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| Scene Title | They're Here |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Eight people appear in a place that isn't quite the one they left. Tamara promises to take them… well, it isn't quite home. |
| Date | April 7, 2019 |
Outside Moab Federal Penitentiary
Moab Federal Penitentiary hovers in the background, a looming hulk of concrete blocks and concertina wire-topped fences which overlooks so much scrubby desert and water-carved mountain slopes. It's a lot more intact right now than it was just moments before, in the time before eight people were jerked out of their places and dumped… here. Not together, but all in relatively close proximity; all eight are outside the facility's boundaries, not far from the packed-dirt airstrip that serves the penitentiary. None were deposited with grace upon the ochre soil; there was nothing gentle or courteous about suddenly being plunked down somewhere just ever so slightly… wrong.
Klaxons blare; that much hasn't changed. But the outer walls of the penitentiary are intact, as are its fences. No one is visible in the yards, although — beneath the monotonous clamor of the alarm, other sounds might be picked out, hinting at the sheer chaos taking place inside. It's somehow fitting that sunset paints the entire scene in shades of gold, orange, and red.
There's a small, private plane waiting on the airstrip, not the kind that is usually seen around the prison; its engines are idling, as though its pilot doesn't intend to stay here for very long. Probably smart of them. The vehicle's stairs are down, three people loitering around the base. Well, two loitering. One steps away from the plane, walks over towards Helena. Her hands are lowered, open; her face is familiar, because just a short time ago Helena saw it in the red-lit depths of Moab, giving directions to Peter and Hiro.
But that girl was unmistakably younger than this woman.
"Hello," Tamara greets, smiling ruefully at the escapee. Blue eyes flick over Alex's nearby form, prone in the red dirt; Isabelle, similarly sprawled out on the runway; the remaining five scattered about like pebbles carelessly dropped from some vast hand.
Alexander and Isabelle aren't the only ones sprawled like corpses in the dust; just off to the side from Alex, the small form of Elle, too, is in an all-but-dead slump on her side. One of her hands is loosely clutching, or resting, atop the opposite shoulder even in unconsciousness, and there is a thin, vertical trickle of blood visible on the side of her head, just partially obscured by bangs. She's breathing, yes. But it doesn't seem likely that she'll be paying attention to Tamara any time soon.
Helena spits the dirt out of her mouth, shakes her head, letting the dust raise and resettle in her hair. She has a nasty taste in her mouth from her stomach turning inside out, which for the moment she ignores as she turns her dirt-streaked face up to Tamara. "You — " she says, and trying to swallow and almost choking, pushes herself to her feet. "How did we — " she looks over at the prison, at the others, at Tamara. "This is wrong," she manages finally. And then, "I have to help Alex." She's not sure what's going on, but the boost she'd gotten from Gillian has since drained from her, and she's back to being powerless again. That in itself makes the world off-kilter.
One moment you're throwing a grenade through the air, jumping out of cover to cover the escape of your friends, placing yourself directly in the line of fire and not completely expecting to make it back through the next few seconds. Then time stops and you are frozen there for several heartbeats that seem like either an eternity or the blink of the eye; as you hit the dirt, you are rolling in a different place and time, to say that it can be…unsettling is a understatement. Trask comes up with his rifle ready scanning the area for friendlies and enemies, he winces slightly as he does, having landed pretty hard on his shoulder.
Trask is still wearing all black commando and a ski mask for the record.
His head hurts, his leg hurts, everything hurts. Was there another explosion? The yard has gone much more quiet than it was only a few moments ago. Now, all of the sounds seem far away. Did the blast deaden his hearing? With a groan, Django rolls onto his back and eases his eyes open, one hand still desperately clutching the grip of his pilfered pistol. Lingering grit and sand make his eyes water, but he's gotten used to it at this point.
The helicopter is gone, and so too the guard on the roof. No rubble strewn about the landscape, no mangled corpses draining their precious life into the lifeless soil under the bloody sky. What the hell happened?
Free of the impending dangers that had pressed him and his compatriots just before the shockwave, the Russky takes his time in pushing himself up from the dirt and assessing his condition. Though he's scarred and lacerated from schrapnel, and the bullet graze on his leg still throbs, but he doesn't seem to have sustained any further wounds. At least, until he rises from the ground, bracing himself against the wall by the door, and the world suddenly spins, nearly depositing him back on the ground. A hand touched to the back of his head comes away wet with fresh blood, black under the waning light of day. A wet, black smear stains the wall where he must have cracked his head on the way down.
