A Good Time to be Bad [RP]

[LunaHawk]

The world is a funny thing, in particular because people divide it between ages...personal ages, government ages, the ages of civilizations. In that little museum in the capitol city of a super power...came the turning of an age. It was almost visceral, it could quite nearly be felt as it was occurring. It was one of those moments in history where those living through it understood that something had changed, was changing. Other ages had passed in a similar manner. Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atomic bombs, the fall of the Berlin Wall...one of those moments where people realized even as they were happening that everything...had changed.

Today was one of those funny days.

In days past one man wouldn't have been enough. In ages past he would have run away and that, right there, would have been the end of it until the police arrived. Times change. People take things too far and social consciousness shifts. It happened in the museum. As the two departed with their threats and made their way deeper into the museum the man reached for his smart phone and then, he stopped. He put it back and limped his way over to the welcome counter and lifted a guide book from its slot. He flipped it open, skimming through the pages like a speed reader on crack.

The museum contained relics and costumes from the Age of Heroes. It was relics that he needed now. One relic, in particular, struck him as useful to his current situation. He finally found it and moved off in that direction as best he could, fighting through the pain. He took the opposite direction of the two women, ascended one extremely painful stairway and arrived at precisely what he was looking for. He looked at the display glass and removed a tactical pen from his pocket. With careful precision he struck the tip against the glass and the entire pane shattered. He reached in and with some struggle was able to pull free the costume he was after. He started to remember all of the youtube videos he could from the old days and hoped to hell the suit was working.

It was.



He lifted his head as the suit slid and locked into place automatically, its inter locking plates adjusting their positioning and sizing to accommodate his smaller form automatically. A HUD activated in front of his vision, calmly informing him of both the injury to his leg and the fact the suit was down to less than five percent power. Not long...maybe long enough to leave a mark. The man in the suit was Carson Delaware, he was a lonely man with no one who would mourn him when he died. He stood for a moment in the suit of a former hero. He knew, of course, that donning the suit of a hero who's named no longer mattered was not going to put him in a new league of fighting prowess, or erase the wound to his leg. He knew as he set out for the hallway with limping motions aided greatly by the suit's servo motors, that he was going to his dead.

He wondered as he descended the stairs if he was going to be remembered by the media, by anyone. Then he realized...it didn't matter. What mattered was that someone stood up to these people...even if they failed in the process. He came down to a landing and found himself standing face to face with none other than Dragonfang. He tightened his hands into fists and allowed the suit to inject a combination of old stims and pain killers. It wouldn't prevent his leg from being crippled but it would help him past the pain. He tried to adjust his youtube memory to account for the fact that one of his legs was, more or less, dead weight.

"The Age of Peace is over." He said, his voice turned into a low rumbling growl by the suit.

----------------------------------

The two women have their own issues soon after leaving. A girl, no older than sixteen, stands between them and their next target. She has nothing on her of any consequence save for a baseball she tosses between her hands. Her eyes glow a faint yellow and she smiles at them...though the smile is a facade. In fact she is terrified...terrified but unwilling to let any further harm come to her friends and the people in the museum. It may have been a good time to be bad...but that didn't mean there were no people left to stand up for the innocent. Maybe people had forgotten how to be heroes...but maybe it was buried somewhere in the human genome. Maybe...

Maybe you never really forgot, maybe it only went dormant for a time, until it was needed...like now. She threw the ball with the expert ability of a high level baseball player. The ball accelerated, shattering the speed of sound in the blink of an eye. The sonic boom shattered glass all around them as the ball hurtled towards Athena, the girl having chosen her target based upon who looked more intimidating. The ball accelerated...and accelerated. The material of the outer covering caught fire somewhere near the mid point of its flight. If it struck, it would do so with explosive force kinetic force strong enough to break bones and pulp internal organs. The ball itself would be unlikely to survive the experience of striking, well, anything.

[FakeSkrillex]

Vadim knew what he was doing against someone with the kind of speed the boy displayed. Many people dismayed when faced with such speed but Vadim went for area control and overwhelming the boy's ability to think and adapt with a veritable wall of lead. The boy could easily have panicked. He did not. He acted...more on instinct than on any sort of planning, it was what kept him alive through the firestorm. It was not, however, what would allow him to be victorious.

