Thirty Pieces of Silver? [Gemini]

[Ravager]

Gotham City. Home of the big bad Bat and his coterie of Birds, Bats and boys in shorts. Either way, it didn’t look like much. Too much Gothic architecture, too many tall, dark, looming skyscrapers that put Rose in mind of the man who liked to call it ‘his’ city. She knew there were a fair few supercrooks who’d like to dispute that claim. Rose? Rose didn’t care two pins whose city it was. Bats, Birds, Corpses. It was no skin off her aristocratic butt and she meant for it to stay that way – what she wanted was to get in, do this stupid job she’d been saddled with and get out again before the Bat or any of his sidekick-stooges found them. If they did, Rose would do her job like she’d been paid to do, and she was confident she could take any of them up to the Bat himself and hold him off long enough to get away, but that didn’t mean she wanted it.

At the least, it’d blow her cover such as it was. Dick would just get all touchy-feely about it, Tim would be all disappointed in her… Eh, she didn’t need the headache. Nope, straight in and straight out again, one surgical little strike and she’d be happier.

Naturally, they’d got the best faked IDs possible – because they weren’t actually faked. God only knew how her bosses had got them, but she wasn’t going to ask awkward question when she really knew the answer. It didn’t matter. They were real, so it’d take the locals a while to realise the helicopter and its crew heading for the one building weren’t actually… Rose paused to glance at her ID again… NSA investigating whatever. No nasty red flags so this would go off smoothly. And really, she thought, adjusting her swords in their sheaths, if the Batman had done his job properly, they wouldn’t need to be there anyway.

He’d let the latest version of the good ol’SSoSV set up shop in Gotham, then they’d rabbited and now N.O.W.H.E.R.E. was going to sweep up the pieces. All part of the service. She really didn’t know why they needed her there, when they already had a full clean-up crew, but apparently they were going with the just in case approach and wanted somebody there to slice and dice any lingering security. Fine by her. Copycat got to skive off and probably have her own fun elsewhere. Rose would just have to do the work by herself, supervise the techboys as they drained this place dry, then play nursemaid until they got it all back to HQ safely. Boring.

The helicopter hovered low and Rose hopped out, landing catlike on her feet. The rest of them followed less nimbly as the Ravager kicked down the door to the stairwell and waved them down it.

“You know the drill, boys,” she ordered. “Split up by pairs, check all the floors, report in if you see anything and find that terminal yesterday so I don’t have to explain to Mister Templar how you botched a baby-run. Got it? Then get going. You two, you’re with me. We’ll head to security.”

With that, Rose and her minions headed for security. The building seemed every bit as abandoned as promised. It was empty, silent, dark –not a single shred of life anywhere to be found. They checked room after room, but nothing. And as they did, Rose’s suspicion grew. Too easy. Way too easy. So where was the catch…?

[Gemini]

This base was compromised, at least that was what Gemini had been told when she had been sent here to supervise evacuation. Her orders had been simple; make sure all personnel left and that the virus which would destroy any society data was uploaded into the base mainframe. Those two tasks had been accomplished, which left her to proceed with the second part of her mission; observe whoever turned up to claim the spoils. If it was the government then her instructions were to keep hidden, memorising faces and appearances so that the Society would know who was hunting them, if it was somebody else though then Gemini’s instructions were very different; kill every last one of the intruders to teach whatever organisation was nosing around that the Society tolerated no interference in its business.

Sitting with her feet up on the desk and her arms crossed in the security office at the heart of the building, Gemini watched the camera feed with a bored expression. For the past two days she’d been moving around the base disguised as various small creatures or oozing through the pipes so as not to attract any attention, but she had so far seen absolutely nothing, not so much as a suspicious postman making a delivery. She was beginning to wonder whether the Society had been imagining things or had left her here as some kind of punishment, when the alarm light connected to the rooftop door started flashing. Eyes narrowing, she immediately sat up, flicking the mouse to change to the hidden camera covering the back door.

