niteo_logs | We believe that electricity exists, because the electric company keeps sending us bills for it

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We believe that electricity exists, because the electric company keeps sending us bills for it

Characters: Noriko, the Joker
When: April 9th
Where: 72nd and Zamka, the Joker's hideout
Rating: PG-13 to be safe, TBD
Summary: Noriko made a deal with the Joker

This was stupid. She hadn't done something so reckless in- well...maybe not that long actually. But still, if someone on her team had tried to pull this she wouldn't have let them hear the end of it. Going off into the middle of no where to meet a strange man, that was pretty much rule number one on the list of things young woman shouldn't do.

But if should could get access to a computer then maybe she could get a message back home. Forge could send messages through her gauntlets, but Nori didn't have a clue in high hell how he managed that. If he couldn't get something off her PDA surely they would be able to find something she put on the net. Assuming she could get on the net. Assuming this guy kept his word.

It was kind of like looking for the drug dealers back in New York, before the Xavier Institute took her in and when she didn't know the city well yet. She had to watch her back and the street signs all at the same time.

She rubbed her arms through her jacket. Deli. Deli deli deli. It had to be here somewhere. ...Was that it? She approached what she hoped was the right building, looking about before pulling open the door. A bell chimed overhead and drew her gaze. Cute, a bell.

"Hello?"

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Reckless, indeed.

The last thing Noriko would see for a few hours was a blur of purple and that stony white face, with its jet-black eyesockets and blood-red grin.

While Nori was ditracted by the bell's chime, the Joker swung out, hanging from the side of the door-frame. He stuck her in the gut with a syringe, emptying it in an instant. And the drug worked instantly; Nori would drop to the ground, paralyzed and unconscious. M99, working to ail what cures you.

The Joker spent a few seconds watching Nori to be sure she was, in fact, unconscious before licking his lips, leaning down, and, with a grunt, hoisting her over his shoulder. Then, cursing his injured knee, he hauled her back to the outpost. Not the smoothest way to get a girl, of course, but it worked. He'd even spent the time to get all gussied up for his lunch date; his facepaint was fresh, and his clothes, oddly enough, were clean- or, at least, as clean as one could manage in Nesreca.

She would awaken a while later in a dark room. The only available light was a kerosene lamp sitting on a small crare beside a closed door. The Joker was leaning against the door, arms folded. At her stirrings, he grinned.

"Morning, sunshine."

Nori's eyes flickered with a brief electric blue crackle, narrowing in annoyance towards the voice, giving a small groan and bringing a hand up to her head, rubbing at her temple, the metal cool against her skin.

"What the fuck?," she muttered, then gave the man a once over, arching an eyebrow, "...Okay, are you like a rapist clown...'cause that's like...a level of creepy I have not yet experienced."

At the spark of lightning from her eyes, the Joker popped to his feet. There came a clicking noise as he cocked the pistol he was holding. He waggled the gun in her general direction.

"...huh."

Either he was still suffering from his head-trip from a few days earlier or he was right: the others in the apartments weren't human. He wondered momentarily how alien biology might interact with the drug he gave her before immediately dismissing it and circling around her.

"I've said it before, I don't have time for that sort of thing," he said with a chuckle. "I can make some, though, if you really want it."

She blinked calmly at the gun, watching him with careful eyes, which seemed to have returned to their natural brown. She lowered her hand, fingers curling trying to gauge whether or not she could hit him with a blast before he could pull the trigger. Probably not a good idea. Even if she did, the shock might make his muscles spasm and if that trigger finger slipped she was done.

Her head twisted to follow him, making a face. "I'd rather not. So what's the deal then? Why the drugging, and the gun and what have you?"

"Well," he started, glancing up at the ceiling as though that's where he'd find the answer. "I wasn't about to let you know where I live just so you could catch up on Facebook. A man needs his privacy." He smiled and tapped the barrel of the gun against his temple. "Remember?"

