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Daycycle 124 [January 29 - February 4]

daycycle 124

[Jan 29 - Feb 4]

[OOC Plotting for this Dacycle can be found here.]

Early Morning [0800 - 0900] — All Troubleshooters Report for Duty

No Specials will be selected for a mission today.

Morning & Afternoon [0900 - 1600] — Service Firm Positions
All Troubleshooters not assigned a mission should report to their Service Firm for their daily duties.

At 0900, Allison Argent will be reassigned to Armed Forces' Very Special Forces firm under Steve Rogers.

At 1300, VIOLET judge Bethany Abbott will be discovered dead in her chambers. Her death will ultimately be ruled murder by poisonous gas. Mind Control will immediately begin running coverage on her accomplishments, including the controversial decision less than a week ago to drop the treason charges against Oliver Queen and Parker and return them to Alpha. Once again, the letters "MOD" will be found at the crime scene. This time carved across Abbott's desk underneath her slumped body.

Gracie Cannell will be pulled from her blog to cover the breaking news due to her Special status.
News of the murder will spread like wildfire across Alpha, inciting fear in higher clearance citizens because VIOLET citizens were believed to be untouchable. In lower clearance citizens, the event will be enough to get ASS vocal again. Within hours there will be anti-special messages spray painted across Alpha.

Evening [1600 - 2200] — Citizen Improvement
All Alpha citizens are encouraged to better themselves through Alpha’s wide variety of educational, entertainment and cultural opportunities offered each evening. Attending these sanctioned events are not mandatory, but is highly encouraged by The Computer. Citizens choosing not to take advantage of these opportunities, have a growing number of other options available to them in how to spend their hard earned credits and free time.

Tonight’s event will be at 1800 in the Wagon Wheel, floor 25, Room H and will be held by the Extreme Ironing Club. This group is for those Alpha citizens who can't get their uniforms wrinkle-free enough. (Though anyone who may attend this incredibly boring sounding meeting, will actually find an established Free Enterprise dice game in progress instead.)

During the dinner rush, at 1900 a group of twenty ASS members in masks and armed with steel bars will form a brief demonstration in the Commissary in which they chant "Down with Specials." If there happens to be any Specials present in the Commissary at that time, they will attack them with malice.

Alpha Curfew Restrictions
All Alpha citizens should be in their quarters within the Wagon Wheel by 2200, unless they’ve been given permission from a GREEN or higher clearance level citizen. Sleeping Aid gas is dispelled each night in the Wagon Wheel at 2200 to assist citizens in getting a productive sleeping period.

Confession Booths
There are hundreds of confession booths available around Alpha Complex if a citizen would like to communicate directly with the computer. Please use these confession booths to report mission statuses, report treason or terrorist acts, unregistered mutants, confess your trespasses against Alpha Complex, request propaganda or speak with Your Friend, The Computer, at any time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Lydia realizes belatedly that by peeking out at the commotion rather than doubling back and barricading herself in the back room, she's made a horrible mistake.

Someone catches sight of her and the crowd she can see that they're calling attention toward True Alpha. She's going to lose all of her inventory, she knows it and while that's a really stupid thing to think about at the moment, she can't help that it's crossed her mind. "Clear the shelves," she calls out to the bots behind her and then, Lydia darts out and into the crowd in the hopes of hiding in plain sight until she can find a safe way to her room.

...admittedly, that would be a lot easier if she wasn't wearing a bright YELLOW jumpsuit.

A subsection of the crowd breaks away from their group to pursue her and Lydia's new reflexive response is to use the scream. The only problem is, when she lets a scream tear from her throat and tries to direct and channel the sound "like a bullet," nothing actually happens. Shit! Shit, shit, shit!

Ronan didn't really want Adam to have to use his new fighting skills so soon after learning them, but he's glad that he'd taught Adam something at least. He's got no intention of leaving Adam alone in this mess, but it's all the better if Adam can help.

The scream is what gets Ronan's attention. Screaming women always equals something bad. He looks around (grateful to be taller than a number of the people here) and spies a redhead in a bright yellow jumpsuit. He remembers that redhead. She'd thought he was someone else and she'd talked to him a little about some attacks that had happened before he'd arrived.

He reaches out, fingers wrapping around Adam's wrist as he jerks his head in the redhead's direction (why can't he remember her name? Oh right, because Ronan doesn't usually give a fuck). "Over there," he says, certain Adam will understand why they're heading over there. They're going to have to fight their way through, but Ronan doesn't mind that.

