Gods and Monsters [cs: torture and murder and scary stuff]

[beetlebutt]

Jaime Reyes was standing on a street in El Paso, looking very confused, and talking to himself. Well, at least it looked like he was talking to himself. Really, he was talking to the scarab, because the two of them were trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. The world had blurred, Jaime had passed out and now...

"This is so not El Paso."

Now he was in a place that was home and yet not home.

|T L[][]KS \|/E|RD. \|/HERE'S THE PUTT-PUTT?

"Exactly. And that - what is that? That building wasn't there yesterday. Neither was that bank building. And where's the El Diablo?"

/-\LTERN/-\TE D|/|\ENS|[]N?

"Are your sensors picking up anything weird?"

...SENS[]RS /-\RE |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L.

After doing a systems check, the scarab trilled a little wordless cry of alarm.

"What's wrong?"

/|\UTIPLE SYSTEMS |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L. []NLY B/-\S|C L|FE SUPP[]RT, B/-\SIC TR/-\NSF[]O/|\/-\T|[]N /-\B|L|T|ES, /-\ND C[]/|\/|\S /-\V/-\|L/-\BLE. D|/-\GN[]ST|CS UN/-\BLE TO DETER/|\INE WHY.

"Whoa, whoa, okay, calm down, you're kinda panicking. Stop with the brain klaxons, okay?"

|'/|\ RUNN|NG BL|ND. Y[]U C/-\LM D[]WN!

"I know this is freaky, and you're not used to being blind like this, but you're still conscious and I'm still conscious, and we're not fighting an evil death satellite or, I don't know, being shot at by aliens. We'll figure this out, okay? Just keep a cool head."

The response was a very surly, | D[]N'T H/-\VE /-\ HE/-\D.

Jaime rolled his eyes. "You know what I meant, Mr. Literal. Look, we'll figure this out, okay?"

In fact, maybe he could just talk to someone and get some answers. Some teenagers ran down the street towards him.

"Hey! Very, very lost superhero here," he said, waving them down. "Any chance you could -"

They didn't notice. In fact, with a feeling like cold mist, they ran right through him. Jaime froze up after they did, expression stricken.

"Okay, we're a ghost or something and no one can see, hear, or touch us. Time to panic."

| T[]LD Y[]U!

Comments

[makeadragonwannaretire]

"Tell me...do you always talk to yourself? Or only when you're stressed out?"

A confident feminine voice intoned from a nearby cafe where she was sitting on the patio looking for all the world like she was waiting to order a drink and a light salad for lunch. Her skin was decidedly pale and hair a long thick black that looked as though only the strongest most worthy of combs could tame it. Her clothes were somewhat old fashioned looking like she had come strolling out of a martial arts movie.

She was however only affording him a sideways glance. He needed to understand how absolutely ridiculous he seemed talking to himself in public like that.

[beetlebutt]

Jaime narrowed his eyes slightly. Mysterious teenage girl could see him when no one else could and the first thing she was offering instead of helpfulness was her sitting there all chill and slightly condescending? Yeah, that wasn't suspicious or anything. He looked around carefully, trying to keep his eyes on her while checking to see if she had any friends. The scarab was operating blind and that made him nervous. That meant if he was attacked, he wouldn't have one of those handy proximity alarms to warn him it was coming. "Little of column A, little of column B," Jaime said. He tended to babble to himself (and the scarab) most of the time in general, but he got a touch more babbly when he was in a panic. "What's your deal, mysterious girl who can actually see me? Are you stuck like this like us or are you doing the vaguely threatening thing because you made us this way?"

[makeadragonwannaretire]

She chuckled a bit at his quick assessment of the situation and finally leveled her gaze on him, almost looking through him.

"The first one, stuck and unable to change the situation at this point in time. I'm not sure how you managed it but you are every bit as dead as you could possibly be."

Because what was one more lie on top of the thousands she left in her wake?

"Do I really come off as vaguely threatening? I was going for amused teasing but it's been some time since I've bantered."

