The X-men run missions and work together with the NYPD, striving to maintain a peaceful balance between humans and mutants. When it comes to a fight, they won't back down from protecting those who need their help.
Haven presents itself as a humanitarian organization for activists, leaders, and high society, yet mutants are the secret leaders working to protect and serve their kind. Behind the scenes they bring their goals into reality.
From the time when mutants became known to the world, SUPER was founded as a black-ops division of the CIA in an attempt to classify, observe, and learn more about this new and rising threat.
The Syndicate works to help bring mutantkind to the forefront of the world. They work from the shadows, a beacon of hope for mutants, but a bane to mankind. With their guiding hand, humanity will finally find extinction.
Since the existence of mutants was first revealed in the nineties, the world has become a changed place. Whether they're genetic misfits or the next stage in humanity's evolution, there's no denying their growing numbers, especially in hubs like New York City. The NYPD has a division devoted to mutant related crimes. Super-powered vigilantes help to maintain the peace. Those who style themselves as Homo Superior work to tear society apart for rebuilding in their own image.
MRO is an intermediate to advanced writing level original character, original plot X-Men RPG. We've been open and active since October of 2005. You can play as a mutant, human, or Adapted— one of the rare humans who nullify mutant powers by their very existence. Goodies, baddies, and neutrals are all welcome.
Short Term Plots:Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
The Fountain of Youth
A chemical serum has been released that's shaving a few years off of the population. In some cases, found to be temporary, and in others...?
MRO MOVES WITH CURRENT TIME: What month and year it is now in real life, it's the same for MRO, too.
Fuegogrande: "Fuegogrande" player of The Ranger, Ion, Rhia, and Null
Neopolitan: "Aly" player of Rebecca Grey, Stephanie Graves, Marisol Cervantes, Vanessa Bookman, Chrysanthemum Van Hart, Sabine Sang, Eupraxia
Ongoing Plots
Magic and Mystics
After the events of the 2020 Harvest Moon and the following Winter Solstice, magic has started manifesting in the MROvere! With the efforts of the Welldrinker Cult, people are being converted into Mystics, a species of people genetically disposed to be great conduits for magical energy.
The Pharoah Dynasty
An ancient sorceress is on a quest to bring her long-lost warrior-king to the modern era in a bid for global domination. Can the heroes of the modern world stop her before all is lost?
Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
Adapteds
What if the human race began to adapt to the mutant threat? What if the human race changed ever so subtly... without the x-gene.
Atlanteans
The lost city of Atlantis has been found! Refugees from this undersea mutant dystopia have started to filter in to New York as citizens and businessfolk. You may make one as a player character of run into one on the street.
Got a plot in mind?
MRO plots are player-created the Mods facilitate and organize the big ones, but we get the ideas from you. Do you have a plot in mind, and want to know whether it needs Mod approval? Check out our plot guidelines.
He took her to the medical room. As she walked, Noel pulled the sections of hair out in long practiced movements that were reminiscent of playing a harp. She had to keep the strands separate or else the ends would tangle. Such a hassle.
And then he held out a can. WD-40? Her raised eyebrow was skeptical.
> "Liquid stitches" Was his defense.
Well, yeah, that's what the can said. Didn't mean it actually worked. Noel indicated for Hades to put the can down. Her hands were full and she wasn't about to glue her hands to her hair. She was making quick work of it anyway.
He showed her a whole new cache of weapons. Considering what she'd seen last night, and the fact that she knew he had more of the same, put Noel's tiny little cash nest egg beneath her mattress to shame. "Oh God." Noel pulled a hair tie from her pocket and tied off the end of the braid, tossing the whole heavy mess over her shoulder. "They were probably all over my place weren't they?" She wracked her memory for protocol, but the memories were sluggish. They hadn't been in her head long enough to leave a lasting impression.
"They'll have it bugged. Assuming our contracts are still non-lethal capture they'll hope for an ambush." Noel put her hands to her forehead. It was probably placebo to think that the action would help unlock those slippery memories. "We should play into that. Again it'll be teams. Wheelmen and an assalt team only." That was the beauty of living in a low-rent, cramped apartment building. There was some small protection in the sheer number of eyes around.
