2431/Citysoul: The Isolation

Citysoul: The Isolation
Date of Scene:	13 July 2020
Location:	Mata Keku, the Grave of Fellowship
Synopsis:	The Heroes of the City face their own demons within the Heart of the Threefold God!
Cast of Characters:	Stephen Strange, Elektra Natchios, Julio Richter, Illyana Rasputina, Sara Pezzini, Colette O'Connail

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Stephen Strange has posed:
The Heroes of the City have moved swiftly. The Sorcerer Supreme, using strange spells, has ushered groups through seemingly innocuous doors within the Sanctum Sanctorum only for them to appear elsewhere. Openings in reality that lead to another place in a dimension not their own. First to a barge on a river of filth, second to a claustrophobic alleyway in an endlessly sprawling city.

But the third door? The third door is different.

As the Doctor opens it, there is only blackness on the other side. A wall of nothing that seems both impassable and as though it is drawing them in, all at the same time. Strange regards it with a furrowed brow for a moment before turning to the group. In one hand he holds the handle of a 1980s boombox, and in the other a polaroid camera on a strap.

"The Spirits of the City have leant their essence to the fight. These are the weapons they've forged. Take them and go."

Elektra Natchios has posed:
The assassin had taken a moment to change her clothing (the normal way since no fancy magick), yet it consisted mainly of getting out of that jacket and jeans she had brought. Underneath she had a dark and red garb, very lightly armored as it seemed to be more about agility than protection. She knew this was about to get serious so every edge mattered and her combat abilities is what she could bring to this attack on a God.

Those deadly Sais were stashed under her sash, ready to come out at a moment's notice as she moved to that third door. Arms were folded together, one hip thrusted to the side. Perhaps an highly doubtful expression on her face that a boombox and a polaroid camera would help in this fight but ... "Anything we should know about those items?"

She didn't yet reach for any of those, instead leaving it for those more magically proficient to take them if they cared to.

Julio Richter has posed:
Julio's head is spinning with the revelations of the past few hours, even moreso given that he is just learning of his own intrinsic connection to this very foreign world. Still, the importance of what this group must accomplish is clear to his instincts, even if he can't fully come to grips with what he's seeing on the conscious level yet. Illyana is here, and he already feels an affinity for some of the others in this smaller group, so he'll have to trust them as his wayfinders in the challenge to come.

He pauses next to Strange at the doorway, his hand hovering over the gifts given to them by the borough spirits earlier. It feels presumptuous to take one, but in his own oblique way, Strange seems to be reassuring even the neophyte to make use of what resources they have, so the mutant steels himself and takes hold of the stereo, lifting it over one shoulder as he passes through the doorway.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Different. Something held in common with the chilly blonde Russian who accompanied so many groups around the city in search of the spirits of the boroughs. She certainly doesn't lack for courage when faced with a black, unyielding veil over reality.

The Abyss peers out. She stares back, stony-faced and obdurate, eyes far too old for a face so terribly young. For a moment, her head tilts slightly and the reflections of Strange and the others caught on the bitter-gleaming spikes of her barbed crown shift in kind.

For an attack on the divine, she carries nothing more than attitude and a slight curl of her upper lip. "I need my hands free," she explains, shaking her head to the boombox or the Polaroid camera. The camera would just be a deadweight strap around her pretty neck. "I advise someone carrying them and another defending them."

That slithering midnight lies ahead and her gaze focuses, pupils vanishing to the rim of white-indigo fire blossoming from her irises inward. Little by little, the humanity in her fades. "We are about to cross the event horizon," she adds to Julio, smirking but a little. "Stick together may be an unwelcome sentiment in more ways than one."

Sara Pezzini has posed:
If Sara has learned anything during these weird voyages with the good doctor, it is not to have expectations. It helps somewhat. Heart racing, Sara steps forward toward the threshold at the Witchblade's urging, aware of the others she has come to know and trust in the last strange hours. She has also learned a lot about co-existing with the artifact that chose her. It augurs well that it hasn't deployed into a gauntlet or a blade. Right?

There is nothing about her clothing that clocks her as a cop - her lucky purple Converses, stretch jeans that will allow her to move quickly, a jacket that will keep her warm in the black space the door has opened out on, and a heavy silver bracelet with a large carnelian red stone. Her chestnut hair is pulled back into a soft tie; the emphasis is on being able to move.

The darkness reminds her of a night without moon or stars. With a glance at the others, at Julio with the boom box, the camera not yet taken up, she takes another step forward. Her role is defined by the weapon she carries and who she has become as a young police officer - a defender.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette has no intention of carrying either artifact if she can avoid it. She's no pack horse! Besides, a boom box and a polaroid, what is this, the /80s/? Someone needs to introduce those genii locorum to the concept of cell phones. Besides she's no sorcerer, and like Elektra thinks they're probably better left in the hands of people who are. Besides, she's only along for the ride.

    "Looks like a whole lot of nothing," She comments skeptically while regarding the darkness through the doorway. Well, darkness. Maybe she's not completely along for the ride then, she's good with darkness. Smells like home. Darkness is basically her thing. She's virtually /made/ of darkness. She wonders momentarily if anyone who might need actual photons to see by has a flashlight, or more likely some neat glowing ball of light spell thing, because she doubts the tiny LED torch on her phone is going to pierce that veil too deeply.

    The line of thinking leads her to another path. "I hope that camera has a flash on it," she offers to the group. "'Cos otherwise I think it's going to need the shutter speed set to about four million years. Still, a bit of music can light up the darkest night, right? I'm sure I read that somewhere."

    Colette watches as everyone steps up to the door, and nobody takes the damn camera. With an exaggerated sigh and a roll of the eyes she snatches it out of Strange's hands. "Okay, I'll be a pack horse then," she mutters to herself. Then, more loudly, "Right. Let's go kick a third of a god's ass or whatever."

Stephen Strange has posed:
As the Heroes pass through the door, something odd happens. One by one they step through, and when they do the darkness parts to reveal a room. It wouldn't be so strange if it were not for the fact that they are alone in these rooms, their fellow heroes nowhere to be seen.

Elektra will find herself in what looks like a Japanese dojo in the traditional style. It would be immaculate and peaceful if not for the bodies heaped up like cordwood in the middle. The bodies wear white and range from men and women to even children. Blood stains the reed mats, crimson and fresh. If she looks down, that same blood coats her hands and the sai in her belt.

Julio finds himself in a ruined city, at the epicenter of some great catastrophe. The buildings around him have been shaken to rubble, and bloodied limbs caked in dust jut out at odd angles from beneath the stone and concrete. The sky is black, and in the distance police sirens wail.

Illyana is in a seemingly normal, downscale apartment save for almost every surface having a mirror of some sort hung upon it. Gilded mirrors, more modern looking ones, mirrors on stands. No matter where she looks, the surface reflects back at her. And the reflection is a leering, self-satisfied demon.

Sara stands behind her desk at the police precinct, though it looks as though a bomb has hit it. The bodies of her fellow detectives lay strewn about, thrown through windows and in some cases cut completely in two. Should she look down, the Witchblade has begun to grow across her body. Not in the usual fashion, though, but more like a spreading cancer.

Finally, Colette stands in a simple living room that appears to have been designed by an eccentric decorator. One side is carpeted in black with black furnishings, while the other is identical save for the chosen color being white. As she stands there at the center of it, the colors run into one another. One moment the black begins to overthrow the white, the next moment it?s the opposite.

