A Faceless Man

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Scene Title A Faceless Man
Synopsis Keira learns something new.
Date May 26, 2018

41st Precinct


Keira took a shining to the place that she and Graeme went to the other day to work out their frustrations. It looked secure, with tall apartment buildings nearby walling the station off, while also providing a nice bit of security — she can have some boys on each surrounding building, and they can all keep a good look at the roads leading to her place of operation. The 278 running right along the building also provides a little extra security by giving anyone looking over the edge a good, long view of the surrounding streets.

It’s about as perfect as it can get.

That’s why she’s here today, inspecting the building with a few of her boys, making plans. The front door that opens on the street will be welded shut for security — the only entrance in will be from the fenced parking lot, which is already surrounded by a reinforced brick and corrugated metal fence. That fence will be reinforced, and lined with plenty of barbed wire and sharp things. The parking garage entrance can be blocked off, as well.

The insides are perfect. Ransacked and destroyed, yes, but with a bit of cleaning up, it will serve Keira’s purposes perfectly. There’s plenty of space for storage, there’s rooms, and there’s even holding cells to keep those people who particularly piss her off.

The boys she has with her are busy staking claims to their rooms, leaving Keira to slip outside for a smoke. With no fire service, this is definitely going to be a non-smoking building — might as well start early. She slips out the back door overlooking the parking lot, pulling out a cigarette and placing it between her lips.

The tiny thug steps out further, making her way down the stairs to the parking lot proper. The old police vehicles can be scrapped — and perhaps some of them can be cobbled together into a few extra vehicles. She’ll have to hire a mechanic, too. What can’t be saved can be scrapped to better protect the fence and building, too.

She quietly kicks a beer can away as she steps a bit further out into the fenced area, idly meandering toward the two work vans that brought her and the boys here. As she goes, she casually puffs away at the cigarette, eye hooded.

All things considered, things are going fairly okay now. She did lose an eye and an ability, but she can walk again. While she misses the anonymity like a drug addict misses their drugs whilst in withdrawal, not being a cripple has been a fair trade off. She has a second chance, and that matters way more than being able to turn into other people. She can still run a successful business without her ability — it just takes away some of the shortcuts she’s grown used to taking. She’ll live.

With the cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of her mouth, she opens the driver’s side door of one of the vans, reaching in to retrieve a bottle of scotch that she brought along with the intent of sharing it with her boys to celebrate their find. It’s a fixer upper, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Keira stops dead, however, as she glances back toward the back of the van, only to find the rear door hanging wide open, a rotund man with crazy facial hair standing still as can be and staring right back at her. And for a moment, they simply stare at each other, Keira’s cigarette smoking in the dull wind of the Bronx as she stares this stranger down.

In an instant, they both swing into action. Keira lithely drops down, slipping under the van as she pulls the large gun at her hip out. She watches the feet of the large man as he scuffles back, presumably grabbing his weapon, and then begins to move around the vehicle in a way that he seems to think of as sneaky — it’s definitely not that.

Gritting her teeth, Key reaches down, pulling out a knife with her free as the man rounds the corner to the side of the van that she was on. Once he gets to a certain point, grumbling, she suddenly shoots out from beneath the video, slashing her knife at one of his achilles tendons. The result is instant, the man screaming as he crashes to the ground, right foot dangling uselessly.

She would let him go at that, but the idiot decides to swing his own gun about, shooting several rounds, though only one grazes her shoulder (and thankfully avoiding any of her tattoos), but sending a river of blood down her shoulder all the same. With an infuriated expression, Keira swings her own gun around and fires off two shots.

But hers actually connect. One hits the man hard in the shoulder, knocking him back hard and cracking his skull against the pavement. The other blasts his jaw off, and in an explosion of blood, the man goes still.

Something about killing him feels way too good. There’s a warm glow that spreads from her chest, down to her fingertips.

The ripping of her clothes backs this odd feeling up — Keira raises her hands, watching in awe as her fingers shorten and plump up, along with her hands, arms, and the rest of her. Her clothing tightens considerably on her frame, before outright bursting; she promptly ducks down, concealing herself as she becomes a he. Her hair grows, becomes brownish-gray and curly, and the facial hair that the man she just killed once possessed before she shot his jaw off sprouts from her now-plump face.

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The strangest sensation is the eye though. It’s quite odd, feeling a fully functioning eye suddenly generate where there was once nothing. The fat man lifts the eye patch, the only thing that didn’t rip to shreds during the shift from tiny thug to rotuned older man, peeking around with wide, beady eyes filled with awe. Then, those brown eyes land on the prone form that they have copied perfectly. She looks like he did right before he died.

So that’s what happened to her power. She didn’t even have to touch the guy…so…

Now she has to kill people to turn into them?

Plump hands raise into the air as her boys file out of the precinct building, guns drawn. Thankfully, these guys knew her before her ability was lost, so it only takes them a moment of blinking owlishly between the naked fat man and the identical fat man laying on the ground with no jaw before they point. “Oh hey, looks like your power ain’t broken, after all, boss!” Back to diving out of Keira’s way.

“No, Mike. It’s definitely not.” Now to figure out the rest of it. How to turn back into herself —

Oh, wait. She just did. Eyes widen slightly, and she promptly covers herself from the guards, who have turned around like proper gentlemen who don’t want to end up like the fat man. What follows is a bit of impromptu experimentation, the woman shifting back and forth between herself and the fat man.

Finally, she gets her boys to retrieve some clothing for her, and while dressing herself, she muses quietly about this newfound ability. There are definite differences — something about the ordeal she just went through has changed her ability and how it works.

But what fascinates her the most is the fact that it felt too good to kill that man whose face she has now stolen.


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