etrayalogs | OPERATION: YOUTHFUL DISOBEDIENCE

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OPERATION: YOUTHFUL DISOBEDIENCE

WHO: Members of the grand curfew-breaking plan!
WHEN: During the Moorecroft event.
WHERE: Various Moorecroft locales.
WHAT: A bunch of youths have gotten together to break curfew in tandem to get to the bottom of the mystery at heart of this place -- but what they find leads to more questions than answers.
NOTES\WARNINGS: Probable violence, death, emotional trauma, cursing. All the fun stuff! I'll be putting the log headers for pre/during/post-curfew breaking logs in the comments, so just hang tight while I do that, though all members are of course more than welcome to post their own logs if that suits their tagging style better.

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[ Krouse doesn't bat an eye at Riz's get up. God knows he's ended up in his share of borrowed - or stolen - attire over the years. He'd be relieved to see Riz in a clown costume, as long as he saw him.

There's something about going through the shit together that does that. Even if he didn't like him, it'd help take the jittering edge off his nerves to add another mostly intact head to the count. Because he likes him, he's just stuck with giving a damn about how he's doing beyond breathing, a slight worried pinch between his eyes as he looks Riz over. ]

Laundry. The true bane of the intrepid investigator's existence.

[ He straightens up where he's sitting, ignoring the spasm of wrenched muscles from shoulder to hip, and pastes on a thin smile. ]

As for how it went, well - I think I have an idea of why there's a curfew. [ He takes a short, hard pull on his cigarette, which is more of the fifth of the daylight hours than the second. ] Carnivorous shadow monsters.

Wait, for real? That's great!

[ Riz brightens almost immediately. It's funny, how easy it is to change his mood; he'd trudged here exhausted, run-down, in-pain, but it's as though he manages to shed it all immediately through virtue of pure force of will and, perhaps, a little mental illness. Still, anything that makes him feel better about this whole thing? He'll take it. ]

I don't mean it's great-great, obviously, just that it's great you managed to find anything out at all. I was getting a little worried that this whole thing was gonna be a bust after everyone's hard work. [ He drags a hand along the nape of his neck. ]

C'mon, let's talk inside. I wanna sit on an actual chair. [ He claps Krouse's shoulder as he hops up the stairs with more agility than he really should (ouch, his muscles pleasantly inform him, which he's ignoring on account of the fact that there's work to do), and glances back with a wry grin. ] We're already a bunch of delinquents. Smoking indoors is the least of our crimes.

[ Krouse is mid-gesture on stubbing out his cigarette before Riz grants him clemency, and he feels a little ridiculous when his brain catches up to what he was doing. ]

True enough.

[ He sticks the filter in his mouth so he can haul himself up with his good hand on the railing, smiling around it. It figures shadow horrors would make Riz's day. And why shouldn't they? He's right about it being better than nothing.

The interior of their haphazard meeting room is as they left it, currently in a lull of visitors aside from the pair of them. That's for the best. It'll be easier to keep smoking if someone new shows up, what with being able to cite precedent. He wanders over to a grey plastic chair and drops himself into it, snagging an empty ceramic mug for a makeshift ashtray on the folding table next to him. ]

So. [ He claps his hand on his knee, regretting the brisk corniness immediately. ] Shadow monsters. Where do you want to start?

Oh, hell yes, someone left coffee in here.

[ It's almost a day old by now, certainly, cold and black and not at all appetizing, but Riz helps himself to one of the mugs and pours himself a cup anyway. The coffee being shit's never stopped him before, and it's not going to stop him now. He'd had some this morning already, obviously, but he knows too that he's running on fumes. He's exhausted, threadbare, in more pain without respite he's been in for what has to be years now.

He's drinking the fucking coffee.

