Scene #8325: Skatepark Sincerity

Owner	Pose
Nephra Tangent	From above, the hazy morning skyscape of Carnegie Park is a blue-grey puppet show of silhouettes, as old brick smokestacks pierce above the ground-clinging mist that fills the valleys between round mountains and elevated interstates. The soft orange glow of the sun is visible, reflected on drifting clouds and just below the eastern horizon, but as one descends from the sky, into the asphalt parking-lot wastes below, hilltops and boarded-off buildings hide it from view. The ground is still sleeping. Who knows if it ever really wakes up. Ambient petrichor soaks the air just like puddles fill cracks and potholes. Somewhere, a chained dog barks, but even roaring jet turbines don't fully pierce the heavy quiet of the town's decrepit industrial quarter. People live here, despite how easy it is to forget that- broken glass in street-bordering grass strips, soaking wet cigarette butts, shoes dangling from telephone wires, and on some of the sidewalk tiles, half-washed chalk doodles. Plastic bags drift in the slow breeze, the synthetic imitation of the same message tumbleweeds represent: What's here may be dried out, but it's still trying. At what, though? Free to navigate to the exact coordinates she was sent, Petra is led to a chain-link fence gate, with an aluminum sign attached. "Carnegie Park Municipal Services Recreation Zone, Hours-" The rest of the sign's text is cut off by a half heartedly plastered-on 'Closed Permanently' sticker, at an angle- and the nigh-illegible sharpie tags on it and the rest of the sign indicate that this is far from a new development. No marks indicate condemning plans, no reason stated, just a stamped-off official notice. Still, while the gate may be closed, the padlocked chain lays hanging limp towards the ground. Nobody is barred from entry, but if anyone has passed through it, care has been taken to be tender with the area. Like reverence. Or housekeeping. The unnamed park doesn't have to be entered yet to be seen, nestled between two old warehouses. Consisting of concrete basins, ledgework, and ramps, it's clear that the 'recreation' mentioned is skateboarding. Planter squares that once held saplings have since drowned in puddles, without the added substrate to moderate the rain. No shade trees will ever grow here- it's left up to the weeds bursting through cement. Drains are clogged with blown-in leaves and twigs, and a smattering of lean feral cats bolt when looked at for too long. There are no tool sheds, no bathroom structures, the park is just an area for kids to have had fun at, in some distant past before even /that/ wasn't enough to justify the effort of maintaining the place. Skate parks just encourage deviants and miscreants, right? Better to torch it, lest it draw more of their ilk. Walking past water-stained concrete and solid benches once painted with blue skies and puffy clouds, the ghosts of lonely wannabe punks, outcast boys with energy to burn, smiling kids not old enough to shirk kneepads and helmets, and unwanted girls with nowhere else to feel at home, paint themselves in sprayed-on nicknames, curses, and doodles on any surface flat enough to be read. It'd be overly sentimental to assume their graffiti to be some type of plea for immortality, but nevertheless, they've outlasted the liveliness of the park itself. Maybe there's a story there. The whirr of bearings, the scratch of grind rails, hooting and hollering at exciting tricks and spectacular failures, even the memory of broken bones and bad falls, all fading until just the impression that they /could/ have been there, maybe, once upon a time, is left behind. But not everyone is so eager to move on.
Nephra Tangent	Around a bend in the park's circumnavigating walkway, Nephra's raincoat, along with its duct-taped peace-sign backpatch, is visible sooner than she is, the sightline-blocking wall of a halfpipe receding as if to let onlookers have a good angle of view on her. Her feet dangle into a smaller bowl, limply kicking back and forth, as her gaze slowly moves across the surrounding walls to linger on the last stars of the fading night dancing above. Morning light not quite yet burning dreams away. Nephra gives time and attention to poring over the remnants, as if her gaze communicates anything to the unliving concrete, but her eye doesn't meet the spots of fresher teal paint still dripping at the bottom of the bowl. Her duffel lays behind her, glistening wet, clueing in that she's been sitting here at least since whatever rain came over the town. The numerous empty beer bottles beside her say the same thing. A car alarm goes off, maybe miles away, carried far by the damp air. Nephra absentmindedly flips a lighter open and closed, leather-clad fingers twisting the sparker without even having to look at it. The butane smell mixes with the lingering mold, wafting pot, and plant decay in the cold air. Her breath comes with rolled shoulders. Click-whirr, the lighter's on, snap, it's off. Click-whirr on, snap, off. It's impossible she didn't notice the Kana's flight. Nothing that big ever happens to Carnegie Park. But she doesn't turn around. This is a choice in of itself, that she's making. A quiet announcement, almost. There's a heaviness here, and she's leaving the invitation open for Petra to do with it as she will.
