Part 1

[walk_ins]

There's a bump and a lurch felt through the entire Academy as Serenity docks, unwelcome. Claxons blare. In the main dining hall the Students stir and murmur, confusion more than ever writ large on their face. The Advanced Students in their special cafeteria have less of a reaction; the outside world matters less and less for them.

In the staff dining hall, the doctors, teaches and nurse exchange looks and outbursts of confusion and consternation themselves. Theories fly around; a meteorite, maybe, or an unexpected docking. Or something gone wrong with whatever madness the Doctor is up to. Only Dr. Sergio Lin actually bothers to leave the room.

In the Special Wing, the Doctor and the Graduates wait for their door. Whatever it is, the guards will take care of it.

It only takes a few of the Blue Hands to guard the dining halls, under normal circumstances, and the rest are here in the Security Lounge. It's a narrow space, with a sterile stink to it; some indefinable imprint of their inhabitancy. Crowded tonight; there're guests in town. The room is decorated with watercolor paintings, all turned upside down. When Serenity arrives, their heads all swivel as one in the direction it came from, and as one they stand and move towards the doors, drawing pistols and slim blue wands from their jackets. They meet Dr. Lin as they come out, and he confuses the situation with semi-hysterical and self-contradictory orders.

And at the docking point, the doors burst open, and with no further ado quite a lot of heavily armed people burst into the skyplex.

Things have begun.

Comments

[badinlatin]

Feet apart, and Mal's gun has left his holster awhile back. Soldier's stance, every inch of him prepared.

Eye contact with Faith and Inara. Sometime later, Mal will wish that he could have given them some sort of look of hope or encouragement.

Nothing like that now is on Mal's face. Only the soldier.

The claxons begin to ring
and Mal yells "Follow me!" to those with him. The others know their jobs. They'll be fine.

Mal's first target - a creature? gloved man - goes down quickly, wound to the chest.

[ff-ambassador.livejournal.com]

As the claxons begin, Inara takes one last glance at Mal, the steel in his expression focusing her. She runs behind him, keeping her gun low, scanning the hall for more guards.

She runs around the first body, avoiding looking at the blood pooling on the ground.

[faithful-slayer.livejournal.com]

Faith's expression is a mask. Slayer Face. It's the face of somebody who makes a career out of going into situations that might kill them.

It's probably not so very different from Mal's.

Her gun - and that's two words she never thought to string together in her subconscious, for sure - is held at her side, deceptively casual, and all her superhuman senses are honed, seeking out people to hunt.

No - not people. Vampires. She's the Slayer, and they're vampires - and that means their lives are hers to take.

[badinlatin]

Still running. Like usual.

Mal's head tilts to his right to see Inara and Faith keeping pace. He doesn't focus on his partners for too long.

They're almost to their destination.

[ff-ambassador.livejournal.com]

Inara breathes deep, trying to keep her nerves steady. The steady footbeats around her help her focus. Her fingers relax a bit from her stranglehold on her gun.

[faithful-slayer.livejournal.com]

Faith's not nervous.
I live in the action of death
Not yet.
I am destruction
She's calm, peaceful almost, as the door to the cafeteria comes into view.
Just the kill
They're gonna live. And the blue-gloves...not so much.

[badinlatin]

The door of the cafeteria.

Pulling back the hammer of his gun, poised, ready, Mal moves into the doorframe to enter the room.

And promptly receives a bullet flyby just above his left shoulder.

Mal pulls back, knocking himself against the corridor wall, waving his arm at his group to stop moving forward.

[walk_ins]

Another bullet flies past them.

A knot of Blue Hands, four or five of them, is coming up the corridor from behind, moving fast. They have to run now. They hate to run.

Cuthbert, bringing up the rear, turns, hands dropping to his guns with dreamy speed, sparing Mal a quick jerk of his head towards the door.

[badinlatin]

A nod to Cuthbert.
A gunslinger indeed.
Mal blazes into the cafeteria, dropping two guards before his crew has a chance to file through the door.

