RP: ISC Phoenix [Mission 1] - Feel the Pain

As Seiren spoke Bronzi responded with two gun shots already. The thunderous report of his revolver shook the building. The first shot went at the sub-machine gunner's arm. The second shot hit the "cleaver" guy in the thigh.

Bronzi shifted defensively in front of Aoi and began moving down the stairs. Seiren could see a trickle of dark red blood coming from Bronzi's lower torso. Bronzi moved as if nothing had even happened. On the floor "You little idiot." Bronzi snarled at Seiren as he raised his gun at him.

A crack of thunder reverberated in the room. Seiren would hear the thump of a body falling.

A young woman ran up behind Seiren with a butcher's knife. Bronzi pressed on. He sighed. "Sorreh..." He said to her as her body twitched. The bullet wound was in the girl's throat...she was choking on her own body fluids.

"I know its not yer fault...but I couldn't let ya hurt my friend." He did not sound happy about having to kill one of the innocents.

Bronzi fired another shot into her as a mercy. Bronzi snarled at Seiren. "You do some shit like dat again and imma let em have ya." He voice was not loud, but clearly he was angry.

Bronzi looked at AOi "Sorry."

He then moved off to the next door way and checked it.

Makari was too busy ensuring his own knife-weilding zombie baddie was down for the count that he only noticed the two zombie people across the way after it was too late. He felt a slight pang of regret that he didn't get to show off his awesome aiming skills, but at least the group was relatively unharmed. He proceeded to smash the window and dive through the new hole in order to better cover his teammates.

Enzo made a sideways look at the fire, sort of accusatory. He'd never been very fond of things that could burn on top of water. It just didn't seem fair, like the offending material just wasn't playing by the rules.

Then again, since when has anything Enzo been about playing by the rules?

The wiry weasel pried the keycard off of the dead man's lapel just before making his presence known with a quick blast to the corpse's head from his oversized pistol. You know, just in case. Enzo was pretty sure that they'd done something with zombies before, even if it might've been before he showed up. Yet another offensive player who didn't use the rules.

All this thought about unfairness and rules was starting to cramp Enzo's style, so the bony vagabond slipped off towards the plant's main building with the key-card in hand-- ready for either answers or plunder.

But hopefully both.

Looks like I wasn't being entirely paranoid after all, The voice in Ellen's head muttered, drily. She simply stood, watching as chaos unfolded in the streets around the town from her vantage point by the oil derricks, when a call came in from Luca.

Well, you going to go, or stand here like an idiot? If it's the latter, I guess I'll have to take over. the voice said, and Ellen's legs began to move on their own.

"No, no, I got it. I'll get over there, just give me a moment." Ellen said to herself, shaking her head a bit to clear her mind and regain control. She trotted over to the hovercar and hopped in, looking at the dashboard and speaking to it "Get me to the water plant as fast as you can!" she ordered the vehicle, and it complied, jumping into the air and surging forward as if some immense force were pushing it.

"I'll be there in a second or two" Ellen responded to Luca over the communicator as the water plant rapidly came into view. "Anybody need help with anything?" she asked in general over the airwaves.

The younger Smith ducked and weaved between bone cutting slashes before darting in low for the haymaker!

With the surgeon spazzing out, he quickly shuffled back, hand instinctively snatching out to his side - catching the adrift fedora in his hand, Scott placed it back on his head with a precise swiftness. 'A pathology lab. This place has a pathology lab!' he loudly thought to himself in his head as leather shoes pounded against hospital floor. Making his way back to the equipment at hand and grabbing everything he'd need, Scott started off to one half of the answer to this mess. The pharmacology lab - pathology would be next.

And then he thought out loud as he kicked his way through the doors, case in one hand, pistol in the other.

"Why the @#$% does a small town have an expensive pathology lab?!" Walking in, he realized that it didn't matter in the slightest. Not yet He just needed to isolate the active agent that was causing the illness - then he could counter the source. Even as he placed the samples into the scanning equipment, Scott knew there wasn't likely a point in just dealing with one or the other; he had to take care of both. The causative agent so it didn't keep screwing people over as it stayed in their system, then the source so the stuff didn't keep coming back. One to cure, one to keep the poison from returning. Short term so they were all alive, then long term.

