taxonomites | [Accidental Visual] (the man who fell to earth)

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[Accidental Visual] (the man who fell to earth)

[[Backdated to day four of Zombie Hell]

Again the tablet is displaying at an odd angle, incorporated into Oolong's bracelet as it is. The city sweeps by in disorienting swatches of building rooftops, building walls, pavement seeming to rush towards the screen, then shots of the skyline and shots of the sky-- repeated over and over as the dragon loops through the air, flying over the streets and trying to find accumulated groups of zombies to vent his fires on.

Or just sit on. This also works.

Of course, he can pick them off one by one, and he has done so, but it's not the most efficient use of his time and energies. He's experimented with simply laying down in the street and using his own body to form a barrier to herd them, but this takes time, because the abominations are slow, plodding things, and he sees less reason to be patient, in this form.

So he hunts out groups of them, swarming around buildings or milling in open spaces. Fire is satisfying, but there is usually at least one or two on the outer edges that isn't destroyed, and they often stagger off into a building, and then he has to attempt to put that out....

So squishing works. It's disgusting, and coats his claws and hands and formerly-spotless scales with a bloody, rotten, oozing sort of pulp that he ends up washing off himself with gouts of fire because it stinks, by Buddha! ...but it gets the job done, so to speak.

The hunting has been getting scarcer; the vermin are taking to hiding, now. He comes across a group of four of them and sighs; by yesterday's standards, hardly enough to bother with, but today...

The dragon sweeps closer, jaws opened to spray an immolating death from above as the corpses stop and stare dumbly up.

Instead the universe suddenly expands.

It wrenches, twists on him even as it grows. The buildings are magnified a hundred-fold; the rotting vermin are suddenly no longer vermin but beings his own size, and he has an indescribable sickening feeling of all that he is being crammed down into a shoe whether it will fit or not, shoved in, shoved into the little skin of leather and hide and hair--

This is followed by a sensation of falling.

The pavement hits him hard, bruising on knees and palms, and he can't even cry out due to the massive disorientation from the shift. The broadcast is now a grounds-level view of the pavement stretching away, and the bloody, rotting feet and legs of four zombies shuffling closer to the dinner that has so obligingly appeared before them, unarmed, naked, and dazed.

OOC: Oolong is Long again! no more dragony funtimes for him. sadface. The tablet will once more display his name and location as Mayland Long though.

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[B'Elanna didn't know why Long was on his hands and knees in the middle of a busy city street. At the moment, it didn't matter. Questions could wait until he was out of harm's way.]

Long. Long. Get up. You need to move. You need to start running.

[As she spoke, she pulled up the map on her tablet to work out where she was and whether there was any chance of her reaching him in time.]

Long, someone called him-- someone's voice, which he couldn't place at the moment.

That was him, he recalled, as he fought off waves of nausea. Pronounced wrong, of course, pronounced in the Western fashion but the name he had adopted to move among them... just dragon. Accurate yet not. It did nothing to distinguish him from his lesser brethren, nothing to mark his color, his nature, the fact that he was the emperor-enshrined-in-the-south, that he had five fingers instead of four... heavens, the name did nothing to clarify that he was even different than one of the hideous brute-minded scabby reptiles known as dragons in Europe.

And it was a mockery and a self-deceit and a clinging to past glory all the same, like a slave picking the name Freeman as a surname. Illusion. He was not a dragon. Better had he named himself Ren.

The urgency of the voice cut through the meandering paths of self-pitying thought, managed to stave off the nausea for now as well. GET UP AND RUN! the voice had ordered, and something in that appealed to the animal sense of self-preservation, the pragmatic, physical nature of the beast.

He raised his head-- saw the dead coming at him, closer now, slow but inexorable. Over the tablet, B'Elanna might briefly have been able to hear a snarl that did not come from the zombies. Then the view of the approaching zombies lurched as Long got unsteadily to his feet, becoming a kaleidoscope of street and undead and sky (and a surreal glimpse of Long's own bare feet) as he took the advice and began to run.

Dragons didn't run from battle.... but men did, frequently, and with good cause.

"...Lieutenant Torres?" Long's voice said, much shakier than usual after a few seconds. "I... apologize... I am somewhat-- indisposed..."

[Klingons didn't run from battle either, but B'Elanna was a Starfleet officer above everything else and a Starfleet officer knew when a battle was already lost. If she threw her life away in some pointless show of glory, other people - people she might have been able to help or save - would die as well.]