With right and left vectors contained the boy could only go two directions, up, or back. He was not good at jumping. So he moved backwards, catching one bullet, then another and another. Simple math indicated he would eventually run out of either room or the time to catch shots headed his way. He was catching and tossing them to the side without the time to throw them and having already learned his opponent was immune to such things. It was during this time he was trying to figure out what a hero from the old days would do in his situation. Adapt. Improvise.

Improvise.

A piercing weapon thrown imprecisely had failed to do any real damage. Perhaps another object would fare better, especially if it were thrown more accurately, perhaps with more speed and at a softer part of the body. He flipped onto his hands, narrowly avoiding a bullet in the process and in the midst of his flip back onto his feet he scooped up a loose rock, not much larger than the bullets. He placed it between two fingers and he sent it hurtling towards Vadim at maximum possible speed...which sadly was not much faster than the bullet he had thrown. This, however, was aimed. He took the time to aim, hoping he could do two things in rapid succession and not die. The little rock was sent for Vadim's left eye.

He then tried to catch the next bullet and avoid it at the same moment. The combination of the two meant he didn't die. The failure of both meant he got hit. The bullet tore through his right hand right in the center of the palm, blood and bits of bone sprayed out from the back of his hand and he was sent tumbling to the ground as the shock of the impact completely disorganized his plan...such as it was.

Vadim saw the rock at the last second and moved his head slightly to the right, it bounced off the side of his head with what sounded like a thud. But in the end Vadim was still standing, he had been hit by much worse.

Vadim noted that of his shots only a few had hit anything in the area around them, the boy was trying to catch all the bullets himself. Vadim decided to use this.

He raised his gun and aimed it to the boys right where a small group of people wearing the same uniform as him were trying to stay out of the way. Vadim pulled out his spare pistol and fired both at the group, a total of 10 shots going towards them. He did this all while advancing. If he could close the distance between him and the boy then he could have a chance at beating his speed.

[Azra]

The armor caught the lights dynamic and well build it was a model example of inginuity to be honest and likely far outclassed her excuse for something similar. It's weight could be felt against the floor but not disgustingly so, it wasn't a burden on the body necessarily to wear. It wasn't his those way the man moved it wasn't a second skin just yet and there was a dependency on a leg. She could feel it in the way he moved, hear it in the sounds lost to anyone else between his joints. He was heading her way it seemed making finding a decision on what to do next an easy task for the dragon.

"Afraid so. Do you have a name?" The question came with a brief bow before Jess would introduce herself. "Dragonfang" as she said this the HUD would likely pick up in the slight rise in temperatures around the dragon's hands. Enough to burn skin on contact but not particularly dangerous to the mostly armored figure. Thing was it wasn't the heat that was a threat. A slight vapor would hover around her hands clear and odorless it likely would be hard for any to spot, to bad given it was the VX toxin. Dangerous on inhalation or skin contact and taking effect within seconds it functioned as a preventer of integral enzymes in the body. Constant stimulation was a result quickly resulting in often the inability to sustain breathing, decreased blood pressure, blurred vision, confusion, drowsiness, excessively sweating, nausea abdominal pain and convulsions amongst other effects. It only would take a little to make the strong and young into what seemed like a old man on the edge of deaths door.

With this about her hands a punch would be aimed at the man's brow a quick jab looking to strike fast like a viper and before a defense might be made. She moved to the side a side step that came with a quick backhand intending to plant more stress on the bad leg. Her free hand yet to take action following the backhand with a pivot and punch aiming for the mouth of the armored hero. Her striking ability was only human the catch was in the toxic vapor that flowed from her body and accumulated with each action. As harmful as her blows may or may not be all she really required was for a man to breathe.

[illirica]

The two women have their own issues soon after leaving. A girl, no older than sixteen, stands between them and their next target. She has nothing on her of any consequence save for a baseball she tosses between her hands. Her eyes glow a faint yellow and she smiles at them...though the smile is a facade. In fact she is terrified...terrified but unwilling to let any further harm come to her friends and the people in the museum. It may have been a good time to be bad...but that didn't mean there were no people left to stand up for the innocent. Maybe people had forgotten how to be heroes...but maybe it was buried somewhere in the human genome. Maybe...

