849/Missing Pieces

Missing Pieces
Date of Scene:	08 June 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Ra's al-Ghul, 271

---

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
In the wake of the terror attack the struck Gotham Central under the rule of Commissioner Joker, Ra's al-Ghul has gained interest from SHIELD, into the shadowy workings of the League of Assassins, and the other organizations that Ra's al-Ghul has clandestinely operated for centuries. A campus anti-war organization was linked to the terror attack. The group, named the Legend Foundation, has organizations operating all throughout the world, an interconnected group of Behavioral Science and Humanities academics that foment for international democracy, however their methods are known to be quietly scurrilous. Armed robberies, drug dealing, poisoning, theft, violent protests, and more forms of student radicalism have been linked to them. After they graduated to being scouts for military terrorism involved helicopters and foreign mercenaries, they now qualify for closer inspection.

As a former Interpol inspector and police undercover in North Ireland, Halloran Guert was a man familiar with danger, a man so addicted to it that he had enlisted with SHIELD as an investigation agent for domestic terrorism, his specialty and the sort of individual that he both craved to prey upon, and enjoyed the company of so much. After having disappeared at Gotham University yesterday, he failed to make the check-in report to SHIELD command. Local police were called in, and the FBI on the ground had related to SHIELD that Guert was being held somewhere inside a campus biology laboratory in the campus graduate work area. Such an operation required due care to extract him, since a full blown campus terrorist movement could be seeded from this if it was not handled properly. The Legend Foundation certainly seemed to be the type to prefer an provactive act to lure in a political raison d'etre for their actions, to draw more recruits in Gotham.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane arrives at the university long after dark, ensuring the faculty and students could be evacuated without alerting any Legend Foundation operatives keeping an eye on campus. Security and maintenance have been quietly replaced by S.W.O.R.D. special operatives and those people go about their nightly business like they're expected to, following garbage collection and grounds patrols in standard university department garb. Special attention has been paid to every detail, ensuring that anyone who might be known to the suspects or is suspected of collusion has been legitimately laid up away from work. A maintenance worker was involved in a traffic accident, a security guard with a habit of shoplifting got busted in a local convenience store, a janitor's coffee was poisoned to ensure explosive diarrhea would stay with him for the next three days - the beauty of that one is that he actually showed up to work, got seen rushing to the bathroom, and then begged off before his replacement was called in so he could rush home.

    So before the alien codenamed P3X-495 even sets foot on the premeses, clad in a pitch black energy field that makes him a perfect shadow in the darkness, anyone who might spot him out is expecting him. A back door to the target building is open and waiting for him. That's when he's finally on his own, creeping through the hallways in a crouch that makes his 8' tall frame still 4-5 feet high. His alien senses are all highly tuned, his hearing picks up such fine sounds as insect feet walking in the ductwork, his vision sees into and through the walls at the subatomic level, assessing energy levels in the wiring and tracing airflows in the halls, seeking potential threats or targets, seeking the missing agent.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
The building, named 'Pichens Tower' after an old alumni that became a major pharmaceutical manufacturer in the 1890s, is seven stories tall, with a major set of elevators in the center leading up to each floor of the facility. The windows are narrow, build into the recessed granite walls of the building, made to vent air and allow as little wind as possible into the building. Those that work here know of the legendary Dr. Jonathan Crane performing experiments with chemistry here, and in older days, there were quiet rumors of lobotomies performed on street children by hyper wealthy scientists from a government that none know the name of, the Owls experiments mythological now to those involved in campus research.

On the sixth floor, where the Legend Foundation has a floor set aside for anthropological research into the Jungian mysteries of the mind, Keane can hear activity. Feet walk about slowly, no attempt to stand guard made, merely the occasional loud noise of someone shouting in pain, before it dies off and echoes through the night. The campus dossier of the activities given to the professor here, one Dr. Hilda Chadwick, indicated research into the human hypothalmus, to study German legends of 'Sleeping Beauty Syndrome', from the brains of past sufferers of the disorder. Klein-Levin Syndrome, typified by cognitive impairment, long periods of heavy sleep, and disrupted dreams, has been hypothesized by her to be caused by internal mental anxiety that some bloodlines find dissonant in terms of social neuro-cortex adaptation. The study has been going on for roughly one year.

