New York, Saturday Afternoon Into the Night
When all was said and done, Jono could honestly say that he'd had better days. Sure, he'd had worse days. His life, it seemed, was an endless parade of worse days, all vying for a position at the top of the worst-days ladder.
At the moment, this one was pretty high up there.
It had started with Thrash informing the group that there was trouble on the rise. A madman by the name of Machinesmith was working on creating a devastating techno-organic virus, and it was up to the New Warriors to get in there and shut him down before he could decimate humankind with it, reducing all organic matter to little more than grey goo. Jono himself had been the one to locate a sewer system leading to Machinesmith's lair on the jet's readouts, and it had been Jono to knock out the wall separating the sewer systems from the criminal's hideout, bringing the fight to his home turf.
That had been the New Warriors' first mistake that day.
Their second mistake had been thinking that they had the upper hand at all. Thrash had taken off in the middle of the fight when nobody was looking. And then, because a villain never seemed to grasp that being blown into a thousand component mechanical parts meant that he was beaten, Machinesmith had literally pulled himself together and had quickly gained the upper hand, electrocuting a handful of the team and leaving them writhing on the ground. Jono had been vaguely aware of Thrash re-appearing, had heard the order to retreat. Machinesmith, of course, had other plans.
The last thing Jonothon heard before the ceiling came crumbling down on top of them was Jubilee, screaming his name.
Tempest, Skybolt, Phaser, and himself. No hope of reaching sunlight, and Machinesmith was backing them against a wall, accusing them of being lackeys of Stark. Jono could have laughed, if it wasn't for the fact that it was four of them against a being that had easily backed the entire team of nine of them into a corner. And the four of them were not doing so well.
Possibly because when he told them to get the hell out and offered them cover, they stuck around, like bloody leeches or something. That was a sonic scream wasted, trying to give them that cover, and there they were, protesting that they'd stick with him to the bitter end.
It was becoming apparent that Jonothon was going to have to beat that out of them sooner or later. His sonic collar had been the only weapon to survive the cave-in, and it was more versatile than any of their powers combined in the first place. After some brief arguing, he got them to agree to take off, try to regroup, and he placed himself firmly between Machinesmith and the hole that they went crawling through, like rats on the run.
"A Noble Gesture, But Your Sacrifice Will Be In Vain," Machinesmith mocked in that computerized voice as Jono built up a suit of armour around himself, all sonic waves and hard light, giving him a few feet on the cybernetic monstrosity that was facing off against him.
"Maybe... But it will give them the time they need to escape!"
He swung a massive armoured fist toward the cyborg, who countered with a blast of raw power that broke Jono's concentration (and his armour) quite effectively. Being electrocuted was going to be the order of the day, apparently.
That would be the first thing Jono was going to have to take care of, then.
A scream. A scream with everything that he could put into it, frying the circuitry in his collar, but not letting up until Machinesmith was incapable of moving, and Jono's own tech was little more than a smoking adornment around his neck. Yeah, there was definitely something to be said for using sonic waves to cut off a cyborg's electrical impulses.
"I may have blown out my tech," Jono murmured as he walked away, leaving Machinesmith making impotent kk-kkkk-kkkkch sounds behind him, "but by the time you're able to move, we'll be long gone."
Well, that had been the hope.
Tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, and Jono could tell that his teammates were getting tired, starting to get desperate. They had no idea where they were, and rescue didn't seem to be forthcoming any time soon. Finally, it had been Jonothon who spoke up.
"Alright... we stop here."
"What's wrong?" Even tired and desperate, it was clear that Angel was in no mood to stop moving. Jono frowned at her. Rats. Rats in a maze. That was what they'd been reduced to, even if he had managed to get the upper hand on Machinesmith back there. It was only a matter of time before he managed to regroup, after all, and they were still on his home turf.
"We can't keep running," he explained. "We need to strategize."
"Strategize?" Vin sounded less than convinced. "Now? We barely escaped."
"That doesn't mean we're helpless." Jono started rifling through his coat - he'd stopped wearing the scarf and kilt combo after Christine's death. It had just seemed right for the lot of them to move on from their old costumes. Besides, what identity did he have to hide? At least his coat had deep pockets, and plenty of them. "I'm taking a look at what little tech I have left. We have to cobble together whatever we've got to protect ourselves."
