RP [Phoenix Team] - Because we Can

"Oh, balls!" Seiren spat, scrambling from his position. The shorted gauntlet had pulled a "headphone bungee" style save and was hanging from the backpack - he'd have to fix it later. He'd rather not find out what happened when a mecha fired on an unarmored body, so he activated his kinetic shoes and bounced up in the air, moving across the way.

It was at that point he spotted Cosmo, the forgotten helper MBF, launching a ball to him by way of a slingshot. Seiren whipped out his grav-bat to catch himself in midair and give himself hangtime to snatch the ball - another cryo-grenade, it seemed. He realized the dog's intent for this.

"Alright, time for a bit of hail!" He said, swinging himself from his grav-bat before flipping in the air. He tossed the grenade lightly before smashing the bat down on it, sending it speeding towards the mech's top mounted weaponry.

Then he remembered he was falling again.

 

Hellion Overlook, Cransky and Sons Self-Storage, Carpark!
Having a huge gun pointed towards you after watching your boss suddenly drop into the ground inconveniently was a highly efficient motivator - the Apachoppers face to face with Snuffles looked behind them towards the doors into the warehouse office. On the one hand, they could confront a Chelti with a huge weapon backed by a team of armed bastards, a very angry bird-owl thing, and continue answering to a boss who didn't care for your best drinking buddy didn't help either - in one biker's opinion.

The option was pretty clear, and the alternative less than pleasant. "Fine! He's your problem!" one man, scarred and wearing tattery leather coveralls said, heading towards the doors and disappearing inside. Others begun to follow suit slowly, retaining their weapons but successfully intimidated from participating in the brawl. "We're just here to wreck the building and the occupants' livelihoods like the big guy asked," one fleeing biker explained, weapon lowered and keeping their eye on the Chelti "not get wrecked by you!"

Sparrow was flying and swooping at the bikers was full of violence and screechy threats: "WE'LL WRECK YOU AND YOUR BIKES IF YOU DON'T PISS OFF!" the mouthy bird bird kept divebombing the bikers until they were corralled away inside the building. "And if I see your faces around here again, I'll crap on your bikes too!" Motorbikes could be heard revving up and disappearing into the night. However, the sound of their fleeing was masked by the gigantic mecha thrashing in the parking lot.


Breyja was host to a pair of dying men, who had only succeeded in getting their fingerprints on her guns, and making an embarrassment of themselves. With no time to finish them off lest any more arrived, she was able to limp away with a bloody knife in one hand and her submachine gun in the other.

Staying low and using the clouds of dust and confusion as cover, she was able to spot the Raiken the gang-bangers were planning to attack with her railgun slumped against a wall further away from the battle. She didn't get the use and harnessing of 'magic', but she could tell the iron-scaled wanderer was at the end of their rope. It was highly unlikely anyone would try and take her on with such an ally nearby.


♫ Nuclear Throne - Big Bandit ♫

Atop the warehouse, Seiren's stunt with the baseball and grenade had resulted in a flurry of ice shards rained down on the mech - the point defence lasers on its shoulder were pierced and disrupted by the shard volley, knocking its aim way off course and disabling it. Similarly, the missile pods were disrupted, with a cook-off (how ironic) occurring because of a primed missile's payload detonating. A blast on the shoulder put the mech off balance.

Seeing the opportunity to move in, Luca charged with the candy-spike rifle in hand, aiming for the chest and the neck of the armour. The spikes of sucrose weren't doing much against the steel and hellenium plating at a distance, but getting closer yielded pinholes upon the metal. The closer I get, the better chance I have of striking something vital. The man in red meditated as the spiker started to sputter, spitting ineffectual slivers. The gun ran dry - Luca hadn't an opportunity to reload in the heat of the fight. Cursing his luck, he tried to backpedal and put distance back between himself and Driver. Shit - why now?

