thecapitol | I Am Number 4

Entry tags:

I Am Number 4

Who| Closed to Brainiac 5, Lyle Norg, Punchy, Donatello, Garak, Julian, and Carlos
What| Brainiac 5's visitor turns out to be the person he wants to see the least and she has plans for her exit from Panem.
Where| The Tribute Center, then an abandoned industrial complex
When| First day in family visit week Early in the family-visit week0
Warnings/Notes| cw: verbal/physical abuse, torture, some body horror, attempted filicide, general violence, etc. etc. Brainiac 4 is not a nice lady.

In the hustle bustle of family members being shown around, it would have been easy for them to escape notice. A brown-haired human woman dressed up in clothes that looked like she perhaps came from a world like the Capitol, her hand on a young man's neck as if he was leading her along to show her around. Even though she didn't look like she was the same species, clearly she had to be a family or a friend because of the familiarity between them, right?

Brainiac 5 didn't look happy to see her, though. In fact, his expression was very blank as he led her along, strange when these were supposed to be happy circumstances.

There should have been joy there or malcontent or at least something but instead his expression was completely emotionless. She, on the other hand, looked quietly pleased, as if there was no else she'd rather see. Never once did she remove her hand from the back of his neck.

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They'd followed Brainy and his mother mostly using other people -- Brainy was both famous enough and unusual enough that most people remembered his passing by. That became more difficult as the number of people in the area dropped, but they eventually narrowed it down to a very abandoned-looking factory.

"She's probably disabled what security there is," Lyle said, voice clipped and to the point, not taking his eyes off the building. He didn't want to be taking this so cautiously -- he wanted to get Brainy out of there five minutes ago -- but he wasn't just going to hand these sentients to Brainiac 4 to torture Brainy with. "She wouldn't be able to use it, so there's no point in having it up. She'll probably be able to see us coming though." He glanced back at the others. "Last chance to stay behind."

Carlos let out a long sigh. He wasn't comfortable with this -- who would be? Who would honestly be comfortable with going into an abandoned warehouse as bait for a sadistic alien? But, well, knowing this much about the situation, Carlos felt that ethically speaking leaving now would be irresponsible.

And besides, he'd been assured that Brainiac 4 would in all probability torture him first rather than kill him outright. It was a comforting thought, because it meant that meant the others would have time to sneak in and stop her. Someone had to.

Carlos squared his shoulders and faced the small side door they would be using to sneak into the building. If he'd been in Night Vale, a gust of wind would probably have whipped his lab coat around his knees, but even without it he managed to look appropriately theatrical.

"Let's go," he said to Punchy. Then, to the others: "...don't leave us in there too long."

Julian couldn't say that he was all on board with this plan. There were too many ways it could go spectacularly off the rails, too many variables that they had no hope of controlling. And any plan that began with needing to use someone as bait was not exactly beginning in the most auspicious manner, in his opinion.

"We won't." Julian's face is solemn--they're counting on her detecting body heat instead of depending on line-of-sight or active life sign detection, so who better to hold back and go in second than a cold-blooded individual and someone who could voluntarily lower his body temperature?

It didn't mean that Julian was enthusiastic about sending Carlos and Punchy in to be potentially seriously hurt.

"A bit late to turn back now," Don replied, voice low. "Especially if she is as dangerous as you say she is. If we can stop her, we have to."

He wasn't exactly enjoying the plan, either. Besides, the woman had been able to disable Brainiac 5, and Brainiac 5 was basically smarter than...well, probably all of them combined. That why they were taking such a risk with a plan that could probably go to shell in two seconds, even and especially with willing bait. But it was a risk they were going to have to take, and he knew it.

He just had to hope she wasn't expecting anything cold-blooded to come after her.

"I'm ready when you all are."

Edited 2014-04-28 21:42 (UTC)

Punchy, on the other hand, is beyond enthusiastic to be sent in to be potentially seriously hurt. In a strange sort of way, this is his element, moreso than the Games where the morality is muddled with necessity and pressure. This is plain old heroes and villains, crazy serial killers and innocent victims. This is what he's been waiting his whole life for.

He feels like he's walking on air, and the only thing weighing him down is that he'll probably have to share some glory with these other goons.

He pulls his goggles over his face, making a completely unnecessary shushing motion with his finger. "Let's do dis."