Setting up the equipment to email him the results, he cued his comms for the others again, "Smith here - anyone else out there find out what's causing this mess?" he asked, now frantically running to the pathology lab next as the device in the pharmacy chugged away, set to search for mind altering substances. He didn't know that algae was the source, but he'd know the mechanism soon enough to get a short term cure at work.

Scott really wished he had some help - he was doing the work of two different lab teams at once!

"Yo, Smith." Enzo was sitting with his feet propped up on a desk in front of him. Pretending, for the moment, that it was his desk and he was some kind of water recycling engineer. He had it nailed down to a T, too, the way he held his communicator up with one hand whilst the other dangled with a lit cigarette over the back of his chair. It didn't hurt that he'd donned a hard-hat from the locker room; which now rested lopsidedly on his head in place of the bush hat he'd worn throughout the day.

"Yeah, I mighta figured out what's makin' all the shits go shits... 'n shit." He suggested, plopping his cigarette into a coffee mug full of pens, "There's some flammable as fuck blue mucks growin' on the water outside. Looks like nasty shit. My money's on that."

Enzo finished his broadcast with a grunt and tossed the communicator onto the desk so he could remove his hard-hat and fling it like a frisbee across the room. Then, slender finger pried open the drawer and started snooping. It was at this point that he stopped pretending that it was his desk.

Pretending that its contents were his... Well, he'd probably keep that up for quite a while.

Panther walked quickly with purpose scanning the area. The smell of algae was abundant, and was thankful the disease was not airborne. While he did not closely examine the area, it was easy to deduce that the water was contaminated.

He began to make a text message to the others of his discovery, sending to Luca only since he has not learned the ability to send mass text to others, before his senses detected something that caught his attention. He moved into a ready stance as he faced the figure with wings and made a short assessment if any allies were in the area.

His left hand put the phone back in it's pocket while drawing a knife with his right hand, still hidden by the long sleeve of the hoody and kept his arm behind his back, as he kept low and slowly approached the Lorath. "Do you know who you are?" asked Panther in a low voice, "Do you need help?"

"Bortelli, could you - tell me - a little more about it?" Smith asked, his breath running short from the fighting and the running.

Scott had made way into the pathology lab, but was at a loss as to where to start. "That sounds like industrial waste or something," he replied, sighing as the trip to the pathology lab suddenly felt useless. Reaching into his pocket, he glanced at the display for any relief - none. The results from the chemlab equipment in the pharmacy hadn't gotten anything yet.

Shaking his head with frustration at the trip, he began walking out, catching his wasted breath.

Zeta slowly and carefuly drew her Easy SMG. She did it turned sideways to the Lorath person, so it would not be seen. Easy was a good gun if you did not want to kill anyone. Her eyes darted around meanwhile, but she could not see anyone. This Lorath was whoever she was chasing. He must the runner.

"Luca," she radioed in safety of her helmet. "You might want to call in John. If nothing else we really need eyes in the skies by now. How are you holding up Mell?"

"Nah, I don't think it's waste 'r nothins." Enzo replied over the radio, now admiring the cleanliness of his fingernails and the way that complimented his new watch.

"Looked too natural an' shit. It was like a-- like a-- like a..." He struggled with the word. "Y'knows, like a fungus 'r somethin'. Or-- oh, what the fuck am I wantin' to says here?"

Enzo furrowed his brow and yanked the desk drawer out the rest of the way from its resting place. He tossed it onto the floor, scattering its contents and stuck his hand into the empty slot, checking for a hidden stash.

"Algernon? Er' Somethin'?"

"Move moving!" Bronzi called out deciding they needed to get going. Makari crashing through the window was loud, and the gun shots were even louder. This building was a death trap and they probably had more people closing in thanks to all the noise that had been made.

He pushed through the last bits of hall way and this time quietly and cautiously opened another door that welcomed them to the out side. Bronzi checked the area then moved out side swiftly He could hear the radio chatter, but he said nothing. Bronzi immediately ran forward towards the vehicles in the nearby parking lot. He sent and elbow into a small car's window shattering it. Reaching in he twisted a key. Nothing. He snorted and repeated the process four more times, before one screeched loudly then roared to life.

