Sunday, October 27, 2013

Arrival: Making Friends Nico-Style

They return to Bob’s Home with plenty of the walking wounded and Jack rushes off to fetch the ambulance as some need a lot more help than can be given at Bob's Home. Nico uses her first aid on them and then tries to do a deal with Bob.

She figures she should get to keep the amulet because of all her good works about the place. Wouldn’t he want to keep someone like her around? He states that her shooting monsters won’t keep him from getting possessed. So it turns out that he wants to keep the amulet, after all.

They then get on to discussing Baccarti. She’s keen on killing him but he reveals that Baccarti’s host used to be a pal of his and that the only thing keeping him going is the little glimpses of his old pal in Baccarti’s eyes now and again. If she can exorcise Baccarti and keep his friend alive, then sure, she can take the amulet and remove the demon but otherwise if she touches him he will hire mercenaries to hunt her down and kill her. She's rather put out by this but she hands over the amulet with a few rough words and heads back to Warehouse 13, leaving Bob's Home in the hands of Gruber's underlings.

Once she reaches Warehouse 13, she soon spots the cowboy who had headed out before her. She gets McCormack (the cowboy) to meet her outside in a dark alley and accuses him of being possessed, telling him her amulet was all a’tingling around him just as it was around the other monsters she had faced. He tells her to back off, that she’s out of her league, and that if she continues down this path she's going to get herself killed.

I think she really surprised him when she immediately...

...turned and went back inside.

It just didn’t seem like the right time to go all guns a’blazing and for all she knew he was just a little possessed by a whisperer or something. Still she knows he might try and shoot her in her sleep since she knows enough to get him lynched so she takes Jack up to her roon for a little bit of old celebratory sex. That way she has her pal in her room with her.

The next morning when she wakes up she sneaks up to the rooftop and checks for snipers. There aren't any.

She gets to spend a lazy day at the warehouse until night falls. That's when the red-lensed glasses guy arrives to take her for a ride in his Prius over to meet the remnants of the last squad that had attacked the bad man. It turned out that the tattooed man lived in a warehouse full of tinned food (damn monsters for guarding food) and that he had several trapdoors through which he’d sprung up and dragged the squad mates down one by one. One squadmate had managed to pull loose from his grip and another ran while the others were distracted.

Nico’s starting to wonder what she’s gotten herself into but is far too tough to back out now. Besides which, she knew a monster would get her number in the end. Might as well keep throwing herself at things and seeing how long her luck holds out.

Because she’s such a lucky person.

As she walks toward the warehouse in question, she gets almost all the way there when she notices a glint of moonlight reflecting off glass in one of the gaping windows of a neighbouring building. Suspecting a sniper (and fearing the gunslinging cowboy), she runs for cover and then sneaks into the building. She heads upstairs and finds a set of binoculars on a table in that particular room and spots stairs going down and two other gaping doorways. She heads toward the binoculars, figuring at this point that it’s just humans, when she notices movement to her right.

Turning her head a little she sees the cowboy, Allan McCormack, standing there and trying to sneak up on her. Figuring that this isn’t the time or the place for a fight (bit dangerous, really), she jumps out the second-storey window (American second-storey so only one floor up) and hits the dirt. Allan comes charging out after her but now his legs are now a skirt of wind and he looks all different and inhuman. He can now fly and moves super-fast.

To make matters worse, he still seems all the more familiar to her!

She charges across the street into the tattooed monster’s warehouse, using Intimidation to goad him into coming out and attacking the demon on his turf. It works and the guy appears out of nowhere and grabs hold of the wind-fellow as his rushes in. The winds rip into him but the guy manages to jab him with a syringe of something that hurts him.

Nico doesn’t stick around to find out what happens next and instead charges up a wooden table and out the window, dropping down just as the wind-demon charges out the window behind her and keeps on going through the air, obviously badly hurt. Nico looks up at the window to see the tattooed-man crouching there, pasty grey and obviously inhuman.

The two get to talking.

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