Raindrops and time (Hive/Zydon)

SETTING: The malls food court
PLOT: A calm day becomes a living hell, when Ethan finds out over the grape vine that Paris Island was utterly wiped out by a zydon attack later that day and Ethan's out hunting for some payback.
MOOD: Johnny Cash- Hurt


Today was a good day to be alive, the sun was out, shining bright above like an incandescent bulb of joy, good thoughts and angel farts. And Ethan had his denim wrapped derriere planted firmly in a chair, right there in the middle of the food court, a package of john player's at hand. He was eating a calzone, tearing into the oven baked bread and all of it's delicious meaty fillings as he idly thumbed an envelope that was stuffed with twenties and fifties with his free hand. It was pay day today, well, everyday was payday really when you worked for an overgrown bug. Huh, I can't get over how ironic that is, working for a big ugly bug in a group called hive. What are we? Worker ants?

He was musing idly over this little idiosyncrasy, grabbing his soda and taking a heavy gulp of the grapefruit flavored beverage when people started speaking all around him. It was like wildfire, or cancer as people spoke about the goings on's about the invasion. But what got Ethan's interest however, was the utterance of Dakota city. His ma and pops lived there and all at once, he tuned in like a radio and what was heard, had sent a literal chill through the otherwise imperturbable causing him to shiver. Paris island, his birth home, the former home and origin of bang baby's like himself, was a smoldering ruin. The attack had happened sometime in the morning, and while the invaders were fought back and many more were killed, it was too late, the island was little more than smoke and ruins. The feelings that were going through him at that moment flew by like flashing lights; fear, loathing, depression, sorrow, but there was one that stood out like a shining beacon of incandescent crimson; rage.

Ethan felt angry, no not angry, he felt the red. He could almost see it at the corners of his vision as he looked down at his food, calmly finished it and stood up before breaking out his communicator and dialing home. Tears literally visible in his eyes. Tears of sorrow and the red. "Hey, it's Livewire, anyone got a minute to chat? It's....important."

Ethan stood there with the communicator for the longest of time, staring at it, what the meaning behind it was. They were thieves, those who purloined that which didn't belong to them. Not intergalactic nazis that wanted to commit a genocide, this wasn't Ethan and for a moment, he felt a blue melancholy before the screams erupted around him and he grit his teeth. This wasn't right, none of this was right even as the bladed whip cut into him and electricity roared through his body, this just wasn't right at all. But he stood there with blood dripping from wounds that were....surprisingly shallow, or maybe the blades didn't get that far in. "I'm an orphan now, got nothing left to lose anymore, huh. I feel.." He sounded out of it, beaten before the fight began but as he lifted his head, lips pulled back into a feral grimace, he stared at Backlash with eyes that glowed with an incandescent white rage.

"nothing, but blinding, white hot solar rage." He tore the hat from his head as trailing veins of white coursed and pulsed across his body, fingers and hands flowing with excess energy that seemed to...grow. "I got nothing left to lose, no need to hold back anymore. It's time to burn out," the energy burst free in a nova that shredded everything around him, cut deep gouges in the stone and concrete, as he moved towards her slowly, metal tables and shopping carts crumpling in on themselves from the massive magnetic field. "I was always scared, you know, felt like I was living in a world made of cardboard because of my powers, held myself back, made myself a nobody. All because of my parents, all because I didn't want to hurt them or make them worry and now they're gone. Now this has created a rare moment, an opportunity for me to finally cut loose and let it all out."

The bullets fizzled out, popping and burning up as he raised a hand towards backlash and with a motion so simple, flicked his finger at her as a whip of electricity tore free from his body that ripped up the ground like a knife through cheese paper. He didn't see the red, no no, that was gone, he saw white now. White hot hate, white hot anger, but his blood felt like ice as he launched himself towards her, fists pulled back to slam into her with the electrical fury of a lightning storm. He wasn't aiming to hurt her, to rough her up, Ethan was aiming to maim her to cause her no end of suffering that was at the forefront of his mind, that was his goal as he skidded to a stop and lifted one of his feet up and around, body corkscrewing to instead aim a roundhouse kick for her midsection. The punches, nothing more than a feint.

Kristoff Makarov was in the Galleria, leaning against a railing, flirting with some girls. No need to be shy when you had the looks to kill and the skills to slay. Heh, he mused at his assassin puns whilst talking to them. They were these cute girls, tourists in the city when the Zydon attacked, now they were stuck here since all ways out of Jump were destroyed. Kris heard his communicator go off followed by some loud BANGS and the crackling of electricity, "Stay here, I've gotta see what's going on."

