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1944 hours. Fresh Kills Landfill. Staten Island.
Some time shortly after 5:22 PM, a jogger seeking shelter from the driving rain swears up and down the west side of Staten Island is being attacked. No one might be inclined to report this as an actual threat to be taken seriously, except the neighbour knows someone who knows a professor at CUNY spitting out his coffee at the description. He has words for a colleague that start with, "I know it's not possible but Nazis…"
Except a few motorists stopped to call the Daily Bugle with word there is a sub lurking and patrolling as far as the New York Container Terminal headed for New York harbour proper.
It also doesn't help that, consequently, forty-nine minutes later, an explosion goes off near the Verrazano Narrows Bridge close to forgettable little Hoffman Island, whose only saving grace is being in a major shipping lane. The Swinburne and the Troll, two container ships, end up struck by the collection of fireworks bursting into the sky.
Choppy water and dark skies threatening to storm do not a pleasant April make. Some enterprising islanders have their Buicks and their Chryslers lined up to look for this enterprising submarine, pointing their headlights at the beach. Not much help except to show the white caps. To the side, the dump is ruled by a foul colony of rats strong enough to be their own voting bloc.
Lorraine is reading the book her father left her when the explosion comes.
She is in the backyard of the school, opening to the first page. She wonders why her father gave it to her.
"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a pleasure to see things blacken and changed…"
Then the explosion seems to shake the air, and she looks towards the sound of the explosion. It sounds like trouble.
She put the book down and stood up.
Fight fire…with fire.
She started running, her body bursting into nuclear fire, and by the third step FireHawk had spread her wings and launched into the air, heading for the direction of the explosion…
Noh-Varr was exploring New York City, not overly concerned about possible bad weather. He's Kree. He's not going to melt. He was in southern Brooklyn when he heard the explosion and ran toward it to get a look.
Helps to have friends in the right places. Anya Corazon was tipped off to some potential action on the island, and made way there as quickly as possible. Upon a rooftop nearby, out of sight, the woman crouches down and begins removing her clothes, revealing the black and white costume she wears beneath. "Un submarino," she murmurs to herself, while stuffing the clothing into her backpack. "Increible."
She is just pulling the mask onto her head when the explosions rock the area, and ends up crouching down lower. A quiet gasp is given, but soon enough she's on the rooftop's edge, looking for objects that might help her get closer with a little web slingin'
Eastside Staten Island
Over the water dances flame and fire, leaping almost placidly into the air. A pillar of sparks twinkle like a celebration of Chinese New Year or New Years, except the dominant colours are orange and yellow, separated by an oily black smoke. Neither the Troll or the Swinburne represent a large class of seagoing ships. The Troll is actually quite short and cumbersome, a wide-bodied, older model ponderous under an unlikely load of shipping crates. It flounders in the water, throwing the bobbing metal crates onto the choppy waves as the rain threatens to pour down. Crew shout in tongues, blame assigned. On the Swinburne, a more modern vessel, the buckled side near the stern shows a huge impact crater like someone — possibly green, angry, and in need of a nap — plowed a fist into the painted metal around the waterline. It doesn't look good for structural integrity.
The traffic on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, always thick, hardly changes because of a popping burst on the waters. Drivers go on, passengers perhaps commenting on the lightshow.
Westside Staten Island
"Go and poke it!" shouts a college student, umbrella raised over his head. "C'mon, you're the best swimmer in Linden High School, that's what you always tell my sister!"
"I didn't mean for the sea, Dick! C'mon, you don't want me to go so deep do you?" cries his friend, trying to huddle into the Buick.
"I bet you told her that too, Harry. Get out there. Show some patriotism! If it's a sub, you just take this!" Dick is aptly named, holding up a tire iron ominously. The others crowded on the beach chuckle nervously.
"At least he ain't up a creek without a paddle," mutters an older gent.
A firework appears in the night sky. Tiny, but growing larger, resolving itself into the shape of an unearthly-looking woman with fiery wings, slowing down as she gets closer, hovering over a building to the left of the one Anya is on, but not seeing her. She takes in the sight, biting her lower lip.
Can she save the people on the ships? Her control isn't that refined yet…she doesn't know the first thing about welding. Right now, the best thing to do is to stop that sub from shooting anyone else!
Noh-Varr slows when he gets to the middle of the bridge, where the best look is available. Though it's not the view that gets his immediate attention. "Gods! What is that smell? Did the entire population of a small planet die? How can anyone live here?" The fiery woman zipping above him in the sky does derail some of the rant and he watches her curiously. "Yes, a very interesting planet."
Near the water's edge, there are two sturdy looking posts, likely at one point holding signs that have long since been removed. It'll have to do.