He crouched down on the floor, laying out what few supplies he had left.
"Okay, who's got what? I have an emergency pack with some web discs, adhesive, and a few gas pellets."
"I've got a toothache."
"I'm serious, Vin."
"So am I. I think Machinesmith got one'a m'fillin's."
"No anti-grav discs," Angel said, mercifully dragging them back onto topic, "but I still have some freeze coolant and napalm cartridges."
"I have my flack jacket," Vin conceded, "and two or three missiles left."
"All I have is a phosphorus pack," Christian added, frowning at his gear.
Well. That was grim. Even so...
"That's good enough," Jono said, his expression a study in 'grim' even while he put on his 'all business' voice. "We're going to divvy everything up amongst us. Now we know why we spent all those hours jury-rigging our tech in the dark."
He was half expecting someone to speak up, to ask who the hell had died and made him leader. But everyone else seemed to know, just as well as he did, that he was the one with the real experience. Not just as one of Xavier's kids, not just as a mutant who had learned how to fight somewhere along the way, but as a soldier. It wasn't experience that he was proud of, but at the end of the day, he was the one who had been a full-fledged X-Man.
And he was the one who had spent a year doing dirty work for Weapon X. You picked up a few things doing that, whether you were brainwashed into it or not.
"How long you figure we can hold out?"
Jono frowned over at Vin.
"Maybe twenty minutes." Honesty was a bitch. "Vin, empty your warheads and pack them in small web-balls. Phaser, give him a hand with that, and give me your phosphorous pack. And Angel, give everyone either a napalm or coolant disk. We're going to make as many weapons as we can."
They looked like shit. They didn't exactly feel much better, standing around with cobbled-together weapons and bandages torn from the clothing they were wearing. But they were doing as good as they were going to get. Jono stood and looked at the group.
"Okay, mates... I think we're ready."
He didn't feel it. Phaser clearly wasn't feeling it, either.
"Ready? Man, I don't ever think I've felt so helpless."
"We've been down before and we've gotten through it," Jono replied, well aware that he was talking to the man who had lost his sister when the worst had caught them only a few weeks before. "We will again."
"I..." Angel took a fighting stance. "I hope so."
"You okay?"
Of the three people that Jono was trapped underground with, Vin wasn't the one that he'd expected to come up with a sensitive side all on the spur of the moment.
"Just thinking," Angel said, and then hesitated before adding, "wondering if I'll ever see Barry and the kids again."
"Hey, don't talk like that," Vin admonished. "We'll see 'em again. I c'n guarantee it."
"You can't promise something like that, Vin. We don't know what will happen down here." At least Angel was... realistic about it. "I just hope the others hurry back."
"If they know what's food fer 'em they will."
"Wait." A sound of metal against metal pulled Jono's attention away from that heartwarming little conversation, and he spun on his heel. "You hear that?"
The giant metallic serpent that reared up behind them was, frankly, terrifying. And not only because they were a few explosives shy of being unarmed against a giant, unkillable shapeshifting cyborg. Jono's heart caught in his throat as he tried to put himself between the cyborg and his teammates all over again. His tech had blown out, he'd left what was left of the smouldering wreck of his collar back on the ground somewhere, and he was the one who had stepped up to keep the other three alive.
He didn't fear death. He'd learned a long, long time ago that Death wasn't a force to be feared. But he didn't sit too well with failure.
"Clever Children... Thought You Would Escape? Every Part Of This Lair And I Are One. There Is Nowhere You Can Hide From My Sight."
"Run!"
It was the best suggestion Jono had at that moment, as Machinesmith's massive tail slammed down on the space that Jono had been occupying a moment before he leapt out of the way. Angel threw a few of her remaining coolant packs at Machinesmith, which bought them, if anything, another precious few seconds to regroup.
They ran. They ran, and they set more traps. Webbing disks that exploded in a spray of spidery netting. Phosphorus that fried the hell out of the creature when it was caught in that net, sending mechanical screams reverberating through the sewers as the four bedraggled New Warriors slipped down a ladder into an open room below.
