155/Collect Call to Hell

Collect Call to Hell
Date of Scene:	26 April 2017
Location:	Gotham City
Synopsis:	A Cat, an Oni and a Crusader crash a demonic party, and everyone gets covered in garbage. Hooray!
Cast of Characters:	Zachary Lightwing, Yokai (Sakara), Crusader

---

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
It is really late at night in Gotham and there's an dead end alley where something strange was happening.

A bunch of people in robes, their hoods drawn back so that they can talk to each other, are discussing some pretty worrying things in voices that human beings really shouldn't have. It would be surprisingly hard to hear them, and the only indication of their presence from the street is a curious red glow around the corner.

For the magically inclined, the alley exudes a stench of raw evil hell magic. Sadly, the ritual is already completed by the feel of it, so there's only violence down that alley if people try to crash the party. They won't be there for long, having provided another member of their order with their 'enlightenment,' which just meant having a demon hijack their body and make Gotham a slightly worse place to live in the process.

Zach is sitting up on a fire escape, staring down at the ritual somewhat passively. He doesn't seem interested in stopping them, but he appears to be a cat made of white fog with glowing green eyes so maybe it's just his feline neutrality kicking in.

Yokai (Sakara) has posed:
The worst thing about cultists is that they completely mess with the karma of a place. Rory Sakura (part-time wandering Japanese street artist and full-time secret monster) was visiting a neighborhood in Gotham that had some of the best graffiti in the area, because he wanted to capture its feel for his own work. And now he finds himself caught up in the miasma of a murderous possession fest. This is ... ugly. He stops, and takes out a white stick of chalk.

line. line, curve. line line short-line, curve. The character for "purity". line, line, curve, scribble. The character for "sunrise". He begins to whisper, over and over, a short partly-growled chant. The miasma is pushed back from him.

"Now that I can breathe for a moment," he says to himself, "what the hell is going on here?"

Vorpal (87) has posed:
The stench of evil is disagreeable to some creatures of Chaos. Contrary to common belief, creatures of Chaos are not inherently *evil*, it just so happens that evil tends to have better hours and a lax dress code.

Thomas Hunter is in Gotham for reasons that are not the best in the world- looking for a scoop for HeroWatch, mainly. Most of the HeroWatch snoopers and scoopers left Gotham alone due to its unholy terrors. But that has never stopped Tommy before.

This was not the best of places to be, and the rumor of Nightwing activity had turned out to be a bust. He was just about to turn around and head home when he catches whiff of that metaphysical stench, and he pauses.

For all purposes, he looks like a normal human in his late teens with a mop of red hair falling overh his eyes. This normal-looking teenager sways slightly for a moment, as if overpowered, and then slowly begins to make his way in the direction from which he can sense the emanations. Something has just triggered his horrified curiosity... "What on earth..."

He hasn't quite noticed Rory in the vicinity yet. The strench is far too present for him to notice details right now.

Crusader has posed:
SInce his almost run in with the dark knight, Crusader had decided to travel to Gotham a bit more often, in hopes of finding batman. But So far no luck tonight as he skittered from roof to roof.

But than... there was that red light. What was that? Crusader wasn't magic, couldn't inherently sense evil in that sense. But it looked just plain eerie. Looking up he notices that foggy cat with the green eyes and his curiosity only grew more

He drops down into the alley way across, and the large figure dressed fully in his Crusader armor heads into the alley with the green night.

"Are, you people all right?" he asks, hearing the unsual voices and chanting and admittedly a bit naive to these sorts of things.

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
The demonic cultists largely ignore Zach's presence. A ghost cat? Hardly worth even looking at to a bunch of these creatures. Zach himself just stares down at them with idle curiosity... he's clearly watching them, though why anyone would want to stare at cultists is probably a mystery without asking them.

The demonic power is waning, at first. The cultists pay no attention to the ambient sense of purity except for the distraction it causes in them. One turns to look in that direction, pausing in what he's talking about. An otherwise unremarkable man that one might overlook when walking by on the sidewalk, but wearing robes. He could be someone's dad or coworker.

