7355/Your Daily Dose

Your Daily Dose
Date of Scene:	13 August 2021
Location:	Gotham Royal Hotel
Synopsis:	An unknown contagion sweeps through the attendees of the 23rd annual Conference on Innovation in Neurocognitive Therapies, held at the Gotham Royal Hotel. A team of Bats and their allies manage to subdue most of those affected, but find little answers to the root cause of the chaos.
Cast of Characters:	Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown, Lonnie Machin, Laura Kinney, Bette Kane, Cassandra Cain

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Tim Drake has posed:
    Though the 23rd annual Conference on Innovation in Neurocognitive Therapies is being held in the ballroom of the Gotham Royal Hotel -- the swanky Blue Room, as it's often called -- most of the publicly accessible areas of the hotel have been taken over by the conference and its attendees. A large banner and various other signage welcomes the International Council on Neuroscience and its members within the lobby, and the mezzanine is where a variety of different vendors and related agencies have set up booths. Most of the major pharmaceutical companies are represented, of course, as the possibility is ripe to recruit some of the best and brightest in medical science that are here to present their good work.

    None of that matters now. The presentations are over for the day, the ballroom doors closed, all the free swag from the booths packed up and stowed away. Everyone is at the hotel's exclusive West Club, now, for a private afterparty.

    "Do you really believe everything Dr. Caldwell said about Somnycin?" a young woman says to another; they're both still wearing their conference badges, identifying them as reps from a big pharma company. Hers reads Daphne Burke. "It just seems strange that we haven't heard anything about this and now they're heading into trials."

    The other woman, name on her badge Alejandra Medina, shakes her head. "My roommate in undergrad went on to work in Caldwell's lab. He's crazy smart, emphasis on the crazy." She rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her second of many free drinks they'll all be served this evening. "Still, if you catch sight of him, let me know. Word is he hasn't decided who's getting the rights, yet. Think of the bonuses we'd get if we manage to convince him."

    Dr. Caldwell is nowhere to be seen tonight, though. After his big presentation, he'd made himself scarce. Several of his PhD students make the rounds, easily spotted by the crowd of party-goers who congregate around them. If there's any chance at getting nearer to the cash cow of the evening, they're willing to take it.

    At the bar, an older gentleman downs the last of his drink and tips his head to a few of his coworkers before he departs. Some hours later the party begins to thin out, and then disperse to their rooms upstairs.

    And that's when the screaming starts.

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    Red Robin glances over the edge of the mezzanine's balcony towards the lobby below, swarmed with GCPD officers. He steps back, towards the elevator, whose doors have been pulled open. Currently the lift is out of service, and he peeks his head in to look upwards.

    The call's already gone out. Multiple reported disturbances across the hotel, rumor of some sort of airborne contagion, people mauled to death but no sightings of potential perps.

    Up above, a hoarse yell echoes against the metal walls of the elevator shaft, and Tim has only a second to duck out of the way as a body comes rushing down towards him. He looks away.

    "<<This is Red Robin, I'm on location at the Gotham Royal Hotel. If anyone's in the area, I could use some backup.>>"

Stephanie Brown has posed:
The motorcycle's speed makes it little more than a blur to people on the sidewalk that it zooms past, electric engine giving little advance warning either. It drives in lanes or between them with equal ease. Traffic lights are hacked to give it green signals the entire way to the hotel.

<< I am nearly there >> Batgirl sends over comms as she slows enough to take a tight corner, leaving the hotel visible at the end of the road. The engine is gunned and the Batcycle leaps forward, accelerating to gain more speed. Batgirl then hits a button and the bike's seat springs her skyward. Lines in her cape grow solid, turning into into that well-known Bat-shape. With the speed from the bike, Batgirl glides, trading velocity for altitude as she reaches the building somewhere up around the eighth floor. She grabs hold of a projecting bit of the building and lets her cape go slack. << On the outside of the building now. Eighth floor. What are we facing? >>

Lonnie Machin has posed:
    Some people at the conference encounter a very tall young PHD student - astute, up on his technical jargon, and absolutely FULL of questions - sometimes odd questions like questions about the monetization of medication and questions about the ethics of the way medication are used - but he never identifies what school he's attending or who he's here with.
    And when he hears that scream, he steps backward into a shadowy alcove and takes off his glasses. "And I was having such a nice time." Lonnie mumbles.

Laura Kinney has posed:
With at least one of the Outsiders pressing concerns currently out of the city and in the care of a, supposedly very powerful, mage and most of the mutants she knows busy fighting aliens it's given X-23 a chance to resume her semi-normal routine of patrolling for NOWHERE and other threats.

Of course this being Gotham other threats seem to be lurking behind every crumbling gothic building.

When she gets the call it's a simple matter of hopping on a motorcycle to rapidly respond. Probably giving some underpaid Gotham PD traffic police a shock as she runs red lights at a speed which you really shouldn't drive at in a populated area.