Kris ran to the food court to see what was going on, and his jaw practically hit the floor, Ethan was there fighting some electric-whip chick. "ETHAN! YOU CALL FOR BACK UP?!" Kris yelled from the second floor, over the sounds of electricity and metal bending. Ethan had entered some sort of super mode. Something must have really ticked him off. Kris jumped down to be next to Ethan, requesting any kind of back-up from the team, especially anyone who could help fight some weird, pitch-black, red haired, electric whip chick. Kris then pulled out his laser Katana, it was acting a little haywire, but Kris thought nothing of it.

Ethan felt the hand grip his leg and he actually....smiled, literally, just went ear to ear slasher smile. She made direct contact with him which, well, that was Ethan's actual, tangible goal in the first place. He wanted to get his hands on her, flesh against any part of her. For a moment he thought that was a rather sexual thought but it dipped slowly into venom as the bullets tore into his leg, exposed her metal arm to bare flesh and for that brief second, he began to suck the energy right out of her like a parasitic leech. "Yeah I remember breaking your ribs, and right now, it's the fondest memory I have." Ethan was literally shooting to kill here, he wasn't just some run of the mill nobody with super powers, he was himself, nothing more. A unique entity in the vast universe and, until he's torn the Zydon apart with his bare hands, he'd never stop coming.

The pulse didn't have any affect either, it tingled certainly but he was running on cold murder, caffeine and high voltage hell that would otherwise turn a normal human into a cinder in seconds. "But there's one thing I doubt even you know about me," he spoke softly, veins pulsing with white light, eyes glowing with the condensed energy of a hundred storms. As he launched his hands towards her, leg throbbing in agony even as the bullets were crushed and warped and twisted before being pushed from his leg with the sheer electromagnetic waves surging through and around his body, "I'm every single other electromancers worst nightmare." Ethan kicked up his other foot as he fell back, a dirty cheap little shot aimed right for the witches groin right for the money shot as it were. He fought fair all this time, might as well play dirty with a soccer drop kick to the metaphorical balls.

There wasn't anymore talking from Ethan, no more words just action, pulse pounding and brutal that would tear the Galleria apart with that ever growing, pulsating level of energy that seemed to well up from seemingly nowhere in the boy's body. Even as kris showed up, his focus was fully on Backlash. She wanted him, she had him and no amount of people big or small, would stop him as he snarled at Kris. "Stay back Zero! I'm not joking, I will kill you!"

Kristoff laughed in disbelief his own teamate thought he'd get in the way, "L-dubs, we're a team, I'm here to help you, not stop you. Kris then grinned as he spun his Laser Sword around his fingers. I'm really gonna need to think of a name for you, he thought as he looked down at it. He then looked at the chick, right now she was an enemy who attacked first. Zydon or no, she wasn't about to get away with it.

Ethan was getting tired of this, anger subsiding slowly giving way to a cold burning clarity as the energy super charged his mind, made him think not in matters of years, but in nanoseconds, femto and picoseconds, time frames that a normal person would think impossible to even imagine as he slowed his pace to a slow crawl, even as the energy in his body continued to boil and build inexorably. He was running the entire gamut of emotions so fast that they all seemed to burn together in his mind, leaving him feeling nauseous, sick to his stomach with burning venomous bile that threatened to cut through his body like a diseased blade. "Outrageous claims, no, no, not even getting started, gonna keep going, push myself even as I tear myself apart from the inside out.."

The energy, the sheer, natural force of nature surging through his body made him think and see. Finding answers that would have taken years, coming to terms with everything, but never the deaths of his parents, no amount of speed or time would fix that gap. Not until he...burned every last Zydon, washed over them like a tidal wave of all consuming power. Leaving behind naught but ash and silence. He took his sweet time coming towards her atop that lofty perch, his body steaming with the moisture as the air roared around him, air and water molecules bursting and burning up as they came into contact with the energy rolling off his body in droves. He was burning up himself, or burning out as it were, like a lightbulb with a short or a broken conductor. He was gaining power, growing with it, becoming something less than human and with that, there was a certain point that he knew, he was going to burn himself out. It was just a matter of time, an inevitable point in time that the energy would far exceed his ability to store and channel it and he'd go boom.