[walk_ins]

There are four--there were four guards in here, supervising the students.

Now there are two.

The students are staring, wide-eyed. None of them look surprised. A few look happy, a few are sad; a few seem angry. Mostly they just stare, shocked and yet not at all surprised.

As Faith and Inara come through the door, they're perfect targets, but the two remaining guards are both swiveling to take aim at Mal, instead.

[ff-ambassador.livejournal.com]

Inara's hand automatically swings up, aims and fires, hitting one of the remaining guards in the chest.

[faithful-slayer.livejournal.com]

Faith pegs the other dead in the center of the heart, with all the accuracy of somebody whose life depends on her ability to hit that target.

[walk_ins]

A hail of gunfire from outside ends with Simon, Ted and Cuthbert ducking into the room after them. Simon and Ted move towards the students immediately.

The dining hall is a wide open room, with three doors. Even as the shooters take up position, these doors fly open and the blue-handed guards begin their seige.

[badinlatin]

"Faith! Kitchen, now!"

Mal doesn't yell to Inara, so much as points in the direction of the group of students in the room.

Mal moves beyond them, reloading on the fly and begins his attack on the guards coming in the closest door.

[ff-ambassador.livejournal.com]

Inara runs over to a group of children standing huddled near one of the tables. She grabs them, pushing them together and leaning in to speak.

"It's going to be alright, we're here to help. Just come with me, okay?"

One girl with a fresh scar on her forehead recoils from the gun in Inara's hand. Inara quickly tucks into her waistband, then grabs the girl's hand.

"It's okay, sweetie, you're going to be safe now."

[faithful-slayer.livejournal.com]

Faith pulls a firebomb, lights it, and tosses it through the window/serving hatch that leads to the kitchen.

The blue-gloves emerging from that area are possibly less pleased with the resulting 'boom' than Faith is.

[walk_ins]

There's not that much boom, actually, so much as fire. Everywhere.

The kitchen has just gone from 'great sneaky back entrance' to 'flaming pit.'

[walk_ins]

Students shriek, adding to the din. Some stumble backwards; some just freeze, wide-eyed.

A gangly young man with an afro -- Stefan -- is watching Cuthbert's gun with narrowed, speculative eyes. A girl named Aiko, tucked protectively behind him, regards the bonfire that is the kitchen with a dreamy gaze. "Oxygen feeds it," she says to no one. "Dinnertime. It's appropriate. We'll run out of air and asphyxiate."

Smoke coils around the ceiling. There's a tang of burning plastic in the air, now, acrid in the back of their throats.

The young girl with the scarred forehead, Hana, lets Inara take her hand, relaxing at her reassurances, but not everyone reacts so. A dark-skinned girl next to her is glaring. "Stupid!" she shouts. "Lets it come, lets it come, fire burns their brains and it won't change a thing! Pretty voices lie."

There's a knot of students, now, huddled in the corner farthest from both the fire and the door. Many are terrified; some are waiting for a chance, although what they're waiting for is hard to tell.

"You came," whispers a girl, sing-song. Mavis. "Said you would. She didn't lie. She remembers the secrets."

"Just a rutting test!" screams a boy named Matthias, glaring at Simon with tears of fury in his eyes. "Gotta stay together. Gonna fail! Red ink marks it wrong until your bones bleed!" In another second or two he's going to take a swing at whoever of the attackers is nearest, from the look of him.

Screams, moans, whispers, talk -- clatter of chairs, gunshots, and the crackle of spreading fire.

[book-moshi.livejournal.com]

As the alarms ring and the groups file out of Serenity, two people remain in the cargo bay of the ship.

Shepherd Meria Book is armed with a heavy semiautomatic pistol from Serenity's copious store. His position is familar--it's the same one he took during the assault on Niska's skyplex--but his conscience is infinitely more troubled. The feeling of the pistol in his hand is familiar, too, in a way that has nothing to do with Adelai Niska.

