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Old 03-16-2017, 05:09 AM   #101
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Default Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

About half of the rat swarm seems to have run off, leaving half of them to probe the line of isopropyl alcohol on the stone floor, looking for a weak point or waiting for the alcohol to evaporate. Cherry Bell uses a stormproof match to set fire to a bandage soaked in ethyl alcohol and inserted into the bottle. Then she presents the flaming concoction to Taylor with a flourish: “Cocktail up!” Taylor grins and intones: “Blue 42! Blue 42! Hut, hut, hike!

Taylor was never a quarterback in high school. In his own words, “quarterbacks is for sackin’”. Whatever his reasons, however, weakness of arm wasn’t among them. Taylor whips the flaming bottle straight at the wall, just behind the line of isopropyl alcohol on the floor and right next to a knot of swarming rats. The plastic bottle hits the wall with enough force to burst open, splattering burning alcohol all over. Several rats are caught in the splash and several more catch fire from the burning fumes near them.

Taylor grabs the stretcher with both hands and runs ahead, heading left, making for the hole in the rat swarm he expects the flames to make. Dr. Anderson is surprised, not having associated the football chant with anything in particular, neither the basic idea of starting to move at the ‘snap’ nor the specific message of a blocking run play to the left, but nevertheless manages to follow Taylor without dropping Mrs. York. Cherry Bell runs behind them, dodging imaginary defenders with graceful, but overdone movements.

The isopropyl alcohol Taylor spread on the floor earlier catches fire from the flaming splashes from the burst bottle on the wall. As the fumes have had a little time to spread, the flames reach further than the rats seem to have been expecting, setting most of them ablaze, and igniting a chorus of agonised squeals along with dozens of furry critters.

As they get closer to the flames, Taylor pulls twice on one handhold of the stretcher to indicate to Dr. Anderson that they should angle to the right now, aim at a point on the floor where there wasn’t much alcohol and the flames seem to be starting to die down. Dr. Anderson, however, is running in what still feels like absolute darkness to him, with his eyes having been overwhelmed by the sudden flames. He fails to register the change in direction and when Taylor alters course, Dr. Anderson loses his balance.

Cherry Bell is close enough to see it happen. Given her obvious speed and agility, she might even be capable of catching his end of the stretcher before it hits the ground, sending Mrs. York tumbling out, perhaps into the flames. Bell makes no attempt to do so, however, simply leaping up and dodging the falling Dr. Anderson as if he were a tackling linebacker. When Taylor feels the stretcher start to lean over to the side, which would send Mrs. York into a dangerous tumble, he decides to go into a controlled slide to lower the front end of the stretcher, to try to reduce the impact and keep Mrs. York horizontal on the stretcher.

With impressive athleticism, Taylor manages to avert a crash landing for Mrs. York, turning the tumble into a slide. To do so, however, he is forced to end his movement inside the fire. His right side and right arm are bathed in flames, which briefly sets the vest and arm guards he washed in isopropyl alcohol ablaze. Taylor concentrates on keeping the fire away from Mrs. York while gritting his teeth and grunting in pain. The alcohol flames die down quickly and Taylor wasn’t inside them long enough for any of his clothing to catch on fire. The flash flames on his arm and side die down in some two seconds, as Taylor looks back toward Dr. Anderson.

Taylor: “Doc? Is you all right?”
Dr. Anderson: “Am I all right? You were just on fire!”
Taylor [trying to hide pain]: “Yeah, you knows how them spirits fires kin jes’ burn kinda cold.”

The squealing, flaming rats running off in all directions provide pretty convincing evidence that while fast-burning, the fire wasn’t particularly cold. Cherry Bell whoops joyfully.

Bell: “Whoo-hoo! Humans 21, rats 0. Touchdown, rat bee-atches!”
[Cherry Bell dances around a ring of burnt rat carcasses, doing the Bob & Weave]
Bell: “And, hey, Chasie, you’re clean now! All filthy lizard spores and disgusting plague germs have been killed with fire. Whoosh! This boy… is clean! Too bad you couldn’t cleanse Scales McPlague there with you. Maybe I can find another bottle to burn the nasty off her?”

Taylor gives Cherry Bell an incredulous and hurt look, which she either doesn’t see in the darkness or simply ignores. With elaborate casualness, Taylor then checks his right arm and discovers he seems to have a full range of motion. He allows himself to hope that the searing pain over his entire arm and right side is deceptive and it’s actually just first degree burns. More likely, however, blisters are forming and he might lose some motion and arm strength within the hour. Something to keep in mind when planning the next steps.

Dr. Anderson comes up to Taylor, wanting to see if he is injured, but Taylor shakes his head and guides Dr. Anderson’s hands to the stretcher so they can pick up Mrs. York together.

Taylor: “Sorry, doc. Don’t wanna stop, cain’t risk more light. Let’s jes’ move. Even if’n this ain’t gonna bring more rats, it sure musta alerted anybody and anything down here ‘bout where we is.”

The three take up their conga line progression again, moving in the direction of the cellars of D Wing, or at least, in the direction Dr. Anderson says will lead them there. Taylor tries to walk as quietly as he can, but with Dr. Anderson carrying the rear half of a stretcher and walking blindly, they are nowhere near as quiet as Taylor wishes they could be. At least Mrs. York slept through it all, which is a small miracle, all things considered.

The acrid stench of burnt rat fur and flesh means that Taylor can’t really make out the smell of the guards who were there before. He can still see sign of the wheelchair’s passage, but whether or not all the guards were still with it is more than he can tell. He also can’t tell if the dress shoes wearing man he thinks is O’Toole was still following them at this point in their trek. Most worrying of all, Taylor can find no sign that the guards left a blocking force behind.

It’s not that Taylor wants to run into an ambush of guards in the tunnels. Of course not. Even if they have a plan to bypass them without bloodshed, running into any number of hostile men with firearms is never desirable. On the other hand, Taylor is getting increasingly confused as he fails to see any sign of guards who have stayed behind in the tunnels. It ain’t possible to overlook somethin’ this basic. Warden Tyrrell mebbe is a few ants short of a picnic these days, but he done use to be a senior NCO an’ warrant officer. He cain’t be that stupid.

Regardless of Warden Tyrrell’s level of intelligence, the three don’t run across anything more threatening than bad smells and far away scuffling noises for the next few minutes. After that, they enter a narrow access tunnel which ends in a blast door that Dr. Anderson says will take them to the cellars of D Wing. Taylor and Dr. Anderson place Mrs. York gently down in her stretcher, outside any possible line of fire, and Dr. Anderson confirms that she is still sleeping.

None of the six keys Taylor is carrying fits the lock on the blast door, but Dr. Anderson’s lockpicks do, despite the high-quality lock. Fortunately, somebody inside forgot to engage the deadbolt. Taylor has a moment of panicked thought as he considers the possibility that the Warden and his men are not actually this incompetent, but are actually predicting his every move, suckering him into an elaborate trap.

If they are, however, the trap is not immediately beyond this door, as Taylor rules out anyone hiding in the cellar by listening for half a minute. He couldn’t actually hear a human heartbeat, not through a door this solid, but he figures that anyone breathing in the cellar would be audible to him. Faint footsteps indicate that someone is walking slowly down a corridor one floor up, but as far as Taylor can tell, absolutely no one in the cellar.

