Orrie likes arrows (sagittal) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-01-28 22:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | green arrow, viola |
Who: Orin Green Arrow and Preston Rescue
What: Vigilante-ing
Where: Alleys and apartments
When: Tonight
Warnings: None
The night was cold, fog and smoke clinging to the wet streets of Seattle, trapped there by the water running beneath the ground. It was was, Orin thought, the kind of night made for bad things. It was nothing like the bright sunny day his childhood fell apart, but it didn't need to be. This place, his home, hadn't changed since he'd left it. Musings or humanity, it was the same at night. Dark and dangerous.
Orin was crouched atop a building, green hood and green eyemask hiding his features, five stories up and close to the edge, and he was watching a young man, one that he'd seen tuck a gun into his sweatshirt a few alleys back. He was shaking, the man, a junkie. Drugs pushed in a way little else did, and as the man on the roof pulled a short, modified arrow from his gauntlet he knew he'd need his bow tonight. He didn't bother hoping that he wouldn't need it, because he wasn't big on hope.
The junkie looked around, eyes shifty, posture one of guilty uncertainty, and Orin watched as he approached an older man, 70 and carrying home a sack of brown groceries. Orin loaded the arrow into his mechanized bow, and he waited. The junkie pulled his gun out, and the older man dropped the groceries, and Orin let the arrow fly, catching the junkie’s forearm with the weighted arrow, the man’s arm jerking back, the arrow lodging in the grey grouting between the bricks on the wall.
Orin’s feet landed on the pavement a moment later. The old man had fled, oranges and apples littering the floor in front of the junkie in his wake. Orin picked one up, and he leaned against the old, graffitied phone booth as he smiled and took a bite. “Bad night?” he asked, kicking the gun the man had dropped with his foot.
In the days following the disastrous date with Eli and Anton Sparke’s departure from Seattle, Preston had done very little except work. Even though Anton had left, pursuing some hazy desert dream of a Lethean oasis, the work remained, and before he went after him to haul him back into the living, Preston had work to do. He spent the great majority of his time in board meetings and strategic meetings, and when he wasn’t in meetings he was issuing orders through email or consulting with lawyers. At night, however, he started sticking his nose in places it definitely did not belong.
They were mostly little things. Preston was too smart to do something as ridiculous as step outside in a Halloween mask and make a target of himself when he was about as athletic as a sheep, but he found other ways. He started dealing in information, mostly, small things. Burglar alarms, police bands, little tip offs here or there to people who were better equipped to do something about it. He started paying more attention to reports of vigilantes, because he was finding them more receptive to his information than anyone else. He was still using equipment that didn’t belong to him, but since the satellites orbiting the globe were mostly just picking up weather, he didn’t feel it hurt anything if he used them to look down on public streets here and there. He wasn’t spying, especially, and where possible he still used traffic cameras and private security footage stored online. Preston was no hacker, but most of these things opened up to him as long as he used one of the hundreds of “keys,” programs that Anton had stored on his computers.
The vigilante in green was new, new enough that the reports were slim to none, but he walked into the situation that Preston--Rescue, rather--had been sitting on for a while. He wasn’t risking anything by getting him involved, he decided. The public phone inches from Orin’s face went off like a morning alarm. Rrrrrring!
Orin didn’t know who used public phones anymore. He let it ring a few times, asking the man struggling to rip the arrow from from his forearm if he was expecting a call, but in the end, he picked it up. Maybe it was the police. It would save him a call. “Let me guess,” he said into the receiver, “this is the neighborhood watch?” There was a smirk in the question, an easy, unworried tone, and he picked the gun up at his feet with hands encased in black leather.
Preston was using a very bad voice inhibitor program, but he didn’t know how to make a program, so he’d had to use one of Anton’s existing voices, a faintly British sounding butler voice that Preston thought was ridiculously pretentious, but it beat anything he could find online. “Something like that. Your junkie is running from a gang, a problem with the drugs, and I highly suggest you avoid involvement.” Preston tried to sound polite. The British butler made it even worse.
Orin refrained from looking up, though it was his first instinct, thinking the caller (and their very bad voice program) had to be in one of the windows above. “And how does the family butler know that?” he asked, voice still casual, but his actions less so. He put the gun atop the phone booth, giving the junkie a shake of his head. “Don’t touch that,” he cautioned, as if the man wasn’t still struggling with the arrow, and he pulled out another sharpened tip and looked around. “Where does the family butler think the gang is?” Because catching the junkie was one thing, leaving him to get killed by a gang, that just wasn’t going to happen.
There was a pawn shop across the street that used a major security company to stream their feed, and they used Sparke tech. “I won’t deny that you’re very good with that, William Tell, but there are three men who like breaking heads and bones coming south down Green Boulevard, about 600 yards to the west and closing. Your junkie is a little predictable; he lives near here.” Family butler. He knew the voice was over the top. Not for the first time, he wished Anton was a little less... flamboyant.