Keep moving, Jono urged them all. All they could do now was keep moving.
"I hope we can find an access port around here that leads to the surface," Angel murmured as they picked a tunnel, more or less at random now, and headed down it.
"I doubt there is one, luv," Jono replied, "we don't even know how deep these tunnels go." He drew in a deep breath. "Weapons check, mates. I've got a half-full battery pack and two web bombs left."
"I have my battery pack and one web bomb," Vin reported.
"It took all my webbing to make that last trap," Christian added. "I'm tapped out."
"And I have one freeze disk left."
"I feel kinda like Custer," Vin said, turning his back to the group. "This could be our last stand."
"What happened to that 'guarantee' you made about us getting out of here?"
Vin glanced over his shoulder, giving Angel a sardonic smile.
"Yeah. I might be wrong on that one. But did I mention that Ah've always wanted ta go out in a blaze o' glory?"
Angel barely had time to tell him that he had a weird sense of humour before a metallic tendril, half as big around as she was tall, reached out and grabbed her, sweeping her off the ground.
"Did You Say 'Blaze Of Glory?' Interesting Choice Of Words."
It was Vin and Christian who acted first, leaping at Machinesmith to try to pry their teammate free and both being swatted to the side like flies, hitting the floor, hard. Jono had held back for a moment longer, grabbing a length of pipe from the wall and ripping it loose, and then leaping into the fray himself to deliver a good, swift crack to the side of Machinesmith's head with it. He wasn't exactly expecting it to accomplish much. It wasn't much of a match for an indestructible cyborg, after all. But their options were exhausted, and he wasn't about to go down without a fight.
He heard Angel scream as the tendril tightened around her.
And he heard the Chukk! Chukk! Chukk! sound of Machinesmith's weapons before he felt the spikes ripping through his flesh, easily two feet long apiece and burying themselves so deeply in his arm and his leg that they stuck out a good six inches on the other side.
Jonothon was not aware of the scream of pain that he loosed as he fell toward the ground, though he was certain that he'd made one.
He was only distantly aware of Christian screaming his name, or of Machinesmith turning his attention back to Angel, or of Vin and Chris mumbling their 'it was nice knowing you's at one another as they waited for the bitter end.
And it wasn't until another explosion rocked the room and he heard Mira's voice assuring the four of them that they hadn't been forgotten that he allowed his body to go slack, and got on with the very important business of putting all of his energy into quietly bleeding out. That seemed like a great idea, right about then.
Somewhere in there, his teammates had clustered around him as he writhed about on the floor. Someone had pulled the spikes out, trusting them less than the very likely chance that Jono would just bleed to death through the eight very large new holes in his body. He probably wouldn't have blamed them, considering everything they'd just barely survived.
Somewhere in there, somebody gathered him up off the ground. Jono didn't learn until later that it had been Miranda, and he tried not to think too hard about the sight that must have been, her, half his size, carrying him like a knight in shining armour, and he was the swooning princess who had just been rescued from a dragon or something.
... It wasn't all that far from the truth.
Somewhere in there, someone took out Machinesmith. Jono had been long unconscious by then. He got to miss out on the joy of being dragged through grey goo by his teammates as the entire lair, apparently comprised completely of nanites, melted around them. He also got to miss out on the flight out of there, once the group had found their way to the surface.
And the explosion behind them as whatever was in there overloaded for good, and sent a plume of flames rocketing into the sky.
And it was hours and hours later before Jono woke up in a hospital bed, stitched up and bandaged and feeling like he'd been dragged through the mouth of hell, with Mira and Lee standing watch over him like a pair of sentries who didn't much trust anybody in the world. He didn't ask why, not just then. He had the sneaking suspicion that he didn't want to know. He just waited until they assured him that the others had gotten out in one piece, smiled a tired smile, and slipped back into blissful unconsciousness.
Well, then. That hadn't been so bad.
[OOC: Grabbed from out of New Warriors Vol. 4, Issues 11, 12, and 13, with a nice, thick smattering of violence and a pretty badly injured Jono to show for it. Open for phone calls, if anyone is desperate to get whined at by a wounded Jon in a hospital bed. For Christmas, Jono gets crutches! I get my boys the bestest presents.]
