Styrbjorn

I, for one, dislike reading longer texts on the monitor, so I put everything into a nice printer-friendly PDF - get it HERE.

edit: I just noticed that villains don't seem to be allowed to swear. Interesting. PDF is uncrippled, of course.

“Hi, uh, what are you reading?”
The question comes from someone she’s never seen before. He’s athletic, crew-cut, and probably is a former high-school football captain, who somehow got into university. Now he’s confused, because he ain’t king of the world anymore. No admiration for him, anymore, and fewer chicks. And somehow – oh, this strange world – the great society seems to think that some of the chess club geeks from high school are more useful than him, he who could run 100 metres in twelve flat. Of course, there’s still the hopeless cases, the hopeless virgins, those who regard soap and shampoo as something to be shunned. But still.
He’s losing his thunder, rapidly, and will probably drop out in less than a year.
But until then, he has decided to get on her nerves.
She simply stands up and tears his head off, a reddish fountain gushes from severed arteries, spinal fluid leaks out, a piping noise as the lungs suddenly deflate and the whole structure of flesh and muscles collapses and falls to the ground. The crowd cheers.
She smiles, and frowns the next second, as she realizes her daydream did not kill him.
No, he’s still standing there, smiling, confident, relaxed, straight outta the textbook.
“Name’s Kyle,” he adds.
She ignores the extended hand and raises her book, as to give him an impression of the league he’s dealing with.
“The Theory of Cybernetics, Part II”, he reads aloud. A bit set back, but not defeated.
“Why do you read that?”
“Because,” she says now, “some of us go to university for some other purpose than applying makeup and dishing out drunken blowjobs at frat parties.”
Mistake. Big mistake. Now that he’s heard the magic word, nevermind the context, he won’t back down.
“Well I just noticed you because you look different. Your belt, uh, and your hair.”
“Family heirloom. And I like green.”
“And your scarf, nice color, something yellowish.”
“It’s called bronze.”
“Well, I’m just a man, we don’t see more than sixteen colors.” He must have picked up that line somewhere else, because she’s certain this man can’t even count to sixteen.
“Will you leave me alone if I tell you my name and what I’m studying?”
“Certainly,” he says, grinning. Figures he has won. Now, about that blowjob…
“Name’s Kerti. Don’t say anything. Informatics. Engineering. Your part of the bargain now.”
“What?”
“Leave.”
He waves goodbye and moves a few yards on, to a group of friends, and she goes back to her book.
A few minutes later, her concentration is interrupted again, this time from a cheer of excitement rising up from the lawn, where the students gather between classes.

It’s The Hawk, again. Each and every day he flies over the area, at 2 in the afternoon, 2 past midnight, grey wings growing out of his back, very elegant and majestic; he goes down a bit and waves, and a ragged cheer raises from the students, to greet this noble and gallant hero, defender of Paragon City, a ragged cheer, at 2 in the afternoon, each and every [censored] day.
“You know,”some near-hysterical girl says, “last week he foiled a robbery, some ninjas from the Isles sneaked in, killed everybody in the bank, broke the vault, but he caught them!”
“That’s nothing,” says someone she recognizes as Kyle. “In April last year…” , and he continues on chattering. On top of his general idiocy, he is a hero buff. Probably knows everything anybody with a cape and a mask ever did, his room being cluttered with posters of Statesman and his posse.
“[censored] poser,” she screams after The Hawk, who spun around, hovering in the air, saluting the students, causing another cheer, among which her insult is lost, and is departing now, picking up speed, to serve and protect.
At times like this, she thinks about moving to the Isles permanently, where nobody cheers when something flies overhead. But it is too early for that – she needs to finish her studies, and the university over at Cap Au Diable is inferior to Paragon, and completely corrupt, by the way. The only way to get through there would require a patron, a powerful patron, which means Arachnos. And she doesn’t want to make her presence known to Arachnos just yet.
She has to study in Paragon, and so she makes a decision, or rather, she decides that the time is right to act out the decision she made long before; when she saw The Hawk the first time.
Then she sees Kyle blast off in a white, slender Corvette. It actually has “Kyle” written on the left front door, and she decides to add an extra bit to her plan.