Having lost track of his surroundings in this examination of his condition, a familiar voice catches his attention, and he snaps his head around to look in Helena's direction before nearly toppling to the ground once again. One palm to his forehead, the other, still gripping his gun, pressed to the wall, he limps in her direction.
"Helena!" he calls out. "Is that you? Oh thank god you made it out." There's enough blood on him that were it all his, he'd be unconscious, if not worse, but gashes on his face and arms show that he's definitely lost his share. "I was so worried."
While the rest of the world may be temporarily preoccupied with everything happening above ground, there's one figure sprawled face-down in the dirt who hasn't lifted up her head yet — despite having recently reacquired all of her assembled faculties — and instead insists of remaining prone with her ear to the earth, as if listening to something stirring just beneath the surface.
She can hear them.
Lucrezia can hear every scuttling thought and poisonous primal urge…
…it draws a smile to her lips that curves dangerously close to wicked. Until the headache begins to set in; the pain that threatens to split open her skull. This surely must be the results of having been forcibly deprived of her supernatural senses for so long only to have them restored in a split-second explosion of augmentation coupled with a decade's worth of vertigo. Of course, literally landing in the desert face-first probably didn't help much, either. The cry that she emits teeters precariously between keen and scream. Is there such a thing as an Italian banshee?
That rueful smile tugs further to the side. "It is," Tamara replies, shrugging her shoulders. "I don't know if it's good or bad. But we can't stay here for very long. Can you bring them both?" she asks, nodding towards Alex and Elle then gesturing towards the plane. Trask is beyond Helena, Django already heading her way; they can assist. She never meant Helena to do it alone. Tamara looks over her shoulder, beckons one of the two who wait forward to also help.
Then the seer moves on, gesturing for the other of her associates to fetch Isabelle from the runway and make sure Jessica also gets aboard. She walks over to Lucrezia, the banshee's cry eliciting little in the way of adverse reaction. Tamara kneels beside the Italian woman, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Can you walk? It's not very far," she assures Lucrezia gently. "But we do need to move."
Trask watches Helena's reaction to the new location. He makes an assumption that this must have been a extraction teleport; he wasn't expecting one, but hey, he also wasn't expecting to be powerless. He moves for Elle first; checking to see if she's alive he leans over her, frowning at the sight of the blood, his rifle still in one hand ready.
Jessica is taking her bearings. Not for long, since "getting away" is at the very top of the agenda. But nothing seems too far off the mark. "We'll all be fine once the drugs wear off. Let's get out of here." She's armed, which puts her a step up on most. Trask gets most of the attention, as the other armed person.
"N — Sergei." Helena smiles weakly in his direction, but shakes her head. She doesn't know what's happened, and she nods to Tamara as she starts heading in Alex's direction. "That's Elle Bishop." Helena says as she slings Alex's arm around her shoulders and tries to lift him up with awkward and minimal success. "She works for the Company, and she tried to kill us. Don't feel obligated to be gentle," she suggests to Trask. Django's eyes are met, and she gives him a weak but earnest smile. See? He's out. So's she. "Help me with Alex, Django?" she pleads.
Elle is spared a brief glance by Django, being something of a familiar face, but most of his attention is on Helena now. He nods once to her request and hurries towards her, still limping and holding his head. While more that willing to help, he's far from in peak condition himself. Between bloodloss, exhertion, and that bump on the head, if he doesn't get some kind of medical attention soon, even just first aid, he's likely to end up much worse for wear.
Crouching down next to Alexander, he slings one of the man's arms across his shoulders and, with a great deal of effort and gritted teeth, hauls him upright. "You have any better an idea than me what the hell happened?" His tone is concerned, tense, and his expression dour. "Can we trust these people?"
Move? Sure, Lucrezia can move. But, she doesn't want to. It's not the impressive dust-encrusted scrape which now decorates the left side of her face that pains her so much as the cruel, temporary taste of her absent and anxiously missed preternatural awareness — without which she cannot fully reconcile herself to be whole. Her ability has been manifest for more years that almost all of those she finds herself keeping company with now have been drawing breath, let alone grown accustomed to wielding whatever so-called "Evolved" abilities of their own God has given them.
When she finally sees fit to find her feet again, the movement comes slow and stiff and her first few steps are more of a mourner's march made toward the plane than anything considered hasty.