It was an old busted up pick up trick. The truck was predictably blue "Its my favorite color!" "Great! Now, who knows how ta drive?" He said with a cheerful grunt while looking out for his team, and attempting to keep an eye on that door they had just exited from .

The world was slowing down and the Phoenix team were watching it lurch around them. Seiren slid down the banister, the splinters facing away from his legs as he watched a gauss-propelled bullet fly past him and rip a hole in the cleaver-wielding man's thigh.

Seiren watched the cleaver fall out of the man's hands and sail over the banister, intersecting Seiren's direction of travel and landing in the ground below. He turned to spot the man with the sub-machinegun and landed on his back, firing his pistol three times at the man - hitting his legs twice while the third shot hit the wall a couple of feet behind him - while another burst through the ceiling above the sub-machine gun wielding man and struck him in the shoulder, near the joint.

Overhead, Seiren could see another series of shots overhead as the sub-machinegun wielding man crumpled and fell - followed shortly by another report from the gauss gun. Aoi turned around to see a woman in her twenties fall face down on the floor, gargling and mewling through the newly acquired trans-tracheotomy.

Aoi flinched and backed into Bronzi, jaw agape as a rivulet of the woman's blood splashed at her feet. She took a step back and clung to Bronzi for a moment before releasing her grip.

All she could feel was a rising churning in her stomach and her breathing shortening as she fixated on the red puddle from the woman's neck growing bigger and bigger and seeping through the cracks in the floor. "This was what I was trying to avoid-" She breathed as she rushed down the stairs to follow Bronzi, watching Seiren roll over to get up and move with them.

-

"Its fine, but its gettin' kinda windy up 'ere." Melissa replied to Zeta. "Narn' 'em's game to climb up after I put 'em back down."

Zeta and Panther examined the Lmanel in front of them, and he didn't seem to be like the others. Judging by how he ran earlier, Panther was able to guess that he was fully aware of what he was doing.

He was lying face down with his shoulders on the side, one arm holding the ground beneath him and the other reaching into his jacket and whipping something out.

The first thing Ellen heard when she touched off and started heading towards Zeta and Panther's position was a gunshot. Panther was struck in the forearm by a .50 Lorath Handcannon round, spinning him sideways.

Enzo's thorough search of the desk yielded some bullets, a dinky pistol and some stimulants to keep you awake on the job. However, a grin came across his lips when he spotted something that didn't belong there: A large wad of money with a band across it hiding in an envelope taped to the underside of the desk drawer. The logo on the band appeared to be a seven pointed star with a black laughing skull in the middle.

A paycheck for the stiff that was in the water - and he didn't have the time to spend it. What Enzo didn't recognise was the symbol on it. It didn't belong to any of the gangs he ran with or interacted with in his past. Maybe it was some new outfit, he guessed. As he weighed the envelope, he felt something in there that wasn't money. Touching it further, it felt like a memory card of some sort.

Pulling it out and looking at it further, it had "BACKUP" etched onto it and a symbol for the Water Plant that he'd seen on the way in.

"...Shit, that cloud's gettin' big, innit?" Melissa observed dryly over the radio.

-

Luca, meanwhile was facing a different problem as he watched the crowd start to descend upon him. His Grapple Stunner was crackling with life as his earpiece awaited input from the person he'd called. He had to do two things at once, hold conversation and fight. He had to get her input, he knew that her medical skills probably surpassed that of Panther, Smith and Dr. Shakes.

Oh, he was good at holding a conversation while fighting - but only to belittle his enemies, not to discuss business with someone in a completely different location and who was in all likelihood in a bunker several miles beneath the sea on a completely different planet.

Well, he was half correct about that wild tangent. He raised his fist into the air and sent it towards the ground, flaring with stray arcs of electricity and punching the concrete, sending a wave of electricity through the crowd ahead of him to buy him some time.

"Aiesu, you there?" He asked as he watched a few people stumble towards him.

The response came late. But it came.

"Unh.. Yeah...?" a groggy voice replied. Though the communication was essentially real time, she was on a different world, let alone different timezone. "What do you want?"

"I need something -" The sound of a fist impacting with an abdomen could be heard on his end of the line.
"Anger manageme--"

"-analysed."

"Oh."

"Got a moment?"

