Who: Hulkling narrative Where: New York When: 6/7/15 What: Criminals don't like Hulkling when he's angry. Rating: PG-13 for violence
Criminals operated via chains. A strict chain of command. A strict chain of supply and demand. A strict chain of communication. If someone wanted to follow that chain via violence, they had to do so quickly. Word traveled quickly among the paranoid. Big operations were ran with military discipline, able to mop up a site within the hour and clear out before anymore capes or police found them. However, there were other ways to go up the chain, ways that didn't make it obvious people were missing or in custody.
He'd left a lot of concussions behind himself tonight, and it wasn't hard to act a thug when he was seething so much at himself under his changing skins. One moment he was a buying client. The next he was the dispenser. Then next he was going to the filthy house to pick up more wares, the next he was the dealer heading to the warehouse to complain that the product was shoddy, and now he was here at the 'production floor'.
It didn't take them long to figure out something was fishy. The 'boss' member didn't know the passcode, didn't know certain people's names. It didn't matter. Hulkling was just in to assess what dangers there were to the product itself before acting. So here he was, in the middle of a warehouse with boxcars resting on the cement floor and barrels of chemicals and the acrid smells coming from the 'cooking tables'. And seven guns pointed his direction. He sighed, removing his sunglasses and putting them in the suit pocket, a pocket that really only existed because of his morphed skin.
"I think, boys, that we have a difference in ethical opinion," he said in the boss's tenor.
"More than that." One of the gang members had a cellphone in hand. It started to ring.
He dropped, arms extending and sweeping four of the gun toting members off their feet immediately. By the time bullets started flaring his way, he was a ball of spiky armor rolling toward them. The bullets only made clunky thuds off the bony hide before he was running over a member and an arm snapped out to the side and took another off his feet. Another was grabbed by the ankle and thrown into another one. Hulkling sprang upward, leaping into a handstand on another's shoulders. He popped the shoulders out of socket so he dropped his gun, then he threw him toward the last member trying to retreat behind the barrels.
He landed face to face with the 'floor supervisor'. There was a voice answering the phone now. "Hello? Hello?" Hulkling glared while he took the phone from the equally glaring supervisor's hand. "Sorry," he said, copying the other's voice exactly. "Dialed wrong." Then his thumb hit the red button. His voice was his own once more. "If you pull the trigger of the gun in your pocket, I am going to break your thumb."
BLAM!
In the next six seconds Hulkling was leaving the floor manager howling in pain on the floor and holding his hand while he strode to the door where he could hear dozens of footsteps racing up the concrete stairs.. He looked to the door, then dug his claws in, metal screeching. It warped it just enough it wouldn't budge on its hinges. Then he marched to the railroad cars. This time he had to struggle to pull the doors free, morphing his fingers into the edges and the metal giving a low wrenching sound as he pulled the iron hinge apart. The door was then easy to move.
Six pale faces stared at him. There was a smell Hulkling didn't want to contemplate. He instead looked at the thin mutants with bandaged arms. One had a reptilian look to her. "Can you walk?" he asked, trying to keep the anger from his voice.
Mute nods greeted them. "Good. Step out. I need this car."
They did so. Hulkling stepped to its side. "Are they any mutants or innocents downstairs?"
A mute head shaking.
"Good." He picked the car up, then threw it to the warped door that the trapped mafia members were trying to shoot through. It gave a momentous clang as it bounced against the wall and rolled back awkwardly on its edge. He stalked up to it, giving it a kick to push it against the door more solidly.
"There's a cellphone. Stay out of sight, free who you can. Don't go outside. It's going to be... what?"
One of the members, the reptilian girl, had a collar on her neck. She was grabbing at it urgently. Hulkling squint at it, then leaned down to wrap his claws in it. "Hold still." He snapped it with a quick jerk. She took a deep breath in, made a small sound, then seemed relieved.
"There are more in the other cars," she said, voice raspy.
"Do they have power suppressing collars like yours?" he asked.
She looked confused. "No, this is a sound restricting collar." Hulkling looked to the five other mutants that didn't have collars. "I have to have one because I tend to heal clean cuts and we're in the middle of New York." Hulkling still didn't get it, and she looked cross and weary. "Everyone who can't heal has had their vocals cut. So we couldn't call for Superman or... anyone."
A second look, and now he saw the thin angry red lines of healing scar tissue on the other five's throats. Hulkling was aghast, then felt rage deep in his belly. "I'll break the locks," he said quietly, calmly. "Call 911 on the phone while the others help release them. I'll take care of the guards I saw outside."
"Careful. They have weapons meant to bring down mutants," she told him while she ran to the dropped phone. The man still holding his broken thumb tried to curse at her. She kicked him in the face.
Good thing I'm not a mutant, Hulkling thought while he morphed into the floor supervisor's form and strode outside.
~~~
Sometime later Hulkling was on his com, laying on the roof and watching the dockside fog turning reds and blues from all the sirens below. "Are you feeling any better?... No? Sorry... No, I don't think I can do a movie right now, Billy... Yeah, maybe one at your house. It's a... It's been a night.... No, it's okay. I know you're going through stuff right now, too.... Okay... Okay... Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow? ... Okay... Sleep well."