Dramatic Entrance

Heroic will: Early story, low

You smirk, and your striking green eyes become half-lidded and seductive as you silently leap and somersault over to the roof of the nightclub. The music is still playing, deep bass thumping so loud you can feel it reverberating through your legs, but the excessively loud 'entertainment' is now punctuated by angry shouts, breaking glass, scuffling feet and shrieks of terror. This is the place, alright. The huge, bright yellow neon sign (with the o in 'Lemon' being replaced by a stylized lemon) obscures your entry.

Parked down near the entrance you spot a parked police cruiser, with a couple of APD cops lingering next to it, shouting nervously into their radios. You had them to thank for the tip-off, but the two of them - a squat, rotund woman and a pimple-faced young man who looked barely out of high school - didn't look like they were especially eager to go diving into whatever mess was inside that club. And that was fine by you; they'd just get in your way.

There was a skylight in the roof which gave you a view of some of the chaos unfolding on the dance floor. There were several sets of young men, one set wearing yellow and the other set wearing red, throwing punches at one another or circling each other menacingly with knives, bottles and bar stools ready to strike. Out of the corner of your eye, you noticed a few minidress-wearing female clubgoers and other bystanders huddled in the corners. The combatants were swirling about the dance floor and bar area in a disorganized melee, so a number of civvies had clearly been too frightened to flee.

Heroes couldn't be everywhere, and this was precisely the kind of situation that was low-level and commonplace enough that both the thugs and the bystanders in there would never expect that anyone would be rushing in to confront it. With no guns involved, the APD wouldn't be motivated to send in the SWAT or a riot squad; they'd just wait for it to die down and drag anybody left standing off to the drunk tank while the paramedics did their work.

But it wasn't too small for you, you thought with a proud clench of your fist as you silently popped the skylight open and eagerly prepared a smoke pellet. Your mom had always taken pride in being a guardian of the streets and the suburbs, treating every endangered civilian, even the poor and homeless, as an equal priority. And you were going to make sure they noticed you.

A cloud of smoke burst in the middle of the dance floor as you silently did an acrobatic fall down from the second story roof, bending your legs as you land in a crouch and absorb some of the impact by planting your palms on the floor. The gang members - track suits and jerseys stained with sweat, many with busted lips and broken noses but still plenty of testosterone driven rage in their eyes - stop and back away from one another, going silent as they stare at the black cloud. Your hearing is so sensitive that, in such a loud environment, you have a low-level form of echolocation, enough to tell people's location within a few feet.

And so, when a swaggering, thick-necked guy in his 20s wearing a popped-collar polo shirt and a bandana wandered into the smoke cloud curiously, you sweep his legs out from under him and send him collapsing to the floor - you tele-sonicly amplify the sound of him hitting the ground with a grunt of pain. Just as the smoke clears, you dramatically rise to a standing position and take a fighting stance, giving your wild red hair a dramatic toss back as you do so. You take one of your batons up into your hand with a threatening flourish and hold it out threateningly in front of you. Your off hand is twirling one of your throwing knives between your fingers.

Calling upon your telesonic powers again, you temporarily suppress the thumping bass of the club music so you can be heard. "A bunch of foolish boys disturbing a peaceful night with their clumsy squabbles. How unfortunate... After a long absence, The Nightingale has returned to your neck of the woods! Now stop this fighting and lay peacefully down on the floor while I cuff your hands. If you doooon't~," you add with a musical singsong tone and a teasing waggle of your hips, giving them a good view of your tight bottom, "then I'll have to help you to 'sleep' myself... and it won't be gently."

Instead of being warded off, all of the 15 gang members that you could see took a few steps towards you, glaring at you with a mix of indignation, amusement, and lust. One particularly muscular and broad-shouldered man in red colors stepped forward, carrying a tire iron menacingly. "Daaamn. You seeing this shit, homes?" he asked over his shoulder. "One of those skanky costume-play hos from outside has decided she gon' play hero. Hey Kings!" he shouted at some of the yellow-dressed thugs. "What you say we finish this beef later and give this bitch what she's begging for, first?" The big man chuckled and contemptuously tossed the iron aside, starting to advance towards you with both hands outstretched. That seemed to motivate the others, and soon, all of the crowd was slowly advancing on you.