He glances at the dark woman in the bay with him, another of Serenity's common-use pistols in her left hand and her heavy, somehow barbaric and ancient widowmaker in the right. She doesn't look relieved to be staying on the ship, in a defensive posture that makes it seem a little less like Breaking And Entering. She looks, in fact, a little pissed (maybe righteously pissed) that the designers of the Academy didn't see fit to make it wheelchair-accessible.

From further back in the ship he can hear Wash hustling towards them. Won't be long now, he thinks. He'd feel a fool actually saying it aloud, though, so he thumbs the safety off his gun. And waits.

[shadowsusannah.livejournal.com]

No maybe about it.

Susannah isn't happy at all about being left behind. But it's the plan. And Roland is her dinh...and it's a good plan. Mostly because she hasn't seen Wash or Book shoot, and Susannah Dean is a gunslinger.

There have been crates set up -- stacks of them -- for cover. Two closer to the door, and one further behind.

Susannah wheels herself behind this last one and waits for Wash to take his position. Better to have her in the back than Book.

She tilts her head back and closes her eyes, hearing Wash come closer, interspersing a familiar rhythm between the steady speed of the pilot's footfalls.

Come-come-commala.

Her eyes snap open, then, and she turns, and then raises her guns in the guard position, back straight. Let's get this party started.

Their party might be simpler than the one going on inside the Academy. But Susannah's will do.

She knows all the steps.

[simon_doctor]

The gun still feels foreign to Simon's hand, but he grips it with an assurance he doesn't feel.

Mal in the lead of their group, Cuthbert bringing up the rear, Faith and Inara and Ted around him -- River's with her group, stop looking for her, stay focused.

There's something in all this chaos that's oddly familiar ... oddly like a Code Blue moment in an emergency room. Sudden danger, and the job to do, and a team of competent people around him all knowing their own roles in it.

He holds on to that as hard as he's holding onto the gun. They're here to save lives. They're here to save an entire universe's life. There's an abrupt bizarre mental image of himself and the others as antibodies fighting an infection, there and then gone.

Code Blue. Go. Go. Go.

[flybywash]

The first time Wash did something like this, he'd been consumed by fire: scorched and shaken, hauled back from the volcano's edge. It passed in a blur of noise and heat that never quite registered.

The second time, Kaylee had been with him, and he'd only fired several shots -- none of which connected -- before they ran.

There's a very good reason Susannah's never seen him shoot.

Wash unholsters his gun as he jogs down the stairs, as much in preparation as to get rid of the uncomfortable weight of it. It feels like his hands should still be shaking, but they're not. There's a gunslinger down there beside the Shepherd; and if all fails, and this is to be their ending, he'd rather be here than listening through the upstairs comm units as they fall.

He takes his position on the upper catwalk and pushes the safety to OFF.

Hell of a day for a last stand.

[key-youth-bert.livejournal.com]

His friends are around him, his enemies are in front of him, and the guns of his father are in his hands.

There's a brief thought of Susan--in the engine room, doing her job as he does his--and then any thoughts of anything other than the job at hand fall away, leaving him cold and efficient.

A weapon set to the purpose it was made for.

Guns at the ready, he follows the others.

[book-moshi.livejournal.com]

Book waits, the gun in a steady hand.

If the ship is taken, nothing else that happens in there matters.

Footsteps. They're coming. They're coming.

[mr-brautigan.livejournal.com]

Ted has a gun. He's not happy about it, and he doesn't plan to use it. Not unless he absolutely has to.

He

(I can kill you with my brain)

has another weapon, after all.

And as he follows the others in, a little behind Simon, he lets go. The world slides in and out of focus -- but not enough to make him immobile. He lets go, and he opens up, and listens in to the students.

Such fear. Such anger, from a few.

Such hope, from some.

A deep breath, and Ted begins the process of reaching out, still moving.