Maybe you never really forgot, maybe it only went dormant for a time, until it was needed...like now. She threw the ball with the expert ability of a high level baseball player. The ball accelerated, shattering the speed of sound in the blink of an eye. The sonic boom shattered glass all around them as the ball hurtled towards Athena, the girl having chosen her target based upon who looked more intimidating. The ball accelerated...and accelerated. The material of the outer covering caught fire somewhere near the mid point of its flight. If it struck, it would do so with explosive force kinetic force strong enough to break bones and pulp internal organs. The ball itself would be unlikely to survive the experience of striking, well, anything.

A child. With a ball.

Really? Tyria's skepticism didn't have all that much time to develop, as the girl quickly threw the ball, letting it accelerate towards Athena. Tyria glanced over briefly, but figured that Athena's shields could probably handle the impact - and if they couldn't, there wasn't really time to discuss. Tyria teleported away quickly, reappearing immediately right behind the Little Leaguer, her gun to the back of the girl's head, her finger on the trigger.

She didn't pull it, though. Instead she sighed, probably the first indication that the girl had that she was even there, and lowered the gun. This is... wrong. Tyria had joined because she'd wanted excitement. Explosions. The sonic boom from the glass had been great. But... this wasn't just fun and explosions. There was a lot more reality to it. Tyria wasn't one of those types who believed in sparing every fragile life - she'd killed before, she would again. But killing teenagers whose only crime was to be in the way? In the wrong place, at the wrong time, trying to help against the wrong people?

It wasn't the sort of excitement Tyria wanted, not really. She looked past the girl to Athena instead, remembering back downstairs. Tyria had sent the injured man out to get help, and when she'd done it, she'd noted Athena's reaction. Surprise, certainly. But maybe... also... approval. She considered her options. It's risky...

But what was risk, other than excitement? She cleared her throat, not taking her eyes off Athena. "This just got ridiculous," she announced, firmly, "I'm not shooting a kid. I'm out. You can tell the boss lady she can split my share among the rest of you, or you can tap out with me and go get ice cream. What's it gonna be?"

[Pronoia]

Athena's physical position in reality changed, never before had she undergone this method of transportation  and so when it ended the nineteen year old began to feel a myriad of symptoms. She felt something almost akin to hypoxia not that it was, she released her grip on Tyria's hand and stumbled a step forward nearly losing balance "hahah?" Athena giggled in confusion while sensing her heart race like a rabbits What is this feeling, why am I laughing and filled with this....elation? Athena placed one hand on her masked forehead and shook her head in a confused daze before eyes detected the sixteen year old staring at her. Instinctively and with rapid reflexes she pulled out her pistol but couldn't take aim at the girl who was only three years younger than her, then time seemed to freeze and Athena's chain of thought halted as her eyes changed imagery of what she saw now to what she saw in the past. A reflection of herself back when she was the same age as the girl who was confronting her now but Athena was crying back then her tears streaming down her cheeks to fall into the pool of water below, ripples soon generated and dispersed the image she was looking down upon in intense grief.

Thoonp!

An immense amount of pain surged into her cranium as Athena's head rocked back violently returning her consciousness to the present, a critical hit from the thrown projectile brought her personal shield down to zero percent and created a hairline fracture on the foxy rubber mask "gah!" Athena grunted out in agony falling down to both knees and placing both hands on her head as waves of pain surged through her skull. The child! A moment later Athena raised her head up with blurred eyes and saw Tyria pointing the gun at the girl don't please don't do this! Athena began raising her pistol with intent to threaten Tyria with a gunshot wound if she harmed the girl but to Athena's relief her companion did no such thing. Exhaustively her gun hand gave up and landed onto the ground in sync with the sprinklers down pouring water through out the entirely of the museum.

"I'm not shooting a kid. I'm out. You can tell the boss lady she can split my share among the rest of you, or you can tap out with me and go get ice cream. What's it gonna be?"

As water drenched her shieldless form Athena listened to what Tyria had to say and remained utterly still as it was said, once Tyria finished what she had to say Athena rose up from her knelt position My intention was never to kill children or kill so many innocent people, I saw some sacrafice as necessary to prepare the future generations but this..this is beyond what's necessay...I killed men...men who had families to look after. Haven't we delivered the message by now already? Athena reached forward to her ear to acess an ear piece that was no longer there and sighed silently her chest visibly contracting as she did, like a sad fox in a rainstorm Athena stood before Tyria in contemplation on the offer before turning her back and walking towards a ledge."Water can't put out napalm so..." Athena stated as she pulled off her back pack and tossed it thrity feet down, the pipe bombs and remaining napalm canisters detonated shaking the museum and creating another large fire ball "we held our end of the bargain, it will just take much longer to burn down" Athena held her position and tilted her head down "I don't really have good odds being alone anymore" she raised her head up "I'll stay with you"

[LunaHawk]

Vadim's efforts at last succeeded. Without training, without a better understanding of tactics, the boy really had lost when the encounter had begun but with his speed and reflexes, he'd not known it yet. Two factors worked against him from the onset, the most catastrophic of these was a basic misunderstanding of his own powers. He had used his speed plenty of times before but never so consistently and had never pushed himself to such a great extent...so he failed to understand the limits of his abilities...or the fact that speed comes with a cost.

