5801/A night on the town

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A night on the town
Date of Scene: 17 November 2018
Location: Unknown
Synopsis: A dangerous tome is secured by WAND. And the Shadow closes off a line of investigation.
Cast of Characters: Shadow, Lara Croft




Shadow has posed:
    Another Saturday night, another week been and gone. Lara would much have preferred curling up with a few good texts, but Sam wasn't having any of it, insisting that the archaeologist needed to spend some time in the present rather than the past for a change...

    So far, the present has included three bars, five pick-up attempts, three slapped faces and one barfight that Lara's reflexes helped them get out of before the police were called, and Sam's enthusiasm is starting to flag just a little. Her arguments for a fourth attempt are slightly interrupted by the distinctive (to Lara's ears) sound of crumbling and crashing masonry from what seems to be about one block further down, and every single neck hair on her neck standing out straight...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara is stepping toward her black Jeep and deactivating the car alarm. "Sam." She says with a light laugh. "This is no way to live our youth." A sentence she'd said to her friend many times before and likely yet to come.

As Sam tries to convince her otherwise while they're both getting into the Jeep's front seats, Lara pauses at the sounds she can hear. She looks in the direction that she thinks they're coming from, trying to figure out what is producing those noises.

Sam continues to talk after crawling into the Jeep and starting to mess with the radio, swiping the keys from Lara's hand to make it easier to operate the stations! Lara hasn't had anything to drink, as per her normal routine... but Sam certainly has.

"One second." Lara says as she takes the keys back and then closes the Jeep door. Sam is already on her phone texting lord knows who while Lara is starting down the street to go investigate the sounds!

Shadow has posed:
    The sound of crumbling seems to have mostly stopped, but Lara easily homes in on the screaming and the equally distinct sound of pistol fire.

    The last corner is a little harder to take as she has to push past various civilians who are very intent on going the /other/ way as quickly as possible, but she manages it -- just in time to see.. /something/... that for all intents and purposes looks like someone wanted to make a spider but all it had was a mass of human limbs, and wound up twisting and breaking them to make the shape work.

    It seems to have just finished pulling itself through a doorway that originally was only half as wide as it needed to be, and its head - which likewise looks like four human heads have been squished together - swings from left to right, searching for something or someone...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara is searching for those noises when the screams happen, then the gunfire... then chaos on the sidewalk during holiday season. Quickly Lara reaches into her dark navy blue jacket and she draws out a handgun and her phone.

As she rushes in the opposite direction of the flow of foot traffic she's using her phone to call it in... She's a SHIELD agent afterall. Maybe not a fancy one like a Clint Barton or a Natasha Romanoff, but she's still an agent... of sorts.

"This is Croft." She says into her phone to the SHIELD operator. "There's gunfire on the corner of 85th and Irving."

A second later and she's rounding the edge of a wall and... SEE what this all was.

"Good god." Lara says then in her heavily accented British flavored voice. Her brown eyes stare at the monstrosity and she swallows. Are people reacting horribly to a... thing or is the thing truly dangerous?

Shadow has posed:
    Either way, people are clearing the area with some alacrity. Well, most are; another set of pistol shots resound, and this time Lara can track their origin to a black-clad figure standing a ways further down the street, firing at the creature's limbs and joints.

    The creature does not appear to appreciate this, and it starts scuttling forward while its multiple lips open and close, sounds coming out that seem /almost/ like words, the cadence and form sending familiar shivers down the archaeologist's back.

    At least the gunshots have gotten its attention and rather than going after civilians it seems to be focusing on the shooter...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara presses her back as close to the nearest wall as possible, her phone is put away back into her jacket and her gun is lifted up with the barrel pointed skyward.

She watches 'whoever that is' shoot at the creature and it makes her eyes narrow. There are a lot of vigilantes in this city, Lara has learned that. She grew up in rural London where there were next to no super powered individuals. The Eastern Seaboard of the United States was like a magnet for them though and thusly also a magnet for super powered villains! Peace and Chaos. Yin and Yang.

Croft watches the 'thing' engage the individual firing on it, she doesn't know WHO is at fault here though. So she just pushes forward closer, ready to fire her own gun at whomever may attack her! When she gets close enough though she chooses to shout out. "SHIELD Agent!" To announce herself... hopefully that wasn't a terrible idea.

Shadow has posed:
    The thing ignores Lara's call and charges straight for the black-clad figure -- and through what turns out to have been an illusion and into the lamppost behind it, knocking it over. The figure - standing somewhere else entirely, now - looks over their shoulder at Lara. "Whatever you do, don't let it --"

    ... And then several things happen in quick succession. A car swerves in an attempt to evade the lamppost as it falls down, and crashes into the creature instead. The creature lets out another of those cacophony roars and smashes one arm through the windshield, /grabbing/, and then...

