(no subject)

[headinjuries]

Who| Sam, some open stuff, and some closed stuff (Rich, notthatJason)
What| Murderworld!
Where| Murderworld, naturally.
When| If relevant, like if you want to note it's after an event.
Warnings/Notes| Starters will be in the comments so I can just throw it all in one post; after I get the closed ones up, there'll be at least one open. Nonetheless, if whatever I do for opens doesn't appeal to you and you'd like to do a thing, hit me up OOCly and I'm happy to consider something else!

Comments

closed, for rich

[headinjuries]

The forest couldn't be too bad, Sam had figured.

The forest couldn't be too bad, except then he'd nearly walked off a huge drop that was barely visible in the undergrowth, and his yell of surprise had apparently caught the attention of a gigantic badger of a size that badgers should never come in. And then he'd managed to hide before the huge freaky birds ran through...

How many other exciting ways did the forest have up its sleeve to try and kill him?

"Maybe I should've read that book," he muttered under his breath. Or seen the movie - there was a movie now, right.

[iamresponding]

There was the sound of something stamping through the underbrush. Somethings, plural. More animals maybe? More terrible monsters, trying to eat Sam?

Nope. Just his mentor, barrelling on through. Rich jumped off of a ledge onto a toadstool, then onto another lower toadstool, and then he jumped to the ground, skidding slightly as he landed. After all the physical therapy, he was a little more surefooted than he used to be when he first found himself in the Legion's universe, but he was basically at the bare minimum as far as coordination went.

Which was why the obstacle course nature of the arena was already stymying him. He just couldn't move through it fast enough to shake his pursuer.

And he needed to shake her because there was no way he could win in a straight fight. He was already sporting a split lip, a bloody cut across his torso, and one of the legs of his pants was torn up with a bloody rip from him slipping and slicing his leg against a rock.

When he saw someone else was there, the hand of his energy arm started to glow with a ball of Nova Force energy and the other hand went automatically to the katana sheathed at his back, but then he saw that it was Sam.

"Run!" he cried out, the ball of Nova Force energy disappearing. He ran over to Sam and grabbed him by the arm with his flesh and blood hand, pulling him along with him. "No questions! Move!"

It was that kind of voice. Parental. Commanding. Mildly terrified -- in a way Rich hadn't been two seconds ago, but was now because Sam was now also in the path of the monstrous thing chasing him.

Something was moving through the underbrush, coming from the same direction Rich had come from -- and it was moving fast.

[headinjuries]

When Rich was trying to get the hell out of there instead of standing and fighting, that said nothing good.

It also said that there wasn't any time for nagging details like asking what the hell was chasing him. For the first couple of steps, Sam was wobbly, adjusting to the sudden shift in his balance, but he pulled it together quickly, falling into step and sprinting along with Rich.

Or slightly behind. He was doing his best, because it was only going to slow them up if he had to be dragged, but -

"Your legs. Are. Way. Too. Long!" he panted.

[iamresponding]

"I don't think we have to go that much farther anyway. The trees are thinning ahead and I think I can hear--"

The trees opened up and revealed they were standing on a cliff that dropped directly into a raging river below. Not far in the distance, the river poured over the edge of a large waterfall.

"Perfect."

The cliff sloped downward, so there was a way to safely walk down into the edge of the river, but Rich had an idea.

"It was a cyborg. Coluan, I think. When I hit her, it was like punching a steel wall, but that means she's probably pretty heavy -- and she might need to breathe. If I can position her right, and I can rocket into her hard enough, I might be able to knock her into the river. Even if I go in with her, she'll probably sink right to the bottom and I can swim out."

His Nova Force arm was crude but he could still swim with it.

She was still coming after them, the sounds of her running through the underbrush crashing towards them. Rich drew the katana and cupped some Nova Force energy in his hand.

"Sam, start getting down to the bank. Looks like there are vines down there. If I go in, I might need you to toss me something and help pull me out again."

No way was he letting Sam go against her, not after he barely got away alive the first time.

[headinjuries]

Perfect was not the first word that ran through Sam's head when they were chased into what looked very much like a dead end.

But that was why Rich was the one coming up with the plans here, and while part of Sam bristled at getting shunted off from the fight, there wasn't really any problem with the plan that he could object to - even if Rich sounded remotely in the mood to entertain objections, which he definitely didn't.

"Be careful." Not that careful was a word in the Nova vocabulary, half the time, but...

[iamresponding]

"Yeah, sure. I'll do something maybe kinda like that."