As they infiltrated the complex, they would see that it was half dissembled, some of its systems still functioning and automated as it finished taking itself apart. It had once been used to manufacture certain metal components required for construction before production had been outsourced to one of the districts.

Once staffed by avoxes and the overseers, the only workers left were robots, much like the ones they were used to that hovering cameras around them. they were dismantling the equipment and packing it away.

The place looked skeletal, in a way, with its half-dismantled machines, their wires and metal skeletons showing, and giant vats resting on the floor in some places.

Footprints in the dust on the floor showed that people occasionally still came in but it looked like they hadn't for some time. There were, however, two sets of fresh footprints - one of them occasionally dragging - that suggested newer visitors.

As they sneaked through the complex, taking their respective positions, they quickly found who they were looking for. In one of the factory rooms there was a strange, sinister device, about six feet tall that looked like some kind of communications array. Some of the robots throughout the complex had apparently been co-opted to help build it, and parts of it seemed to be assembling themselves out of a gray goo that might have been nanites.

Standing next to it was "Zam Tolen" her hand still on Brainiac's neck. He looked deathly pale now, sweat pouring down his face, his expression the kind of expression someone might make upon realizing they'd swallowed poison.

"I should have known," Brainiaac 4 said lovingly, sounding for all the world like a mother that was joyful over being reunited with her lost child. "I should have tried to find you. If I was able escape the fires of a dying universe, I should have know that you and your little Legion would have. I suppose you have questions, though. How about I give you control of your face, lungs, and vocal cords, how does that sound?"

She pulled away, just slightly, and now they would see why she'd kept her hand at his neck the whole time she'd been with him. Coming out from her hand were strange little wires, gold, prehensile, and very fine. They had dug into the back of his neck and with her hand pulled away slightly so she could stand in front of him, the wires lengthening as she moved, they would see that the places they'd dug into his neck were oozing slightly with green blood.

She'd been controlling him like a puppet from the moment she'd gotten her hands on him. That was why he'd repeated the false name Julian had given right back to him - she had been the one making him talk and had taken Julian's word for it that his name was "James Bond."

He gasped as if it was the first breath he'd willingly taken in a long time. The rest of his body stayed stock still like a mannequin posed in a storefront.

"How are you alive?" he croaked out. "How did you get free from the Peacekeepers to accomplish all this so quickly? And how are you disguising yourself?"

Despite her control over him, now that he could control his face, he didn't have the look of a man defeated. He looked scared but he wouldn't have been asking her questions if he didn't think the answers might be useful.

He had to buy time.

Edited 2014-04-29 06:01 (UTC)

"Did you really think that psychiatric ward was able to hold me as our universe started to collapse? It barely could before the chaos. After that, constructing a device that allowed me to fall through the cracks before it all crumbled was very simple. Well, for me, at least."

She was far more creative in her schemes and destructive devices and far more inventive in general.

"As for the face I'm wearing, it's a hard-light hologram. It's how I've managed to not get caught, drifting from world to world entertaining myself. Holograms, sensor cloaks, life-sign simulators - I haven't been wearing my own skin since our universe fell apart. But I have mentioned you now and again, wrapped you up in all my little lies. Sentimental, perhaps, but I liked to pretend you were still alive, so that I could still imagine being the one to kill you."

She reached out and started to gently brush his cheek with the hand that wasn't connected to his neck, ignoring how he tried to cringe despite not being able to move most of is body.

"The primitives here must have tracked my point of origin as our dead universe and seen me talking about you on occasion. Perhaps they thought I was actually your friend without being able to see who and what I really was."

They'd brought her for "family day," thinking they'd stumbled on some long lost friend of his from a dead universe because she liked draping her cons and schemes and evil plots in the corpse of the son she'd regretted not getting to kill herself.

"I read as a baseline human. I even have implants to produce the proper pheromones. The Peacekeepers are stretched so thin that it was easy to slip away - sometimes disguised as one - to make my arrangements."

She smiled at him, and what was sick about it was it looked sincere, it looked like a mother staring at her child with love in her eyes.

She dragged her nail down his cheek, scratching it until it bled.

"I'm so happy you're alive."

Lyle was right that she was going to be be monofocused. Right now, she didn't seem to be paying much attention to anything other than her son and he seemed smart enough to keep asking her questions to buy some time.