<X-23 on route.> she subvocals over the teams encrypted comms channel. <Let me know where I'm needed.>

Bette Kane has posed:
Bette Kane had to sit through the whole bloody conference. She had to wear a Versace original. Present a grant award. Then be sucked up to by egg-heads up to three times her age in hopes of getting the next grant. Being a billionaire was so tedious some times. Right, that wasn't the girl that Bette Kane was. She was antsy to get back to training for the U.S. Open, rushed to get to what ever Tim had said they needed to be here for. She was more than ready to convert to Flamebird and vent a little. Yet, as she was just finishing her quick change in a utility closet, when Tim was heard and the scream. Rushing the rest of the way, she opened the door with one hand as she zipped up the back of her left boot. "On site, getting to position."

Tim Drake has posed:
    Most people wouldn't poke their heads back in. Most people would probably be repeating a mantra of 'don't look down, don't look down, don't look down' in their head. But most people don't strap on capes and body armor and go out patrolling the streets at night.

    Though at this point it's so far into the night that they're going to have to call it early morning, soon enough. Either way, Tim looks.

    The body at the bottom of the elevator shaft is still recognizably a body, and a quick glance upwards shows a rectangle of light only a handful of floors above. Far enough for the impact to kill, but not to completely decimate.

    Whoever it is must have twisted in the air as they fell, because Tim can see a profile of their face, and it's enough to see their expression contorted into something stricken, a rigor of fear.

    "<<Could be Scarecrow,>>" he says over comms as he swings out into the empty space in front of him, grabbing hold of the nearest rung of the service ladder. "<<Not sure. The GCPD are talking about some kind of airborne gas but I haven't been able to get a read on where that information came from.>>" Just in case, though, he withdraws a rebreather from his belt and attaches it to the lower half of his face.

    The next time his voice comes over comms, it's slightly muffled. "<<Mask up if you can. I'm heading in. There's an opening to the eighth floor, I think.>>" He climbs the rest of the way slowly, listening as he goes. So far there are only the distant sounds of screams and things breaking; from outside, Stephanie will be able to see a man run screaming from his room through an adjacent window, but that's on the opposite end of the floor. Tim only hears it distantly. "<<Batgirl, X-23, get inside without alerting the police.>>"

    That is admittedly easier said than done, if one goes through the lobby. It's filled with GCPD officers and terrified hotel staff. They're currently waiting for some sort of specialized team to arrive, tension thick in the air. Both the stair access doors and the elevator itself are under guard.

    Inside, Red Robin is still climbing. "<<Flamebird, what can you see?>>"

    The third floor, where Bette is, is fairly quiet. Not a whole lot of convention-goers are staying in the handful of cheap -- well, cheap for the Gotham Royal -- rooms without a view of the city. One woman comes stumbling out of her room, convention badge dangling around her throat. Her pencil skirt is ripped and she's crying, mascara streaked down her face. "She's dead!" she's screaming. "She's dead, she's dead, I know she's dead! Why is she here!" She doesn't even react to Flamebird, just slumps against the wall, hands pressed trembling to her mouth and her eyes, bloodshot, aimed at the open door of her hotel room.

Bette Kane has posed:
Bette quickly replied to Tim. "Flamebird. Third floor main hallway. Enough to lean into that Scarecrow thing, there is a crazed terrified woman talking about seeing some ghost.. And she looks messed up. Checking to see though, never know." Flamebird, despite the Kane wealth, did not have the level of access to the military products Kate did. She was terrible about asking too, tried to do too much on her own. So, she was stuck with a cloth face mask as protection. With a kick and a spin she is looking in the room the woman ran from. "Do you have any antidote for her, Red Robin?" Her next move would depend on if there was a dead, or not quite dead thing before her.

Stephanie Brown has posed:
Batgirl gives a soft groan. "Why do bad guys have to be chemists," she mutters to herself as a gloved hand opens a pouch on her utility belt. She withdraws a piece of equipment, moving it her cowl where it snaps in place over her mouth and nose. The lenses drop into place over her eyes, along with the rebreather it makes for an airtight seal.

<< Looks like people are running around losing their minds. Definitely could be Scarecrow >> she agrees as she swings hand over hand from one grip to another towards a vent. Dangling by one arm, she pulls out an electric tool which quickly undoes the bolts holding the vent cover in place. She adheres it to the outside of the building so it won't fall on anyone below, and then the nimble collegian pulls herself into the vent.

It isn't the fastest going, but it only a few feet to the first grate that lets her look down on the hallway. She's on the wrong side to remove the bolts, so this time they are cut free and the cover turned and pulled up inside the vent. Then Batgirl sticks her head down, making sure the coast is clear before dropping down. << I'm inside now. Hallway on the north end near room 820. >>

Laura Kinney has posed:
<Confirmed> Laura replies over comms. No details about how she plans on getting inside, but that's pretty usual for her. It's not long before she's pulling up the motorcycle in a nearby alleyway. If Gotham PD are still loitering in the lobby it's a fair bet they haven't completed the outer perimeter yet. So she slips into the adjacent building and heads upstairs.