The next day there’s a gathering of sympathetic bystanders around the car. “She just won’t start!” complains Kyle and is utterly confused by the Mysterious Satanic Car-Powering Devices Under The Hood. The crowd takes their turns looking at the engine, cranking this and that, and giving useless advice.
“Uh, Kerti,” a desperate Kyle calls to her. “You’re doing engineering, right? Can you help me?”
“Of course,” Kerti says, “where’s the blast furnace in question?”
“What? It’s about my car!”
“Well, we only covered blast furnaces so far. Sorry.” and she moves on. Of course this is a lie, but she fears that, if she could be convinced to take a look at the Corvette, her instincts would kick in and she would actually fix the damage she did before. Nothing to do with some mythical female instinct of mercy and a need to help people – she just really enjoys a smoothly running machine. Therefore, she walks away a bit faster than necessary.
“Well, just leave it here for the night and get a mechanic tomorrow. I can give you a ride.”
This is the last thing she hears, and she smiles. This improvised bit of the plan worked.

There actually is a ferry line between Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, because there actually are honest people who have honest business to do in the infamous City of Villains. (Which actually is an archipelago rather than a city, but “Archipelago of Villains” won’t fit into headlines so nicely, so City it is.)
It is heavily guarded, of course, Longbow on permanent guard on the docks, two dozen red-and-white spandex suits, equipped with heavy weaponry, to make sure no snakes enter paradise.
There’s Arachnos troops on the other side of the connection, but they are easier to deal with, because they ignore everybody who doesn’t look like he could put up an entertaining fight. Kerti, at 1.65 meters, slim, obviously student, doesn’t fall into their scheme.
Longbow bugs her every time, though.
“Purpose of visit?”
“Visiting relatives. You know, old people, they just refuse to move out.”
“You’re quite close to them, it seems?”
“Well, look at my record. And I promise I won’t try to smuggle drugs or enriched uranium back.”
The Longbow sergeant puts his hands up in the universal “don’t blame me” gesture.
“I’m sorry, it’s regulations.”
“I know,” she says sweetly. “So I’m just gonna stand over here while you check back. As usual.”
He nods and checks back.
“All right,” he says. “Go on. And be careful, please.”
“As usual,” she says.

The trip takes about forty minutes, and she uses it to get psyched up. Where she’s heading, there’s nothing even resembling the law, and so it’s important to cultivate the appropriate attitude, which is more or less one of two extremes – either you look tough and ready to [censored] everyone up who looks at you funny, or you completely disappear, looking so harmless and unassuming that nobody notices you, much less believes you pose a danger. It’s important, in any case, not to fulfill any feminine cliché. Seeming lost, helpless and cute won’t get you help in this city.
The aggressive stance has the disadvantage that it draws Arachnos heat, and furthermore, it doesn’t work so well on a small woman.
The defensive stance suits her better, but it draws bored punks who want to intimidate someone. And because they are too weak to intimidate the real bad guys, they gotta go with woman and children.
That is why, fifteen minutes after she stepped off the planks into her other life, she is surrounded by a group of five who’d been hanging around outside a bar.
“Don’t [censored] with me,” she starts off the conversation.
The leader ignores this. “Well,” he says, “Maybe you weren’t aware of it, but this street you’re walking on, you see, it belongs to us. Right, guys?” The guys hoot and grin.
“And therefore, I fear, we must claim a certain fee or toll to allow you to use it.”
He apparently gets a kick out of talking like that, and it seems to go well with the guys. They’re all in their late teens or early twenties, all probably opted to drop out of school in favor of the much more entertaining activities of theft, harassing innocent citizens, heavy drinking and the consumption of and dealing with any controlled substance they can get their hands on.
They’re representing the type of gang pretty near the bottom of the feeding chain – preyed on by bigger, better organized gangs, who are in turn subdued by the Mafia, who in turn try not to draw too much attention from Arachnos, who are more or less on top of everything and haven’t come around to crushing all opposition only because they are fighting on so many fronts simultaneously, a few of those within the organization itself.
But as unimportant as her assailants are in the big picture, at the moment, she is outnumbered and, not carrying any weapon, outgunned.
“You understand,” she says, “that if I called a certain name, Arachnos might come here and fry your [censored]?”
“Unfortunately,” the leader says – he’s really enjoying this, letting her know he’s seen through the bluff – “the next Arachnos guard is a few hundred meters away. We’re keeping the peace here.”
She says nothing and starts to finger her belt buckle. This draws excitement from the crowd.
“Ah, yes,” the leader speaks up. “Alternative forms of payment are also accepted.”
“Not today, [censored].” she says, spits in his face, jerks her head upwards and vanishes.
There’s something to be said for secret identities. But there’s even more to be said for keeping your teleportation device with you at all times, disguised as a belt buckle, calling it a family heirloom.
As for the green hair, she really just likes the color.
The other part of the teleportation device is in her glasses – sensors in the rims measure the movement of the eyeballs, contraction of the iris and so on, to calculate where she’s looking. All she had to do was activate the device in her belt buckle, look towards the sky, blink twice in rapid succession, whoosh! Suddenly she hangs in the air, a hundred and thirty meters above the scene, focuses a nearby rooftop, blinks twice.