He flashed a Sam a grin that was half reassurance, half-devil-may-care. He couldn't really promise careful. He could at least promise that however he tried to wing it, hopefully it'd have minimal amounts of dying.

Rich looked back to the crashing sounds coming through the underbrush and then she was there, that fast, running towards him with a speed and pitiless determination that made her cybernetic nature very clear. The fight was brutal. This wasn't the kind of superheroing that Sam was used to seeing on Earth. This was vicious and savage, the fighting of two soldiers that knew only one of them was walking away.

Unfortunately, it was starting to look like that person was possibly not going to be Rich. Without his superstrength, flight, and invulnerability, he was ridiculously outmatched. The metals that Wiress were made of had to be similar to something like adamantium, so even when he successfully blasted the flesh off of her body, or cut it with the katana, he couldn't destroy the metal at her core. And that meant he couldn't entirely destroy the flesh the metal was guarding. Her nanites meant that she regenerated from every wound with a speed that would've made Wolverine or Deadpool envious. Even after Rich successfully blasted all the flesh off of her face, knocking her back towards the edge, by the time she turned to face him again, it had almost grown all the way back, T1000 style.

"Oh, come on, seeing as I don't have a convenient vet of molten lead to drop you into, would you just die already?"

[murderworldtributes]

Wiress responded by kicking him hard in the chest, sending him flying into a tree with a painful-sounding thud.

"That's the problem with purely organic life. So soft. It's so easy to batter your tender flesh until the will to live leaves it. I'm not just going to kill, I'm going to make you beg for your own extermination."

She tilted her head to the side, in Sam's direction.

"And then I'll do the same with the human broodling my sensors detect not far from here."

[iamresponding]

Rich dragged himself to his feet again, clearly hurt, nodding briefly, almost as if agreeing to her argument that humans were weak and fleshy, or as if he was about to capitulate, and then he lunged at her, wrapping his Nova Force tentacle arm around her face and pouring as much burning energy onto her face as he could, trying to burn through to her brain. To help things along, he stabbed her in the eye with the katana, trying to get it in deep.

Using both to twist her around, he was able to get her closer to the edge of the ridge, almooost where he needed her to be to rocket her off into the water.

He let go of the sword and one last kick to her chest got her right up against the edge. He was clearly about to rocket into her when her chest opened up to reveal some kind of energy cannon. The blast seemed mostly just concussive, so fortunately it didn't tear through his flesh wet tissue paper the way it would've if it'd been a pulse cannon, but it did slam him backwards with such force that he slammed into the ground multiple times, rolling end over end, and left a furrow in the ground as he skidded to a stop.

Clearly disoriented, his face and body battered and bloody, he started to move, tried to get back up again. She approached him, pulling the katanna out of her own eye, her flesh already healing. She held the sword up, clearly planning to use it to kill him.

"Now that I've got you down on your knees, this is the part where you beg, meatbag," she hissed.

"You say that...like m'gonna stay here."

It was possible he'd get up in time. Maybe. He was certainly trying. But he was clearly struggling and she was getting closer and closer, the blade raised, her back to the drop behind her--

[headinjuries]

Maybe he'd get up in time.

Maybe he wouldn't.

Sam wasn't going to take the chance on waiting and finding out. There was no time to think about it, no time to consider the consequences - there was just a single opening that he was going to have exactly one shot at taking.

So he rocketed forward, with every bit of momentum he could get behind his weight, slamming into her midsection.

[iamresponding]

Rich looked up to see Sam rocketing into her. He saw her go over the edge. Then he saw her grabbing onto Sam's shirt and dragging him over the edge with her as she started to drop towards the water like a stone.

The sudden drop in Rich's gut felt like his stomach had been tied to a boulder and tossed off a cliff too.

"SAM!"

Rich didn't bother with doing something asinine like going over to the edge to look over. No, he finally dragged himself to his feet successfully and started running down the slope, nearly tripping over his own feet, and skidding down the rocks so fast he almost broke his damn neck.

He saw vines already at the shore, still attached to the trees but pulled partly free so they could be used as a lifeline -- Sam had done exactly what he was told. Rich took advantage of it, wrapping the vines around his forearm enough that he could swim without them becoming unwrapped, kicking off his boots, and looking out on the water.

Seeing Sam in the rapids, he ran forward and dove into the water, the currents so fast that he didn't even have to swim that much to get dragged right in his path.

[headinjuries]

Oh, crap.

Crap, crap, crap.

