Running out of Time

Summary:
August 19 2014: In the of the Tal Temer incident, Jericho goes to see Angelo to let him know that they're running out of time.

Avenue C Clinic

Low cost, cutting edge medicine for the mutant community, administered by Doctor DiLucci and his partners.


Characters

NPCs

  • None

Mood Music:
[* None]


There's two stops Jericho knows he has to make. He'd prefer if he could get both his contacts in one place, but at the present he has no idea where May is. Odds are he's going to have to look her up at the Triskelion and he doesn't want to do that. So he puts that off in favor of talking to the other person who is likely to be really angry about this. Down to M-Town it is, then and the Avenue C Clinic. He doesn't like to scare folks (not that Angelo's people scare easily) but the look on his face kind of brooks no argument when he walks in, over to the PA at the desk and says he needs to see Doctor DiLucci right away.

*

Ange walks in from the back lab and says, "Oh good. Just who I need to see. Come in to my office."

He's in scrubs, because they're easy. He waits for Jeri to enter then mutters a few words, and there's a sense of enclosure around them.

"I've been learning some tricks with the shield. So. You heard about Tal Temer."

*

Once in the office and safely enclosed Jericho leans tiredly back against the wall. "I was there… an hour too late. They used it, Angelo." That's all he says. He figures that Angelo will know who 'they' and 'it' are.

*

"The Seraph is furious. This was a major setback to what he was planning. I am not furious. I am sick. I was too slow, being too careful." Angelo walks around, paces really, he has enough room for that. He taps at his laptop and the whiteboard is replaced by a display, schedules and maps of Mutant Town.

"I test-sprayed last week and verified that the modified lactobaccillus spreads. I tested on a few of my staffers, with their permission. I know it immunizes against the plague form, and doesn't hurt anything — calculation says in 9999/10000 but it's the 1/10000 who gets a partial coverage or a side effect I was worrying about. No more time."

*

Jericho sighs. He looks sick himself. "You and me both. I thought I had identified a lab near that town in Syria. But it wasn't, it was the field test. I got there too late to do anything but gather information and try and track down those responsible. It…" The hacker trails off sadly, switching into analytical mode.

*

"The virus was one hundred percent effective on unimmunized victims, so I think they'll count that as a successful field test. It was delivered via a large atomizer. Well, probably more than one, but one was all I found. I am positive they'll use it on a more… visible target next. Probably one state side given all the prep they've done. I just don't know exactly where or when."

*

Angelo gets a very disgusted expression.

"You don't? Seriously? This is the week of the 'Burning Human' celebration, it's going to happen here and probably on Sunday at the peak of the festival. I intend to immunize the area by Friday. I've been disseminating the bacterial agent for the last two weeks, but the rains that came through knocked the spread down. I'm going to have to get it into all the food and water. Immediately."

He paces a little more, and says, "Beast's right. It has to go into the water supply. We can't guarantee everyone will get it otherwise."

*

"I'm not sure they'll be ready to move that fast, though anything's possible. Can you really get the whole district immunized that fast? That'll help a lot, though I'm kind of worried that now that the virus is 'in the wild' it may itself mutate."

Jericho nods. "For that you'll either need to break into the water purification plants or, more ideally, gain sanctioned access. You've got ins with SHIELD and I need to take this up to Agent May later today anyway. Any chance you can get them to finagle you access?"

*

"I'll deal with the in-the-wild. I'm pretty sure I'll have no choice but to do so. The viroid degrades quickly in ultraviolet, but the city needs to be cleansed."

Ange looks at the map of the city.

"Talk to May. Tell her what I expect will happen. I don't trust my chain of command in SHIELD, necessarily," Angelo says. "I'd trust Hill and May but I can't promise anyone else."

*

"What do you want me to sell her? Worst case scenario? Or expected scenario?" Jericho isn't at this point entirely sure what the expected scenario is. He knows Hydra will act, and soon. He knows the target is likely to be local and M-Town seems logical as it is a highly public concentration of mutants. What he doesn't know is when, and what their actual target would be. The district is too large to cover with the atomizers he saw in Tel Tamer. So it'll have to be a smaller, more concentrated target. If only he can figure out what."

*

"Expected scenario is worst case here, Jericho. If they manage to get a weaponized version of this going here, it will kill all but a handful of the residents in very short order. However. There's nightmare case - what happens if they get vengeful. What I'm afraid of is them testing a slower-dispersal method. That would be a plague version, something that initially acts slowly, hanging onto an intestinal bug or a mild respiratory, like they started with initially, something contagious that acts as a carrier for the viroid." Angelo punches the desk, then shakes his hand out, visible cuts to the knuckles fading away almost before they're visible.

*

"Dovetailing it with one of the flu variants, for example?" Jericho hadn't thought of that. And now that he has, he doesn't like it. "Sit on it just in time for flu season. By the time anyone figures it out it'll be far, far too late. Most of the populace will be dead or dying and people will have already spread it globally. I hope that punch was you knocking on wood."

*

"Something like that. And yea, the flu or maybe a bacterium, because dysentery is always popular."

Ange checks his calendar on the laptop. No more patients today. Nobody critically ill tomorrow, but he does have a full slate then.

"Fortune favoring the bold. It's too far to get from here to Syria and back … I will need your friend Illyana's help."