Elektra Natchios has posed:
A good look is given to the others about her, the Defender, the two reluctant 'ring bearers', then the one who seemed to know darkness in quite the personal manner. Her gaze lingers on the latter for a time longer, studying yet then it was time to go past. No more time to linger.

Eyes turned ahead, into the darkness, hardening, expression almost mirroring the darkness within the portal, the last thing that many of those she met saw. Death followed her and this seemed like it'd be no different.

The shift is immediate, her eyes taking in the scene, the bodies, the scent of fresh blood. All familiar sights, a lifetime of it.

Dark gaze turns down to her hands, Sais. Her handiwork. Children though?

Perhaps against her better judgement she takes some steps closer to the bodies, to look at the faces. This could not be her handiwork..., or could it?

"Is anyone else close by?" She asks to the air. Even if she could not see the others perhaps they could still hear. Magic, eh?

Julio Richter has posed:
When Julio hears Illyana's recommendation, he slows, considering whether to turn and pick up the camera, as well. He's doubtful he'll be able to defend anybody in that darkness; his mystical connection doesn't appear to be manifesting anything that could be considered a power yet, and what good are his ground-based mutant abilities going to be in a featureless, unmoored void?

But then the decision is made for him, as Colette takes the item instead, grumbling about it the whole way. A smirk crosses his features, but then evaporates when he faces the dark again. Hesitation was a mistake. He tenses his jaw and passes over the threshold.

Truth be told, he was half expecting this magical portal to play some kind of trick, so the sudden change of scenery, grisly though it might be, isn't what initially throws him. No... what hits his psyche first is the /smell/.

Cracked masonry. Upended earth. The ozone and smoking rubber stink of severed wires. The /blood/. Julio knows this smell. This smell played midwife at the birth of the worst three years of his life. The hand that isn't holding the boombox instinctively curls back protectively, the back of his hand meeting his upper lip. He looks like he's about to retch.

Then he hears a faint voice from the speaker at his ear: "Is anyone else close by?"

"Estoy aquí," he answers, already starting to run into the rubble. "I'm here." The others will hear his words, echoing in their minds.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
The passage of shadows over Illyana, a riveting spiral of nightfall painted against her skin. Mild pressure bears down on her t-shirt and her dark pants, though the instinctive response to flinch away never comes. Too long beaten out by circumstance, the infernal crucible refining and reshaping the imperfections within forming a cage around the fears and doubts that mark her as still human.

When the atmospheric imbalance settles itself, the scattering of small plates start crawling in a wave from her shoulder. Liquid silver settles in luminous spikes of a star frozen in its fury, plasma arcs held in perfect, razor-sharp stasis. Indigo fire seeps out between tarnished shadows laced somewhere between draconic scales and chips of mica, laid in a strata that dances with eerie fire. Down from the shining pauldron flows the armour, bleeding across her collarbone, forming a plated shell as impossibly supple as a leather cuirass or bodice. The mark, one of them, of a shared lineage within the family Rasputin.

"Da. Someone thinks to play games. Is anyone else inside a building?"

The mirror-bright images all around share none of Colossus' inherent purity, the finish shaped into a noble ideal or familiar titanic shape. In the circle she stands alone, feeling something akin to living steel and utterly removed from it closing around her fingertips to grant even protection to the deepest extremities. Glistening finishes redouble her image into infinity normally.

Maybe they still do. Her answer to that humble place with its humble fixtures is a fire, ripped out from the center of her soul. So often it's the thicker version of that blade, something uncannily large for the lithe sorceress. Not now. Not at all: it takes on the first form it ever had, ablaze and slender like a bar stolen from the core of a blue giant. "I offer you peace. A place to live, far from here, if you choose it." Choices.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
The Witchblade's grip is excruciating; it's a live electric wire plugged directly into the nerves of her wrist and elbow. It reacts to the blood splashed up the Precinct's walls, blood drooling from her friends and colleagues' bodies.

Defensively, the bracelet unfurls like a living thing, a vine wrapping around her arm instead of the armored gauntlet of a suit of armor. Mouth open in shock, Sara remains rooted behind her desk, the only one untouched by the explosion that tore through the building.

Her first clue that something is wrong with what she sees is the absence of wailing sirens rushing to the scene of devastation. No voices of rescuers sound in the hallway, no dust blows through the air, the smell of cordite should be stinging her nose. It smells like a slaughterhouse. She has walked straight into a dream.

Palms pressed flat against the surface of the desk that should not be there, she closes her eyes and goes rigid as the vines twisting up her arm tries to plug straight into her mind.

Relief floods through her as she hears Julio's voice question the silence. Unsure of its source, her eyes jerk open.. Her own voice is a startling croak,

"I'm here." That affirmation stops the painful progress of the Witchblade. "I'm here," she repeats more loudly. "Who else is here? Julio?"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette strides through the door without a care in the world. Limitless empty voids? No problem.

    Simple living rooms? With a weird, fluctuating black and white theme? "Oh fuck this!" she snarls at the air. This is way too personal.

    Colette sits down in the middle of the floor, the tide of white and black flowing and ebbing beneath her. She drops the camera in her lap and folds her arms in a sulk. "This is BULLSHIT," she declares to the particular chunk of whatever universe it may be around her. She sits in a silent huff for a few moments, then continues berating reality. "I don't fucking care!" she declares, rather belying her sudden temper. "What do you think this is supposed to achieve? It's none of your business. Well FINE. Play your dumb fucking stupid games. See if I care. I'll just sit here, see who gets bored first. This city will be fucking DUST before I get bored, and there will be nobody to remember you ever existed but me, and I /won't care/. "

    As she rants, Colette's form begins to fade into the black half of the room, particles of darkness like smoke wreathing around her. Tendrils of shadow flow down her arms and entwine her fingers. "What even /are/ you? The darkness, the void of a city? A darkness that exists only as a reflection of the light. Without that light as your counterpart, you don't have anything. When all is ash, what is the point of you? Only the true Dark is eternal. "

    Colette sits there and stews, her body slowly turning into a thing of shadow.

    Estoy aquí The words filter into Colette's consciousness and the shadows surrounding her slowly retreat, fading away into the dark half of the carpet, and the black of the room retreats, giving way a while to the white. She blinks a couple of times, and relaxes slightly. <<Who's that?>> she thinks, as if expecting her thoughts to go answered. Then she speaks aloud. "Who's that? Can you hear me? I assume we all got separated." She's a lot calmer now. "It seems to me there's a message in that."

    She turns the camera over, looking at the back. There's a small window on the back that normally shows the number of shots left in a polaroid camera, but all that shows in the window is a smiley face. "Great. Fucking bullshit!" she snaps. The shadows flow back, but after a moment they recede again. "I have no idea how much film is in this camera," she says. "But I could try taking a photograph. It may show us something that is more... real, less personal, that what I... and I would guess we... are all seeing."

Stephen Strange has posed:
The bodies on the floor of the Dojo include many faces. Many Elektra does not know, but two she most certainly does. On closer inspection she sees the face of Matthew Murdock, blood-stained and wide-eyed with a look of horror. Nearby is Colleen Wing, her head twisted at a fatal angle. Then an old man, Master Stick, who seems more at peace than dead though the bloodied wounds in his chest make it clear which of the two it is.

"There is no coming back," the demon in the mirror laughs at Illyana, matching her every motion but speaking of its own accord, "You can't redeem a stain. You wash it out. Abolish it. You are the stain."