The chair creaks as he eases himself into it with a quiet groan and a thinly veiled wince, all of his injuries smarting like hell whenever he decides to do anything beyond standing perfectly still. It's fine. It's easy not to focus on it when there's more important things afoot. ]

Start at the beginning, I guess? [ He shrugs. ] I trust your judgment. You'll know what parts are important for the rest of us to know. [ From out of his briefcase, he removes a notepad and a pen, flipping it open to an empty page. ] Just don't skimp on the details.

[ Krouse doesn't bat an eye at Riz's coffee scavenging. It'll taste like stale motor oil diluted with greywater, but that's one of what a person might call the occupational hazards of this lifestyle.

Riz prepares his notetaking gear. Krouse pretends not to have noticed him wincing. He takes another drag of his cigarette, turning his head in profile to study a poster tacked on the wall that advertises a three months past rummage sale. ]

I was running interference with a few other people around the hospital. Not as a unit, but coordinating.

[ No preamble and no hesitation, his thoughts already organized more or less in the form of a report. He'd expected it to come up. ]

I noticed the manifestation in the form of small tendrils, at first. They emerged from inside of manmade structures as far as I saw. A sewer grate, cracks in the pavement. They weren't aggressive yet. I thought it might be something exploratory, connected to the surveillance system.

[ He holds the cherry of his cigarette over the empty mug, watching it glow. His eyes half-close, bags heavy beneath them. ]

They started growing after that. Growing or combining. Whichever it was, they picked up size. Not mass, I think, I couldn't get a fix on them. That's not necessarily an indicator of anything, because this place fucks with my power at its discretion.

Then they turned into mouths. [ A flicker across his face, something elusively troubling. ] Vaguely reptilian, if I had to guess. Long teeth, looked like the same stuff as the tendrils, but more so. Black. Really black, but with these little lights inside of it, almost like...when you looked out the windows on the space station.

Once those showed up, the bots went berserk trying to get us out of there. That's when I had to cut and run.

[ He rolls his cigarette loosely between his fingers, still studying the light. ]

I got the impression that I wouldn't have enjoyed ending up in one of them. Not that I'm a general enthusiast of being eaten alive.

That's about it off the top of my head.

[ Riz's hand moves like lightning across the page, sloppy, spindly letters joined together in some strange, half-aborted attempt at cursive steadily filling the page. He's writing more than Krouse is saying, his notes peppered in with his immediate observations and speculations that burst out of him at odd intervals. There's a reason why he defaults to making boards out of this sort of thing; doing this in paragraphs alone would make this look like the ramblings of a madman instead of the very organized thoughts of a madman. The distinction is valuable. ]

Mmh.

[ He doesn't answer right away, even after Krouse has gone through the trouble of providing a more cogent report than anyone could be reasonably expected to give after a long, exhausting night, very little sleep, and more than a few bruises. He gets intense when he's like this, eyes wide and focused, lip curled enough to expose one of his rarely seen upper incisors, usually covered up by his significant underbite, pausing on occasion to gnaw on the end of his pen and only just managing to restrain himself from destroying another one.

And then, abruptly, he's done. A couple hard blinks, and he's Riz again. ]

Got it. I forgot to say -- good job out there. You guys did better than I'd hoped. If not for you guys, me and Fabian wouldn't have been able to make it into the hospital at all.

[ Back to business. ]

It almost sounds like something infernal in nature. Or... celestial, maybe. That doesn't give us much to run off of, but it's better than nothing. If they're a known quantity, then the robots must be trying to --

[ Suddenly, he jabs his pen at Krouse, thoughts skipping past each other in a convoluted jumble. ]

-- you told me you didn't have powers.

[ Most of Riz's focused intensity is something Krouse catches out of the edge of his peripheral vision and absorbs through ambient sound. He gets the picture just fine. There's a pressure in Riz that he thinks he half-gets, wherever it ultimately comes from. A drive, bordering on or tipping into compulsion, to capture as much information as goblinly possible from every word and implication and potential inference he can draw.

He had that, once. He didn't take notes like that, but he watched. He absorbed and correlated and processed and strategized and obsessed, and, well. He guesses he hopes Riz has better luck than he did. Most people do.

