He hated its weight, unnaturally balanced. He hated the way it would kick in his hands, the acrid smells it would produce, the heat of the firing changing cold metal to blistering hot. He didn’t care for the sights, finding them restrictive, or the constant need to take it apart, clean it, oil it, and then put it back together. He hated the Stream techniques learned with it, and how mis-using them could make the gun misfire or explode in your hand. Most of all, he hated how such a basic tool could make the weak and worthless into destroyers and takers, though at age 12, he had only barely begun to understand that fact.
He supposed his dad was pretty reasonable about it, in retrospect. He’d picked up Bernard just did not care for firearms or the T.A.N.G.L.E combat system. He wasn’t going to force a square peg into a round hole. But he insisted on Bernard learning a firm set of basics. He lived in Oriam, the centerpiece of high tech, advanced ranged weaponry. Just as Paul had learned some close combat and melee weapon skills, he wanted to make sure his kid’s bases were covered. It was much better to have such skills and never need to use them than vice versa.
Personally, Bernard was certain the insistence was because he was trying to quell the whispers. The rumors that Bernard was illegitimate, that Paul was a useful pawn and cuckold for Laura, his wife. The basis of this didn’t seem TOO far fetched: Bernard wasn’t mixed like his younger brothers. Or rather, he didn’t appear to be. Laura had had him tested to try and shut people up, and that test was virtually infallible. He was their son; it was just some weird quirk that none of his father’s pigment made it into his skin whereas his brothers clearly had. And hey, if he had an aptitude for guns, that would clinch it for sure.
He was sure he proved a double disappointment there.
Even so, just to be sure, when he was older he had had his Aunt Christine run the test herself personally, just in case someone had somehow faked something or lied somewhere. They hadn’t. Christine never lied, ever. He was their son, though by then he was well on the way of being the black sheep of the family. Too different, too inverse to his parents. His parents were crafters, builders, advancers. Bernard prefered nature and all things natural, with the low influence of his parents’ being subsumed into building what he did out of wood and stone, of rawer metals and the Stream focused through organic energies.
Then his father and he had had their final disagreement. They hadn’t spoken or seen each other since. Bernard was pretty sure if he set foot back in Oriam, he’d be arrested and charged with first degree murder. His parents probably would be loath to do it, but both had been pigeonholed in their own ways into being ‘fair’. No exceptions, not even for their son.
Oh, they’d surrendered, those bastards. As one final rubbing of their deeds in Bernard’s face, so smug in how much their actions enraged him. Bernard would never understand why some would feel superior to others via their ability to not care. In this case, it had been a fatal error.
Such was life. But those worse days were to come. In the time of that recollection, he was just holding the gun and not liking it, and trying to not annoy his father too much with his distaste, and failing because it would be some time before he developed a good stone face.
The ironic thing was, even now, every two weeks or so...he’d still run through a drill of those basics.
He still hated it.
---
He didn’t much care for Dawn either, at least after recent events. But he’d given his word to Joy and Neeko, and Dawn hadn’t crossed the line enough to make him consider going back on it.
“So this book is in this prison.”
“Somewhere in its walls, yes.” Dawn said.
“Please tell me exactly why you want me to go in, undercover as a prisoner at that, to retrieve it when it seems like you could easily do it yourself in several different ways.”
“I have a lot of balls in the air-”
“Then drop some.” Bernard crossed his arms.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then make it that simple.”
“...look. Bernard. I know you’re upset over the issue with the Klendathu. Do you really feel that one error of judgment invalidates any and all ability I may have to assess who is best for missions?”
“You hurt Neeko.”
“Please point me at someone who has tried to go through life helping others who hasn’t always gotten that part right.”
To that, admittedly, Bernard had no answer.
“There are certain...circumstances that have made me believe that subcontracting this job to you will work out for the best. You just need to find the book and get out. Or if it gets too hot, just get out.”
“What’s in this book that’s so important?”
“It’s not what’s written in the book. It’s what was put in the book after it was hollowed out. A length of metal that-”
“How will this help Neeko find her people or aid her in her process to figure out a way to fix Joy?”
“If you GET it, I can get a key, and the key can get us into another location, and that location likely has USEFUL MATERIALS that will aid in potentially BOTH those issues.”
