[color=115DA8]“The lion does not concern himself with the opi-”[/color]

[i]SMACK![/i]

A little welcoming gift for Luke on his way up from the rubble pile. Fighting with one’s fists closed was considered using a lethal weapon in the eyes of the Francian authorities, so it was that an entire fighting style was devised around the concept of an open hand. And boy, did it show. The sonorous [i]SMACK[/i] resonated throughout the bellowing streets like a warning shot, to say nothing of the blistering red handprint now painfully present on Luke’s face. If only the woman had put more effort in, she would have knocked the poor sod clean into unconsciousness.

Ines glared down at Luke, not casting her full facial view, no, just slighted enough to dare him to gain her full intrigue. In a hostile land full of Imperials who would love nothing more than to bring the Darcsen woman to bleeding submission, she questioned if Luke wanted to be her biggest threat. 

[color=4682b4][i]“You should know better than to attack someone in their home environment Don’t make me remind you again.”[/i][/color] She thought, that inkling almost perfectly transcribed in her revolted bodily posture. Only an idiot could miss so clear an enunciation.

She looked forward to smacking Luke again.

But something was oddly - darkly - correct about Luke’s underhanded comment. What remained of the city of Amone eerily reminded her of the Calais Ports in Ostend’s poorest districts. Pile after pile of rummaged tenements and decrepit factories, barricaded warehouses and soot-brimming derelicts, firetraps patiently awaiting their incendiary ends. People made their homes and livelihoods around a city block with centuries and centuries of cobbled slums built on top of one another. Many structures were still carved from layered cobblestone from a bygone era, testament to their sturdy construction. The streets in many places did not have proper paving, or even cobblestone beneath them. Dirt tracked around the district, disrepaired roads laying to the side as earth and water pools took their place. And everywhere Ines gazed, she saw naught but a mirror of her home. The buildings were worse off, certainly, yet...all carried a faint familiarity that came with poverty, as if they had only been moved ever so slightly South. 

Another Darcsen - someone important, by the wear of his clothing and the insignia on his sleeve, busied himself with talking to Jean; What Ines took from this was that it was none of her concern to be worrying about the captain or his crew. Yet when they brought over a crate full of weaponry, that was her cue to follow over. A veritable assortment of savage armaments, beckoning from a more carnal sense of warfare.

[color=4682b4][i]“Just like home.”[/i][/color] Ines mused internally. If you listened carefully, you almost heard her snicker at the idea. 

Bats and hammers, knives and bricks, that is what fed the constant struggles - for control, for reputation, for survival - in Ostend. Firearms were aplenty in the Mad City, of course, yet there was something so satisfyingly intimate about a gang with antiquated arms that garnished their antediluvian attention. The pile of improvised weapons, then, struck an all-too-familiar cord in their display. She was instructed to take one - and Ines would argue no further to such a display of generosity - but to what did she find most suitable for the urban march? 
[hr]
[center][i]March 25th, 1911[/i][/center]

Desperation forced the hands of men greater than compulsion to love, to live, to mate. It was the greatest motivator, turning the minds of men into servants of circumstance, no matter what the bounds of rationality told them. The occupants of the alley felt it mutually, for it was desperation that kept them going, and desperation that blurred the boundary between conscience and primal urge, murking the memory to haze.

Two beaten fighters had their kerfuffle in the mist-laden alley, just down to the count. Ines was one of them. Her opposite? He had a knife. A shining, argent beam against the moonlight of the evening, canted in sword grip as its’ curved grip caved just so slightly toward her. He wasn’t letting her go easily. Not without a fight. Not without something to prove. If you couldn’t even mug a Darcsen, you may as well have hung yourself then and there.

Oh, did it seep from her arm, all right. Even through the adrenaline, Ines could feel the gash widen. Almost felt like it went straight through into the bone, almost like she could feel her skin peeling open with every move she took. Her teeth bore down all the while, sonorous kiai while she fought through the pain, trepid as it was. She almost wanted to close her eyes, give in right there, make it go away, yet the truth of the situation beat down on her harder than the iron-laced mist of the evening’s humidity; The only way to beat an ambush was to push back into it.

Another charge, another dash. Another blur, and headed for her. And insight became reflex, instantaneous as she stepped left. Without knowing it, his wrist caught itself keenly in her good hand, stopping him dead mid-charge. She saw him stricken aside, heard the blade hit stone as the sound rung through the alley, yet this was no process. It was pure instinct, hard at work. A splitting tear along her left arm was what she could feel, almost like she felt the dagger rippling through her forearm yet again, and that’s what she immediately processed. Her attacker staggered back, reeling from the strike.

