516/Aliens

Aliens
Date of Scene:	20 May 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Sibilance, 271

---

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil has a very nice thing set up for herself. A single old apartment building that people tend to stay away from is now being overrun by Latino gang members, and they're starting to expand a criminal enterprise under the vague umbrella of legitimacy that comes from the current topsy-turvy state of Gotham. They have practical free reign over the residents and they're now especially curious about why there's no way into the room at the very top of the building, and no ladders up there, and...

    A room erupts in gunfire and screams quite suddenly and abruptly goes silent after a loud shattering noise. Someone was lobbed so hard out of a window they struck the neighboring building, landing messily in the alley.

    Sibil steps up to the door to start going hallway by hallway when she steps around the way and the lieutenant of these gang members steps around the doorframe and startles her, as he possesses zero mental noise. A metallic claw snaps out toward her and she slips backward just in time to get a few hair-thin cuts on her face. She ducks in, swerves, and tries to hit the man so hard that it would bust all the bones in a man's chest and break his organs. It doesn't work the way she thought it would. CLUNK!!

    "A-AAAAH!!!"

    Ever banged your shin on a coffee table? Imagine that feeling, but ten times worse. Sibil is not equipped to deal with her nerves screaming at her like that... thankfully she's just durable enough to avoid breaking her hand, but the metal man she just punched across the hallway and into a neighboring room extends claws from his previously human hands, and a soft silver fog of nanobots glows around him as he stalks toward her.

    Sibilance runs. She sprints down the hall and the combat android pursues her with single-minded efficiency. It is not nearly as fast as her, but it can just plow through obstacles. Eventually the pursuit spills into the street and the android comes to a screaming halt when a car SLAMS into it and knocks it clean through the air, creating a massive imprint in the concrete. This seems to be enough to stun the android, giving Sibil some time to duck behind cover in the form of a parked truck and finally cringe and clutch at her arm because of screaming, burning nerves.

    She's quietly sobbing. Yeah, that clearly didn't feel nice, and tears mixing from the blood dripping down her face make for a very ugly, painful moment for any who might spy it.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Out on the street there had been a lot of foot traffic, mostly civilians going about their business. A couple of the Joker's 'beat cops' were hassling a teenaged girl and her boyfriend on the corner, holding the boy in handcuffs while backing the girl up against a chain-linked fence. Someone - or something - had been closing in on them rapidly from a side street, a 6'8" figure in a three-piece suit and an antiquated-style fedora hat, but the gunfire had distracted even those jokes for police officers, allowing the girl to escape.

    Then the car wreck outside the old tenement gets the cops to draw their weapons and advance on the cyborg while the suited figure deftly breaks the handcuffs on the boy and sends him on his way too. The android is recovering its senses, maybe re-initializing itself, when those cops come running up with their guns drawn and shouting at it to put its hands up, and it just slashes across one of them at the neck and the other at the torso and both fall limply to the pavement. That tall figure stands back, taking in the scene from the broken building to the serpentine woman, the now-fleeing civilians, the scattering traffic, the recovered android. It's like a statue amid the chaos.

Sibilance has posed:
    The tech-enhanced gang member, with his claws and the metallic sheen to his arms and cheeks, stands up. His eyes glow as they fixate on the blood pooling from the two officers that were just murdered fairly indiscriminately. The nanobot-created ... cyborg? Android? The robotic man stomps across the street in the growing chaos and straight toward where Sibilance is currently hiding, having found her signature with some kind of futuristic scanning tech. This guy seemingly ignores the stationary figure over there, not concerned in the slightest about that oddity, despite the clearly inhuman density there.
    Sibilance, on the other hand, looks around cover, and spots an unusually tall man just... staring. Her rattlesnake-like face shows pain but also confusion. Then she steps out of cover and starts backpedaling away from the android until she stops near a bus stop sign just as he comes in for a swipe with absurd metallic claws. Right when the claws rend the sign away, Sibil whips around to grab it like an improvised staff.

    And then she kneecaps the android immediately, and takes several brutal, limb-bending swings, complete with cacophonous CLANGs and humming from the metal bending under the impacts, until one good baseball swing knocks him clear across the street and toward that stationary figure that is just watching all of this go down. Sibil gasps when she realizes the trajectory and shouts out, "MOVE!!"

