I mean, I did do more writing than just this; just, nothing that's ready to be seen yet is all. So that's two good newses to only one bad news. Yee
number 12
Then, instead of driving toward the exit ramp, he drove inward, toward the building. Up the ramp, bursting through the loading door, and into the kitchens. Crashing through the racks and movable counters, bursting through the doors of that into the dining hall. People scrambled this way and that as he plowed through. Unless the guards after him were to hop onto vehicles of their own and chase recklessly behind him, he was safe from them.
Of course, this didn't rule out having supernatural forces sicced on him... just because he'd be able to deal with those, didn't mean that it would be a picnic, or something he'd very much care for. He'd survive it, but he couldn't afford the wasted time- by the time he'd circumvent the attack, it would quite possibly be too late to escape.
Moone was now in a dining hall adjacent to the hall where the speakers had addressed everyone; there were tables set up all prettily of course. He plowed the car right through them. Security guards on jetpacks flew behind him, shooting magic little pew-pew bullets at the tires of the car, attempting to slow his vehicle down. But the tires were reinforced, and pew-pew bullets don't have the right ricochet-to-stopping power ratio to pull off such a feat on a good day, doing it the proper way by aiming at the ground and having the bullets bounce up into the cabby of the car. Because pew-pew bullets are lasers, and they were trying to bounce lasers off of the matte surface of the industrial carpeting.
Moone crashed the vehicle into the next room over, into the auditorium. Through the rows of seats; they popped like easter eggs under his tires; many were scraped along underneath the car chassis. The auditorium was two-tiered and raked, and as he proceeded he drove onto the balcony, the ground floor of the building. Driving vertically through the seats posed no problem, but in order to get to a double-door wide enough to fit the vehicle again, he would have to run parallel to the rows of seats; the seats wouldn't just flatten like they had, but just kind of slide underneath the car and knock things up a bit. That wouldn't have been a problem if he'd been able to drive mostly perpendicularly through the seats, at a slight angle to aim for the center door frame, but the center portion was a balcony, and the raked area up to the second floor was only on the edges of the hall, where he had to drive straight. "This is also stupid." Moone was very astute. The most stupid part was that somehow everything was working.
Moone crashed through a single-wide door straight ahead of him, only by enough to poke through a little bit of his vehicle's nose. This was enough to maneuver with, however; using the edge of the doorframe as a pivot point, Moone rotated the car around to the wide walkway area fully behind the rows of seats, and drove backwards to the center of the room, crashing backwards through the center double doors. Doing that required a lot of momentum which Moone didn't have, as he had to turn at the last second in order to crash the car into the double doors in the first place. There was a steel door jamb in between the two doors, which only partially came undone.
Moone put the car into drive, drove forward a little, put her back into reverse, and slammed the car backwards again. The doors were now completely off, and the jamb in the middle loosened some more, concrete dust showering down from where it was being pulled away from the upper area of wall. He performed the maneuver one more time, but stopped; he was doing just as much damage to the car itself as he was to the jambing. The back window had shattered inward, scattering square bits of safety glass all over the back area.
It reminded Moone of someone getting derezzed in the movie Tron. It had been ten years since that movie had come out; when were they going to make a sequel already; Moone thought they probably never would; after all, he was the only person he knew who'd even heard of it, alright that's probably a bit of an over exaggeration. Moone's thoughts were spiraling out of control again; he tried anchoring himself in the present moment. Focus on something going on here and now, like the jetpack guys swarming in front of the car.
Oh well. Moone had gotten as far as he'd planned to anyway. In the car, at least. He unbuckled his seatbelt, squoze between the driver's and passenger's seats, clambered over the back seats and into the Tron area. Through the broken window and unhinged doorless doorway, Moone could see the agents surrounding the back of the car as well, guns at the ready but holding fire. That was also fine. Moone reached at the safety-glass-covered tarp and flicked it away. It was still there, of course.
The reason why Moone had chosen this vehicle in particular, out of all the other identical SUVs he could carjack, was because it still had a motorbike in the area behind the backseat.
