annexedmeme | Test Drive Meme #3

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!test drive meme

Test Drive Meme #3

Test Drive Info

⇝ Test Drive Memes take place in a virtual reality simulation occurring in characters' minds that tests them for 'fitness' before they enter the setting officially. Because it is set in a simulation created by the Sylphid, the missions, while being comparable to regular missions in the game, will be from a Sylphid perspective.
⇝ Characters will not be chipped during the simulation, and will have access to their abilities from canon, but will be chipped upon waking for the rescue.
⇝ Current characters can easily be pulled into the simulation if they are sleeping and dreaming when it's happening. The Sylphid cast a wide net with the simulation to fill it out with characters to interact with for prospective new arrivals.
⇝ Test Drive Meme threads may be considered game canon so long as all parties agree to it.
⇝ Test Drive Meme threads do count for Activity Check.

i. Awakening

It happens in a dream. You fall asleep and the next moment you feel like you're awakening again, but without any exhaustion, as if you've had a full night's sleep. You find yourself in a comfortable bed in a room full of comfortable beds, all of which contain other people waking up just the way you are. The room is large but cozy, with wide windows that are framed by light curtains, and the sun is shining in from an angle that suggests morning.

Once you're up and moving around a little, ready to explore this new place, you'll discover an open door on one of the walls in the room, through which soft strains of music can be heard, and above which there's a sign saying "Free Breakfast." Once you make your way into the room, possibly with some of the other people just waking up in this strange place, you find a buffet table loaded with breakfast foods - some familiar, and some strange, mainly featuring mushrooms and root vegetables. Quiet, soothing music is playing and there are a variety of tables with chairs available to settle down and enjoy some food.

This is just a dream, right? What could be the harm in eating a bit of food, maybe trying out some cool alien cuisine, and getting to know the other people here?

ii. The Mission: The Fungus Among Us

Once everyone has eaten their fill and gotten to know their new compatriots a little better, there is an interruption in the music playing in the room. Three musical chimes sound, and a pleasant female voice speaks.

Attention, new recruits! We have a mission for you.

The intercom goes on to explain that there is a forest of mushrooms called The Troop that borders on the northwest walls of the city, which releases spores near constantly (though more prolific in fall) that have a hallucinogenic effect on sentient beings. These spores can cause people traveling in The Troop to become disoriented and confused, experience vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, and become permanently lost. Generally, the spores aren't a problem inside the city or in the surrounding area because no one has built close enough to the Troop to suffer serious effects. However, this particular fall, the spore count has been significantly higher than previous years, and spores are making their way into the neighborhoods bordering The Troop. Even worse, the spores are having a slightly different effect on top of the usual ones.

The spores, once inhaled, are growing into microscopic fungi that populate in the brains of citizens and take over the brains of the infected. Once taken over, the citizens who are infected are servants of The Troop, and will do whatever they can to infect others by whatever means possible, whether it's by capturing spores and releasing them in people's faces or by gagging up fungi that will infect others. Beyond that, there is a kind of mania about the people who have been infected - they are wide-eyed and high-energy, they will accost random people with spores or fungi, they will chase people down on the street to infect them.

Beyond that, there's another effect. Those inflicted with fungal infection become distinctly lacking in any kind of verbal filter. They will say exactly what they're thinking, they will blurt out secrets, expose themselves emotionally, and share their innermost thoughts and dreams. After all, it's not like the individual mushrooms in The Troop keep secrets, they're all part of a larger whole, and that's how infected individuals will behave. It's as if they're sharing a consciousness, taken over by the hive mind of The Troop, and see others as simply extensions of themselves.

Will your character get infected, try to help the infected somehow, or just plain stay out of the way of all this madness?

iii. The Mission: Full Fungal Smackdown

As the infection gradually progresses, those who are infected start to become more violent, which is a big problem. The infection is slowly spreading throughout the low-income neighborhood that it initiated in and moving toward the city proper, with increasingly aggressive infected doing their best to infect others. Their methods are starting to become more aggressive as well, where before they would simply spray others with spores or present them with mushrooms, they are now altering common devices like leaf blowers to spread the spores over a broader area and violently attacking people to shove mushrooms into people's mouths, curling fingers inside their mouths to force the fungi into their victims' sinuses and infect them.

