2014.01.21 - Cry Fowl

It was a late evening in South Gotham, and shit was going down. Batwoman, The Huntress, and Black Canary had staked themselves out across the street from the target--an office building housing numerous businesses, which had an unexpectedly high level of activity for this late hour. The three heroines had been eyeing the situation for the last ninety minutes.

Dinah Lance was perched close to the window, showing a particular interest in the happenings--even though it was obvious to everyone that this was an attempt to distract herself. She'd spent at least half the time here relaying her recent circumstance--being on the target list of some psychopath. In fact, this was part of why she'd taken up Kate's offer in the first place, to do this stake out and infiltration. After a few minutes of silence, Dinah took a long, slow breath and spoke again. "Okay, somethings moving down there again," she announced, referring to the Garage.

"There's a rental truck coming in from the north. Bit of an odd time to be moving office furniture, don't you think?" Batwoman asks, tapping the side of her mask to trigger a 'zoom' function in the white lenses. Another tap, and it switches to heat vision. "Three armed guards right inside the garage entrance" she tells the other two. "Two in the truck. We should be able to get into the garage from the building itself, provided they're as lax in security there as they are below." She frowns, then. "Assume they're not. That way it won't be a surprise if we have to fight our way down each floor." Such an optimistic crime fighter! She fires off a grappling hook, letting it take her to the roof of the building. At only five stories, it shouldn't be /too/ hard to make it down the stairwell, right?

Huntress is watching from within arms' length of Canary, having been brought up to date on the goings on and having made a mental note to stick close. She's also watching the goings on, but her mask isn't as fancy-ancy as Batwoman's. She's got a pair of small binoculars. They do the job. "So if she's taking the high road, you wanna take the low road, C?" She's /trying/ to not let her resentment of THE Bat bleed over onto the red-haired woman, but it's difficult.

Dinah gives a stifled laugh to Huntress, commenting, "So used to being solo, isn't she?" But then she remembers who she's talking to. "Let's move at the same time--I'll hit the ones inside, you go for the truck?" she asks, starting to move already, partially assuming the suggested plan was good. She'd seen Helena take out this many dudes by herself before, so figured this wouldn't be an issue.

In less than ten seconds, Dinah had gotten within 20 feet of the entrance with a series of quick, stealthy movements. "Ready?" she asked in a quiet but alert voice--when suddenly she heard a voice. It was one of these dudes on a radio. She held up her hand to indicate 'hold a sec' to Helena.

"Yeah, reportin' in. Everythings quiet here, but I hate bein' on delivery-boy duty when all the funs upstairs." -- The radio responded in a harsh, deep voice, "Stay put. We've got twenty men up here." Dinah gave a silent 'oh-shit', thinking about Kate above.

Batwoman is certainly used to working solo, aside from her dad's voice in her ear. There's a resigned sigh over the comm-link when Kate hears the "20 men upstairs," comment. Her earlier intel did /not/ bring up those kinds of numbers with this group. Guess there was a 2-for-1 sale at Hire-a-Thug. At least the roof itself is empty, which gives her a chance to prepare the smoke bombs before the opens the access door, tossing them in ahead of her to fill the hallway before she swoops in, switching her mask to thermal vision mode.

Huntress hmphs at Dinah. "Cake walk." She follows the blonde, her crossbow already prepped with steel quarrels -- ideal for taking out vehicle tires -- and waits for the go-ahead. Yes, if it were her op, she wouldn't bother waiting, but if there's only one thing Oracle has successfully pounded into her head, it's the importance of working well in a team. She's THIS close to saying 'to hell with it' and moving anyway.

Dinah does a pretty slick little slide maneuver, quickly rounding the corner into the warehouse. One of the guards, starts to shout: "Sh--" but his cussy-exclamation was instantaneously met with a swift crack to the head with Dinah's foot. His body flopped down in front of of the two other men, to each of his sides. They didn't have their guns ready, and Dinah made quick work of disarming them. "This operation is over," she said, landing a punch square to the first one's nose, while thrusting her boot in the opposite direction into the pudgy belly of his partner. He let out a pained "Oof!"

Meanwhile, up top, Batwoman is heavily outnumbered, but at least has rendered her opponents blind, and has them bottle-necked in a narrow hallway.

CRACK, POP, THUD

That would be the sound of bones breaking and/or dislocating. And a heavyset body being thrown into drywall. At least no one's been stupid enough to pull a gun out in this mess... yet.

