Scene #8750: No More Exceptions

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	As Lilian told Petra after one of her very first important battles, the best way to take care of yourself after exerting yourself in life-or-death is to drown your brain in dopamine. It's become a habit for Petra by now-- not exactly indulging, but taking time for herself to do something fun, relaxing, exciting, and so on, to 'build a healthy relationship with dangerous work'. Yesterday at Lilian's manor certainly helped with the dopamine aspect, but wasn't much good for soothing the wounds Petra picked up aboard the Union Busan. She had a date planned with Cinder, but Cinder wasn't able to schedule a day off with the PTO Petra earned from fighting against the Queen until next week, so there's still nothing she has to do today. So Petra made something for herself to do. There's a section of one of the books, in the reading list that Eggman assigned to Petra, that focuses on evil vehicle tech, and how to up your supervillanous weaponized-craft potential. Petra has no interest in building a mech, for a lot of reasons-- namely two, each of which can be broken down into an infinite tangle of others-- but she does have a vehicle to tinker with. So after a couple hours customizing her electric bike with various jets and engine upgrades she scrounged up from the Egg Carrier, Petra wheels it over to the most abandoned stretch of road she can think of to see what she can do with it-- the American Midwest. Some hours later, after somehow surviving racing down open highway on a jury-rigged bike that she strapped rockets to based on tips in a book written by a mass murderer, without even having a drivers license, Petra is taking a break. The bike-- I need, like, a motif. Doctor Eggman would call it the 'Egg Bike' and it'd instantly be his brand.-- is pulled into the empty parking lot of a roadside attraction, hours west of the nearest warpgate. Petra is wandering around the focal sculpture, tousled and flushed from the wind, cigarette smoke coiling up away from her while she clambers around to enjoy the nice weather. The sculpture-- 'Carhenge'-- is a rendition of Stongehenge with vintage cars. Upon seeing the sign on the highway, Petra had imagined beautiful old cars, with their bright colors, well-maintained despite being in the middle of fuckoff nowhere Nebraska. Instead, they're all spraypainted dull, matte grey. She can't help but feel disappointed. Feeling a profound lack of respect for the sculpture, feeling liberated by the absence of other people, worked up from the adrenaline of driving, and a little bit rebellious from the deviancy of all of it, Petra hops up to sit on the sculpture itself, ignoring the 'Do Not Touch' signs. She sits on the edge of the grey truck bed of a grey 1948 Chevrolet, dangling her legs over the side. She's wearing her bomber jacket, plain white cigarette labeled 'RESEARCH CIGARETTE' loosely held between her knuckles. If she has weapons, they're under her jacket, or stored in that mirror of hers. Petra leans against the cabin of the truck to watch the sun set.
Liza Grier	The middle of nowhere, Nebraska, rules out taking a nice clean shot and wrapping it up right then and there. The sight lines are so long and the vantages are so few that it'd take a specialist to be sure of hitting it, and Liza isn't someone like Neutron. Petra's chaotic dipshit behaviour, ruled by random handbooks by insane supervillains in juxtaposition to shockingly practical advice from a woman she barely knows about, even liberated from any expected timetable regarding her actual job at the moment, rules out laying a decent trap either. Predicting where she'll go and when from here would take a specialist to be certain, and Liza isn't someone like White Dwarf. If it were the old days, she'd have a team on this. If she theoretically tried, she could order one. And Petra would probably kill at least one of them. The unknown suite of cobbled together powers and gadgets she has stuffed under her jacket, and her cornered rat behaviour, would need a specialist, and Liza isn't someone like Red Dwarf. The reality of working alone is that you trade away those strengths for scrubbing away weaknesses. Liza Grier is someone who'd already survived implausibly long on the job by learning to do everything a four man cell and on-site backup would do. Itself, a ludicrous proposition. The stuff legends are made of. But even she has pressing, salient limits to how well she can do every little thing. And as much as she despises the special treatment everybody gives to Petra, she hasn't lived this long by underestimating people she doesn't like. There's no data on Petra since she left the Watch, so the smart thing to do is to assume she has Eggman's full backing and a Paladin rescue team on speed dial, and work it down from there. First things first; wait until she's far from a Warpgate. That took weeks, but it's done. Second point of order; disable SOS. Considering Petra doesn't exhibit the caution needed to leave timetables with close friends, and can't use psychic abilities, that's solvable by the taste of metal on her tongue preceding the ear-splitting screech into her radio and the flatline of her phone's battery; followed by a sound reduced to a misty firework pop by distance. Third would be securing escape routes, but it's the middle of the desert; it saves Petra the chance of a shot to the head before knowing what's happening, but also makes for nowhere to lose sight lines in a chase. Fourth-- well, that isn't by the playbook, but something compels her to anyways. Maybe it's just because of remembering Rita talking about her. Maybe it's because she seldom ever gets a reason to. "I don't normally do this, but I'm real fucking curious, Petra." It's probable that neither matters to Petra, when she hears Liza Grier's voice, not as it is on the radio, but as it is on the job; sieved through the harsh distortion of the same broken vocoder she's kept for years, into a timbre-ambigious electronic growl that only somehow carries recognizable tone and inflection. "What's so special about you? Some nobody from nowhere. A teenager with no background. No ties. Nothing special. What did you do to get them so obsessed that they can't stop talking to you, can't stop clinging to you, even though you hate them?" She'd probably teleported in at some point, if she's maybe fifty meters at most from Carhenge. Doesn't really matter now. "It doesn't really matter if you answer. Titanomachia finally made you too much of a problem to let go forever. Which I guess still means you made yourself a problem. But I really did always wonder. Same way I always wondered why no one could ever be honest to Rita. You hate their guts, you stabbed them in the back, you burned their contacts, you went to work for the enemy, and now every day you live is another spin of the chamber on another mass death. You don't even try to deny it. And they're still desperate to save you. Like you'll come back and like them again."