    The only mercy is that it happens too /fast/ to see or hear much of anything beyond an abbreviated scream and a sound Lara is going to want to drink heavily in an attempt to forget, and then the thing has two more "limbs" and its head and body have grown...

    "... Touch you." the figure finishes grimly, raising their guns and firing again -- but the damage their earlier shots left has already mostly healed thanks to the new body mass...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara is quick to duck out of the way of some of the resulting chaos and she moves herself to another position that she deems a bit safer and more covered from any resulting attacks! or so she hopes.

She watches the sheer madness unfold in front of her and she realizes just how wild this city really is... She'd come here for the job with SHIELD, to have resources at her disposal that did not involve her tapping into her family's wealth, but now, she often questions whether this city is just purely too... lost to chaos!

"Don't let it touch me." She repeats then as she watches the dark clad figure resume its course out to fire weapons upon the 'thing' that just absorbed someone?

"Shit." Lara says, gasps it out really. "Will guns even work on it!?" Lara shouts to the person in black.

Shadow has posed:
    "Unknown. So far it's only slowed it down," the figure replies, whatever voice mask they're using turning an angry snarl into something barely human. "I've been breaking up an artifact smuggling ring. When I confronted the buyers they tried to summon something at me."

    The figure moves again, blasting at the creature's joints which seems to slow it down at least briefly. "They're the core of that thing; I'm guessing they got the spell wrong..."

Lara Croft has posed:
"Be careful with your shots!" Lara shouts at the person firing at the creature. Sure they've landed every shot they've taken but its still a necessary thing to shout considering its almost Black Friday in the busiest city in the entire world.

The archaeologist rushes closer to the person and comes up beside them. She looks to the monstrosity and then back to the gun-wielding one. "Magic? Bullets likely won't work then. We need magic to counter the spell." Thats a fair enough guess! "I can place a call for a Spellcaster to be sent here." She offers as a potential solution. Her own gun is held up still, ready to fire just in case... if it DOES slow this thing down, she'll definitely want to do that should it come after her!

Shadow has posed:
    I'm the one it's after. I can try to keep it occupied - there were several tomes and artifacts in their ritual chamber. See if there's anything we can use to hurt it or stop it in there..." The figure orders, then fires another shot at the monster's head while darting to the side...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara listens to this suggestion and she squeezes the handle of her gun then turns around to look back in the direction that she'd first seen the leg/arm monster clawing its way out of. "Right." She says to the dark clad figure.

A second later and the Agent is making a dashed run toward the location, she moves to slip inside and lifts a flashlight up from her waist, flicking it on she uses it to brightly illuminate her pathway while her gun is aimed and drawn... if there are lingering dark magicians in here she's not going to play silly games with them!

"Come on." Lara mutters, trying to find something that looks like what the person had described. She moves around, seraching with her eyes and avoiding bumping into anything!

Shadow has posed:
    Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be much blood, but there's significant structural damage from where the thing pulled itself through narrow doorways. At least that makes the point of origin easy to find.

    It's almost disturbing how... /normal/ most of the place looks -- a kitchen, bedrooms, living room, and a badly damaged staircase to the basement.

    .. Yeah, this looks more like one would expect. Bookcases, candles, disturbing drawings on the wall -- and near one of the walls, looking like it had been thrown out of the way, a leathery old tome...

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara proceeds through the oddly normal setting of the ground floor of this building, but she eventually comes to the basement doors. "Its always the basements." She mutters as she steps down the staircase, its badly damaged so she has to be careful with her foot placements, but thats nothing new for the avid climber and 'thrill seeker' that she is. She progresses down to the 'lair' of sorts.

"I hate it when I'm right sometimes." She says to the room, her eyes scanning around it. When she comes across the leather tome she rushes toward it and puts her gun away. She gathers the book up and then turns to go back the way she'd come, she pauses a moment to give the room another look over but then lets those thoughts go and she rushes back upstairs.

Lara rejoins where she'd last seen the person fending the Beast off with the handgun. "I have a spellbook!" She announces, holding it clutched to her torso.

Shadow has posed:
    Reading it is... Unpleasant. For one, it's written in Phrygian, an extinct language that's vaguely related to ancient Greek, although if the Fertile Crescent languages are a family, Phrygian would be the dirty uncle that nobody really wants to talk to anymore and makes everyone uncomfortable when he shows up for family dinner. The vast majority of its recovered texts graphically exalt a multitude of ways of maiming others like it was their national pastime, and their pantheon tended to be highly in favour of that as well. Most historians agree that that's why the Phrygians were wiped out by their neighbors at some point a couple dozen centuries B.C.

    Judging by the text, if Lara translated this right, this creature is called the 'unformed prophet', a creature that lacks physical form in this world so it requires bodies, plural, to take and maintain shape, and while it exists its mouths 'speak of lost secrets and hidden truths'. Apparently whoever tried to summon it hadn't managed to translate the part where it warns that if no sacrifices are made available it will grab whoever's nearest...

