|
   |
The amount of junk food Amadeus can pack away in one sitting is nothing short of terrifying. Five burgers, a large order of cheesefries, and a can of soda later and he's feeling more like himself again. Ah, yes. The datastreams return and his mind is aflood once again with the numbers and equations behind everything in the physical world.
Currently, he and Steve are walking back towards Wing Sing with a bad full of still-uneaten burgers. He doesn't have Kirby or his suit with him right at the moment, sneaking out while the coyote puppy snoozed. Right now he's just wearing a plain white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of tennis shoes. It's a much more played-down, nondescript look for him. As they walk, Cho stifles a rather loud belch and looks rather sheepish in the aftermath. "I usually graze," he explains weakly. "I got one for you, though. Did you know Bette Davis?" He looks to the much larger man inquisitively.
*
"Not in anything more than the movies. Bad Sister was her best work, probably," Steve says as he holds the door open for the young man. He walks alongside him and through towards the secret passage entrances and down into SHIELD headquarters. He needs to take a load off after that large lunch (though Amadeus did put him to shame). He finds himself wishing for a Spanish siesta time. He plumps down in the waiting room next to his helm and shield and exhales. "I'd ask to play you in chess, but I am pretty sure you would wipe the floor with me."
*
It's been a gripping few weeks for the city. Riots in Mutant Town, the kidnapping of the Deputy Chief— things are on edge. And it's hot. It's hot out, and the city fairly seethes and groans as it chafes under the weight of overpopulation and stress and the petty bickering that so often flares into meaningful violence.
But people try. People try to live, to have lives, to be happy and find kindness to one another. But life goes on, and people come and go, and the world turns.
Around the corner traffic slows and then stops, a funeral processing turning down the street. A lone motorcycle cop rambles ahead of the crowd, his bike emitting a loud, rasping growl- *brap-ap-ap-ap* as it clears the street with the silent red light atop the front handle. Behind him, a caisson rattles along, led by two white horses and a black-clad fellow suffering the heat stoically.
Mourners follow the hearse, some singing songs and hymnals, others silent. There's a strange frisson in the air as the hearse passes— Steve and Amadeus couldn't possibly miss it. Thinned lips and scowls extend across the street to expressions of sanctimonious pride. The body in the hearse, that of former Councilmember Col (ret.) William Horton, a staunchly conservative element opposing mutant integration— notably of his own neighborhood, one that's rapidly grown more diverse as mutants reveal themselves in New York. A veteran of Korea, he'd gone into politics and promptly placed himself atop the mutant rights barrier holding the conservative colors.
This is his old neighborhood, it seems.
Someone offers a low boo, and then there's a hiss from another corner. More boos. One of the mourners snaps something at a mutant. "Get lost! This is a funeral!" he shouts.
"Fuck you!" someone else calls from another corner. There's a flipped bird. More low boos. A screech of disdain. A window slams open. "Burn in hell!" Slams shut, loud as a gunshot. The mourners slowly shrink into a hard knot of humanity, shaking their fists in defiance at the murmuring scorn coming from the sidewalks.
*
"That's a shame," Cho says with a nod. "But she was really pretty in that movie." The young man grins over at him as the door is held open and they both walk into Wing Sing. He's a nice guy, so Amadeus seems happy enough to follow along and ask him all manner of questions about gorgeous actresses from his time period. "I'd go easy on you. If you want, I could teach you to play in your head. It keeps your brain occupied under stress. Well…it works for me, anyways." With a lift of his shoulders then, he keeps walking.
Until the sounds of booing and then shouting come from outside. Amadeus turns towards the window and to the hearse outside. Squinting, he quickly takes in the objective data, every calculation streaming through his consciousness. A motorcycle, a hearse, and people talking in hushed tones about the mourners. "William Horton?" he says out loud, able to read the lips and piece together the fragments from different conversations in a moment.
Cho stalls there, not quite moving to the secret headquarters entrance in the back room just yet. "Sounds like it's getting ugly out there."
*
"Movies have changed quite a bit since I came out of the ice," Steve says as he considers. "Ever since, I've been into Elizabeth taylor. I guess I was always a Ginger Rogers before." Pause. "No relation."
Steve cranes his neck and grips his shield a little tighter once he hears the commotion outside. "Hopefully it's not anything serious. Just in case, I probably should get my gear on." All he's missing, really, his the armor he wears over his upper half. He begins to shrug into it easily before returning to keep an eye on the situation from behind the one way, mirrored window.