Liza Grier	A harsh, sythesized laugh follows. It doesn't even feel like it's at Petra's expense. It almost feels like it's meant to be shared between them. Like a moment of camaraderie. "Not enough to lift a finger, though. Right? All that clinging to you and trying to be your friend, but they didn't try to break you out back then, 'cause you were tainted goods the second you gave what they wanted from you to someone else. So trust me when I say that all they had for me was a brave little speech about how I 'can't'." "It kind of pisses me off, actually. How far the bar dropped. How spineless they got. That a girl like you can own their fucking souls; and I think you don't even want them. So, between the two of us, I'm kind of sorry it has to be me. If it was anyone else, this could have gone different. You sure have a whole lot of 'anyone else' that should have been here." "But the Watch has real ones to clean up after the kids who fuck around too much playing superhero, so eventually it trickles down to me. I have to get rid of you either way."
Petra Soroka	Despite only ever hearing it twice, eons ago, Petra recognizes the grainy vocoder instantaneously. Like an ancestral threat, recoiling away from a snake rasping through the detritus even before knowing what a 'snake' is, Petra flinches away from the voice so violently that she tumbles into the truck bed, only consciously putting together who it is a second later. She lands with a clang, rolling into a crouch like a spooked animal, and looking the part with her wide eyes and pale face dotted with cold sweat. It takes her a second to creak out a response. Her mouth goes dry. "... O-oh. L-Liza." Her hand, slipped under her jacket, shakily clicks her radio, then spasms and clicks twice more at the expected unresponsiveness. "You're-- y-you're actually here to-- haha. I guess I-- y-yup, curious, go ahead." The first thing on Petra's mind, looping like an alarm ringing, is that dying here would mean breaking her promise to Lilian. That tinnitus-like stress is severe enough that she's barely able to focus on what Liza's actually saying to her, over the runaway pounding of her heartbeat and twitching nerves. Cinder, too-- the last thing she'd sent to her was a picture of the modified bike pulled over to the side of the highway, rocket dangling off the side from a bump she'd hit, with a stupid little ':p' emoticon. She'd never even brought up Liza to Cinder! Or anyone! She barely mentioned her around Angela, just to say that she had it all handled! 'The idea that she could handle it' feels incredibly distant to Petra now. Fuck the Watch, fuck everyone-- why didn't she ask for help from her friends?! "'Special'. A-ah. Well. I-- you know, I-I'd usually say 'nothing', p-probably, and-- and maybe more r-recently I'd have, some, you know, like, long philo-- philosifical explanation, but that, s-sort of feels kind of, ahah, pointless, now." Moving her hand extremely slowly from her radio to her transteam gun on her utility belt, hoping to still seem rigid with terror in case she's being watched through a scope for sudden movements. She painstakingly wraps her finger around the trigger, and pulls just enough to feel the click-- and a pathetic, whimper of sparkling steam leaks out the muzzle, still out of commission from the Queen. Petra feels like screaming. Her arm clenches along with her jaw, a split second away from ripping it off her belt and throwing it as hard as she can. Oh god. I have to keep her talking. "Er-- but-- but you asked. I-it is weird that people are so obsessed with me. I-I think it's weird too. But-- but there's a t-trend, I-I think-- or, I've noticed, or-- had-- had explained, to me." She takes a deep, shaky breath to quell the hyperventilation. "I think-- people are obsessed with me as... n-no, I guess there's a couple reasons. But for the people you mean, I think it's, like, hoping to vicariously fail through me? Like, er-- I'm just paraphrasing how Lilian explained it, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, I'm not totally thinking straight, but I've always tried to make myself better in a way that a lot of people try to be better. A lot of-- er, um, losers without anything else going on, I mean. Like Hibiki. Remee."