The armed men moving in through the door told her what she needed to know and Gemini immediately turned, switching off the computer with a stretching limb and headed for the ventilation grille at one end of the room and compressed herself through the gaps. She didn’t bother to reform herself properly inside the ducts, instead becoming a long, soft worm of blue rubber, stretching rapidly and soundlessly through the myriad of ducts towards the stairwell which she knew would be on the intruder’s route to the security desk.

Less than a minute later, a thin tendril of blue goo oozed out of a grille on the landing two floors above, pausing briefly to make sure the intruders hadn’t yet arrived, before slithering out fully and pooling into a puddle of blue liquid underneath the grille. Moments later the puddle partially solidified and reared up in a thin rubbery sheet which quickly adhered to the wall, changing colour and shape so that when moments later the first intruder descended the stairs, they would be greeted by a completely empty stairwell.

For the moment Gemini had no intention of attacking; she wanted to know who these men were and what tactics they were using to search the building before she acted. One of the figures that came down the stairs was very different from the others however; dressed in blue and orange with silvery metallic armour, the figure of Ravager was one that Gemini immediately recognised. Now what was the daughter of Deathstroke doing mixed up in an operation like this? She was now sure that this was not a government op, and that meant the fate of these men was now sealed, Rose Wilson though might prove useful in future.

Gemini’s gaze focussed on Ravager as she approached, watched carefully and deciding to let the intruders past even though she was close enough for them to brush against her disguised form. For the moment they were too concentrated; it would be easier to let them pass and then deal with the minions one on one before attacking Ravager.

[Ravager]

The stairwell was silent in a way that those less secure in their ability to thrash anything still in the building might have found eerie. Rose, who was secure in her ability to do just that, still didn’t like it one bit. If their intel had been on target, there should have been something by way of a response, even if just a loud alarm when they broke in. Instead, there was nothing that her enhanced hearing could pick up, nothing at all. It bothered her. When people kicked in the doors to a top security base of a secret organisation, particularly those brought in by helicopter and not exactly stealthy, it wasn’t normal in her not-humble-in-the-slightest opinion for the reception to be… nothing. There wasn’t any way that they didn’t see her team coming and, while they might not know who was onboard, that wouldn’t stop them getting ready.

So, where was the welcoming committee? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where, and she didn’t trust that one bit.

The obvious option was that they were gone, that they’d taken their stuff and run before N.O.W.H.E.R.E. had realised. Best case, that made this a total waste of time, one that was going to end with absolutely nothing at all to take back and Rose herself bored silly. On the other hand, there was the worst case scenario – it was a trap. And traps could take any number of shapes, though something told Rose that it wouldn’t be a bomb. Blowing up buildings in Gotham would just ensure that the Bats would be after the bombers with everything at their disposal, while taking all their stuff and pulling out first strongly implied that they didn’t want to attract attention. Either way, they didn’t have much choice. Unless they tripped over a bomb, they had to go forward and make absolutely one hundred per cent sure that there was nothing here, or Templar’d throw a fit.

Rose hadn’t got time to waste with that.

Still, it did mean she had a change of plans in order. Pausing at the first exit from the stairwell, Rose glanced back at her team. “We’ll play this a bit differently. Split up into two lots of three, I don’t care how. One lot takes this floor, the other takes the next floor down and I’ll take the one with the security office personally. Sweep the floors fast and thorough, then regroup in the stairwell. Any resistance…” Her grin was lopsided. “Hey, I don’t need to tell you what to do.”

The first trio, with two of them escorting the tech in the middle, broke off and made their way onto the floor. The other three and Rose continued on until the next floor, where the troops left and Rose was alone. Lacking anyone to comment on her paranoia, the Ravager paused to glance around suspiciously. No-one, but she’d been sure someone was watching her – it was instinctual, the tingle at the back of her neck that told her enemies were nearby. But the stairwell was empty and silent and, after a moment wasted looking, she shrugged and jogged down to the next floor which housed the security office. Naturally, the building had more than three floors, but only the top three had been part of this base – or so her intel had said.