Orin knew he was being watched. It didn’t take a genius, and he wasn’t as stupid as he pretended to be on a daily basis. He stepped forward, ripping the arrow out of the junkie’s forearm with a speed that kept the man from yelling for too long, and he shoved him toward the far end of the alley. “Don’t stop running until you’re out of sight,” he said. He could follow him later, using the blood trail. He wasn’t worried about that. “So, Jeeves, you want my private number, or is this the end of a beautiful relationship?” he asked, grabbing the gun from atop the booth, unloading it and using the arrow in his hands to ruin the chamber.
The pawn shop feed was grainy and he couldn’t see what the man in green was doing to the gun, which made him nervous. Yet he made a sound that the voice-changer couldn’t do anything about, a very un-British sound from the back of his throat that every Boston mother made daily when her children gave her gray hairs. “Give me the number.” As soon as he did, the phone would ring, and Preston was triangulating a position so that he could map out Orin’s position without using his imagination. “500 yards,” he added helpfully. All three men were cruising in a ‘57 Chevy in an ugly tan brown that had been brought so low deep dips in the road made the skid plate scrape.
Orin game him the number, an unlisted thing he kept tucked in his ear to call the police with when he pinned someone somewhere for them to collect. He rotated the numbers through an illegal switch every day, and so he had no worries about giving it to the butler. “Are you a fanboy, Jeeves?” He asked, giving him the number immediately after - after all, he was being helpful, so far. Once the gun was destroyed and the junkie had run off with his blood trail, he scaled the building across from the pawn shop so quickly that it didn’t even register on the grainy feed, hitting the roof before the man from the phone even had time to dial.
When Orin picked up ‘Jeeves’ was in a very bad mood because the man had vanished off the two-second refresh feed and it made him grumpy when he had to scroll through the available cameras. “I am not a fan, or a boy,” he said, frostily. He refused to ask where the man had gone, but the traffic lights were continuing to be helpful. “Mr. Case--your junkie--has crossed fifth, and he is...” Even the computer voice was annoyed. “...Going home. Really. They don’t make them very bright anymore, do they? The low gray vehicle with plates ending in 9X8 is the one you are looking for. Are you sure you’re interested in hassling these men? Do you even know what the Harbor Trips are?” The gangs were stronger in the wake of the Reaver attack, acquiring smaller gangs and consolidating as the police focused on civil efforts.
“How about something helpful instead of questions?” Orin asked, grabbing for the smaller bow on his back and loading it with a grappling hook. “Do they have anything on them the police would be interested in?” he asked, trying to catch sight of the car in question, and just managing to sight it in the distance. “Or is that too much to ask?” He sounded entertained, like he thought it might be. “And let me worry about what I want to do and what I don’t want to do, or we’re going to have a really short courtship.”
“They’ve been doing rounds, picking up things. Could be money. Might be drugs. Definitely weapons. But no guarantees. I don’t have x-ray vision, sir.” After a short pause. “What exactly are you planning to do? Rob the stage?”
“That almost sounds romantic, and I’m never romantic,” Orin said, the same unworried smile in his voice. The car came closer, and he sent the zipline across, assuming they’d have return fire if they had weapons. A second later, he had his bow in hand and he took out the two tires on his side, before using the zipline to cross to the opposite building, where he did the same to the remaining tires, bullets flying upward by this point. His new position offered more cover, and he managed one well aimed arrow just above the wheel well, fluid leaking onto the ground below almost immediately, and then he was on the move again, scaling down to an escape and waiting for them to exit the car, their guns still pointed at where he’d been a minute before. “Still with me, Jeeves?”
Preston only got blurs of this. In the middle of the night, no camera was very good, and he had the misfortune to be stuck between satellites, which did move--or rather, the earth moved under them--or both. He didn’t quite understand the physics. The point was, sometimes he didn’t get a direct image, and now was one of those times. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” He tried to conceal his worry, and the voice did the rest of it.
“Can you call for the police? Tell them they have something to pick up,” Orin said, and when two of the men stepped out of the car, he loaded his bow again, once, twice, catching one in the ankle and the other in the calf. His cover was good where it was, even from the wayward bullets, so he didn’t move, not yet. “Any more in the car?” He couldn’t tell from where he was.
“The call already went in.” Finally, finally, Preston found a visual. “Not that I can tell. You’ve got their attention, at least,” he commented, dryly. “And now the boss isn’t going to get his payments. I assume those are gunshots. Are you, by chance, bulletproof?”