*
It goes from ugly to bad in a heartbeat, the way these things do. The funeral procession gets slowed down between some construction that seems hastily added, and a parked utility vehicle that's a bit too far from the curb.
Steve and Amadeus would probably come to the same conclusion fairly fast. Unexpected construction— a chokepoint. A vehicle that doesn't belong there. The oppressive heat, the inconvenient timing, a funeral hearse in a residential area that's off the main roads— and only a single cop for escort?
It's a recipe for disaster.
And then there's shouting from a close cluster, where mutants and pro-separatrists are almost nose to nose. Tensions flaring. Shouting, fingers wagged, chests bumping. It's so close to a fight. So close. So close so close— that urgent bleating in the back of the head, that animal instinct that should have Cho and Rogers both coiling in readiness. The surety of an explosion about to happen.
And then gunshots ring out. People scatter, diving for cover. Then MORE gunshots ring out in response, these from the south side of the street where Wing Sing cafe is located. The street explodes into bedlam in an instant, as armed men rise up from the shadows and back alleys and windows with surplus military rifles in their hands. It's impossible to tell at a glance who is who, but it seems block warfare has erupted, and though the lines are momentarily vague for Cho and Rogers, it's obvious that a lot of people are going to be hurt if the firefight is allowed to continue.
*
While Steve gears up in the upper half of his armor, Amadeus grabs a couple of pairs of chopsticks from the counter and stuffs them into the back pocket of his jeans. He doesn't need a lot of gear, no, though his suit would be nice right about now, perhaps. At his mention of Ginger Rogers, he looks up at him and gives a humorous smile and a short laugh. "I was about to say that movies aren't the only thing that's changed since then."
Things gradually get worse and they ramp up quickly. Amadeus flits his gaze quickly around the scene, gathering every equation for quantum outcome from the world around him in an instant. "Geez I'm stupid! I should have seen that on the way in!" It's the perfect choke point. The hearse and the cop are baasically stuck helpless. Instead of rushing out, he lets Steve take point and is ready to assist in any way he can. Captain America is better-equipped at the moment.
*
Captain America doesn't wait an instant. Rather he emerges from the back door and out onto the street in one move. Bullets ricochet off the shield, dampened and deadened the metal falls to the ground and clangs off the cement.
"Get down," the Star Spangled Man yells as he moves across the avenue to come upon one of the shooters. The assailant catches a shield uppercut to the face, knocking his head backwards. The gunman staggers and Steve is on him with inhuman speed. There's a punch to the throat, a kick to the torso, and once the Captain grabs his arm, the short interlude is done. As Steve continues on, the gunman's wrist bone is sticking out from his skin as he screams in horror.
*
It's just turned into a hell of a gunfight at this point. It doesn't take Cho and Steve long to figure it out, whether or not they communicate to one another— it seems like pro-mutant radicals had decided to ambush this cavalcade to make a statement, or perhaps kill someone, or maybe just menace the procession and make a statement that way. But someone had tipped off the pro-humanity right-wingers— the mutants were better set to mob the funeral and start a riot, but the Humanity First folks were in defillade and much more heavily armed.
Someone had talked, or the Humanity First people had a spy in the mutant ranks. And then, someone had simply lit a match under that powder keg. It's the sort of explosive violence that promises to tear the city apart if it's not checked, but the abrupt arrival of Captain America almost instantly quells the actions of a half a dozen radicals on the south side of the street— many of them former servicemen themselves.
"Hol-ee shit, it's Captain America," one of them wheezes, his gun barrel dropping in shock as Cap perfunctorialy kicks the shit out of one of their number.
*
Cho doesn't so much get down as he does gracelessly dodge through the gunfire. Velocity, trajectory, and point of supposed impact are all seen as a flood of equations from the constant sstream of data. Staggering and fumbling through, the bullets seeem to miss him as he plants himself strategically where they are not. As Steve goes after one of the mooks, Cho slides behind a newspaper machine on the street and takes one of the very American chopsticks from his pocket to flip it quickly between his fingers. "Alright, asshole," he utters with a smirk on his face. Peeking around his cover then, Amadeus reads the datastream for a couple of seconds before standing up and flinging the utensil at one of the other gunmen. Except that it's high. He'd targeted a loose screw he found noting wind velocity, structure, and the subtle movements it was making. When the chopstick hits the sign with a *CLANG*, it rattles a moment and then falls, clobbering the guman right on the top of his head.
