483/Frost and Steel

Frost and Steel
Date of Scene:	18 May 2017
Location:	Lower East Side, New York City
Synopsis:	Molly Carpenter crosses paths with the Winter Soldier on a job.
Cast of Characters:	Winter Soldier, 184

---

Winter Soldier has posed:
Heat comes on fast in New York City, fast and ugly and sticky. It's not something rain solves, either. Rain almost seems to make it worse, the downpour just adding to the overall humidity until the daily commute becomes a thing of unique misery. Neither does nightfall provide any palpable relief; it's one o'clock at night, now, and the heat of the day still lingers in the air, undeterred by the sheets of rain sluicing down from the sky.

Heat or cold, rain or shine, though, there are some trades in the city that always run like clockwork -- which, in fact, benefit from the fact that nobody wants to be out in weather like this -- and one such transaction is taking place in a narrow alley between two buildings within spitting distance of the East River, presumably offices associated with the shipping docks nearby. There's a cluster of men, about four or five, standing together i the dark, smoking and overseeing the loading of some sacked cargo onto a truck.

It's not really all that clear what the cargo is, up until it moves and makes a low, stifled, noise.

Molly (184) has posed:
The nighttime hour serves as a retreat from the building summer, soon on its way. With it comes the sticky humidity, the drenched layers, and the unpleasant need to unpeel yourself from a plastic seat on the Skytrain. Molly could do without. She's a creature of the night more than the day, her intensely fair skin and raver getup entirely appropriate to the situation. The abundance of her wildly dyed hair and entirely strange attire, punk leather halter top and stiff lace skirt all part of the typical raver ensemble.

Outside of a forgettable warehouse where others of her set still intend to rock away the night, she leans against the wall. It's a long moment of silence, and the Winter Lady, wizard, and general problem about town scrunches her technicolor hair rather than bum a smoke or mutter curses. It won't help.

Giving the battered door a nudge for good measure, she stalks off down to the river. It's not like she has an Uber home, and something passing for a bus might be found at the nearest bridge. Gotham by night isn't terribly safe, less so here.

But sometimes the frozen touch of instinct guides a girl, and this time around, she follows the call of the mantle that makes her fae. It urges her on, though she might not be able to say why. Sometimes it's best not to know.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Soft voices reach Molly around the corner of the first building as she draws closer. There's an angle at which she can approach where she can see and hear the unfolding events without being herself seen. The voices, all male, speak to one another in Ukrainian, rough and short and punctuated by the sounds of footsteps, the moving of heavy cargo, the occasional whimpers of said cargo.

Eventually there's the slam of the truck's cargo doors, a few last curt words, and the sound of cigarettes being dropped and ground out. The men start walking, some presumably to get into the truck to drive it off, others back towards the building. Everything is quite incongruously peaceful, considering what is actually happening here.

Up until the sudden slap-crack of a suppressed rifle firing shatters the silence. The man heading for the driver's seat of the truck drops instantly, his head ventilated by a bullet.

The others shout and immediately draw their sidearms, though the rain and the acoustics of the area make it hard for them to pinpoint from where the shot came. A hint comes eventually, though, to anyone really paying attention. Through the background hiss of the rain, there is the soft, deliberate sound of a rifle's bolt handle being cycled, followed by the gleam of a spent casing dropping down from above.

Specifically -- from a disparate dark shape perched on the top level of the overlooking building's fire escape, hunched over to survey its targets.

Molly (184) has posed:
One of the earliest lessons obtained in the apprenticeship with Harry Dresden: bullets are bad.

Bullets hurt and rip through magic unless conducted into useful shells of force. Those tend to require a lot of energy to hold up, and bullets move at such a high velocity, the idea is to get out of the way right away. Better yet, don't be in trouble. Of course, Harry Dresden lures trouble and his brightly coloured protégé is the definition of lured to such things. So when the first crack goes off when she rounds a corner onto an event no pretty young woman's eyes should see, well... The response is almost reflexive. She throws herself to the wall and eases back.