It isn't just infection techniques that are getting more aggressive. Their behavior in general is aggressive - the infected are starting fights, are attacking people, often shouting in a strange, unintelligible language. The tone of the attack is that of people defending their own territory, fighting off intruders or predators, even if the person they're attacking made no moves to strike first. Attackers may fight hand-to-hand or even employ weapons that they are familiar with to attack others, whether it's guns, knives, laser swords, or anything else they might use in their regular uninfected life. Even those who were non-combatants will use kitchen knives or other makeshift weapons to attack the uninfected.

They never attack the infected, somehow they seem to know immediately who is and who isn't part of the hivemind.

As the attacks start to really escalate and there is panic in the streets, characters will be informed that a cure for the infection has been found, and everyone who isn't infected should stop by one of the Sylphid trucks carrying syringes of the cure and load up. Anyone who's able to fight, or even who is just capable of carrying and using a syringe, is asked to take a bandeau of them and to inoculate anyone infected. Unfortunately, though, the only real way to tell if someone is infected is by that wide-eyed look, and the attack that comes out of nowhere.

iv. Welcome to the Broken World.

The simulation is over, and you don't even know how you got here from there.

All you know is that one moment you were participating in a mission to save the Sylphid children, to uphold peace talks, and then you were asleep again, after the mission was over.

You wake up in what seems like the blink of an eye, nauseous and dizzy but otherwise unscathed, possessions taken away, barefoot and dressed only in a set of plain grey clothing, like the most bland uniform ever imagined, in an empty room with empty walls and one single door with a small barred window and a single number printed just above it. The door is locked and cannot be broken by any means, you can feel your connection with any superhuman powers you had severed, leaving them just out of reach - you can feel them there, tingling at your fingertips or in the back of your brain, but you just can't get to them. There is no one to greet you or explain what's happening. You start to lose track of time, the only sound the distant ticking of what sounds like a massive clock.

Just when things seem hopeless, when you feel like you're about to go mad, there's the sound of a commotion outside your door. The sounds of a battle, or perhaps an infiltration gone just slightly wrong. Either way, when the door opens, there is a figure there with a hand outstretched.

"Welcome to the Broken World. Come on, we'll explain everything just as soon as we get you and the others out of here."

NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Well, most people do tend to overreact as soon as they see something that isn't human," Donatello points out with a dry chuckle. "Although I guess sometimes it's completely warranted given a lot of the ones that aren't worried about hiding are the ones blatantly causing trouble."

Normally Li's words would be flattering, but the main point of the matter is stated clearly: no one could handle this alone. If Li hadn't popped up when she did, he doesn't want to even think of what might've happened. Inevitably getting overwhelmed, surrounded by people wanting to force-feed you fungi. Donnie covers his mouth at the thought, shoving down the nausea that had wormed its way with it, maybe looking a little greener somehow for it. He shakes his head.

"Yeah, me neither. Guess we make a pretty good team. I mean, look at how many you managed to round up! I sure hope they have enough shots to go around." At the moment he's willing to leave that problem to someone else.

"You don't look that strange to me. I'm only one sixty-fourth nonhuman, but the original aliens..." There's no accurate way to describe it, so she abandons the attempt. "At least you're a good person. Not all the others I've met are." That'd be equally hard to get into, but right now isn't the time regardless. Now is the time to try to figure out what comes next.

She's not sure she'd have made it on her own, either. At best she could have managed to find a roof to hide out on, but there's no guaranteeing that people wouldn't storm the stairs, and her stamina isn't limitless. Eventually fleeing from building to building inbetween trying to convince uninfected to leave would take a toll, and then she'd be seized ahold of and force-fed regardless of what she wanted. That wouldn't be the first time she'd been force-fed, but before it was because she'd pushed herself too far and needed it. This is more akin to torture than anything else.