Don't apologise, just get out of there. You need to keep moving until you find cover. They're slow, but they'll follow you.

[Given enough time, they'd catch up.]

"Yes," he said in terse understanding of her words, focusing on running. The pavement was rough on bare feet-- or rather, rough on human feet, soft fleshy horribly impractical things that they were-- and for a moment he longed for shoes, despite the fact that once upon a time he had loathed them.

All the same, he did not doubt his ability to outpace the shambling horrors behind him. He knew from experience now that while his human body seemed slow to him, it was fast enough by the standards of other men. If B'Elanna is still looking at the map, she might notice that whatever else, he's making pretty good time.

"Do you know if-- any district--" A pause as he saw a fire escape ladder dangling from a nearby building, and instantly veered towards it. He didn't speak again until he was on the rooftop, which appeared to be clear of zombies, and afforded him a view of the best sort of path out of this mess.

"--if any district is still free of this infestation, Lieutenant?"

I don't think so. [She didn't enjoy being the bearer of bad news, but the ability to work together and share information was one of the few things that gave them an edge over the zombies.] The Sanctuary is the only building with any power, so most of them are heading for Central.

[She didn't add - didn't want to add - that she was currently stuck in the Sanctuary herself.]

"I see. Best to seek out a defensive location and work on holding it, then," Long grunted.

"Are you yourself somewhere safe, Lieutenant?"

For now. They haven't managed to get into the Sanctuary yet.

[But they were trying. She could hear them trying.]

"Please continue to stay safe, Lieutenant. You are armed?"

Said while Long himself was crawling along a rooftop, eying the street below and the zombies that wandered along it.

[B'Elanna laughed dryly at that.]

I'm half klingon. I'm always armed.

There was an appreciative, if strained, chuckle at that.

"Then I will not further distract you from your own attention to survival. Thank you for the warning, and... good luck, Lieutenant."

You too. Take care of yourself, Long.

[What else could she say? Even 'see you soon' was probably overoptimistic at the moment. In the end, she left it at that and switched off the tablet.]

Kate was on her motorcycle, hurtling from her apartment in the direction of the library, when she noticed the zombies converging on someone kneeling by the street. She headed as fast as she could in that direction, driving with one hand, gun in the other.

As she got closer, she recognized Long. She parked the bike and flew into motion, not even registering that Long was naked. She shot a zombie between the eyes as it neared Long, arms outstretched. She put a hand out over his back, not touching him, but hoping to get his attention. She shot another zombie before she could address him.

"Long! Come on! Are you injured?"

He'd gotten unsteadily to his feet, the loud retorts of a gun making him wince reflexively. Someone, a woman, was asking him if he was injured.

Almost a good joke.

He blinked as a zombie's corpse twitched on the ground nearby, then turned to try and find the speaker. Ah, yes, he knew her, Kate Beckett, the policewoman; she had showed him the basics of a gun...

"I... no, I am not... hurt.... in any measurable way..."

He was cold, though, and perplexed by that. A glance down explained why.

Long's eyes widened as his brain kicked back into gear and he realized the situation-- back in human form, in miserable weak fragile helpless human form, and on top of it, undressed. In front of a woman, no less.

"....oh now this is really unacceptable," he hissed, sounding suddenly not at all dazed and quite angry. Quite helplessly angry, but at least angry was an improvement.

"Unacceptable? What?"

She finally looked down. Why was he naked? She shook her head. There was no time to address that now. As another zombie approached, she grabbed Long's arm.

"Come on, we have to get out of here."

One of the great mysteries of the universe, indeed.

He stared a moment at her hand on his arm, her hand pale against his dark skin, and then when he looked back up to Kate his eyes were not the sleepy brown of an overly polite middle-aged man but a feral, animal yellow.

He was angry-- not at Kate, but at this absurd, humiliating situation, at whatever force had trapped him in a human body six years ago and at the... 'hamsters' for doing it again, for taking delight in both the suffering of their abductees and, apparently, their embarrassment.

With one motion he shook off her hand with strength that should have been impossible for a man so slight. White teeth bared in a snarl, he turned on the nearest zombie.

Faster than a man his age ought be, too-- he closed the distance between it, and a long-fingered hand reached up beneath the rotting throat, took hold of a slack jaw, and cracked the neck with a sound like popcorn being popped.