Cautious, alert, the white haired woman stepped out into the main floor and began to move towards her goal, checking the offices between her and it as she went. Empty. Empty. Empty. Despite the silence and the lack of any reports so far, she was still suspicious. This was too easy, she knew it, even for an empty base…

[Gemini]

Ravager was so close that Gemini could have reached out and touched her if she wanted, but for the moment that wasn’t her plan. Instead she watched unmoving as the goons tramped past as quietly as they were capable of down the stairs, splitting from Ravager as per orders and giving Gemini exactly the opportunity she wanted, she did so love it when teams split up; it was the perfect opportunity for her to take them out one by one. For the moment though Ravager was not moving and Gemini noted the suspicious glance with interest; she didn’t know much about the former Teen Titan’s powers beyond the fact that she used swords, but somehow she seemed to know that the stairwell was not as deserted as it looked. Nonetheless after a few moments Ravager moved on, Gemini watching the girl’s back until she disappeared and then counting to ten before she moved.

Peeling away from the wall with a faint rubbery slither, she condensed herself once more into a snake like form, making herself black to blend in with the shadows, and slithered down the steps to the bottom floor of the base with a speed greater than any normal snake. The floor below was quiet but as Gemini sharpened her senses the sounds of the men moving quietly through the floor became clearer. Moving more slowly and shrinking further so that she was the size of a mouse, Gemini kept to the shadows and wormed herself along a corridor at the foot of the wall. The soldiers were bunched together; one man opening the door and checking the rooms while the other two covered him, which would make it nice and easy to take them out quietly. Moving slowly past them, Gemini began to spread herself across an unlit section of floor in a thin, dark sheet, blending in and waiting until the soldiers were right on top of her before she moved. Usually soldiers were not trained to expect razor sharp spikes to erupt from the floor they were standing on and before they had any time to realise what had happened they were already dead.

Gathering herself up again, Gemini slithered back to the stairwell, not bothering to use the stairs this time, instead stretching her thin snake like form up the gap in the middle with the speed of a bullet; it was much faster and reduced the chance of being spotted by Ravager if she was loitering near the stairs. The second group of men presented even less of a challenge than the first having split up to search more quickly. She dispatched the first man quickly, by opening a door and then shaping herself into a replica of it closed. When one of the soldiers opened her, she engulfed him, wrenching the gun out of his grasp and breaking his neck while muffling his cries for help. Taking his form she simply walked up behind the penultimate comrade, shifted her finger into a blade and disposed of him two. It was only with the last soldier that something went wrong; as she dug enlarged fingers into his neck, taking her time choking him, he managed to flick his radio button on. Although she immediately muffled any further sounds he made, Gemini was sure that Ravager would be suspicious about the radio clicking and then hearing nothing. Dropping her last victim, Gemini liquefied once more and oozed into the ventilation ducts, now that she’d finished with the warm ups she was more than ready for the main act.

Pouring herself out of a grille, she slithered towards a corridor in the main floor and settled down to wait at a crossroads that Ravager was likely to pass. She briefly considered blending in with the floor, but decided not to; instead she simply relaxed into a puddle of viscous cobalt blue goo, her most basic form. Gemini hoped that it would appear to Rose that someone had dropped some kind of industrial waste on the floor and simply left it there when the base was abandoned. She really hoped Ravager would enjoy the surprise, Gemini knew she would.

[Ravager]

Given her uncertainty that the information that they were working off was valid, Rose was patiently checking each room for ambushes as she moved, taking her time and being thorough. She’d turned up nothing so far and was considering stepping up her timetable and daring anything waiting just ambush her so she could get on with this.

The radio at her belt clicked. Then nothing.

Rose paused in her slow walk, but heard nothing beyond the one sound. And that meant whoever had pressed the button was almost certainly dead. And that meant that she’d been right. Someone had been watching them. Thoughts spun through her mind. If one was dead, that meant that all three of that fire team were down too or she would have heard something like gunfire. And Rose had a sneaking suspicion that the lack of any response from the other three soldiers with her meant that they were dead too, only without any chance to radio for help. She was now alone, dealing with an unknown number of enemies who were probably between her and her exit, on a mission that was a total waste of time and with no idea of whether any of their intel about the structure of this place was even accurate.

