irls Night Out XXVII: The Grey Panther Strikes Again

Posted on Mon May 28th, 2018 @ 8:52pm by Captain Charybdis MacGregor & Commander Fiona McCray & Commander Yuna Raza & Lieutenant Commander Selune
Edited on on Mon May 28th, 2018 @ 9:25pm

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Operation: Risa!
Location: Risa, Roma Arcology, Empress hotel penthouse suite
Timeline: 2265

Panther

by Ned O'Gorman, Earth poet

When the panther came
no belfrey rang alarums,
no cleric spat his tea.
When the panther came
the sky and lawn were still.
The panter came
through forest,
through field,
up to the wall
and my one blossoming cherry tree.

I had constructed
the world as it was
and had pared the body
from the customs of languor.
It pressed its nose against
the pane and its gears
ground me away into ribbons
of dissonance.

It turned and sauntered
into the shadows. Its
paw marks on the earth
like cherries too ripe in a white bowl.


The grey-haired man in his grey suit with his grey gloves held Selune's hair in his hand and twisted just a little bit as he held his disruptor to her temple. "I'd rather we not have any unpleasantness, ladies. I just want my property back and I'll be out of your... hair."

Fiona's face flushed to the point that it clashed with the red of her hair. "Oh, ye dinna want tae hae any unpleasantness? We joost walked 5 miles through sewage, I think it's a wee bit late for thet!" she narrowed her eyes at the man holding her friend by the hair.

"Not my fault and not my concern, little lady," replied the grey man. "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn..."

"Real-ly? One liners? Is this where you give us the big villain monologue?" The angry scot parked her hands on her hips defiantly.

The false smile turned cold quickly. "I'd rather not shoot any of you, but if you'd prefer I can start with you, McMouthy. Just give me what I came for ladies, nice and simple, and no one gets hurt..."

The diminutive woman took a step closer. "No one gets hurt? What guarantee do we have oov thet?" She didn't point out that they had seen his face. Her goal was to keep him talking and to hopefully get him to take the gun from Selune's head.

Char spread her arms between the crew and the grey man. "Because for the record now," the usually careful scientist seemed to mispronounce the tense of 'record' when she spoke. Fiona caught the gaff and just in case the house security system didn't, she thumbed the button on the PDD in her left hand.

"He's a thief, who works under cover of darkness and stealth, and the last thing he wants is a murder hanging over him, let alone four. His two associates are not so discerning, however... though he didn't get a vote in them coming along. But then, one seldom does when dealing with the Syndicate... eh, Grey Panther?"

His eyebrows rose in surprise, and he inclined his head slightly. "At your service. Do go on..."

"Nausicaans have a very distinctive heavy breathing in m-class atmospheres. And they move with the subtlety of a supernova. May as well come out boys, we know you're there..." At that, sure enough, two heavily armed Nausicaans moved from behind the curtains on opposite sides of the room, holding disruptor pistols. They moved in quite close, actually, much to the curvaceous commander's satisfaction.

She fervently hoped that Nausicaans never got any smarter if they were going to continue to plague her life.

"So you stole the jewels for the Syndicate, probably because you owed them a debt and this was how they planned to collect- and of course it wouldn't hurt your reputation. But when the manhunt began you couldn't move them through customs... so you used Fiona for that, since as a Starfleet officer she wouldn't be suspected and she would be waved through. You tailed her, but she was with Yuna, who picked up on you right away, and you couldn't get close to Fiona again."

"So then you just followed them to the hotel, never imagining they would be in the most secure room in the hotel... and you waited, imagining that when we went out for the night it would be your big chance, since sneaking in with the cleaning and delivery staff didn't work out. But when you finally got in here you realized that we had taken some of the pieces out with us- some were still here, but now you had to wait for us to return. And that's when the Syndicate decided to step things up a bit and make sure that it all went off without a hitch."

"And by that, of course, they meant no witnesses. Which is why you're not bothering with a mask, and why you've resorted to a hostage plan... because you know none of us are supposed to survive this encounter. You might not even want to kill us, but the Nausicaans definitely will... and if we don't give you the jewels, they'll kill us all, you included. Have I missed anything, Panther?"

The gentleman in grey chuckled and shook his head. "Sadly, no... I think you've covered everything, and yes, I'm afraid you have analyzed the situation quite correctly. Bravo... I would applaud, but my hands are a bit full at the moment."

"So when it all comes down to it, you ballsed up, and now you want your shinies back. Yes?" Yuna cocked an eyebrow at the Grey Panther. "If you want them, you're gonna have to come and get them." She was tired, but prepared for a fight if that's what it took.

"I think you speak far truer than you know about having your hands full," the pointy-eared science siren opined. "We all resist petting our feline friend, but we would never dream of pulling her hair. I think you're about to find out why... now, ladies."

At that, brief but terrible mayhem ensued.