Petra Soroka	"Practice" is the feeble excuse given, for Petra to be following coordinates to fight someone she barely knows, and has had nothing but negative interactions with. As if she couldn't do the same with one of her dwindling supply of friends, or a training room in the Shrine of Adversity, or any other option that's less messy than this. Maybe messy is the point. The Kana sounds, as it so often does, hollow with all of its volume, the bassy vibrations of its engines rattling chain-link fences for blocks around with less vitality than one excited child could, as it descends. Settling into one of the many parking lots--Petra has to have seen the skate park from above, but still chooses to land a few blocks away--the Kana powers off, and silence naturally settles back in across the lifeless industrial surroundings. Once she disembarks, Petra doesn't bring any liveliness to the scene either, her dull appearance blending into the atmosphere as if she was just another one of the scuttling rats. Petra is wearing her overalls again today, for the first time in a while, its blue-grey trending more grey in the haze, and the green of her scarf and bomber are similarly muted. Heavy knife blades stick out of the holes they pierced in the pockets of her jacket, signifying the presence of her dual revolvers. She lights a cigarette as she trudges along the sidewalk, crunching glass and leaves under her boots with equal lack of care. Once she gets to the gate and reads the sign, Petra scowls, recognition stirring at the location. Not directly, Petra has never been to Carnegie Park and will likely never return. Recognition of the choice to be here, and of the type of girl who would. The gate squeaks loudly when Petra pushes it open, and after a moment of hesitation, she doesn't bother closing it, striding into the park. Her heavy boots beat against the concrete with each step, but the sound echoes off nothing, flatly dissipating into the air. Upon seeing Nephra, Petra stops some distance away, dropping her cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it with her toe. Her voice scratches painfully as she calls out. "Place sucks."
Nephra Tangent	The momentary blasting stench of tobacco gets Nephra to crinkle her nose up, before she turns her head around. Still seated, looking back over her right shoulder, viewing the other girl out of the corner of her only eye. "Haha. It does, doesn't it? I wasn't sure I believed you'd even show up here, but.... ah. It's the quietest place I know. I kind of love it for that." Nephra pockets her lighter- still visible, the pockets of her coat leave nothing hidden- and pushes off the bowl's edge with gloved palms, until her feet are under her and she's standing balanced firm on her heels. She spins- leaning one arm over to scoop a beer bottle's neck up by two fingers- and faces Petra. Two blades, two guns, maybe she's ambidextrous. Guard your left so it matters less. Short ranged, so keep her at bay. She's fast, it's not crowded, so don't hesitate to go loud. Don't wanna clean blood out from between my plates today. Haha. Nephra takes a step forwards, and smiles. Her few silver teath don't even gleam in the overcast glow, and she extends the beer bottle out in Petra's direction. "Want one? It's still cold, I think. Means it won't taste like anything." This is a trick. Direct focus to her hand, try to let it be missed that matte metal is tracing its way over Nephra's skin, underneath her jacket, and that her eye is looking to the tape-wrapped spear leaning against the halfpipe nearby. Before waiting for an answer, she flips the bottle at Petra- gently, her arms not yet under the weight of her suit, and she does earnestly hope it's caught- and breaks into a shoulder roll across the wet concrete, to grab her lance. No time left for preambles.
