Fairy in a Bottle

[Cailleach]

"Because it is..." she strains for a moment, finally croaking out in an imitation of Hazard's own voice. "...fun."

[Hazard]

"Now you're getting it," he smiled, "But, as much as it pains me to admit it, we should get away before having too much fun."

[Cailleach]

"It will not look any different than our palaver does now."

[Hazard]

"Fine. Not that anyone would believe me saying I'm not me. Not before it's too late."

[Cailleach]

"Suspicious. All of them. Scared and angry and so very small..." Cailleach muses as she rudely grabs Hazard's head, palm against his forehead and he can feel his power dissolve and flicker. Cailleach lets out a grunt, her free hand that's holding the paper-figurine is tense, cramped. And suddenly things align again. Hazard's perception blooms out a couple feet, then a yard, stuttering and fraying beyond that, becoming fickle and uncertain the further it goes. But within his reach he gets impressions of the things around him as discreet objects and a sense for their weight and mass and he can see why Cailleach called this one "Balance'. As soon as he is aware of two objects that have roughly the same mass they seem to connect through some unseen means, just waiting for a mental flick to change positions. The blurrier the distinction between objects gets the 'stickier' they feel but he still has a vague sense of them. Cailleach's body in front of him is mostly made up of interconnected things, fiddly and indistinct, but bones stand out. And with them the brain-cavity they encircle.

[Hazard]

"Ooo... trippy. I can feel your brain. Neat!" he said before grinning slyly, "Time to get to work."

With that, he headed out to search for someone who might be able to get access to the collar keys. A guard? A doctor? Were they below or above ground this time? Was anyone scheduled for release?

[Narrator]

The only people he can even see are the guards in the observation ring and even loitering near the elevator shaft he can only get a vague sense of them up there.

[Hazard]

Hazard frowned.

"Stupid automation. Oh well, desperate times."

He went to the day room to find a victim.

[Narrator]

Not so much a 'room' but an open area with tables and chairs bolted to the floor, but none the less there are a handful of other inmates milling about.

[Hazard]

Hazard picked someone in clear view of a camera and gripped the origami weapon in his pocket as he approached from behind. Like a striking snake, he whipped his arm out and stabbed his fellow prisoner repeatedly in the side.

[Narrator]

At first the only sound is that of the inmate's startled scream which quickly goes from surprise to 'oh shit, I'm bleeding profusely'.

"Fuck shit, motherfucker...!" he curses as he slides out of the chair he was in, clutching his bleeding side, blood welling up between his fingers. It takes only a second or two and the lighting in the entire complex takes on a red tinge and an alarm blares, giving everyone a couple moments to take note before the various sections around the circular room are separated by walls rising from the floor arranged like spokes on a wheel, locking Hazard and his victim along with two others.

And the next thing Hazard knows he's on the ground, limbs seizing up as the collar delivers an electrical current. He can't have been out for more than a couple moments and from his vantage point he can see two guards stepping out of the central shaft, one of them with his gun drawn, the other carrying a first aid case.

[Hazard]

Hazard pretended to be more disoriented than he actually was, trying to get up.

"Huh? Where... Why am I down here? I'm not... Hey! Why are you aiming at me?!" he said confusedly.

[Narrator]

"Drop it!" the guard shouts, aiming his weapon right at him. "The act and the weapon. Now! Stay on the ground!" he barks as he takes a careful step towards Hazard.

[Hazard]

Hazard tosses the metal origami away and gives the guard a mocking smile, "But Mr. Guard, I'm you. Or am I Napoleon? Or was it Gandalf? I forget."

Then he swapped his brain into the guard holding the gun.

[Narrator]

It's a strange sensation to say the least. With a mental flick everything goes dark and for a moment Hazard is plunged into utter isolation. No sounds, no sights, nothing but his own thoughts. And then everything returns with almost overwhelming force. A blinding flash of cacophony rings in his head, almost enough to drown out the excruciating pain of an entire body feeling like it fell asleep and is now nothing but pins and needles. And then it's over and he's looking at his own body, no longer in the process of getting up and instead collapsed on the floor, eyes wide in a kind of primal terror.

