FoH Detonation
Mar. 28th, 2018 07:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainThe Brotherhood takes on the FoH Headquarters. Things are a bit more explosive than expected.
And there it was. The Headquarters of the Fuckheads of Humanity.
Wanda crossed her arms over her chest, wishing they'd been able to get the building's schematics so that Fatale could have teleported them inside. Not, she had to admit, that breaking the front doors was going to be any problem - just that they'd lose some of the element of surprise.
They'd lose more, however, if she just stood here, unconsciously waiting for her father to give the order to move in. She glanced over at Lance, caught his answering look, then nodded. Arms in front of her, she generated a hex -
And the front doors of the facility burst inward in an explosion of glass and metal. "Try and get the fuckers out before we blow the place!" she reminded everyone. The key word there being "try". If it meant any of theirs were going to get hurt again? Well, she really didn't give a damn if there were some injuries to the other side.
Well, Wanda sure as fuck didn't do things halfway. There was no way Eileen was going to. Rising into the air effortlessly--it had damn well better be effortless, after all those months of practice--she propelled herself through the ragged hole that had once been the building entrance. Only half-consciously, she began tracking the electromagnetic signatures that indicated human sources, contrasting with the steadier background EM harmony of all the electrical wiring and equipment running through the structure. "The lemmings should get out now, while you're still feeling generous," she commented, almost casually flinging one flatscan back toward the exit with a sudden surge of electron repulsion.
"There's a harmony this way that feels like a main server and computer center," the blond added, eyes glowing a brilliant purple as she nodded to hall branching off the foyer to the right. "Can I trash it?"
"You trash it, I burn it up?" Pyro offered. If he wasn't allowed to go after any of those fuckheads, then he was damn well going to burn everything else he could. The others could handle getting them out; he was all out of sympathy. They'd shot Magneto and Havok. They all deserved to burn.
But for now, he was behaving, using his wrist device to generate fire and hurry the assholes towards the exit, with the judicious application of scary, scary flames.
Striding beside Wanda, Lance put his hands out, letting vibrations rumble into the foundations, setting off small quakes throughout the complex. He worked them from one end to the other, herding people from the safety of their offices and rooms toward the exits. It required an intense amount of concentration - that level of precision - and he hated it. He hated holding it all back. He hated keeping his anger in check. Part of him wanted to just open a hole in the ground and dump everyone and everything inside, but he knew what was at stake, and that was the stupid part. He had to be the grownup. He had to play it smart.
They should try and get the data off, Wanda reminded herself as the floor began to shake, rattling desks and chairs and sending flatscans scurrying even faster for the exits. There could be something important there, something that definitively tied the FoH to the other bastards. Except they'd have to get someone from the school to deal with the encryption, which could be problema- her train of thought cut off as she caught sight of a poster on the wall. One featuring a shot of her father from his appearance on the news, with the crosshairs of a gunsight drawn in around his head.
Hex energy crackling around her hands, she turned towards Eileen and Pyro. "Do it."
Pietro--returning from people herding in a gust of wind--was practically dancing from foot to foot, his image just slightly... vibratey. "Do it hard. Fuck 'em up."
Eileen's grin was bordering on the ecstatic when she got the order; yeah, actually killing these shitheads was to be avoided as much as possible, but she could at least do her part to demolish their fucking bigot clubhouse. "Hard is the only way I know how to do it," she smirked back at Pietro--who looked even more animated than usual, which was saying a lot. She turned her glowing gaze on Pyro, and jerked her head down the hall. "C'mon, firebug By the time we finish, there won't be enough left to prove there ever was a building here."
'Cause, yeah, she'd seen the poster, too. And, yeah, she had kinda had it with these fucking flatscans and their fascist, fear-mongering bullshit. Time to kneecap this movement before they went full-on Brownshirt. A guard--or maybe just a member of the staff--appeared in front of them with a handgun, but Eileen repulsed him into the ceiling and then sent him skidding down the hall with barely a backward glance. She was done playing that game; from now on, any FoH bastard she laid eyes on was getting thoroughly concussed and tossed in the direction of the front door. If they didn't have brains enough to make it out before the place went up, then it was because they were a bunch of dumb fucks to begin with.
