Scene #8596: Compassion is a 9mm Cartridge

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	PHONE: Phoning Meika Kirenai, Petra Soroka says, with the kind of awkward twang of a girl with History, "I don't think I should encourage you to take your gun to school or anything." PHONE: Phoning Meika Kirenai, Petra Soroka says, "But, The shooting range that Petra brings Meika to is a small, dubiously unofficial building off to the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Barely more than a shack constructed out of sheet metal, unlabeled from the outside, with a patch of dirt instead of a parking lot, the 'range' and the accompanying unmarked warehouse beside it are the only buildings standing out in the arid grassland, with power lines and oil-drilling rigs an appreciable distance away. There's no sign of human activity besides the trucks rumbling along the highway, and the dozen cars mysteriously clustered around the warehouse, though no one ever comes in or out. If there's one thing in the multiverse that Petra is a genuine authority on, it's where depressed teenage girls can learn how to shoot guns after feeling like they've ran out of all other options. Petra is waiting for Meika by the warpgate, leaning on her electric bike. She's wearing her bomber jacket, despite the heat, which isn't unusual in Meika's perspective of her-- but unlike before, she looks like it's suffering. She looks like shit all over: her face is pale, making the bags under her eyes stand out even more. Loose strands of hair stick to her forehead, shiny with sweat, and she seems slightly unsteady on her feet. Despite her physical state, Petra smiles and waves when she spots Meika, patting the seat of her bike. "Yo. It's a bit outside the city, and technically this thing isn't safe for highways, but I've done it before and it's basically fine. So we'll ride there together, if you want." Once at the range, Petra dismounts and rolls the bike along with her when she opens the door, rather than leaving it outside. The opening room is just a thin strip barricaded off from the rest of the range by a soundproofed wall, where a man reclines in a chair at a desk, smoking and watching a TV on the wall. He waves the pair of girls in without bothering to look at them, and Petra awkwardly lingers with her bike for a couple seconds, trying to draw his attention from the TV to make sure it's okay to leave it inside, and then gives up and leans it against the wall. She pulls open the door to the range itself without any further conversation to the man at the desk, so presumably she had some kind of prior arrangement. The range is a few dozen meters long, and has no dividers for lanes, so there won't be anyone else coming in behind them. The walls are lined with soundproofing padding, but no insulation, and the box fans set up in the room only manage to bring the temperature down to 'barely tolerable'. The far wall is heavily padded, to catch stray bullets of course, but the padding is also torn and charred with years-old damage that couldn't possibly be from simple bullets, and the concrete floor at that end has old, dark stains ingrained into it. "Cool. Nice and private, now! I guessed you probably wouldn't want, like, all the noise-- well, not noise, for you, I guess. But it feels nicer for it to just be us while you're learning, right?" Petra chatters, sweat trickling down her face, while she pulls a compact mirror out of her jacket pocket. She flips it open and presses her palm to it, drawing out a sour-looking Qetra holding a box of ammunition. "This stuff's heavy, you know? Maybe I'll make you lift a twenty pound weight for hours next time." "Yeah, yeah. Spend that time doing push-ups instead." After Qetra returns to her mirror, Petra sets the box to the side and smiles. "So! How much do you know?"
Meika Kirenai	Texas in the daylight is far, far brighter than relative-midnight in Kagoshima is. Unfortunately, somehow, it's also a relatively similar temperature, and just as cloyingly humid. Dressed in her uniform skirt and its wrinkled white shirt, and all bound up in a similarly out of place jacket, the two girls probably couldn't be worse equipped for subtropical gulf conditions if they tried. There aren't a lot of options for Meika's choice of outfit, though- she's not quite sure when she'll be back home, and with the time differences, being up and out all night means a bit of time saved in the morning could be the difference between yet another scolding by school authorities and getting just a smidge less bad attention. Plus, it's easy to wear- and she's trying to make a little bit of a good impression, going somewhere new. She waves to Petra as she comes through, with a hand occupied with a nearly empty energy drink- which gets quickly pitched in the nearest trashbin, or the side of the road, if none are convinient. Staying up late needs some kind of fuel. "Highways aren't too bad, I ride-" A small cough. "Um. Used to ride on them, when I could. It's nice. I liked the feeling of the wind. So I'm not- I'm not scared, if that's what you're asking." It's not like Meika has another transportation option at her fingertips, and she'd be lying if she said she'd prefer something else. She seats herself, awkwardly sidesaddle, on the bike once Petra has, tugging her own cuffs near-fully over her hands as she makes to hold on tight. "It's not too far, is it?" On the actual ride, Meika's eyes close tight, not out of some need from whipping hair and dusty wind, but out of a preference for feeling surroundings pass by in their hollow reverberating echoes than seeing them as the unfamiliar nothingness that they are. She hops off