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The sirens had approached from some distance, blaring out their warning above the din of honking taxi and overhead subway. Then it had gone quiet, and people where strangely absent. Several blocks of manhattan had been quietly evacuated, cars left running in the middle of the street with doors ajar, neon signs buzzing, TV's on in over-store appartments with windows open. Street lights began to fail as the section of the grid went into a low power operation. Alternating lights off, dense cloud cover over head, now the city was a series of bright circles seperated by actual dark. A few other pedestrians had also, like Namor and Crystal, been trapped inside the quarantine barrier, a barrier setup with eerie rapidity, but they had scattered to find somewhere to hide. Dumpsters, unlocked store fronts, building roofs. The pair where in eyeshot of each other, so Namor ventured a "Any idea what this is about?" to a Crystal who'd been told nothing. Even he seemed wary.
*
Crystal had come into the city to deliver a signature for a last-minute investment for the school, expecting it to be a short trip. Being caught inside a quarantine line was not part of her plan. She's been watching the lights and the line of barricades, checking the attentiveness of the people around her. Maybe she could…Nope. There's at least one person paying attention.
"Probably something to do with whatever's been happening in Central Park," she replies with a faint, restless smile. "And Hell's Kitchen. And increasing parts of Midtown," she sighs, smile fading to a grimace.
*
Namor walked from the perfect circle of light into the darkness, expensive shoes tapping his way into the cloak of shadow, until he emerged in another lit circle. He removed his suit jacket and folded it compassionately, resting it on the hood of a car. He took out his cuff links, placed them in his pants pocket, and rolled the cuffs up slowly.
"Feels like a fight." he said ominously. Then he gave her a stern look, "Can you handle yourself?"
*
Crystal arches a brow at the question, a faint smile tugging at one corner of her lips. It's not a question most ask of a lady in this day and age. Who expects a lady to be able to handle herself? And Crystal looks, to a cursory examination, like a fairly typical young lady in a mid-calf, full-skirted dress, white gloves on her hands.
And yet, as she plucks the gloves from her fingers, tucking them into her clutch, she smiles. "Quite," she answers. "You?"
*
Namor murmored, "Depends." summoning a large golden trident from the air as if it had been resting on his back this entire time. "Last time I was topside I messed with the wrong woman."
Then his head turned, far off down the block the sounds of men calling; worried and alarmed. Gun fire. Silence.
He lowered his voice, "I'm Namor." he explained, "What do I call you?"
*
"Crystal." The young woman tilts her head slightly when the trident appears, but she doesn't seem unsettled by it. Intrigued, more like. "Nice to meet you, Namor." She glances down at her dress, sighing softly as she smooths a hand over her skirts. "I am never dressed for these things."
Dismissing that problem, she looks to the barriers once more at the sound of guns. "Shall we?" With the words, there's a shift in the air around her, a rush of wind that spins and starts to lift her from the ground.
*
"The Cryst…" he started to say, and he seemed equally incredulous as much as awestruck by dumb luck to have a powerful ally at this moment. His reverie was short lived and she would have seemed to take off from the ground at the most elegant moment. Namor's feet shifted, the sidewalk beneath them becoming suddenly and instantly unstable. Namor made a muffled yelp, a cry of surprise caught in his throat, never quite making it out in time. He was gone below now, a large black hole where he was standing, the golden trident clattered noisily to the ground, bouncing end to end and singing audibly with the hardened quality of its construction.
*
Well that was unanticipated. The wind fades as Namor drops beneath the pavement, Crystal dropping lightly back to the sidewalk to crouch at the edge of the hole. "Namor?" she calls down, reaching for the trident. "I suspect you're going to want this," she murmurs to herself. A ball of flame kindles above her shoulder as she braces herself at the edge. "I'm coming down!" she calls after him, summoning an updraft to slow her fall.
*
The 8th Avenue Subway Line
When she found Namor he was on the tracks, lit overhead by flicker flashes from failing flourescents and the natural incandescance of her portable flame. He was covered with a many million little yellow lengths, resembling angle-hair pasta in color and dimension. The long strings where all over his body, suckered to him somehow, and stretched long down the tracks into the black. Namor was struggling as he was dragged, ripping and tearing at the feeble scylla with grunts of pain and ragged rasps of raging resperation. Even as he did his clothing shredded and tiny nicks disappeared from his skin and bled excitedly. Each handful of thin mandible was replaced by urging, squirming, wriggling more and the uselessness of his struggle served to tangle him further and further. His strength didn't seem to matter here, in fact it was something of a disservice as he thrashed this way and that, inching with rapidity toward the yawning mouth of the subway tunnel.
*
That is definitely new.
There's a moment where Crystal pauses, staring, as she tries to comprehend just what's attacked him. But there's no time for overthinking it. Not right now. Once the traces the little vines down into the mouth of the subway tunnel, she tosses the trident to Namor with one hand, sending the ball of flame at her shoulder toward the main body of the things, away from Namor. Things that live in the dark rarely appreciate fire, after all.
*
A terrible, angry, vindictively inhuman scream answered the fireball. For the moment of the explosion something lit up down there, a fascinating mass of eyes and mouths and nope with long slender tendrils curling painfully back from the searing flame. It screeched loud vocal warnings of rage in some gurgling series of squawks that would seem to have gotten farther and farther away, as if it was in retreat. Namor grasped his trident and peeled himself off the tracks, standing now the way he was usually seen in the media. Almost naked, holding his golden trident, and grimly determined.