Krouse smiles slightly at the praise, tipping his head in a nod as he brings his cigarette back to his lips, and then he grins behind it as Riz veers off from his verbal articulation of the direction he's going with his conclusion to hit on that little detail. ]

I seem to recall only strongly implying I didn't have powers.

[ He says it with smoke curling out of his smoke, blowing the rest of it out in a thin stream as he shakes his head, lifting his free hand and turning it palm up in a gesture of mild supplication. ]

Or I might have lied. Bad habit.

If it helps, you're one of the only people I felt any moral compunctions about misleading. I know you put a certain value on accurate information. That's on me. But everything else I said about powers was true, for the record. To the best of my knowledge.

[ His grin settles into a smaller, resigned smile. ]

If you have any follow up questions, I imagine I owe you. I may plead my right to silence, but no more outright lies.

[ He lies, easily and smoothly. ]

Fool me once, [ Riz says sharply, in that way of his that's a little too intense to tell if he's joking or not. ] I've got my eye on you now, Krouse!

[ He is joking, for the record. Mainly. He doesn't love being lied to, but considering the nature of powers, considering how vehement Krouse had been about the dangers of these heroes walking among them -- Riz can put two and two together. Whatever it is, it's too personal for him to give away unless he absolutely has to.

And in a case like this one, he absolutely had to. Riz wouldn't be surprised if the other guys on Krouse's team got to hear about his powers, but nobody else managed to. Which means it's probably a pretty open secret by now. As one secretive guy to another, Riz tends to have little to no faith in anyone else's ability to keep a secret, provided it's interesting enough and at least seems harmless on the surface. Some guy's cool powers, especially if they don't know all about how powers in Krouse's world are manifested, make for perfect gossip.

Krouse has to know that Riz will be reverse-engineering his trauma as soon as he discovers what his powers are. No getting around that one. ]

I appreciate the vote of confidence in the accuracy of my intel, even if I don't appreciate the lie. [ He opens his eyes again, brows raising in obvious interest. ] So? What're your powers? Spill!

[ Krouse smiles affably, accepting Riz's definitely mostly a joke with a little you got me, fair enough shrug, like he's not ranking Riz somewhere at the top of the list of people who are inevitably going to find out sooner or later. That's later's problem. He's reasonably good at making things later's problem.

For now's problem, he picks up the empty mug he's been using as an ashtray, pushing his power into the ceramic heft of it, an invisible, undetectable extension of some humming force he has never fully understood. He glances across the room, brushing his power over other, similar mugs, then extends into one of them. The line of connection hums.

One second, he's holding one mug. That same second, he's holding a mug of the same shape and size, but an entirely different colour, and a painted smiling sun on the side. ]

I'm a teleporter.

[ He swaps the mugs again, then sets the original back down. ]

A swap based teleporter. I can move things of about the same heft, switch them with each other. Doesn't matter what the thing is. People, objects, organic, inorganic. I can do some disassembly, if something is composed of different parts, but I do have a Manton limit. Technical term back home meaning my brain has a self-imposed block that stops me from using my power to take off my own arm, which also means I can't do that to anyone else. Not that I want to - that's more a reassurance for passengers that I couldn't accidentally leave your kidneys somewhere if I tried.

[ The vast majority of that is even true. He smiles at Riz, taking another drag off his cigarette, and taps it into the mug. ]

I triggered when my home town got hit with a disaster. I needed to be able to take a trip, so, here I am.

[ After everything he told Riz about how trigger events work, he can guess how his brain will move sooner or later. He prefers to head it off at the pass. It's an explanation that is more or less completely bullshit, but he's told the lie internally enough he can half-believe it himself. ]

Oh. And unlimited use. I don't think I have a power limit except line of sight and eyestrain. All in all, I lucked out.

You see why it's something I was keeping to myself. Back home, mover powers like that? They get you on a team, one way or another, and that wasn't my thing.

