Know When to Fold 'Em (Closed for Obuzeti)

Kara’s ploy worked itself out better than even she thought it would-down to the words the ‘long suffering’ merc says as he kneels.

Quick as a wink Kara steps in, both of her smaller hands curling over the fingers of his against the lapels of his partially unbuttoned fatigues and chest, her soft lips pressing a quick and searing kiss to his. A surprise attack!

“One of those~” Kara says with mirthful delight, grinning. "We're sure to win, now."

Her lips are soft. Moray has no time to consider the searing sensation before Kara hops back again, grinning just as wide, victory flush in her face. It felt a hell of a lot different than he remembered. He considers the turn of events.

"I'll give that the edge over the pin," he says, eventually, and rises to his feet as he does up the top of his fatigues. Then he takes a long step forward, crowding Kara to the side of the elevator. The fact it was designed for one person, and that one person smaller than a hulk like Moray, is suddenly evident; and that against his size, Kara is actually pretty small.

He plants both hands on her waist, and just bodily lifts her up - one arm swooping under her ass to hold her weight, the other steadying her shoulder as he leans against the wall, knees and elbow supporting his weight; Kara, cradled in his grip, face to face with him. The air is stifling, and his face is still, perfectly even.

Moray leans in, his head turning as his lips first brush against then press to Kara's, not the teasing jokey kiss she'd laid on him but a declaration as firm as a flag planting. In contrast, his grip is gentle, and his weight is held off of her body as he explores her lips with something between careful scientific rigor and the heady sensuality of indulgence.

It's a long second after the elevator door pings and slides open that he draws back and lets her drop to her feet, steadying Kara with a hand on her shoulder.

"I don't do things halfway," Moray says, a satisfied curl to his smile. "Now, let's go."

"I'll give that the edge over the pin," “Whaaat? That was my favorite, luckiest one!” Kara’s infinitely amused, as usual-already spinning jokes in her head about the value of tangible luck totems stacked against fleeting good luck kisses from red heads-when he steps forward.

He is tall.

“Hey now-” And then he picks her up like she’s nothing, capturing her easily given their vastly different sizes. There’s a caught rabbit sort of skittering pace to her heart and a charge to the air between them, one of her hands caught loosely on the front of his baggy fatigues and the other against the arm supporting her, vivid blue eyes on his opaque green ones.

Her throwaway, flirty joke had turned serious-she has no damned idea what he's thinking, and then he leans in, intent to his kiss that had color coming to her face again. For all her ADD, there’s briefly nothing but the firm press and exploration of his lips against hers, the warmth of his chest beneath her fingers, radiating from his much larger form. Hell, she even forgets to breathe.

And then she’s released, dropped back to her feet so they can continue their adventure, a curl to his smile she hasn’t seen before.

“Ha, yeah, I guess not-” A dazed, blushing Kara breathes before she shakes herself-casting him a curious, openly interested glance before turning her attention to the world outside the elevator. Maybe she -won’t- set anything on fire after this is all over. Maybe she’ll just take him right back home, thank you very much, and see what happens there.

The elevator doesn’t dump them off in front of the vault the Slaver Scribe was so intent on getting to-no, they’re looking at a chainlink fence and narrow corridors of pipes on either side of them, glowing blue lights of ghost people.

It just keeps getting better, apparently. At least the emitters were visible again-all they have to do is target those and avoid getting turned into dusty goop from the blasted energy beams.

Along the way Kara spots a skeleton underneath and to their left. Red toolbox, a note, a holotape. Without a word the petite merc dropped and slipped under the pipes to hop down there, curiously snapping up the note and holotape before wandering back, reading the letter over.

“I guess Dean and Vera were in league at some point to rob poor Sinclair blind.” That’s a turn in the story Kara hadn’t been expecting. “So he was always a treacherous fuck, turns out.” Kara ducked her head and climbed back to the corridor they’d been in. “Guess Sinclair found out and set a trap for them both, then changed his mind when she confessed. This warns her not to read ‘Sinclair’s Personal Accounts’ on the vault terminal.”

“Rich dude was going to seal him up in his vault forever, during the opening Gala. Damn.” Talk about revenge. She’s also wondering if they might be able to use that against their adversary somehow, it came down to it.

Kara shakes her head. “This place is some kind of bad horror story, tell you what.”

"Men without limits make terrible foes," Moray says, unperturbed. "Who was going to tell them to stop, besides each other?"

He glances at the note, considers, and ultimately shakes his head. "We'd never get him to walk past us into the Vault. He's coming armed for bear, unless I miss my guess, and unless you want to hide back in the piping somewhere and hope he passes us by unawares we're going to have to fight him straight up. The problem, of course, is making sure he doesn't just set off Vanessa's collar out of spite once he's trapped."