Noticing his nausea, she reaches out and places a hand on his forearm briefly, an attempt at comfort even if she isn't well-versed in that. "I wouldn't have been able to do it without your explosives. We saved a few hundred lives back there. That's much more than I thought I'd be able to manage." She looks out at the stadium again, sighing. "The question now is, what do we do next? Do we keep trying to trap others? Do we focus on evacuations?"

It's a big problem they're facing. Partially she differs to his judgment because she doesn't usually give orders. In large part, though, it's because she already trusts him to think things through, an invaluable resource in the field.

One sixty-fourth. He almost laughs. "Practically negligible- at least you don't have to say you're in costume when you're out and about the city. I wouldn't have pegged you for an alien, but red eyes could be anything these days!" ...okay, so he can't quite think of any good reasons for such, so he just kind of lets that subject trail off.

Despite being the only one of his team who would plan things out, Donatello hadn't allowed himself to consider what he'd do in the instance that things didn't work out. He'd been preoccupied with trying to keep his distance from fungi-stained hands. Li's gesture gains a weak sort of smile from him. They're both not very good at the whole comforting thing, but the attempt's appreciated, nevertheless.

"I...don't really know." He hates giving that kind of a response, but this problem's stumping him. "The objectives were simple but overall pretty open-ended. Isolating and trapping the infected will only work so long as we have places to do it and going to be considerably trickier to seal off. Focusing on evacuations might be better. We can't be everywhere so we're going to have to just pick an area and stick to it. Hopefully by now there's some kind of designated safe zone for people to get to, and so long as we can keep them from getting chased and attacked, it's something."

Li raises an eyebrow at him as if to say, 'really?' The idea of it as negligible has never occurred to her before. It's the reason why she was kidnapped and forced into the life of an assassin, the reason she's called a Creature and not a person, the source of everything that's wrong in her life. The way he casually accepts it surprises him. "I... don't know what to say. Thank you. That's very kind of you. I always wanted eyes like yours. Dark and normal."

Is there any comfort adequate for this situation? She's not sure. What she is sure of is that even this hell is easier to bear with someone beside her. Stranger or not, he's proven himself to be hardworking, thoughtful and a solid ally. He seems like a good enough person. Mutations don't matter to her anymore than her alien heritage matters to him. Such things are insignificant in the face of the harshness of their reality right now.

She'll take honesty over false bravado any day of the week. "Agreed. Sealing infected off would be doable if we had a map and a better idea of the layout, but as it is now we risk fatal miscalculations trying to wing it. However, that same lack of knowledge means we don't know where the safe zone is. We can't get people somewhere we don't know the location of. So. How do we find that out?"

Granted Donnie's perceptions may be a little skewed given his less than natural origins, but from a scientific perspective he still stands by his opinion. Glowing eyes did not a non-human make, and aside from her mad fighting skills, Li seems pretty normal. Not that he has much experience with normal, but maybe that's what makes things work out here.

"Eh, dark and normal is overrated. And while my personal preference is purple, I don't think the red looks bad." Mildly creepy in a dark alley, perhaps. "Anyway, get the angle wrong in photos and with light refractions and anyone can have red eyes. You just make it look natural."

Donnie sets his bo beside him as he leans out to look towards the rest of the city beyond them. "You'd think that a city next to a giant dangerous mushroom forest would have some kind of emergency protocols set up for such a scenario. That's poor planning on someone's part if there isn't." He scowls, studying the streets, scanning for more people who look like they're in the process of fleeing. "The ones I came across while you were getting the attention of the fungus-freaks all seemed to be heading in a general direction, so I was kind of assuming at the time that they knew where they needed to go. Clearly they know this place better than we do. ...which...is something that's been bothering me, but I don't know if it'll help our current situation to worry about."

She thinks he looks less jarring than she does. Human enough eyes, a smile that comes naturally, and a green that makes any other unusual features less jarring than they'd have been if coupled with a human skintone. He's a mutant. He's not as offputting in appearance to Li as he might be back home. Donnie is unusually smart and skilled in combat, but she doesn't know what kind of life he's lived. Perhaps it's natural for mutants to learn self-defense.

