Poughkeepsie Attacks!!!: Team Opera House

[gone_byebye]

The Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie has been in operation since 1869. It's a big, intricate building, located solidly in the middle of town, and on all of Ray's distant PKE scans it shone like a beacon.

Possibly with good reason, since the streets around it are alive with mice.

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[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Arriving at destination Bardavon Opera House, on right," says a digitized female voice.

"Well, that was easy enough," Indy comments.

He pulls into the main parking lot and switches off the Garmin Street Pilot on the dashboard. He's at the wheel, sunglasses stowed for now, and Mel's riding shotgun in the decidedly inappropriate Hyundai Entourage that Ray had rented for them. As is so often the case with small town rental places, minivans were all Hertz had left. Unfortunately, neither Mel or Indy are from an era when Soccer Moms existed, so lots of jokes went begging over the course of their drive.

Indy gets out of the vehicle and squints through the street-lit night towards the Opera House building. It shows no signs of life from out here. Which is more than can be said for the empty lot around them...

[slayer_fray]

Mel slips out through the open window more out of a lack of understanding about how vehicles from this time period work than any actual attempt at style.

Glancing around, she sets her gun to the lowest setting.

"And neither of us have comedy phobia about mice," she remarks, sounding almost disappointed.

[gone_byebye]

It's probably best that Indy doesn't know about the conversation Ray had a while ago with a Bar patron from Garion's world. When the chief servant of Salmissra, Queen of the Serpent People offers to help you out with a loan of snakes to deal with your mouse plagues... well, we'll just leave the comedy phobias right there, shall we?

By and large Poughkeepsie is not a town with a lot of night watchmen. Most of the businesses rely on security alarms and rent-a-cops who sit behind a desk somewhere on the premises and watch the monitors, rather than actual patrolling watchmen. The Opera House may or may not have one of these, but it definitely has an automated security system, because someone's tampered with it. Small electronics make a different crunch underfoot than rodent bodies do. The security camera that had had its eye on the front door? Disabled and left for dead on the sidewalk.

Mice or no, they're not gonna be alone here.

[slayer_fray]

All of which Mel takes in with the expert eye that doens't have to look twice.

"Wait up."

But just in case, she's picking up the Security camera to see how it's been disabled.

It's amateur work however you look at it. Someone of Mel's calibre? You wouldn't even know the Security system wasn't at full function.

[gone_byebye]

There were screwdrivers involved. Mostly because otherwise someone would see the similarly poor caliber of work done to the locks on the door.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

At first Indy had tried to avoid stepping on the mice that are skittering back and forth. It's an almost impossible task though. Which made the walk to the main entrance quite disgusting, and not entirely stealthy.

He stops when ordered to. Technology is not his forté at all, so he waits for Mel's analysis on the situation.

"I could end up developing a comedy phobia real quick," he notes in the mean time, face squinched. "This is gross. I think I'm starting to channel dad's genes."

[slayer_fray]

Mel flexes her ankles to rock on her heels, grinning when mice run over the top of her boots.

"I dunno, this is kind of soothingif you don't think too hard.

"This," tossing the camera over her shoulder, "is the shoddiest break-in I've ever seen. No one takes pride in their work these days."

[gone_byebye]

No, indeed. Subtlety is lost on a certain class of criminal, which is why they don't generally last very long in the position. At least they have the sense not to've turned the lights on in any of the areas that would be visible from outside.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Doing his best to follow Mel's advice, Indy puts the mice to the back of his mind, appraises the lock situation and nods his agreement.

"Very sloppy. Still, it saves us some work," he points out as he pulls the door open. Making like a concierge, he then bows slightly and makes a courteous gesture towards the dark lobby area inside.

"Enjoy the show, madam."

[slayer_fray]

Mel rolls her eyes as she wades through, stoppinga few feet into the Opera House in order to listen for any further sign of the intruders.

Y'know, over the sound of the mice.

[gone_byebye]

There's someone moving around upstairs. This isn't the part of the Opera House that has to worry too much about swanky acoustics. The stairwells aren't exactly padded for silence, so to speak.

The doors that lead into the acoustically important part of the building, on the other hand, look like they have recently been grievously abused.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Dang. This is a pretty nice venue," Indy comments as he tails Mel through the door. "I feel like we oughta be wearing black tie or something."

Once inside, even Indy, with his regular hearing abilities, detects the movement on the floor above. He looks to the staircase.

"If we wanna see who's clumping around up there," which he assumes she does, "we're gonna need to shed some light on the situation." He rummages around in his shoulder bag and pulls out a couple of headlamps. "We can use these, or try and find the main lighting controls and forgo the element of surprise."

He shrugs. "Up to you."

[slayer_fray]

Mel gives him a look.