"Friends of yours?" he wondered, grasping at something to explain what had just happened.
*
"That is the strangest thing I have seen in a long time," Crystal shakes her head to Namor, staring down the tunnel toward the body of the beast. "And I have seen some very strange things lately." Tearing her gaze from the tunnel, she looks back to him, assessing. "Are you all right? I'd rather not leave that thing in there, and I'd rather not try to take it alone, but I don't want you to get hurt either."
*
Namor nodded, shaking off her concerns, "Can you breath under water?" he asked, seeming even more grim. He hefted the trident, which was ringing from a tap of its butt on the floor, and begining to shimmer in the dim light. He was stranger in person, this close, than he might have appeared before. Pointed ears and gills flaring angrily on the sides of his neck where the least of it when white nictitating membranes sealed over his eyes making them seem solidly white and occluded. "We can flood the tunnel, I'll charge it, you…" he paused and smirked, good naturedly pointing to her skirt and heels. "…do whatever it is that you do. Seems to be working."
*
"Not precisely, but I can manage," Crystal grimaces at the suggestion of breathing underwater. "If you flood it, I can add to the electricity. Assuming this thing can be taken down with a big enough shock." She pauses, giving him a closer look. "Are you sure you can flood it? Where are you going to get…" Extending her senses outward, she seeks for signs of water until she finds the nearby water main. "Ah. Never mind then."
*
Namor pointed the Trident down the long black of the tunnel. "Neptune's Trident." he said, as if no further explanation was required and then it rushed out of seemingly no where, a massive boiling gout of angry sea water. He seemed less interested in charging into the water since she'd offered to charge the water. So he walked forward slowly, the column of water shouting out of the tips of the trident and engorging the tunnel ahead.
"Do your worst, Crystal. That thing should know the consequences of its choices.", he said this imperiosly, hints of rage hissing from his teeth.
*
As he shoots the water toward the creature, he can sense the feel of another hand on it. Crystal shapes air and water around the flow, making certain that the water stays around the creature in the tunnel rather than escaping to the path of least resistance. One hand reaches out, helping her focus the energy, as her steps follow his.
"I'm not certain that sort of thing makes choices," she muses, her jaw set. "But it's not going to have time to find out." The buzzing lights in the tunnel brighten to an actinic glare until one bursts, a wire falling down. Crystal's fist clenches, and a spark of lightning bursts from the wire into the sphere of water, charging it in full.
*
The sphere of water was suddenly occluded by bubbles as the many mouths of the Deep Thing screamed and emptied itself of air. The sound didn't meet their ears but the violence of it did. The water burbled and spat, became a soup of the exploded body parts, murky blood, long hair like tendrils. The electricity had ended it, spectacularly, and as Namor released the magic in the trident, he gawped in silence. "Uh…" he said seeming for a moment like the Lumux his body pretending him to be and harshly lacking for something regal to utter, "…nice job?"
Then, as the water receeded and the wet parts slumped to the ground some distance away, the smell hit them. A waft of sick, dead, complimented by briney water. Namor nodded up the whole he'd been dragged through, taking to the air with her. "Thats awful." he said, voice deaded by the pinch of two fingers on his nose. He lead the way out, making sure no to stray too far from his ally, dragging her out by the hand if need be.
*
Crystal lets out a breath once the creature explodes, at least pushing what she can of the overflow away from them. Unfortunately, letting go of that breath means she needs to take another, gagging at the stench. "Ugh, that's disgusting," she grimaces, waving a hand and setting at least the larger pieces to flame before hurrying out of the tunnel behind him, hand over her mouth.
"I know just short of nothing about magic, but if that thing came from the thing in Central Park, then it is far past time for the people who do know it to do something about it."
*
Namor emerged from the hole with Crystal in tow, he glanced down toward her as she spoke. "Sounds like you humans have your hands full." because he didn't know better to call her what she really was. He opened his mouth to say something pithy and then stopped, looking around the ring of the hole to the mass of figures concentrically arranged. Cops, FBI, Men in Black, some mixture of all of them or something else entirely; either way they were now surrounded by nervous men with trembling weapons trained on them.
Namor blanched a moment, not expecting to be joined so soon or by so many. "rest easy, Gentleman." he assured them, moving aside for Crystal to emerge. "She killed it."
A roar went up in the crowd, cheering and shouting, nervous release. Not a single one of them wanted to go down that hole, and all of them thought they would have to. Now the relief was spilling out of their mouths, and banging across hands.
*
Namor isn't the only one who blanches. Being a star is the last thing Crystal needs, and as gratifying as the cheers are, they're also a little bit terrifying. "No, it wasn't-" She smiles faintly, nervously, as she raises a hand to shield her face, hiding her features from any cameras that may be around. "It chased me, right onto the tracks, and the tracks electrified it," she lies. "But that thing, it's…it's dead now."
*
Namor looked at her oddly, except of course he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was the mostly naked Manfish. Turning down glory seemed as utterly foreign a thing as he could imagine. The crowd dispersed, cleaning crews began to setup near the subway entrances for what promised to be a very long night. The pair where left to their own devices without any further adoration. Perhaps one day the two of them could be heard to say 'Remember the old days when the cops where just greatful?' but today was the Silver Age.
*
As the crowd starts to disperse, Crystal lets out a breath of relief, turning to Namor with a faint smile. "I appreciate it," she says quietly. "But the world doesn't need to know some things just yet." She offers a hand, self-composed once more. "A pleasure working with you, Namor," she smiles crookedly. "Perhaps we'll meet again another time."
*