From there it's just a hop, a skip and a jump to the fire escape. Well okay mostly just the jumping part. Thankfully her enhanced mutant physiology makes leaping that kind of distance fairly simple.

And once across her claws can easily open an entrance. Probably cutting the glass from a window. It's quicker than disabling the alarms on a fire door.

She doesn't have anything in the way of a gas mask, unless you count wrapping a bit of wet cloth over her face, trusting to her healing factor to protect her from whatever has happened inside. Besides if it /is/ dangerous inside her nose will know.

Hopefully before whatever is inside is strong enough to hurt her...

Lonnie Machin has posed:
    Lonnie says, into his phone, "I didn't actually plan to do anything tonight, you know - this was a fact-finding mission..." He thinks to himself as he goes, "Scarecrow's toxins are hallucinogenic and disassociative cocktails, usually riding on other drug combinations to make the effects more potent and addictive." He slips into a supply closet, and picks up a backpack he stashed there, before he pulls out a white mask with a filter in it, and an armored jacket and t-shirt. "Fortunately I'm well-prepared, or as some people would put it, paranoid. What is it that Batman uses to treat Scarecrow's fear toxins again - isn't it some sort of enzyme that degrades the proteins in the poisons Crane uses? I read the hospital reports-"

Cassandra Cain has posed:
There wasn't supposed to be any problems tonight. But then, any gathering of heroes will always have an equal proportion of trouble. It's something that Lonnie is likely to appreciate.

So is this.

Cassandra decides to walk in the front door. She doesn't wear her mask or hood, and walks into the midst of the Gotham Police Department's finest.

She walks behind a cop, waits til she can move again, and then steps past another. Using blind spots and hints of motion, she makes her way through the room, observing each of them and letting them see her when necessary. She walks with exactly the right stance and tone of body language to not be something that they'd bother noticing, and eventually makes it through the room and into the hotel. In plain sight, without ever once being 'seen'.

Absolute bullshit I call it, but she manages it anyway.

A tap to her earpiece signals them that she's on duty. A locator ping will give her location. Then she's moving to look around.

Tim Drake has posed:
    "<<Scarecrow changes his formula up enough that I can't say for sure, but I have a compound that counteracts his most recent toxin. Not enough for the entire hotel, though.>>" Red Robin makes it up to the eighth floor opening just in time to see the man that Batgirl saw a few mere moments before collapse down onto the ground. His chest is heaving, but his eyes are closed, and Tim proceeds on quiet feet towards him.

    He crouches, puts two fingers to the man's throat. "<<It's not paranoid if they're all really out to get you,>>" Tim comments as he withdraws a small pneumatic injector, loads it, and presses it where his fingers had been. A soft hiss announces the antidote's deployment.

    Like the man Red Robin is dealing with, the woman Flamebird has encountered is now slumped against the wall. Her eyes are closed but her breathing and her pulse are still wild, like she's still in the throes of whatever's taken over her.

    And whatever she saw? Well, there's nothing in her hotel room. So Bette's not about to get attacked by a zombie, thankfully.

    Red Robin withdraws to the junction of the hallways and lifts a hand in greeting towards Batgirl, who he can see down the way. "<<Yeah, the antidote significantly reduces the half-life of the toxin in the bloodstream. But we definitely don't have enough to treat them all here. All we can do is sedate the people we encounter, for the time being.>>"

    For a few moments he stands there, head tilted slightly downwards, typing into the touch screen on his gauntlet.

    The fire escape trick puts X-23 a few floors below where Red Robin and Batgirl are, a few above Flamebird. "<<Okay, group up and start clearing floors. Batgirl and I will head up top and work our way down. X-23, meet up with Flamebird on the third level, do the same from the bottom up. Anarky, Orphan, head up to floor nineteen and start working upwards to meet us. Be careful. These people aren't trying to hurt us but I've seen more than a few Scarecrow victims go wild. The fear toxins affect people differently.>>"

    He nods once to Batgirl and then withdraws his grapple gun from his belt, leaning out into the empty elevator shaft to fire it upwards.

Bette Kane has posed:
After clearing the room of zombie or ghost possibilities. Bette taps in. <Bette Third Floor: Just delusions, no zombie, I hate zombies. And no Ghosts. Best I can do on clearing coming up.>

Bette gets ready to use what she has on hand, she pulls the fire arm. Then she draws up a heated smoke grenade and a Flamebird-a-rang. The pin pulled, she rolls it the length of the hall and then flings the the weapon to hit the sprinklers to be sure. She lines up the shot for a triple, one hit on the control and bounce to the wall, hit the next. -Oh yeah..- Then the bird-a-rang fizzled by sticking in the wall. Two out of three. /Unacceptable, more practice./ Goal accomplished though, the sprinkler system starts to dissipate the smoke, which hopefully diluted some of the toxin if airborne.

