[Things Happening ITT] 15 minutes into XI history class...

[Regan Rourke]

"This is the best day ever."

[Calvin Strong]

"Okay, just for the record, I was going to play ghostbuster and you told me not to," Cal said idly, watching the car flying. So putting that on the network...

[Narrator]

Alex would be just a second too late. The shot fire, hitting Roland square in the back. He gasped, and fell to his knees, arms akimbo.


And then Alex punched the guy really hard in the head, causing the guy to also fall down.

And get the remaining three guys standing to turn towards him, leveling their guns, and shouting in Russian.

[Mercy Wilkins]

Mercy finally realizes what she probably should be doing, and fumbles for her phone, eventually calming her shaking hands enough to dial the schools emergency number.

[Narrator]

The car spiraled down in a low, graceful arc, smashing into the roof of Southminster Fondue Bar, and shattering into a million pieces.

[Brigid Plunder]

Which was about the point where Brigid arrived, and tried to kick the nearest one in the head.

[Alex Carpenter]

"Sorry, I'm not a superhero yet, don't have to give you a chance to give up," Alex growled in a metallic voice. And with that, he started opening the boat underneath them.

[Mercy Wilkins]

"Xavier's Emergency Services, what's your emergency?"

Mercy wails to the phone in distress, "There's some kind of drug deal and guns and they're killing us out here!!"

[Theresa McMasters]

Theresa for her part had been lost in her own head for a while. The sensations of intentionally manipulating that much weather, even though it was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, were overwhelming her. The sounds of yelling and gunfire snapped things back into focus and she fed the clouds the one thing she knew worked... pure anger. Theresa was a teenager after all. It wasn't terribly difficult to find things to be angry about, especially in this situation. A soft green glow began to hide (or was it replace?) her eyes as the clouds turned dark and violent. Lightning flashed inside one of the clouds and, completely out of keeping with the gravity of the situation, Theresa laughed.

[Kay Haddock]

When the gunfire outside the ship dies down Kay pokes her head out of cover just in time to watch Brigid disappear below deck. When the ship suddenly jerks and presumably starts to sink thanks to Alex ripping a hole into it she suddenly looks worried. For a moment she's torn, then she kicks off her shoes and runs towards the pier while taking off her hoodie, preparing to jump into the water.

[Steve Jones]

Steve had been quiet and frozen since the gunfire started, feeling sorry for himself, but suddenly looked to Haley.

"Maybe... if... if we work together..."

[Calvin Strong]

"Before we start escalating this and making the fallout totally worse... Can you see what's going on inside?" Cal said, looking over at Steve. Cautiously he looked up to see if he could see the boat through whatever Mercy was doing. He thought they were clear now... Right? He started double checking, checking the feed and seeing if there was anything inside the boat he could tap into now that they were this close.

[Steve Jones]

"I dunno... Maybe?" Steve answered, "It's worth a try."

He focused on the minds on the boat, trying to pick up their optical senses and see through them. Once before he had seen through another's eyes... during his assault... so just maybe.

[Regan Rourke]

"Kay?" Regan says, "Kay!"

Regan follows after the girl, "Where are you going?"

[Calvin Strong]

"Actually, since you're the one who started this..." Cal muttered. He really wasn't a Regan fan at the moment.

[Alex Carpenter]

Shitshitshit not my best plan ever... ALex thought as he surged forward, ignoring the goons he opened the hole under and trying to form a sort of dome-shaped patch over the hole (so that it wouldn't keep the bad guys inside it ) before the boat sank with Brigid (and the history teacher and the history teacher's friends, he supposed) still on it.

[Calvin Strong]

Cal looked back over his shoulder at Mercy. "That shadow thing you do... think you can hold a boat at water level for a few minutes? We might as well give her a shot at pulling this off before it sinks."

[Mercy Wilkins]

"A whole boat? Um... I can try I guess...." Mercy looks pretty dubious, but the emergency people have already promised her that someone is on the way so she huddles down, dissolving her impromptu shield into a mass of darkforce. That mass is quickly joined by a flood of the stuff from her wings. Cable-like extensions of it begin pouring out from the main mass, snaking their way across the docks to eventually grab onto the boat.

[Calvin Strong]

"All right. Just keep calm," Cal said, remembering how everything had gone to shit when she freaked out. "We're at shore, that water can't be too deep. Nothing to freak out about."

[Haley Crusek]

"Maybe Mercy and I can work together to keep the ship up...I don't think my TP is gonna help anyone do anything, Steve. But try. I bet you can do it"

[Calvin Strong]

"Worse comes to worst we dive in there and dig people out," Cal said. "So... no pressure here, anyone."

[Mercy Wilkins]

Mercy's tendrils reach the ship, and wrap around anything semi-solid, mostly deck railings and the like. She pulls, but she doesn't have much upward lift, most of the pulling is toward the shore, which will help at least indirectly. She grunts with the effort, as more darkforce spills out of her, and seems to flood her internally as well, her eyes filling with black.

[Narrator]

((Deep breath everyone, this might be a long one. Be careful what you wish for, aye?

I'm ruling everything that happened int he thread since the last narrator post is happening ROUGHLY simultaneously -- apologies if anything gets twisted out of order, but that's what happens when seven players all take action at the same time . If I miss anything, let me know.))



