wasafreak | Rise, Rapture, Rise

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Rise, Rapture, Rise

The red glow that had overtaken the room was starting to hurt Teddy's eyes. It was bright, and pervasive, and it made his temples throb but there was no way in hell he was going to look away: That was Billy in the middle of it. Seeing him beside the Scarlet Witch, their eyes closed and their lips moving in concentration, they really looked like family. Which was good, that was what Billy had wanted, and Teddy wasn't about to nay-say it, only...

Well, only they were in a dungeon in Latveria and Doctor Doom was, at least in part, running the show. Which was concerning. Teddy had concerns. Eli was voicing most of them. As a team, they couldn't afford to be split on this. They had to trust Billy and get through it, and seeing as how 'it' was already going down, that wasn't the kind of thing you interrupted. At least not if you were thinking straight, which Patriot demonstrably was not.

"We can stop them."

"How?" Kate said, ever the voice of reason. Teddy appreciated not being the only one.

"How do you propose we stop the combined powers of Wiccan, the Scarlet Witch, and Doctor Doom?" Patriot was so tense he looked like he was vibrating head to toe, and it made Teddy nervous. Eli was a good leader- a great leader, or else he wouldn't have followed him down the block, let alone into battle, but Eli had a history of making... less than stellar choices when he was feeling especially passionate.

"I don't think we should," Cassie said over Teddy's shoulder, and he felt a sudden spike of relief through the anxiety. This was it, this was the team making a decision, if admittedly not a unanimous one.

"Neither do I," Teddy said, adding his vote, gaze slipping from Eli's distraught expression to Billy's serene one. His eyes were glowing white, he was lost in the magic- or hopefully not lost, exactly, but using it, and keeping anyone else present from taking it over. It was weird- Billy was playing with the A-Listers, now, and Teddy would have been proud if he wasn't so damn worried. Also, apparently, distracted.

"-an incendiary arrow might do the trick," Eli was saying, and Kate was looking practically livid behind the slick dark lenses of her shades as Teddy forced himself to look away from his boyfriend.

"It might also kill them," Kate pointed out, in her how-are-you-this-dumb-and-I-still-like-you tone that she only used with Eli, and then Teddy's heart fell into his stomach because Eli lunged for her bow.

"Then I'll be sure to aim it at Doom."

It was the strangest moment- and it was only a moment, Patriot being able to move as fast as he could. None of them had time to step forward, to grab the arrow back, to stop him. Teddy could feel himself staring in horror like a big, hulking idiot as Eli notched the arrow and let it fly. Billy's eyes, brown again though awash in the red light, slid sideways as it flew.

Toward Wanda.

"No-" Billy said, and Teddy heard the word working its way out of his own throat, even as the red light burst outward, brighter than it had yet been, to the point where it flashed a blinding white.

When it cleared, the room was dark- darker than it had been before the spell had started- and Teddy was alone. He took two halting steps forward, eyes widening, one pale arm outstretched-

Pale. Not green. No armor. Flesh. He had reverted forms- why?

"Billy?" he said, head whipping around.
"Kate? Where.... are.... am... I?" he whispered, as his eyes adjusted and the dilapidated art deco motif of the room came into focus. Not Castle von Doom, then. Probably not Latveria at all, which was a lot of thatched roofs and gothic stonework and tudor cottages. This place had, at one time, been sleek and as sophisticated as the '20s got. Actually, it all looked eerily like a level from Bioshock. He started across the room to a window, two stories high and looking out at what he had thought was a darkened night sky but upon closer examination proved to be dark blue waters. He stood dumbly in front of it, tracking silvery, flat fish as they moved in small schools past him. His gaze caught on a neon sign some distance off, the glow murky. It said FLEET HALL, and there were other signs around it, something for what he was pretty sure said tobacco, although a letter or two had broken and burnt out, but all of which told him he was, in fact, in Rapture.

Which, if he didn't know a mother-son team of magic using reality warpers, he would have said was impossible.

