[hider=Panel Sixteen]Ken didn’t move after her, Warbird, didn’t even try to reach her once he caught sight of her through the falling debris, refuse and once people forming a cloud of junk around the pair as they tumbled through the air towards the ceiling. She was too far away, and in the opposite direction than gravity was leading him, and besides, she didn’t need his help, or anyone else’s, not for this. She was well on her way to ending this quickly, the bitch in blue didn’t even see her coming, and most of these reality benders weren’t known for being tough enough to just shrug off a blow like the one she had to look forward to in a second. He’d really have to get a grappling gun one of these days. At least, if he wasn’t going to get flight down any time soon, it’d certainly be nice not to have to, “improvise,” in these situations by using his own body as a fleshy shield. He could take the hit, of course, had the physical toughness to not just die or severely rupture tendons, organs and muscle tissue from the impact. If he was lucky and had the correct angle in the fall Tal would lend her weight to his crash, relieving her of the worst of the messy physics and he’d take the blow for the both of them, she sure as shit couldn’t take something like this without sustaining massive, irreparable damage, and they both knew it. Maybe if they’d been trained better, had done something like this in the holoroom or something, he’d be more confident in his angle and in her survival. 

Thwack!! Clang, buzz, “errgh,”. It hadn’t been pretty, but with a quick glance at the girl in his arms, he knew he’d done it, she was okay, and he was gonna be sore in the morning, but unlike any normal human his limbs hadn’t been liquefied by the sudden, hard impact. Wasn’t every day he took a forty foot fall, and truth be told he’d rather not have to repeat the experience any time soon, but luckily for him he was more than capable of taking a hard hit without turning into a spout of blood and gooey bits. He’d even landed on his feet, which was way cooler than landing on his back like a total scrub, and besides the falling body that had whacked him upside the head leaving a trail of sticky, wet, red down his face before impacting the ground spraying his legs and lower torso region with a thicker concoction of the gory awful substance that makes people tick, Ken and Tal seemed to be perfectly fine. Fighting back the urge to throw up once again, he cast a glance in Warbird’s direction just in time to catch the aftereffects of the human body moving at speed and impacting a neck with a sharp kick from a boot heel, hard enough to send the bitch in blue facing the wrong direction then she seemingly should be given the angle of her body. Failing to keep his terror and disgust bottled inside, he unceremoniously half set down, half dropped Tal before doubling over in the opposite direction, the image of Warbird sending that woman’s head spinning, neck snapping burned into his mind’s eye. 

He felt weightless, and simultaneously heavy, under pressure, the world around him hazy and confused as he heaved. This was just a nightmare. This badass angel in a combat suit and geared out to the teeth falls in from the sky in a world of death and chaos, and just as quickly casually kills her target in a second flat. Could he accept what he had just seen? A computer would, it’s input all that weighed on its memory, devoid of consideration for the ramifications and toll of what had just been witnessed. Ken, of course, was not a machine, and this had been cold, calculated, aimed and timed with a jarring, inhuman precision. Is this what being a super hero means? Watching people die, potential allies kill those villains that kill others, and somehow having to sift through the particular moments, seconds, decisions which begat yet more decisions, in some vain attempt to get some kind of grasp of who is the good guy, and who the bad? Now he’d seen a dead body, several as it were, and watched someone he considered to be a hero kill someone he considered to be a villain, all in the same shockingly small window of time. Had it even been a whole minute? Felt like a world away, a lifetime here and then gone and passed, but he knew, that rational part of his mind still whirring on as though this were all just normal old shit that he dealt with all the time, that it couldn’t have been any more than a few seconds since he entered the lobby. Was Warbird a hero? Some anti-hero? A villain? 

Was she some more easily quantifiable, somewhere in between human being who had complex morals and codes of ethics who was likely experiencing her own wave of colors and emotions wash over her at her own actions this day, this moment, just as he was subject to the press of conscience and the whirring of the lizard brain in opposition to the emotional bastion that supposedly made us unique to the beasts and monsters of the world? Ken couldn’t say, everything was too fogged and overwhelmingly blue, the kind of deep, dark shade of midnight that elicits fear of the dark in those who haven’t been exposed to the chilling bleakness that reality holds in those little turns, little moments that shape lifetimes. He was no exception, and found himself simply floating for a moment, capable neither of speech or breath in the face of the obscure, alien blues obfuscating his vision like a cloak or death shroud tossed haphazardly over his face. Something was screaming in the back of his mind, but its message wasn’t coming in clear, overwhelmed by the emotions and coldness of the twilight hues. Wait. He found himself floating, cold, wet, incapable of breath or speech, even his sick seemed to be floating beside him, and this wasn’t just in his mind. Panic overtook him as he suddenly forgot all about the shock of the scene he had just witnessed, and realized that he was literally, not figuratively floating in something cold, wet, and deep, dark blue. [i]Oh shit[/i]!! This was water, salty, near freezing sea, and it was all around him, burying him alive in it’s cold embrace. [i]I can’t swim[/i]!!! [/hider] 