Bernard kept his stance.
“Fine.” She’d give him ALL the information. He was being stubborn about it, so let the squeaky wheel get the grease.
The following length of babble admittedly made Bernard very confused, losing the plot eight or nine times. And in the end he didn’t like what Dawn was trying to do even less than he had before, which was really saying something.
But he couldn’t argue that he had a better way, and lacking certain information, all he could do about risk assessment was be careful and alert. Paranoia never worked out for anyone in the long run.
“I have one request.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like my own cards in the hole.”
“That can be arranged.”
“Do it first. And then we have an agreement. For now.”
---
-The Silverwater Institute. Maximum Security Prison. On Yet Another Earth-
He was regretting the agreement. Again.
He could live without any of his gear. Prisons were dangerous, but he was more dangerous. Even without his weapons, he had his life. The upside of being a child of the 44 was that you got the very best of training, for one reason or another. Hell, he was positively a wimp compared to some of his peers. Julia came to mind…
And he could live pretending to be “Leslie McGurk”, a three time loser whose life of crime and violence had finally caught up to him. Dawn’s fake rap sheet, at least, had avoided the sort of criminal acts that no one in prison liked. Not like it mattered much. He didn’t plan on staying long enough to be known in any way. He just needed to get in, sniff out the book (perhaps literally) and get out.
No, what he regretted was that this place was a zoo. And Bernard had never much liked zoos.
He got the basic logic of criminal punishment. Even at its most benign (and Dawn actually knew that sort of thing well, as she had a hand in the prison industry back on her world, and had dumped gigantic sums of money into reform), it was still about locking men and women into cages. Very few things liked being caged. Combine that with all the improvements here built solely into keeping the men here caged instead of both that and trying to reform them so they would one day be out of the cages and not wanting to go back into them, and well…
The place seethed with energy that had nowhere to go but back into itself. Bernard didn’t know if it was a typical day or something drastic had happened, but the lengths of cells were a maelstrom of noise, threats, and general rackets as Bernard was escorted by three guards, all dressed up in full intimidating inhuman black, with full face masks to complete the dehumanizing effect. He was chained at his wrists and ankles, and shuffled along in a resentful slouch that wasn’t entirely acting.
“HEY PRETTY BOY! I’LL PEEL YOU GOOD-!” Bernard thought that MIGHT have been addressed to him. He did have a certain fresh-faced quality a lot of people here lacked. He ignored the threat, as he was semi-pulled up some stairs, his handlers anything but gentle.
Finally, he reached his cell, the door sliding open as he was shoved in, nearly falling due to his restraints. Then he actually WAS shoved down to the floor, the guards still being a lot rougher than needed as they undid his chains, their body language clearly begging for an excuse to crack his head. He didn’t give it to them, and they sullenly left, slamming the door closed behind them as they headed off.
What lovely accommodations. A slab with a barely there mattress, a hole that counted as a toilet, a boxed-in camera watching him up in the corner, and that was it. Well, at least his cell had a window. Rather than the traditional wall of bars, the cells had an open space with super-hardened clear material, with a sliding door that had a traditional set-of-bars window at head height and a slot for passing stuff through.
“The wine list is killer, though.”
Bernard’s eyes flicked to the cell across from him.
Then he wondered how people, or at least this man, could live without proper dentistry.
Oh yes, prisons didn’t exactly have the best medical care. But Bernard was at a loss to how a man could let his teeth become a mass of brown rot to THAT degree. Didn’t it hurt like hell? Or had the infection been outpaced by other, more immediate pains, allowed to grow until there was nothing left to hurt? Or maybe it was just bad stains. The way the man across from him was grinning certainly seemed like he was purposely showing off his teeth.
Then again, maybe he was just damn unpleasant. Bernard’s dull blue-grey jumpsuit, with the off-white undershirt and shoes he’d been given when he was processed, at least was freshly laundered. Winey Brownteeth’s was a mass of stains, mostly on the arms and chest, but spotted along the legs as well. He was a short, stout type, with a gut that was probably more muscle than it looked but still far more flab than any properly exercising person would have. His hair somehow was both greasy and stuck up, like he’d used some hair product and then followed by washing his head down with some motor oil; the exceptionally large whitehead on the left side of his nose, however, suggested the grease was ‘all natural’. He had a bit of a babyface going on as well, giving the impression that he was a giant infant with hygiene and table manners to match stuck in an adult’s punishment.