Keane (271) has posed:
    The pained shouting puts a sense of urgency into the alien, who may not have any such senses of his own but who does in fact possess the concept of it. In fact he has a little hobby regarding people who hurt other people, specifically paying them back in kind. Keane spends only a few seconds visually confirming what his ears tell him, that he's alone on the first floor, and then he rises a bit to crouch-run up the hall. He makes some effort to stay low and stay silent, to stay near a wall so if there were anyone but his own people watching the cameras they might mistake him for the shadow of a passing car or patrolling guard, but he moves fast.

    He's heading for the stairs, not the elevator, knowing that he can go up six flights a lot faster than a mechanical box could lift him. Hopefully the map campus security showed him is accurate, and up to date.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
The building is only occupied on the sixth floor, the occupants unaware that the building has been emptied by SWORD. As Keane enters the stairwell, he can hear a distant wind sucking about the faintly dusty passage upwards, one of the windows on the sixth floor open. If his senses are sharp enough, he can smell a blend of two odors, the pungent smell of marijuana, and the acrid smell of tobacco, both occasionally being smoked in the stairwell above him. In fact, there are a pair of voices, both male, talking above him, six stories up. Their conversation seems to be about Emile Durkheim, and it's quite the odd topic, the campus activists discussing the reasons for the development of the warrior ethic in a dialectic to the pacifist ethic. One of them has taken the position that one is meant to choose between ethics and create a warrior poet, while the other one, much more quiet in the conversation, makes the occasional point in a stoned brogue that both are necessary for society to be complete, and that the 'social machina' must be prepared to move between these two in various ways to survive. The one arguing for the warrior poet is much more forceful and manipulative, while the secondary individual is audibly shuffling to turn away from the first while the first speaks.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane doesn't smell. He does see the subatomic particles in the air, recognizing oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and tetrahydrocannabinol, even as he looks through three layers of flooring above him he recognizes the difference between the smoke rising from the burning end of a cigarette and the smoke exhaled from a human's lungs. He can even detect the minute differences in the sound of burning tobacco and burning marijuana.

    Picking up the transient thoughts they transmit during conversation and hearing the casual, arrogant tones in their voices makes him slow his rush up the stairs until he's on the floor just below the two. He stands there a moment 'listening,' then creeps a few steps up until he can look straight up from the stairs at the landing where they stand. He hunkers there, coiled to pounce upward if or when necessary, but waits to see if they'll clear the landing first.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
As the tobacco smoker, the forceful intellectual, continues to discuss the ramifications of poetry among the soldier scholar, a pistol tucked into the front of his pants, the other campus radical, joint in hand (and unarmed), slowly turns to look at Keane. He stares, dropping his jaw, his hand lowing with the joint in it, before the burning bit of contraband slips from his fingers. "Ohhhh, maaaan," he moans, "It's the alieeeens."

The tobacco smoker turns and looks, and shouts, "Jesus Christ, SHIELD is in it with the space people!"

There's a panic that flows throughout the other Legend Foundation members as the alert goes out, the tobacco smoker fumbling for his gun and managing to shove his cigarette's flaming ember into his knuckles as he crushes it against the butt of the weapon. The stoner, meanwhile, takes a step backwards, staring right into Keane's eyes, his jaw slack.

"Oh, man, I knew they were real!" the stoner exclaims, beginning to shake.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Space people? Keane glances down at himself to check and make sure his energy field is still on. Check. He's wrapped in that skin-tight synthetic black hole that he's managed to keep secret even from S.H.I.E.L.D., because he wouldn't want to deal with turning them down when they asked him to weaponize one for them. Must be some good dope for him to see space aliens in black shadows!

    Either way, P3X-495 launches himself from the stairs up at the men on the landing. His clawed hands sink into their chests, fingers find and clutch the spines and punch out the backs in a pair of bloody messes. Behind the black energy mask the countless nanoscopic cillia in his toothless mouth are vibrating at the speed of light, rapidly reverberating until the dense particles of his whole body start quivering with the energy and even the energy field surrounding him ripples like water from the vibration.

