(no subject)

[hecu_marine]

Adrian Shephard is not a man known for his subtlety or his patience in anything that does not involve waiting for a target to wander through his sights. Which is why he's standing in the middle of the Bar, hands cupped around his mouth, as he calls out, "Hey! Anybody here know anything 'bout all that shit down in the garage? I wanna see a man about a helicopter!"

That being said, he plops down in his seat and gets to work going over an extremely detailed topographical map of western Mongolia. He's got a busy week ahead of him.

Comments

[electro_kinetic]

"Subtle as a brick, Marine," Noriko murmurs, one hand over the ear that had been closest to Adrian.

"Don't know much about the shit in the garage, but as far as I know unless there's a name on it it's yours. No alarms go off or anything if you touch it."

[hecu_marine]

"Subtle is somethin' that happens to other people," says Shephard, unfazed. "Man, if that's the case then I gotta figger out how to get that fuckin' Tiger off the ground without hitting the ceiling."

[electro_kinetic]

"How close is it to the door?" asks Nori, turning a chair around to straddle it. She's wearing what used to be a pair of greytone BDU pants, cut up in places and half-covered in paint, but clearly comfortable.

The things a young delinquent gets into, really.

[hecu_marine]

"Found a door that I swear to fuckin' God wasn't there the first three times I got lost in that sector," says Shephard. "Ain't more'n a few dozen yards away, neither. Watch, next time I go down there it'll fuckin' be clear the other side of the goddamn floor."

[electro_kinetic]

"Hell, I dunno. There's a jet from my world that shouldn't even exist down there, but I ain't flyin' that thing," she says. "Not if you paid me. You wanna go down and check it out? You can put something in the door, prop it open a bit so it won't close and disappear."

[hecu_marine]

"Might as well," says Shephard. "I know where the helicopters are. Can't fuckin' miss 'em. Ain't too many I recognize but shit, Blue Thunder's easy as balls to spot, 'n the one I'm interested in's two over from that motherfucker."

[electro_kinetic]

"The jet's more or less like an SR-71. We call it an SR-77, but most of that is the modifications supposedly no one knows about."

Her tone says a good deal about what she thinks of this assertion. It's much like what she thought of Scott telling them 'they were safe at the mansion'.

[hecu_marine]

Shephard blinks at this. Several times. "Jesus fuck," he finally says. "How the shit fucking piss did you assholes get a goddamn Blackbird? That ain't the kind of thing just falls off the back of the fuckin' truck!"

[electro_kinetic]

"Technically we had it first," she says. "But what can I say, Professor X was fuckin' loaded. How did we get any of the technology we have?"

Like the gauntlets she wears and the plane, the bulletproof cloth for uniforms and the hard-light fitted Danger Room, and about a million other things.

[hecu_marine]

Well, there's a difference between 'things your resident techno-genius could theoretically build with a whole trainload of spare parts' and 'things specifically commissioned by the United States Government for use by their intelligence agencies'. The response to the second one begins with 'People are probably looking for that' and moves on up from there.

"Fuck me if I know but damn y'all've got to be pullin' enough strings to moor a goddamn aircraft carrier." Shephard shakes his head. "Anyway. Ain't my world. Don't matter none. Let's go find those murderbirds."

[electro_kinetic]

She snorts at the name for helicopters, getting up to follow him. "Lemme tell you now, the history of the X-Men is long and complicated. Half the time we work with the government, and the other half they don't recognize that we exist. Or that we're not terrorists."

It's just fucking confusing all the time.

[hecu_marine]

"... so you're Pakistan. Got it," says Shephard, running his hand over the wall to find the cunningly concealed elevator door, and then the concealed elevator button. "Must make for some real fun times."

[electro_kinetic]

"Oh, it does. Most of the time us kids get babysat by a robot roughly the size of a three-story building. The excuse is it's piloted by a human."

[hallelujahpilot]

Someone say 'helicopter'? Music to the chopper pilot's ears.

"What helicopter?" Chacon asks.

Beat.

"What garage?"

[hecu_marine]

"They got a clear-to-shit-and-back modded EC 665 Tiger downstairs," says Shephard. "Motherfucker's built to keep flyin' no questions asked through a direct goddamn EMP hit. You ain't never been to the garage here?"

[hallelujahpilot]

"Never knew we had one. But a Tiger's pretty damn cool."

For, you know, an antique.

"Thinkin' of seeeing if you can use it?"

[hecu_marine]

"We ain't got spares back home," says Shephard. "And we got us one more gene worm to kill and a whole fuck of a lot of Combine gunships'n shit between us'n the worm's terraforming facility. Either I got to borrow a murderbird from somebody, or I got to take one from here, or we're one flyer short when we head to Mongolia an' I ain't about to take down what little air support we got."

[hallelujahpilot]

"Think about just askin' Bar? I'm sure she knows."

[hecu_marine]

"That was gon' be my next choice," says Shephard. "Reckoned I'd try the patrons first."

There's a napkin there already when he gets there, with a note to the effect of 'unless somebody drove it here and parked it, I don't really care'.

"Huh."

[hallelujahpilot]

Trudy grins.

"There ya go."

Beat.

"What else they got down there?"

[hecu_marine]

"One of every fuckin' car you ever heard of," says Adrian. "Least it sure as balls looks that way. And other rotary craft. Some of 'em I ain't never seen outside of TV'n movies but they're real as shit. You can't fake that kind of armament."

[hallelujahpilot]

"Need any other air-support assistance? In spite of what I fly now, gunships are my thing."

[hecu_marine]

"This sumbitch's the last terraforming Synth the Combine've got on Earth," Shephard says. "All signs point to the fuckin' maggots pullin' all the forces they c'n move safely into position around it. I ain't gon' say no."

[hallelujahpilot]

It's an honest fight.

An honest, 'defeat the bad guys, save the world' fight.

And helping a fellow Marine to the boot.

"How do I get to the garage?"

[hecu_marine]

"See them two wall panels over there?" says Shephard, indicating a section of wall that looks more or less like any other wall. "That line down the middle, that's the elevator door. Button's right here."

Ding! goes the elevator as the doors suddenly slide open.

"You just go down from here."