Moray shrugs. "Best to just kill him, be done with his tricks. I don't know what he's had time to rig around this place."

Making a route through the images doesn't appeal, since he's still not sure they'll die if he shoots them. Instead he glances around, and notices a workman's area set up top on a separate level. He can't reach it, and neither can Kara, but maybe he can set something up to let her climb to it.

He glances around, considering, and then pulls his glaive from his back, and simply hacks through an enormous sheet of the chainlink fence. The holograms twitch at the noise and turn yellow, and Moray promptly dives to the side, dragging Kara with him.

They flicker back to blue soon enough, and the big merc releases a tense breath and rises to a kneeling shuffle. He repeats the process, hacking out about a three-by-six section of chain-link, and drags it out of sight and back to where Kara is still watching inquisitively, back in the hallway.

He backs up, spears the glaive through the links, aims for a moment - then tosses the entire contraption like the world's most unwieldy javelin through the open window, ten feet above their head. The glaive punches through the ceiling and lodges in the steel, with the chainlink dangling heavily below, about eight feet over the floor.

Moray nods and turns back to Kara. "I'll give you a boost. See if you can find any emitters up there, or consoles, or something. Maybe another route. I don't fancy shooting through ghosts."

“That’d be funny, but you’re right-I don’t want to risk Vanessa.” Kara agrees. Besides-soon as she realized he was putting bomb collars on people? Yeah, Kara knew he’d have to die. She’s still irritated about how utterly hard he’d shut her down earlier too. Threatened to kill their charge with a five and sixty minute timer.

Fuck that guy.

Moray’s onto something or other-Kara’s not sure what but she goes along with it, curious as always.

“Damn, how sharp is that thing?” And what was it made out of? Clever handmade ladder, though-even if it had been noisy. Kara tips her head back, curious about what’s up there anyway. “Yeah, I don’t think bullets would work. You can stick your arm right through the lady at the fountain.”

She accepts the boost and makes short work of the chain link fence-twisting around to then clamber onto a narrow scaffolding plank, disappearing from view. A moment or two later, the blue lights flicker out of existence-and a bit after that, the red head reappears. “This leads to the vault proper.” She tells him, fingers curling over the edge while she thinks. “There’s inactive turrets set up and you can climb on top of the vault itself before hopping down.”

She’s got her rope, but the ceiling was pretty low up here. Mostly, she’s thinking battle options.

"Sucks he already knows there's two of us."

"It's not, now," Moray says, irritated, as he pulls the thing up to check. Indeed, the blade is ruined. "Weight and leverage count more than sharpness anyways. I could have done it with a shovel. Eventually."

He considers for a moment, then calls up, "Check for a console. I'll go loot the body for anything like a keycard, or ID. We might be able to rewire all the defenses into something useful for us."

Suiting action to words, he heads back to where Kara had found the skeleton and starts checking pockets. He does come up with some flimsy piece of plastic in a pocket with a magnetic pattern on it, but God knows what it's meant for. Better than nothing, he supposes. He heads back and tosses that up through the window with a sidearm flick.

"Best I could do," he calls. "See if that card goes anywhere."

“Better than nothing!” Kara calls back, swiping the card. Somewhere over there, after a few moments-he’d hear her giggle to herself with a distant “Bingo.”

She pops back to peer down at him.

“Alright-we can activate the turrets and reactivate the ghosts-not to blue but straight to red-they’ll fire a no warning plasma bolt at anything that moves.”

Kara slips her pack off, considering. “I’ve got two additional stealth boys ‘sides mine, grenades we salvaged ‘sides my final gambit, aaaaand-” Well. That’s mostly it. Her baseball bat, side arm, and knife. She’s got a mean left hook too, but that’s more of a last resort weapon, short of biting. “My good looks and fabulous sense of humor.” She finishes with a shrug and smirk-half because she knows it’ll irritate him.

Oh, and her rope. Never know when one of those can come in handy. Kara produces it absently. “Could always string him up like a pinata, I suppose.” She murmurs to herself.

Moray nods as he does the counting in his head. Then he holds a hand up to Kara. "Toss me a stealth boy. I'll draw him down to the vault door; when he gets there, give a shout and I'll pop the Boy, then reactivate everything. They'll target him and I'll get out of the line of fire. Either that'll kill him or I'll come back in and unload into his back after. Should be enough.

He glances around, then takes a moment to drag a couple barrels, that piece of severed fence, and a steel crate into a rough resemblance of a barricade, just to give himself some cover. A grenade snuck between the barrels and crates ensures that the cover will go poof if Elijah tries to take shelter behind it later too.

"Alright," he says, dropping the LMG on top of the whole metal mess he'd erected, and cocking the gun into readiness. "I'm set. Best of luck, Kara."

