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Our Paranormal Chernobyl
Scene 47: Power Plays
Tuesday, 6:36 pm, Cook County General Hospitall

He’d heard what they’d said, the ones that had done this to him. He’d thought about just lying there forever, thinking about nothing, feeling nothing. That part of it was extremely refreshing. But no, he couldn’t just sit idly by and let someone be hurt. He’d done that once before, hadn’t he.

He slid of the table, the sound of stone on steel loud in the stillness of the morgue. He was startled by it, and ran a finger along the edge of the table he’d been laying on, fascinated by the odd tactile sensations he received.

He blinked, then walked forward, his footsteps heavy on the tile. Those two things—the doctor and the nurse. They were up to no good. He’d find them. And then he’d… what? Stop them?

He pushed the door open and entered a brightly lit hallway. Things looked funny. The light was odd, and it seemed he was more feeling his way around then actually seeing anything. He shook his head and walked up the hallway, towards a doorway marked "stairs."

Something was happening above him. Something was causing ripples in the air, and he wanted to find out what it was. He heard something too—like an explosion. A series of small percussive events. The door opened before him easily, and he began to climb, startling a blue-clad orderly who was rushing down from above. The man turned at the sight of him and began to climb in the opposite direction as fast as he could go.

Eli remembered what the woman had said as she’d stood over him. She’d called him a fossil. Thought him dead and gone. He looked at himself as he climbed and his mouth set into a thin line. They’d transformed him with their needle, that was for sure. They had to be stopped before the did it to others. He had been in the morgue after all. He found himself at the door to the next floor, so he pushed it open and stepped out.

Down the hall he could see two more blue-clad people rushing towards him, hands over their heads, faces screwed up in terror. And there, right behind him, was the woman. The nurse-thing that had held him down and injected him.

There was another percussive event, and glass went shooting out into the hallway behind the running people. This couldn’t be good. This was a hospital, and people shouldn’t be in danger here. This was a place of healing, wasn’t it?

His mind was still trying to adapt, to adjust to what had happened to him. And while he wasn’t actually angry at the nurse-thing, he was positive that she needed to be stopped. He began to walk towards her, his head cocked to one side, his fingers taking on edges he wasn’t even aware of.

As the two blue-clad nurses passed the opening to another hallway, a man’s voice shouted to them. "Get down back here, now!" Eli picked up the words easily.

The plastic woman suddenly braked to a halt—and stared at the stone man coming toward her. She was shaking her head, as if about to laugh. Then she raised the pink, plastic gun in her hand, aiming between the heads of the fleeing nurses.

And then something interrupted her aim. A man dressed in red appeared from out of the hallway, sliding on the linoleum like a kid on a skateboard. He had a quiver on his back and a bow in his right hand. The nurse-thing dropped the angle of her aim slightly to take in the new target. "Well, hello there!"

"Garl JJiko," Eli said, blinking in surprise at what he heard. That wasn’t what he’d meant to say. Not at all. And the sound of his voice - it wasn’t his voice at all. It was loud and hollow, like a bass stereo speaker gone bananas. He tried again.

"Ni, Gat Dean."

More strangeness, more ways that his life had been altered by the thing in front of him. He decided it wasn’t important right now, this speech issue. He’d work on it later. First he had to do something about the thing with the gun. The man in red was very brave to be tackling this creature. Or maybe the thing had done something to him as well? For that matter, Eli himself was taking quite a risk. What if the first time he was struck he simply shattered into a hundred pieces, or dissolved into dust?

It didn’t matter. The thing had to be stopped, and if it took time to destroy Eli, perhaps it would give the red-clad man the chance he needed to take her out.

The archer looked like he was about to turn around—and then the nurse-thing fired her weapon. The explosion sent the man flying backward six feet, into the legs of one of the fleeing nurses, and she went down too.