Cho prepares to move again, attempting to follow after Cap even though he is quite a bit faster.
*
Oddly, Steve slows down just a bit as he coils his body for a split second. In a violent twist, he flings his shield as hard as he can. The red white and blue painted metal knocks off two of the heads of his adversaries, caroms off of the brick wall, and then hits a third before it comes back to his hand.
*
Cho gets a perfect look across the street at the Mutant side of things. There are a dozen armed men, at least, and his fantastic brain starts feeding him more datum. A gas pipe. Overpressure valves fifty yards away. The right amount of pressure in the proper location and ignited in a certain fashion could avert an almost certain disaster, turning a liability into a tactical advantage— separating the two lines of combatants with smoke and fog and fire.
Steve's moving swiftly, routing the ambushers with his usual ease. Fast. Flawless.
And then he hurls his shield at another man, and it bounces off a wall, around a corner— and with a discordant CLANG, it hits something… and stops.
That mighty shield isn't suppose to yield. But it seems to have clipped something that checks the return of the mighty icon of Freedom.
*
All of the math is read from that shield and he just boggles. Amadeus has to give that thing some serious thought there for a moment, squinting just a touch. "What the /heck/ is that thing made out of?" he asks Cap in a shout as he himself suddenly flings the other chopstick at the shield to intercept it. This doesn't change the course off the shield at all, but rather sends the chopstick shooting like an arrow back over Steve's shoulder to pound right into the barrel of a gun aimed at the Star-Spangled hero's back. The wood explodes and the bullet sticks in the barrel of the gun.
"I mean, seriously!" Amadeus arches his body clumsily and stumbles into a spin to avoid another couple of bullets coming his way. "Whatever they told you that thing was made of…dude. It's almost like it's alive. How'd you get so pinpoint with it?" The sudden tactical advantage is noted, his mind catching every last bit of the data for creating a controlled disaster to avert a disaster. "Here we go!" With that, he flings the last two sticks. One breaks the window of a parked car on an incline, punching through a slight crack in the glass. The other stick follows, slipping into the hole in the glass as well, flipping to disengage the faulty parking brake. The car slams into the one in front of it that sets off a chain reaction of events like the world is his personal Rube Goldberg machine. One of the mutant gunmen, about to fire, is hit with a stray shovel, turning his aim so that the bullet hits the valve to apply just that /exact/ amount of pressure needed.
And then there is a rumble from under the ground right before smoke and fog erupt from underneath the street between the lines of protestors.
*
"Practice, Practice, Practice," Steve says as he responds to Amadeus in concert with three vicious knees to the ribs of one gunman that he has sort of bent over a bit to the side. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Steve throws the battered man away like someone would throw a can in the trash (hey, recycling isn't here yet). But then, the shield doesn't come back. Steve hrms and follows the line it sailed a few feet, just around the corner. There it is.
He reaches down to pick it up only to find a grenade beneath!
Steve pulls up the shield to protect himself, just as it explodes!
*
The grenade shakes the building, fragments of steel bursting out. The concussion rings Steve's ears, and only the shield saves him from more serious trauma of the weapon going off so proximately. Drywall is peeled from the studs, every piece of glass in the building blows out simultaneously, and almost everyone dives for cover.
The riot of battle ringing in his ears, a haze of smoke and blurry eyes fogging his vision, Steve gets a glance— just one— of a figure. Lean and strong, stocky, broad shoulders and with mussy brown hair that hangs to his thick trapezius. He wears a black vest, with a silver sleeve, and his face is obscured by a helmet protecting his eyes and ears, extending down to cover his mouth as well. Red goggles leer at him, mockingly.
Then between eyeblinks, he turns and leaps out a third story window, and vanishes into the screaming crowds fleeing the main street.
The gunshots stop as the radicals and isolationists both give up the fight, smoke and fury conspiring to drive them apart. Some are injured. Some are worse than injured. Blood on the ground, a city in raging riots, and now the question of who was the man who planted a grenade under Captain America's shield— and who very possibly orchestrated the entire riot, given his stealthy absence from the battle until a key opportunity.
Meanwhile, the city groans in pain.