To say Adam has fighting skills is an overstatement, but that's okay. He knows how to throw a punch now and that's something more than Adam has ever done in his life. Translating what Ronan has taught him in the gym into a real time scenario is probably not so easy. Adam is ever a work in progress, even here, even now. In fact, when he sees the first impact of pipe to someone's head, he has a flashback of Robert Parrish yelling at him and fists flying in his direction.

It's that scream that snaps him out of the memory haze, and for that, Adam is thankful. His gaze snaps over in the direction of the scream and the first thing he notices is YELLOW, then the flaming red hair. He's still ready to grab Ronan and get the hell out. But first Ronan grabs him and they're headed in the direction of the red head. Adam holds on tight to Ronan's hand as the chaos and violence around them only seems to get more chaotic and violent.

"Are we going to hide in -" Adam gets jostled enough that Ronan's grip is momentarily ripped from Adam's hand. Adam swings in some direction, any direction, and hits something, or someone, he isn't sure because his eyes are closed. Then he's looking frantically for Ronan and feels the hit of a metal pipe at his back. "Ronan!" He sees him just a few feet away and steps forward to get to him. They're closer to the red head now and Adam still isn't sure if there's an exit over here by the True Alpha store.

When the scream does nothing other than pull more hostile and unwanted attention in her direction, Lydia goes into a fight stance. She might never have physically lived the lessons, but she remembers them. The first person to get close enough gets a kick in the side while she's fumbling to pull out her cold gun.

The name Ronan rings out and it distracts her because she knows it — not Jackson — and Lydia turns in the direction of the sound. She points the gun and her finger fidgets at the trigger until it looks like Ronan and the guy yelling for him are clear of the shot. It's the first time she's fired the gun outside Cisco's corner of the back room. There's no kickback, but she still sucks in a gasp and yelps in surprise when the person coming at her with a steel pipe stops dead in his tracks. Literally frozen.

It's in her awe at the fact that she's literally frozen her attacker into a statue of ice — and the subsequent misguided swing of someone else's steel pipe that shatters him into a thousand glittering pieces on the floor — that she loses the gun. She's staring one second in awe and horror and the next second, she's being grabbed and tugged, her wrist being bent back painfully and the gun clatters to the floor.

Lydia spies Ronan making his way closer and she calls out, "get my gun! Don't let them get my gun!" before turning her eyes on the blond right in the line of fire for another swing from another protester. Lydia abandons the gun because Ronan-not-Jackson is moving in her direction and she's hoping like hell he's heard her, but instinct kicks in: they're trying to help her and now she needs to repay the favor.

Sprinting forward, Lydia kicks out at a protester's stomach and leaps up when the man doubles over, locking her thighs around his neck and swinging her body weight around to drop him to the ground. When she's level again and beside the blond rather than in front of him, she tries the scream again because it comes more naturally than it should. Taking a deep breath, Lydia opens her mouth and the scream that tears from her throat rings in her own ears as she pushes her hands forward.

Above them, two of the overhead lights shatter, raining glass down on them and Lydia barely notices because her focus is on the five men and women thrown back against structural pillars and the crowd itself from the sound waves of the deafening banshee cry. It surprises her all over again, like the cold gun, but she isn't willing to lose focus a second time; she can't. Snapping out of it, she grabs the blond's hand roughly and pulls. "Come on! My store!"

Ronan roars at the sight of Adam being torn away from him and he's lunging after him when Lydia freezes the guy that just hit Adam with a pipe. He stops in his tracks, gaping a little at the ice statue and the girl holding some sort of freeze ray.

"Fucking piss Ronan says in absolute awe that the redheaded chick just froze someone. He looks to her with a a sharp smirk that passes for a grin with Ronan. "Man, that is the shit."

Of course, in the next second she's being grabbed and she's directing Ronan to get her gun. Now that he's seen what the gun can do, he realizes how damn important it is to make sure those people don't get it. He does a quick check on Adam then dives after the gun, throwing a sloppy punch at someone else going after it. He stomps on someone's fingers as they reach for the cold gun then knocks another person to the floor by tackling them, grabbing the guy's ear and twisting hard. He's just about to reach the cold gun when that sound comes out of Lydia's mouth and everything in him shuts down. He covers his ears with his hands.

The sound disappears as quickly as it came. Fortunately, it affected everyone around him the same way. He grabs for the cold gun, sees that Lydia has Adam and he gets up, lunging after them, cold gun in hand.