The Crusader, however, is less easy to overlook. He drops in unannounced, and all of the cultists turn as one to stare at him. "No." "We're not done." "We can't let him leave, he's seen us."

And all as one, they manifest blades seemingly from smoke rising from the alleyway pavement, and they charge toward Bjorn as one, except for a couple of the cultists, who recoil in surprise at the sudden aggression of the others. While the ones clearly charging in at high speed like a wall of swirling death have glowing eyes and they make loud hissing and chattering noises which don't carry far past the alleyway entrance, their presence still masked to most people.

"You might want to dodge," Zachary unhelpfully calls with his childish voice down to the Crusader, the familiar ghost cat apparently unconcerned with the imminent bloodshed.

Vorpal and Rory will feel the demonic influence resurge from the alley, thanks to the hornet's nest being prodded. Something bad is happening over there.

Yokai (Sakara) has posed:
Well damn. That's the Crusader guy. Rory lunges forward with ninja-esque speed, appearing in front of Crusader and slamming a piece of paper to the ground between the oncoming demons and the super-hero fellow. He shouts a sutra so fast that it almost ... almost ... garbles, but the image on the paper manages to activate. A barrier in the form of a hedge maze of extravagantly over-thorned roses slams into being between the rushing horde and their target.

"If you have any mental defenses," Rory says, "You'd best raise them."

And his "human" guise is gone, replaced by an Oni. Yeah, he's a demon, but not one of these common, everyday, vulgar demons. He's imported.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
Something is going south, and it's definitely not the birds. Tommy cleches his jaw at the surge of evil, and he ducks behind cover quickly. In a second, he has vanished- his illusion is dispelled and in its stead the spell of ivisibility has descended upon the Cheshire cat.

But he's not going to take the ground route. Hell, no. Using the Rabbit Hole, and risking the brief moment of chaos burst being detected, he drops himself onto the nearest rooftop with a view to the alleyway from which the scent of Pure Evil is coming from. From there, the invisible Vorpal will try to peek down and get his bearings on the situation before jumping into action.

Crusader has posed:
Crusader had immediatly taken a stance to take on the oncomming charger. But than he sudden appearance of man... and then Oni give him pause. He recognizes this one at least

He dosn't say anything about mental defense...because frankly he dosn't HAVE any beyound MABEY higher than average will power... and that likely wasn't enough to stop demons.

But he instead seeing as this wasn't a danger he met before, his right arm forms a tower shield structure, and in his left a club like mace (no spikes though) getting ready to rumble. "You mind telling one, what is going on here?" he braces for when the Rose Bush defense breaks down.

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
The group of demonic cultists gets roadblocked by a Japanese demon, the Oni finding it surprisingly easy to stop them in their tracks... but only temporarily, because soon they are just hacking at it like a pack of howling animals, jabbing the points of their swords into it. It appears their swords are wind-aligned, and the barrier might not last forever against them. They SCREAM from the pain of the barrier gouging into their flesh and tearing at the chains bonding them to their hosts, but their intentions are clear.

They really, really want to kill Rory before they get properly exorcized.

Scouting from above shows that there's a magical array they were using, with several orbiting circles where the cultists would've stood. There's a floating crystal for each cultist, and the circle appears to glow with a power that is in all but the two crystals representing the cultists that have yet to be possessed. Those two are cowering in a corner of the alley behind a trash can. A woman in her forties and a teenage boy by the looks of it.

Zach lifts his head when he feels the brief flicker of chaos magic, looking vaguely up where the invisible Cheshire is. Those familiar glowing green eyes search... and then turn away to look back down at the action.

"Nice, an Oni!" he cheers, "These guys are screwed!"

He really isn't treating this with the gravity it deserves. He apparently also knows what Rory is supposed to be, and when he calls out, one of the demons pauses and snaps its gaze up toward him... and flings its magic sword at him hard enough that Zach barely avoids it, causing the ghost cat to scream in pain and spray an impressive amount of electricity and ectoplasm just from the small cut it makes in his side. He collapses onto the grate of the fire escape and trembles.