[beetlebutt]

He wasn't dead. No way was he just randomly dead - unless something bad happened and he didn't remember it. Azula hadn't convinced him that easily, but if she wanted him to wind up distracted and deep in thought as he considered the lie, that had been a rousing success. He couldn't be dead, could he? He could still feel his heart thudding in his chest - rather rapidly, in fact, because he was nervous about the situation. "Kinda, yeah," he said. "You know, just sitting there all like 'hey, I'm here and can see you and I probably know what's going on, no, I'm not gonna just tell you or anything.'" Like bait for a trap. Or...like she was the trap. "Because I don't believe you about being dead. I still have a heart beat. I'm still breathing. If I was dead, I wouldn't need to. I'd be all vague and, like, made of mist or clouds or whatever. I wouldn't have a body that still works, even if things can go through it. This is probably more like some kinda weird, dimensional kerflooey."

[makeadragonwannaretire]

"Is that so? Have you been dead before then?" That would be a new one on her. Other then the occasional angry spirit back home Azula had never actually encountered a dead person before coming to this world. And the dead people that Kuk had drafted were hardly the best examples.

"I'm not even sure kerflooey is a real word, but I'll let you keep it if it makes you feel better." She remained seated and with one foot pushed the chair across from her back from the table silently inviting him to join her. After all if it was a trap then he was already caught in it. And if it wasn't then there was no harm.

And really at this point what did he have to lose? It's not like anyone around was stopping to pay attention to them.

In a meatpacking warehouse in the middle of nowhere...

[beetlebutt]

What did you do with the really decent heroes? With the ones that were pure and true and easy for kids to believe in? Not that he knew it yet, but Jaime was one of those heroes. Believers had seen him partnered with Batman, a kid just like them but braver. Believers saw him as part of Young Justice, desperately trying to fight his fate and save the world. And some of the strongest, some of the ones with the most faith, were the ones that had read about him. Just for a little while, while they could. The belief of some of these teenage readers was explosively powerful. Rain after a drought, that was what bright stories were to some of them. Something light after all the dark. That kind of faith and belief was dangerous to the dark things in the world. It had the potential to be potent, to spread. It meant that just killing him might have just brought in more of him, brought in other Jaimes to replace him. And so Jaime's fate had been decided the moment he stepped into this new world. Azula had been tasked with a special way of destroying him, much like how Benedict had tried to ruin the very idea of the ninja turtles for the world by arranging for them to get dragged away by men in black suits in Times Square. Kill a Jaime and another might take his place, with just as much potential. But if he broke, if he became darker, harsher, gritty and grim like some of the stories told about people like him - if he became something kids were too scared to believe in - then it would destroy his potential power and there would be no more Jaimes. Not that Jaime knew all this. Because he didn't know what was going on or where he was or why he was here. All he knew was that he'd woken up with a killer headache, with the feeling of sticky blood and suit goo dripping down his face inside the armor. All he knew was that his feet were bound with rope and duct tape and his hands were bound with handcuffs and more duct tape and... a Chinese finger trap? What the hell? All he knew was that he was dangling from what looked like a meat hook, under very shady and terrifying circumstances and the Scarab was blaring alarms in his head like it'd been trying to wake him up for the past ten minutes. "I'm awake, I'm awake, stop yelling," he said groggily. When he finally got his eyes to focus, his blood ran cold, something that was quite the feat considering that he was pretty sure his blood turned to hot blue goo when he was suited up. He was in a place that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Saw movie. Nearby on a table, there were scattered tools that had bloodstains on them. A sledge hammer rested against the table and a pinata was hanging from another hook and had vague meat shapes leaking out of the middle where it'd been split open. A half eaten cake shaped like a creepy clown face was also on the table a table and next to the table was an oversized teddy bear sitting in a chair. It looked like a broken zombie of a doll, with teeth that were far too sharp for a children's toy, something purposefully constructed by some evil doll Dr. Frankenstein to be terrifying. "Ay Dios mio," he squeaked. The breath he drew in after saying it was almost a sob. He'd been in some bad positions before - even tortured by Max Lord - but nothing like this. Never anything like this. "What horror movie did we just wake up in?!" he hissed in a panicked voice to the scarab. "This is so far from good it's in another zip code. An evil zip code. Where evil things live. And eat the mailman when he comes by." When he looked down, he saw some kind of device attached to the suit, dug in, like it'd drilled its way into the armor. He had a feeling that was possibly what was limiting his ability to do anything with it. "Please tell me things are actually working," he begged the scarab. "Any things. I can't - why can't I make arm blades? Did we lose that too?" DEV|CE BL[]CK|NG M[]ST REM/-\|N|NG FUNCT|[]NS. /-\RM[]R |S []NLY /-\SSET /-\V/-\|L/-\BLE. "What do you mean we only have the armor? We can't even shift it into anything? Seriously?!" \|/E /-\RE S[] SCREWED, the scarab said, fear entering its mental voice. "Please don't tell me that. There's got -" He grunted with the effort as he started to swing "- to be - something." He tried swinging his lower body, seeing if he could do maybe get his hands off the hook but all it did was cause his already aching shoulders to ache more. Now he started to panic. "Oh God. Oh God. This isn't happening, this isn't happening..."

