Justice Avengers: Dawn over New York

Cannonball's eyes went very wide. "Er-Um-I-Ah- Mah name's Cannonball, ah'm one 'f the New Mutants and oh mah gawd ah'm talkin' to a real life MARTIAN! What's it like up there? Is it true that you got underground canals 'n' stuff? Is it hot or cold most o' the time? What's your technology level? Does anythin' have three legs? What kinda animals you got? What's yer life cycle? Do you have dehydrated vulture monsters?!"

If no one else clapped a hand over his mouth, Cannonball would have to do it himself.

Darwin peers into the dark.

"What the bloody Hell are you babbling 'bout, lad?!" Rocket mentally yelled at Canonball, interrupting the Kentucky mutant's question spree.

As Darwin looked through the darkness, he might have seem something big enough to be a man dart out of sight. There seemed to be some sort of flickering firelight much further down the tunnel.

Cannonball promptly shut up. After a moment, he took a deep breath, and spoke again. "...Ah'm...so sorry 'bout that," he said, avoiding eye contact with Ms Martian. "Ah'm somethin' of a sci-fi buff, and, uh, ah guess I got a liiiittle excitable that ah'd jus' met someone from Mars."

edited 15th Oct '12 3:39:22 PM by LizardOfAus

Rorschach suddenly entered the fray of Miss Martian and the other supers, having eavesdropped on them. All that running left Rorschach fatigued, and so she decided to stay and listen to Power Girl and the others just out of range instead of racing them to the source of the pulse. Now, Renée Montoya would have taken the time to—Exactly. Taking time. Wasting time. Rorschach couldn't waste time.

"Had the suspicion you wanted to find out about last night's energy wave. Forget it. Go home. Going into it won't end well for you."

Miss Martian raised an eyebrow, a nervous smile appearing on her face. "Well, the ground is red, the sky is ... orange, I think... don't remember if we have underground canals... it's really hot during the day and cold during the night... I-I think we are pretty advanced technologically... I don't know, not a lot of things have three legs back home, and the list of animals we have back there is just... too big." She looked down once it came time to the life cycle, but looked up once he mentioned the vulture monsters. "No, but we like that cartoon. It's funny."

"It's not a problem, Rocket." Miss Martian replied mentally, a more comforting smile appearing on her face. "I like answering questions about my home." However, once Rorschach re-appeared, Miss Martian furrowed her brow and raised both of her hands. All of the dumpsters and trash cans around them began to levitate with her as she glared down at her. "What do you want now?! You already threatened us one time, I won't let you do it again!"

"Calm down lass, I got this," Rocket said, calmly pulling out his pistol and firing three experts shots right into Rorschach's knee and both arms. If the masked vigilante did not dodge, she would notice that neither her clothes or her body was damaged only after her brain stopped telling her that she suffered multiple gunshots wounds in those places.

Rorschach was an easy target for Rocket Raccoon's shots, but she wasn't a victim. She convulsed in pain each time she was shot and limped to the ground when it was over. Despite not having any real wounds, she continued to talk as she couldn't even stand up on two feet, fully imagining her wounds to be severe.

"That's how it is. Shoot me. Threaten me with you powers. Over three hundred fully grown men died the instant that energy wave hit, including Dr. Langstrom... Can't let children... go and see what caused it... not safe. I'm... for your own good..."

"What the hell, you guys!!" Power Girl said to Rocket and Miss Martian, rushing over to Rorschach; she hadn't seen the masked man threaten the two aliens with a grenade earlier, and so it looked as if the raccoon had just randomly shot someone who was trying to dissuade them while being mildly rude. "He wasn't even doing anything!!" Despite the somewhat off-putting scent coming from Rorschach, Power Girl began to reach for his back to prop him up.

edited 15th Oct '12 10:41:26 PM by Demovere

Megan raised an eyebrow at Cannonball's interesting conversation with their new martian ally. She would not have pegged him as such a space fanboy. It was kind of funny. She looked a bit surprised when Rorschach started talking to them, apparently she never noticed the masked person. She was even more surprised when Rocket just up and shot them. "Whoa!" She proclaimed in surprise. She flew over to Rorschach with Power Girl to see if she could help. It was odd though, she couldn't see any bullet holes. She looked at the masked person and said "I...I understand what you're saying, but I can't just leave it be. If last night taught me anything, its that there are a lot of people that either hate mutants or are more than happy to take advantage of us. I'm still new to being a mutant, and frankly that scares me. If that power falls into the wrong hands...I think that would end up worse than if I tried to find it myself."