Taylor taps Cherry Bell on the arm and guides her to look at him through her rifle optics, turning on the IR illumination for a moment. Then Taylor gives her a military hand signal to ‘Stack up’ and follow him into the room. Cherry Bell takes up position behind him, prepared to cover his blind side with her rifle. She keeps fiddling with her rifle and is grinning from ear to ear as she waits for Dr. Anderson to open the door and let her and Taylor through.

Once the door is opened, Taylor and Cherry Bell glide into the room with their rifles pointing in different directions. The cellar is filled with old furniture, whiteboards, mothballed hospital equipment and other debris from when this wing used to be in use, but it seems to be empty of all people.

Before calling Dr. Anderson in, they confirm that by moving around and checking every likely hiding place, clearing two bathrooms, a supply closet and two large rooms that seem to be used for storage of more clutter. Then Taylor goes to help Dr. Anderson move Mrs. York into the cellar and they close the blast door behind them.

Taylor can hear the person walking slowly on the floor upstairs clearly now, even to the point of hearing his breathing. There are some others further off, probably on higher levels of the main building. Taylor can hear the radio of the person closest to him click to life.

Warden Tyrrell [over radio]: “My loyal Knights! This is King Tyrrell. Some of our radios have fallen into the hands of our enemies. This is why I’m calling with a message for that mouthy, disrespectful, inbred, cousin-----ing redneck, hillbilly traitor calling himself Chase Taylor.”
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Old 03-16-2017, 09:23 AM   #102
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Default Re: Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

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With elaborate casualness, Taylor then checks his right arm and discovers he seems to have a full range of motion. He allows himself to hope that the searing pain over his entire arm and right side is deceptive and it’s actually just first degree burns. More likely, however, blisters are forming and he might lose some motion and arm strength within the hour.
Having had 3rd degree burns on 25% of both arms (underside of both lower arms from wrist to elbow), I can say that Chase has very little to fear.

If hurts that bad, the burns are minor (2nd degree at worst). If it didn't hurt much at all, he'd be in trouble (I kept working for an hour and then walked a couple of miles to the hospital without much pain*). Also, the burns I suffered never reduced mobility or strength, but they also didn't cover any joints, so... YMMV on that point.



* The pain came later... oh the debriding.
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Old 03-16-2017, 02:22 PM   #103
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Default Re: Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

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Having had 3rd degree burns on 25% of both arms (underside of both lower arms from wrist to elbow), I can say that Chase has very little to fear.

If hurts that bad, the burns are minor (2nd degree at worst). If it didn't hurt much at all, he'd be in trouble (I kept working for an hour and then walked a couple of miles to the hospital without much pain*). Also, the burns I suffered never reduced mobility or strength, but they also didn't cover any joints, so... YMMV on that point.

* The pain came later... oh the debriding.
Yeah, it's not all that serious an injury on its own. Chase Taylor knows that there are no 3rd degree burns on his arm. The fire wasn't hot enough and didn't burn long enough for that. Taylor is just hoping that most of the reddish area is first degree burns, not second degree. Extensive blistering would be a Bad Thing because he figures that before this is over, he'll need to use his right arm a lot and he can't be off his game even a little bit.

In game terms, he's worried about losing arm function because of the 'Partial Injury' rules on MA p. 136. In real world terms, he's concerned because the burns cover part of the shoulder joint and the inside of the elbow, which can lead to stiffness and difficulty using the arm. Being unable to use it is unlikely, but Taylor can't really afford any extra penalties to his unarmed combat, use of less-than-lethal weapons or athletic feats.

Sure, he's a 'Superhero', but only his Perception and a few Powers connected to that are above the levels achievable by real humans. His physical abilities might be pretty impressive compared to average people, but he's no faster, tougher or stronger for his weight than many top athletes in the real world. He doesn't even have any exceptional resistance to pain, he's just trying to perform through it using high Will, Sense of Duty and Selfless.

In total, Taylor has taken 2 HP of burn injury to the right arm, 1 HP burn injury to the right side of the torso (side of Chest 10 area) and previously, he took 3 HP of blunt injury to the side of the torso (side of Chest 9 area), for tackling Terry Amiti's leg. He also suffered Moderate Pain for a while due to dislocating the left shoulder by using his limited Flexibility, but that didn't cause HP injury. Of course, if Taylor hadn't been wearing tactical gear just now, he'd have taken 5 HP of burning injury, which would have put him in a lot worse shape.

As it is, taking 3 HP more of injury anywhere will put him at half Dodge and Move, essentially making him pretty useless at doing action hero stuff. He's already at -1 DX to all tasks for the torso wounds, while an injury of 3 more HP to the torso would give him a -2 to DX. A 4 HP wound to the torso would be good for a -3 DX.

One more HP of injury to the right arm would put him at -3 DX to any tasks involving it, which includes most of the things he's been relying on as less-than-lethal takedown moves against guards. Also any shooting he might be forced to do.

'Minor' injuries is a pretty relative term, depending heavily on situation. Something that rates as a fairly insignificant annoyance for a few days after a quick visit to a hospital can be life-threathening when there is no time to treat it or any room for a slight impairment in performance.

Of course, as the other players rightfully noted, Taylor is happy to spend 30 minutes of time they don't have to allow extensive treatment on an NPC, but won't stop for a minute to allow anyone to use First Aid on him. Which the other players were at this point pretty nervous about, as it is not as if Dr. Anderson or O'Toole* were feeling confident about handling all the murderous guards if Taylor became a casualty through ignoring a bunch of small injuries.

Selfless sucks, I guess. :-)

*Total expenditure on tactical skills, including Guns, between them: 2 character points.
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Old 03-16-2017, 08:24 PM   #104
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Default Re: Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

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In total, Taylor has taken 2 HP of burn injury to the right arm, 1 HP burn injury to the right side of the torso (side of Chest 10 area) and previously, he took 3 HP of blunt injury to the side of the torso (side of Chest 9 area), for tackling Terry Amiti's leg. He also suffered Moderate Pain for a while due to dislocating the left shoulder by using his limited Flexibility, but that didn't cause HP injury. Of course, if Taylor hadn't been wearing tactical gear just now, he'd have taken 5 HP of burning injury, which would have put him in a lot worse shape.

As it is, taking 3 HP more of injury anywhere will put him at half Dodge and Move, essentially making him pretty useless at doing action hero stuff. He's already at -1 DX to all tasks for the torso wounds, while an injury of 3 more HP to the torso would give him a -2 to DX. A 4 HP wound to the torso would be good for a -3 DX.

One more HP of injury to the right arm would put him at -3 DX to any tasks involving it, which includes most of the things he's been relying on as less-than-lethal takedown moves against guards. Also any shooting he might be forced to do.
I've never liked the way GURPS homogenizes wounding*... but yeah those are probably 2nd degree burns. Here come the blisters!

Note having suffered a lot of burns over the years, in order for a burn to reduce your mobility it has to be really bad. I mean muscular tissue trauma, beyond what I've ever suffered, levels of bad.