"If you can silence the exterior team without alerting the inside guys that there's anything wrong, that'll half the fight right there." The numbers. She couldn't grasp them. Either she couldn't reconcile her apartment layout with their tactics or the information was just plain missing.
"Between the phone and notes... No, this pretty well covers things, I think. I've never used video surveillance before like this. It's helpful." And the phone. She liked that too. Noel locked the phone and slipped it into her pocket and compared the signatures. Adequate, she decided. Not a 100% match, that would have been suspicious, but to her untrained eyes it was enough.
"My roommate's a police consultant," and she talked to dead people, "if there was anything suspicious, she'll stay at the station." It had happened before. Besides Noel's message to her was probably enough to tip her off to stay away. Probably.
> "I am trying to find out who sold us out."
Us. She didn't miss that grouping. Were they an us? This contract thing might have thrown them together. That was us enough of an explanation for Noel. She usually had to let the whole tracking down reasons thing was something Noel usually had to let go of. She watched Hades do his thing, pouring herself a second cup of coffee but preferring to stay standing for now. Just in case she needed to move quickly.
> "How are your wounds?"
Noel rolled her shoulders, testing. "Cut's pulling. If I reopen it again, it's gonna need stitches 100%. Bruises aren't too pretty yet. Tomorrow we'll see the really cool colors. Nothing's broken. If it comes to a fight, I still can." An honest report from someone who was, unfortunately, rather used to taking a beating. She was just like a normal human in most ways.
She shuddered at the thought of someone, anyone, keeping her to constantly read others. Without her routines, without her safeguards and rules, she wouldn't be a person. She would just be a sieve of information.
"I'm willing to do whatever it takes to stay my own person." Even sacrifice more memory. She set down her cup. "Let's go." She pulled her hair around her shoulder and started braiding. Business time.
Truth. More truth. Phone? Noel put down the gun on the counter and pat her pants down looking for her phone. Ah. Not these pants. The ones she'd stepped over in the bathroom. "My mind settles it accounts when I'm sleeping. If there's a surplus, that's when it'll bail out the extra memories." She poured the coffee while her hands were free. She was confident that she could reach it before he could reach her.
She turned and leaned back against the counter in front of the coffee maker, both hands wrapped around the mug. Noel took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of it and wincing once her lungs were full. Was she all right?
"Mostly stiff, I think. Headache. I remember bikers." That was helpful, right? "Let me go get my phone." She had to do an odd sort of juggle to hold up the oversized pants while balancing a full cup of coffee and a gun, but she was nothing if not stubborn.
Back in the room, Noel ditched the pants. Hers might be dirty and blood stained, but at least they fit. She found a phone in her back pocket and the note he mentioned in the front. Again, the phone wasn't hers. Except it was. What the heck did she do last night that got her so many new things?
Noel sat tailor fashion, balanced the gun on one knee, and sipped her coffee while she read. It was her handwriting and the more she read, the more she remembered. Ugh. She took a hit from a chain to the side. She took a quick peek at the bruising. It was a sick sort of yellow. The kind of bruising that's deep and takes more than a day to hit its full bloom. But this was only half the story according to Hades.
"Still one more cell." She muttered to herself and fiddled with the phone as she made her way back to the kitchen. Noel grabbed a napkin from the counter and a pen from a drawer. The gun was now only sort of safe tucked in the front of her pants. "Sign it. Uh. Please." She hesitated, distracted by a video this crazy awesome phone that was totally now hers. The words 'keyed to her DNA' floated around like maybe she'd heard that.
"Whoa. You go through walls." Whoa. Another lightning strike. Noel looked around at the safe house, eyes resting on a few specific places. There were weapons inside these walls. Quick access hideyholes for someone who could go right through the sheetrock. "If it's not been too long, neural pathways can be reforged." She flicked her eyes to Hades now. Another thing she remembered. Assassin.
She wasn't sure what woke her, but once she was awake, Noel was too achy to get back to sleep.
Hotel? The brunette sat up pulling a gun from beneath her pillow and setting it in her lap so she could rub her eyes and inspect her surroundings. She usually slept with a gun in hand so no surprise there. She felt fuzzy in the head. There was no note. That was usually a good sign, right?