Huntress moves a scant second after Dinah does, snap-firing quarrels into two of the tires on the moving truck, then charging the vehicle to take out the driver and whomever all else is with him. Ever seen that part of the Indiana Jones movies where Indy gets into a fistfight with someone driving a truck? Well, that's what's going on, but Huntress doles out the pain and gets it dealt with quickly enough to bring the moving truck to a halt before it careens into the building. Throwing the parking break, she cuts the engine and breaks the key off in the ignition. You know, just in case.

Dinah sent the third guard to the floor with a roundhouse kick... she didn't need to be so harsh, but he was a convenient outlet. After the three were clearly down, Dinah took a few paces back, to look at Helena, the truck, and the receiving area of the garage. There were two doors on opposite ends--one of them marked 'STAIRS'. Dinah spotted a large, metal post in the middle of the area, and began dragging one of the floored gaurds, by his arms, over to it.

"Head up and help Bats!" she called out to Huntress, knowing full well that Helena wasn't the type to tie dudes up when there was another fight waiting to be had. "We don't know what she's up against--I'll clean this up and be right after you."

Just as the doorway to the stairwell is open, a body comes falling down, stopping just short of the floor, dangled by his ankles from above. Timing is /everything/. Still just barely holding on to consciousness, he looks at Huntress and screams. How can there be /two of them?/

"Yeah." That's all the response Huntress gives to Dinah as she throws herself out of the truck and toward the door leading to the stairs. She pauses only long enough to silence the screamer with a quick jab to his temple, and then she's charging up the stairs two at a time. Helps being nearly six feet tall. She does have to pause when she hits the edge of Batwoman's smoke screen, 'cause this shit is a pain in the ass to fight through. But. She takes a deep breath and wades in. If this smoke turns out to be tear gas...

This isn't something Clint meant to get himself involved in. Actually, no, he's not- to be honest, he wants to see what "Rebecca" can really do. Let's call it morbid curiosity. Because Clint sure as hell doesn't know why he's doing this.

The smoke kind of makes it a pain to keep track of everything going on, but thanks to Stark Tech, he's got her heat signature tracked through the building. As well as several others. Well. Best to sit back and watch the show.

It didn't take but three minutes to incapacitate and tie-up the five men to the large post in the garage... she'd had a lot of practice over the years. She scrambled towards the door to the stairs, giving an awkward, knowing eyebrow to the random fella hanging upside down. She darted up the stairs, skipping them two at a time... after the first flight, she heard a slamming sound behind her, followed by a latch. Or was it a lock? Someone--presumably someone hiding in the garage--had closed and sealed the door behind her, she assumed. Not taking the time to head back to look, she continued upward towards the fifth floor, but stopped after two breaths. Something had winded her--Dinah took a good five extra seconds, taking two deep breaths, just standing there.

What the hell was going on? She wasn't used to having her energy suddenly sapped like this. In front of the third floor exit, she heard rushed, angry chatter. She looked up and heard some punching sounds above. Shrugging to herself, she swung open the third floor door and was instantly met with two large men with assault rifles. She reflexively dove back around into the stairwell within a second, avoiding their burst of gunfire. It was heck of loud. Dinah starting rattling off a chain of exclamatory phrases.

The smoke is starting to clear around Batwoman, and there are several goons littering the hallways, in various stages of consciousness, with varying amounts of physiotherapy in their future. Batwoman doesn't pull her punches, it would seem. "Canary, you alright?" she asks, speaking for the first time since she came inside- she doesn't have to worry so much about giving her location away.

Huntress takes out one last lingering goon fleeing down the stairs with a swift punch to the throat, then catches up with Batwoman as she's addressing Canary. "What's next?" she asks while waving a hand to fan a bit of the lingering smoke away from her face.

Damn, it's cold. Maybe the bare arms were a bad idea. Should've taken the winter gear when he left SHIELD, but... hindsight being what it is. He wasn't exactly planning on coming out of retirement right after going into it.

The fire escape creaks underneath Clint as he shifts his weight. This is getting kind of boring. Stakeout gigs used to be his /thing/, but this feels more like stalking. Maybe he should leave. Orrr... he pulls a grappling arrow out of his quiver and frowns thoughtfully.

