper rifle into the bed of the truck to his right, and then he's reaching into the glove compartment to pull out a few things, under the front seat for what looks like a gun safe, and straightening up.

"Seems that's the lot of them - and its probably my cue to get moving before... paperwork, if nothing the fuck else. Too damned many mugshots taken of me already."

A half jump to the top of the garbage truck, "Which one are you? There's so damned many of you spider ...people? Folk? Tribe? Herd...."

Gwen Stacy has posed:
"Oh, that's... colorful." It wasn't that she wasn't used to cursing, or even that she was immune from it herself. But _that_ was a new one.

"It's a cluster, actually," Gwen supplies with one hand planted on a hip. She'd drawn her feet together, one heel to the arch of her other foot, and even wearing Chucks, it's easy to picture the ballet slippers she sometimes wears. Everything about that posture just _screams_ trained dancer. Her other hand, however, is gesturing vaguely while she talks, wrist rolling lazily.

"_Technically_ clutter is also correct, but given the amount of damage that follows us around, the sheet number of jokes that can be made about the clutter in New York boggles the mind..."

Those sirens are getting closer.

"Anyway, the name's Ghost-Spider... and you're... what... Darth Squiggles?"

She even holds her hands up and wiggles her fingers like whatever was coming out of those shadows.

Jackie Estacado has posed:
He just looks at her for a moment...eyes hidden by the golden lenses of his mask, before shaking his head and then looking down as a little 2 foot tall ... black little person like being steps out of his shadow. A Darkling for those that know, for others - well...something to learn.

"Boss. Cops are almost here. Nevvle can slow'm down..."

"What'd I tell you about that? Get the others, go round up the guns and ammo, don't need a gang war with AP rounds layed anywhere near my feet. Oh.." He hands the darkling the things he got out of his car, "Make sure these get home."

Then he looks back to Gwen, "Cluster.. Really? Well.. that brings a _whole_ new meaning to the the term: 'Cluster Fuck'."

Somehow it's easy to tell that he's smiling under the mask.

"Time to go, though, Ghost-Spider..me? You're close, but not quite there."

He turns and runs along the length of the truck rough before he jumps, leaving dents in the roof as he launches himself upward before darkness spreads around him into .. wings that carry him to the roof of the nearest building where.

Along the way, he finishes: "The Darkness."