Log:Terror Inc

2020/08/27 Copycat 1

It's a relatively quiet night on the 'oh no, there's trouble at the mill!' front; a few assorted (relatively) petty crimes, and little else. You'd been considering cutting it short when, taking a short-cut through the Industrial Park and past the Fuel Cell plant -- you know, the one they said Porters From Another Dimension came to raid? -- when something nudges your 'wait, something's not right here' button.

Normally the plant has, as it were, power to burn, and as a consequence keeps /all/ the lights on, all over the place ... but there's several of them out, right in a row.

Copycat flies along on patrol, a lime green trail of energy flaring behind her in her propelled method of flight. She's about to take short cut when she notices the lights out at the power plant. That's...strange. It's not quite right. She slows and changes course to investigate.

Getting closer and looking specifically at where the lights are out, Copycat realizes that the ones that are out are all within thirty or forty meters of a side door leading to the inside of the plant.

Copycat swoops down to the side door and lands. She looks about, then sneaks o the door to test if it's been left unlocked. Perhaps she can sneak in to check that everything's alright.

The door is indeed unlocked, and in fact the handle feels ... a little loose, unusual for such a top-end place. Like the handle assembly had been removed and put back on kind of slap-dashed. But the door /is/ open, and you ease it away from its frame to get yourself inside.

Inside, the mostly-automated plant is running on 'standby' -- which is to say that the primary tasks of generating energy and infusing the power cells with them is taking place; most of the human-overseen work has to do with packaging and organizing shipments. Even in here, the lights are always on, though there's little to no movement. Well, except for some ways down the plant, a sketch of movement along ... maybe a walkway?

Copycat slips her gloved fingers into the opening between door and frame. She slides it open just enough to slip her petite frame through and look around. Movement catches her eye and she looks up, then looks around for a place to climb up there quietly.

I can't find a character with that name.

I can't find a character with that name.

There are stairs leading between the five-meter-apart levels here and there; interspersed are ladders with 'cages' meant to arrest a fall if someone slips after climbing a couple meters or so. For the most part, from the various walkways someone can access most of the machinery in the plant, automated or not. The (increasingly distant) movement is accompanied by a tromping clang that doesn't quite manage to get buried by the plant's overall thrum.

Copycat is stealthy as her namesake as she climbs up a ladder, then tries to swiftly move towards the clanging noise.

Stealthy and swiftly Copycat moves, pausing when pauses are needed, scrambling when scrambles are needed, moving lightly after the trompings. She catches (relatively) up to them as they stop; according to the posted signs, the door that the six of them are at (and that one of the six looks to be working on getting through) should lead into the administrative section of the plant.

Copycat chews on her lower lip as she finally gets in sight of the group. They don't -seem- to be people that work here. While she plans on how to proceed, she loosk over them for weapons, uniforms, or identifying markers.

/Definitely/ not people who work here; people who work here probably don't wear full-coverage body armor and carry what look to be rifles of some sort. The body armor's base color is black, with white accents; there's a skull motif with the helmet and on the chestplate, but the 'skeleton' element carries through the rest of the detailing, with white down the middle of the front and along the spine to suggest a bare spinal column, 'ribs', 'pelvis', even 'elbow' and 'knee' caps. Oh, and skeleton-themed gauntlets as well. One has spikes on their helmet; the one kneeling at the door has a green plume, like a ponytail, coming out of the top of the helmet. They all sport (or have slung, in the case of the plumed one) an assault-rifle-looking thing which has a couple of glowing power-readout looks.

Copycat definitely can tell those are bad guys. I mean, how can they not be? Right? She takes a quick cursory look around and behind her. If they open fire, what do they risk hitting? This place seems like a bad place for a firefight. So she waits and crouches, allowing them to get into the administration area.

Definitely not a good place to have a fight, either -- stray bullets or blasts or whatever would undoubtedly have the chance to rupture power lines, power cells, power generators -- a /lot/ of 'power X'. Get inside the admin area, the worst that can happen would be a computer system getting wrecked, right? And there would be failsafes to shut the place down if some computer went amok. Right?

The ... agents? soldiers? ... certainly /seem/ disciplined, weapons held with what appears to be a certain amount of professionalism, heads turning as they look this way and that, relentlessly questing for a threat -- or you, which to their minds might be the same thing. After a minute or so, you can here some very muffled sounds like someone saying something, then some more muffled sounds like someone else replying ... but nothing happens for almost a minute more, when there's a hum and a click and the door releases. Quickly, the team moves through, and not haphazardly -- two lead with weapons pointed, two cover the backtrail until they're the only ones left, then withdraw with their weapons still pointed 'back' until they're through the door and it's closed behind them.

Once the door is closed, Copycat sneaks to the door. Less explosions if she takes them on in there instead of out here. She crouches low and puts an ear to the door to listen for them to move away. It'll be harder to slip through without being noticed this time.

Copycat can hear them moving away from the door; they are /not/ being very quiet, but with six people moving, what do you expect. Listening until she thinks they've been gone -- or at least moved out of sound range -- for a few extra moments, Copycat checks the door, finds it open, and pushes it in -- only to hear a muffled interrogative ("??") and then movement from around the corner of an intersection only four or five meters away!