When the shadows begin to coalesce around Colette, the light of the room grows brighter. As though no matter what she does, it seeks to drown her out with the opposite.

Julio will suddenly feel aftershocks rippling through the grounds. Tremors that start beneath his feet and shudder outwards, making even the rubble topple and fall down upon itself. The wail of the police sirens grow closer.

Besides Julio's voice, Sara will hear something else in her head. A strange, disembodied urging that feels inherently like the Witchblade. Though it does not speak in words, the images and emotions are palpable - let go, give in, be a vessel.

They are each of them alone. No other living beings in sight. The only hint of an outside presence is Julio's voice crackling in their head as though it were being played on an old radio.

Elektra Natchios has posed:
A voice, something to center her. And to anchor her to reality. At least that's what it is to Elektra. And even if she doesn't exactly know Julio -that- well it's at least something. "I am inside a dojo. Where are you? Close-by..?" perhaps hopeful it's just on the next room. However this magick works. But there's that sinking feeling that this is her hill to climb.

"I am going to---" The words stop, ominous silent afterwards. She catches a glimpse of those faces. Familiar, too familiar.

The Hand Assassin pauses, perhaps for the first time in years finding hesitation. Mouth opens then closes.

She begins to get drawn towards the dead bodies. "No." She says, jaw tightening in a futile attempt to will those images away. Reality or not this was ..., disturbing. A fear. Deep within.., that she'd be the death of all she touched, even to those she had a care to no matter how much she would not admit so.

Hand reaches towards the first body, that of Master Stick.

Julio Richter has posed:
Julio stumbles as he runs over the cracked and crumbled pavement, then looks back and realizes it wasn't the pavement that tripped him up; a man's bleeding arm, extending from beneath a massive chunk of toppled wall, lies across the path he just took. It should be unmoving; there's so very little space for a body, so much weight focused on just the corner that crushes the elbow. Nonetheless, the fingers move, signaling blindly into the darkness: here is a person, here is a life that ebbs but remains. Bring help.

He whirls away and keeps running, just like he did at 16.

Another voice crackles over the stereo: Illyana's! He chokes out a sob of relief as he stumbles to a crouch in the crook of a ruined bank's single remaining wall. He lowers the stereo to the pavement, holding it with his hands bracketing the speakers, and answers, "I'm outside. No buildings left, barely any walls. Everyone is dead." He stops, remembers the fingers, hates himself, then amends, "Dying."

His words are not directed: whatever he says is broadcast to all of the people who he had expected to guide him through this trial. And, in turn, their words all come flooding in, tripping over each other as they stamp out Illyana's offer of peace. Sara, calling out to him. Elektra, trying to reunite the group. Colette, first ranting venomously, then seeking connection, then looking for ways to find their way back to reality.

"It's me, it's Julio," he answers them all, voice quaking. "The boom box is... connecting you to me. I can hear you. You can hear me?" He takes a gasping breath, quieting his panic response the best he can. "Take the picture, Colette. These things they gave us are here to help. They're the--"

He's cut off, shaken by a seismic aftershock, and his fear returns. He starts running again, the stereo clutched to his chest, seeking the epicenter of the eruption. "No," he starts to repeat, almost delirious, reaching out with his mutant powers to try to calm the riotous earth. "No, no, no, no..."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
The hung glass oval on the wall shows that hideous visage, exaggerated from the familiar. Illyana stands harsh as the Orthodox saints facing their bitter, bleak land: the cradle of winter. Mother Russia suffers no fools in her children, reaping them by the cold season and winnowing their lives through the failed harvests, raging rivers, and burrowing hunger leaving plagued trails through emaciated bodies.

Stains. Poisoned.

Anger kept on an adamantine leash threaded by her own blood lurches, awakening from its bedimmed sleep in reckless answers. She feels the shifting in her bones, a nameless entity bestirred in the fathomless reaches of the psyche.

"Da. I was. I paid the toll, and remained myself." A cold, shining projection receives the brunt of her narrowed, burning eyes.

Her back goes ramrod straight to absorb the blows raining down in every syllable stitching a deeper meaning, a personal one threading the eye of every vowel. No siren song is this, the demon's voice searching for the gaps in the armoured wall. "What do you know about living and losing, then getting back up? What do you judge, when you are alone in the dark?"

The Soulsword burns in a steady glow of a second star, the sun of the Arctic winter, white and all consuming against the silvered glass. She lifts the blade as a child might hoist a candle in a Victorian tale, bound to the kitchen to scarf a scone. Fear is an old, familiar sensation and her reaction to bring that terrifying light nearer to the glass.

"You just wish you had a prettier face." Words slid back, not spat, a retort bridging silver. The sick quicksilvery sensation threads through her blood. "Demons have a temper. They bite." Another turn, closer to one of those freestanding mirrors, looking on the other side. Is it there, too? The sword sings, collapsing melodies into a raging melodic movement of defiance and sheer determined stubbornness, underlaid by another counterpoint thinner than most but fueling the fire. "They are still breathing. They still live. There is still /hope/."

Who are you trying to convince, Illyana? But those last words carry over the distance, pushed outwards, a rigid repetition no doubt voiced by others. Remembered by others. She points the Soulsword at her reflection, her arm stiff, wrist steady. Only the slightest points of her eye-teeth indent her lower lip, and she stares down the length of the blade.

"What are you going to do if I walk /through/, <<Melkiy bes>>?"

Sara Pezzini has posed:
A whisper rises in Sara; it dims Julio's distant words. A blaze of fire crackles up her arm. She screams silently, holding out her arm, expecting to see her arm crisped and blackened.

Worse is what the whisper asks her: to be a willing vessel, the passive woman whose will is replaced by the magic that chose her. An empty weapon wielded by some unknown force.

But she won't. Will she?

Taking deep breathes, she reaches for the woman she was before the Witchblade came into her life. She can hear her father's loving voice, encouraging her to be herself, to be strong in the face of all the prejudice that the old boy's network in the police exerts - strong in the face of all the pressures to conform and be a mouse in the tiny rut of society's expectations.

There.

She finds that place, the wordless source of love welling deep inside her. It allows her to listen carefully to the voice, telling her to be an empty receptacle for power. Separating herself from it. It is not the Witchblade.

"How are you, Julio? You doing alright? Julio, it is speaking to us, isn't it? It's trying to scare me. Maybe."

A revelation sweeps through her. The god is trying to help though it feels like her psyche is being put through a strainer. It, the God exists on another scale of space and time.

The Witchblade, for all its mystery and strength, has never felt wrong, not this wrongness. The twisting vines that wrapped her, trying to engulf her in their will revert slowly to the clean, cold embrace of the gauntlets plates warming to her skin.

"Are you okay?" The question is for all of them, the god included.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    The room around Colette grows blacker. She sits calmly, listening to Julio's words and thinking things over. She raises the camera, presses the button and waits. The shutter clicks, the motors whirr, and white rectangle slowly grinds its way out of the front. She pulls it out and stares at, then puts it down on the floor with a sigh. She's about to take a second photograph when a memory hits her, and she picks the little white rectangle up again. Looking closer she sees a faint image forming. She blows on it, shakes it, and slowly an image appears. She stares at the image a few moments.

    "Julio?" Her voice is calm, precise and confident, quite different from the angry ranting of a few moments before. "Julio, listen. Whatever you are seeing is not real. You are safe. Don't move. Stand still. Tell everyone else to stand still. Listen very carefully to me. None of what you are seeing is real. We are all close together, standing in the void we saw through the doorway. Try to stick together. We are close to a... it looks like a beating heart. It looks diseased."

