A shuffle from across the room. A pause, scratch, clatter as a can is bumped and they know she's there. Nothing to be done - the noise has been made and her presence is known. She scuttles about the floor, low to the ground and invisible to the untrained eye. And though her enemies know she is there, they know not [i]where[/i] there is. Her escape in sight, but tunnel vision sets in as the goal edges ever closer.

Freedom never comes as Arlene Jefferson ends the poor rat's night with a knife straight through the neck.

Arlene crouches next to the rat's corpse, leaning in close in order to examine her latest victim. The rat had light gray fur once, but a lifetime of living in the gutters and alleys of Ankora had permanently dyed it to a deep brown. It was something Arlene knew well - anything she wore that wasn't black quickly became so. Arlene removed her knife from the rat's body, wiping her knife on her boot before returning it to its sheath.

It was a shame, she mused, that the rats were doomed to a life of scavenging with no hope for the future. But could she be blamed for killing the poor creatures if they found their way into her pantry? Of course not! Punish the thieves for their actions and let it be a message for those to follow.

"Maybe it's time to quit being so fuckin' dramatic, Arlene, you have shit to do," the rat murderer muttered to herself, kicking her victim to the side of her apartment. Maybe she'd throw it out later, maybe she wouldn't. Not important. Every minute she wasted on rat killing was another minute that her people had to suffer without her protection. Graffiti threw on her gas mask and hood and jumped out her window to the fire escape.

As she navigated the creaky stairs and ladders of the fire escape, Graffiti kept an eye and ear out towards the city streets for activity. Gunshots could be heard intermittently throughout the small area of downtown Ankora local residents had dubbed "The Blood Blocks," or simply the Blocks, for short. The area was known for its older, shorter, more run down apartment buildings and its incredibly high crime rate. Graffiti's entire tenure in the city was based in the Blocks, an area that reminded her all too well of her home in Chicago. It was from here that Graffiti felt she could have the most impact for her people. If she could stop crime in the Blocks, she felt could stop crime anywhere.

Of course, finding crime was the easy part. Figuring out which crime took priority was the hard part. It was moments like these Graffiti wished she had her own Alfred in the Batcave giving her direction. Or maybe her own Oracle. Graffiti always had reserved a special place in her heart for Barbara Gordon.

"Focus, honey. You can crush over comic book heroes later."

As she neared the roof, Graffiti jumped off the ladder, rolling as she connected with the rooftop adjacent to her apartment building. She ran across the rooftops with grace, running one of the dozen or so routes she had through the Blocks and the area surrounding. These routes had a pretty solid rate of finding crime, though Graffiti figured you could probably make it about twenty feet in the Blocks before you tripped over a mugging or something. That she sometimes ran routes and came up empty was the real mystery.

She hadn't yet made it to the end of her block when a scream in the distance caught her attention. Female adult, Graffiti guessed from the sound of it. Never something she liked to hear at night. She stopped in her tracks, scouting the rooftops in between herself and the source of the scream. She'd have to cross a few streets, and none of them had any way of crossing without Graffiti dropping to ground level. Typically, Graffiti would look for a billboard, or some telephone wires, or a construction site with a crane should she be so lucky. But there were none of these on this route, so she'd have to drop.

The streets made her out of place. She stuck to alleyways as much as she could, but crossing the street exposed her. It was silly when she looked at it in a vacuum, but put in context, that much exposure for someone of Graffiti's kind was exactly what she didn't want. So she spent as little time there as she could; the street crossing policy was always dead sprint, stop for nothing. It never changed, no matter the circumstances. It was just a risk that Graffiti could not afford.

The alleys were easy enough to maneuver, and within a minute, Graffiti had found her screamer - a woman with her shirt half ripped from her body and some ski masked idiot with a knife pointed at her. She ran up to the two loudly, making her presence very clear to them both. As expected, Ski Mask turned to point the knife at Graffiti, holding it out at arm's length.

"Back away, bitch. You don't want to end up like her, do ya?" Ski Mask motioned at Screamer to prove his point.

Graffiti laughed. Ski Mask adjusted position awkwardly; Graffiti realized she had left him out of the joke. "Are you blind? You see this gun. Now, I don't have a whole lotta ammo for it right now, but-" In an instant, she drew the gun and sent a bullet into Ski Mask's leg, dropping him to the ground immediately. Screamer flinched as the knife clanged loudly in her direction. In a moment, Graffiti would see to this woman's well-being, but for now, she had work to do. Graffiti walked up to Ski Mask slowly, grabbing the mask and yanking it off his head, revealing a young white man, maybe in his early twenties.

She snarled, "You have a thing for power, huh? You like taking women that can't defend themselves?" Graffiti withdrew a knife from its sheath, flinging it into Ski Maskless' leg, just above the gunshot wound. "Well, you see, I have a thing for power, too. Funny, isn't it?" Another knife, even further up. She was about halfway up his thigh now. "It's not really a sexual thing. I'm not into your type. You know, the type with those things hanging between the legs." 

A third knife to the inner thigh. Ski Maskless winced and tried to back away as he realized where this was going. Graffiti grabbed him by the shirt collar and jammed the latest knife even deeper than it had initially penetrated.

"These, though?" She withdrew the final knife, holding it up to Ski Maskless' face. He began to cry, out of a mix of pain and fear.

"These go great between the legs."

His screams rang through the alleyway until he fainted, unable to endure any more.

Graffiti turned her attention to the woman she had rescued, lifting up her gas mask to reveal her face. "You okay, honey? He won't be bothering you, tonight. Or any other night, for that matter." The woman could only nod, her emotions confused between gratefulness and fear.

"You're... you're Graffiti, right? I've heard about you," the woman stammered, her voice shaky and weak.

"Yeah, that's me. Didn't answer my question though. You okay?" Graffiti smiled, warm and sincere.

The woman felt it, smiling in response. "Yeah. Yeah... just a bruise when he grabbed my shirt. I live just a few doors down, I'll be okay." She glanced at the bloody mess Graffiti had left, turning away quickly and covering her eyes. "Can I go? That's a bit much for me to deal with."

Graffiti hurriedly helped the woman to her feet. "Of course, of course. I'm really sorry you had to see that. Look, if you ever need to find me again, for whatever reason, come back here and leave a spray can. I'll find you. I need to wrap up here, okay? You sure you don't want me to walk you home?"

"I'm sure. Thank you." The woman rushed off at that, holding her arms close to her chest. Graffiti was sorry she had to expose the poor woman to that mess, but some things just couldn't be helped.

Graffiti stood, shook up one of her spray cans, and got back to work.