But Lucrezia is moving, and the precog is content with that. She steps back from the Italian woman, glances over her shoulder towards the facility, then up at the sky. Tamara's manner is that of someone counting down the ticking seconds of a stopwatch, though this doesn't translate into any overt attempt to hurry the group along. She just hovers, and waits, which is in its own way a message. Let's go.
If Trask moves Elle in any way during his examination, shifts any of her limbs, it's possible he'll notice a cause for some hesitation. That is, if he is at all inclined to be nicer than Helena's suggestion that gentleness doesn't matter. The arm crushed beneath Elle's body looks, for some reason, to be longer than the other. The shoulder sits…too far down. There is also a discolored blotch of pale red high on her forehead, blackish rivulets of blood still clinging there; and that, even more relevantly, is the reason why she is not currently awake for Tamara's wonderful and thoughtful reception.
True, she's tried to kill some of you at some point. Maybe even most of you! But clearly she's in no condition for it now; whatever the others choose to do with her, she is, for all intents and purposes, at their complete mercy.
She might be on the other side, but Trask has had to kill too many people who were just doing their job all too recently. And leaving her behind is not an option, she needs a hospital. He leans down and shoulders his rifle. He has a first aid kit at his side and immediately begins moving to stop the bleeding and do his best to set the arm, his military training coming in handy here to triage the body on what must be treated immediately so that she can be moved, because if the attitude of the woman who seems in charge of evac is anything to go on if he takes too long, then she is going to leave him behind. Once that is done he moves to lift her in his arms, tenderly and protectively, making sure her arm is secure before doing so.
Jessica looks over to Elle. She has her own love/hate relationship with the blonde Company agent, but they don't seem to be treating her…well, too badly. Not badly enough that she'd pipe up for it, anyhow. So she moves over to follow Tamara, who seems to be their guide in the direction of "away".
"Her." Helena's chin tilts toward Tamara as she speaks to Django while they make their way to the plane. "She killed Verse, down on Red, helped all of us. I'm pretty sure she's here to help and well — she's the one with the plane." And that's enough for Helena. If she never, ever sees Moab again, it will be entirely too soon. She focuses on the struggle to get Alex onto the plane, but turns a worried gaze on Django as they do so. "You don't look too good yourself." she says gently as they get situated.
With Alexander's weight added to his own, compounding the strain of his injuries and the weariness that now begins to set in as the rush of adrenaline fades, Django's progress is slow. Helena's assistance helps a little, but there's only so fast he can go. If you're in such a hurry to get out of here, Miss Mysterious, why don't you lend a hand? He doesn't give voice to this thought, however. It would take too much effort, and with his throat and lungs still clogged with dust and smoke, his breath is too precious to waste, as each one taken hurts a little more than the last. There had better be some damn booze on that plane.
It's not until they can put Alexander down again that he finally responds to Helena's concern over him. "Been better," he says with a sigh and a slight shake of his head that causes him to wince. "But I'll live. Wh—" Stopping himself before the question can escape his lips, he realizes that it might be a bit of a tender subject. Maybe not the best time for it. But the details could important, so he scowls faintly and asks anyway. "What happened on Red? You get that Petrelli guy out?"
While it may initially appear that Lucrezia is doing anything but paying attention, the fact of the matter is that she's merely listening intently to what everyone else — some enemies, some otherwise, some wholly unknown — has to say. One key piece of information manages to make it into her ears even over the noise of small aircraft engine whine and the Italian woman's dark eyes fix with silent intensity on whatever part of Tamara there is to bodily be seen as they all pile into the plane, which will presumably fly them to… safety? Whatever that word means any more.
The plane is small compared to most commercial jets, but large enough to seat this group comfortably — together or apart, as they deem appropriate. Eight time-travelers, three of them unconscious; Tamara; the two male associates who aided in getting everyone inside; a woman who was apparently left to wait on the plane, and remains in her seat as the others file in, though she offers a polite smile to anyone who looks her way.
Tamara sits down in an aisle seat seemingly chosen at random, and looks back at the group filing in. There's a row of three seats on one side of the aisle; enough room in which to lay out sleeping people, particularly with all the armrests folded up. Isabelle is already laid out on one.
"Set them down there and sit wherever; don't worry about buckling in. Takeoff will be fine." Her expression is faintly weary; blue eyes flick to the woman in the back. "Sarah will fix what she can for you once we're up." Translation: healing. At least partially.