Noel ran through her checklist and not a lot of it was fitting. It was a new place. Not her clothes. The weapon in her lap was not even hers.
But it was loaded.
The whole thing was weird. Like she'd stepped into someone else's life. She hurried to the restroom to double check that she still looked like herself.
Once she finished as much of her morning routine as she could, Noel scrounged some pants and went to explore. She stepped quietly in this stark place, pausing in front of a painting in the hall way before the kitchen.
She liked it. If she had to describe it in one word, she thought, it would be movement. Wait...
It felt like lightning striking in her head. She'd stood here before. Sort of like Deja Vu, but this was reality. A memory. She stood here last night. Noel put her hands on her head, one still clutching the gun. Don't forget. Hades. Davronski. Movement. Hades. Davronski. Movement. "Hades. Davronski. Movement." She whispered the words to herself. She'd made a deliberate memory, knowing that she liked this piece, knowing that she would spend time here. Now she could almost feel her mind seeking out old connections.
>"There is coffee in the kitchen"
Noel jumped and moved to pull up the loose men's pants. "Are you Davronski or Hades?" An ally in either case, if they were having a casual morning coffee together. She tried to be cool and made herself keep the gun down by her leg rather than pointing it at anyone who might take offense.
She peeked around the corner, enticed by the promise of caffeine.
Bald, tan, wiry. Another lightning strike. She was wading through bikers using non-lethal strikes shouting for someone who looked like the man here in the kitchen.
"I feel like I got hit by a bus." She went to get some coffee, but she had to put down the gun to do the pouring. It felt wrong. Like driving without a seat belt. Choices, choices.
Strip!? Noel double checked with the deity in her head that this was, in fact, a strip version. The memorymancer took a calm seat across from the boy who seemed quite agitated. Well, with a bullet on the table, it was understandable. One of them would die.
But God was on her side.
"If we're playing strip Russian roulette, I think I'm winning." Because she was only missing a shirt. One of two shirts she was in the habit of wearing. The handcuffs were disconcerting for Noel to see. If a man was to choose his death, it should be a real choice. Not one made under duress.
Trade favors. Trade favors. Noel rolled the thought around in her head, trying to figure out what it meant. She plucked the bullet from the table, unconcerned with her fuzzy memory. Happened all the time.
"Turn it thrice and speak my desire." She muttered to herself as she tested the gun in front of her with quick taps. It was hot. Really hot. But it was cooling fast.
"My name's Noel." That fact was easily backed up by the tattoo on her wrist that was clearly visible as she handled the gun. "I'm here to play the game." That was also written clearly on her arm. She checked the chamber once the weapon was cool enough to handle, blew out a small flake of ash and placed the bullet in one of the empty slots.
She spun the revolver's cylinder with her hand quick enough for it to whiz in its housing. One, two, three times. Whizzz, zzzz, zzzz. Then she put the barrel to her head. "And I'm here to win." That's what she wanted first. To not die. Pretty reasonable, really.
It felt good to do something based on the information she’d gathered. It made it more worthwhile, like whatever she was losing wouldn’t be a waste. Doubly so when they got to set up the accident afterward and got to watch that cell burn.
The Davronskis were not stupid. It didn’t matter if they knew they had a fire hazard in the form of an old radiator. Half of New York still used those death trap radiators. It was just too convenient that, after all this time, it would choose this moment, in summer, to catch fire.
Whatever they knew, or even suspected, would not be enough now that Hades and Noel were destroying what they had.
It was a good day’s work. Was it bad to think that about killing and destruction of property? Her head hurt too much to dwell. The Mercedes practically purred all the way to the M&M safehouse. Hades had a lot of time to accumulate wealth. It helped that he worked in a high risk, high reward field, but without having met this man, despite the bizarre turn of events, Noel was sure she would not be riding in fancy cars or helping to unlock fancy hidey-holes with weapons stored in the walls.
Where the other safehouse was more homey, this one was decorated in a more ultra-sleek, minimalist decor. Lots of blacks, woods, metals, and brick. Noel went straight to the hall where she’d seen the abstract painting in Hades’ memory. She didn’t know the artist, but she liked it. Black lines on a white canvas. It almost looked like movement.
