"Beautiful?! What's going on?"

Her voice is a butchered mess; all of its normal melody stripped away into a charred hoarseness that at once is trying too hard to be heard and not to shout at the same time. Normally she would cringe at her own lack of decorum. Right now, there's no time. Right now she is a sword pulled unexpectedly from the forge and quenched before it's ready. She's burning with the full fury of her battle rage and chilled through her marrow with that single chance meeting of the eyes, with no transition between these two states. She burns hot and cold at the same time, and in some parts of her body in the same place. 

Her rushing blood turns to lead in her veins without slowing down to make way for its sudden horrible heaviness. Her stomach seems to have disappeared entirely in a sudden swoop that no change in gravity could hope to match. Beautiful is here, and something is wrong. That means the world has spun out from underneath her feet, and there's nothing left to even cling to. 

Bella's legs turn on their own. What was meant to be a death charge becomes an uncertain step toward her friend instead. Her ears droop for just a moment, until she catches herself and scowls as she forces them back to attention. All of her attention shifts to Beautiful. She can't afford to miss anything. She can't, she can't afford to-

The Great Hall explodes in a volley of SP fire. It's not pointed at her, and in such a vast and open room the rapport is fairly muted, but even with all of that in her favor the sudden ringing in her sensitive ears is painful enough to make her stagger. The stench of the smoke belching out of the rifles gags her as much as fresh blood. The flood of bursting lights leave trails in her eye that take the Auspex precious extra cycles turning the mess into something she can still see through. It hurts. Every sense pounds against her brain and it hurts, there's another volley and it hurts and she's going backwards not forwards and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts!!!

Bella howls. The world turns into smoke and evil shapes she doesn't need an artifact in her eyesocket to figure out. Her legs tingle with treacherous weakness when it's less welcome than it's ever been before. She squeezes her eyes shut and claws at her head and face. Her breath is wheezing, snarling, and wet with the notes of anger dripping off of each exhalation. Sense by sense, she forces the world to go dull. With the colors less sharp she can see better. With her ears blocked up she can think. With her nose focused she can breath the air and pick out the strongest, most important bits instead of wincing like a stupid kitten at the noxious stench. With her skin turning numb, she can burn hotter. Move faster. Fight harder. Now she can give even more of herself to the job.

...In the absence of directions, Bella should trust her instincts. Beautiful never said as much, but she was clear about it anyway. She trusted Bella's instincts. She could work with them. Which meant she was breathing in the same danger. Her lungs must be tingling with the awful sting of it, too. Something is here, something ancient and violent, and...

There's no sense to it, really. No reason for it to be true. The first time she met Beljani, she'd asked her what the secret was to turning her Rampant. She'd left Beautiful in her coffin the entire time she'd known she existed, and resisted waking her up until the last possible second. And Mynx was... somewhere far, far away. She hoped. She prayed, in fact. Artemis, if you give a single fuck about... nnnnngh. No. 

It wasn't all pleasant. Most of it felt bad instead of good. And there was no good reason for it besides. But Bella can feel her connection to each of these girls wrapped around her throat, and it reminds her of a collar. Her fingers gently brush her neck, but it's not there. Artemis, you stupid bitch, this is her family. This is all you bothered to give her for a family, and now you'd let her watch them all get lost or eaten right in front of her. 

No. No. [i]No.[/i] Whatever love you have for your servants, O Goddess of the Hunt, show it here and now. Give her, give Bella the strength and speed and skill to take everything in the Great Hall and crush it beneath her claws. Make it all fall on her. Only on her. 

There's not a word of prayer spoken aloud. Bella doesn't wait for a sign or a feeling that things will be ok. There's never time to wait and see if the gods have decided to accept her or sweep her from the board before she has to move again. The answer comes the way it always has: results. Only the outcome means anything at all. And if she dies? At least she doesn't have to live with it.

Bella's scream is primal and otherworldly. Even in the cloud and haze and chaos, it's possible for anyone looking at her (and who couldn't?) to see the white flash of her tail whip-flick with desire for the hunt. She hunches low and bursts forward like a thunderbolt, tearing massive gashes in what's left of the floor as she surges straight into the red.