He probably shouldn't be mouthing off around demons. That one is clearly trying to climb the fire escape, drool running off its chin. The cultist the demon is puppeting doesn't appear to be the kind of woman capable of jumping the height it did to reach that ladder.

Yokai (Sakara) has posed:
That's not going to hold is it? The purple oni pulls another picture from his satchel. This time it's a ... drawing of a garbage can filled with burning wood being used by a bunch of street people to keep warm? And when it becomes real, the scene fills the area.

"Crusader. Could you maybe go to the other side of the alley and mess up that summoning pattern? It'll break when you smash it."

Yes. Send the tank to do the tank's job... but keep the attention of the demons. Which are jerks, no sophistication at all.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
A grin manifests from thin air. "Don't you know heckling is a high risk business, kid?"

It is quickly followed by the rest of the Cheshire cat, who leaps off the edge of the roof and lands on the fire escape, shaking the structure some. He makes a point of stepping far from any ectoplasmic splatters on the metal- he may see no trouble at running through Gotham barefoot, but he drew the line at getting slimed.

"So what we have here..." Vorpal says, leaning over the edge of the fire escape and looking down at the demon below, "Is a Donkey Kong slash King Kong scenario. And me without any barrels to throw down... are you badly hurt or are you being a scaredy cat?" he asks Zachary over his shoulder while he cogitates. A quick glance at the alleyway and he knows what to do.

"Keep down, kid. It's time to get Wonderful!"

He even does the double-u with his fingers, because every hero needs a gimmick. With a quick leap that displays his full feline agility, he jumps off the fire escape and, after a rather showy flip, lands on top of the lid of the nearest dumpster. Landing in a crouch, he touches his hand to the dumpster and there is a burst of chaos magic.

"You're a hungry hungry hippo, and you crave cultists!"

The dumpster *rears* and begins to charge towards the cultist trying to climb up the fire escape, its lid opening and closing ominously as it advances, a metallic 'Yuuuuuumyuuuuum!' voice emerging from the depths of the dumpster.

Vorpal quickly gets his bearings. He hopes the dumpster can 'swallow' some of the cultists and keep them occupied inside it. At least until they break free from it- they seem to have enhanced strength so this diversion is likely to be temporary.

Crusader has posed:
"You got it!" Crusader voice booms out. His shield and mace are reabsorbed. And he CHAAAAAAARGES! Right through the rose thorn wall "Oh yeaaaaa!" and takes one or two demon possessed folks with him as he keeps moving forward!

The man was running on a single track. Mess up Pattern! And that is what he intends to do. Though there was SUDDENLY a walking talking chomping dumpster

Crusader slides across the dumpster surface when it closes it 'mouth' and off onto the other side to get to the summon pattern. How do you ruin such a pattern?

Welp, he begins trying to rub and brush away any marking he sees, to see if it will get rid of the circle.

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
"Ooohmph save it if you're just going to pun at me, this really hurts," Zachary whines at Vorpal, his metallic voice distorted by the agony of what just hit him. The ectoplasm sloooowly slides back into place as Zach recovers from the damage and pulls himself to a stand there on the fire escape. He stares down at the approaching cultist with wide eyes, electricity climbing over his body as he prepares to zap--

But no, there's a great big dumpster that leaps up to eat the hapless cultist and bends the ladder it was climbing in the process. The sound the demon makes is not intimidating, it is more like "WHAT THE F--" shortly before it got smothered in living garbage.

The cultists get bowled apart by Crusader's bulk, and several just kind of comedically fall into the open mouth of a living dumpster, with suitably astonished noises with each one. They end up in a scramble, creating big dents in the living metallic being as they try to break free of their confines. The rest of the demons have broken through the thorny barrier and stumbled right into... the light of a painted fire.

They all hesitate. They heard the word 'Oni' a second ago, and now foggy shields are being lifted in preparation of a fight.

Crusader finds that the circle just reconstitutes itself by burning into the pavement if he tries to rub it out with his foot. Zachary, now helpful instead of not, calls down, "The crystals! Smash the crystals! The binding will break!" There ARE several crystals just ominously floating in the air and pulsing with eerie light. The same light he saw in the eyes of the cultists a moment ago.