Petra Soroka	"So what I-- I think is true, is that there's a way they want to, a-and can't, improve, in terms of emotional actualization, and wanted me to can't-- to fail, also. Because I-- I guess I tried harder, and they could tell. And I did. Am." 'Was', maybe. "It's a process. People can't stand that I'm trying to have a soul now. They-- they want to 'save' me, that's what they've always wanted, but all they want to save me from is not being like them." Petra, near-giddy with the tide of stress hormones, matches Liza's laugh with a strained, squeaky one of her own. "Always-- always fucking speeches, huh? Yeah, you know-- Hibiki didn't even tell me you were coming. I had to tell her I knew, and then she freaked out. Isn't that-- isn't that just how it goes? I bet they'll scream and cry at you when you kill me, aha-- ha. They did with Lilian, too." One last squeeze of the transteam gun's trigger, violent enough to make her hand tremble, then she moves on. Pence, unhooked, gravitationally nullified to float silently under her coat. Pillar of Creation is in the parking lot with her bike, that's no help. Her gunblade? Against Liza fucking Grier? She might as well. It's better than dying without it. "... They talked about me for hours last night. In the broadband. I wasn't even there. How much they hate me, but never-- never like, to keep their distance." Hand on her gun, imagining a red dot trained between her eyes, Petra still feels the need to keep rambling. She really, rarely ever gets a chance to talk about how strange it all feels to her, like she used to with Berislav, and it pours out with more words even as she tensely gets ready to fight. "And I wasn't even there, because I was busy trying to push a treadmill upstairs for someone that I l-love. Isn't that so stupid? I-- looking at all of them like this, they're kind of just-- pathetic. So I-I kind of think I hate them more than I hate you." Petra swallows. "I still-- I don't want to die, though. I wish you'd killed me last year. But now there's too many people who need me alive. A-and I promised." Petra throws herself flat in the truck bed at the same time that the ratbot's hook snaps into place on the ground, connecting it to its antigravity generators. The painted-grey truck abruptly rises into the air, lifting off the stack of cars as if 'falling' upwards. A short distance up, Petra peeks up over the truck bed as little as she can, taking potshots with her revolvers at wherever it sounds like Liza's voice was coming from.
Liza Grier	"Two-oh-three bee-pee-em." Liza states it as a matter of fact. She says it like that fact is a little salacious. Like finding out Petra's exact heart rate is equivalent to discovering a bizarre kink. "You were awful confident the last time I saw you. Pushy even. And you sure didn't seem like you had any worries when you quit. Actually, you looked like dying would have been fine." The click of the transteam gun gets a low vocoder crackle, one that must have been subvocalized laughter at some point, assaulting Petra's ears. "Anyone ever tell you that you're kind of fucking stupid? I know you've got nothing in the tank after that last big op. And--" Liza, curiously, stops, for a second. "Rita is away for a couple of weeks. So she doesn't need to see it. Doesn't need to hear it. Coming out somewhere like here alone is the exact mistake at the exact timing I was kind of hoping for." It's entirely probable that Liza would mean to just shoot Petra once she got her rambling. Having someone distract themselves so she could get a quarter second of life-or-death lead on them is far from the most ignominious thing she's done to kill someone. Considering it's Petra, and what that means for how well she can explain anything at all, it's less likely that she'd wait long enough to hear an answer. And yet, she does. A stay of execution for a couple of minutes of barely coherent rambling. "People get scared about the way they're living." says Liza. It feels like she skipped a step. "Just the shadow of the idea they might've been wrong about something big, for a long time, scares them shitless. So they do everything they can to cover it up and hide from it. I guess it's the same when you know something about 'the person' as when you know something about 'people'. They call you crazy or they beg you to see reason and come back." The sigh is surprisingly not as staticky-harsh as it seems like it should be with that setup. "Should have noticed. I decided if it was the stupid fucking reason I thought it might be, I'd try sending you back to them, like they want, over two months, but seeing as it's the stupid fucking reason I was afraid of, you can at least die on your feet." "Probably." She means the crying and screaming. "But what do I give a shit? They don't have the balls to get in my way. I'm not even going to notice it, next to what I've already heard." The word 'love' probably just bought Petra another ten seconds there. That's probably not a word Liza hears often, but especially not one she'd expect to hear from Petra. What she settles on is, for a change of pace, obviously a deflection from what she thought. "Huh. If that was last night, then it wasn't Remee." What does that m-- "Sorry Petra. I'd say I don't want to kill you either, but S&P is that you'd be erased the day you firebombed the Watch and handed materiel and information to the enemy anyways. Should have thought of that before playing tourist with people's lives in the balance." A beat. "Not that I can be assed to hate you. You're kind of insignificant next to the bougie fucking wolf and the rest of the problems we've had. Could have had potential, even. So I guess I can say thank you for making Rita happy before I dispose of you."
Liza Grier	It's the desert. There's not exactly anywhere for Liza to sneak up on Petra. A little grass around the artwork. A few trees. Not hard to pick out the one she'd been behind, and even then only to lean against it in the shade and stare off into the sky. Petra's gunshots are anticipated the instant she throws the truck, and Liza is even quicker to ignore the fact she had briefly bulletproof cover, rolling her shoulder off the trunk with a 10mm handgun readied and charging straight into the open towards her. The cyan glow of Liza's wrist-mounted energy shield flares up before the first couple of bullets strike her. The sparks of former slugs leave illuminated ripples on the screen, stressing the heat sink with each impact. It's not hard to hit her; she isn't zigzagging at all; which means she's already decided it'll last long enough. Not hard to believe. Mangled dirt and grass are already spat up in two dozen places before Petra can register she's already halfway there. The handgun comes up around the side of the shield. Elbow in, grip to her chest, Liza braces the slide against the notch in its edge; no arm exposed. Two answering thundercracks strike the side of the truck bed, puncturing straight through the thin chassis, and a third walks up to Petra's center mass; a split second where she could be shot in the heart and die before she'd noticed. A brief pause gives her time to take cover or bail out; and then shows just how rehearsed it is when Liza aims another three shot grouping at which direction Petra chooses. The pauses get shorter as she closes in, smoothly increasing pressure to match the naturally rising instinct to break and run. Just before it seems like Liza is actually too close, she diverts sharply enough to to spit gravel through the windshield of one of the art cars, leaps up to the side of another one, kicks off from it, and fires her EVA thrusters in mid-air, gaining and extra jump that puts her back to the sun, and her shadow over Petra, leaving only her optics clearly visible. Up close, she swings the back of the energy shield at Petra's head with jaw-cracking blunt force, aiming to destabilize her with a crushing kick to her inner ankle at the same time. The kind of takedown that usually leads to a point blank shot to the head the instant someone lands prone.