“No, but I have good cover,” Orin said, and he did. He waited until he heard sirens, and he scaled back up toward the building top, as if it wasn’t the slightest bit hard, and then he jumped to the next building with the same ease. “I can follow a blood trail, or you can tell me where I’m going, Jeeves, He said, letting another arrow and zip fly and using it to cross the alley. “Do you answer doors and bring drinks, too?”
“Not for you,” Preston said, as if he didn’t do exactly those things when necessary. He reeled off the junkie’s address. “It’s not as if you need to go this second, I imagine the fool will be there in the morning.” He paused, just a little, and then said, almost brightly through the digital green curtain: “There’s a burglar alarm going off two streets over; to the west.”
Orin stopped, just as he was about to climb down the building to the junkie’s apartment. “Are you telling me where to go next?” he asked, almost laughing at the balls of whoever was in his ear. “Someone has a hero complex, but what? Is too scared to come out to play? Alright, I’ll let you have your way with me this once.” He turned west, moving easily two blocks over using the building tops. “What are you going to do when I disconnect? Miss me?”
‘Jeeves’ didn’t like that very much. Preston had thought it over several times and decided he didn’t have a hero complex. He was interested in the doings of Creations, concerned that Eli’s vendetta might be catching, and he had the means to help, so he did. “Good luck, Arrow.” Preston disconnected the call and watched as the cell phone signal moved toward the burglar alarm. Maybe it would prove to be nothing.
Inside the apartment, a man was holding a woman at gun point. Not nothing, but not what Orin usually went after, either. Apartments were tight, small and there wasn’t much room to pull bows and shoot arrows without drawing attention. He could see the woman from the low window, could see the man, and he cursed and shot an arrow at the glass, causing enough of a crack to draw attention, and also to let him break it in. The bullet, when it came, grazed his shoulder, which only served to put him in a worse mood, both with himself and Jeeves, and he pointed his bow at the man and managed to get an arrow into his shoulder before another bullet was fired. The gun clattered to the floor, and Orin climbed through the window, the entire process of shooting and being shot taking no more than a second. He swung, knocking the man off his feet, and smashing the butt of his bow against his head once he was down. “Excuse me,” he told the woman, giving her a smile, even through the pain in his shoulder. “You might want to call the cops,” he said already backing toward the window. Maybe Jeeves had already called. He wouldn’t put it past him.
The parking structure across the street so happened to be connected to an exclusive club beneath it, so the tech was very good and the image even clearer. Preston watched the incursion from through the window and the image correction software did a decent job of showing him the rest. A scream of sirens were police from a different precinct that Preston had rerouted here since the others were tangled in the mess Arrow had left in the middle of the road a little ways away. The phone rang again as Arrow was silhouetted in the window for a brief moment in his retreat.
A finger to his ear, and the line was connected again, but Orin didn’t say anything. He was heading back toward that junkie, the burn in his shoulder indicating that was going to be his last stop of the evening. Short night. Not what he’d had in mind. “Don’t you have other masks on call for break ins?” he asked, sounding slightly less cheerful than before as he aimed a zip up to the adjacent rough, climbing out of the question.
“I’m not on speaking terms with any of them,” Preston said, sounding a little contrite. “Except you, at the moment. You’re injured.” It was not a question. “Are you going somewhere to be treated?”
“First we’re going to meet our little friend from earlier,” Orin said, the sound of wind hitting the earpiece as he landed on the roof, his movement a little slower as he jumped to the next. “Unless you’re planning on calling someone in for that, too?” It was a question. “Seeing as you’re probably monitoring the city’s police activity.” It was said casually, like that was nothing at all, but there was something behind it that wasn’t nearly so flippant.
“There is nothing on Mr. Case’s person to imply that he’s anything except what he is: a washed up addict. You can’t roust him out of his home and expect the police to do anything about it. You better at least stop and bind it up, you’re leaving a blood trail.”
Orin glanced at his shoulder, then down at the street below. “Tell me something, are you a know-it-all? Or is it just a result of the voice software and that pretentious accent?” he asked, but he turned around, walking to the edge of the building and looking around for some sort of surveillance or feed that fed to the man whose voice was in his ear. “Your name?” he asked, even as he slipped his bow back against his spine with a slight grunt of pain.
Definitely contrite. “The program makes the accent. It was the only one I had available. I’m an eye-in-the-sky, so to speak. I go by Rescue, since I’m usually talking to people who need it.” Then, after a pause as he wondered what he was looking for: “Twenty feet to your two o’clock.” Another parking garage camera, a dark eye that had turned to watch him.
Orin didn’t turn his head to look, but he caught sight of it out of his peripheral. “Thanks for the intel, Rescue. Now, if you don’t mind?” he asked, and he pulled out his hand bow, more gun than bow, and he loaded and shot out the camera with perfect precision. “You have a good night,” he said, disconnecting the call a moment later and shutting off his cellphone.