Hades, again, went about his business on his own. That suited Noel just fine. She left him to putter in the kitchen while she took a shower. By the time she was out, hairbrush in hand, Hades was nowhere to be seen. She scrounged a granola bar, took another round of medicine, and found a spot on the couch to brush hair that was entirely too long for this line of work. She kept meaning to cut it, but… would it be lame to make the excuse that she’d forgotten?
She all but collapsed onto one of the spare bedroom mattresses, too tired to even braid her still damp hair.
Nemesis was practicing with the scope and slowing her breathing when Reaper came in over the radio. She jumped upsetting her whole rig on top of what was left of the North guard house. Not that she’d gotten a visual on the three snipers on duty today yet anyway. As the fourth sniper on call for Van Krouse, the owner of this rifle Tim, was a lucky duck that he had planned vacation for today. Unlucky for Nemesis, that meant his memory had very little insight into where his counterparts would be stationed. She had a few things she could try, though...
“I copy, Reaper.” She should have picked a spiffy tag like Neurotap. Hell, that even made sense for her on some levels, though, why he’d thrown in the red bit, she couldn’t say. What was the point of a call sign that was more than an easy mouthful?
Nemesis disappeared into the building’s roof access hatch. Time to reverse engineer the three man cover positions Tim was trained in.
“There you are, Sierra Two.” Noel fiddled with the controls in the guardroom and leaned in close to the screen once more. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was a bit easier to realise she wasn’t looking for the sniper on screen, she was looking through his scope. Sierra Two was picking off drones one after another without fear of reprisal. She watched his view move slowly and methodically between the machines.
Her best guess, based on what she could see, was that the second position sniper was holed up in tree bank on the west side of the building. He was the only one with a good line of sight to the drones, given the terrain. Sierra Four’s monitor showed his scope covering the east-side generator. Sierra Three was Tim and that joker was on vacation. That left Sierra One who was nowhere to be seen. Not on the external monitors anyway.
“Neurotap, care for sniper cover on the east side generator.” She didn’t know Neurotap from Adam. It was better to be clear in her instructions. “Looks like he’s outside, clear of the drones. I’ll let you know if I hit him, otherwise steer clear of windows. Over.”
She hoped that Hades hadn’t gone radio silent. “Reaper, Sierra One is likely covering the vault. Over.”
Now. To deal with the snipers she could see and, of course, that generator.
Back on the rooftop, Nemesis practiced her breathing with Sierra Two in sight.
With her legs in the air and her hair pinned under the back of a metal chair, Noel was still technically sitting. Just. Not the typical direction that chairs were meant to be sat in. The memorymancer was missing a few pieces of this puzzle. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.
Okay. Review time. Noel shuffled out of the chair and onto the floor so that she could right the chair and free her hair. She’d come looking for information about Gunter Van Krause. Hades had asked her to confirm that the informant was, in fact, the man who had betrayed his trust. Her only lead on the Russian mob had led her here to this gambling house.
That’s where the pieces started to get funny.
>”Who’s there?”
Noel froze with her hand on the back of the chair. She had a single bullet in her fingers and she wasn’t wearing her usual button up long sleeve shirt. She’d used permanent marker to scribble a note to herself on her now exposed arms.
They’re watching. Play the game. God is on our side.
On her other arm. Trade favors.
The brunette peeked up over the edge of a metal table that was only slightly melted around the edges. In the middle of the table a revolver was cooling down from ember red. Behind that, a boy still young enough to be in school. He couldn’t be old enough to drive.
The heat of the table warmed her face, making Noel realize that her cheek was tender like she’d taken a punch.
>"Do you have my pants?"
”Pants?” Noel started to look. ’School age!’ and stopped herself, eyes darting back up above the table. ”I do not.” She watched the boy carefully for a reaction as she set the single bullet down on the table between herself and her best guess at why the table was melted. ”But I do have this.”
> "Does the amount lost scale with the amount gained?"