Moone started the bike up, and launched it out of the back of the car, kicking the back hatch open, knocking the last of the door post loose and sending it clattering into the attack pattern the guard squadron was trying to form. The motorcycle with Moone on it came right after, sending more security agents scrambling. Moone did a wheelie, and peeled away toward the stairs. Apparently receiving the order, the guards started open firing behind him.
The motorcycle still had the shield, of course. Their non-magic, non-pew pew bullets pattered off like raindrops against a windowpane. Harmless to Moone, at least. To those on the outside of the bubble, they were still ricocheting bullets, and not a good time.
There was a lull in the sound of gunfire as the guards switched over to magic-infused bullets. Holy water, silver. Whatever. Magic bullets going against magic shields. It was sort of a game of rock-paper-scissors, as no object was immovable and no force irresistible; the magics would just have to find a way to work around each other. It was a perfect coup: magic bullets were usually used against magical targets because they'd be able to counteract shields, but Moone with his boon, going against magic bullets he would manage a way to, just not be in their trajectory.
Moone weaved between the agents, laughing his head off as bullets whizzed by mere centimeters away. He worked his way to the staircase, the elevator, as the agents flanked off to one side so that nobody would get hit in crossfire. The constant struggle- he had to be serious, but him being serious wouldn't make his magical boon work any better, would it? He could at least put his head into it, if not his heart...
Alright, so what would they be doing, if they couldn't shoot him? Probably switch over to normal bullets, and attempt to separate him from his shield. Then they could shoot the heck out of him just fine. Lovely thought.
Moone drove the bike up the stairwell, as the elevator ascended next to him. It was an even bumpier, even steeper ride than flattening those seats back in the auditorium with his SUV, but Moone was still having a blast.
into the last place they'd expect him to go in a vehicle- into the freight elevator.
There were ways to shut the elevator down externally, emergency measures and things- or there would have been, if not for the master key. Taken from a magical hotel room, if Lovecraft was to be believed. Overriding any external force on the elevator. Short of them cutting the cables, they couldn't stop him from going to whatever floor he wanted to- but they could be waiting for him when he got there. That would have been the easiest solution. And they'd be waiting for him with real guns and real bullets... So it was time to play a little game of Find the Lady.
Moone had seen a game of three-card monte on the streets of Cairo once, when he was tracking down, in the hopes of recruiting him as an asset, an office clerk with a weakness for the sauce working in a were-jaguar court. Moone could no longer remember if they were successful or not in turning the asset, but there was that scene very clearly in his mind from the first afternoon in the city, touring the town while waiting for their base of operations to finish being set up. On the street corner, flipping three sharply creased playing cards, was a con artist, pattering in rapid Arabic. Which one is the queen, find the queen, it's not this one. Moone's supernatural teammates had been totally suckered in by the sleight-of-hand trick, while he himself had seen perfectly through it; not growing up in a magic world he was more used to seeing logical explanations of things, rather than explaining everything as magic or forces he couldn't understand. This tendency was not always a benefit, but he hoped to pull the same sleight-of-hand stunt here that the street con artist had pulled back in the city.
Moone mashed three buttons: 6, 7, and 10. They would be scrambling to monitor which floors the elevators would be stopping at- meanwhile, agents would be sent to converge on the sixth floor, to rush the elevator when the doors opened there.
It would look like floors 6 and 7 were red herrings, Moone attempting to escape to the roof via the 10th floor roof access, but in fact floor 10 was the true misdirection. Moone knew what he was doing. Hopefully his stunt with the car had bought him enough time, and the guards stationed at the sixth and seventh floors just in case wouldn't be in place yet; hopefully he'd successfully put them off-guard that he'd been heading for an elevator of all things the whole time.
The elevator continued upward to the tenth floor, which had rooftop access- further agents would be converging there, to halt his wingsuit-assisted escape off of the roof. Moone ripped off the last remnants of that suit now, and dropped it down the shaft.
Of course, he had a pristine tuxedo on underneath.
The seventh floor. The portal room.
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