revivalproject | Strange Noises & Too Many Legs

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Strange Noises & Too Many Legs

WHO: Jon, Tony, Cal, Cayde & probably YOU? (some closed and an open prompt in here)
WHERE: Not!Library, Safehouse, Control Shed
WHAT: Giant spiders are invading the city and one Archivist doesn't have a good time.
WHEN: Spider Invasion Event thingie
WARNINGS: violence, injuries, idiocy, possibly huge spiders? No mothcats are being hurt.

Day 1 - Not!Library [ closed to Cal, later Tony ]

"Countess! S-stop it-- C-Countess!! I- OW!" Jon tries to duck from a set of clawed paws coming down on his head again, carried by a pair of fluttering wings before the winged feline with its long, feathered tail pushes away again with an agitated hiss and lands on the side of a nearby shelf, wings and feathers spread open wide while she hisses in a display of intimidation and fury. Jon looks up at the animal from where he has tried to crouch down in confusion, unsure what to make of the situation.

And he thought it would just be another, well... Day. But apparently the creature that has taken to live in the library as well has decided it doesn't agree with his presence or something. Haven't they been getting along just fine?

He carefully raises a hand towards the mothcat, attempting to calm her down again. "Look. I- I know you like to nap between these shelves, but I- W-well. Sometimes I have to walk between them? We both live he--AHHH!!" No, he doesn't even get to finish his sentence before the Countess pounces onto his hand and arm and sink claws as well as teeth into it viciously and tearing that scream of shock and pain from the Archivist.

Day 2 onward - Safehouse [ OPEN ]

When Jon wakes up, everything hurts. His head, his toes and everything between those parts. Heck, even his teeth hurt. It takes him a moment longer to realize another thing: He is alive. And that's the thought that really pushes itself into the foreground when he finally opens his eyes to figure out where exactly he is waking up.

The following days Jon remains at the safehouse. To recover and also gather information about what is going on, whether it be over the network by replying to people, or from those stepping by the safehouse themselves. Even though it quickly becomes obvious that its service is only really needed during the night. At the same time it's winter in Temba and the nights are clearly longer than the days and even the strongest among their group will need a night without having to deal with massive spiders every once in a while.

And so Jon will offer company for now. And maybe information. And maybe, maybe he can figure out what's the reason for all these spiders to suddenly attack the city...

Towards end of event - Control Shed [ closed to Tony & Cayde ]

It has been a quick audio message: 'I believe this is our fault. Has either of you noticed the countdown stopping? Meet me at the control room.'

Sending the message has been quicker than walking all the way back to the tower while still not fully recovered. Jon does his best to hide the limp, though, and he hopes they can get this fixed before it gets dark again and they end up getting attacked while stuck in that little shed that hardly offers any protection at all.

Jon makes a point to carefully avoid the nearby tower's area of effect when heading back to the hidden little building, pretty much expecting the other two to already be there by the time he arrives.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm rather certain we can scratch radio tower from our list of possibilities." Jon remarks, then falls silent while his eyes lock onto the tower and its irritatingly present light. He doesn't turn to directly address either of the others and the poncho hides the way his hands clench around his own upper arms while the scowl on his face deepens.

He takes a deep breath, then exhales.

"Right. We are all frustrated by this. I loathe not knowing what we are dealing with as much as either of you are." Jon pauses for a moment, then closes his eyes and makes a decision. "You two go home. Get some rest. For god's sake, Tony, take off that armor for a bit. I will figure out the tower. And the controls. Maybe a way to destroy it if it proves as dangerous as we already assume it to be."

"If we would only be dealing with the fallout ourselves, that would be more bearable," Tony amended. If he was alone out here, and there wasn't the potential for the reaction to spread its deadly effect to the whole city, he would have been happy to take what came next after taking his frustration out on this equipment, instead of waiting for anything to happen.

Jon might have been hiding in his poncho, but the tension was still evident, and Iron Man went conspicuously still again as he watched Jon close his eyes. He wanted to apologize for failing Jon at this, too, his fingers itching under his armor, but was suddenly taken aback by being told to go home. His head snapped back around to face Cayde, definitely raising his eyebrows behind his mask, fully anticipating Cayde to be in agreement about what Jon could do with that suggestion. In a thrilling, new growl of dynamic frustration, Iron Man announced, "I'll go get a glownie," and sent the dry leaves around them swirling manically as he lifted into the air.

Watching them both from where he is, Cayde holds back his own sigh. They'd all come here feeling guilty with an angle to make things right, but the situation isn't allowing it to be solved so easily as they'd like.

