Recent Posts

Will could feel Quin lagging, something in the back of his mind noting the tug on his arm, the increasing frequency he had to tug her along, and some small part of him wondered why she wasn't keeping up. She had longer legs. Longer stride. As they broke out of the alley they cut right sharply, and he didn't look behind him, not back to the intersection at Broadway where there was noise and light and--

Will felt Quin stumble, almost go down, caught herself, kept moving.

Ow. He felt the gash from Knives open further from trying to catch her, keep her up.

Ow? He was starting to be able to feel the hurt from the damage that had been done. That wasn't good. Will was beginning to realize that he couldn't run on caffeine and fear and adrenaline forever -- if only because he was starting to run out of the latter. All the bits of glass and rock and ceramic he'd been aware of, started to actively ache, throbbing with every step across the pavement. The river looked a lot further away all of a sudden. Even alone, he'd be completely spent getting there at this pace, in this shape, and assuming he made it all the way there, he'd be so out of breath he'd be an easy target... 

Cover then. They were pushing past the intersection of Riverside and 112th. Lots of open ahead, but no buildings. Far off basketball courts, tennis courts. Further off trees. Close though?

Monument. Dead ahead. Statue on a big block of stone and some low stone walls around it. Not ideal by any means, but it'd have to do. Sitting, the walls should cover them, unlikely that anyone from the streets would be able to see them, if they anyone was looking for stragglers. Open enough that he'd be able to see or hear anyone trying to sneak up, if they were spotted. Close enough he figured they could make it. It'd have to do.

Will pointed, rather than spoke. Pointed with the knife. Right. Still holding onto that. His fingers felt like they were locked around the thing, and as much as he wanted to throw the thing aside, it was a tool that could save them. He'd have rather had the bat.

Just a bit more. Away from the screams and the smoke and the things he refused to turn around to see. 

Cardboard and dust and rubble slid under his feet and Will only stay standing through luck and stubbornness, as he ran with Quin in a dead sprint for the back door as he hoped against the impossible that they could outrun whatever Rocky had planned. 

They couldn't. And he felt the bits of the mug and the rocks and god knows what else batter his back and puncture his shirt and skin and he wished he'd thrown the apron behind him to absorb some of it but his legs kept moving and then they were outside.

They were outside?

There was noise. More noise than he was used to, but it was also quieter than he was used to. He reached to pull out his earplugs, but they were already out? Right. He'd surged. Knives. And he had a knife in one hand. A Quin in the other. His left arm felt sticky and wet and he could tell there were things in his left palm and his back and his skin on his back. But it didn't hurt, not yet. That was good. Or very bad. He was banking on good.

Three people were making noise behind the heavy metal door, still inside the cafe. Bat. Rocky. Hammer. He must have done a number on Knives. Fists? It didn't really matter now. There was noise to the left, he knew that. Broadway, not safe. Yelling. Smashing. Not traffic. 

Will dragged them both to the right, down the alley, heading towards the opening leaving to 114th street, his feet moving before his brain could protest. Trusted his senses. Noise. Noise. Noise. But he was used to noise, he could find the path that worked. Sounds bounced between buildings, echoed, there were screams of fear and screams of triumph and screams of...

Focus.

Switching directions suddenly, Will muttered a "Nope!" as he yanked Quin by the arm, turning a sharp 90 degrees to instead run further into the area behind the buildings between 113th and 114th street. Only a second later, debris and shrapnel blasted down the path he'd started leading them down, as something turned a car into a deadly barrage. "113th. Safe. Most noise. Coming that way." The man explained in as little breath as he could as he pointed in the direction of where they'd been headed and slightly to the side. Roughly the direction of the University, if one was geologically savvy. 

Was it safe that way...? Will closed his eyes as he ran, relying on his ears and Quin to keep him from running headlong into anything. No. It wasn't safe. But it was safer. And it was the only path he could find out of here that didn't sound even worse that the cafe had been. 

As Will grappled for the knife with Knives (that was really not going to cut it for a nickname if he lost -this- knife as well), Will marveled at the ability of adrenaline to mask the sensation of pain. He knew he was cut, missing a chunk of hair, and he could feel the bits of glass in his hand from his most recent attack, but none of it came to his brain saying 'hurt'. It was just more sensory information, he acknowledged it and moved on. 

The barista saw a blur of movement as something that looked like an angry Frisbee careened towards Hammer. Will's enhanced ears could hear a grunt of surprise, then anger, then panic as Hammer's head was enrobed in a sheet of what was once dice and meeples. Rocky seemed to have a hard time deciding what to do, stuck between continuing the assault or helping his mutant partner in crime. 

Will couldn't afford them any more attention. Knives was swinging at him with his now free hand and wildly struggling to get his knife hand free. Will's only advantages were his enhanced senses, allowing him to feel the flex of muscle under his hand whenever Knives moved or swung, tiny movements that gave Will tiny factions of seconds more than the average person to react, to know where to apply pressure or push or duck -just- soon enough. Even so, it was still a stalemate, and Quin and Will were outnumbered.