Chase is probably losing "dexterity" to pain. Which... second degree burns suck. In some ways... a 3rd degree burn would be easier on him (in reality) as they don't hurt (until the healing comes. Or the debriding, oh the debriding). They are just really serious infection risks, and if bad and a large enough area coverage don't heal well (not without modern medicine or surgery).



* Not an argument to have here, but burns don't act the same way other wounds do, unless they are very, very bad.
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Old 03-16-2017, 10:29 PM   #105
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Default Re: Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

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Of course, as the other players rightfully noted, Taylor is happy to spend 30 minutes of time they don't have to allow extensive treatment on an NPC, but won't stop for a minute to allow anyone to use First Aid on him.
Bell could probably persuade him to do so, were she motivated and thinking about the problem.
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Which the other players were at this point pretty nervous about, as it is not as if Dr. Anderson or O'Toole were feeling confident about handling all the murderous guards if Taylor became a casualty through ignoring a bunch of small injuries.
Anderson doesn't have some kind of Healing power? What are super-powered doctors coming to these day?
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Old 03-17-2017, 01:44 AM   #106
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Default Re: Lord Almighty, I Feel My Temperature Rising

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I've never liked the way GURPS homogenizes wounding*... but yeah those are probably 2nd degree burns. Here come the blisters!

Note having suffered a lot of burns over the years, in order for a burn to reduce your mobility it has to be really bad. I mean muscular tissue trauma, beyond what I've ever suffered, levels of bad.

Chase is probably losing "dexterity" to pain. Which... second degree burns suck. In some ways... a 3rd degree burn would be easier on him (in reality) as they don't hurt (until the healing comes. Or the debriding, oh the debriding). They are just really serious infection risks, and if bad and a large enough area coverage don't heal well (not without modern medicine or surgery).
In reality or in GURPS terms, if the fire had been hot enough to cause third degree burns and hadn't gone out almost immediately, Taylor would have taken first and second degree burns all around the worst affected areas anyway. Basically, losing more HP to the fire would always have sucked, as we're right up to breakpoints where he can't function if he gets hurt any more.

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Bell could probably persuade him to do so, were she motivated and thinking about the problem.
That is a really good point.

Also, probably my fault for not mentioning it to the GM. She should certainly have received a Body Language roll for noticing that Taylor was hurt as soon as they first entered any light in the cellars of the barracks and a Detect Lie check when he said he was fine. Not to mention that a Diagnosis check should have been pretty easy for her in the dining hall of the barracks by the events of post #69 'Crash Into Me', as she pretty much has to have been running her hands over what were by then fairly major bruises.

Injuries of 3 HP are the sort of thing that people take a week to recover from and would probably represent nasty bruising.

Retroactively, we'll explain her complete lack of concern by noting that initially, she may have just been amused by Chase acting all tough and pretending that he wasn't hurt at all. A single bruise isn't the end of the world and she didn't really realise the extent of the danger. Well, maybe make that doesn't realise. Of course, that's assuming she is in danger at all.

By the time she had definitely been established as having some degree of friendly feeling for Chase*, maybe enough not to want him to suffer physical pain** without doing anything to reduce it, there might be other explanations for not saying anything. She might have thought it was just minor pains, with nothing to really treat, for example if her Diagnosis check failed. She was an aspiring nurse with no real medical training other than some High School AP biology classes and the minimal medical training the US Army gives Mental Health Specialists. And that was a long time ago, too.

Granted, a few minutes of running her hands over a heavily bruised back ought to be good for a bonus to Diagnosis, but then again, she was suffering from penalties of her own by then. In retrospect, Chase is pretty sure that she kissed him from motives of manipulation***, but she doesn't seem to be immune to his awkward and untrained Sex Appeal, as she was suffering pretty hefty penalties to Acting, Will and self-control rolls back then too.

Which neatly explains why she didn't do anything about it at the most natural point, when they were making friendly in the lobby in post #91 'When We Were Us'.

Chase's Diplomacy did prevent a temper explosion triggered by her Selfish Disadvantage (he made his roll by 13) when he explained that he couldn't pursue any kind of romantic (really, any kind of physical) relationship at that point, but the kindest, most sensitive rejection from anyone is still a massive blow to her self-esteem and she was simply unable to attend to anything which did not have directly to do with her at that point.

As for why she doesn't notice that he's hurt much worse now, well, Cherry Bell can't see in the dark. Also, she's furious at Chase for delaying to treat Mrs. York, risking her life and freedom for someone she cares nothing about. Well, someone she actively hates, by now, as she failed a Fright Check badly enough to acquire a new Squeamishness Quirk and it must be conceded that Mrs. York may indeed be an infection hazard.

*Which, however, may not be all that friendly. She doesn't appear to be quite as indifferent toward him as toward other people, but given that she regards other people with Callous Sadism, that's a pretty low bar. And she seems to like Dr. Anderson too, but that didn't stop her from putting him in a coma last time.
**Unfortunately, she'd need more than lingering affection from an old friendship and maybe a slight adrenaline-induced crush to be against him suffering mental anguish from time to time, especially if he has done anything to annoy her. She has mental-aspected Sadism and he is way too easy a target.
***Well, his interpretation is that she has major trust issues, understandably, and reacts by trying to have control over people through social engineering and sexual manipulation, to try to prevent them from betraying her. From his perspective, it is not reprehensible that a victim should try to manipulate him into saving her, unable to accept that no manipulation is required, it is just intensely sad. And it makes him very angry at the people who've been keeping her captive.


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Anderson doesn't have some kind of Healing power? What are super-powered doctors coming to these day?
I'd say 'not that kind of doctor', in light of the fact that Dr. Anderson is a psychiatrist, but that hasn't stopped his player from taking Physician at IQ+3 and even Surgery at IQ. Don't ask me how or why a research psychiatrist learned 8 character points worth of the Surgery skill.

The justification for the very high Physician skill is that it is required to prescribe drugs effectively, but when I suggested an Optional Speciality to make sure that Dr. Anderson was better at regulating clinical dosages of psychiatric drugs than he was at oncology or treating a sucking chest wound under fire, the player rejected the idea.

On the other hand, his powers are basically two-fold. He has some of the basic physical improvements that Project Jade Serenity subjects exhibit, being quite athletic and healthy for a middle-aged couch potato. He also exhibits cognative improvements that are way beyond anything known from any other subject, being way smarter than any living man has ever been.

Being smarter than any man has ever been means that his First Aid default from Physician is something like skill 20. As we're using the Speed/Range table for the Time Spent rules (instead of -1 per -10% reduction in time taken), this means that with a crash kit, he can perform fairly reliable First Aid that gives the full 1d HP for TL8, at skill 14-16 or so, in 2-3 minutes.

Then there is the secret part of his powers, his strange mastery over sleep, sleepers, the subconscious and dreams. I suppose some of what he can do qualifies as 'healing' powers, as long as what is wrong with his patient is mental and can be treated by shaping his or her dreams.

Generally speaking, I wouldn't want the setting to feature superpowered healing. I mean, sure, Very Rapid Healing is a plausible mutation for humans, but anything beyond that risks critical suspension of belief levels quickly. Mrs. York strains my ability to rationalise anything connected to her condition, but at least she might be entirely non-human.