with an awkward almost-trip when the two of them finally do get to the unremarkable range, the bright Texas sun once more causing Meika to reflexively shield her eyes. She stays behind Petra as she enters, clutching her bag tightly out of a pointless nervousness that anyone here would care that there's the dangerous contraband of a gun within it. She clearly doesn't know a lot about Texas. "Woah." The interior of the range looks like something pulled more from the filmset of a low-budget horror movie, dingy and analog, and her eyes scan the little brass casings litering the corners of the floor, and the ambient gunsmoke smell lingering. Meika shrugs-- albeit with a nod, to clue in just a bit of her agreement --at the comment on the range being private. It is nicer than if it was busy. No verbal reply as her finger traces the shelf from which to fire from behind. Qetra's summoning, however, causes Meika to jump. She's heard from her, and of her, but never seen her, and especially not seen how she gets brought through- even if just for a short time. "Um. Is that-" A hand gets half-raised, and then lowered, as if on instinct to question-asking. "...Nevermind. Push ups are- are pretty good for..." She trails off into mumbling, and her eyes get relocated to staring down the range's lane. 'So! How much do you know?' "Ah, um." Really not much. Fished out from her bag, the pistol enters Meika's grasp with a hesitant looseness. "Trigger's only for when you want to shoot something, the release switch is..." Running through the thoughts, her finger almost engages the magazine release, and Meika lets out a short little 'Eep!', nearly dropping the weapon in an attempt to avoid a harmless crisis. "I- Oh. There's the safety, too, right?" Her eyes move to check it, and quickly notice that it'd been left off. Oops. "...I don't really know anything more about... how it's supposed to work, other than..." With sloppy posture, one-handed, and one eye tightly shut, she holds the loaded, safety-disengaged pistol out and points it downrange. Horrible form. "But It's not too complicated, is it? I mean, I even hit stuff with it, the other day. That's good, right?"
Petra Soroka	Petra's gotten adjusted to Qetra's presence in her life shockingly quickly, all things considered. The unbelievable weirdness of her existence, even when compared to the raised baseline of being an Elite, was never questioned even from the start, and Petra immediately settled into a routine where she complained about Qetra as a person rather than an entity. Bickering with her and using her as a second set of hands was already habitual, and Petra never really feels the need to distance herself from her reflection by ironically and pre-emptively pointing out the absurdity. Which means that she's knocked off-balance any time someone does question her. "Oh. Um. That's just Qetra, she's just, she's not that important." In the moment, Petra forgets whether Meika knows anything about Qetra, and babbles her way through the whole spiel. "She's, like, my reflection, but she's alive. But only sort of alive. She's not, really, like, totally a person, even from her own perspective, as she says it. So she's just stuck around with me, ever since she showed up, which really wasn't that long ago, she's just from this weird magic mirror room on the Infinity Train. I know it's kind of weird, but she's harmless. I just make her hold stuff for me." The moment that Meika starts clumsily fiddling with the trigger, Petra's hazy idea of what teaching her will look like suddenly collapses. Shouldn't she talk about safety first? She went to handgun classes when she was a kid, she remembers how she didn't even touch a gun for the first few hours of learning. Of course, that's not what Petra herself did, when she came into the Elite sphere with her revolver. This was where she came back then, too, and she got right into shooting. "Hmmm. Okay. So...." Petra straightens up and walks behind Meika, chewing her lip thoughtfully. Safety's bullshit, actually. We're Elites. It's not safe to be one of us in the first place. Fussing over all of that will just make her feel like less of one. "It's actually super cool that you managed to land some shots your first time. A lot of people don't. The clerks all have guns, but they're... well, maybe I'll talk to Hod about organizing classes for them, too." Petra starts to reach over Meika's shoulder to adjust her form by hand, then freezes and retracts before touching her. Instead, she steps up beside her, withdrawing another pistol from an ankle holster beneath her jeans. "You want to hold it with both hands, like this, for starting out. If you hold it too loosely, then the recoil will make it jump, and it'll jam up. Don't tense your wrist too much, or you'll hurt yourself, but you can't hold it loosely like you're scared of it." "So before firing-- make sure you're pointing it at something you want to shoot, like I said. Then press check if you're not sure-- that's when you pull the slide back partway, like this." Petra puts her gun down to unfold and clip a paper target-- blue, featureless human silhouette-- to the rail, then wheels it down to about thirty feet. "Do you know how many rounds are left in the magazine? It's good to always know that." "Okay. So once you have a stance that feels steady, just look down the sight and shoot the rest of the magazine. I've got plenty more here for you. Pause after each one, to see how your stance feels, and stuff. Yeah." This is good teaching, right? Or, more importantly, this is the teaching that's good for Meika? Petra isn't sure, and the heat makes it a little hard to think, but she's trying.
