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| Scene Title | Smoke + Water |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Ling Chao underestimates the power of the river. |
| Date | November 8, 2010 |
For a moment, the grey concrete is the only thing that fills her blurry vision is the only thing she sees, the only sensation she experiences. Chaos rings off in the background, long forgotten as Ling Chao chokes on something lodged in her throat, begging her body to caught, to force it out, something it seems so unwilling to do.
Red fills her vision as it spills from her mouth to the pavement, the Chinese woman continuing to hack violently afterwards. The scuff of shoes draws her eyes upward, to a man; a man with blonde hair and a gun pointed at her, smoke rising from the barrel. A man she doesn't even know had just shot her. Sometimes, the universe has a sense of humor - after all, it's impossible to be prepared for the assassination you never see coming. And Ling knew that lesson better than most.
She shifts her weight and tries to sit out, but instead just cries out as a stabbing pain shoots through her body, the sticky red puddle underneath growing every second. The man says something, but it's lost in the mix of the numbing throbbing in her head and the oppressive chaotic noise permeating the air. She reaches out, clawing at the pavement, desperate to get enough of a grip to pull herself up, but her fingers just won't move like their supposed to, cold and deadlocked as they are.
A bloody cough forces its way up again, a small billowing of smoke following after it. It's too late for that, Ling knows; by the time she could muster the concentration to go through with the process it would be too later. Still, wisps of smoke begin to raise her from body as she slowly begins to lose control, swirling and dissipating as they extend up into the open air. Her vision blurs further, and as she gives up and slides down to the ground, she looks up and tilts her head to the man, smirking.
"Business as usual, I guess. Funny how these things go…"
And then the blur fades to black.
Thirty Minutes Earlier
Canal Street, Chinatown
The clinic was a dead-end and coming here was a terrible idea. The riots may not have consumed Manhattan like they have Roosevelt Island and Queens, but looting is almost as bad. Storefronts are being smashed out, cars flipped over and burned, police are nowhere to be seen and pandemonium is the law of the land. Canal street is tearing itself apart and without the Flying Dragons to maintain order, the heart of the old Triad is going to bleed dry on the street.
The Ghost Shadows are too preoccupied with fighting the police to give a damn about it. Zhao Wenzuo is merely out for blood.
Ling Chao bares witness to the worst of the violence from the second-story window of the Cong Clinic. Bao-Wei has been long gone from here, his records moved, files taken, everything but the furniture stripped from the place. Medicine cabinets had been long since raided by junkies looking for a fix.
Outside the window, a group of teenagers lob a molotov cocktail towards an approaching column of riot police, setting the street ablaze with liquid fire. The shield-clattering police back away, shouting threats, launching tear-gas canisters towards the looters.
How long can the city sustain so much bloodshed?
There's a disapproving click of her tongue as Ling stares down from window, letting out a sigh. She had thought one last chance at figuring the mysteries behind her own vision might finally be figured out, looking here for anything that could shed light on identity or location, anything she could use. In retrospect, she should not have been so surprised to have found the place so looted, so empty. Not considering the last time she set foot here.
But for all the disaster that had been, she had not forgotten what her former employer had told her that evening. Bao-Wei Cong had said she shot him in her vision. And now with that day arrived, and with Richard Cardinal's news that he had somehow inexplicably survived what should have most assuredly been his death on Staten Island, she had returned in hopes of…
Well, there were no two ways to put it. She had come here hoping that, once more, the man had returned to once was familiar, regardless of his new found icy form or not. Truth be told, of all people, Ling Chao had still be hoping to find mercy and compromise, in finding and sparing Bao-Wei, perhaps she would be able to avoid her own fate.
Instead, all she had found was dust. Truly, coming back here had been a bad idea.
Letting out a heavy breath, she sloses her eyes, rather than watch another window be smashed. "This was a mistake," she says to no one in particular. Now, it is time to leave, time to find Melissa and Peter, and time to figure out what she is to do next.
On the way down from the second floor, Ling can hear the sounds of violence outside, shouting and the choir of riot shields being drummed against by police batons. The front entrance to the clinic would be an ill-advised escape route, so through the back door is the best way to make sure things are best kept unnoticed.
Ling's shoes make soft report down the stairs, clicking the entire way into the front office. Outside, she can hear glass shattering in the street, hollaring and the pop of guns firing rubber bullets into the crowd to disperse them. It's a harrowing situation, one that Ling herself knows could be — at any moment — the source of her undoing.
Passing down the corridor where the Institute had captured her, she recalls how she had gotten tied up with Messiah in the first place. Somehow, against all odds, this is all Kain Zarek's fault. Given pause, Ling considers that notion, trying to remember the face of the man in her vision of the future that wound up delivering a killing blow.