The more he moved, the more he intervened, the more energy his body consumed. It was difficult to say at what point he realized it was happening, but he pushed himself past it and tried to save every single one of his friends and the bystanders Vadim fired upon. He managed...but the effort was enough. No amount of careful maneuvering and manipulation of his speed could save him from himself. So it was that while Vadim never did strike him in an area more vital than his hand, he slew the child anyway.

As the list of the bullets Vadim fired was expended and caught the child collapsed to the ground, a pale shadow of his former self, no breath on his blue lips, no life in his pale corpse. Vadim had pushed him to and past his limit and in doing so, forced his body to consume everything it had in order to protect the lives of others. Death by forced exhaustion.

The thing about heroism though is in moments such as this one, it tends to spring eternal. Vadim's next threat came from two directions. First, the initial first responders were now arriving, trained to react faster than average because of the city they were located in. Six police cars pulled up and established a barricade, leveling weapons at Vadim and shouting commands of surrender. A man teleported suddenly into view. He stood a little over six feet tall and was lean, built almost like a cheetah in proportions and his eyes appeared as if colored by too much exposure to extreme cold, their pupils so utterly blue as to almost redefine the color. A flick of his wrist and the heat around them both was suddenly gone, sucked from the space around them in the blink of an eye and replaced with utter, mind numbing cold. Ice formed on nearly every surface in an instant, slicking the road like an ice rink but that was not his attack. His attack came a moment later as he took the heat he had stolen and directed it straight back at Vadim's chest in a concentrated beam of heat concentrated to a single, tiny beam no wider than a pencil with enough heat to melt metal, slag bone and over heat blood.

All noise was drowned out by the sudden TH-CRACK!! that resulted when intense heat blazed through air that was intensely cold. The pressure wave and thunderous noise shattered car windows and set off car alarms for fifty feet in every direction. Fortunately for Vadim the concentrated beam lobbed at his chest was not moving at the speed of light, because it was not light, it was heat, focused and tightened over a tiny area. It moved slower than a bullet, more like a ball thrown really fast...fast enough to make dodging difficult, slow enough to not render it impossible.

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Afterthought stood from her bench and casually dusted the front of her clothing as the museum was hit again by firebombs Smoke billowed from open windows and people streamed from the front door in panic. With casual effort so without remorse as to be less than contemptuous, she removed a cylinder from her belt and flicked it in the direction of the people trying to stream out of the museum exit. The cylinder hit and its glass shattered and two mixed chemicals met oxygen for the first time. The two chemicals reacted with oxygen in horrendous fashion. There was no visual effect from the chemical release...except that the first ten people near it simply...boiled. The sight of people bubbling and boiling, of skin bursting and sloughing off like melted wax, was enough to cause the crowd streaming out of the building to pause and then panic and break in a different direction, away from Vadim, away from Afterthought and away from the police barricade.

Afterthought didn't pay them any more attention and simply turned away from them, without so much as a smile that might indicate insane enjoyment of murder. She didn't care about them...at all. Their deaths weren't even unfortunate in her mind, they simply existed. The purpose of the display had been to force the crowd away from the fight between Vadim and the other man and away from the first responders. The first cops on the scene also turned their attention away from Vadim and opened fire on her. Bullets pinged off her personal defense screen and she drew her revolver with the same casual gesture she had used with the cylinder. She fired two shots. The first bullet shattered against the two central police cars and the released chemical agents flash vaporized as they mixed together. The two central police cars were torn in half by the resulting reaction, the front half of each vehicle simply disintegrated. The second bullet passed through the space opened by the first and burst open in mid air. The chemicals that spilled out mixed with the after-effect chemicals produced by the reaction of the first bullet and the whole center line of the police barricade exploded. Two of the officers were killed instantly and the rest were forced to fall back to new defensive positions. It was enough to buy them a little time while the police took cover and called for reinforcements.

