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Dancing at Dawn; [Invitation Only - see associated Plotting thread linked in first post]
Topic Started: Dec 24 2017, 01:26 AM (991 Views)
Nonsequitur
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Yellow Bubblegum
Despite Control's best efforts, not much had appreciably changed. She was still rattling her own plans off without a second thought to what other people might have had in mind about a situation. It didn't matter who they were or what their experiences were, either.

…no, she wasn't going to be able to stay calm under fire. She hadn't been in a good mindset for some time, but this was just too much for her at once. She was so furious she was surprised she wasn't shaking. She felt herself tense up like a coiled string more out of practiced reactions to the sound of approaching trouble than conscious effort.

"Move back, you're going to compromise his line of fire like that." Given their position, thinking things were just going to proceed in a rosy fashion according to the predetermined plan seemed too ulikely to Maki.
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The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Kyo looked over to Shin, narrowing her eyes in confusion. Then with Maki's interjection her eyes widened, and she looked apologetic. "Nah, nah, what I mean is I'll be breakin' out... breaking out, and fighting on the ground. So I should be outta your line of..."

She heard it too, and thanked the gods she'd had the good sense to mutter an answer instead of speaking clearly. Her eyes focused on the door and she tensed, like a hobbit ready to pounce onto the face of a cave troll. She lowered her voice to a whisper.

"Sorry, clearer communication," she said softly. "I'll do more damage out there than hiding in here. Don't worry about me. I've been in these kinds of scuffles before. They can't focus on both the office and me out there at the same time, anyway. Just, uh... I'll stay back until there's an opening. Tell me when it's clear for me to move. I'll leave that in your hands!"

Eri nodded faintly in the next room, but stopped. Scuffles... plural? As in multiple times Hadn't there only been the one? That lynch mob that Kyo, Ayane, and a helmet-concealed Aleksandria had beaten back? Kyo hadn't ever been in a big struggle other than that one, had she? She'd never mentioned others. And she'd told Eri, come to thin of it, that she hadn't directly fought, but had used Morrigan's charm spell to cause chaos in the enemy ranks, and then Ayane had gatecrashed the party to even the odds. So what was Kyo talking about here?

But she couldn't ask, and Kyo had gone completely silent now, listening and waiting. Then she whispered:

"Unless you guys have a better way to take out any ear protection these clowns might have. They need to be able to hear..." Pause. "They need to be able to hear."

Eri blinked. Oh. So Kyo couldn't remember the why, but she could remember the what. That was... kind of unsettling. But it also gave her hope that whatever had been done might not be permanent.

She kept her eyes fixed on the screen, silently praying that the officers would go for an alternative to Kyo's plan. Kyo was quite right, of course, they needed to make sure there was no ear protection, otherwise playing out the recording for them would be pointless. And there was no way to know that they didn't have ear protection unless someone went out and looked. The doorway presented a defensive position, but it also obscured all view of any incoming aggressors except the one or two (at most) visible directly outside of it. Anyone else would be approaching from the sides, and there were no windows in the back to show the railing or its occupants.
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FirebreathFishslap
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I'm the best! I'm the king of me! I'm gonna eat chips out of the garbage!

At the time the message had gone out, Sachiko Samurakami had been sitting inside a cafe a few blocks away. She’d been sipping her coffee quietly, trying to forget how absurd this scheme she’d been recruited for was. She’d sit in the cafe. She’d wait for the text message. And then it would be up to her to keep a highly armed and trained small militia occupied. There was a good chance this would end poorly. People might die. Everything she knew about the Black Hoods told her that.

But when the text had gone out, she’d picked up the bag with her training bokken and calmly walked down the road to Kyo’s office, all in defiance of her hammering heartbeat. In the end, she didn’t want Eri to cry like she had. She owed her that much.

When she arrived at the office, she looked around, and quickly spotted an alley down the way, which she slipped into. There was another boy here already, clasping a bat like his life depended upon it. She raised her hands as she approached, and said, “Are you th’ rest o’ th’ backup?”
Edited by FirebreathFishslap, Mar 12 2018, 12:56 PM.
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Czernobog
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Best Influence.
Shin nodded, slightly. He felt an icy slithering in his gut, but kept his face blank. He wished that this situation had never arisen, that he had not shown up. Or, alternatively, that he was coming in from the outside instead of kettled in this office. He recognized that this was, at best, cowardice. Something to be strangled and discarded.

Outside, the heavy footsteps reached the door and paused outside of it. The whole world seemed to hold its breath.

Chances were that, on such short notice, they weren't equipped to breach the door like they normally would. He predicted batons, maybe knives. He would try to hold them at the barricade, let the audio of the encounter that Kyo had with their leader be used against them. Would it work?

Shin had no idea.