"Automatic rifles... yeah, I'm fucking fantastic!" Dinah shouted into her commlink, her hand cupped to her ear in an attempt to block the reverberating sounds of gunfire blasting through the cheap drywall around the stairwell's third floor doorway. She'd crouched into a corner, remembering the last time she was in a situation like this. She'd wait for them to stick their stupid faces from the doorway, anticipatorily preparing herself for a striking leap. During a momentary pause in the gunfire, Dinah heard something odd: behind these gunmen was someone else, who was laughing in a deep, guttural tone. It sounded like the voice heard earlier, from the radio.

As soon as she saw two heads perk from the door's still-intact frame, Dinah launched into a furious flying kick, knocking the guns downward to the floor. One slid down the steps to below, thankfully not going off. "Get down here, quick," she said with a quiet but urgent tone. Dinah gave a powerful elbow jerk into the jaw of one of the dudes, sending out a wince-worthy bone-crackle sound that echoed throughout the stairwell.

Batwoman doesn't reply to Canary so much as swing herself over the stair railing to drop herself one story in one quick movement, the armor in her boots and suit soaking most of the force of it. "Cover your eyes and nose," she instructs the others over her comm link, just before pulling out what appears to be a bright red handgun. There's a quiet pfft-pfft sound, and capsules of concentrated pepper gas strike each gunman in the back of the neck, producing clouds of the invisible, but really, really painful gas to bloom around their heads. Given how concentrated it is, Dinah and Helena shouldn't have to worry about exposure, unless they get /really/ close.

Huntress blinks at the sound of gunfire and Dinah's tone of voice. "Shit." So, she chooses to fast-track it down. You know how stairwells have this gap between the stair rails? She saw it in a movie somewhere, and now's a good a time as any to see if it really works. So, she's on her way back down to the third floor the extra fast way. And... damn. Batwoman did the exact same thing, but WAY more impressively. And of course she heeds the advice to cover her face. Damn Bat-people and their habit of throwing around noxious gases. As soon as her feet are on the stair landing and she's not at risk of breathing any of that nasty red gas, she fires a quarrel toward where the machinegunmen are.

Growing up in a circus means you get a taste for theatricality. Clint can't help it; if SHIELD didn't beat it out of him, nothing will.

A window shatters as an arrow zips through and right into one thug's shin, another following that hits him in the shoulder. Down he goes, just in time for a dark figure to come tumbling through the now-open window, landing in a three-point crouch.

No, it's not Batman. Unless Batman has a taste for giving ladies tickets to the gun show. Hawkeye raises his bow and aims it at another bad guy- uh... actually, he's assuming these folks are bad guys. The guns do give the impression, yes, but maybe these three ladies are actually some nefarious feminist supervillain group.

...that's kinda hot, actually.

With the front entrance clear, the three women stand side by side, with a clear view into the floor ahead. It's a large, open work area, with two large conference tables to the side, and a bank of cubicles in the back. Another isolated office is in the far back, with four more gunmen standing at the ready. Between them stand another man--he has a gigantic forehead and is dressed in an expensive suit.

"So, this is a Maggia operation," Dinah comments, turning her voice slightly to Huntress. "Middle guy is Hammerhead," she relays these facts like an expert, when in truth she'd only read about him via from JLA Criminal files. "He's got adamantium in his skeleton. He's a charger--"

"--Evening, ladies," Hammerhead interrupts, pointing up a gigantic shotgun. "Didn't expect any visitors tonight, but I'm glad you stopped by!" he shouts, breaking out into hysterical laughter. They all lift their weapons up just as Clint comes crashing through the window. Each gunman picks a target and opens fire.

Batwoman is knocked a few feet back by the force of the gunfire, but... ah, bless that bulletproof armoring. Her ribs are already hating her for moving, but hey, her blood is still in her body, and her organs remain un-perforated! She gives her gunman a slightly crazed-looking smile, which is even creepier than it sounds, with the white lenses, and white skin and red, red lips. In one smooth moevent, she begins to run, hoists herself up onto a desk and launches into the air, all while taking two of the 'spikes' off her gauntlets, and tosses the hinged blades at his arms. Her cape flares out- she's making herself as much of a moving target as she can. She lands not-too-far from Hawkeye.

"Got anything with voltage?" she asks him, nodding towards Hammerhead. If he's going to make himself a walking lightning rod with all that internal metal, they may as well take advantage of it.