Afterthought looked down at her weapon and its remaining bullets. "Vadim you might want to lure your fight towards the museum, I held them off for now but I won't be able to do that again. Museum strike team, give me an eta on the destruction of that arsenal." She said over their team com system, unaware that two of her people had just become to weak stomached to kill teenagers.

-----------------------------------

"It's not about names, it's about symbols." He said and reacted swiftly to her assault The Youtube Wonder expected his death but he intended to remind her that breaching the peace meant engaging in war. There would be others after him. He moved with the grace and skill of a melee master, a quick motion of his head combined with a swipe of his arm deflected the blow meant for his head. A tiny amount of her toxin made it into his system, further slowing him down, but the rest was sealed out as the mask sensors activated and sealed the suit shut. He pivoted on his good leg and swept his opposite arm down to deflect her leg away from his crippled leg with an open palm from which four inch spikes suddenly protruded, spikes he intended to drive into the flesh and bone of her shin while shoving the assaulting leg aside.

The cost of both of these was the inability to completely block the third strike, the loss of speed and the injury to his leg neatly cut in half the amount of motions he could partake of in a single few moments. There was another problem. The suit itself was barely functioning, its energy systems weren't going to last much longer and when they failed the suit's seals would open. He was fighting on borrowed time. The punch aimed for his mouth grazed against it thanks to a quick jerk back of his head but none the less struck the plate now covering his mouth and nose and threatened to dislodge it, revealing the suit's low power.

---------------------------------------------

The girl found herself standing there alone, the two villains having vacated the vicinity. She blinked. Had she just won?

[FakeSkrillex]

Vadim's efforts at last succeeded. Without training, without a better understanding of tactics, the boy really had lost when the encounter had begun but with his speed and reflexes, he'd not known it yet. Two factors worked against him from the onset, the most catastrophic of these was a basic misunderstanding of his own powers. He had used his speed plenty of times before but never so consistently and had never pushed himself to such a great extent...so he failed to understand the limits of his abilities...or the fact that speed comes with a cost.

The more he moved, the more he intervened, the more energy his body consumed. It was difficult to say at what point he realized it was happening, but he pushed himself past it and tried to save every single one of his friends and the bystanders Vadim fired upon. He managed...but the effort was enough. No amount of careful maneuvering and manipulation of his speed could save him from himself. So it was that while Vadim never did strike him in an area more vital than his hand, he slew the child anyway.

As the list of the bullets Vadim fired was expended and caught the child collapsed to the ground, a pale shadow of his former self, no breath on his blue lips, no life in his pale corpse. Vadim had pushed him to and past his limit and in doing so, forced his body to consume everything it had in order to protect the lives of others. Death by forced exhaustion.

The thing about heroism though is in moments such as this one, it tends to spring eternal. Vadim's next threat came from two directions. First, the initial first responders were now arriving, trained to react faster than average because of the city they were located in. Six police cars pulled up and established a barricade, leveling weapons at Vadim and shouting commands of surrender. A man teleported suddenly into view. He stood a little over six feet tall and was lean, built almost like a cheetah in proportions and his eyes appeared as if colored by too much exposure to extreme cold, their pupils so utterly blue as to almost redefine the color. A flick of his wrist and the heat around them both was suddenly gone, sucked from the space around them in the blink of an eye and replaced with utter, mind numbing cold. Ice formed on nearly every surface in an instant, slicking the road like an ice rink but that was not his attack. His attack came a moment later as he took the heat he had stolen and directed it straight back at Vadim's chest in a concentrated beam of heat concentrated to a single, tiny beam no wider than a pencil with enough heat to melt metal, slag bone and over heat blood.

All noise was drowned out by the sudden TH-CRACK!! that resulted when intense heat blazed through air that was intensely cold. The pressure wave and thunderous noise shattered car windows and set off car alarms for fifty feet in every direction. Fortunately for Vadim the concentrated beam lobbed at his chest was not moving at the speed of light, because it was not light, it was heat, focused and tightened over a tiny area. It moved slower than a bullet, more like a ball thrown really fast...fast enough to make dodging difficult, slow enough to not render it impossible.

