ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Hell Hath No Fury

Vignette - Hell Hath No Fury
Dramatis Personae Thea (A vignette)	2013-06-21 Thea takes on city hall.
Location City Hall, New York City
Anthea stood on the street outside Radio Shack, busy pedestrians bustling by behind her. She watched the televisions in the window, hidden beneath a brown burqa, complete with face screen. The events of the last month had all been too much. Since the sinking of her hometown, she lost the Lady Green, and Thomas, who had been with her for over a decade, killed by the mutants who should have been her allies. Then her prize pet, Ivan, also taken from her. All of her oldest friends were gone, except her beautiful dragonfly steed, Sugar, but Sugar wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Thea had been stalking the streets, looking for the chance to catch the police in something dirty, when she heard about the press conference with Stark and Holland. That was what brought her to the Radio Shack windows. She only caught the end, but it was the bit with the mutant fighting rings. She barely suppressed the scream of rage rising in her throat to fizzle out behind clenched teeth. Whelan had /deserved/ to die, and the police had been holding him up as a martyr to their cause. It was finally too much for her, and Thea felt she knew what to do. An hour later, Thea was underground beneath Central Park, picking through roots and rotten stumps in an old tunnel dug by her ants a month previous. It took a few hours, but in the end, she found everyone she would need. She had never used the dynastes beetle before, but she had a double handful of the critters before she finished looking. The first, she raised up to the height of a man, and named him Hercules. He went through the process she thought of as ‘naming’ which also blessed him with intelligence. In seconds, Hercules stood before her, only five and half feet tall, but still needing to duck inside the tunnel to make room for the three-foot horn growing from his forehead. He was a sickening mix of human male musculature, and the beetle parts his species was famous for. His shell gleamed in the dim light Thea had brought with her, and he split his carapace down the back to give his wings an experimental flick before tucking them away again. He knelt before her, once he became aware of his surroundings, and his monarch. “My queen,” he said, in a growling, gravelly voice. “Someone threatens our family, Hercules. Do you understand?” Hercules grunted his understanding. “No one will ever threaten you again, {mother}.” His word for ‘mother’ would not have been recognized by anyone else present, spoken in some grating inhuman language, but Thea smiled and cupped the side of his hideous man-beetle face in the palm of her hand. She swept her other hand above the space where several other normal-sized beetles scuttled about unaware. They all began to grow and change. She had managed to find nine more beetles, numbering ten in all. As they scraped and grunted to full-size, each one nearly as big as Hercules himself, they fell into three lines of three organized by their commander. The dim intelligence in their eyes would be enough to follow him into battle, but it was all Thea could bear to give them. “Tonight,” Thea began, once Hercules had everyone in order. “We march on city hall.” The name of the place meant nothing to them. All they needed to know was Hercules hated it, and their /Queen-Mother/ hated it, so they hated it. They gave grunts and nods, all around. “Every single one of you is stronger than ten of them, and you have /each other/. The humans are cowardly, and weak, and /alone/. We will bring their citadel of lies down around their ears!” The cheer that went up from the beetle-men reverberated up and down the tunnel. Thea held back her tears. There was no going back. There was nowhere to go back to now. An hour later the troop had traversed as much of the underground as they could before they burst through the wall of the City Hall subway station. Ceramic tile and dust flew everywhere, and late commuters scattered like cockroaches as the ten emerged from the rubble, Hercules at the front, with three by three following in his wake. They marched through the station, and up the stairs. The lone police officer at the end of the platform ducked behind a pylon and used his shoulder-walkie to call it in. By the time the troops were in City Hall Park, the city was already bringing its defenses to bear. Most of the regular employees were long gone, this late in the day, but the police were always on duty. They were a little confused on how to respond to the gasped warning from the cop downstairs, but it became clearer when the monsters appeared in the park. At Hercules’s shouted orders, the teams of three split up and sprinted through the park to their designated targets. Each team was immediately fired upon by uniforms on duty, which they shrugged off like so many biting flies. Pleased with how things were progressing, Hercules split his carapace open at the back, and spread his thick, heavy wings. When they were flapping fast enough for him to leap his enormous bulk into the air, he sounded like a B-52 bomber taking off. Hercules took a couple of stray pings off his shell, but most of the current officers were being kept busy down below. He would stay focused on his primary objective. He heard the crunch of a car rolling over, and then the dying warble of a police siren going to that great police siren heaven in the sky. This was followed by the muffled, yet satisfying thump of the car’s fuel igniting. As much as he wanted to stay and watch his brothers work, he homed in on the window he