Hardly enough to kill a zombie, of course, and Long used his grip on the jaw to slam the zombie's head against the pole of a streetlight, once, twice, three times-- pulping it until the zombie stopped flailing at Long's arm and flopped twitching but lifeless to the ground.

Long smiled grimly-- for about two seconds. Then realized what an idiotic, risky thing to do that had been-- putting his hands anywhere near the mouth! He backpedaled quickly nearer to Kate's motorcycle.

"Yes. You are quite right. My apologies for wasting time," he said hurriedly.

Kate glared at him at first - she was only trying to help after all - when she noticed the change in his eyes. Without a word, she makes her way toward her motorcycle, shooting a couple zombies that were lingering near her bike. She turned around in time to catch Long bashing in a zombie's head. Kate stared for a moment, jaw dropped, as Long turned back and apologized - apologized - for wasting time. As if they were running late for tea, instead of surrounded by brain-eating zombies.

She shook her head, gesturing to the bike. She swung a leg over and started it up.

"At some point you'll explain to me how you did that. For now, get on."

She glanced at him over her shoulder.

"And go for the brain. or decapitate them. Most effective way."

He wordlessly obeyed, although he had never in his life ridden a motorcycle and attempting to do so sans clothes was going to be a whole new exercise in 'oh dear'. He settled himself gingerly on the bike behind Kate, as far back from her as possible in the limited space.

After a moment's battle between his sensibilities, embarrassment, and the common sense knowledge of what would happen if he fell off the bike, he reluctantly grabbed at Kate's belt, hooking his fingers around it.

"Yes. Sadly, my parlor tricks do not extend to being able to summon guillotines." (Was that a joke?) "I am secure now, please feel free to take off at your discretion, Miss Beckett."

She gave a short nod, then took off, hurtling through the streets of Taxon. She turned a bit and yelled over her shoulder so he could hear.

"I'm headed to the library. Are you coming with me, or do you have somewhere else safe that you can go? I can take you."

She wanted to ask why he was in outside, naked, with zombies all over the place, but she figured that was a conversation for later.

"Do you know of the Hyperion Hotel? It is in Speares-- not so far from our current location, I think, on such a contraption as this."

What he really wanted even more than the comfort of his own rooms was clothes, but even his ego stopped short at suggesting to the no-nonsense, all-business policeman steering the bicycle that they stop at a shop so that he might find some sort of clothing. He rather thought she might kick him off the motorcycle if he did.

"...and thank you. I believe I owe you my life."

Kate nodded again and headed in the direction of the hotel. She was silent for several moments before she turned again.

"You're welcome, but you seemed pretty capable of taking care of yourself. I'm sure you would have managed fine."

She gave a wry smile at his use of the word contraption.

"You've never been on a bike before?"

Long laughed, a little bitter, before answering. He had to speak up to be heard over the roar of the bike's impressive engine.

"I am not so certain. One of these walking corpses-- it is possible to be lucky, for a strong grip to give one an edge. Against many? No; I am not best suited to such foes. Not like this."

He would rather think about motorcycles than being human again.

"I have not, no. I did not think they would be so-- so loud."

She carefully made a turn, dodging a group of listless zombies who scattered out of the way.

"Yeah, you get used to it after a while. It's a lot to take in at first."

She paused a second to turn, glancing at him over her shoulder.

"Do you have something you can use as a weapon at your place? Besides your hands?"

With some droplets of spattered zombie blood on his face and his usually immaculately-combed hair in disarray from the wind, Long looked much less like the reserved, weirdly-polite man to whom Kate had given shooting lessons.

"I have a fireplace poker," he said with a shrug. "It is solid iron, and pointed; it should suffice for defense. Also, I am on the sixth floor, so the building should be easy to defend."

As they approached the hotel, Kate noticed a couple zombies roaming listlessly outside the entrance. She quickly shot them, then parked the bike, making sure to look Long in the eye, and no where else on his body.

"It takes them a while to figure out stairs, so you should be fine. Barricade yourself in, and keep your tablet and weapon with you. Call if you need anything. I'm headed for the library."

Kate, simply by keeping your eyes on his and not once asking about why the hell he has no clothes, you have forever endeared yourself to one Mr. Long.

"Yes, I'll do that," he says quickly, moving to put a parked car between his lower body and Kate as soon as the bike comes to a stop. "Thank you again. Be safe yourself, please, Miss Beckett."

And we will just never mention this again, yes? Yes.

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[Accidental Visual] (the man who fell to earth)

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