The magical power to cause human tissue in others to regrow at combat useful speeds would play havoc with my disbelief suspenders. Aside from issues of powering it and the whole reversing entropy thing, there are millions of ways that something like that could go massively wrong, causing tumors and lethal complications, but only about one way to connect all the nerves and veins correctly. So it pretty much has to come with a whole range of other powers, such as limited omniscience about the internal workings of the subjects.

I get that whatever happened in Project Jade Serenity was probably as much alchemical or magical as it was scientific, but still, I want the majority of powers to be fairly low-key in terms of violating the way the world works. Sure, I know the GM wants to introduce all kinds of comic books stuff, but exotic powers are way more interesting if they can plausibly be treated as exotic and inexplicable in the setting, without having their impact diluted by a constant stream of increasing implausibility in the day-to-day life of the protagonists that makes any kind of internal setting logic a waste of time to maintain.

In modern superhero media terms, I liked the fairly grounded, more-or-less gritty first series of Daredevil much better than I like events in later series, like streams of immortal ninjas who don't use stealth, but still don't seem to be noticed by anyone other than the protagonists. And I liked Gotham better when it was an action/noir detective series with occasional superhero elements than now, when every episode seems to introduce more illogical weirdness and
Spoiler:  
.

As for the MCU, DCEU or the X-Men cinematic universe, I can't watch any of those movies. Just... no.
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Old 03-17-2017, 06:39 AM   #107
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The crackle of the radio one floor up is not loud enough to be audible to Cherry Bell or Dr. Anderson. A dull whoosh that might be a muted explosion at least one building away is, though, and they both look questioningly at Taylor. He grabs Bell by the arm and nods at Dr. Anderson while leading her up the stairs.

Taylor: “Gots one o’ them cell phones, doc? Call O’Toole. Ask him if’n he be in C Wing an’ if he done burnt hisself. If’n he kin walk, tell him to meet in the D Wing stairwell real soon. If’n he cain’t walk or ain´t in C Wing, try an’ figure another way to meet up. We’s gonna be back directly. An’, uh, mebbe try them Coast Guard boys if’n ya kin get through?”

Dr. Anderson gives Taylor a doubtful look while he’s talking, but immediately takes out his cell phone and looks up the phone number he saved for Special Agent O’Toole. To his surprise, he gets a ring tone when he presses it. It takes quite a few rings for anyone to answer, however, and Bell and Taylor have disappeared from Anderson’s sight onto the ground floor by the time his phone call starts.

Agent O’Toole: “…----ing ----etty ---- ----! Yeah?”
Dr. Anderson: “This is Dr. Michael Anderson. Perhaps you recall me from earlier. I am calling to ask you to meet me in the D Wing stairwell as soon as possible. Are you quite all right, O’Toole?”
O’Toole: “----ing magic. I think I set off some kind of incendiary -----ing trap, but at least I’m not on fire. The ----ing room is, which is some crazy ----ing ----, but I stayed out. Pissah, ain’t it?”
Anderson: “Can you make it to the stairwell down to the D Wing cellar in two minutes? Not the dining hall one, the lobby, the one closest to the central building?”
O’Toole: “Hell, that’s only like three hundred feet. If I can’t, you can trade my spaz ass to the ----ing Yankees!”

Danny O’Toole is standing in a corridor on the ground floor of the abandoned C Wing. The door he had been trying to open evidently triggered an incendiary device inside the room, which O’Toole considers pretty nuts. Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane was already like something out of a Batman movie or a Japanese horror game and that was before the entire guard force went full rehtahd, obsessing over psycho bitch Bell like a bunch of unhinged John Cusacks in the 80s. Chick was mad hot, had that sexy kind of easily corrupted innocence shtick going on, but going Apocalypse Now fighting over who’d stick their dick in crazy seemed excessive, even for Maine-iacs.

----, that Green Beret ---hole, Taylor, had rigged some kind of explosive trap in G Wing for the guards earlier. Maybe he was still with Dr. Anderson and had been through this wing too, leaving ----ing Rambo-style traps like the goddamn PTSD Fairy. Though ---- knows if that’s better or worse than some of the guards having developed a bad case of incendiary IRA-envy to go along with their Fatal Attraction to Little Miss Bunny-Boiler.

O’Toole has another happy thought, maybe the guards having gone ape---- means that the criminally insane inmates are running free in the world’s looniest riot, some of them having sought shelter in the abandoned wings. Maybe the incendiary device was some pyro-spaz’s latest arts & crafts project.

O’Toole figures that anyone in C Wing might have heard the fireball in the room and it won’t take long for the flames in there to start making plenty of noise. He therefore draws his M9 pistol and runs northeast down the hall heading for D Wing. It’s maybe a hundred feet to the C Wing lobby and the stairwell there and O’Toole slows down to cross it, passing over to D Wing through a connecting corridor between the Kirkbride Plan wings.

Emerging into the dining hall of D Wing, O’Toole moves only slightly over a walking speed, being unsure whether there might be guards walking in the halls of D Wing. It’s abandoned, yes, but the guards also saw him running toward it earlier and they might still be looking for him. O’Toole wishes he hadn’t cut off the phone call before he asked whether that Green Beret nutcase was with Doc Anderson. Yeah, sure, Taylor probably was ax-crazy behind that butter-wouldn’t-melt aw-shucks Forrest Gump thing of his, but at least he didn’t seem to have any immediate homicidal plans for O’Toole, whereas the guards probably did.

---

After O'Toole ended the phone call, Dr. Anderson closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt Mrs. York sleeping close to him, but ignored her for now, scanning for other dream signatures. On the floor above him, maybe twenty feet up and 40-50’ north, there were four sleeping men. Three were mildly sedated and might be suffering from minor aches. The fourth had been heavily drugged, but his mind was still overwhelmed by a constant barrage of awful pain from what appeared to be life-threatening injury suffered recently. His condition can barely pass for sleep and he is unable to reach a dream state.

Dr. Anderson can tell that all four men are confused, frightened and psychologically troubled. Without taking the time to examine each one, he cannot tell why or how, but he figures that all of them have been living under great stress for a long time and suffered a series of psychological shocks and repeated trauma. If they are mental patients, they are hopefully recently arrived patients, as otherwise, Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane has become a truly terrible place.

There do not appear to be any sleepers on the second floor of either the rear central building or the main building in the centre of Manhanock Asylum. On the third floor, however, Dr. Anderson can detect a man moving in and out of fitful sleep, somewhere on the cusp between drug-induced unconsciousness and real sleep. In the same room, there is another individual who is not asleep, but almost seems to be in a wakeful dreaming state, which he maintains by repetitive low chanting. There is also a third man, sleeping, despite obviously having been drugged.

That third man has events running through his mind which will form the substance of his dreams when he enters an REM state. Dr. Anderson notes that there is an image of Agent O’Toole there, along with anger, resentment and contempt. Dream-O’Toole is given a pair of rat ears and a long ratty tail, running around the sleeper with mocking cheeps.

After determining that there are no other sleepers within range, Dr. Anderson focuses on his patient, Mrs. York. She is dreaming, apparently being chased through dark tunnels by a figure not unlike Terry Amiti, except larger and more fearsome. She is trying to reach an even larger figure holding out arms protectively. That figure has the face of Agent O’Toole and is backlit by lights from several flashlights. The tunnels Mrs. York is running through are identical to the ones close to where she was found and it is remarkable how soon identical stretches of them repeat.