"Okay," he murmured to his ghostly half-reflection, which looked decidedly freaked out and not at all like the pillar of cool, nor calm, nor collectedness that Teddy felt he ought to be, "it's okay. I beat this game in one sitting. I didn't even use a walkthrough. Not a problem." A low metallic groan echoed from somewhere deep in the bowels of whatever building he was currently in, and the hairs on his arm stood up. He wasn't sure why he couldn't transform, and that threw him off, but then, Billy had thought his powers had been gone, too. It was just Doom messing with him. Teddy could handle being messed with. He was a high schooler, for crying out loud.

He just had to find his friends and get out of there, or get the hell out of there and find his friends. Either way, standing still wasn't going to get him anywhere, so he turned from the window and headed into the dark, feeling intensely, vulnerably human, which was something he hadn't really felt for a long time.

It seemed straightforward enough, until he realized he was in the Sander Cohen level, and then thoughts of people with lead pipes in rabbit masks spurred him on. He could hear voices, screams every now and then, but it was mostly quiet. He dug through one hallway's detritus into another's, and stopped when he saw what looked like a security office. He picked up a phone, which had no tone, then picked up the clunkiest, biggest radio he'd ever seen.

He flicked it on, then dropped to a crouch so he was hidden behind the table. Just in case.

"Hello? Is anyone on this frequency? Billy? Eli? Kate? Hello? ...Over?"

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Natalya blinked, looking up from where she'd been cleaning her pistol during her turn of the world's most boring duty, aka, guarding the door to Rapture. She lifted the radio and thumbed the talk button.

"Da, am hear you. State your name and position, if you are in danger or not. I am not aware of any excursions into city at this times, are you-" She frowned, feeling exasperated by a sudden twist of concern.

"Are you just arrive?"

She sounded kind of Russian. He couldn't remember any Russian characters from the game, and the way she asked him if he had just shown up didn't sit entirely right, but then, he was having the conversation crouched behind a table in the broken down room of a fictional underwater city. Nothing was really sitting right with him.

"Uh, yes. I'm- I'm in Fort Frolic. I haven't seen anyone yet but I can hear-" There was the skittering sound of someone crawling on, Teddy would have bet, a ceiling, and the sort of deranged half-audible mumblings he remembered so well from the game and its sequel.

"...people. My name is Teddy Altman and I don't know how I got here." But he had a pretty good idea.

"Uh, over," he added.

"Acknowledged," Natalya said, snapping her side arm into its holster and standing, pulling her rifle onto her shoulder.

"Hold your position, I am coming for to retrieve you, over."

Even for a woman well used to darkness, the dimness of the island caves is a shock after all that sunshine, and Natalia blinks, adjusting to it before moving towards the mouth of Rapture.

She's close when the last echoes of a transmission reach her, and Natalia rounds the last corner with her head cocked, her eyes on Natalya curious. "No? Real trouble?" Natalia's smile cuts white through the darkness. "I believe it's my shift now."

Natalya looked up at the other Russian's arrival and smiled like a knife.

"New arrival, in Fort Frolic. Last report said that mad man Cohen was still active in the area. And you're right," she replied, opening the large metal hatch that led the way down.

"Watch the door behind me?" She paused, one booted foot kicked up onto the hatch's lip.

"Unless you would care to join."

Natalia replies with a quip that bears no proper translation in English, though were any phrase to come close, it would be, Bitch, please.

"Try and stop me," she adds, then pauses, thoughtful. "No, save that for the next time. We cannot afford so much excitement in one day."

Edited 2011-11-12 00:53 (UTC)

Natalya smirked a little- she liked the other woman, which had been rare for her before the plague and an absolute necessity afterward, enjoying the company of, well, of women like herself- and started down the hatch to the Bathysphere.

"The arrival's name is Teddy Altman. He did not sound nearly as disturbed as I would have anticipated, given the situation."

"No," says Natalia, the interest that's plain on her face shifting focus now, becoming something equal parts surprised and concerned. "He wouldn't. That child has seen much strangeness already."

Following with enough speed to almost overtake the other woman, Natalia makes an unnecessary inventory of weapons. "He is too near that madman's lair for my liking."

Natalya looked the other spy over sidelong, curious.

"You know the boy?" she asked, pulling open the hatch to the bathysphere and standing to one side so Natasha could duck in first.

"I have read his file," Natalia replies, setting the bathysphere into motion the moment Natalya is inside. "He and a group of other children decided they were no longer content to sit sidelined while the adults had all the fun. They gave Steve no small amount of trouble."