As he heard the air whoosh with the movement of the bat as it The Bat brought it up to swing, Will cringed, expecting the worst... only to feel the ground shake as Quin expertly flipped him over her shoulder, disarmed him and bound his wrists together in a second flat.  

”I don’t think we can stay here…”  No kidding. 

Quin's words were enough though to let him know that the noise outside was close enough that the average person could hear it. Which meant they were out of time. They had to get moving. Now. 

Will reached out with his powers, something he had tried to bury, hadn't actively used for years. They responded like an eager puppy, and he could feel Knives' whole sensory system laid out in front of him. Like a work of art, a tapestry made up of hundreds, thousands of delicate strands, impossibly intricate. Pluck one here and blue becomes a little more dull. Push on this and sharpen the taste of sour. Obscenely complex and interwoven and oh-so fragile.

Will did the equivalent of reaching in with both hands and yanking.

The man pushed out with as much power as he could, utterly blasting the thugs 5 senses with an overwhelm blast of sensory information, utterly inundating Knives with the sensory equivalent of a sledgehammer to the skull. The thug went stiff and then slack, dropping to the ground like someone had turned his legs off. It must have looked bizarre to anyone else, like Knives was a marionette who'd had their strings cut without warning. 

Will reeled, his senses adjusting to the sudden ebb in energy, one hand clutching the bartop and the other snatching up the dropped knife. He didn't particularly -want- to have the weapon, but he much less wanted any of their new friends to have it. Three down? Only Rocky left, but... Focusing through the pounding in his ears, he could hear a -lot- of trouble out the front. 

Will took half a second to look around the place. Only one left. Quin seemed capable. He'd be able to hear any trouble ahead if he took off on his own, find his way home, somewhere safe... It wasn't his problem. But... Something he'd been told recently stuck stubbornly in his head. 

"Sometimes doing nothing is the only thing you can do... And then there are other times when you do have a choice." He was never going running in that park again. 

"Back door. Then hook right." Will answered Quin. "If I say move, we move that way, alright?" Will cast a glance over his shoulder at the mutant pair. Hammer was scraping clumsily at the plastic about his head and Rocky seemed to have made a decision on what to do, swapping the boulder for a cluster of sharp shards of rock from their earlier attacks and ceramic from the mug. As Rocky aimed, preparing to fire it towards them like a shotgun blast, Will didn't wait for Quin's response. In spite of the rubber in his legs he grabbed the taller mutant's wrist and started sprinting across the mess of cardboard and rubble strewn across the cafe floor for the back door, fear and adrenaline propelling him faster than he thought he'd even run before. 

Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. That's what it was. It was too quiet. Okay, so with the earplugs in Will could hear his heartbeat in his ears, and movements of the few others in the place. He could hear one of the two from the pair playing games gloating as they won. He could heart the occasional turn of a page or tap of keys from Quin's direction as she hummed under her breath. But outside? Nothing.

The hell? They were right on Broadway. Will couldn't remember it ever being completely quiet out there. If not foot traffic, there was always, always, someone driving up or down the street. The traffic was one of the few background noises he'd actually gotten used to, with how omnipresent it was here, and in NYC in general. To suddenly -not- hear it...

While he might have caught onto the vibe a second or two before anyone else did, it became apparent he wasn't just hearing things. (Or rather, not hearing things). A chill up went up Will's spine as he caught Quin peering over the top of her laptop with a puzzled expression on her face.

There was a faint sound, outside, that he could just pick up. It reminded him of a baseball ball and bat colliding, but meatier? And then all the rest of the missing sound came back with a vengeance as the front of the store exploded into noise and glass. 

He was -very- glad for those earplugs right now. 

There was suddenly noise. Screaming. The three people that weren't Quin were loud. The one, two, three, four new people weren't loud. Will squinted to see through the dust and hoped he'd counted wrong. Or was still asleep. Two mutants. He thought, before correcting himself with. At least. 

One lifted things, the other had massive, hammer-like lumps at the end of his wrists. The air was too dusty and Will's brain too adrenaline spiked to tell what they were made of. He'd figure it out later, or wouldn't. He watched with detached disbelief as the hammer lumps swung into the rock with the now distinctly not faint, meaty bat-to-baseball sound. The rock blasted forward with a speed that made the air sizzle and embedded itself in the wall. That didn't belong there. That was going to be a pain to fix.

”Sorry Will…” The words reached his ears, even through the noise and the earplugs and the with the faintness they were said. It gave Will just enough time to glance over and see hundreds of boxes suddenly erupt like they were possessed, the myriad plastic pieces surging towards Quin. So too did the hundred or so multi-coloured plastic straws tucked behind the counter. And the two earplugs stuffed into his ears, the two bits of foam yanked out with a pop that caused the noise of the world to suddenly come surging back in full, shocking the man out of his shock.

He -had- been very glad for those earplugs. 

Out of the dissociative daze from everything happening all at once, Will took stock of the situation as quick as he could. Four bad people. One rock was in the air. Lots of plastic was in the air. A knife was in the plastic. Very little of any of this made sense, but his eyes and ears and skin picked it all up and told his it was happening and they told his brain that it could catch up later. Rock and Hammer were lining up to send another boulder bullet through the cafe and people were panicking and Quin was scrambling for the bar and he needed to run buy some time.