Spider-girl leaps from the building in a swan dive, pivoting midair so that she can fire a webline at the roof to slow her fall. She lands without a sound amidst a crowd of people. "Clear some room, folks," she advises them, gloved hands to either side. "Go on! Move away from the scary woman in a mask."
After a moment, she sets her eyes upon the Swinburne, then judges the posts she intends to use to her advantage. "Aqui vamos." Weblines are fired from each hand, striking the posts with hairpin accuracy. Then, she begins pulling back, one after the other, increasing the tension while the muscles under her skin tight uniform bulge. Her body arcs backward, held in place against the tension by the grip of her feet alone. She pulls until she's growling a little, then suddenly kicks off with her feet and goes flying like a rubber band snapped loose.
Over the water at breakneck speed, she lets loose of the weblines when they reach the end of their use, letting loose a cry of excitement while soaring over the water. She tucks in against herself, adjusting her drop so that she's headed right for the Swinburne's exposed deck.
Westside Staten Island
The small crowd watches the rollers crash against the ragged shore, making logs or deadfall indistinguishable from craft meant to slip unsuspecting through the North Atlantic, hunting down convoys with the determination of a wolf after a deer.
Unfortunately for Harry, he's goaded on to approach the waterline, hiking up his pants. The waves rush past his boots, and he wields that tire iron defensively against some kind of obstruction poking out of the water. "Looks like a … tower thing!" He shouts back over his shoulder.
"It hasn't got guns yet! You should go knock!" Dick calls back from the safety of his car door.
Poor Harry, he's soon enough wading and the waves knock him about like everything else. He slips in the cold water.
The great bulk of Staten Island and its dubious dump stands between the sub and the sinking ships.
Eastside Staten Island
The crew of the Swinburne, the larger of the two ships, at least make an attempt to get the pumps going and the captain calls the port authority over the radio for help. Meanwhile, the folks crawling over the burning Troll contend with the stinking oil and the burning water, the structure already shuddering and listing. Ships can flip quick, even in relatively shallow waters, and that boat is going down without serious help. Lorraine on high can easily distinguish the desperate state of one over the other, though the //Swinburne/ by no means does well. Not with that hole in her side.
Several cars swerve around Noh-Varr, who clearly is from somewhere alien like Rhode Island, gawking at the water instead of driving like a normal person. Horns honk. Beeeeep! Keep moving!
Anya has plenty of opportunity to try to measure her way out, but the little island near the sinking ships is a fair open stretch of water. Being able to fire her way across is probably outright terrifying given there's open sea there, and now horrified crewmen negotiating getting into their lifejackets seeing someone drop out of an oily, burning cloud.
"EEEEE!"
Think, think, THINK!
An idea comes to her. She has NO idea if it will work, but doing something is better than doing nothing!
She flies over to the Swinburne, looing at the hole, metal petals blown inward.
First, the water. As she descends, the air heats around her, and then the water boils into steam in a five-foot radius around her. She flies in through the hole, the superheat aroun her causing the petals to glow rose-red.
Then she begins to fold them in, the hot metal heated to the point of elasticity. She pulls and stretches the petals, overlapping them as she folds them inward to close the hole, then heats the overlapping edges and presses them together until they stick.
Then she lowers the heat, the water cooling and shrinking them, but the mashed-together metal holds.
It's going to fail inspection, but the torrent has died to a trickle, the job of ejecting the water by the bilge pumps made much easier. It should stay afloat.
She flies up through the boat's hallways and bulkheads until she erupts from one upper-deck doorway, rising into the air.
She waved to the people, hoping to HELL it worked well enough to save them, then flew towards the sub. She had a date to keep with the sub, and she was going to order the LOBSTER.
Noh-Varr throws the honking cars an annoyed look then just hops up onto the railing of the bridge, balancing effortlessly. Given he's in sneakers, jeans and a jacket, he's not going to be mistaken for a superhero. A jumper, perhaps. So, flaming woman coming in from above. Slingshot woman at edge of water. Seagoing vessels damaged, perhaps sinking. Welp, nothing he can do about it except watch the fiery one patch the hole and nod approvingly.
|ROLL| Lorraine Reilly +rolls 1d20 for: 4
The excitement fades when Spider-Girl realizes just how dangerous this move is. She flattens herself out in an attempt at making the distance, but becomes quickly worried that she may have undershot. With a gasp, she throws a hand toward the command center tower on the Swinburne and releases another web. Once it catches, she pulls, the effort giving her that little oomph of speed. Moments later, she comes skidding to a halt on the deck, chest heaving with hot breaths and the boil of adrenaline in her veins.
"Hey!" she calls to the nearest sailor, hands in the air as if she were under arrest. "It's okay, yeah? I'm here to help. Y'understand?" On a hunch, she tries Spanish. "Estoy aqui para ayudar!"