"Please leave some for me to have fun with," Pyro bitched, although he managed not to sound all that bitchy at all. They were finally doing something, and he was highly hopeful that the fuckers would give them a reason to take the kid gloves off any minute now.
In the meantime, torching their server room would be enough.
He opened the door they'd been heading for, revealing computer stations and a bank of servers at the back. Oh, and a bunch of hateful flatscans, of course. A flick of his wrist and a wave of fire went through the room, just above their heads, near enough to those of the taller ones to maybe scorch their hair a little. "Get out, get out," he told them, moving out of the doorway and gesturing for them to get the fuck out. "Or stay, and make my day."
Lance ripped the poster off the wall as he walked past, fury building in his chest. He turned the corner, then kicked in a set of large, fancy doors to find himself in a conference room. Much to his dismay, the people there didn't look like the ones in charge, but they were close enough. He held the poster up in the air, then with his other hand began to open a massive sinkhole in the middle of the room. It shook the pictures off of the walls, and quickly swallowed the entire table, as the men and women threw themselves against the walls with shrieks and screams. "You think that murder is propaganda, now, assholes?!"
Wanda glanced around and took stock of the other Brotherhood members, assuring herself that everyone was okay so far, then turned just in time to see one of the men who'd been cowering by the wall a moment before pull a gun from the inside pocket of his coast and take aim. At Pietro.
"Pietro!" she called out, even as she set off a blast of hex energy towards the bastard, who smacked back into the wall with enough force to break bones. Not caring whether or not it had, she sent hexes off towards several other people in the area.
Pyro's light show was more than enough incentive to send most of the tech-nerd-bigots scampering for the door and making a beeline for the building's exit. Two of them, however, broke of running in the other direction--further down the hall, deeper into the building. That was enough to excite Eileen's curiosity, so she refrained from overloading their nervous systems for the time being. She gestured in the direction of the banks of computers and rows of servers filling the room--unnecessary, since her powers worked whether she could move her arms or not, but it felt like the thing to do--and all the assembled electronics guttered and sparked internally for a moment before going dead. So much for whatever information and propaganda network the Fuckheads of Humanity had set up here.
"Light it up," she told Pyro with a grin. "Don't hold back. Then come follow me--I think I might have found something interesting." Or was about to be led to something interesting; the techs were out of sight now, but it was easy enough to track them through the building by their harmonies.
Like Pyro needed to be told not to hold back. Fire streamed towards the servers and spread quickly as Eileen headed down the corridor after the flatscans. Fuck if it didn't feel amazing as he fed it more oxygen, then pulled a few flames towards the nearest desk. They jumped from desk to desk, catching as they went, and it was a damn shame that Pyro had to leave at all. He watched it all with a smirk, then only turned to jog after Eileen, still feeling the heat of the fire in his chest.
It wasn't often Pietro was caught off guard, but there was enough going on that he'd needed Wanda's heads up. Shit, he'd almost ended up in a bed in Xavier's infirmary like the old man. Hell no. Pietro zipped around, collecting the people Lance's sinkhole had almost eaten and setting them outside with a little, "go fuck yourselves" to send them on their way.
A few of them puked as they started running. Epic.
Pietro rolled up beside Wanda when he finished, just to watch the chaos in slow mo. So. Epic. "Where to?"
Lance strolled up beside the two of them, though it was clear that he was only barely holding his anger in check by the vibrations in the pictures on the walls. "Pyro and Phantazia headed for the back."
"That sounds ominous," Wanda observed, frowning as she hexed one persistent asshole through the nearest window - and got him stuck halfway through. Huh. Well, it'd probably break sooner or later if Lance kept vibrating shit. "Should we go see what they found?"
Eileen, meanwhile, had followed the two nerds down a level, and past a number of other side-passages and doors leading to who-the-hell-knew-what. They were heading somewhere important, she gathered that much, and not just looking for a place to hide until the scary mutants went away. She noted them pausing some distance ahead of her, and a fluctuation in the ambient harmonies. But by the time she swung into the room they had previously occupied, it was just in time to see a fairly serious electronically-locked security door bang closed in front of her.
