everything's on fire

[krasnaya_vdova]

who: Everyone!
what: The residential building is on fire
when: ~2am, August 23rd
where: The Residential building
warnings: Fire, destruction of property, injury, general warnings for crisis situations



It's a reasonably quiet night, pleasantly dry with a slight breeze. Almost nice, for those that enjoy the hours after midnight long before dawn starts to creep on the horizon. Right until it isn't, when the air changes, and there's the scent of heat that promises smoke. In most places it starts with a flash of blue light that arcs from floor to floor as energy pulses through the building, and there's a crack of sound that follows. The power dies for a moment, and if you're one of the unlucky ones, the light that follows is a literal spark in the dark, burning to life in bright orange-red, yielding heat and smoke and trouble. The energy surge doesn't just hit the lights, but sparked flames that burst to life, and they catch quickly, spreading.

The worst of it starts on the ninth floor, where the smoke and the beginning of heat starts moments before the surge. The fire spreads faster there, people starting to startle awake and realize what's happening as the flames crackle. Eventually there's an announcement on the Network, both alerting people to what's happening and trying to organize both those that are willing to help and those that need it.

Some areas are untouched, while others are ravaged badly, reduced to ashes and crumbling ceilings, so watch your step. There's chaos, but through it there's people doing what they can to help each other, and the official fire services show up to help control the blaze. After that, it's just a matter of repairing the damage that's been done, rebuilding and putting things back together, seeing what's been lost and what was saved.

Even later, people start putting the pieces together, and there's the official investigation into what might have caused a fire like that in the first place.


[ooc: As promised, the residential building is on fire! OOC plotting post is here if anyone wants to work out some last minute plans before diving in. Plotting post also includes the relevant details. Elsewise, just top level and mingle. Try not to get burned too badly. :) Good luck!]

Comments

Keith | OTA

[tempredmental]

Floor 2

Keith wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper, especially lately. So, even with seven floors between them, the slight rumble from above was all it really took to rouse him. He opened his eyes, not really moving, wondering if someone had just bumped his bed as they walked past to the bathroom or something, but there wasn't any movement in his area of the floor. He sighed a little, intending on rolling over and attempting to go back to sleep when strange blue arcs made their way around the room, lighting it up in a momentary flash.

Then they were gone.

He frowned and sat up now, wondering what that had been, when his communicator buzzed. He looked at it.

"Quiznak." He jumped up and grabbed his Paladin armor. He was used to pulling it on fast now, and, as he did, he started working to wake other people on Floor 2.

"HEY! Get up! There's a fire upstairs! We need to get out!"

=====

Rescues!

One good thing about Paladin armor was that it was pretty resistant to heat and flames. He'd done this before when Sendak and his second in command set fire to the Arusian village to draw the Paladins away from the Castle of Lions in an attempt to take it over. Activating the facemask, he charged up the steps to start waking people up and getting them out, helping anyone he could along the way.

He was also escorting people out, or, as he got to floors that were burning, taking them out through windows if needed as the jetpacks on the back of his armor were good for helping him land easily from high jumps, even carrying someone else. Here was hoping his 'passengers' didn't mind heights!

=====

Rescued?

Okay, so Keith was impulsive, and often jumped into things without thinking when he was trying hard to do the right thing. He often disregarded his own safety when attempting to ensure the safety of others. Oops.

On a particularly burned up level, he wasn't paying attention and the ceiling came down on top of him. The armor protected him from any major injuries, but he was definitely pinned and was going to need some help getting out.

=====

Aftermath

A few bumps and bruises later, as well as a sore and potentially sprained ankle from the caved in ceiling, and Keith was basically stuck outside waiting to see who he knew had made it out. He had pulled off his helmet, the surface of his armor covered in soot and smoke, and looked pretty tired. Thankfully, the helmet had kept him from breathing in any smoke. He was pretty sure he'd seen Shiro at a few points, as they both had the lighting on their armor, so it would have been easy to spot each other, even in the smoke and darkness, but he was limping around the crowd looking for him now to make sure he was out of the building completely. It seemed like most everyone was out, so there was no reason to go back in, right?

Rescues! Beware Falling Marinettes

[de_evilise]

Marinette had refused to flee the building immediately - she insisted on getting the cloth and dolls she'd been working on because she did NOT want to redo all that work all over again. She was still moving quickly, stuffing what she could into her backpack as she shifted her weight from the rising temperature as the fire got closer. Once she was ready, she darted over to the door, only to see the fire had already reached her floor. "No!"