Meika Kirenai	"Oh. She holds things. Alright." The comments on her not being quite a real person, and what not, are congruent with the things she's heard from and about Qetra otherwise, so Meika simply nods along. "That's... convinient, yeah. I wish I could trust my Cherub with little tasks like that, but- um. Doesn't matter." A soft exhale, and the subject changes. "They- the Clerks don't know how? It.. seems like they should. I mean, it's dangerous for them all the time, right?" Shoulders shuffle fabric ever so lightly, as Meika tenses in the moment that it seems like Petra's hand would make contact- and fabric shuffles once more as the motion reverses, when Petra pulls back. Meika's hands both wrap around the grip, nodding ever so slightly as Petra demonstrates. "Not too loose, not too tight. Got it." It's not the exact same familiarity with holding an implement with which to bludgeon monsters with, or even the exact same as a hockey stick with which to shoot a puck with, but the idea of balance to handle an impact is precedented in muscle memory, and neither sound nor recoil are alien enough to make her truly flinch. Blue, featureless humanoid silhouettes. That's a familiar target. Meika's breath hitches when she sees it, and she passively breathes out a comment on it. "...Did you pick those on purpose?" There's no insinuation in her tone, except a slow fade into realizing she's said something obviously stupid- Wait, she wouldn't know the Temptations, right? I didn't tell her, or something. "Aha, um, forget th-" For the third time, cacophanous tinitis feedback and skin-peeling itching racks Meika as she slips into using a casual fragment of her manipulative magic on the worst person in the entire Multiverse to try it on. She visibly, obviously flinches, her posture freezing mid press-check. Her eyes shut, face scrunches, and she takes a long, deep breath. What the fuck! A quick-sequence of emotions crash through her mind, settling out into annoyed guilt. "...Four- thirteen. Thirteen left in this one. Haven't used it back home, I- I haven't been out to fight in a little while. I left the other magazine at home. Just in case. I didn't realize..." A short shoulder raise in the direction of the box of ammo. As the itching mostly fades, as much as humidity and scratchy fabric and remnant scrapes and scabs allow it to, Meika re-assumes a stance, and looks down the sites. "...All thirteen? Alright." It's just practice sets. I can do this. She sets her jaw, aims down across the sites, and one after another (with a notable exception of once accidentally discovering that failure to release the trigger far enough makes a second shot much quicker to follow-up, and the subsequent half-jump in embarrassed surprise) downrange, at the blue target. Her aim is nothing spectacular, but no proper flinch response follows up the expected recoil, and every time her posture shifts improperly she's quick to readjust. As sulfrous smoke is eaten away at by the facility's fans, and the slide locks back without a bullet to feed, Meika puts it down and turns to Petra. "Hah! How was that? Y-you should give it a go!"
Petra Soroka	"... Cherub..." So they do actually fight literal Satan. And they have angels fighting with them. Okay. Petra internalizes this knowledge, without questioning it. Meika had said that everyone she talked to started pitying her and prying into her world, so Petra will try not to ask too many questions, to not force Meika to explain it over and over. "I mean, it's dangerous for them all the time, right?" "Yeah." Petra sighs, while thumbing more rounds into her own gun's clip. "My-- Cinder, my friend, used to be a clerk. She-- we met when I, um. She's one of the few clerks that managed to put her gun to good use. That's why she got promoted. Most of them-- yeah, I want to give them better odds." "Aha, um, forget th-" Meika cuts off mid-sentence with a wince and takes a few seconds to recover. Petra waits patiently in silence, assuming she's just suppressing a cough or something, and then looks confused when Meika changes topics. "Are you okay? What about picking the targets on purpose?" When Meika takes aim, Petra briefly considers the fact that she might've lost some amount of healthy instinctual fear of bullets, after being relatively untouchable to them for a while. Still, that's no reason to worry about safety measures. While watching Meika shoot, Petra starts off with her arms crossed, then quickly gets self-conscious about her pose. She fidgets around awkwardly, just behind Meika's field of vision, pointlessly shifting her weight back and forth, trying to keep her attention on Meika's form and firing instead of herself. For the couple minutes that Meika is emptying her clip, Petra is subjected to a personal hell of a sulphur-scented inverse birthday song, completely uncertain what her behavioral role in this situation is supposed to be. Then it's over! And Meika did surprisingly well! Petra's face lights up excitedly at the target, reeling it back over to point out the clusters of bullet holes. "Hey! This is actually really great for a first time. Most people don't even, like, hit the target with most of them. A lot of your shots landed left of the head, which I think..." Petra pulls out her phone and quickly googles something. "Yeah. Maybe you're trying to squeeze the trigger with the very end of your finger? You want the middle of your fingerpad to be on it, so it's straight forwards when you fire." The target's far from done, so Petra reels it back out after explaining. "Though, you do already have plenty of experience doing this kind of thing, don't you? Not-- like, not shooting, I mean. But... using dangerous things? Fighting, and stuff. So it's no surprise you'd start out this good." Petra knows Meika's been a magical girl for some time, but she assumes this means, like, less than a year. After all, Petra's only been an Elite for a year, and Meika's younger than she is, so she couldn't have been around longer. "You want me to go a round?" Petra giggles, obviously having fun. "I'm not the one learning! But-- actually, now that I think of it, I haven't shot a gun since-- ah, um. Some stuff happened. So yeah! Sure, I'll show you."