Huntress throws herself to one side to hopefully avoid getting ventilated by these morons and their guns, and fires a quarrel back in exchange. She's aiming to jam the quarrel into the machine gun barrel of the man farthest to her right. And she's hoping like hell it works.

Dinah does something that nobody would ever expect: she panics. Her breathing grabs her like a choke-hold, and she starts into panicked, uncontrolled breaths--thankfully for her, at least, this didn't stop her quick reflexes, and even before the gunmen pulled the triggers, she was already tumbling away--at least from any predictable path. Also unexpected was Hawkeye, who crashed through a window directly in front of where Dinah landed.

Dinah gasped--not just because of the crash, but who it was. Dinah couldn't believe her eyes, but she was seeing *two* Hammerheads. The first one was still firing a shotgun at Batwoman, but here was another who had crashed through the window. And looked fucking *demonic*, his eyes all on fire, his face contorted. Dinah wasn't one to mince words, so she threw a swift punch straight at Hawkeye's head, thinking he was an enemy.

"Hey, hey, woah, Canary!" Batwoman attempts to intercept the punch but-holy shit that woman can /punch/, and the she-Bat just barely avoids a broken jaw- Hawkeye's given a slight shove, but... yeah, you're on your own there, buddy. As she lands on the ground, she tosses a disk-like object from her utility belt at Hammerhead. The aforementioned voltage. If it hits him, it will release a taser-like charge on contact.

Given what she knows of Canary's hand-to-hand skills, though, Batwoman's calculations put the fishnet-clad heroine at the top of their threat list until they can figure out what's going on. Now, here's the question- is it bad form to tranquilize a fellow crime-fighter during a team-up?

High-society etiquette, Kate can do (she usually doesn't, but she /can/). This masked team-up stuff is so not her strong point.

And now he's getting punched. Clint gets an arm up in time to soften the blow but it still rocks him because, holy shit, whoever this lady is she has some serious power behind her blows. He'll be impressed once the little birdies flying around his head disappear. Thankfully he has trained reflexes to save his ass because his brain sure isn't going to help, so he throws himself backwards into a tumble, scrambling for a fresh arrow as he does, and as he rights himself he has it aimed at Canary.

THWIP. Blunt tipped arrow with a mini taser attached, so she should also remain unperforated.

"How the HELL are you doing that?!" Dinah shouted at Clint, with the kind of rage you'd expect her direct at someone made of pure evil. She went into a full pursuit of his tumble backwards. She slid towards the ground below him, attempting to disarm him with one of her patented moves. His arrow was too quick for her, however, and her mighty launch at him was met with the electricity of a taser arrow hitting her shoulder. While it's good for Clint that Dinah was now too stunned to continue throwing punches and/or kicks at him, it was bad luck that Dinah had launched at him with quite a bit of momentum. Her stunned body still hurled itself into his body, slamming it hard.

"Oh, fuck," Huntress blurts. Yeah, the brain-mouth filter is officially off. She sees Canary freaking out, knows that she has a snowball's chance in a kiln of being able to stop her, fails to recognize Clint in the chaos, and decides that really the best thing she can do right now is get the gunmen to stop. So she fires off her last quarrel and slaps a new cartridge of the lighter and faster wooden bolts into her crossbow while running. Can't make herself a sitting target, after all. That's just stupid. And she's no longer trying for nifty things like hitting their machine guns. Shoulder hits, fleshy parts of the thigh, these people are gonna get perforated as fast as she can manage, and Hammerhead is no exception. That HUGE NOGGIN, it's a virtual planetoid. And that makes it an easy target.

Yeah, this is a lot of evidence to support the feminist supervillain group. Canary's dead weight slamming into him definitely knocks the air out of him, and also- ow, ribs. Ow.

His head's still spinning, too, but he has the good sense to roll her off, at least, so he can breathe again. "Oh god."

Bad guys, though, right. He kipups and smacks the thug that thought he could take advantage of his prone status across the face with his bow, and then nocks two arrows, putting them in the shoulders of a couple thugs aiming at Huntress. She doesn't recognize him yet, obviously, but his HUD has her tagged.

As soon as Hammerhead saw Batwoman, he pegged her tricks along the same lines as Batman, and had expected her to throw little doohickeys at him. Her first attempt, this taser, he managed to dodge, stepping directly into the line of Huntress's arrow. Which hits Hammerhead's forehead with the clang you'd expect from a steel toaster. A small blood spurt sprays from the wound, while the arrow itself bounces straight off, sending him into thunderous guffaw. He marks Huntress as his target, and begins a shockingly-fast running charge, rhino-style, straight at her.