Welp, there was only one other way out. She ran over to the balcony, peering down. Sure, she was ONLY on the tenth floor. Climbing down was a STELLAR idea and.. yet that was exactly what she planned on doing. After grabbing a few bedsheets from her bed, that is, tying them as quickly as she could to the balcony. "Here goes.." She tied the sheet to the railing and climbed over the balcony, starting to climb down.

Her cloth tying skills needed work though, because by the time she got to the eighth floor, it started to loosen. She glanced up just as it gave way, and as she started to fall, she shrieked, automatically grabbing hold of the ledge, her body hitting the building heavily. "GGuh!" And just her luck, the ledge just so happened to break away under her hands and she was falling again. "TI--!" WAH, she's gonna be street pizza'd before while she was still in her prime!

oh nooooo!

[tempredmental]

That was another person out. Keith made sure to get the most recent person he had helped over to where they were gathering people that needed care and was making his way back to the building when he heard someone screaming above. He looked up and spotted someone falling from a balcony. The jetpacks on the back of his armor shifted out and came to life as he jumped, propelling him upwards. He had to act fast because, while it was high, the tenth floor wasn't that high. Dodging a falling bedsheet (what?), he slowed just before meeting up with her, and then reached out to first slow her fall before actually fully catching her. If he'd caught her on his way up while she was still coming down at full speed, it would have just hurt them both a lot more.

"Gotcha! Hang on!" He leveled them out and started a slow drop to the ground. "Are you oka-? Marinette?"

Her Hero~! XD

[de_evilise]

Falling from buildings was, sadly, not new to Marinette - but she wasn't Ladybug this time. She had panicked initially when she started to fall, the first thought was that she was going to die, worse, in a strange world, her parents and friends would never know what happened to her, and all because she didn't tie the damn sheet tight enough! Or maybe it was something else that made it give - in any case..

Street pizza was thankfully not in the cards for her, because the next thing she knew, she wasn't falling quite so quickly. And in fact, it felt like someone had caught her - a familiar sounding someone. Her heart was beating a mile a minute from the scare, but she managed to look up, stunned. "K.. Keith?" She let out a long breath, "..O.. oh my god, am I glad to see you." ... wait, was he flying?

Aww!

[tempredmental]

Keith pulled her close so she wasn't dangling awkwardly from his grip, wrapping his arms around her waist. She'd be able to see the jetpacks on the back of his suit now.

"What were you doing? How'd you end up falling out of the building?" he asked.

Hee :D

[de_evilise]

Whoah. That was a little closer than she was expecting, but you know what, now was definitely not the time to get awkward about ... him having his arms around her like that. In fact, it made sense, since he didn't want to drop her, so she reached up to help take some of the burden off his arms by putting one of hers around him to hold on.

Seeing the jet packs, a part of her went 'oh yeeeeeeeeah'. Pilot. They would have something like that right? ... maybe? ... no no, still, not the right place or time to contemplate that kind of thing. She glanced down to the ground curiously, and then back to Keith, "Wh.. o-oh. Uh, well..." She glanced up towards the balcony she had fallen from. "It was going to be tricky getting down the stairs with the fire, so I tried...climbing out that way." She pointed with her free hand at the bit of bedsheet still tied to the balcony. "It would have worked if the knot didn't come undone." Darn thing. Also she has no guarantee it would have worked.

[tempredmental]

Keith looked up as well, a dubious expression on his face.

"A single bed sheet?" Nope. It would have been too short. "That was pretty risky." Thanks, captain obvious...

If Marinette were to take a really good look, she'd see that his "armor" was actually a lot like some hard shell pieces on top of a spacesuit. Jetpacks where useful on spacesuits.

He considered the floor where the sheet had been tied, and yeah. She had been right above where it looked like the fire was concentrated. She probably hadn't had muchtime to get out.

[de_evilise]

Marinette grinned awkwardly, able to laugh at her own carelessness now that she wasn't going to get squished on the ground. "Well, there was more to it than there," she explained, "I think the rest of it fell somewhere down there...I didn't really have a lot of time to think about it."

She smiled a little, "I mean, I knew the risk, but -- well I'm just glad you were nearby or I probably wouldn't be having this conversation with you." She grimaced a little. And yet she'd likely make the same choice if this happened again.

She does indeed take another look at the jetpacks on his armor -- no, not armor. Now that she had a decent look at what he was wearing ...

[tempredmental]

A decent look will show her that it was definitely some sort of armor, lightweight and durable, but that he had a soft jumpsuit on underneath. There were some cyan colored lights in various places, including the helmet, and areas that needed freedom of movement were where the jumpsuit was exposed, like the lower torso, shoulders, hips, elbows, knees...