The hand he took away from the window left a faint smear of...whatever when he removed it, having been leaning on his cell’s window when he spoke. Whatever grime accumulated on a person who disdained bathing, soap in general, and semi-decent table manners. Bernard flashed back to when he was seven and some rather gross kid had discovered the best weapon to get a reaction was to gather up some collected nose-pus and flick it. His ‘Bogey-Blasts’ he called them. Bernard had last seen him in Oriam’s military, he’d cleaned up his act well and good by then. Some of those types, it seemed, never did. It made him grimace, which was misread by his ‘fellow’ prisoner as something else.
“Oohhhhh, the tough silent guy. You’re gonna find your roided up meat-arms and death glare don’t matter when there’s ten of them with knives who want some fresh-” Bernard had stopped paying attention. The heck did it mean to be ‘roided-up’? His arms did have very high development, but he did a lot of swinging, pulling, and so on: they were needed. He’d tried to teach Kaede some basic spear throwing for a reason.
Kaede. Wonder what she would have thought of this mission. Might have even gotten past her All Kobber All Good mindset. This was not a good place, and it probably said a lot that he, a multiple murderer by a lot of law standards, was far and away the…
...something was wrong.
He wouldn’t put his finger on just what until later, when he’d had silence and time to think. He had good senses, honed finer by his preferences and training, but he wasn’t like Dawn, who could spot something nigh-microscopic and then extrapolate a host of minute details that added up to a secret picture in the space of a few heartbeats. Still, whatever had twigged in the back of his head had been enough to make him subconsciously note the contrast between appearance and action.
Winey Brownteeth might have been the picture of slimy calm, greeting the new meat, but his body language spoke of something else. A tension, carefully held down, but starting to slip. It was seen in just a little too much movement, a little too much facial animation. Waiting on something to happen. And not the same thing that it seemed like the rest of the prison was waiting on, which would become apparent in the space of sixty seconds.
But for now, all he’d picked up then was a sense of wrong. The eyes of a predator spying something out of the ordinary, which could be followed to locate vulnerable prey. The man aside from him slid into more focus.
“What? What are you looking at?”
Bernard inhaled slowly. There was a lot of miasma to sift through, the smell of dirt and blood and aggression and fear and chemical attempts to wash it away…
“You wanna kiss my ass? You wanna suck my dick?”
And under it all…
A certain ever so faint fragrance. Not perfume, that would be stronger, more obvious. It was the natural scent of a person.
And it didn’t match what he was seeing.
“You smell wrong.” Bernard said, cutting off the man’s latest crude challenge.
He didn’t get a chance to reply, because with a loud buzz, Bernard’s door suddenly slid open. He took a step back, blinking twice.
No guards. None immediately arriving from the edges of his vision. A few seconds ticked by. Nothing. The cell had not been opened by people planning to escort him somewhere else. It had been opened remotely…
A faint sneer came over Bernard’s lip as he turned up to look at the camera. Gee, who could have gotten into this prison’s system to open his door because him being loose in this prison as soon as possible would in theory be a good thing?
“Are you changing the plan on the fly, golem? Without ANY word? You can go hang.” Bernard said quietly. He might have been stripped of his weapons and tools, but he still had a hidden trick or two that could have opened that door, preferably when it was quieter and darker. “Close it. You’re just making this harder by…”
An alarm went off. Bernard grimaced and ran his fingers along the wall, leaving faint grooves in his hand’s wake. His temper was starting to slip its leashes. The damn robot. He didn’t like thinking that way, heck Kaede’s friend had a cause to make robots equal, and he had no issue, but come on, this sort of mess was solely because Dawn WAS a robot. She couldn’t do anything straight, she had to have gears inside gears inside gears inside machines that were redundant to begin with and she’d consider a hundred small things and decide they all added up to one large change needed when in reality they were just a hundred raindrops and you couldn’t change the gathering dish in mid fall.