[putyouinstitches]

"God can't hear you my little baby bug~"

The voice came from behind him and though she lurked in the shadows her high pitched voice was like needles in his ears and the scratching and scraping of something heavy and metal like a knife being sharpened began echoing across the open concrete floor.

"Which is good because I like my play things NICE and LOUD!"

The scraping stopped as she stepped out of the shadows and swung a sledge hammer for his side, as a way of introducing herself.

[beetlebutt]

Chills ran up and down his spine at the sound of the scraping metal but before he had a chance to respond or ask questions or do anything, the blow to his side knocked him for a loop. The armor protected him but it could only do so much. Just because it managed to protect his body from things like, say, internal bleeding, didn't mean it could protect him from everything, especially while damaged. So that? That hurt. That was a broken rib or two there. "Yeeeeargh!" His body swayed back and forth, painfully yanking at his already sore shoulders.

[putyouinstitches]

"Yeeeeargh?" She repeated and pouted taking a hand to spin him around making sure to grab at him by his injured side.

"What the heck kind of greeting scream is Yeeeargh!? Come on you're gonna have to do better then that! Maybe I'm just not using the right tool huh?"

Letting the handle of the hammer fall to the ground she produced a pair of sisscors bringing them up to his face and tapping the point on his cheek.

"Are those lenses in your eyes really strong? Might be interesting to see those pretty eyes with some shiny glass bits in them!"

The grotesque and grinning face of a makeup and stitched up woman was grinning at him wildly with her eyes wide to the point they looked like they might fall out of her head at any moment.

[gonebyebye]

Bunny's tunnel opened up, Ray climbing out after him. Ray already had his PKE meter out, scanning the area.

"Got a lock. Follow me," he said, running lakewards.

He stalled as soon as he spotted the carnage, a distraught look upon his face.

"Oh no. Don't let us be too late... Bunny, get down there, get his head above water. The proton pack's got more than a few tricks to get that tree out of the way."

Ray started up the pack, and began hosing down the tree with Mood Slime.

[bringinghopewithme]

The amount of blood in the area clouded Bunny's sense of smell, but more than the amount, the traces of so many sources of blood gave him pause. Two people had bled a lot here, but mingled with those two scents were traces of many others. A weapon that had spilled a lot of blood had been used.

At the cliffside, he dove in as soon as Ray was done speaking. Swimming, as a rule, was not something Bunny liked doing. The sensation wasn't pleasant, he looked ridiculous when wet, and fur as thick as his took forever to dry out. But he knew how to do it. Too many children drowned, and too many things that hurt children lived in water, for him not to have learned.