"Thanks. I'll try not to sneak up on you. That's when it's most uncomfortable for people." Then again, sneaking up on someone who can fly and has his reflexes seems unlikely. This isn't a problem they're likely to come across.

She sighs, idly cracking her ankles, a bad habit she's never been able to shake. "That's better intel than I was able to gather. If they've got some kind of fallback point, then urging people towards it is our best course of action. I have a lot of questions, too, but they'll have to wait until later. We don't have the time to make inquiries right now, much as I'd like to. When this is over, though, we should find someone adjacent to power and get some answers. Something feels very off about all this."

"The effort will be much appreciated." Donnie may be trained as a ninja, but there's still a lot of room for improvement, even though they've come a long way once he and his brothers had started to get more serious about their training.

He looks to the thin bracer on his left forearm, a computer of sorts by the looks of things as he taps at the screen's interface. "Wonder if I can tap into any existing network and find a city layout..." he murmurs. He'd have attempted it earlier, but he just had some odd notion that it wouldn't work. Unfortunately it seems to prove true as a big 'x' comes up on his screen. "Off is right, what kind of modernized city doesn't have some sort of network or intranet structure! Unless I'm being blocked somehow-" He laughs that comment off, apparently quite certain that couldn't possibly be the case.

"Backtrack a bit though- I'm not even sure who's running this whole thing. We were given instructions by an announcement and didn't really ask questions about it- that's weird right? No, why am I even asking, of course it's weird..."

She has a feeling they'll both be getting more serious about their training after this. If this night has taught them one thing, it's that there's always room to improve, and they can't afford to slack off if moments like this might be a future possibility. Maybe they can spar sometime, assuming they make it out of this.

Li watches him at work, wondering where he got the tech. It's a very good thing that it was on him when he was brought here, so they can have something to possibly give them insight as to what's going on. That hope fades as he speaks, and Li tilts her head, thinking. That doesn't make sense. This isn't some village in the middle of nowhere. It's a city. They ought to have at least some connection. "This is wrong," she mutters, frowning. "This whole setup feels wrong."

The look that crosses her face is mildly self-reproaching. "I don't normally question orders. Especially if lives are hanging in the balance. But you're right, this is strange. I'm not sure how we got here, we don't know who brought us here, and they didn't introduce themselves before they told us what to do. We're being used, but altruistically. I don't know what to make of that... where were you, before you ended up here? What were you doing?"

And why did it take them this long to question that?

Even though he's had his growing concerns, hearing them echoed by someone else isn't reassuring. It's one of those rare instances in which Donnie was open to being wrong, at the risk of sounding crazy, of course, but there must be some logical explanation for this.

"Yeah..." He falls silent as he backtracks on what all had been happening, looking more and more disturbed as Li summarizes it. "Being used is still being used," he points out. "If someone needed help that badly they could've just asked..."

He chews on his bottom lip. Why is it so hard to remember things? "I...should have been at the lair, back home in New York. I forget what I was doing though... I just know I woke up in some big room with a bunch of beds and other people- I figured I was having some weird dream! Whiiich abruptly became a nightmare once the fungus-people came into play."

Li has no such certainty that there's a rational explanation for this. Irrational, maybe. That's more along the lines of how her life works, usually. For now, though, any speculation would be baseless. They have to stick to what they know for sure.

"It is. But there are worse things to be used for, and... when people ask for help, they're never guaranteed someone will say yes. Forcing the matter makes sense, for people who have reached out to others and been refused in the past." A lot of people are selfish. She was that selfish not long ago. It's a bad decision, a wrong thing to do, but a kind of wrong that she can understand easily.

"I was in Suzhou. The mission was done, but I wanted to go see the statue of Guanyin. I was... walking there? Maybe I was there? I'm pretty sure it was night time. Then I was here. I thought it was a dream. My dreams get weird, when I haven't had enough sleep. This, though..." Li turns to him, looking very concerned now that she's given it more thought. "I don't think I would dream you. And I don't think you would dream me. Neither of us would dream of this," she gestures to the city as a whole, "so I don't think this is a dream, Donatello. I think this is real."