Petra Soroka	The implications of 'over two months' take a beat to crystallize in Petra's mind, then come crashing into her imagination in a tide of bloody chunks. Envisioning Hibiki's reaction to getting deliveries of butchered segments of Petra's corpse is horrifying enough to cross the line into numbly unbelievable, almost silly. Miku saying something like, 'Oh, Hibiki, you got another one of those mysteriously stained brown paper bags in the mail!', and Hibiki responding, 'Go ahead and toss it in the trash, it's probably Petra's severed left ear or something'. Petra giggles again, stacatto and high-pitched. Two-ten; well above what would be a healthy maximum. "Ahaha-- Remee? Her? No. Of course not. No." Her voice is tinged with a little delirium now, the mental toxin of riding a too-high spike of panic for too long without being able to do nearly enough to act on it. She shivers within the truck bed; not from the cold, just from the idea that she's about to be murdered by someone with so little knowledge of her past half-year of character development that she still assumes that Petra would mean Remee. It feels like it invalidates that time partways, somehow. "She's just a stalker. Obsessed. Just like the rest. I didn't even like her before going to jail, and after that she murdered fifteen fucking people just to get a sniff of my laundry in that stupid mech. At least it's fair. If you're going after her, too. She's the reason the fucking thing ever got out of the fucking warehouse again. So it's-- it's halfsies." Leaning against the interior of the truck bed each time she ducks back down, Petra becomes acutely aware of how thin the metal is, even before Liza rips a pair of holes through it. Before the third, Pence tugs the entire trio of painted cars over, metal supports creaking before being torn out of the ground. Petra dives-- low, not straightening up-- over the edge of the truck as they all fall over each other, rolling behind the newly created thicker cover of the pile. The gunblade's not good enough on its own-- not at range, and Petra's never been simultaneously both brave enough and suicidal enough to dive into CQB with Liza Grier without even having her EGO suit for protection. "Hhhhh-- please, fucking hell--" Letting up on her ineffectual gunfire, Petra uses her brief moment of relative cover to pull the transteam gun out onto her lap. She fumbles with the FullBottle's connection, checks the trigger, adjusts the exhausts and tubing around the barrel; she can't get her toolbox from Qetra this fast, and forming morphmetal tools would cut into its reserves. She makes an aggravated, near-tears noise of frustration, pulls the exhaust pipe off of one of the painted cars where it broke in the fall, and just starts slamming the transteam gun with it. "Fucking--!! Work--!!! Piece! Of! Shit!" Just as she's standing up again, Liza's shield bash sends her crashing back down. A black haze briefly distorts her vision, sharpening to red and starry static when her ankle is taken out from under her. Half a second vanishes, and when Petra comes to, she's face-down on the gravel, 10mm muzzle rotating towards her head. She squeezes her eyes shut, shoulders curled in, as if she's bracing for a slap, and tenses her finger around the trigger of her gun for one last, desperate time.
Petra Soroka	Glittering, metallic dust-filled smoke pours out of the end, engulfing her and blasting Liza away in a dull fiery shockwave. After the gun's grainy callout of STING SILVER, the fog clears to show Petra in her Kamen Rider armor, standing up, still tremoring. The sickly yellow hexagons tessellating across her chest pulse in a rapid glowing beat, two-ten, still, but peaking and starting to settle slightly lower. Morphmetal drains from vents out of nowhere, flowing fast and heavy as if it was actually her blood to run in rivulets down her gauntlets. She wobbles in place, then realizes the need to put distance between herself and Liza. The meager amount of already bled morphmetal is thrown up as a thin shield between her and Liza after she recovers from the blast, repulsors in her calves rocketing her backwards faster than she could run. "Did you-- did you wait until after I helped fight with Rita's family and world and everything? So that she'd have another person there?" She wrenches one of the vertically standing cars up out of the ground, a huge clod of dirt still stuck to it, and swings it in front of her to block Liza's next shots. "I-- um. A-appreciate that. Glad I helped. I didn't look, either, not even-- not even while I was there. Fighting. I had special goggles. But--" Her voice wavers behind the mask, creepingly pleading. "I-I'd rather tell her that myself."