She smirked. Oh, this was going to be fun – just like the good old days.

Drawing one of her swords from its sheath, Rose resumed her advance, taking her time as she checked each room and corridor before she risked moving past it. Her adrenaline was pulsing at a steady rate now, so that her precog ought to warn her of any nasty surprises, but she was in no mood to do anything but slaughter whoever else was in here without getting a scratch, then go back to HQ and explain the definition of decent intel to whichever idiot assigned this mission. It’d better not have been Templar.

The first two corridors were empty, but, as she came to the intersection of two more, she found something that was definitely out of place. The rest of the building had been stripped, abandoned and left practically like new. Nothing useful had been left, nothing at all that could possibly give any clue as to what was going on here. On top of which, she hadn’t spent years training with and working beside people like Slade and Nightwing for nothing. So, when in an otherwise empty building, she came across a puddle of goo just left in the middle of the corridor, her response was to stop and eye it suspiciously.

It could be anything. Acid, glue, some sort of contact based explosive. But to Rose, it suggested one thing. Ambush. It was way too convenient for anything else and she had no intention of going anywhere near it. Instead, she stopped a little more than a sword’s length away, stared for a moment, then shrugged.

“So, this is your great ambush attempt?” She demanded of whoever was watching. “How stupid do you really think I am? Please, stop embarrassing us all and come out so I can chop you into sushi and get this over with.”

[Gemini]

Staying perfectly still, Gemini watched as Ravager approached cautiously, taking in the details of Rose Wilson’s appearance and cataloguing them for possible future use. Before today she’d only seen a few blurred cctv pictures of Deathstroke’s daughter, so to have her standing so close and speaking just the right number of syllables to allow her to copy Ravager’s voice, was exactly what Gemini would have wished for.

The sword point was almost directly above her, but Gemini didn’t as much as glance at the weapon, her focus was on Ravager herself. For several long seconds after Rose spoke Gemini made no reply, mentally preparing herself, before her voice issued from the middle of the puddle, a web of tentacles erupting upwards and toward Rose with ballistic speed. “If you insist Ravager, how’s this for an ambush?.” Stretching the tentacles at Ravager, Gemini coiled and twisted, hoping to get a grip around the legs and pull Rose’s feet out from under her. Meanwhile the other tentacles elongated and curled towards Ravager’s arms and torso; the moment she had a grip Gemini would start to coil them around Rose, intending to wind round her until she had the girl completely immobilised.

Doubtless Rose’s sword would slice off enough tentacles to make her task difficult, but she could simply grow more; there were only so many places Ravager could hack and stab, Gemini didn’t think it would take the famed daughter of Deathstroke long to work out her swords were useless, but they were the girl’s main weapon, which might make her reluctant to make that connection. “I don’t think you’re stupid, but you are outmatched Rose; I’m the kind of chopped sushi who bites back. You're going to wish you never came here.” Laughing darkly, Gemini focussed her attention on her tentacles and her attempts to ensnare Rose in her grip, she had questions which only Ravager could and would answer.

[Ravager]

Nobody could argue that there weren’t definite bonuses to the particulars of Rose’s gifts, even if some might say that the price tag that they came with had turned out to be a bit too high. It would definitely be too rich for most people but, while Rose had sometimes wondered if she’d do things different if she could, she never wasted much time on that sort of useless junk. In this particular case, it was the precognition that proved its value. There was, after all, no way that even Rose Wilson could have dodged that attack. It was just impossible, even for her, to dodge tendrils and extensions that moved that fast in those numbers. If she’d still been standing where she had been, just about a sword’s length from the puddle, it would have been over in seconds, probably.

If.