Via slingshot, Cosmo passed him a vial of additional liquefied ammunition - but as Luca leapt up to catch it, a much larger hand swooped in wrapped around him, pulling him to 'eye' level with the battered Mecha and squeezing him. Seiren meanwhile landed hard on his side, looking up at Luca in the mecha's grip. Cosmo barked in fear, trying to grab something else to slingshot at the mecha in a hurry - the Driver's other hand raised, and peppered Cosmo's area with fire, forcing the MBF to retreat.

With the subject of his grudge in hand, Driver chuckled low and deep, "What good is a soldier..." his voice eminated from the damaged speakers in the mecha's head, crackling and afuzz with distortion. They looked around the lot - they had seen the Maidenhand, the Raiken, and the Sentai unable to fight - and the lone chelti at ground level wasn't focussing on them, "when their team cannot be there to save one from their mistakes?"

Writhing inside the metal hand, Luca scowled. "Your mistakes, or mine? Are you still dwelling - on the breakdown of EAD?" he retaliated, staring daggers at the mecha's face. "That was then - this is now - you made your shitty decisions, and now-" there was a squeeze from Driver's mecha, forcing the breath out of Luca, "-you're ruining innocent people's lives and protecting those who'd prey upon them, for what?" He knew money wasn't a sole motivator - the thrill of combat was an irresistible siren-song for both men - left to find their own reasons to fight.

The hand tightened, stopping Luca from talking further, and letting Driver say his piece. "You saw the news reels, the broadcasts - they tarred us EADs with the same brush, dismissing any good deeds we'd done, to reframe everything as evil." The pilot's voice slowly rose as he recalled each whirling headline he was forced to see from a prison hospital bed. "'Monsters in human clothing', 'dangerous weapons liable to go off at any minute', unstable! War criminals!"

Driver was panting haggardly after his tirade, now focussing on crush Luca. His face turned red as blood was rushing to his head while he croaked for air, and one of the mecha's fingers placed pressure upon his neck. "They hate us!" Driver summated, referring to the public. "Why fight public opinion, when you can revel in infamy?"

♫ Streets of Fury - Odds ♫

Seiren, Cosmo, Ravnir, Breyja, and Snuffles could hear something heavy crashing into the ground outside the front of the warehouse, followed by hydraulics whirring and suddenly pushing out. Up in the sky, the outline of Yttrium could be seen, backlit by the city lights. The crude gynoid's luck was infectious, and the heavy-weighted pendulum that guided her fortunes was swinging back towards Luca's - and the Phoenix Team's favour.

Driver looked up and saw two heavy-set armoured legs barrelling down towards him, and he tried to raise his hand to intercept it, but the oily giant landed hard on the mecha's shoulders, forcing their mecha to bend backwards and slam their back against the parking with their weight. "Get your hands off Lulu, you freak!" She screamed, trying to pry the suit of armour open with her appendages and peel the shell open - she'd gotten a few ideas by watching Friday night wrestling programs with Luca.

The sudden jolt had caused Driver to release his grip on Luca - sending him spiralling away and landing hard on his chest and bouncing across the lot - short of breath and already nursing tender muscles. He gasped his first breath of fresh air, but his chest felt like millions of pins and needles were stabbing him, and his vision had started to blacken from shock.

Come on - come on - keep it together... Luca told himself, feeling the back of his neck - his adrenal implant was malfunctioning, and a second wind was unable to grace him as he started crawling towards a truck to hide under. Driver had seen the implant getting put in - fitting for him to ruin it. The grapple stunner had also sustained damage in the crushing, rendering it broken for the moment.

A screech of metal filled the lot, followed by the chestplate of the mecha being cast aside by Yttrium, ripping layers of mecha-musculature and subsystems away to find a prize. "Huah?" The gynoid emoted, single eye blinking as she examined an empty cockpit. "Where's the pilot...?" Yttrium asked aloud.

Upon hearing the crude fail to locate Driver, Luca was shocked that Driver - for all his personal pomp and circumstance, still had a self-preservation instinct for when the tables turned on him - offered perhaps by Tanhauss. They had the resources to make such things disposable - and a remote controlled mecha seemed... perhaps a bit too apt. A lot of Tanhauss' produce was disposable some way or another.