Liza Grier	'She's just a stalker. Obsessed. Just like the rest. I didn't even like her before going to jail, and after that she murdered fifteen fucking people just to get a sniff of my laundry in that stupid mech.' "Yeah. Fucking figured." is one of the last couple of sentences Petra hears before she is under imminent, lethal gunfire. Oddly, it sounds more sure than the one that'd prompted her. As if Liza had seen it that way, but was willing to entertain the consensus that Petra simply wasn't capable of expressing positive feelings. "Rich pervert comes by to score college girls with no homes and big rebellious dreams. Happens every so often. Leadership wanted to wring her dry. Didn't even feel good to say I told you so after." Petra giving up on trying to return fire seems to be what Liza anticipates. There's no moment of give in her decisionmaking; none of the softly variable slowdown that comes from verifying then choosing. So she either thinks of her as scared, or thinks of her as smart. Neither stops the accelerating rain of slungs punching apart her sparse cover. It's probably only her terrified hyperventilating and sweating that spares her long enough to hear "You got to stick around longer than she did. At least it's more fair than not at all." It's extremely unusual that Liza Grier of all people would even add the half-second it took to finish that sentence between taking Petra down and training her sights. Even accounting for Petra as functionally helpless, and assuming her Transteam gun obviously broken, it just isn't a margin she ever seems to cut. One that she's no doubt already unhappy about when, against all odds, STING SILVER actually kicks in, because that's what it means when she suddenly goes silent. The gap where a gasp or a snarl would be is somehow more of a punctuation mark than one; or perhaps only an ellipses between gunshots, when Petra rocketing away triggers a flurry of them at point blank on spinal reflex, barely withheld by her morphmetal. "Why's it matter to you?" Behind the pile of earth, Petra can hear Liza talking over an active reload and firing into her chosen car again; ambient gun trivia in her brain tells her with the luxury of adrenaline-enhanced attention that she must have left one in the chamber if she hadn't heard the slide. Another magazine is rapidly poured into the decrepit old vehicle as Liza circles around her, testing the mobility of her lift, and then Petra catches a glimpse of the empty magazine as it's flung aside in her peripheral. Another blurry shape divides her attention around both sides of her cover; if she can split her focus between both and talking, she sees it's the empty handgun itself. Neither are the direction she needs to be looking, which is straight down. "Maybe this was a better chance. Maybe I was busy." says Liza, enunciatingly especially harshly to drown out the soft thud of a cylindrical grenade rolling under the lifted car-clod and all the way to Petra's feet. She must have equated Sting Silver to a hardsuit if Petra is being given the dignity of an explosion; one that could fold the car in half and throw her off her feet at least with one eardrum less, albeit.
Liza Grier	The forced view of Liza is only more bad news. Petra hadn't even gotten to see the moment when she armed and shouldered the submachine gun she's just now raising the muzzle on as she sprints. And she's still approaching. The sand and gravel haven't fully settled from her first step out behind that tree, and she's already driving new patterns into the desert with the hard bank and pounding charge coming after Petra seconds after her transformation. The first two strobes of fire cut such horribly clean arcs across her that it feels like trying to dodge a power saw more than being sprayed with bullets. She walks the third downpour of fiery harsh noise up Petra's future middle in the direction of Carhenge, hemming her out with a screen of buzzing tracers. The recoil she must be absorbing means that suit has to be more than heavy enough, but she maneuvers like a Harpoonist. There's no sight of where the weapons or ammo are coming from. Her arm shield is nearly fully cooled again. The creeping sense that she has no openings starts to feel like a dread certainty. 'I-- um. A-appreciate that.' 'I-I'd rather tell her that myself.' "Yeah. Me too." Liza take the opportunity to pivot her aim under her shield arm and fire half a dozen rounds sideways along the flank of Petra's motorcycle as she passes. The reload passes in a blink. More on her, stretching the limits of her morphmetal and focus with the hair-raising threat of an arbitrarily deep supply of 'exactly what it will take to kill her with one good hit'.
Petra Soroka	"I-it-- it matters because-- I guess I like the lore. Narrative. Ahaha." The squeaky giggle, punctuated more by the raspy shriek that each panicked inhalation makes than the laughter itself, sounds completely disjointed from her voice, distorted slightly by the helmet. Shots in return, in between being raked across the chest by gunfire and pulling cars out of the ground as shields, are sparse and feeble. Charged potshots from her transteam gun only serve to show that she's not not firing back. When Petra glimpses the grenade rolling across the ground, videos on shady internet boards pop into her head. The geyser of dust-- it is dry out here-- obscuring the mutilation in the moment of the explosion, and dissipating to a gritty haze where the shredded flesh, flaps of skin, skullcap sheared off lies crumpled. At least there wouldn't be anything to mail to people. Petra stares at it for a moment too long, stumbling back too slow, then directs the tide of morphmetal around her feet to swallow the explosive instead. When it goes off, the metal isn't a perfect dome to contain the blast. Morphmetal flechettes spray in every direction, scraping with sparks across Petra's armor, cutting her off and sending her flying back. A pulse from her calves turns backwards momentum into sideways, ducking behind a car to dodge the next salvo. "You-- you know? I'd really like if there was a reason. That I lived this long. Y-you know, in the time since I first heard you were coming after me-- I-I guess I like the idea that I 'earned' that time. By managing to-- to be a little halfway decent to someone for once." "L-like... a few days ago my girlfriend told me a story about-- about this villain she hunted down, a-and she was really excited about it, and-- I'm glad I g-g-got to hear it. Between now and back then-- I fought a d-duel. 'For Lilian's honor', haha-- ha. I-I always wanted to do that." The despairing noise she makes when her bike gets shot to pieces is shrill and choked, like this is a greater indignity than being murdered. She still takes advantage of the moment Liza's gun isn't pointed at her, dashing across the central space of the rapidly-diminishing Carhenge to hoist a Cadillac over her head and hurl it at Liza. She'll dodge, of course, but the morphmetal squirming in its undercarriage isn't bound by the same momentum as the main projectile, and it springs out at a ninety degree angle to the car like a javelin, slamming into Liza when she sidesteps. A series of air jumps and rolls puts Petra on top of the pavilion cover over part of the parking lot. With a bit of distance, she's able to steady her transteam rifle enough to get a few shots off, raising her voice to still be heard. "I--! I've made Lilian happy on-- on days where she wasn't, otherwise, and-- and that doesn't make up for what I did before, but it's better that I did it a few times than none! In the past month! I've p-probably saved my coworkers' lives a dozen times. Wh-who knows which ones of them would be dead if you killed me right when you decided to?" "A-and-- and Cinder, and Lilian, and Angela-- and R-Rita, she was really happy, back at-- in the House of the Seven Worthies, and I kept that promise, so if I was allowed to have this time because you knew that I'd help her save her world, if I managed to be good enough to convince you of that, then--" The transteam gun creaks in Petra's hands, not firing while she goes on and on. Her hands shake and her voice pitches up more and more desperately, cracking with a sob. "So that-- th-that has to count for c-closure, right?!"