Stephanie Brown has posed:
Batgirl makes her way over towards the elevator shaft, just pausing to crouch by the downed man. "I know how much that stuff sucks," she comments to him though he's unconscious, patting him gently before the blond rises back to her feet fully and moves over to the elevator.

She glances down the shaft while drawing her own grapple gun. "Elevator shafts. Good memories," she says as she looks up and aims the gun upwards. "Not." She says, finishing the thought as the bat-shaped grapple head flies upwards and secures itself at the top of the shaft. Soon she's flying upwards, cape streaming behind her.

At the top she uses her telescoping staff to pry the doors open. She barely has it open a half of a foot when a woman's face suddenly appears in the gap. "I'm not going back in the water! You can't make me go back in the water!" she screams. Batgirl groans and pushes the woman back so she can force the doors open enough that she and Red Robin can slip through them.

The woman rushes for the opening though even as Batgirl is clearing it. "Hold on there, that's where the water is," the heroine says as she grabs the woman. Pivoting, Batgirl uses her momentum to swing the woman about her, off her feet, and take her down to the ground gently. A pair of Batcuffs go on her to secure her, and Batgirl drags the woman over to where she can be secured so the woman can't rise or roll away. "Will save what antidote I've got for anyone in worse shape," she says, looking to Red Robin as she straightens and then works her way up the hallway.

Lonnie Machin has posed:
"Unfortunately while I do know a lot about analytical, physical, and inorganic chemistry," Anarky admits, because... yeah, "When it comes to biochemistry and neurochemistry I'm mostly an enthusiastic reader." He... takes the elevator. ...Ding! "But--" He opens the door, and a man comes at him raving-

Lonnie snaps his tazer out and gives the guy a love-tap with a *VRZZZZZZZT* causing him to give a 'HRNNNNNG' before he collapses to the floor in a twitching heap. "I can improvise. Suggestion - we find a doctor who can help who's either unaffected, or one we can sober up and get on his feet?"

Laura Kinney has posed:
<Sweep and clear. Civilians. Non-lethal force only.> X-23 confirms back over the comms. It's probably a little redundant, Tim did after all just give out his orders, but it never hurts to make sure the person in charge knows you've received your orders.

The lower floors are thankfully not very busy. Most of the rooms this low down are likely rented by people attending the conference who couldn't afford a nicer room higher up in the building, who probably stayed late to take advantage of the free booze at the party, or regular guests who have evacuated by now.

On the occasions Laura does run into someone... Well just to be on the safe side she moves in for quick and efficient take-downs. Knockout blows, choke holds and other non-lethal techniques. There's no waiting to see just how badly the toxin is affecting someone, if it's even bothering them at all, because it's just more practical that way.

If someone is mostly passive they'll probably have fewer bad memories to recall if they go unconcious. And if they're hostile? Well better to take them out before they can hurt themselves or others.

Cassandra Cain has posed:
Cassandra nee Orphan looks around the bottom floor. She isn't getting the messages at one hundred percent, but she got some of the important stuff. Gas. Mask. Now. Bad. She rolls her eyes, then ducks into a washroom.

There is a bit of scuffling noises, and a man's voice yelling, "No! Not the pants! Keep the rats away!" Then a sudden kicking sound, and silence.

When the door opens up, Cass has got on a strip of wet cloth over her mouth, wrapped around her head and tied. She starts looking around for things as if she thinks it'll do 'well enough'.

Honestly the girl has a serious problem with overestimating her own abilities. You can't just 'punch through' a gas assault!

Bette Kane has posed:
Bette exits the third floor and follows up the stairs to the fourth. So pedestrian. Some sort of terrified screaming and running above her, then stumbling she moves a flight above to catch a man doing the stair roll. A wince. And she hits him with a Taser after aligning him a bit. One foot zip-tied to the arm rails. Switching channels, she reports the guy's location to the paramedics for when the all clear is given. After he is secure, Bette proceeds back to the fourth floor. Again, with her last smoke grenade and a bird-a-rang, Flamebird sets off the sprinklers in the halls. Score keepers, three of three) Fist pump. Changing to the team channel, <Flamebird fourth floor: hall mostly cleared. In rout to fifth.> Again the dang simple stairs over that poor unconscious dude. Least he won't feel it till he wakes up.

Tim Drake has posed:
    The woman Batgirl pushes back is still in a sequin-studded dress that she likely was wearing at the party earlier, and it's long enough that her movement is limited. Which is good, because there's already one body too many at the bottom of this elevator shaft. When Steph pushes her away a second time, more forcefully, the woman trips over her heels and is down for the count, easy to restrain. By the time Batgirl is done, the woman's eyes are closed, eyes moving erratically behind her lids like she's deep in REM sleep.

    A few feet ahead, Red Robin is on the ground, wrestling with a man who is flailing so hard he's just as likely to injure himself as he is Tim. "They're here, they're here, I gotta go, please! Please, I gotta go!" Whatever he's begging to get away from is a mystery but he's managed to scratch his face and neck significantly enough that his hands are wet with blood, making it a real struggle for Red Robin to get a hold.