He'd meant 'ourselves' including those who like them were also stuck here with little guidance nor real desire to be in the city working towards what end under whoever's annoyingly watchful eye. If they could take the blame themselves and not worry about the others, oh the things the Exo would do. It's easier to look after oneself, to own up to any consequences and deal with your own failings knowing you had it coming. Letting anyone else take the fall for your screw-ups isn't something Cayde wants to ever happen, and just knowing that his tactless button-tapping had brought on nightly spider raids and driven some of their own mad just gnaws at his metal insides.

He nearly misses Jon's suggestion to them- no, not even a suggestion. His horn just makes the sudden jerk of his head as he looks up even sharper, optics narrowing. Catching Iron Man's look in his direction, he snorts, his expression and body language confirming an unspoken and complete agreement as he shoves away from the door frame. With the other metal man opting for glownie wrangling, Cayde's left to waffle over what good he's able to do to follow up on whatever defiance he'd been meaning to voice to Jon.

"-you got another pair of eyes and hands here and we have Sundance. Let's start picking at this. And if we decide this thing needs to go for good, I think me and Stark can handle that better than you can."

Jon has been mentally preparing for verbal protests and that he may have to raise his voice. Tony's sudden exclamation followed by his departure to head out and catch a glownie is not exactly the sort of stubborn defiance Jon is mentally prepared for and all he can do is blink his eyes back open in surprise and then look up to where Tony he disappeared to.

He really is starting to dislike that armor.

Sighing, Jon reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, finding himself reminded again of his missing glasses by the time Cayde speaks up, drawing his attention towards the Exo. He isn't really convinced anymore that shouting will do him any good, but he still winces a little. "I... Want to try and understand it, Cayde." Jon explains cautiously. For whatever good it has done him in the past, it's the one thing he can at least try.

Cayde's not expecting a shouting match anyway. He thinks they're reacting perfectly reasonable. Tracking Tony to get an idea of how fast the guy can go in that spiffy armor of his, the Exo finally looks back at the Archivist, folding his arms.

"And I'm not saying you can't go ahead and do whatever you're wanting to do. I'm just not wanting to be left out of it. I know you know we wouldn't have just stepped off to the side without putting a word in, and let's be real- none of us are going to get any decent rest when we're responsible for this. Hell, I'm the one who hit the buttons."

Edited 2021-02-02 05:04 (UTC)

"You can't exactly blame me for trying, though." Jon replies, his eyes shifting up to look at the sky. "You two have been dealing with these monsters for days now. You deserve some rest." Meanwhile all Jon has done is hide away, useless and scared.

He sighs, lowering his eyes again to set them firmly on the tower blinking away ahead of them. "But I can't force you, of course. Guess I will have to try if I can see something before Tony returns."

"Hey, at least it's only the graveyard shift. Not that I want to make this a habit. Getting to the source of the problem will let everyone sleep better at night- literally."

Cayde smirks, stepping over to drop an arm over Jon's shoulder to lean on as he looks off at the annoyingly innocent-looking tower. "No, you sure can't. This is what we do, Jon." He moves away, stretching his arms out over his head before he turns back towards the control shed. "Well let's get to it."

The trip did take longer than it possibly should have, given how quickly Iron Man had flown away, but his return was easy to anticipate. Like everything else about the suit, the sound of the Iron Man's flight was not subtle, and echoed eerily across the barren plain of the tower field with little around to dampen it before he came crashing into the brush outside of the mouldering control room. When he came stomping into the building, the door giving up and wilting to pieces under his boots this time, it wasn't with the added illumination of a glownie's fur, but a bundle of Jon's sheets in his arms.

Either the flight hadn't done much to improve his mood, or he didn't feel particularly compelled to explain any further, given how obvious the discovery of the state of the glownie pen had felt to him during his brave 30 seconds near it. All of the context that Iron Man did provide was, "I made an executive decision," the sound of his voice prompting a familiar, low growling from the blankets in his arms.

After a while of glaring at the tower in the distance without acquiring any noteworthy enlightenment, Jon has followed Cayde into the control room and has settled with quietly looming over the array of buttons, squinting down at them as if he could compel them into giving up their secrets to him.

And this is how he has been staying until the unmistakably noise of Tony's approach draws Jon's attention away and back to the door where he certainly expects the man to bring in a glownie. The wrapped up blanket gets a raised brow at first, a suspicion already settling in.

No. He hasn't...

Glancing up at Tony himself when the man speaks and back down at the growling, Jon winces.

He has.

Jon finally turns to walk up towards Tony and what he has brought along, worry settling onto his face and into his voice. "...Countess? You... You caught her." She appears well enough to still be angry at least?

Watching Jon have a staring contest with the control panel was about as thrilling as watching paint dry, and internally Cayde grumbled about Tony jumping the gun to go grab a glownie. Figuring out this puzzle is a lot less hands-on than he'd like, and with Jon trying to work out some hidden secrets, Sundance hadn't wanted to try hacking into things again, lest she throw something off.