Her shoulders tense, the blue-haired girl eyes up the truck. If the whimpering cargo is getting any louder, then she has something to put a bead on. Otherwise she shrinks down to make herself smaller, already calling on the magic to try and veil herself. It's not hard to make a few smart assumptions: trafficking of some kind, a deal off the books, an enemy not up to it.

And when it comes to trafficking, hey, why not throw in a 20 year old with it? Her hands clench at her sides and she peeks out in time to see the blood running in a puddle, and the body flat. Some magic is easy for her, some harder. Easier might be messing up the truck, but as that might be her getaway, she's not quite prepared to do that.

Not with an active shooter. And the ravers probably high out of their minds.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Nobody is paying any mind to the truck anymore, at the least. Nobody's paying any mind to Molly either, who is still largely out of sight. The focus of the remaining men is swinging upwards to track that dropped shell casing, their eyes squinting past the pelting rain to find the figure up above.

The shooter speaks down, something in Ukrainian. His voice rasps like it's rarely used, rough and harsh and full of obvious, laughing contempt. "I had to give you a hint?" he finishes, in an English with edges grated onto it by a Russian accent.

The traffickers react with stung fury, whatever he said, and their weapons swing upward. Gunfire sprays at the fire escape. The man up there starts reacting even before the muzzle flashes light up the night, however, a turn and a soundless leap taking him ten feet straight up. His left arm latches the edge of the roof -- it catches and reflects the sparse light in a way it should not -- and he swings over and vanishes from sight.

The traffickers curse, strafing down the alley, trying to regain a bead on the man who just shot one of their own. Their progress takes them, coincidentally, away from the truck standing idle, positioned so its rear doors face out towards where Molly stands. She can see them shudder a bit as the presumably-human cargo within tries to get back out, clearly already not keen on their situation and even less keen now there's gunshots.

Molly (184) has posed:
There's really no time like that present to run away. Get gone, no one notices. Wrong kind of girl for that. Molly tightens the veil of invisibility around her. It's not perfect but it holds up on a battlefield well enough. This is nothing if not a battlefield. Her spell set, she cautiously steps forward and then uses the cover of whatever she can find to avoid having her head ceremoniously blown off or a bullet taking her through the shoulder.

It can still happen. Indiscriminate sprays of fire do not help. With her footsteps placed carefully, she inches towards the back of the truck and then breaks into an outright jog. A run might disrupt the illusion, but not terribly likely. Reaching the bed of the truck, she falls forward onto her stomach. The vehicle probably rocks with the added weight, for all she doesn't amount to much. Any door gets yanked open before she flops on it, but that still amounts to something worthwhile.

"Hold still, I've gotta get you out of here. And if you're a carnivorous dolphin or something, remember to eat //them//." Nothing like humour in a bind. She puts her bare hands into the material and pulls back, shimmying herself until her feet are on the ground and she can finally get some purchase.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Molly's dash for the truck goes unnoticed. It might have even gone unnoticed even if she didn't veil herself in that spell of invisibility, because the men are wholly focused on the shooter taunting them from the rooftop. Even despite that focus, however, they're still shocked when another of their number gets cut down by a second shot from that rifle, this time from an angle completely opposite the direction in which they last saw their unknown aggressor. They swing their own carbines around, but there's still nothing to be seen through the sluicing rain.

There is a sense he is a cat playing before the kill.

Whatever he's doing, it's creating an opening for Molly to get those truck cargo doors open, whether that's intentional on the mysterious man's part or not. She's confronted with the sight of four shapes within, all apparently female, tied up and wrapped in sacks to keep them muffled. It won't be too hard to cut them loose and get them untangled -- the men clearly weren't expecting too much trouble -- and as she's doing so, one of them replies, "I WISH I was a carnivorous dolphin!"

Another of the women spits, "'Have a job for you,' my ass!"

