dualislogs | we’re ready to make you one of us.

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we’re ready to make you one of us.

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: When Roboclones Attack
WHERE: Anywhere in the city!
WHEN: The night of Oct. 19
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable! And if you happen to end up dead by roboclone, please fill out the death form!

It’s an ordinary night in Dualis, until it suddenly becomes a very dark and stormy night in Dualis. There hasn’t been a single day of unpleasant weather since any of you arrived, but soon after the sun begins to sink behind the city’s skyscrapers and the neon lights intensify for the night, storm clouds begin to gather overhead and unleash a cacophony of thunder, a deluge of rain, and brilliant spikes of lightning arcing across the sky.

It’s a violent storm, to be sure, but surely severe weather is no challenge in such a technologically advanced city as Dualis, right? As long as you stay indoors, you can keep safe and dry until the storm passes.

Except … less than an hour after the storm begins, the power all across the city goes completely out. All buildings are dark except for the illumination cast by lightning across brick and steel and glass. All electronics - including phones - are dead, all biometric locks are disabled, and no attempts to call, text, or reach the internet or the network succeed. Eerily, the streets are silent and empty.

Under normal circumstances, such a widespread blackout would merely be odd and inconvenient, but tonight, circumstances are anything but normal. About half an hour after the blackout begins, something approaches you, wherever you are. In the dark, you’ll be able to make out that its shape is humanoid, but maybe its motions are jerky and mechanical. As it draws closer and you get a better look, by candlelight or flashlight or flash of lightning, you recognize the face staring back at you.

That face is your own.

The face, like the rest of the body, is likely some degree of incomplete, an incongruous jigsaw of metal and flesh, but it’s definitely yours. And this machine doppelganger’s mission is soon made apparent as it launches a targeted attack on you:

It’s here to kill you.

After nearly four hours, the storm subsides and the power is restored and the city falls back into its normal rhythm. Will you survive until then?

May the odds be ever in your favor, friends.

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The storm was unsettling enough on it's own; Cissie is mildly alarmed to realize how comfortable she's grown here in the city, how accustomed she's become to the day to day way of things, especially after the uncertainties of the Village, or Wonderland. She has a job to go to with regular hours, she has access to food without having to hunt, gather, grow or store it, she has electricity and a place to live, and people she cares about. And the weather is never something she has to think or worry about; she doesn't even think to look at any weather reports, even if they exist.

Then comes the blackout, and the silence. Cissie had been used to living without electricity and the constant background thrum of noise that comes from living in a modern city with power, back in the Village, but here? The silence and stillness that accompanies the power outage is eerie and wrong in ways she can't name.

Her doppelganger finds her on the streets, making her way back to the dorms, hurrying to find her friends, to see what they can do to keep everyone safe for however long this situation may last.

It's not an easy fight, and one she won't be forgetting any time soon. It's going to haunt her dreams for a while, though at the moment, she's not thinking of that. She's only thinking that if her robot double was this hard to take down and incapacitate, she can only imagine what Tim or Jason or Steph or some of her other friends are being faced with. She can only hope that they aren't being confronted with murderous duplicates, but somehow she doubts they're that lucky.

Injured, exhausted and scared, Cissie rushes back to the dorms as quickly as she can, hoping against hope that the others are okay.

[ooc: Cissie is available to help folks with injuries thanks to a lot of first aid training/experience; she also can help fight if needed, and will want to help anyone she comes across however they might need.]

The power's still out in the dorms when Jason returns from a sweep through the city blocks surrounding the building, evidence of the battles left on him in cuts, scrapes, and bruises, though nothing's broken or dislocated, and he's definitely not dead this time. Jason may not learn from every mistake he makes, but that one? Yeah, he did.

Unsurprisingly, the front desk is unattended, but there's still not enough light to make out whether any other evil twin-bots are in the vicinity of the lobby, so Jason figures he'll just draw anything lurking out into the open - by calling to them.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are!" He's high on adrenaline and armed with a shotgun, along with two pistols stuck into the back of his waistband for backup, all of which he'd "borrowed" from a dealer's shop down the block that was left entirely unattended.

Cissie is relieved when she makes it to the dorms without getting attacked again, but the darkness is so complete and the night so quiet that she can't help being on edge. When she gets to the dorms, part of her wants to rush in and upstairs, but she knows better than to run headlong into potential danger. She can't be the only person who has been or is being attacked.

With that in mind, she sticks to the wall, edging her way through the lobby. When Jason's voice rings out, she freezes mid-step, and reacts possibly foolishly.

"Jason?" As soon as she calls out, she realizes that maybe she shouldn't have; maybe that isn't actually Jason's voice.

If it isn't... Well, she has no idea what she'll do.

It is actually Jason's voice, and there's relief intercut with the worry in it when he calls back to her: "Cissie - where are you? Are you OK?"

