Re: Las Vegas -- Superstition, Fear and Jealousy
Phantasm's leap put her on the fifteenth floor. Microscopic slip of the foot at the last minute, otherwise she might have made it to the sixteenth directly.
"... you see that?! ..."
"... can't we get out of ..."
"Everybody stays! Calm down! It'll be fine!"
"We're going to die in here!"
"He'll come back for us."
"Fuck you! I can't breath!"
Her skin crawled and she got a sense that this was potentially a very bad idea. Cans that once held gasoline were discarded around here, half melted as the fire spread down the tower. Doors hadn't been installed on the units yet, walls stood half-finished, but there was more than enough debris to conclude that someone had been living here a day or two. Thunderbird and cheap beer cans, too. Combined with the cars outside, there was no doubt that at least some of the people upstairs were to blame for the fire. The missing information was why. They were clearly surprised that a pair of novas had shown up so fast. The Latin -- guy was chanting loudly now right over the argument and god would it kill that idiot to be consistent with his pronunciation? -- suggested religion was a factor. Editing out the sound of the fire was a pain, she'd picked up enough to know there were three powerful voices -- two male, one female -- trying to convince the others to stay. The woman probably had a revolver, there was a click like she was tapping it on something.
The stairwell was fireproofed appropriately, however. Apart from choking smoke, it was safe for now. And she guessed that nothing below the 15th floor was on fire yet. Which made the people sitting upstairs even dumber. Thinking fast, Phantasm guessed eight or nine voices. Their coughs were distinctive enough. They were all standing around in one of the condo units with a clear shot at the stairwell, so what the hell were they doing?
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Farther up, Gale forced her way into the building, the winds at her disposal pushing back smoke and flame. It looked like the fire had begun on the 20th floor alright. Most of the ceiling had fallen in, and so had a bunch of the floor. As she brought on the wind, bits of debris were thrown from the tower and an eruption of smoke fired out in all directions. Driving the oxygen away robbed the heart of the blaze. And another moment's work chilled the air. Child's play. Small fires on the top five floors or so might reignite the structure as a whole, but that would be it.
It didn't take much to guess that this fire was man-made, though. Her mind tumbling once more over the details, Gale got the same unsettling sense that coming was a very bad idea. True, no one else would have been able to put out the fire so quickly. True, baselines weren't much of a threat. But baselines generally didn't paint a pentagram on the floor of a half-finished condominium or sacrifice goats. This was very, very out of the ordinary.
As she cleared the air, however, something leapt out of nowhere and slammed straight into her. Red skin, horns, yellow cat's eyes. Scales. Hard to tell, the guy moved fast, nearly as fast as she, and hit like a ton of bricks. She was bleeding from somewhere too. Spurs on his hands.
"As righteousness tendeth to life: so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death," he said. "Do you understand? Do you understand?" Her eufiber was torn up. She replayed the last few seconds in her head: he must have come in through a window, jumped or flown, and another hit like that and she felt certain she could die. "Do you renounce evil? Do you? Tell me now!"