"Mmm. I do," she drawled. He could hear the sound of a seat squeaking and then the clatter of keys. "Hold onnn..." she hummed softly to herself. He could make out the sound of a coffee machine.
"Excelle-URK!" Luca could be heard trying to pry someone off of him in the crowd as he started trying to wade through the crowd. "Get off me!"

"Hum..." she said, a beep sounding quietly over the comms: A familiar pang of an error dialogue alert.

"PC Load... Letter? What...? Uuuhhnn... Hold on..." the keys clattered more now. He could hear her yawning.

"Take your-" The sound of the Grapple Stunner could be heard reeling out - a very distinct noise as though a boulder was hurled off a cliff with a steel cable attached to it and rasping against the edge of the cliff. "-time." The sound of rushing air could be heard muddying the communication line. "Did I wake you?" He was sticking to the side of a building and looking down on the crowd who were jumping up and clawing at the walls to try and get a piece of him.

"What are you... doing at this... NNh..." she yawned again. "Yeah. Ugh... Why does it have to be bothersome when I NEED it? I'm just gonna reboot, okay?"

"Fie. Okay, can I send you something while that's happening?" He now had his communicator in his spare hand, flicking it open and making access.

"Um... What like video or like... Chemistry?"

"Bit of both plus some photos."

"I can do photos but ... Alright, hold on--"

The line went dead.

Luca growled and sighed for a bit as he looked down. He was beginning to watch the crowd of angered, blued people start to lose interest in him and start heading towards the warehouse where Vita and Aoi's companions were.

He couldn't let that happen. He pocketed the Communicator, set it to take mental commands, and disengaged the grapple stunner's piton from the wall he was grappled to as he leapt off of it and landed in the very middle of the crowd with his crackling fist leading the way.

"Phoenix..."

cracka-THOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!

"PUNCH!"

Aiesu's end of the line would probably have picked up a huge wave of signal interference from Luca's end as excess electromagnetic pulses bled from the Grapple Stunner. She would've heard the sound of a thunderbolt. The crowd dispersed and scattered, sent in all directions flying as Luca remained in the centre.

Indeed, elsewhere she was patting the side of her display and clinging to one of her ears as she grumbled - a ringing filling her ears. The line finally resumed, crackling through the interference.

"Gyuh... RIP headphone users... Load... Load... Hokay! 'Ready to accept sample'!" she read the dialogue in front of her... "Sorry for my waits... I sorta uh... 'Nodded off'...?" she struggled. Unlike the Aiesu he'd met, she didn't speak trade quite as fluently.

Luca was kneeling down with his fist stuck in the concrete. He pulled it out and realised that his right arm was on fire. He patted it out casually like a casual annoyance. "Sure, here we go." He pressed a button and off it went.

A screen popped up on Aiesu's end. It appeared to be a custom-made file transfer protocol for large files and quick compression. This archive, however wasn't so big, and its best capabilities would go unnoticed. Aiesu hummed quietly to herself, hitting return - surprised by the latency of the thing.

The file contained photographs of what everyone had been seeing when they got to Handler's Reach. Photos of people who looked like they were in a trance, pictures of blue algae floating on the water in a water treatment plant, the strange intrusion made to the pipeline that Zeta's WIND armour saw.

Medical results from Dr. Shakes in Sargasso, Scott, Panther and Aoi, all heading in different directions and getting different answers, all there and cumulated into a great big tarball. The most recent additions were Luca's photos of some medical waste he was unable to identify. There was also a photo of a Lorath passed out that Aiesu might've recognised as someone from her University - Echelon found it.

"The people around this town have lost their mind, and now that its dark, they're waking up and, well-" He started streaming what he was seeing from his headset to them. Multiple people were writhing on the ground, having being shocked by the Phoenix Punch. Their bodies were arranged as though they had all been tossed from a single point; exactly where Luca was standing. "-I've had to discipline some of them. The team thinks its a chemical or a bioweapon of some sort, and we've seen the symptoms. What could it be?"

"Huh..." Aiesu's voice crackled over the comm. He could hear a key press every few seconds and the heavy clicking rasp of the processor decks on her end - and the whirring of the cabinets either side of her desk as the system came to life, starting to really work with her now.

"That's what Scott said too."

"Did he mention piracy?"

Luca drew a blank and shook his head. Aiesu would watch his streaming view wave side to side. "I don't follow, why?"

