10235/Whoosh!

Whoosh!
Date of Scene:	28 November 2019
Location:	Bucky's roof
Synopsis:	No one got shot. Another night, maybe not so lucky!
Cast of Characters:	Winter Soldier, Magik

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Winter Soldier has posed:
If this were Paris, this space would be called a garret. But since it's Brooklyn, it's an 'unreconstructed loft space'. Functionally, it's an attic with pretensions and a bathroom and a skylight.....and at the moment, it's got a soldier and his dog in it. There's a real bed, if a battered one, and he's lying on it reading a worn copy of *Captain Blood*, with Lili resting her head on his belly and sighing contentedly. Sometimes he just needs somewhere that isn't SHIELD or Steve's place to hide out in.

Magik has posed:
If this were San Francisco, the unreconstructed loft space would command a rent upward of $4,500 a month. It might be described as 'artistically desirable open-plan with vintage feel.'

If this were Moscow, it would be direly threatened by a teardown to allow some monumental skyscraper to rise from the flat landscape, a testament to the oligarch of the week, disregarding the shivering masses at its collective feet.

Brooklyn, a place of colliding ideas and falling morals, rising property taxes and grudging gentrification. It shouldn't be the stomping grounds for a woman running her way across rooftops, slinging a path down fire escapes tested now and then for use. The tramp of her booted feet on complaining iron dislodges several potted plants. She cannot afford the time needed to snatch them up, to halt their crash sideways. A trail of tears, spilled dirt and the thick morass of gelid moss, gunk, and nameless organic debris coagulated at the top. One of those goes bouncing over to someone's forgotten bike, and she curses, traipsing to the end of the walk. No choice.

A dance through destruction's liminal reaches is required. The Russian sorceress reaches out and rips open a thin hole, enough to spare her from falling four stories down. Parkour she's decent at but not that good. Stories she knows, but she can't fly over the street. Few people ever look up but when she steps through the breach that launches her across to the nearest warehouse rooftop in line of sight, distortions from Limbo inevitably wreak a little havoc. Even if it allows her to shake trouble.

It might also cause the lights to flicker or go out, or any running water to start knocking around in the pipes. Interdimensional rifts do that, sadly. Atoms have to go somewhere, even when they're restored.

She steps out just in time to trip and go facefirst for the rooftop. Bloody hell.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Lili's got her ears up, first, raising her head. Buck's looking at her and looking around curiously.....

And then there's a form flashing past his skylight and landing, hard. So she's greeted, in moments, by the prospect of a metal hand propping up the skylight, and the human hand with a Sig in it. The Soldier's inclined to resent the instrusion, face set in that wary mask, long hair loose around his shoulders. It eases a fraction when he recognizes her, and there's a questioning noise from him.

Magik has posed:
Lights might be low, then leap up. Digital clocks prone to flashing 12:00 in their insistent blinks lose track of time, track of themselves, unlesss programmed with an ounce of memory to withstand a surge, a brownout, a loss. This is still New York. No power grid is perfect, especially not if the winds blow too hard or some borough starts biting into the power budget, spurred on by bad weather, good parties, and trouble.

The battered sound above isn't sufficient for a tree. What trees grow over a warehouse? Maybe a drone crashing, maybe some kind of thing blown away. The initial scuffling slide stops, a slithering weight probably reaching a gutter and perilously blown over.

When the Sig bursts out, she is already swiveled into a low crouch. Too low, tripod stance, prepared fully to flip straight over the side if called for. She can identify most common firearms at short range, and unlike her brother, hasn't the benefit of a metallic skin to shield her from them. Blonde hair spills around her in disarray from tumbling and running. Too fair skin is blotched at her cheeks, pinkish from exertion. Glacial blue eyes taking in the situation narrow, stilling.

Most women with a gun pointed at them don't respond too differently, putting their hand out. Usually their palm is up, a 'stop' motion or a protective arm. They don't look like they're reaching for it.

Winter Soldier has posed:
While his own pale blue eyes widen. There's recognition, but he doesn't *know her* know her. That first encounter might've just been scouting, after all. But then, how many roofrunners are greeted by a disgruntled cyborg with an automatic, just for the bad luck of falling on the wrong roof. "Nuh-uh," he says, like she's a baby reaching for a lollipop she's not allowed to have. There's an inquiring woof from below. Lili wants to know what's going on.

Magik has posed:
Knowing isn't knowledge; recognition isn't identification deeper than a passing face on the same street, a mutual train or a path home. Who can you trust in a city of so many layered millions?

Illyana lacks her best friend, the good-boy with his black on black inkstain. Xraxre is no where to be seen, a blessing otherwise teeth might be sinking into a metal arm. Presumably dogs don't leap from the nearest building, however likely or unlikely that height is. No signs of overt injury lie with her, but given the oversized sweater, today in a muddy rose-gold, and the leather pants, it might be hard to be sure. She moves with a frisson of fatigue stitched into the response. Disgruntled cyborgs and skills honed in bad, bad places indeed keep her on the move. Black barrettes sliding back at sharp angles pierce those wild black locks. "<<Are you going to shoot?>>" A rather direct question, that, given the circumstances.