At the moment, this one was pretty high up there.
It had started with Thrash informing the group that there was trouble on the rise. A madman by the name of Machinesmith was working on creating a devastating techno-organic virus, and it was up to the New Warriors to get in there and shut him down before he could decimate humankind with it, reducing all organic matter to little more than grey goo. Jono himself had been the one to locate a sewer system leading to Machinesmith's lair on the jet's readouts, and it had been Jono to knock out the wall separating the sewer systems from the criminal's hideout, bringing the fight to his home turf.
That had been the New Warriors' first mistake that day.
Their second mistake had been thinking that they had the upper hand at all. Thrash had taken off in the middle of the fight when nobody was looking. And then, because a villain never seemed to grasp that being blown into a thousand component mechanical parts meant that he was beaten, Machinesmith had literally pulled himself together and had quickly gained the upper hand, electrocuting a handful of the team and leaving them writhing on the ground. Jono had been vaguely aware of Thrash re-appearing, had heard the order to retreat. Machinesmith, of course, had other plans.
The last thing Jonothon heard before the ceiling came crumbling down on top of them was Jubilee, screaming his name.
Tempest, Skybolt, Phaser, and himself. No hope of reaching sunlight, and Machinesmith was backing them against a wall, accusing them of being lackeys of Stark. Jono could have laughed, if it wasn't for the fact that it was four of them against a being that had easily backed the entire team of nine of them into a corner. And the four of them were not doing so well.
Possibly because when he told them to get the hell out and offered them cover, they stuck around, like bloody leeches or something. That was a sonic scream wasted, trying to give them that cover, and there they were, protesting that they'd stick with him to the bitter end.
It was becoming apparent that Jonothon was going to have to beat that out of them sooner or later. His sonic collar had been the only weapon to survive the cave-in, and it was more versatile than any of their powers combined in the first place. After some brief arguing, he got them to agree to take off, try to regroup, and he placed himself firmly between Machinesmith and the hole that they went crawling through, like rats on the run.
"A Noble Gesture, But Your Sacrifice Will Be In Vain," Machinesmith mocked in that computerized voice as Jono built up a suit of armour around himself, all sonic waves and hard light, giving him a few feet on the cybernetic monstrosity that was facing off against him.
"Maybe... But it will give them the time they need to escape!"
He swung a massive armoured fist toward the cyborg, who countered with a blast of raw power that broke Jono's concentration (and his armour) quite effectively. Being electrocuted was going to be the order of the day, apparently.
That would be the first thing Jono was going to have to take care of, then.
A scream. A scream with everything that he could put into it, frying the circuitry in his collar, but not letting up until Machinesmith was incapable of moving, and Jono's own tech was little more than a smoking adornment around his neck. Yeah, there was definitely something to be said for using sonic waves to cut off a cyborg's electrical impulses.
"I may have blown out my tech," Jono murmured as he walked away, leaving Machinesmith making impotent kk-kkkk-kkkkch sounds behind him, "but by the time you're able to move, we'll be long gone."
Well, that had been the hope.
Tunnel after tunnel after tunnel, and Jono could tell that his teammates were getting tired, starting to get desperate. They had no idea where they were, and rescue didn't seem to be forthcoming any time soon. Finally, it had been Jonothon who spoke up.
"Alright... we stop here."
"What's wrong?" Even tired and desperate, it was clear that Angel was in no mood to stop moving. Jono frowned at her. Rats. Rats in a maze. That was what they'd been reduced to, even if he had managed to get the upper hand on Machinesmith back there. It was only a matter of time before he managed to regroup, after all, and they were still on his home turf.
"We can't keep running," he explained. "We need to strategize."
"Strategize?" Vin sounded less than convinced. "Now? We barely escaped."
"That doesn't mean we're helpless." Jono started rifling through his coat - he'd stopped wearing the scarf and kilt combo after Christine's death. It had just seemed right for the lot of them to move on from their old costumes. Besides, what identity did he have to hide? At least his coat had deep pockets, and plenty of them. "I'm taking a look at what little tech I have left. We have to cobble together whatever we've got to protect ourselves."
