1888/Heedless Lash

Heedless Lash
Date of Scene:	08 August 2017
Location:	New York City
Synopsis:	If Michael Jackson's Thriller video was filmed at Noon.
Thanks to:	Thanks to Clea Lake for running.
Cast of Characters:	1198, 1261, Black Ranger (Taylor)

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Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    New York City graveyards get busier around noon, as people get off on lunch and decide to go drop off some flowers and maybe spend a few minutes chatting at their loved ones. It's one of the more sincere rituals you're apt to see in such a cruel, cynical city; and that's why it's so odd to see a white woman with white hair-horns dressed in violet tights walking down the paved, twisting path between plots with one of those old, vinyl-lensed magnifiers people used to use to look at photo negatives held up in front of her eyes, lips moving as she makes her slow way down the path. It's also a bit unusual that, on an otherwise bright, sunny day, a bank of mist seems to be rolling in from... well, nowhere, actually. The hell?

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    There's someone else walking through here, too. Alexander doesn't like being here. Not at all. But then, he isn't here by choice, as anyone capable of seeing the dead can attest. There is a spirit literally grabbed hold of his shirt and it all but pulling him along through the graveyard.

    ...Wait, how does that even work? Ghosts can't touch people, can they? Much less pull them along a pathway. Nonetheless, that looks like exactly what's going on!

    Alexander himself is a pretty normal looking teen, lightly bronzed skin and dark hair, though the yellow-gold eyes might be a little disconcerting. He's wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers that look like they've seen better days. He's heading towards that fog too, it seems.

    For the very astute of hearing or sight, this apparently 'mostly normal teen' isn't breathing, nor does he have a heartbeat. And his body temperature is about the same as the temperature around him -- he doesn't seem to have any body heat of his own.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
    Zack spends so much time in New York he might as well get some kind of apartment down here or something. Lucky for him, though, he can always CouchSurf thanks to CouchSurfers.com. He's down here on another one of his expeditions for creativity and art or just being weird and creepy in the cemetery. No, seriously, he's just hanging out in the cemetery. It's weird. He's weird. And he's proud of it.

    "Um. That's /weird/." Zack says to no one in particular from his seat upon a larger gravestone. He raises an eyebrow in the general direction of the White Horned White Woman and then turns his nose up at the mist. "Okay, yeah, I've seen this movie. Not good alert." Zack doesn't make any moves but he does decide to pay closer attention. Y'know, just in case something pops off.

Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    Clea stops walking just past eight monuments on a smallish plot encircled unevenly by diverging paths. She lowers the magnifying lens to about mouth level to intently look over it at the plot before lifting the lens to eye-level again and nodding once, definitively. She snaps the lens back into its black rubber holster and tucks it into her purse--though on closer look, it's more of a pouch--before lifting her hands to the sky, palms up, fingers curled into claws. Two things happen then. The first is that the fog bank begins to thicken and swell immediately. The second is she seems to be talking to herself; from a distance, it's hard to make out what (something something something "she broke the face and broke the depths and broke the sea" something something), but as she chants the day gets noticeably darker. Black, boiling clouds roll across the sky, pregnant with rain, ominous with thunder.
    Then, shoulders squared, the white woman starts walking toward the plot.

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    Alexander's ghostly guide points in the direction that the white-haired woman is walking in, and Alexander winces. "...You're absolutely sure?" he asks the ghost. And now there's someone ELSE talking to themself. Is it an epidemic? Is this about to be the convergence point for a bunch of crazy people?!

    Whichever's the case, Alexander sighs, shoulders slumping. "OK, OK, I'll look into it, geez." With that he starts walking towards that same plot that Clea's walking towards. Though he's following quite a bit slower and he's keeping some distance between the woman walking towards the plt of land and himself.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
    "I swear I hate New York. There's always some BS. Always." Zack hops off the gravestone and pulls his arm up. "Zordon. This is Zack. Something weird's goin' down in a cemetery in New York. I'll keep you posted." With that message sent off, Zack starts to jog-trot off into the direction of where all that chatter is going on. Or self-chatter. It's weird, right?

    "Hey uh, if you're gonna' make it rain or somethin'... can we do Franklins instead of Water? I just dyed my hair this morning..." He probably shouldn't be trying to distract a crazy witch person.

Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    Clea smiles faintly at Zack, and nods at the plot of land ahead of her. "Look. Count those monuments. You see eight, yes? Look again. Count again." As she gives that command, she turns to face Zack with hands lifted in front of his face, both hands making an L with finger and thumb, tips together to from a rectangular window like you sometimes see a photo of a director doing on set. Viewed through that box, there are nine monuments, but it's impossible to say where the ninth is, or to describe its shape: all nine of them are nauseatingly blurry, swimming in his vision as if immense heat waves are distorting the air. As she takes her hands away and the plot of land ahead snaps back into view, Clea suggests kindly to Zack, "Run. Run into the mists. They'll clear your memory and you'll be fine."

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    Alexander jumps when Zack speaks up, now standing closer to him. "H-huh?!" His gold eyes are wide in surprise. "Oh. Uh, s-sorry. Didn't see you," he says apologetically. He doesn't seem like he was trying to ignore Zack, no. It really seems like he wasn't aware he was there until then.

    Whether through Clea's hands or not, Alexander sees nine monuments. "...What should we do?" he asks Clea. She can probably tell he's not a normal kid, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. There's no malice to be sensed from him though, so it's unlikely she'll mistake him for an enemy.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
"Uh, lady you trippin'. You in the cemetery, right now. You want me to call somebody for you? Hol' up." Zack grabs his phone and starts to swipe through his screens so that he can get into the position to be ready to call some people and get some 504 action going. Cuz this lady is definitely out of her mind.

    Zack looks off towards the other person hanging about and gives a bit of a nod. "Keep her talkin'. I'll see if I can get the crazy house on the phone. With double the straight jackets." Zack hasn't even tried to count any monuments or anything. He's just trying to figure out why this person is making mists and what not. It's too much.

Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    Clea glances at Alexander. "If you're offering to help, then be ready to fight. This will be bad." She glances at the plot of land again. "The golden barque. The maiden at sea. 'Rarely is travel peaceful,' said she." That odd couplet pronounced, Clea crosses the path onto the plot, air splitting for her in an inverted V, the atmosphere on either side piling up in waves like she's passing pushing curtains aide to part them.
    Inside, great piles of brown earth stand near most of the graves, as do shovels. Six men and women in voluminous purple robes with red trim are startled to see the intrusion. The five corpses standing dully by the graves do not. Apart from being upright and on their rotting feet, they seem about as placid as you'd want a dead person to be. The white-haired woman, for her part, wastes no time on surprise: she picks a target, one of the robed men with short, brown hair in a bowl cut and a kind of rat-shaped chin. She gestures at him with one hand, forefinger and pinky extended, to loose a sinuously twisting bolt of yellow light that slams into him and knocks him backward into a grave. He's too unconscious to even yell as he falls.
    "Stand down, servants of the eye," Clea warns, hands tracing arcane patterns before her. "I mean to undo your works. Don't make me undo you."

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    Alexander shakes his head. "No, wait!" he says to Zack, holding up a hand to try to draw his attention away from the phone. "There's really something going on. I don't know exactly what it IS that's going on, but someone's disturbing the dead here."

    Clea warns him there's going to be a fight, and he nods. "Gotcha." A look to Zack. "Careful, man. This is probably gonna suck to some degree." He tries to keep himself between Zack and whatever's on the other side as Clea walks forward into the 'pocket', seemingly popping it like a bubble. She goes in swinging, so to speak, and Alexander makes to back her up. His fists light up with some sort of sheath of energy, though he doesn't start literally swinging yet.

    He isn't about to underestimate Zack and tell him to scram, but he hopes the guy has sense enough to run if he can't do something to fight.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
    "Uhhhhhh." Zack looks at the going-ons like there's something coming out of their necks. Or worse. But still he doesn't turn to run or anything like that. It would seem that he does mean to be a part of this. He's a Power Ranger with or without his suit. And he'll morph if he has to. But for the moment, he's just going to play everything a little bit closer to the chest. His phone gets slid into the pocket of his jeans as he lines up alongside the Crazy Cemetery Lady and Light Fists. Considering that Crazy Cemetery Lady went in swinging, Zack figures he might as well do the back up thing.

    He steps back into a martial arts stance that could only be recognized as Hip Hop Kido for those that pay enough attention to notice such things. It doesn't look like anything more traditional as his body is moving to a beat that doesn't exist or isn't playing right now. "And I thought this NY trip was going to be boring. Serves me right."

Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    The servants of the eye, if that's what they call themselves, do not choose to obey the horn-haired woman's warning. They instead begin to act as one, no words spoken between them, each just moving to do his or her part in unison.
    One guy in robes stands back, circling behind a tall, obelisk-like monument for some cover as he begins doing magical things with his hands and voice. The inverted V through which you each passed falls shut.
    Two guys in robes start spreading apart from each others, conjuring in more or less simultaneity. Mandalas of red energy appear before them, circles that look like iron rings with spikes containing inverted pentagrams. Fire bursts out of them in a pair of wide, flat fans. The fire screams and twists like living ribbons to avoid the other purple-robes and even the zombies. Intruder-only fire.
    The remaining two servants of the eye draw long daggers with curving blades and crescent hilts from their belts and charge forward. The zombies seem spurred to action by this movement, because they too charge, but creakily, their dry tendons snapping and rolling up like blinds as they're forced into unnatural movements. Their hands are extended like talons, and given that their fingers have worn away to leave naked bone behind, talons is just about the correct term.
    The white-haired woman has no chance at all of it. Oh, she conjures a floating shield up, one made of solid light in the shape of a large tablet in which weird letters are carved, and that shield holds back the dagger that arcs down at her throat, but two zombies set on her and tear her flesh; snakes of fire lance into her and burn her. She howls but doesn't go down. She isn't even that bloody yet.

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    Sadly, Alexander isn't really formally trained in fighting, so he can't recognize Zack's stance for what it is. All he knows about it is that it's a hell of a lot more trained than his own is. In fact, if Zack is formally trained, he can probably see that Alexander isn't. Fortunately, since Alexander realizes this, the energy around his fists disappears, and he calls to Zack, "Here, take point. You look like you could mess somebody up like that. I'm better as support."

    When he sees the trouble the white-haired woman's having, he curses in French. Though instead of wading into the fray, he gets close to the nearest undead and... suddenly pale green smoke, a little like cigarette smoke, but 'thicker' somehow, more like dye clouding water, rises from his open mouth. As the smoke appears, there's a sound like a low, ethereal groan that seems to come from somewhere roughly underneath Alexander's feet.

    The smoke seems to 'reach' out to the nearest undead, trying to enter its mouth. He's not going to apply enough ectoplasm to completely take control of the zombie, no. He's just trying to confuse it. He doesn't want to leave his body unattended just yet.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
    "Watch our backs, dude."

    That's all Zack has to say in agreement to whatever Alexander's chosen to do. He can see the smoke attack out the corner of his eye and makes a mental note of it. Looks like there's a couple of magic people that're going to be helping out with things. Of course, he's going to have to be the physical one and it's a good thing his Power Coin is on him lest he not be able to actually do anything useful.

    Zack takes off in a quick run towards where the lady is being attacked by the Zombastic Duo. He leaps from farther away than a normal human should be able to and somersaults through the air before his descent takes him down with a pair of sneakers aimed for Zombie Skulls. One for each. May the power of enhanced strength give him the boost he's going to need to help with these things.

    He's taken note of the other things that're around with the robes and what not and is just planning ahead for that action. But for the moment he needs to get these things off the Cemetery Lady.

Clea Lake (1198) has posed:
    The servants, or whatever, have the advantage of numbers, and they're not afraid to press it. Five zombies and four people in robes mean three attackers per. One of the dagger-wielders had been aiming for Alexander before he fell back and Zack leapt forward. She approaches him with the tip of her blade pointed down, like a knife-fighter. Two zombies flank her, hemming away any attacks from the sides and providing four extra ripping, tearing arms to deal with. The undead aren't strong--too much muscle mass has wasted away--but the woman with the dagger hits like a falling piano, and blood sprays in a fan from Zack's belly.
    The two fire-slingers are drawing their mandalas again, preparing for another attack. Clea sees them and spares them no mind. For all that they burned her, the burns aren't too bad, just red, raised blisters on her sides. It's the knife-wielder she's worried about. Clea keeps the Shield of the Seraphim between her and the stabber as she flings an explosive mote of light into the cultist's face. The light blinds her, and she staggers back. That just leaves two hungry zombies to deal with.

Alexander Dubois (1261) has posed:
    "Give it my best," Alexander replies to Zack as he jumps into the fray. For his part, the gold-eyed teen isn't really much of a physical fighter, so about all he can do is stay to the fringes of the battle and harass a few of the magic-users. The fire-flingers seem like the best targets; he can try to knock them over or juggle them with 'blasts' of that green smoke. Which can apparently 'punch' when required, even if it's just metaphysically so.

Black Ranger (Taylor) has posed:
    Teamwork seems to be the key element to this entire thing and even though these other two aren't the Rangers, Zack is doing his best to attempt to meld his physical kicking and punching with the metaphysics and magicality that's coming from the others that he's working with. Sometimes he's kicking something into the smoke or energy that's being used or he's flipping something the other way. It's all very swift and very stylish movements that are intermingled with dance moves. Y'know, for style.