There's no refuting what Li says, which only makes it worse. Donnie folds his arms tightly in front of himself as he still tries to come up with something, but there seems little point in making an argument when Li's in the same position as he is.

"Great. Soooo. Abduction? That makes things so much better." As much as he hates to admit it, this nightmare hadn't gone along the same route as his recent trend of nightmares had been. He just hopes it doesn't spark something worse, but at the moment going back to sleep is the last thing on his mind.

Sarcasm aside, this latest revelation is clearly unsettling. He looks a bit more lost as his gaze shifts back towards the foreign cityscape. "...so what do we do? Keep this up?"

She nods, grim-faced and just as displeased about this as he is. There's something unsettling about the idea even to her. How could someone have grabbed them both from opposite ends of the Earth without either of them catching a glimpse of their abductor, and why bring them to the same spot? Why bring them here, of all places? How could someone know such an outbreak was going to occur and know to bring help here in advance?

"It would appear so. My usual nightmares don't have any of this in them. And in my dreams, people call me by my birth name, even if they're strangers." Li glances over at him, hoping against hope he'll say it. He doesn't.

The cityscape beneath them is chaotic and rife with violence. She nods. "Even if our kidnapper is a terrible person, these people aren't. They don't deserve to die for another person's actions. They've done nothing to us."

The how's aren't really that much of a question to him. Abrupt displacements aren't at all impossible, frustrating as the source is for him to understand. Still, he's hesitant to write it off immediately as magic. Magic would still always be a secondary explanation, even though he had access to mystic abilities of his own.

Donatello glances at Li as he catches her look, feeling like he's disappointing her in that moment, but the only name he has for her is the one she'd offered.

No, not a dream. Closer to a nightmare, but the danger would have to be treated as real, and Li was right about the people. Well, that wouldn't be too much of a shift in gears, given they'd already been handling things that way. He nods, grabbing his bo. It's better to at least have some kind of thing to focus on, something they can do at the moment. They can worry about other things later.

"Okay. So we help out the stragglers and fend off any trouble they run into while they make their escape," he says, reiterating his earlier proposition.

Damn. She was really hoping for a shared dream. Those were something she'd heard of, something they could've worked with. Instead he has no name for her beyond Li and she has no knowledge of him beyond what he's said to her. They're as clueless now as when they started speaking.

A thought occurs to her. Without a pause to let him stop her, she takes her knife and makes a cut on her wrist, under the edge of the glove. The pain confirms it's real, and she swear softly in Mandarin. "This is real." It's less a statement of discovery and more one of resignation. They've got no way out but through, now.

She cleans her knife on her skirt and wipes her gloves on her blazer, trying to keep both free of any lingering slickness. The battle isn't over. It is once again time to face down the unknown. At least this time they had each other from the start rather than meeting mid-fight. Two can face a lot that one cannot. And while she doubts they can save everyone, she knows they can save some.

"Go for the joints," Li says. "Elbows, knees, they're all still as sensitive as before. It's easier to take them down that way than normal people because they're swinging wildly. Up high or down low confuses them. I've rolled under at least a dozen without any problem. We're not as well armed as I'd like, but we're learning. We can do this, together."

Still, something has her pausing, hesitating to step up onto the ledge like before. Softly, she admits, "Xiaohu. My birth name is Xiaohu. If we meet outside of this city, somehow, say it to me, so I'll know it's you, and I'll know this wasn't a dream. We'll both know, that way. Okay?"

While the thought had occurred to him, Donatello wasn't so eager to go inflicting pain on himself and using the knife had never crossed his mind. "Wait, what are you-" he starts, though he already figures it out even before she's cut a neat little line. He can only go by her response, a confirmation dashing any remaining hopes that there might yet be a way out of this.

The turtle teen sucks in a breath between his teeth, rolling his shoulders back as he nods. Back into the fight it is, then. "Thankfully they don't seem to be trained fighters, but that also makes them dangerous in how unpredictable their movements are," he nods, making mental note of her advice. "We don't need to beat them, we just need to slow them down. If you still have any of the cure on you, use it if you find an opening."