But she wasn’t. In the heartbeat before the puddle erupted, Rose had coiled her legs under her and sprung away, her blades already weaving a web of steel between her and the oncoming tentacles, as if she’d known exactly what was going to happen before it did. Which was because she did. Oh, not much of it, obviously, but enough that she’d been already moving when the attack came rather than just standing still and waiting for it. It meant that, instead of a whole forest of things coming at her, she was dealing with far less and most of those found themselves hacked apart by the blurring blades that Rose spun through the air with consummate ease.

“Seen better,” She said with a sneer, landing on her feet and continuing to slice and dice tentacles.

The issue was that, short of her being totally wrong, Rose thought she knew who this was. And, if she was right, there was basically nothing she could do with what she had here to hurt her. The next taunt to come her way, annoying as it was, basically proved her theory. Rose spat a curse and decimated another wave of tentacles before the white-maned girl began to slowly retreat back the way she had come. It frustrated her no end, but there was literally no way she could stop something that didn’t care if she chopped off all its limbs and had no head to take off either.

“I already wish I never came here,” she muttered briefly, hacking at another limb, taking another step back. “You’re just the latest reason. And only because I didn’t bring an incendiary grenade.”

So far, it was basically a slowly moving standoff. Rose was doing pretty well at chopping the tentacles that came near her but it wasn’t actually helping. And, right there, the dynamic nearly changed. A tentacle slid under her guard, caught at her foot and pulled. Rose hissed and hacked it through a second later, but she was momentarily off balance. Another two shot through her guard and only another display of her superhuman agility kept Rose free of Gemini’s grip. Then it was right back to the same old stalemate, which was, as Rose knew by this point, never going to end in her favour. She backed away, her precog and reflexes keeping Gemini back but without doing any real damage.

Darkly, Rose promised herself that she was going to make bike tires out of this thing.

[Gemini]

Her first tentacles were sliced apart, but new ones sprouted even as the old ones regenerated and returned to the attack. But it wasn’t enough; Ravager was too fast with her swords, even when Gemini almost had her Rose still managed to evade her grip, it was extremely frustrating. She armoured her tentacles as best she could, hardening them until they had the texture of steel themselves, but Ravager’s swords were obviously made of a metal sharper than the steel which Gemini was capable of blocking and so the stalemate continued. The amputated pieces of herself slowly slithered across the floor to reintegrate with her main mass, incapable of doing much else as all Gemini’s concentration was fixed on trying to get past her opponent’s guard.

“Really? Your men are all dead and you were only inches away from me on the stairwell, I could have attacked then and immobilised you before you even realised what was happening.” Perhaps she couldn’t- Ravager was annoyingly fast and seemed to know exactly where she was going to strike each time, if she continued like this then the stalemate might continue, which wasn’t acceptable to Gemini. “Why are you here Ravager? I didn’t picture someone like you playing the lackey for someone else” she taunted, hoping to get Rose’s angry enough to start making mistakes.

“What was it they promised, a good dental plan or maybe a new eye to replace the one you tore out?” The tip of a tentacle pulled back, bulging into a spherical shape as the rubber moulded itself into human features, re-colouring to match human skin and white hair sprouting from its crown. A copy of Ravager’s head stared at Rose with two intact eyes, winking at her briefly before it twisted, morphing into another configuration. “Or perhaps it’s for a chance of revenge against ‘daddy’?” Gemini’s voice floated from the centre of the tentacles on the floor, even as Slade Wilson’s face leered at Rose from atop its rubbery tentacle. From what she’d heard of Deathstroke’s daughter that might be enough to cause just the mistake she wanted.

[Ravager]

In fact, the stalemate wasn’t acceptable to Rose either. She’d almost come to grief a second earlier, while only her speed and skill and swords were keeping her free, but she couldn’t count on this opponent tiring. She might tire, she might not, but there was nothing to say it would be before Rose herself did. That would be hours away yet, even like this, but Ravager wasn’t happy with a stalemate. She wanted to win, or at least to attack, and this enforced defensive stance grated across her nerves like nails on a chalkboard.

On top of that, she had a long climb up the stairs to look forward to, backing up all the way with this thing in front of her, having to do this same stunt just with the added fun of keeping her balance on a changeable surface. Could she do it? Hell yeah. Was it going to be easy? Not a chance, a set of developments that basically fuelled her discontent with the situation as it stood.