Carlos crept through through the warehouse, keeping to the shadows. His bright white lab coat wasn't exactly ideal for sneaking, but then again, it was his job to be caught. He just had to postpone that as long as possible.

That nanite goo looked like bad news, though. All of it looked like bad news.

"What is that?" he whispered to Punchy, quiet enough not to carry. "It looks like it's constructing itself -- like it's being assembled by living metal, but I can't tell what it's being built for." The cadence of his whisper was like someone reporting a phenomenon, like someone taking notes.

"I'm going to get a closer look."

With that, he took off toward the machines.

Edited 2014-04-30 04:11 (UTC)

Lyle had followed Carlos and Punchy into the warehouse, splitting off from them to try and catch Brainiac 4 in a pincer. It will make it look less like the three of them are the distraction if it looks like he's using the other two as a distraction. After all, she's more likely to notice the sentients who don't have about a decade's worth of spy training first, no matter what method of detection she's using.

Sprock, he wished he had his ring. And his invisibility. And the rest of his sprocking team instead of three near-strangers whose survival he also has to worry about.

He crept forward along the floor, staying low and praying that he'd be able to pull this off.

"Tiny-ass robots," Punchy says, distilling the concept of nanotechnology into layman's terms. At least, that's his best guess, but given that Cyberheroics and Advanced Cyberheroics were the only classes he ever did remotely well in, they aren't exactly uninformed guesses. "Not sure what the big-ass robot's supposed to do."

He reaches into his jacket and pulls out his puppet, curling his fingers over the cloth and then relaxing his whole body, as if this strange wooden and fabric puppet brings him some sort of peace.

"I'll get the closer look," he whispers back to Carlos, scrambling to get ahead of his companion and thus get to the glory first. Stealth can wait, right now there's a spotlight to grab.

She suddenly turned to face Carlos and Punchy, spotting them.

"It looks like we have an interruption to our little family reunion," she said, turning. "And who might you be?"

Edited 2014-05-03 00:22 (UTC)

"You came alone? Run, you imbeciles!" Brainy cried out.

Did they even have a plan?

...well, that happened a little faster than he would have liked. A lot faster. Damn.

But, well, nothing for it now. Carlos drew himself up to his full (and respectable enough) height.

"I," he said with gravity, "am a scientist. And I'm very interested in that machine you have over there. I've never seen anything like it before. What is it?"

Distract, he thought to himself. Delay her, hold her attention -- he just happened to be indulging his own curiosity at the same time.

"Shit yeah we came alone!" If there's any bluff Punchy can be convincing at, it's the dumbass egomaniac too confident to ask for backup. And he does that beautifully. He stands beside Carlos, all posed like he should have a cape billowing behind him.

And he leers at Zam. "'Ey, shawty."

Yeah, Punchy having the utter lack of knowledge and/or survival skills to leer at Brainiac 4 was probably the best distraction that Lyle was going to get. Staying low and moving as silently as he could, he darted out of the shadows and aimed a strike for the back of her neck. If that one didn't connect, the cupped-hand blow to the ear as a follow-up should also be enough to bring her to her knees.

The back of her neck was much harder than it should have been - hard enough to possibly break Lyle's hand, at that - and she didn't react at all to the blow to the air, other than her head moving just slightly.

Her movements were so fast they were difficult to track as she grabbed Lyle by the neck and hurled him in the direction of Punchy and Carlos.

"Ah, a rescue attempt led by one of your little Legion friends? I recognize that one from the news." She smiled at her son. "I'm still so surprised - and happy - that you actually developed social skills. I'll enjoy killing them all in front of you."

"Lyle," Brainy called out. "She's not -"

Whatever it was that she wasn't, apparently she didn't want it to be known, because his face suddenly went blank, although Lyle maybe had an idea, given what had just happened to his hand.

Well, force evidently wasn't going to work. Julian could see from here, the fact that her skin barely gave at the blow to the neck, and the one to the ear should have stumbled most humanoids, with the delicate inner-ear structures that helped balance in most of them.

The warning Brainy gave was, perhaps, a little less useful to someone who didn't have context. But he could assume it was nothing good.