Having someone on the same page as him at least helps to calm him. She's right. They can do it together. They didn't really have much choice.

"Xiaohu?" Donatello blinks up at her before giving her a nod as he commits it to memory. "Okay."

He hops up onto the ledge beside her. "Time for round two."

She shrugs at him, expression wordlessly conveying 'well, one of us had to try it'. Might as well have been her. At least this position for a cut doesn't leave it apt to do more than get matted to the inside of her glove, which is hardly something she'll even notice in the midst of all this chaos.

Li tries hard not to imagine what it'd be like to fight this many people if they had any kind of experience. "I've seen some improvising weapons. That's a danger in and of itself; we can't predict what they might have on hand. That'll make it necessary to drop some of them in order to stay alive." There's no ideal rendition of this where no one dies. That much, she accepted going into it. "If we don't have openings to use the cure, we can slow them by putting obstacles in their way. They're bad at climbing - mindlessness and something that requires hand-eye coordination don't go well together."

They're a decent team. She's more used to taking commands than being part of the planning, but it's nice, honestly, to be able to contribute to this part of proceedings.

"Pan Xiaohu. But Li Ya-Jing, now. It's... complicated. Too long of a story to get into now, definitely." Not the time, not the place, and also, not really something she even knows how to talk about. That's a problem for future Li to deal with, assuming future Li survives this in order to exist.

She looks around, red eyes regaining their glow in the direct sunlight. "There's people hiding to the west, in a bodega. They used the metal gate shops use to keep burglars out to keep infected out, and then I drew all the attackers away from them when I ran past. There's probably a lot of people stranded hiding down there like that. Should we start with getting them out?"

"Not quite mindlessness. If they're all connected through this Troop hivemind then they're just simply being driven with one directive. The how's are all secondary so long as it gets things done. Honestly this would be a lot easier if we could just disrupt whatever kind of signal they're broadcasting by but I suspect that's probably going to be along the lines of some kind of psychic connection."

Donatello seems a little calmer as he has something to explain. It helps him put his mind in order and at least thinking in such a way is something he still has control over, even if they're not going to be possible to carry out.

Complicated... He can understand complicated. Getting into his origins would dip into complicated pretty easily. He offers a nod. "Maybe over tea or coffee later," he proposes, not really serious but he's just trying to lighten up the heavy situation they've been shouldering.

Following her look then, he tips his goggles down, trying to get a better read on the location she mentions, but there's a lot of buildings between there and them. Donnie turns his attention back to her, nodding. "Sounds as good a place as any. I'll follow your lead."

"Hiveminds impact hand-eye coordination, then. Good to know, in case I ever have to have a fight like this a second time." She's not hoping for it, though, nor does it seem likely. This kind of thing doesn't happen back home. The threats to humanity there have the good sense to stay in the shadows where they can't be easily found out and stopped.

Li is surprisingly calm in the face of this. That might be, she reflects, because of her training. Neutralize targets, move civilians to safety, avoid being hit, it's more familiar than it is strange. If she focuses on that this is fine. A surprising number of things can be fine, if she's in the right mindset.

She physically can't discuss her origins. Years of conditioning have made her mind and body both react poorly to it. But the idea of tea after this soundly heavenly. Just something warm, somewhere quiet and a moment to breathe. It's a joke, but it's a lovely mental image regardless. "I'm not into coffee. I'll take you up on the tea, though."

The climb down to the ground would be fastest, but with the possibility of infected down there, the safest way to get to their destination is roof-hopping. Li is better at that than her physique suggests, though the spacing between buildings here is bigger than back in China. Once they get to the building closest to their desired location, Li deftly, near-silently climbs down the fire escape so she won't have to jump onto the ground from the second story, then jumps off it to the ground, rolling into the landing to avoid putting strain on her knees. Instinctively she tenses, listening for any sound of infected in the alley. Fortunately, none are visible or audible - not that there's no chance of them being there, but the majority, at least, have vacated the area, lured away by Li's earlier run through the area.