    Whiteness flows across the room and her voice grows harsher. "The symbol is obvious. Fucking heart of darkness bullshit. The heart of the beast, diseased and slowly dying. But too slow. Let us help it on its way." Colette holds her hand out, palm upraised, and a pinpoint of darkness appears in it and starts to grow and swell. Her lips curl up into a cruel smile. "We can end this abomination, this false darkness of the mind. Kill it, consign it to the True Dark between the stars."

    The room is almost all white, but slowly the tide turns and blackness starts to engulf the room again. The orb of darkness in Colette's hand is snuffed out. "Or we could seek to heal it. If it is diseased and we are separated, perhaps we can heal it by insisting on togetherness. We /are/ together, we just don't know it, because we are visiting our own hearts of darkness. Perhaps we should tell each other a little about ourselves. Perhaps we should tell the heart that it is not alone. "

Stephen Strange has posed:
The body that Elektra reaches out to is real to the touch. Every sense seems to believe that it is seeing something tangible and real. These are not special effects or models - they are the real corpses of people help dear. But as she touches it, the walls of the Dojo seem to fly away. Now the assassin stands at the top of a flight of stone stairs, flanked by a horde of red-clad ninja all prostrate in the deepest showing of respect to her. Beyond them, a city burns and the wails of the anguished fill the smoke-swollen sky.

"I do have a pretty face." The Demon tells Illyana, its voice full of horrible glee, "I do. This is my face. I don't just wear your face. My takiye zhe." It is then that the Demon shifts, no longer a fearsome face. Instead, Illyan's cool blue eyes stare back. The room around her in the mirror is no longer the apartment but a cheerful bar full of her fellow New Mutants. They're laughing, smiling, having a good time. The Demon-Illyana's features contort into a malicious grin, and now she starts to move on her own. She turns away, regarding the room with a predatory gaze.

In the ruined city, Julio can hear voices now. Angry and broadcast over loudspeakers in the distance: "Él está por aquí! Cosiguele!" Somewhere within the rubble, unseen but heard, boots pound as a group run. Getting closer and closer and closer.

The voice, passing itself off as the Witchblade or the Witchblade itself, quietens as Sara focuses herself. Nevertheless, it still seems to lurk there in the darkness. Waiting. Urging her to just let go. Just let it do what it was meant to do.

Colette's Polaroids show the void. And the group of them not so far from each other, even if their senses betray them. When the photo is taken, the beating of a heart echoes through all the strange illusions the Heroes occupy. Like the distant beating of a colossal drum. Echoing into eternity.

Elektra Natchios has posed:
"Everyone is dead." Elektra echoes Julio's words. A finality to her tone, dark and ominous as this all situation seems to be for everyone. Again moments of silence, that nagging voice on her head, the anchor to reality. "But then again, that was always what was going to happen, wasn't it?" is she talking to herself now or to Julio?

The woman is more demon than human now, vestiges of humanity having been torn from her. What would be, what could be if she let go. If she embraced that darkness, did not find a way to rein herself in and anchor herself to some kind of light that -some- still claimed she had.

The shift of scenery makes her get up, to look upon the ninjas paying her respect, to the city destroyed in the distance..

Would this be her legacy?

Hands wrap about her Sais and she draws them out. So this was what full power felt like. No morals to keep her down, nothing but darkness to show her the way. Yet it was still..., empty.

"Julio." She says the young man's name. "How do we get out of this?" did she really want to leave? She begins moving forward, towards the ninjas. Her destiny?

Julio Richter has posed:
The sirens and the angry cries of the policía harry Julio along his path, and with each ragged inward breath, he tries to draw on the powers in the ground he treads upon: both seismic tensions and, he's learning, the mystical flow. He's trying to redirect those energies, settle whatever is out of balance, with each footfall.

The speakers thrum into his chest with the others' words as he runs. Illyana's confrontation with herself plays out beat by beat, and he almost fears to listen to her narration of something so personal, but the link that ties them together is all he can cling to right now. The phrases: "They are still breathing. They still live. There is still /hope/," inspire an additional burst of speed as he seeks the destructor at the heart of this blasted land. He did it wrong last time -- so many died, and he ran away, and he never looked back. Does he have any reason to hope he'll do any better this time?

"I'm not doing alright, Sara. It's scaring the hell out of me," he admits. He knows, as he says this, that they can all hear him: one man's fears broadcast to a connected audience, like a voice speaking to shared pain on a darkened stage.

Then, abruptly, Colette snaps her photo, and the drumbeat of that diseased heart cuts through the tremors and the yelling and the sirens that surround him. A sound. A vibration. He /felt/ that. He skids to a halt in the rubble and turns, his mutant senses orienting on that all-encompassing echo like his own personal True North. He lifts the boom box to his ear again and listens as she explains what she sees.

"I felt it, Colette," he answers her, his own voice not nearly as steady as hers, but growing stronger by the moment. "I know where it is. Everyone -- stop moving. Nothing we see or hear is real. We're all in the darkness together, not far apart. There's a heart that's creating all of this -- Colette says it is diseased, but she thinks we can cure it."

Orienting on that divine drumbeat, he begins to slowly walk forward. If it's story time, he might as well start. "I killed a lot of people once. It was an accident: my powers. I didn't do anything to help, or make it better. I just ran away. That's what the heart is showing me. And I keep running, but this time I can't escape, because I guess I didn't really escape the first time. That was a long time ago, and those people are gone."

His words are carried to each of the others in their private torments, and his voice is getting stronger. "But I am breathing. I still live. This time, I can do better."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Beauty that burns in the void burns away all memories of the demonic. Mirrors showing a fragmented constellations of Illyanai in one of those sterile, makeshift apartments littered across Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd.

A place that once spoke of luxury, security, stability. Wealth. All the virtues deprived from a little girl half-starved in the Russian Far East, watching her family rake out an impoverished existence on the cusp of a rift lake. A place that embodies dreams of a brother gone far away, parents broken by a failed system, a hero asked again and again to give everything up.

Crayoned, crude imagery once imagined in a poisoned darkness bleeds through the cracks in her astral pattern, pale silver scars dancing over her armour as it darkens into black rainbows spread against the thigh-high boots, the pants melding into them.

Around her flow a succession of faces and names, best friends moving together and sharing their lives in the reflection pool while she stands apart. On the outside, as they seize the moments and the days, whirlwind laughter and in-jokes, stories that make no sense captured in that amber glass. All she could ever want. Not hers.

Not hers.

Not here.

Child's dreams, manifest in living vision, swirl across the glass. She can see herself in the plain sweater and dark skirt, the white parka rimmed in fake silver-tipped fur against raking winter cold, hunting those plump doves and drowsy hawks unaware of what moves among them.

<<Nyet, ty temnoye otrazheniye etoy snezhinki.>> At the end of the day, she /is/ still that child.

"You are not me. I know what I am," she hisses, Russian to English to an ancient demonic tongue spoken by the third of the Host fallen from the Creator's grace. Julio calls his warning, transmitting across Radio Free Mystic the promises of freedom and liberty to those imprisoned by an unjust system, an unjust /god/.

Too late. Too soon. Time breaks in Limbo, time is broken in her. Her shadow bends in its wake, black wings unspooled with the rise of the Soulsword in a double-handed grip. The sweep of curling horns echoes in her black crown, an unearthly speed poured into the devastation reaping glass and cloying smiles with no weapon other than her broken soul.