With the assistance of two people, Rorschach rose up, staggering as she continued to imagine her nonexistent wounds into reality. She addressed them as a group, not talking to any particular person.

"You're just kids... I was trained for this, been doing this for two decades. You're young, inexperienced. You use your powers to make up for the skill you lack. Whatever is in Manhattan can take away your powers, and that's exactly where you're headed. What then? Do you think you could handle murderers and rapists without your fancy abilities? We—I mean, I... I don't want to see it come to that."

"B-but you don't understand!" Miss Martian said, frowning at Power Girl. "S-she threatened us with a grenade just a few minutes ago!" As she landed down and put all of the dumpsters back on their places, she glared at the "injured" Rorschach. "At least we aren't acting like little kids that can only complain instead of actually doing something."

"So I see. I'm never doing the right thing. Always either going too far, or not doing enough... Fine. Go ahead. Pry your heads into whatever mess happened last night. Don't expect me to pull your corpses out of the gutter... No, actually, I'm not going to let that happen. You need to be taught a lesson. Raccoon here will be a good demonstration of what you're going to look like if you do this."

She turned to face Rocket Raccoon, as she withdrew her menacing shotgun from the holster slung around her back. Before she could pull the trigger and fill his face with buckshot, that feeling of intense regret started washing over her. The world was going gray and impure again. Rorschach couldn't think in white and black anymore, instead, the memories of her former partners and romances filled her head, and all of the things they would have said to her in this situation. Renée Montoya finally couldn't be a bystander as Rorschach doled out another execution. Her fingers quivered as she could barely hold the shotgun. Her hands shook. She lowered her shotgun away from Rocket Raccoon's face, and reached for her face, still an ever shifting pattern of black splotches on a white plane, but watched her arm stop cold as her gloved fingers were inches away from her chin. Renée Montoya tried her hardest to speak, but no words passed her lips. The only cries for help she could make were mental, inside her own head.

The mask, take it off! Help me, before he comes back! He's going to kill him!

Darwin's eye turned black and then glowed with a dull red in their core as the world became awash with a new array of colors, strange to him in hue but distinctive shapes and distances could now be made out.

"Wha - hey!!" Faster than any normal human could react, Power Girl grabbed the barrel of Rorschach's shotgun and aimed it at her own abdomen, making sure the blast would hit nobody but her if he fired. "No 'lessons'! No shooting anyone here!!" If the inkblot tried to pull the shotgun away or aim it somewhere else, he would find that her grip on it was rock-solid.

"Look, Inkstain," she said to him sternly, apparently ignoring how his free hand was hovering under the lip of his mask. "I'm worried about these kids, too - that's why I'm here to keep an eye on them. Well, that and I am curious about that pulse-thing that went off last night. Like Pixie said, what happens if unscrupulous folks get their hands on whatever caused it first? It's not like every mutant wants to lose their powers..."

Rocket took advantage of Power Girl distracting Rorschach by running over to the trenchcoat vigilante and then shackling her wrists. "That oughta hold ya!" the raccoon said after Rorschach's wrists were bound together. He then pulled out his pistol again and pointed it at Rorscach's face. "Now, since you have so little faith about these kids, and since you ain't convincing them to go home, how's about you act as their chaperone instead?" Rocket said. "I am gonna officially deputize ya for this job, and if you be on your best behavior during the endeavor, I won't arrest you and let you go on your way. But if I find you killed someone along the way, I am going beat you down so bad, the coppers in that city of Los Angles is are gonna blush with envy!"

A beat.

"And don't bother trying to get out of those shackles," Rocket said. "They have a remote release mechanism that can only be opened using a special radio signal directly from my PDA, and they only come off if I'm touching them, and want to open them!" Then he looked over at Marsha. "Marsha? Link him up," he said.

Even with his new night vision, Darwin didn't see much more down the tunnel. The brick walls were smeared with filth, though very far down could be seen the flicker of torchlight. Now and then, there might be the faint sound of heavy breathing, or a small sign of movement, like a silhouette disappearing into nothingness. In summary, the path seemed clear...but they were definitely not alone.

"Right!" Miss Martian replied, raising her hand and closing her eyes. She hoped Rorschach didn't have some kind of mental power, because Megan knew the results wouldn't be that goo—

The Martian never got a chance to finish the link, as she began to read Rorschach's mind. She grunted, falling to the ground, raising for head, as Montoya's cries for help echoed in her own mind. As a natural instinct, she cut off the link, but that somehow only gave Montoya's thoughts even more strength, forcing the Martian to curl up on the floor. "HELP HER! TAKE THE MASK OFF! MAKE IT STOP! P-PLEASE, MAKE IT STOP!" she yelled, looking like she was about to burst into tears.