There were still footfalls on the stairs outside. How many were there? They would probably be staggered, multiple groups. Every moment that passed was another moment that they weren't smashing skulls, but also the worse it would be when they did breach the door.

His heart rate began to climb as the doorknob began to turn. He knew this in himself -- as soon as the door opened, his heart rate would drop and everything would loosen. For the moment, though, he felt as if he was going to have an aneurysm, and needed to use the restroom.

"Everybody ready?" he asked, his voice tight.
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Nonsequitur
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Yellow Bubblegum
Was she ready? Of course she wasn't ready. She could have done the same thing dozens upon dozens of times and she'd still feel like she was going to be on fire and was going to vomit at the same time. Not on the best of her days, and certainly not today.

She could hear them coming and she took a deep breath, quiet jittery nerves. Soothe boiling blood. Pay attention, anticipate. Her kinetic perception was so sharp as to be primeval. It was like the knew the door had moved before it had turned. More than likely her mind was simply playing tricks on her than having entered some zone, but she acted at once all the same.

She was at the door herself, unlocked, swung open and without even time to register who was there or how many, she had cut loose with a Magarula spell. A wall of wind carried enough force to push back whomever was at the doorframe. Ideally with enough force to push several people straight off the balcony to the concrete parking lot four stories down. Just as soon as that was done, the door was slammed shut and locked again.

It wasn't like Maki to do something so unrestrained, but what had that ever done for her? Restraint had solved nothing. Restraint had them trapped like rats at the behest of a too precious by half teenager who she still thought of first as talking down to her in costume than anything else. It never did her any good, and so at that critical juncture, she cast it aside so it wouldn't hold her back as they fought for their lives.
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Ket
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Alan cocked his head back as he heard someone walking down the alley towards him. An older woman, she had her hands up. He turned as she spoke and let out a short, relieved sigh. "I was beginning to think I was the only one who'd showed up." He gave a nervous smile before looking back at the building. He'd heard commotion coming from the inside and there were still more funneling in. To say he was tense was an understatement.

"I think our best best it to wait until a good portion are packed together in the building before making a move. If we're to corner them, a more confined space might make that a little easier." He really wished he could've discussed this earlier. "We don't have much time at this rate though and I'm worried about everyone inside..."

He took a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself. "If you want to go now though, I'll have your back."
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The One True Nobody
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"...does this clockwork hand follow you... or guide you?"
Well, you know. It was one thing to mind your own business. But when you were walking home from a part-time waitress gig and just happened to spot a boy with a bat talking in a hushed voice to a middle-aged woman with a bag in a dark alley, you just had to stop and take notice. But what really made Violet decide to poke her nose in was the fact that the woman looked so damn calm and the boy, a foreigner, looked like he was the one about to get mugged. What she had learned at the park and the ruins mere days before prompted her brain to contextualize this in a horrifying way: her first assumption was that the woman with the bag must be a Persona-user, and the boy a normal human. But then, what had actually happened? Had the boy tried to mug her and she'd defended herself? ...No, he didn't look the mugging type and she didn't look angry or defensive, just... calm.

Violet, tugging her jacket closer, hovered for a moment around the corner and made up her mind. She decided to shadow and them and see if the situation needed her intervention... if not, she would go her own way. So she hung back, listening rather than watching. Their voices didn't carry far enough for her to pick up words, but she would be able to tell when they moved or if either of them rose a voice in alarm. Her hand slipped into her pocket, fingers brushing the edge of her favorite self-defense folding knife, which she had begun carrying again in spite of her aunt's advice now that she knew there were people running around with magical spirits in their heads, and that some of them were very dangerous people indeed.

Work at Café Odette had gone smoothly enough tonight, and her shift was short enough, that she wasn't too tired and her feet weren't as sore as they might have been if she hadn't had so many chances to sit down and rest them. She didn't look overly sinister even hovering at the edge of an alley, though she'd changed out of her uniform before leaving and the rose tattoo above her breast would have been on display if she weren't zipping her jacket up (slowly, to avoid making noise with it). If either of them happened to glimpse her on their way to that alley, their impression from a distance would have been of a somewhat dark-skinned girl who was at least half-Japanese and had dyed her hair a vivid violet, wearing a jacket and casual pants. Keeping in mind that she couldn't peek around the edge without exposing that very attention-getting color to the eyes of the people she was trying to avoid being seen by, she resisted the urge to look around again and focused still more closely on her sense of hearing.