Cayde perks when he hears that sound signaling Iron Man's return, and with a bounce in his step he pushes off to follow after the Archivist, though not far as the armored wonder steps inside with an armful of writhing sheets. Yeah, that's not glownie-sized.

Looking from the bundle to Jon to Tony and the bundle again, the Exo tilts his head with a quirk of a smile. "They all busted out, didn't they." All things considered, if there's something driving animals up the wall, fences aren't going to keep wild glownies in.

See, obvious, it really should have occurred to them earlier that the glownies were probably also having a terrible spider season. To Cayde, Tony suggested, "The lucky ones," because some fences were also not going to keep massive bugs out when they were hungry for destruction. Cayde should remember about as well as Tony that the glownies were both not very bright, and lacked some integral self-preservation skills, unlike whatever this thing was that had taken to Jon.

With a shift of his arms to try to coax a minimally deadly part of the Countess out of her bundle, Iron Man achieved a flailing, clawed paw that he quickly tried to restrict again, and asked, "Have you met the Countess yet? She'd like you." The first time he had walked into the library in the Iron Man, she was trying to find purchase on his shiny helmet almost immediately in a dazzled frenzy, so Tony was started to figure out what made her tick. "She's not very happy, but she was thrilled to try to take my face off again, so--you know her better than some squirrel outside, I figured we'd have a better judge if there was any changes."

While Jon is in the process of reaching out towards the wrapped-up animal, he is quick to pull his hand away again once the claws shoot out, accompanied by an angry yowl from the trapped creature.

"It's... not a bad idea." Jon admits. As much as he dislikes seeing the mothcat like this - And as much as he fears her claws. "We just should fix that purrito to she can breathe and see us at least." Of course he is familiar with the proper term for this specific practice.

"I've not had the pleasure," Cayde replies, his optics flicking back towards Iron Man's expressionless visage before studying that swiping paw. He raises a brow.

"Again, huh?" He's not liking the implications he's getting from putting these hints together. While he says nothing to Sundance, the look he gives her suggests enough as she decompiles in a brief shimmer of light. No need to have more targets for an unruly feline.

"Here, where's her head at?" the Exo asks as he steps closer to offer his own assistance. At least between his metal and leathers he won't run as much a risk of getting clawed up as Jon while Tony's holding onto the Countess.

Sundance making her escape before the mothcat's fixation could land on her was reasonable, but absurd enough that between Jon had casually introducing Tony to 'purrito' in his serious grumbling, and the Countess' complaining and wiggling between Cayde and Iron Man resulting in plenty of struggling and tangling of blankets between them until she finally had a very unimpressed nose poking between Cayde's arms, Tony had started to snicker. "There might be a few reasons that she's a little testy," he tried to suggest as evenly as possible, because she didn't look at all impressed by Iron Man leaning down in front of her snarling snout to chuckle at her predicament. "But we don't really have the time. What did you figure out?" The days might have been long here, but they didn't feel that way when they inevitably ended with a spider surge.

Seeing the mothcat's face appear, perfectly ready to hiss and possibly snap at anything getting too close is- Well. It's a bit of a relief if Jon is honest with himself and despite the lingering wince, he can't help a small smile. He even dares to reach out and gently pat part of her securely wrapped body with one hand. "Please don't be mad, Countess. We just want to help you."

Jon gives a small nod of appreciating to the other two, then turns to walk back to the control setup. "Unfortunately not as much as I would have liked." He admits, scowling down at the buttons. "The symbols I understand, but we already figured they are numbers. I'm just... Not getting anything of use. I'm sorry. This is not how I had hoped to have to go about this." And in a way not very different to Tony earlier, Jon presses one of the buttons, the very first in the last row of them.

While he tries to maintain a good grasp on the bundled up cat, even Cayde can't help but snort in a brief laugh at the undignified position Countess is in. "Are you trying to get her to bite off your face? Because she's tensing like she totally would," the Exo smirks as he looks at Tony. With both Iron Man right in front of him and Jon moving to try petting Countess, he tries to make extra sure the cat doesn't slip.

"If being any closer to the problem isn't doing her any favors, we'd better at least try something," he suggests, glancing over at the buttons while the Archivist steps over to them again. "If staring at it hasn't yielded anything, you want Sundance to try hacking it?" He lifts his head as Jon taps at a button, looking to the screens, waiting for any sort of sign that something's happened.

Edited 2021-02-06 18:26 (UTC)

"She wouldn't. Its my best asset, we have an understanding," Iron Man replied, sticking a finger close enough to the mothcat's face to let her lash out and chew maniacally on it, drooling ineffectively on the metal and proving she had no such respectful relationship with this figure. Tony doubted she would react much better without the maddening effect, but maybe having something to focus her frustration on would be a welcome distraction.