No— no she would remember Kain's voice. She never got too good a look at her attacker, but the sense was that she didn't know him. It couldn't be Kain, could it?
Hopefully, no one will notice the oddly moving cloud of smoke that will be moving out across the street, mixing in with what already trails up into the air from the chaos around the former medical clinic.
It's with a cautious movement that Ling resumes her movement down and off the stares, coming to a brief stop as her boots clack down against the floor. This all had been Kain's fault, from the the start, the damnable man who ran Rapture in Eliot's stead. When she heard it had been raided several weeks ago, a part of her had helped that the place had burned to the ground.
Perhaps tonight, that little bit of justice would be found.
Rubbing her hand over her face, Ling takes a deep breath, before resuming her steps. She was out in the cold on the identity of her potential attacker. There were only a handful of details she could remember - that blonde hair being the most prominent. It was an unfortunate thing, then, that most every other blonde she could think of was dead, or Kain Zarek.
Well, no. There was John Logan, with that dirty blonde hair of his. But he had never struck ehr as the type, particularly not after he had been reluctantly willing to help her figure out who would be her undoing to begin with.
Certainly, perhaps that had all be a ruse to throw her off a trail to begin with.
Out the back door and into the alleyway behind Doctor Cong's office, Ling's breath is stolen from her by an unusual sight. Directly across from Cong's office is a brick tenement building, one that has been vacant since the FBI raided it a summer ago due to connections with the neighborhood's Triad influence. There, in front of the building's back entrance, kneels an unusual figure.
Matte black armor looks hauntingly familiar, hydraulic pumps, hoses, large chrome bolts and segmented kevlar weave over an MR fluid filled bodysuit. A glossy black helmet is tipped downward, and the FRONTLINE officer is on his knees, gloved hands raised and fingers folded together, praying.
It's silent, at least, the prayer. There's no one else in the alley, and a glass jar in front of the officer has three sticks of incense sticking up out of it, burning with a sweet and spicy aroma that mixed with the smell of kerosine and burning alcohol coming from the adjacent Canal Street.
FRONTLINE. The last thing, honestly, that Ling had expected to find here in Chinatown, forgotten until the end of things as it usually is. The presence of a single lone member of the military force that she has found herself up against several times in the last few months is almost more unnerving than if she were to find an entire squad waiting for her in that alleyway.
Her movements step dead for just a moment, unable to keep her boot from hitting the ground with an audible clack as she recoils and jerks back in surprised, trying to twist herself back inside of the door before her presence can be revealed. Her breath hitches, smoke drifting off her form and outside the door way, for all the little bit that Ling notices.
But this is no big deal, right? Ling has snuck through worse, far worse, closing her eyes and trying to summon up the concentration she needs to convert herself, so that she may drift away off into the smoky filled streets, no one the wiser.
Tonight, she will not fall victim to some random member of FRONTLINE.
The sensation of having her arm in a vice, halfway through transformation has Ling caught off-guard. Thick fingers curl around Ling's arm, and when she snaps a look to the figure standing in the alley behind her, it's— "Going somewhere?" A sudden explosion of wind blows away from the wiry young man in dark sunglasses that throws Ling Chao off of her feet, a hurricane-force wind that slams her into the brick wall of the tenement building as the young asian man with a scar across his right cheek flicks his tongue over the cur at the corner of his mouth.
"Look what fucking providence got us today," and yet the FRONTLINE officer is doing nothing but praying still. In her dazed confusion, Ling recognizes the voice, breath catching back up to her, arms trembling, voice hitching in the back of her throat.
Johnny Wong.
"Been a long time you back stabbing bitch."
Of all the fucking people for her to run into in Chinatown. As if the windstorm that had been Thalia Ashford hadn't been bad enough to endure, now here she was, face to face with someone who possesses the one thing she knows is a problem to her power, and who has an actual reason to kill her. It's not ahrd to notice how she trembles, gulping audibly as her eyes refocus. There's a moment where time sees to freeze before she looks over in the direction of the voice, offering a bit of a grin, any attempt at confidence belied by how she trembles.
"It has been a while, yes."
Stated simply, inhales deeply, taking in the smell of the incense burning in the alleyway - and suddenly curious as to why FONTLINE is standing there, simply waiting as she is manhandled by one of the last people she would have ever wanted to see.
And yet, despite the shaking, she doens't feel worried. Not yet. She doesn't recall Johnny Wong being blonde. If anything is going to come of this vision, perhaps it is the slight bit of renewd confidence she feels at that realisation, her grin widening just a bit.