The thing was fast, very very fast. And as Eli watched, another thing appeared—again a female, this one in the most astounding configuration yet. He blinked rapidly, trying to figure out if he was seeing this, or feeling it, or hearing it… It was all very confusing, that was for sure. This new woman was covered in the most interesting sheathe—it clung to her every curve, and for a moment Eli wished he had a mass of clay before him so he could sculpt the image before it faded from his sight.

Truly amazing. Things were exploding, sending shivers across the entire front of his new body and the man with the bow was down on the floor, having been struck or shot or something by the Nurse. It was time to stop dawdling. Time to stop observing, as he had done in the morgue. Here there were real people feeling real pain, and he wanted to help. He owed it to Louise, didn’t he? He owed it to himself.

He didn’t even think, he simply let form follow function—let his artist’s mind take hold of this stony casing he found himself in. The rock flowed, rippling like the finest of silks, and where there had been a man, there was now a lion. A great stone beast that bounded down the hallway, its obsidian claws digging great rents in the floor as it came to a stop near the fallen archer, placing itself between him and the impossibly curved female form with the gun. A low rumbling echoed off his entire body as Eli turned his great maned head towards the Nurse. Eli was fascinated with the way the sound echoed and blended with the other noises in the hall. Especially with the way it flowed over the other female, the one near the archer who seemed to have arrived with him. Eli’s tail twitched, marble tufts of hair scraping the paint from the wall.

"Holy fuck?" Stranger mumbled. Someone must have left a cage door open somewhere and now that thing seemed really pissed off. He took a step forward and leaped towards the lion. He wondered what the circus would do with such a creature. Whatever they came up with, he had to check out the show.

Crossfire, still dazed from the mini-missile, stared up at the beast. He felt like someone had smashed a table into his chest. Luckily, his padded costume had absorbed a lot of the damage.

He wasn’t sure what to make of the lion, though, or how it had suddenly appeared, but the Welsh he’d heard gave him a good idea. It was probably magic and that meant Woodbridge in his three-piece Armani armor and the rest of his posse. Jonathan wondered what agenda the bastard had for being here, but put those thoughts aside.

He arched his back and flipped into the air feet-first in a reverse somersault. Still in mid-air, he now faced the Barbie doll, his telescopic sight focusing in on the powerful animatron. One hand came back with a hunting arrow and the archer fired, even before his feet touched the ground. He landed on the balls of his feet still to the right of the stone lion, but just ahead of it.

B saw the arrow out of the corner of her eye and tried to duck. The vanadium-reinforced shaft struck B in the arm and bounced into the air. The robot looked up over the top of the nurse’s station at him. "Mr. Smarty Pants again! Doesn’t anyone stay blowed up anymore?" She shook her head and dropped out of sight.

First things first, Maggie thought. As long as that lion’s standing there he’s not being a problem. Maggie leapt, firing her jets. If she was careful, she’d manage to get an angle where cover wouldn’t matter. There were a couple people cowering behind the nurse’s station, but that didn’t worry her; one good thing about the EMP spray was that it was totally harmless to people. Of course, it might wreck their pagers, but from what she’d heard from her friends in med school, not too many tears would be shed over that.

Maggie came to a hover near the ceiling then surged forward, pointing the EMP sprayer towards B’s position behind the station. B came into view. The blonde robot was crouched, looking straight at her, the pink gun aimed at Maggie’s chest—and a mini-missile was streaking from its barrel.

For the second time today, Maggie had time to watch the thing twist through the air toward her. At least this time she had her armor on.

No sense getting cocky, though. She threw herself sideways in mid-air. The projectile whistled past her—and detonated a few feet away. The blast knocked her across the room, her armored form tearing fluorescent lights from the ceiling, until she crashed into a corner. She was conscious when she hit the floor, but only barely.

"Wow!" The Barbie doll exclaimed. "I can’t believe I get paid for this!"

Jonathan watched Maggie slump down onto the floor. With her mask on it was hard to tell what condition she was in, but it didn’t look good. The archer ran forward and executed a forward flip, putting him in line with where the doll ducked.

He didn’t want anyone getting hit by that gun again. "Whoever said a good offense was a better defense," Jonathan thought, "never faced a little pink gun." He reached for another hunting arrow but this time sent it coursing towards a smaller target.