"Well, shit," she muttered, deciding to wait for the others before trying to bypass the thing.
"Shit what? Can't you do your thing?" Pyro asked as he came to a stop beside her, slightly breathy from his run to catch up with her. (He'd been afraid she'd be having all the fun with the two fuckheads, without letting him torch either one of them.) "'Cause I'll just do my thing if you can't," he added, flicking his wrist again so his device created a small flame.
Somewhere back down the hall, Pietro frowned. "Well, I haven't heard any explosions. Which concerns me. So yeah, let's roll."
Lance nodded, heading down the hall. "And when we're done, I'm backhoeing this hellhole."
"Maybe we should send everyone else out?" Wanda suggested as she followed him. "Just in case?" If Eileen and Pyro hadn't exploded it, it had to be something big.
"If they aren't out by now, then they're a part of it, whatever it is," Lance told her.
Pietro rolled his eyes and said, “I’ll do a quick sweep for stragglers, get Blob and everyone clear, and meet you guys, Pyro, and Eileen in a few. Don’t explode it all without me. Later.” And he was gone.
"The hell I can't," Eileen told Pyro with conversational irritability. "I can crack this thing like it was an eggshell, no problem. Just figured I'd wait for Lance and Wanda to weigh in before I did it." The blond, still hovering in mid-air, shrugged. Wasn't as if it actually mattered.
"Watch and learn," she went on, brow furrowing above eerily glowing eyes. The locking mechanism for the heavy vault door gave a guttering electronic wheeze, fizzled slightly, and there was an almighty crack of giant tumblers disengaging within. As it began to sag open, an explosive blast from inside rocketed Eileen backwards through the air and into the hall again. Her momentum came to an abrupt, painful halt as she collided with the wall, and she slumped to the floor without so much as one profanity uttered.
The only reason Pyro fared marginally better was that he had not been hovering, and he had not been straight in front of the door. He hit the opposite wall, too, but managed to take the hit weaker hit on his side. His shoulder, elbow, hip and knee smarted as he picked himself up from the floor, and that was when he noticed Eileen. His eyebrows raised, and he rushed to her side. She had a pulse, good. That meant he was free to turn back towards the open door, behind which, he had no doubt, the two cowardly fucking flatscans who had attacked her cowered. "Kid gloves come off," he told them, and flicked his wrist, expanding the flame into a huge fireball he guided swiftly into the previously locked room.
Only then did he notice the stacks of ammunition and firearms inside. He reached with both hands to put out the fire, already knowing that he was too late.
Pietro, having cleared pretty much everyone out--or at least he'd gotten them moving in the right direction--heard the explosion and went directly for the source. He zipped right past Wanda and Lance and hit his knees beside Eileen, reaching out to scoop her up and get her to safety. He hoped to hell she didn't have some kind of spinal injury that'd be aggravated by--
"Fuck!" In slow motion, a metallic burning sensation tore through his right side.
He'd been shot. Fucking shot!
"Pietro!" Wanda screamed. And Eileen. And Pyro, and - fuck, what the hell was she supposed to do, and where the fuck was her father when they actually needed him, and - more by instinct than intent, Wanda generated a hex that created a domelike barrier over the Brotherhood members. And rocked on her feet, trying to hold it steady as the explosion hit.
To be honest, Lance didn't know what the fuck had happened. They'd only just reached the others when everything seemed to go to hell in a handbasket, and all he could see was his team falling apart. He felt the call-out for Pietro build in his throat at the same time as he felt the shift of energy suddenly take hold around them, and saw Wanda do...something bubblish around the entire group as the building started to come down and fire washed over them. Not knowing what else to do, he pulled at the concrete beneath their feet, drawing it up and around, forming a dome of protective rock beneath Wanda's field. Calling out to his phone, he yelled, "Hey Google, call Fatale!"
"What the fuck is happening?" a panicked voice demanded a moment later. "The whole building just collapsed!"
Lance exchanged a strained look with Wanda. They were both working to keep the entire building from crushing the group, and he knew it wouldn't last forever. They needed out. "Portal. Now. Get us out of here!"