He trained the gun back on her and looked her up and down. The hardware on her arms wasn't exactly a sensible fashion statement, but neither was purple pinstripe.

"The generator's over there. Get that thing spinning and we have ourselves a working computer."

"You know, a blindfold would have achieved the same thing," she pointed out, but she wasn't really going to argue with the nut job clown with a gun. She pushed herself to her feet, pursing her lips and dusting off her hands on her pants. "I take it the gun means I'm not going to get my turn with it, hmm?" she asked, brushing her hair back and heading towards the generator.

Jeez, this thing was a mess. She crouched, looking it over with a frown. "Tools?" she asked, looking back.

Another chuckle came at Nori's blindfold suggestion. The thought of convincing her to put a blindfold on followed by dragging her through Nesreca by the hand was pretty rich. It was something akin to slipping roofies into a woman's drink while she watched and then asking her to drink it.

"Oh, come on. What kind of person do you think I am? We made a deal, I gave you my word. The gun is just... lightning insurance."

He picked up the lamp and brought it closer to where she was before waving it at the boxes in the corner. "Parts and tools are in that box. Oil and gas cans are in the other."

Nori shrugged at his laughter. She'd done stupider things during her times on the streets. A person will do almost anything if they're desperate enough. "I'd rather that then be drugged," she said. She didn't need any of that stuff in her system again.

"It's not lightning," she murmured absently, wandering over to the box of tools, half hoisting half dragging it closer to the generator before riffling through it the sound of metal on metal with each tool she picked up and dismissed. She back twisting at a bolt, frowning, and stopping to take off her gauntlets. "Don't touch," she said with a brief glare before turning back to her bolt, able to grip the tools better with bare skin.

His eyebrows and shoulders went up in a 'who, me?!' expression. He did eyeball the gauntlets, giving some thought to how a pair of metal gloves made electricity come out of somebody's eyes.

He kept the gun on her as she worked, and kept quiet if she didn't initiate any conversation. Patience wasn't one of his virtues, but this one was dangerous. Or, at least, he was going to assume that until she was out of his hair.

She got the rusty bolts off one by one, glancing back at him with a frown every now and then. It was rather unnerving to have that gun trained on her. She opened the generator up, letting the metal door happen to fall in a way that blocked most of what she was doing inside. She didn't trust this guy to his word, and if was going to drug her and point a damn gun at her she wasn't fixing this thing properly if she could help it. She did some work, nothing that would last, and then carefully gave it a shot of electricity from her palm, aiming to keep her deceit hidden. She withdrew her hand, reaching to retrieve her gauntlets and the generator hummed and gurgled back to life.

When the generator came on, electricity filled the abandoned station. The room filled with flickering fluorescent lights; one of the fluorescent bars in the corner exploded, raining glass down and making the Joker smile, but apart from that, everything went on without a hitch.

The Joker did a little jig in excitement. Now he had food, water, electricity, drugs, and, most importantly, explosives. It made him feel generous.

"Good work. Now get your little gloves back on and we'll go upstairs."

No telling how long the power supply would last, so he wanted to move quickly. She would probably be just as happy to get out of there as soon as possible, herself.

Nori flinched at the light exploding, more a wince of guilt then of fear, having caused more then her fair share of lights to burst like that. This one wasn't her though, and a faint colour stained her cheeks and she scowled, clipping the gauntlets back on and standing.

She arched an eyebrow at his jig, lips twisting in confusion. "Lead on, I don't know where I am," she said, gesturing to him.

The Joker waggled the gun at her again, indicating that she would go out the door first. He wasn't about to give his back to her- whether she was an alien, had magic powers, or had really bad taste in handwear, she was a danger. People at gunpoint had a funny habit of turning on you.

"Out the door, up the stairwell, take a left turn. Second door on the right. Get walking."