    While that energy builds he rushes forward out of the landing, already aware that the raised alert may endanger the life of the captured S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Those two men, impaled on his forearms, are carried along for now, borne in front of him like meatshields.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
The two campus activists are sent screaming to the afterlife as they're skewered and their spinal columns are severed at the upper back. Down the hallway, with the elevator hub in the center leading to a corridor deeper into the building (where the agent is being kept), and a hallway down to the opposite stairwell, Legend Foundation members rush out of rooms, some dropping their jaws in horror at what they see. A black demon-esque shape with two of their members dead and bloody, hanging from its arm, charging at them. They don't look like standard movie terrorists, instead they wear campus outfits, looking to be a range of artists, intellectuals, and drug users of varying sorts. But despite the howls of horror and the screams of sorrow, there's one major difference.

Instead of being afraid, they are /pissed/.

Guns are drawn, and despite relatively little training at manuevering with things like cover and squad tactics, they're all firing range trained. They begin discharging rounds out of pistols that they all brace with both hands, police officer style, with square stances. They do not appear afraid to die, after the brief shock of the two deaths is over. Instead, they use their trauma to fight, channelling it into grieving rage.

From the room Halloran Guert is being kept in, there's a slam of a door, as Dr. Hilda Chadwick herself into the hallway. She's a short woman, maybe 5'1, pixie-ish in build and haircut, with a green bandana amidst her blonde locks and a liberal academic chic sundress on. She begins shouting, "Get the warmongers!" repeatedly, as she loads and chambers a Thompson submachine gun at her hip, pointing it down the hallway towards the elevators and waiting for Keane to turn the corner.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane leans forward and sprints down the corridor with those two dead bodies leading the way. They soak up most of the bullets which is lucky for them if they weren't already dead. Those bullets that do get by them impact the alien and ricochet with angry, zipping whines. Not each time but once in awhile, when a bullet glances off the mesh overlay the alien actually wears, the garment that emits that singularity field, the black field flickers out like an old TV. The creature revealed by those flashes is pale to the point of translucence, completely hairless without so much as eyelashes or brows, and its eyes glow blue in the dim corridor like LED lights at low power. Each bullet that glances off him does leave a little pockmark in his dense body, chipping and cracking little craters away at him like shooting bullets into a block of diamond.

    As he nears the first set of shooters in the hallway he turns sidewise, skidding since he didn't bother to slow or stop, winds up, and hurls one of those meatsacks off his arm at extreme force. His strength is immense, more than enough to turn a motorcycle into a flying bulldozer, nevermind a human body. He leans back into his sprint and keeps bulling up the hallway behind that thrown body, still using the corpse impaled on his other arm as a shield.

    Seconds have passed and that sonic energy is still building in his mouth. His overfield, when it isn't flickered out by bullet impact, looks like a glass of water sat in front of a bass speaker at ultra high volume.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
The dead campus radical is flung into the others in a blur of motion, sending shooters flying off their feet in ragdoll-like movements, falling to the ground and skidding about the slick tile floor. There are shouts of anger from the remaining gunmen and women, as they chant, "CHE! CHE! CHE!" They continue to fire, some of them walking forward or moving into doorframes partially, to pause their firing and evaluate the situation. Those latter ones have the look of drug dealers, the more street savvy of the activists.

Dr. Chadwick steps out from the corridor down into the building's laboratory and administration housing wing, the little campus professor clicking her Thompson submachine gun's safety off as it hangs from her arm on a strap. There are cheers from the campus radicals as she squeezes down the trigger, braced, and fires the Thompson directly at Keane, the submachine gun rattling with bullets. This particular gun lacks penetration, even in its day unable to breach a car door, but more than makes up for it with rate of fire and ease of handling in regards to recoil.

Keane (271) has posed:
    The alien releases that pent-up sonic energy from his mouth. First his mouth opens wide and he's looking straight down at his own feet, releasing a sonic boom. It's the same kind jets make when they breach the sound barrier five miles up, that shakes windows and makes hearts skip a beat on the ground below. That rocks the building to its foundations, blasts the shooters ducking into doorways around him backward even though they aren't in the path of the -actual- attack, explodes every window in the building outward and implodes everything made of glass inside the building inward. It even picks -him- up off the ground and buckles the floor where it impacted, slamming his shoulders into the ceiling, but he was prepared for it and crouched and coiled himself just before he hit.