He gave her a small smirk.

"I think I dodged part of it on my way up to catch you," he said teasingly. He honestly was glad he'd been there, too. The idea of her falling like that bothered him. He landed carefully, making sure she was settled on the ground before letting go of her waist. Once on the ground, the jetpacks actually dropped almost completely flat against the back of the chest piece.

"You okay?"

d.va to the rescue!

[bunnyhopped]

Hana had been doing a sweep around the outside of that level precisely because it was particularly burned up; she wanted to make sure she'd done everything that they could to get people out of there. The reinforced canopy of her mech made it easier to see through smoke and flames, although it didn't really help that the way it was designed, her arms were still exposed. She was really, really glad she decided not to skip out on suiting up before going to get her mech, because trying to do everything she had been – flying around, extracting people from the windows, occasionally going in to reinforce something that was falling so someone could make their evacuation – would have been a hell of a lot dicier if she was piloting her mech in, basically, her pajamas.

And speaking of things falling, she heard the sound of crumbling and crackling and she managed to turn her mech around just in time to see the ceiling cave in and—

Oh, shit. There's someone in there.

"Hang on!" She called it out over the comm of her mech, so that whoever was under, if they were still conscious, could hear. "I'll get you out of there!"

Chalk it up to the size of her mech, or maybe the building's ceilings were just conveniently high, but Hana was able to get onto the floors as she had been the whole night through large balcony doors. In this case, however, there was already a chunk of all missing from the facade, and she flew in through there, moving her mech through fire and smoke. She kept her mech's boosters going, hovering above the floor, not about to risk landing on the flooring and causing a cave-in, herself.

She positioned her mech carefully, moving her arms and the joysticks to get the mech's arms underneath the biggest piece of debris and trying to lift it out of the way. While it wasn't Hana herself doing the lifting, she could still feel the resistance of weight against her controls.

"Ugh," she grunted, but at least there was starting to be a little bit of give. That was when she could start to see who exactly it was underneath.

"Keith!?"

woohoo!!

[tempredmental]

Keith heard the shout, and recognized it as coming from an external speaker on something. Judging by the noise that followed, it was some sort of mechanical unit. The only one Keith knew of was Hana's down in the garage under the building. Could she fit it up here?

His question was answered when the felt the weight of the beam that had pinned his leg lift slightly. He shifted, then summoned his bayard, activating the blade to cut away other debris that was lighter and still in the way. He heard her shout his name as she moved the bean far enough for them to see each other.

"Hana! Thanks!" he called. Thankfully, because of the armor, the lighter debris hadn't really injured him beyond a few bumps and bruises where he didn't have the hard covering protecting him. But the force from that beam had twisted his ankle pretty bad when it fell on him. He was able to move, though, and got himself out from underneath so she could release it. "I'm clear!" he yelled, letting her know he was out of the way.

[bunnyhopped]

She barely fit up here, and she had to be extremely careful with how she moved her mech; luckily she was an incredibly proficient pilot even if she hadn't been one for very long. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bayard materialize and then turn into a sword which— okay, that was pretty cool and she wondered what exactly it was, but it also wasn't the time for it, not when she was trying to hold up a chunk of fallen ceiling.

Not for much longer at least, because when she heard Keith give her the all-clear, she felt a little relieved.

"Okay, I'm letting go!" And the debris was dropped. Now that he was out of the pile, the next matter would be getting out of the building. She pivoted in her mech to face him.

"Are you hurt badly? There's support down in the streets, I'm sure someone can help you with any injuries."

[tempredmental]

Keith seriously considered the stairs, but they were like 8 floors up. Hobbling that far down the stairs when they could potentially be rickety this close to the fire was not exactly top of the list of things he wanted to do at the moment. Jumping from this high wouldn't be great either. He had the jetpacks to slow himself down, but he'd still need to land, and that would probably hurt. No, it would definitely hurt. He sighed.

"I'll need a ride down," he admitted. "Got a spot I can hold on to on that thing?"

[bunnyhopped]

There was something in the way he stood, or maybe she was imagining it, but she didn't think he needed to push himself more than he needed to under the current circumstances. She moved her arms down and closer together, and the mech's arms followed the same motions.

"Probably safest if I just carry you."

You know, like, princess style.

[tempredmental]

Keith studied the arms for a moment. That looked... probably worse than if he just held on somewhere. Those were guns... not hands. His arms were fine, so he wouldn't have a problem just holding on. Still, though... arguing about it was just going to delay her from getting to someone else that might need help getting out.

"As long as I'm not going slide off half-way down," he grumbled, attempting to find some handholds so he didn't do just that...