«Johnny» crackles the distorted voice in the matte black suit of armor, «ease up.» Hydraulics hiss and whine as the armored figure slowly rises to stand, turning to look over at Ling with the street lamp overhead reflected on his glossy visor. There's a subtle difference in the design of the armor he wears as opposed to the other FRONTLINE members Ling as seen, a different cut to it perhaps, a stylistic change. On the chest, his numbering scheme is different too.
OS-01
Johnny backs off when the armored figure makes that statement, his hands curling against his palms, dark eyes peering over his large sunglasses to the armored man. "What about— " a whirring arm lifts and a hand is motioned to Johnny, warning him not to talk.
«Not now. Just go and tell the others.» As the hydraulic-encased arm lowers, Johnny's armored companion begins to take slow steps towards Ling, reaching down to his side to withdraw the pistol holstered at his side. «I'm going to give you thirty seconds,» the armored officer explains with a hollow, metallic tinniness to his voice thanks to the helmet.
«Then I'm going to shoot you. No tricks, just run. Maybe I miss, maybe you're out of sight. Otherwise,» in some sense of sadistic glee, the armored man trains his gun down on Ling. «I just shoot you like a dog.»
Ling should be terrified. Any normal person would be. On the other hand, any smart person with her unique ability would have fled the moment the wind manipulator was called off, and thus lived to fight another day. Lived through the madness, ready to rise from the ashes.
In this moment, Ling is neither of these things.
Instead, Ling Chao's eyes narrow as she stares at the unknown individual in front of her. She has her knife, but even she wanted to just reach out and stab this man, like she has others before him, it would be a futile measure. "I would ask where you get off," she remarks - doing a half turn as she does, the clock is after all ticking. "But I know what you used to be, if you are hanging around someone like Johnny Wong. Whoever you are, don't think shooting me will make anything better." Smoke trails off her body as she turns.
No tricks. Which normally means no powers.
Ling Chao, however, is not one to play by the rules. Finishing her turns, she takes to hesitant steps - expecting to be shot anyway - and then darts. She'll waiting a moment, and then go smoke. He'll never have the opportunity.
That's only if he ever intended her to get the thirty seconds.
The first sound Ling hears is a pop, the snap of helmet clips coming off, then a clunk of the heavy piece of multi-million dollar headwear landing down on the asphalt visor first. As her body begins to turn to smoke, the next sound she hears is the crack of a gunshot so loud that pigeons scatter from their sleeping roosts in the eaves of the buildings that form the alleyway.
Their wings flutter int he dark and Ling feels a sharp pain lance through her throat.
He just wanted her to turn her back on him.
It was symbolic.
For a moment, the grey concrete is the only thing that fills her blurry vision is the only thing she sees, the only sensation she experiences. Chaos rings off in the background, long forgotten as Ling Chao chokes on something lodged in her throat, begging her body to caught, to force it out, something it seems so unwilling to do.
Red fills her vision as it spills from her mouth to the pavement, the Chinese woman continuing to hack violently afterwards. The scuff of shoes draws her eyes upward, to a man; a man with blonde hair and a gun pointed at her, smoke rising from the barrel. A man she doesn't even know had just shot her. Sometimes, the universe has a sense of humor - after all, it's impossible to be prepared for the assassination you never see coming. And Ling knew that lesson better than most.
She shifts her weight and tries to sit out, but instead just cries out as a stabbing pain shoots through her body, the sticky red puddle underneath growing every second. "That was for the knife in my back, and leaving me to die." but in Ling's condition the words are lost in the mix of the numbing throbbing in her head and the oppressive chaotic noise permeating the air. She reaches out, clawing at the pavement, desperate to get enough of a grip to pull herself up, but her fingers just won't move like their supposed to, cold and deadlocked as they are.
A bloody cough forces its way up again, a small billowing of smoke following after it. It's too late for that, Ling knows; by the time she could muster the concentration to go through with the process it would be too later. Still, wisps of smoke begin to raise her from body as she slowly begins to lose control, swirling and dissipating as they extend up into the open air. Her vision blurs further, and as she gives up and slides down to the ground, she looks up and tilts her head to the man, smirking.
"Business as usual, I guess. Funny how these things go…"
And then the blur fades to black.
Lowering the gun, Liu Ye turns to look back at a stunned Johnny Wong. His hair is fairer than it was all that time ago when Ling betrayed him to the government, dyed a sandy blonde and clipped short in a military cut atop his head. "Find the others, tell them, but do not let the word spread further…"
Liu's lips creep up into a smile as he turns back to Ling, aims the gun down at her again and furrows his brows.
"They think they can leash me," the former boss of the Flying Dragons intones sharply, squeezing the trigger three more times and unloading more rounds into Ling's body.
"Let this be their first lesson."
"Water eventually finds a way."