That... Gormless... Fucking... Twat! Luca mused with a breathless growl, allowing himself to black out, legs sticking out from underneath a truck. Snuffles could see him laying undignified, and the hardlight elements on his jacket and forearm-grapplegun sparking electricity. At least the Apachoppers had cleared out and everyone could regather their bearings with relative safety.

 

Seiren wheezed his way off the ground of the warehouse lot, air hissing through his grit teeth.

"Gotta stick the landing," he groaned, clutching the side of his body he landed on. He wobbily got back on his feet. Seiren looked around cautiously for a moment but then shrugged and picked up his bat. Yttrium's mention of the missing Driver made Seiren wander over to the pit with the mech still in it and hopped onto the shoulders of it. He retreived a utility tool from his bag and began disassembling the mounted weapons eagerly.

"Claiming salvage rights right now! Got dibs! Total dibs!" Seiren called over his shoulder to the others.

 

Hellion Overlook, Cransky and Sons Self-Storage, Carpark
The action had wound down. Wisps and plumes of smoke rose from the wreckage of Driver's mecha - if it even was his mecha. Yttrium stood amongst the Phoenix Team, freshest of the arrivals. She could see Luca was being carried by the Chelti - and a bird was perched upon Luca's butt. The little sugar-scented one was hot on his heels to begin trying to salvage the scrapped mecha, with a little multitool.

From what Seiren could surmise, there was a remote control system - but the connection had gone cold. Data modules were still intact behind the pilot's seat, and the model of mecha - upon further inspection, was a knockoff. The most sophisticated thing in it was the remote control system - everything else physical and material simply wasn't built to last beyond the previous conflict.

There was a wail from out the front of the carpark - a familiar drone of police sirens, and Unit peacekeeping - or peacemaking, depending on severity. This had become a familiar pattern - things happened around the Crude, then the police show up. At least Units didn't hold an agenda were on someone else's payroll - they were only armed with facts presented to them, and previous information.

One such Unit was the first to veer down the alley leading to the carpark Yttrium was standing in, floating past the passed out Raiken, making sure to avoid their bladed tail. Breyja was paid no mind either - but police weren't as discerning, kneeling down to ask questions to the battered Maidenhand.

The rubbery face of the Unit looked at Yttrium up and down. "Ms. Maganese." It stated, without fear or favour. Other Unit drones were moving around the scene, taking forensic photographs of various blood stains, splatters, and impacts. "This seems to be a recurring thing..." Even though there was minimal intonation in the robot's voice, Yttrium could tell the bot was displeased at the ruckus caused.

The curvy synthetic almost bounced on her pnumatics with each step - her single eye exploring the scene, her body wrapped in a cowl. Yttrium took careful note of where the drones were and what they focused on and instead was looking for anything they might not have noticed.

Her synthetic hand reached forth, fingers reaching beneath the rim of a truck as she bent down carefully: tipping slowly to look beneath - her posture unusual, exposing her shining backside. Her ever curious eye spotted something: gazing her hand over to assure herself she had no fingertips to taint evidence before she withdrew from beneath the truck a fire-arm.

"Is this sort of thing normal?" she checked the chamber with large hands before offering it to the robot at her side. "This doesn't quite look like anything I'm really familiar with."

The robot took the discarded firearm and turned it over in their hands. Its eyes studied the make and model of the gun, looking for maker's marks or an identification. "This is from Noir. If the serial number is not forged, then this gun is stolen, or a duplicate of said stolen gun."

The Unit passed the gun to a drone to safely contain, before looking towards Yttrium and intertwining its fingers. "Security camera footage from adjacent captured some portions of the incident, involving Mr. Pavone and his crew. Prior to that however, we also have recordings of the Apachopper gang moving in."

Other humanoid Units and drones, in addition to armed police were moving into the warehouse and the adjacent office, searching for more evidence. "This seems to be part of a series of gang attacks upon business owners. We do not know the motives or reasons for this..."

Its eyes glanced towards Luca - or rather, his posterior hoisted on the Chelti's shoulders. "...but he might."