[bunnyhopped]

Look, they were cannons, but he was going to be on top of them, okay, so his chances of getting accidentally shot or something were pretty low. Besides, the alternative was for him to ride on top and hold onto one of the "bunny ears," but Hana didn't have the room to maneuver so that he could get on top to do that easily enough without major effort.

"You're not!" she said it a bit defensively. Gosh, just trust her. "It'll be a smooth ride all the way down, okay? Jeez."

She waited for him to get settled and secured; there were plenty of little nooks and for him to hold onto, at least, or if he really wanted to he could hold onto Hana's actual arms.

"All good?"

[tempredmental]

Keith frowned at her, but managed to find said handholds, and gripped on tight. He wasn't worried about getting shot, though should he be? Just how easy was it for her to shoot those things, anyway? But, still, he hung on and nodded when she asked if he was ready.

"Yeah... let's go."

Aftermath

[lionunchained]

Shiro had been worried about Keith initially not having seen him immediately, but finally at some point during the ordeal, he'd spotted the lights on Keith's armor, knowing that he was there and in his armor, which would keep him safe but he had lost track of where he was in all the confusion.

Now that there was nothing else for them to do, Shiro had taken off his helmet, armor covered a faint gray tinge because of the ash, looking for Keith.

Finally he spotted the light of Keith's armor between the people in the crowd.

"Keith!"

He had to fight his way through the crowd a bit, but finally made it over. "Are you alright?"

[tempredmental]

Keith heard his name, knowing the voice to be the exact person he'd been trying to find in the crowd. One would think their armor would be easy to spot among other people, but... not as much as he originally thought. Either way, they'd found each other now, and he turned towards the voice, looking relieved to see Shiro coming his way.

"Shiro..." He let out a breath and took a few steps towards him, still limping a bit. "I'm okay... just a bit banged up. You?"

[lionunchained]

"A bit? You're limping." He took Keith's arm when he walked closer to him to brace him. He looked really beat up. Apparently he'd had it easy compared to Keith.

"I'm fine. A little dirty, but other than that."

But he was relieved. The other paladin was alive and while beaten up, nothing that wouldn't heal. He couldn't help himself and pulled Keith into a quick hug. He had been worried okay. Let him have that.

After a moment, he stepped back.

"We are looking for a new place to live."

[tempredmental]

Keith looked a bit sheepish. Yeah... he was limping. Oops? He was glad Shiro was okay, though, and let himself get pulled into the hug, putting his arms up and around his friend in return. That had been too close, and kind of scary. But, he was glad they'd gotten the same idea and made it out.

He looked up at Shiro as the Black Paladin stepped back. He managed a small chuckle.

"Yeah. Sounds like a good idea."

It had been something on the table before, but now, he could definitely agree with the renewed urgency. Extra privacy was one thing, but avoiding getting stuck in a massive fire again was a little more important.

[lionunchained]

Shiro had been probably more afraid for Keith at that point, not really worrying about himself. Considering he had been the crazy person who had gone back into the burning building to save people, but from the looks of it, Keith had done the same thing.

Considering how precarious their living was in a building fifteen stories tall and packed to the brim with people? Yeah, Shiro didn't trust it. This could easily happen again and he didn't want to risk it.

"Alright. Start thinking if there is anything we should have in a place. It may take a few days to scope something out. Do you need to sit?"

Completely different tangent, but Keith was limping.

[tempredmental]

"Yeah... it probably will. I'm not sure what we've got around the city, or if we'd need to go clear one of the overgrown areas," he said. "Though, I'm not sure... I mean, how much space would we really need unless the others show up." After all, if Allura had been there, then that could mean the others could show up, too, right?

He furrowed his brow a little and then nodded.

"I probably should," he said. "The EMTs over there didn't think it was broken, but they did say to be careful." Which he promptly disregarded in favor of trying to spot Shiro and anyone else he knew that might have been in the building.

[lionunchained]

"That is true we'll need more space if the others show up, but we won't need that much space until then. We could look at an apartment since it really is just us. We can worry about more people showing up if it happens."

No point in paying for extra space what they don't need.

"And walking around through a crowded area is being careful?" Yes, he knew Keith all too well and was not surprised that Keith had completely disregarded it to try and find him. "Let's find somewhere you can sit."

[tempredmental]

Keith nodded. That sounded like a good idea.

And, yeah... he looked a little guilty...

"I wasn't pushing it..." Mostly. "I just wanted to make sure people got out okay." But, he wasn't adverse to the idea of sitting down for a bit now. There were still some others he wanted to find, but he could definitely feel that he needed the break.