-------------------------------------

Afterthought stood from her bench and casually dusted the front of her clothing as the museum was hit again by firebombs Smoke billowed from open windows and people streamed from the front door in panic. With casual effort so without remorse as to be less than contemptuous, she removed a cylinder from her belt and flicked it in the direction of the people trying to stream out of the museum exit. The cylinder hit and its glass shattered and two mixed chemicals met oxygen for the first time. The two chemicals reacted with oxygen in horrendous fashion. There was no visual effect from the chemical release...except that the first ten people near it simply...boiled. The sight of people bubbling and boiling, of skin bursting and sloughing off like melted wax, was enough to cause the crowd streaming out of the building to pause and then panic and break in a different direction, away from Vadim, away from Afterthought and away from the police barricade.

Afterthought didn't pay them any more attention and simply turned away from them, without so much as a smile that might indicate insane enjoyment of murder. She didn't care about them...at all. Their deaths weren't even unfortunate in her mind, they simply existed. The purpose of the display had been to force the crowd away from the fight between Vadim and the other man and away from the first responders. The first cops on the scene also turned their attention away from Vadim and opened fire on her. Bullets pinged off her personal defense screen and she drew her revolver with the same casual gesture she had used with the cylinder. She fired two shots. The first bullet shattered against the two central police cars and the released chemical agents flash vaporized as they mixed together. The two central police cars were torn in half by the resulting reaction, the front half of each vehicle simply disintegrated. The second bullet passed through the space opened by the first and burst open in mid air. The chemicals that spilled out mixed with the after-effect chemicals produced by the reaction of the first bullet and the whole center line of the police barricade exploded. Two of the officers were killed instantly and the rest were forced to fall back to new defensive positions. It was enough to buy them a little time while the police took cover and called for reinforcements.

Afterthought looked down at her weapon and its remaining bullets. "Vadim you might want to lure your fight towards the museum, I held them off for now but I won't be able to do that again. Museum strike team, give me an eta on the destruction of that arsenal." She said over their team com system, unaware that two of her people had just become to weak stomached to kill teenagers.

Vadim sighed as he watched the boy collapse, he knew that one of them would die, and he knew it would be the boy no matter what. It was the only possible outcome.

As soon as Vadim heard the sirens he holstered his pistols and grabbed his rifle, the response was fast as the barricade was formed. That was when the man appeared in front of him. Just by the look in his eyes Vadim could see that this one was different than the boy. This one had powers that he knew how to use.

Barely a moment later Vadim saw ice form on all the surfaces around him, he looked at the mans stance and sensed what was coming. He rolled quickly to the his right, very narrowly avoiding the beam but being launched back onto a parked car about 10 ft away from him. He quickly recovered from the impact and steadied himself, firing two shots aiming for the mans chest before he heard the voice over the radio.

The assassin grumbled, his backup on the rooftops was missing and the police and every potential 'hero' in the city are still in play. But this was as good a place to die as any.

"Copy that." a heavy Russian accent spoke into an earpiece. He moved around the car that the blast had launched him onto . As he moved across the street he used abandoned cars for cover, taking shots at the police as he moved along, taking note of Afterthoughts handiwork as he did so. Even though he did have to admit it was impressive he knew a bad tactical position when he saw one.

"Pull back to the museum with me, we'll draw them through the entrances. Leave the hero to me." his voice sounded more serious now. Somehow carrying a different tone than before. And with that he made for the museum. Hoping his prey would follow along with him.

[Azra]

Her leg swayed back in direction from the spikes fabric tore some and a few small openings were made for small drops of blood to flow. It was minor however, she was trained for combat this was her life. Her attacks already seemed to be wearing the figure down, aided by a poison that had made contact though evidently not to much. The armor looked to protect him from more but how long it would hold out for seemed a question with a less then favorable answer. Backing away for a second though the dragon looked to further question him and his course of actions.



Her armor fell and cowl tossed to the side, it came closer to the way of the Lotus and felt more right to the dragon. It also was a test of self. "You wear a forgotten symbol. The armor of someone else. The moves probably not of your own. At least show me who you are, what your symbol is." Her body flowed into a ready stance for a further attacks made against her. She didn't attack however curious to see what the person before her would do. He moved well and talked like the costumed heroes of old, but it didn't feel real yet.

"If I'm to be stopped let it be by someone with meaning, if a hero dies to tonight. Let the world see he wasn't a coward dressed like someone else."