She gasps briefly when the woman, FireHawk, appears and goes bursting to the sky.
Eastside Staten Island
The Swinburne carries mostly manufactured goods, and those weigh heavily on the groaning, straining ship. Belowdecks, the engine room and the crew quarters are already showing signs of damp after Lorraine begins the process of reversing the crater in the hull, a slow and laborious process at the best of times, and in the pouring rain and blowing wind that leaves the water foaming with white caps is not the best of times. Spots of hissing metal pop and melt, slagging, but her origami patch job will eventually do well. It's holding up for the moment.
Crates float around in the water, forming a decent game of leap frog for anyone brave or strong enough to dare them. The oil from the two ships is aflame, though, a roasting pit for the unsure of foot. The reason no one from the Troll has jumped, but they mostly shout and point and cling.
Another ship inches along, answering the call for help. It's below the bridge, not that far from Noh-Varr, steaming along bravely. A garbage scow! The tug is at full throttle, noise absolutely abominable, and the nice, inviting mound of a trashpile not about to be any sort of danger unless he dislikes Twinkie wrappers and Wonder Bread.
The one man on the Swinburne about to lob the nearest thing at hand — a life preserver — halts from making Spider-Girl a game of ring toss. "Uh… What? This is a boat with a hole in it! This is very not okay! It's on fire!" No, that's probably Lorraine, but.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap. No sign of whatever did this…and she can't just leave these people. There's another ship that needs help.
What is here? Crates…could put them together, they are floating. Make a raft, big enough for the people of the Troll…but they are not metal, so she can't melt them.
She flies towards the Troll, calling out as loud as she can, "I need rope! I can lash the crates together to make a raft if I only had some ROPE!"
Argh, that noise. Shaking his head, Noh-Varr reroutes the pain impulse to some an area without any pain receptors so he can just ignore it. If only he could do the same for the odor! At least he doesn't have super smelling. There's no way he's going to jump into it though. "You!" he shouts. "The one… umm, here to help. With the sticky rope! Fasten those barrels to each other and form a raft for them. Add enough debris and you can make a bridge to land. You! Fire woman! Weld metal plates from one ship to the other so they can get off the burning one!"
"The breach is over there!" the sailor cries, pointing astern, but Anya flattens the life preserver against his chest. "Go, now. And get as many of your mates!"
She's about to head astern when Noh-Varr's voice carries just enough over the din to catch her attention. She clambers to that end of the vessel, glowering. "It's Spider-Girl, not sticky rope!" she answers, then eyes the oil in the water dubiously. "One little tweak."
She starts with a single web, fired toward the Troll as far away from any flame as possible. That line is attached to the Swinburne, then another, and another, and another. She turns, fires a line toward one of the cargo crates safe aboard the Swinburne, then whips it like a bolo over the edge, where it catches somewhere upon the web bridge she's created. "Little help?" she calls. "Don't use the stuff in the water, it might be flammable!"
Troll
The crew doesn't seem to exactly grasp the desperation of their situation, snapping and snarling at one another. There could be better ways to resolve their given situation, like jumping into one of the little lifeboats probably wedged somewhere on the deck. A flaming person of any sort causes a brief measure of confusion.
"Is that the Human Torch?" whispers a burly fellow, maybe Greek given the glorious mustache. He squints at the shipping crates and the blaze on the water, the spreading morass of trouble. Another of his companions is seriously considering just leaping over the side, and he scrambles back to find rope. They always have enough of that on a ship to hang themselves with, though the boat is listing dangerously at this point, and that takes some difficulty to find in a timely fashion. Not before Noh-Varr or Spider-Girl act, though!
Swinburne
Hey, their boat isn't sinking, though this takes them a bit of time to realize. The group is somewhat more coordinated than on the Troll. A mate pokes his head out of the main structure and he scrambles. "What do you need us to do? Boxes?" Those crates are big for most of the men. Some of them probably contain the likes of tools and small vehicles. But they can try to offer some help with prying the smaller shipping crates free with hand hoists and jacks.
The oil. What can she do about the oil in the water? She can't risk trying to burn it off—both ships could go up in flames if she can't control it.
She begins to pick up the panels of the smaller disassembled crates, then begins to lay them out on the multiple weblines. It's tricky, but slowly, she begins to lay out a wooden "bridge" on the weblines above the water. She's not very strong, and she still has so much to learn.
"Someone…! Help me make a bridge!"
All the power of a fusion reactor, and you can still feel helpless.
Noh-Varr clasps his hands behind his back as he stands there on the railing, not even noticing the distance down or that most people would consider it a precarious perch. "Good!" he calls. "Keep doing that. Use the sticky rope to patch the cracks and small holes in the hull the water is going in! Also lower those smaller boats into the water and use them to get away from the wreck!" He'll continue to supervise.