The rapid change of surroundings caused nausea, at first, but she learnt to cope with it. She executes a series of jumps, appearing and disappearing like an electric ghost, until the device feels too uncomfortably warm to the touch. She actually overshot her destination by a few hundred meters, so she has to walk back. She left the punks miles behind in less than a minute, and by now, they are – without any doubt – in a state of fear for having messed with her and her strange powers. Tonight, they will have their fear justified.

She makes her way to a certain warehouse without further incidence. It’s completely inconspicuous; a solid block of cement and steel, not at all differing from any of the half-dozen other warehouses crammed on the street.
After opening the door and entering, it becomes somewhat more conspicuous. The front door leads to some kind of antechamber, a tiny 9-by-9-room, another door leading to the actual warehouse. It’s guarded by a pair of two-legged chunks of metal, armor and guns, easily six foot high, painted in a simple pattern of black and bronzish colors, emitting a constant low hum. Watching, listening, analyzing, while remaining completely motionless.
If she had entered unauthorized, the robots, upon noticing her, would have counted down from five, then opened fire. If she had born the marks of Longbow, Police, or other undesirables, they would have opened fire without warning; in addition to that, sounded alarm. Siren and red light in the warehouse, messages sent to her cellphone as well as that of her roommate. “PLUMBER’S ARRIVED” for her. She offered her roommate to work out a set of codes, but she declined. If the warehouse ever comes under attack, her roommate’s cellphone will receive a simple, clear message. “COME HOME KILL ALL.”
Her roommate is also responsible for the third conspicious item in the antechamber. A severed arm is nailed to the wall over the door, beneath a sign, stolen somewhere, that says: “CAUTION! WEAR WARM CLOTHING!” She finds it quite funny, and the spent considerable effort working out a spell to keep the arm permanently frozen.
Kerti doesn’t find it so funny, but on the other hand, she appreciates a display of strength.
Entering the actual warehouse now. It is nothing but a large hall, evenly divided. In her half, worktables, computers, and more electrical equipment than an aircraft carrier. Bits and pieces of discarded wire, screws and assorted technical garbarge on the floor. The whole scene is dominated by a mean-looking, towering robot, armor plates removed, wiry intestines laid open. The walls are one almost continuous bookcase, filled with manuals and photocopied treatments of such esoteric issues as electrical engineering, nonsentient artificial intelligence and weapons technology. The only nontopical book in here is called “Dynamics of an Asteroid”. She keeps it to measure her progress – the day she fully understands it, she’ll skip her mathematics courses. Then the bookcase ends, where her armoured suit is standing against the wall, and three more drones, smaller ones, bronze and black, currently shut down and lined up as before a firing squad.
Her roommate calls herself Winter, and her half of the warehouse is mainly filled with smoke, clothing, magazines, and magical hijinks. Kerti lights a cigarette, goes straight to the stripped-down robot and starts working. After half an hour or so, a voice calls from the smoke-filled side of the hall. “Soooo,” it says. “How are you?”
Winter’s got the slowest metabolism Kerti’s ever seen. She eats about twice a week, spends most of her time sleeping and a substantial fraction of the remaining hours in trance; a strange, drug-assisted form of meditation. She’s reliable enough, but moves, acts, and thinks as slow and powerful as a glacier.
“Some punks hassled me on the way here,” Kerti responds. “Wanna hurt them?”
“Do it yourself.” These three words take about half a minute to form and be spoken.
“I can’t. I’m gonna take down the Hawk tonight, and I gotta prepare.”
“Tough luck.”
“What if I bring you a souvenir?”
“From the hawk?” Winter contemplates the offer, and Kerti has time to run some electrical testing on her big bot.
“All right,” she finally says. “He’s a mutant, right?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“Bring me the heart, then. Undamaged. If you can’t do that, some internal organ, spleen, liver, kidney. Hope your bots know surgery?”
“Not yet, I’ll have to cut it out myself.”
“You do that. I take care of your punks.”
“Tonight.”
“Fine with me.”
“Anything else happen?” Kerti asks, and uses the ensuing silence to recreate the environment in Winter’s brain. What did happen? How much of this is relevant? What do you mean by relevant? I could tell her this, and this, and this; very well, now, how much of it should I tell her? Anything I want to keep to myself, for some reason? Hmm…
“A few Skulls running around the area. Maybe they want their nest back.”