But she had another little trick up her sleeve. Pragmatism was the best tool you could afford, right next to creativity.  In her overcoat rested her holster. Before her, a man bleeding, staggering to get his bearings. In her hand, now, her trusted piece. 

And what stood before her? The wide-eyed, stupefied gaze of a man, shining deep with desperation as he looked into the barrel of the last gun he would ever see.
[hr]
Even after she got her new steel, she couldn’t help but feel jealous of Jean’s new sidearm. It was an old revolver, but it was a revolver. Something for her holster. Slow to load, sure, but damn they were workhorses. Revolvers were the tools of choice for when times got going, when all bets were off and it was time to prove how many gangsters you could lay out on the street without breaking sweat. Firearms were supposed to be strictly regulated in Francia, but Ines had seen plenty even before she joined the force. For her, she preferred the self-loaders. Faster to shoot, faster to reload. More work to take care of, but they were the epitome of the new century. Her new trench knife found its way into a sheath on her belt, but her eyes always fixated themselves on Jean’s new piece. [color=4682b4][i]“What do I have to do to get another pistol…”[/i][/color]

Nothing to do about it now, except groan about it in the rainy afternoon of a city torn apart. Nothing to gain from any of it. Sick of it, was what she was. Maybe it was just that she developed an acquired taste for agony after years and years of putting up with it, like how bedridden sickness becomes your life after days of fighting. Maybe there was just something it fulfilled, deep in the dark parts of your mind, tucked away under gilded pretenses of civilization and humanity. Maybe we were all savages waiting for a head to hunt, just another tribe of hunters and scavengers, living in concrete yurts. All just gentiles, waiting for the slightest danger to poke its head out.

Echoes of gunfire meant nothing to her now. It was almost a daily routine, really. Ines knew the dangers, of course, but wasn’t perturbed. She was ready. Ready to expect the worst to come, but with life parallel to hell, it’s just another way to maintain. A few troops, sure, but there was something else off in the distance. A faint rumbling, like the bellowing of an automobile engine. Every car Ines was used to was this clunky gizmo, more of a curio than anything reliable. [color=4682b4][i] “Someone has to be crazy to try and drive an automobile through a-”[/i][/color]

Just the sight of that metal monster brought her into some fold of reality she never wanted to accept. This wasn’t your average Sunday driver with goons hanging on the side. No, this was a fully mechanized iron ship, fast and ready for combat. Some scientific slaves toiled days away on perfecting this beast of iron, and accepted nothing short of perfection from the laiden war machines of the future. 

There was this odd flash of inspiration that only facing sudden, uncertain death could grant you. It was almost like a fantasy of sorts, a protective mechanism. Being whisked away to a realm of flight and fancy-free in the imminence of danger. Almost like a dream, an idealized vision, where nothing yet everything is clear. You can almost think straight, and your senses blur out as you zone into and out of reality. Ines dreamed, but did not think. It was a trance, more like. Instantaneous reaction that overruled any sense of rationality that came to. A dilapidated city was her home, and what the Imperials so easily forgot was the most simple rule of the wild;

[i]The cornered animal is the most dangerous one in the jungle.[/i]

There were blurs, some faint flutterings in the background, yes, and for all their attempts, no order nor cry from friend or foe beckoned her focus like the iron beast before them. A simple stand would be a heartbeat away from death, the wrong move, a trip to the grave. But therein lie the advantage, and such close encounters were nothing for a Darcsen. Death always was a heartbeat away - on the fine line between conscience and limbo - for those cursed with dark hair. And that line, no matter how emaciated, provided greater clairvoyance than any tactical advice shoddily crafted by a lightheaded wastrel could ever hope to provide. 

Franz called to her first, then Isaac soon after, yet she moved of her own accord, to her own intuition. When they looked upon this woman, they saw someone clearly not of their own sound mind, for she peered forward in unflinching, uncompromising gaze. She did not remark, nor turn her head for any purpose of acknowledgement; human communication would no longer do for her. Her newfound comrades were accessories, at best. Liabilities at worst. They did not control her; suggesting as much is as laughable as saying a sea captain could control the winds. Thoroughly entranced, Ines posed herself, grenade in hand, as she prepared her next move.

Ines was not at war. This was a hunt. Franz, Isaac, Gwyn, Britta? They were simply along for the ride.

[@FalloutJack] [@CFProxy]