"It looks like a mutated version of something we made. Whoever copied it tried to make it barely different enough for the patents not to apply."

Luca's lips dropped for a moment as tried to comprehend that at a biological scale. "They... stole your stuff?"

"Yeah. Its actually not a bad knockoff. Until it meets local stuff in the body and then it metabolises when the body's defences panic because they screwed the composition up..."

"Judging by what I'm seeing, I don't think it was entirely a mistake."
"Who does a cheap knockoff of something then has it fuck up its customers? That's bad business, isn't it?"

Luca looked around himself and all of the blued people were still moaning, and afraid to get up to confront Luca again. "If I didn't know any better, I'm standing in the middle of a testing bed for a chemical weapon." He looked over to the Water Processing plant and watched the cloud start to accumulate in the sky above him.

"A weapon?" she went silent for a few minutes. "Did you find this in a water supply? ... And are they performing repetitive behaviours... Like, whatever they were doing five minutes before infection?"

"They all seemed to be in a haze before sundown... huh." His tone hushed. "Weather looks nasty."

"According to this, you're set for storm. If I were you - and I am not - but if I were, I'd climb into a nice cozy hazmat suit."

"Hazmat? Wait-" Luca looked up at the clouds starting to darken the sky and blot out Nepleslia Prime's satellites and surrounding stars. He blinked for a moment as two and two begun to come together.

"Oh, fuck me running." His tone had dropped considerably as he heard the bad news from Aiesu.

"Excuse me?"

"I ... er, might have to take a rain check on that one, no pun intended." He whipped out his communicator and started typing a message to John, eyes fixated on the storm clouds in the sky. "Quick - what's the counter or prevention to this, and where can I buy it in bulk?" His voice escalated in mild panic.

"Erm..." Aiesu said quietly. "Is there a drugstore nearby?" She'd overheard his words, breaking into his device to monitor the situation: evident fromt he flicker of the interface and the number of processes he didn't recognise. "Wait... So you're... Here?"

A crude map showed his location. His position was slightly off thanks to magnetic interference.

"Mr. Palvone?"

"Yeah. I'm in a town that's known for its blue shores and blue rinse. With any luck, there should be a drugstore somewhere..."

"Here, two hundred meters west of your position" the voice replied, marking it. "Go there. Now."

"I can't yet - I need to hold this area until the rest of my team shows up. Hold on, I'll heads-up them." he quickly switched channels - "Bronzi, I'm going to try and get even with that thundercloud, I need to abandon my position - how far away are you?"

He switched back to Aiesu. "Yeah - I think they're a while out, but I think I can make it, my enemies aren't going anywhere. What am I looking for exactly? I'll see if I can get the others to find it too." He started streaming what Aiesu was saying to Scott and Enzo without her knowledge.

"A Large white metal briefcase in the back room, labelled Motivia in biiiig grey etched lettering. You'll find a green vial, a blue one and a red one inside. You want the red one and the green one -- and you need to mix them together, boil them then cool the mixture."
"Red and green equals yellow, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. Its kind of a sort of emergency backup we didn't document, in case there was... A ... Non-desirable scenario. "

"Good for engineered heroics, I bet." Luca remarked dryly.

"Engineered? Its business. Nothing personal. Anyway. There's only a 50% chance this works properly. You screw it up, you have to start with another fresh case. And there are other steps. You also need to boil up the blue one, then add it separately to the yellow mixture."
"And what colour does that make?"

"White, if the process takes successfully. " she replied. "Black if it doesn't. If it doesn't, don't pour it down the sink or you'll contaminate the water."

"Get that all, Scott? Good. Now, how the hell do I deal with the thundercloud?" He started moving, looking up and noticing the clouds getting thicker over Handler's Reach.

"You make like a huge batch of this and airburst it inside the cloud. The final solution can withstand the heat and pressure pretty easily."
"I'm more worried about the delivery." Luca replied.

"...You're on Nepleslia and you're telling me you can't figure out a way to deliver a liquid payload and detonate it? You're standing on the missile and rocket manufacture capitol of known space."

"That's too easy from below."