Petra Soroka	"This place isn't quiet. It's dead. There's a difference." Petra coughs and tugs on the collar of her scarf. The heaviness is uncomfortable, settling on her like shame. Reminiscent of before, crushing the iron weight in her stomach with molten metamorphic weight, but this time there's no reason not to get angry. Maybe that's why Petra's here. To punch a wall that punches back, and scream somewhere that it feels appropriate, and vent frustration on someone who doesn't care enough to be hurt by shrapnel. Or maybe she's just lonely. Whatever the answer, disproportionate violence is the only language that Petra feels like speaking today. Her hands shoved in her jacket pockets, she doesn't even bother shaking her head at the offer of a beer--because her neck still hurts--and instead whips out one of her revolvers and shoots it out of the air, then looks briefly surprised. Even though the flurry of movement made her expect an attack, the throw was lighter than anything hostile could've been, and she momentarily wonders if she just literally shot down a genuine offer. Nephra grabs her weapon, and Petra is reassured that nothing else was going on. This part is easy. Petra twists her revolver behind her and fires, closing the distance between herself and Nephra. Mid-air, she kicks off of a ledge to leap onto the halfpipe above Nephra, pulling out her other revolver and slamming the pair together as she does. The weapons merge into her large bladed shotgun, and the tip bites deeply into the concrete as she lands with a stumble, the increased gravity throwing her off. "It's funny, actually, I was thinking about it on the flight over. The only way Lilian's offer to pay you to fight me would still stand at this point would be if you're trying to assassinate me." Petra rambles, hoarse voice partly drowned out by the sound of her gunblade swinging down and detonating to slash into Nephra's spear, trying to cut through the metal. "And I don't think you're the type. But it's funny, how fast things change." After the attempt to cut the lance in half, the blade racks back in place under the shotgun's barrel, and Petra fires it again to launch a cloud of metal shot at Nephra, attempting to propel herself into the air. The gravitational pressure leaves her skidding across the ground instead, the acrid smell of rubber treads disintegrating on concrete filling the air.
Nephra Tangent	Nephra doesn't even wince as the droplets and crushed glass sprinkle from the utterly eradicated beer bottle, hiss-clinking off onto cement and joining the remnant refuse of the industrial wasteland. It's a good day to be a wall to punch, but more than anything, Nephra's happy she gets to teach just how much it hurts to crush knuckles into inhuman steel. Metaphorically, at least- punching doesn't seem Petra's style. "Haha. What's got you so sure it's just a corpse, missy? We're here, still, after all." Fingers choke around the familiar plasticine wrapping of her weapon, unable to feel the texture of subsurface chains through the vice-claws of her armored hands, she shifts her position to a guarding one the second Petra's outside her immediate focus. This proves to be a mistake. The solid steel of her spear's haft protects her- she wasn't the target, it was- and in doing so, is cleanly bisected between her spread hands. Mundane metal just doesn't stand up to things that really matter. Nephra's instinct reaction pulls her back a step, making room and preparing for the split-second continuation of the assault. Range is no longer on her side but she is far from unarmed. One ten-foot pike is now two five-foot batons, and she has the strength to shrug their imbalanced nature off. "Oh. Playing that way, hm? I'm not here for her money. Haha. I'm no hired gun. But seeing as you're here for real fun, well..." The ambient weight of Nephra's burning-cold reactor thrums, a heartbeat audible in the small bones of teeth and ears. It hadn't been pulsing like that before. The heaviness sinking into the ground is no match for its sudden whirr of hornets splattering against windshields, as weight and gravity lurch downwards. Nephra laughs, on top of it, her grin hiding how tense her body is to withstand the inescapable pull of distant dying stars. Blood struggles in the ventricles and atriums of her heart, but that's not the heart that matters to Nephra right now. "Doesn't that feel better?" She spits, footsteps crunching forwards. Slower, heavier, seeping with a drive towards nothing. She waits for Petra's next foray, by stumbling, or by chosen assault, into the reach of her weapon's broken cadaver, battering half-hafts still strong enough to bruise and crush.