*

"I'll talk to her about it. I don't know how much she pays attention to the news feeds so she may not have heard of any of this mess yet." Jericho shakes his head. "You two be able to play nice? I mean, you seemed to get along okay when she first dropped in but I got the sense that you put each other on edge."

*

"We put each other on very much edge, but it's absolutely not her fault. I look at her and see nothing but injury, and I can't help. And from me, she sees nothing but the things she can't trust herself to have any more. Seriously, it's fucked up. But I trust her, especially where our interests overlap like this," Angelo says. "This is going to be something different. I'm going to have to write a spell. Want to watch, see if I can do it without screwing up?"

*

"I have a more than passing interest in the magical these days," Jericho smiles a little for the first time since the start of the conversation. "Sure, if you don't mind showing me I'd love to watch." He probably won't understand the words. Enochian and Demonic are similar but decidedly not the same. Still…

Speaking of magic, Jericho's eyes have become a lot more amber recently. It's to the point now where there's easily more of that than the original grey, such that his eyes could be described as grey-banded rather than amber-banded.

*

Ange puts the laptop away, and clears his desktop. He pulls a small bottle - the kind one would use for a urine sample - out of a drawer, and puts it on the desk, then takes a sheet of parchment paper — yes, the stuff you would normally cook with, not actual animal hide — and spreads it flat.

"Here's the fun part," he says. The Angel Lightshow starts up, and he takes a feather from one wing, and strokes it gently, edge-wise, across the palm of his right hand, and a bright red is quickly replaced by a flow of what looks like star-matter, seeping down the feather, and he quickly places the quill into the bottle, allowing the glowing fluid to collect in the bottom. It only goes for at most ten seconds before the trickle ends, and Angelo flexes his healed hand.

"For the purpose of magic I select this parchment, let it hold the words until they are fulfilled, and then let it be returned to fire."

He takes the quill — which has a pen-point-like end — and starts drawing, smoothly, even-handed. An equilateral triangle, a tangent circle, three smaller tangent circles inside the larger, three yet smaller tangent circles inside the tangent circles, and the circles have all caught light in different colors than the white of the triangle. Words go at each vertex, outside the circle, in the tight, fluid shapes that Ange's feathers are written in. The paper starts to smoke as he finishes one, but a quick return of the quill to the "ink" stops that for the moment.

"First I define the exclusion," he says, and writes in the left-side base circle, using a very shorthanded version of the language. "To cleanse only the thing that we choose, and to forego the removal of other things."

The second circle gets a complex set of words describing the viral component. The third, a set of words almost understandable, a direction, an order to go out, to seek, to bring light. Everywhere in that falllen town, and through every fallen body.

*

"Almost looks like writing a contract to be honest," Jericho murmurs, not wanting to interrupt. It's important that the viroid be removed from that town or it'll be uninhabitable to mutants for a while to come and worse, there's the risk of a viral mutation, something that might let it affect non-x-gene humans.

"Very different from other magic I've seen." He notes.

*

"Yes, well, it's a single use spell," Ange says. "And I have to define it very carefully, because I'm going to be feeding it, and if I don't it'll drain me dry and leave a husk."

*

"Feeding it? Mmmm, as in you pour energy into it? But there's no off switch." That sounds like a horrifyingly dangerous ability to use to Jericho. Very, very, very, frightening. "I take it that's never happened. Or at least, um… I hope it hasn't."

*

"Don't know. Haven't tried it. But it's the only way to make sure I get everything, every body that originated in that town," Angelo says, with a grim sort of smile.

"Y'know, I used to be this carefree sort of guy, but now, this is about as much playful risk-taking as I get."

*

"People who meet me have this disturbing tendency to get less carefree," Jericho's joking, but only a bit. His allies often end up embroiled in some proper messes and this one's about as messy as they come.

*

Angelo laughs at that. "Oh, you don't get to claim this one. It's been happening ever since I got the ink. Anyway. I'll need a ride there and back. Do you know how to contact Illyana? Will I need to drag your pet away from the bowl of ice cream? I mean, I don't want to scare the little monster."

Well maybe a bit. It can't help being what it was made to be, but it's still obnoxious.

*

"If I'll get word to Illyana quick as I can, but she's got a realm to rule and things earth side to attend. We'll handle this today if possible. Just don't be surprised if your cue that I got ahold of her is the two of us appearing next to you." Yes, two of us, because hell if they're going back Jericho might as well too. Always the chance there's something more to be gained by looking a second time. He didn't have a whole lot of time the first.

*

"OK. Don't worry if I'm in the shower."

Angelo waits a few minutes longer, allowing the 'ink' to dry on the parchment, before he very carefully places another sheet of parchment on top of it, then rolls it into a loose cylinder, and pops that into a mailing tube.

"There. Ready to go."

The 'ink' and the quill dissolve into the air, as soon as he folds down the end of the tube, and the sensation of being enclosed 'pops' … and the phone rings, and a knock comes on the door, "Your four-thirty is here," even though Angelo doesn't have anyone scheduled, and so forth.

*

"Four-Thirty?" Some kind of doctor code? Jericho shakes his head. "I'll get on that. Have to find May soon too. Take care Doc. Be seeing you soon." With a wave Jeri turns and heads out the door.


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