Lara Croft has posed:
"Phrygian..." Lara mouths as she identifies the language, she'd seen it before in a few manuscripts but she'd never truly read any of it, but she'd also never tried. Greek, however, was a language she DID know very well so she wa able to at least start down a pathway of understanding, so to speak.

Lara looks up to the madness still unfolding, she can see that SHIELD has arrived on-scene and she can see that others are trying to help fight it off with guns now.

She moves to find a good viewpoint while staying out of range. Her eyes scan the script, she tries frantically to find key words that would speak of how to unsummon the entity behind the monster.

Lara's lips start to move, she whispers little broken words until she starts to form a sentence, she starts tossing words together that she feels are the correct pathway toward her goal and while doing so she keeps stealing glances upward at the monster and its fight!

Shadow has posed:
    The Prophet is still trying to go after the dark-clad figure, greatly hampered by the fact that the figure seems to never be standings where it looks like they are. Teleportation, illusions, whatever, but the prophet is doing a great deal of property damage but hitting no one. Thankfully, the street has cleared by now and there are no new... additions... to worry about.

    "... The Prophet's form is ever-changing, but unlike the people of this world, its flesh is not renewed; that which it loses is lost forever, as clay torn away from a statue..."

    "... Its purpose is revelation; if denied the ability to prophesy it will go into a frenzy..." ... which, given that nobody speaks Phrygian anymore, may be part of the problem right there...

    "... When asked a question, it must answer; if it cannot, it must depart..."

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara releases a heavy sigh and she looks up to the chaos and then up to the two story building she's standing beside. Her hand darts behind her back and she presses something attached to her belt on the small of her back... A silver jet propulsion pack unfolds itself like a Transformer on her back and she uses it to suddenly launch herself upward with a spout of screaming energy behind her... a gift from a Space Man.

Lara ends up on the corner of the building, looking down at the street and down at where the creature is. She pivots on her feet side to side, the jetpack on her back is spouting steam behind her as she moves side to side. "Ask it something, anything." Lara says to herself.

"Where is my father!?" Lara shouts down to the 'Prophet' in its language, forming the words to the best of her ability all while placing herself up high enough that anyone down below can see the crazy woman shouting up above with the book. "Where is Richard Croft?!" She clarifies a little further. Its a question she cannot possibly imagine this creature could know the answer to, or have any information on him at all. So it seems like a logical choice... she hopes.

Shadow has posed:
    The Prophet's ears - all twelve of them, at the moment - perk up as it hears words spoken in a language it recognizes, and it turns to listen to Lara as she shouts her question.

    Its expression - expressions? - becomes almost dismayed as it realizes it doesn't know how to answer. It starts to shudder and wail... And in a spectacle that nobody witnessing will be likely to forget no matter how much they might want to, it comes apart in a brief rain of limbs and body parts.

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara takes a tentative step backward as she sees the creature's many entities trying to process the words she'd just questioned it with. She's not sure whats about to occurr but she doesn't believe its going to be goo--.

Foul!

The British explorer's face scrunches up in an expression of pure and utter distaste when the monstrosity becomes a hail of body parts. She has backflashes inside the corners of her mind of similar sights she'd seen in her time on Yamatai... memories she's certainly not eager to dredge back to the forefront of her thoughts... but this _had_ to be done.

Lara releases an exhale then and she steps off the side of the building, letting her jetpack carry her down to the ground once again on a low yield sending. Once back on the ground it folds back up and disappears back beneath her jacket. Lara clutches the book against her chest and walks to the side of where the creature/entity had just detonated.

"Foul magic." She quietly says.

Shadow has posed:
    "Indeed," the shrouded figure concurs as they walk up next to the archaeologist, then nod at the book in her hands. "I admit I don't actually have a safe place to store that, or a way to determine its rightful owners. Perhaps SHIELD will have more luck in that regard..."

Lara Croft has posed:
Lara turns then to look at the voice speaking to her. She eyes the person in black and then looks down to the book. "As it so happens." She starts. "Finding a safe haven for artifacts of great dangerous is..." She sighs, like it actually is a burden. "My speciality." And she looks back to the mess on the street. "I'll find a place for it and its secrets will remain just so." She looks back once again then. "Thank you for fighting it off long enough to allow me to do something about it." She tells the mysterious person, a vigilante she assumes. "I'd ask who you are, but I imagine that is information you're not quite so giving of."

Shadow has posed:
    Blue eyes crinkle in amusement as they regard the archaeologist, and the figure nods. "I am known as the Shadow," they reply with what was probably a chuckle before that voice mask mangled it. "Well met, Lady Croft," they finish with a bow, then turn to walk away, their outline blurring and fading well before they reach the other side of the street...