RP: ISC Phoenix [Mission 4] - Phoenixes, Caduceus and Zombies

The firecracker that was thrown at the guard's feet courtesy of Crane did its job quite well. Snapping, crackling and lighting up the place with blinding white light momentarily, and the guard got an eyeful of it.

"Aaaigh!" He shielded his eyes but was too late and stumbled for a moment. This gave Luca the moment he needed. He strapped his empty SMG to his right leg, decided not to draw his pistol and instead ran up and gave him a flying kick - with his left leg - to the FACE. Small splatters of blood and a tooth flew into the air nearby and the guard fell down, rightly knocked out by the sheer force of the kick.

Luca fenced one of the guard's spare SMG magazines and loaded it into his SMG. He then looked at the door. A simple tempered glass window with a metal frame and opened automatically if you went near it.
"That wasn't so hard..." Luca said as he dusted himself off and walked through the door, turning around and walking backwards slowly to address his peers, "A bit of teamwork, some elbow grease and a bit of..."
Luca felt one of his feet push the ground down and he heard a few mechanisms clatter and get to work, then the floor behind him opened up and gave way.
He stumbled and fell back into the hole, but caught himself by stretching out and grabbing either end of the pit, the long way around.

"... luck?" He got the last word out as he looked down. It was pitch black and smelt to high hell with rotten flesh and other hazardous materials. His voice echoed down there too. "HOH-LEE SHE-IT!!" He wasn't sure how much longer he could exert himself and the weight of his gear to stay above the horrid pit and prevent himself from falling to some unknown horror.

Mitch rushed over from his previous position to try and help Luca. He thought it was a stupid mistake for him to make, but had to rescue him anyway - after all, who'd pay for his booze?

"... Oh, crap." Vincent said, quickly stepping back from the area he was standing on; quite close to where Luca had stepped on the pressure-rigged tile. He tenatively made his way to the ledge and crouched near it.

"Luca, you alright?" A stupid question in a cliche' situation.

Jim ran to where Luca had fallen, looking to see what he could do to help. "Vince, can you grab hold of him? I'll see what I can do to make sure you don't fall in after him." Jim slung his weapon over his shoulder and got ready to help.

"Alright, just spot me! Keep my ankles pinned to the floor when I go over!" Vincent said, already sliding towards the ledge where Luca hung.

Jim got in position to keep Vince from falling, and to help Luca back up onto safe ground. "Alright, Vince, Whenever you're ready. I've got you covered."

"Thanks guys." Luca smiled as Jim and Vincent came to his aid, still hanging precariously over the pit by his fingertips. Crane, Mitch and Hitori had gotten inside the building soon, "I think I'll have to watch my..."

"Ah ah ahhh..." Said a feminine voice over a hidden loudspeaker, "The ringleader of your stupidity is mine." A transparent barrier was put up between Jim and Vincent, buffeting them backwards.
"Ringleader?!" Luca repeated after her in disgust, "Is THAT what she thinks I look like?"
"Now now - you misguided oaf..." She was talking to Luca in a condescending tone, he bore his teeth aggressively.
"Well, I never..." He didn't know who this woman was, but he wasn't going to like her.

"I see you've found my trap to be captivating. Care to stay a while?" The female voice told him with a vile, grating laugh. Some other mechanisms could be heard clanking.
"Oh hell no..." Luca sighed. He could feel the edges of the pit falling away from his already thin grasp. And he too, fell into the inky blackness.
"Let this serve a lesson!" The female voice barked as the trapdoor snapped shut and blended with the floor, "You can wander through the corridors of my organisation, and this trap has already taken a victim - but there are many like it. I'll leave my guards to find you and kill you ..." She left the group with another grating laugh and the barrier dissipated. With a bit of effort she could compete with a mad scientist that Luca had once seen in the movies.
Mitch put his right fingers to his temple in disbelief of what he'd gotten himself into once more, "Crazy bitch..." His fingers then curled into a fist and he rested them on his forehead. "So our great 'leader' is gone... Great. Whatever shall we do now?" His words had a hint of defeatism in them as he contemplated his next actions.

LUCA'S ORDEAL
So, Luca was hurtling towards a curiously smelly fate. That's when he realised that he had an ace up his sleeve that he should've used earlier.
He immediately tried to self-right himself using his Yamataian gravity control and slow his fall, onto something soft and spongy - and horridly smelly.

Meat. Rotten meat. And that's probably the least of it. It was dark too. Feeling around his body, fortunately he hadn't lost anything, his communicator especially. He flicked it open and the backlight of the screen lit up his immediate area, he fiddled with the settings, turned the camera on, and put the light on, then put the device in his front pocket. However, he didn't know the camera was recording.

Luca took a look at his surroundings once more with a bit of light to shed. What appeared to be a massive landfill dump of sorts was under here, brimming with rotten meat, food, the occasional intruder's dead body and medical waste. Especially medical waste. There seemed to be a light of sorts at the opposite wal. It then faded away, then came back momentarily, blinking.