Petra Soroka	Petra trembles as Liza closes the distance to the roof she's crouched on, and for a moment, it looks like she's about to snap her gun over her knee. Instead, she raggedly shouts and throws it in frustration, the bayonet addition making a poor projectile. She dives and rolls to snatch Pillar of Creation from where it lays besides her ruined bike, holding it defensively to bat away any heavier explosives while her quivering morphmetal halo intercepts bullets. "I-- I killed the worst person that-- that I've ever met! A month ago! Th-there's no one else in the world that knows it wasn't a suicide, and that's-- that's how it should be, so-- s-so when I'm gone, it'll be no one. P-perfectly rewritten. If that was the only thing I managed to do in-- in the month, or months, or however long-- if that was it, then it would-- would still all be w-worth it." "S-so it matters. It matters. It's the bow on top. It makes it make sense. It's all-- i-it makes it-- it-- it m-makes it o-o-okay. I know I deserve it."
Liza Grier	'I-it-- it matters because-- I guess I like the lore. Narrative. Ahaha.' "There's no fucking lore. You just die." Liza blasts through the dust and debris of her own grenade. There must be thermals in those optics. Like Petra's gunshots, she acts as if the smoke isn't there. "People only care as long as you're alive. Once you're gone, they sigh in relief and call it a solved problem." 'You-- you know? I'd really like if there was a reason. That I lived this long. Y-you know, in the time since I first heard you were coming after me-- I-I guess I like the idea that I 'earned' that time.' The fire that rakes after Petra's sideways dodge lags behind just a hair and punches FMJ beams of weak sunlight through the other side. The only proof a human is aiming. "There's always a reason anyone lives that long. There's only two honest ones." A second grenade, hurled at the next car Petra goes for, ignominously cuts off a chunk of her autobiography. The twisted hulk is hurled out of reach, leaving a blank spot. "You either have no enemies, so you deserved to live." The magazine was already swapped in at some point. The next series of rounds hiss and catch fire where they strike, boiling off the morphmetal and bleeding agonizing heat through the suit. "Or you're in combat, and you're earning every second. Proving why you get to live and they don't." She turns and shoots the bike again for emphasis. 'I've p-probably saved my coworkers' lives a dozen times. Wh-who knows which ones of them would be dead if you killed me right when you decided to?' Liza moves so little to evade the car. An amateur would sprint. An experienced combatant would throw themselves and tumble. Whatever she is, she takes the exact number of steps and turns her shoulder to take a firing stance before the end. "How many civilians died because I didn't?" The morphmetal javelin slips past her buckler and strikes her waist. A second, personal shield flickers to life across her entire hardsuit for split second. The javelin snaps and veers off. The hand shield is fully cooled. She moves it to cover her body and alternate their individual cooldowns. No gaps. But that question nearly didn't sound rhetorical. "Lilian again. Whatever you see in that girl-- how many girls just like her were in those glassed over towns, and just weren't rich and lucky enough for you to see them? How many girls would you have loved if not for the crime of living innocently instead of chasing power?" 'So that-- th-that has to count for c-closure, right?!' The frantically hurled transteam gun is batted aside by the arm shield. Liza's gaze eerily doesn't divert from Petra at all to do it. "There's no fucking closure, Petra." She's still closing. Magnetically drawn. Like the speed and distance are all for show, and this is nothing but a nightmare where the monster is always drawing closer. Even in broad daylight, she feels more and more like one. "You die and they forget. Martyrs are a fucking lie."The next load of bullets-- an entire twenty four round magazine-- explode from a digital signal sent by a tiny double flash from her gun's targetting emitter. Liza throws it aside as easily as anything else and a pneumatic holster launches something into her hand, snagged by magnetic grip plates. It ignites into a hot flash of arcing energy and snap-contracts into the shape of a long, thin blade.