As far as Dr. Anderson can determine, every aspect of the dream is modelled on sensory images that must result from direct experience over the the last fews days and there is little evidence of older, subconscious imagery providing emotional subtext. The sensory images are fairly vivid and detailed, but limited to a very personal viewpoint, without any sense of a larger world. Dr. Anderson takes a deep breath and sits down on the stairs before apparently falling asleep as he enters Mrs. York’s dream to investigate more closely.

Dr. Anderson takes care to stay an invisible observer, but he gets the sense that even if he didn’t, Mrs. York might have trouble noticing him. Her brain seems to be functioning adequately and her memory over the last few days might be much more reliable than should be the case for a patient who has had Alzheimer’s Disease for more than a decade, but she seems to be sorely lacking the buttress of personal memories reaching back a lifetime that makes a person who she is. Her world is limited to the tunnels beneath Manhanock Asylum, with only a few fleeting snatches of memories seeming older than a few weeks.

The massive trauma to her head from the blunt force injury that had broken her skull and many facial bones seems to have caused major damage to her brain and whatever had partially fixed it had not been able to prevent some loss of memory. New nerve and brain cells might be successfully integrated into the central nervous system by whatever process had been used with Mrs. York, but that didn’t mean that they could be grown identical to cells shaped by events, complete with her memories. Average mental capacity or not, without any life experience or many memories to provide a sense of self, Mrs. York seemed to be extremely naïve, impressionable and lacking in initiative.

Mrs. York’s tiresome dream seemed to involve nothing but endless sequences of a giant-sized Danny O’Toole saving her from various threats in the darkness and carrying her into the light. Sometimes he didn’t arrive and she found herself swallowed by the darkness itself, falling, falling, into silence and emptiness. Romantic emotions toward her imaginary rescuer are childishly free of physical desire, though Terry Amiti had connotations of terrors of violation. Mrs. York didn’t even dream about food or drink in her rescue fantasy, probably because she had forgotten every positive association they could have.

Dr. Anderson knows he should gather more data before treating Mrs. York in any way. On the other hand, he really doesn’t want her to wake up with a demoniac lust for his human flesh. If she isn’t a cannibal, instilling an aversion toward eating people will presumably change little. So Dr. Anderson starts weaving a dream, one where Mrs. York is all the diners as well as the main course. She ought to be easy to terrify enough for her to never want to eat anything even resembling human flesh. It's a kindness, really. And he really wants to know if it will work.
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Old 03-17-2017, 09:52 AM   #108
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The stairwell in D Wing does not have full indoor lighting, as the D Wing of Manhanock Asylum is supposed to be abandoned in these days of outpatient care, budget cutbacks and reduced public tolerance for unethical experiments on unwilling subjects, but the ‘Exit’ signs and red emergency lighting there still work, probably because it was only abandoned within the last few years, as opposed to almost two decades, as is the case with the laboratories down in the tunnels.

While Taylor doesn’t need nearly this much light to see clearly, Cherry Bell’s senses, while sharp, are still within human norms. After a long period of dark adaptation in the tunnels, however, she finds this meagre illumination more than sufficient to enable her to follow Taylor up the stairs, taking them two at a time after Taylor stops talking and turns away from Dr. Anderson.

Warden Tyrrell [radio only audible to Taylor]: “…meet him, consider him armed and highly dangerous. Do not…”

Taylor is flashing a series of complicated hand signals at Cherry Bell. She’s smart enough and her memories of the year 1999 are pretty vivid, but her basic training was in 1998, she didn’t get any infantry or room clearing instruction and while Taylor and others among the SFQC trainees at Project Jade Serenity may have taught her some basic signals for fun, she really can’t follow these. Something about ‘Stack up’ and then an instruction for her area of responsibility, which is… somewhere Chase isn’t aiming, probably.

Warden Tyrrell [clearly audible only to Taylor]: “…under any circumstances shoot at or otherwise risk the Queen. Just contain them, call in and wait for us. If that redneck bastard speaks with anyone, make sure you tell him what I said.”

Not that Cherry Bell is worried that she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to be doing. Chase’s fault for thinking she’s just an obedient little soldier he can order around when he wants to and ignore the rest of the time. Serves him right if he screws up trying to play GI Joe and she has to save him with her mad powerz. Again. Which would really teach stupid bossy Chase who should be doing the planning and giving the orders, thank you very much! Though maybe playing GI Joe with fancy guns and tactical gear isn’t entirely dumb, because: This is so much fun!

Warden Tyrrell [radio close enough for Bell to hear indistinctly]: “Are you listening, you backwoods, backward, cotton-picking, grit-sucking, roadkill-eating Confederate-loving traitor? This is King Tyrrell. I’ve got your friends. Yeah, that’s right! What’s your lazy-ass swamp drawl comeback to that, you rebel son of a bitch?”

Taylor pushes open the door to the ground floor of D Wing, entering with his M16A2 rifle at the ready, covering to the left, which happens to be a corridor heading north-east, into the rear central building of Manhanock Asylum. Cherry Bell covers an open door to her front, which leads to the rest of D Wing, ignoring several potential hiding places to her right as they move forward, but if she missed anything of importance, it doesn’t seem to threaten their life in the next few seconds.

Warden Tyrrell [over radio less than 40’ away]: “If you don’t give yourself up in fifteen minutes, I’ll start killing them. I’ll shoot one every five minutes after that. Do you hear me, rebel scum? They’re dead, unless you walk up to the next guard and give up!”

Taylor and Bell stalk down the northeast-bound corridor. They can see a T-intersection up ahead, with the radio located in the right side corridor off it, the one leading to the east-southeast, further into the rear central building of Manhanock Asylum. Taylor can hear the same message on other radios further off, including two on the floor above him and he’s also pretty sure that there are more people walking around up there.

Warden Tyrrell [over radio]: “Don’t ----ing think I won’t do it! She’s mine! You’re just a passing whim for her. She’s just using you to make me jealous. She doesn’t want you! If she gives up too and admits that, maybe I’ll even let you live. Come back, Cherry! You’re my Queen! What can that hillbilly offer you? This isn’t a time to play games, Cherry! I need you!”

Taylor sneaks a peek around the corner of the T-intersection, spotting a lone guard standing some 25’ along the corridor. There are doors on both sides of the corridor, three on the left and two on the right, before the stairs which lead to the second floor. The corridor continues after the stairs, with several more doors. Taylor recalls that Dr. Anderson said that the kitchen and main staff dining hall were located at the back of the rear central building and that back before 2000, at least, there also used to be a fairly nice bakery there.

Warden Tyrrell [radio, calmer]: “My Knights, I know we’ve taken heavy blows. We are facing our greatest challenge and our Queen is missing.”

The first door on the right is closed, but behind it, Taylor can hear multiple people breathing. He guesses that most of them are sleeping, from the slow breathing, but of course they could be really patient ambushers. There is a loud knocking coming from the third door on the left, as someone beats and kicks at the door while shouting in a female voice to let her go!