It felt like the world moved into slow-motion when she grabbed his shirt; Sam knew he couldn't be falling for more than a couple of seconds, but it felt like he had all the time in the world to see the water getting closer...closer...

As they went under, he kicked Wiress in the gut, hard, and whether it was just the shock and force of hitting the water or whether he actually made a difference, she let go, and he was able to thrash his way to the surface -

- and then he was under again, because Sam didn't have nearly the weight or the strength to make any headway against the current. He was at the mercy of the rapids.

closed, for rich

[headinjuries]

There was only so much yelling the two of them had in them, and the fact that too much of it might bring someone else down on their position was enough to put the lectures and counterpoints back in the can.

Also, it was getting dark.

Sam glanced around, looking for...somewhere likely looking to stop for the night. "I wonder if that giant badger is nocturnal."

He really hoped not.

closed, for jason

[headinjuries]

Every time Sam entered another zone, he found himself revising his opinion of how he'd rank them, worst to best.

The industrial zone was definitely a front runner, though. Every passage and room looked the same, except that one he'd wandered into that had tried to slice him up with a gigantic pendulum axe, which he'd managed to escape with a well timed roll forward and only a little screaming of things his mother would definitely not be happy to hear him saying.

The door to that room slammed shut behind him, and he leaned against the wall next to it (it would spitefully open again, he wasn't taking chances), sighing heavily. Close. Way too close.

"If this is like Cube and it turns out I was in the room by the way out to begin with I'm gonna stuff Arcade's head down a toilet."

[notthatjason]

Jason never thought he would miss Candy Land. How did he get from a pastel, sugar-coated death trap to...well...he was pretty sure he'd seen this setting in a video game somewhere. It hadn't been a very pleasant game either. When told he was in MurderWorld this was more of what he had pictured. Well, this and that desert wasteland with the cars, but he'd rather not think about that.

He'd tried skirting the buildings, but this place was set up so terribly that the only way to get anywhere was to go through. He was really starting to miss those flight powers -- wind-based or otherwise. Currently, Jason was making his way down a fairly straight corridor. So far he hadn't stumbled across any traps but he had the distinct feeling of being watched by something more than just the cameras recording everything. He glanced over his shoulder a few times, but never picked anything up except the distant hum and clang of machinery.

That was NOT reassuring, mind you, but he couldn't exactly attack what he couldn't see. However, it's just as important to guard your front, which was why Jason nearly jumped when he turned a corner and there was someone there. It was a split second reaction though and he quickly realized it was just Sam. He'd take a friendly face any day.

"Sam. It's good to see you," Jason looked over his shoulder and then back, "Did you hear that?"

[headinjuries]

"Oh. Thank God, Jason, I thought you might be another one of those things skittering around down the hall."

Those things he had yet to see face to face, because he'd made a point of steering away from the noise every time he heard it. He was pretty sure by now that nothing in this place was worth indulging his curiosity.

"Yeah, but..." He glanced in the other direction. "I was hearing it from that way, a few minutes ago."

[notthatjason]

Jason raised an eyebrow, "That's what I thought you were going to be." He really didn't like where this conversation was going. This was a horrible movie cliche just waiting to spring on them. Jason hated this part in movies.

He looked in the direction Sam was looking and then sighed, "Of course. So how do you want to play this because apparently they're already playing us?" Jason reached into his pocket and pulled out a small golden coin. It didn't look like much now, but he was holding it like he was going to use it for something more than buying a soda.

Something clattered -- a pipe or something falling over -- back the way Jason had come and he glanced behind himself, turning slowly and trusting that Sam would keep an eye on the other direction. "This is going to suck...I'm calling it now," he paused and then asked, "Are you powers working here?"

[headinjuries]

"Yeah. I'm not great for enclosed spaces, though." Energy blasts weren't great when you couldn't easily stay out of the way of the collateral damage, and the kinds of high-speed flight maneuvers he thrived on were useless here. "I know we don't want to get split up, but don't stick too close, either."

hope you don't mind if i go ahead and bring in the mannequins

[notthatjason]

Jason frowned, processing this information and trying to come up with a strategy. "Me either, at least not the stuff that would cause major damage. I can't use the wind to fly but for some reason I can still direct it as a blast."

Before they could plan much more of their strategy there was a loud crash and a giant amalgamation of mannequins came tumbling around the corner on disjointed legs and mix-matched parts. It's hands and feet clattered on the floor like some kind of terrible spider and no less than three heads swiveled to look at Jason and Sam who were standing about 50 feet away from it in the middle of their conversation. Jason had seen a lot of horrors in his short life, but he was pretty sure this thing was going to give him new nightmares.