[ Something that keeps on getting him about magic in other worlds (or whatever the hell terminology they use for it; as far as Riz is concerned, it's all magic) is the fact that it seems absolutely limitless. Sure, nobody has the same sort of flexibility and skill as Adaine does as a high level caster, but they seem to be able to do it continuously, endlessly, without worrying about spell slots or limited resources or anything other than getting physically tired.

It's useful. And dangerous. From the way his eyes gleam, he's already thinking over all of the possible uses of teleportation -- and maybe how he would have utilized Krouse if he'd just known in advance, but that's behind them now. ]

That's -- incredible. And so, so useful. [ He thinks back to all the battles they've faced down, the mess at the row and the ruction, Kalvaxus and the dwarven skateboarders and the street fights and everything in between. ] As long as you're smart enough to use it strategically. You could put someone else at...

[ Gain some height with a friend. Swap out the friend and your enemy, and while they're still bewildered, push. He chooses not to say it out loud because it makes him look like a sociopath, but he's sure as hell thinking it. ]

Damn. Remind me to get Gorgug to make you some really, really good binoculars, if it works like that. Sorry to immediately do the exact thing you're trying to avoid, but you gotta admit we're just gonna keep getting into shit. Might as well maximize your ability to game the hell out of a bad situation. [ ... ] Uh, sorry about your hometown too, man. Your Mom made it out of it okay too?

[ Of course Riz remembers Krouse has a mom. It's a fairly mundane detail, and not easy to lose track of. And of course he's the kind of guy, with his own close relationship to his mother, who'd think to ask.

It still gets him. He'd been all winding up to laugh lightly and nod, keep delving into Riz's enthusiasm for the concept - someone who just instantly gets how teleporting works as a tool - but now he's thrown, for a second. Genuinely, in a way he doesn't expected, affected by a simple show of consideration. ]

Yeah.

[ His smile is quick, unguarded, relieved. ]

Yeah, she's okay. She wasn't even there when it happened.

[ He doesn't say thanks for asking, but it would be kind of unnecessary. It's obvious in how he leans back in the plastic community centre chair, some tension leeched out of his shoulders. ]

It works with binoculars. I did it with a telescope, once, although that's really more of a situational thing. Doesn't work with screens. I think I have to be able to see the actual light reflecting off of something. Don't ask me why.

[ And then it's right back to the powers nitty-gritty, and Krouse is giving away a lot more information than he usually would volunteer. It doesn't feel like talking to a contingent ally, or a potential rival, or the usual combination of both in one person. It kind of feels more like -

More like talking to Jess, back in the day. When she and him were working it all out, patching together a system to understand what they were capable of with her cape nerdom and his ability to rapidly absorb anything he found compelling enough to really focus on.

Jess would like Riz. A lot. He can see it, her leaning forward in her chair, piercings glinting, sinking deep into heated discussions right off the bat. ]

You're right. It's probably past time for me to stop half-assing hiding it. No getting out of the powers gig now, right? [ He pulls on his cigarette, banishing Jess back to the back of his mind, but some wistfulness lingers, the spark of unexpected familiarity not extinguished. ] And you're right about whatever you were going to say about putting someone somewhere they don't want to be.

I used to main a - well, the classes don't matter. But it was a lot of negotiating other players into environmental hazards, putting them into the damage radius of their own allies, assisting my team into more advantageous positions. Same core concept, more or less. And who said video games were a waste of time?

[ He rolls his cigarette between his fingers, lightly, and decides to put one more card on the table. It's already pretty much out there, after his performance last night. ]

I've done it in real life before, too. Nothing too wild. But it's been helpful in some tight spots.