[LunaHawk]

Vadim's efforts at last succeeded. Without training, without a better understanding of tactics, the boy really had lost when the encounter had begun but with his speed and reflexes, he'd not known it yet. Two factors worked against him from the onset, the most catastrophic of these was a basic misunderstanding of his own powers. He had used his speed plenty of times before but never so consistently and had never pushed himself to such a great extent...so he failed to understand the limits of his abilities...or the fact that speed comes with a cost.

The more he moved, the more he intervened, the more energy his body consumed. It was difficult to say at what point he realized it was happening, but he pushed himself past it and tried to save every single one of his friends and the bystanders Vadim fired upon. He managed...but the effort was enough. No amount of careful maneuvering and manipulation of his speed could save him from himself. So it was that while Vadim never did strike him in an area more vital than his hand, he slew the child anyway.

As the list of the bullets Vadim fired was expended and caught the child collapsed to the ground, a pale shadow of his former self, no breath on his blue lips, no life in his pale corpse. Vadim had pushed him to and past his limit and in doing so, forced his body to consume everything it had in order to protect the lives of others. Death by forced exhaustion.

The thing about heroism though is in moments such as this one, it tends to spring eternal. Vadim's next threat came from two directions. First, the initial first responders were now arriving, trained to react faster than average because of the city they were located in. Six police cars pulled up and established a barricade, leveling weapons at Vadim and shouting commands of surrender. A man teleported suddenly into view. He stood a little over six feet tall and was lean, built almost like a cheetah in proportions and his eyes appeared as if colored by too much exposure to extreme cold, their pupils so utterly blue as to almost redefine the color. A flick of his wrist and the heat around them both was suddenly gone, sucked from the space around them in the blink of an eye and replaced with utter, mind numbing cold. Ice formed on nearly every surface in an instant, slicking the road like an ice rink but that was not his attack. His attack came a moment later as he took the heat he had stolen and directed it straight back at Vadim's chest in a concentrated beam of heat concentrated to a single, tiny beam no wider than a pencil with enough heat to melt metal, slag bone and over heat blood.

All noise was drowned out by the sudden TH-CRACK!! that resulted when intense heat blazed through air that was intensely cold. The pressure wave and thunderous noise shattered car windows and set off car alarms for fifty feet in every direction. Fortunately for Vadim the concentrated beam lobbed at his chest was not moving at the speed of light, because it was not light, it was heat, focused and tightened over a tiny area. It moved slower than a bullet, more like a ball thrown really fast...fast enough to make dodging difficult, slow enough to not render it impossible.

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Afterthought stood from her bench and casually dusted the front of her clothing as the museum was hit again by firebombs Smoke billowed from open windows and people streamed from the front door in panic. With casual effort so without remorse as to be less than contemptuous, she removed a cylinder from her belt and flicked it in the direction of the people trying to stream out of the museum exit. The cylinder hit and its glass shattered and two mixed chemicals met oxygen for the first time. The two chemicals reacted with oxygen in horrendous fashion. There was no visual effect from the chemical release...except that the first ten people near it simply...boiled. The sight of people bubbling and boiling, of skin bursting and sloughing off like melted wax, was enough to cause the crowd streaming out of the building to pause and then panic and break in a different direction, away from Vadim, away from Afterthought and away from the police barricade.

Afterthought didn't pay them any more attention and simply turned away from them, without so much as a smile that might indicate insane enjoyment of murder. She didn't care about them...at all. Their deaths weren't even unfortunate in her mind, they simply existed. The purpose of the display had been to force the crowd away from the fight between Vadim and the other man and away from the first responders. The first cops on the scene also turned their attention away from Vadim and opened fire on her. Bullets pinged off her personal defense screen and she drew her revolver with the same casual gesture she had used with the cylinder. She fired two shots. The first bullet shattered against the two central police cars and the released chemical agents flash vaporized as they mixed together. The two central police cars were torn in half by the resulting reaction, the front half of each vehicle simply disintegrated. The second bullet passed through the space opened by the first and burst open in mid air. The chemicals that spilled out mixed with the after-effect chemicals produced by the reaction of the first bullet and the whole center line of the police barricade exploded. Two of the officers were killed instantly and the rest were forced to fall back to new defensive positions. It was enough to buy them a little time while the police took cover and called for reinforcements.

Afterthought looked down at her weapon and its remaining bullets. "Vadim you might want to lure your fight towards the museum, I held them off for now but I won't be able to do that again. Museum strike team, give me an eta on the destruction of that arsenal." She said over their team com system, unaware that two of her people had just become to weak stomached to kill teenagers.