He's tense. Moray doesn't like running defensive, and especially not against someone with the resources of the Brotherhood, this city, and whatever Big Wig deigned to lend. If he's got a way to lure the fog freaks down into the vault proper it's about to be a hell of a party before Elijah even shows up. A multitude of things could go wrong.

No way to know. Time to shut up and roll the dice.

The plan’s solid-and also very minimal on the bullshit. Kara can’t decide if it’s good he’s so brutally efficient-it’d up their chances for survival for sure-or maybe a little boring, as it’d lower the entertainment value.

But it’s not just her head on the line here. It’s Vanessa’s, and it’s Moray’s, too. She’ll just have to settle for the hilarity of the ghosts and turrets lighting the Slaver fuck up.

She tosses down one of the stealth boys, intentionally choosing the silliest one. In white paint marker she’d written ‘Poof!’ on the top, and on the underside drawn a rabbit popping out of a magician’s hat. It’s a cruddy and yet charming little drawing-and utterly unnecessary. Why she would decorate something like that was beyond anyone-must have been entertaining herself campfire side or something.

“You too, big guy. Between my luck and your professionalism, oughta go fine.” She’s already activated her own stealth boy, slipping back towards the console she’d found. He had her pin, and there had been TWO lucky kisses. They were as insured as they could be with lady luck.

Elias catches the Stealth Boy, nods, and sets up. Goes silent. It's time to focus.

The first hint something is wrong is when a series of clanks precede anyone's entrance at all. They're heavy, resounding, and with a muttered curse Moray recognizes the characteristic hiss of power armor motorized joints compensating for heavy weight.

The first leg appears at the end of the stairs, just the shin and the top of the knee joint, and Moray holds his fire long enough for the second to come out and then sends a three round burst into it, fouling Elijah's leg back into the staircase and making him trip and fall down the stairs in a clattering mess, directly into Moray's line of fire.

The second hint is when a blurry, invisible mass darts past Elijah's downed form and dashes straight out of the hallway in a flat second, taking only a single stray round as Moray opens fire into Elijah's downed form. It briefly vanishes from sight in the open room - too fast to keep track of -

- a double-tap of laser fire blasts into Moray's collarbone. Fabric pops and hisses as it melts like butter and he drops into cover with a wheezing hiss. The next shot fuses the action of the LMG into a slagged mess and ruins his four-thousand cap investment in a fucking heartbeat.

The blurry splotch resolves into a dark-skinned man in faintly glossy armor, with trench-coat like extensions from the heavy plates. It looks faintly ridiculous, but the smoking laser rifle in his hand is not.

What in the hell was THAT guy?

Kara doesn’t know. She assumes he still bleeds, though-and punches all she’s got with a sharp warning whistle. In an instant red ghosts pop into existence and turn on the only standing target, the turrets arm, and suddenly there is a a lot of hurt in the room with the super fast guy.

Kara doesn’t waste time, doubling back towards the clumsy fuck Moray’s already shot down the stairs. She can hear some serious shit going down back behind her-God she hopes he’s okay. Okay enough to receive condolences about his ‘girlfriend’ here in a minute. The merc moved quickly and stealthily overhead, shoving a stick of gum past her near manic smiling lips to give her ADD something besides worry to focus on-in her chest, her heart is pounding harder than it had when she'd faced the nightkin. No wonder she preferred to adventure solo-that fast pace of her heart was in her fucking throat.

He’s got the pin and TWO good luck kisses-

Her hands slip her rope over a pipe, tying a knot without her even thinking about it-jaw working double time on her bubble gum as she drops down nearly -smack- onto the power armor wearing creep.

"Hi handsome!" She chirps to the bucket of bolts, ever her annoying, bubbly self. She’s already bent to twist the valve on his back, yank the fusion core smack out of his fancy suit with a laugh. Because fuck him, and fuck his now medieval-esque, heavy ass armor. "You don’t mind if I borrow this, do you?" She shoves it into an inside pocket where it heavily weighs her jacket to the one side, stepping fast to scoop up the nasty looking pump action something he had carried down and dropped. “Or this? Oooh, what the heck does IT do?”

She doesn’t wait for a response one way or the other-just books it. Because shit, that other mother fucker had shot Moray, and it sounded like he was tearing up their hijacked defenses on top of that-the gun is heavy and she’s not really an expert with anything bigger than a pistol-but fuck it, like she’d told Vanessa-one end goes boom and make sure it’s not pointed at you or an ally and you can’t go wrong.

With a pop of a bubble, Kara disappeared back into the Stealth Boy’s cloaking and hauled ass down the hall.