Warden Tyrrell: “But we will get her back. And we will be victorious. These imposters are not the Coast Guard! They are just Shadow Government assassins who’ve gotten their hands on our gear.”

Taylor knows that the corridor they are entering goes straight on in the other direction, too, over to the main building of Manhanock Asylum. There are stairs at the front entrance there, which means that they might not be immediately apparent to anyone standing outside, but anyone who walks up those few steps to actually enter the building will be able to see them well enough over the 150-200’ length of this corridor. This is not a place to linger.

Warden Tyrrell [radio]: “We have hostages that are valuable to the Shadow Government. We have important agents of the lizard people to trade. They won’t dare assault us here, in our stronghold!”

The lone guard is walking slowly down the corridor, heading in the direction of the kitchen or dining hall. He looks kind of familiar, but Taylor can’t see his face and doesn’t have time to try to figure out if he’s seen him before. Maybe he was at the gate when they arrived, the dining hall when they had clam chowder and meatloaf or maybe he’s one of the guys Taylor has already tied up, now released by his compatriots. Taylor dismisses the thought and taps Bell’s shoulder, pointing at the guard and making a Jedi mind-trick gesture. She nods eagerly as Taylor races ahead to reach the guard.

Warden Tyrrell [radio]: “We’ve just got to stay strong.”

Before Taylor reaches the walking guard, the sentry gives a terrified screech as he stares at a door in front of him. Taylor cannot see anything, but what Cherry Bell is showing the sentry is all the lights cutting out, the door opening and a tall and slender humanoid being with scales and shining predatory eyes emerging from the perfect darkness in there. Snakelike jaws open impossibly wide as a fanged mouth lunges for the lone sentry. He jumps back, right into Taylor’s swing of the rifle stock, a perfect pugil-stick sideways smash to the lower back, one hard enough to knock anyone down.

Warden Tyrrell [radio]: “Fear nothing.”

The guard was so lost to terror that when the blow hits him in the kidney, he doesn’t even recognise he’s being attacked. He went limp with fear and would probably have lost bowel control, but he doesn’t have the time before the massive smash to his kidneys paralyzes him with pain and causes his insides to clench up. Taylor had meant to pull his blow slightly, but the backward step the guard took means that he didn’t manage it. The transmitted shock through the rifle hurts Taylor’s right hand and he feels his heart sink as he imagines what the rifle stock has done to the bones and organs in the lower back of the poor guard. Still operating on combat instinct, Taylor catches the guard in a choke hold using his rifle before the paralyzed body hits the floor.

Warden Tyrrell [radio]: “Believe in our final victory, as we are the Champions of Humanity, the Knights of Justice and the Servants of the True King.”

Taylor can recognise the guard now. It’s Lamb, one of the ones who were in the dining hall when the sprinklers were on and Taylor tried to talk them down. Lamb had been stubborn, ended up being punched out by one of the others, Randall, but it looked like Lamb was more afraid of the consequences of failing Warden Tyrrell than he was truly loyal to the man’s insane vision. And now I might have killed him or at least crippled him for life.

As Taylor is making sure that Lamb is unconscious, he can feel a familiar warmth at his back as Cherry Bell jumps up to hug him. He hears her rifle clatter to the floor behind her and then, to his shocked surprise, feels her right hand slide down his stomach, ending up fondling him in a vulgar, overtly sexualised way that neither of them had quite proceeded to during a few minutes of making out in the guard’s dining hall earlier. When she speaks, her voice is husky, hungry, raw with sexuality.

Cherry Bell: “Goddamn, you’re sexy when you let your beast out, hon.
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Last edited by Icelander; 03-18-2017 at 05:15 AM.
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Old 03-18-2017, 03:58 PM   #109
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While holding the brutalised guard, Lamb, in a choke hold with his rifle, Taylor is unable to react to Cherry Bell’s advances, which she takes full advantage of for several seconds. Once Taylor has determined that Lamb is unconscious and breathing, he drops him to the ground, along with Taylor’s rifle and Lamb’s shotgun. With his right hand, Taylor grabs Cherry Bell’s offending hand. It takes him a few seconds to compose himself enough to speak, but when he does, his voice is steady.

Taylor: “This what friendship mean to you, Sherilyn? We done talked ‘bout this.”
Cherry Bell: “Yeah, well, that was before I noticed how much of your boring Boy Scout bull---- is just a mask for the real you. Real you got a darkness in him. Real you’s dangerous, scary and sexy. Guess growing up was good for you.”

Cherry Bell doesn’t try to break Taylor’s hold on her right hand, but instead uses it for leverage to transition over his left shoulder, feet first, in an incredible display of inhuman agility. She ends up face-to-face with Taylor, straddling his hips with her legs and nuzzling his neck. Taylor lifts up their right hands, still entangled, to try to push her away, but while she only weighs two-thirds of his weight, she has a very real grapple on his core restricting his motions and he’s unwilling to push her away hard enough to hurt.

Taylor can’t figure out what Bell thinks she is doing. Not being an idiot, he rules out the explanation that she just couldn’t resist his manly charms a moment longer. But even if she’s deliberately trying to seduce him for some reason that makes sense to her, she ought to know him well enough to know that the way she’s acting now isn’t at all calculated to appeal to him. In fact, she ought to know that it all but guarantees that he’ll push her away, leading to a nasty fight. That’s what she wants.

Taylor: “Sherilyn Bell, I ain’t gonna push you away an’ I ain’t gonna play your game. Won’t you jes’ look silly perched up there all night like a scairedy-cat gone climbed the swing tree?”

The sound of a rubber stock being shouldered against a ballistic material precedes the sound of a gun’s action by a fraction of a second. Taylor’s chagrin at not having noticed anyone approaching this close is washed away by a wave of fear. As the shot rings out, Taylor leaps to the side, doing his best to shield Bell with his entire body. Taylor can see the projectile narrowly miss him. It’s large and fairly slow-moving, probably a baton or other type of less-than-lethal munition from the shotgun that the guard is now pumping for another shot.

While kicking off the wall to turn his sideways leap into a run toward the threat, Taylor notes idly that the shooter is Hewitt, the guard who initially brought them to Sherilyn Bell’s cell in J Wing, Taylor estimates that he’ll never be able to reach him before Hewitt fires again. Not with Sherilyn still wrapped around him, slowing him down. Taylor doesn’t know whether the shotgun is loaded entirely with less-than-lethal munitions, but keeps in mind that it would be standard procedure. Unless the first projectile wasn’t a baton, but a frangible breaching slug, in which case the rest of the tube could be more slugs or 00 buckshot.

Hewitt finishes pumping the next shell into the chamber and his finger tightens around the trigger. Tracking where the barrel is pointing, Taylor spins around to present his back to Hewitt and protect Bell as well as he can. He figures he’ll get hit, but the assault vest should stop most shotgun loads from penetrating. Hopefully. At worst, both sides of the vest and his entire upper body would be enough to prevent Sherilyn from being hit, even if it was a slug.

As a heavy blow to his upper back staggers Taylor, hammers the breath from his lungs and making him feel like he’s being crushed, Taylor belatedly realises he’d forgotten how much getting shot hurts. He takes some comfort from the fact that this much immediate pain probably means a large surface bruise and not a truly disabling penetrating injury or broken bones, which would probably overwhelm his system with shock at first.