Liza Grier	'I-- I killed the worst person that-- that I've ever met! A month ago!' "Yeah. Shame." Liza sees Pillar of Creation, performs an imperceptible moment of mental calculus, and turns her profile behind her shield, deliberately charging into the point. The blue disk turns red hot. The emitter smokes from the impact. Her superior weight and physical strength turn the spearhead aside as a matter of elementary physics. She shoulder charges Petra, and ducks just below waist level at the very last instant with an assist from the EVA thrusters on her back, taking her out at the legs. "You did have potential in the end." Petra going down is an attack of opportunity. Liza doesn't work for the perfect opportunity to land the decisive strike; she takes every opportunity there is that doesn't leave her open in return. She's expounded on that philosophy before. How any arbitrary enemy can be ontologically divided into easily defeated parts and be reduced to a measure of repetition and grit. She doesn't have the footing to skewer Petra with the blade, but she can slash her hideously from hip to shoulder on her way to the ground, and that shrinks her odds of a miracle down to nothing. "Shame you're gonna die for doing fucking nothing and hoping it'll be fine." she says, barely audible over the shriek of the moving blade. "Hibiki got people killed pulling that too, and didn't even try to pay her tab. The fact she's not on the block next-- You're smart enough to know it's not fair. It happened because she has the org's backing and you don't. There's no fucking merit to it." 'It makes it make sense. It's all-- i-it makes it-- it-- it m-makes it o-o-okay. I know I deserve it.' "Shut the fuck up. No it doesn't." Of all things, that delays Liza another precious second. "If it made sense then you'd come back, the pissant enablers would be dead, we'd nuke the fucking genocidaires last month, and Rita would still be here and she would be happy to fucking see y--" Something blinking in the corner of Liza's HUD cuts her off. Something so important she'd stop in the middle of a killing blow for it. Something so important she'd tap finger-palm contacts to answer it. And it is an answer, because her vocoder is still running from her cutting off mid-sentence, and the audio playing inside her helmet filters through. The message plays dead air. Then a familiar little steeling breath. "Hey, Ms. Grier. I'm going to be making fif- fourteen of these, okay? One for each day. So you don't miss me too much. I know you will a little." There's a quiver in her tone. The sound that fills the punctuating silence could barely be construed as human.
Liza Grier	"I'm not going to see that orchid blooming. I'd like it a lot if you could take a photo of it for me. Little Bota would like that too. Sometimes he likes it when I pick him up and take him to the garden, and--" The audio skips. Rita sounds a lot steadier now. "--If you get lonely, you should look out the windows, Ms. Grier. I'm going to be in the ocean a lot. When you're deep enough, it looks a lot like a starry sky. So it'll be like we're stargazing together, okay?" She sighs sweetly. Paper rustles. "And... I hate to say this now. I'm sorry. I should've told you sooner. But, Ms. Mia told me that... Ms. Petra has gotten involved in some really dangerous things. And that some people want to hurt her because of it. I don't really understand. But, while I'm gone, could you please look out for her, for me?" "You're the best, Ms. Grier. I'm looking forward to having a drink with you after. To celebrate." The silence that follows isn't silent. The live mic is still on. Petra, at the feet of the invincible, apathetic killing machine, is listening to a woman's breathing speed up to the point she'd feel sick herself. She can tell by the way Liza is holding the blade that her fingers don't want to work. She can't move it or release it. She can't will her body to do that. A horribly violent hardsuited kick to her side drives Petra away, seemingly first out of spite, then only seconds later, apparently necessary for her to drop the weapon. The active blade burns its profile in glass into the sand. Liza turns her back to Petra. Letting down her arm, she's wide open. Her hand goes to her helmet again, and she falls silent for the exact length of the message again. Moments later, she tears it off. The atmospheric seal rips from the brute force separation. She hurls it into the nearest standing car so hard that it dents the roof inwards. The start of a noise comes from somewhere deep in her throat, and dies out. Petra can only see the profile of Liza holding her face from behind.
Petra Soroka	"I-- I met a ghost." Petra blurts out suddenly, her voice through her helmet's filter rasping as if the speakers inhaled smoke. She even sounds woozy, cloaked by glittering quicksilver steam that she sweeps in an wave to obscure herself. "He died for me. Kind of. He died for his home, so that-- that I and, other kids, could be there." 'His home', 'their home', not 'mine'. Petra's voice starts to wobble, speeding up and stumbling over her words, tongue-tied and clumsy with emotion. "His dying words, in-- in the recording. It's s-sort of like a ghost, I think. He was just a n-name on the mon-- monument, before, but then I heard the recording, and-- and he talked about how he didn't want a-any of the kids to see something like that. I'm-- i-if I had-- if I had just a few more months, I'd be-- older than he him." "And-- and there I was, one of the k-kids, there at his fucking m-mech, listening to his ghost tell me he hopes I never exist. That he fought so I'd-- so we, they'd, never see the battlefield, and the d-death, and everything, and there I was already, and-- and that the money he earned, g-goes back to the project, and they use it f-for-- for our mechs." If it's possible for a tokusatsu suit to look utterly distraught, Petra does, covered in charred marks with her fist clenched, before Liza forces her to relocate again. "S-so-- so the lore has to matter. It makes it all so much worse, doesn't it? That even after he-- he died for it, I'm still the-- the fuckup parasite that ended up poisoning it all anyways, it's not that it didn't matter, it's that I ruined it. I'm-- I'm out here, I was doing everything he-- he tried to shield them from, and even my-- my fucking mech, u-using the money h-he-- he d-died for--" "Of course I care! I--! I don't-- I'm not-- I-I don't want the Beauty of Ash to kill people! I can't stand what they're using it to do either! I-it's just, I...." It all feels like bile coming up out of Petra's mouth. It's not any kind of attempt to justify why she should live, it's practically the opposite. Jay's lore is corrupted by Petra's life and arc, and his death is anything, anything but a solved problem. "Of course that only makes it worse that I-I let it happen. It's-- it's evil-- it's worse than Hibiki, way worse. But then breaking it... I can't stand the idea of it turning into trash, even though it's like this now. Everything I d-do adds more sins to the tally." Maybe it's the comparison to Lilian, her current train of thought about Jay, or her sudden acute familiarity with death, made that much more pressing by Liza still shrugging off the one direct hit she lands, but even Petra sharply inhales at the thought of those glassed-over towns. The two halves of the javelin slow in the air and reverse momentum, then lose surface tension and disintegrate into silver droplets. As ever, it's not the idea of civilians dying en masse that gets her, she can barely even imagine it, but the ways it reflects in the facets of herself and the people around her.