    As he lands in the middle of that crater, on his knees and both fists braced on the floor to catch his weight, he starts raising his head and narrowing his lips to a whistle, closing that sonic assault down to the height and width of a laser beam, but it doesn't make it any less godawful loud or destructive. As his eyes raise toward Doctor Hilda Chadwick that narrow sonic beam cuts a swath through the hard industrial-tiled floor between him and her, sending bits and pieces of ceramic snapping and shooting every direction as if some kind of deep-cutting saw was burrowing its way toward her. He's going for the legs - a nonlethal but most likely conflict ending (and definitely life altering) maneuver if the woman isn't quick on her feet.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
There are flailing bodies, shatters of glass, explosions of computer monitors, ruptures of plumbing, and cracks of mortar and brick and tile as the sonic boom goes off. Dr. Chadwick screams as the sonic beam slices through her legs, rupturing one of them into pieces as she falls to the ground, bloody and completely defeated. Her Thompson fires bullets into the ceiling as she falls, her hand clutching it for balance that is not there, as she is laid low and ends up on her side, sobbing and moaning in a combination of mortal pain and mental shock. Blood gushes from the base of her knee where the attached tissue that used to be her shin and calf and foot used to be, gushing all over the floor. "You bastard, you bastard, you bastard," is all she can heard repeating, sobbing and choking as she tries hopelessly to crawl somewhere else, anywhere else but where she is now.

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane is swift to get his feet under him, not unmindful of surviving Legend Foundation members but far more mindful of the dying ringleader and the still-endangered S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. The special ops teams are moving in on the first floor now, recognizing the end of conflict by the sonic assaults and the cessation of gunfire. S.W.O.R.D. radio chatter isn't particularly flattering. "Was that a detonation?" ... "More likely the rescue team." ... "There was only one guy." ... "Worse than the freakin' bad guys, yeah." ... "You hear about his, uh, 'hobbies?' Wait, he's not on comms is he?" ... "Friggin' alien can't use 'em. Just don't think mean thoughts when you get too close to him."

    The alien reaches Chadwick and, simply not having time to waste, picks up her Thompson and fires a long burst to heat up the barrel before rolling it across one of her stumped legs to cauterize the wound. He lets off another burst into the floor to quickly cauterize the other. It's imperfect, unbelievably painful, leaves her seeping blood, but is enough to close off the arteries. When he's done the alien palms her face with one huge hand and drags her by that grip through the door into the lab she was guarding.

    "I go to war so others may live in peace," he observes in a deep-toned voice, as if the woman would somehow understand that he was responding to the conversation he interrupted back at the stairwell. "It is my fondest wish that trash like you didn't make it necessary."

    From all the bullet impacts his suit has been so damaged that his field flickers intermittently in several spots and is simply not there in others. Where the room's light bleeds through the damaged places his pale skin puckers and crawls as if exposed to direct flame. Still dragging the woman by the face he looks over the room, scanning for the missing agent.

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
Dr. Chadwick looks up at Keane in inhuman agony as her wounds are treated in the effective, but brutal, manner, letting out a sobbing scream as she arches her back and thrashes her head about. There's a deep, clutching convulsion through her as she cries, before she chokes and passes out from shock, her head snapping forward like a rictus dummy for a moment before falling to the side. She gives no further question as she's dragged after Keane into the room, set aside for patient study, where Halloran Guert is being held.

The laboratory is a sedate affair, not a professional surgeon's office, but there are lab tables, a chemistry area with a fume hood, and a number of gurneys present. Along one wall is a bank of brains preserved in formaldahyde, with a number of surgical implements present on other dissected brains, and a small doorway to a storage room, shut at this time. That's where all the samples are stored in liquid nitrogen.

Agent Guert is strapped into what appears to be a cross between a dentist's and a gynecologist's chair, his arms pinned at his sides by white rubber straps and his legs secured and spread, giving him no leverage to move or fight. The whites of his eyes are blood red, and there's blood leaking from his mouth. His shirt has been removed, and his muscular (but not ripped, he's an undercover) chest has white, round sensors stuck onto it, with wires leading back to a vitals monitoring unit along the side. His head turns about, this way and that, incisions made into his body here and there at sensitive nervous clusters.