Not stopping to assess his injuries, Taylor finishes his spin with a jumping right foot roundhouse kick for Hewitt’s knee. Cherry Bell focuses her power on Hewitt and he sees Taylor morph into a reptilian creature with impossibly long, inhuman limbs, hissing through a forked tongue. Hewitt’s terrified denials are cut short by the powerful kick, which crushes the tibia and knee cap, bending the leg at an ugly angle. Before Hewitt can fall to the ground, Taylor has launched into a flying left knee to his midsection. Taylor’s knee hits Hewitt in the groin with enough force to launch him slightly off the ground and turns Hewitt’s scream of pain and terror into an indrawn groan.

Cherry Bell: “Oh, yes! God, Chase, yes, yes, don’t stop!”

Hewitt is obviously seriously hurt and will crumble to the ground as his legs cannot hold him up, but he still has the shotgun in one hand and a pistol on his duty belt. And a broken leg, even a crushed pelvis, won’t prevent a determined man from pulling a trigger. Hewitt doesn’t look determined. He probably isn’t. Feeling sick, Taylor knows that ‘probably’ gets men killed when they rely on it. As Hewitt falls forward, Taylor grabs his head and pulls it down to meet another knee, aimed at the jaw. Hewitt goes down as if poleaxed, clearly unconscious. Still breathing, thank God for small mercies.

Cherry Bell [breathing hard]: “More, sweetie! Let’s find another.”

Bell looks toward the door where the female voice is still demanding to be let out, beating and kicking at the door.

Bell: “Let’s do her next! It will be like a threesome!”

Taylor scans the corridor for more threats, but sees no one. Both Hewitt and Lamb are still breathing, though both sound tortured and weak to Taylor’s guilty ear. Other people, further off, are obviously reacting to the gunfire, with several men a floor above calling for support by radio. Taylor counts four on the second level of the main building, but none of them seems to be planning to descend the stairs that would bring them down to the hallway just yet.

Bell: “C’mon, lover. Why don't ya fu…”

Taylor grunts in frustration and fury. Grabbing Cherry Bell with both hands, he slams her into the next wall. Not quite hard enough to injure her through assault vest and helmet, but certainly enough to stun her into shocked silence. Taylor’s voice is not loud, but it is a low, coldly furious growl, dramatically different from his usual friendly drawl.

Taylor: “You don’t even want this! You’re jes’ playing some kinda sick game!”

Looking into Sherilyn’s face, Taylor is surprised to notice that while she may be faking her interest in him, specifically, she is not just feigning arousal. Her pupils are insanely dilated, her face and neck flushed, her back arching involuntarily as she tries to maintain bodily contact while pushed against the wall and her breathing and heart rate through the roof. In fact, if her physical responses are anything like Lola’s, Taylor’s ex-wife, Sherilyn’s body is giving every indication of being moments away from climax. Even with the shock of Taylor’s action, Sherilyn looks very much in the mood to disprove Taylor’s accusation of not wanting him. If I were jes’ to stop fighting it, melt into her…

The rapidity of her physical responses make no sense. Even if Taylor were conceited enough to imagine that he were the cause, they’ve been touching for less than half a minute. In Taylor’s limited experience, nobody goes from ‘normal’ to ‘orgasm’ in twenty seconds of dry humping someone who’s not even reciprocating. It’s her power. She’s turned on by what she did to these men. With a flash of insight, Taylor realises that even if her instant euphoric arousal might be a side-effect of her mental powers, his own regret, shame and pain at having to hurt the guards is what most appeals to Bell about the situation.

Cherry Bell: “No! Chase, please don’t look at me like that! I… I was screwing with you, yes. I was angry… thought you’d been ignoring me and were being bossy… I… it… it was just supposed to be teasing! But it got out of hand!”

Bell’s voice rises at the end and she looks about to start crying. Her legs are still wrapped around Taylor’s hips, though his outstretched arms on her shoulders mean that their entire bodies no longer touch, and Bell continues to push herself forward, trying to make their contact more sexual, even while her contrition seems entirely genuine.

Bell: “I’m so stupid! And now you hate me!”
Taylor: “Naw, Lynnie. I don’t hate ya. Lord help me, I think I cain’t. But why would ya ever risk our lives an’ get people hurt bad jes’ to play mind games with me?”
Bell [crying]: “’Cause I think I’m broken!”
Taylor: “You is jes’ tore up. An’ if’n you really is broken, I’s fixin’ to put you back together, like Humpty Dumpty. Them horses jes’ gots hooves, while I’ve got thumbs an’ all.” [pauses] “I ain’t gonna judge you for being tore up from ever’thing done happened, Lynnie. If’n you care about what I think, though, you cain’t hurt people less’n you got no choice. Hurt me if’n you must, but don’t ever put me inna position where I gotta hurt or kill somebody jes’ because o’ you playing games.”
Bell [babbling and crying]: “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Taylor [holding her comfortingly]: “Shush, Lynnie. I’ve got you an’ I ain’t lettin’ you go.”
Bell: “Why did you hafta come back! I love somebody else. You’re ruining everything. You’re not even my type. I’m so confused! And it’s all your fault!”

Taylor shushes her with a hand signal, listening intently.
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Old 03-19-2017, 06:35 PM   #110
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While sneaking around in the tunnels, avoiding homicidal guards, Special Agent O’Toole had turned off the handheld radio captured from a guard he had with him. He still had his DHS-issue Motorola XTS 5000, but kept it turned to Channel 16, the Coast Guard emergency channel, at a very low volume.

While close to the fire from the incendiary and then while running the length of a corridor after his phone call ended, O’Toole didn’t hear anything at such a low volume, but once he slows down, he can make out a radio operator calling his name and that of Agent Banks. As O’Toole moves to answer, he hears somebody else cut in.

Randall [over radio]: “Calling US Coast Guard, South Portland Station and any cutters or air units around Jewell Island. This is Randall speaking. I’m a guard with Manhanock Security here on the island. Our boss, Warden Tyrrell, has instigated a mutiny, but not all the guards are with him willingly. Our families are being threatened. If you can guarantee their safety, I’m willing to surrender and many…”
[crackle and noise, including what sounds like violence]
Other voice [in background over radio]: “What the ----!”
Another voice [background of radio]: “Stop him.”

There are brief sounds of an ongoing struggle before the sending from that source cuts off. After scanning rapidly for any threats close to him who might hear him if he speaks, O’Toole grabs his own radio and presses transmit himself.

O’Toole [whispering]: “This is Agent O’Toole, still on Jewell Island, avoiding the guard force and trying to stay alive. Warden Tyrrell has hostages now. Any news on that rescue, over?”

There is no response. Changing the channel yields nothing but more silence. Looks like the jamming is back up, though O’Toole can’t hear any interference or white noise, just that ominous total silence on all channels.

O’Toole: “[faeces]! [fornication]! Ass!”

