[center][img] http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/dHRmLjEyOC40MzIyOTEuVm1WeVoyRWdTV3huY21GMlpXNCwuMAAA/wind-sans-serif.regular.png [/img][/center][hr]
The sky broke, and when it did the cracks went in every direction.  

Verga had little time to react—the rain came down not like a storm unfolding naturally, but like a child's toy dropped from the kitchen counter and shattering into a million billion pieces across the tiled floor.  [i]This,[/i] some part of her faintly thought, as she covered her face against the remorseless wind and remorseless rain, [i]must be what it's like at the bottom of the ocean.[/i]  Her ears popped from the tantruming air pressure.

It was seconds later when the stadium began to fragment under her feet with the sounds of lightning and thunderclaps, and Verga suddenly found herself sliding down the side of the building.  Debris soared past her.  Before she could dodge, one chunk of rebar came at her from her blindspot, and beamed the woman across the head.  

[i]I've gotten slow,[/i] she thought with jagged spite, cursing herself quickly and wordlessly.

The stadium finally gave way properly, and it plummeted away from Verga's feet, collapsing to the earth.  Quick thinking this time, and Verga's Singularity technique drew gravity around her like a tight-knotted blanket.  The stadium was gone, and she hovered in the air above the chaos.  But up in the sky there was still wind and rain and spinning airborn detritus.  She had to move.  Maneuvering her way to the ground, tightening and untightening her Singularity, hovering in midair and falling like a rock, ducking and dodging and finessing—Verga eventually reached solid ground, and when she did she felt like she'd just spent a week out in the tundra.  

And just in time.  The feeling had barely returned to her lungs when the storm suddenly broke apart and dissolved, and then it was gone.  Quick as a baseball strike, broken grayish twilight took its place.  Mist hung heavy in every direction.

Then, the oni appeared.

They were about what you might expect, the creatures of mountains and fairy-wine and children's stories, all rippling muscle and beards and horns, and tattoos like fire.  And, according to their leader, they were now calling the shots.  

"Any objections?" the leader demanded.

That was it, then.  Like all the most common violence, it was so aggressively mundane it might've seemed unrealistic.  But real life wasn't an action movie, and in real life, the mundane wrote the rules, and here, today, real life was nothing more than a muscle-head who wanted to play big boy and call himself emperor.  Verga may not have paid much attention in history class, but even she could see the infinite chaining pattern of kings furiously masturbating to their own fame and power across past and present and future.

[i]Give it a few hours, and the nomads'll probably revolt their way through the oni like rats eating through a rhino,[/i] Verga thought.  [i]Who was it, the one that compared nomads to rats?[/i]  Verga had heard that phrase before, on TV, or in a magazine.  Rats, creatures in endless supply that live more-or-less harmlessly wherever you look and wherever you don't look, creatures more than capable of eating anything alive if you have enough of them.  It was a good description, Verga thought.  And if you couldn't count on the rats, then wait a few days, and the international community would come down like a thousand oni-sized hammers on the barrier surrounding the country and the self-proclaimed emperor.

There was a smart strategy here.  Hang back, wait for the other nomads to mobilize themselves, wait for them to soak up the brunt of the undoubtedly powerful oni-attacks, and then maybe sneak up behind the oni chief and melt his brain out with the Antiparticle, or something.  Traditionally you would say some smart one-liner as you did it, too.  But Verga was not good with one-liners, her head was aching from the hit it took earlier, and to be perfectly honest something about the oni king and his my-penis-is-larger-than-yours attitude was really just setting her off today.  More than anything, right now, she wanted something to hit.

But before she could put the smart strategy away in the garbage and maybe vent her general frustrations, a woman emerged out of the rubble and approached the emperor, and her hands were raised, not quite surrenderishly, but clearly not motioning to attack.  It looked almost if, if Verga's eyes weren't playing tricks, that this woman wanted to talk.

[hr]

([@lavulman]'s planning a post right after this with Jill trying to talk to the oni emperor, just so people know and don't go full attack-mode right off the bat before he gets a chance to finish the post)