Though Rakhana waited for her quarry in near perfect stillness, her mind was buzzing with thought; not about the Fifth Apocalypse, whom she had next to no information regarding, but upon the absurdity of the entire situation she had found herself in. What on earth were her superiors thinking? Sending one member of a team on a solo mission, with next to no information about the target other than the fact that they were extremely dangerous... it was a suicide mission. Or, it would have been, had Rakhana not been much more able to take care of herself than the average agent, despite all appearances to the contrary.

Her musings on the dwindling competence of the once-revered international policing agency were cut short, however, as her eagle-like eyes spotted a figure approaching from the Manhattan side of the bridge. Her eyes locked on to him, adjusting her firearm aim ever so slightly as he moved closer, so it was trained squarely on his torso, waiting to do maximum damage at a moment's notice should it be required. She could have dismissed his unusual hair as nothing more than a particularly individualistic personality, but given his physique, armour, and the weapon upon his back, Rakhana knew that the man was no misguided civilian. He was some sort of soldier, here for some unknown purpose, and she had not lived this long in her danger-fraught life without exercising extreme caution in all things.

As soon as the man drew the blade - a reasonable size for any well-built man, so it would have constituted a heavy weapon for a normal person of Rakhana's slight stature - the young Russian simply narrowed her eyes slightly, every single, painstakingly altered muscle in her body coiling and tensing in preparation to move at a moment's notice. She would take the unsheathed weapon as a direct threat, even if it was wielded in direct answer to her own unholstered gun. The argument could be made that America was notorious for its general stance on firearms, and a young woman wielding a gun (presumably as a means of defence on a dark winter's night) was not a particularly unusual scenario.

[i]"Hey you! Come over here little girl! You shouldn't be out here all by yourself! Besides, I have a couple of questions I'd like you to answer for me!"[/i]

Only Rakhana's impressive command of her reactions and facial features prevented her jaw from dropping slightly at the stranger's address. She was aware that he was in fact not much older than her, and she was in no real danger just because of their physical difference - but to the untrained eye, this was a very large and imposing man addressing a solitary young girl with some of the creepiest approaching lines known to man. [i]Honestly...[/i] she thought to herself with some disdain, [i]"Come here little girl?" "You shouldn't be out here all by yourself?" He might as well have offered to show me where the hidden stash of ice cream was in the nearest alley...[/i] He was not the first man to underestimate her based on her size, and he would not be the last.

She wouldn't let him approach any further than that, however - Rakhana answered his dialogue with a simple, sharp movement, utilising the tension in her muscles to launch herself back in the blink of an eye. At the same time, a layer of the heat that cocooned her peeled off of her body, leaving a momentary heat echo in her place, and her movement through the air was briefly concealed through a heat haze distortion of the air - the illusion being that she disappeared and reappeared with a little more distance between the pair, the movement path angled so that she landed about twenty feet back, and five feet to the left of her original position.

"Don't come any closer."

Her voice was simple, her tone cold. The inflections of her words were clipped and precise, with a very similar accent heard in the British and European areas of the world, the only hint of her origins being a very slight Russian accent underlying the words. And as she spoke the words, she sent with them a wave of blistering heat towards her opponent - not necessarily immediately lethal, but enough to cause serious third-degree burns over a large swathe of his skin, especially those parts trapped beneath armour. she could have burned it hotter, but for the moment she intended it more as a severe warning, to emphasise the seriousness of her words. A second pulse of heat continued to cocoon Rakhana, enveloping her in a heat aura burning at several thousand degrees, enough to melt most ordinary metals. He would most likely never have the speed or reflexes to get close to her, but she would not take any chances on that front.