Bernard had gotten close back to the wall with his hands up when the guards finally arrived, still as blackly faceless as before, this time armed with shields and taser rods.
“GET DOWN ON THE GROUND NOW!” Was their general request.
“I don’t know what happened.” Bernard really didn’t want to go down on the ground. These men were far too tense. No matter what he did, they’d be unable to hold in their aggression, and he really didn’t want to be kicked, stomped on, zapped, or anything in that vein. If he could stay vertical, they’d probably just restrain him, maybe drag him somewhere.
“NOW!”
“It must be a malfunction…” Maybe he’d get on his knees. One knee, maybe? He had his hands up and wide, his eyes flicking from guard to guard, trying to assess which one would be the most likely to…
….WHAT THE HELL?
Winey Brownteeth was gone.
So to speak. In his place was a whirling mass of...what the hell was he looking at? Clothing and flesh and smoke and wind and it was so oddly silent, a tumbleweed trapped in a tornado and the blue was being replaced by black and limbs and features were coming together like someone had kicked apart a jigsaw puzzle only for it to spontaneously morph into a completed rubik's cube in mid-shatter…
Gone. The man was gone. What was in his place so floored Bernard, despite his own host of marvelous experiences, despite his own eyes seeing places and people transform under a host of special powers, despite the fact that his nose had told him not fifteen seconds ago the man was not what he appeared to be, that he almost didn’t catch the woman reaching under the mattress and yanking something out, the removal turning into an upward toss before she grabbed it out of the air and secreted it away god knew where.
He saw enough. Dull pink cover with a twin leather strap keeping the book closed. The exact object he’d been told to find; someone had beaten Dawn here. They’d found it first, they had it, but why would…
Then the woman reached through the bars of the door, her arm now slimmer and able to reach out further than the closest guard had thought possible, and with one powerful yank, she pulled him back up against the door, even as her hand blurred down, the grip switching from the back of the guard’s outfit to the wrist of the hand holding his taser rod, as she yanked it up and into his neck.
The guard’s yell cut through the general prison noise, and then the woman yanked up the taser rod and rammed it into the computer bank directly above her door. A spray of sparks emitted from the outlet, the faint green text on a black background going flashing red…
And then a much louder alarm went off. As every single door in the prison followed Bernard’s cell’s example and opened up.
And as the door swung open on her own cell, Bernard could only respond with a gasping sputter. He had been TRYING to say ‘Are you KIDDING me?!’, but one of the guards had snapped under the noise and gone forward, jamming him with the taser.
While another one of the guards turned around at the sound and motion of the door opening behind him.
Feet. Literally. She wasn’t wearing boots or shoes; her feet were just bandaged up, her pose as she landed from the swing-kick almost ballerina like, flicking Bernard the briefest of salutes as she ran for it, the rest of the guards still focused on Bernard’s ‘threat’. Never mind the threat solely existed in their heads; all the violence was happening elsewhere.
It had seemed like the prisoners had been waiting on something. There was really no other way to explain it. Even the most violent, tense prison would need more than a moment to react to the reality that all the doors were suddenly open. But not this one.
The second the doors were open, chaos poured out into the halls, the masses of prisoners attacking the gravely outnumbered guards. It probably would have broken down into such a hellscape anyway, but not within five seconds. Only the fact that Bernard and the woman, the kunoichi (although Bernard wouldn’t know that term), were up at the end of the upper level in the two cells kept them from immediately being swallowed by the swarm.
The kunoichi didn’t care, as she ran for the rail and leapt over it in one smooth motion, handless, her legs tucking under her as she vaulted and went down into the chaos.
“STOP HER! SHE’S GETTING-ARRRRRGHHHHHH!” Bernard snarled, both in pain from another taser being jammed into him and his temper finally exploding.
The three guards trying to subdue him abruptly found that their numbers, equipment, and sneak attacks meant nothing, because despite all he’d given up to mask his entrance here, a pointless mask as things had fallen apart in less than five minutes, Bernard Maser could still tap the Stream.