"Luca Palvone," she mispronounced his name in Lorath twang. "This isn't a game. If the winds catch this cloud, it will literally engulf the whole planet. I'm not playing clean-up just because some Nepleslian MORON wanted to cut corners, slice his profit margins and got in over his head modifying and replicating a substance he knew jack shit about. Your people did this. Not mine."

She was half correct. Enzo was responsible for giving the cloud its shape and form.

"Which is why I have to handle the proceedings personally."

"Meaning what exactly?" the comm crackled. "Where are you going?"

"If you'll excuse me, I have a cloud to catch in ten. Ciao, thanks for the aid." He hung up on someone who commanded a multi-billion KS company that was shadowier than a Funky City plastic surgeon.

What that didn't mean, however, was that she wasn't listening. She'd broken into his communicator, and hadn't severed the link just yet.

"John, get a shuttle over here, quick smart - Scott and I are going to drop a bomb on the cloud."

"You're going to drop a bomb on a cloud." John echoed as the shuttle's startup sequence chimed in the background. "Seriously?"

"You heard me." He then swapped channels to the Water Plant team, "Ellen, Zeta, Panther, Enzo, stop that cloud from getting bigger! Try and disable the water plant." He was now directed as he ran through the empty streets, jumping across cars to reach the drugstore that Aiesu mentioned. "Scott, we'll meet up here and try and get this chemical assembled now that we know how to counter it. John, circle overhead and keep me posted. Melissa?"

No reply. "Melissa, report!"

"Nnnnghhh... wh-Damn!" She cursed. "Almost nodded off!"

"Get down from there! Stay away from the cloud and skyline!"

"Right!" She replied as she started heading down the ladder.

-

Close to Ellen, Panther, Enzo and Zeta, they could see the Water Plant's machinery stations still operational and still functioning thanks to a rudimentary program that kept things operational even without user input. The consoles were open and awaiting input, if you knew how to work it.

There were USB ports below for quick access and quick formatting or imaging of the software.

Ellen was closest to the pond, and she could see the burning Algae on the surface sending the cloud further and thicker into the air. There had to be emergency measures somewhere, and she spotted a brightly labelled emergency station with all of the measures in there. Maybe there was something for fires in the array, or draining the intake lake and starving the fire of fuel for the cloud. Or perhaps a cover that could starve the algae fire of oxygen.

She wouldn't know until she tried.

However, the Lorath in front of Zeta and Panther was beginning to rise to his feet as his Hand Cannon swivelled around to Zeta - opening his mouth to roar and revealing rows upon rows of teeth and roaring a Lorath obscenity.

Things were reaching fever pitch as the stakes got higher and higher still, seeing no limit.

He nodded to Bronzi. "I'll drive, assuming none of yall get carsick. My driving isn't for the wussy-stomached," Makari declared. "Let's move folks. Sounds like shit is going to hit the proverbial fan and I don't, I repeat, don't want to be in or near the lab that created the blue gunk that made them zombies." He climbed into the driver's seat and began to reload his Peashooter while he waited for the rest of the team to climb in. He had more than enough ammo and weapons spread throughout his coat and other hidden nooks in his clothing to arm everyone in the current team twice. He smirked at that thought and adjusted the mirrors and the seat. Gotta drive comfy if you've gotta drive fast, he thought.

"Big, square gun." Enzo mumbled from the platform he'd come out to after stuffing the envelope into his breast pocket. He was, of course, mumbling about the Handcannon being waved around below by what looked like a big, angry, bug person. Or whatever.

"Big, stupid Loraths gots a big, square gun." He reassured himself, as if the offending object were something he was proud of the Lorath for having, or that perhaps it was an object below the Lorath's station. Either way, Enzo with his arms crossed under his chin from above decided, "I want that."

And so, he jumped, kicked off the wall and hooked his feet around Lorath shoulders. With one arm, he grabbed the wrist which held the Handcannon and pulled it tight against himself. His other arm struggled to pull some pistol, any pistol, free from his coat.

This had probably been a bad idea.

"This isn't going so well..." Ellen muttered to herself.
"no shit." the other voice muttered back. Ellen could feel it urging, fighting to get to the front, to take over, and take charge of the situation. But Ellen wasn't going to let her. She could handle herself. That was the lie Aerin had told the world when the CEO had been impersonating her, so why not make it true? If she could, anyway.