He crouched down on the floor, laying out what few supplies he had left.
"Okay, who's got what? I have an emergency pack with some web discs, adhesive, and a few gas pellets."
"I've got a toothache."
"I'm serious, Vin."
"So am I. I think Machinesmith got one'a m'fillin's."
"No anti-grav discs," Angel said, mercifully dragging them back onto topic, "but I still have some freeze coolant and napalm cartridges."
"I have my flack jacket," Vin conceded, "and two or three missiles left."
"All I have is a phosphorus pack," Christian added, frowning at his gear.
Well. That was grim. Even so...
"That's good enough," Jono said, his expression a study in 'grim' even while he put on his 'all business' voice. "We're going to divvy everything up amongst us. Now we know why we spent all those hours jury-rigging our tech in the dark."
He was half expecting someone to speak up, to ask who the hell had died and made him leader. But everyone else seemed to know, just as well as he did, that he was the one with the real experience. Not just as one of Xavier's kids, not just as a mutant who had learned how to fight somewhere along the way, but as a soldier. It wasn't experience that he was proud of, but at the end of the day, he was the one who had been a full-fledged X-Man.
And he was the one who had spent a year doing dirty work for Weapon X. You picked up a few things doing that, whether you were brainwashed into it or not.
"How long you figure we can hold out?"
Jono frowned over at Vin.
"Maybe twenty minutes." Honesty was a bitch. "Vin, empty your warheads and pack them in small web-balls. Phaser, give him a hand with that, and give me your phosphorous pack. And Angel, give everyone either a napalm or coolant disk. We're going to make as many weapons as we can."
They looked like shit. They didn't exactly feel much better, standing around with cobbled-together weapons and bandages torn from the clothing they were wearing. But they were doing as good as they were going to get. Jono stood and looked at the group.
"Okay, mates... I think we're ready."
He didn't feel it. Phaser clearly wasn't feeling it, either.
"Ready? Man, I don't ever think I've felt so helpless."
"We've been down before and we've gotten through it," Jono replied, well aware that he was talking to the man who had lost his sister when the worst had caught them only a few weeks before. "We will again."
"I..." Angel took a fighting stance. "I hope so."
"You okay?"
Of the three people that Jono was trapped underground with, Vin wasn't the one that he'd expected to come up with a sensitive side all on the spur of the moment.
"Just thinking," Angel said, and then hesitated before adding, "wondering if I'll ever see Barry and the kids again."
"Hey, don't talk like that," Vin admonished. "We'll see 'em again. I c'n guarantee it."
"You can't promise something like that, Vin. We don't know what will happen down here." At least Angel was... realistic about it. "I just hope the others hurry back."
"If they know what's food fer 'em they will."
"Wait." A sound of metal against metal pulled Jono's attention away from that heartwarming little conversation, and he spun on his heel. "You hear that?"
The giant metallic serpent that reared up behind them was, frankly, terrifying. And not only because they were a few explosives shy of being unarmed against a giant, unkillable shapeshifting cyborg. Jono's heart caught in his throat as he tried to put himself between the cyborg and his teammates all over again. His tech had blown out, he'd left what was left of the smouldering wreck of his collar back on the ground somewhere, and he was the one who had stepped up to keep the other three alive.
He didn't fear death. He'd learned a long, long time ago that Death wasn't a force to be feared. But he didn't sit too well with failure.
"Clever Children... Thought You Would Escape? Every Part Of This Lair And I Are One. There Is Nowhere You Can Hide From My Sight."
"Run!"
It was the best suggestion Jono had at that moment, as Machinesmith's massive tail slammed down on the space that Jono had been occupying a moment before he leapt out of the way. Angel threw a few of her remaining coolant packs at Machinesmith, which bought them, if anything, another precious few seconds to regroup.
They ran. They ran, and they set more traps. Webbing disks that exploded in a spray of spidery netting. Phosphorus that fried the hell out of the creature when it was caught in that net, sending mechanical screams reverberating through the sewers as the four bedraggled New Warriors slipped down a ladder into an open room below.
Keep moving, Jono urged them all. All they could do now was keep moving.
