We were called out in the dark, by a choir of beautiful cheats- Characters: Cassie, Peter Setting: The Empire State Building Content: Nothing questionable Summary: Cassie goes to see Peter in the midst of these troubling times
All the buildings of the city made up a graveyard and the hulking shell of the Empire State Building was another lonely tomb, stretching up into a night sky that was a terrifying darkness. All the back up generators in the city couldn't light it up like before, when it was still alive and even those were going out now as they ran out of power. The Empire State Building had lights though, just a few, way up near the top and that was what Cassie headed towards, a beacon, and Peter was there, she knew. She'd promised Tony she wasn't leaving again, well, that wasn't a total lie. She wasn't going far. Just into the city, to the Empire State Building and to Spider-Man and his collection of rescued refugees. He just couldn't help himself- he had to help everybody. Maybe that was the curse of being a superhero.
The car she'd borrowed (stolen? Did it count if it was abandoned with the keys in the ignition?) had a full tank and getting through streets of empty vehicles was hard but not impossible, it just took awhile. Sometimes she had to cut the engine and the lights when a helicopter flew by overhead and once she had to drive right through a mob of zombies, but she got through and eventually pulled up in front of the building with it's lit windows high above. She examined the boarded lower floors with a frown. Even if she could get in down here, walking up a billion flights of stairs was out of the question. The dark was a good cover. Cassie got out of the car and immediately shot up in size and when she got to the very upper limits of her height (about two hundred feet) she began to climb the side of the building, feeling like some weird King Kong. Even at her largest it was a really long way up, over a thousand feet. At the very top, huffing and puffing, she let herself shrink down until she was hanging from a windowsill (and trying really hard not to even glance below her) and haul herself up and then banged on the glass with her fist until a really surprised woman- who had shrieked first- let her in. "Sorry," she mumbled to the lady as she tumbled inside and then took a look around.
She stood in a room piled with crates (stolen, she assumed) from the National Guard. There were about a dozen people in the room and sleeping bags and blankets laid out on the floor. It was pretty late after all, and the woman's scream had woken most of them and now they were staring at her in surprise. Maybe they'd thought she was a flying zombie or something, whoops. The light in the room came from lamps hung up and powered with an extension cord that hooked into a thrumming generator. It was a pretty basic set up, none of the amenities of the helicarrier, but it seemed to be working for these people. Cassie knew places like this, she'd sheltered in places like this on the long journey back to New York. There was a solidarity here that she liked already in the way the people had gathered together, protective of one another. Nice to see that, good to know Spider-Man was the shepherd of this little flock. Comforting as it was, though, how long they could actually keep on surviving here was another thing entirely. The fact that a lot of those ration boxes were empty and the generator was making weird pained clunking noises, Cassie didn't think they'd manage much longer.