Stranger had seen the Red Archer fire at something at the other end of the room, then run after it. He couldn’t see what he was shooting at but he figured that it must be more of a threat than the lion. He rounded the corner just as Crossfire fired again.

B spun and dove away from the desk, toward two petrified orderlies. The hunting arrow struck the tip of the gun and almost knocked it from her hand, but she held on.

The robot rolled to her feet and came up between the two staffers. "Hi there!" she said brightly. Neither orderly returned her greeting.

"THERE’S MY GIRL!" Stranger shouted, and ran towards the robot. Crossfire was to his right, and the stone lion was now at his back. "Hey Red," he said to the Jonathan. "Let me know if the kitty here starts to get frisky."

But the kitty had become… something else.

Eli wasn’t sure what had happened to the Nurse-thing. He knew the man in red had bounced back to his feet and fired something at her. An arrow? And then she’d moved very quickly around the island in the middle of the floor. There was another woman there as well, with a gun of some sort. He was still tingling from the weapons discharge, sound washing around him like a tide.

And then this new person, in a metal mask and ripped black clothes. And all the people screaming in the background, so many people. Shouldn’t he be concerned about getting the people out? Maybe he should help the other woman, the one with the elegant shape? She’d been knocked into the far corner by the Nurse-thing mere seconds ago. So much going on, all of it confusing to him.

He remembered again what the Nurse-thing had called him. A fossil.

A memory flickered into being: an image of an impossible creature running quickly across a forest glade, pursuing a man and a woman. Again his mind warped this new body as he moved forward, his head rising up from the floor, his lion’s shape folding in on itself like paper revealing a new shape consisting entirely of slender bones without the flesh.

He leapt atop the island, the counter-top collapsing under a weight it was never designed to hold. He hissed at the Nurse-thing through a double row of needle sharp teeth, the elongated claws on his bony feet flexing. She had called him a fossil, and now he was one.

In the flesh, as it were.

Crossfire saw the stone lion fold in on itself like paper, revealing a new shape consisting entirely of slender bones without flesh. It looked like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park: an animate fossil made of carved stone. And it was fast.

The stone skeleton passed Stranger in a blur and leaped atop the island. The station collapsed onto the floor with an explosion of glass, sheared plastic, and rending metal. Two female nurses had been hiding behind the counter: one of them dove away from the explosion; the other lay on the floor, screaming. She was trapped, her leg smashed under the slab of Formica.

The fossil was staring at B. It hissed at the plastic woman through a double row of needle-sharp teeth, the elongated claws on its bony feet flexing.

To Stranger, the room was still. He looked closely at the creature. The gears of his mind tried to parse a lifetime’s worth of experiences and learning. The frantic search across his brain yielded only two results that could possibly explain the thing next to him.

He ruled out the first explanation his mind returned, as it was unclear how chocolate pudding could be involved. The second explanation, however, seemed to fit the facts at hand.

Crossfire had mentioned something about a magical person that they should be careful of, and here was a shape-shifting stone creature. If it was not the magic man himself, it must have been summoned. With each passing thought the argument gained momentum. (1) It was crushing the nurse and did not seem to care. (2) Its initial shape, that of a lion, a Cereberus-like guardian of hell, was proof enough, but now it had become an avatar of death itself.

The members of his mental faculty nodded in agreement, their booming consensus rolling from the top of his head to the tip of tongue with all the deliberateness of a slinky shuffling down a flight of stairs.

"Say hello to your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death!" Stranger yelled.

The creature turned toward the sound, and Stranger’s punch struck the elongated jaw with a sound like a sledge hammer on concrete. The creature staggered back a few feet, shaking its head as if dazed.

Crossfire watched Stranger tackle the beast before him. He’d have his hands full, but they all would unless the Barbie doll was taken out. So far, most of his arrows had proved ineffective. He fired at the android, hoping this one might work better.