    Finally, a click, and then Tim gets the man's arms around the leg of a nearby table so he can get the other cuff on. It's a heavy table; the man's continued thrashing doesn't even budge it, though the courtesy phone atop it gets knocked off onto the floor within a few moments.

    Then, overhead, the fire alarm starts going off. "Oh great," Tim mutters, and then into comms, "<<Anyone know where that alert is coming from?>>" It's only the sprinklers on the floors Flamebird is clearing that go off, so Tim further up is only hearing the alarm. The water raining down hasn't calmed anyone down yet; she'll find an older gentleman huddled underneath a desk in the next room she clears, whimpering.

    The man that encounters Anarky in the elevator isn't even saying words at this point, he's just screaming. His clothes are half-torn off and when he goes down to the taser he doesn't come back up, but there's flickers of movement behind his eyelids.

    So far, none of those with makeshift masks will feel much different, though there's no sign of gas yet. "<<Scarecrow's produced toxins in the past that weren't visible to the naked eye, so we might not be clear. Or maybe they were all dosed somewhere else and this is a delayed effect.>>"

    X-23's next encounter may shed some light. One of the doors opens on the level she's on and a head pokes out. Young, dark hair ruffled like it's been against a pillow, one earbud out and held in his hands. "Uh... what's going on?" he asks. The kid's in a t-shirt and shorts and he definitely looks like he's been asleep this whole time. He leans out further to see unconscious bodies in the hallway and his eyes go wide before he ducks back into his room and shuts the door.

    A second later, Laura will hear the locks turn. "I didn't see anything!" he yells through the door and then frantic footsteps take him into an adjacent room (maybe the bathroom?) where another door snaps shut.

    Orphan, near the bottom, probably isn't seeing much activity yet beyond those that other vigilantes on-site have already put down. But she'll find a couple of young women -- also in night clothes -- trying (and failing) to sneak their way towards the stairwell. "My mom was right, we should have gone to New York instead for our vacation," one is crying to the other. They look scared, but not panicked, not yet.

    "<<I've put in a call for more antidote to be delivered from our backstock. We can let the emergency responders handle it, let's just make sure no one's going to hurt themselves or anyone else for now.>>"

Stephanie Brown has posed:
Batgirl confirms that Tim is alright and then moves on to the next door, checking it quickly, and then the one after that. Signs of struggles, a chair overturned, items knocked off a dresser, but no people.

Further down the hallway is a downed woman next to a flipped over housekeeping cart. Batgirl checks her pulse. "Beaten, but alive," she says. She picks her up and takes her into a room, making sure it is empty, and putting her on the bed, then closing the door and locking it. She crouches by the cart, getting one of the bed mints and slipping it into a pouch on her utility belt. "What?" she says towards Red Robin, the rebreather hiding the grin that he'll know is there. "Those things are good."

The next door is ajar, and Batgirl swings it open carefully. Inside a woman in her forties stands facing the door. Hair mussed up, but calm. "Oh, there you are," she says in a relieved voice to the costumed hero. Batgirl relaxes slightly and says, "Are you ok? If so best to stay locked in your room while we take care of everyone."

The woman, dressed in a smart looking skirt suit, smiles. "Take care of... the way you took care of Frank, my husband? You thought I didn't know?" the older woman asks, and then suddenly she lunges at Batgirl, raising high a knife she had hidden behind her back, bringing it stabbing down on the woman her hallucination tells her is ruining her family.

Batgirl steps into the attack, arms crossing and lifting up to block the woman's arm before the knife can reach her. A wrist hold is quickly applied, the woman falling to her knees and flipping halfway over to avoid her wrist being broken. It makes it easy to disarm her, and then Batgirl is busy cuffing her. "Sorry lady. You got the wrong blond," Batgirl says as she secures the woman to something heavy in the room.

Lonnie Machin has posed:
Lonnie makes his way down the hallway and hums under his breath. Hmmmm hmmm hmmm, he steps out of the way of someone who charges him in a blind panic and gives them a kick in the butt, sending them sprawling in a heap. "Na na na... all the rumors are true, yeah, they hated on me since school yeah, now me and Cardi we cool, yeah- na na na na, na-" He looks up, and says, "It occurs to me, if the Scarecrow is here and is causing chaos, that means one of two things, Red - either he's running one of his insane experiments, in which case he's going to still be on site to observe the results, or given that this place is full of information on new pharmeceuticals, there's something here he *wants* and he's creating cover so he can steal it so where the HELL is the Scarecrow?" He gives one person attacking another a light shock to the ribcage. "He's not usually hard to spot, he wears a burlap bag on his head and sometimes he carries a scythe-!"