Okay. Okay, cool. Glad she got to stay out of it -- even if she didn't get any cool powers as a result. She probably doesn't need 'em anyway, [ Riz says with a crooked smile, from one mama's boy to another; like recognizes like, and he has a feeling that his Mom has her hands full with just trying to keep an eye on Krouse without grappling with a dramatic shift in identity herself. ]

It makes sense that it wouldn't work on-screen. The same goes for most magic that requires you to see someone back where I'm from too. You're not really seeing the person, you know? There's some, like, distortion there by necessity. It tracks that a spell that's all about moving matter requires you to actually have a grasp on the physical space where you're moving it to. [ He cracks a small smile. ] Besides. From your whole, uh, e-gamer standpoint, being able to teleport through video cameras would be wayyyyy overpowered. It'd ruin the whole balance of the thing.

[ He's joking, obviously. Being overpowered is a great thing. Riz himself would really love to be overpowered instead of scrounging around in the dark. No superpowers, no strength, not a whole lot of anything beyond his mind and his grit and his gun. He's jealous, sometimes, of people like Gorgug who can swing an axe with ease, or people like Adaine who can just create something out of nothing. And now Krouse, who has the power for someone better at using their mind than their fists.

Lucky man. ]

Sounds like the power went to the right person. Teleportation like that would be pretty useless in the hands of someone with only half a brain to use it with. [ Okay, so he can be a little judgmental. So sue him. It still drives him crazy to see some of his classmates with spectacular skills, but absolutely no canniness on the field with which to use them. ] Utility's the name of the game there. What's the coolest thing you've ever done with it?

[ Compared to most people with powers, Krouse was already overpowered. He wasn't even close to being the strongest member of his team. He had more flexibility than anyone but Jess and Cody, but that was it.

Riz gets how much utility can trump raw firepower, in the right hands. That's one of the reasons Krouse decides that all he's giving the comment about his power scaling balance is a smile and a shrug of agreement. He's not getting into some of the theories he has about why it so happens that he has the limits he does, or why they're less restrictive than most triggers, or how the whole comment about limiting overpowered abilities is closer to being a literal truth than Riz might've put together yet.

He's got another more immediate problem, besides suppressing the intrinsic fuck, no about the idea of his mom ending up with a power. Another thing he's not getting into. She doesn't need powers. She doesn't need to fucking deal with what having a power is like.

Krouse has to figure out an example of the coolest thing he's ever done with his power, and the problem isn't that he lacks examples. For all the shit that came with the lifestyle, there were things he did that were undeniable cool. They were also all pretty much felonies.

Well, Riz, he imagines saying, One time I swapped three cop cars in five seconds with parked cars on the side of a city street using the rear view mirror of a car I stole while it was in motion.

His face is probably showing too much of his struggle to narrow it down. He hopes it's innocuous looking enough to suggest misdemeanours. ]

Well, [ he says, stalling ] it depends on what you mean by cool. There are plenty of definitions.

[ A total nothing of a sentence, but it gives him time to click on something. He smiles wider, dredging up an early memory. ]

I used to know a guy who was a kinetic accelerator. He could charge things up, then let them go. It looked like super strength throwing, but it was more than that. And I'm guessing you're familiar with the whole acceleration times mass equals force equation.

When I switch things, they keep their momentum and direction. So we had some synergy. He'd throw, I'd swap. We used to practice with fruit. Figuring out how our powers worked, you know?

And one day, we decided to scale up. There was this election going on, and this one guy running - total prick. And we weren't doing anything else, one afternoon, so he said hey - let's go out and do some community service.

Mostly just an excuse to throw watermelons at billboards. Punched right through that guy's head a dozen times, up and down main street, three am. I'd throw one watermelon up in the air, he'd charge one he was holding, and I'd switch. It was such a fucking stupid idea. I mean, we could have punched holes in a bunch of innocent businesses if I'd blown the timing. But it was -

[ His eyes have taken on a shine, a ripple of old laughter underpinning the words. Him and Luke, driving up and down a mostly empty city street, Luke blowing weed smoke out of the passenger window while Krouse blew cigarette smoke out on the opposite side, backseat full of watermelons. ]

It was fun.