It was a tricky shot, with the android sandwiched between two nurses. He fired, and the android ducked. The taser arrow struck the nurse in front. The high voltage coursed through her body, sending her into spasms. She dropped to the floor, unconscious.

B looked down at the woman, then back at Crossfire. "You shot my hostage!"

With the sudden appearance of a number of metahumans and a living fossil, Laura slipped the Brick Breaker over one shoulder and dealt with the one problem which, apparently, no one else could: Maggie. The heroine was lying in an unconscious heap practically at the PRIMUS agent’s feet. In situations like this—and she had experienced similar ones before—she’d long ago learned to do what she could, stay out of the way, and not ask questions.

She dropped to one knee and took hold of Maggie’s armored shoulders. "Miss Thorin," Laura said, shaking her as vigorously as she could. "Come on, let’s go, on your feet—we almost have them, Maggie, and I need you right now—c’mon!"

To Pender’s left, a couple of nurses were pulling an elderly couple to their feet and pushing them toward the door to an examination room. The nurse trapped beneath the fossil was still crying out, and the stone creature seemed to have just noticed her. B was out of sight around the corner.

And from somewhere near the front of the building came the sound of another woman screaming. Pender recognized it as the voice of the tongueless woman.

Maggie shook her head violently to clear the cobwebs, muttering something in French about this not being her day and using lots of devout Catholic terms to do it. Her eyes opened to a naked Pender hunched over her.

"Good," Laura said, half to herself, in response to her recovery. She looked off towards the tongueless woman’s screams, then back to Maggie. "You alright?"

"Ow", she said, rubbing her helmet as if that could help. She looked at Pender again, her eyes widened, and she remarked, "You might want to put something on." She started to pick herself off the floor.

"No time. They’re getting away."

Maggie picked herself off the ground and started muttering. "I’ve been freakin’ knocked down once too freakin’ many times today…" She fired her jets.

Pender cursed as Maggie re-engaged B. There was no doubt that bringing down either robot was a priority—and it might very well take all of them to do it—but everyone else was busy with B and the fossil, K was getting away with his hostage.

"Dammit," she muttered, and ran after Maggie, heading down the hall in the direction of the screams.

Maggie quickly turned the corner and roared down on B. "And I’ve had ENOUGH!" she screamed at B. "Crisse de Tabarnak, I’m gonna rip your little bot for spare parts, and then I’m gonna find you and rip YOU for spare parts, too! I hope you’ve signed your donor card!"

"Oh please," B replied. "How many times do I have to shoot you?" She squeezed the trigger of the pink gun at the same moment that Maggie fired the EMP sprayer. The gun clicked loudly, then made an unhealthy whining noise.

"Uh oh," Barbie said.

The glowing glop struck the android in the face. She stepped backwards, into the nurse behind her, and dropped the gun. The little device fell atop the unconscious form of the other nurse.

"Hey now! Who turned out the liiiii…." The robot’s electronic voice wound down into a low rumble. The pistol, however, continued to whine, the pitch climbing in counterpoint.

Jonathan had seen a lot in the last minute that he didn’t quite believe, but what he’d heard was enough. He knew he’d been ineffective against the robot, but he planned on making that up with the male version Pender had said was nearby. The same place he’d heard the scream. He ran for the ambulance bay.

Pender reached the corner and took it all in—Maggie in mid-air, the blind robot, the downed nurse, and the pink weapon laying on the nurse’s back that was whining like a Star Trek phaser on overload.

"Dammit!" Pender repeated, shouting now, the time for muttering rapidly passing her by. "Maggie! Get K! He’s getting out the front door!" She scooped up Barbie’s Dream Gun and added "Hurry!" before ducking through the door near the downed nurse.

The glass-paned doors swung shut behind her. She was in a long, tiled hallway. A bald, withered man in a hospital gown stood a few feet away, gripping his walker, regarding her with wide, surprised eyes. Then he smiled, beaming at the naked agent as if she’d just granted his dying wish.