She pauses, selecting a direction in the dim light. "I quite liked them."

"Ah," Natalya said, "a young hero. I do feel better, then. Still, I agree with you." Her eyes narrowed, memories of the end of the conflict in Rapture turning over in her mind. Bodies cast in plaster paraded as statues, breaking apart in a hail of gunfire.

"Of all the buildings he could have arrived in, Frolic... I truly hate that place." The sound of the water rushing around them and then the quiet muffling of all noise as they hit the depths irked her. She did not like being so far from the sky.

"At least its station is still operational," she murmured as the bathysphere slid along the track toward the dimly glowing neon and the still highly improbable sight of art deco sky scrapers rising from the deep.

Natalia hums her agreement. Of the many horrors of Rapture, Frolic must be the most macabre with its still lit invitations to fortune and fun, too many vestiges of commercial cheer left behind when all else came crumbling down.

"It would be dangerous for any of us," she says, a worried line forming between her eyes. However skilled in combat Teddy might be, he's arrived without the benefit of the powers he surely relied on at home.

"Then let us bring your young comrade home," Natalya replied as the bathysphere doors open and the ever dilapidated, still rotting, cold dank landscape of Rapture opened up before them.

She stepped down, not drawing her sidearm or taking her rifle from her shoulder, but taking in the room with the cool blue gaze that had made her the premier sniper of her unit. The city was populated with nothing more than ghosts and one lone mad man, but she didn't trust it to remain so. She nodded, fractionally, and started forward at a quiet, sure-footed run toward the doors to Fort Frolic.

The further into Frolic Teddy travels, the more he realizes that what he heard earlier were either ghosts or the echoes of old recordings, because Rapture is deserted. The only people in sight have been plaster statues of rabbit-masked dancers in grotesque poses, and it twists Teddy's stomach to know that most of them were alive when those white shells were hardening, cutting off their breath and freezing them in that pose forever.

It's creepy and cool in the game. In real life, it's awful.

He finds his way to the grand stairway with a ruined stage at the foot of it, empty frames where four photographs of murdered men should go, and everything's so surreal for a minute that he stops.

It's a mistake.

"I don't miss them, you know," a highly affected, cultured voice says, floating down from the ceiling, fuzzy in the way old radio plays tend to sound, and Teddy's blood runs cold. He ducks out of the light and into the shadow of the stair, looking fervently around for any weapon he can find.

Not abandoned, not abandoned, not abandoned. Sander Cohen is still alive.

"Oh, don't do that, my boy, my boy. Don't hide from the spotlight. The spotlight is the only thing that matters!" Teddy's hand connects with a piece of metal and he pulled it out from under some debris. A wrench, long and at one point red, now mostly brown and silver from rust. He grips it with both hands and looks out at the room.

"I don't miss them because they had no vision, and worse, they'd all gotten so ugly. There was no meaning to their lives, anymore. I'm glad the surface dwellers came and exterminated them. They were pollution. Polluting Rapture. Polluting my art. Art must be pure, my boy, to be meaningful. It must be."

There's no Waltz of the Flowers playing, and Teddy hopes to hell that means he's safe for the time being, but he has to get out of there.

"You, however... you look very.... pure," the voice says wistfully. There's a crackle in the speakers, a quite moment.

"Get back into the light," Sander howls and Teddy jumps, foot catching on something mangled and broken and discarded, and he all but falls back into view, then whirls, holding the wrench up defensively.

"Yes," Sander's voice murmurs, "yes, I thought-." Another pause and then even the soft crackling buzz is gone, and Teddy's left with the sound of his heart thudding in his chest and the echo of water dripping onto metal, somewhere. He turns after a moment and starts to run the way he is almost, almost positive lies the exit.

Hearing the hurried fall of footsteps in the near distance, Natalia moves with renewed urgency, running towards whoever's coming be they Teddy or the wicked man who hunts him.

Rounding the corner with Natalya, she breathes no easier for the sight of the boy hurtling towards them. Terror is plain on his face, and there's no way yet to tell if he's alone. "It's all right, Mr. Altman," she says regardless, halting with one gauntleted arm raised and pointing into the empty space behind him. "You're quite safe now."

