Thread: //.ghost/ECHO::Murphy_Was_Right:// [ClockworkCadence x Ryees]

radcliffePLACE Eyes scanned the streets with a naturally-suspicious glare, the steel-grated hood of his cloak blacking the glint of his eyes in the dim, foggy street. .LAPLACE 's eyes were always searching like that, always suspicious. It kept him alive. Radcliffe was a long, winding street that snaked its way through the entirety of Norn, from the very north end where the city trailed off into badlands, to the south where the quarantine zone's walls severed the road's head. Those gates sat closed, now, lazily waiting in the way of the .WRATIH population within. Those walls wormed their way southward, hooking up a dozen miles out of sight and circling back around to the city's east border to line the edge of the entire southeastern quadrant of the city. .LAPLACE found himself at the north end, now, near the badlands, and near where he kept a small apartment for his stays in the area. The owner was long since dead, this district of the city nearly abandoned for its proximity to the denizens that lived within those arid, wild-plasm plains. And that was entirely fair, for most of those denizens would tryand succeedto kill you. .LAPLACE had spent the last minutes following a pair of mengoons, more accuratelythat had nicked the purses from a bar a few miles away. His irritation had not been spawned from a feeling of injustice or righteousness he had had his own eye on those purses. Their original owners looked loaded. The goons were having a very idle conversation, heading towards the badlands with no visible trepidation, which is why .LAPLACE had not made a move yet. His curiosity had gotten the better of him, causing him to pass by a long list of chances to cleanly and quietly disappear the men from the street in the interest of finding their destination. It was when the pair turned towards a small apartment building and started fishing for keys that .LAPLACE clicked his tongue exasperatedly, well and truly annoyed now. Not even going anywhere interesting. At least they're on my way home, not wasting my time. He tossed back his heavy cloak, revealing the submachine gun slung tight against his back. A quick pull loosened the strap and freed it for firing, and his feet moved softly against the cobblestone as he ghosted toward the men from behind. He took the travel time to produce a suppressor from his belt, screwing it quickly onto the barrel and then unsheathing his knife in an icepick grip. As he moved, his weapons lit up in a particulate green energy, like a light winter snow made from green pixels. The plasm expenditure left a rush of heat in .LAPLACE 's body, comfortably warming him in the stale, chilled night air. The scuff of his boots on the stone was quiet enough not to be heard by the tipsy men as they bantered back and fort, one jumbling with the keys in clumsy fingers. It was the other man that .LAPLACE came to first. A vicious slam sent the knife plunging into and through Goon One's chest from behind, cramming the steel through the musculature of the vagrant's chest far enough for the blade to poke out his front. His lung punctured and filling with blood, the scream that tried to come out was airy and silent before it turned wet and gurgling, goonly hands scrabbling at a throat that could not draw breath. Next to him, Goon Two stood shell-shocked, almost visibly short-circuiting. He would not be given time to reboot and act, though, as .LAPLACE shifted his feet and turned his kebab to face his still-alive-for-now friend. .LAPLACE twisted sharply, twice, quickly and efficiently drilling a sizable hole in the man before wrenching the knife out and swinging that arm around the man's neck to assure he stayed standing for just one more moment. He then shoved the suppressor of his gun into the hold made by the knife and squeezed a long burst. The first few bullets spread the hole, and the remaining six punched through his chest and into his friend's, peppering Goon Two's own chest with bullets and punching enough holes in his lungs to immediately silence any attempts he made to be a noisy, attention-attracting jerk. Goon One was deposited on the pavement and .LAPLACE stepped away for a moment, looking around him with the edges of a plasm draw perched in his mind. Seeing himself free and clear, the raider jerked on the strap that tugged the MP7 tight against his back, out of his way as he bent to the men. The purses he came for, he found, and some more besides, including the goons' own possessions. Nothing of note but a few hundred dollars in cash and city transit cards. Those were discarded .LAPLACE did not use city transit. It kept him alive. It was only a few minutes later that .LAPLACE drifted through the back alley between his apartment and the abandoned, nameless building next to it. The back door was the only working door he had found on the building, so the others had been barricaded and reinforced and trapped, this door being used as an entrance. Two separate keys unlocked the deadbolt and the handle. He pushed it forward, but only an inch or so. Two chains hung limp in the space of the door, and it was those he reached for. Above where each anchored on the wall, he slipped his fingers, pulling upwards on a set of wires attached to each. The ends of those chains fell away from the explosives mounted to the wall, and he finally opened the door. The locks were locked again, the explosives reset, and he made his way upstairs, then upstairs, then upstairs to the top floor. The ground floor was empty, devoid of any usable rooms. Floor two had three rooms, and was the pantry. Three was the armory, with a full six rooms that were habitable and secure. The top floor, with only one room, was where .LAPLACE lived. As he entered the room, .LAPLACE set about doffing his gear. The mask set into the cloak came away as a single piece, and he set it on a plate stand he used to stage it. The cloak and hood were attached to a light leather mantle underneath which took the whole airy, loose cloaking off his body in one piece and left him in just a pair of athletic pants, boots, and a military-grade kevlar vest, which was unfastened and staged on the floor in front of the hook that he stowed his mantle on. Finally he was out of his gear, and finally, Kirin stretched for the first time that day. Dark, red-brown hair cropped just long enough to touch his ears framed an otherwise friendly-face with eyes much too sharp to be human. Icy blue, those eyes reflected light in a way that made it look like he was trying to look everywhere at oncewhich, frequently, was a fair assumption. Tall-but-not-inconveniently so, he sunk to his natural six-foot-and-change height as he braced one foot against the back of his boots and pulled them off. He maintained his figure rigorously, athletic and powerful enough without being too big and burly so as to add weight and hinder his speed. An eerie scar looped the very base of his neck, a skin-tear scar from when a hanging was attempted on him for a situation he referred to as, Very complicated and not worth explaining. That scar bent and stretched as he moved his arms this way and that, trying to stretch the discomfort out of them. He was sore, exhausted, and starving, but a good deal wealthier. It had been a good haul, a good day. And now, it would be a good sleep, as his body ached for it. Discipline dictated that he spent fifteen minutes on calisthenics and light exercise, but it did not say that he could not do so while mawing on a hunk of beef jerky and sipping at a Mountain Dew. His PC he ignored, browsing and gaming completely out of his mind for the night. It was bedtime. He approached his desk, pulling the ball on the Newton's cradle to a practiced height and fixing his eyes on the grandfather clock just next to the desk as he released it. A minute passed. A second minute passed. A third, and the cradle had almost entirely stopped ticking away. It was then that Kirin waved a hand through the plasmatic energy that thickly coated the apartment, which had long been his atelier. One tick, blue tick, fuck tick, you tick, he repeated to himself, the same mantra he repeated every night. He watched the second hand on the clock spin backwards once, then twice, his perception launching back two minutes in the past. His eyes turned to the cradle. It clicked away, freshly pulled, to the eyes within his head, but shifting his vision, he could see it still and stationary. Satisfied, he drifted through the doorway into his bedroom, closing it behind him and locking the two deadbolts and the knob. He fell into bed on top of the covers, asleep within microseconds of touching the bed.