Petra Soroka	Petra's head and shoulders snap down with the pull of gravity, the shotgun blade carving a jagged line through concrete as she takes heavy steps backwards to distance herself. Wrenching her head upright, Petra grinds her boots into the ground to steady herself, and grins at Nephra, her bottom lip forced down to reveal more teeth than usual. "Gravity." The single word is uttered with metaphorical weight to match the literal, Petra's voice dropping and rasping through her throat. "It's everwhere, in everything, no matter how far from Earth you run. I can handle however much you throw at me. I always have." Petra effortfully stands upright, swinging her shotgun to rest on her shoulder. She locks her knees in place, suffering the ache rather than letting them bend, and keeps talking even while her extremities flush red with pooling blood. "I've been to Jupiter. A million years ago, but still. For a field trip." She steps forwards and readies her shotgun in front of her, and the sudden shift in weight provides Nephra the opportunity she was looking for as Petra staggers. Nephra swings her half-spear at Petra, and with her gunblade still configured to launch the bayonet forwards, the split-second reaction isn't enough time to get out of the way, recoil-aided or not. So instead, Petra stands her ground and twists her torso to give the gunblade the full-bodied effort it needs to arc against gravity. Squeezing the trigger on the hilt at its apex, the blade juts out to intercept the pole with a shower of sparks, then continues down to slam it into the ground, carving another chunk off of the pole to leave Nephra with just one five-foot weapon. Now, Petra finally jumps back, and with a sour smile on her face, scans Nephra's silhouette and the weapon she holds. That's about the right length now, haha. "You're a prize fighter, right? A gladiator? I guess it makes sense that you'd fight so brutishly, I've heard that they throw animals into the pits. I've been trying to learn to be more refined, though." Gunmetal gleams dully in the first hint of sunlight as she swings her shotgun in a horizontal arc at Nephra's core. Midway through, she squeezes the trigger on the hilt and shifts her weight to lunge forwards, jabbing the sword into Nephra's stomach with the combined effort of combustion and upper body.
Nephra Tangent	Rather than keep a grip on the even-shorter spear fragment, Nephra lets it- and its twin- thud to the floor. She likes her spear. Well, liked. But it's not going to help her here anymore, so she resorts to the base weapons she has- vicious clawed fists and sheer gravitic force. Petra's sword finds armor far more robust than the spear, however, plates cracking under the force of the stab but transferring only winding force, not the needed sharpness to draw blood. Nephra puts out a sputtering laugh as she swallows air back down. "Jupiter, huh? 2.6 Gees, continuous strain on a shrimpy body like yours. Can you handle more than that? I don't care how far from Earth you've been, just look around you! Haha, we're right at its beating heart! Wouldn't it be more fitting to amp it up some more?" "Be patient and work her over thoroughly until she can carry her own weight, if you would." "Won't you try on 10 Gees for size?" A visible circle around Nephra cracks its way into the solid concrete, weblike, a gravity well traced into pavement. Ignoring the densening air, a paperclip would fall three hundred feet a second. Nothing Earth-like was built to survive this, and even Nephra strains under the pull. Sliding blates of metal click together tighter, particles of dust and droplets of water twitch, unsure whether to be pulled straight downwards or towards the hungry jets sucking all the air they can get into into reaction mass, throwing her Schwarzchild Radius just a fraction of an inch closer to the boundaries of her reactor's core. "You're the first animal to jump into my ring, Miss Soroka. Haha." Grabbing claws reach for the gunblade's edge itself, grinding sparks out against the tough metal. She takes a strained step forwards- not to advance, but to try and tower over. "I think you could use it pulling you deeper, you know. Haha.~" She grins, but makes no direct blow back.
Petra Soroka	Petra is, by all accounts, Earth-like. She tries to step back from the expanding cratering effect of Nephra's reactor, but stumbles and falls, her knees twisting painfully under the immense pressure as she crumples into the ground. And then there's a flicker, and she's standing upright unharmed, the only evidence that she was ever on the ground being a scrape in the concrete where her weapon gouged into it. With each beat of the reactor's heart, Petra collapses and stands up in the same moment, as if she's skipping frames while stepping backwards. It looks distinctly alien. "I'm not a fucking animal. Don't call me that. I'm a person, and I'm so sick of people saying I'm less of one so they don't have to listen to what I'm saying." At this point, her voice is lowered because her trachea is sinking in her throat, pulling her vocal cords taut. Her scarf flattens against her shoulders, and when she leans forwards to steady herself it pulls down on her neck like a leash, revealing the bruises and forcing her to her knees, finally sticking. The air is filled with the screaming sound of metal rails twisting under the abuse, and Petra only holds herself off of the ground by plunging her gunblade into the concrete to stabilize herself. Nephra leans over her, claws outstretched, and Petra lifts a trembling thumb to flip a switch on the grip of the shotgun. She pulls the trigger, and a flurry of motion happens all at once, faster than any of the strained movements under Nephra's gravity. A shotgun slug buries itself into the concrete, and the gunblade arcs up out of the ground fluidly, catching Nephra's face as she leans into its trajectory. With her fingers tight around the grip, Petra converts the recoil into a tight backwards somersault, kicking her boots into Nephra's chest and then repositioning back on her feet, muscles trembling with exertion, but reasserting her stance against the gravity. "I actually wish Lilian had sent you, honestly." She's still on that? The words don't come easily out of her mouth, on account of the air itself trying to reject them, but her voice is back to normal, or at least, as normal as it has been since Indus. "Then maybe this could send a message, rather than just being a way to spend my morning."