Copycat freezes upon stepping through and hearing that muffled sound. They're already around the corner. Okay, good Time to sneak up and surprise them. She should be able to blast them now! She tries moving swiftly and quietly to the intersection.

TI Agent

Carrying a rifle and wearing armor that is suggestive of a skeleton, this individual is clearly ready to fight.

Copycat raises up her hand, palm charging up rapidly with that same lime green energy as her flight. Her arm trembles faintly from the force being channeled and brings her other hand up to brace her wrist before....SCHOOOM! She rakes a blast across the armed and armored skeletor agents. As the glow around her hand dims, she says belatedly, "Uh, um! Freeze and drop your weapons!"

Oh, poor techie.

Like ninepins, the blast scythes across the armored up agents and sends them tumbling -- well, kind of almost. The beam of lime-green energy shoots across the space, spread by the quick wave of Copycat's hand, but goes over the heads of two of its members -- the kneeling Scalp-Lock and the far agent who was down on one knee as well. Scalp-Lock gets the near-side right agent blasted into him and will probably take a moment to recover, but the remaining agent spins around, then there's a 'click' and you can clearly hear him (or her, it's a 'voderbox) say, "Flash-bang!"

The three-centimeter-across barrel glows green -- not quite your lime-green, but not far off it, either -- and then *BLORT!!*

The shot is rushed, as soon as he fires it becomes obvious; the globule of energy the weapon spits out swells as it goes, but doesn't really 'go off' where he meant it to go off. Instead, it zips right past your ear on an upwards course, rebounds off the wall of the hallway behind you, then caroms back and forth at high speed in a zany 'out of whack pinball machine' style before finally detonating in the middle of the hallway. Too soon or not, the intense radiance and concussion leaves a ringing in Copycat's ears and a haze of green before her eyes.

Copycat's ears are left ringing, and spots fill her vision. She almost staggers as her hands reach up to cover her ears, disoriented from the flash bang. Her eyes blink several times, a golden glow building up in them as she grows swiftly taller. Quickly, it's the Colonial Bay Sentinel standing before them, much more muscular and imposing than wee little Copycat. The eyes are now fully glowing a golden yellow, which increases before a wide beam of energy washes forward in an arc in front of CopySentinel. Hopefully it can still hit without seeing.

Copycat must've staggered more than she realized, as the eyebeam blasts through the plasterboard wall adjacent.

The blasts strike CopySentinel squarely at just around the same vital spot. A golden aura flares around him, most of the energy diverting an absorbing into him. The aura dies away, and all that's left is smoke and singe marks on his costume.

CopySentinel cannot see it, but she can feel it -- beams of energy, pretty powerful to punch through Sentinel's defenses, hammer her, punching shoulder, chest, chest, belly -- then another one, only a fraction of a second later, into her belly again. These goons, if goons they are, know how to be organized.

Copycat feels Sentinel's confidence after being hardly scorched by the blasts. "I take it you're surrendering since you aren't attacking?" he grins, speaking a bit louder than normal due to the flashbang. "Glad you're being reasonable. Now just put your hands on your heads and we'll wait for the authorities," he says with open arms and that confident smile. The dots are starting to fade a bit.

The spots disappear from CopySentinel's vision, noting they're all still aiming their weapons. He frowns in disappointment, feeling sorry for them. "Bad call," he admonishes them before this time aiming another eyebeam slice at the entire crew.

Now that he can hear, unfortunately, CopySentinel /does/ detect something that hadn't been happening before -- alarms. Ding ding ding ding! Intruder detected!! Wall demolished!!! Coffee maker destroyed!!!!

The golden energy washes over the entire group, the whole hallway filled with light. When the light clears, four of the agents are on the ground. As the last two remain staggered, CopySentinel tsks. "Should've surrendered," he comments before a more narrowly targeted sweep of eyebeams downs the last two. He steps over the first two agents as the alarms go off, halting briefly to listen to them. He then looks among the agents for gear to use to tie them all up for the police.

None of them have anything like ties, cuffs, or anything of the sort; there are, however, cords aplenty to be had in the adjoining rooms, including (gasp!) a pack of long zip-ties that are probably to control excessive cordage.

One, mmm, curious note -- even unconscious, their weapons are within their grasp.

CopySentinel carefully kicks their weapons further from their grasp. CopySentinel moves faster than most eyes can track in the search of--Zip-ties? Perfect! In a flash, he's back amongst the group and binding their wrists behind their backs.

It actually takes some effort and distance, not just a kicking -- there's some sort of attraction between the weapon's grips and their hands. Presumably it turns on and off at their release, but when unconscious, it defaults to 'on'. But tie-tie-tie-tie, and another couple of tie and tie, and the six are trussed up with their hands behind their backs.

(And with their weapons are kept at a distance, the 'magnetic grip' finally powers down after ten or twenty seconds.)

CopySentinel gathers the weapons up once the magnetic grip of their suits deactivates. Now all he has to do is radio in to the authorities and babysit these guys. The alarms are annoying, though.