Lamellar plates are converging around her shoulder while she speaks, sliding down like a gorget off her arm. They flow in a way almost like watching a 3D printer mates with a sluggish waterfall. Another loud pop is followed by a bang of a frisky water heater. Okay, so pressure is really disrupted when a jump interrupts the water line. Whoops.

Winter Soldier has posed:
"<<Depends on what you mean to do.>>" His voice has a way of sounding weirdly offhand, when he's suppressing emotion. Like a bored teenager - even though his eyes are those of a wolf peering out from the trees, trying to evaluate the possibility of a threat. His head's canted, just a little.

The sound of the water heater makes him frown, and there's a whine from below. "<<What're you doing here?>>"

Magik has posed:
Poor pup: nothing to hear here. Even the strange arrangements of the metal armour snapping into place in a spidering arrangement gives off little noise. The click, a supple creak. Illyana hasn't closed her hand or dropped her arm yet. She still keeps it interposed between her torso and Bucky. Like this might somehow stop him from firing, somehow reaching. Those callused fingers measure space, but her unwavering gaze doesn't move from the Sig. From the man with the Sig.

Advantages are steadily whittled away in the cold and the protesting vibrations of her knee, but she ignores that for the most part. The mark on her cheek from meeting the roof after that horrendous trip won't be explicably dark for a few hours yet. Still, he has an advantage. Lupine eyes meet the arctic storm staring right back, the empty heavens over Lake Baikal and the waters of the world's deepest continental crack retaining their secrets. Gloomy. Insistent.

"<<I went on a trip,>>" she says with the mordant humour of their birthplace. A shared inheritence, even if she doesn't really know it. "<<You always answer your door with that?>>"

Winter Soldier has posed:
That stare unwavering....Winter is sleeping, bound in ice by the Trickster Prince, but he's not dead. His affect, his abilities, still at James's disposal, when the fractures aren't too much for him. "<<You didn't knock on my door. So yeah. What do you want?>>"

The uncomfortable, skin-crawling experience of being exposed, his head out of his burrow. Like any moment there'll be the *zing* of a sniper's bullet. It's what he'd do - get his prey to prairie-dog up with some distraction.

Magik has posed:
"<<This is yours?>>" A slight incline of her head is Illyana's equivalent of a grand gesture under the circumstances. The eldritch armour has already got its claws into her, unwilling to surrender it; she, a battle queen tested and blooded, is stuck in a situation for which a fancy vambrace or spiked pauldron won't do much for. She dare not look away from Bucky. He invites too much of a threat. Drown in the snow, rise from the cold. Is the ice tangible, a frisson of power locked in there for someone so innately attuned to magic there's no way out?

She drops her arm. Holding it there frozen is tiring. "<<I had no idea.>>"

Winter Soldier has posed:
That armor - in the back of his mind, he's envious. He's only got the arm, and while he's dextrous enough with it, it doesn't cover everything. Even the wirework beneath the skin is only partial.

For someone who knows magic....there's that faint trace of it, like the first breath of snow. "<<What luck you found me.>>" His deadpan is flawless, and his arm doesn't waver. James could stay there poised all afternoon, it seems. The click of claws from the loft- someone is dancing around, aware of her human's distress.

Magik has posed:
The armor on her reflexively fits. It might not even be something she notices, its weight accommodated by someone very slight indeed. Her boots scrape on the roof, gravity and the cold weather not doing any favours. Illyana doesn't deserve them. It probably knows not to offer.

"<<Luck is a fool's errand.>>" Her deadpan delivery sums up her opinion of that. Another battery of little pings and clanks emerge from a pipe, somewhere. She briefly shifts, daring to turn her head a degree and no more as if trying to place the noise. It's familiar to a Russian, the water heater straining, suffering. Bubbles, perhaps. It might just be the place calming down. "<<I am not the one with the gun.>>" Poor dog. She cannot respond to the shepherd below, not really. Her eyes lift, flitting, scanning a horizon. Nothing clear, there. Whatever she was running from must be waiting. Present. Shooting up the water heater to blow the building up.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Familiar to someone who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement, too. There are lot of things from the old days he's not in the least nostalgic for, and the rickety structures chief among them. He loves the occasionally antiseptic luxury of his suite in the Triskelion.

"You tell 'em, sister," he says, dropping abruptly back into English, and that laced with Brooklyn. "You need help? You on the run from someone?"

Magik has posed:
The English isn't fair. Not by a long shot. James speaks it fluently and so does she, bitten hard by the remembrances of an English day school she never went to; by a Russian upbringing; and things so far away as to be unimportant. It carries through the bitten Ural consonant peaks, the crashing defiles of syllables lowered by assonance.

How she conducts herself is a still, frosty review, taut and prepared to leap. Illyana shakes her head. "Tell who? You haven't got ghosts or a coffee maker to talk to."

No signs of movement on the horizon, but then if she has stilled, they might be measuring up a shot. They might well be hiding to avoid being seen by her. Hard to know.