He looks up at Keane, his grin matching his appearance as the devil himself. "Looks like the backup arrived. Takes a demon to save a shithead, huh?"

Keane (271) has posed:
    "I'd think today you'd call me an angel," Keane answers Halloran flatly, dropping Chadwick to the floor since she's out cold and therefore less threatening. He steps closer to the restrained agent, holding one still-field-covered arm over one of his uncovered belly areas to conceal the spot from the brighter light he's stepping into. His subatomic vision carefully examines Halloran from head to toe, following the sensors and tubes from the man's body to the machines to ensure he's not about to disconnect anything that might do more harm than good while also examining the human biology for any damage done by Chadwick's poking around.

    He turns from the restrained agent to gesture at the downed doctor by looking at her, "If you prefer we can leave you here while we get her some medical treatment, decent prosthetics, physical therapy, bring her back to finish up?"

    Keane doesn't sound like he's joking but while he makes the offer he starts poking around in the trays and shelves, seeking an ampule with the right molecular makeup to counteract the stuff that's been pumped into the man in the chair. When he finds what he's looking for he gets a needle and dispenses a small amount, leaving the agent restrained while he fulfills the role of a medic. Finding an alcohol swab to sterilize the needle and injection site and so forth.

    Meanwhile S.W.O.R.D. are systematically clearing the floors in teams. The team on six are counting bodies and collecting the unconscious. Radio chatter continues to be unflattering. "Jesus, look at those two. What'd he hit them with?" ... "His hands, maybe, or one of those crazy sound effects." ... "Sound effects?" ... "Sometimes... " it's hard to imagine a special ops soldier, especially one accustomed to dealing with aliens and super-powered individuals, sounding creeped out, but this guy does, "... sometimes he spouts these creepy nursery rhymes like you'd hear in a horror movie, but when it's on the screen, man, well, when you hear a little girl chanting some Lizzy Borden rhyme from an eight-foot monster in a black forcefield?" ... "You're joshin' me." ... "You guys know he's on that floor, right?"

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
Agent Guert emits a low hiss as the neurotoxins in his system are counteracted, as best they can, with the supplies available and Keane's subatomic chemical sense. The particular organic agents involved are quite complex, and it's possible Halloran may never make a full recovery from whatever has been put in his system. At the very least, it appears that his cortex system has been amplified, a marker of an attempt to drive him insane from some sort of induction of memories related to conceptual relationships. It would require Keane, however, to know human physiology and how it relates to neurology and psychology, and Keane is, of course, a far different species. It's something for the SHIELD doctors to work on.

"Just untie me," Halloran says as he writhes in his restraints. "I need to make a report to command. These berks are some sort of eco-terror front. This entire network is devoted to taking down the building blocks of the industrial complex. Someone taught them that Ernesto Che Guevera wanted the Stone Age."

Keane (271) has posed:
    Keane uses the clawed fingertips of both hands to slit the restraints away from Halloran's arms and legs on both sides at once, then steps quickly back out of the bright examination lights.

    "One would think educated people would be less gullible."

Ra's al-Ghul has posed:
Halloran lurches forward. "You'd be surprised," Guert mutters, closing his eyes and rubbing them forcefully with his palms, trying to take away the pain that the chemicals have induced and physically display in the reds of his previously eye whites. "Social outcasts with identity disorders from being pulled from small ponds. I ran into them out in Ireland, when I was an undercover." He rubs the blood from his mouth, before hobbling to his feet, lurching forward a step, but refusing to brace for balance.

"All you need to do is have a lure to drag some poor kid out from the country that fancies themself a man of intrigue or a lady of the state, if you know what I mean. A few weeks in a new environment with strangers, and they're easy meat for a recruiting operation. Then, they believe anything they want."

Guert limps out of the room. "These ones want to cripple the World Bank in a way I don't quite understand. Something to do with Christian socialism. I'd almost call it Sinn Fein."

"Except these ones stab needles in you."