The nearest door was another fifteen feet away, a laundry cart another five beyond that. Perhaps she could—

Then the whine became an ear-splitting squeal, and Laura knew she was out of time.

Maggie watched through the glass as Pender turned away from the old man and pushed herself against the wall, the plastic weapon held to her chest. The blast knocked the PRIMUS agent backward, into the opposite wall. The doors burst open, and smoke rushed into the hallway.

Maggie gasped and jetted through the smoke. Pender was embedded in the wall, half buried in cracked two-by-fours, broken PVC pipes, and crumbled dry-wall. Maggie swooped down and knelt next to her, trying to assess her condition. At least there wouldn’t be much distance to go to reach the hospital…

Pender was glowing, her skin throwing off a coruscating sheen of energy. There didn’t seem to be any blood. A moment later the luminescence faded, and Pender opened her eyes.

She coughed twice on the still-settling dry-wall dust and shook her head, groggy from the experience. "I’m okay, I’m okay," she said, mostly to herself.

"That… that’s great, but…" Maggie wondered what this was all about, if Pender had secrets she was keeping from them. Was she ever really injured in the first place?

From a few feet away came a low moan. The old man lay on the floor, his aluminum walker overturned next to him.

Something about this brought Laura back to reality. She glanced left, right, then found Maggie’s face and repeated, "Get Ken. Go!"

Frowning, Maggie nodded and blasted off after Ken.

Laura scrambled to her feet and over to the old man. "I have a man down here! Doctor!"

He was on his back, looking confused. His nose was bleeding. Then his eyes focused on her, and he smiled. "Hiya, angel," he said, to which she rolled her eyes and stood up. He was alive and conscious, which were all well and good, but this nudity issue was starting to get on her nerves.

Two nurses, one male and one female, rounded the corner and rushed up to the man and Pender. "Get away from him!" the female nurse said to Pender. She stooped down next to the old man and began to feel under his neck.

From the south came the echoing rattle of a machine gun. And closer, Stranger and the skeleton creature were locked in combat.

Pender turned back to the male nurse. "PRIMUS Acting Silver Avenger Laura Pender; sorry, I don’t have my badge on me. I need some scrubs, now."

He looked at the naked woman with the huge gun on her shoulder. "Scrubs." He glanced down at the old man being helped up by his colleague, then back up at Pender. "Scrubs. Yeah. Follow me." He turned and ran back the other way.

Eli had just realized that someone was beneath him, that he’d hurt someone by leaping onto the counter, when he felt something strike him.

There had been no pain, not really. More a sort of disconnection with his new body. A fugue-state, during which he’d simply stopped trying to focus on anything external, stopped trying to move, stopped everything. For a brief moment, nothing at all mattered.

Then the moment was gone, and awareness slammed back into him He’d been forced away from the desk by the force of the blow, and he could still hear the person he’d hurt crying out. He wanted to stop everything so he could help them. Explain that he hadn’t seen them there, and that hurting someone had never been his goal.

But the man in front of him wouldn’t stop attacking. Eli saw the man’s fist swinging towards him again, and he raised his own limbs n reflex, noting with interest that the bones of his puny velociraptor forearms merged and spread. A stone shield now jutted from the ends of his skeletal arms.

The mad man’s blow struck the shield with unimaginable force: Eli could almost see the rippling of the kinetic energy pour off his altered hands, and he knew that if he hadn’t sunk his talons into the floor, he’d probably have been slammed through a wall.

"COP!" he shouted out, trying to tell his attacker to stop, to cease, to desist. He wondered how he was able to utter sound at all, lacking lungs and tongue and breath. Given time, he’d probably be able to piece it all together. But time was something he didn’t have now.

Stranger could not believe the gall of his opponent. Not only was this creature death incarnate, but he was trying to call the cops on him to boot. Only a supernatural creature, or someone who had listened to the local news, could know that Stranger was a wanted man. Stranger had to try to stop him before he could blow his cover or hurt anyone else.

He feinted with his right, the velociraptor raised its bony shield in response, and Stranger jabbed a left into the thing’s ribs. Not surprisingly, it felt like hitting a rock.