After Clint gets from under Dinah, she rolls around the floor, feeling the sting of his arrow's tase. Her eyes look up to him, and she still sees him as Hammerhead, only he's looking even MORE freaky, full of horns, head on fire, freaky claws. She takes a deep breath--she has so little energy, but she thinks she can still muster at least one canary cry.

"Huntress, fall back, we get Canary out of here before she does damage to herself or to someone else," Batwoman shouts. "Hammerhead is no longer a priority." Because a crazy Black Canary is way, way more dangerous than a C-list villain, even without the threat of hearing loss. "Heads up!" she shouts, tossing Huntress a pair of earplugs. She doesn't need them- again with the high-tech mask and everything. Her ears are covered and protected. (Which begs the question as to why she has earplugs in her utility belt... god, the Bats are freaky-prepared for everything, aren't they?)

Huntress sees the arrows hit the thugs faster than her own bolts do and is momentarily surprised. Wait. Purple fletchings... SHIT.

"Clint?" She looks over and that's when she sees that Dinah is inhaling. "SHIT. Clint, MOVE!" She races toward them, using a bit of parkour-ish tumbling to avoid Hammerhead (and aim a bolt at his gut at the same time), and then she's catching the tossed earplugs and DROPPING her crossbow to try and get her ears protected at the same time as trying to body-tackle Canary to abort the scream that she knows is about to happen.

It's really too bad that Clint has no idea who the Black Canary is- no offense meant, Dinah, he's just not a Gotham guy- because he would've been much more hesitant to burst in here like the Koolaid Man. In fact, now that she's down, he's treating her as a non-threat. There aren't supposed to be supers in this neck of the woods, right?

Welp. He's already got his next arrow aimed when his name is called out, and it's only training that lets him fire the arrow before turning to look. The capsule behind the arrowhead explodes as it makes contact with Hammerhead's massive noggin', releasing a very potent aerosol tranquilizer. Only then does he turn to look at Huntress, offering her only a blank stare.

Dinah stumbled back to her feet, her head reeling with pain. She'd plucked Clint's arrow from her shoulder, but her head throbbed in a way she'd never felt before. She pulled up her gaze in a futile act to regain composure, breathing uncontrollably. She spotted Clint, who seemed to be mutating progressively more and more into some sort of demonic monster. Dinah unconsciously rolled her hands into fists and breathed out a short, two-second sonic burst. An instant before sounding her cry, she saw Helena hurling right at her! Oh shit! She pulled her head away, and the attack that was aimed directly at Clint's back--an attack that from this distance might've killed him, went straight up and over Clint's head, pummeling the ceiling, sending pieces of it down below. The shriek was deafening, despite its brevity, and seemed to bounce around the room--the unbroken glass windows shook but didn't shatter. Huntress' tackle combined with Dinah's already wobbly footing sent her straight to the floor, and the two of them lay there. Dinah went limp and drifted into unconsciousness.

Hammerhead spun himself around, pissed at Huntress' agility, only to be met with a tranquilizer. He felt to his knees, and then face-forward into the floor. His adamantium skull rang through the large room, like an odd follow-up to Dinah's attack.

Batwoman stands up and looks around, frowning. This is why she doesn't like team-ups.

Canary's reaction to her charging forward thankfully works in tandem with Huntress's attempt to keep from hurting Canary... too much. Huntress does tackle her teammate to the floor ('God, please don't fire me from the florist shop over this!') and as quickly as she can she rolls back to her feet and looks over the room. Hammerhead's down, as are his thugs, Batwoman looks okay, pile of rubble with a bow...

"Clint!" She scrambles over to try and unearth/help the archer.

It'll occur to Clint later how big a bullet he just dodged. Not right now, though. All he can think about at first is nothing, head ringing again but so much worse. That's always the worst part- knowing the pain is coming and unable to do anything about it.

And then it hits. The rubble, from above, first, and then it's like the first time all over again. He's already down but now he's officially out, hands clapped over his ears as he squeezes his eyes shut. To his credit, Clint doesn't cry out. He doesn't say a word, actually, even when Helena drags him out from underneath what's left of the ceiling. Not a word even when he's stumbling off into the night alone after refusing further help, expression dazed.