But right now he didn't have time to process it, he flipped the coin in his hand. One minute it was a normal looking coin but there was a flash of golden light and Jason was suddenly holding a six-foot long javelin. He didn't throw it though, instead he jabbed it towards the creature -- even though it was so far away -- and tried blasting it with lighting. The javelin conducted the blast further and more accurately than he would normally be able to. Unfortunately, Jason hadn't considered the fact that the monster was a mannequin. The lightning hit it, but the creature just blinked its eyes, tilting two of its heads like it was wondering what Jason thought that was supposed to do.

"Plastic...of course," Jason muttered.

The creature swiveled its heads and started crawling towards them down the hall.

it's cool! \o/

[headinjuries]

"Oh my God."

That thing was hideous, and Sam had seen some pretty ugly aliens. This thing was the kind of freakishly grotesque that Chitauri only dreamed about.

And it was coming straight at them.

His hand started glowing bright blue, then brighter and brighter, and a few seconds later when it had reached the point of almost blinding, he fired down the hall.

His aim was fine. A few of the heads melted, dripping hot plastic onto the floor, features blurring into some kind of even uglier perfect storm of gross...and the creature hardly seemed to notice that parts of it were coming apart. It certainly wasn't stopping.

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod."

[notthatjason]

Well that was one way to try and hold the creature off. Unfortunately, it seemed to only have a cosmetic effect and didn't actually slow it down at all. Jason cursed in Latin of all things, his eyes flicking to an unobstructed corridor. The creature was gaining too quickly though to try for a quick retreat tactic. Jason would have to try his other super power.

Spinning the javelin he swept it down in an arc and sent a concentrated gust of wind howling down the hallway. He kept it concentrated and, like a punch, it sent the creature sprawling back several feet -- heads over torsos over arms. Jason then grabbed at Nova's hand and yanked him down the free corridor and shouted, "Run!" for emphasis. He didn't bother holding Nova's hand of course, after the initial tug in the right direction Jason was hauling butt and hoping that Nova was right behind him. He could try to fight it with the javelin, but Jason would rather try to avoid seeing if the thing was also immune to Imperial Gold on top of everything else.

There was nothing saying he HAD to fight the creature.

[headinjuries]

When he needed to move, Sam could move - they didn't call him the Human Rocket for nothing. It didn't take more than that one tug to get him booking it down the corridor without looking back.

- well, scratch that, he took a look back over his shoulder as they ran, because maybe that thing wouldn't follow them?

Okay, no luck there, but maybe it at least wouldn't follow too fast?

...this really wasn't their day. "Have you been down this way yet?" Sam hadn't, but he'd run into a lot of dead ends and rooms that might be more trouble than they were worth to try and escape through. If there was a good route to get out, they needed to find it, and fast.

[notthatjason]

"No," Jason called back, "But it doesn't have a monster down it for the moment so it's the better option." This place was basically a maze, so honestly he COULD have been down this way. But he was fairly certain he'd approached Sam from the opposite direction. Also, he couldn't be certain there weren't more of those creepy plastic things either. But the one was behind them and he could only hope it wasn't pushing them towards more.

Jason looked around while he ran, trying to find something that might block the creature's way after them. Even though their surroundings were rusted looking, they still looked fairly solid. At least solid enough that Jason couldn't just blast them to fall down and block the path behind them. He glanced ahead, they were quickly approaching some turns, "We can try losing it? I don't know the layout of this place so it's not like we can get any more lost right?"

[headinjuries]

"Can't be any worse than staying put and letting that thing...do...whatever it does." Sam had a few guesses, given that not all of those body parts looked like they'd come from the same source, originally. But he really, really didn't want to follow that train of thought into the station.

open

[headinjuries]

The walls were made of...actually, he didn't want to know what the walls were made of.

Meat? People? Wasn't there that one video game he played where they built a tower out of screaming people or something? There weren't any definable features to the walls in the escher zone, but the corridor he was in was squishy to the touch (one touch was all he was giving that, ew) and if he stopped and looked too closely, they were...throbbing.

Was there ever anything good that included the word "throbbing"?

Better to move fast and get out of this one as fast as possible.

But the sound of something up in the hall ahead was enough to make him stop and reconsider.

open

[headinjuries]

(there's gonna be another open i just haven't figured out what it is yet)