"I'm afraid I can't answer that question. It's not like I know what I forgot." If she knew what she forgot then it wasn't really forgotten. Noel shrugged and then winced as her cut pulled. If she didn't stop re-opening it, it was going to scar. "An outside observer who knows me really well would have to answer that one." And her tone made it clear that there wasn't exactly a whole lot of those to spare.
There it was again, that full throated masculine laughter. She was caught between turning her face up to Hades' laughter like a flower seeking the sun and looking at the assassin like he'd sprouted a third head. She'd just asked a question. A normal one, given the circumstances. It seemed like that kind of depth and richness of mirth was wasted here in this bloody place.
"It's a long drive, but the one off Monroe and Market seems good." From what little she'd gleaned, it was a lot like this apartment with its multiple layers of security and medical room. "It's scary close to another cell. Not sure if those will be our guys, but it can't hurt to sit on 'em." That was the real power of her abilities. Cross-referencing. Besides. That apartment had a painting she liked hanging in one of the halls.
"Ibuprofen." That's what she'd forgotten in the medical room. Noel let Hades do his thing while she followed up with some medicine and a big glass of water. She needed sleep soon or things were going to get bad.
Noel grabbed a towel or two from the bathroom and a change of shirt for herself and Hades, since she was already in the closet. Now they could be twinsies in Hades' button up shirts. As for weapons, Noel plucked two pistols and some body armor that looked small enough to not get in her way. It would have to do. She couldn't carry any more.
Down in the garage, Hades looked to be wrapping up whatever prep he was working on. "Here." Noel tossed him a towel and clean shirt before stripping her second ruined shirt of the evening off and putting a towel down for herself so that she could get into the car without ruining anything.
Shower. She needed one of those too. Noel wanted to mess with the new cell phone badly, but pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes instead. Electronic screens were not her friend right now.
The glimpses Noel had of Gunter Von Krause’s life were fascinating. He dealt in information and because of it, became a very, very wealthy man. Noel hadn’t even known that kind of life existed. When Hades had asked her help to verify who had sold him out, she hadn’t know what to expect. She’d had to kiss a few toads to get there, but through a memory she saw it come from his own lips. Gunter Von Krause sent the Davronskis after them.
Now, understandably, Gunter was scared of Hades.
Like. Really scared. She’d asked that Hades allow her to come because she wanted to know why. She also wanted a crack at the wealth of information in an informant’s head. Seemed like there would be something for them to use in there.
He’d asked her to choose a call sign. Only one name made sense at the time. Nemesis was the distributor of fortune, neither good nor bad. That appealed to Noel. She liked the idea of distributing justice in due proportion to according to what was deserved.
> "...Attack in motion, if interested have left care package...Suggest use all of it..."
Once outfitted, Noel looked like some weird kind of commando. He’d even left her grenades. In what bizarro world was it a good idea to give a lady with a memory problem grenades?
Apparently this one.
Nemesis surveyed the landscape of this brave new world. The gates had already been blown up. Recently enough that the dust was still settling but long enough ago that nothing was moving anymore. At least, nothing at the gate. Inside the Manor grounds was a different story.
Automated drones were making coordinated fire. Hades had assured her that they wouldn’t shoot her, but… well, that was a lot of trust to put in both programming, several killing machines, and one person.
”I see you started the party without me.” If she sounded irritated, that’s because she was. Did he not trust her enough? Sure, going in deep with him was probably not the best for her health, but there were some things only she could do. Like make sure they had an exit strategy. ”I’ll get your 6. Save me a lick.” He should know now that she meant that literally. If he wanted anything more than vengeance, he would let her have a look through the informant’s head. Though after seeing the carnage, she realized that Hades, no Reaper, was mad enough that Van Krause might not make it back for her kind of interrogation.
Through one of the many holes in the 20 foot brick perimeter, Nemesis found her way to a guard station. Considering that one one the walls was melted, the inhabitants now were all gone or dead. Inside, she dusted off a keyboard in front of a bank of CCTV monitors. There were only exterior ground tapes playing here and not a whole lot of the monitors had survived. Of the surviving monitors, not all of them showed working cameras. Savage work, this sending-a-message business.
Something groaned. Nemesis drew and shot it without a second glance. Hopefully these men, despite their poor employment choices, had set up nice life insurance plans.