The last to speak just says, "Oh god, thank you -- "

Molly (184) has posed:
Four people. Too many to conceal along with herself. The blue-haired girl bites her lip, dark plum, and gestures. "Look. There's a rave club around the corner, and up two streets. It looks like a brick warehouse with 'Old Line Trade' over the door. Go inside. Run to that door and get inside." While she's talking, Molly throws a hasty look over her shoulder to the open sky and touches each of them, the excuse to pull off a bit of sacking or sticky tape. To her eyes, at least, they're all immediately branded with a starburst shape. Woe to anyone in her Court who doesn't recognise the opalescent film of four women now put under her protection for the night. The most they'll get is a chilly shiver, not much more.

"I'm going to help you down, but if someone comes, I'll..." What, exactly? "Distract them. Okay, we clear?" If they need more instructions, so be it: warehouse, go inside, two streets. Otherwise the lambs are on their own and the sheepdog -- never going to think of herself as that, maybe punk Bo Peep -- slides out to escort them. Someone is running. Someone upstairs on a rooftop is shooting. And some asshats screwing around with trafficked women are really going to have a bad day. She's not going to interfere on that score.

One has to pray they're not coked out of their minds or stumbling drunk, drugged and confused. That will slow them all down, but she's not leaving them to rot, either.

Winter Soldier has posed:
None of the women are aware of the powerful protection under which they come, but to a one they feel a sense of safety. They shakily agree to Molly's instructions, and thankfully none of them seem too drugged to walk. They shuttle out as directed, into the rain, getting ready to run at Molly's direction...

In the meantime, between the frenetic gunshots, there are a few moments of silence, where no guns are fired and even the rain seems to dull to no more than a background drone. In those moments, the sound of metal moving and articulating comes through, clear and sharp and inhuman.

It is immediately followed by the rapid descent of a shadow down the wall of one of the flanking buildings. The assassin slides straight down it with total aplomb, his progress braced by a left arm that appears to be made entirely of metal, throwing showers of sparks where it drags against the brick. He leaps off the wall at the last moment, knives first, and buries both blades in the throat of a man midway through turning towards his threat. The others fire, somewhat wildly; he twists and ducks through even the close-range fire, putting down the second-to-last man, and then the last, with such lethal efficiency that the entire transaaction could be missed between slow blinks.

Apparently he considers himself to have wasted enough time here. He looks over the dead, doing a clear count and checking off some mental kill list, and starts to walk towards the truck. Whereupon he pauses, because it's very obvious that someone is freeing the women from it.

Blue eyes, empty and unremitting and cold as a trackless snowfield, appraise this over a heavy black mask that obscures his features. The rest of him is swathed in black also, except for his left arm. This close it's obvious it's prosthetic, the bright metal of it stamped with a red star. He makes no effort to hide it as he considers the person delivering aid who he can hear, but not see.

Then he laughs. "All right," he says, in his voice harsh from disuse, "whoever you are. Take them, if you like." And he turns away, letting the rain sluice the blood off his knives.

Molly (184) has posed:
Murder at close hand is nothing Molly ever gets used to. At least one hopes she doesn't; the moment she loses her humanity and the fae eclipses the mortal, the world is going to be the colder for it. Her expression is drawn as she traces after the girls, letting them get ahead. Of course, without concentrating, the veil is down.

Her part was small, but there's something to be said about rescue of victims by the escapee from an electronic music video with memorably colourful hair. She has all the subtlety of glitter thrown in Times Square or a bat symbol over the Gotham skyline. A glance over her shoulder might confirm her awareness she's severed the spell on reflex, and then wipes the rain from her face with her palm. None of her makeup is really running yet, but the look in her eyes is gem bright, haunted, and full of far too much energy. Even in the rising of spring, there's an element of her vital sparkle on display.

And what she finds is enough to give her pause. Red star, articulated arm. And eyes so dark, and blighted by the shadows, despite their pale hue. It's something to stamp a person to the marrow. Her shoulders draw back and she pivots in a puddle, starting a run after the others. So he's left in the rain and the humidity, iron blood and ashen death as his companions.