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

[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.

[gonebyebye]

Ray threw his hands out, and concentrated. The car appeared beneath his palms, and, as if it had sensed some sort of need, had come with the engine running and the wheels locked in flight-mode.

The Ghostbuster threw open the back doors and helped Bunny load Jaime inside, before hopping into the driver's seat.

"I'll see you back at the pole. I'd offer you a ride, but Cadillac Miller-Meteor's weren't exactly built with the comfort of giant rabbits with tall pointed ears in mind."

With that, not wanting to waste any more time, Ray punched it, taking off into the sky.

[mywarrenmyrules]

"Just hurry!" Bunny shouted, stamping the ground open to follow them to the pole on his own path. The car had better be as fast as he was.

He burst through the floor of the Pole a moment later and looked for the car, shouting for a medic.

[googledox]

Brainy came bolting to meet them, jumping over a couch and right into the air, flying the rest of the way. His clothes were extremely rumpled and his cowlicks (plural) were sticking out everywhere, as if he'd been sleeping or otherwise indisposed and had instantly leaped into action the moment it was necessary. "Out of my way!" he cried out, shoving past Bunny, using his forcefield as a stretcher to lift Jaime out of the back of the Ecto-1. He scanned him with his omnicom as he did it, and started moving, flying him and his patient back towards the Medbay. The boy - 17, human, male, with some kind of techno-organic symbiote? - didn't look good. Brainy didn't have access to his skin other than where the cracks were in the armor, but it looked deathly pale and there was a blue-tinged foam around his mouth and nose. "He's in respiratory failure and V-fib," he said to Lyle and Tadashi, tapping away at his omnicom, as they motored along. "We need to get him intubated." Brainy, Tadashi, and Lyle all booked it to the Medbay, and Bunny and Ray were left behind without even a word.

[bringinghopewithme]

The boy was in good hands, but that didn't mean the work to be done was over.

"I need to go back and follow up on some tracks," Bunny said, grim-voiced. He asked Ray, "The kid knew you, right? He oughta have a familiar face nearby when he wakes up."