And unshoulders her own backpack before reaching in. "You think I ever come on a mission without my own quip?" she asks dryly, pulling her own night vision goggles over her head.

Shooting a reluctant look at the big doors, she nods. "Let's go pay him a visit.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Oh that's the way you wanna play it, huh? My stuff's not good enough for ya."

Looking amused, Indy reaches into his own bag again. Out come a pair of hi-tech spectacles (as manufactured by one Warren Meers many moons ago) which he changes into night vision mode once he's put them on.

"Okay," he says, replacing the headlamps and starting towards the stairs, "up and at 'em!"

[gone_byebye]

Ah, the life of a professional thief. Mel knows her business, which is probably more than can be said for a lot of people. If she and Indy are careful enough coming up the stairs, they'll doubtless hear the sounds of people who don't- apparently, these guys decided that as long as they kept the outer lights off and the doors closed, they had no reason to be quiet or subtle on the second floor.

"God dammit, would you mind turning that thing somewhere else?" snarks someone on the other side of the door at the top of the stairwell. "I can't see where I'm supposed to be putting this stuff down."

"Shut your damn cakehole," snarls another man's voice. "All we have to do is finish up with Peck's runes and get the hell out of here."

"I can't see what the hell I'm doing! How'm I supposed to make runes if I can't-"

"Fred, if you do not shut up right this freaking second, I am going to feed you to the zombies, okay?"

They wouldn't survive fifteen minutes on a submarine.

[slayer_fray]

It's enough to make a professional embarrassed.

"Oh, for god's sake..." Mel mutters as she draws close to the stairwell, pulling out her gun and looking to Indy.

"OK, breaking the door in three. Two..."

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"One," Indy interrupts.

...And calmly opens the door using the handle.

"I told you this a nice place," he says to Mel as he strides in and points his revolver at the clustered occupants of the room. There's light inside, so the night vision spectacles are pushed onto his forehead for now. "No breaky without due cause."

"Evenin' fellers!" he then says in a cheerful voice to the men under his aim.

[slayer_fray]

"If that hadn't worked, you'd've announced our presence," Mel mutters at Indy, holding her gun out formly towards the room.

[gone_byebye]

There are twelve men up here, most of them wearing White Power t-shirts. Three others are dressed in ill-fitting approximations of ceremonial robes. They're all looking thoroughly startled, but the difference is that the guys with the robes (who're on their hands and knees, sketching out enough of the Elder Futhark all over the floor to make Papa Odin demand his damn eye back) grab up their tools and stay wide-eyed at floor level. Whereas the ones in the T-shirts... well, one of them tries to put up his hands in surrender, but he gets smacked by the one next to him, who's got a billy club out. The others drop into fight-or flight stances of their own.

"Who the hell are you?" says one of the robe people; they've been working by light of a couple of glowsticks shoved into a Coleman Lantern, and it's still not well lit in here.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Us?" Indy says, "Oh, we're just your friendly neighborhood evil supernatural deeds prevention force. Milliways branch. So, um... not really neighborhood. Annnd... we're not really very friendly either to be honest."

He glances at Mel.

"I oughta work on that intro."

[slayer_fray]

"Yeah," Mel says, glancing at him while lowering the gun to the guys on the floor.

"You wanna back away from the mystic circle? I'm kinda allergic to magic."

[gone_byebye]

Two of the guys on the floor (who look, frankly, like the kind of guys who live in cellars and have damp handshakes and tend to hide from women on general principle) do so immediately. The third just stares; he's got a real deer-in-the-headlights look.

"Fred? Fred!" hisses the nearest other robe-wearer. "Come on, Fred!"

Fred swallows and awkwardly comes to his feet. We do mean awkward. He manages to catch the heels of his absurdly reinforced boots in the hem of his robe and topples over backwards. There's a distinct crunch noise as he does so; Billy Club's head whips in Fred's direction, and the two other robe-wearers blanch. "What," says Billy Club, "just broke?"

Groaning, Fred fishes the shattered remains of some sort of amulet out from under his robe.

"Oh, hell, no."

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Easy guys," Indy warns. "No sudden moves."

With his gun still trained unwaveringly, he squints at the fragments of the talisman.

"Was that what I think it was?"

He sounds a little more on edge now.

[slayer_fray]

"Does what you think it is mean I get to fight things?" Mel asks, a little more hopefully than she intended to sound.

[gone_byebye]

"If by 'things' you mean 'a cellar full of animated corpses that I can no longer control no matter how hard I call on the gods of my Aryan ancestors'," says Fred, "then, um, yeah."

Billy Club rolls his eyes, but he's already dropping almost to the floor with intent to charge Indy from under the gun's line of fire and tackle him. Several of the others are following suit.