Behind his cover, Moray primes his most eclectic toy - a pulse grenade - and cooks it for the count of two before slinging it up at where the Terminator's chilling on the rooftop, waiting for more shot opportunities. His bullshit aim lets him clip Moray's forearm and burn away the fatigues there, but the grenade's too a big a threat and the Courser bounds from the upper level down to ground floor, right as the holograms and turrets click on.

The pulse grenade clatters to a standstill on the rooftop, its pin unpulled, its bluff successful.

Their superhuman enemy turns into a blur of motion as the holograms pour fire into him, his shiny space-age armor taking a dozen shots in a heartbeat. It immediately turns cherry-red, taking the fire better than Moray's cloth defenses but still not designed to endure this level of punishment. He fires through the holograms and accomplishes precisely dick all; his eyes snap almost one hundred and eighty degrees instantly, light upon the turrets as they wheel into place, and then he launches sideways like a bullet and rebounds off a wall, evading fire.

Moray pops the Stealth Boy and fades from sight. He immediately throws a burn bandage on his chest and arm, wrapping as fast as he can.

The Neo wannabe comes off the wall firing, slagging two turrets before his arc peaks and the last one reacquires its target. The heavy 30-ought rounds jerk him midair and sling him out of the sky. He twists and bounces off a foot as soon as he gets back to the floor, darts through a hologram and cartwheels, putting a final shot in the last turret, which explodes, fusing into useless chunks.

Mid-cartwheel, a medieval knight hologram swings a giant claymore into his stomach, throwing him from his acrobatics into a flailing fall across the room. He springs up, crackling with energy, and thrusts his arms down to discharge arcs of Tesla energy everywhere. The three closest images crackle and fade, but two are left out of his reach, still dropping shots into his rapidly-melting armor.

Teminator Man's expressionless shades turn towards the emitters, and he leaps towards them, coat flapping in his windtrails, as a visual distortion rises from the cover at the front of the Vault entrance and begins to sneak after him.

Elijah, groaning on the floor, rolls over and stares hatefully after Kara - and then the back of the armor pops, and he exits with a groan and scrambles with his robes; coming out with a second Fusion Core, which he starts trying to jam into the Armor while using the immobile lump as cover.

The stolen holorifle bursts into light and life from the much smaller, stealthier distortion that had slipped in undetected-and chose to fire just as the last of her poor 'pet' ghosts were dispatched.

One end goes boom-and it just so happens, Kara's aim isn't terrible. Helps she's nearly point blank firing on his back.

"Freak on ghost violence has got to end, sir!". The red head jokes as her cloaking ripples and bursts away from the point of the holorifle backwards, revealing that manic smile and almost gleeful large blue eyes, that contrasting fiery red hair. Her white teeth are chewing bubble gum of all things. Kara's version of a cigarette, probably.

She doesn't stop firing-targeted bursts even as the bastard seems to pivot in mid air, a blur-but Kara's already slipping back into stealth with a pop of her bubble gum, a grenade tink tapping forward to dissuade a direct frontal assault as she changes positions in a hurry.

Whatever their mysterious enemy's armor is made of, it was clearly not meant to resist the holorifle's effects - it almost melts off of him in flecks of light, searing away from the point of contact even as the kinetic energy involved nearly bashes him off his feet. He turns it into a somersault, intercepting another shot on the opposite shoulder pad and fricasseing that too, because he blurs forward in a whirl, swinging the slagged armor off his body in a smooth motion that belonged at Chippendale's and smashing the entire mess into a third and fourth shot as he charges. Kara melts away from his advance, and he stops, eyes starting to glow in infrared colors.

That's when Moray hits him.

He doesn't quip or joke - just bulls straight out of stealth into a shoulder-first tackle that drives into Keanu's ribs and bends him double backwards over Moray's broad shoulder. The Courser's legs kick up in response and he starts to flip over Jonah's shoulder -

Moray reaches up and catches the Courser's hands. His arms tense, biceps bulging. The flip halts halfway. Terminator legs kick helpessly in the air, the unreal enemy inverted atop of Moray, pinned in place.

With a roar, Moray kicks his feet out from under himself, and drops their combined weight onto the point of his foe's head in a move that would have been banned in any wrestling ring, anywhere. The chrome dome is made of stern stuff; instead of just crushing against the steel mesh floor, it dents and drives it in, reinforced cranium jamming at an awkward angle between the opposing forces of floor and death suplex.

Still with a hold on the Courser's arms, Moray spins - catches a boot the the face as the still-moving Terminator tries to get leverage - and puts his own boot in the middle of that trenchcoated back. Then he hauls backwards as hard as he can, still holding onto both arms. One comes loose with a sickening pop, the joint pulling out into a dislocated mess.

In the background, Elijah manages to pop the core into the power armor, and crawls back into it.