The Skulls had been in here before and even made modifications to the warehouse – sealing the windows and all doors except one with solid concrete, setting up chokepoints and so on, creating the usual gang-fortress. Then Winter, Kerti, and her five working drones had come and taken it. Completely wiped the inhabitants out. In this neighborhood, you have to display power, strength and a certain degree of violent madness to secure your lot. The Skulls tried to capture it back, once. That’s where Winter acquired her frozen arm. She sent the other arm to the local Headskull, inviting them to come back anytime they wanted to get their [censored] literally frozen off. Nobody has bothered them since then, which is good, since the warehouse is nearly perfect for the purpose. With only one entrance, it lacks an escape route, but Kerti’s secured her own means of getting away.
Should a force they can’t handle come through the door – something along the lines of Thor The God Of Thunder flanked by a few hundred elite Longbow badasses and Statesman himself, a small section of the wall – nothing structural - is rigged to blow. In addition to that, she placed a few IR smoke grenades throughout the hall, the smoke mixed with hot particles to confuse infrared vision, and two concussion grenades for good measure. Which means that, after the five seconds it takes Thor, Statesman and the Longbow army to get their vision adjusted and shake off the initial confusion, she’ll be half a mile away, blinked through the hole in the wall in a split-second, thanks to her trusty teleportation device. It’s a good escape plan, and Winter doesn’t know of it, which makes it even better.
“Think they might try something?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Let them come.”
“I’m leaving my Protectors here, then.” She had planned, for a moment, to take her Protector Bots – the ones guarding the entrance – with her, firmly believing that there weren’t such a thing as too much firepower. But the warehouse is important, and she should do just fine with her three smaller drones.
She works a bit on her big bot, trying to figure out just where the fault in the electrical system lies, eventually kicks a spanner around, frustrated, and takes a nap until midnight.
She wakes up at exactly 23:58 and suits up.
The armor looks like something straight out of a Jules Verne novel, but it’s incredible sophisticated. It’s thick and heavy – she climbs into the trousers and the boots rather than putting them on; and as soon as the breastplate is in place and she dons the metal sleeves and gloves, she’s practically immobile. Not too immobile, though, to reach the unmarked keyboard on her left wrist, and once she hits the power switch, it becomes very clear how sophisticated the armor really is – the internal machinery kicks in, and the whole thing slows her down no more than an extra layer of skin. The cape is done up in bronze and black like everything else, and sports a bronze celtic cross on black ground.
She has no idea what the Celts have to do with this incredible piece of technology, but she likes the pattern. And it came with the armor, so she feels obliged to wear it.
Just putting on the armor gets the adrenaline pumping. She notices a spanner on the ground, the very same she kicked before.
She picks it up – the armor is virtually nonexistant - examines it, fine stainless steel.
She holds it between thumb and middlefinger. Then snaps fingers, and with a crunching sound, two pieces of fine, stainless steel are sent spinning through the room.
“Didn’t you need that?”, inquires a sleepy voice.
Kerti is angry at this interruption of her power surge, but she keeps quiet; turns back to the mirror, which is now visible; he hangs on the wand where the armor stood. She rifles through the pockets of her discarded jacket for the only make-up kit she owns – and will ever own – it is a rudimentary thing, featuring only black, and she uses it for the sole purpose of applying two slim bars of black paint right under her eyes, on the skin over her cheekbones. The degree of control she has over the gloves is fascinating – she broke the spanner with nothing but a twitch of her fingers, yet she knows that she’s in no danger of accidentally smashing her own face in; it’s that sophisticated. She can even replace her glasses with contact lenses, which have the same properties, but are less likely to be lost in the heat of battle.
Then she spends a few seconds looking at herself in the mirror; a small green-haired woman wearing five-houndred pounds of bronze-black cybernetic armor, geared for mayhem.
It doesn’t look clumsy. It looks mean as hell.
“[censored],” she says to the mirror, and to the world in general, and then “[censored],” again, because her own appearance leaves her speechless. She would love to show up at the punk’s corner, screaming fury, heavy metal thunder, pure vengeance, watch them [censored] their pants, but she’s got more important things to do.