Petra Soroka	The end result is almost indistinguishable. "I-- I don't kn-know. I can't do the math." She means metaphorically, doing math with lives. The only people she affords moral dignity are the ones she's obsessed over at one time or another, but each person wiped out by the dilute, broken outcome of the Eidolon Squadron contains a fragment of harm towards Jay, and Dianna, and Elara, and Petra doesn't even know how to begin comparing that to helping Lilian or Angela. "I know-- one thing, one thing I did was worth it. But, I-I know it's terrible, and the... I h-hate the-- the Titano-m-machia for what they did to it. W-with it." Her voice shrinks, tiny and whimpering as she grips on the edge of the pavilion room hard enough to splinter wood. "I want to fix it. I want to care. I don't want to forget. I don't want to d-die. But I-I don't know how." Down on the ground, spear in hand, Petra tenses like she's about to run for it when Liza charges, then freezes like a deer in the face of an oncoming truck. Training and EGO attunement wrench her arms into the position to brace the polearm against the cavalry charge, but anyone could see that she's trembling, and that her hyperventilating breaths through her mask are a sign of panic, not just exertion. It's easy to slip past her guard, and the impact of the full-force tackle blasts Petra's armor into a cloud of smoke and sparks, leaving her battered and vulnerable.
Petra Soroka	"If it made sense then you'd come back, . . ." Liza's blade parts jacket, skin, and flesh. Blood wells out, hip to shoulder, not deep enough to hit vitals, but the icy prickling of shock robs Petra of her ability to speak. Mute, after all that talking, not even whining in pain as she squirms around on the ground, helplessly pressing the torn strips of her jacket into the wound to stem the bleeding. As Petra feels heat drain from her with each of three heartbeats a second, she contemplates politics for the first time in her life. ... Back in the Watch? Is that what she means? I don't... well, the problem was always the people, right? If Hibiki, and Remee, and Newman, and all the others weren't there, would I go back? ... I don't think so. I'd be as aimless as Hibiki, just better at following orders, from people who aren't even in the faction. Petra's vision unfocuses, so she only half-notices when Liza pauses to answer the message. It just feels like it's taking forever for her to finish Petra off-- but maybe that's normal? She's right. It feels so-- wrong, that I won't get to talk to Rita again after everything. I got to talk to Lilian just a couple days ago, and Cinder last night. I saw Angela smiling just a week ago when I gave her an excuse to hang out with Curupira. But Rita, the last time was at the House of the Seven Worthies, and I was waiting until-- and Hibiki, the last time was fighting with her in front of Niko, and-- Meika's going to be basically alone, I don't even know how this will fuck with her, and-- and Val. Val won't even ever hear what happened. Rita's voice dimly filters into Petra's consciousness, gradually sharpening her perception through the pain and tears. Vaguely, still not certain where the source is and assuming she's imagining it, Petra thinks, She kind of does sound like an angel. Petra peels a hand away from her sticky, blooddrenched jacket, clumsily swiping it across her cheek. She leaves a fragment of a red handprint on the CREATURE MODE t-shirt beneath her jacket, visible now with the zipper slashed open. "But, while I'm gone, could you please look out for her, for me?" Oh. Right when Petra regains enough clarity to place Rita's voice as coming from Liza's headset, she's nearly sent back into oblivion by that kick. Petra rolls to a stop on her stomach, and the world keeps spinning afterwards. She curls up around the bruise, crumpled on the ground, and maybe she could pull out her revolver, or send a command to Pence, or even just scramble to her feet and run, but the possibility isn't even on her mind. "I... d-d-hon't want... t-to d-die." She's not reinvigorated by Rita's private request to Liza, or by Liza backing off. She's not spurred to make some speech about how she'll try to make the world better, she doesn't have any incisive comment or insight, she's not gearing up for an attack or even defiantly spitting on the ground at Liza's preemptively broken promise. Hearing Rita's voice just hit Petra with another wave of tears, and the still-unprocessed yearning to keep living. "I-I-I-I-- I'll f-figure... something out. I c-can-- I can co-contact people... or... or I-I'll make calls, and l-look for a w-way. I-I know how-- h-how it works, how th-the B-Beauty of Ash works, I j-just-- just can't control it, s-so... so there's g-got to be a w-way. P-please. I-I promise, I-- I want th-there to be a w-way, I'll m-make there be a way. I-I don't want... a-anyone to-- to die from i-it. I d-don't want t-to, to leave anyone b-b-behind. I'm sup-- supposed t-to make amends."