One guard went flying backwards into the kunoichi’s empty cells, smashing against the wall so hard the whole cell vibrated. Bernard grabbed the second by the head and smashed him into the side of the doorframe, moving with the attack, grabbing up the third guard as he tried to zap Bernard again, and threw him up, clotheslining the guard with the top of the doorframe. Stepping away, Bernard reached up and with one firm, simultaneous jerk, tore the arms off his prison jumpsuit, following the kunoichi’s path.
She was down below, rolling from her landing, springing up and charging into another prisoner’s back, pushing him forward and using him as a shield as a guard fired shots into the prisoner’s torso, before the kunoichi leapt and spun on the prisoner’s shoulders, both tossing him down, kicking the gun from the guard’s hands, and kicking the guard across the face in a rapid fire trio of actions before she landed, grabbed the gun in mid-air, and swung it around her head before she clobbered another prisoner across the face and turned that move into a spear throw, firing the shotgun butt first into another guard’s faceplate.
But the purpose of the moves was clear. Forward movement. She was focused entirely on escaping.
Like hell. Bernard leapt the railway himself, and with a surge of power, literally exploded his shoes and shredded his lower pant legs when he landed.
“GET BACK HERE!”
If the kunoichi heard him, she didn’t indicate it, still running. Bernard followed.
Or tried. The kunoichi was a pure WTF sight: neither prisoners nor guards knew what they were looking at and she used that to move on unless attacking them aided the flight more. But Bernard was clearly in prisoner clothes, making him a much more obvious target. A guard swung a nightstick at him; Bernard dodged and tripped him, moving on. A prisoner, wielding a makeshift shiv, came at him from another angle. Bernard stopped, causing the prisoner to overshoot, and Bernard grabbed said arm before he slammed the door of the cell they were next to onto it, elbowing the prisoner as he screamed, the pain mixing with the dull sound of breaking bones.
The kunoichi took flight in a different form, leaping, doing a backwards flip, and falling down to a lower level of the stacks of cells, smashing two prisoner’s heads together as she used their fight to both provide herself a landing and deliver a double noggin knocker. Bernard took a second to assess his own path.
“HEY BITCH!”
That voice. Familiar.
Of course. The bearded, balding, tattooed giant who’d made the threat to peel him. Guess he HAD been speaking to Bernard. He must have really had some specific driving urges if something like this riot that wasn’t half a minute old made him consider someone like Bernard a priority, because he was coming for him, another makeshift shiv in his hand.
“When I promised to cut you I didn’t think it’d be so soo-!”
Bernard grabbed the man’s hand as he tried to stab Bernard in the neck. As in, he intercepted the stab with his own hand.
The sharp makeshift tool did draw blood, but it failed to penetrate, breaking up against Bernard’s palm as he both twisted and ripped into the prisoner’s hand with nails that were a lot sharper than they looked. Blood sprayed between his fingers, and the prisoner’s scream was as much as surprise as pain, before Bernard seized him by the face and smashed him, back of the head first, through the nearest prison cell window.
“You were correct.” Bernard said, and moved on, flicking the blood from his hand. Down below, the kunoichi had grabbed the arm of a guard that had actually deemed to take a swing at her, smashing it down on a metal balustrade that ran down the hallway, letting her steal the nightstick and smash it across another guard’s face. Damn, she could mo-
The impact slammed into Bernard’s chest. It hurt, it actually hurt a lot, and it staggered him a bit, but half of that was from surprise. The nightstick slamming against his face also hurt, but he surged back from the blow’s impact so fast the guard was caught in mid second swing, Bernard grabbing his wrist with one hand and his neck with the other, before with a mighty toss he threw the guard across the prison, sending another guard and a prisoner tumbling down when he struck them at the end of his trip through the air..
Another impact against him. This time he didn’t stagger, as he looked at his attacker. His shooter. Firing one of those shotguns he’d seen the kunoichi briefly use. Well well. Non-lethal ammunition. Well, they at least had SOME small degree of mercy.
“Downing shot. Thanks.” Well, it was technically rubber bullets, but Bernard didn’t know those details. He just knew it wasn’t going to affect him like an actual gunshot.
So he walked forward, tanking the next two shots, and grabbed the gun, spinning it down and shooting the man in the foot, and then spinning the gun up and firing at two more attacking guards. And they didn’t have Bernard’s capacity to soak it, the impact knocking them down like a bowling bowl meeting pins.