Inspecting the controls, Nemesis flicked through the channels until she found some movement. The drones were cutting swathes through the expansive grounds, but there was just too much ground to cover all of it. As she watched, one drone exploded back into one of its fellows, a large hole nearly severing the unit in half. The memorymancer leaned in to the screen, as if that would help her see better through the grainy CCTV.
Sniper fire?
She flipped through the rest of the channels hoping to catch a glimpse of Reaper or the sniper, but she had no such luck. She couldn’t even determine what angle the sniper had shot from since she couldn’t peg the location of the drones on camera. The grounds were just too incredibly large.
Nemsis stepped back and surveyed the room for any items or people that she thought might lead her to find the location of the sniper.
There was some… human debris. Some log books that were written either in code or acronyms. Pens. A set of keys. And a gun locker.
Nemesis pulled out her very own Barrett M82.
She’d never shot a sniper rifle before, not that she could remember anyway, and this one looked very well cared for. She hoped they hadn’t wiped it down too well or worn gloves. Otherwise, she’d have to put her new toy back where she’d found it.
> "...people have different ways of dealing with it. As for me, until I actually expire I will continue assuming that the world will continue to revolve..."
Understatement of the year. Still, he had a point. There was no point to having hysterics. It didn't really help anything. Noel pressed her hands into her eyes, still trying to relieve the pressure of her headache.
Scientists estimate the human brain can comfortably hold 60 to 80 years worth of information without loosing too much. Noel had to keep some parts of her memory in near constant rotation to maintain a comfortable level of remembrance. "Information like that comes at a cost." Noel folded her arms across her stomach. She no longer felt ill, now she just felt empty. "I'm going to lose things now, memories I mean, since I took more in. Payment, I guess, for downloading so much new information." This was her reality. One step forward, two steps back.
"Uhm. There's no telling what'll go, but usually it's last in, first out with bulk. If I'd had time to cherry pick... well. Next time. For now, I'll try to keep you in mind. Maybe make a deliberate memory." She fiddled with her earrings as she mulled over her options. It wasn't too unlikely for her to remember him. She had some of his memories now from the keyboard and the cup. Lips and hands. Nothing so full in spectrum like she'd gathered from D45.
> "Tomorrow when we are both rested and refreshed we can plan what to do about the second cell."
It sounded like what they needed to take care of tonight might not be so bad after all. If the enemies were mostly out and about covering Noel's apartment, Hades and Noel could take the cell's base of operations without too much fuss and leave the operatives out in the field without back up, support, or orders. Sure that'd bolster other cell numbers, but it'd be less to do tonight. Noel was all for that right now.
"Is it... safe here? I know you, uh, have other places to go." She was a bit embarrassed to have to admit that she'd learned about some of his other safe houses. Secretive killing machines were not always the best at sharing their info even if not all of them were twisted and sadistic.
And speaking of sadistic. "Don't suppose there's a maid service you can call..."
Tahiti sure did sound nice right about now. Not that she'd ever gone before. Not that she'd ever been out of the country before. Hades was talking about Tahiti like it was a done deal, though. Noel smoothed back the flyaways from her hair, of which their were many and she chugged a second full glass of tap water.
She gasped for air afterward, having taken no breaks in her chug. Really what she needed was to sleep for a couple days and not get up. "You do that a lot," she observed, "you assume it's gonna be okay and that you're in control of the situation at all times. It's... unnerving." She'd thought herself brave once. Hades was either more brave or more... stupid. Noel pulled the pen-needle contracption from her thigh, only just now remembering it.
> "How are you holding up?"
"Mostly the same, just a little extra skull throbbing. Your phone made me bleed." She frowned at her hand where some small pinpricks showed in her palm. He'd said something about DNA encoding...
"I know from what I saw, we probably have to do this tonight." Because this place was like cancer. They needed to stem the flood. "I don't..." She cut off her own objections. Didn't matter if she didn't want to. Didn't matter if she was tired. So she took a breath and changed tack. "I don't want you going in without me." So she told him everything she'd gotten. Numbers, locations, heck she even knew what the men they were about to ambush and kill looked like underneath their masks and what they preferred to eat in the mess.