Bette Kane has posed:
Okay, awake but just sitting there, the puts Bette in an awkward position. He shows only signs of being terrified. Just seeing what is happening could reduce some people to that state. The water going down from above, she taps her Comm: <Flamebird fourth floor: I turned on the alarms and sprinklers to dissipate any airborne particulates. Not sure it is effective.> Bette just kneels down beside him, thankfully, Flamebird's outfit is showy, not scary. Some might even say flattering. (Others: theatrical.) "Help is on the way.. Stay here." Nothing seems suited to make that happen though, so she'll just hope. A brief listen. <Flamebird: moving to fifth, had a hang-up.>

Laura Kinney has posed:
\ It's not until X-23 is close to rendezvousing with Flamebird that she pauses <Can anyone confirm the youngest apparent age of a victim?> she asks over comms. <Minors dont seem to be suffering any ill effects.>

Thankfully for the minors in question her advice would be to lock themselves in their rooms and phone for help anyway. So the rapid retreat the boy makes saves her time asking nicely. Or trying to ask nicely anyway..

There might be a little confusion at first, once she slinks out into the same corridor, as Laura is dressed more like a criminal than a hero. Dark hoodie, wet cloth over her face, tight black pants and some boots that look ideal for applying an unpleasant level of violence to a person.

<Do we need to clear floor by floor? Or should be divert to the fire escape and bypass anyone that's been dosed?>

Cassandra Cain has posed:
So one might be aware by this point exactly how underequipped Orphan came to the site. She is wearing a shirt leaving her arms bare, a pair of pants, and currently a towel wrapped about her head (just in case). She doesn't appear to even HAVE a grapple on her, let alone using it.

So when she sees the two ladies in their nightclothes, she's likely to hardly register. She looks at them, gauges them to be 'not', and then walks right past. Whatever they say does not concern her, and she tends to ignore people's gabble anyway.

Then she finds what she was searching for: a stairwell. She takes a quick glance left to right, then gets started. She pushes, she pounds steps with briefly touching feet...

She accidentally leaps over Bette as she passes the woman on the landing, looking rather surprised herself! Skidding to a stop she glances about, her expression saying that she wasn't expecting a kind of ...

She wasn't expecting Flamebird, that's for certain.

Bette Kane has posed:
What was that? The Dark shadow had Bette on high alert, had she started to succumb the toxin? She looks, up as the figure passes her in the stairwell. But, this is a Bette thing actually, she leaps to the arm tails and bounces upward to the figure enough to make out the face of Cassandra, "Oh, hey. Didn't know you were here.. Seems to be from the conference just up."

Tim Drake has posed:
    The only response Batgirl gets is a thumbs up, initially. Red Robin has to lever himself up into a seated position and give himself a little shake before he's stable enough to be on his feet again. "Might not even be dosed," he says of the housekeeper, and he goes still again, likely looking at his HUD while she continues clearing rooms.

    "I used to swipe them by the handful when I was a kid." And there's the headline: Timothy Drake Wayne's horrific criminal history revealed! He doesn't go for one himself but he shakes his head in amusement towards Batgirl before he continues on, taking the stairs a level down while she continues clearing the second of the two penthouses on the top floor.

    Once she's cuffed that woman, in fact, Batgirl will have done so. No one else on the top floor aside for the two others already restrained in the hallway and the housekeeper unconscious in one of the rooms. Though the woman out in the hall *is* blonde. Is the man cuffed across from her Frank? Who knows.

    Maybe just a coincedence, though.

    "<<No sign of him so far, no,>>" Red Robin confirms. "<<If he's here to steal something I imagine it would have to be in the form of documents or computer files. I don't know if they were handing out pharmaceutical compounds as free swag during the conference.>>"

    Still, he makes a note to scan the rooms for any potential data sources that Scarecrow might be after. "<<Somnycin isn't actually in production yet, right? Maybe that's what he's--.>>"

    Tim's comms cut off.

    The man in the room that Flamebird encounters doesn't say aything, but after a few moments he nods at her and remains huddled where he is, calm enough to at least follow directions. And he's well over fifty by the looks of him, not a child. The two young women that Orphan passes are probably early twenties or late teens. And the housekeeper who may or may not be dosed that Batgirl tucked away safely is definitely in her thirties at least.

    Basically, there isn't a pattern to who is running around, clearly under the effects of some sort of drug, and those that are still scared but more composed. No commonalities in age or ethnicity. Some of the affected are wearing conference badges, but until a proper assessment of the scene is made, there's no clear answer.

    More and more, the encounters become less violent. Several affected people are found already on the floor, apparently deep asleep. Nearby where Flamebird and Orphan encounter each other, a man is taking a nap on the stairs in a position that looks deeply uncomfortable, but his eyes move rapidly behind his eyelids.

    A few moments pass before Red Robin's comms crackle back to life. "<<--and it's probably starting to decay in their systems already. Wait, did anyone feel that?>>" From the sound of it, he wasn't aware that he was briefly off-comms. Steph is the only one close enough to his position to register what he's talking about, which was a brief thickening of the air as if lightning was about to strike before the feeling dissipated.

