Jenifer Williams, storyline introduction

((closed for now))

Jenifer woke around dusk, the failure ceiling of her apartment greeting her with the last flickering light of day, she sat upright and looked at her clock and sighed with relief as she saw that she hadn’t overslept, two hours at a time was enough for her as things were, she couldn’t afford to sleep all at once, not in this city, not with her agenda. She carefully stepped out of bed and switched on the lamp, its almost entirely bare blab dimly lighting the room. The stillness of night was so different than the stillness of dawn, it was a greater stillness, one that was only savored by people like her who needed the nights forgiving cloak of darkness, people like her who needed that shroud, that barrier in which to move freely. In another life she might contemplate the irony or wakening at this hour to start her activities but Jenifer was no poet, she was an assassin and as such she readied herself to go to work. She slipped in to her usual outfit, black pants, black shirt, black coat, black shoes.

She was turning over in her head all the things she would do, she had the building planed out, the targets memorized, and the plan very simple but it would do. She opened her door to leave, long ago this might fill her with dread, the thought that she may not return alive, but those emotions were dead and gone now, she knew only the task at hand. She put her weapons in the spots shed practiced drawing them from so tirelessly, made sure everything was clean, loaded, assembled, charged and ready finally slipping her sword over her waist in its sheath and strapping it on. She took a deep breath and walked out on to the pitch blackness of the slums.

Inside the building she was headed for Dustbreaker grunts were having a bit of a party, the first floor of the building was a bar, alive with the usual loud drunken din of their like. Arguments, laughter, banter, even a couple of fights constituted the group of drunken mutants but this was no ordinary bar on the bad side of town, mutants with guns stood at the door. They were not ordinary gangsters, thease were the band of criminals that caused everything to unfold, the gang that claimed to run the city now, it was because of them no one was aloud to leave this awefull city.

Suddenly all eyes in the bar turned to a sound, a spraying sound preceded by a metallic resounding, and followed by a gargled scream, then another. Between the two cleaved bodies stood Jenifer in her assassins’ uniform, gun in hand with nothing to hide. She calmly looked down at the mutants, these once brave thugs lying on the floor reduced to the primal, infantile state only mortal pain could bring. Her calm, unblinking unfeeling face was the last thing they saw as she wasted no time fireing two well placed rounds in to them from her handgun, she wasn’t taking any chances, as the bullet’s explosives detonated inside the mutants sculls the others were finally realizing what had happened and the first of her attackers was a mutant that came rushing at her at supersonic speeds, she caught one of the glass beer bottles the guard mutant had been drinking in mid air and threw it directly at the super speedster, suddenly the shards of glass embedded themselves inside his body, peppering his skin like a shotgun, she had thought of the weakness to powers like his well in advance and as he lay incapacitated on the floor she dispatched of him as well with one of her explosive bullets. Her reflexes were incredible and her face was so calm as the super human bar goers rushed at her from the back of the room.

The first three of her attackers were taken care of simply enough with her gun at a distance and the fourth mutant was easily slashed with her blade, then when the next few reached her distance she skillfully swiped her leg under the nearest one and vaulted over him impaling his body to the ground with her sword which she then used to do a sort of hand stand on, turning her body forward and kicking both feet in to the nearest two mutants, the hydraulics in her shoes taking effect to create a truly bone shattering kick to their unlucky chest and neck. She used the momentum of the kicks to leap back pulling the sword with her when the guns came out.

The first few shots were blocked with the sword, being adamantine it had nothing to fear from them but as more shots were being fired she grabbed on to a nearby attacker and used him as a human shield, stomping in the face of an injured attacker that had been crawling at her while her unwilling shield was riddled with bullets.
When the shots stopped she flung the corpse at a group of attackers knocking them in to the bar just before ducking an ocular laser from one of the men in the back, she veered to the left of the beam and ducked under it, ensuring that the attackers behind her were hit by it instead of her before jumping in front of a mirror behind the bar and ducking just in time for the laser mutant to accidentally blow his own head away.

While crouched she sliced the legs off of an attacker with her sword before shooting him with the gun in her other hand before standing up to break the jaw of an attacker with a very well placed pistol whip intern firing at him. The numbers of her opponents were very quickly dropping as the floor became messy with the blood from the explosive bullets inside her victims. No movement was wasted, no reflex unused, her face still so calm and emotionless as she jumped back from a burst of pyrokinetic flame and kept running left from the blast. She kicked out the supports of a nearby table and turned it as a cover for the flames, firing a shot through the wood at the mutant who was able to narrowly avoid it.

By the time the table had been burnt away she was nowhere to be found behind it. She had used that time to slip behind her pyrokinetic adversary and suddenly he found a price of adamantine wire wrapping itself around his neck and hoisting him up over a ceiling pipe. He grabbed at the wire and kicked and struggled before a surge of electricity from her weapon made his hangman’s dance in to a seizure of electrocution, then his body grew still and the wired retracted back in to Jen’s tool letting him fall to the blood soaked ground, clearly dead. Jen reloaded her gun and threw the empty clip in to the face of an attacking mutant before using his blindness to grab him and run him through with her sword. Then, hiding behind the corpse she fired over his shoulder at another eight mutants never missing a target.

