Joshua/The Trial of Joe Black (Courtroom Riot)

[At this point the courtroom erupts into chaos at Black's "guilty" vote. Things start to happen fast & furious!]

"Oh, shit," Joshua whispers as the audience starts assaulting the courtroom. He didn't expect this. The dragon was saying something about a shield, but he would trust that about as much as he could see it. He ducked down behind the wall of the jury box. Which way could he go? Out the back of the courtroom, or the front?

If those people attacking the room were after the jurors, did they have a chance to get away?

[One of Joshua's fellow jurors suddenly explodes and a horde of bizarre creatures pours out - he finds out later that these are Twistings, which is the menace that Joe Black is fighting against.]

Joshua, taking cover behind the wall of the jury box, did not see Mr. Black suddenly reacquire his guns. He does, however, see Sybella's sudden explosion into horrible creatures. Since he's on the back end of the box, at the front of the courtroom, and she was on the other end, it seems that his decision of which way to go has been made for him.

In one quick motion, he leaps straight up and forward out of the box, rolling over his shoulder and somehow coming to rest on his feet outside the box. Dimly wondering how he managed to do that, he looks up and then sees the murderer with his guns pointed at the jury. "Ah...!" is all he can manage before he starts running directly at the door that the jury had come in the courtroom earlier, hoping that it would still open.

Running at full tilt, not wanting to look back at what was happening behind him, Joshua reaches the white jury door, expecting it to slide open as he approached. Unfortunately, the door is locked. His shoulder hits the door, low to the ground, and he bounces off, grunting in pain as he lands on his backside. Dazed for a moment, he finally looks back to see the battle behind him. He is far, far out of his league in this courtroom. It doesn't even enter into his mind to help anybody else. His head is full of the sheer panic of the scene. Turning back to the door, he kicks it in the hopes that it might suddenly decide to open. It doesn't, and with a steady stream of curses the musician-turned-juror inches around the front of the courtroom. If he can get to the other side of the room without any of those abominations noticing him, maybe he can get away out the back.

Joshua stops in his circuitous path around the courtroom as the path straight to the door is suddenly free of monsters. He has no idea how they were destroyed, but knows better than to pass up such an opportunity. The sheer amount of sensory input in the room threatens to overload him entirely; he can only think of one thing: get out. He sprints for the doorway to the outside, fully intending to run until he is far away from here.

In his headlong dash for the outside, Joshua sees a group of Twistings just ahead, lying in wait for the remaining people inside the courtroom. There's no way to avoid them, so he aims for the spot where the least of the creatures are and hopes fervently that he'll make it through. He puts his shoulder down and straightarms one of them out of the way, but its claws rake down his arm painfully. But his strategy was surprisingly successful, and he's past them and running into the open plaza.

Joshua looks over his shoulder to make sure he isn't being followed. At that moment he trips over something and falls to the hard ground. Looking back, he sees that he'd tripped over the corpse of a man in an expensive suit, minus his head. He vaguely thinks of that woman in the courtroom as he fights to keep from throwing up. /I wonder what happened to her./

Turning back around, he starts to stand up. Then he sees a young woman, perhaps around the age of eighteen, lying there in front of him. The first thing he notices is that she's been badly wounded. It appears that a stray bullet had hit her, and she's bleeding profusely from her stomach. The second thing he notices is that she looks a lot like his wife might have at that age. /Nicole... no, it's not her./ But seeing her was enough to break him out of his panic-induced run-for-his-life selfishness. /She's breathing!/

Making a quick decision, he looks around the plaza and sees the red cross that indicates that a medical unit has arrived. He carefully picks up the wounded woman, knowing that he probably shouldn't be moving her. But more Twistings are still out here and he doesn't want to abandon her. Like he abandoned Nicole.

Holding the woman's unconscious body close, he walks as fast as he can toward the medical truck, hoping that no Twistings head his way.

Joshua is in the middle of making his way around the plaza with the injured woman when the huge tree-things suddenly pop up. "I'm so far out of my league here..." he mutters. He doesn't have any special powers, he has no idea how to fire a gun, he has no skill in combat. All he can do is to try to save this woman. He has to focus on that. The Red Cross truck isn't that far away. "We can make it."

"Uh, I think," he backtracks as one of the tentacled monstrosities lurches up out of the ground in front of him. He cuts to the right, hoping that he's out of the reach of the tentacles. "It's not that far, it's not that far, stay with me now, we're getting to help, it's not that far..." he repeats over and over, hoping that he doesn't lose the woman.

Joshua can see that the thing's tentacles are growing longer, and are about to cut him off from the truck. Somehow coming up with a reserve of strength, he stumbles into an awkward run, just avoiding the grasp of the tentacles and finally arriving at the back end of the truck. Leaning on the side of the truck, leaving a smear of blood on it from his wounded arm, he shuffles to the other side, looking for a medic.

"Hey, uh, she's hurt, she's been shot, ... she needs help," Joshua says to anybody that might be listening, wondering why he feels so lightheaded.

[The parts of the Red Cross units played by Aaron Johnson, I think.]

Top takes the woman from him, lightly laying her down on a stretcher. A medic runs up and begins examining her, as the large red-headed Captain of the 14th Street Police looks over the young man that brought her here. "Well done, son," he says, "Are you alright? Have you been hurt?"

The musician stands regarding him with unfocused eyes. "Oh. Uh, what?" He looks down at his arms, to see the blood running from the deep gashes in his right arm, and promptly collapses onto the pavement.

Top moves quickly for a man his size, but he's not fast enough to catch the young man as he falls. "Dang. Gail!" Gail looks over, sees the man on the ground, and runs to assist. Together, the two get him on a stretcher. Gail types his blood and starts bandaging him. Top, who has been around enough accidents, shootings, and assaults to know some EMT training, preps a bag of blood and gets it into Joshua's arm as soon as possible. They carry him into Bumper's transport, Gail shouting, "One more, Bumper!" and then she climbs in to hook him up to the more powerful scanners.