For a moment the chains creak, loosing from its vexed sleep the rage. Rage held by a single ribbon stitched with Native American beadwork in the light, rippling off the hilt of the Soulsword as she flies into a dervish dance, striking down one mirror after another, pressing onto the darkness with a surgeon's efficiency. The whitefire flames seethe to a blazing heat forcing the darkness to recoil.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Fatigue, as she has seldom felt in her life, saps Sara suddenly. The top of the desk invites her to crawl upon it for a nap, even surrounded by the carnage that leaks around her. The doubts about the Witchblade niggle her still.

'"Okay", she says aloud to herself, unaware of it being relayed to the others. "It's not perfect. I'm not perfect, but I will tear you off my arm and throw you out the window if you think I don't have a say in how this goes. Partner. I will be your partner but not your slave. I will not be some crazy killing machine on a strange crusade I don't understand. Hear me?"

Like riding a roller coaster to the crest of a big drop, Julio's voice admitting the same fear she feels diminishes her own. A chill shivers up her spine when the silent room filled with the dead reverberates with a hollow heartbeat. His admission of failure rhythmed by its beat speaks to her fears.

The heartbeat urges her out of the room to some unknown destination. She fervently hopes that she will find the others when she reaches it.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    The transition between black and white in the sitting room where Colette sits flows back and forth, and she sits in silence a while, breathing heavily. Slowly the transitions become less chaotic, until the back and forth seems to match the steady beating of the heart.

    Colette stands slowly. She stares a moment at the photo she had taken earlier, then turns to her right, and takes another photo. She waves it back and forwards impatiently until the image has resolved, then turns another ninety degrees and takes a third. Again she goes through the ritual of waving it about to develop. When the image resolves itself, she nods her head slightly to herself.

    "Julio? This is Colette. I'm going to try something. If you feel someone you can't see touching you, it's me. Don't worry, okay? Stand very still or this won't work." She glances down at the photo to fix it in her memory, then starts walking forwards.

    There is a faint thump as Colette's shin crashes into the edge of a couch. "Fuck!" she yells, and the room lurches towards white again. She takes a single step back, and closes her eyes, breathing slow and deep, her breath becoming synchronized with the pulsating of the room.

    Colette holds the photo out in front of her and opens her eyes. She stares at it intently, then starts walking, her eyes fixed on the polaroid. This time her legs pass through the couch, and then her body passes through the wall. After a few steps she reaches out a hand and starts to edge forwards. Fingers brush against the fabric of Julio's vest, then fumble down to grip his arm.

    Colette steps forwards again, suddenly visible to Julio. She lowers the polaroid and looks around blinking at the earthquake-wracked cityscape of his personal Heart of Darkness.

    "Huh. Welp, I won't ask," she says with a shrug. "Not my business. Who do we grab next? Tell everyone to stand still and /do nothing/, okay?"

Stephen Strange has posed:
The gathered ninjas begin to chant. Their blood-red garb rippling as a cold wind sweeps through the burning landscape that is Elektra's own personal vision. The words are ancient, a dialect not spoken anywhere except amongst the servants of the Hand, and they are chilling: <<Hail, Great Queen of Death!>>

The mirrors do not shatter as Illyana's sword passes through them. They do not flicker or fade. It is as though the sword itself knows of the illusion even if the rest of her mind and body will not follow. In the earthquake-ravaged cityscape, Julio and Colette will see the blade emerging from nothingness before them several times. Slashing wildly, but never striking them.

As Sara hears Julio's words, the voice claiming itself to be the Witchblade gets louder now. Kill, it insists. Maim. Death. Give in. Give up. No partnership. Domination. Only the strong should rule.

Nearby, the heart beats louder now. Faster. And it sounds so very close.

Julio Richter has posed:
Julio stops when Colette asks, but he doesn't turn aside from the direction he's facing, the direction of the beat that he feels in his bones. Still, in spite of the warning, he jumps a little bit when Colette's fingers first scrape against his vest. A frighteningly similar feeling to the memory of a border guard's grasping hands. By the time her hand reaches his arm, he has settled, and her sudden appearance next to him is merely surprising, not frightening.

He turns his head to look at her, eyebrows tilted upward in the center, but keeps his feet planted on the course they must walk. He seems... embarrassed isn't the word. Contrite? Her question brings him back to the task at hand.

"It's getting bad for all of them," he answers her. But as though the uncharacteristic emotion in his friend's shouted Russian words weren't warning enough, suddenly the narrow, flaming blade of the soulsword is cutting directly into their reality, just ahead.

"Illyana!" he calls out, already starting to move in that direction. "Please lower the sword! I'm coming to you! I can get you out of there!" More quietly, but still just as audible to any of the group, he adds, "The rest of you, stay still. We will do this together."

As he advances toward Illyana, the thin green aura of his mutant powers, fed by the hearbeat's seismic pulse, collapses into a single point ahead of him, and as he shuts his eyes, it expands into a filigree of a mesoamerican icon, legs wide and knife-filled mouth upraised. A ward of invisible stone, held ahead of him like a shield. He has no idea how he summoned it, or how easily the soulsword will slice through it if she doesn't stand down. The only thing he knows in this entire hellscape is how important it is that they get to his friend.

Elektra Natchios has posed:
The chant is a lure, to power... To all she wants? But again, something is off. This is not it, this way... When she becomes who she is meant to be it will be her choice..

The words in her mind, from Julio, continue to anchor her, and she shares some of her own fear. "The heart shows me what would happen if I cut ties to what still makes me human." gaze strays up to the sky, away from the ninjas. A Black Sky? Mmm, why does those words seem so familiar?

Memories of her learnings, from Master Stick, from Daredevil, to see without see, they sprout into her mind. To look beyond the illusion. She closes her eyes then, the last thing she sees being that black sky above. "It tries to show me ..., who I am meant to be." speaking it makes it all less real. The sharing. Though those words to remain still finally get through to her.

The Sais are placed back on her sash. -She- would choose who she killed, and when. Not this heart, this vision.

She focuses then, teeth gritting together, waiting until they are again close to one another, she attempting to align her own chi, slow exhales coming out.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
From the other side of the veil, it might very well be entertaining to watch the projected sweeps and stabs traced by the Soulsword. Illyana isn't, however, stupid. Dangerously angry but not lost so far to wrath that she cannot change tactics.

The Soulsword is her, and she is the blade. Should those mirrored surfaces defy its bleeding edge, then the answer is terrifically simple.

Halt.

"Stillness is the death of change, the end of one stage and the threshold of the beginning." She holds up the sword in a guard, considering the shivering nimbus.

Julio says it, but then Julio is in the mirrors and reverberating through the aether. Her eyes narrow until all the shapes blur together in a sea of silver glass and mocking shapes dividing lives and lines.

That stillness descending over the sorceress leaves her poised for violence or calm, anchored in the driving tide of oppositional forces struggling to find equilibrium and tear her apart in the same motion.

For Julio to enter the hellspace is to join a lively club, assuming a role of himself. Colette simply manifests with greater ease, far from fitting an anticipated space amongst the cavorting figures spun with wicked detail. Whirlwinds of sonic and visual impressions seethe around her. Her armour shifts from black to pure silvery brightness, in and of itself a hopeful sign. Except for that resonating relic in her hand, brilliant in the darkness. Who wants to trust they aren't getting stabbed by a demon? She doesn't look like a demon... Bad little snowflake.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Arguing with an unseen foe, Sara picks her way over the dead, tamping down the hysteria she feels rising in her. She steps in a pool of blood next to the severed head of a man she didn't particularly like but never wished dead.