By the end Noel was rubbing her hands over her eyebrows in a vain attempt at some relief. She could probably forget that information now. Better to save it and use it like a weapon, though.
They were not nice people. Noel knew that going in, but what she saw now about what they'd planned for her made her already tight throat feel tighter. They'd do the same or worse to Lumen. They knew a lot about her already.
This wasn't going to end unless she ended it.
Hades was a man of action. He brought something, stabbed it into her leg, and took the earbud. Beyond that, Noel wasn't entirely sure what was going on. Did he just disappear into the ceiling?
Noel shook her head against the vertigo and, rather than risk another bout of nausea, she put her head between her knees and closed her eyes.
She had to focus. She would not be useless. She needed to sift through the mind-dump before things got hazy.
There'd been a wheelman. Two, actually, for the 12 man team. Whoa. Twelve? They were probably long gone, back to... she saw a house, an address, a basement that led down into a complex nest of hamster tunnels. She saw training rooms. She saw intelligence monitoring. Files. Scientists. Torture. Drugs. Generators.
That was just one cell. This man knew there were more, even if he didn't know where off the top of his head.
The man, designation D45, gasped suddenly and violently began to seize from the cocktail of drugs in his system. Noel sat up enough to remove the dagger from his leg. She would have preferred to re-insert it in his eye, but it was too much work. She eased the weapon into the throat. He sighed in relief, it sounded like relief to her anyway, and Noel flopped down onto her side on the plaster and rice covered carpet.
The phone somewhere near her buzzed softly twice.
They still had work to do tonight.
Noel picked up the phone and dragged herself to the kitchen for some water. "After this, Tahiti."
Noel squeaked as the weapon she was kicking came free unexpectedly and spun toward her face. The man had let go of his sword to face Hades. She heard them clash, but all she could do was pant to catch her breath. Hades had it. If not, well... she just needed a moment. She'd thrown herself around enough that her ribs were very, very unhappy with her. That coupled with the sword that stood mere inched from her ear... yeah. She just needed a second to savor the fact that she still had an ear.
>"Are you ok?"
"I'm okay." She wheezed, not surprised in the least that Hades had come out on top of that fight. Now, also unsurprisingly, he wanted answers. "Yeah." Noel grunted as she shoved the unfamiliar weapon away from her and struggled up to her feet. "On it."
She found only one alive. Injured, bruised, bleeding, paralyzed, and dazed but alive. Noel knelt next to him, looking into his mismatched pupils that still managed to convey a special kind of loathing and a hint of something else. Fear?
"This won't hurt." She touched his face to keep him still, not quite sure why she'd offered words of comfort to an enemy.
Then she kissed him, tongue delving deep enough to elicit a surprised sound from the man.
Again information poured in, but this was the most complete kind she could get: his thoughts, his words, anything he'd had mental access to was now her playground.
Noel did not like what she saw.
A strange texture filled her mouth and Noel pulled back suddenly. "Cyanide capsule." She whispered the answer before she could even fully form the question. She also had a mouth full of second-hand suicide pill.
She spit. She clawed the foamy mixture from her mouth and then grabbed at the man's earpiece even as the foam coming from the man's lips bubbled out pink, his deathmask a smile. "Snipestilllisten" She slurred and waved the earpiece at Hades, who was talking about a phone? They were still listening! They were getting away!
She may have had two weapons now, but Noel couldn't handle more than one effectively. The memorymancer threw her weapon point first into the leg of a man to her left that she only just had time to register.
She turned and managed to nick the hand of a man who had a shotgun, the paralytic took effect quickly making his arms seize and his weapon's muzzle to float up before it fired at far too close a range. Scattered shot bounced off the ceiling and showered Noel and the one remaining assailant with bits of plaster and rubber.
They locked eyes before moving at the same time.
Noel threw herself backwards onto the couch, tipping the whole piece of furniture onto its back. The man swung his blade after her and was too committed to stop his weapon from biting into the wooden frame.
She kicked the tip of the blade that she could see to the side, wrenching the hilt in his hand. It made a nice lever and her shoes weren't going to pass out from touching the blade.
Wrestling as he was with his own weapon, he'd be a sitting duck for Hades.