“Moray’s got a bone to pick, given what you did to his girlfriend.” Kara’s tone, the laughter in her voice is strange as fuck-and also a little chilling somehow. It lacks the warmth, the vivaciousness the merc usually had. Manic, crazier seeming than usual. It’s downright threatening, somehow.

She’s got a lot going on under cover of the Stealth Boy despite her verbal mockery, still moving and having just thrown her voice ten feet away from her actual position. She’s trying to balance the holorifle and tape an explosive to the fusion core at the same time, too nervous about her aim to try firing the thing when Moray’s on top of their surprise guest, and not dumb enough to get too close to that mess. At her size, either one of them could rip her in two or knock her out cold, she's sure of it. Better not to be in the way.

Said guest might be about to get his arms ripped off anyhow. Holy fuck.

And then she hears the hydraulic hiss of power armor, that telltale clank of Elijah’s first step.

Shit.

Moray’s busy and Kara's not sure she could convince him to get clear enough anyway-she bolts back down the hall after the abandoned old fart she’d THOUGHT would be forced to either clod along or abandon his armor. Apparently he carried a spare core. Well how was she supposed to guess at that?! She’d been busy wanting to make sure Moray wasn’t keeled over, jeez!

Another rip of tape sounds, the cloaked merc fixing her extra Stealth Boy to the ugly, messy bomb she’d put together. The whole mess is too big for her small hands-the holo rifle is dropped and kicked aside onto the lower walkway pipes. She slips her thumb through the grenade pin, tests the weight of the taped together abomination. She hopes he didn't have a side arm with him as she rounds the corner.

“You got more vigor than I woulda guessed!” She mocks, blowing and popping another bubble-before she slips under the pipes, sneaking along that lower pathway towards her target. She twists the extra Steath Boy on and hopes like hell it adds to the boom. Pulling the pin, Kara set the cloaked fusion core grenade combo on the walkway with the care normally reserved for one’s own children.

She double times it back towards the more open area where Moray and the terminator are fighting hand to hand, snapping up the gun she'd kicked aside. The knight in powered armor would be juuuuust stepping past that bomb when it goes off, assuming her timing and his steps were right-and she sure as shit doesn't want to be there when it does.

The arm that Moray's trying to pull off spins in his grip and clamps onto his forearm hard enough to bruise. With that grip as leverage, finally, the Courser pulls himself out of his awkward headstand; the moment his feet touch the ground, he kicks off and drives himself elbow-point first into Moray's stomach, and instead caught the big man's knee in the face as a perfect cross counter. The forces involved rattle even his titanium skull, and the Terminator staggers for a beat as Jonah regains his balance and puts his dukes up.

" . . . Irritating," he says. Terminator's voice is smooth and low, an androgynous buzz. With his other arm, he reaches up and resets the dislocated one with a vicious shove. It doesn't quite work - something has cracked and broken in there, but it does give him basic mobility with that arm again. Then he tries to pull a sidearm in a blur, launching himself backwards out of the momentary pause to make distance.

Moray's sawed-off is already in his hands, and that vicious gun barks and tears the laser pistol from the Courser's hands in a brief spray of plastic and busted energy cell. Most of the hand comes with it, the shell eroded to reveal synthetic skeleton and motors. Terminator half-way starts some flipping dodge, and Moray pumps the action and shoots him again, the kinetic force slapping him out of the air and onto the ground. When he starts to throw himself out of the way from there, Moray shoots his leg out from under him, the buckshot tearing through synthskin and lodging itself in actuators and capacitors.

The Courser looks up, face expressionless behind his black shades that somehow haven't fallen off. Moray shoots him in the head, too, blasting the shades off and cracking the black skin to reveal pale automaton skull.

The clack of the lever-action and the roar of the shotgun bellow out four more times in quick succession, and the head is reduced to a sparking ruin, cratered in and a chunk of it missing. The Terminator is still moving, now crawling at Moray at rabid speeds - weaving both intentionally and from the destruction of its limb. He casts the shotgun aside as the machine's body flips up on it hands and tries to lock its legs around him - he catches both legs in his now-empty hands.

It flips up, agile as a snake, grabs onto his wrists with both hands, and tries to drive the shattered, spiky ruin of its own skull directly into Moray's face now that his hands are bound up.

His foot comes up between them and smashes the machine in the chest. There's a brief tug-of-war, as it tries to push past and just fucking gouge his face out with that smouldering ruin of a head, sharp shreds of plastic poking out of what had been a nose and the inner half of a skull. This time, though, it has the leverage, and it's all Moray can do to hold it off, straining and poised against each other; he hops backward awkwardly on one foot, and slumps against the wall, pushing off it with his upper back to give him just that extra bit of oomph: it buys him maybe a half-inch of space between his head and sparking tenderizer.