Okay that was unexpected. Really, of all the things Adam could have dreamed up, a weapon that turns people to ice is not one of them. Sometimes he's entirely too logical for his own good. Because while he might be considered genius level smart, Adam's logic can get in the way of that. And at the end of the day, a weapon that shoots ice, or whatever it did to turn a whole person into an ice sculpture, is kind of amazing in a fantasy novel kind of way.

How did she get something like that? Why doesn't he have something like that? Is the guy dead? Will the man get hypothermia and die? So many questions are cycling through his brain when Ronan finally curses and Adam looks back over to him, reaching for him.

The red head is then fighting basically like a ninja and Adam is on sensory overload between the gun and her nearly inhuman fighting style/skills. He sort of just stands there dumbly, watching in disbelief because this is looking and feeling like something from a comic book come to life and he's pretty sure Alpha is not the place he's always thought it was.

Adam is shoved from behind and pushed to the ground close to the fallen gun and starts to reach for it at the same time Ronan does, if just because he doesn't want someone with a metal pipe and a mask covering their face to have it. Then there's another scream, only this one is amplified and he feels it inside and out. His hands go to both ears even though he can only really hear out of one of them. He can feel the reverberation of the scream in his bad ear though, even if he can't hear it, and when he pulls his hand away there's blood on it. A trickle of blood drips from his bad ear.

He's still huddling on the floor when the red-head has his hand and is pulling him along. He isn't sure he really wants to go with her after the way that scream affected him. What was that? A girl with an ice gun and a scream that jarred every inch of his insides? Yes, she saved him. But the unknowns don't necessarily make him feel all that safe. He looks frantically backward to make sure Ronan is with them.

Once in the store, he's immediately twisting his hand from hers. His left ear is still vibrating or ringing or something that it never does. It doesn't even hear. His hand presses to it and he wills it to stop. Ronan has the gun, he's vaguely aware of that. Adam is assessing Lydia and Ronan for damage. All three of them were attacked, caught up in the ruckus.

Finally, he glances back toward the main entrance to the store. "Who are those people? Alphas?" And why are they attacking them? He really hates this place.

Ronan has her gun, she sees, when she catches sight of him moving toward them and everything is happening so fast that she doesn't actually notice the blood dribbling from the blond guy's ear until they've gotten into the store shouting at her bots to lower the gate in emergency lockdown once she's sure Ronan is inside, too, and clear of the gate. It slams down with impressive speed, locking them inside the store and she can see the A.S.S. coming at them through the bars before the steel sheet comes down to seal them off from the Commissary completely.

He's pulled his hand from her grip and she can't really blame him. It takes a second to register the blood for what it actually is and her hands move to cover her mouth for a second before falling away again. Her expression is positively pained with apology. "Oh my God...oh, sweetie, I'm sorry! I didn't—I've never been able to do that before, I just had the memories of how to with no actual experience to back it, oh God...oh God, are you okay? I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" she gasps, before her hands make it back to her face, covering her mouth. Every part of her wants to move to him to check him and make sure he's okay, but she stops herself, assuming he won't want any part of it.

Lydia's backed herself against a now-empty shelf and she's shaking like a leaf as she finally finished processing everything that she's just seen; everything she's just done. The blond boy is bleeding. She'd killed someone. ...technically she'd frozen them and another A.S.S. member killed them by breaking the statue they'd turned into, but still. The scream had come and she'd channeled it without shattering anything more than a few light fixtures.

My scream is like a nuclear bomb. You need yours to be like a bullet.

Her stomach turns with worry. Matt's probably out there. Allison almost definitely is. She's just locked them, plus Cisco and Tony out of the store, so if they haven't got their weapons, they can't have them now. The blond boy is bleeding from the ears because of her scream. The blond boy is bleeding, the blond boy is bleeding, the blond boy is bleeding.

Lydia starts to cry. It's silent and it's not in despair; just soundless tears and hyperventilating for a few seconds before she finally gets a hold on herself. Her breathing goes back to normal almost as quickly as it went out of control. The tears keep coming but she lowers her hands from her mouth and when she speaks, it's calmer than she actually looks or feels.

"A.S.S," she answers. "I'll bet my life on it. They're Alphas; they're the Anti-Specials Society. They beat the shit out of me and left me for dead a few months ago. They even videotaped the whole thing and sent it to the rest is the Specials as a warning. I'll bet anything it's them."

Lydia takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it out again just as shakily before the tears finally slow to a stop and she wipes her eyes with her palms, almost definitely smudging her makeup. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I'm really sorry," she whispers because a lump has risen into the back of her throat cutting off the sound.