He echoed a previous statement: "Hmm... This place has a ... ah..." He drew his 10x25 and began wading through the miasma while trying to cover his nose. Syringes could be heard crackling against his boots, unable to get through the steel, tough cloth and rubber they were made from, "Rustic charm to it..." Stepped over some poor chap's decayed body, "Could do with some paint..." He heard something shamble to life behind him, "...nails..." He promptly gave it a donkey kick with one leg, "...and some drapes, too!" And then gave it a double-tap to the chest and head as he kept on stumbling through the darkness with only a small light to guide him.

He decided to also broadcast the fact that he wasn't dead and that the crew shouldn't buy a coffin and headstone for him yet.
"Jim, if that bitch thinks she can just write me off..." He sent him a telepathic message, "She is in for one hell of a surprise when I get out of this shithole."

Vincent had since began to hammer away at the invisible barrier.

"Jim, you got any idea what's going on?" He said off-handedly, a quick statement punctuated by another heavy-fisted thud against the wall.

The barrier dissipated, and Jim had to quickly block a strike intended for the invisible barrier before it hit him instead. "Yeah, I got a transmission from Luca saying he was still alive and kicking. Not much could bring down that guy. For some reason, he's quite lucky. I guess it's up to us to find out what's going on from here. I think us five could easily make it through the obstacles that crazy bitch placed in our way, probably in the form of more guards. I say we go right through them!"

"Normally that would be the point where I yell out a hoo-ah, but not now. This crazy bitch is exactly as you said; crazy. So no doubt she has more in plan for us than the soldiers we've been up against so far. I would suggest trying to get across this pit first." Vincent looked up at the cieling, inspecting the crates and looking for a sort of rudimentary ladder useable for climbing up to it.

"Jim, try and find a pipe or something we can use to crawl across the pit on the cieling."

Jim looked at Vince. "Why don't we just walk over that pit in the floor while it's closed, and have a rope tied around each of our waists so if one of us falls, we can pull the other one up. In fact, I'll go across first, since if it opens over me, then I can float across using my anti-grav. Then I'll tie the rope to something heavy and you can walk across as well. Now all we have to do is find a rope..."

UP TOP...
Mitch seemed oblivious to what the other were saying, and made a running jump over where the trapdoor was.
"C'mon, we don't have time to waste." Mitch said upon hearing the somewhat good news that Luca was still alive, "Hurry up."

BACK IN THE CESSPIT...

Looking back on what he'd just put out of its misery, it was probably the corpse of some poor sap who had tried to come in through the front gate. He'd obviously been here a while and might have been animated by the virus.

The gasses and fumes that Luca was wading through were beginning to get to him somewhat, he choked and coughed a little. He had a feeling that he should get out of here soon and to somewhere with . The place with the blinking light - Luca thought that it might be a vent of some sort with a fan at the end.
It could have also meant a possible means of escape for him.

"Hey Jim, I forgot to add." Luca transmitted to Jim, "While you get through the offices, try and see if you can steal some information. I've seen movies where they hold it for ransom and make a killing!"

With that in mind, Luca got to the bottom of the vent, and looked up. A small breeze of fresh air was coming out of it, and there was what looked like a fan at the top. The surfaces of the walls of the shaft were metal, and smooth, making it hard to climb the normal way, but the vent shaft was narrow enough to brace against and shimmy up.

Before Luca was to consider this option though, he heard some footsteps behind him. He immediately turned around to find a woman in a black overcoat with red trimmings. The collar of the overcoat stuck up and covered the lower half of her face, leaving Luca to see a small nose, piercing reddish-black eyes and neatly groomed black hair.
Some brown stains on her coat and matching boots suggested that she'd been here a while. Luca couldn't tell what sort of body, or weaponry if any was under the thick coat.

"Hmm. You tried to infeeltrate too and failed - like I have." She said, her voice had a heavily Slavic tone to it, "So accsept your fate."
Luca blinked incredulously at the introduction, "...eh?" He looked up the vent, "Well I could cli-"
"It is impossible to leave through there. The fan blocks the way," She advised, "Мы все умираем, окончательно..."
Luca wasn't exactly listening as he pulled the M'Cel Grenade launcher from his pocket, breaking it open at the breech and loading in a single Yellow-lined 40mm conventional Slug.
The woman stopped and pointed, her eyes narrowed at Luca, "...you aren't serious..." He still wasn't taking notice as he pointed the launcher up the shaft with both of his hands keeping it steady, "...are you?"
"Well! I once heard that there's nothing that..." He fired the slug through and it ripped through the fan, shattering it and the fan and its casing to bits, and embedding itself at the top of the vent, "...a bit of brute force can fix!" He stood out of the way as the metal debris fell down the shaft and onto the floor of the pit.

The woman was stunned at this peculiar man's behaviour. "You're unusually positive in a place like theese. Aren't you even concerned?"
"Oh - I've been in worse, Lady, trust me!" Luca recalled his previous experiences on the Goban. He thought an introduction was in order, "I am Luca. Odd Jobber for Fun and Profit. Someone told me that there's a virus being manufactured here that'll be used to turn this planet into a ghost town - I want to destroy it."
The woman's eyes widened, "You know of the--!?"