"I hope we can find an access port around here that leads to the surface," Angel murmured as they picked a tunnel, more or less at random now, and headed down it.
"I doubt there is one, luv," Jono replied, "we don't even know how deep these tunnels go." He drew in a deep breath. "Weapons check, mates. I've got a half-full battery pack and two web bombs left."
"I have my battery pack and one web bomb," Vin reported.
"It took all my webbing to make that last trap," Christian added. "I'm tapped out."
"And I have one freeze disk left."
"I feel kinda like Custer," Vin said, turning his back to the group. "This could be our last stand."
"What happened to that 'guarantee' you made about us getting out of here?"
Vin glanced over his shoulder, giving Angel a sardonic smile.
"Yeah. I might be wrong on that one. But did I mention that Ah've always wanted ta go out in a blaze o' glory?"
Angel barely had time to tell him that he had a weird sense of humour before a metallic tendril, half as big around as she was tall, reached out and grabbed her, sweeping her off the ground.
"Did You Say 'Blaze Of Glory?' Interesting Choice Of Words."
It was Vin and Christian who acted first, leaping at Machinesmith to try to pry their teammate free and both being swatted to the side like flies, hitting the floor, hard. Jono had held back for a moment longer, grabbing a length of pipe from the wall and ripping it loose, and then leaping into the fray himself to deliver a good, swift crack to the side of Machinesmith's head with it. He wasn't exactly expecting it to accomplish much. It wasn't much of a match for an indestructible cyborg, after all. But their options were exhausted, and he wasn't about to go down without a fight.
He heard Angel scream as the tendril tightened around her.
And he heard the Chukk! Chukk! Chukk! sound of Machinesmith's weapons before he felt the spikes ripping through his flesh, easily two feet long apiece and burying themselves so deeply in his arm and his leg that they stuck out a good six inches on the other side.
Jonothon was not aware of the scream of pain that he loosed as he fell toward the ground, though he was certain that he'd made one.
He was only distantly aware of Christian screaming his name, or of Machinesmith turning his attention back to Angel, or of Vin and Chris mumbling their 'it was nice knowing you's at one another as they waited for the bitter end.
And it wasn't until another explosion rocked the room and he heard Mira's voice assuring the four of them that they hadn't been forgotten that he allowed his body to go slack, and got on with the very important business of putting all of his energy into quietly bleeding out. That seemed like a great idea, right about then.
Somewhere in there, his teammates had clustered around him as he writhed about on the floor. Someone had pulled the spikes out, trusting them less than the very likely chance that Jono would just bleed to death through the eight very large new holes in his body. He probably wouldn't have blamed them, considering everything they'd just barely survived.
Somewhere in there, somebody gathered him up off the ground. Jono didn't learn until later that it had been Miranda, and he tried not to think too hard about the sight that must have been, her, half his size, carrying him like a knight in shining armour, and he was the swooning princess who had just been rescued from a dragon or something.
... It wasn't all that far from the truth.
Somewhere in there, someone took out Machinesmith. Jono had been long unconscious by then. He got to miss out on the joy of being dragged through grey goo by his teammates as the entire lair, apparently comprised completely of nanites, melted around them. He also got to miss out on the flight out of there, once the group had found their way to the surface.
And the explosion behind them as whatever was in there overloaded for good, and sent a plume of flames rocketing into the sky.
And it was hours and hours later before Jono woke up in a hospital bed, stitched up and bandaged and feeling like he'd been dragged through the mouth of hell, with Mira and Lee standing watch over him like a pair of sentries who didn't much trust anybody in the world. He didn't ask why, not just then. He had the sneaking suspicion that he didn't want to know. He just waited until they assured him that the others had gotten out in one piece, smiled a tired smile, and slipped back into blissful unconsciousness.
Well, then. That hadn't been so bad.
[OOC: Grabbed from out of New Warriors Vol. 4, Issues 11, 12, and 13, with a nice, thick smattering of violence and a pretty badly injured Jono to show for it. Open for phone calls, if anyone is desperate to get whined at by a wounded Jon in a hospital bed. For Christmas, Jono gets crutches! I get my boys the bestest presents.]