She needs to ask for her gun back, but that can wait.

Edited 2017-02-02 22:05 (UTC)

Things are moving way too fast and Ronan is having a hard time keeping track of it all. He's used to fighting, but he's used to a one-on-one sort of fighting. There's so much less going on in that sort of fight. It's all he can do to keep track of Adam, but does make certain he does that.

He doesn't hesitate once he's got his hands on the gun to lower his shoulder and knock anyone and everyone out of his way. Sure, he gets tangled up in a few people, but he manages to get clear of the gate by sliding in underneath it and into the safety of the shop. Ronan gets to his feet, trying to assess the situation. Lydia is having a meltdown (and he can't say he really blames her) but it's Adam he's worried about. That much is clear. He flips the safety on the gun (at least he hopes it's a safety) shoves it into the pocket of his jumpsuit and moves over to Adam, pulling the sleeve of his jumpsuit down to wipe at the blood dripping from Adam's ear. He puts one hand to Adam's cheek on the right side of his face and holds his sleeve covered hand to Adam's left ear.

"So what the hell was that? The whole scream thing?" Ronan asks. Surprisingly, he's not being particularly angry or confrontational about it; by dragging Adam in here and waiting for Ronan to get in before shutting the gate, she's saved them from more injury. Sure, he knows that she probably let him in just because he had her gun, but she'd saved Adam without any apparently ulterior motive. That counts for something his boo so he's not going to yell at Lydia for what she did. It's obvious she didn't mean to hurt Adam.

Ronan looks to Adam, directing his voice a little to Adam's right side, his voice soft and quiet, but well above a whisper. He's not trying to hide anything from Lydia. "Hey, you still able to hear me, Parrish? Because it's going to make annoying your ass a whole lot harder if you can't."

It's only once Ronan is in the room with him and this girl he doesn't know that Adam starts to really take stock of the situation. There's still that strange humming vibration in his bad ear. Ever so slowly it seems to be slowing down and dying away. He wishes it would hurry up because it's uncomfortable in so many ways, the least of which is that it's a mockery of actually hearing out of that ear, which he can't and hasn't for some time.

He can vaguely hear Lydia's apology even as Ronan pockets the gun and comes over to him to press his sleeve against his bad ear where Adam knows there's blood. His hands rest lightly on the front of Ronan's jumpsuit and he nods. "I can hear you." Out of his good ear, which is normal, and helps him to accept the humming, or whatever it is, in his bad ear. He doesn't hear the red head's apology or Ronan checking on him out of his bad ear. That's normal.

He doesn't know the Red head, has never actually met her. What he does know is that she saved them, the both of them. Maybe Ronan didn't need saving because in Adam's mind Ronan is a bad ass. But Adam had certainly needed it, because he's not a bad ass, not when it comes to anything physical.

Adam looks over to Lydia and shakes his head. "It's okay. I'm okay." He tries to reassure her. That scream, the one Ronan asked about. "That was you, wasn't it? You saved us."

It's a little jarring to see someone who looks so much like Jackson act so little like him — Jackson was always one of the few people she knew who was both insistent that he was attractive to gay men while simultaneously being slightly homophobic when it came to the suggestion that he might be bisexual. So seeing someone looking like him tending so gently and carefully to another guy is a little startling, but that's actually a good thing, because it helps pull her back out of her state. He's not Jackson, this is real, this is all really happening.

Her eyes move away from the way he's tending to the blond and up to his face specifically when he asks what the scream was all about and she blinks, still a little daze — the blond boy is bleeding — and she takes a breath as she tries to figure out how to answer the question. The blond gives her a way out when he assures her that he's okay and she lets the breath out, realizing as she does it that she'd been holding it unintentionally, anyway.

Lydia nods a little dumbly before the light seems to come back into her eyes and she's more focused. "Okay," she says quietly. She's just glad he can still hear. And, on the plus side, his head is in tact, so she hasn't shattered his skull like she had Dr. Valack. In the memories, anyway. Lydia forces her attention onto Ronan for the moment to answer his question, belatedly.

"Back home, I'm different. I'm what's called a banshee. My scream is a weapon. I could kill someone with it," she says and looks back at the blond apologetically again. "I didn't know how to control it or use it, but now I have all the extra memories of things I never lived back home and so now I know how to, I don't...it's confusing even to me, because it's news to me, but yeah. That was me."