"EVERYONE GET THE **** OUT!" Will screamed, cursing as he did. He couldn't remember the last time he'd even yelled, let alone scream. It made the inside of his head ring. That was four people loud now. That seemed more appropriate somehow. 

Will grabbed the nearest thing at hand. A coffee mug. Well, if they wanted to play baseball... With a wild overhead pitch he hurled the makeshift projectile at the hammer-hand mutant, adding the the chaos in the air. Screaming first didn't lead to a great sneak attack, however, and the mug shattered to ceramic splinters as one of the massive 'hands' blocked the makeshift weapon. At least it distracted the guy a moment. Will scrambled as the man with the bat advanced, the barista snatching up another mug to use as a weapon again.

"Time's funny like that, eh?" Will commented back as Quin claimed that it had felt like she'd spent her whole life in school for law. "I could barely tell you how long I've been here, but it's also sorta hard to remember what I was doing before this." Will admitted as he continued his easy movements behind the counter. Coffee grinds dumped out, bottles and cartons back where they belonged, dishes put away to be washed up later. Will couldn't say he was jealous of Quin, per se, for the path she was on... Law was roughly the last thing he'd want to study, for a multitude of reasons, but it still tugged at a certain chord to see someone so ardently pursuing a goal while he'd simply... been. 

At least he'd been thinking about that sort of thing more than usual lately. What he was and wasn't doing. Seemed like runs in the park had started to have a side effect of giving him a lot to think about. 

"Yeah, I'll see if I can get someone to watch the counter inna bit." Will responded to Quin's suggestion, raising a hand in a wave as she found herself a seat and set up an intimidating array of books and other studying accoutrement. 

The barista sipped at his own drink after he'd finished tidying up from making the two beverages, bringing the glass back behind the counter to set out of sight before he once again tried to make it look like he wasn't doing a whole lot of nothing. He supposed he could try and straighten out the publicly available board games at the back more, but that was truly a Sisyphean task. 

There were no drinks to be made, not enough dishes yet to even pretend to worry about. The few customers were happily absorbed in what they were doing, his powers weren't driving him crazy today, and he even had a favorite beverage to sip on. In theory, Will should have ecstatic. It wasn't often you managed to get paid by the hour to stand around and drink coffee, and yet... Maybe it was the nagging feeling about the last four years having gone by in a blur, or maybe just something in the air -- that 'restless' feeling that Quin had mentioned, but Will just couldn't seem to slip back into that lackadaisical mood that the earlier morning had been.

As Quin said she wasn't terribly picky about her drinks, Will mentally flipped through half a dozen different choices in his mind, but ended up sticking to one of the ones mentioned before. A shaken espresso. Brown sugar shaken espresso to be exact. Sure, it might have come to mind that previous day because it was an ice-cold coffee concoction... but it -was- also one of his go-to drinks of choice. Will walked and talked and worked as Quin continued explaining about her day.

"Gotcha. Think I'll stick to what I said then." Will crouched briefly out of sight, his reason two-fold. First to dig a bottle of brown sugar simple syrup and a carton of whole milk out of the fridge beneath the counter, and second to stealthily dig a pair of soft foam earplugs out of his apron pocket and fit them into his ears. He'd taken them out earlier when things had gotten calm, saving himself the discomfort of the foam in his head, but the espresso machine made a few high pitched noises outside of normal human hearing when it really got going, what with the steam and pressure. Between that and that clattering of ice when he'd be shaking the drink, (Well, drinks, he wasn't about to -not- have one), he was out to save his ears as best he could. 

Ears protected, he placed the carton and plastic squeeze bottle of dark brown syrup onto the countertop before standing, moving to the back of the workspace to wash his hands before starting to make the drinks. Earwax coffee was not something that he planned on serving up at any time. All the while he made sure to keep his head turned towards Quin, trying to make it obvious in spite of his moving about that, yes, he was listening. 

Evidently, she'd had a very different morning than him. Everywhere she'd gone had been busy, or restless. Sure, he'd had his morning of rapid-fire drinks, but since then it'd been near placid here. Maybe oddly so? 

"Imposing? Well, as you can see, we are about full up..." Will snarked dryly as his hands moved with practiced ease, loading two espresso baskets with finely ground coffee and loading them into the machine, placing small mugs under each as the machine hummed and whirred to life. "But I'm sure we can squeeze you in somewhere." 

He did have to grimace in sympathy as she explained that her 'break' from school was little more than a breather. Will hoped at least she'd been able to catch up on the shows she'd fallen behind on. However, as Quin asked about the cover, one of Will's hands briefly stopped it's work on the drinks to wave dismissively. "Nah, don't worry about it. The seating fee's just to cover wear and tear on the games. If you're just grabbing a seat, and there's room, then it's no bother." 

As the room filled with the scent of brewing espresso, Will lifted the carton of milk and gave it a little waggle. "Whole milk fine? We've got like, half a dozen veggie ones too. Oat? Soy? Almond... think cashew too..?"