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 Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 12:27 am
To protect and serve.
Harrison Hughes learned a lot when he was introduced to his first beat. How you could make plenty of money as a cop, but not always from the station. How if you wanted things done, you greased palms. How in the end, everything came down to reports, and what you put in them.
How no matter how much fiction he read, the truth was always stranger.
Harrison got on okay with his fellow officers. His very short police career came to an end not because of his brief liaison with corruption, but because of his inability to ignore weird s**t.
On February 3rd, he and his partner answered a domestic abuse call on Russgate Drive, a line of High Victorian style houses uphill from the Art Museum.
There had been a lot of blood.
The guy ran.
They pursued him on foot about three blocks to the Anthony-Breyers Museum of Art. The museum was in the historic district of downtown, and too small for security guards. They got there in time to see him send a rock through the one of the double-doors, then disappear into the building.
Harrison aimed the flashlight beam past the ruined plexiglass.
"So what do you want to do, you want to follow him in there?" he asked.
"No," Angelo said.
"But we're going to anyway," Harrison said.
"Yup," Angelo said.
Harrison wiggled the flashlight. "...You first."
The lobby was on the main floor, and only had two adjacent rooms showcasing a feminist commentary on yarn, and the staircases.
One up.
One down.
Blood was on the upstairs railing. They split up at the top of the staircase. Angelo took 19th century furniture, Harrison took Oceanic art, with the logic that only one of them would be unlucky enough to actually run into the guy.
After seeing some of the pieces, Harrison wished he had picked the 19th century. The walls were packed with shields, weapons, and carvings. Indigenous art stolen from faraway churches. It gave him the willies.
He ran the flashlight up a giant, not-too impressive post that looked like it had a d**k on it. Great. He loved Art.
Harrison had a strategy for situations like this. If he was slow and poked around enough, the guy might manage to sneak far enough away to be someone else's problem. As long as the guy didn't do something stupid. Like make any sudden movements, or stand in plain sight. The strategy had worked for him before, and was working right up until the flashlight caught a humanoid shadowy shape in its beam. Harrison reluctantly unholstered his gun, training it to where the flashlight ended. "Stay where you are! KPD!"
He realized it wasn't the suspect pretty quick. For one thing, the shape was black. And naked. With enormous horns. He relaxed. Statue.
Then it grinned at him
Its mouth was impossibly wide. It stood from one of the thrones, shaking some nearby robes to get rid of dust, then throwing it over its shoulders like a cloak.
It...no, he was still definitely mostly naked.
"KPD," Harrison repeated, hoarsely. "Get on the ground."
The figure limped towards him, saying nothing. His limbs were twisted. His smile grew wider.
Harrison made the third mistake of the night (after going in the museum in the first place, and then splitting up), which was not ignoring the terrible horned thing limping towards him, and instead employing the old police protocol of flipping the ******** out and emptying his entire clip right into the wall. There was an explosion of splinters and feathers. If he had been paying attention to something besides the demon-monster, he would have noticed the perp (who had not seen anything but Harrison obliterating some art) grabbing a spear from the wall.
The spear did not hit wall.
It hit Harrison, grazing his side.
At that point, threatened by eldritch horrors, attacked from behind, and out of bullets, Harrison lost it a little.
Later, it became apparent how important correctly filling out reports was.
---
"...And the guy stabbed himself?"
"In the hand, with the spear head. Yes sir," Harrison said. Talking to authority figures made him nervous. He didn't look at the sergeant, choosing to keep his eyes on the floor and his hands clutching his knees.
"What the hell were you shooting at?"
"Dunno," he said. "Something moved. The guy's shadow, I guess. Sorry, sir."
"Who's responsible for the damages? You going to pay for it?"
"Sorry, sir."
"The problem," the sergeant said, "is that you've only been with us a few months, and this isn't the first time this has happened."
They said he was a risk-taker. A loose cannon. With a hair-trigger temper. Words reserved for cops like Dirty Harry, and if he'd been Dirty Harry he would have dramatically slammed down his badge and solved the case lone cowboy-style. But Harrison was an 19 year-old kid not long out of the training academy, and he got a thorough review, and a pink slip and a tidy severance pay and that was the end of his days as a police officer.