“BUT I!” Bernard threw the guard aside. “HATE!” He slammed the gun across yet another guard’s face. “GUNS!” He broke the gun over yet another guard’s head.
That got him shot three more times by even more guards with even more shotguns. With a growl, Bernard went down on all fours and leapt, slamming into the primary guard like a jungle cat, before he switched to the mannerisms of a large primate by hoisting the guard up and throwing him into his peers. Enough of this shit-!
His eyes flicked back down to the kunoichi, as she completed her own elaborate jumping maneuver, dodging her own shooter, grabbing his head as she flipped up, around, and down, and smashing it against the same balustrade railing, the echoing thud seaguing into a louder, grinding noise. Metal shutters had begun to start coming down, over prison cells, doors, and just about everything else, trying to re-box the escapees in.
The kunoichi flicked her eyes back up, looking up at Bernard for the first time. There was perhaps the briefest moment of impressment on her face before she turned and ran like the wind.
How she knew the switch would work, who knew. She knew enough that when she leapt and dropkicked a guard into another guard, sending both smashing into a switchbox, the rain of doors stopped coming down. Bernard was somewhat grateful in the back of his mind; trying to tear down the average metal door was a lot of work.
But it wouldn’t slow his step. If anything, it increased it, as he leapt up on the railing and sprang down, hitting a lower hallway running before he slid under a punch and off the edge of the floor, hitting the fenced wall that he’d been lead through not five minutes ago, the entrance chambers and officers, now abandoned, Bernard using the fence as a cushion and a redirect as he got down onto the kunoichi’s floor in the space of three seconds.
The kunoichi was running for it, hard now. She’d taken some time to show off, maybe knock down some badasses along the way just to prove that she could, but that was all gone, she was in full complete retreat before the metal shutters re-activated, and Bernard couldn’t follow because he was STILL a more comprehensible target, as he dodged someone stabbing at him with a broom and tossed them aside, and then blocked another nightstick swing and flipped the guard over his shoulder, slamming him to the floor.
The kunoichi leapt over a cluster of battle, her body curling up as her hands and feet briefly touched in front of her person before she coiled back out, landed, rolled, and kept running. Another cluster, as Bernard reached the first one, having to punch and shove his way through it. She ran alongside the wall and then up it, briefly sprinting before she twisted, grabbed the chain link, and kept spinning, her movement still going forward as she fell back down to the floor, back into a run, as she then went into a slide, going right through a confused guard’s legs.
Bernard’s fists slammed into his last two obstacles, sending them flying ass over elbows backwards as he kept going. Another prisoner: he gut punched him and moved on. Another guard: he juked aside and tripped him. A third guard closed in. Bernard grabbed him and headbutted him so hard the helmet nearly cracked in half. A trickle of blood emerged from Bernard’s forehead as the guard collapsed at his feet.
The exit door was just ahead.
With five guards there, armed with shields again, and clubs. But for once...Bernard could see it in their body language. Hesitation. Fear.
Four seconds later, all five guards went sprawling or crashing into the hallway beyond, Bernard not even looking back as he kept going.
He was out of the riot now, into a hallway he hadn’t seen before. It actually led to a garage, and normally would have been a lot harder to access, if not for the utter carnage that had consumed the prison.
It also meant the kunoichi no longer benefited from the overwhelming confusion. She might have made no sense, but she was also the only non-guard in the hallway, which made her the only obvious target.
It didn’t help.
The latest guard that had gotten in her way crashed through the hallway door into the garage, the kunoichi making a few rapid fire hand signals as she stepped through.
A katana. She had a katana now. From...whatever mystical pocket she had tucked the book into. It wasn’t like her skintight outfit had pockets.
The guard that attacked her next thankfully just got his nightstick sliced in half instead of his hand cut off, the lack of impact making the guard overreach, the kunoichi spinning and kicking him in the back of the head. Yet another guard, but she could see freedom, and so she blocked his attack and went with it, using her sword to spin the nightstick down and making the guard lose his balance as well, the guard going down to one knee as she kicked him across the face so hard he also went into a spin, and someone was coming, she spun and brought her katana up and down in a cleave…
Bernard caught the blade between his hands, shifting it aside even as he shoulder-rammed into the kunoichi, carrying the two out through the garage door before it slammed closed and she broke away, canceling her attack for pure escape. Bernard rolled and got to his feet even as the kunoichi sprang back to hers.