had been sent for, and barreled forward. He lowered his horn and crashed through the big double windows of the huge corner office. He couldn’t read any of the mayor’s plaques or placards, but he recognized the seal he’d been shown. The mayor was gone, of course, but Hercules had gone there to destroy, and destroy, he did. The bookshelves were short work, and the fine chairs sailed out the window to shatter into splinters in the street below. The heavy mahogany desk was slightly more challenging, but Hercules bent to the task. He would leave nothing unbroken. Outside, the teams were making excellent progress. Alpha team had flipped a police car and sent the officers running. Beta team was unchallenged at that point, and was crashing their horns against the concrete pillars and front doors. The glass and wood portions were already destroyed on the first pass, so the team was focused on cracking through the reinforced housing of the entryway. It was slow progress, but fissures were appearing every minute they kept pounding. Delta team had been tasked with dealing with the larger team of police collected. They had been standard blue uniforms, and their side arms had proven ineffective. Delta waded through the bullets, swiping their horns from side to side, sending officers flying in every direction. It would normally have been some time before SWAT arrived, but with the recent unrest in the city, a contingent had been stationed at City Hall, just in case. It was at that moment the elite group of police officers double-timed it out into the grand entranceway of City Hall. They fired tear gas at Beta team as the beetles pounded at the walls. Canisters bounced off two beetle-men and rolled hissing on the ground. With a screech, the creatures recoiled from the awful burning in their lungs. Confused and angry, one of the beetles charged the SWAT team. He pounded across the floor, running on pure rage, and was rewarded with the discovery that assault rifle ammunition was indeed heavy enough to pierce his armored carapace. He was riddled with automatic gunfire, and collapsed on the marble floor, oozing yellow gore in a puddle around his body. The two others by the door each threw an arm across their nose and mouth, and deployed their wings. In no more than a second they were up to speed, but rather than take flight, the beetles stood their ground, and blew the clouds of gas back into the great hall with the wind from the wings. They both gasped a lungful of fresh air as the SWAT team experienced momentary confusion. The team was wearing gas masks but the real problem was the lost visibility. Then the beetles charged the room, holding their breath. It was a brief and bloody skirmish that Beta team couldn’t have possibly survived, but SWAT was fewer in number by six. Bodies flew up and out of the cloud, crunching hard against the marble and stone interior of the hall. Later that night, they would even find one officer who had been impaled through the middle with a gaping belly wound the coroner could put his hand through, but the beetle corpse was back to only 4 inches long. The remaining SWAT members took up fortified positions at the front entrance, but didn’t bother with tear gas this time. The six beetle-men still outside rushed their position from two angles with a war cry that made the humans’ skin crawl. Even with that terrible sight however, the SWAT team hesitated only a moment before opening fire. The beetles weathered a hail of gunfire, and reached the officers, tearing into them with horns, fists, and feet. The devastation when it was over was horrible, but in the end, the officers had outgunned the monsters. In a far corner of the park, Thea stepped through the trees, tears rolling down her cheek as she watched her beautiful children fall and die. Necessary sacrifices, she told herself, jaw tight against the loss. The humans would remember this day. She waited in the gloom for the final signal, praying that Hercules had been able to do all of his special tasks. Just when Thea thought he must have been stopped along the way somewhere, a fireball exploded from the lower corner of City Hall. She had worried about asking him to find the Hall’s kitchen, but he had done it. He had filled the place with gas, and found some way to ignite it. The loss of her valiant Hercules, replete with proper name, was worse than the other nine combined, but the bottom floor of the Hall was gutted and burning. She choked back a sob, and turned to leave. “Hold it right there!” Two officers snuck up behind her, guns drawn, while she watched the mayhem. One was close to retirement age, one was no more than a year or two on the force. She didn’t recognize them of course, but they remembered her. “It’s /her/ I’m tellin ya,” the older of the two cops said. “She was running those monsters at the diamond district when you was /knocked out/. Just cuff her, McManus.” McManus smiles, a murderous gleam in his eye. He could see from the look on Thea’s face that she didn’t mean to fight them. She must know she didn’t stand a chance against two armed men at point blank range. She followed all of his instructions in fact: turn, hands on head, kneel down. He got the cuffs on her, and drew his gun again, pointing it at the back of her head. “C’mon Rivers, who would know, or even care, if she got shot in all this mess? She don’t /deserve/ a trial…” “Put that away, you idiot,” Rivers replies. “Do it right, or not at all. Let the public watch her fry.” McManus grunts his disappointment, and then delivers a vicious pistol whip to the back of Thea’s head. The world spins in her eyes as Thea struggles to stay awake, but finally she crumples face first onto the grass and lies still.