And there it was. The Headquarters of the Fuckheads of Humanity.
Wanda crossed her arms over her chest, wishing they'd been able to get the building's schematics so that Fatale could have teleported them inside. Not, she had to admit, that breaking the front doors was going to be any problem - just that they'd lose some of the element of surprise.
They'd lose more, however, if she just stood here, unconsciously waiting for her father to give the order to move in. She glanced over at Lance, caught his answering look, then nodded. Arms in front of her, she generated a hex -
And the front doors of the facility burst inward in an explosion of glass and metal. "Try and get the fuckers out before we blow the place!" she reminded everyone. The key word there being "try". If it meant any of theirs were going to get hurt again? Well, she really didn't give a damn if there were some injuries to the other side.
Well, Wanda sure as fuck didn't do things halfway. There was no way Eileen was going to. Rising into the air effortlessly--it had damn well better be effortless, after all those months of practice--she propelled herself through the ragged hole that had once been the building entrance. Only half-consciously, she began tracking the electromagnetic signatures that indicated human sources, contrasting with the steadier background EM harmony of all the electrical wiring and equipment running through the structure. "The lemmings should get out now, while you're still feeling generous," she commented, almost casually flinging one flatscan back toward the exit with a sudden surge of electron repulsion.
"There's a harmony this way that feels like a main server and computer center," the blond added, eyes glowing a brilliant purple as she nodded to hall branching off the foyer to the right. "Can I trash it?"
"You trash it, I burn it up?" Pyro offered. If he wasn't allowed to go after any of those fuckheads, then he was damn well going to burn everything else he could. The others could handle getting them out; he was all out of sympathy. They'd shot Magneto and Havok. They all deserved to burn.
But for now, he was behaving, using his wrist device to generate fire and hurry the assholes towards the exit, with the judicious application of scary, scary flames.
Striding beside Wanda, Lance put his hands out, letting vibrations rumble into the foundations, setting off small quakes throughout the complex. He worked them from one end to the other, herding people from the safety of their offices and rooms toward the exits. It required an intense amount of concentration - that level of precision - and he hated it. He hated holding it all back. He hated keeping his anger in check. Part of him wanted to just open a hole in the ground and dump everyone and everything inside, but he knew what was at stake, and that was the stupid part. He had to be the grownup. He had to play it smart.
They should try and get the data off, Wanda reminded herself as the floor began to shake, rattling desks and chairs and sending flatscans scurrying even faster for the exits. There could be something important there, something that definitively tied the FoH to the other bastards. Except they'd have to get someone from the school to deal with the encryption, which could be problema- her train of thought cut off as she caught sight of a poster on the wall. One featuring a shot of her father from his appearance on the news, with the crosshairs of a gunsight drawn in around his head.
Hex energy crackling around her hands, she turned towards Eileen and Pyro. "Do it."
Pietro--returning from people herding in a gust of wind--was practically dancing from foot to foot, his image just slightly... vibratey. "Do it hard. Fuck 'em up."
Eileen's grin was bordering on the ecstatic when she got the order; yeah, actually killing these shitheads was to be avoided as much as possible, but she could at least do her part to demolish their fucking bigot clubhouse. "Hard is the only way I know how to do it," she smirked back at Pietro--who looked even more animated than usual, which was saying a lot. She turned her glowing gaze on Pyro, and jerked her head down the hall. "C'mon, firebug By the time we finish, there won't be enough left to prove there ever was a building here."
'Cause, yeah, she'd seen the poster, too. And, yeah, she had kinda had it with these fucking flatscans and their fascist, fear-mongering bullshit. Time to kneecap this movement before they went full-on Brownshirt. A guard--or maybe just a member of the staff--appeared in front of them with a handgun, but Eileen repulsed him into the ceiling and then sent him skidding down the hall with barely a backward glance. She was done playing that game; from now on, any FoH bastard she laid eyes on was getting thoroughly concussed and tossed in the direction of the front door. If they didn't have brains enough to make it out before the place went up, then it was because they were a bunch of dumb fucks to begin with.