Guiltily, he realizes that he's been so focused on stopping the immediate threats that he hadn't thought to seek her out and make sure she was OK until now. Does he ever feel like an asshole.

"Talk to me. You sound close."

Cissie lets out a deep sigh of relief; if this isn't the real Jason, he's a lot more subtle than her doppelganger had been. She can hear the worry in his voice, and somehow that's reassuring.

"I'm okay," she calls back. Mostly, but she's in one piece and that's what counts. She pauses to take stock of her location. "I'm in the lobby, next to the big potted blue tree." As opposed to the small potted blue tree, she doesn't add.

Tim has already had his run-in with his doppelganger, and it's something he'd like to begin repressing as soon as possible. Yes, it was an evil clone robot hellbent on destroying and replacing him. No, it's not likely that there was much of a chance of rehabbing it. But his best friend is a clone who was meant to go evil and destroy Superman, so it's hard not to see the parallels.

Plus the clone had his face. It's creepy.

He's a little worse for wear after the fight, but he heads back to the dorms. If his clone had found him in the middle of a patrol, he's pretty sure the others are going to have a much less difficult time. He enters through the window of the room he shares with Cissie, hoping she's all right.

"Cissie?"

Cissie had returned to their room, hoping Tim would do the same. Trying to find him out on the streets during a crisis was a pointless idea, so she could only hope he might come back to find her. She hears him before she sees him--given how many times she's harassed him about his inability to use perfectly good doors instead of the window when entering their fifth floor room, at the moment she's actually grateful for this particular habit of his. She's on her feet before he's through the window, though she waits until his feet hit the floor before she rushes in to hug him.

"Tim! Are you okay?"

The truth is that he's been better, but he returns the hug, sighing a little in relief. That's one country heard from, and while she doesn't look like she's come out of things completely unscathed... She's all right, and that's the important thing. "I'm okay. Better now." He pulls back to give her a small smile. "And all of my limbs are more or less in their usual configuration. You?"

She can't stop herself from giving him a quick once-over when he pulls back; she believes him when he says he's mostly in one piece, but Tim's definition of okay sometimes pushes the envelope. She gives him a wry smile of her own in return. "I'm okay too, mostly. I saw Jason--he's okay too. He found himself some guns somewhere."

She should probably be somewhat conflicted about this, but honestly, she doesn't. It should bother her that she doesn't, and when this is over, she'll probably beat herself up about feeling this way, but for now, she's not thinking about it. She would have given pretty much anything for a bow when facing off against her double, and it would still come in a lot more handy for her than any other weapon, but with the way her arm is feeling, she's pretty sure she couldn't use one anyway. A gun would be a lot easier.

The fact that this has even crossed her mind is not something she's about to share, though.

He nods. He's much more concerned that Jason had found a way to protect himself than he is about the specifics of it. Another country heard from.

"Mostly?" he asks, frowning slightly. Is it a little hypocritical that he's this concerned about her injuries while not acknowledging his own? Maybe. Does he care? No.

Cissie gives him a mild look, though she can't help smiling at him anyway. She shrugs, and almost instantly regrets it. "It's been a while since I've had to really fight for my life in close quarters," she admits. "I'm better at a distance."

W O W.

The wince is not unnoticed.

"I know. Anything you need to have looked at by another set of eyes? Maybe eyes taht can see your whole arm, rather than a top-down look?"

She hesitates, and eyes him. "...If I say yes, does this mean maybe you'll listen to me the next time you're injured?"

"I am shocked. Shocked that you would suggest that I am a bad patient." He gives her a wry grin. "By which I mean I will definitely consider that."

She laughs and sits on her bed, shaking her head. "I'm going to remind you of that. I'm pretty sure I dislocated my shoulder; I think I put it back into place, but..."

She trails off, because it's hard to tell, especially since she couldn't exactly rig a sling to keep her arm immobile until now.

He takes a seat next to her so that he can get a better look at the shoulder. It's swollen, of course. Dislocation often does that, even if you do manage to remedy the situation quickly.

"Can you move it?"

She nods, and rotates her shoulder as best she can to demonstrate. It hurts, and she doesn't bother hiding the fact; Tim knows she's hurt, and she knows if she wants her arm set correctly, hiding things from him isn't going to help.

"I don't think anything's broken. Thankfully. Are you sure you're okay?"

"I don't think anything's broken," he said, echoing her words. It didn't mean he was okay--he'd definitely collected a good number of cuts and bruises and some of them could use attention, but he was more interested in making sure that Cissie was okay first.

The shoulder is stiff and obviously painful to move, but Cissie's right that it doesn't seem to be broken. He looks up at her. "I think you're right about it not bring broken. Probably the best thing you can do is rest and ice."

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