The scenario is playing on one of Rich's worst fears: losing his powers. He can tell they're entirely gone, which means he's at his weakest and most helpless. It also means he's dying, not with a bang but a whimper, with his cells quietly falling apart. But at least he has a few days before that happens, days that are unlikely to pass if he can get out of here.
As terrifying as it is, this was a really dumb fear to pair with this. Instead of having time to react in horror or dwell on it, he hears the scream for help and then all bets are off. His own horror at his malfunctioning body - ever the enemy - is immediately kicked to the side.
As much as he wants to barge into the room after hearing that cry, he has to play this smart. His brain or the...the whatever of this place has him feeling like the last time he lost his powers. When he first joined the Legion, he'd had trouble with numbness in his limbs, with clumsiness, but he'd at least had some Nova Force he could still access. Right now, he's running on empty and that means his limbs are like putty and his hands feel frostbitten and numb.
That makes this a challenge. Sure, he knows how to fight without superpowers - he's lost them often enough in the past to know he needed to learn - but doing it with limbs that barely work is a special kind of difficult.
So he gets cunning. They look like med techs. If they're "programmed" (or whatever it is) to act like real medtechs, they'll react a certain way to a perceived medical emergency.
Rich isn't wearing his uniform, it's civilian clothes at the moment, but that looks a little less strange than wearing a superhero uniform as he lurches through the door. He hunches over, in a way that makes someone pay far more attention to how someone's moving than what they're wearing. He looks like a man who's been stabbed or had a heart attach, collapsing into the room.
"Help! I need help! They're coming!"
The techs immediately look towards the door, expecting some kind of enemy, or maybe some authority figure to explain where this mystery casualty is from - and Rich takes advantage of that to spring up and knock one out with one punch. He grabs a metal medical tray and bonks the other one on the head, twice. It bends from the force, because even clumsy and powerless he's still built like a goddamn MACK track. He could probably rip a phone book in half.
He tosses the bent tray at one of the other techs and then picks up the next impromptu weapon he can find - a metal bedpan. That's good for clobbering two more of them - but they start getting aggro now, and he's awful clumsy. An attempt to throw one of them away from him gets sloppy. The Counselor falls instead of getting carried by his own momentum and as he drops, he drives a scalpel into Rich's upper thigh.
He doesn't cry out. He lets out a little pained "htt" of noise, reflexively holding in and silencing a scream, an old habit from the Cancerverse. A haymaker knocks the Counselor out and then he and Wash are alone. He doesn't yank the scalpel out, he knows better. Maybe after he gets him loose, but not right now, while he's still trapped. God help them both if Rich yanks it out and suddenly bleeds out on the floor with Wash still stuck on that thing.
"Cavalry's here." He unbinds him from the bed. "Don't get too excited. I'm not running at 100%. As in, the Nova Force is gone, which, alongside making me powerless, has the side effect of making me clumsier than a newborn giraffe."
1
As terrifying as it is, this was a really dumb fear to pair with this. Instead of having time to react in horror or dwell on it, he hears the scream for help and then all bets are off. His own horror at his malfunctioning body - ever the enemy - is immediately kicked to the side.
As much as he wants to barge into the room after hearing that cry, he has to play this smart. His brain or the...the whatever of this place has him feeling like the last time he lost his powers. When he first joined the Legion, he'd had trouble with numbness in his limbs, with clumsiness, but he'd at least had some Nova Force he could still access. Right now, he's running on empty and that means his limbs are like putty and his hands feel frostbitten and numb.
That makes this a challenge. Sure, he knows how to fight without superpowers - he's lost them often enough in the past to know he needed to learn - but doing it with limbs that barely work is a special kind of difficult.
So he gets cunning. They look like med techs. If they're "programmed" (or whatever it is) to act like real medtechs, they'll react a certain way to a perceived medical emergency.
Rich isn't wearing his uniform, it's civilian clothes at the moment, but that looks a little less strange than wearing a superhero uniform as he lurches through the door. He hunches over, in a way that makes someone pay far more attention to how someone's moving than what they're wearing. He looks like a man who's been stabbed or had a heart attach, collapsing into the room.
"Help! I need help! They're coming!"
The techs immediately look towards the door, expecting some kind of enemy, or maybe some authority figure to explain where this mystery casualty is from - and Rich takes advantage of that to spring up and knock one out with one punch. He grabs a metal medical tray and bonks the other one on the head, twice. It bends from the force, because even clumsy and powerless he's still built like a goddamn MACK track. He could probably rip a phone book in half.
He tosses the bent tray at one of the other techs and then picks up the next impromptu weapon he can find - a metal bedpan. That's good for clobbering two more of them - but they start getting aggro now, and he's awful clumsy. An attempt to throw one of them away from him gets sloppy. The Counselor falls instead of getting carried by his own momentum and as he drops, he drives a scalpel into Rich's upper thigh.
He doesn't cry out. He lets out a little pained "htt" of noise, reflexively holding in and silencing a scream, an old habit from the Cancerverse. A haymaker knocks the Counselor out and then he and Wash are alone. He doesn't yank the scalpel out, he knows better. Maybe after he gets him loose, but not right now, while he's still trapped. God help them both if Rich yanks it out and suddenly bleeds out on the floor with Wash still stuck on that thing.
"Cavalry's here." He unbinds him from the bed. "Don't get too excited. I'm not running at 100%. As in, the Nova Force is gone, which, alongside making me powerless, has the side effect of making me clumsier than a newborn giraffe."