[ Krouse takes a drag off his cigarette. He tries not to remember Luke's face, his lazy, half-sad smile, his beanie pulled down over the kind of terrible haircut Jess improvised for him with kitchen scissors. ]

I'm not sure that's the coolest thing. But what good are fantastic powers if you don't dick around with them, right?

Okay, I know for a fact that that's not the coolest thing you've done with them, [ Riz says, a quiet laugh on his breath, ] but I'll let it slide this time. Sometimes the funnest thing trumps the coolest thing.

[ He's naturally curious, but he gets it. There's a lot of cool shit that he and his friends have done that have been wrapped up in some of the most horrifically traumatic days of their lives -- and after all that, it's hard to find a way to make it wrap back around to being cool again. Another day, maybe he'd do a little more prying.

Today? After everything they'd been through? Even if they're not putting the clues together, they deserve a laugh or two. Even Riz would rather think about Krouse and his buddies fucking around with their powers instead of the nascent apocalypse, or the guy that died under Riz's watch, or the hundred unknowns still surrounding them.

Honestly, he could probably use a day of petty destruction. It's good for the soul. ]

That sounds like exactly the kinda stuff people would get up to back home too. If you've got magic, you might as well fuck around with it. [ Riz is largely at peace with his own abilities, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't a little envious of the magic users, sometimes. They can just do so much. ]

My friend Fig, she can, like -- there's this spell called Disguise Person? And once this guy was hassling me, and so she turned into him and started menacing him right back.

[ She menaced him right into jumping off the pier. He decides not to mention that part, as to not ruin the vibe. ]

It was awesome. It's probably a good thing I don't have any. I get myself into enough trouble as it is.

[ Riz is letting Krouse off the hook. He doesn't know how big of a metaphorical fish it is he's letting go, but he's still doing it. And he's laughing it off, the quiet, tired laugh of someone who's as bruised at the edges today as Krouse is.

It feels comfortable. Familiar. Like shrugging into an old hoodie to step outside to smoke, worn cotton soft at the wrists. ]

They're overrated. Which I know sounds like a dick thing for a guy with essentially magic powers to say, considering my position of privilege, here, but - seriously. More fun for messing around with than anything else. Party tricks. Or mindfucking.

[ Krouse grins, easy and slender, ashing his cigarette into the mug again. ]

I'd abuse the hell out of Disguise Person. That's pure cheese, man. People underestimate how much havoc you can cause with a little impersonation.

I bet you've thought of that, though. I mean, here - imagine turning up as Aurora one of these days. You could get people to do anything if you posed it as a mission. Half of these idiots would go for it. You know I'm right.

You're right, that is a dick thing to say, and you're wrong, 'cause magical powers are super cool. I mean, come on, man. Chronomancy? Interplanar travel? Really, really big fuck-off fireballs? What I wouldn't give.

[ He'd also like Krouse's power, though it pales in comparison to others that he's seen. He's still grinning though, nice and easy; as pale and exhausted as he seems, he looks comfortable, limbs loose and expression slack in a way that they rarely are. For once, he's not on guard. ]

But, y'know, thanks for trying to make me feel better about it. Disguise Person is the last one I'd want, though. I'm so shitty at, like, tricking people and coming up with backstories and stuff. Though I think I could just about pull off a robot. Get everyone to haul my groceries home for a week.

[ And living with Fabian and Gorgug? That's a lot of groceries. ]

My friend's a total whiz at it, though. You know, once she disguised herself as like, a medical student? And it worked! We got into the hospital! We got all the way into the friggin' operating room, and everyone was like, doctor, doctor, help, you're the only one we can trust!

It was insane. By the time she left the room, like, half of them were already totally in love with her. That's basically her superpower, no magic needed.

[ Everyone loves Fig. She's effervescent, smart, charismatic, too brilliant to ever be able to stay in the shadows like Riz prefers. He can't even hold it against her. How could he? He loves her too. ]

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OPERATION: YOUTHFUL DISOBEDIENCE

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