Nephra Tangent	There. There's her teeth. That's what this is all about! Always. Haha. Nephra's shoulders roll- more accurately, intercepted neural inputs push click-snapping arthropod bracework boughs into rolling the suit's shoulder joints. Her flesh is just along for the ride at this point. Adrenaline and muscle-tearing tension is all that keeps the soft part of her body standing, her human heart beating, her last eye on Petra's stuttering motion. The rest of her, cold steel and unthinking impulse, brushes the pressure of her reactor's weight off. Petra's rebounding motion doesn't even make the slab of not-quite-living metal flinch. It can't feel real pain, like the- blade cutting across her face. A sudden jerky motion, leaning back, her center of mass not quite where a person's ought to be is just enough give to pull the sword's tip up and over her eye- the real one- and nick the eyebrow above it. Blood wells up slower than it should, but the pooling drop falls far, far quicker across her skin. The cold sear, and following itching tickle, on her real skin, not the artificial analog of epidermal sensation her armor offers, is the whisper that tells Nephra she's going to lose. She grins wide. "Attagirl. Haha. You're right. Animals don't fight like this.~ This is so much better. An animal would have killed me by now, but you're still. Just. Playing. If you're a person, what do I get to be, hmm~? A setpiece? Discarded refuse?" Nephra can't get through her words without giggling. Honest, vivid giggling. "Haha. So I'm your notebook, is it? Paint your words in my blood and send me back to her, then! I'm having too much fun to stop at anything less." Her words are lighter than her motions, but far slower too- The Androktasia suit is more of a vehicle than just armor, and she carreens forwards, left arm cocked up, ready to strike a blow with clawed fingers bent into the shape of a spearpoint. The motions are jerky, a different kind of stutter- that of metal joints straining past tension thresholds to new, comfortable states, snapping into rigid formation, keeping what's held beneath molded and sealed off from outside change. Curtained by a thin rivulet of blood, her one eye is wide and savage, and her clenched grin seems as locked into the muscles of her jaw as her spinal nerves are into her suit.
Petra Soroka	"Would you rather I killed you? I thought this was a play fight." The corners of Petra's lips turn upwards, fighting against gravity with a shaky grin. "If you want to just be a setpiece, you can. I can't make you be a person. I think people would get angry at me if I did anything but play, though." The giggling puts Petra off-balance, her smile slipping off her face at three hundred feet per second. She pulls up her shotgun to block Nephra's claws, but it's not actually a sword. It's clumsy, and her grip on it is awkward, and her arms tremble with exhaustion. The claws glance off the blade a second too late, rattling Petra's arms, and the weight and inertia of the heavy metal suit is barely deterred. The shoulder of her bomber jacket is slashed open, drawing blood underneath, and Petra only manages to avoid further injury by firing a slug wildly through reflex, launching out of the path of the barreling tank. Skidding across the ground in an unnaturally flat arc, Petra comes a halt at the edge of a slope into the pit. She tucks the shotgun into her arm, and grits her teeth to growl out her words. "I'll do my best to shoot you in a way that writes "bitch" really big on the ground, then." At this distance, with this pressure, with a slug this size, Petra figures she'll have to aim above Nephra's head to hit her. That probably isn't true, but just in case, she aims right for the top of Nephra's head--hoping, mostly, that the bullet does get pulled down by gravity.