Yttrium smoothly stood upright, feeling a soft hiss from her pistons as she settled back down to the shortest profile she could assume: wrapped in her bodycape for the sake of trying to be professional. Standing aside the robot, she began to ponder where such a thing could be found or why - her gaze like everybody elses now, fixed on Luca.

Snuffles looked around in confusion at the staring faces, before edging out from behind the truck.

The Unit made a simple request for the Chelti. "Lay him down carefully. Please." The bird perched on Luca fluffled its feathers in irritation - it was a comfy rump. "His neck implants are malfunctioning." The couch the Apachoppers had dragged out of the office (and the Drones were stashing empties into evidence bags) seemed occupied.

Mister Snuffles looked the robot up and down, big eyes tracing be before the bird flew off and Snuffles hauled Luca off its shoulder and knelt down to lay him on the ground with only the softest of thuds. Kneeling over Luca, Snuffles looked back up at the robot again, staying strategically quiet as it peered at the crude likeness of a man. Luca was breathing softly, but laboured in his unconscious state, many of the panels in his under armour crushed, face pale from internal bleeding.

"We need to fix him," Yttrium frowned, visibly disturbed to see him like this. "Is he going to die? Can we get him to a doctor?" -- She was very clearly tempted to peel the armor off - fingers ready to do so, flexing but she could only hesitate - frightened she might break him.

The Unit's hands came together, weaving something from hardlight before a tool coalesced, gently cutting and lifting sections of his jacket away. Beneath wasn't a pretty sight - the crushed ribs the patient had sustained was turning his flesh a myriad of bruised blues and black. Analysing and looking through his body, the Unit was quick to deduce the problems "Three broken ribs, one crushed. Some internal bleeding near the stomach. Left arm dislocated at the elbow and shoulder, right arm broken midway through the humerus."

It lifted his neck up, touching fingers against a familiar set of surgical scars near his nape. "Currently rebooting his wetware..." It waited a few moments, looking down into Luca's face. His eyes opened suddenly. "There."

Looking up into the Unit's face through blurry eyes, Luca was startled into conscious via a manually-activated flood of adrenaline. "...I saw a white light, and now I'm looking at you." He said, heaving a very heavy sigh - a Unit's face never got any prettier to him. "...I preferred the light."

"...very funny." The Unit replied, perturbed as it looked towards the mecha Seiren was running rough shod upon to dismantle. "Who owned the Mecha?" A pair of drones kindly requested Seiren to hand over the data cores, but the rest was his as far as they were concerned.

"Driver. He got away... even though he wasn't here to begin with..." Resting his head back down, his gaze wandered Yttrium, smiling weakly towards the gynoid.

Yttrium's eye folded, almost like a smile in her cheek as she stepped closer - looming over him like a worried parent.

"We've had words about this young man, you're not allowed to die" she chuckled -- looking him over once more. "How are you feeling?"

Luca shook his head just a little. "Like shit. I need a hospital before the adrenaline goes thin or I'll pass out again."

"Right away. The police and we-" the Unit referred to itself plurally, "-will continue the cleanup."

"Will call cousins for Raiken." Snuffles said, looking over their shoulder at the passed out monstrosity. Even though the Unit may not have spelled it out, the gesture was greatly appreciated, given the Raiken culture's stance on robotics. Even so - a Raiken in the middle of the Unity Protocol was a huge oddity, but the Unit before Snuffles wasn't willing to take any risks.


Hellion Overlook General Hospital, Emergency Ward
With the team moved several blocks down to a white building with sterile corridors and the stench of disinfectants, Luca and Breyja, two of the most injured members of the team were laid onto treatment beds - Tanhauss branded ones.

The irony of it wasn't lost on Yttrium as she got to watch her ward get flooded with medical nanites, and an hour later he was good to go - with the condition that he spend a few days resting to let the bones knit correctly. Breyja's injuries healed much faster and didn't require a rest period, on account of being a Maidenhand. Her body was designed to be taken apart and pieced back together for battlefield duty as soon as possible.