At Jon's prodding, the display lit up again, back to those symbols that Tony couldn't read but added to the array to try to interpret. "That's doing something, which is better than nothing, probably. If Sundance can find out what the buttons do without actually having to press them, that would be ideal."

"I may just have reset the countdown." Jon assumes with a look over at the display. So far the symbols are not changing, at least. He may still have to actually start it. "The tower remains the same?" He can't see that one from his position, though he has still left his finger resting on the button he has pressed.

Cayde tries very hard not to bounce the cat a bit like an overgrown baby, especially seeing as how she's content with chewing on Tony's metal hand. That's not something Cayde would offer. He likes his hands, and his gloves, thanks.

"Reset it for what though?" he frowns, scowling at the screens before going to look outside. Iron Man may or may not come with him depending on how fastened onto him Countess is.

"...uh...." The Exo looks at Tony then. "You're seeing this too, right?" he asks, giving a meaningful up-nod in the direction of the tower.

The Countess was dragged away from her chewtoy with a dissatisfied grumble as Iron Man lingered, watching Jon instead with an inquisitive tilt of his head until Cayde was luring him over. That didn't sound good. He joined the Exo at the doorway, squinting through the sunlight up at the tower, which was...not doing anything. "It's off," he reported, not sure enough how to process that information to commit to more than a dry account. Like the display screen before it, the light in the tower was just...off now. Which was certainly something. "Does that mean off-off?" he asked, and turned back to the squirming animal, like she might be able to tell him or had any good reason to calm down and stop being irritated.

"...off?" Jon asks, disbelief in his voice as he makes his still comparably slow walk over to the door and peer outside as well, blinking twice. No. That can't be right, can it?

His own attention shifts back to the wrapped mothcat when a dull, rumbling noise resonates through the small building, just a large piece of machinery powering down. The low, steady background noise that has been present this entire time without really being notable dies away with it, filling the cabin with that sort of silence that suddenly seems much too loud.

"Wha-" Jon starts, daring little more than whispering that half-word while looking back to the screen, which again appears dead. Entirely dead. Not filled with the darkness of being on stand-by but properly deactivated.

"...that's.... Probably not a good thing."

Head lifting at the sound, Cayde exchanges a look with the others then. "Power's out. So's that weird ringing at the back of my head." Which is a relief to know it hadn't just been him. "I mean...we would've tried shutting it all down some way or another, right?" he suggests as he follow's Jon's attention towards the screen and back.

Glancing down at the cat bundle in his arms, easing a hand to try petting Countess's head. "How's that? Better?" His holding the cat is about the only thing keeping him from bounding off to try jumping up to the top of the tower or shooting at it to test things.

Turning the whole array off was kind of what Tony had been hoping to do since they found it, so he snorted his disbelief at Jon's pessimism and pointed out, "We've been messing around in here and this whole time, you could have got it in one." It was hard to know whether just pressing that button would have been effective from the start, but Jon certainly had made his impression.

Luckily, Iron Man was not held back by a cat on board and was quickly taking to the air again, circling the strange, dead boundary of the tower zone only with brief hesitation before daring to breach it. Nothing knocked him immediately out of the air like it had Cayde, and flying ever closer to the source of their headache wasn't prompting the suit to warn him of strange overloads or fluctuations. It was just a big hunk of metal, sitting in a barren circle.

From the air, he could still watch the camera to keep an eye on any changes to the control room while he hovered in front of where the light used to be, then gave it an experimental nudge. His tinny voice came from both Cayde and Jon's communicators without warning as he announced, "There's nothing up here. It's just a tower."

Jon watches Tony fly over to the tower long enough to make sure he doesn't see the man getting hit back down to the ground before moving over to Cayde and the Countess, who looks around in irritation, ears swiveling back and forth between little shakes of her head followed by slight squirming attempts.

She doesn't try to go for Jon's hand, however, when he reaches out to carefully pet her head. "Oh, Countess... I'm so sorry." From there Jon looks up at the Exo and nods. "I think she's fine now."

With Tony's message cutting through as well, Jon wordlessly offers to take the feline from Cayde, should the Hunter wish to take a look himself.

"Well that's convenient," Cayde mutters at Tony's findings. He looks down at the cat, and at Jon's gesture he slowly turns Countess and all the sheets over, still somewhat hesitant in case it looks like the cat might still be hostile.

He lingers just long enough to make sure the Archivist won't find himself a chewtoy before he goes to dash off outside. He stops about midway, looking down at something on the floor before he nods to himself and continues on to join Tony at the tower. With Tony checking things up above, he goes back to the base where the underground equipment had been.

"There's no power flux, and I wasn't hearing and seeing things on the way in- were you Stark? I think this thing's completely dead," he reports over his own comm once Sundance patches him in. "The lights are all out down below too. Seems too good to be true."

Strange Noises & Too Many Legs

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now we're in the wrong order, absolute chaos

Tasty tasty chaos~

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