She glared for a moment before doing as he said. She hated guns. Why did they not train for more guns? Giant robots, aliens and terrorist mutants she had down pat. Guns were unpredictable. And her powers weren't suited to stopping them.

At the very least going first afforded her the ability to cast her eyes about, taking in what she could along the way. It could be useful information. She passed through the door, crossing her arms looking back to him.

The abandoned outpost wasn't massive, but it was big, to say the least. If Nori had been given the chance to see it from the outside, it would be clear that most of the outpost was underground. The building on the surface was more of an entryway than anything else; the real facility was downstairs. There weren't any signs to indicate what the place had been used for, but the spasming fluorescent light revealed how its inhabitants had ended up. Grease for the walls.

He followed her up the stairs and moved her along. Most of the doors were closed, and the ones that weren't were pitch-black. The Joker himself hadn't done much exploring, and there was a lot of ground to cover. Getting electricity was the first step.

"There. That room," he said, motioning at one of the open doors with this pistol. He followed behind her just beyond arm's, or leg's, reach. "You got ten minutes."

She blinked at him a moment, seeming surprised. He was going to keep up is end? He was creepy, and probably insane, but kept promises. Good to know.

She opened the door, and there it was- the computer. She could have died, that was the happiest thing she'd seen since she'd been dropped into this place, even the gun couldn't keep the smile from her face at seeing it.

"You're creepy, but honest, I'll give you that."

The Joker said nothing, but only wiggled the gun at the computer, impatiently.

This was the room that the PDA had recorded before he jumped to shut it off. There was still MRE packaging and a couple of empty water bottles on the floor and around the desk. There was also a bottle of aspirin sitting beside the monitor. Opposite from the computer there was a bed, unmade, with military linens and a green wool blanket on it.

In the corner of the room there was a box of dynamite, grenades, some C4, and a few ammunition cans. There was also a small crate full of wires and odds and ends, which was, ostensibly, a pile of bomb parts.

The electric light flooded out the flame of the lamp that sat on top of the CPU. The monitor was showing a boot-up screen. Looked like Windows 98.

Noriko moved to the computer, though as she waited for it to boot up her eyes kept drifting back to the corner. She was drawn back to the day Stryker had blown up the bus of students, and she looked back to the screen uncomfortably.

Finally the screen finished loading, and she clicked about fairly quickly. She didn't have much time to spare. She couldn't get the internet to connect, whether it simply wasn't set up or wasn't working all together she didn't know, and she swore under her breath, pulling up a word document instead. Forge was smart. He could figure it out.

Forge,

Dunno how I got here. You better be looking for me. I'm fine for now, but you gotta get me home. They say this place is called Nesreca. It's another world or something, I dunno how it works, maybe like the whole Limbo thing? No one's heard of the X-men, and there's this whole war thing going on I really don't want to get caught up in.

I have a PDA thing. You need to find a way to contact me.

Tell the team I'm fine, and make sure they keep training.

Surge

She saved the message to the desktop under the heading 'FORGE', glancing down at the clock. Ten minutes was up.

The Joker was silent for the duration. He had occupied himself by picking up one of the half-eaten MRE packs and sitting on the bed, eating. As her time came to an end, there was a creak from the bed. Then the sound of the gun clicking as he decocked it.

He reared back, and in just enough time for her to turn around to see what he was doing, he pistol-whipped her across the head with the handle of the gun. And he was stronger than he looked- strong enough to knock her out, and out of the chair, with the one well-placed blow.

As he did before, he stood over her for a little while. The real debate was whether it would be better to kill her now or haul her ass back outside. Finally, with a, sigh of irritation, he holstered the pistol and stooped down.

Nori would come to a while later to find that he had stuffed her in a dumpster somewhere in Nesreca. Aside from being in the trash, two other things were off. One, she was missing her gauntlets. Two, there was a note pinned to her chest with a creepy smiley face on it.

It said, 'Smile!'

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We believe that electricity exists, because the electric company keeps sending us bills for it

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