Teddy comes to a graceless, stumbling halt, breath hitching sharp in his side, but his immediate concerns re: for his life sort of fall to the wayside.

"Oh my God," he blurts out, "the Black Widow?"

"You are famous," Natalya murmurs, her dragunov off her shoulder and held aloft, gaze darting from one corner to the next.

She takes pride in her reputation, not because of the limited celebrity it affords, but because she's earned it. Despite their danger, Natalia allows herself a smile.

"In some circles," she replies, and has no doubt that the other woman would experience similar, should as many of her own people ever appear on the island. "Hulkling," she amends, holding out the hand not currently whining with a sudden charge of electricity, "hurry now, Rapture is no place for introductions."

"Not so much," he says, "my powers aren't working, I'm- I'm stuck in one form. Uh, hello," he adds to the blond woman with the sniper rifle.

"There's no one here except Sander Cohen, I don't think, which is weird, but he's insane and he's a Houdini splicer, so he could literally pop up anywhere, at any moment."

"...How you are know this?" Natalya asked, her eyes narrowing a little as she looked back at the young man Natalia had vouched for.

"You have been in contact with him?"

Natalia swears none too softly, her eyes refocusing on the darkness beyond Teddy, but there are only shadows to be seen. "Come," she says, ensuring it this time by wrapping her hand around Teddy's arm and positioning him first towards the exit.

"It is best not to engage Mr. Cohen." Not without a considerable amount of weaponry. "And there are people who will be extremely interested in your arrival outside these caves," she adds with a significant glance his way.

Teddy moves, now, because the Black Widow is moving him and he's not going to piss her off. Anyway, he's too distracted by what she's saying now to care too much about their surroundings of the extremely immediate danger he was just in.

"Billy?!" he asks. "What about Kate, or Eli? Do you know where they are, are they okay?"

Natalya moved swiftly and quietly and backward, keeping their rear covered with her rifle. She wasn't familiar with any of the people he was inquiring about, but Natalia seemed to have that covered, so she focused her attention elsewhere.

It just wasn't the right spot.

"Where do you think you're taking him?" Cohen demanded, his voice echoing live off the walls, not through any of the tinny old broadcast systems scattered around the buildings. Natalya whipped the muzzle of the dragunov in the direction it had to've originated from, but there was a sound, one she hated, the gasping dispersal of air and matter, that meant he'd teleported elsewhere.

"Leave him with me, leave the boy!" the voice cried, bouncing out of another darkened corner to their left.

"I can make something of him."

"Fucking shit," Natalya swore, running faster and pushing the boy along.

Natalia swears in turn, extracting a handful of small explosives from her belt and throwing them into the darkness behind him. The little balls roll down several paths at once, and with any luck, the evil bastard will choose to materialize into at least one of them.

"Billy," she confirms as if they were not running for their lives. She would like nothing better than to turn and engage this Cohen at last, but there simply isn't time. "He's the only one from your team here, I'm afraid. He'll be very glad to see you."

If that's not a reason to get the hell out of Rapture as fast as he can, Teddy doesn't know what is.

"Thank God," he mutters, almost smiling, running flat out and with a new single minded focus, which is why he doesn't notice that there's slick, discarded plates of corrugated meta half hidden under water on the floor. When he feels his foot go out from under him, his instinct is to grow wings, keep himself upright.

It doesn't happen, though, and he falls, like an idiot, as something explodes behind them and the only other guy down there makes a very pissed off sound before the sucking noise of a teleporter jumping locations happens again.

Natalya didn't have time to swear. She swung her rifle around as she half crouched, continuing backward, and fired into the dark, twice, in practically opposite directions.

"The bathysphere, we are close," she said, turning to reach out a hand and help the teen up, "keep- Teddy-"

He was pulling himself up, wincing, on a balustrade that was well and thoroughly rotted through. He seemed to notice and was pulling away from it when another of Natasha's small explosives went off down a hallway, and another came flying out of the dark to strike the scrolling ironwork and light up the elevated walkway.

Because there were plasmids that made one telekinetic. To think, she'd almost forgotten.

Edited 2011-11-26 21:23 (UTC)

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Rise, Rapture, Rise

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