Then he drops and releases the pressure, and the Courser soars by barely an inch over his head, drawing lines of blood over Moray's scalp, as it slams its skull-stump into the wall with ear-ringing force. Jonah scrambles from under it as it shudders, already rising again; he boots the bad leg in the back of the knee and drops it again. "Light it up!" he bellows, but the yell is almost drowned out by the siren-scream of a fusion bomb going off in the hallway, the raw force blasting Moray off his feet and throwing him in a tumble down the room; the force of the blast contained by the indoors area into a concussive, fiery blast that sends everyone off their feet and eats almost all the oxygen in the room.

However bad they take it, Elijah deals with it the worst. He had almost literally stepped on the stealth bomb. It bounces him off the ceiling with bone-shattering force and roasts him inside his suit, breaking almost every bone in his body. He dies instantly.

It occurs to Kara, admittedly late, that fucking around with brand new, very experimental explosion techniques might not be the best idea when it’s more than your own ass on the line. This late, Einstein level realization comes when her left arm, back and shoulder take the brunt of a very hot, very concussive blast that violently throws the petite would be demolitions expert into the pipes on her right side, landing hard on her front in the lower level and diminishing, maybe ruining her stealth boy. She had already been dealing with a pretty nasty headache from being knocked out-the impact has her seeing stars again, briefly unsure if she’d been punished by her own bomb or a truck.

“Fuck-” The word is more wheeze than anything, the air having been knocked out of her. The scent of burned leather and ozone is strong, charred flesh. Kara laughs breathlessly-then sucks in a shaky, hissed inhalation as she forces herself to her hands and knees, the world spinning and oddly dark at the edges. Oh. Oh fuck-she’d hit her head hard enough she feels sick.

~*~

Kara is laughing. It’s not mirthful. It’s not the silver peals of uncontrolled delight he’d heard, seen before. It’s the same sort of unhinged, manic madness of someone who just did not give a fuck. “You fuckers-” There’s the sound of metal scraping metal, an electrical noise of something shorting out, malfunctioning. A stumble in the pipes somewhere, that lower walkway and pipe corridor that tightens around the open plane and vault. “Made me swallow my gum!”

Where in the hell was she? Why was she laughing? Jesus, the noise is downright unhinged, and the nonsensical shit she says sounds as crazy.

The thing that had shown up and ruined the whole mess was already on its feet, its fours-or rather, threes-darting in a balanced shambled blur that shouldn’t have been possible with the level of damage it had sustained. There’s a brief noise behind Moray somewhere-and then a baseball bat fires into existence, low and JUST at the right angle to smack against the groin of the thing with a wooden ‘thunk’ on metal.

Wha-

And then there’s Kara darting from beneath the pipes to ‘light up’ the fucking thing with her stolen holorifle, looking beat to shit but firmly among the living. The upper left arm of her lucky jacket was burned clean though as well as her vault suit, bubbles in her previously pale, unblemished skin and little more than a cuff and length of sleeve around her wrist and forearm. She looks a bit like she crawled out of a den somewhere-and then sprinted to be where she was, out of breath and nearly panting through her glinting, manic grin.

“Jonah of the whale and robot-” The crack isn’t funny, the same harsh manic humor. She’s so pissed- what the hell was this thing!? Who had let her play with explosives? Had she cooked that other guy or what?

She fires the rifle even after the headless abomination has been blasted halfway across the room, the muzzle overheating and a buzzing noise before Kara slams it onto the floor and hauls herself into the space proper, pulling the knife from from her boot of all fucking things. No longer half hidden by the pipes, the damage was more obvious-from shoulder to hip, she’d been hit with the heat of that blast, and it had burned her clothes and her something nasty-a swathe of her midsection and just enough of her side exposed to reveal no undershirt and the same briefs she’d slept in under the vault suit.

Moray hauls himself up, catches Kara's shoulder as she starts to hare off after the broken robot-thing, and just falls backwards with her in tow, dragging her somewhere between his lap and on top of him. His hand digs into her thigh holster and the Lil' Devil comes out - when her hands instinctively reach back for him, Jonah slaps that into her palm and drags her aim back down to light on their shattered opponent. His grip is steady, even if his breathing is tight. There's a couple odd lumps in his chest that can be felt. Those are probably broken ribs.

A long, aching silence. The Terminator does not rise. It does not stir. The sparks are gone.

Moray blows out a breath, and his grip on Kara loosens.

"I'm handling the high explosives next time," he grumbles.

Kara instinctively tries to shake him off, but he’s too big, too strong. “He’s not sorry enough yet-” The small woman says as she’s pulled down on top of him, resisting-only for big man to slap her new favorite pistol into her hands, take aim with her. Oh, yeah, guess that made more sense-she’d gotten carried away there a minute, wasn’t used to having a gun that...well, worked.

