1670/Of Monsters

Of Monsters
Date of Scene:	26 July 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Lady Blackhawk, Black Canary

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Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "You have to understand, the nineties were a different time for the intelligence community. We didn't quite know what to do with ourselves with the cold war over, and Pablo Escobar needed to be stopped."George Fisher cranks open that cardboard box, before he starts digging through files. Finally setting a stack on the bar, before cranking the thing open half way. "The Herbet Sauer lost his arm in the closing weeks of the second world war, he was also my partner down when I was the Colombia station chief. Who you met, is a guy named Armin Keller."
    The photo in that file is of a young neatly dressed fellow, and well it may be a mug shot but he manages to look stylish all the same. Other photos of, well him in a Uniform below the GDR flag. "More specifically, Hauptman Armin Keller,Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment Kommando 4, Stasi directorate of clandestine affairs. A professional interrogator, torturer, and spy killer. When we picked him up in Beirut in 85', our shrinks diagnosed him as a psychopath a pronounced streak of narcissism. The GDR picked him up torturing small animals, after the suspected murder of his mother when he was about eleven. They turned him into, whatever you want to call him now. He's one of the worst I've ever seen, a serial killer with all the wrong kind of training."
    And another thick stack, this one contains well Polina was a knockout like sixty years ago. "The woman, was Polina Vanchev. Originally out of the Ukraine, she was the chief bio-weaponeer for the soviet union in the sixties and seventies. She weaponized just about every nasty bug you can imagine. She defected in 88', or tried to. They sent Armin after her, only he didn't kill her. Instead he put a nail in her, and took her as his bride. Kept her for himself.
    "Old Armin, isn't a good guy. He's a sick fuck, and a monster. No he figured out somone else had access to his special trick, so he's aiming you to go after them. He sent you to me, so you'd know and feel obligated to do it anyway. Thats the kind of shit he gets off on, I'd hoped he'd died."

Black Canary has posed:
    Dinah taps her fingers idly at the arm of her chair as she listens, then leans forward as he offers the file, flipping it open to read over it, her brow furrowing. "STASI..." she says with a frown. "...definitely a winner, from the sound of it." she says dryly, then accepts the other one to look at Polina, her expression getting increasingly stony as she hears more about their relationship. "...that loathsome son of a bitch." she mutters. "He's had her all these years..."

    Her blue eyes flash a bit as she looks up at the other man. "...he's right, dammit. I do want to deal with this. Whoever has it is screwing with people...killing them, making them puppets with this thing.' She taps the nail gently on the chair arm. "But he's going to be on my radar now...and he won't be able to run forever."

    She leans forward, dismissing it. She'll deal with that when she can; Armin is definitely on her list of people who need a great deal of punching, and Polina to be rescued. "What can you tell me about who might be using these now, if not him?"

Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "Well Armin got roped into "M-K Ascender" back in the day, which was turning captured agents out against third parties. In this case it was Pablo Escobar, he was the "Los Pepes". Took them strictly off the reservation, went rogue. He was hitting Pablo's safehouses and taking the cash for himself, Everyone had told the director thats what would happen. Anyway after a few weeks, we started finding dudes with those nails dead. First it was Pablo's dudes who Armin had tortured, then it was cops and Search-bloc. Nobody knew what they did, you know most of us just assumed it was some sort of signature."George starts paging through whats left in the box, before offering a soft "Ah.."

    Out comes a third file. Photos of neat "pins" like Armin's, as well as clumsier "Nails" like the one Dinah brought with her. "There are two basic models, pins and nails. The Pins, well we've only seen two of them. One in Armin which he just showed up with, and another in this guy here. We don't have a name for him, but judging by his uniform we know he was FARC."And in stark black and white, is a far younger Goerge with an M-16 in one hand, pointing the camera to a nail embedded in the head of a dead man. Boring green fatigues, and an AK still slung. "Radio carbon dating back then wasn't too great, but they didn't have a name for the material. Said it was a few thousand years old though, his also had a kind of design on the head of it. Aztec or Mayan or something? I got thrown out of the agency before I had a chance to figure it out."

    "Anyway the Pins control the nails. As far as we can tell, some sort've mind control sort of affair. We tried to de-nail a few, but they never survived the procedure. Granted we usually had to shoot the fucker a bunch of times first, even Armin."He shrugs finally, leaning back to snag a bottle of jack and a straight wall. "I put eight into Armin's chest at point blank and died like a bitch, then a week later he's out and about. I had witnesses and everything, I killed him about as well as I've done anything in my life."

Black Canary has posed:
    She pages through the pictures, frowning quietly. "So...he's essentially immortal as long as he has the pin? And someone would have had to recreate the pins, or find the one the other guy had...unless the other guy is the one doing this."

    She leans back in her chair, turning it over in her mind. "This FARC guy could be the one, or if these can be...ew....reused, then possibly someone got hold of his control pin and is making use of it. But we didn't see a person controlling them...there was this..." She frowns. "Spidery...thing. Connected to the nails in the two we fought. Is this....extraterrestrial? The material?"

Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "Oh Le Cometa? Yeah those things are a bitch, they're everywhere down in Colombia."Because, of course giant hyper intelligent spiders are just every day. "Oh so you found, yeah ok that's interesting. Usually Le Cometa doesn't control -people- just dolls that look like people, mannequins even. If the nails arent slaved to a pin, then I guess they're kind of...living dolls in a way. So Le cometa could I dunno, control them if they had been nailed, huh. We never ran into that, theres a French guy who knew all about that stuff though. He was also in MK Ascender, uh christ what was his name? I just remember his alias."
    George pauses to sip his drink a moment. "Renard Noir, the Black fox. He was from uhh, Lyon I think? Whole family of werefox things out there apparently, don't ask me the details I know right? Saw a six foot tall fox guy eat some dude's liver though, made me a beliver. Anyway Uhh, Jean Pierre Fabre? Yeah JP, he knew all about Le Cometa. Animal senses I guess?"

    "As for where the Pins come from, darlin I have no idea. I don't know where the FARC pin went, and by the time we were getting into digging into the nails and all this nonsense the whole taskforce was wrapped up. Fired all of us, tried to screw us out of our retirement to boot. Anyway what happened post my service, I have no idea. We'd all been blackballed."

Black Canary has posed:
    She considers, raising a brow at the casual mention of Le Cometa, then holds up a hand as he starts to wind down. "Pause. Where the hell do Le Cometa come from, and what are they? And one of them was a puppet, the other was human...guy in a luchador mask, but he looked completely different when the nail was in his head. I don't know if he was alive or not by that point, honestly.

    She thinks, frowning. "Yeah...amazing how those covert agencies are always so willing to fuck over the people who have given everything to them." She speaks with a certain amount of dryness, but also with the air of someone who has experienced some of that herself.

    She then adds. "Is there anyway to track a control signal like that? The pins, I mean? Or anything else you can tell me? It sounds like I need to go pay Armin a little visit before he has time to get too far."

Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "Le Cometa? Oh they're a species of sentient, evil spiders. They have some sort of illusionary powers, magic maybe? Anyway there are a bunch of them, all over the jungles down there. They're fantastically succeptable to fire, by the way. Like actually flammable, any open flame is enough to ward them off but I kept a flamethrower in the truck for those things."He pauses to sip after his glass a moment. "Oh they puppet dead bodies frequently. Usually they'll snag a family member and use them to lure the rest of the family into their web. Either way they don't talk very well, if at all. Max of like 2-3 words, yeah?"

    "Track no, but you can certainly screw up the signal reception with a good AM frequency jammer. They don't do well in cities as a result, why Armin came to you himself and took Polina with him. As far as why the pins can't be seen?"
    And well Theres some digging around, before he produces a neat little cardboard box with a brightly colored tip of..well it's a chunk of Le Cometa, maybe the tip of a leg? "Anyway, this is theory right but..."And he produces a magnet. The tip vanishes from inside the bag, before the bag lifts to the magnet. "I think the Pins are made from Le Cometa, I think maybe this is something they cooked up from Le Cometa parts or who knows. We'd just started looking into it, and we got canned. So you can have your own conspiracy theories, trust me I have enough of my own."

Black Canary has posed:
    "Well...and I thought it couldn't get more creepy...' she murmurs, then nods a bit. "Would make sense...that might be why La Cometa could control them directly when touching them with threads." She frowns. "...if someone has restarted this project, then it needs to be shut down. Hard, before they can get farther than they have. If this is just a leftover, then I need to find these nails and collect them all to let those poor puppets rest, if there's no way to save them."

    She sighs, leaning her head against the back of the chair as she looks at the ceiling. "...I really hate people who do shit like this. Turning people into weapons." she shakes her head. "Alright...where is the FARC pin now?" she says, wanting to clarify. "It's 'somewhere', or do you know where it should be?"

Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "Last location I knew of was a DIA facility in I think Utah, but it's property of the CIA. So I mean have fun getting access to it, as far as I know we're talking national security interests and all that bullshit."He plucks the bag free of that magnet, and well carefully stashes the bit away. "Where is it -now-, Goodness who knows. Could they have made more, I also don't know. Bill Clinton was not a fan of us, so we got shut down pretty hard."
        "Take my advice though, anyone you see with a nail in their noodle bucket? You do them a favor, and put rounds in their dome. Theres no getting better after you've been nailed, those people are dead. Oh and I'm not kidding about the flamethrower, if you intend on going after those spider fucks? I mean we're talking about colonies of intelligent, malevolent, invisible spiders."

Black Canary has posed:
    Dinah gets a quiet, hard look. "I will." she says simply, then pushes herself up, holding the files. "Do you mind if I keep these, in case I need to research a bit more? I have a feeling this is going to be a chase." she murmurs, clasping them against her chest absently. "Appreciate the warning though...and I've got friends who probably DO have a flamethrower, somewhere." Or she can go find Firestorm and have him just nuke the site from orbit, she supposes. Though this really isn't the sort of thing the JLA would normally deal with the way she feels it needs to be dealt with now. "Thank you for all of this, George. You've been a big help."

Lady Blackhawk has posed:
    "Sure, take'em."He offers a wave off to make the gesture clear. "I stopped being a Case officer, I never stopped trying to be an American. Go do whats right, Armin'll keep for awhile."

Black Canary has posed:
    Canary smiles at him. "I fully intend too..." she purrs, waving to him as she heads back up out of the house. "I'll bring you pictures if I can."