Securing a passage is no problem. She knows a guy who owns her a favour, and HE knows a guy who owns HIM a favour, and who owns a seaworthy boat, too.
It is obviously not the first time he has smuggled someone into Paragon City, and he maneuvers the security grid with ease and drops her off in a shady part of the docks, promising her to wait for two hours. Judging from the looks he gave her and her robotic entourage on the way, he won’t dare not to wait, so she leaves him without having to create tension.

Navigating through the city at night, in full dress, with her robots trailing behind her, is not easy; but it’s not especially difficult either. She sneaks through backyards and little streets; the gangs allow her to pass, not willing to die in a hail of laser fire, they simply look away. If Longbow or the police ask, they have never seen her. It’s a silent pact: When the bad guys from the Isles come, just step aside, and nobody will be hurt. She teleports across intersections and broader lanes, always keeping in the shadows; her bots are right behind her, they ‘port when she does. Sometimes she navigates over rooftops. The armor enables her to run with little effort, and so she runs most of the way.
At a quarter to two, she arrives at the Paragon University’s parking lot. Apart from a certain disabled Corvette, it is completely empty; an open field of concrete the size of a football field. Nobody in sight. Perfect.
She lights a cigarette and waits.
The travel wore the adrenaline high out, but it rushes back in the exact moment her robots turn, as one, south. They have picked up the target; airborne, coming in at a slow 30 mph. She orders them to open fire at her command and looks at her watch. It is 01:57.
One of the drones carries her pulse rifle; she takes it from its back and raises it to her shoulder. He shows up very clearly on infrared. There is no blood circulation, of course, in the feathers, so his wings resemble something fossilized.
Still, he must carry substantially more blood than the average human; this will be a mess. Typing in another command on her wrist, and a sphere of electricity builds up around her and the drones. Compared to the mathematics behind the energy shield, Dynamics of an Asteroid is preschool math - she has no idea how it works. Yet.