"I can't… answer all your questions," Tamara continues regretfully. Her gaze lingers on Helena for a moment, then returns to moving between each of the awake members of the group. "You will have them," the sybil adds ruefully. "But — there's clothes, and things, if you want them." Not visible at the moment, but presumably tucked away in storage compartments; the plane is about to take
And so Elle remains, cradled in Trask's arms all the way to the plane, the line of blood from her head trickling ever so slightly slower. Despite the heavy mask of injuries, the slim blonde looks so…peaceful when she's out, it's weird. Silent. Angelic. Pity she couldn't be this peaceable when normal and wakeful.
Trask settles Elle on a bench, making her as comfortable as possible, he then moves to clean the wound, once he makes sure everyone else is in. His touch is gentle, tender, as he applies first aid. He doesn't ask what is going on, figuring the Helena will be doing so, and he will hear the answer. He doesn't even ask where they are, taking teleportation in stride, and having no idea how late for dinner he is about to be.
Jessica just gets onto the plane, quiet and silent. The gun is left in hand, though. Never know if things are going to go south. She does take the time to pop the magazine and count the rounds. Never know how many got used before she got it.
Helena seems to have taken a minimal amount of damage — she got beat up by the guards this morning, but wasn't worked over too badly. She managed the upper hand in her fight with Tabitha, shockingly enough. She's mostly bruised and scraped, and maybe a bit post-timey wimey nauseous (not that she quite realizes what it is, yet). To Django she hesitates, and then nods. "I think that was Hiro Nakamura I saw with him, so I'm sure he got out. He said he was right behind me, but even if he didn't — " she smiles, hopeful. "Peter will find me." Her smile at him increases, and she gives Django the gentlest of pats, mindful of his injuries, before rising and murmuring to Trask, "Stay near her. If she wakes up in that state, she might lose control of her ability and I don't want to nose dive." And then to Tamara, "Can you at least tell us where we're headed?"
Lucrezia sits alone, at the back, positioned as such so that she might be able to keep a wary eye on everyone else — with a particularly pitched interest cast in Tamara's general direction for reasons both obvious and not. Despite the overwhelming desire to shed her penitentiary-issued couture, the former fashion model doesn't twitch a muscle to move until they're very nearly twenty minutes airborne. Then, and only then, does she hazard a distracted glance at the ginger-haired man laid occupying three seats supine while failing to enjoy what appears to be a less than restful state of sleep.
With Alexander laid out on one of the seats prepared for just such a thing, Django limps down the aisle to take one of the seats towards the back for himself, finally turning over the safety on his gun and tucking it into the rolled-up leg of his jumpsuit. New clothes sound like a very good idea, especially seeing as his current garments are practically in rags, and turned an ugly brownish-red where they're caked in blood and dirt.
He nods, slowly, sadly as Helena explains about the things that went on inside the building while he was out in the yard. Poor girl, it must be hard on her. "I'm sure he will," he says with what he hopes is a smile to match her own. After that, though, he lets her do the talking in regards to Tamara, since she seems to comfortable with the leadership role. The last of the rush has finally worn off, and he's dead tired now, with his entire body aching. When they do come around to heal him, give him new clothes, all that jazz, they just might have to wake him up.
Tamara smiles cheerfully at Helena. "New York. So it'll be a kinda long flight. But we'll go visit Liz, and I think Abby will be there too." Her gaze drifts to somewhere beyond the girl, focused in the distance. "Cole might be there, but she should be at work." Thoughts wandering, as they're still prone to do. Tamara blinks, and refocuses. "Go easy on them," she says, a hopeful wish. None of what's coming is apt to be easy.
She falls silent then, as the plane launches itself into the air, beginning the long trip back to Manhattan — a Manhattan not quite home for so many of its passengers. Tamara is spared other questions once the flight begins by way of Sarah tending to the worst of their guests' injuries and their other associates matching supplies to people they go with; she helps for a little bit, but then slips out of the cabin and into the back.
There's a phone there, and Tamara dials a number, speaking cheerfully into the receiver once the person on the other end picks up. "Hi, Liz. We have guests for tomorrow. …Yeah, there's… eight. …Okay. I'll see you then." Short and to the point, since most of the talking was done before this little trip.
She replaces the receiver. Picks it back up a moment later, dials another number. This call is shorter yet.
"They're here."
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This begins the storyline Maybe Someday.
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