rexbox | The Great Jack-Off of 2014

The Great Jack-Off of 2014

Maybe you took the wrong turn in Fort Frolic, and found yourself in 'Gallery of Narcissus' (which is of course a Hall of Mirrors). Or, maybe you're rich enough to have a huge walk-in-closet, and while you walked in looking for the light, you just kept going. Or maybe you lost track of where you were wandering in the haze of an ADAM high.

Or some other reason - it doesn't matter. Because now, Jack, you're wandering through a labyrinth of mirrors, and no matter where you turn, you see your face.

You're pretty sure that's your face. You're pretty sure that's you, but - is it moving the same way you are? Are you sure?

((ooc: SO THIS IS HOW IT'S GOING TO GO - first comment/tag wherever in a thread, you list your Jack's info in the thread title, NAME / AU / TIMELINE. Example: Jack Wynand - Good End - Post-Game, or Jack Ryan | Batya | Chapter Nine, or Jackie•FemJack Harvester•Neptune's bounty and so on and so forth. Pretty it up as much as you want but have that basic info in there for your first tag so we know what we're working with!

And after that...! Tag around. We don't have to cram up in one thread! Different Jacks could be meeting at different times, form adventuring parties, cross paths with another pack of Jacks, whatever.

For now we're in a standard multiverse meet up kind of thing, but I figure everyone's acquainted, we could start moving to other locations! :D))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And there's another thing she has trouble interpreting. Is he asking where Fontaine is? Is he asking if she knows Fontaine? (Actually, scratch that -- it can't be that, everyone knows Fontaine.) Is he asking... something else entirely? Scrawled one-word questions are tricky. It's a bit obnoxious of him to be mute, really.

Jack glances up at the ceiling, and across, wondering if she'll spot a security camera, reminded that she must be being surveyed. Maybe the man is asking if Fontaine's watching them right now. Well, she has no way of knowing that. Sometimes he graces the tests with his presence, sometimes he doesn't.

"He might be there?"

''Might''. He'd better be here. He nods, looking grim.

He writes again: WHERE

This seems like a good point to place a reminder that Jack has a lot of blood on his sweater, and not all of it is from his DIY throat surgeries.

Hey, if he does a test badly enough to get blood all over him, that's not Jacklyn's problem.

...Is he doing tests? It's possible. There are other girls here having lessons and tests as well, although she only sees them rarely. On the other hand, she's never seen a person her apparent age running tests. Or a man, for that matter. And theirs have never overlapped with hers.

But if he's not running his own test, he must be a part of hers, just like O'Brian. She narrows her eyes and wishes they'd give her more of a clue about what to do here.

They've put a dangerous-looking man here, looking for Papa Fontaine. And they've put together a scenario that seems pretty nonlinear, which maybe means they want her making decisions as well as just solving problems; unusual, but not unheard-of.

Do they want her to... not help him?

She's not sure. But it's worth mentioning that she's been standing here puzzling over this, instead of answering, for a lot of seconds.

He waits.

She's taking a conspicuously long time to answer. So whats her angle then? Is she working for him? Or is she weighing the risks of betraying him? Or does she honestly not know?

Jack's shoulders get more tense. He can feel his hand tingle with the need to slap it against the glass, as if that'd remind her to answer (or startle it out of her), but he's at least together enough to realize she still has her gun, and startling her might not be the best idea. Even if he's pretty sure he can handle getting shot once.

His head tilts a little, so he's glaring at her with a little more intensity, waiting for the answer.

She's not sure. She's not sure. So she chooses an answer at random and runs with it, because there's nothing more useless than staying still.

Jack opens her mouth, and carefully asks a question that she doesn't ask very often:

"Why?"

Ha. He's not sure he has the breath to sufficiently get across the why. He rolls his eyes, a little. Because, really, this is what's holding him up?

This is useless, he decides. He steps back, shaking his head, and then waves his hand, motioning her to move aside.

She moves, ever obliging, sideways and back several paces.

But she keeps a tight hold of her gun, because she has an idea of what he might be about to do.

If her idea was 'shoot the glass' then she is completely correct!

When she's out of the way, Jack's gun is raised again and he shoots the glass. It shatters impressively easy, actually, compared to the panes in the rest of Rapture. In fact, there's enough room for him to step through, if he's willing to tap a few pieces here or there for a clearer route.

It's probably a good thing that that WAS her idea, because otherwise she might be startled into shooting at him. As it is, she trains the gun on him firmly again. She's very aware of the barrier between them being removed.

Go ahead with stepping through if you're going to step through, man.

Don't mind if he does, thanks!

She still has the gun on him. So hey, he's got his pointed back at her too, but it's more insurance. 'Yeah, yeah, I have a gun too. What are you going to do about it?'

Actually, that's a good question. He raises his eyebrow. If he wanted to shoot her, he'd have shot her already, right? Still, he kind of wants to head in the direction she's blocking. So other than that eyebrow, he wiggles the gun as another silent request for her to step aside.

This time, she doesn't move.

They wouldn't put someone so clearly important in her path if she was supposed to be letting him go, right? She's been trained in a lot of things, fighting and killing prominent among them. Her training has had a conspicuous lack of letting people go.

Of course, a harder question is: what is she supposed to do?

"...where's O'Brian?"

It's natural for someone raised in a tiny environment to operate on the assumption that everybody knows everybody.

Jack blinks, squints, and tilts his head. Who? Name doesn't ring a bell.

... But it sounds suspiciously Irish.