There weren’t many mutants left alive in the room but the only exit had been blocked by Jen, they weren’t going anywhere and they knew it so they charged forward. Jen landed a brutal punch in to the solar plexus of the first to reach her then fired in to him with her gun point blank knocking him back in to another who she then priced with her blade through his friends body before cutting out the sides of them to block a set of mutant claws. Her face still so calm, unchanging.

The clawed mutant was quick but Jen was far quicker, she saw over his shoulder another mutant rushing at her with some sort of claw and used her blade to push his back in the way of the second attacker, the clawed mutant was hit by his comrades attack but was filled with a substance from his claws that made him scream and gasp before literally melting!
The second clawed mutant, the one with the hypodermic, acid filled claws lunged at her wildly but Jen fired out her adamantine wire in to the ceiling to use it to block his hand gaining a window of time to slice his arm off. Though this proved to be a bad move as the mutants blood itself was acid and the bar stool that was hit by it melted away. Jen retracted her wire and leapt back and darted behind him stabbing him through the back but this mutant was determined to bleed his deadly acid on to her and still he turned, yelling and screaming at her. With one final strike using her speed she cut clear across his left ribcage finally killing him.

All was quiet and still, Jen had killed over twenty five mutants in under six minutes. She sighed and walked about the room, making sure no one was hiding and to fire a bullet in to any body that was so much as twitching. Then she took to the stares, for what she had arrived to get. The second and top floor of the building contained an office, in this office there was a desk, in the desk a few files. This is what Jenifer had killed all those men for, but as they were murderers, rapists, slave owners, mutants, and genocidal radicals they would not be missed. She put all of the files in her jacket with out reading them and went down stairs. Carefully she soaked everything in the bar with alcohol and placed a few small explosive charges in load bearing sections of wall stepping back outside.

The Dustbreakers would find that the building had burned down and all the bodies had had large sections blown off, that was her M.O. She pressed a button on a detonator and the charges went off, burning the alcohol soaked building down faster than you could say mission complete. It was so much quieter then the roar of her battle, and it seemed peaceful. The ashes and embers dancing through the air like snow, the city still and silent.
She took this time to riffel through the files, the last three dustbreaker bases she had done this to hadn’t yielded anything, but maybe these files would give her the names she wanted. She searched them for a leaders name, a record of her brothers death, the creator of the mutation drug, anything. She did see one alias that she had read before, “cold shock” as Jen understood it he was a founding member of the gang, the likes of which were already on her list. She pondered a moment and decided to read the rest of the records later on, now it was time to leave before other dustbreakers showed up.

On the way back to her apartment Jenifer slipped by unnoticed by the crowed that soon gathered before the flames, the surprise caused by her attractions just reaching them. Finally she reached her apartment again, tossing off her jacket, which had saved her from many a gunshot that night on the couch before takeing a seat herself and going over the files after locking the door. As she read she kicked off her boots and let out a sigh, the icy expression finally leavening her face as she relaxed a bit. “This “Cold Shock” guy, his name is Matt Ervin…” she found a photograph of the former and wrote a name above the picture, tacking it up on her wall before going through the other photos and crossing out any of the faces shed seen that night during her massacre, only a couple of those mutants had been her targets. All and all it could have gone over better, she slipped off her gloves. Her attention turned to the three new faces again “most of thease guys look rather strong but this Shock guy dosent seem to fit, he looks pretty short and thin compared to them” she began, wondering aloud “that probably means he has a power far greater than the other two, just judging by his rank…” he had appeared in a lot of her research, perhaps he was even a founding member.

She began to review the events of her plan, though it had been a success she had gotten very lucky, all of the mutants she had fought were low ranking thugs, hardly anything to worry about but her more high profile targets would certainly be an issue, she needed to be stronger, faster, tougher, and much better at fighting, and if her power wasn’t going to surface any time soon shed need better weapons. She had been the victor tonight but even the simple mutants had been a challenge for her. She put her head down on her desk and sighed in frustration. “This isn’t going to work at all…” she looked up at a bag of sunflower seeds that had been on her desk and took a few, the taste bringing back bittersweet memories with a subtle reminder of why she was doing this. If even one higher ranking duskberaker found her shed be killed instantly, after all they challenged S.H.I.E.L.D. a gigantic organization of mutants with powers and the best weaponry, what could she, a single seventeen year old mutant with no power and last years hand me down anti mutant weaponry do? Her task was solemn, lonely, challenging and probably even suicidal but there was no alternative for her, no reason but her mission left to live for.

It had been days since shed spoken to someone else, maybe even weeks since shed so much as gone outside her apartment to so much as buy groceries out of fear of encountering someone who may have seen her as slipstream, but of course none of those people were alive, she made sure of that. All the same maybe it was time she stopped by the black market of the slums, she knew a weapons dealer there who used S.H.I.E.LD. technology and crafted the latest in weapons technology, she had brought her explosives from him. Maybe it was time to go back, but then she saw her clock and remembered that it was perhaps three in the mourning and sighed again, shed probably have to wait a while. She looked out the window again, the same rows of blacktop lined with tall dark structures lit by dim streetlights as before, but now in the distance an orange glow with black smoke rising against the light of the moon, that had been her doing. Exhausted she slumped in to bed again for another few hours of sleep.

End of the prologue