He was pissed about it. Of course he was pissed. Why had he shot at it? The thing hadn't even attacked him, it just kept limping right through him, and disappeared. ...He probably shouldn't have stabbed the guy, either. But what else was he supposed to do? He had wanted to be on the right side of the law, one of the boys in blue. If he couldn't do that... well. Maybe it was time to join the other team.
He hadn't expected the other team to be the same color as his dismissal form.
But one signed contract from a mysterious stranger later, there he was.
Fight back? Be a hunter instead of the hunted? Possibly get a uniform that involved a badass cloak instead of a tie and a giant scythe instead of a billy club? Hell yeah. He'd been ignoring weird s**t the best he could his entire life. He would have tangled with it sooner if he'd known the Halloween version of the Men in Black would make him a job offer over it.
Under the mask, as E-13, he could have been anyone. A president, a religious leader, a billionaire, an olympic gold medalist. Instead he was a kid whose parents had kicked his a** out of the motor home the moment they didn't have a legal responsibility to do otherwise, and whose career opportunities were quickly veering towards drug dealer. He wasn't the best policeman, okay. But he had hoped for something more.
Instead he had ended up dead, surrounded by shadows, and alone.
Not the best end to the week.
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Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:47 pm
It was dark, and endless fathomless dark beyond dark that would echo with silence but sadly those echoes were smothered by darkness. He was alone. In super intense darkness.
"WOW THIS IS REALLY NOSTALGIC IN A KIND OF TRAUMATIC WAY," a female voice suddenly boomed above him. "WAIT. NO! I MEAN...." There was a soft coughing sound of someone clearing their throat.
"PUNY MORTAL!" She started up again, her voice loud and terrible in its might. "HERE YOU STAND AT A CROSSROADS, THOUGH YOUR WEAK SPIRIT CANNOT EVEN FATHOM ITS APPEARANCE WITHOUT DESTROYING YOU OUTRIGHT! AND AH..." A pause, as if she wasn't quite sure what to say next and then, "DOOM!"
Another soft cough.
"SO...UH. YEAH! RELEASE THE WEAPON THAT IS FEAR! THE WEAPON THAT LIES WITHIN YOUR SOUL!"
Another pause.
"DOOM!"
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Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 6:14 pm
There was a voice out of The Deep.
He wanted to ask where they were, and was she standing on stairs, and did she see a door anywhere, when the patter changed from some sort of invasive commentary to a command.
It was, Harrison decided, weird. But better than the singing in the lounge.
Ultimately he registered the important, non-Shakespearian parts, which were being destroyed and get your weapon. Already the black seemed less empty and more...shadowy. Who knew what else was out there?
"Lady? We under attack?"
Harrison was already pawing around with both hands, looking for his knife. At this point, he wasn't even sure where the floor was. He had been doing a lot of remembering lately. His knife wasn't here. It was back with his medkit, and the pendants, tucked safe in his jacket before E-10 had sent him to jazz singer hell, and he'd sent himself to the middle of Nowhere. Maybe that guy's scythe...? He wouldn't have minded holding that, just once. But with the darkness looking more and more ominous...was that rustling behind him? Or just kickback from the girl's voice?
He didn't care what he got a hold of. He didn't need fancy, or refined, or polished. He needed sharp. Something that would do the job, keep him alive, and make whatever he was up against dead.
His hands each found what he needed. He looked down. One knife, he decided, was kids stuff. That wasn't a weapon. These were weapons.
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Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 7:16 pm
"DOOOO-oh you did. Hey uh...wow, I really wasn't expecting that. This is kind of my first time and..." A thunderous throat clear and then, "NOW...LOWLY MORTAL. FORGET THAT LAST BIT AND STRIKE INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS OR FACE YOUR DOOM!" The darkness trembled and began to shake. "DOOM!"Pieces of it began to fall, with a blinding light shining through.
"DOOOOOOOOOO-""Clarice...what exactly do you think you are doing here...?"
"OH FU-"((OOC: Congrats on the successful awakening! Please post following the prompt on page 13 here to wrap things up ICly for your char!))
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