"That's fine!" Spider-Girl calls to the sailor, while slinging web after web to each item added to the bridge, further securing it, keeping it strong. "Just tell me when it's loose!"
With each crate the sailors free, she attaches a line to it and slings it onto the bridge with her enhanced strength. No one her size should be able to do that!
"Okay!" she calls out to Lorraine, while adding a couple more lines to help secure the bridge to both the Swinburne and the Troll, at distance. "Start getting the sailors over here!" she calls. Noh-Varr's direction isn't lost on her, but she chews er lip for a moment, worrying that the Troll could be doomed to tip over by the way it's listing.
Rogue goes home.
FireHawk alights above the bridge over troubled waters, calling out to them to follow her across, to get them off the Troll. She is as bright as a beacon, shining over the bridge and over the entire area.
Excellent. Things seem to be under control and Noh-Varr didn't need to jump into garbage. A win-win scenario for certain. He studies not just the fiery woman and young arachnid but the panicking crew members as well. Humans will likely be easily defeated if they all panic under such minor circumstances.
"Come on, come on," Spider-Girl urges, but worries that the sailors are taking too long. She climbs out onto the bridge, going out a few meters until she can perch atop one of the larger crates. "Faster, faster!" she calls. "If you fall, one of us will catch you!"
The Troll is listing, threatening to tip. She can see it from here, and so she starts flinging weblines to the hull's of each ship in different directions, hoping that the more stable Swinburne might keep the other afloat for long enough. "COME ON!" she shrieks, and climbs to the side of the crate as the first sailor climbs over it and toward the relative safety of the Swinburne.
Firehawk lands on the deck of the Troll and begins pushing people onto the bridge. "Go! Go before the ship blows up and takes you all with it!" She looks almost as intimidating as she did when she was 'born,' and she looks around to make sure no one is wandering off or planning to do something stupid.
From his vantage point, Noh-Varr can see some things those right on top of things can't and frowns a bit. Opening his hand, the wrist band transforms into one of his guns and he fires a blast of concussive energy at the hull of the ship. Low power of course so it's little more than a light show to attract attention. And once he has it, he points into the water toward the rear of the ship. "A body!" he shouts. A crewman who probably fell overboard on impact and maybe hit his head.
Anya reaches out to help a sailor who slips, before firing another web at the Troll. This one she holds onto, and leaps back onto the side of the Swinburne. From there, she pulls and holds tight, keeping the other ship from tipping. Teeth are exposed as she grinds them with the exertion, and quietly hopes FireHawk is able to help the fallen sailor!
Firehawk sees the sailor and nods, jumping over the side to fly down to grasp him by the shoulders, lifting him out of the water. She needs to figure out how to increase her strength…
She lifts him over the railing of the Swinburne, then lays him out on the deck, leaning over him, checking his airway and pulse while making sure her external temperature never goes above 98.6.
Noh-Varr nods as the flaming woman rescues the sailor. The blaster shifts back into a wrist cuff and he hops down off the railing. His job is done; the clean up can be left to the others and the authorities who are closing rapidly to judge by the ever loudening sirens.
"Is it clear?" Spider-Girl calls to Noh-Varr. She's straining, to be sure, and the weblines are beginning to unwind. "Can't… hold much longer!"
Fortunately, the last of the sailors are starting to scramble over onto the Swinburne. Just in time, too. With one final growl, she just can't hold on any longer. The line is released, and the Troll begins turning over with a raucous sound.
Jesus, it sounds like the end of the world.
The sailor on the deck below her suddenly coughs up a cup of salt water, then begins gasping. The relief on FireHawk's face is palpable. She stands up and steps back as his comrades come over to check him over, looking to Spider-Girl. "Hi…that was VERY impressive." She smiles encouragingly.
"Clear!" Noh-Varr shouts back, seemingly able to hear them much more easily than they can hear them. He starts walking against traffic, heading back to the Brooklyn side.
Spider-Girl climbs over the edge of the Swinburne and falls into a heap, utterly spent. Her shoulders rise and fall for a few moments as she breaths heavily, before looking to see where her helpers are. Noh-Varr is nowhere to be seen, but she utters a silent thank you to him before turning toward FireHawk.
"Back at 'cha," she groans, before mustering the strength to stand. Her costume is sopping wet and covered in shrapnel, to which she grumbles. "Ugh."
FireHawk smiles. "Need a lift? I can bring you back to the mainland…or I can drop you off anywhere." She winks. "Seems the least I can do…:"
"Sure," Anya agrees, and seems to dig deep for a moment, before mustering resolve. "But not until we find the Captain, make sure this boat gets to shore."
The room shakes and begins to crumble.