O’Toole decides to just run the length of the D Wing corridor as well. He can’t see any threats and if anyone walks out of a room or comes down the corridor while he’s walking it, it won’t matter how stealthy he is, they’ll spot him anyway. Better to cut down on the time he’s exposed. O’Toole manages a pretty stealthy run, too, which probably won’t be heard by anyone in the rooms and is feeling pretty good about his decision as he can see that it’s only a few more steps to the stairway that leads to the cellars.

It’s at that point that O’Toole hears the roar of a gun fired close by. He dives for the stairway and lands in a half crouch, with his M9 pistol held in an attempted two-handed Isosceles stance, aiming down the stairs, and hears another ear-splitting roar. The firing is definitely taking place over where D Wing crosses into the main buildings, which is less than 50' away, all too close for comfort.

---

Dr. Anderson amuses himself quite thoroughly running Mrs. York through endless variations of feasts of human flesh, all of which are designed to awaken in her feelings of terror, abhorrence and revulsion at the very idea of consuming it. Human flesh with her face, dreams where she is the main course, enticing meals of human meat which then changes into maggots and rot, flesh which comes to life inside her when being eaten and, of course, flesh which turns out to be that of an accusing and judgmental Agent O’Toole. These latter scenarios appear to be the most effective at terrifying and tormenting Mrs. York.

Dr. Anderson can see Mrs. York has transferred all her hope of rescue and a better life towards O’Toole. Apparently, he personifies for her the joy that she feels at renewed human contact and being taken out of the darkness, held and cared for. Judging from what Dr. Anderson can tell from their actual contact, Agent O’Toole in no way deserves the halo of romantic hero Mrs. York has endowed him with, but in light of the fact that the ‘girl’ in question is scaled and horrific-looking almost-certainly-cannibal, Dr. Anderson is perfectly happy that she hasn’t imprinted on him.

After designing a range of dreams that he’ll leave Mrs. York with, Dr. Anderson comes out of his trance and takes a look around. He has a handheld radio, but didn’t use it to contact the Coast Guard, mostly because without Taylor around, he doesn’t really know what he should tell them that would help in ensuring a quick and bloodless end to these events. Also, he suspects that the hostile guards would hear everything he had to say, which rules out giving the Coast Guard his location and hoping for a rescue.

When he hears the shots upstairs, Dr. Anderson grimaces. Almost simultaneously, he can hear someone in the stairway. It might be Bell and Taylor coming back, but he just isn’t sure. Trying to remember how to use the optics on his M16A2 rifle to see in the dark, Dr. Anderson leans his head through the cellar door into the stairwell and scans upward. Someone is up there, but Dr. Anderson isn't sure whether it's guards, Bell and Taylor or someone else.

The stairwell is close enough to the place where the shooting took place for Dr. Anderson to hear a noise immediately after the shots, like a body falling to the ground, and then another noise, maybe another body falling down or a beating going on, a few seconds later. As he scans for the threat in the stairwell, he thinks that someone might be talking up there, in low, intense voices, but he can’t be sure.

Nor is Dr. Anderson sure what he’ll do if the person on the stairwell turns out to be hostile. He can’t shoot someone, for all that he might appear to be some sort of SWAT member in this ridiculous get-up, holding a military style assault rifle.

Dr. Anderson: “O’Toole?”
O’Toole [whispering]: “Yes, damnit! What the [fornication] is going on?”
Anderson: “Anderson down here. Please join me.”

O’Toole hurries down the stairs while trying to minimise any noise he makes. When he sees Dr. Anderson in his SRT guard disguise, he does a double take, but Dr. Anderson dispels any nervousness by immediately handing him the M16A2 rifle.

Dr. Anderson: “I do not want that thing. You are the federal agent, you must have training with it.”
O’Toole: “Uh, thanks, doc. [faeces], are we all that’s left?”
Anderson: “No, Taylor and Bell are upstairs. At least, I hope that what we just heard was them taking out guards and not vice versa.”
O’Toole: “Guards would probably scream for help, right? Or try to report in if they got them?”

Anderson nods and then takes a good long look at O’Toole. He notes the dried blood in his nostrils, his extreme paleness, bloodshot eyes and the way he keeps blinking his eyes and frowning.

Dr. Anderson: “ Are you quite all right?”
O’Toole: “Uh, that’s just from a flashbang. Blew up by accident, I was close by. Nothing serious.”
Anderson: “Let me take a look at you.”
O’Toole: “No! I mean, we’re still in danger. It could be guards up there. I’m a federal agent. Can’t ignore my duty.”

O’Toole aims his assault rifle at the spot where any threat on the ground floor might emerge into the stairwell. There is a low voice from the ground level, pitched to carry into the stairwell. Both O’Toole and Dr. Anderson can hear it fairly clearly.

Taylor: “That O’Toole? Two here on ground level, comin’ in.”

Cherry Bell comes first. She’s holding her rifle haphazardly, not in any kind of ready stance and the patrol sling is not attached to her gear. She’s been crying, her helmet is loose on her head and she’s very clearly in the grip of some strong emotion, at least some of which can be surmised to be anger toward Taylor, as she is walking extremely fast to avoid being close to him and does not glance in his direction. After her comes Taylor, moving backwards for the first few steps to cover the hallway he emerges from. He’s moving stiffly and when he turns around, his face is etched with pain and other, clearly negative emotions.

Dr. Anderson [to both of them]: “Are you all right?”
Cherry Bell [angrily]: “Fine!”
Taylor: “Not really, doc. But we ain’t got time for me, we’s onna clock an’ gotta find them hostages.”

Dr. Anderson is not prepared to accept this explanation, but Taylor moves right past him, holding up his palms calmingly.

Taylor: "I ain't refusin' treatment, doc. Jes' not while we might could get shot in the next few breaths."

Taylor looks O’Toole over, notices the rifle he’s carrying and checks Dr. Anderson. Then he looks back at O’Toole.

Taylor: “Got separated from them others?”
O’Toole: “Uh, yeah. Accidentally.”
Taylor: “First firefight?”
O’Toole: “Yeah.”
Taylor: “They’s rough. Sorry it had to happen to ya. But, hey, at least ya done saved someone, even if’n ya couldna help Burr an’ Townsend an’ them. Mrs. York done tole’ us to thank you.”
O’Toole: “Uh, who?”
Taylor: “Lady what got shot down there. She done said you went to find her help.”
O’Toole: “Of course. I was just looking for someone to send down there.”
Taylor: “Okay, doc, ready to help me with the stretcher?
O’Toole: “Stretcher?”
Dr. Anderson: “Would it not be better for O’Toole to carry it with me? That way, you can provide security. I would feel better that way.”

O’Toole notices that in a dark shadow in the cellar, there is a person on an EMT stretcher with an IV drip in her. Not having much choice, he puts on another pair of plastic evidence gloves and goes to pick up the rear end of the stretchers, facing Dr. Anderson, who picks up the front end. Taylor looks at Cherry Bell, his eyes filled with pain.

Taylor: “Please hold yer rifle right an’ cover me. If’n ya can, use powers instead o’ pullin’ the trigger, but try an' be kind. They’s not monsters, most o’ them, jes’ scaired men.”

Bell doesn’t answer and makes no move to hold her rifle correctly. Taylor sighs and moves ahead without her in support.
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Last edited by Icelander; 01-27-2018 at 12:24 PM.
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