    He's quiet on the line, before a deep sigh crackles over everyone's comms. "<<I think things are starting to calm down, at least.>>"

Stephanie Brown has posed:
Batgirl jogs back down the hallway, the last of the top floor penthouses clear. She pauses at the elevator, head tilting to the side in that body language pose of curiosity. << Red Robin your comms cut out right after 'not yet in production' and back on at 'probably starting to decay'. Odd. I would not expect anything in a hotel to interfere with these things. Might want to scan the area you were in for a cause. I'll do the same here and then head down two floors. >>"

Batgirl retraces her steps, letting her suit's sensors record what they can for Oracle to take a look at. And then it's back to the elevator shaft. She jumps into the shaft, pitting herself against gravity as she slides down the elevator cable. When across from the next elevator door below where Red Robin went, she jumps over to it and pries it open, moving down the hallways and subduing people with non-lethal jabs from a tazer.

Lonnie Machin has posed:
"I didn't really have all my gear, but my tablet just rebooted." Anarky taps it with a finger.

"Anyway, I'm currently... on the sixth floor by the ice machine. I'll do a cursory sweep. You might want to take a blood sample from someone - I don't have that kind of equipment on me right now."

"I really was just here for the conference! ...I like keeping on top of the pharmeceutical industry, it's high up on my list of malefactors."

Laura Kinney has posed:
<The air is clean.> X-23 decides, pulling her face covering off to get a better sniff. <All victims so far seem to have been drinking alcohol. But then it was a party.>

The next open room she comes across will get a quick inspection. A check for open bottles or half drunk glasses, a random alcoholic drink from the mini-bar opened and similar checks for hotel food.

Tampering with the food or drink is after all how she'd go about poisoning an entire hotel. Although she'd just use something fatal. Nothing as inefficient as making everyone scared and.. hoping that it somehow leads to profit down the line.

Then again there is a reason most villains in Gotham don't end up in regular prisons.

Cassandra Cain has posed:
Cassandra, still not certain what she's actually doing, gives Bette a nod of acceptance if not exactly greeting. She lets her eyes pass over the woman, checking her pulse from a distance and her eye movements. Then she sighs, and pulls off her own makeshift mask as if she's tired of wearing it.

The eyeroll says it all: she doesn't think that they're doing jack squat. Then she motions to Bette's own, upnodding towards it with exasperation.

She then reaches out and grabs a person who's about to walk out the door on the next landing by the collarbone. She idly wraps her right arm around the woman's neck before she can walk off the landing and tumble down the shaft, choking her out with apparent boredom.

She tosses a glance at Bette, indicating upstairs without words.

Bette Kane has posed:
In truth, Bette was only certain she was not under the effect of some delusion when Cassandra didn't attack. A hostile Cass would very much be the stuff she might expect to see on terror inducing drugs. She nods and starts to abandon the useless cloth mask though. The Cass takes someone out silently before Bette even noticed them coming. So very cool.

At the motion up, Flamebird is quick to move up the steps. She has to confirm her target, but does wait to see if the man that rushes down from above is anything but friend or unknown. She let him reach the landing between floors and flings one of her few hi-tech weapons, taser bolos. He is caught around the torso and they circle in before electrifying him. Of course, they are at a premium, so she does go retrieve the bolo and just zip tie as she reports in. "Flamebird, stairwell between fifth and sixth. Orphan is with me. Er, I am with Orphan. Well, she is here."

Tim Drake has posed:
    "<<They did?>>" Red Robin is momentarily at a loss for words. He retraces his steps from where he stands, to the stairs. He gets to the point where he was standing when his comms cut off without noticing anything out of place -- no more than the various unconscious bodies and the recent chaos would suggest, at least -- so he heads back into the hallway.

    There are still people to subdue but they seem few and far between now in comparison. Of the ones already unconscious, many are bearing injuries that look to be either self-inflicted or having occurred during their attempts to escape from whatever monstrosities they thought they were fleeing from.

    Several are dead. Three older gentlemen from what will likely be diagnosed as heart attacks, a woman in a bathroom that had fallen through the glass shower stall and another that had accidentally drowned herself in an overflowing tub, two men who had tried to fight back against their nightmares without realizing they were fighting each other, and then of course the person at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

    At the bottom of the stairwell, a SWAT team breaches the door and begins to ascend, wearing gas masks and body armor. They're followed by a team of emergency responders in hazmat suits.

    Up at the top of the hotel, forty-something floors away, Red Robin comes up empty. "<<If there was something here blocking signals, I'm not finding it. The place is trashed.>>" He stops to look out at the Gotham skyline through the shattered remains of a window. Out on the horizon, Tim's not sure, but he thinks he can see a hint of pink starting to show.

    Is it really nearly the morning already?

    Police chatter cuts through his thoughts. "<<GCPD is headed up. They've already received the delivery of antidote I called in. They can probably handle things from here.>>" He does get that blood sample though, having to double back to the penthouse level for it. There wasn't anyone on the floor he was on.