His sneaking skills, of course, were nothing compared to Lyle's. But he's moving with intent, mastering his breathing and heart rate to give as little an indication of his presence as possible.

He's not sure if this will work. He knows how it's done, of course--he can target the trapezius nerve on any number of humanoid species, but he's not sure if Coluans--or, more specifically, this example of one--are vulnerable to the technique he's about to try.

Julian strikes as quickly as he can, snakelike, gripping with all his strength the precise pressure points that Vulcans could use to subdue any number of humanoid species.

Don, meanwhile, was on standby. Or, at least moving. But he had the feeling that directly attacking would be pointless. Well, not pointless, but certainly, would leave him vulnerable. And - seeing Julian near "Zam" - he would have had little to no time to even get in a hit, if he tried.

Instead, he quietly slipped behind the machine, intending on disabling it. He kept himself as clam as possible, careful to not make noise. Instead, disable the machine. Disable the machine. He did have some experience with alien tech; hopefully this machine wouldn't be too far advanced for him to stop.

Punchy steels himself and outright catches Lyle, taking the smaller guy's weight to his chest with a "whumpf" and falling on his ass, but managing to keep Lyle from smacking his head into a much harder surface like a wall. Punchy's teeth clack together as he hits the ground, and he feels blood in his mouth from biting his tongue, and for a second panic wells up inside him - but it's gone in an instant, because this is what he does.

"You breezy, dawg?" He's not especially fond of Lyle, given that he's a self-proclaimed villain, but a team's a team.

Punchy gets back to his feet and rushes Zam, intending not to take her down (although that would be a nice bonus) but to buy Julian and Donatello time. Without his puppet, and having seen Lyle hit her in the neck, Punchy knows he can't rely on his traditional skill. He'll have to leave it to Julian to hit a nerve or something.

Punchy so hates not being the competent one.

A Vulcan nerve pinch, Donatello moving for the machine, Punchy attacking head on...

It was a lot to take in at once, especially when she still had to keep the probes from the one hand attached to Brainy's neck.

Or at least it was a lot to take in for most people. She, on the other hand was a twelfth level intellect.

"You really thought that would work?" she crowed as Julian's hand clamped down and did absolutely nothing to her but then again he'd feel his hand clamp on something as hard as steel, even if the texture on top was that of normal cloth and skin.

"I'll live," he answered Punchy, cradling his injured hand as he rolled back up to his feet. He was pretty sure he'd broken something when he'd struck her neck, they'd lost the element of surprise, and Brainy was still under her control. Sprock sprock sprock.

He followed hot on Punchy's heels, using the taller hero to shield his movement from Brainiac 4. It wasn't invisibility, but it was better than nothing.

"What are you now," he demanded, darting out to try and grab a handful of her hair -- if she still had hair -- and yank on it. "Some kind of ridiculous cyborg?"

Edited 2014-05-09 06:44 (UTC)

She had turned to face Julian, fist raised, about to attack but hearing Lyle behind her got her attention again.

So she turned her head around completely backward, her body still facing the doctor...and laughed, as if Lyle had told a funny joke. Then she kept laughing, a full tilt evil cackle. As it echoed through the room, metal tentacles started to spring out from her body, from where they'd been hidden under a hologram, darting around fast enough to drive all of them back away from her, and there was the sound of clinking and clacking, metal sliding over metal, as she rose up higher in the air.

The hologram dropped, revealing a body that was mostly technology, made out of cold metal and lifeless plastisteel. Only a few parts, like several segments of her green-skinned face, retained the last vestiges of her more organic origins. The sliding metal sounds that happened as she raised up into the air were being caused by her legs breaking apart into more spider-like appendages. As they unfolded, her body twisted back around the right way and she towered over them.

She was a monstrosity, a cold and terrible thing. Now the outside finally reflected the inside and only by hologram could she hide what she really was.

Brainy stood as still as ever next to her, only his eyes moving as they widened at the sight of the horror she was.

Edited 2014-05-09 06:53 (UTC)

"Yep," Lyle said, because his mouth was just as capable of getting him into trouble when he was already in a life-or-death situation as it was in any other, "definitely a ridiculous cyborg. Take her DOWN!"

He lunged toward her in a feint, intending to tackle Brainy to the floor and hopefully get those wires out of hers out of his neck in the process.

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Diversions are go!

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