---

The barricade that had been set up by the door did not give easily, but something about how forcefully Maki had opened it pushed it halfway and slid the sofa out several feet: it was not the heaviest piece of furniture on earth. There was room for the wind spell to blast out, but at an angle. This would have been lethally dangerous for whoever was on the other side if it had been able to blast directly outward straight from the doorway to the railing, but at a diagonal angle, it was more likely that the person or persons on the receiving end of the spell would be sent sprawling to their backs (or faces) on the metal stairway that led up to the roof, or else would be pushed awkwardly into the railing at an oblique angle rather than over the top of it, which meant they were more likely to catch on the railing and tumble to the ground on the balcony side than to fall to their deaths. The wind spell also had the effect of snapping the door shut behind it, though it was the rush of air blowing in to replace what the spell had displaced which did half of that job. Kyo snapped forward to grip the sofa with both hands, roughly heaving it back into position in front of the closed door.

Kyo hissed out a surprised breath as she released her hold on her furniture. "What the hell!" she snarled, at a volume that was unintentionally loud enough and growly enough to carry out the door, and angry enough not to be mistaken for anything other than a snappish disagreement between the Black Hoods' opponents. "I thought we were trying not to kill anybody here!"

Eri pushed up from the desk, snapped up the phone and the portable speaker, and stuffed them inside her jacket. She moved to hide behind the doorframe, peeking out to see what had happened. Alarm bells rang in her head at Kyo's reply: the teenager and the police detective had once had a very unfortunate encounter that had ended with Kyo trying badly to prevent a situation in which Maki would have to shoot a man, and things going down in such a way that Kyo had blamed herself more than Maki for the fatality that resulted.

But there was time for no bickering. Whatever the Hoods' response, Kyo's response, or Shin's response, the first shot had been fired and the Persona-users inside the office needed to focus on responding to whatever their response was. It was possible that the Black Hoods had been looking to blindside the people inside the building, but there was no question now that their presence had been acknowledged. Whatever happened next would probably happen really fast. Eri's mask was already over her face. She was ready now with a gravity spell... which she would use on the sofa, the moment someone forced the door open again. If she could hold the barricade in place for even a few seconds with the door only partly open, it would frustrate any attempt to enter the office more than one person at a time, at least for a few seconds.
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FirebreathFishslap
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I'm the best! I'm the king of me! I'm gonna eat chips out of the garbage!

Sachiko's brow furrowed at Alan's response to her question about numbers. She'd expected more people to show, but that had been a bit too optimistic. At the end of the day, for all people pretended toward altruism, they thought of themselves first. It was just the people like her who could afford to throw their lots in.

She didn't see Violet sidle up to the side of the alley to watch the two of them, as she'd been more focused on what was going on across the street. Not that she could see anything in the building from here, and it was likely too insulated for her to hear any voices unless they were particularly loud. She was about to speak up to Alan again when she heard something like a loud bang from across the street, and turned her head toward it.

"Th' decision's been made for us. Move it!" Sachiko snapped, and pulled the zipper to her bag open in one movement, pulling out her bokken and dropping the bag. She dashed across the street and toward the stairs leading up the building into Kyo's office. She could hear Kyo yelling from upstairs, something about how they weren't here to kill anybody. Well, she knew what to expect when she walked in, now...
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Czernobog
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Best Influence.
Of the three black hoods that were on the top landing, two were knocked down. Neither fell off, one sprawling on the landing and the other clinging to the railing, the eponymous hood ripped from his head, the bandana over his mouth held in place, head whipped to the side by the force of the blast. The fallen black hood was dripping blood from his nose and ears, but didn't seem to be wholly disabled: he was struggling to his feet, slightly disoriented. Most likely, the blood was flowing due to the change in pressure brought on by the magarula.

The third black hood dove to the side, hunkering down immediately on the other side of the wall from Maki's position crouched to the side.

Shin said nothing, keeping his gun pointed up in the air. He had been hoping to force them back with a few well-placed gunshots, but this was going to be a difficult siege. He wasn't sure if a gunshot was more terrifying than magic, but it was easier for people to conceptualize a gunshot than a blast of wind. Or perhaps he was just being hopeful.

On the stairway, another trio were headed up the stairs. They were halfway up, one of them laboring with a fire extinguisher, and all three had homemade gas masks over their faces. Another van pulled up, parking near the mouth of the alley. The doors opened and another trio began to pour out. They would most likely head for the stairs, which would trap Sachiko between two groups of the enemies.
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Nonsequitur
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Yellow Bubblegum
Maki ignored the complaints instead focused on their barricade. She did what was possible in short notice to get it back to how it was before. No doubt that her actions only delayed things and she wasn't sure if it had an appreciable difference on how it was all going to play out.

They were still trapped and bottled in and the Hoods still needed to get though a chokepoint to take advantage of that. She took several deep breaths and steadied the blade in her hand as she anticipated what was going to go down next. She hadn't had a chance to make any preparations other than what was hastily thrown up on short notice. She was expecting them to handle this with kidskin gloves and for them to all walk out unscathed because something was just going to work out?

Not a chance, something had to give and she was dreading what might have been the final cost for this.
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