The other guard is tending to the injured prisoner, not having noticed anything being amiss.

[Hazard]

"Stay down and shut up!" demanded the Hazard formerly-known-as-nameless-guard-he-couldn't-be-bothered-to-read-the-nametag-of. He'd need to fix that.

[Narrator]

"Wha-bu---how? I... you... what?" the guard dangerously insane inmate stammers.


"We might need to transfer this one to medical. Everything under control over there?" the guard tending to the injured prisoner calls out.

[Hazard]

"Nothing a little sedation won't fix," he said, "No idea where he got the weapon though."

[Narrator]

"Well then get to it." the guard says impatiently.

Meanwhile the Hazard-guard is slowly coming to his senses. "Wait, no, something's not right here!"

[Hazard]

Hazard knelt and took out a syringe, plunging it into what used to be his neck.

"Nighty night."

[Narrator]

And with that the guard is knocked out, letting the other one finish patching up the inmate before getting ready to move him to the elevator and form there to the infirmary.

[Hazard]

"I'll be up after I get this one to his room to sleep it off behind a locked door," he said, hefting the unconscious guard over his shoulder. His previous body didn't seem to weigh all that much. The guard must work out a lot.

[Narrator]

"Uh..." he can hear the other guard behind him. "Procedure's to leave them be unless they need medical attention, Hank. Besides, they're not gonna lower the partitions just so you can drag this piece of shit to his cell."

[Hazard]

"Right. Where is my head today?" 'Hank' said, putting 'Hazard' down. "Can't get out of here soon enough."

[Narrator]

"No kidding. It's bad enough up there. Being down here with the creeps gives me... well... you know." the guard says as they make their way into the elevator. The door closes and a narrow band of light moves from the bottom to the top as it scans them, followed by a beep and a synthetic voice speaking up.

"Additional occupant detected. Outside authorization required."

"Come on guys, hurry up. You saw what happened, got one for medical." the other guard responds to the voice.

[Hazard]

Hazard found himself worrying that the scanner was picking up two sets of DNA from him.

"I hate these scanners. Always paranoid they'll give me cancer or something."

[Narrator]

"Man, you really are twitchy today. You need to cut back on the coffee." the other man jokes, misinterpreting the tension.


Finally, the elevator starts moving. "Tell you what, I'll take this guy to medical if you write up the incident report, deal?" he says as the elevator stops at the observation deck.

[Hazard]

"Yeah, okay. But you get the next one," he answered.

[Narrator]

"There better not be. Guess no matter the prison, somebody's always gonna figure out how to make a shiv. This is gunna be a shit-storm once the warden gets wind of this." he groans as 'Hazard' steps out of the elevator and into the circular observation room, the view out the windows currently segmented by the raised security dividers. Aside from the elevator door, the central shaft is filled with monitors showing footage from inside the prison. There's a total of 4 other guards in the room, one of them keeping an eye on the screens while the others look out through the window.

[Hazard]

Four to take out without raising the alarm, and a fifth when he gets back. Or before he leaves. But how...

He searched the room, feeling with his current powers for anything in the room with the same mass as a vital organ or if anyone had a pacemaker.

[Narrator]

No pacemakers. And distinguishing individual organs is difficult, he can't seem to get a good grip on them, not enough to swap them out by a long shot. There is plenty of stuff around to work with, at least. Tablets, pens, chairs,a fire-extinguisher on the wall. And of course what he has on himself - same as the other guards - a baton, a sub-machinegun, a radio. As he's kind of taking stock of the things at his disposal there's a chime and one of the other guards seems to open a communications channel.

"Sir?"

"Has the situation been resolved?" comes a voice over the console's speaker.