Let's start with the easy bit -- a practiced kick to the head was enough for Brigid to knock out a dude with a gun pointing at Alex. This was witnessed by Steve, who did manage to get a blurry, semi-sorta-solid vision from one of the other guards in the room -- enough to see the kick, Alex standing there with guns pointing at him, and Roland, looking down at a gaping chest wound -- and laughing, as he began to climb back to his feet.

And that's when Alex opened up a hole in the ship, the ensuing panic enough to shake Steve's vision loose, as well as knock the remaining two guards below deck off their feet and into the water -- and also letting a shitload of water ~into the actual boat~, rushing up much faster than he probably anticipated. There was a loud thud from the other end of the ship, as well, and the entire boat started rocking. Roland, by this time, had manged to get to his feet, and was managing to balance himself much better than, say, people who don't normally go on ships.

ABOVE-decks, the guards had been distracted by the sudden storm Theresa had whipped up, and when lightning started to rumble, they had lost their composure -- something that wasn't helped by the entire ship buckling and shaking from the sudden hull breech, sending them off their feet, and stopping the gunfire.

BELOW-decks, under the sea? Kay would see two guards suddenly plunge into the frigid water, as well as a large looking heavy metal chest, all before a wavy film of black darkforce energy started hiding the ship from her view. It was not enough, it should be noted, to keep water from pouring into the ship, though it did somewhat stem the rate. Alex's patch job, however, did NOT help particularly -- in his hurry and panic,he was unable to form a solid enough patch against the onrushing water pressure.

Cal would notice all kinds of alarms and whatnot ringing in the boat -- SOMETHING had gone wrong, somwhere

[Kay Haddock]

Kay sees the guards but quickly notes them as not being Alex or Brigid and swims towards the underside of the ship, letting herself slip into the surge of water rushing through the hole, even if she can't actually see it with the darkforce blotting things out. Just as when she was diving in the Danger Room she just feels the presence of the ship and the flow of the water and follows it.

[Alex Carpenter]

Alex kept trying to patch the hole up, knowing that he was the only one here that didn't have to worry about time. "Go! Quick!" he shouted as he tried to firm up the seal, tried to undo what he'd done... hell, even section off this part of the under-deck. "I'll get this, just get out!"

[Narrator]

No dice. Perhaps, in a dry-dock, without water rushing in, without adrenaline coursing through his system, Alex would have succeeded -- but the water pressure was just too much for him to overcome.

As was a certain fish-girl popping up through the hole.

[Alex Carpenter]

"GAH!" Alex shouted, falling back into the water with a splash as Kay popped through the hole.

[Roland Sackville]

"Well, this is a fine mess you brats have managed to achieve," Roland said, pulling himself back to his feet, bleeding quite notably from his chest wound. "We need to get you top decks, and fast."

[Alex Carpenter]

Alex just gaped at the gaping chest wound that Roland seemed to not care about. "Uh... yeah. Think you might need to get up there more..."

[Mercy Wilkins]

Mercy intensifies her efforts, more darkforce pouring from her wings, which now resemble more like wing-shaped collections of tentacles than proper wings. Her eyeballs are completely black, and occasionally she'll mutter something like "Shut up" or "Not now" or "Quiet, I'm trying pull". The mutterings do not seem to coincide with Cal or Haley actually saying something.

[Kay Haddock]

Kay looks around, trying to get her bearings in the rapidly flooding hold.

"Are you okay? You need to get out of here fast!"

[Brigid Plunder]

"Come on, everybody out!" She urged.

[Kay Haddock]

"There's still armed people up top! I can take you out through the side but you'll have to dive."

[Alex Carpenter]

Oh my GOD!... "Everyone who needs to breath, take a deep breath!" Alex shouted in that weird metallic voice again. THen he focused on the hull again. "Swim out! I'm going to open it up wider!" And, as he had said, he focused on a sectin of the side of the hull (that wasn't going to have ground crushed against it soon) and willed a nice door-sized hole in it that everyone could get out through easily. Aaaaand more metal for the collection... let's see if we can be a big human shield here...

[Roland Sackville]

"I'm not leaving until I have what I came for. I have waited too long, tried too hard. The rest of you need to get out. Now."

[Kay Haddock]

"Is it a big chest?"

[Steve Jones]

Steve cursed and reached out again with his powers to try and push the image of total darkness into the enemy's vision. They can't shoot his friends if they can't see.

[Regan Rourke]

"I think I can see your heart," Regan says, looking at the hole in Roland's chest, "Neat."

[Haley Crusek]

Haley's initial wffort to aid Mercy hadn't helped much, so she stopped, took several deep breaths and then threw out her hands in front of her, lifting them as she tried to focus on lifting the ship. She grit her teeth and grunted with effort, trying to lift the ship totally upright again.

She had a ton of power. Less fine control...but it was a big target at least?

[Roland Sackville]

Roland turned to look at Kay. "...Yes. Yes, it might be."

He turned to Alex and Brigid. "Can you two take the two men I brought with me to safety? You'll have to go up and out, and there may still be guards up there. I am responsible for their lives."