She stands and smokes for thirty more seconds, then her drones inform her the target is in range.
He is still unaware of her – a warm night, the moon hiding behind the only cloud in the sky.
Still coming at her, coming at her… she can see him with bare eye now.
Either time is passing faster than usual, or her heartbeat has gone insane. She hears the pounding, the seconds drip away with every thump.
At last, she drops the cigarette, brings her boot down on it, and yells “FIRE!”
Her drones followed the silhouette in the sky, they don’t need to level their weapons.
A storm of fire cuts through the night. The barrage lasts for a few seconds, the lasers hiss and scream, raw energy pumped through the air. A bit of moisture in the air, instantly vaporized, so the faintest line of steam raises in the trail of every shot.
Her drones pause. They missed.
Maybe The Hawk heard her, or his reflexes are superhuman, but he dodged everything.
And now he’s coming straight towards her.
“Fire! Fire!,” she commands, and raises her own rifle.
He resembles an old plane up there, something out of World War II, only a hundred times more agile.
Old dogfighting stories come to her mind, as he zigs and zags across the sky. She can’t get him into her sights, he’s too fast; when she follows him, draws a bead on him, he suddenly dives left or right and is gone.
Her drones can’t get him, either. They dutifully fire, every time they think they’ve got a chance of hitting, but they accomplish nothing.
And then he’s directly over her and dives down. The shield is made to deflect incoming projectiles and such – he breaks through it with no effort. She wants to run, but she’s sure he’s fast enough to alter his course and catch her. He’s so close that she can see his hands. They end in talons instead of nails. Talons, pointing at her eyes.
She jerks her head to the right and blinks twice in rapid succession.
Now he’s a hundred meters away, correcting his course, flying a few feet over the ground.
Her drones stopped firing.
They are still facing the sky, scanning for a target that vanished out of sight.
They should switch now, switch from air defense to the standard program that deals with everything up to twelve feet from the ground. They don’t. Something is wrong.
She blinks again, but The Hawk’s got a quick mind. He noticed where she’s looking and alters his course as soon as she blinks, and this time, he’s barely fifty meters away.
She hits a few buttons on her keyboard, and her drones freeze. They’re completely useless now.
Then The Hawk's upon her. Close combat now. He’s a superpowered mutant, she’s got her armor.
His first blow sends the pulse rifle spinning. She gives him a kick that would shatter his backbone, if he were an ordinary human. She reacts to his next attack, deflects it, but he moves much more quicker than her, and then she is down, her head jerked backwards.
One hand covers her eyes, talons lie against her exposed throat. At least he’s breathing heavily.
“Power down,” he says. “Power down. I’ve notified Longbow and the police, and you’re going to the Zig. Don’t try anything. If you move, I will slit your throat. Do we have an understanding?”
She lies still. Nothing but darkness and sweat and his smell. Ten.
“Power down. Switch your armor off.” he repeats.
She lies still. Fifteen.
Moves her mouth, but the pressure against her throat prevents her from saying anything.
“Something you want to say?”
The talons move away. Not far, but far enough. Twenty.
“Fire!” she whispers. It takes twenty seconds – exactly twenty seconds – for her drones to go through an emergency reboot routine. It takes a second for them to align their weapons and aim, and it takes a fraction of a second for them to receive, process and follow her order.
So she lies still for another moment.
Then the air is filled with hissing noises, and The Hawk screams and jumps away from her.
The drones caught him by surprise; she blinks away and watches from a safe distance.
Smoke and blood. She blinks again and fetches her pulse rifle.
He tries to get in the air, to get out of range, but one of his wings is perforated – he is badly imbalanced.
Everything is slow-motion, as she raises the rifle to her shoulder, watches him tumbling through the air. She has all the time in the world, it seems, to draw a bead on him, zoom in on his head, and watch his dark eyes jerking left and right, looking for an escape. She sees his face contort in pain as another laser burst from a drone burns through his flesh.
He is still gaining height, and maybe he could make it.
She holds her breath and fires between two heartbeats.
One half of his face simply disintegrates, and he goes limp, falls out of the sky, faster and faster.
The fall terminates on the roof of Kyle’s corvette. She hadn’t planned on that – she hadn’t planned on anything to go as it went – but it still results in a feeling of satisfaction. As she approaches the smashed car and the dead Hawk, she fires another few rounds in his head, just to make sure.

Then, she takes the scalpel and plastic bag out of her pocket and goes to work on the corpse.

The skipper groans as he notices the blood.
“Are you okay?”, he asks, ready to fumble for the first-aid-kit.
“It’s not my blood,” she says, and grins.
“Of course,” he says. “Won’t you people ever stop killing?”
Actually, this is an interesting question. It’s not the first time she has killed a man.
But this time it feels different. The Skulls in the warehouse were something completely else – outnumbering her, and she likes to think that Winter took the initiative, with her trailing behind.
And she wasn’t as cold back then, almost went insane with fear from the beginning, but it worked out.
This time, though… it feels different because it was personal.
It was just her and him. Not a trace of self-defense – you can hardly feel guilty if some punk with a knive rushes at you, screaming like a maniac. No, she ambushed him. And she could have left him alive – it would have been the most stupid decision she ever made, but she could…

Then again, he had it coming. He knew very well that, from the moment he donned that cape, he became fair game. Being a hero is dangerous, and those dangers include being shot to death on a warm summer night, just because somebody wanted to test his strength.
And that’s it.

The skipper drops her off at a place with no Arachnos in sight, she gives him a nod and makes her way back home. She walks fast and feels powerful.
Screams and gunshots from a building on the other side of the street, and a few Mafia people guard the door, to make sure nobody escapes. They grab their weapons as soon as they notice her. One of them claps his hand over his ear and starts talking, reporting, possible danger, looks tough.
She doesn’t slow down, confident, relaxed, she doesn’t want trouble, but she makes sure to pass under the cone of a streetlight so they can see the dried blood on her armour.
They let her pass without trouble, although she feels their stares in her back for something like the next half mile. A new entry will be made to the Mafia’s database tonight. They will do their best to protect their data, but sooner or later, it will leak and find its way to Paragon City and Longbow.
All she can do is keep her teleportation device ready.