"Yes. The offending inmate has been incapacitated, the weapon confiscated and the victim is en route to medical. I was just about to lower all partitions save for the section Hazard is in."

"Hold off for a moment until I've had a chance to review the security footage leading up tot he incident. Do we know what the weapon was?"

"Not yet, sir. It should be on it's way up along with Boscoe."


That's... probably not good. Cailleach's weird-ass origami is pretty distinct. And more importantly, distinctly not made of metal, so once someone takes a critical look at that they'll know something is up.

[Hazard]

First, Hazard switched a few random components in the elevator release system to prevent it from working. Then all the radio antennae with pens in rapid succession. Lastly, he swapped the injured inmate's cuffs with an open set.

"Go for his gun," he whispered to the inmate before whipping his gun at Boscoe's chest and firing. Without hesitation, he began strafing the other guards.

[Narrator]

There's an odd grinding noise that happens as the elevator doors try to close, causing everybody to turn their heads just in time to catch Hazard gunning down Boscoe, which saves two of them that manage to jump out of the way of Hazard's sweep. The other inmate, while technically awake, is groggily fumbling for Boscoe's gun but not making a lot of progress.

One of the the two guards taking cover pulls out his radio and Hazard can hear him try to call the situation in while the other returns fire, a spray of bullets aimed right at center-mass and travelling up with the recoil...

[Hazard]

Hazard abandoned Hank and cruelly switched into the one firing at him. He shuddered at the nerve sensation and smirked at 'Hank.'

[Narrator]

Hazard reaches out for the guard firing but he doesn't have the time to deal with how fiddly and slippery brains feel to this power. Forcing it through he ends up switching his entire body with that of the other guard, which serves just as well for letting him get mowed down by his own bullets. The guard crouched next to him drops his radio and reaches for his own gun, but Hazard already has his weapon at the ready and it's really no contest. The last surviving guard goes down in a burst of SMG fire, the thud of his body hitting the floor punctuated by the click-click-click-click-click of Hazard's gun firing on an empty magazine.

Even having disabled communications, this is almost certainly not going to stay quiet for long. On the panel next to him are controls for the emergency dividers, the elevator and such. Underneath the console he spots a locked cabinet with a front of reinforced glass or clear plastic of some sort. On it a piece of tape with a hand-written 'Prisoner Release' on it. Inside it he can see a strange key, like a mix between a safe-key and an USB stick as well as a handle for a valve with bright yellow poison and biohazard warning symbols. The key looks like something he'd want, the valve maybe not so much.

[Hazard]

"Well, that was exciting!" he grinned, swapping his gun for another.

Using his swap sense to help him locate the key to the compartment, he said, "Hurry and help me find the key. Then you'll get your powers back."

[Narrator]

"Thefucksappenin..." the other inmate slurs, barely managing to stumble to the elevator door and only managing to stay upright because he slams into the side of the door with his shoulder.

The compartment doesn't seem to have an obvious key. Fortunately, he does manage to find a can of pepper-spray that is close enough he can just swap it into the compartment, bringing the key right into his hand.

[Hazard]

"Well you're no help," he said, happily shooting the inmate. Because Hazard was feeling particularly evil that day. With that out of the way, he swapped out the key and headed for the elevator. He hoped he only disabled the emergency measure.

[Narrator]

The emergency measure for the elevator shaft is much further up. The jammed elevator might impede it but that'd still be a problem. But if he hurries maybe they'll make it out in time? Somehow that seems unlikely considering it'd involve a climb up the elevator shaft. But he has the literal key to unlocking the collars and down in the prison proper he can see Cailleach nervously pacing along the separator-wall that went up. In fact, quite a few inmates seem anywhere from confused to curious at the muffled but probably still noticeable sounds of gunfire.

[Hazard]

"I guess it can't be helped," he said, remembering to lower the partition before making his way back down. With the guns.