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 Doug may have officially been Emma's Knight, and he and Angie weren't dating these days, but that didn't mean he didn't still think of himself as her knight occasionally as well. He wasn't the fool throwing himself in front of a bullet, though - he just knew that Marie-Ange worked better when she had a clear field to use her powers, as evidenced by the creature currently doing its best impression of the Ten of Swords. He still had his guns out, and he fired a shot from each at the suited figure as it closed to arm's reach. Impossibly long white fingers reached out to grab his left arm as he pushed the gun toward its face, only to have it click on an empty magazine. A sensation brushed against Doug's mind, manifesting, as things often did in his mind full of memes and references, in a twisted version of a movie clip. Agent Smith, grinning at Neo and smugly announcing "You're empty." But instead of the counterbalance of Neo's heroism, just a deepening void of...inevitability, as Smith would say. But then the tight bastion of Doug's mind, already closed down like rows of doors locked against entry, tightened further, the doors suddenly reinforced with bars. Bars with a copper sheen on them, if the phages could have seen the imagery. Doug cocked his head minutely and dropped the empty pistol from his hand. ::Friendos. Rakshasa.:: Ever since he'd taken on the nanites, Doug had spent a lot of time thinking and planning for eventualities, ways to utilize his arm in ways that were impossible for a regular one, and that anyone seeing it as just a prosthetic would never expect. This was probably one of the first he'd ever come up with, and the nanites moved smoothly. Rather than twisting in the Slenderman's grip, they instead moved -through- each other, as if the back of his hand was passing through his bones and palm on the way to reversing its orientation. And now, like the infamous D&D monster, his hand was oriented in the other direction, which enabled his fingers to close around the wrist of the hand holding him like a manacle, trapping the thing who thought it had him trapped. Doug yanked the Slenderman forward, off-balance and disoriented for the barest moment that allowed him to pull the arm around behind its back, hauling the hand upward toward the back of its neck until its shoulder gave way with a wet cracking noise. Skeletons could only move so far, even in this place that twisted the laws of physics. Doug bore it to the ground, his knee pinioning the thrashing figure as he continued to pull upward and keep the pain from letting the creature have a moment to gather itself. "I've been here before," he told it in a flat, almost conversational tone. "I know how this place works." |