"You don't listen, do you?" Anger lights each word on fire. "I said no. You picked the wrong woman. This is wrong. Is this why Jeanne d'Arc went to the pyre? To fucking get away from you? No."

Sara flings open the door from her office, and instead of a hallway, she looks out at an earthquake devastated New York. Shock stops her protests to the madness that the Witchblade seems to whisper. Half a block away, she sees Julio and Collette picking their way towards something blocking their way. It dissolves into the armored figure of the Russian woman, Illyana.

"Christ, I'll never complain about being bored again." Straightening her shoulders, she calls out, "Hey! Wait up!"

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Colette glances around at this new space with a critical eye, then raises an eyebrow wryly in Illyana's direction. There's a quick click-whirr-shake-shake-shake as she takes another photograph with the polaroid, then holds it out in Illyana's direction.

    "Illusion. No choppy. We're still in the darkness. Big heart thing, look. " So much for exposition. Colette's getting a bit impatient.

     Without awaiting Illyana's reaction, Colette takes a couple more photographs, until they've got the locations of Sara and Elektra pinned down. She passes the photograph of Elektra's position to Julio, and says "Fetch. Don't look at the scenery, look at the photograph. Count your steps, then we meet back here."

    Colette takes the job of fetching Sara herself, largely because she's lazy and Sara's seeing through the illusion already, so it seems like the easy option.

    It only takes four steps to reach Sara, though visually it seems like it should be far more. She offers Sara her hand. "Come, follow me. Don't wander. It's just four steps. We're all gathering together, which is almost certainly exactly what this thing was trying to avoid. Then we can kill it. Or heal it. There's a heart. Either we stab it and blast it to oblivion, or we hold hands and sing it kumbayas. I tend towards the first choice, but eh. I'm probably not the best person to ask."

Stephen Strange has posed:
The Polaroids are used well. Small, rapidly developing portals to other places. Realities existing stacked atop one another. Colette draws Sara into the strange, cluttered mirror room of Illyana's personal torture chamber. Julio's own reaching out draws Elektra into the same room, passing through the illusion like the parting of a curtain. But it is not until they are all together that things begin to change.

Firstly, the heart begins to beat. Fast now. So fast that it cannot be healthy. The beating of someone in the throes of terror. The drumbeat is almost deafeningly loud, ringing in their ears so loud that it almost drowns out any spoken words. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

Then, the illusions melt. They simply droop, losing their cohesion until there is nothing left but darkness on all sides. The Heroes find themselves standing there in the middle of the void, the only other occupant the immense and diseased heart hanging suspended several feet away. The Heart itself is larger than a house, and the poison coalescing on its surface shimmers wetly even without a visible source of life.

There is a cry of anguish and terror. What comes next seems to emerge from the darkness of the void around them. A demonic, twisted version of Illyana with Soulsword in hand. A blood-stained Elektra. The Witchblade in total and vicious control of Sara. A dark reflection of Julio that brings the whole world to a violent shudder. And Colette, oscillating wildly between dark and light. They attack their namesakes, screaming for bloody vengeance.

And the heart beats louder.

Julio Richter has posed:
The moment Julio finally spots Illyana, his form breaking through one of the mirrors into the bare, mirrored apartment, he casts the ward aside, and the shining outline of crouched Tlaltecuhtli, reflected dozens of times, retracts into a point of light before dropping away into the ground. He runs forward, tears in his eyes, and throws his bare arms around his friend's shoulders. He presses his face into the join between her helmet and its stylized horns and squeezes her tightly enough to potentially draw his own blood on her spiked armor. In this moment, he doesn't care.

"Estoy aquí," he says quietly, the image of their embrace multiplied on every one of the demon's mirrors before he relinquishes her and pulls back, hands separating to pause on her upper arms for just a moment as he locks eyes with her. It's a check-in as dual in nature as she is: are you okay? and are you going to kill me for that?

Then Colette passes him the photo of Elektra, and there's no more time for reunions.

Once they're all together, the question of what to do about the heart is put on the back burner as shadow duplicates descend upon them. The diseased Rictor sprints toward them, his scream the tear of a fault line shattering a bridge. Julio lunges forward and slams his fists to the ground, barriers of voidstuff leaping upward behind him to protect the others from what he's about to do. The doppelganger of Rictor springboards forward off of a column of rock and fires three blasts of pure explosive energy, which the real Julio catches on another Tlaltecuhtli-shield, before running forward himself and dissolving the mystical energy into the shattered green aura of his natural power. "I haven't done this in a while," he hisses, "But for you, I'll make an exception."

The first time Julio used his powers, he misfired and detonated three blocks of Guadalajara like a bomb going off. The rolling, sickening lurch of the earth and the deafening noise the others will endure from the opposite side of the barrier, which itself crumbles under the impact, might just bring across what exactly that means. When the wall finally collapses, there's just one Julio left.

Elektra Natchios has posed:
Being brought into the room Elektra finally re-opens her eyes, dark, full of murder but in control. That much at least she has. A quick sweep of her eyes goes over the rest of the group, fighting their own demons, but they had found some measure of common ground into surpassing this. Or at least she thought it mostly surpassed because then those doppelgangers appear.

Blood calls to blood it seems as she faces up against her own self, the unhinged demon, Queen of Death, the future Black Sky.

Both Sais are drawn, the two figures mirroring each others movements as they prepare for bloody battle. And then it is -on-. They run towards one another, a blur of motion, close to superhuman, all that training, those years killing coming to the fore as Sai meet Sai, singing death to one another while their bodies attempt to dance away and grasp into just another moment of life, another second breathing. For as long as she breathes she can still find victory.

"You have nothing more to lose. What do you fight for now?" She rushes in, motions again mirrored but the real Elektra shifts, turning to let one of the Sais bury itself in a shoulder. It makes her able to pass through her doppelganger's defenses and when her own Sais come up they impale the bloody one.

"Thought so." She murmurs when the doppelganger, falls, giving it's last breath and starting to fade into nothing. Blood drips from her wounds, from her Sais. She looks up.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Racing into the Russian's presence almost has her bringing around the Soulsword in a protective stroke, guarding the itching space between her shoulder blades before it resolves into an aura her senses know, even if her eyes are closed. The metal around her is hot, not cold, and it crumples and flexes under Julio's weight. Mind the pointy spikes on the pauldron or down her arm, which make spontaneous embraces possibly lethal, but Illyana holds firm while he tries to knock her over..

Meeting those eyes is to stare into a stellar inferno, no traces of humanity anywhere. The answer might be found there, but it's too late with the Polaroid handed over by Colette.

"Illusion." Far from cracked crystal, that response is sibillant, a rush of velvet. She stares down into the image, and sees not herself or her friends, nor vestiges of a childhood dream that never was. Just a foul, cloying darkness peeled back to show the Darkchylde on her digitigrade legs, curling horns and bloodied skin, magnificent and terrible, utterly inhuman. A diseased organ overgrown by cancerous tumours and sickly patches, gone corrupt to the core around the few healthy spots. Foul and thick, a stench of organ meat putrifying on the blighted vine earns the wrinkle of her nose. Even the demon queen has her limit.