Vadim sighed as he watched the boy collapse, he knew that one of them would die, and he knew it would be the boy no matter what. It was the only possible outcome.

As soon as Vadim heard the sirens he holstered his pistols and grabbed his rifle, the response was fast as the barricade was formed. That was when the man appeared in front of him. Just by the look in his eyes Vadim could see that this one was different than the boy. This one had powers that he knew how to use.

Barely a moment later Vadim saw ice form on all the surfaces around him, he looked at the mans stance and sensed what was coming. He rolled quickly to the his right, very narrowly avoiding the beam but being launched back onto a parked car about 10 ft away from him. He quickly recovered from the impact and steadied himself, firing two shots aiming for the mans chest before he heard the voice over the radio.

The assassin grumbled, his backup on the rooftops was missing and the police and every potential 'hero' in the city are still in play. But this was as good a place to die as any.

"Copy that." a heavy Russian accent spoke into an earpiece. He moved around the car that the blast had launched him onto . As he moved across the street he used abandoned cars for cover, taking shots at the police as he moved along, taking note of Afterthoughts handiwork as he did so. Even though he did have to admit it was impressive he knew a bad tactical position when he saw one.

"Pull back to the museum with me, we'll draw them through the entrances. Leave the hero to me." his voice sounded more serious now. Somehow carrying a different tone than before. And with that he made for the museum. Hoping his prey would follow along with him.

"Agreed!" Afterthought said and quickly fell back. She weaved between as much cover as she could as the police opened fire, bullets pinged off the ground or flattened against her personal shield but it wouldn't hold forever. She closed quickly on his position though she gave a wide birth for the air pressure hero.

Speaking of which...the two bullets nearly caught him and gave Vadim and Afterthought time to retreat to the museum as he spent all of his effort concentrating another wave of heat around himself by once more sucking heat from the air of his surroundings. The bullets impacted against a wave of heat that melted them into useless globs that quickly evaporated, boiled away by the intensity of the wall. The hero stood for a moment to recover himself and moved casually from the area he had been standing in. There was no ambient heat at all in the thirty foot radius around him, everything had been reduced to a horrifying absolute zero. Fortunately, no one was in that immediate zone. If the cold affected him at all he made no show of it.

He focused again on Vadim once he was in another area with ordinary temperature levels but this time he moved more quickly. Rather than try to create instantly lethal beams that took longer to prepare, he snapped off a series of heat bursts straight for Vadim. These were not beams, but rather intense waves of heat not even hot enough to blister the skin. They were designed to heat up his armor and his body, the hero had switched to playing the long game of trying to ware Vadim down.

Even as he did this he held one hand out to his side and the air around it quickly frosted, visible bits of ice forming in mid air and dropping to the ground as he sucked heat from every molecule near his clinched fist. His eyes locked on Vadim and he grinned a little as he prepared himself for the shots he was certain would come next. His plan operated on two concepts...first, he could deal with the bullets at Vadim's current rate of fire, even though it would tire him out, and second, his heat could tire Vadim out faster. Once he was tired, he'd not be so quick to move out of the line of a lethal shot.

Of course, such truths went both ways.

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The Youtube Hero stood for a moment facing The Dragon and then finally deactivated the armor. The suit's cowl lowered to reveal...a man...just...a man. His face was not relevant, it wasn't the face of a man who had spent years training or fighting in the dark back alleys of a criminal underworld. He was...a guy...a guy you might pass on the street any given day. He looked horrible though, his body was exhausted and the pain of walking with one leg essentially useless was clearly getting to him.

He was not hiding a symbol because he did not have one. The symbol he wore on the armor was old...because there were no heroes...not of the traditional kind. There was no one here but people in the right place at the wrong time, people who would stand up for others. They were the beginnings of heroes...but they weren't there yet.

"Villains create heroes." He said, little flecks of blood coating his lips. "From this day others will rise, real heroes. Your day in the sun light is limited. Burn down the past if you want, but the past is just the past, it's the future that is being forged now." He flicked his wrist almost too slightly to notice and sent a bat shaped razor straight for her sternum. He followed this up with a driving fist towards her face, an act meant to distract more than do any real damage. It was also a move done by a man too tired for anything fancier. This battle was quite nearly over.

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oc: Sorry about the delay guys.