Yokai (Sakara) has posed:
The Kanabo is the traditional weapon of the Oni. It's basically an upsized baseball bat clad with iron on one end - the thwacking end - that's been shaped into spikes. Rory doesn't carry one around, because his father wants him to become better at fighting without one. But there are certain circumstances where he'll bend the rule.

He reaches into his satchel. There's a card-stock drawing of just such a weapon. A whisper of evocation and he reaches into the drawing and brings the image into reality. Then, with a mad grin, he begins spinning it about, WHAM! into a demon-possessed cultist.

And it goes right THROUGH the cultist. But not the demon. It's spiritually extra-real, and it's also red-hot to add a bit of suffering. And he's now dancing around in a series of movements that wouldn't be completely unfamiliar to someone watching a Samoan Haka. Except, the movements aren't a THREAT but rather, action in place.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Now that sight just brings a tear to your eye," Vorpal says, watching his Frankenfant Terrible plow its impulchritudinous self through the demons, "Or maybe it's the smell. Who knows..."

The Cheshire cat jumps up and clibs up the twisted stair, up the outside of the fire escape. It looks perfectly effortless for him, and rather graceful. Clearly in a spirit to show off, he perches on the top ledge in a crouch and stays there, smirking at Zachary. "'Thank you for saving me from my scary stalker fan, oh mighty Vorpal','Why, think nothing of it, citizen! All in a day's work!'" He raises an eyebrow, "Joking aside, you sure you're okay there, sparky? Let me see where you're hurt, you might need someone to look at it..."

He pauses, letting Zachary call out his hint. Looking over his shoulder, he sees Rory and Crusader at work. "... that's the guy from the museum, I'm pretty sure of it," he mutters to himself. Of course, this whole crowd was unsettingly ... familiar.

The crystals. He figures Crusader and Rory can get crystals smashed. Just in case, though, he stays on top of the fire escape in case he needs to swoop down some more What Fresh Hell Is This on the cultists to give the others an opening to attack the crystals. Cats like having a high vantage point, after all. It confers tactical advantages.

Crusader has posed:
Crusader glances up at Zachary and Vorpal when he hears Zachary call out that rather helpful hint. He responds back in kind while moving "On it!"

His arms stretches out to grab three of the crystals and begins to try and crush them between his hands. Hopefully his sheer strength would be enough to do that. But yea, demon crystals. Never know whats going to happen with them.

He does spare a glance to Roary when the Oni begin Hakafighting his way through the demon possessed denizens. He blinks seeing the weapon go through the citizens apprently. An impressive sight if nothing else.

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
The demons inside of the living dumpster start RENDING through it one at a time, spilling gross gooey garbage guts all over the alleyway, and as they spill out, they slip and slide and fall over each other, and even one of the demons looks like it's having a worse time with this than any other part of this.

"What do these humans EAT!?"

Gotham dumpsters, everyone. They're lucky they got out with a minimal amount of used needles sticking out of them.

The demon struck by the club that Oni is using slams into a nearby wall, and the chainbs connecting it to its host snap like wet tissue paper in the process. In truth, this could exorcise those things with ease, but now they're all quite aware of what Rory is doing and they have taken on a pretty cohesive stance, strengthening their shields so that they can knock away the club with their own magical power. Which probably won't stand up against an Oni, but they won't get hit quite as hard.

Zach looks toward Vorpal, and ... wilts his ears. "You know how it is. Demonic sword wounds don't make for a very gracious innocent," he admits, "Thanks for the save. I could've handled it, of course, but you did it with style, and that counts for way more." There's that feline pride, and some feline respect.

The crystals are, in fact, crystals, and not particularly durable when squeezed by strong superhero hands. They shatter and the corresponding orbiting circles vanish in the process. It's a simple matter to destroy the rest of them, and the rest of the possessed cultists begin to collapse in heaps of robes and drooling hosts. Crusader makes short work of it with all the distractions dealing with the others.

Pretty soon, the last crystal is smashed, and the cultists are rendered harmless, their possessing demons expelled and sent back where they came from thanks to the reversal of their ritual.