The creature fell back a step, and Stranger followed with another right. The blow struck in the center of the thick sternum, and the stone beast collapsed.

After Stranger had leaped out of the sphere, Goo was left to watch the monitors and listen to DuFord curse as he tried to isolate the plastics’ frequencies. "Cursing," perhaps, was too strong a word.

"Gosh darn it!" the little engineer exclaimed. "They’re switching frequencies every few seconds. I’ve gotten three of them, but they haven’t cycled back to those yet."

On the monitors, patients were spilling out of the doors of the ER waiting room. The men and women mostly ignored the white sphere hovering over the parking lot and ran for their cars.

Stranger had knocked a hole in a wall to get inside, and now the entire team was out of sight. Long seconds passed. Maggie had stopped broadcasting. And through the ship speakers, Goo and DuFord could hear intermittent, distant explosions.

Goo scanned the monitors, looking for it-didn’t-know-what. Perhaps a big ol’ van with an antenna on top?

There were a few mini-vans in the parking lot, but the only vehicle that fit that description was the Channel 7 Eyewitness News van. There was a satellite dish on top, attached to some kind of crane.

Which made Goo think.

"DuFord?" Goo said, pointing an appendage at the van on the monitor. "Have hunch.

"That van. It legit?"

"Legit?" DuFord repeated, looking up at the monitors. "I don’t know. Why?" Then his eyes widened. "You don’t think…"

Goo nodded. "D-i-i-ish position."

Instead of pointing up and to the south, toward the geosynchronous orbits of most communication satellites, the van’s dish was aimed squarely at the hospital.

Goo turned to DuFord.

"Contact Ma-a-aggie. Say I’m trying something, don’t say what. Pla-a-astic might intercept."

Goo Slinky-ed itself out the door.

"Wish me lu-u-uck."

"Good luck," DuFord said as the last part of Goo left the sphere.

Under his breath, he added, "Though, somehow, you don’t strike me as the lucky type."

Goo dropped through the air like a cylinder of cranberry jelly released from the can. It hit the ground with a splorch, compacted slightly, then popped back up to its normal height. The fleeing patients veered away from it with surprised shouts, and one portly woman tripped and fell forward onto the grass, right at Goo’s base. One of the other patients turned back and shouted, "Eleanor!"

A more terrified exclamation drew Goo’s attention to the ambulance bay thirty yards away. The Ken-style robot hopped out of the bay doors, a woman under his left arm, and his large gattling-gun style pistol in his right hand. The woman was screaming.

K pulled open the rear door of the ambulance and fired the gun into the cabin. The shell made a distinctive whomp, and purplish smoke started to billow out the door. K shoved the woman in and slammed the doors shut. The woman’s screamed abruptly stopped.

The robot moved toward the driver’s side of the ambulance—and halted when he saw Goo.

"Yo, K-k-k-k-ken!" Goo shouted.

"I go-o-ot your testicles! Come get ‘em!"

With that, Goo hurled itself away from the male robot, toward the parking lot.

At the same moment, Crossfire came charging through the doors to K’s left. K spun and fired, a spray of bullets erupting from the gattling gun. The archer dove sideways, but some of the bullets caught him. He was blown back against the wall, and then he slumped to the ground, unconscious. The uniform was torn at his chest, exposing the padding underneath. Blood gouted from his left leg and began to pool around him.

"Got ‘em!" K said, elated. Then he looked around for where the goo creature was going, and his face went slack.

"Uh oh."

Goo zipped beneath the Q-Ball and shot toward the Eyewitness news van. A young man wearing headphones was sitting in the driver’s seat. He saw the gelatinous avenger coming for it, and he ducked down below the windshield.

Nearing the van, Goo shot a long, thick tentacle upward like the tongue of an obscenely large bullfrog. The satellite dish was ripped from its base and sent tumbling across the parking lot.

K stood next to the ambulance, unmoving. "Dam—" he said, voice roaring with static. "—mit." And then it said nothing at all.

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