A moment. Two. Moray exhales, relaxing his grip.

”I’m handling the high explosives next time.”

“Well-” Kara’s still eyeing the broken thing, not quite having caught her breath, a hitch to it somewhere. Those vivid blues are still narrowed angrily on the dead robot, the grin pasted firmly in place. The thing stays dead. She doesn’t think robots would play possum...and it looks pretty fucked. The grin falters, then drops off as the tension in her shoulders slowly relaxes, her grip on her gun loosening for her to rub her throbbing forehead. Her vision was still fucking swimming, the world rocking a little more than it ought to be. The arm and hip joints caught in the blast are stiff and painful, the skin taut and agonizingly painful when she turns around to face him.

“Well I’m not used to not being able to just suicide the shit outta stuff, okay? Last time I fought with ‘allies’, I left them all in a burning fucking grocery store with the folks they were set on razing.” And the time before that she’d gotten her weapon ripped out of her hands and tackled through a cheap interior door-come to think of it, she had a terrible track record of playing nice with her own team. She either turned out useless or bailed all of the the two times it’d happened. And then she’d gone and tried to blow Jonah up. Damn.

Poor professional, sensible Jonah, with his melted fatigues and gouged scalp. Shit, he’d gotten fucked up too, pre and post explosion. There’s...there’s an apology somewhere here, but hell if Kara can figure how to articulate it. Instead she rips what’s left of her left sleeve off, shrugs out of her wrecked jacket. Her right, non aching hand holds the remaining stimpack she’s got left-least in the trademark apparel item. Her backpack was uptop by the console, she’d have to grab that-that’s where the rest of ‘em were. Maybe three, she can’t remember. “You bad off? You look kinda bad off. Where you want the poke?”

Her heart is still pounding hard. She...she might actually have to be more careful next time...she could have blown them all sky high, and that wasn’t really funny if it got him killed too.

Moray rolls his eyes, sits straight up into the needle so that it jabs him in the chest, and then responds by pulling a stim out of his fucking boot and stabbing Kara in the thigh with it, pressing down the plunger and flooding her with its healing agent. "You worry too much," he says, and tosses his used stim aside as he straightens up. Kara's, on the other hand, hangs awkwardly from his chest. He depresses the plunger on that, waits a bit, then tosses it too.

He looks down at the lightly-fried Raider girl for a moment, then herds her into a hug, his arms coming around her shoulders lightly. "Success. Congratulations."

Moray lets go, and then swats Kara on the ass, pushing her towards the Vault console. "Go steal things. I'll get the collars fixed."

Yiiiiiikes ouch. Right in the chest-though it turns out needles DO poke into the marble looking merc, so there’s that-and then Kara jumps slightly as he jabs one into her. Well aren’t they just the best doctors ever.

"You worry too much,"

“No one has ever said that to me in the history of ever.” Kara says with that false scowl of hers, the crinkle of the bridge of her nose and the slight narrowing of her eyes-and the twitch of her lips as she tries not to grin. She might’ve argued she wasn’t worrying at all-but that’d be a lie, and he’d either know it-or she would hope he'd know it.

“And now I’m just encouraged to try TWO fusion cores with my new Steath Boy Grenade combo-” He pulls her into a hug mid sentence, arms light around her shoulders. Just like that.

"Success. Congratulations."

Everybody's made it through. Kara feels...

And then an innocent scandalized look at the swat to her pert derriere. Those big blue eyes help pull it off-if it weren't for the mischievous grin pulling at the edges of her lips. “For -shame- sir. This is a quality establishment.” She’s so full of shit-and it's quickly apparent, that grin of hers-the warm, amused one, not the 'war' one. Get to stealing? Well hey!

“I mean, if you’re insisting…” Kara says with a laugh. To the console she goes, trying the keycard first-and then having to spend a minute or two hacking at it. All of that, and the old bastard never even saw the inside of the place.

Good.

“I wanna get a look at what’s left of that robot guy. He looked hella real…” She calls, working out her afflicted shoulder as the chems start to take effect. She’s going to have to figure out how to fix her poor jacket, too.

"It might have been before you bombed the shit out of it," Moray retorts without looking up. He swipes up his knife, lodges the tip in Terminator's neck stump, and then soccerball kicks it hilt-deep in just for good measure. The body doesn't so much as twitch. Moray shrugs and walks over to check Elijah, but when he cracks the armor's seal the steam wafting out immediately drives him back. He scowls and covers his mouth and nose with a strip of cooked fatigue before diving back in. "You'll be satisfied to know you at least wiped out the customer base."