“...Guess I called you wrong.” She said. Barely winded, only a trace of sweat.
“I need that book.”
“You need it? This book’s gonna keep me in beers and passable motel rooms for...a while. What’s so readable about it that you and me both broke into a prison to get it, I don’t know. The only words I cared about were ‘payment in advance’...”
The kunai flew through the air.
The kunoichi knocked it aside more by instinct than by a ‘saw it coming, initiate defense’ motion. Her head flicked around…
Just like that, her whole body language...changed.
Later, Bernard would puzzle it out. In the cell, what he’d subconsciously sensed but couldn’t break down into specifics...it had been tension. The kunoichi had been waiting for something to happen.
It hadn’t been Dawn who had opened his gate. In fact, she’d ended up just as cross as he was that the whole thing had exploded into a mess of trouble and drama. It had been someone else, and they’d opened the wrong door. And the kunoichi had seized what she could to get out. She had had someone on the outside…
But whoever it was had been compromised. Or sold her down the river. And now Bernard found his senses picking up multiple life signs that had dropped their concealment. Some fine arts, to avoid his senses.
More ninja.
And that fact had immediately switched the kunoichi from cocky control to barely reigned-in mortal terror. It was in everything. Her dilated eyes, her slight uptick in breath, her muscles all tensing so hard they seemed ready to snap like an overstressed wire...and her scent. Sour flooded away the pleasant fragrance of the kunoichi.
He’d smelled this before. Kaede had been scared before, and he’d gotten a result like this. But never this intense. For all her ‘weakness’ and ‘softness’, Kaede had never been as scared as this woman now was.
“Kono nansensu ga owatte yokatta, Kaburagi-san.”
----
-Some Time Later-
Dawn was, on a lot of levels, the curious sort.
She definitely wanted to know the whole story of what she’d just walked into. All she knew was that Bernard’s mission had gone completely FUBAR, and then he’d dropped contact for a time, and then re-established it solely to invoke his personal alarm system. And once she’d responded, radio silence for another day or so. Until now.
But he hadn’t asked for Joy’s help, or Llarness, or Zemira.
He’d asked for her. The woman sitting on the tree stump, watching the mass of buildings burn. And even with the fire…
Death. The air smelled of death. Oh, they weren’t all dead. Cleanup would bring unconscious ones, and prisoners. But the air smelled of a certain kind of violence and horror that only certain battles could bring out.
Bernard had walked into SOMETHING, that was for sure. Something so bad he’d called in the Vendetta.
The kind of thing where pain had rotted and festered so virulently, intermixing with the viler aspects of the human condition, that the only solution left, it seemed, was to bring in a wholly different kind of virulence. One of scouring, and ruin, and violence raised to an art form.
Punishment no prison could match. A justice whose eyes were closed because the blood had blinded them.
...but he had her book. The key part in it, as well. So...provided there hadn’t been some terrible mistake...
“.......I’m not going to tell you how to do your job.”
Her eyes flicked to Dawn. Oddly bright, but not in a Clash/Giselle sense. Moreso an analytical brightness. Oh? I’m listening.
“I just hope this wasn’t a 7 or 8 that you decided needed an 11.”
Julia emitted a short, brief laugh. Then she reached down, holding up the doll. Oh hey, speaking of Clash, this doll was of her.
“It takes a village to raise a child.” Julia ‘said’, waving the Clash doll to indicate that it was supposed to be the one speaking. Now the other doll, a featureless one with a lock of hair stuck on it. A fresh lock. From the original source, who was probably somewhere around here. Maybe they’d even died before the scalp.
“A child that is not embraced by its village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
“That what this was?”
“It was consequence. It always is. If you challenge it...don’t be surprised if it falls on you like the sky. If you think a chokehold is an embrace, well…”
Something exploded. Somewhere, Dawn could vaguely hear the sound of someone crying.
“...also, daddy issues.” Julia said. “A pair of ‘em.”
“Ah.” Dawn said, as she watched the fires burn. “But of course.”
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