Her codename isn't idle. In two steps light and dark collide with one another at inhuman speeds on a final, wicked leap. They presumably know one another's tactics, an impending collision never to be. Firefly circles of a portal and the repulsing shield explode in a shower of hellfire. Enchantments peel away under the Soulsword, but that's useless compared to getting a hoof in the chest. Fall, rise, fall again. Night wreathes the dueling pair -- even the void turns brighter by compare, hellish flames erupting in a series of parried blows. Concussive shockwaves fling Illyana back onto the ground, such as there is ground, and she whips out her hand for a trio of concussive violet-black bolts to rip through the illusion of tendrils snapping up to bring her down.

Disruptive invocations become the harder to see in a blending of shapes that soon make something terribly apparent in the sinuous flicker-flashes and bloody sprays. The pressure on from circling around the 'Darkchylde' pushes back to the heart, pressing an advantage, until those parrying sweeps and violent sleights circle it in a decaying spiral and jarring overhanded slashes might just carve out the corruption itself. A bombardment of stars and a bleak stygian wall swirl around one another, until the end is not an end rammed through by bladepoint or spell-shard. For one terrible moment, the superimposed echo of a blonde child about ten and the adult reflection simultaneously reach into their doppelganger and rip out two glowing shards of a soul. And then there is one.

Sara Pezzini has posed:
"Jesus H. Christ."

The gigantic heartbeat thrumming in her ears, the Witchblade snaps up Sara's arm, extending into vicious claws. The metallic ring of a blade being unsheathed heralds a three-foot blade snapping into existence.

The real Sara's shock transforms her face into a child's for an instant. "Do I really look like a witch?" The child-like expression hardens into adamant as she steps forward to face down her double.

Only once for a pitched battle against terrible odds has the gauntlet formed into a full set of armor. Magic at full tilt wraps her in gleaming armor from head to foot.

Good fights don't necessarily last long. Sara swipes the blade at the neck of the demon wearing her face - an oblique stroke meant to decapitate. She's reached her limit and acts on instinct. Around her, the world lurches into the grip of an earthquake. Her twin crumples beheaded to the ground.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Of /course/ they would have to fight themselves, because that's what a Heart of Darkness journey is all about. Colette's initial reaction is to roll her eyes, but she barely has time to do that before Colette2 starts hurling bolts of darkness at her.

    Colette raises both hands, summoning a black wall in front of her into which those bolts fade. She drops the wall and sends blasts of her own, as Colette2 raises her own shield. Colette's blasts are aimed not directly at her attacker but to one side, the shockwave knocking Colette2 to her feet.

    Colette2 springs up, launching herself at... herself, but Colette is surprisingly good at anticipating the move and ducks low under the leap, then springs upwards. Colette2, equally good at anticipating her opponent's moves, twists sideways and lashes out with a foot, staggering Colette back.

    The two Colettes circle each other, lunging, feinting and countering. Centuries of Martian combat experience as a manhunter make her... both of her... talented, if out of practice, combatants, very good at reading, and counteracting, each other's moves. From time to time one fires a bolt of darkness or two at the other, but their opponent immediately absorbs it into a shield of darkness. The battle has all the hallmarks of a stalemate.

    Until Colette starts to change. The fight comes to a pause and the two combatants separate, breathing heavily. Colette feels anger rising up in her, anger that she's wasting her time on this nonsense, anger that this /thing/ dares to play with her in this fashion. Both Colettes start to summon spheres of darkness in the palms of their hands, but Colette's start to swarm backwards over her forearms, and then streamers of shadow spill down from her shoulders to meet it. Her arms twist, and there is the sickening sound of bone cracking. Nails lengthen, flesh twists, and a sweat of blood seeps across her skin. Her lips curl back to bare her teeth, and blackness crawls from her eyes in a thousand hair-like tendrils that wrap themselves around her face and crawl down her neck and body.

    Colette2 thrusts her hands out and twin orbs of darkness blast towards Colette. They hit her in the stomach and shoulder, the impact knocking her back a little, but rather than dissipating, the darkness of the two orbs flows around her in swirling motes of utter blackness, merging with the inky darkness flowing down her neck and up her arms.

    "ENOUGH enough enough!" Colette hisses, her voice echoing weirdly in the dark. "Enough of this game game game. Sometimes purity is the answer answer answer."

    The shadow-swathed form of Colette flows forwards, limbs a blur of darkness, trailing motes of deepest blackness that swirl into the void. Teeth glinting in a mouth filled with blood, she roars with delirious pleasure at this embrace of her darker nature. Colette2 raises a shield of darkness to protect herself, but Colette's arm thrusts straight through the shield and sharp talons pierce her clone's stomach through, and out the other side. She withdraws the hand and stares at the blood dripping from it as Colette 2 staggers, clutching her ravaged guts.

    Colette flows forwards again, the shadows that make up her body blurring, and engulfs her clone in darkness. Slowly the shadows recede, and there is nothing left of the clone.

    The Shadow-Golem that Colette has become turns its head towards the great, diseased heart, and flexes her claws. Animal-like, she lopes towards it hungrily, then comes to a pause. "No. For this... balance balance balance."

    The shadows recede, flowing up her body in rivers of smoke that pour into her eyesockets and drain away, leaving Colette standing there, looking rather awkward. "Uh. Nobody pay any attention to that," she mutters. "Everyone was busy anyway. Yeah. Light from venus reflecting off whatever."

Stephen Strange has posed:
As the last of the doppelgangers falls, the heart continues to beat. It's arrhythmic now, sick. 'Beat' would be an inaccurate name, as there's nothing on-beat about the sound. It shudders and splutters, struggling as the diseased flesh that chokes it continues to spread across the organ. Green and slick and vile, it drips down into the endless void that surrounds it.

The surfaces of the heart seem to show places far away. The glistening flesh reflecting back a distorted image. In one, a tremendous blonde woman of Japanese descent brings a colossal baseball bat down on what looks to be a sailing ship. In another, the superhero Thunderbolt flies through the air to break open a brass pipe adorned with Latin writing. Each of them only the briefest vision before white light spills forth, blotting out the vision and returning to the same blurred reflection of the void.

Ba-dum-DUM. BA-DUM-dum. Ba-dum-dum-DUM.

All around, the void itself seems to shudder and shake though not in the way Julio might make it do. The blackness rends, revealing nothing but the sprawling cosmos beyond. Distant worlds, alien realities, and an unblinking eye wreathed in blood red.

Whatever is to be done, it must be done now.

Julio Richter has posed:
Battered, emotionally exhausted, and physically spent, Julio nonetheless picks up the boom box from where he dropped it, just this side of the shattered void barrier, and then staggers toward the heart. He doesn't know what the hell he's doing, but he flicks the radio on, without touching the tuning knob, and sets it down in front of the diseased heart, blaring a stuttering sequence of chopped-up piano chords and male vocals shouting:

"I didn't know I was lonely 'til I saw your face
I want to get better/better/better
I didn't know I was broken 'til I wanted to change
I want to get better/better/better/better"

He looks down at the speakers, perplexed by the song, then back up at the abstraction that has been their opponent through this whole ordeal.

"I already killed part of a city once," he says over his shoulder. "Like I said earlier... I'm still alive, which means I get to try to do better this time."

Green light spreads out from him again... this time a bright, concentrated pattern of abstract leopard spots, which dissolve into a sort of particulate rain when they get close to the diseased heart and are drawn into it. What he's doing is instinctive on his end, but deeply patterned and organized on the mystic side. It feels nurturing... but will it make any difference?