"Awesome!" Zach cheers, happy to see such heroism in-person!

Yokai (Sakara) has posed:
"And that was //disgusting//," Rory says to Crusader, as his nice shiny leather combat boots are now covered in the gunk that the possessed idiots were contained in. He pulls a phone out of his satchel and begins snapping pictures of each of the cultists, including the two who didn't manage to get themselves soultrapped.

"Don't do this shit again," he says to the two. "It's like swimming through a pool filled with rusty razor blades and then rolling in leeches. It doesn't make you a better person, just dead."

And he burned through two perfectly good sketches which he now has to re-do. Fortunately, he can put his virtual kanabo back on its card. It's still good for a few more uses.

Note, he DID notice the ghost-cat and the chaos-cat. He just isn't sure what to make of them. Even having seen them before.

Vorpal (87) has posed:
"Don't mention it, cats stick together." Except when they don't, but Vorpal doesn't mention that. Instead he reaches over and air-boops Zachary's nose as he smirks, "Name's Vorpal, I'm on Chirp, same handle." He lets go of the edge of the fire escape and seems to fall backwards, only to hook his legs on the rail so that he ends up hanging upside-down. He brings his hands up to his mouth as he looks 'upwards' (down) towards Crusader and Oni.

"I call 'not it' for cleanup!" he says. He may have sent the Garbage Fail Kid on the rampage, but he sure was not going to take responsibility for its effects. The chaos magic had worn off by now and the disfigured dumpster was inert once more.

"Ah, nevermind, I'll lend a hand, wait for me."

He hooks his feet along the bars and pulls himself up as if he were doing sit-ups, until he's sitting up again to address Zachary. "You coming down or what?"

And then he unhooks his feet and legs and falls back down, seemingly doing nothing to stop his fall towards the ground. Such a fall is likely to kill him.

Except that a hole in reality opens up an inch away from impacting the ground, and Vorpal flies upwards from another one that opens up just a few inches away from it- this time falling *upwards* until his momentum is stopped by gravity, and he finally lands back on the ground in a crouch.

"I'll bring that other dumpster to life and get it to pick up any mess that isn't human. Or humanoid. You guys can start tying these guys up. Savy?"

Crusader has posed:
"....why would one tie them up? Seem more like they were being possessed" sure he may not be used to magic, but he can recognize when something isn't right. Crusader glances to Roary when he address the two still very conciouse and scared citizens. Yea he highly doubts they were in this on purpose

But still.... probably not good to leave needles in them. Who knows where that dumpster has been. Crusader begins going around and rounding up the down folks. Starting with the eldarly and moving to the younger one. He was checking for injuries and getting rid of trash "Thank you for your help Vorpal" haveing heard the cats name

He glances up to Zachary "And once again thank you. The crystals were just the thing. Though one not completly understand what has happened here"

And than, a double take at Roary. Wait, wasn't an Oni a demon? He thought about this.... well not like the dude hurt anyone. And actually was rather heroic. His voice booms out "By the way Yokai...must teach one those moves someday" referring to the haka-fighting style he was using.

Zachary Lightwing has posed:
"Sure sure," Zach replies to Vorpal, fully understanding the nature of felines, and especially the nature of a Cheshire Cat. He leaps on down to meat them down there, and then follows along to check on them, sniffing at each of the fallen cultists in turn.

"The demonic influence is gone," he diagnoses, "They should recover ... mostly. This one's been dead for a while, I think." He turns and places his paw on one of the cultists. "That's how it usually starts. A demon forces someone out of their body when they slip up, and it tries to spread its master's influence. It probably slithered into this guy's weaknesses and forced out his soul by just killing him. He was leading the ritual when I got here."

It's true. That's definitely a corpse. A corpse that didn't look like that a moment ago, when the demon was still puppeting it. "These people are going to be seeing ghosts and other weird stuff for the rest of their lives," he adds. "I don't envy their situation."

The cultists are easy to clean up and tie up, but it might be hard to explain what they were doing back here and why it was a crime except to more magically-inclined authorities.

"... and before you ask, it's insane to get into a fight with a bunch of cultists by myself."