The Pip-Boy comes out and he looks it over with a disgusted sneer. There's baked Elijah all over it. The scarf comes off and he wipes the worst of it off before he logs in and disarms all the bomb collars, then tosses the thing aside. "Collars are off. I wonder if he had something to do with Devon's big client, because nothing in the Sierra was anywhere near as tough as he was. Maybe insurance or something? I can't imagine it being common at least, he ate five shells to the head and kept coming."

If that kind of durability is going to be in a mass-produced robot line, then the mercenary lifestyle is about to go down as a whole.

Kara’s bouncing on the balls of her feet as she makes a heck of a lot of noise on the keyboard, high energy and seemingly barely containing it in her lithe frame.

Ugh, that smell was horrendous-she picks it up even from here. “I AM satisfied to know. He was a twat, and I didn’t appreciate how very, VERY uncooperative he was that first interaction, thank you very much.” No. She sure hadn’t been.

What the hell was up with these layers of passcodes, Sinclair? How was your lady supposed to get in here?

“Still, hell of a way to go-I figured it’d blow his leg off or something. I wouldn’t have had the idea at all if he hadn’t been carrying a spare-I only took the damned thing to keep him from partying with us before I wanted him to. I would have politely shot him instead, if he’d been patient...and less prepared, I guess.”

She hums a happy tune about the collars being turned off. That was great news, WONDERFUL news! Now they can take Vanessa home. Suppose she better ask about Dean, maybe. Give ‘Ness the option.

“Shit I hope not-I thought you were going to rip his arms off for sure at the start, and that headless skittering fuckery? Yeah, no thanks. My baseball bat should have at least been funny, but he even ruined that.” Moray was a behemoth, a whirlwind of death and violence. If HE was talking about something being tough, it fucking was. And what kind of man made a metal noise when hit in the taint with a baseball bat? Not one, that’s what.

“Hopefully anybody and everybody related to this mess either died or forgets my name. Devon’s a prick. Not going to miss him.”

Kara made a noise of thrilled delight. “Ooh! We’re in!” The door doesn’t roll but instead releases a pressure lock, retracting and lifting up out of the way to reveal an old world looking bank vault that, frankly, doesn’t look comfortable to hang around in if he had really intended it to house and protect Vera Keyes.

But finally! She was half about to give up on...um...

“...is there a table full of a gold bars in there, or did I get hit harder than I thought? Cause if I’m going to hallucinate, I demand there to be some old world scotch too, dammit."

Moray shrugs. "I pissed him off deliberately so that he'd come with everything and we wouldn't have to worry about him later. Didn't fancy waking up to Power Armor with a gun in my face one night."

The mention of his fight with the robot turns Moray's limbs down. "I really tried, but he's got half-inch cabling run through him as support. That stuff's rated upwards of twenty-one thousand pounds to break. I popped the joint, at least, but I didn't really know he was Robot Man before that."

He turns and offers the collapsed metal corpse a healthy kick. "Fucking piece of shit melted my gun and my jacket."

Then he turns back about and witnesses the bounty of the Vault: thirty-seven gold bars, thick as fuck apiece, with a smattering of bucks and some poker chips. It's mostly the gold that holds his attention, though. He ambles up beside Kara and hefts up a bar - it weighs about forty pounds, a decent chunk. It's all fucking gold.

He takes it in, and then looks back at Kara, face frank. "You still got Lucky around, by any chance?"

Kara’s already hyper, but she visibly brightens when he uses the name she’d bestowed on the Brahmin. “He was trailing after us the other night. Somebody kept feeding him on the way...very mysterious.”

That he hadn’t gotten eaten yet just gave more credence to his name, in her opinion.

Kara steps up to the table and pushes a bar forward with the full butt of her hand. It’s as fucking heavy as it looks. “He can’t carry all of those-you’d break his poor back!” She considers the yellow glinting bars a moment. It’s the most wealth she’s ever seen in one spot, and she has no idea why Sinclair would just...stack it up like that. Least hide it in something else, he knew Dean was after it all, jeez.

She picks up a handful of the poker chips and jingles them around absently, zeroing in on the terminal nearby. Ooooh, secrets. “‘Sinclair’s Personal Files’ is booby trapped, remember.” Alarmingly, the murmured phrase is more to herself than to him. There’s a letter of enduring love for Vera in one. She considers the holotape she’d found-goes back to her jacket, snags it, returns to shove it into the terminal.

Kara’s eyes widen at what she finds. “Oof. He was not happy with Vera Keyes before she confessed. Yikes-he was going to lock them BOTH down here. Hell hath no wrath like Sinclair scorned, I guess.” That's all of interest on the terminal, and Kara looks...disappointed, looking around the vault absently, jingling the chips.