Elektra Natchios has posed:
Mercy.

It is an odd word for one such as Elektra. But at this point there is but one choice. "There has been enough death today." She says in agreement to Julio. The bloody Sais are put back in her sash. A symbolic gesture perhaps but one that shows even humans can show -mercy- to a God. A thought that would make her laugh in other circumstances but here she finds herself to be.

Elektra looks around at the other faces, a very brief nod of acknowledgement given and then steps forward to join Julio closer to the heart.

She focuses, letting herself achieve peace and at the same time attempting to transmit so to the diseased heart.

Even killers like her can choose another path. The same way this creature could choose another path.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
"When the bleeding starts, ignore it." Illyana's warning goes to Sara, of all people. "Call to the city in the event I die. It might help you." Elektra is already locked in communion with Julio, the rhythmic songs of the Bronx stitched into the sickly throb coated in a vile sheen. Trust is a distant commodity here, but another woman with another ambitious weapon gets about as close as she can get.

The Soulsword will be no use here and it vanishes from sight with a concentrated thought. What remaining light glimmers comes from them, not from what they wield.

She approaches closer to the void than she should, were she a wiser woman, a more cautious one. Her fingers spread out to encompass an ovoal, tracing out the boundary that encircles the gory, outsized organ defiled by some unnameable smut. Blood lies on her palms, smoke around her fingers, the flotsam of extinguished spells and the attack by a demon's hands.

One breath to center herself. Old memories of a white-haired woman showing her the steps rise to the surface, reinforced by more modern lessons under a familiar sky. The magic comes easy at first, sprung from the bleeding cracks in her soul. Whole, it would be nothing. Partitioned, fragmented chips of Limbo scour her will on each tidal ebb as she draws breath and proceeds.

A mandala blooms under the sorceress' feet, wide enough in successive bars to ring the others and slam a closed border of equalizing mystic pressure on the outer band. <<Lady Oshtur, we seek your grace to purge the corrupt and cleanse the broken heart to heal.>>

Pinprick constellations fall in a silvery path around her as the beseeching begins, the slowest form of magical rite. She shapes the complex triple feminine yantras needed to anchor those energies called down, her will not enough here. Something more profound invokes the gods. Just a single god, though not the worst choice out of a massive pantheon of options. A woman with feathered hair and fathomless eyes, called by a single whisper falling softly as down from a spread wing.

White magic pays a price for her: blood, pain, rebellion of the flesh. She accepts these without speaking, the slow trail running down her nose to her chin. It slows nothing. The taste of copper and iron on her tongue merely infuses the words, rendering a sacrifice that strays out. In Limbo, this would be far easier, but blood and life walk hand in hand. The price is balanced, offered with hands outstretched to shape another layer of the mandala. The sorceress' aura flashes, clear as day, burning too hot and bright. "Share what we can to make it whole."

Sara Pezzini has posed:
Killing. It was the crux of her fear of the Witchblade. The irony of having to slay the fear that has held her back from bonding with the Witchblade doesn't escape Sara. It leaves her blinking with exhaustion, but the suppurating heart needs them. The young detective wonders how she knows this, but she does, as she ponders if it isn't in some manner the heart of the world.

Julio's music fits the man, and it gets her blood pumping again. Glancing from side to side, she sees the same impulse in the group. Gone is the killing rage and, in its place, a desire to heal. The Witchblade has healed Sara; already, she can feel the rejuvenating energy coursing through her.

The armor piece by piece retracts until only the gauntlet remains, last the sword withdraws. Sara holds up her armored hand. Images cascade, superimposed on the diseased heart, of the Witchblade's power to heal those deemed worthy.

Illyana's words elicit a wide-eyed questioning glance. She can no longer dissemble in front of the likes of her. She wields magic whether she willed it or not, and there is no turning away from it now.

The question is whether it will consider the arrhythmic heart worthy of its attention. Sara does. She approaches the void with Illyana. Gently, she reaches out, fingers spread to touch it. A glow emanates from the gauntlet bridging the distance while Sara recites a prayer to all the saints of the universe to come to their aid.

Colette O'Connail has posed:
    Healing and life-giving isn't something that Colette is really built for, and pumping dark death magic into the heart would almost certainly be counter-productive. Still, it's tempting. Killing a god, now that would be a thing. There's so much life force in a thing like this. So much to snuff out.

    It's /greedy/ really, having that much life force. So much energy. It's the enemy of the Endless Dark. An anti-entropic force. It would be better to kill it, whatever these other people think. So why not?

    It's going to take an effortt to heal this thing. If she floods it with death magic, it's pretty likely the effort to heal it will fail, and the pathetic godling will die. She could even pretend to be helping, and nobody would ever know. Yeah. Why not?

    But everyone else seems so convinced it's not the answer, and if there's one thing Colette knows it's that she shouldn't trust her instincts on things like this, because they're pretty messed up. Okay, okay, heal it is. Whatever!

     She is not going to hold anyone's hands and sing kumbaya, though. That's for losers. Her contribution to the procedings will have to be less directly magical, but maybe there's magic of a sort in words too.

    As the others make their effortts to heal, Colette takes another photo, directly pointing the camera at the heart. When it has developed, she holds it out towards the heart - there are no eyes here, but maybe it can, in some way, see.

    "Look, whatever-you-are," Colette says to the heart. "This is you. Diseased, dying. The way you are now. Is that really what you want to be? The path you're on, that ends only one way, and you don't survive it. You think you can go it alone? You can't. You think you know what solitude is, what it is to be truly isolated? Been there, done that. So you want to try it your way, come back in three billion years and tell me if you had fun. You won't, you can take my word on that. Of course you won't live that long, you're dying already."

    "So here's another path for you. Our gift to you. We are here, in front of you, and you are /not alone/. We've fought our way through all this bullshit, and now we're here to help you heal. Accept that gift, and you have a chance to be something that isn't doomed. This is a chance of life we are offering you, a chance to be something. Take it, because being nothing is really fucking boring."

    Colette crumples the polaroid image of the diseased heart in her hands and drops it to the floor. "Don't be this dying bullshit, there's no future in it. Take our offer of being something more. Accept this gift. One condition though. There's already a city here. It's not exactly you."

    " The spirits of this city granted /us/ the gifts to be here, and offer /our/ gift to you. That means you owe them." Colette jabs a finger towards the heart. "That means you /do not. Fuck. With the city/. Capish?"

Stephen Strange has posed:
It is the combined effort that does it, and there is a distinct feeling that any lack of effort here would cause the spell to fail. Magic is one thing, after all, but wielding it to heal and give life is quite another. More so to wield it in aid of a god, an entity present across the great panoply of dimensions.

The music from the radio, the positive emotions, the magic all coalesce together into a singular, gossamer thread of white light. It spills forth, wrapping about the heart like the web of some gigantic spider. It flows forward at a clip, spinning and spinning around until the heart is bound entirely. Cocooned within the white, silken blanket that shines so brightly the very void seems to melt away around it. But there is no alien cosmos now, only the eternal lights of New York City.

The heart ceases to beat. Slowing, a creeping crawl. No longer arrhythmic. No longer anything.

Then it starts again. Thumping. Alive. Not straining, not diseased, not fearful. A living creature. A living god.

The white light engulfs the Heroes, blinding them. The last thing they feel is the patter of cool rain on their faces ...

You do not fuck with the City.