"This may seem like the obvious, but I don't want him doing anything too strenuous." The doctor on duty advised Snuffles, Seiren and Yttrium. "Can any of you you make sure he stays still?" He spelled out, fencing with his pen and tapping it against his clipboard. Will he stay still at all? His records say otherwise...

Snuffles looked up from gnawing at an itchy plaster over their arm to peer at the doctor questioningly.

"Doc. Tying the Shagpile Mophead to the bed doesn't work. I'm pretty sure Black Lard over there has tried." Squawked the bird pet grumpily from Snuffles' other shoulder. Fluffing himself up and shaking to work out a cramp from being inside and not allowed to fly for so long in the wards.

"Does he have any video games, favourite movies or something? A hobby other than serial heroics?" The doctor questioned, glancing back down towards the clipboard. "I saw him and you on the news earlier."

"Framerunning and wrestling is a passion, but not a hobby... Football," Yttrium replied "...And the occasional oil-painting." something sounded smug in her tone as she looked Luca over, a thumb of metal running over his cheek delicately. "Is he going to be okay? I ...Don't know that much about mammillian life. Organs, blood, all of that. Very confusing to me."

Looking back down at his clipboard, the doctor took inventory of his treatments, then addressed Yttrium. "He's on a program of medical nanites. They are instructed to mend the broken bones and stem the bleeding. If this process is interrupted by - say, a call to heroics or a truck..."

The doctor's examples seemed a bit off colour - it was late and he was tired, "we'll be back at square one and his injuries will reopen. Otherwise, he'll pass the nanites when they've done their job."

"So, alcohol allowed, right?" The bird asked hopefully. The chelti seemed very interested in the answer too.

"I believe so." The doctor nodded. "Just make sure he doesn't get into any more fights for a few days and you should be golden." Luca could be heard heaving a sigh of relief.

Snuffles and their bird companion looked at each other, and then back to Luca. Then Snuffles reached for the net gun and aimed it at Luca laying on the hospital bed. It was clear what the chelti thought of how likely that would come to pass. The fact that the net gun also had the exact appearance as a four barrelled shotgun might surprise some.

As if with a start, Luca shot up from his prone position with a sidearm in hand and a steely gaze. The doctor thought it'd been surrendered at the front desk, then again, so had supposed to have been the chelti's. "Damned if I'm going to be shot at in a hospital bed," Luca grumbled, laying back down and shaking his head. The doctor looked at him in mortified shock, before looking at the chelti too.

"...just get out of my emergency ward before you kill someone else!" The doctor stammered, the sound of wood clattering against the floor as his clipboard fell down.

"See what we mean, Doc?" Asked the bird, peering around Snuffles head, still aiming at Luca. He rose out of bed and lifted his legs up, slowly and gingerly with a grunt before finding his feet. He was wearing a gown, and he started looking for his clothing in the adjacent closet. As he walked past Snuffles and Yttrium, they could see his bare buttocks. He slipped a pair of underpants.

Yttrium tilted her synthetic head slowly, taking careful note of everything important... Mainly the buttocks before they were eclipsed with fabric.

"So if we want to smash people, we have to do it somewhere else. It might be an idea if we lay low for a few days -- or at least pretend to to see what happens, maybe...?" she spoke running that mental image moments previous through her mind. Soon, Luca had slipped on some sweatpants and a t-shirt, casting the gown away.

"If is shoot him, will he dies?" Snuffles asked, the gun still hadn't stopped pointing at Luca.

"It'd be... extremely painful." Luca replied, turning around and eyeing the chelti.

"For you~!" Yttrium piqued up, eyeing Snuffles -- her pnumatic forearm slamming back into her elbow as if she were cocking the hammer on a gun. Her expression was as sweet as ever - saccharine even but it was clear she was getting rather cross with Snuffles.

Breyja was already up and moving well before Luca was, and she had been waiting with Seiren and Snuffle's Cousins with Ravnir in tow. Or tow-truck, as it had seemed necessary. "Okay okay you two," Luca said, grabbing a duffel bag containing the rest of his equipment. "let's head back to Midway Beach for debriefing, and pizzas."

"Thank you. Please get out." The Doc urged, pointing towards the door.