[hider=Panel Seventeen]”Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!!” Tal curled up to Ken as much as possible, as close as she could, given the circumstances. All notions of physics, proper form and procedure, yeah, all out the window in an instant. Falling toward certain death had a habit of causing convention and reason to flee post-haste, and just this moment she didn’t feel much like any amount of training would have prepared her for this, then again maybe some holo time wouldn’t have hurt. She wanted desperately to close her eyes, but found that she couldn’t look away from the bitch in blue, their eyes locked as she coyly smiled at her f#$%ing prey, watching the amateur squirm under her effortless assault. That bitch was [b]enjoying[/b] this, this wasn’t just something she felt like she needed to do for whatever lame ass reasons villains cause the trouble for everyone that they do, no, this was about some sicko satisfaction at watching people try to stop her, and fail. She wanted to rip this bitch in half, would even open up on her with those powers she knew would draw the attention of her family’s old foes, the ones that would one day chain her to a throne in a palace under the sea, her sanctuary, her chair, out of an old grudge toward her supposed ancestor long since dead. Even so, she’d gladly have invited their gaze to see this bitch burn, she had never wanted to see someone dead so much in her life as this living piece of semi-human garbage who wanted to splatter her brains, [b]Ken’s[/b] brains on the f#$%ing floor, well, ceiling of this lobby. 

She saw her then, that asshole who scared her half to death a couple seconds ago, Warbird, flying toward the bitch in blue. [i]How is she doing that[/i]? Wait, was that a grappling hook? She was on course to knock the shit out of the bitch, moving faster than seemed at all reasonable given the fact that she wasn’t a flier and was being propelled entirely through use of a tiny little grappling gun and her own presumably totally within the normal spectrum of typical human level of physical strength, and here her and the bitch and blue were, just locking eyes with one another, her pain and fear feeding this bitch’s little ego trip. The woman in blue wouldn’t know what hit her. It was the first time she felt like she could grow to like this bitch, Warbird, [i]knock her f#$%ing head off, girl[/i]. The timing, the angle, the speed, it was all just perfect! She’d clock her no question, she was gonna land a little high, but Tal had no doubt she would correct herself before impact and just send the blue bitch flying, or crashing to the ground. Either way, it was gonna hurt, which she couldn’t say she regretted her one bit, and she’d probably follow up with enough force to knock her out, or at least get her to stop fighting back before cuffing her or whatever it was she planned to do before handing her over to the authorities, before they finished up the job. Then they could be the heroes, save the day, and finally stop having to ask Ken’s mommy for permission to do baller super hero stuff. 

THUD, SPLAT, CLANG!! [i]Holy shit!! Am I alive? I am alive! Oh, Ken, I always had confidence in you[/i]. The thought was almost true, too. She’d thought, known that he could take the hit, at first, before the whole falling thing took away her reason and replaced it momentarily with crippling fear of imminent death by squishing off the floor. Plus, Warbird was just about to, --, [i]Oh… Oh God,[/i] even from this distance anyone looking could see that the bitch in blue was facing the wrong way after meeting up, hard, with her face and Warbird’s boot, at speed, and with incredible accuracy. Tal would’ve wondered how she’d managed to land the hit, if she wasn’t overwhelmed with the disgust of what she had just witnessed. She’d wanted to tear the bitch in blue in half, sure, but she wouldn’t have actually [b]killed[/b] her, not like that, not when she didn’t even have a second to react, and could have been disabled rather than just… [i][u]Oh, God[/u]. That was cold blooded, she wasn’t even looking ‘till that last moment, she was looking at me! Why’d you need to do that!?!?[/i] She wanted to scream, to cry, to throw up, but mostly she just couldn’t understand why Warbird had done that. That wasn’t an accident, that blow was so well placed, computer precise, like something a robot ninja would do, that was planned to happen, meant to happen, had to be. We’re heroes, we don’t do things [b]like that[/b], dying in a proper fight where one side won’t give up and shit just happens is one thing, but that was just killing, cold, calculated, brutally efficient. 

Tal felt cold, sick, wet, and altogether disillusioned with what she had just seen. She reached out to pull Ken closer, to take some comfort in him, her oldest and closest confidant, but found herself set down, hard, instead. Ken was doubled over behind her, throwing up again. She didn’t blame him, even if she was pissed that he was more concerned with being human and understandably disturbed by the events of the past few moments to care about her and what she needed, well, wanted from him by way of human contact. She moved to stand, to get up and get away from the bodies around her, to get somewhere else, anywhere where everything wasn’t quickly shattering apart, and taking her faith in humanity along with it, but found that she couldn’t. She could move, though she had a pain in her ankle that told her something was likely wrong and that she was probably in need of medical attention, but that wasn’t the problem. It was less that she couldn’t move, and more that she couldn’t stand, not in any proper sense of the term, anyway. As she moved she seemed to be traveling in one too many dimensions, as though floating. Well, not [i]as though[/i] floating she realized, as she grabbed at her throat in disbelief. She found that she was floating, literally, and the chill she had felt upon seeing Warbird kill the bitch in blue, the wetness, it wasn’t exactly all in her head, an emotional response. [i]Tastes… Salty,[/i] and it was salty. Sea water? Why was sea water everywhere? “Blub, blub, blub, blub!!” [i]Ken can’t swim, need shelter, air, need… Sanctuary[/i]. [/hider]