"Welp, Morlocks!" Darwin declared and marched forward.

Rorschach couldn't seem to respond to Rocket Raccoon or Power Girl said: All she wanted was to remove her face, the psychological parasite that claimed ownership of her mind as it grew agitated. Her shotgun hit the ground with a crack, but as she tried to remove the inkblot mask from her head, her own hands fought back, aided by the shackles that Rocket Raccoon put on her. Her gloved fingers slipped as she clawed her own face, her arms quivering as if they carried a great weight. And as she witnessed Miss Martian buckle down under pressure, empathetically absorbing her feelings and thoughts, she in turn panicked as she saw one who seemed so young suffer the same pain she did.

Power Girl promptly raised an eyebrow when Rocket detained Rorschach with his futuristic-looking shackles. "So you're offering him a chaperoning job... after slapping cuffs on him," she deadpanned.

She wouldn't have time to mull the raccoon's seeming contradiction, though, when Miss Martian began screaming in apparent terror. "Alright alright alright alright!!!" she blurted out, her gloved hands reaching past Rorschach's frantic ones and flinging his hat off first before grabbing the rear hem of the mask and pulling it in one swift move.

Power Girl blinked. "...You?"

The very second Power Girl ripped off the mask, it was over. The vigilante named Rorschach was no more, decapitated in one movement. Renée Montoya could not channel that dark part of her soul without the inkblot mask bound to her face tightly. Those few seconds of turmoil between two personalities had cost her a great deal of stamina, so she could barely stand at that point. But with Rorschach gone from her, for now, she could at least speak. She wiped the tears from her eyes, and spoke.

"He's gone, for now... Thank you."

Gradually, she rose from the sidewalk, brushing her wet gloves against her coat. She was silent. She just seconds ago, it looked like she was going to kill Rocket Raccoon. No words were going to tell them that it wasn't her fingers that took out the shotgun, or her lips that passed the cryptic threats. But at the same time, she felt guilty for even letting it get that far. She was astonished by Rocket Raccoon's apparent forgiveness, offering to let her get away with a pardon if she decided to help them out, immediately after she attempted to end his life. And as she looked as Miss Martian, she knew that her own mental outbreak touched her in some way. That's all she did, Rorschach or Renée. She only made people suffer.

"It's... It's not what it looks like... It was his fault, not mine..."

Miss Martian took a moment to collect her thoughts, re-establishing the link with her friends. "I'm okay, I-I'm okay," she sad, still in her knees, wiping the tears off her face. She crawled over to Montoya and hugged her, trying her best to look like she was calming her down. However, the truth was that for the brief moment there was a link between her and Montoya, she had seen the most horrible things. Murder, torture... and the worst part about it all was that...

Instead of seeing Montoya committing those atrocious acts in the visions, Miss Martian saw herself committing said acts. Whether that was Megan's own mind overreacting, or the... thing that controlled Montoya torturing her, she didn't know.

Rocket looked on in wide-eyed terror when Ms. Martian suddenly collapsed in mental agony from establishing the mental link with Rorschach. Rarely did Ma'aleca'andrans react that way from the mere action of establishing mental connection. The cause is always because the one they are linking to is just that batshit INSANE.......

The raccoon shook himself out of his stupor to realize Marsha was calling for Rorschach's mask to come off. And that the Martian calling him her. Those question were answered when Power Girl threw off Rorschach's mask......revealing the angry women from the diner....

That explains some things, he thought.

Then Marsha started to hug Ror - Renee. Rocket holstered his gun and walked up to her. "You are the third person I met on this planet that had some other guy poking around in their head," he said to the former police officer, his voice suddenly.....compassionate. "Your the first to have that other guy manifest in an object though," he added, looking at the mask in Power Girl's hand. "I give you applause for managing to steer your other guy towards more acceptable targets, but as you saw miss, the other guys have a tendency to overwhelm you. Eventually consume you."

Rocket reached up and took off the shackles restraining Montoya. "You might be able to help yourself, by helping us," he continued. "My gut tells me we're gonna need a cooler head to find that pulse source. Time to give the other guy a rest for a while."

Power Girl quietly looked around - at Miss Martian, then at Renee, then at Rocket. Finally, she shrugged her shoulders, turning to Pixie and Cannonball with a defeated look. "Well, I'm not sure how to react to all this anymore."