Petra Soroka	Petra draws her twin bayoneted revolvers from her jacket pocket, then hesitates, swaying on her feet. "Yeah. Um. Some stuff happened. So sorry, about this, it's just a little too hot." Petra takes a slow breath, then slips her arm out of her bomber jacket, peeling it off of her overheating body and tossing it onto the counter in front of them. Without sleeves, gauze, or Silver, Petra's arms are a red-pale washboard of scars, with knife wounds trailing up her forearm, up over her shoulder and down beneath her tank top. Electricity burns and pinpoint lighter marks spread beneath and around the scars, with barely an inch of skin untouched. Teeth marks on her neck smear mosquito-bite specks of blood when she accidentally brushes against them. Petra exhales, leaning into the airflow from the fan, then lapses into a coughing fit. She wraps her arms around herself and squeezes, looking down at the floor. "Um. Anyways. The-- the ones I usually use are revolvers. Not pistols. So they're-- they're a little different, but the... fundamentals, still apply."
Meika Kirenai	'I want to give them better odds.' "...That's kind of you, to want. I... hope it can be safer there, for everyone." Meika chews the inside of her lips, mulling over the words said, bitter guilt seeping in. "Cinder's the... agent w-who likes your pet chinchilla, right? Who's been on the radio bands a little...?" 'What about picking the targets on purpose?' "It's... it just kind of looks like the Temptations do, but- I mean, that's silly. I know it's not made to. I just wasn't thinking. You- you wouldn't know that, nor would..." She lets herself fade off with a shrug, as the emptied pistol sits on the shelf in front of them. She's happy to trace a fingertip over the bullet holes in the paper target, watching their torn and slightly singed edges flex under slight weight. "...Really?" There's a note of surprise in her voice, at the slight praise, but the thin hints of a smile come across her face despite it. "...Oh, yeah. That makes sense, I think. Too much leverage at the tip, right? It'll affect-" She stops herself from entering a tangent on dynamics of grip position for hockey sticks, old, parroted concepts ingrained into her focus and habit. "...I'll try with the middle next time. "...Yeah. Aha... closing in on retirement." A grim topic to joke on, as the bit of a smile shifts away. Absentmindedly, she fumbles with pulling the handgun's magazine out, far slower than a practiced motion, and check through the ammunition box to fill it back up, bullet by bullet. It's not a fast process for a beginner, with its stiff spring, but it's something to do with hands. "...Since some stuff happened?" A pause, and pursed lips, a bullet halfway clicked into the magazine. "...Oh. Y-yeah." She does her best to give Petra the dignity of not having eyes on her, but Meika is only human. Half-consciously, the magazine gets left on the table, and her own hands are shoved deep into pockets of a similarly stifling jacket, for not altogether dissimilar reasons. Don't say anything. Eyes forwards. Act normal. Her breathing hitches. "...Do you... have to do the cowboy thing, with the lever?" An attempt to put words out and think of other things. "Is... that one of the differences?" She's not the most versed on guns, beyond what she's seen in movies and advertisements and a few books, but revolvers have an iconic bit of expression to them, even when not all function that way, and there's a bit of a rise in tone as curious excitement enters her voice, from the novelty. Meika tries to quickly re-affix the already-shot-at target and send it downrange, clipped ever so slightly slanted and only noticed by her when awkwardly far enough that returning it wouldn't be worth the effort. "Um. Good luck, with your go." A small smile, as Meika finally puts eyes back to Petra's posture and hand positions. Oh, okay, wrists held even straighter, elbows...