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane wasn't just standing there rubbernecking. Nobody could see it from that distance, but billions of sub-nanoscopic cillia were vibrating at near lightspeed inside a chamber that would look like a mouth if it weren't hidden by a pitch black field around him. They vibrated so fast for so long that every particle in his dense frame got in on the action and even the field itself began quivering like water rippling, and it's just good luck that Sibilance sends the target sailing his way at about the time he has to release that sonic blast or fly apart, himself.

    The tall, trenchcoated figure actually takes a step forward to place himself even more directly into the path of that flying android and in the style of a sports-field alley-OOP one black-gloved hand catches its back, the other slams into its chest, and the alien physically crouches and leaps straight up. A dozen feet in the air Keane upends himself, releases the target, and releases that sonic blast at the same time.

    The shockwave is no wider than a human mouth, but is loud enough to shatter every piece of glass, rattle floorboards, set off car alarms, even be felt like the bassline at a heavy metal rock concert for half a block in every direction. The frequency is so low as to be barely audible by human ears, tuned for its force value rather than anything else, and sends the android blasting toward the street like it was hit by a ton of bricks.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil watches this with shock and more than a little horror. The first thing that enters her mind is 'oh, what is THIS fresh hell' just as she witnesses the man and the enhanced ganger launch up into the air. Her eyes widen as the android, stunned briefly by the drubbing she just gave it, is slam into the pavement with so much force that it would've sent up a cloud of debris, but instead sends dust outward in a wide carpet thanks to the method that was used.

    The android is... flattened. The device the man was using, buried in his chest, is clearly destroyed. There's a faint sparking and crackling.

    Sibil slowly approaches to stare down into the crater from the edge, craning her head and flickering her tongue, her long snake tail perked up. "Ah..." She bashfully touches her fingertips together and winces from the ache in her arm, her fingers visibly scuffed and bruised. "I... didn't mean to knock him toward you," she says, a kind of apology directed toward the very scary being that she ALSO can't read. She is also shouting, because her ears are ringing, because something that loud even when too deep and focused to cause major harm can still rattle ear drums.

    She actively tries to get a mental reading, in fact, which he might even pick up on. Low-key telepathy isn't very common.

    'I just want to go home and water my plants without gang members breaking in,' comes her mental complaint, a hope that this doesn't get even more complicated, a thought she holds back. 'Please don't be angry.'

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane's mind is actually quite easy to read, the problem is sorting out his alien thought processes. Have you ever read the output from a scanning electron microscope, a high-definition frequency scanner, a mass spectrometer, and a radio telescope all at the same time? He had landed from his high-jump heavily, as if he weren't accustomed to athletic displays, but recovered quickly enough. Then when Sibilance walked over and he looked at her, all of -that- kicked in immediately. A true mind-reader might even hear the conversations he hears from blocks away, and realize that he doesn't comprehend the human languages they're in even though he analyzes stress factors in their tone, breathing, and volume. Sibilance receives something like an amount of fascination, not because the X-Gene is unfamiliar when he looks through her but because of its unique effects on her human biology.

    "If you hadn't, I may have missed him resulting in non-combatant casualties," he answers her apology for swatting the android his direction, and then turns his attention down to the enhanced ganger. It's a deep, thorough inspection to verify his earlier reads and to double-check that it is, in fact, dead, and that the nanites won't be resurrecting it or infecting anyone else.

    "Are there more?"

Sibilance has posed:
    She isn't really 'tuned' to even comprehend it, so the flash of noise Sibil receives from him is bizarre just to put it lightly. She gets... glimmers. She gets the barest idea that he doesn't really see the way she does, the way he understood her. She gets the impression that he thinks in a different set of senses, and she gets an image of what she looks like through the sensory input he has. The not-really-static fuzz, the intellectual approach to her nature... That he can read intent and meaning in its raw form pretty much the same way she does on reflex, but at a much wider scale. She certainly does not hear people from further than a couple yards than her.
    She immediately stops trying to read his mind.

    'An alien,' she observes mentally and just leaves it at that. Sometimes that's all that's needed to register when mind reading is a poor decision, but she was spooked enough to fear the incompatible psychic link might fry her.

    For his form of communication, her 'voice' would be strange. Very few gaps are there to even register that she's saying anything or even thinking at all, as if her mind closes itself off by default. It creates pockets of 'quiet' that might do a good job of representing her own skittishness. Those are some severe mental defenses. "No... I cleared out the rest of them. This one caught me by surprise," she explains, pointing down at the very dead alien tech enhanced man. The nanites apparently don't function autonomously and must be commanded by a signal from the core device. Clearly some kind of alien weapon meant for a soldier and not anything more dangerous than that.