The punk’s corner is empty. But then she feels the cool draft coming from a nearby back alley, and she knows Winter’s done it.
She enters the alley, just out of curiosity. The temperature seems to drop with every step, and thawing ice cracks under her feet. A corpse lies in the middle of the alley.
Frost burns don’t look much different from regular burns, which means: Not pretty. The smell is different, the strongest note here is urine and feces – looks like somebody got his colon pierced - but it’s a sickening sight, and she steps over the body without giving it another look.
They made their last stand between two overflowing garbage containers.
Three of them are obviously dead. The remainders of the faces express horror.
The fourth one is still alive and screaming.
She steps closer to examine him. Winter was almost gentle to him – went to work with surgical precision.
“My legs!” he screams. “I can’t feel my [censored] legs!”
“They’re gone,” she says. “Deal with it.”
“Oh god, no, oh god, Jesus...”
“He won’t help you. Listen. Look at me.”
The urgency in her voice makes him stop whining, and he looks up. Then two drones seize him and hold him up, slamming his back against the wall.
“Recognize me?”
He recognizes the green hair, but the rest of her seems to have changed into some kind of mechanical demon. And she’s got [censored] robots.
He tries to wrestle free, but the drones are too strong. Tries to kick his legs, too, but there’s nothing left to do any kicking. As soon as he realizes this, he starts to cry again.
Kerti looks him directly in the eyes. Deer before headlights.
“I told you,” she says to the shaking punk, “Don’t [censored] with me.”
Then her drones let him down again, and she returns to the warehouse, where Winter with her pale face and fragile body lies on the couch, very relaxed.

“You left one alive,” she says. First thing she does is get the plastic bag – all of her drones have compartments, little trunks, for such purposes. She puts it down on a table in Winter’s half, who nods to her. Then, she orders her drones to plug themselves in and sleep, then she deactivates the armor. Drones and armor powered down, she’s back to her human self. Still feels mighty, though.
“Of course,” Winter responds, smoke rising from her pipe, pupils narrowed down to pinheads. “To spread the story. How did it go?”
“Okay. AA routines need some work. Buy some of your stuff? I need to come down.”
“Bag for twenty, suit yourself.”
Kerti gets one of the bags from the table, replaces it with a twenty-dollar-bill and stuffs her own pipe with the carefulness of the amateur. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know what exactly the mixture includes; only thing she knows is that Winter put something in to reduce damage to the spleen and liver. That’s probably important if you’re using it all the time.
She just thinks it’s great to cool off, so she sits down on the mattress in her own half of the warehouse and smokes, leaves that look like crystals, and the great comfortable silence comes over her, nobody speaks a word, until she drifts to sleep after some time.

The next day a girl with a bronze scarf, obviously student, very harmless, steps off the first ferry to Paragon.
HAWK SHOT DOWN, a headline screams at her. She buys the paper and reads the article on the subway. There’s a statement from Longbow in there, explaining that it were multiple attackers, using energy weapons, but they rule the Clockwork out; the tissue damage doesn’t match, and they never take body parts with them, so, pretty much no idea who did it.
This could be a ruse, of course, to lull her into a false sense of security and trick her into making a mistake. There’s always the possibility that somebody saw something bronze with green hair on top. Maybe she should start wearing a helmet… but a helmet would restrict her vision. She needs complete control, for that, she needs complete oversight.
Arriving at the university, where Kyle’s destroyed car is being heaved on a truck. A good portion of the parking lot is sealed off, Police Line, do not cross. They haven’t managed to clean everything up yet, so there’s a few feathers still lying around, dark spots on the asphalt, hinting at a gruesome fate. Police and Longbow, looking for hints, footprints, fingerprints, DNA. Students gathered around the line, shocked faces. Kyle’s in tears. The good guys are supposed to win, aren’t they? His world is coming apart. The loss of his car might have been the final straw, if she’s any lucky, and he might walk into the dean’s office today and drop out.
A Longbow duo looks at her, and she walks away.
She’s getting tired of this hiding game, and silently vows to finish her studies as fast as humanly possible. Which just got a little easier.
Because, as her watch shows 2 PM, silence hangs like death over the students on the lawn. They stop talking, as soon as someone points out the time. “[censored],” somebody else mutters, and everybody goes quiet for a while.
The grey sky is empty. There is no cheer today.
There won’t be tomorrow, or next week, or ever again.
And Kerti smiles and turns the page.