You sensually licked your lips... but moments before the foremost one got close enough to grab you, you flung your wing-shaped knife backwards at one who was trying to sneak up on you (superheroes weren't supposed to use lethal weapons, but these were more like shurikens - light enough that they couldn't kill unless you hit someone right in the throat, but sharp enough to be plenty painful). You heard a gratifying scream of pain as it pierced someone's shoulder, and them you did an acrobatic cartwheel to the side with your one free hand, ending up standing atop a table.

Several of the gang boys tried to rush you, undeterred by your display. There were a couple of reverberating smacks as you met their charges with high kicks to the face, leaving one with a broken nose and another spitting out several bloody teeth as he stumbled back. That was three down, and about a dozen left to go.

Undeterred, the thugs started to rush you again, so you whipped out your second baton and swung both your weapons in a wide circle, just at head height. One of them got an electrified, crackling smash to the temple and collapsed ****, and the other six who were surrounding you backed off a few steps.

To be as showy as possible, you started singing along with the loud club music before doing another dramatic somersault over the head of the thugs around you, spinning 180 degrees in mid-air so you landed facing them. You stunned a couple of them with quick strikes to their backs before they could turn to face you. Even as you swung and kicked flamboyantly, you were also using your telesonic powers to gradually amp up the volume of the music. It had been very loud to begin with, but now, it was becoming distractingly painful for the men attacking you, and a couple were backing off and clutching their ears.

When they backed off, you pressed your attack, leaping from side to side, constantly keeping them off balance. Smugly, you decided that you'd fought teenage taekwondo students that were more of a threat. One of the men managed to get behind you again, and two dark-skinned arms grabbed around your waist. But the touch of your silky soft skin under his fingertips was distracting, and instead of pulling you to the ground, his hands slid up and groped the exposed undersides of your tits. You just roll your eyes. As he starts to exclaim how nice your bust feels in his hands, you throw your head back and break his nose with the back of your head, causing him to stagger backwards in pain. Feeling testy, you spin around and give him a kick between the legs for good measure.

Although there are only five thugs left standing after your merciless ****, they happen to pick that exact moment to rush you. Realizing that your batons are your biggest threat, two of the bigger guys grab your wrists. You throw an elbow into the stomach of one of them and a knee at the other, but it isn't enough to stop them, as you don't hit the solar plexus like you aimed for. You chide yourself for getting sloppy. What's worse, before you can wriggle free, the others charge you. By swinging your whole body upwards, you manage to deliver a jaw-breaking kick to the first one that gets in range. But the second one seems like he actually has some boxing experience, and he ducks under your follow-up kick and dives down to grab you by the knees. The last one - seemingly the leader of the gang members in yellow, the 'Kings' - plucks the batons from your struggling hands and switches them off.

You're struggling, but you're tired out now - and four against one is more than you can slip out of. You feel the three muscular, sweaty men pressing in against you threateningly. While the others keep you restrained, the shaved-headed, tattooed leader, his powerful chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt, starts roughly groping and rubbing your abdomen, tracing his hand up to give your breast a quick squeeze before settling under your chin.

Belatedly, you decide that you've bitten off more than you can chew, trying to fight fifteen opponents all at once. You gulp but try to remain calm. There are several ways this situation could go very bad very quickly. You consider your options. You could use your telesonic powers to make them think that there is a huge police presence outside the club, ready to storm in any second. You could try to reason with your captors and tell them they had better not do anything or other heroes will punish them even more harshly. Or perhaps, your best option is to play the tease and flirt with them a little, degrading though it would be, and try to find an opportunity to take them down before they go too far with whatever they have in mind...