Equally instinctively, some civilians step back from her. She's a dark-clad, blood-splattered figure with glowing red eyes, and while it's clear from the way she moves and acts that she's not infected, that's not as minor a factor to them as it is to Donnie. Not everyone is enlightened on this topic. In an ideal situation, she'd like to have had time to put her color contacts in. This is, among many other descriptors, not ideal.

"I'm here to help," she says, approaching with her hands up to try to make herself look a bit less threatening. "You can't stay here indefinitely. You need to move."

No one looks convinced. Li turns to Donatello, hoping he'll have some insight on this. She's no good with people.

"Ah, I'd still treat it on a case-by-case basis. If they were ordered to attack us rather than spread their influence, I think things would be a lot worse." In this case at least their attention was spread than focused on specific targets.

Tea preference, then. Donnie files that away. It's nice to think there'll be a chance of some semblance of normal after they deal with this. Right now, they've got a mission. No big deal, nothing really new- it's just that the team-ups got swapped around. It's fine. This is totally fine.

As it turns out, rooftop hopping isn't something foreign to Donatello, and he keeps up rather well as Li takes them towards the location she'd recalled. He drops down not long after her, opting to push off the wall and catch an adjacent windowsill before he lands. Without being told to he's already taken to watching out for any signs of their situation changing while Li goes to address the sheltering civilians. He's still listening though, and the lack of any sounds of the barred security fencing being moved doesn't really sound like things are going well. Donnie looks back then, frowning to himself. He casts one more look about before stepping over to the bodega entrance.

It's not like he's exactly used to dealing with people directly, and Leo's always been the self-proclaimed face man. Hopefully he can appeal to their reasoning, even though he knows that sometimes under such circumstances, common sense is usually the first casualty.

"Look, she's right. It's clear at the moment and we've sealed up a number of the spore-infected people, but there's still others roaming around. If there's a better place to shelter until things get under control, then you all need to move now. Get what you think you might need and go. We'll make sure no one touches you."

Her sigh is genuine. "Please, Guanyin, intervene on our behalves. Once is enough." Once is more than enough, actually. And she'd be willing to bet on this not being possible back home. No one she knows has the self-restraint not to have used it if it did. Li would love for this to be a one-off, especially in terms of location. Invoking a Bodhisattva probably most accurately conveys her feelings on the matter.

Tea, some red bean buns, some music in the background - a nice normal night after a long day's work. Nothing her handlers wouldn't have given her for exemplary performance, nothing fancy, just a reward for putting up with all this. Between the infected hordes, the wary people and the abduction, they've earned it.

He keeps up admirably. That he's done this before is obvious. With her gloves still a little slick with blood, she doesn't risk using the windowsill like he opted for, even though it'd be the better option otherwise. Donatello has clearly worked well in teams before, given the way he lingers behind for a second, making sure there's no threats before proceeding. He knows how to have someone's back. Li appreciates that. Still, she'd assumed her relatively human appearance would've made her a better choice for approaching other humans. The response, though, makes sense when she realizes everything that's been attacking them for the duration of this hellish day also looked human.

Donatello's appearance seems to break the unspoken consensus that this might be a trap of some kind. He doesn't look infected, even if Li's bloody appearance is a bit less neutral under the circumstances. Hesitantly, after some internal debates, the people raise the gates, gather their things - mostly water, Li notices, probably because that's harder to find in a pinch than food - and start walking towards the same direction the fleeing people had gone earlier, murmuring amongst each other uneasily.

Li's first thought is that these people need to walk faster. Her second, which she voices, is, "Should one of us stay at the head of the group and one at the back? Cover both sides in case of any attacks?"

It's a strange irony, but Donatello's just glad the people are finally coaxed from their hiding place. At the moment it's too early to say what's more difficult, directly addressing the problem or protecting those suffering in its wake. Both have their uncertainties, but he's beginning to see the slow burn in taking this route, unknowing as to when this seeming calm will be disrupted.

The number of people that emerge are a lot more than Donatello had anticipated. Speed definitely is of the essence and his thoughts are right alongside Li's in that realization.

"Probably a good idea," he agrees as Li makes her suggestion. "You want front or back?" At least they wouldn't be expected to lead the way. The only real problem was hoping that the way was clear, but thankfully any threats would be restricted to being on foot, and the spores were limited to what they could control.