Under water, though, he realized that the boy's head was not going to reach the surface, not with that tree on his torso, and not with the surface where it was. But like Ray, he had more than a few tricks - at least, for keeping a dying child alive.

He gripped the tree with one clawed hand and supported the boy in the blue armor's head with the other, focusing on the breath he held and the boy's slowing heartbeat pounding from everywhere in the lake. He pulled himself down by his grip on the tree, and when his feet touched the mud, stamped to open a wide tunnel beneath them. The shallow lake drained quickly down the mountainside, until Bunny could hold the boy's head above the water.

Then, with the lake still draining, he did something stranger yet, and breathed through the cracks in the armor onto the boy's face. The breath he'd taken in before diving left his lungs like a shimmer of summer heat on a meadow, almost visible in the deepest tones of green leaves and gold sunlight.

In the Warren, such a breath made stone effigies stand with a life of their own. Here, it made the banks around the lake bloom with new shoots of grass, flowers opening out of time, and more importantly - it strengthened the boy's heartbeat.

Bunny closed the tunnel siphoning the water out of the lake and kept the boy's face above the surface. When Ray moved the tree, he would move the boy.

[gonebyebye]

Psychomagnotheric slime had several interesting properties. Given the right emotional feedback, it could allow ghosts to cross over into the physical world, animate objects, alter a beings emotional state on contact, and, finally and most importantly for this day's efforts, allow items coated in it to be affected by the proton pack's capture stream.

When the tree was sufficiently doused with the green slime, Ray fired the neutrona wand, and lassoed the trunk with the proton stream, lifting it up and away. He dropped it on the coastline.

That done, he pulled out his comm. "Goes without saying, but we need to get the kid back to the pole pronto. I'm texting Tadashi, and Brainiac 5. Whatever that is on his chest doesn't look like it's supposed to be there."

"Can you carry him through the tunnels, or should I get the Ectomobile?"

[bringinghopewithme]

"Better get the car. His heart's going, but it's spotty and I can't get him breathing again."

Bunny dragged the kid out of the shallowed water, keeping his forehead near the kid's, forcibly keeping his life force from fading. "C'mon kid, I can't do this for you forever," he muttered, exhaling another green breath through the cracks in the armor. Flowers burst into bloom around the dying boy.

The Medbay

[googledox]

"Trach kit, cabinet, now," Brainy said to Tadashi, pointing to a nearby cabinet as he worked on clearing Jaime's airway of debris and started using a bag-valve mask to re-ventilate. "Lyle, get the crash cart and the debrillator." He looked down at the suit, and one-handed, with the other hand still working the bag-valve mask, he got out his omnitool and carefully disengaged and dismantled the device stuck into the armor, putting it down in a nearby metal pan. "And you, symbiote, you need to get this armor off my patient. You should be free to disengage and self-repair now so get out of my way."

Re: The Medbay

[the_civilian]

This was a bit more than the bloody scrape he'd dealt with his first day here. Nevertheless, Tadashi dove for the indicated cupboard, grabbing the (clearly labelled, thank goodness) tracheotomy kit and a pair of gloves as Lyle (the one of these two Tadashi had actually had an extended conversation with) went for the cart.

"Is it listening?" he asked dubiously of the (really cool) symbiote, then added, since the armor didn't appear to be peeling back, "Hey, I know this situation's pretty scary, but I promise that we're here to help. But we can't help with you covering him up like this, so ease off so we can help your friend, all right?"