It's no secret to Adam that people here have their abilities squashed. It's frustrating, because feeling and being Cabeswater is what had helped him move forward so much back home, his connection with the Greywaren. When he hears Lydia say she could use her banshee powers, like a banshee from mythology he assumes, Adam looks back to Ronan as he tries to feel for Cabeswater, anywhere, somewhere, close by.

There's nothing. And that's more of a let down than he'd like to let on. He's not the magician here. He's just Adam Parrish, which is far less whelming than he's been before.

"What you did, saved us - or me, at least." Ronan could probably have taken care of himself. And while Adam has a vague recollection of throwing a punch and actually hitting something, or someone, he has no idea what or who he hit, just that he'd had a momentary fight or flight instinct and acted on it before the scream happened. "Thanks. I'm Adam."

He looks from Lydia to Ronan, the vibration in his ear finally dissipating into the nothingness he's more accustomed to. "Is it still bleeding?" He asks him. "It quit... doing what it was doing." Whatever that was.

Ronan thinks almost everyone here knows that people have had their abilities squashed and it's incredibly fucking annoying to Ronan would could have dreamed a world and more back home. Here, he can't even dream up something decent to eat, much less a night terror or something that would have actually helped them out there. When Adam looks at him, Ronan shakes his head; no he can't feel Cabeswater and he can't feel the power from the ley line that would let him dream Cabeswater. Of course, tonight he's going to try like hell to dream something.

Ronan knows the feeling.

As for Lydia's explanation of what she is and what that scream was...he tilts his head a little at Lydia. "Don't banshees predict death, or at least warn of it?" Niall had come over to America from Ireland when he was a young man. Because of that, Ronan grew up with all kinds of old Irish folklore and superstitions.

No, Adam is right. Lydia did save them. Sure, Ronan could take care of himself but he couldn't take on a mob by himself. "Thanks," he echos.

Ronan pulls away his sleeve covered hand from Adam's ear, smearing the blood on his jumpsuit leg. He looks a little closer at Adam's ear. "Nah. It's stopped, You're okay." He doesn't step away from Adam though; he stays close, unwilling to leave his side right now.

Taking a deep breath, still shaking a little where she's lowering herself to sit on the floor, Lydia nods. "Yeah," she confirms in response to Ronan. "Yeah, I predict death. The scream wasn't always the weapon it is now. It just used to clear out the cobwebs. I have voices..." she pauses, knowing how crazy she sounds. "Had. I had voices in my head that would tell me when someone was going to die. Sometimes it would be specific enough to know everything: who, where, when, how..." her voice trails off and she wets her lips, frowning.

"I hadn't missed the ability, trust me."

But now? Now that she can use the scream to protect herself and other people? Now that she could use the scream to blow up the Computer if she could ever find where they house it here? Now? Now, she's going to be missing it, because she can't feel it anymore.

Her eyes move over to the blond boy and she smiles a little. "I'm Lydia," she replies softly before looking down. "I don't think that the back room has a back exit, but we can look," she offers, looking back up again a moment later, her eyes moving between the two boys. "Or we can just wait out the noise and go back when it's quiet." Her eyes move back to Ronan specifically. "Can I have my gun back, now? Please?"

Adam, on the other hand, doesn't know anything about Banshees aside from a peripheral sort of knowledge. So hearing that they not only scream like Adam has never heard anything scream in his life, but they also predict death, is new to him. He gets an uneasy feeling in his stomach at the idea. Has Lydia predicted Ronan's death? Or his own? Is that why she saved them?

Strangely enough, Adam understands having voices in your head. When Ronan dreams too much at once, Adam tends to go a little bit crazy too. His voices don't predict death, they just speak Latin to him, tell him when he's fucking up and what he needs to do to fix it. Unnerving. And crazy. Yes, he understands.

Adam isn't very good at meeting new people, so he leaves the introduction at that. There's no hostility between them and he worries that if he says more, he'll mess things up. It's her request for the gun that he focuses on. Because if she has her power back, maybe they need the gun. It is her gun, technically. So... "Where did you get the ice gun?" Maybe he and Ronan can get one too. "I've never seen anything like it."

And if Lydia got some of her powers back, however briefly, Adam has to wonder about Ronan. He looks at his boyfriend, the question wanting to be asked but unsure how to ask it in front of Lydia. That's Ronan's business if he wants to say anything about it out loud. Not Adam's. But he wants to know.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Daycycle 124 [January 29 - February 4]

daycycle 124

[Jan 29 - Feb 4]

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