Nephra Tangent	"Haha. I don't want to die. But the most fun play can be is when you're trying for real, no?" Nephra is almost dissapointed when her claws draw blood. It's different fighting someone whose skin can tear. She's not deterred, though. She can / can't keep this up all day. Dust and debris are visibly swirling near Nephra's feet, like water into a bath's drain, pulled towards a faint analog of an accretion disk. It's all just stardust waiting to go home, after all. She doesn't pursue immediately, when the girl slips past her grasp, and instead stills, to catch her breath for a shallow moment. "Bitch? That's really the best you've got? For me, or for her? Haha. I know you're both just using me. That already stings more than the-" Oh. There's the shot. Nephra has the split-second option of how to react to a bullet she doesn't quite know the trajectory of- release her gravity, free Petra, and let the bullet go on its natural course, or make it worse on purpose. It only takes a moment of weight being flared up even higher for the slug to be yanked even further down. It could have hit her in the head, it could have really killed her if she'd made the wrong call, and instead of even impacting her in the torso it fragments against metal, just above her hip. "That a warning shot, Ms. Soroka?~ I don't need to be alerted, you know. What've you got to be timid for? Haven't you ever fought for real? Has your life ever truly been on the line~?" And there's the charge. Petra, perched at the edge of a bowl, is an open silhouette against a blank backdrop, and Nephra launches herself like a comet. Boots tear chunks out of cement beneath tenfold-heavy strides as muscles scream, as static burns through the neural interfaces, and as her brain and inner ear picking up the slack of the suit's gyroscopic stabilization and inertial vectoring. At the last moment she leaps, trying to grab Petra and knock her into the gravity well of the skateboard bowl, fractional seconds of freefall before slamming impact beneath.
Petra Soroka	Petra, shaking with exertion and streaming sweat, lets her gunblade drop down after her bullet shatters ineffectually. Resting the tip against the ground only reminds her how much effort it is to keep the rest of her body upright, and she sways, gravity's pull tugging at her properly, now. "What, do you want me to write a whole manifesto? You've only got so much blood. I'd have to wring you dry, and who knows if that would be enough." Petra laughs, wheezing with the effort, then forces her chin to balance on top of the butt of her gun so she can look at Nephra without holding her head up. "I've been an elite longer than you. I like being able to say that. I've been an elite for longer, and I'm still alive, and I've been in dangerous fights and survived them. I'm fucking skilled, I'm not one of the average losers who becomes a statistic offhand." She smiles and wheezes again, her diaphragm fighting to spasm hard enough to cough. "All this talking is hurting my throat. But that's fine, I think I'm stuck like this anyways. Not healing any worse or better, just damaged enough to remember every time I should've died." Petra grabs her gun and rips it out of the concrete, scattering flakes of material. She straightens up in response to the charge, and casually calls out, "This isn't one of those times, though." She jumps to the side. Nephra barrels past her, tumbling into the bowl with all the inertia and gravity that she herself created.
Nephra Tangent	The outcome Nephra aimed for happens, without the minor benefit of also being able to take Petra down with her. Oh well. Nothing she can do, even cutting her gravity, will prevent the force she's already carrying from slamming into the hard floor, in the middle of the earlier-painted graffiti she'd placed there. Nephra lands flat on her back, awful metallic crunching noises whistling out. There's a sudden upwards lurch, utterly unsettling and much, much like intense freefall- not quite, but close- as her reactor slows, quiets, and lets the world drop back to just over 1-G. She stands back up, uncomfortable with the lightness of even the normal weight of Earth, and lets the engines of her suit help her scramble up the sloping walls. She'll think about whatever new funny bruises she's accrued underneath her armour later. "Five liters of blood. Five bags worth, transfused. But I've got about three liters of hydraulic fluid, and it's dyed red. So I think you'd make do just fine. Haha. And you're right. This was never going to end with anyone dead. We're not fighting for real-real, are we? Just real enough we can taste it, foot the edge enough to feel alive." Nephra wipes her brow with the hard metal of her gauntlet, clearing the dripping sweat and streaming blood away. "I just wanted to know if you even knew what that means. Real-real. Haha.~ I know I'm not that scary, Petra. This is just a curiosity. Maybe you've been an Elite longer, up against scarier things than little old me could imagine, but you know what?" "I still wouldn't believe you if you said you'd ever really fought with your life on the line. 'Shoulda' ain't the same as 'coulda'. You're just not that kind of girl. Haha. But we're all just statistics in the end, so chin up, take it easy, yeah?" Nephra dashes, ducking low to the ground, unsettlingly animalistic as the lurching, bent and bending frame of her suit propels her faster than she should, until one of the discarded halves of her spear is clutched tightly in her hands. Instead of doing something sensible, she holds it like a golf club, twisting at her ankles, and swings- a discarded beer bottle as the ball. Free from extreme gravity, the shattering shards shoot towards the other girl, a rain of cutting glass. It's painfully obvious that even at her most serious, Nephra cannot take this seriously. Maybe that's why she can't.