Ellen made her way to the control panel, and stared at it. It was made of metal, and covered in buttons. Had a little screen. It was completely foreign to her, really. she started looking for things that appeared as if they might help- perhaps draining the stuff, or flushing it away. She didn't find any of those, but she did find one that turned something on. What that was she couldn't tell, as it was unlabeled beyond 'start'.

"This better work..." the short Yamataian hoped aloud.
She pressed it.

A pang of sorrow rang through Scott at the mention of that name, but he had no idea why.

In the end it didn't matter - things were getting worse and worse by the second! If they didn't kill the stuff now...the younger Smith stopped what he was doing in the pathology lab. If it was an algae, in the water like this, and producing this knockoff of Motiva? He cued his comms again. "Geeze, I was starting to think it was something worse. If it's just algae, just kill it the good old fashioned way," the Nepleslian replied. "Bleach the shit out of everything and flood all the waterways with it. Get an 18-wheeler of the stuff to do it or something, or even if we get the stuff to get rid of the knockoff chem, it'll keep on getting made."

His solution to one half of the problem was brutally Nepleslian.

Quickly cleaning up, he quickly made his way to the pharmacy again - Motiva was one of the newer items on the shelf, he knew that much! But even as his nice leather shoes clapped on the floor and brought him straight to the still plastic wrapped cases, he had to ask as the first one was torn open. "Just for the record, just what are we going to do with this and how much of the neutralizer will we be needing?" Just as he was told, and the instruction labels said in agreement, Scott followed the simple instructions and mixed away the red and green solutions before getting to the boiling.

"I feel like I'm in middle school doing a lab or something," he muttered to himself.

Panther took the bullet and spun from the shot and fell on his back. He pushed the ground to roll himself over on his stomach and glared upwards at his enemy. Rather than getting up however, he began to run forward on his legs and spare hand when he noticed the Lorath was distracted. After covering the gap he pushed himself off the ground to a standing position and threw a knife at the Lorath before noticing Enzo grappling him. He rushed ahead regardless hoping to tackle the gunman if his knife wasn't enough.

"As much as we can." Luca replied to Scott before making a loud wolf whistle. The sounds of confused people being thrown into the air and an engine that roared like a tiger could be heard behind Luca. He jumped up and landed in the seat of the motorcycle, having grabbed and mounted it on the way through.

Scott was able to find some briefcases of Motiva, opened them, assembled their contents and got to work mixing it all up; watching the liquids boil and waiting for them to react. He kept on watching the liquid roil as if it were alive, trying to make the decision whether or not to help or hinder Scott's cause.

Luca, meanwhile, saw Makari's truck pass him by as he went towards Smith's position. "John, which plane are you bringing?"

"Bringing the Big Bird." John replied. The thing was a couple of minutes away. It was big enough to hold everyone and small enough to remain inconspicuous in orbit. "If all of us have to run, this is what we do it in."

"I hope we don't!" Luca replied as he approached the pharmacy, manoeuvring the motorcycle through the doors and into the back room. He could see Scott working feverishly to mix more and more samples of the anti-Motiva solution. Luca smiled as he saw vials of white amongst some of the black vials.

Luca looked around the pharmacists office for something to help assist the doctor as he worked more and more. He found a medical sponge and tapped it against Scott's forehead lightly to remove the sweat on his forehead.

He then put the sponge down and started rifling through the pharmacy's weapons supply. "You know what I love about pharmacists?" Luca asked as he started searching the locker and held up a pungent, malleable olive green brick wrapped in plastic. "They have hobbies and side jobs to pay the bills if they got a legitimate education."

The huge costs of getting proper medical training usually lent themselves to malpractice and corner cutting as medical students had to pay upwards of a million DA total to get a proper tuition and be an officially recognised and validated doctor rather than the guy who'd remove a bullet from you, no questions asked, at 3 AM who had a more 'practical' education.

He fished further into the locker and found a detonator and trigger. "I love it when people keep their eggs in one basket. Its a very Nepleslian trait." He commented dryly as he stashed the explosives and started looking for something to keep all of the white Motiva in.

Bell jars and flasks and all that were too fragile, he needed to find a pressure vessel of some sort to ensure that it went in all directions when it exploded. "Something something somewhere..." He mumbled as he searched.