"Please leave some for me to have fun with," Pyro bitched, although he managed not to sound all that bitchy at all. They were finally doing something, and he was highly hopeful that the fuckers would give them a reason to take the kid gloves off any minute now.
In the meantime, torching their server room would be enough.
He opened the door they'd been heading for, revealing computer stations and a bank of servers at the back. Oh, and a bunch of hateful flatscans, of course. A flick of his wrist and a wave of fire went through the room, just above their heads, near enough to those of the taller ones to maybe scorch their hair a little. "Get out, get out," he told them, moving out of the doorway and gesturing for them to get the fuck out. "Or stay, and make my day."
Lance ripped the poster off the wall as he walked past, fury building in his chest. He turned the corner, then kicked in a set of large, fancy doors to find himself in a conference room. Much to his dismay, the people there didn't look like the ones in charge, but they were close enough. He held the poster up in the air, then with his other hand began to open a massive sinkhole in the middle of the room. It shook the pictures off of the walls, and quickly swallowed the entire table, as the men and women threw themselves against the walls with shrieks and screams. "You think that murder is propaganda, now, assholes?!"
Wanda glanced around and took stock of the other Brotherhood members, assuring herself that everyone was okay so far, then turned just in time to see one of the men who'd been cowering by the wall a moment before pull a gun from the inside pocket of his coast and take aim. At Pietro.
"Pietro!" she called out, even as she set off a blast of hex energy towards the bastard, who smacked back into the wall with enough force to break bones. Not caring whether or not it had, she sent hexes off towards several other people in the area.
Pyro's light show was more than enough incentive to send most of the tech-nerd-bigots scampering for the door and making a beeline for the building's exit. Two of them, however, broke of running in the other direction--further down the hall, deeper into the building. That was enough to excite Eileen's curiosity, so she refrained from overloading their nervous systems for the time being. She gestured in the direction of the banks of computers and rows of servers filling the room--unnecessary, since her powers worked whether she could move her arms or not, but it felt like the thing to do--and all the assembled electronics guttered and sparked internally for a moment before going dead. So much for whatever information and propaganda network the Fuckheads of Humanity had set up here.
"Light it up," she told Pyro with a grin. "Don't hold back. Then come follow me--I think I might have found something interesting." Or was about to be led to something interesting; the techs were out of sight now, but it was easy enough to track them through the building by their harmonies.
Like Pyro needed to be told not to hold back. Fire streamed towards the servers and spread quickly as Eileen headed down the corridor after the flatscans. Fuck if it didn't feel amazing as he fed it more oxygen, then pulled a few flames towards the nearest desk. They jumped from desk to desk, catching as they went, and it was a damn shame that Pyro had to leave at all. He watched it all with a smirk, then only turned to jog after Eileen, still feeling the heat of the fire in his chest.
It wasn't often Pietro was caught off guard, but there was enough going on that he'd needed Wanda's heads up. Shit, he'd almost ended up in a bed in Xavier's infirmary like the old man. Hell no. Pietro zipped around, collecting the people Lance's sinkhole had almost eaten and setting them outside with a little, "go fuck yourselves" to send them on their way.
A few of them puked as they started running. Epic.
Pietro rolled up beside Wanda when he finished, just to watch the chaos in slow mo. So. Epic. "Where to?"
Lance strolled up beside the two of them, though it was clear that he was only barely holding his anger in check by the vibrations in the pictures on the walls. "Pyro and Phantazia headed for the back."
"That sounds ominous," Wanda observed, frowning as she hexed one persistent asshole through the nearest window - and got him stuck halfway through. Huh. Well, it'd probably break sooner or later if Lance kept vibrating shit. "Should we go see what they found?"
Eileen, meanwhile, had followed the two nerds down a level, and past a number of other side-passages and doors leading to who-the-hell-knew-what. They were heading somewhere important, she gathered that much, and not just looking for a place to hide until the scary mutants went away. She noted them pausing some distance ahead of her, and a fluctuation in the ambient harmonies. But by the time she swung into the room they had previously occupied, it was just in time to see a fairly serious electronically-locked security door bang closed in front of her.