"Yeah, yeah," Luca said, "About that - some scientists fled and asked me to defend against some croons from this company who wanted to silence them. They thought I'd do well to go the whole hog and destroy the virus and the company."
The woman was blinking incredulously, "That puts us in ze same boat then - I was just gathering information, ven I got too nosy I was found and tossed down here like rubbish."
"Gathering information? For who?" Luca asked curiously.
"None of your business." She snapped at him.
"Oh well - may as well get going, ladies first." Luca offered her a boost up into the shaft like any gentleman would, "Shimmy up."

"That works for me." Vincent said, crouching down and inspecting the floor for any other pressure triggers, using military training to figure out what was real and what was fake. Vincent was searching for something- an off-colored patch of tiles, a gap in the grout, a slight rise or tip in the floor- anything that could give him a hint as to where the next rigged spot could be.

Hitori tapped on John's shoulder, as if coming out of nowhere. In reality, that was impossible... but this is Hitori we are talking about, so who knows? Anyway, the Geshrin whispered in his ear, "Hey, there~ What's the situation?" She then waited for his response and, most likely, surprise.

John jumped when he saw what could be called 'Hitori out of Nowhere'. Mel wasn't too surprised. They had been on the lookout for a while, and what appeared to be the chitinous remains of a knee-high scorpion were nearby. Mel had sniped out some desert fauna that went too far.

"Goddamnit, don't do that again!" John almost had the crap scared out of him, "Near scared the shit out of me. Thought you were a bug."
"Yeah. Little critters 'ave been runnin' about," Mel added gruffly as she looked about for another of the bugs, "Not much of a problem for us - does pass time though, reminds me 'a when I used to go huntin' with ma daddy!"

"All's fine here Hitori. Nothing we can't handle." John told Hitori, nodding, "How's Luca and the rest doing?"

Jim used his gravity manipulation to 'walk' over the tiles, not actually touching the ground at all as to not set off any of the trapdoors, or for more sinister traps. Not encountering any traps so far, Jim made his way to the nearest door and motioned for Vince to come over. The door itself was a large metal one, with rust and scratches covering it, less of the former, and more of the latter to be precise. Readying his flechette launcher, Jim turned the handle and started to open the door.

Vincent finished checking the floor and delicately skittered across the floor in a zigzagging, erratic pattern before arriving at the other side. He drew out his own flechette gun and crouched by the opposite side of the door.

"I'm ready when you are."

The door that Jim and Mitch had opened appeared to lead into an elevator big enough to fit the group. There was a row of buttons from 1 to 4 and a keycard slot. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 were lit up as available.
Some cheesy music was playing, slow jazz which was heavy on the side-stick and harmonica.
It was very jarring to listen to the tune, as it derailed the "action hero" train of thought.
"How non-linear..." Mitch felt like he wasn't being lead on rails any more, "Looks like we have a few ways to get through this. We can charge through the offices up on those floors, or try and sneak through subtly and not attract any attention, unlike Luca."
He looked at Vincent and summed up the ID-SOL, "No 'fence meant Mr. Vincent, but your big frame will make it hard for you to remain unseen."

DOWN BELOW...
So Luca and the unknown Slavic-accented woman were shimmying up the shaft. Ladies first, of course. The woman's trenchcoat was somehow sticking to her legs, not allowing for an unintentional cheap view. It couldn't have been comfortable wearing them.
"Looks like we're in this together, eh?" Luca questioned as he got further and further up the shaft.
"Hmmyes - it vould seem that way, Mr. Luca." The woman replied, "We are in this ... Together." She reached the top and slid into the air vents, turning over on her belly, "Follow me."
The vents were rather cramped. A person could only crawl on his knees through the vents, and their shoulders or hips rubbed against the walls half of the time.
"Uh huh." Luca followed suit up the vent, almost slipping and falling, "Where we headed?"
The woman would have turned around to say this, "The Lab. We're getting the sample of ze virus, and of the cure. Then we destroy the remaining virus if there is any."

"Sounds like you know what you're doing." Luca nodded in agreement and accidentally bumped his head on the ceiling, "Ouch ouch ouch..." He was rubbing his head.

"So we combine the plans." Vincent said, analyzing the room and offices. "I'll attempt to draw any guards through the middle of the room and you sneak through the outskirts, simple as that."

Jim replied, "I agree with that plan with one addition: Mitch, you go with Vince, as you will also be hard to miss. I'll sneak past the guards and silence them. Remember though, all of the cover inside that office will likely be soft cover and the bullets will likely go right through it. That should actually work to your advantage as long as you're on the offense."

Jim got ready to sprint as they neared the top of the lift.

They had to press a button first to make the lift go somewhere! Floor 1, or Floor 2 were available options, with the lift sitting on "G"
"Which floor?" Mitch queried as he tried to find a label of some sort to indicate where they were going and there were none, "First, or Second?"