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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[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.

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Okay. Wasn't what I thought," Indy remarks offhandedly. "Same end result th—"

He breaks off as Billy Club and company start to lurch towards him.

[slayer_fray]

"Oh," says Mel. "OK."

Meanwhile she's going to step in front of Indy, kick Billy Club in the chest to make him back off, and follow it up by pushing #2 across the room and shooting #3 with her stun gun.

"You guys probably want to try and escape. From the zombies."

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Having barely moved, Indy smiles some gratitude in Mel's direction. It's nice to have a superhuman sidekick. Means you don't have to react quite as fast as you might normally.

His expression falls into a less happy one soon afterwards though.

"You say that like we don't."

He sighs before she can reply. "Okay. We can fight the zombies if you want. Just tell me how to kill 'em if it's different to usual movie methods."

[gone_byebye]

#2 was expecting to get shoved by someone with, oh, possibly the strength of a regular Nautilus machine user. Not a Slayer. When he hits his fellow brawler it's with a lot more force than he expected, and it knocks the wind out of them both. The sight of #3 falling to the ground twitching results in a number of dropped weapons, mostly of the nunchaku-and-other-improvised-stick variety. "Peck isn't paying me enough for this," says one of the more thoughtful-looking men (although admittedly, when you are dealing with the kind of person who has grammatically correct but morally objectionable German tattooed across the back of his hand, this is not really a hard distinction to achieve). "I'm out of here."

[slayer_fray]

Mel waves cheerfully at him and turns back to Indy, jerking her head out of the door.

"I'm going to try beheading. That usually works, right?"

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

"Seems to, yeah," Indy says. He looks and sounds a bit down-hearted now. "And here's me without my sword, or any other kind of reliable decapitation device."

He looks to the remaining crowd of scumbags in the room.

"Don't suppose any of you guys have something I could use?"

[gone_byebye]

There is an incredulous look from Nunchuck Nazi #1. "Screw you," he says, "I'm keeping my stuff for myself."

The guys in robes are trying to scramble discreetly out of the room. Fred's looking less and less happy with the situation with every passing moment.

[slayer_fray]

Mel shrugs, moving out of the way for the Nazis to escape.

"This is an opera house, right?" she says to Indy over the attempt. "You can use a prop."

[henry-jones-jr.livejournal.com]

Indy stops scowling at the rude Nunchuck Nazi and brightens considerably.

"Of course. Good idea, sis. There's bound to be something backstage."

He holsters his pistol and makes an urging gesture to the remaining Nazis. "C'mon, boneheads! What are you waitin' for? You've been granted a reprieve. Get outta here before we change our minds."

[gone_byebye]

"But I thought-"

"That's your problem," says Billy Club, staggering to his feet. "You thought. Peck isn't paying you to think. He's paying you to get the hell out of here and tell him what the hell is going on."

As realization dawns and the guys in robes get shoved aside in the mad rush for the stairs, the sound of things cracking under pressure begins to filter up from somewhere well down below.