"Well, shit," she muttered, deciding to wait for the others before trying to bypass the thing.
"Shit what? Can't you do your thing?" Pyro asked as he came to a stop beside her, slightly breathy from his run to catch up with her. (He'd been afraid she'd be having all the fun with the two fuckheads, without letting him torch either one of them.) "'Cause I'll just do my thing if you can't," he added, flicking his wrist again so his device created a small flame.
Somewhere back down the hall, Pietro frowned. "Well, I haven't heard any explosions. Which concerns me. So yeah, let's roll."
Lance nodded, heading down the hall. "And when we're done, I'm backhoeing this hellhole."
"Maybe we should send everyone else out?" Wanda suggested as she followed him. "Just in case?" If Eileen and Pyro hadn't exploded it, it had to be something big.
"If they aren't out by now, then they're a part of it, whatever it is," Lance told her.
Pietro rolled his eyes and said, “I’ll do a quick sweep for stragglers, get Blob and everyone clear, and meet you guys, Pyro, and Eileen in a few. Don’t explode it all without me. Later.” And he was gone.
"The hell I can't," Eileen told Pyro with conversational irritability. "I can crack this thing like it was an eggshell, no problem. Just figured I'd wait for Lance and Wanda to weigh in before I did it." The blond, still hovering in mid-air, shrugged. Wasn't as if it actually mattered.
"Watch and learn," she went on, brow furrowing above eerily glowing eyes. The locking mechanism for the heavy vault door gave a guttering electronic wheeze, fizzled slightly, and there was an almighty crack of giant tumblers disengaging within. As it began to sag open, an explosive blast from inside rocketed Eileen backwards through the air and into the hall again. Her momentum came to an abrupt, painful halt as she collided with the wall, and she slumped to the floor without so much as one profanity uttered.
The only reason Pyro fared marginally better was that he had not been hovering, and he had not been straight in front of the door. He hit the opposite wall, too, but managed to take the hit weaker hit on his side. His shoulder, elbow, hip and knee smarted as he picked himself up from the floor, and that was when he noticed Eileen. His eyebrows raised, and he rushed to her side. She had a pulse, good. That meant he was free to turn back towards the open door, behind which, he had no doubt, the two cowardly fucking flatscans who had attacked her cowered. "Kid gloves come off," he told them, and flicked his wrist, expanding the flame into a huge fireball he guided swiftly into the previously locked room.
Only then did he notice the stacks of ammunition and firearms inside. He reached with both hands to put out the fire, already knowing that he was too late.
Pietro, having cleared pretty much everyone out--or at least he'd gotten them moving in the right direction--heard the explosion and went directly for the source. He zipped right past Wanda and Lance and hit his knees beside Eileen, reaching out to scoop her up and get her to safety. He hoped to hell she didn't have some kind of spinal injury that'd be aggravated by--
"Fuck!" In slow motion, a metallic burning sensation tore through his right side.
He'd been shot. Fucking shot!
"Pietro!" Wanda screamed. And Eileen. And Pyro, and - fuck, what the hell was she supposed to do, and where the fuck was her father when they actually needed him, and - more by instinct than intent, Wanda generated a hex that created a domelike barrier over the Brotherhood members. And rocked on her feet, trying to hold it steady as the explosion hit.
To be honest, Lance didn't know what the fuck had happened. They'd only just reached the others when everything seemed to go to hell in a handbasket, and all he could see was his team falling apart. He felt the call-out for Pietro build in his throat at the same time as he felt the shift of energy suddenly take hold around them, and saw Wanda do...something bubblish around the entire group as the building started to come down and fire washed over them. Not knowing what else to do, he pulled at the concrete beneath their feet, drawing it up and around, forming a dome of protective rock beneath Wanda's field. Calling out to his phone, he yelled, "Hey Google, call Fatale!"
"What the fuck is happening?" a panicked voice demanded a moment later. "The whole building just collapsed!"
Lance exchanged a strained look with Wanda. They were both working to keep the entire building from crushing the group, and he knew it wouldn't last forever. They needed out. "Portal. Now. Get us out of here!"