With inhuman speed, Selune's hand dropped onto the weapon aimed at her head, twisting it to point at the floor as her arm dropped and yanked it away.

"Never," Selune growled as her head slammed backwards into the Grey Panther's face with a satisfying crunch.

"Pull," she continued, spinning out of his weakened grip. One wrist still rolled with his, forcing his weapon hand still wider, the other dropping low as she spun and drove her elbow into his floating ribs.

"My," she hissed, voice cold as ice while she half stepped back, driving her hand forward in a vicious palm strike to his solar plexus.

"Hair!" She finished as her wrist wrapped around his, gun still held tightly in his hand despite the dazing blows. Striking twice into his exposed forearm against the ulnar and radial nerves to force his hand into a state of numb agony and free the weapon, she finally let him drop with a small huff.

"Is it really so much to ask for?" she asked the room, ignoring the combat ensuing around her.

Fiona didn't need any further prompting. She trusted the kitten to show the Panther what real cat style martial arts was all about, and took the ugly on the left. Her tactic was simple- throw her tool kit at his head then go in low and fast. She dropped and dove for the Nausicaan's legs silently blessing the local obsession with marble.

The thick robe she was wearing made it easy to slide into home. She put every ounce of her momentum into the blows aimed at the big alien's knees then followed with a double kick and lift to his midsection. Gravity took care of the rest and he made a very satisfying thump when he hit the wall. The scot scrambled to put more space between him and his disruptor. She settled for kicking it out the still open balcony window, then was all over the downed man like a deranged nightmare.

Meanwhile, Yuna had ducked to the right and tackled the thug closest to her at waist height. They weren't fast by any means, and strength was no substitute for balance and coordination in a fight. Yuna had both, and the Nausicaan thug had neither. As soon as he was down she popped back up, ready to use every advantage.

For a while there was nothing much visible but wet flame colored hair and flailing limbs from Fiona and her victim as the two pinballed around the suite. It wasn't elegant or refined, but it was very effective. The engineer ended up sitting on his chest and simply pounding him into a state of deep unconsciousness with a heavy metal bit of bric a brac the two managed to knock off a table during their roll about that had previously been an elegant statuary reproduction.

"An' stay duin," the scot ordered with one last thump as she staggered to her feet and hitched her robe into a more modest configuration.

Celes had learned long ago to never fight equal with someone bigger, stronger and uglier than herself. She used her light weight and swift feet to her advantage, darting around the taller smellier Nausicaan and using a variety of fighting styles to incapacitate him and keep him on the floor.

The idiot genuinely never knew what hit him.

Spinning behind him, Yuna easily avoided both his weapon and his limbs as he tried to follow her movements. His thick neck meant his vision was restricted - something she used to her advantage. As he began to rise to his feet, no sooner did he get weight on one leg than a crack was heard as his knee was expertly broken from the side, sending him careening back towards the floor. A quick left hook, and he was all but done for.

Throughout it all, Charybdis remained uncharacteristically removed, observing the flow of events and the individual combats with an analytical eye. Either she was grading her fellow officer's performance or she was waiting for something... and as the barely conscious Nausicaan pressed the timer button on a grenade and let it roll from his fingers onto the polished marble floor, only to stop at the edge of the luxuriant carpet with a beep, she saw her moment.

Nausicaans were renowned not only for their sadism and their high pain tolerance and to their willingness to hire themselves out as mercenary muscle, but for their low intelligence. This often led to poor tactical choices, and upon observing the level of armaments with which they had been equipped when they had stepped out- the many mirrors of the penthouse serving her purposes well- she had realized that there was a remarkably high probability that one of them was going to do something spectacularly stupid.

Her observation now served her well as she calmly picked up the live grenade as it beeped again and strode quickly to the main bath. "Everyone down please, fire in the hole." she asked as it beeped twice more, then she pitched it into the enormous marble bathtub and ducked and covered herself, sticking her fingers in her sensitive pointed ears.

There was rather a spectacular explosion as physics had its way with the bath room. The rounded marble tub, being made of remarkably dense and solid material, was only slightly surface marred. Being a concave sphere, it redirected the energy of the explosion (as well as the shrapnel from the grenade) upward, along with the 29 kiloliters of water formerly held by the bath tub. This in turn caused the elegant mirrors above the tub to completely shatter, the shards of said mirrors being swept throughout the suite along with the minor tidal wave.

Save for that, and some minor structural damage to the ceiling of the bathroom, there was very little overall damage... quite impressive given the yield of the weapon. Soaked through, her hair in a wet mop on her head, Charybdis stood, brushed herself off somewhat ridiculously in her sodden robe, kicked the downed Nausicaan for good measure, then cleared her throat.

"Ladies, we are about to become rather popular. I strongly suggest that you take a few moments to put on your uniforms, unless you would rather spend the next few hours in those wet bathrobes. I suspect we are about to have company... rather a lot of it."

 

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