[beetlebutt]

It could hear them. And it was scared. Not for itself. The scarab didn't want to expose Jaime's face to these strangers but right now it was all or nothing. Either it fully retracted and tried to regenerate or the armor would remain deployed. In either case, it could not call up the functions it needed to to resuscitate and heal Jaime. So the armor retracted, withdrawing from the boy's body, making horrible crunching and grinding noises as it did, a clear sign that it was malfunctioning. It all disappeared under him, into his back. On Brainy's omnicom, on all the monitors and sensor feeds that had now been turned on while they tried to help Jaime, there were words, clear and desperate: F|X H|M. What the armor left behind as it retreated wasn't pretty. Because of the cut to his head, under the armor, and because of a nasty wound on his cheek where some flesh had been scored away by the head of a hammer, his face was drenched in blue goo that was pretty clearly a substitute for blood while the suit was functional. His left leg was also drenched in it, due to the damage to his knee, some kind of foreign object that had been shoved through it. So was his right arm and part of his torso, due to the chewed up chainsaw wound at his shoulder/neck. All of those injuries were still bleeding, so after the suit retracted, the wounds started to trickle red instead. Those were just the wounds that were actively bleeding. The boy's side looked horribly bruised, in a way that suggested blunt trauma that might have broken some ribs and there were countless other bruises and places that had been battered. The boy looked very, very small without his armor.

[googledox]

Brainy pulled a sheet in a thin band over the boy's waist to preserve his modesty, leaving the rest of his abdomen and legs uncovered so they could work on them. He flicked on an overheard heating lamp, knowing that he was likely suffering at least mild hypothermia from immersion. Right now they couldn't afford to cover him with blankets when they had so many injuries to work on. The retracting armor and the messages on the monitor were something that made Brainy arch his eyebrow in interest as he took the trach kit from Tadashi, gloved up, and worked on stabilizing the boy's airway. "What a fascinating case," he muttered. "Lyle, the techno-organic symbiote he has - it's quite remarkable." He had so many questions he wanted to ask when he was conscious and conversational. There. Intubated. Brainy attached the tubing to a ventilator and set up a separate set of nasogastric tubing that was meant to provide suction. The boy's chest rose and fell but only lightly. There was too much fluid in his lungs and his heart was still in V-fib. But now Lyle was there with the crash cart and the defibrillator. Brainy primed the pads and attached them to the boy's chest. "Everyone, clear," he said, hitting the buttons that started the device. It automatically started scanning for the boy's heart rhythms, calculating the right charge to provide. While it did that, Brainy held out the metal pan with the device to Lyle. "Lyle, this device was inhibiting his armor. It was primed with an explosive charge and a vial of particularly deadly neurotoxin for whoever tried to remove it, perhaps as a trap meant for any possible rescuers, but I disarmed it. Please dispose of it safely, Tadashi can assist me from here." And kashunk, the deibrillator shocked the boy, causing his body to startle slightly as it did it.

[bringinghopewithme]

The injured new guardian was with the medics, but Bunny had smelled a lot more that disturbed him at the sight of the rescue. Enough that he knew he was going to want someone to watch his back where he was going.

Someone who'd already seen a lot of corpses before.

He tracked a likely guardian through the pole by scent, making fast time through the levels of the workshop.

"Oi Sam!" He shouted, when he'd spotted the Winchester. "I need backup with a strong stomach. Is that you?"

[fromfryingpantofire]

Sam was usually not difficult to find. Either he was in the library or he was watching the Yetis work. Because he wasn't allowed to help them and...well, what would he know about building toys, anyway?

He was doing the latter when Bunny came looking for him. He looked up at his name, then straightened at the question. "Usually, yeah. What's up?"

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny stamped a tunnel open.

"So far, at least an attempted murderer. You need a sec to arm up?"

[fromfryingpantofire]

He gave that a moment of thought before nodding. "I don't normally go armed at the Pole and I'm not like Dean and can pull what weapon I need out of my ass." Which wasn't exactly how Dean did it, but it was close enough. "Give me a minute. I'll be straight back."

If he was getting time to arm up, he figured it wasn't an emergency. But Sam still went quickly, finding his gun and a knife, putting them both on his belt. After a moment of thought, he grabbed some salt and the flask of holy water, shoving them into his jacket before heading back to Bunny. "All right. I think I'm good."