...Or maybe everybody doesn't know everybody. Two whole people have failed to recognise her, after all. Hmmm.

"He's shorter than me. And blond."

There, she devoted a whole seven syllables to a description. Jack-over-there must know him now!

Nope, that doesn't ring a bell. Well - not for anyone real, anyway. He shakes his head. Doesn't know him, hasn't seen him.

Then he motions her to move aside again.

Okay, that's going nowhere. Think. Maybe that's not what she's supposed to be asking. Why did he seem suspicious?

Oh right, he was asking after Fontaine.

She frowns, and stands up straight in an attempt to look imposing.

"Why are you looking for Papa Fontaine?"

Well. That's a question that needs more words to answer than he can give. Or maybe not:

After some deliberation, he raises his free hand, with only the thumb out, pointed at his neck, and he moves it across in swift, slash of a motion.

(But it's while he does it that his brain picks up on the odd thing out in her question: Papa Fontaine? Who the hell would ever think of him like that?!)

Oh.

Oh.

There's really no way to misinterpret that gesture, and Jack is hit by anger. She's not sure if it's training or instinct or just this surge of protective indignation in her chest, but -- for once not thinking of her scorecard -- she fires the gun.

Fortunately, that's about the time Jack realizes how significant 'Papa Fontaine' could be to his situation.

Well, not the whole deal, but some of it: The armed person in front of him has potential loyalty to Fontaine, and he just made his intentions clear. The look in her eyes right before she pulls the trigger fulfills that potential, and Jack attempts to get out of the way. The best he manages in the narrow hall and narrower window of time is twisting, but hey, at least the bullet hits somewhere else in his chest instead of his heart.

It hurts, more than the lance of pain from his neck when a sound tries to grit out. At that point he's acting through reflex more than thought - his gun hand has swung wildly out of the way as he tried to dodge, but his plasmid hand was still in a good place to retaliate. It's probably one of the sloppiest electro-bolts he's fired, but all he needs it to do is to stop her from putting one in his head while he recovers.

She's already following his movement with her gun, and she squeezes the trigger again -- but the Electro-bolt only has to catch her a glancing blow to go snapping up and down her body. Everything shakes and pops out of control. Her shot goes about as wide as you can possibly imagine, and a high-pitched noise escapes between her teeth.

It feels like fire, but sharper. It's like the zaps they give her when she does something wrong, only ten times more so.

Has she done something horribly, horribly wrong?

The answer is 'probably'.

Well, it sounds like that vague plan has sort of worked out. Jack, meanwhile, hits a mirror and slowly slides down it, teeth bared and jaw clenched in pain.

Okay. Okay, take stock: what hurts? Chest and throat. Throat was low-priority though, chest ranked a little higher, even if the gunshot didn't feel that strong. It wasn't a through-and-through, that's for sure, but he was kind of in a hurry so digging the bullet out would have to wait. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and rummages with his free hand for a first aid kit. The other hand still has the gun and has it pointed around where he remembered the woman being, roughly.

The lightning crackles away and Jack heaves in a breath, feeling it rasp in her throat. She can taste blood. But she moves.

She spots the man slumped against a mirror, pointing his weapon. She spots the revolver on the floor, where it's dropped from her hand. In the same movement, she scoops up the revolver and dodges parallel to the man. She's definitely moving on instinct now. Except that for her, instinct is programmed in for effectiveness, and honed through practical testing.

There are all sorts of things she could be thinking about, but they're blotted out. Her head is in the game.

And she's firing again.

There's another bang and he's been punched somewhere in the chest again. The first aid kit he found slips out of his fingers as his body shudders from the hit, and he bangs his head against the glass behind him. A grunt tears through his throat again, but Jack gets his eyes open and he's really mad now.

He's done with everything Fontaine, with this other bullshit distraction and bullshit obstacle in between him and finishing what that bald fuck started.

Her head's in the game, but his has ragequit and stormed off to the lockers. He drops the gun and lunges for her. She can't use the gun if he's too close, is the justification he would go with if he was thinking clearly at all.

She doesn't yell out as he charges, because she's a Jack, but she does make an alarmed sort of noise through her teeth.

Not gonna lie, she really expected that second shot to finish him off. Or at least to slow him down enough that he couldn't cannonball into her. So Jack doesn't dodge nearly quick enough, and she -- well, she's not sure if she has bullets left anyway (that's a beginners' slip-up, she'd get the shock prod for that for sure), but the question now becomes moot as her arm is awkwardly pinned. She's thrown back by the weight of the man.

Her heart's going a thousand miles an hour and her muscles are full of a jerky urgency. She's scared, she realises. Really scared.

Feeling like it's in slow motion, she aims her unpinned fist at his head.

Jack's focus is on pinning that gun arm, and after - well, he's playing it by ear. Knocking her out is definitely on the table, killing her - normally he would, but something's putting him off. Maybe it's her face. Sure, that's it - it's unmarred by splicing, so she's an ordinary person. An ordinary person who hasn't wronged beyond him beyond, er, trying to kill him just now.

He catches the movement coming in, and while she hits him harder than he expects, he's too spliced and mad for it to really stop him. He catches her arm before she could pull it back, but before he could figure out what to do with that, he sees it:

Chain links on her wrist.

He freezes, staring. The tattoos. Fontaine. Hell, even her name.

Jack takes the freezing as an opportunity. She pulls back enough to twist her trapped arm, get the barrel of the gun right up against his gut, and--

click

...

Oh. It was out of bullets, then.

(no subject)

obeyseventually - 2014-02-27 00:07 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only