Petra Soroka	The shift back to Earth gravity is like taking a breath after having a stuffy nose for days, and the relief that Petra feels when stretching her arms up is palpable. So much so, in fact, that her feet briefly leave the ground before she readjusts, swinging her shotgun as if it's weightless. She pants, and turns to face Nephra, catching her breath in the conversation phase. "...'Petra', now? It was 'Soroka' a minute ago. Do you put thought into that, is there a reason for that? I can tell, for most people." She twists the grip of the gun, unlocking a mechanism to slide it parallel to the barrel, twisting it back to snap in place as a hilt. Holding it out in front of her as if it's a proper sword, she matches Nephra's motion to charge with a defiant stance. "My life is on the line. I put it there, and it's still balancing on the line right now. Not with you, with everyone. Don't you know anything?" The earlier suppressed coughs come back in force, and Petra presses a wrist to her mouth to cover them, trembling. Even while half-blinded by pained tears, all Petra has to do to dodge the shards of glass is shove her bayonet into the ground and detonate explosive force into it, slamming the gun itself backwards rather than the unmoving blade forwards. She vaults over the glass, landing right behind Nephra, gunblade already at full length. Gripping the hilt in both hands, she jams the weapon into the jet on Nephra's suit, triggering a point-blank explosion to ripple through the blade and tear into the mechanism.
Nephra Tangent	"Tsk, tsk, don't put too much thought into that! One name gets stale in your mouth after a bit, no? Haha. Do you have a preference, really? I'm not trying to bite you with names, y'know. I'm playing nice! I'd stick to it!" She smiles. And pauses, as the other girl holds her ground. She sinks her posture lower, arms wide. The sword's something to worry about, but the words she spits out after are enough to disrupt her focus- with a tiny laugh. "You /put/ it there? Oh, that's just not how it works! You really haven't! Haha." The smile stays on her lips. "It's only on the line if someone's aiming to take it, and you're only fighting for it if you're against that person. If you put it there, well, you're playing both sides, hm? But you're right! I don't know anything! That's why I'm so happy you're telling me a lot!~" She sticks her tongue out, cheeky. Petra charges, and vaults into the air. Nephra tries to twist in time- but worn, bent metal snags, and she falters, freezing for the vital fractions of a second that could be real life and death. If this wasn't all just a game. The blade cuts through afterburner grilles, piercing the surrounding nylon of her jacket to stab deep enough for flames to sputter out and awful grinding noises to shriek. There's no fuel smell, just electrical ozone. Blade wrested between Nephra's shoulder blades, her arms raise up in a clear indication of surrender. The suit worms its way closed, far slower than it deployed minutes before, hissing and snapping and dissapearing into the dense metal caterpillar wreathing her spinal column. Petra may or may not notice that it's not quite the same shape it was before. "Haha. You got me. Uncle, uncle, uncle." She doesn't even turn around while the blade remains where it's pointing. "This was fun and all, but... Y'know. It was a dick move to break my spear. I liked it. You owe me, 'kay?" The tone of her voice makes it clear she's smiling wide despite that. She lost, quite handedly, and she's happy- even as translucent fabric hides bruises, and the blood on her face is out of sight.
Petra Soroka	Nephra's suit collapses into her spine, clearly indicating that the fight is over, but Petra keeps resting the tip of her blade on her back. Just weight, no force behind it, like a hand on Nephra's shoulder to keep her in place while Petra talks. A captive audience. "I don't know with you. Most people call me Petra. Most of my enemies call me Soroka. The ones that want to kill me." Petra gives a short laugh, sucking breath back in with a painful whistle. "It's my fault they do, obviously. That's what I mean by putting my life on the line. People do want to kill me now, so it's not like I can take it back. And I wouldn't." Petra lets the blade sink to the ground, cutting one last mark into the scarred skate park. Some people are just overly sentimental. She splits the shotgun back into its two smaller halves and stows them in her pockets, blades conspicuously poking out. In response to Nephra's complaint about the spear, Petra just shrugs, already walking towards the exit and lighting a cigarette. "I can't replace it. I'm as broke as you are. Besides, if you wanted no consequences, we would've gone to the Shrine. Out here, we live with our choices."