-

Makari, Seiren, Bronzi and Aoi arrived where Luca had told them to. The crowd were wailing on the doors to the warehouse. Vita was behind those doors and holding them shut against the onslaught, holding on with all of her might. The children behind her were confused and scared of what was going on, but they were watching Vita hold it fast despite her size.

Was it the adrenaline of heroics making her stronger and holding against thirty people wailing down on the doors, or was she something greater than she appeared all along? Luca had said that he wanted a non-lethal approach, and the bay looked mighty inviting for a swim. Most of them seemed weakened from Luca's previous attacks.

-

Panther and Enzo had the situation under control as Panther, despite his handicapped forearm. The thrown knife went wide of its target as his pain clouded his aim, but the violence in his eyes as he grappled the Lorath was still there.

As Enzo was holding it down from one angle, he was unable to see the lone Lorath gunman attempt to pull a holdout pistol from a side pocket. Panther saw this, and drove his knife into the Lorath's hand, pinning it to the dirt below.

Satisfied that the duo had it under control, Zeta double-backed towards the pipe that had been broken into, and looked as though something had been stuffed into it to interfere or perhaps coat the flow of clean water, nullifying the entire filtration process.

In retrospect, the clean water made it so much easier to infect, since there were no other contaminants or additives, making whatever was in there pure as it could be diluted. Zeta spotted the thing jutting out of it - it looked like some sort of film with blue briquettes interlaced into it. Something for the flowing water to pass through, and in the process erode the briquettes slowly, contaminating the supply.

She reached in with her cybernetic arm and attempted to grab some sort of hard point against the running water and the smooth, wet surface of the filter. She found a hard edge to the filter, pushed her fingers through the film, grabbed on and tried to pull it out.

It was stuck fast. She pulled, once and pulled twice. She then started pulling constantly.

She heard a whirr from her cybernetic arm and Zeta watched as her elbow appeared to slide out of her forearm, like a fin. She paused to watch it extend all the way out, being as long as her forearm before it beeped. She then gave the filter another pull.

The extension from her forearm slid back in violently as she felt her hand explode and shake the inner construction of the pipe and filter apart. She pulled the ruined filter frame and the string of briquettes sandwiched inside the filter out triumphantly, casting it aside.

Looks like Allison did a number on that arm after all.

Ellen and Aerin were faced with a different problem as their hand hovered over the console. She pushed it down onto one button. A single button. She could hear machinery move into action, and a checklist was appearing on a screen before her, going through each check line by line judiciously. Rods extended from the ground near the burning pool of algae, and a protrusion extended from the top of it. It appeared to be a nozzle of some sort. It took aim at the fire on the water and a white, fire retardant foam jetted out of it into the flames and water below.

The foam kept on coming, but the fire didn't seem to be stopping. A secondary measure was rolling itself out. Across the length of the burning pool, a sheet of composite steel was being rolled out across it, and the cloud was billowing out from under it as it was three quarters of the way across.

Then it jerked to a halt. From where Ellen could see, something was jamming the mechanisms outside for rolling the fireproof sheet. It appeared to be a crowbar.

The fire was still burning, even though the flame retardant foam was still pouring onto it, and it had to go out or at least be de-oxygenated and contained beneath the sheet.

The fumes in the air were starting to make Ellen dizzy. The world before her started to double and defocus slightly. To her side in the emergency booth was a gas mask and oxygen supply.

The ISC Big Bird came into view above the Water Plant, and it was heading towards the city.

"Big Bird reporting in!" John announced over the general radio. "I hear we're-" He paused for a moment to process what Luca had said earlier, rolling his eyes. "-dropping a bomb on a cloud. Really."

Makari brought the truck to a lurchy, screeching halt six truck lengths from the horde. "End of the line, Hordesville, not to be confused with the ever-so-popular Horesville. Let's go!" Makari exclaimed as he dumped his HHG red rounds neatly into his pocket and reloaded it with liquids. He continued as he sprang from the driver's seat. "I've only got two speed loaders of liquids, after that I hope yall have a better means of incaping these folk. I'll keep the car running in case we need to split. I doubt the zombies are intelligent enough to drive stick." Makari didn't like the odds, but such is life when one must avoid casualties.

And thus he began deftly plugging liquid rounds into the rear-most zombie-people.