    "<<We might've just gotten lucky and arrived after it dissipated from the air. Flamebird, Orphan, Anarky, I think you three are closest to the bottom. Try to clear out before you're spotted.>>"

    Something isn't sitting right with him, and Tim is at least high up enough that he doesn't have to worry about -- oh, nevermind. He receives word of an approaching police helicopter through his system's automated monitoring of police channels. "<<Belay that, everyone out. I'll stay behind to coordinate with officials. Think I spotted a friendly face down in the lobby that might be willing to share information. I'll let him know about the potential alcohol angle, thanks X-23.>>"

    In fact, Jim Gordon himself is on the scene, which should be no surprise given the significance of this emergency.

    "<<Are you worried that I might be thinking you're involved somehow, Anarky? This is a lot of collateral damage for you. Only half of these people are big pharma.>>" He huffs out a breath that reads vaguely as humorous across the comms line. "<<Something's weird about this, though, that's for sure. I know this is asking a lot but if you could all write up a report of what you've seen, we might be able to piece something together. Good work, at any rate. Red Robin out.>>"

Lonnie Machin has posed:
"I am commonly misunderstood, Red Robin." Anarky says, "I'm not here to cause chaos," He steps over a person and then bends down to check their pulse, before he turns them so they won't aspirate their own vomit, "I'm here to save the world." It's just that he doesn't have a lot of patience and doesn't want to work within the system. "A little revolution now and then is good for humanity."

Or maybe a lot of it.

"I'll put in an order for sandwiches."

Laura Kinney has posed:
<A gas delivery system is indiscriminate. It would have dosed the teenagers and kids too.> Laura points out over the comms. And then of course the police finally get around to moving in. Cutting short her investigation. <Copy that. Making an exit now.>

And she does indeed make her own exit. Snikting a door open, then opening the window and leaping for the building opposite. It doesn't really matter if there's a fire escape or not. Her claws can dig into solid stone allowing her to climb up and away.

And in Gotham who'll notice a little more minor property damage?

Cassandra Cain has posed:
A moment later, a window breaks. A Cassandra, arms over her head, is the motivating force for said window becoming a tool for dramatic exitude, but she waited approximately one second before starting to plan said exit.

The fact that she has no grapple, no cape, and five stories of height never enters her mind. She falls, flipping in mid-air, and breaks a window on an adjacent building. Landing in the room, she bypasses some people who are doing things that she politely chooses to ignore.

She vanishes into the building and is just gone. Really at that point even Steph could pull a vanishing act, so it's likely appro for Cass to manage it.

Orphan taps her earpiece off.

Bette Kane has posed:
     Bette hadn't seen Cassandra use her comms, so she calls down to where the woman was. "Bug out." she calls downwards, and rushes to the sixth before heading through a room and dashing off the balcony. The two people in the room clearly weren't afraid, and hopefully didn't notice the orange blurr. A look back, no, they were not noticing anything else happening.

Lonnie Machin has posed:
Lonnie pauses. "No minors..." and then he snaps his fingers. "Tell Comisssioner Gordon to confiscate every bottle of alcohol here!" He looks around, and then he reaches down to gingerly pick up a half-spilled bottle of vodka between two fingers. "Wild party."

He espies the cap, and corks it. "They're going to need to get it to a toxicology lab."

"Red, I grabbed one - I don't have a crime lab, so I'll hand this over to you later. Can we snag a couple more from one of the hotel bars before we clear out, just to expand our sample size?"

Tim Drake has posed:
    Having already taken a grapple line down to the mezzanine floor, Tim fires off a few texts to Commissioner Gordon's cell encouraging him to 'look up'. Once spotted, Red Robin gives a cheeky smile and salute, before gesturing over his shoulder.

    Look, maybe Batman can pull off the clandestine rooftop meetings, but Tim's wearing too much red to be able to brood to the level necessary for such a thing.

    "<<Copy. Not likely to be gas, or at least administered where minors could have been exposed.>>" He opens the window at the end of the hall and settles down on the windowsill as he tracks the sound of the Commish's shoes on the marble tiles, headed up the stairs nearby.

    He drums his fingers against his leg. "<<I'll see what I can do. Can you get extra pickles on the side for me? And no revolutions until I've gotten at least a solid eight hours of sleep.>>"

    Gordon gets him those bottles, as well as access to the wealth of reports that an incident of this scale will generate. It's going to be a lot to sift through come morning... which has already arrived. The sun breaks free from the horizon, shining down on another day in Gotham.

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    TRIAL #3A NOTES:

    Dosage adjustment necessary. Unconscious mind should have been powerful enough for materialization, however activity in hypothalamus was not adequately dampened. Excess energy routed through subject muscles, allowing for walking nightmares. Also recommend settings on device fine-tuned for more precise area of effect as agents within GCPD reported side effects of field exposure. Detailed report to come later.