Cassie and Nightwing

[googledox]

Brainiac 5 was still attending to Jaime's health when Cassie arrived, carefully monitoring him and using strange futuristic devices to help heal his wounds. Even despite all the care he'd already received, and the magical healing Tadashi had provided, Jaime was, nevertheless, clearly not in the best condition. He was still on oxygen, although fortunately he'd been extubated and only had a nasal cannula now, but he still occasionally coughed a wet cough. Quite a few IV bags were attached to him, as if there were less visible threats to his well-being they were meant to control. And a strange little device had been placed at his temple. The parts of his body that weren't injured were bundled in blankets but the blankets were pulled away from his injuries so Brainiac could have access to them. His left knee was heavily bandaged and propped up on some pillows with some ice packs around it. A medical drain had been attached to it and seemed to be siphoning out blood and nasty clear fluids into a little reservoir. The meaty part of his left shoulder was heavily bandaged, as if there had been some terrible gaping wound there. There were lines of stitches on both his forehead and his right cheek. And to match the little bruises all over his body, his right side was covered in one giant mass of nasty bruises, now turning an ugly purple and red as they healed. That was the injury Brainy was focusing on right now, scanning Jaime's side with a strange little device, one that seemed to be helping the bruising to slowly fade. When Cassie arrived, he only glanced up at her briefly, before looking back at what he was doing. "He's quite fortunate to be alive, all things considered. He barely had a heartbeat when he was brought in and we were only able to properly resuscitate him and stop the respiratory failure after I intubated him and pumped the water from his lungs. Staving off the cerebral and pulmonary edema has also been quite the challenge, but he's stable now, and despite the hypoxia it appears we've prevented any permanent brain damage. His symbiote seems to be successfully self-repairing as well." Jaime was still unconscious, although his sleep didn't seem to be a comfortable one. Every so often he stirred slightly, trying valiantly to fight his way back to consciousness, before drifting back asleep again.

Re: Cassie and Nightwing

[mark_in_the_sands]

"Asclepius..."

Cassie brought a hand to her mouth, more out of horror than to suppress the urge to throw up. She'd seen worse. Not on Jaime, poor kid, but she'd seen worse. Though it had apparently been much worse when they'd brought him in.

"Good job," she said to both Brainy and Tadashi, though Tadashi might not hear it; he seemed pretty absorbed in his healing work. "He looks better already. Thank you."

She moved forward, but did not reach out to touch Jaime. She didn't want to accidentally disturb something that shouldn't be disturbed.

"Is...Khaji Da unconscious too?" she asked. She didn't really talk to Jaime's symbiote much since she couldn't hear it answer, but Jaime had shared its name with the Titans. She wasn't sure that it did unconscious, but this wasn't their world either. It could be different here.

[googledox]

Some of the monitors flickered and strange blue alien text scrolled across them in the background. Fortunately the main part of the message was in English. N[]. "It's been commandeering both my patient's auditory organs and my monitoring equipment for the last hour. Mostly to express pointed remarks." His monitoring equipment. He was the one that'd built most of it. TH/-\T |S BEC/-\USE Y[]U /-\RE /-\ RUDE [☈♃☡╣]. That last bit was in scrambled alien letters that were apparently too filthy to have a proper translation. J/-\|ME[FR|END]/C/-\SS|E, J/-\|ME S/-\YS WE D[]N'T K|LL. WE MUST F|ND THE []NE WH[] HURT J/-\|ME AND N[]T-K|LL HER. REPE/-\TEDLY. |N THE F/-\CE.

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie coughed into her hand to disguise a smile at Khaji Da's latest 'pointed remark'.

"I doubt it counts as 'commandeering' if he's always listening through Jaime's ears," she said diplomatically.

Her smile thinned and her eyes narrowed at the suggestion aimed at her. Quippy though it was, she couldn't bring herself to disagree.

"This is the first time anyone's had this bad of a run-in with the bad guys," she said. "What can you tell me about the person that did this?"

Because Cassie wanted to not kill the right her repeatedly in the face.