Everything about today is strange. That might as well extend to this. At least no one's insisting on taking anything impractical with them, no hauls of unneeded snacks or something that might slow them down any further than they're already going. Really, it's not the slog of getting to the safehouse that's her concern. The problem is that there's more infected out there, and she knows she and Donatello didn't get rid of all of them.

People were crammed into the only available hiding spot. That makes sense. It also would stand to reason that in other little stores in this area, other places with anti-theft gates might hold similar groups of people. They'll address that as they go through the commercial district, bit by bit. They'll probably end up going back, grabbing more people and repeating this trip a few times before the night is over.

"I'll take the front. You have the tech it takes to fly to the front in an emergency, and I was trained to look forward for incoming threats more than I was to look behind me." She trusts him to watch her back and the back of the group. She does not want to risk high-value assets she's moving (which is how she has to think about this in order to stay focused) by putting herself in a position she wasn't trained for. "Yell for me if you need me."

Depending on the route they all take, there's the chance that others might join them. That would make things more complicated even while it made things easier. It's just another bridge they'll have to cross if they get to it.

Donatello had a feeling that Li would opt for the front, and he's not going to argue the assessments made there. Truthfully he's a little relieved to be tasked with bringing up the rear. He's not used to taking point.

"You do the same if things start looking bad," he says, nodding at her. Not that he wishes for anything to go bad, but at least they know they can count on each other if things do. He hopes his expression comes off as brave and not anxious as he steps back, waiting for the rest of the people to file past until the last person goes by.

He doesn't look unduly anxious. Some degree of apprehension is probably wise. No one should be relaxed or casual under the circumstances. Li isn't used to taking point - it's the opposite of how she normally operates - but she trusts in his competency and knows he can handle half the work of this.

The crowd does tries for some semblance of speed, and Li finally gets it out of them where they're headed: north, uptown, uphill. Not as specific as she'd like but at least something, and it gives her an idea of how she'll know when they've started getting close to where they need to. How long it'll take, no one is sure. The cars clogging the road force everyone to use the relatively clear sidewalks, which means there's only so fast they can move. At least everyone seems to understand the value of staying quiet; murmurs and whispers are low, no one shouts, and any protests to having Li and Donatello as their guards are kept to their heads and left unvoiced.

The peace feels fragile, though. It's a spun-glass peace built to shatter. Li doesn't quite trust it.

The quiet is actually unsettling. Donnie doesn't trust it either. Cities shouldn't be this quiet. He tries to reassure himself that it's due to most of the chaos happening elsewhere and fortunately not in their immediate vicinity, or that maybe they had in fact managed to entrap the majority of the infected spreaders who had made it deeper into the city. But these are all theories at best, and you couldn't sleep soundly on those.

At the back of the group he feels exposed, but he has a feeling being at the front would be no different. There's too many blind corners, too many openings between his point and Li's. There's not much to do but to keep an eye out and ears open for any sounds. If there's at least one thing to be thankful of, it's that the infected aren't subtle.

Donatello slows to a stop. He's sure he's heard something, a familiar sound that makes no sense in the quiet of an evacuation. His grip tightening around his bo, he turns, scanning the streets behind them, eyeing the intersections warily. There's that sound again, the idling start-up putter of a motor. Behind it he can start to hear the low murmur of voices, nothing intelligible, but they're still a distance off to really be made out. Slowly he starts to back up, unwilling to turn completely just yet.

He catches the movement behind the haphazard blockade of cars, sucking in a breath as his fears are verified. The listless sway of the people that come into view, the random array of objects clutched in their stained hands- they aren't too many but the moment they catch sight of the group ahead, they start to rush. One of them hauls up a handheld leaf blower, revving it up.

"Oh no, they've found us. Keep moving-" Donnie barks over his shoulder. He leaps up onto one of the cars in the street, watching the incoming people as he slides into a defensive stance.

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DW didn't give me a notif for this

*fistshake*

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Have to head to bed now. Sorry!

Goodnight!

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fistshake