But would he survive? And if he did, would he still be livewire? "You're just so blinded by that stupidity you call pride in your own humanity, that you just don't see it do you? Look in the mirror you're just like me, a monster. Black skin and red eyes, demon, fiend, murderer. You're no more human than I am, I wouldn't be surprised if you killed your parents, psychopath." He stood there, a sharp exhale rolling from his lungs as he stared her down. "I may be a metahuman, but at least I'm more capable at being human than you'll ever hope to be." He didn't even know if he'd still be Ethan after this, if he'd still be livewire or something more. Or something less. Part of him welcomed the idea of becoming human again, but at the same time, this thing in front of him, never would he consider Backlash a person ever again, it was one of the reasons people were afraid of metahumans. It and everything like it. And he was going to kill it, bring it down like a rabid dog.

Kris grinned as Backlash threw the statue at him and turned her attention away from him, breaking the #1 rule of engagement against assassins, NEVER break line of sight. Kris ran with the statue so it looked like he'd been hit, dodging at the last second, slunk into the shadows and quickly made his way to the second floor, grinning, did he really just get a second chance at the surprise attack? Kris was silent as he snuck up on her, listening to Ethan's speech. Kris pulled out two grenades and tossed them at Backlash, them making clinks as they hit the floor, but Kris never was one for relying on one attack. He quickly took out his pistols and began to fire at Backlash. "Peek-a-boo!"

"No, see, I'm not saying you're proud of it. I'm saying you've thrown it off to the side like a scrap of clothing. I don't know where you came from, but you're not reading me right." His body surged with energy, metal as far as the other end of the mall seemed to shake and rattle, display cases jerking and twisting as he focused himself on nothing. Ethan had not so much as reached the apex limit of his abilities as he....tore through that barrier, forced himself into a dangerous spot as his flesh began to glow bright incandescent white like a light bulb about to burn out. "I cling to my humanity, it's what keeps me....rooted, if I let that go for a second? well," he smiled at her as the energy imploded towards himself, this ripple of energy that bent the light itself making him seem distorted at one point, than invisible the next as it continued to pull into himself and it did not stop for one second. "Let's see, just how many deaths I can cause, when I stop caring about how easy it is for me to rip things apart."

And he charged himself up, magnetic waves and electricity, harmonizing into a slowly condensing sphere about himself. It was go time, an old trick in his book and one he never used ever or very rarely, because it took a while to get a strong enough blast charged. Simply put, Ethan was getting one big old electromagnetic maelstrom ready and raring to go to level the entire mall and because of his current situation? It was very much possible, tearing apart anything made of metal with this kind of concentration and charge. Packing over 300 terawatts of energy, 18 times the amount of energy the whole human population of earth would use in a single hour and it simply, hurt to horde it all to himself. "Oh I know funner ways of getting at you. Than killing you." He exhaled softly, wishing he had one of his cigarettes at this point in time, this was still such a bother after all, exerting himself, forcing himself to go beyond his limits. If he survived this fiasco, he was going to be...really sore for quite a few weeks.

Just needed a few more moments, precious moments as the ground began to buckle underneath him and the pipes above tore free in screaming agonized protest. Ethan was going to be hurting after this, he had no doubts in that, might even die with all the exertion he was throwing himself through. But if it wiped the smug look off that cocksure little tramps face? Oh, he'd die with a smile he would, a genuine heartfelt smile and he'd make sure she'd remember it too. " I was gonna just let bygones be bygones. Bury my dead, like I buried my brother cause it was something I didn't have the power to stop. But you just.... Had to open your stupid lip and talk your smack. Didn't you?" That last part was delivered not with venom, but a sort of embarrassed disdainful lack of respect for the one whom in his mind was nothing more than a bottom of the barrel, b list bastich that couldn't make up their mind on if they wanted to be a hero or villain. " Lucky day for you that Kris was packing my favorite flavor of lead and copper chips."

Kris grinned, Ethan knew what bullets Kris used, and the best part of these metals were that they weren't magnetic. He sort of laughed, "Babe, I'm an Energy Vampire! You think I'm gonna use bullets that electromancers can use against me?" Kris readied two more grenades and threw them, this time to just cause a distraction so Kris could sneak off and go for the next surprise attack, a fatal attack. He looked at his sword's energy supply, it was half way out, he'd have to save it for the next attack, couldn't risk it dying.

((comment, no Backlash cannot control nonmagnetic metals. They aren't magnetic, can't be manipulated by magnetic powers. Please stick to your application.))