The total lack of any real reaction to her ongoing mutilation of the thing in front of her aside from it pulling itself back together again like a particularly nasty lump of black jelly didn’t help either. And there was her without a flamethrower.

That said, she was focused on the need to keep the stalemate going because, right this minute, Rose was sure that the only possible changes would be against her. And she really didn’t need this getting any worse. Which was why, as nice as it would be to let herself go and hack Gemini into tiny, tiny pieces of quivering jello, she kept a tight grip on her temper and just threw the rage she could feel bubbling up inside her into the whirling sphere of steel that seemed to surround her. Each limb that got too close was severed, each stroke calculated as precisely as Rose could make it so that every blow hacked through a tentacle or more than one. But she was just killing time and she knew it.

Still, she managed a smirk at the taunting, her expression nearly as sharp as her swords. “Didn’t you get the memo? Sneaking up on me is a losing proposition. So you killed six redshirts? Big deal. I could have taken them all at once, not in two groups, and I wouldn’t have made the rookie mistake of letting one of them alert his help.” A wide sweep of her swords cleared Rose enough space to hop back several steps. Progress. But she didn’t take her eye off the enemy.

“And you’re one to talk about being a lackey,” She sneered, sliding back a little more. Rose was going to have to kick the door down when she got there, as she couldn’t afford to turn away from Gemini for the time it’d take to find and turn the handle. “All you’ve ever been is a second-rate, second-strong mommy’s girl with a half-decent power. The Society really must be desperate if you’re the best they’ve got.”

Nothing about the first part of Gemini’s speech bothered her – the dental plan part was just a bad joke and she’d long ago come to terms with what she’d done to herself. What Slade had made her do to herself. But she unmistakeably twitched at the second face that Gemini tried to throw her with. The first, her own, as it used to be… She could ignore that. But even knowing that it wasn’t really him, Rose’s features twisted with hatred, both of the man who had manipulated her and the meta who was trying it again.

Rose stopped. She held her ground. Her swords blurred through an intricate pass that cleared the air around of tentacles before she tossed one upwards. The now free hand dived to one of her hidden knives. And with more force than necessary, the white-haired woman hurled it at the mocking features of the man she hated. Then she snatched her sword back out of the air and went back to her ‘dance’. “Don’t you dare talk about my father,” She hissed.

TAG: Gemini

[Gemini]

Having each and every one of her attempts to grab Ravager sliced away was getting increasingly irritating, not to mention wearing on her concentration. Rose also seemed to know exactly what to say to best provoke her and Gemini's temper was rising accordingly. "You're not going anywhere!" she spat back. "It's only a matter of time until you get tired or make a mistake."

She would have left it at that, but Ravager's next words had her boiling with fury, she could barely think through the red haze that burned through her at being called a mommy's girl and having her powers mocked. "How dare you mention my mother...lackey...you you !" she shouted incoherently, not realising she was repeating almost what Rose had said about her father.

Gaining some measure of control The face of Deathstroke darkened into an angry scowl, which only got deeper when the knife sliced through the middle of the face. "Hit a nerve?" asked Deathstroke's face with a smug smile, voice copied from the master assassin. As she spoke, Gemini expelled the knife and it dropped to the floor with a 'clunk', the hole it had made sealing up almost immediately. "What's the matter daughter, not happy to see daddy dearest?"

Gemini hoped that Rose would be sufficiently distracted to not notice what was going on behind the head: The mass at the centre of the tentacles was coalescing, reshaping as the other tentacles ceased their attacks and retracted. The respite only lasted a split second, as with a loud roar a creature twice the size of a lion pounded towards Ravager, Deathstroke's head now swinging bizarrely atop an elongated tail.

"Second rate, half-decent power. I'm going to make you regret that!" Four eyes and a maw of razor sharp teeth gleamed as Gemini pounced, teeth and claws outstretched, aiming to knock Rose to the floor and inflict some punishment.

((OOC: Gemini's form.